{"id":75545,"date":"2014-08-18T13:35:01","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T17:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75545"},"modified":"2014-08-18T13:35:01","modified_gmt":"2014-08-18T17:35:01","slug":"illinois-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/18\/illinois-jesus\/","title":{"rendered":"Illinois Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"

A forgotten Midwestern religious sect and the strange novel it inspired.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An illustration from Six Years in Heaven<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The most confusing thing about the rural Midwest is the importance placed on being normal. Perhaps this comes from demographic homogeneity: there\u2019s a comforting stability in being able to drive a hundred miles in almost any direction and find\u00a0a landscape almost identical to the one from which you set out.<\/p>\n

The Midwest is construed as a place where nothing happens\u2014that being, it should be emphasized, a good thing. Native Americans once lived here, of course; but there\u2019s no longer any sign of them aside from some low mounds and their continuing near-universal use as school mascots. When I grew up here, no one wondered why they\u2019d left. Probably it was more exciting somewhere else. Who could blame them? It\u2019s a fine place to leave.<\/p>\n

But on returning, as I did recently, the effect is disorienting: this is a place where everyone is cheerfully convinced of the rationality of their insanity. I was never immune to this. In school, everyone was perplexed by race problems. We weren\u2019t racist. How could we be\u00a0when there weren\u2019t any black people? We ignored that in Rockford, Illinois, ten miles away, desegregation lawsuits were impossibly still grinding through the court system. Likewise, we firmly believed that gay people weren\u2019t something we had; we learned we\u2019d had a Jewish family in our town only after they\u2019d safely escaped. This seems ludicrous to me now, and things have undoubtedly changed since the turn of the century. With the arrival of the Internet and cable TV, the boast that newscasters were carefully trained to speak like us\u2014because we, among all Americans, had no accents\u2014isn\u2019t quite as impressive.<\/p>\n

In 1988, when I was ten, my parents moved to a five-acre farm between the rust-belt city of Rockford and the village of Winnebago. Not being from the area, they were naturally curious about the history, and one of them found a Works Progress\u00a0Administration history of Illinois in the library. In that book, we discovered that the country road we lived on had once not been so somnolent. A block north of us, a large complex of buildings painted red bore the name Weldon Farm, but once it had been called Heaven. In the 1880s it had been the center of an obscure religious sect\u2014still lacking a Wikipedia entry of their own\u2014called the Beekmanites. A woman named Dorinda Beekman had declared herself to be Jesus, as one did in those days; she died after promising to rise from the dead in three days. Her considerable followers were disappointed until one of them, a red-headed man named George Jacob Schweinfurth, neatly solved the problem by explaining that her spirit had moved into his body. Many agreed; he and his followers, the Church Triumphant, moved into Heaven and lived communally, where he\u2019d attracted attention as far away as the New York Times<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

A block south of my parents\u2019 place, the road dead-ended in front of a run-down house. A \u201cbad\u201d family lived there, and their children occasionally went to school with me. We would have called them poor white trash had we not been afraid of being beaten up. Their house, ramshackle as it appeared to be, had a history as well: it had once been Hell. Schweinfurth had lived in luxury in Heaven, arrayed with young women called Angels. Their husbands, had they any, and members of the group who\u2019d fallen out of favor, were sent to Hell, where the work needed to keep the sect fed was done. <\/p>\n

\"7274905_orig\"<\/a>The end of the Church Triumphant is predictable. The Angels started bearing children; this was declared to be a miracle, their fathers being the Holy Ghost, but the locals noticed that many were suspiciously red-haired. After too many Holy Ghost Children, Schweinfurth was arrested and driven from town. Later, he announced that he\u2019d taken up Christian Science and moved to Chicago, where he became a realtor, thereafter vanishing from history.<\/p>\n

I was surprised, at the time, that most of my classmates seemed entirely unfamiliar with this story. Schweinfurth\u2019s cult was considerably more interesting than anything that seemed to have happened in Winnebago, Illinois, in the succeeding century. I came to realize I\u2019d made a novice move: it was unseemly to be interested in local history. No one in the Midwest is familiar with the phrase \u201ctall poppy syndrome,\u201d but the idea, which can be traced from Herodotus, is abundantly familiar: those that stand out are cut down.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Every once in a while I search the Internet for Schweinfurth or Weldon Farm or Beekmanites. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m looking for: maybe to make sense of the houses that held the place I grew up like distant and mismatched parentheses.\u00a0What happened at Heaven and Hell is mostly beyond the reach of the Internet, of course, but surprising traces from the past pop up occasionally. Ongoing digitalization has worked its magic: first, a reference to a novel about Schweinfurth. Then, against all odds\u2014the book seems to barely exist and I have never seen a copy\u2014I received a badly scanned PDF courtesy of the Library of Congress. The full title alone indicates what the reader is in for: Six Years in Heaven: A True Story of Human Credulity and Unexampled Devotion, Embracing a Complete Expose Of the Abominable Practices and Monstrous Professions of George Jacob Schweinfurth, the False Christ, Whose Main Heaven is near Rockford, Illinois, with a Biographical Sketch of this most Remarkable Religious Pretender of the Century<\/em>. The book is by one Alex. [sic.] McClenaghan, seemingly his only literary effort.<\/p>\n

Six Years in Heaven<\/em> is not a forgotten Midwestern masterpiece. It\u2019s hard to say exactly what it is. Though the subtitle announces it \u201ca true story,\u201d it\u2019s very much a novel. From the start, there\u2019s a romance between a beautiful, impressionable young girl, Clara McCoy, and her devoted admirer, both from Shelbyville, Kentucky, who will be ensnared in the machinations of Schweinfurth in Rockford. Schweinfurth appears as himself, sometimes speaking in sourced quotations, and many of the supporting players\u2014the members of the Weldon family, who gave Weldon Farm and my parents\u2019 road its name, for example\u2014do as well. Periodically the invented narrative breaks off and the reader is presented with events that seem more straightforwardly historical; sometimes even public documents are introduced into the text. The whole is illustrated, albeit not very skillfully, with depictions of climactic scenes. A figure of Satan\u2014or at least a man dressed in a Satan suit\u2014smiles behind the bearded Schweinfurth whenever he appears.<\/p>\n

A man named Hatfield periodically turns up, trying to get to the bottom of the story of Clara McCoy and why she disappeared. (One can easily imagine McClenaghan at his study wondering what names people in Kentucky might have.) He is aided by various helpful pastors and once, intriguingly, a lady detective, whose part in the story is all too brief. They confer:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThis seems to be a chance for a story, founded on cold facts, that will discount Haggard\u2019s wildest flights of imagination, if it does not rub shoulders with the alluring tales of the Arabian Nights.\u201d \u201cTruth is stranger than fiction,\u201d laughed Miss Howard. \u201cIt assuredly is in this case,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Screen<\/a>Despite Hatfield\u2019s assurances, the question of veracity is left as a problem for the reader to solve. Clara is taken from her home by an apostle named Mamby who trawls the country selling histories of the Franco-Prussian War, keeping an eye out for beautiful women and rich elderly people who might be scammed. He, like Schweinfurth, is a master of mesmerism. Mamby appears to be as fictitious\u2014he would find an easy home in the pages of Bram Stoker\u2014as Clara. So does Dr. Brown, a doctor brought low by misfortune who takes refuge in Heaven and, through his skill in the black art of mesmerism, helps Schweinfurth raise the dead. (Mesmerism appears to be the chief source of Schweinfurth\u2019s power, alongside his looking exactly like pictures of Jesus.)<\/p>\n

Six Years<\/em>\u2019s characters\u2019 motivations are a mystery; they behave with a perplexing idiocy. Arthur Fitzroy, Clara\u2019s betrothed, follows her from Kentucky to Rockford and goes undercover, working as a stable hand in Heaven for five years without catching sight of her, except for once, when he mistakes another woman for her. Then he leaves when Schweinfurth\u2014whom, bear in mind, he still believes to be a swindler\u2014 explains to him that she\u2019s left. The woman he mistakes for Clara gets consumption and is sent off to Clara\u2019s parents\u2019 house in Kentucky to die (the death of an Angel being unseemly in Heaven) in front of her parents, who don\u2019t notice that their daughter has been swapped out.<\/p>\n

Clara stays six years\u2014with a brief escape\u2014though she fails, from beginning to end, to believe in the immaculate conception of the Holy Ghost children, a central tenet of Heaven\u2019s faith. The problem of motivation goes for Schweinfurth as well. He starts as an extremely religious young man, entirely noble until he proclaims himself the reincarnation of Dorinda Beekman and starts amassing land and followers. A follower attempts to explain:<\/p>\n

\n

Mr. Schweinfurth \u2026 is one of the most persecuted saints the world has ever seen. When a Methodist, they did not like him because he preached against sociables. He said he did not believe in having kitchens attached to churches.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps this is true. A minister from Rockford\u2014who seems to be a historical figure\u2014explains that he\u2019s absolutely sure that Schweinfurth had no lusts of the flesh. Late in the book, when the congregation begins stirring, Schweinfurth announces his intention that his followers should be eunuchs, a promising development that goes nowhere, as does his sudden enthusiasm for pedigreed dogs \u201cbeing valued at one thousand dollars each.\u201d A description of Indiana fiddle-playing technique and tuning seems to have been included simply as padding.<\/p>\n

The book is confusing because it was published in early 1894\u2014the introduction is dated December 20, 1893\u2014a year before Schweinfurth\u2019s reign came to its ignominious end. He and the three leading Angels were arrested for adultery in April 1895. Fictionalization might have been a strategy to avoid libel, but that seems craftier than might be expected for a book whose final illustration depicts an elderly Schweinfurth being greeted by the devil at the gates of Hell. McClenaghan\u2019s characters hope that public outcry will eventually bring down Heaven, but it seems more likely that Schweinfurth will be deposed by the more mundane problem of disposing of the bodies of his residents, who fall ill and die at the same rates that everyone else did in the nineteenth century\u2014a troubling problem when they\u2019d been assured they\u2019d live forever.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Walking around the block the most recent time I was home, I was surprised to find that the dead end that leads to Hell had been blocked, the road torn up and overgrown with pigweed and St. Anne\u2019s lace. The house, my mother said, had been torn down by the police; it had been abandoned for years. Drugs, the police thought. I mentioned that I\u2019d found a novel about Schweinfurth, which surprised my mother. Why, I wondered, didn\u2019t people talk more about what had happened there? What she heard, my mother said, was that Schweinfurth\u2019s descendants were all over town; I\u2019d gone to school with them. The whole thing was embarrassing.<\/p>\n

To return to the New York Times<\/em> article: Schweinfurth, we learn, was threatened by White Caps. The White Caps have also vanished from history, though not as inconsequentially as the Beekmanites. They were rural Midwestern predecessors of the KKK. Another story could be imagined here: Schweinfurth as a transgressor of cultural homogeneity who needed to be cleansed, the victim of religious persecution. One wonders how he would have told his own story, whether he might have been a freethinker rather than a rascal. Early in McClenaghan\u2019s book, we see Schweinfurth as a fervently religious youth in Ohio, not far removed from Joseph Smith, to whom he is later compared. There are mentions made of Schweinfurth\u2019s own versions of the Bible, though these don\u2019t seem to have survived. We\u2019re left with breathless news reports decrying the ignominy of Heaven and Hell and a novel that sells itself by being a true history, albeit with characters and a romance added. One wonders what the Angels would have said, whether they ever attempted to explain the wild years of their youth, years later when those who survived had settled down to sedate farm life: Did they believe they\u2019d been tricked by a false Christ?<\/p>\n

They, like Schweinfurth himself, have no voices left.<\/p>\n

Dan Visel lives in Bangkok and is writing a book on reading.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A forgotten Midwestern religious sect and the strange novel it inspired. The most confusing thing about the rural Midwest is the importance placed on being normal. Perhaps this comes from demographic homogeneity: there\u2019s a comforting stability in being able to drive a hundred miles in almost any direction and find\u00a0a landscape almost identical to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":738,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7555],"tags":[142,8618,14777,15011,11503,13883,8173,4324,5725,12985,1786,15010,15012,15009],"class_list":["post-75545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-history","tag-america","tag-christianity","tag-cults","tag-george-schweinfurth","tag-heaven","tag-hell","tag-illinois","tag-jesus","tag-mesmerism","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-religion","tag-rockford","tag-sects","tag-the-midwest"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIllinois Jesus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dan Visel on a forgotten Midwestern religious sect and the strange novel it inspired\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/18\/illinois-jesus\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Illinois Jesus by Dan Visel\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 18, 2014 \u2013 A forgotten Midwestern religious sect and the strange novel it inspired. 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