(1911)
THE SWAMI'S PATRON
In 1911, a Maine courtroom debated an unusual question: could Hinduism drive an American woman insane? The case centered on Sara Chapman Bull, patron of Swami Vivekananda and one of the most important architects of American Hinduism. Stephen Prothero traces a movement’s rise and fall, starting with a scene from the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
We are in downtown Chicago on the afternoon of September 11, 1893. This is where historians looking for the beginnings of American Hinduism typically start their narratives. It may not be the best place to begin (more on that later), but here we are, so we might as well look around.
Chicago is bustling as it celebrates the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the “New World” by hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition, one year late because of logistical snafus. Among the many events at this six-month world’s fair is a sixteen-day interfaith gathering called the World’s Parliament of Religions. A bell tolled ten times this morning at 10 to open the festivities—one for each of the ten religions deemed worthy of inclusion by its liberal Protestant organizers: Confucianism. Taoism. Shintoism. Hinduism. Buddhism. Jainism. Zoroastrianism. Judaism. Christianity. Islam. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), a young monk from India, was slated to speak this morning before a standing-room-only crowd of some four thousand in the Hall of Columbus. But he was too nervous to do so—“my heart was fluttering, and my tongue nearly dried up,” he said—so his talk was delayed until this afternoon.
Vivekananda had the devil’s luck getting here. He arrived six weeks ago after a month-long journey by ship from Bombay to Vancouver and then by train to Chicago. But he didn’t have an invitation to speak at the Parliament or a letter from anyone to vouch for him. As his funds dwindled—things have been expensive here in Chicago since the Exposition opened on the first of May—he decamped to Massachusetts, where in August 1893 he looked up Kate Sanborn, a recently retired Smith College English professor who had given him her card after they met on their Canadian Pacific trip east from Vancouver. Vivekananda favorably impressed Sanborn, who later described him in a book as “a magnificent specimen of manhood—six feet two. . . with a lordly, imposing stride, as if he ruled the universe, and soft, dark eyes that could flash fire if roused, or dance with merriment if the conversation amused him.” After arriving home, Sanborn had called on the Harvard Classics Professor John Henry Wright, who invited Vivekananda to his home and promptly dispatched a letter to the Parliament’s organizers calling his new friend “more learned than all our learned professors put together.” As for Sanborn, she later named a newborn colt “Viva,” after Vivekananda, whom she remembered as “an education, an illumination, a revelation!”
World’s Columbian Exposition
Advertisement for the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair
(1893)
Now back in Chicago and becalmed a bit after lunch, Vivekananda is approaching the podium before a massive crowd of world’s fair visitors, journalists, scholars, local religious and civic leaders, and delegates of various religions. A freelancer for the Boston Evening Transcript looks up and sees “a large, well-built man with the superb carriage of the Hindustanis, his face clean shaven, squarely moulded regular features, white teeth, and with well chiselled lips” that part ever so slightly into “a benevolent smile.” He wears a yellow turban and his robe is striped in “bright orange and red crimson.” In short, his physical presentation is somehow both chic and otherworldly. He “looks as if made for this life and its fruition, as well as for meditation on the life beyond.”
This holy man has no prepared remarks. He has never given a speech before more than a dozen or so people. “Sisters and Brothers of America!” he begins, in perfect British English. The crowd erupts in applause, interrupting his address for several minutes, perhaps because of some indescribable charisma bubbling up around him, perhaps because so many of the prior talks were as dry as autumn leaves, leaving his audience thirsty for something more alive. When the hall quiets, Vivekananda calls for an end to interreligious strife. Sectarianism and bigotry are “horrible demons” that have drenched the earth with blood for too long, he says. He hopes that the bells that opened the Parliament this morning will be “the death knell to all fanaticism” and the beginning of a new order of “universal toleration.” All religions are true and all religions are one, he proclaims—different paths to one shared god.
Another round of applause follows. A large crowd surrounds him, including many women. One of those women is overheard saying to herself, “Well, my lad, if you can resist that onslaught you are indeed a God!”
Swami Vivekananda
Chicago (September 1893)
On the left Vivekananda wrote in his own handwriting: “One infinite pure and holy – beyond thought beyond qualities I bow down to thee.”
Vivekananda was a disciple of the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, a member of India’s Advaita Vedanta philosophical school, which taught that the essence of God (Brahman) and the essence of humans (Atman) are one and the same. Ramakrishna also claimed to have learned through experience—by engaging in devotional practices to Hindu gods and goddesses and to Jesus and Allah—that the world’s religions are essentially the same.
After the Parliament, Vivekananda seized on his status as the US’s first celebrity guru by delivering lectures across the Midwest. In spring 1894 he returned to New England, where he reacquainted himself with Sanborn and Wright. With their help, he moved into an influential network in and around Boston, consisting of seekers, social reformers, writers, artists, musicians, and professors—including the Harvard philosopher William James. He also shuttled back and forth to New York City. In November 1894, he founded the Vedanta Society in New York as an American outpost for Ramakrishna’s work. In the summer of 1895, he retreated to Thousand Island Park on the Saint Lawrence River. He meditated in the woods and taught classes on yoga and philosophy to a small group of disciples. He told a friend he planned to “manufacture a few ‘Yogis’” there, and he did just that, initiating a few disciples as celibate renouncers. By 1896, had established a European foothold for his activities in London. He returned to Calcutta on February 19, 1897, to a crowd of thousands that greeted him as a returning hero.
All this activity remade this young swami who had fumbled his way to Chicago in 1893. In his first few years in the US, he was ever eager for an argument—a “cyclonic Hindu” intent on “pulling the fangs of bigotry” from the mouths of every American he encountered. But when Professor Wright saw him after his 1896 London trip, that “old antagonistic spirit” had come out of him. “He is become so much gentler, and wiser, and sweeter,” Wright wrote. “Indeed he is most charming.”
Swami Vivekananda
At the Greenacre Conference in Eliot, Maine
(summer 1894)
This was not really the beginning of Hinduism in the US, or at least not the only beginning. Historical breakthroughs can on rare occasions be traced to one day, one person, one event—for example, Albert Einstein’s “aha” moment in a streetcar in Bern, Switzerland, in May of 1905, when he looked up at the famous clock tower looming over the city, wondered what would happen if his streetcar was moving at the speed of light, and immediately grasped the theory of relativity. But even that revolutionary moment was the product of prior moments in Einstein’s life and prior events in the history of science. And it was not Einstein’s alone. Earlier that day, his friend Michele Besso had served as a sounding board for his ideas in the making.
People looking for pre-Parliamentary sightings in the US of the sorts of practices, rituals, concepts, beliefs, and holy people that now crowd under the umbrella term of Hinduism can find them almost everywhere. In artifacts brought back from India during centuries of US trade that began in 1784. In writing on all things “Hindoo,” in author Hannah Adams’s An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects (1785). In a letter the former president John Adams wrote in 1814 to another former president Thomas Jefferson about his investigations into “Hindoo religion.” In Walden (1854) where the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau wrote, of his morning ablutions, “I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta...in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.” In the Theosophical Society, established by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott in New York City in 1875 as the first organization in the US dedicated to spreading the truths of Asian religions in the West.
As for other people in Vivekananda’s life who made what he did in the US possible, there was his teacher Ramakrishna and many supporters in the US, England, and India. Here, let us remember one of them, who is likely the most important in the US, and perhaps as much a maker of American Hinduism as Vivekananda himself.
Sara Chapman Bull
Second from left, posing for a formal picture with friends and family members
History Cambridge, Cambridge, MA
Sara Chapman Bull (1850–1911) was principally known during and immediately after her lifetime for two things. First, she was the wife of Ole Bull, a world-famous Norwegian violinist, whom she married rather scandalously in 1870, when she was twenty years old and he was forty years her senior. Second, she was known for being sued posthumously by her only daughter, Olea Bull, who sought to overturn the will on the grounds that her mother had signed it after Hinduism had made her go insane. The trial ran for several weeks between May and June 1911 in the small town of Alfred, Maine. It was widely covered in newspapers from New England to Norway. The New York Times billed it as “one of the strangest cases in the history of will contests in this country.”
The woman whose death stirred up all this bother was born Sara Chapman Thorpe in 1850 in upstate New York, to a father who was a lumber tycoon and a mother who was a socialite and the daughter of a wealthy suffragist. After marrying Ole Bull, Sara traveled with him on his world tours, accompanying him on occasion on the piano and overseeing his books as he amassed a fortune. In 1879, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she immediately entered elite social circles. After he died in 1880, she devoted two years to memorializing him in Ole Bull, a Memoir (1882). At the time, Spiritualist seances offered mourners hope that they could continue to communicate with deceased loved ones, and Bull gave Spiritualism a try. This fascination withered away quickly—she was not much interested in either esotericism or the occult—but the experience opened her up to alternative spiritual and religious possibilities. Long before she met Vivekananda, she was attending lectures by Mohini Mohan Chatterji, a member of India’s Brahmo Samaj reform movement, who inspired her to read Hindu scriptures in translation. She would later name him a beneficiary in her contested will.
In the years leading up to the World’s Parliament, Bull was more a social reformer than a religious missionary. She had a leadership position in the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was a woman suffragist. And she donated to progressive causes such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and Jane Addams’ Hull House.
Swami Vivekananda & Guests
Green Acre
Eliot, Maine (1894)
Eliot Baha’i Archives, Maine Memory Network
#6208 photographic print
How she and Vivekananda met is not clear. It likely occurred upon his return to the Boston area and his entry into her social circles in the spring of 1894. That summer, Vivekananda and Bull both attended the Greenacre Conference organized in Eliot, Maine, by the peace activist Sarah Farmer. Bull helped Farmer organize that gathering, which was devised as a summer sequel to the World’s Parliament. It drew “avant-garde intellectuals, religious figures, spiritual luminaries, eccentrics, and vacationers.” Vivekananda happily meditated there, gave public lectures, and offered private yoga instruction. Before the end of 1894, Bull had become one of Vivekananda’s first American disciples and was well on her way to becoming his primary patron and perhaps the most influential contributor to his growing global movement.
Bull was by temperament and talent a convener. Her Cambridge home doubled as a fashionable salon. In December 1894, she held a series of lectures there in an effort to continue what had been started at Greenacre. Attendees included a who’s who of Boston-based scholars and intellectuals: Ernest Fenollosa, a Buddhist convert and historian of Japanese art; Harvard Sanskrit professor Charles Rockwell Lanham, who edited the thirty-six volume Harvard Oriental Series; and William James, Harvard philosopher and psychologist who would go on to write The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Colloquially referred to as the Greenfield Annex, this effort would come, by the end of 1896, to be called the Cambridge Conference.
Soon, Harvard philosophy professors Josiah Royce and George Santayana became regular visitors. Charles Sanders Peirce gave a famous series of eight lectures in 1898, later published as Reasoning and the Logic of Things. Bull’s salon thus served as an important incubator not only of American Hinduism but also of the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. Bull also hosted East–West conversations about Asian religions, where Vivekananda spoke and listened, as did various other Vedanta swamis who came through Cambridge. Others attendees included a wide variety of literary lights, social reformers, musicians, scientists, and scholars in comparative religion.
James and Vivekananda likely met while Vivekananda was staying at Bull’s house for ten days in October 1894. Two years later, Professor Wright, who had cleared Vivekananda’s path to the podium at the World’s Parliament, wrote in a letter that “Swami has evidently swept Professor James off his feet.” That is likely an exaggeration. But the two were amiable conversation partners. One evening after dinner at Bull’s house, they sat in a corner and talked privately until late in the evening. They met for at least one meal at James’s residence. James addressed Vivekananda in letters as “Dear Master” and attended a lecture Vivekananda gave to Harvard graduate students in philosophy. James read Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga book—ushered into publication by Bull in July 1896—and quoted from it in Varieties. The two men shared interests in mysticism, commitments to religious and philosophical pluralism, and the conviction that religion is first and foremost about individual experience rather than beliefs or institutional activities.
Bull’s other job, in addition to all this convening, was assisting Vivekananda personally and helping him grow his Vedanta movement. In that capacity, she was likely his leading patron and his closest American adviser. She visited him in India in 1898 and again in 1902. It was in India that Vivekananda initiated her as a lay disciple and gave her the name Dhira Mata (“Steady Mother”). Others in the Vedanta movement, where she was according to one historian “a near-beatified figure in the fold,” called her “Saint Sara.” After Vivekananda died on the Fourth of July of 1902, Bull’s health declined rapidly. Friends reported she was never the same again.
To look at what Bull and Vivekananda did on the East Coast of the US is to see Hinduphilia at work—the love Vivekananda’s disciples had for all things Hindu; deep respect for Hindu sacred texts and teachings among Harvard philosophers, Sanskritists, and comparative religionists; growing interest in yoga as a spiritual practice, with more than a touch of romantic condescension thrown in. However, the increased visibility of Asian Indians in the US also brought on Hinduphilia’s psychological shadow: Hinduphobia.
Chinese people were the first Asians to immigrate to the US in large numbers, beginning the 1840s and eventually building the transcontinental railroad that connected the East and West coasts on May 10, 1869. The successes of Chinese immigrants in these jobs and in establishing their own businesses and temples prompted US Congress in 1882 to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended Chinese immigration. The Japanese immigrants who arrived in considerable numbers in the 1890s met with comparable resistance, including from the Asiatic Exclusion League, established in 1905 for “the preservation of the Caucasian race upon American soil.”
Indian immigrants came next, at the beginning of the twentieth century, but in far more modest numbers—just 6,795 people between 1901 and 1920. Almost all of these new arrivals were men, and most performed manual labor on farms and railroads, and in mines and lumber mills. At the turn of the century, the term Hindoo marked ethnicity more than religion, referring to all non-Muslims and non-Europeans from India. And the overwhelming majority of “Hindoo” immigrants were actually Sikhs, a distinct religious group.
Therefore, while Vivekananda and Bull were working to spread Vedanta across the US, there were likely fewer than a thousand Indian-born practitioners of what we now refer to as Hinduism in the country. This seemingly inconsequential immigration hardly constituted a ripple, much less a wave. But there were consequences. Critics in the early twentieth century decried the “Hindu Invasion of America.” And, according to the Asiatic Exclusion League, informants up and down the West Coast lodged complaints about “the undesirability of the Hindoos, their lack of cleanliness, disregard of sanitary laws, petty pilfering, especially of chickens, and insolence to women.”
This Hinduphobia went beyond talk. In the fall of 1907, anti-Hindoo riots occurred in Washington State. In an uprising in the border boomtown of Bellingham, hundreds of Indian immigrants, almost all of them Sikhs working at lumber mills, were forced to run for their lives into Canada.
After Sara Bull died in 1911, she was cremated at Cambridge’s venerable Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her ashes were spread in Norway. In her will, Bull left much of her half-million-dollar fortune to Vedantist groups and individuals. Her only child, daughter Olea Bull Vaughan, hired attorneys to challenge the will on the theory that her mother was mentally incompetent when she signed it. Therefore, the central issue before the judge in Alfred, Maine, was Bull’s sanity. Yet Hinduism was on trial too, since the main argument of her daughter’s main lawyer, Sherman Whipple, was that “Hindoos” had driven Bull crazy.
Over the course of the five-week affair, Whipple called a variety of colorful witnesses, including a cook, a maid, and a “psychic barber.” Despite the fact that both Bull and Vivekananda were repeatedly on record for nearly two decades as opponents of all things esoteric or occult, witnesses presented her as someone who communed regularly with spirits of the dead and talked to pumpkins as if they were people. She also allegedly befriended a woman who claimed to be able to heal the sick by lying in bed with them, a rite she allegedly performed with some regularity with Bull herself. As Bull grew older, witnesses testified, she came to believe that her enemies exerted “malignant psychic powers” over her, and “could propel those killing thoughts over the telephone.”
These witnesses bolstered the case to nullify Bull’s will. But they were peripheral to Whipple’s main argument: that Bull’s brain had been “inoculated with the bacteria of faith taught by Indian swamis.” Bull had come to Hinduism seeking spiritual wisdom, he argued. What she got instead was a “psychic conspiracy” of Hindu swamis who put her under a spell, coerced her into taking a variety of Indian drugs, and then stripped her of her morals, her mind, and her money.
According to court testimony, Bull chanted in Sanskrit, burned incense, and meditated. She traveled to India to pursue her spiritual goals, abandoning a dying granddaughter to be with her beloved swamis instead. In the “Raja Yoga” room at her Cambridge home, she conducted “mystic meditations” before an altar adorned with images of Vivekananda and his guru Ramakrishna. Thanks to her talent for esoteric breathing exercises—and alleged spirit communications with Swami Vivekananda after his death—Bull reportedly became a yogi herself, hailed by friends as “Saint Sara.” If stripped of the raised eyebrows and salacious rhetoric, much of this was rather standard Hindu fare. Meditating before images. Chanting in Sanskrit. Breathing exercises. Herbal remedies. Going on pilgrimage to India.
The most lewd trial testimony concerned neither brainwashing nor drug-taking but love and sex. Here the star witness was Mr. Nicola Ruberto, “a tall, handsome young Italian” variously described as a barber, a masseuse, a chauffeur, a billiard room operator, and a wine merchant. Ruberto advanced a truly bizarre interpretation of bhakti yoga (“discipline of devotion”), which was then and is now the most common Hindu practice globally. This practice consists of gazing with devotion at an image of a divinity or of a yogi—because in this tradition all human beings are understood to be essentially divine—and being seen in return. According to Ruberto, bhakti yoga was a “love rite” so offensive to Victorian sensibilities that the judge heard testimony regarding it only in closed session, and the transcript of what Ruberto said was sealed by the judge.
Another witness testified that Bull’s health declined after she was “attacked by malign influence” that sapped her will to live. Olea’s attorney gave that “malign influence” a name—the “strange Hindoo faith”—and placed the guilt for Bull’s mental and physical ruin at the feet of the Vivekananda, the Vedantists, and their “psychic gymnastics.” Under the influence of these foreigners, whose motive was supposedly financial gain, Bull was coerced into taking “Hindu drugs,” which along with the Vedantists’ “thought-viands, breathing-drills, wish-waves, malignant vibrations, incense incantations and orgies” hastened her mental and physical demise. In short, Bull was a victim of a “mystic meditation ring.” Her daughter, too, was robbed of her rightful inheritance and of her mother's affections.
Local gossip and newspaper reports from around the world made it clear to Bull’s team that things were not likely to go their way. On July 17, 1911, they agreed to a settlement that gave Bull’s daughter almost all of her assets, and hung her Vedantist friends out to dry. Bull’s daughter was not able to enjoy the victory. She died on the day of the settlement, just before it was announced.
Between Vivekananda’s resounding triumph at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and Sara Bull’s resounding loss in a Maine courtroom in 1911, American Hinduism had had a bumpy ride. From that trial forward, the notion that to convert to Hinduism was to demonstrate one’s insanity gained cultural momentum.
In “The Heathen Invasion,” a Hampton-Columbian Magazine article published in October 1911, a few months after the Bull trial, journalist Mabel Potter Daggett denounced American Hinduism as a criminal enterprise. “Eve is eating the apple again,” Daggett began. She then constructed her polemic as a modern-day Garden of Eden story, casting the Hindu swami as the seductive serpent and the American woman as the innocent Eve. This enterprise, she wrote, had begun at the World’s Parliament and then moved into fashionable salons and summer retreat centers where gurus of various sorts traded in their begging bowls for filthy lucre. Now women who were by birthright Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and Jews, were revering the words of Hindu swamis over the word of God in the Bible. “It is not the worship of images of stone and wood that constitutes the gravest peril in the teaching of the Orientals,” Daggett wrote. “It is the worship of men.” And the subjugation of women, who had literally kissed the feet of their gurus while offering them riches and, in many cases, their bodies themselves. Citing the Bull case, Daggett argued that American women were attracted to yoga by “the promise of eternal youth.” What they got instead was “domestic infelicity and insanity and death.”
This is just one way to tell the origin story of American Hinduism. It is true and not so true, as all origin stories are part history, part fable, part hope, part fear.
The occasion for this collection of essays is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. John Adams hoped that this anniversary would be “solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” However, he thought those festivities would take place on July 2—the date that the Second Continental Congress had declared its freedom from England. That declaration was not signed by a majority of delegates until August 2. But on July 4, Congress had officially adopted the Declaration of Independence and marked the occasion as the Parliament’s organizers had marked theirs, with the ringing of a bell. So the “Day of Deliverance,” as Adams called it, is, for better or for worse, the Fourth of July.
Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address of 1863, accepted that date, calculating the intervening time as “four score and seven years,” but he had a very different origin story to tell. Yes, the country was founded on July 4, 1776, but not by declaring independence. On that date, Lincoln argued, the founding fathers had dedicated their country to equality. This was just not true as a matter of history. The founders would not have accepted that their newborn country was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” All signed on to slavery. And few would have accepted that Hindus and Christians should be equal under the law. That is why many claim today that the United States originated as a racist country and a bigoted one. Others, following Lincoln, are more aspirational: the country has been reaching toward equality yet never quite attaining it, like a small child reaching out to grasp a wooden carousel’s brass ring, forever out of reach.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Partha Sinha, 2019). Richard Seager, ed. The Dawn of Religious Pluralism (Open Court Press, 1992). Stephen Prothero, A Nation of Religions (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Worlds Fairs: A Global History of Expositions Database. Adam Matthew Digital. https://www.worldsfairs.amdigital.co.uk/.
Stephen Prothero
is the C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor Emeritus of Religion at Boston University. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Religion Matters: An Introduction to the World’s Religions (W.W. Norton, 2020), God Is Not One (HarperOne, 2010), and the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy (HarperOne, 2007). Prothero has commented on religion and politics on hundreds of National Public Radio programs, and on television on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PBS, and all the major networks. He was also a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Boston Globe, Politico, and CNN’s “Belief Blog.” Prothero was the chief academic adviser for the critically acclaimed six-hour WGBH-TV series, “God in America.”
