by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The next part of Louis Adamic’s often-coruscating “Little Blue Book” series contribution, “The Truth About Los Angeles,” published in 1927 by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, concerns “Mrs. Elsie Lincoln Benedict—Archpriestess of Inspirational Bunk,” of whom, however, the writer claimed to be “overjoyed . . . to see in a large advertisement and on billboards” that “the renowned and fascinating speaker” was to be in the Angel City. Adamic added that his joy was because of the purported bad news that Aimee Semple McPherson of the Angelus Temple was away in Europe and Palestine, leaving her church in the hands of evangelist Paul Rader.
More of Adamic’s dripping sarcasm came as he professed:
Although I am a fearful sinner, the Lord is good to me—He tells one of my heroines to take a vacation to the Holy Land and Paris, and, to make my life endurable, sends back my other favorite—Elsie Lincoln Benedict, the Marvel Woman; the Human, Helpful Woman; the head (and the rest of the body) of the Elsie Lincoln Benedict “School of Opportunity”; “the Traveling University for Men and Women.”
His disdain for Benedict, who was a major figure in the woman suffrage movement before becoming a renowned and highly popular orator, continued that, while some “readers of this little book know of her, have perhaps even drunk from this fountain of inspirational claptrap,” his essay on her was for “those unfortunates who dwell in remote sticks and marshes, where her messages of Inspiration, Optimism, Pep and Success has not yet penetrated.” Moreover, he offered that “she is to psychology what Billy Sunday [another famous evangelist] and Los Angeles’ own Aimee Semple McPherson are to religion.”
Adamic claimed that “Los Angeles is Elsie’s favorite city” and she was said to make annual visits of up to four months and that “I am reliably informed that three years ago she made $100,000 in Los Angeles alone in a couple of months, and a year later she cleaned up nearly half-a-million dollars in four or five months, whereupon she set out upon an extended ’round-the-world cruise, from which she has just returned; and now, as I write this, is in Los Angeles once more and doing well.”
Benedict’s scheme was to offer free talks before capacity crowds in large venues and the writer continued that “to gather material for this article I went to four of her free nights—all I could stand.” He professed not to enjoy the experience as much as he anticipated, but also described her devotees as he’d done generally for Angelenos, offering that “her victims are tired, weary, fate-flogged people, their faces wan and gray; disappointed drudges of the home, the factory and the office; victims of life, victims of systems and conditions, man-made and otherwise.” Then, she encouraged her attendees to spring for $25 courses.
A typical “performance” included a warm-up by a singer doling out chestnuts like When Irish Eyes Are Smiling or, to take advantage of the locality, I Love You, California! before “Behold, Elsie Lincoln Benedict herself! Dressed in gorgeous costume, she gazes at the mob before her with a superior but tolerant, kindly smile, while the yokels applaud and applaud.” Bathed in flowers, including bouquets (purportedly) brought by legions of admirers and former students, Benedict generally referred to successful acolytes as a reminder that her system worked beautifully before working the adoring crowds as she expounded on such topics as finances, marriage, family, social life and more, leading Adamic to acidly remark,
Her talk is the simplest bunk imaginable; almost any shrewd person could compose it and get away with it. She aims to please, to gratify the poor devils who hunger for success, power and love, most of whom wouldn’t know what to do with either power or love if it really came to them. She talks for an house but actually tells them nothing. They eagerly applaud every pun [talking about looking forward to the next weekend, but doing so with a weak end, for example].
In appealing to, or buttering up, the substantial proportion of older citizens in her crowds, Adamic reported, she promised them that it was never too late to achieve success and, he wrote, claimed that Shakespeare didn’t write any of his famed plays until he was beyond 60 years of age,” leading the writer to snidely note that the bard died at 52.
Benedict ended by commending her hearers to those $25 courses, while Adamic concluded by remarking that a prostitute “just staring out on her career in the Oldest Profession” near the auditorium was doing work that needed comparison to that of Benedict—one adored and lionized, the other “leers and winked at by the vulgar, and all but spat upon by the self-righteous.” This led the scribe to wonder “it is a queer breed we humans are!”
Under the heading of “The Morons of Los Angeles,” Adamic then turned to Sister Aimee, as the Angelus Temple’s high priestess was widely known and he informed his readers that “in the present piece I propose to examine, briefly, the tricks and secrets of the evangelistic and faith-cure industry as it flourishes, though, in the main, I shall keep in mind my favorite heroine” who was denoted, in comparison to Benedict, “the wonder woman of Los Angeles and Radioland, her faith factory, the Angelus Temple, and her customers.”
He attributed her remarkable rise to her flock as much as to her own skills and talents, as he commented that “one who wises to succeed at peddling anything would better get some commodity the mention of which strikes a responsive chord in souls or bellies of a lot of people.” Not sparing the rod, Adamic asserted that “names for the customers of Aimee’s faith-factory and similar concerns are ‘morons,’ ‘boobs,’ and ‘suckers.” He then burst forth with a variation of what might be applied at any time, including our own:
They are the two-legged organisms who make up the vast memberships of various fanatical religious bodies, reform leagues, and mobs of all sorts. They are the folks whom the Lord blessed with a lot of feelings and scant reasoning power, making them, thus, abnormally suggestible to dynamic personalities—spellbinders, demagogues, bunk-shooters, bunco-steerers of all sorts. They make life rosy for the evangelistic faith manufacturer, the salvationist, the “divine healer,” the flag-waving politician, the blue-sky promoter. The fill our churches and jails. They shout hallelujahs at Aimee Semple McPherson’s temple and furnish recruits to the Oldest Profession in Earth. They are the folks who make possible the so-called “scientific salesmanship. But here I am primarily concerned with the business of faith, religious revivalism, “conversion,” salvation,” “faith healing.”
Another sharp-edged observation was Adamic’s aphorism that “pure faith is synonymous with the child attitude, citing Christ’s admonition in Matthew 18:1.3 that “except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,” which the author interpreted to mean that “you must be as receptive as little children.” Beyond this, he mused, “the chief characteristic of the child-mind is credulity” and that it was easy to implement concepts in the minds of the impressionable.
After sharing a story about how he convinced gullible children in his San Pedro neighborhood that there was wildcat nearby, in order get them to stop torturing an old goat, Adamic propounded that “a good many people never grow up; their bodies mature, but they retain their child-receptivity, their primitive credulity, thereby remaining in condition to attain to the Kingdom of Heaven—the kingdom of illusion—as easily as the kids who annoyed my friend and neighbor, the goat.”
He added that “the average person entering a religious revival joint does so aware, at least vaguely, of his shortcomings” and, as the service celebrates the power and spirit of God and the testimonies of these shared by minister, pastors, preachers and so on, “under the pressure of various emotional stimuli, he surrenders to the idea and gets ‘saved’ or ‘healed.'” With this exalted spiritual condition, Adamic went on, the congregant “is as incapable of deliberation or of doubt as a sea-gull egg is of flying,” and they forgot those lacks in their lives, fell under the sway of “the power and spirit of the Lord” and “the mood becomes . . . an actual experience.” It was “this abandonment of self to the illusion,” the writer concluded, “that is the central secret of evangelism, of healing—of the entire faith business.”
It was the “cheerless circumstances” of the lives of “these dismaying customers of the faith business” that led them to “seek relief from reality in illusion” and create a new reality through religious zealotry. Adamic posited that,
The lot of these people is to suffer a great deal, indeed all they can stand; to perform dreary, wearisome task, to be looked down upon, for as a rule they are old or else unbeautiful and unhealthy of body and full of mind; and, naturally enough, they are eager for something to hoist them out of the morass of their lives. They crave comfort, something to sooth their wounded vanity; they crave well-being and peace, security and certainty . . . and being also full of inhibitions and the sense of sin, carefully implanted into them by the forces that made them what they are and that feed upon them—they eagerly reach for the neatly prepared cakes of simple but potent hokum that Aimee Semple McPherson produces and distributes.
And the simpler the “hokum,” that is, nonsense, the better, the writer continued. The gullible followers of a Sister Aimee or an Elsie Lincoln Benedict would not be capable of comprehending Einstein’s theory of relativity or Robert Milikan’s views on cosmic rays and particularly if delivered in an academic (read: dry) fashion. It was not wise, he observed, to “speak of the thrilling and intricate mysteries of our world and the universe, but, rather, “one must get a plain piece of something or other and then put it over in terms of the everyday life lived by the audience.” Cited was Sister Aimee’s simple explanation on how God brought light to the universe, but did so in a dramatic, storytelling way, not an academic, scientific one.
Another key aspect of the minister’s success, Adamic informed readers, “is the fact that she succeeded in endowing herself with supernatural abilities,” starting with her birth emanating from her mother‘s prayers and an upbringing in which she was “trained for God,” which then evolved into hearing voices representing the “call of God.” It was added that “she modestly compares her career to the life of Joan of Arc” with a life comprised of miracles that involved her as a worker of them.
Apparently, Aimee felt the she was “the greatest miracle of all” and that the Lord guided the selection of the Angelus Temple location and fomented her escape from the alleged kidnapping that riveted so many people in 1926 when she suddenly vanished. Because “the Lord functions through her in a most amazing way; He gave her miraculous powers to cure the afflicted—that is, those who have faith.” Given this creation of her life of miracles, “she acquired a tremendous hold upon the imagination of her poor followers,” who believed her explanations concerning her disappearance with some evidently seeing an ascent to heaven after it was believed she drowned in the Pacific Ocean. After all, how could she have been capable of lying if she was a recipient of God’s miracles.
Somewhat abruptly, Adamic ended his work by citing Anatole France and his 1889 novel, Thaïs, specifically an excerpt relating to a monk who amassed a massive following, including those who were essentially healed by faith, a la McPherson, and the work even featured a monologue by a physician who marveled at the ascetic’s abilities and commented that “there are forces . . . infinitely more powerful than reason and science.” Adamic inquired “What are they?” and answered his rhetorical query with “Ignorance and folly.”
Idiosyncratic as it is, “The Truth About Los Angeles” is a fascinating read about the burgeoning metropolis by a writer with strong leftist inclinations and who had a cynic’s perspective about the city and its people, most especially when it came to religion. When the “Little Blue Book” contribution was published, Adamic was starting to get some local attention, but national renown followed later and continued until his mysterious death in 1951. Anyone seeking to better understand the Angel City and its environs during the Roaring Twenties is well advised to seek out this fascinating little work for an unusual perspective about our region.
The mass followings that gathered around celebrity evangelists in the 1920s suggest a strong need among the people of that era in Los Angeles. The so-called Roaring Twenties were marked by rapid development, explosive migration, sudden wealth, and a sense of newfound superiority over other places.
Since not everyone could be an Einstein capable of formulating a theory to explain such bewildering changes, many people naturally gravitated toward charismatic opinion leaders.
Over the past three decades, people in China have experienced the same – if not even faster – pace of development, wealth accumulation, industrial advancement, and rising global influence. I’ve noticed similar anxieties among the population, especially in major cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, and Chongqing. I believe sooner or later, spiritual, psychological, or religious leading figures will begin to emerge one after another.