36 minute read
To Lay Bare All of Spiritualism’s Shams: Harry Waite and Oscar Eliason’s Anti-Medium Crusade
To Lay Bare All of Spiritualism’s Shams: Harry Waite and Oscar Eliason’s Anti-Medium Crusade
By BRANDON JOHNSON
On April 23, 1894, an intriguing letter appeared in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune under the title “Open Letter to Oscar Eliason.” The letter’s author, Harry H. Waite, was a traveling spiritualist medium who, according to an advertisement published in the Tribune only a few weeks earlier, frankly invited curious Salt Lakers to witness his supposedly supernatural skills. “Parlors packed!” read the newspaper announcement. “Lawyers, doctors, merchants, teachers, ladies. Why? Come and see.” Satisfaction, Waite assured the public, was guaranteed. 1 By the looks of the April 23 letter, however, it appears the optimism exhibited in the medium’s earlier advertisement had quickly run its course. Instead of a bold cataloging of Waite’s supposedly mystical talents, this new missive was a tangled bundle of self-pitying declarations and vituperative claims aimed at Oscar Eliason, a magician from Salt Lake City.
Oscar Eliason
REPRODUCTION OF LINE DRAWING IN SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 1, 1899, BY LISA JOHNSON
Eliason, who was born in either 1869 or 1870 to Mormon immigrant jeweler O. L. Eliason and his wife Emma, began his career as a secular conjuror by performing in Mormon meetinghouses, a fact that won him the moniker “Mormon Wizard.” 2 (Later, he acquired a second nickname: “Dante the Great.”) According to a biographical news story filed in 1899, Eliason was a graduate of Salt Lake’s St. Mark’s School and had been groomed to follow his father into the jewelry business, but his resistance to the “idea that he would have to spend his life ‘watching wheels go round with a dice-box stuck in his eye’” caused him to haunt the environs of the Salt Lake Theater in the hopes of learning some magic tricks, until he finally broke with family tradition and took to the stage himself. 3
According to reports, his performances were usually well attended, likely due to his expert conjuring. Audiences left his shows “thunderstruck” at his ability to turn ink into water, hatch “real birds from … eggs,” produce goldfish from thin air, create “umbrella heaps of flowers,” and make people disappear. 4 But where audiences were impressed by Eliason’s act, Waite was sorely disgruntled. To his way of thinking, the magician had slyly—and very skillfully—turned the public against him, by contaminating audiences with silly sleight-of-hand performances and then passing his tricks off as exposés of supposed spiritualist deceptions.
The opening salvo of Harry Waite’s April 23 letter focused on Eliason’s perceived bad-mouthing of his father, Dr. A. A. Waite, who was also a medium and appears to have been traveling and performing with his son. (An announcement in the Tribune a day earlier had invited the public to witness “the Waites … in their wonderful materialization séance … at Shell’s Auditorium Hall.”) 5 In a culture that prized personal honor, the younger Waite would have sensed his own reputation, as well as his father’s, to be on the line, a feeling that probably prompted him to write his angry letter. But it was the charge of conspiracy that lay at the heart of the spiritualist’s communiqué to the Tribune. In Waite’s mind, Eliason was part of a sinister plot to keep mediums from performing in Utah’s capital city. “I have been refused the Salt Lake Theater Sunday nights,” Waite complained, “but you [Eliason] seem to get it. I have had the rent raised upon me to keep me out, and there is not a place in this city where I can challenge you to meet me in open contest. This puts me to a great disadvantage, but I am honorable enough to meet your bluffs the best way I can—through this paper at so much a line.” Calling on the illusionist to “come to my rooms, 261 South West Temple Street,” with his friends, Waite said that he would give Eliason $100 in gold if he could raise a small table without using his hands, thus duplicating a popular element of many mediums’ acts. Eliason was an untested neophyte, Waite continued, who would prove unable to raise the table, even with the wager on it. But that was only part of Waite’s challenge. He also called on Eliason to “let me come on your stage at your so-called exposé. In fair contest; if you duplicate my spirit manifestations as they are produced, before an honest committee, you stand acquitted. If not, you stand convicted as an impostor, and the winner takes the gate receipts.” 6
Not surprisingly, Waite’s tartly-worded letter found its mark, setting in motion an epistolary mêlée between the hometown magician and the traveling medium. For a brief moment in 1894, Salt Lake City became a primary front in the rhetorical war between practitioners of secular magic (alternatively called “magicians,” “illusionists,” and “conjurors” by nineteenth-century Americans) and public spiritualist mediums. Played out in the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune, this local manifestation of the national dust-up between magicians and spiritualists might best be described as an internecine brawl between cultural cousins whose public performances were remarkably similar, but who disagreed fervently about the source of their power. While mediums sought to convince audiences they possessed special supernatural knowledge and could communicate directly with spirits, conjurors were bent on establishing, once and for all, the natural— even mundane—origins of their own tricks, and, by extension, those of the nation’s mediums. But there was more to the illusionists’ desire to expose spiritualist mediums in public than a simple drive to naturalize the supernatural. Their dispute with mediumship was primarily about the respectability and credibility of their profession. In a world where supernatural magical practice and secular conjuring were often still entangled in the minds of spectators, the late-nineteenth-century magician had to struggle mightily to set himself apart from lingering associations with supernaturalism. In a fundamental way, secular magic’s forceful collision with spirit materialization across the country—and in Utah—can be attributed to this issue. Secular illusionists like Oscar Eliason saw any association with otherworldliness as a threat to their desires for professional status, and believed that any conflation of the secular and the supernatural in the public mind promised to re-associate the magical profession with an older, bankrupt culture of superstition and necromancy.
The story of Oscar Eliason’s spirited exchange with Harry Waite, then, plainly illuminates the strong cultural bond between spiritualist mediumship and secular magic in American culture, while at the same time revealing the vast cultural distance that still separated the magical and medium professions. Eliason and Waite (as well as other mediums and illusionists across the country) shared elements of a common repertoire. Yet, at the same time, the professional imperatives of conjuror and medium did not allow them to coexist peacefully.
There is, however, something else the tussle between Eliason and Waite illuminates, namely the modern character of Salt Lake City at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the exchange between Eliason and Waite shows just how far Salt Lake City had progressed along the path toward cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. We might think of it as evidence of what Gustive Larson (when talking about politics) dubbed the “Americanization of Utah,” but on the register of culture. According to Larson, in the final few decades of the nineteenth century, Utah’s mostly Mormon polity, once highly antagonistic to federal supervision, underwent a profound ideological change that ultimately opened the way to statehood for the long-lived territory. At the heart of that change—Larson’s process of “Americanization”—was the “demand for undivided loyalty to the United States government, for the acceptance of the country’s democratic process under the Constitution, including the separation of church and state.” 7
St. Mark’s School, founded by the Episcopal Church, where Oscar Eliason attended school.
Gustive O. Larson, The “Americanization” of Utah for Statehood (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1971), ix.
The separation of church and culture in late-nineteenth-century Utah was just as profound, and it is this transformation—what we might identify as “cultural Americanization”—that the public debate between Eliason and Waite unmistakably marks. Once a rather rustic frontier outpost, settled and dominated, both politically and culturally, for decades by Mormons, Salt Lake City had grown into a diverse urban center by the 1890s. As historians Thomas Alexander and James Allen have shown, theorist Gunther Barth’s conception of “modern city culture” clearly applied to late-nineteenth-century Salt Lake City, if only on a “rudimentary level.” “Its divided space,” they wrote, “its newspapers, its department stores, its ball park, and its theater were like those of other American communities.” What is more, argued Alexander and Allen, the citizens of Salt Lake City saw in the 1880s and 1890s the “introduction of ever greater diversity of cultural groups, and the tendency of persons within the city to belong to more than one subculture,” a noticeable reversal of previous decades. 8 Certainly the relative cultural vigor of itinerant mediums and debunking magicians—as well as supporters of both—reinforces the truth of that observation. Waite’s protests about conspiracy aside, itinerant spiritualist mediums treated Salt Lake City as they would have any other American city and often stopped to hang out a shingle, if only temporarily. At the same time, of course, Utah’s capital city had also become a venue for the development of secular magic and its program of disenchantment.
The Salt Lake Theater
Originating in 1848, when Maggie Fox and her sister Kate claimed to have interpreted mysterious raps in the walls of their upstate New York home as messages from the spirit of a murdered peddler, spiritualist mediumship was, at first, a relatively unsophisticated form of public performance, and consisted primarily of interpreting loud “spirit” noises in walls, floors, and tables as a form of spectral communication. In effect, the Fox sisters’ supposed ability to understand and translate the raps made them the country’s first mediums. Soon, as news of the “Hydesville rappings” spread, other women and men began claiming they too were mediums. Eventually the nation would become acquainted with the likes of Emma Hardinge Britten, Cora Hatch, Henry Gordon, Charles Foster, Ira and William Davenport, Annie Eva Fay, William and Horatio Eddy, Lizzie Doten, and Achsa Sprague, as well as a host of lesser-known public mediums. 9
Not surprisingly, eager spiritualist practitioners soon began pushing beyond the conventional boundaries of mediumship set down by the Foxes to invent new forms of spiritualist performance. Within a few decades, they had included as elements of their repertoire not only automatic writing (where “spirits” guided the medium’s pen), but also slate writing (where “spirit messages” appeared between two sealed slates), pellet reading (where mediums “read” sealed messages with the aid of “spirits”), consulting the planchette (the precursor of our modern Ouija board), and trance speaking or lecturing (where mediums “channeled” spirit voices). This last category of performance was especially common, though trance speaking was soon eclipsed by the more popular materialization séance. The supposed ability of materialization mediums to make spirits appear on stage either in special “ghost cabinets,” where they revealed only parts of themselves, or directly in front of the audience, absolutely astounded audiences, who flocked to séance venues just for the chance to see a materialized “specter.” 10
At the same time that spiritualist mediums were expanding the boundaries of their profession, magical practice was being redefined in fundamental ways. Old associations with witchcraft and necromancy were falling away and new links to secularity and showmanship were being forged. Linguistic changes substantiate this conclusion. As historian Jackson Lears has suggested, in nineteenth-century America the word “magic” had begun to function more as a “rhetorical device” that connoted “sleight-of-hand showmanship,” than as a reference to “participation in a coherently animistic cosmos.” 11
There was still the possibility, however, that audiences would misunderstand this shift and question where secular magic actually “fit” in American culture. This situation motivated illusionists to redouble their efforts at shedding lingering associations with supernaturalism and persuaded them to continue working to refashion their performances into respectable forms of secular entertainment. Over time, the forces of secularization and professionalization transformed illusionism. In New York City in the 1830s, it had become almost impossible to find a magician “who did not explicitly claim disenchantment as the goal and function of magical entertainment.” Audiences, too, were backing away from supernaturalism. Magician Antonio Blitz (1810-1877) recalled that as early as 1835, “large and fashionable audiences” were attending his performances, where “there was, with a very slight exception, a total absence of an approach to the superstitious character” among spectators. 12 Magic was also becoming an increasingly important part of commercialized show business, and began to assume many of the trappings of a bona fide profession: a burgeoning market for tricks (which some illusionists considered to be such important assets that they sold them only when they retired or desperately needed money); specialized knowledge cultivated through apprenticeship and incessant practice; hired managers; and modern marketing campaigns. What is more, for many of America’s illusionists, success also depended on a working understanding of various mechanical “magical” apparatuses, superb physical dexterity, flawless showmanship, a keen interest in innovation, and enough expertise to fool the audience’s collective eye. Such markers of professionalism caught the attention of the middle class and gave conjurors a new aura of respectability. 13
Through all of these transformations, the nation’s materialization mediums—almost to a person—continued to claim they were aided by otherworldly forces, even as fewer and fewer magicians expressed a willingness to make similar claims. These changes spelled trouble for spirit materializers, whose séances were beginning to look more and more like burlesques of secular magical performance. In one 1876 séance, for example, the “spirits” supposedly materialized flowers and a live dove from thin air, while in another, a medium produced a large black-and-white rabbit from beneath a spectator’s partially unbuttoned waistcoat. Even the illustrious Cora Hatch Tappan, one of the nation’s best-known mediums, turned in the 1870s to materializing flowers. And there were of course the floating bodies, disappearing people, and disembodied limbs that both magicians and mediums were exhibiting on stage. Such phenomena threatened to halt the secular, respectable advance of magical entertainment and undo everything modern magicians had been working for, if only because the public could easily mistake materialization, with its continuing claim to supernatural status, for illusionism. In such a confusing environment, conjurors fretted about how best to distinguish themselves from spiritualist mediums. 14 Believing that such circumstances called for drastic measures, anxious illusionists began taking on the deceptive activities of materializing mediums with a vengeance. Robert Heller (ca. 1826- 1878), a British illusionist who toured the United States extensively, was heavily invested in outing materialization mediums as part of his magical work. Initially entering show business as a concert pianist, Heller soon turned to magic after seeing Jean- Eugène Robert-Houdin, the famous French conjuror, perform. Young Heller was so taken by Robert-Houdin’s performance that his first magical act was based almost solely on the older man’s tricks. He took the act to New York City in 1852, and then traveled from there around the United States. By 1865, he was doing a “cabinet show” based on the Davenports’ materialization act. A report submitted to the Banner of Light, perhaps the spiritualist movement’s most influential newspaper, from a St. Louis correspondent indicates that Heller perfectly mimicked nearly every process the mediums normally went through in their show, even deputizing a committee from the audience and then having them bind his assistant in a cabinet similar to the one the Davenports used. The correspondent, a believing spiritualist, was not convinced by Heller’s act, but others presumably found his exposé compelling. 15
Interior of the Salt Lake Theater, where Oscar Eliason began his conjuring career and performed in 1894.
Other illusionists were as enthusiastic as Heller in their exposure of mediums, often using print culture as a tool of attack. John Nevil Maskelyne (1839-1917), author of the popular anti-spiritualist tract Modern Spiritualism (1875), targeted Kentucky medium Annie (also known as Anna) Eva Fay for special assault, perhaps because her reliance on confederates to “create” spirit phenomena seemed so obvious. The magician was quick to find the deception in Fay’s performance, pointing to the fact that the ringing of a bell in a séance was not accomplished by materialized spirits at all, but by Fay’s husband, Henry. When a group of spectators bent on preventing deception held his hands, Henry ingeniously used his mouth to take the bell from his wife, and shook it “as a terrier does a rat.” 16
In Utah, Oscar Eliason was doing what Heller, Maskelyne, and other illusionists were doing elsewhere. Spiritualism was hardly new to Salt Lake City in the 1890s. Indeed, the spiritualism “bug” had bitten some Utahns as early as the 1850s, causing Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt to condemn the practice at the 1853 dedication of the Salt Lake temple cornerstone. Mormons, declared Pratt, must be able to differentiate “between the lawful and the unlawful mediums or channels of communication—between the holy and impure, the truths and falsehoods, thus communicated.” 17 Other Latter-day Saint authorities, including Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Jedediah Grant, also roundly attacked spiritualism, claiming it was demonic. 18 But it was the influence of dissenting Mormons William Godbe, E. L. T. Harrison, and others who came together in 1870 to form the Church of Zion that helped create the cultural space necessary for spiritualism to flower in Utah. It was after a trip to New York City in 1868, where they apparently visited the rooms of popular spiritualist medium Charles Foster, that Godbe and Harrison began their gradual turn toward spiritualism and away from traditional Mormonism. According to at least one nineteenth-century account, it was Foster’s alleged ability to channel the voice of the deceased Heber C. Kimball that convinced the two men of spiritualism’s authenticity, though Godbe and Harrison believed Foster had also put them in touch with the spirits of Joseph Smith, Jesus Christ, and German explorer Alexander von Humboldt. By the time Godbe and Harrison returned to Utah, they believed they had been set apart to cut their fellow believers free from dogmatic Mormonism and engage them in a new religious movement tinged with spiritualist ritual. 19
The establishment of the Church of Zion under the direction of Godbe and Harrison, and visits by Godbeite “missionaries” to the East and West Coasts, helped unleash a stream of visits to Utah by some of the nation’s most eminent traveling mediums and spiritualist speakers. Predictably, Charles Foster garnered plenty of interest in Utah, due to his early contacts with Godbe and Harrison. Other spiritualist visitors to Utah included John Murray Spear, whose supposed vision of a hierarchical heaven filled with orderly spirits catapulted him to easy fame in the 1850s; actress-turnedmedium Emma Hardinge Britten; and Cora L. V. Tappan Richmond, whose very public divorce from her abusive manager-husband (while still a teenage bride) became a cause célèbre among spiritualists. 20 According to historian Ronald Walker, nearly fifty outside spiritualist practitioners can be identified by name as having visited Utah during the 1870s and early 1880s, though, as he points out, the “actual count may have been much higher.” Whatever the number, spiritualism had found roots in Utah by the 1870s, leading to the establishment of institutions in Salt Lake City, Park City, Beaver, Logan, Ogden, and Mount Pleasant that could, in Walker’s words, “meet the needs of … local and itinerant spiritualists.” 21 Even the institutional disintegration of the Church of Zion at the end of the 1870s had only a modest effect on spiritualism’s cultural strength in Utah; spiritualists still flourished outside the boundaries of formal institutionalized religion, and itinerant mediums continued to make the state a stopover point in their transcontinental travels. 22
It was these later spiritualist visitors that Oscar Eliason designed to expose. One of the first to feel the Utah magician’s wrath appears to have been none other than Annie Eva Fay, the same Kentucky medium who John Nevil Maskelyne had outed years before. A brief 1893 report in the Ogden Standard put it succinctly:
But Eliason did not limit his anti-medium efforts to the Wasatch Front. Taking his act on the road, he sharpened his skills of exposure and disenchantment in shows at various locations around the western United States. An 1893 article, printed in the Salt Lake Tribune, suggests that Eliason’s chances of making money as an itinerant magician were pretty good, particularly as other illusionists were choosing not to travel. Eliason, declared the article, had “received a good offer to go out on a starring expedition in legerdemain. [Alexander] Hermann is practically the only one traveling in the line—[Buatier] De Colta [sic] and [Harry] Keller [sic] remaining in New York and Philadelphia. So, Mr. Eliason would have a good drift to work.” 24 By the next year, Eliason could be found touring the “interior Utah towns” and performing in Aspen, Colorado, where a group of the state’s spiritualists, claiming Eliason was himself a fraud, attempted to “expose the exposer.” The illusionist’s response to the spiritualists’ challenge was ingenious: according to a newspaper report, he “exposed himself, showing just how he performed the manifestations.” 25 (He also toured an unknown number of “Eastern cities.”) 26 Such forthrightness apparently won Eliason rapid fame, ultimately opening the door to international performances. (At the time of his death, he had received invitations to perform in such far-flung places as Cuba, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) 27
It is the Tribune’s reports of Eliason’s dealings with Harry Waite, however, that provide us with the most thorough picture of the magician’s antimedium work. His response to Waite’s original April 23 letter in the Tribune was bold and aggressive. Referring to Waite as “Medium-by-the-Gift-of- Gall” (a parody of the medium’s self-imposed nickname, “Medium by the Gift of God”), Eliason declared that he had deposited $200 with his manager to be paid to a local charity if he could not move the table. Supposing he could easily shred what he thought were the medium’s outlandish claims to supernatural assistance, he then upped the ante, pledging another $200 if he could not “reproduce, duplicate or expose, without the aid of angel, spirit or devil … [Waite’s] so-called spirit manifestations … after I have seen them performed three times.” Warning Waite that he would not like the dire results of public exposure, Eliason also informed local spiritualists that they “must not blame me if I shatter their delusions. I will so completely expose the sham, humbuggery, and duplicity of all mediums and spirit manifestations that a belief in their supernatural power … cannot find lodgment in any sensible and logical mind.” Writing that he had “never before attempted to lay bare all [of spiritualism’s] shams, simply confining myself to a few of the most difficult tests performed by Miss [Annie Eva] Fay,” Eliason intimated that he had decided to declare all-out war on spiritualist phenomena. “Now I will spare nothing,” he promised, “but will expose all mediums.” He signed the letter “Medium-by-the-aid-of-Tricks” and “Medium-by-the-aid-of-Legerdemain,” no doubt an attempt both to poke fun at Waite and, at the same time, to clarify the very un-supernatural power he believed lurked behind all materialization séances. Eliason’s letter highlights just how deeply his disdain for spiritualism flowed. The movement was, to use the magician’s own uncomplimentary term, a “sham,” composed of delusional believers and duplicitous mediums. 28
Salt Lake City’s West Temple Street in 1908 near where Harry Waite rented rooms in 1894.
Utah State Historical Society
Waite’s response, published the next day in the Tribune, was equally pointed. Calling the illusionist a “slick catfish,” the medium curtly declared that he “admire[d] the twist” Eliason made “by ‘accepting’ my challenge,” and then ignoring it. But Waite did not stop there; as if to demean his opponent by comparing him to a woman, he added: “Don’t toss your curls and get mad.” Not only did Eliason refuse the challenge Waite issued in his April 23 letter inviting him to levitate a table, but he also refused to invite the medium onto the stage during one of his performances. Waite issued a new challenge to Eliason: produce “spirit” slate writing without detection and through natural means, and the medium would pay him a hundred dollars in gold. 29
Not surprisingly, the quarrel between Waite and Eliason continued with the two opponents discharging new rhetorical broadsides at each other in the Tribune’s pages. Declaring that he did not need to “resort to billingsgate [or abusive language] ... to defend my position in this community,” Eliason intimated that Waite needed to learn the “rules that govern gentlemen in their intercourse with each other,” particularly “moderation in the use of language.” Not wanting to continue his rhetorical scuffle with Waite, Eliason proclaimed that he was “done.” The medium would next hear from him at his Sunday night performance. The medium, on the other hand, maintained that Eliason was a liar, a “consummate fraud,” and a “deliberate impostor,” and that none of the illusionist’s “bluff and talk” had damaged the “confidence” believers had “in spiritualism.” The conjuror had nothing more than a few “Jim-dinkey tricks” up his sleeve, culled from a “10¢ book of magic,” the medium crowed. Adding that he would “fool” Eliason at the magician’s performance the following Sunday night, Waite maintained that his reputation as a medium was above reproach. 30
A final, desperate letter from Waite found its way into the pages of the Tribune three days later. In it, the medium angrily attacked Eliason for mocking him in the press and for continuing to refuse him a spot onstage at his upcoming magic performance. “Was there ever,” spewed the spiritualist, “a dirtier coward or a more contemptible liar” than Eliason? “Excuse plain language,” Waite continued, “for the fact is plain that I have been foully slandered and have stood alone, with every church against me, with every newspaper against me, misjudged, falsified, far and near. I ask you if I have been a man! I am challenged and called a fraud, and then, after accepting, barred out of the house [theater] on pain of arrest.” 31
It is important to note that Waite’s hyperbolic description of his “persecution” at the hands of Eliason fits onto a broader literary convention used by many nineteenth-century spiritualist mediums. By drawing attention to their physical and mental suffering through writing, mediums sought to elicit sympathy for themselves as “martyrs” to the spiritualist cause and, in an ironic calculus, ultimately convert their “oppressed status” into public esteem and visibility. 32
This mode of writing already enjoyed a respected place in nineteenthcentury American religious literature; mediums simply appropriated it and then reshaped it for their own use. 33 Works such as Henry Steel Olcott’s People from the Other World (1875), a literary representation of William and Horatio Eddy’s rocky career as spiritualist mediums, made especially heavy use of the “martyr” trope. Shot through with numerous references to the physical victimization of the Eddys at the hands of their opponents, Olcott’s book at times devolves into a shocking litany of sadistic episodes in which the mediums are subjected to inhuman, disfiguring torture, sometimes with their own parents looking on. To be sure, mental persecution also dogged the Eddy brothers (if Olcott’s book is to be believed); robbed of an opportunity to gain even a rudimentary education, they were never able to “enjoy the companionship of boys and girls of their own age.” It was the physical violence the Eddys allegedly endured, however, that received top billing in the book. “Scored with the lash, cicatrized by burning wax, by pinching manacles, by the knife, the bullet and by boiling water,” the mediums’ bodies bore the physical signs of abuse. 34 Once, William had “scalding hot water” poured down his back and a “blazing ember” put on his head, in order to startle him out of a supposed trance. (He still had the scars to prove it, and later showed them to Olcott.) On other occasions, wrote Olcott, the brothers were “passed through the merciless hands of scores of ‘committees of skeptics,’ bound with cords by ‘sailors of seven years’ experience,’ and riggers ‘accustomed to tie knots where human life was at risk’,” until their “soft young metacarpal bones were squeezed out of shape, and their arms covered with … scars” from the melted wax used to make sure their bonds were secure. The “wrists and arms” of the brothers, declared Olcott, were “a sight to see.” Both of them had “a marked groove between the ends of the ulna and radius and the articulation of the bones of the hand,” and were “scarred by hot sealing wax.” 35
Salt Lake City Main Street near where Oscar Eliason's father had his jewelry business in 1890.
Utah State Historical Society
While Waite’s description of his suffering may not have been as successful as the graphic sensationalism of Olcott’s book when it came to making himself a martyr, it likely created an environment of superheated emotion which Eliason would be forced to enter if he chose to go ahead with his planned performance a few nights later. But if Eliason hesitated, we have no evidence of it. When he finally mounted the Salt Lake Theater’s stage on Sunday, April 29, he did so without Waite, despite the latter man’s dogged insistence that Eliason let him “put up [his] cabinet alongside” the illusionist’s. The magician apparently wanted complete control over the stage. Yet, whatever his apparent concerns about actually appearing with Waite, his performance was a resounding success, at least according to the local press. Reminding readers that Eliason had bested Annie Eva Fay only the year before, “duplicating in sleight-of-hand” everything the medium did, the Tribune pointed out that the magician now “took the work palmed off … as ‘spiritualism,’ and duplicated it on the Theater stage … showing to the audience how each trick was done.” The performance had attracted an enormous crowd. “The lobby,” read the Tribune article, “was a compressed cake of humanity, the wide and high flight of steps together with the platform was a crush, and the sidewalk overflowed into the street with … people. The attachés of the Theater said they had never seen such a sight.” 36
What the crowd got that night was a behind-the-scenes look at the stunts mediums used to humbug their audiences. Beginning with a short historical talk, Eliason aimed to “show his audience the full humbuggery of this fraud [spiritualism].” Maggie and Kate Fox, declared the magician, the “originators of the so-called religion,” had been exposed. So had Ira and William Davenport, and “a long list [of] French, German and American impostors” who had followed “in the same footsteps and in turn” had been “shown in their true colors.” Then, one by one, Eliason ran through his repertoire of tricks, showing how each one was done, and eventually ending with a mock materialization séance. In this final act, he called up from the audience a committee of representatives from the local papers, along with his assistant H. A. Fyler, and allowed the committee to bind Fyler. Within seconds the assistant was free of his ropes, thanks to a trick knot attributed to Harry Kellar, the illustrious illusionist. The committee tied Fyler again, hand and foot, but this time they threw him into a cabinet where he immediately fell into a fake trance. Then the committee added a few twists of their own, placing coins between his fingers in order to detect even slight movements, and filling his mouth with water to prevent him from playing the horns and other instruments that Eliason had placed around the cabinet. Again, Fyler slipped his bonds, and proceeded to dance around the cabinet, playing the instruments by blowing air through his nose. From this performance, spectators were able to see just how easy it would have been for mediums to dress up and behave like “spirits” in a séance. According to the Tribune, “the whole performance was carried out with skill, grace, and a sarcasm extremely enjoyable.” The audience seemed to agree; they “cheered and applauded from beginning to end,” and, tongues planted firmly in cheeks, they voted Eliason “a ‘medium’ of equal ability to any that have ever visited this city.” 37 People who had been turned away on Sunday begged Eliason to repeat his exposé, which he did the following Friday. 38
Maggie and Kate Fox, the country’s first mediums.
ANN BRAUDE, RADICAL SPIRITS: SPIRITUALISM AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA (BOSTON: BEACON PRESS, 1989)
More than anything, Eliason’s performance drew his spectators’ attention to the fact that nearly anyone—even his assistant—could replicate materialization phenomena using simple sleight-of-hand tricks. His shows, and others like them, promised to rip open the shadowy world of spiritualist mediumship and expose it to public scrutiny. Eliason furnished audiences with a compelling, alternate interpretation of how supposed spirit phenomena were produced—an interpretation that clearly departed from the explanation spiritualists offered.
The same night Oscar Eliason was being fêted by his enthusiastic audience, Harry Waite was hosting private séances at his rooms on West Temple. In a letter to the Tribune that was printed on the same page as the account of Eliason’s performance, Waite not only claimed he had had to turn “hundreds” away Sunday evening, but also bolstered his claims to spiritual legitimacy by quoting such religious luminaries as Jesus, Simon Peter, Paul of Tarsus, and others. In a particularly humorous quotation attributed to the biblical King David, Waite appears to have equated himself with a young David, sling in hand, and Eliason with Goliath, the “uncircumcised Philistine.” “I am a medium by the gift of God,” he wrote, “for those who are in trouble and need help. Not for blasphemers, curiosity-seekers, or smart fools.” A few days later, Waite posted an announcement in the Tribune inviting the public to a séance at the city’s Auditorium Hall. Both he and his father would be there. “Come early,” he instructed, “and avoid the rush.” 39
Ironically, that announcement effectively signaled the end of the public battle between Oscar Eliason and Harry Waite for the hearts and minds of the Salt Lake City public. If there was a winner in the skirmish it was Eliason, not Waite. Indeed, after his last plea for attention, Waite’s trail grows cold and he disappears from Utah’s historical record. It seems likely that he decided to leave the state hastily and with little or no fanfare, despite his stated resolve to continue battling the conspiratorial cabal he believed had been formed against him. Eliason, on the other hand, flourished following his 1894 newspaper exchange with Waite. The Tribune kept close track of him, regularly informing readers of his whereabouts and providing them with descriptions of his shows. 40
Then, in November 1899, a cable arrived from Australia with the news that the “Mormon Wizard” had been shot and killed. 41 Over the next few days, details about the conjuror’s death filtered back to Utah. Eliason had traveled to Australia as part of an international tour and, while hunting near the town of Dubbo, had been fatally injured. Initially, there was some speculation that M. B. Curtis, his former manager, had had a hand in the shooting, but it was eventually learned that Eliason’s pianist had accidentally wounded the magician in the groin with an errant gunshot. Doctors were at first hopeful that Eliason would recover, but he soon took a turn for the worse and died on November 29, 1899. He was buried in Sydney. 42 One wonders if Harry Waite caught wind of the sad story, and what he might have had to say about it.
Notes
Dr. Brandon Johnson is Director of Grants and Historical Programs for the Utah Humanities Council.
1 Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 1894.
2 Salt Lake Tribune, December 1, 1899; Bureau of the Census. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1880), T9-1337, 153D. The 1880 census lists Eliason’s birth year as “abt. 1870” and gives his age as 10 rather than 11. In the census, the family’s last name is spelled “Elison” rather than “Eliason.” There is an “O. L. Eliason” listed as a jeweler in the 1890 Salt Lake City directory, published by R. L. Polk and Company. According to the directory, the elder Eliason’s jewelry business was located at 220 South Main Street. See Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk and Company, 1890), 271. For more on the elder Eliason’s jewelry business, see Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1883.
3 Salt Lake Tribune, December 1, 1899.
4 Ibid., April 8, 1895.
5 Ibid., April 22 and April 28, 1894. For more on A. A. Waite’s experiences in Utah, see Salt Lake Tribune, April 27, 1894; and April 28, 1893.
6 Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 1894.
7 Gustive O. Larson, The “Americanization” of Utah for Statehood (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1971), ix.
8 Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Company, 1984), 8-9.
9 Herbert G. Jackson, The Spirit Rappers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); and Ernest Isaacs, “The Fox Sisters and American Spiritualism,” in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles L Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 79-110. Also see Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970).
10 Historical treatments of American spiritualism include R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
11 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 42-43.
12 James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 180; Signor (Antonio) Blitz, Fifty Years in the Magic Circle: Being an Account of the Author’s Professional Life; His Wonderful Tricks and Feats; With Laughable Incidents and Adventures as a Magician, Necromancer, and Ventriloquist (Hartford: Belknap and Bliss, 1872), 114; quoted in Cook, Arts, 181.
13 Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 98, 107-34; Cook, Arts, 180-81.
14 Spiritual Scientist (Boston), February 10, 1876; August 26, 1875; and May 20, 1875. See also Milbourne Christopher and Maurine Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2006).
15 Randi, Conjuring, 98; Christopher and Christopher, Illustrated History, 211-12; Carl Waldman and Joe Layden, The Art of Magic (Los Angeles: General Publishing Groups, 1997), 79; and Banner of Light, January 6, 1865.
16 During, Enchantments, 156-71; James Randi, Conjuring (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 60-67; Christopher and Christopher, Illustrated History, 155-77; Fred Nadis, “Facing the Divide: Turn of the Century Stage Magicians’ Presentations of Rationalism and the Occult,” Journal of Millennial Studies 2 (Winter 2000) [online journal]: 1-8; and John Nevil Maskelyne, Modern Spiritualism: A Short Account of Its Rise and Progress, With Some Exposures of So-Called Spirit Media (London: Frederick Warne and Company, 1876; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1976), 122.
17 Parley P. Pratt, “Spiritual Communication,” Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, England: Latterday Saints Book Depot, 1855-86), 2:45, quoted in Michael W. Homer, “Spiritualism and Mormonism: Some Thoughts on Similarities and Differences” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27 (Spring 1994), 176.
18 Ronald W. Walker, Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 111; and Homer, “Spiritualism and Mormonism,” 175-76.
19 Walker, Wayward Saints, 113-26.
20 Ibid., 251, 253-54, and 267-68. On John Murray Spear, see Carroll, Spiritualism, 105-107, 117-88; and John B. Buescher, The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2004). Also see Homer, “Spiritualism and Mormonism,” 183-84.
21 Walker, Wayward Saints, 268 and 270.
22 Ibid., 208-209.
23 Ogden Standard, April 25, 1893.
24 Salt Lake Tribune, August 15, 1893.
25 Ibid., May 18, and December 18, 1894.
26 Ibid., December 1, 1899.
27 Ibid. Also see Kent Blackmore, Oscar Eliason: The Original “Dante the Great”: His Life and Travels in Australia and New Zealand, 1898-1899, rev ed. (Sydney, Australia: K. Blackmore, 1987).
28 Salt Lake Tribune, April 24, 1894.
29 Ibid., April 25, 1894.
30 Ibid., April 26, 1894.
31 Ibid., April 29, 1894.
32 Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110.
33 For specific examples of the “martyrological” mode in nineteenth-century American religious literature, see W. P. Strickland, ed., The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, The Backwoods Preacher (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1856), 60-61, 90-92, 131-32, 144-46, 236-37, 312-16, and 376-84; and William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
34 Henry S. Olcott, People from the Other World (Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle, 1875), 33.
35 Ibid., 26-28.
36 Salt Lake Tribune, April 30, 1894.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., May 1, 1894.
39 Salt Lake Tribune, April 30, and May 6, 1894.
40 For newspaper coverage of Eliason following his scrap with Waite, see Salt Lake Tribune, May 18; July 29; October 14; October 24; December 18, 1894; April 8; April 14; May 14; July 8, 1895; September 22; November 23, 1895; September 5, 1896; and September 18, 1898.
41 Salt Lake Tribune, November 30, 1899.
42 Ibid., December 1, 1899; December 2, 1899; December 29, 1899. Also see Deseret Evening News and Salt Lake Herald for the same days.
