John Murray Spear was one of nineteenth-century America's most
interesting characters. A leading social agitator against slavery
and capital punishment, Spear also became the nation's most
flamboyant spiritualist, inventor of "spirit machines," and
advocate of free love. In his captivating biography, John Buescher
brings to life Spear's superlatively odd story. While no photograph
or engraving of Spear exists, and his letters and personal papers
are scarce, Buescher recreates in this book a sympathetic, even
heroic, figure who spent the most energetic decades of his career
absent, in a sense, from his own life, displaced by other spirits.
Born in 1804, John Murray Spear started his career as a
Universalist minister. He later was a close colleague of William
Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker in the abolitionist movement, an
operator on the underground railroad in Boston, an influential
leader in the effort to end the death penalty and to reform prison
conditions, and a public advocate of the causes of pacifism,
women's rights, labor reform, and socialism. Buescher chronicles
Spear's work as an activist among the New England reformers and
Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, and
Dorothea Dix. In mid-life Spear turned to the new revelation of
spiritualism and came under the thrall of what he believed were
spirit messages. Spear's spirits dictated that he and a small group
of associates embark on plans for a perpetual motion machine, an
electric ship propelled by psychic batteries, a vehicle that would
levitate in the air, and a sewing machine that would work with no
hands. As Buescher documents, Spear's spirit-guided efforts to
harness technology to human liberation-sexual and otherwise-were
far stranger than anyone outside his closest associates imagined,
and were aimed at the eventual manufacturing of human beings and
the improvement of the race. Buescher also examines the way in
which Spear's story was minimized by his embarrassed fellow
radicals. In the last years of his life, retired by the spirits and
regarded by fellow Gilded Age progressives as a visitor from
another age, if not another planet, Spear helped organize support
for anarchist, socialist, peace, and labor causes. Buescher
portrays Spear's life as an odd mixture of comic absurdity and
serious foreshadowing of the future-for both good and ill-that
provides us with a unique perspective on nineteenth-century
American religious and social life.
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