“Not an Earthly Service”

by Kevin Dann

In Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America (Rutgers University Press, 2000). Kevin Dann weaves a superb narrative of two contrasting initiatives “up Hudson” from New York City, the first of which celebrated the Naturalist worldview as well as social betterment through eugenics. The following excerpt begins to introduce the other initiative, what anthroposophists still refer to as “Spring Valley,” comprising the Threefold group, farm, and center. The two stories unite in Percy Mackay, who began in one camp and ended in the other (see “Columbia Rising...” in this issue). — Editor

Among the dozens...of Arcadian experiments carried out in the New York metropolitan region in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the convergence of personalities and events in that part of the Ramapo Mountain landscape transformed into Harriman Park was unique. No other place witnessed quite the concerted effort at restoration and integration or so distinctly expressed the new ethos of Naturalism held by its shapers. In the 1930s, at almost the exact moment when the metropolitan naturalists felt most assured of the success of their venture, just across the Great Border Fault a much smaller band of Manhattanites was directing its efforts at rescuing humanity from the very triumph of Naturalism celebrated by its Arcadian neighbors. Though sharing their Naturalist peers’ commitment to the scientific reshaping of the individual and society, these men and women blazed a radically different trail into modernity. They called themselves “anthroposophists,” a name that denoted their allegiance to a spiritual science that placed the human being at the center of knowledge, radiating out into the natural world, contrary to the Naturalist stance of defining the human being out of knowledge derived from nature.

Threefold

By Sunday afternoon, the field beside the oddly shaped green three-bay garage at Threefold Farm was filled with automobiles, most of them with New York plates. Many of the newly arriving non-motoring guests had come via the Erie train from Jersey City or by bus from the Astor Hotel Bus Terminal.... Ralph Courtney and other residents of Threefold Farm periodically made the two-mile trip in his roadster to the Spring Valley station to bring them out to the farm. ...[O]vernight guests headed across the yard, past the greenhouse and gardens, into the oak woods, where twenty canvas tents...accommodated participants in the two-week Anthroposophical Summer School Conference of 1933, the first to be held in America.

The conference had opened the night before with a lecture by Dr. Christoph Linder on anthroposophical medical science. On Sunday morning ... Dr. Maria Röschl, a teacher from the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, [lectured] on “Ways of Inner Development.” A vegetarian lunch was then served in the dining hall of the main house. All afternoons were free for reading, meditation, and tea under the trees, a tradition introduced by Threefold founder Ralph Courtney, who had picked up the habit during his student days at Oxford....

There was also plenty of time for a swim in the pond, which had been created by damming the Oost Val, the little brook that bisected the farm’s thirty-two acres. A photograph of the pond, sporting a diving board and sandy beach, was featured on the front cover of the conference brochure, which advertised the farm as a “delightful vacation spot...lying in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains....” In 1926 Charlotte Parker, one of the original members of the Threefold Group of the Anthroposophical Society in America, had come to Spring Valley searching for a place where she and her fellow anthroposophists could escape the stifling city heat and begin to put into practice in a more convivial setting some of their ideas for regenerating modem metropolitan American culture.... Charlotte Parker had first come to know Ralph Courtney in another Arcadian setting, an Adirondack summer camp, during the terribly hot summer of 1922. There Courtney had put up a sign outside his cabin: “Lectures by Rudolf Steiner read here every evening.” She recalled that only one person usually attended the evening readings....

Anxious about the political compromises at [the 1919 Peace Conference at] Versailles, Courtney [had been] drawn to Steiner’s threefold idea and conducted two interviews with Steiner in 1921. At their second meeting, as they said good-bye, Steiner helped Courtney put on his overcoat. Courtney was overwhelmed by a feeling that he found impossible to describe but that seemed to recognize Steiner as the representative of the very universalism for which his threefold idea called. Courtney formed an inner resolve to devote himself to nurturing in America the idea of the threefold social order....

In November 1923 Courtney founded the Threefold Group.... The purchase of the Spring Valley farm in 1926 provided a landscape close enough to Manhattan to allow them to engage fully in an effort to renew both nature and culture. But the Arcadians assembled at Threefold Farm were far from going “back to Nature.” Rather than seeking to be redeemed by Nature, they sought to become redeemers of Nature, aiming to reclaim for human beings their central role as the intermediaries between the sensible and supersensible worlds. While their contemporaries just a few miles away in Harriman Park were reshaping the physical landscape in hopes of drawing modem metropolitans into closer contact with the sensible, the Threefold anthroposophists directed their efforts at a wholly supersensible landscape. In 1924, when Rudolf Steiner had carried out the rededication of the General Anthroposophical Society, he had declared: “This anthroposophical movement is not an earthly service; this anthroposophical movement, in every detail of its totality, is a divine service, a service of the gods.” ...

Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (right) with long-time coworker Sayre (Sally) Burns in the 1950s.

The audience for the evening lecture that Sunday in 1933 was very large, as it was to be the first American lecture given by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, who had pioneered the Biologic Dynamic agriculture practiced at Threefold Farm.... Enlisting at age eighteen in the German Army Corps of Engineers, Pfeiffer [had been] sent to the war front... In 1919, back at [the manufacturing firm] Bosch, he attended a lecture on the threefold social order given by Rudolf Steiner to the employees at their union hall.... Steiner emphasized the need to discover new forces that were life-enhancing; until humanity reckoned with them, modern social structure would continue to mimic the disintegrating forces upon which modern civilization was based.... It was a hot summer day, and Pfeiffer noted that the long lecture had already left the speaker hoarse and perspiring. He asked a waitress to set a bottle of soda water on the speaker’s platform, and Steiner immediately drank it. From that moment on, Pfeiffer devoted himself to serving Steiner’s work. In 1933, eight years after Steiner’s death, he was at the beginning of a relationship with the American anthroposophical community that would echo Steiner’s twenty-five-year relationship with European seekers of a spiritual science.... For the next twenty-seven summers, Pfeiffer would open the Threefold summer conference and, along with the biweekly Sunday lectures he gave after coming to live at the farm in 1942, pour forth a remarkable body of knowledge about nature and history in his own right.

The above is excerpted from Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America (Rutgers University Press, 2000), by Kevin Dann