The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science

Christian Science

Eddy and 26 followers founded the Christian Science church in 1879 in Boston, Massachusetts, following the publication of Eddy's book Science and Health (1875). In the book Eddy argued that disease is a mental error rather than a physical disorder, and that it should be treated not by medicine, but by a form of silent prayer that corrects the mistaken beliefs. Her ideas were not new, she said; on the contrary, the church sought to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing".

At a time when medical practice was in its infancy, and patients often fared better if left alone, the Christian Science message was a welcome one. In 1882 Eddy set up the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, where, for $300 for a 12-lesson course, she and her students taught mostly women how to become Christian Science practitioners, licenced to offer Christian Science prayer to the sick. The college made Eddy a wealthy woman; when she died in December 1910 her estate was valued at $1.5 million.

Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in the United States. The church had 27 members in 1879; 65,717 in 1906 when McClure's began its research; and 268,915 at its height in 1936. In 1890 there were just seven Christian Science churches in the U.S.; by 1910 there were 1,104. Construction of the mother church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was completed in Boston in December 1894, and in 1906 the Mother Church Extension, rising 224 ft and accommodating nearly 5,000, was built at a cost of $2 million. Art historian Paul Ivey writes that, for many, the building "visibly declared that Christian Science had, indeed, arrived as a major force in American religious life".

McClure's articles

The McClure's articles were published in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908, under Georgine Milmine's byline, as "Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science". The series was preceded by a seven-page editorial in December 1906, outlining the difficulties of the investigation and explaining why it was being published. Referring to Christian Science as a cult based on a "hazy and obscure" book, the editorial continued: "A church which has doubled its membership in five years, which draws its believers mostly from the rich and respectable ... and which has just paid for the most costly church building in New England—to the wordly, this is no longer a joke":

In 1875 no one living outside of two or three back streets of Lynn had heard of Christian Science. Now, the very name is a catch phrase. In those early days the leader and teacher paid out half of her ten dollars a week to hire a hall, patching out the rest of her living with precarious fees as an instructor in mental healing; now, she is one of the richest women in the United States. She is more than that—she is the most powerful American woman.

The series got off to an unfortunate start by reproducing a photograph on page two of the editorial that purported to be of Eddy, but was in fact of someone else.

Synopsis

The book's criticism of Eddy is considerable. She is portrayed as greedy, uneducated and deceitful, someone who regularly revised her life story and was interested only in making money. The authors produce witness statements from Eddy's childhood alleging that she engaged in repeated fainting spells to gain attention or avoid punishment, particularly from her father, and that, as an adult, she developed a habit of appearing to be seriously ill only to recover quickly.

Eddy was widowed when she was 22 years old and pregnant, after which she returned to live in her father's home. Her son was raised there for the first few years of his life, looked after by domestic staff because of Eddy's poor health. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy alleges that she allowed him to be adopted when he was four. According to Eddy, she was unable to prevent the adoption, but McClure's implied otherwise.

Her next two marriages, lifelong poor health, and the numerous legal actions in which she was involved, are examined in detail—including lawsuits she initiated against her students, a criminal case in which her third husband was accused of conspiring to murder one of them (an allegation never proven), her conviction that her former students killed her third husband by using "mental malpractice", and her legal adoption of a 41-year-old homeopath when she was 67. The authors also allege that Eddy's major work, Science and Health (1875), which became Christian Science's main religious text, borrowed heavily from the work of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a New England faith healer. Quimby had treated Eddy in the years before his death and had given her some of his unpublished notes.

Editorial team

Georgine Milmine was born in Ontario, Canada. Before joining McClure's as a researcher, she worked for the Syracuse Herald in New York. She had been collecting material about Eddy for years—newspaper articles from the 1880s, court records, and a first edition of Science and Health, all of which were hard to obtain—but lacked the resources to check and write it up herself, so she sold it to McClure's. Apparently when McClure's was sold, the new publisher threw away the research, including the first edition.

S. S. McClure assigned five writers to the story, including Milmine, Willa Cather, Burton J. Hendrick, political columnist Mark Sullivan, Will Irwin and, for a short time, the journalist Ida Tarbell. Cather had started working for McClure's as an editor in 1906 when she was 32 years old. She and Sullivan spent time traveling in New England seeking confirmation of the material about Eddy's early life. The journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, a friend of Cather's, wrote in 1953 that McClure saw Eddy as a "natural" for the magazine, because of her marital history and idiosyncrasies:

The material was touchy, and would attract a world of readers both of the faithful and the doubters. ... The job seemed to [Cather] a little infra dig, not on the level where she cared to move. But she inspired confidence, had the mind of a judge and the nose of a detective when she needed it.

Cather's authorship

David Stouck, professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University, writes that the Mary Baker Eddy Library holds the original manuscript, and that Cather's handwriting is evident in edits for the typesetter and notes with queries.

Cather discussed her authorship privately with her father and friends, but otherwise said she was not the author. She was reluctant to discuss most of her work before O Pioneers! (1913). According to L. Brent Bohlke, editor of Willa Cather in Person (1990), Cather regarded the Eddy book as poorly written. While it contains some excellent writing and character analysis, Bohkle wrote, it is not well-structured; the editing had failed to rid the book of the serialized nature of the McClure's pieces. Stouck adds that Cather wanted to distance herself from journalism, and sought to minimize her role in the articles because they had angered the Christian Science church.

Letters

Cather identified herself as the author on December 17, 1906, in a letter to her father, Charles F. Cather. The articles beginning February 1907 (at that time written, but not published) were hers, she wrote. Apologizing for being unable to come home for Christmas, she explained that she had to get the March article ready:

But if you were here, my father, you'd tell me to stand by my job and not to desert Mr. McClure in this crisis. It would mean such a serious loss to him in money and influence not to have the March article come out—Everyone would think he was beaten and scared out, for the articles are under such a glare of publicity and such a fire of criticism. I had nothing to do with the January article remember, my work begins to appear in February. Mr. McClure is ill from worry and anxiety ...

Cather referred to her authorship again in a letter to the writer Harrison G. Dwight on January 12, 1907:

Mr. McClure tried three men on this disagreeable task, but none of them did it very well, so a month ago it was thrust upon me. You may imagine me wandering around the country grubbing among newspaper files and court records for the next five months. It is the most laborious and sordid work I have ever come upon, and it takes every hour of my time and as much vitality as I can put into it. ... You can't know, never having done it, how such work does sap your poor brain and wring it dry of anything you'd like to pretend was there. I jump about like a squirrel in a cage and wonder how I got here and why I am doing it. I never in my life wanted to do this sort of thing. I have a clean conscience on that score. Then why am I hammering away at it, I'd like to know? I often wonder whether I shall ever write another line of anything I care to.

On November 24, 1922, Cather wrote to a friend, Edwin H. Anderson, director of the New York Public Library, that she was the author of the entire book except for the first chapter. Burton J. Hendrick had written the first installment, but it had been based largely on rumor. McClure asked her to complete the series because she was regarded as impartial. For the rest of the installments, she told Anderson, no expense had been spared in verifying Milmine's material. McClure had promoted her to managing editor on the basis of the work. She ended the letter by asking Anderson to keep the information confidential; she added that had not told the truth about it to anyone before this, but felt that someone ought to know.

Cather's letter to Anderson can only be paraphrased by scholars, because she left a clause in her will forbidding the publication of her letters and private papers. The correspondence enters the public domain in 2018, 70 years after her death. The Willa Cather Trust permitted the publication of selected letters in 2013, and a complete edition is planned for early January 2018.

In letters to others, Cather continued to deny her authorship. She told Genevive Richmond in 1933 and Harold Goddard Rugg in 1934 that she had helped only to organize and rewrite parts of the material. One of the first public indications of Cather's authorship came in 1935, when a copy of the book listed for sale by Philip Duschnes, a New York bookseller, was found to contain an editor's note from Witter Bynner. Bynner had signed the book on February 12, 1934, and added: "The material was brought to McClure's by Miss Milmine, but was put into the painstaking hands of Willa Cather for proper presentation, so that a great part of it is her work."

Eddy's response

Eddy responded to the early installments in McClure's by challenging its description of her father, early family life, and the issues surrounding her marriages. McClure's had said that the Bible was the only book in the house when she was growing up; on the contrary, she wrote, her father was a great reader. To counter McClure's claim that her childhood home had provided a "lonely and unstimulating existence", her statement described the educational and professional achievements of her family. In response to McClure's description of her as bad tempered, she offered as an example of her own kindness that a housekeeper of the family's had resigned because Eddy allowed a blind girl, who had knocked on the door and was unknown to the family, to stay with them.

Church response

According to Peter Lyon in his biography of S. S. McClure, when the series began, three Christian Science officials arrived at the McClure's offices and asked Witter Bynner, then managing editor, to take them to McClure:

The Christian Scientists came in. Before they sat down, they stood on chairs and closed the transoms over the two doors to the rooms. Then they made their demand: the series must not be published. S.S. scowled at them and said nothing. To fill the silence, Brynner began rather nervously to assure the Scientists that the articles were not sensational, not offensive; that there was no cause for apprehension; that all the facts had been most carefully verified. 

When McClure refused, they said he would soon notice a loss of advertising. The church purchased the manuscript when the book appeared, and there were rumors that the plates had been destroyed. In June 1920 it also purchased some of McClure's research files from a New York manuscript dealer, including notes from Milmine and drafts of the book handwritten by Cather. Christian Scientists were reported to have bought and destroyed copies of the book, and removed them from libraries. Sergeant wrote in 1953 that the book "disappeared almost immediately from circulation—the Christian Scientists are said to have bought the copies". It had become scarce even in libraries. According to Sergeant, readers in the 1950s were likely to have to borrow it from the chief librarian and be watched while reading it. The book's copyright expired 28 years after publication. Baker Book House, a Christian publishing house, republished it in 1971 "in the interest of fairness and objectivity", according to its back cover.

University of Nebraska Press edition

Caroline Fraser writes that the church tried to stop the University of Nebraska Press from republishing the book in 1993. The press was interested in doing so, with a new introduction by David Stouck, because the articles and book were Cather's first extended work, and therefore important in her development as a writer. According to Fraser, the head of the church's public-relations office, the Committee on Publication, called the press and told them the reprint might damage the church's and Eddy's reputation. According to a press representative who spoke to Fraser, the church representative "felt it was his responsibility to try to bully us into stopping publication or into saying that the book was worthless".

Stouck made clear his view in the book's preface that Willa Cather was "indisputably the principal author". But, according to Fraser, there were fears for the jobs of the church researchers who had helped make the Cather–Milmine manuscript available for examination. Stouck therefore agreed to add a statement to the book, which, in Fraser's view, was essentially a church press release:

Since the Bison re-issue of The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science went to press new materials have come to light which suggest that Ms. Eddy's enemies may have played a significant role in organizing the materials for the "Milmine" biography. New information about Georgine Milmine, moreover, suggests that she would have welcomed biased opinion for its sensational and commercial value. The exact nature of Willa Cather's part in the compiling and writing of the biography remains, accordingly, a matter for further scholarly investigation.

The "enemies" Stouck refers to relate to the "Next Friends" lawsuit that was being prepared during the McClure's serialization. The lawsuit was brought by Eddy's relatives, who maintained that she was unable to manage her own affairs; had it succeeded, she would have lost control of the church and her fortune. According to Fraser, the suit was organized in 1907 by Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the New York World (1860–1931); his motive was to engineer a story about Eddy to rival that of McClure's. The McClure's journalists were in touch with the litigants.

According to Fraser, the head of the church's Committee on Publication included the following in a report for its 1993 annual meeting:

A major corrective opportunity this year involved the rerelease of one of the earliest malicious biographies of Mrs. Eddy, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science by Georgine Milmine. Dating from the yellow journalism period, this book was published in an attempt to discredit her. The current publisher, after much correspondence with our office, instead issued a statement accurately characterizing its bias. The book has received almost no attention in the public, proving if Truth isn't spoken, nothing is said.

General reception and influence

The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy became a key primary source for biographies of Eddy that were published independently of the church. It influenced Lyman P. Powell's Christian Science: The Faith and its Founder (1907); Edwin Franken Dakin's Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (1929); Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore's Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932); and Martin Gardner's The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy (1993). The New York Times wrote in 1910 that the book "ranks among the really great biographies—or would were its subject of more intrinsic importance":

Since this Life first appeared in McClure's Magazine not one important statement as of fact in it has been disproved or even seriously questioned. It is a product of much and highly intelligent labor, and were Christian Scientists open to argument or amenable to reason the wretched cult would not have survived its publication for a single month. It is unanswerable and conclusive, and nobody who has not read it can be considered well-informed as to the history or nature of Eddyism.

Gillian Gill disagreed that the book offers an accurate portrayal of Eddy. She argued, for example, that the story of Eddy having "fits" as a child to get her own way, or the way McClure's described them, was "invented more or less out of whole cloth" by McClure's journalist Burton Hendrick, and that the accounts of her as "hysterical" were misogynist. That Eddy would regularly appear to lose consciousness as a child is supported by Robert Peel, who worked for the church and wrote a sympathetic three-volume biography of Eddy.

The journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, who was a minister in the Church of Religious Science—a belief system closely related to Christian Science—wrote in 1974 that Cather was "a fine—maybe our finest—American woman novelist", but also a "lousy unscrupulous reporter". She argued that Cather had "stirred with grim fancy the most vicious and inaccurate of all the attacks on Mrs. Eddy". David Stouck, in his introduction to the 1993 University of Nebraska Press edition, wrote that Cather's portrayal of Eddy "contains some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature that Willa Cather would ever write."

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