Righteous Remnant

S. Fogarty Robert

Description

Many Americans associate the House of David with its bearded barnstorming baseball teams of the 1920s and '30s. Others may recall the sex scandal associated with the group, a scandal that gave newspapers during the first years after World War I some added spice. Still, others may know it as a religious communal society founded in 1903, which has a few adherents today. What is this strange group and how can these diverse images be reconciled? In the first in-depth study of the House of David, originally published in 1981, Robert S. Fogarty places the sect in the Anglo-Israelite millennial tradition that goes back to seventeenth-century England, which produced prophets like the mystic Joanna Southcott and from which arose sects in England, Australia, and the United States. Their reading of the Book of Revelation promised the saving of a "righteous remnant" of humanity who would gather in one place to await the millennium. Evangelist Benjamin Purnell became the seventh prophet in the line of this tradition and, with his bigamous wife, Mary, established a community for its followers in Benton Harbor, Michigan.The House of David was a celibate communal society controlled by the Purnells, and it attracted members who exchanged their worldly goods for the security of salvation. At its height, the community had more than 700 members and prospered by running farms, a canning company, and an amusement park and hosting popular touring bands and the traveling baseball teams.But there were defectors, and from them emerged rumors of oppressive conditions, sexual misconduct on the part of the prophet himself, hastily arranged group marriages, and financial wrongdoing that led to a series of civil suits. The allegations drove Purnell into hiding, and the State of Michigan launched an elaborate trial against the colony.The Righteous Remnant is more than the story of the rise and fall of a religious community. By examining its religious roots, the staunch testimony of its members in the face of demonstrated charges, and the social relations within the colony itself, we can begin to understand the attraction that such "social contracts" can exert. The House of David is now a remnant itself, but other religious groups continue to grow and bind members to them in the same ways.

Sujets

• Béisbol
• USA
• History of sport
• États-Unis
• Baseball

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612778488
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE RIGHTEOUS REMNANT
Michigan State Archives
Benjamin and Mary Purnell, founders of the House of David.
The Righteous Remnant
THE HOUSE OF DAVID
Robert S. Fogarty
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio
© 2014 by Robert S. Fogarty All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-60635-217-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
Second edition 2014
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
18  17  16  15  14      5  4  3  2  1
To G. F. both of them
Contents
Preface Sex in Michigan, Beards in Baseball, The New Jerusalem in the New World
Chapter One The Prophetic Tradition
Chapter Two The American Prophets
Chapter Three The Shiloh at Benton Harbor
Chapter Four Chased Like a Fox
Chapter Five The Social Compact
Appendix A Sixty Propositions
Appendix B Colony Membership List
Appendix C Biographical Information
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Benjamin and Mary Purnell
Benjamin Purnell
Mary Purnell
The Purnells as itinerant preachers
Arrival of the Wroeites
Miniature train at Eden Springs
Purnell as shepherd
House of David archway
Eden Springs depot
Colony orchestra
Administration buildings
House of David draftees
Wanted poster
Purnell in 1927
Baseball park at the colony
House of David baseball players
House of David basketball player
Mary Purnell at the City of David
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Sex in Michigan, Beards in Baseball, the New Jerusalem in the New World
In 1936, the House of David offered Babe Ruth $35,000 a year to play for its barnstorming baseball team. Ray Doan, manager of the barnstorming team and a community member, said, “the Babe won’t be required to wear whiskers, either.” The Babe declined, in spite of the waiver in his case of the rule that all players wear beards. This sort of information contributed to my perplexity about the House of David when I first encountered it. The impressionistic notions of this religious colony I had formed over several years seemed contradictory. On the one hand, there was a description of the group in William Hinds’s American Communities and Cooperative Societies (1908), which emphasized the messianic pretensions of its leaders, Mary and Benjamin Purnell, and sketched its Adventist theology. According to Hinds, the colony was filled with dedicated believers who thought themselves part of the elect 144,000 children of Israel forming the ingathering at Benton Harbor, Michigan, in anticipation of the millennium, but there was no mention of athletic interest or capacity. They were characterized as being “not only sane, but intelligent, and are assuredly, so far as the observer can judge, morally sound.”
Yet there were two other notions—certainly less well defined, though equally compelling—that I had about the House of David. The first revolved around a childhood memory of going to see the Harlem Globetrotters play and seeing a bearded basketball team take the floor. All I can remember is that they wore beards, and in Brooklyn in the late 1950s the only people with beards were Hasidic Jews. I assumed that it was the local synagogue fielding a team—some local color prior to the arrival of the real exotics. My confusion was compounded years later when I read a pulp article about a scandalous free love community in Michigan where the leader had a harem and lived like a king. That colony was also called the House of David and bore no resemblance to the basketball team I saw nor did I recognize it again when, as a graduate student, I read William Hinds’s account of the colony.
That all three could be the same colony was too preposterous. Who had ever heard of a bearded, possibly Jewish, adventist colony in Michigan that played basketball in Brooklyn and, off court, practiced free love? In 1972, I began to try to make some sense out of my contradictory impressions. What I found, of course, was that the preposterous was not only true but also even more preposterous when one began to probe the history of the House of David. First, and most astounding, was my realization that so little had been written about it and that a rich set of resources existed in the form of court records and investigative reports compiled by federal, state, and local officials because of that scandal-ridden history I had read about in the pulp magazine. Because the records were so voluminous, no researcher had sorted through the material located at the State Historical Commission and in the records of the State Attorney General’s Office, both in Lansing. I read those records and analyzed them with an eye toward constructing a colony history from its inception through its legal dissolution.
This history of the House of David was then necessarily incomplete because colony records remain closed, and efforts to gain access to manuscript and diary records had proved fruitless. Following publication of the 1982 edition of this book, a current member of “The House of Mary” published an “official” history that is sheer hagiography, and a local historian authored a study that is earnest but glosses over the trial and conviction of Benjamin Purnell despite an overwhelming amount of court documents, sworn testimony by members of the group, and competent onlookers. In addition, there is a growing body of literature by baseball fans and historians who are fascinated by the galaxy of famous legendary athletes who performed for the House of David as guest players. These include Grover Cleveland Alexander, Chief Bender, Satchel Paige, and Jackie Mitchell, the first woman to sign a professional baseball contract. By 1929, the number of copycat versions of the traveling House of David teams had grown so much that the community issued a warning broadside about “fake or unauthorized travelling baseball teams.” Beards in baseball reemerged in 2013 when the Boston Red Sox, on their way to a World Series win, adopted a hirsute style as a way to enhance team solidarity.
Beyond that, there is now an archive collection of the religious House of David, the lurid House of David, and the baseball and basketball House of David at Hamilton College for all to see. And if you go further afield, you can tour the House of David Museum in Benton Harbor that has tons of memorabilia. There is even a novella titled Eden Springs from the pen of a fine Michigan-based writer.
That the House of David was the target for prosecution is incontrovertible, and we will see that the fear of persecution was a part of the tradition from which the House of David grew. The continuing mania for secrecy was not mere paranoia on the part of the remaining remnants of the colony but rather a natural suspicion of the motives of the outside world, so often hostile, so seldom objective in its dealing with millennialists. The colony therefore had to be seen largely through the eyes of its official prosecutors who, despite the scope of their investigations, remained outsiders.
To begin to understand the House of David, one must realize that it was not an isolated or local phenomenon. The Israelite kingdom that existed near Lake Michigan from 1903 to 1927 was the direct outgrowth of a tradition of Anglo-American millennialism with roots in the seventeenth century. Six months of reading at the British Museum in 1975 established the Anglo-American connection, proving that the road to Zion ran from London through Benton Harbor and that the way had been shown by a series of prophetic leaders who both inspired and directed the sects that gathered about them in England, Australia, and America.
Like other groups—such as the Shakers who invented neither the three-legged stove, which was common in eighteenth-century America, nor the clothespin (which was, in fact, a Pharonic Egyptian discovery)—they were miscredited with many innovations. The House of David partisans say they “invented” the automatic tenpin setting machines at their amusement park; however, the commercial firm, Brunswick, via a Norwegian inventor, perfected that particular modern bowling device. Yet both the Shakers and the House of David were unique in their own ways. The Shakers were celibate, and the House of David claimed to be despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
What we have here is an account of the colony, its prophets, and its tensions with the world. There is much that could be added to this narrative, but I have chosen to focus on the development of the Anglo-Israelite tradition and the social compact forged by a series of prophets with their followers. For more than a century, this compact shaped the boundaries of the New Jerusalem and dictated the roles played by prophet and disciples alike.
The emergence of millennialist and adventist sects is part of a complex social and religious phenomenon that is shaped by the personal eccentricities of religious leaders, and the history of such groups is often a confused welter of pamphlets, schisms, prophetic utterances, and obscure scrapes with the authorities. But the line of continuity, which the House of David espoused, was by no means either fictive or far-fetched. Benjamin Purnell of the House of David identified himself as the seventh in a line of prophets that ran from Richard Brothers, the “Prince of the Hebrews,” whose prophetical career began sometime after he encountered the mystical “Avignon Society” in the 1780s; through Joanna Southcott, a domestic from the Cotswolds; John “Zion” Ward, an Irish-born prophet; William Shaw, whose works were circulated only within a small circle of believers; John Wroe, a hunchbacked prophet of dubious morals; and finally the American-born James Jershom Jezreel.
Benjamin Purnell was the legitimate, albeit self-proclaimed, heir to a long and continually sustained prophetic tradition. This astonishing manifestation of religious ferment and social experiment of which the House of David was a part not only thrived over generations but also produced a body of theology in prophetic b