Nineteenth-century Quaker sex cults

March 6, 2018

An arti­cle in Port­land Month­ly is get­ting a lot of shares today, large­ly giv­en its breath­less head­line: How the Father of Ore­gon Agri­cul­ture Launched a Doomed Quak­er Sex Cult.

It pro­files Hen­der­son Luelling (1809 – 1878) and it’s not exact­ly an aca­d­e­m­ic source. Here’s a snippet:

Luelling had tak­en up with these groovy Free Lovers, whom he met in San Fran­cis­co. From the out­set, the jour­ney had com­pli­ca­tions. “Dr.” Tyler, it turned out, was actu­al­ly an ex-blacksmith who now pro­fessed exper­tise in water-cures and clair­voy­ance. One of the men was flee­ing finan­cial trou­bles, and when the ship was searched by police he hid under the hoop­skirt of a female passenger.

Luelling’s life fol­lows many com­mon themes of mid-nineteenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er life:

  • He was a hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist, first mov­ing to the Port­land, Ore­gon, area and then to a small town near Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia. Friends had long been inter­est­ed in botan­i­cal affairs. Rough­ly a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er John Bar­tram was con­sid­ered one of the great­est botanists of his generation.
  • Luelling moved from Indi­ana to Salem, Iowa in the 1830s and became a staunch abo­li­tion­ist, even build­ing hide­outs for the Under­ground Rail­road in his house. Wikipedia reports he was expelled from his meet­ing for this.
  • He got Ore­gon fever and moved his oper­a­tion out there.
  • At some point in this he became inter­est­ed in Spir­i­tu­al­ism and its off­shoots like the Free Love move­ment. This was not a Quak­er move­ment but the mod­ern Amer­i­can move­ment start­ed with the Fox Sis­ters in Upstate New York and was heav­i­ly pro­mot­ed by Quak­er Hick­sites Amy and Isaac Post.

If you want to know more about Luelling’s “sex cults,” this arti­cle in Off­beat Ore­gon feels much bet­ter sourced: The father of Ore­gon’s nurs­ery indus­try and his “Free Love” cult:

The “free love” thing is far from new. Over the years, espe­cial­ly in the Amer­i­can West, at least half a dozen gen­er­a­tions have pro­duced at least one “dar­ing” philoso­pher who calls for a throwing-off of the age-old yoke of mar­riage and fam­i­ly and urges his or her fol­low­ers to revert to the myth­ic “noble sav­age” life of naked and unashamed peo­ple gath­er­ing freely and open­ly, men and women, liv­ing and eat­ing and sleep­ing togeth­er with no rules, no judg­ment and no squab­bles over paternity.

He’d also start­ed his very own free-love cult — “The Har­mo­ni­al Broth­er­hood.” Luelling’s group made free love the cen­ter­piece of a strict reg­i­men of self-denial that includ­ed an all-vegetarian, stimulant-free diet, cold-water “hydropa­thy” for any med­ical need, and a Utopi­an all-property-in-common social structure.

Port­land Friend Mitchel San­tine Gould has writ­ten about some of these cur­rents as well. His Leavesof​Grass​.org site used to have a ton of source mate­r­i­al. Dig­ging into one day it seemed pret­ty clear that the Free Love move­ment was also a refuge of sorts for those who did­n’t fit strict nineteenth-century het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty or gen­der norms. Gould’s piece, Walt Whit­man’s Quak­er Para­dox has a bit of this, with talk of “life­long bachelors.”

Many of the Spir­i­tu­al­ist lead­ers were young women and their pub­lic lec­ture series were pret­ty much the only pub­lic lec­tures by young women any­where in Amer­i­ca. If you want to learn more about these devel­op­ments I rec­om­mend Ann Braud’s Rad­i­cal Spir­its: Spir­i­tu­al­ism and Wom­en’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century Amer­i­ca. These com­mu­ni­ties were very involved in abo­li­tion­ist and wom­en’s rights issues and often start­ed their own year­ly meet­ings after becom­ing too rad­i­cal for the Hicksites.

And lest we think all this was a West Coast phe­nom­e­non, my lit­tle unpre­pos­sess­ing South Jer­sey town of Ham­mon­ton was briefly a cen­ter of Free Love Spir­i­tu­al­ism (almost com­plete­ly scrubbed from our his­to­ry books) and the near­by town of Egg Har­bor City had exten­sive water san­i­tar­i­ums of the kind described in these articles.

Talk to the Future Video Magazine

October 1, 2008

Talk to the FutureThese ‘pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions with today’s bold­est voic­es’ are the brain­child of San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia-based activist jour­nal­ist Anne-christine d’Adesky. She’s trav­el­ing the world inter­view­ing pol­i­cy mak­ers and on-the-ground orga­niz­ers on issues of glob­al health and AIDS. The site uses Google Video and Mov­able Type to cre­ate an online video mag­a­zine.

Vis­it: Talk​tothe​fu​ture​.org and Acdadesky​.org

Recreating the theatrical residues of history

April 3, 2004

On the Pick­et Line, a fun­ny post about the “cir­cus of the cur­rent pro­gres­sive movement”:http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=26Mar04
bq. In San Fran­cis­co, to be part of the anti-war, pro­gres­sive move­ment means to be shar­ing the stage with a whole bunch of unapolo­getic Stal­in­ists, para­noid schiz­o­phren­ics, ersatz intifadists, tin-eared rhetor­i­cal broken-records, insa­tiable identity-politics police, new-age gurus of every vari­ety, pub­lic­i­ty hounds, careerist Democ­rats, and the like… A super­fi­cial fetishiza­tion of the the­atri­cal residue of his­to­ry gets you a renais­sance faire, not a suc­cess­ful polit­i­cal movement.
The author also gives some hope­ful reports from a recent con­fer­ence he attended.

Feds targeting activists at airports

July 25, 2003

There is now some hard evi­dence in the charges that the fed­er­al agency over­see­ing air­lines has com­piled a list that tar­gets and har­rass­es activists. A Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request has not turned up the names or who they rep­re­sent but has dis­cov­ered that the list itself is 88 pages long.
There have been a num­ber of activists who have expe­ri­ence extra scruti­ny and spe­cial search­es, espe­cial­ly in the San Fran­cis­co and Oak­land air­ports. The FOIA case, filed by the North­ern Cal­i­for­nia ACLU, is the first to start shed­ding light on the prac­tice. Dis­sent is always chal­lenged as unpa­tri­ot­ic in times of war and scan­dal. Con­trary to the opin­ions of the many cranks who write in to Non​vi​o​lence​.org, it’s not the mil­i­tary who has ever pro­tect­ed our right to free speech – it’s groups like the ACLU fight­ing to bring harass­ment to pub­lic attention.