Futility Closet - 287-The Public Universal Friend

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 11,000 quirky curiosities from a tower illusion to a one-sided mug. This is episode 287. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. After a severe fever in 1776, Rhode Island farmer's daughter, Jemima Wilkinson, was reborn as a genderless celestial being who had been sent to warn of the coming apocalypse. But the general public was too

Starting point is 00:00:39 scandalized by the messenger to pay heed to the message. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the public universal friend and the prejudiced reaction of a newly formed nation. We'll also bid on an immortal piano and puzzle over some Icelandic conceptions. A few months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a striking figure rode through southern New England, followed by a double column of disciples. The leader wore a combination of men's and women's clothing beneath flowing robes and a man's beaver hat over ringlets of chestnut hair. The rider paid little heed to the revolution and the redcoats. An apocalypse was coming. and the Redcoats, an apocalypse was coming. This journey had begun unremarkably in Cumberland, Rhode Island on October 5, 1776, when a 23-year-old farmer's daughter named Jemima Wilkinson had been afflicted with a fever, probably typhus. She suffered for five days, and her family were preparing for the worst when, on October 11, the figure rose from the bed and announced that Jemima

Starting point is 00:01:43 Wilkinson had died, her soul had gone to heaven, and her body had been reanimated by God and invested with a divine spirit that was neither male nor female. The new dweller in Jemima's body would serve as God's instrument in redeeming humankind and would be known as the public universal friend. That's an odd name to our ears. Friend here refers to the Society of Friends or the Quakers, the denomination in which Jemima Wilkinson had been raised. The public universal friend drew many core beliefs from that faith. Ultimately, there's no way to prove whether the claim of divine intervention was true, but for what it's worth, no one else present at the transformation thought that Jemima had died. The physician wrote later,

Starting point is 00:02:25 none of her friends or attendants had any apprehension or thought of her having been dead, but she was for some time after considered by her friends not to be in her right mind. The public universal friend did seem sincerely convinced of the change, though, and preached a sermon after worship outside the meeting house the following Sunday, calling on hearers to turn from their lives of sin and to be saved. Biographer Paul Moyer says there are two challenges in telling this story. The first concerns the gender identity of Jemima Wilkinson and of the public universal friend. There's no suggestion that Jemima had ever thought of herself as anything but a woman in her life before the illness, or that her rebirth reflected a struggle over her gender identity. Instead, that rebirth seems to have been driven by spiritual factors. The friend's identity is harder to address. It seems clear from the prophet's dress,

Starting point is 00:03:14 speech, and demeanor that the followers didn't understand the friend to be either female or male. One contemporary said the friend was, quote, not to be supposed of either sex and acted in ways that reinforced the image of, quote, being neither man nor woman. Moyer writes that the friend was, quote, not simply a male figure but a being with an intermediate gender that defies easy attempts at classification. We do need to choose pronouns to discuss the friend, and I'm going to follow Moyer's practice of using she and her to describe Jemima Wilkinson and he and his to describe the public universal friend, since that's how the disciples themselves spoke. Generally, only the friend's detractors used feminine pronouns, since they thought that Jemima Wilkinson was either

Starting point is 00:03:56 deluded herself or acting deliberately to deceive her followers. The friend wore long, loose gowns and cloaks that fastened at the neck and hid everything but his hands, feet, and face. Where men of the day powdered their hair and women arranged it on their heads, the friend let it fall loosely around his shoulders. On the whole, one critic said, she looks more like a man than a woman. He refused to answer to any name except the public universal friend, and when people taunted him by calling him Jemima, he pretended not to hear them or denounced them for their disbelief. It's ironic that so much

Starting point is 00:04:30 attention was placed on the friend's gender because that wasn't a topic that he seemed to contemplate or showed any interest in discussing. At one point, when someone asked whether he identified as male or female, he simply said, I am that I am. He was there to spread a gospel of repentance and salvation in the days before the final judgment, and to spread this message he embarked on a series of preaching tours throughout New England. By all accounts, his creed was not especially new, but drew on several religious traditions and included human free will, the possibility of universal salvation, and warnings of an approaching apocalypse. He laid out rules regarding speech and dress, discouraged drinking and smoking, and urged his disciples to minimize

Starting point is 00:05:09 their contact with non-believers. However conventional, this message was delivered with such confidence and conviction, especially coming from a divine spirit in a young woman's body, that the friend began to gather adherents and received invitations to speak throughout Rhode Island and in southeastern Massachusetts. So many converts joined that in 1778, the Friend moved his headquarters from Cumberland to Little Rest, Rhode Island, and his ministry evolved from an ad hoc series of preaching tours to a proper religious movement. Entire families began to join, and in 1779, the ministry expanded into Connecticut, where one meeting attracted 3,000 people. To be sure, this didn't always go smoothly. When the friend arrived in Philadelphia in 1782, a public debate started up in newspapers and periodicals. The prophet's creed was unremarkable,

Starting point is 00:05:57 but critics objected that his appearance, dress, and demeanor violated social norms and accused him of blasphemy and fraud. This controversy reflected the ferment of the time. The American Revolution was a period not only of political rebellion, but of radical social change. Under monarchy, the rules of society had simply been handed down, and status markers like class and lineage were paramount. Now, when Americans were proposing to replace this system with a republic, people had begun questioning even traditional conceptions of class, sex, and race, and historically oppressed groups such as women, African Americans, dissenters, and the poor were contending for places in the new social order. Some people feared that this would lead to anarchy, and the friend and his followers came under suspicion.

Starting point is 00:06:40 He wore a broad-brimmed hat, a black cloak, and a cravat or necktie like an Episcopal clergyman, and his tone of voice and style of preaching were said to blend male and female traits. This was not uncommon among female prophets in Quaker culture, but the people of Philadelphia saw gender ambiguity as disturbing and dangerous, and they pelted the friend's lodging with stones and bricks. One observer wrote, the friend's lodging with stones and bricks. One observer wrote, Again, this is ironic because the friend was not preaching about worldly matters at all.

Starting point is 00:07:23 In fact, if we suppose that the claim was literally true, that the friend was a genderless, celestial being sent to warn humanity of the apocalypse, then these critics look ridiculous. Their objections reflect their own attitudes and prejudices and say literally nothing about the prophet who was trying to warn them about the end of the world. Despite these encounters, the movement grew steadily, and by 1783, the believers had founded a formal religious sect called the Society of Universal Friends. They built a meeting house on an acre of donated land in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and in the months that followed, they built additional houses in Rhode Island and Connecticut. By 1787, the public universal friend had hundreds of followers. They came from every walk of American society,

Starting point is 00:08:00 including some of the leading political, intellectual, and economic elite of the day. What distinguished them was not class or education, but a sense of spiritual seeking and a faith in this compelling new prophet. But they were still discouraged by the persecution of non-believers, and the friend turned from spreading his holy message and led his followers on a search for a new home where they might live according to God's law. By the end of the 1780s, they'd established one on the shore of Seneca Lake in western New York State. There they faced hard work, food shortages, disease, and predators, but by 1790 the communal village was thriving, with about 260 inhabitants, making it the largest non-native community in that region at the time. But their disputes erupted over ownership of the land, and in 1794,

Starting point is 00:08:46 the prophet led a number of disciples to a second spot, just north of Keuka Lake, where they founded a spiritual sanctuary from the outside world that they called Jerusalem. At Jerusalem, the public universal friend accomplished something remarkable. He'd established the settlement to await the second coming. In organizing the community, he was following his religious convictions, not trying to remake society. But his decisions look like progressive reforms. One observer has called this accidental feminism. Jerusalem gave women more opportunities to live free of male authority. Twenty percent of its families were led by women. Married couples had fewer children, and more people remained single than in the society at large. This meant that the average household held four people when the national mean in 1790

Starting point is 00:09:30 was just over five. Women dominated religious leadership while men managed earthly affairs and interacted with the outside world, and women held property, ran households, and engaged in business dealings independent of men. Men gave up drinking, gambling, physical aggression, and other masculine behaviors in keeping with the evangelical movement in general, but they also sometimes gave up authority over the home's domestic affairs and religious life. A so-called faithful sisterhood of about 50 female followers renounced marriage and committed themselves to celibacy like their leader. Some of them owned property and lived in full economic independence, and women also served as witnesses on important legal documents. Many of these

Starting point is 00:10:10 practices had Quaker precedents, but as in Philadelphia, critics could see only that the Friends' followers were breaking norms. William Savory, who visited the settlement in 1794, said the society was composed of, quote, women who have forsaken husbands and children, and also of men who have left their families. He said that they'd abandoned their responsibilities as spouses and parents, and that their daily lives violated the proper roles of men and women. Jemima Wilkinson, a woman, had improperly usurped patriarchal authority, and her male disciples had become, quote, hewers of wood and drawers of water to an artful and designing woman. Some of this suspicion was founded in the anxieties that followed the Revolutionary War.

Starting point is 00:10:50 American citizens feared that their new republic was vulnerable to vice and weakness and believed that the best way to promote virtue was through male authority. Female authority was a threat. Women could best foster virtue by serving as good mothers and wives to those around them. The public universal friend was seen as a woman trying to act like a man, which made him insubordinate, and because he was celibate, he was charged with trying to destroy men's rule over the family. Things began to fall apart. The society had purchased some highly profitable land collectively and began to fight over how it ought to be distributed, and the added attraction of unclaimed fertile land near Jerusalem began to prove too much to resist. Disciples fell away, and the society descended into conflict. Most of the Friends' male followers remained loyal,

Starting point is 00:11:36 but the apostates who led the revolt were all men, and their objections centered on the challenges to social norms and gender hierarchies within the society. They may not have opposed female power in principle, but the worldly temptation of property and political office had begun to appeal to them more than allegiance to a prophet, and when they left, they turned on the settlement and its leader. By the early 19th century, the society had fallen into decline, diminished by death, apostasy, and legal battles. The friend died in 1819, and the battle over his

Starting point is 00:12:06 estate dragged on until 1828, again caught up in worldly questions of identity. Among other troubles, the Friend had refused to use a birth name on legal documents asserting title to the society's lands, in the end grudgingly signing an X to a document bearing the name Jemima Wilkinson. The Friend's will was similarly open to challenge because it bore no worldly name, calling itself, quote, The Society emerged victorious from these battles, but the decades of lawsuits had cost them thousands of dollars, and they finally shelved their plans to build a new meeting house in Jerusalem. Within the society, bitterness and suspicion had overcome fellowship and trust,

Starting point is 00:12:57 and the Society of Universal Friends died out before the Civil War. as we just wouldn't be able to commit to the amount of time that the show takes to make if it weren't for the donations and pledges we get. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or if you'd like to support us in a more ongoing way, you can join our Patreon campaign where you'll also get access to outtakes, extra information and discussion on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and peeks behind the scenes of the show. You can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the link at the website. And thanks so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We really couldn't do this without you.

Starting point is 00:14:11 without you. We've covered explosive devices disguised as everyday objects, such as coal in the American Civil War in episode 99, and dead rats in World War II in episode 101, for which listener James Nichols still has the nickname of exploding rats. Kathy Jones wrote, I immediately thought of the exploding coal and other instruments of sabotage from previous podcasts when I came across the World War II occupied France Maquis resistance operating 300 miles south of Normandy with assistance from British SOE agents using manure bombs against German convoys heading towards the Normandy D-Day invasion. It got to the point where the manure bombs in the road actually caused enough problems that for every road apple that they came across,

Starting point is 00:14:51 they stopped the cars to inspect it, delaying their arrival. And Cathy quotes from Sonia Purnell's book, A Woman of No Importance, which is about Virginia Hall, an American agent who worked with the British Special Operations Executive to aid the French resistance. Soon, entire German convoys screeched to a halt every time they saw Dung, genuine or not, until it had been investigated, causing hours of delays. Elsewhere in her book, Purnell notes that the SOE boffins had designed a number of inventive explosive devices, which she says included milk bottles that exploded if the cap was removed, loaves of bread that would cause devastation when cut in half, and fountain pens that squirted poison. Perhaps the most popular

Starting point is 00:15:34 was fake horse dung that exploded if driven over. So exploding manure was definitely a new one for me, and I was able to find a few mentions of its use in World War II, including in a couple of newspaper articles about a 2017 book called Weird War II by Peter Taylor. Taylor is the former publishing manager of the British Imperial War Museum, and he dug through its archives and SOE agents' autobiographies to compile some of the more creative or odd gadgets and techniques used by the British in the Second World War. So the book includes our old friends, the exploding rats, and explosives disguised as manure, including the details that the London Zoo supplied the SOE with fresh droppings

Starting point is 00:16:17 from several species of animals so they could model different ones in plastic, and that different fake droppings were used in different places, with, for example, mule droppings used in Italy and camel dung in North Africa. I guess part of the idea there is that if you make them paranoid enough, they'll have to examine every... Right, that's what they were saying. So every time they come across any manure in the road, they have to stop and check it out rather than risk driving over it. Someone's job to do that. Yes, you put that on your resume.

Starting point is 00:16:46 Other inventions mentioned in the articles included garlic-flavored chocolate bars that could be eaten by SOE agents before they parachuted into Spain so that their breath would smell more like that of the locals, and overshoes shaped like bare feet that could be worn by agents in Southeast Asia and the Pacific so that any footsteps left behind when trying to sneak ashore would hopefully look to the Japanese

Starting point is 00:17:09 like they were left by the barefoot native inhabitants. There was also discussion of how dogs were dropped by parachutes behind German lines with some British troops on D-Day to help detect mines and enemy soldiers. And Taylor's book notes some of Winston Churchill's assiduous efforts to keep up the British citizens' morale, including ensuring a solid supply of Barbary apes at Gibraltar, in accordance with a legend that held that if the apes ever left Gibraltar, it would cease to be a British colony, and making sure that there were enough ravens guarding the Tower of London, in accordance with the legend that we mentioned in episode 269, that the tower would crumble and a great harm would befall the kingdom if there were to be

Starting point is 00:17:48 fewer than six ravens there. I'm glad someone's thinking of these things. We also recently heard from Thomas Lipping on the topic of interesting World War II inventions, some of which was a follow-up to episode 76's story about how MI9, a branch of the British Secret Service, had provided escape aids for POWs that included Monopoly sets that contained hidden tools, maps, compasses, and real currency, and playing cards with hidden maps. Thomas said, I was watching our special broadcasting service channel on TV tonight in Sydney, Australia, and a show was on called Guy Martin's Great Escape. The host is a bit of a daredevil who was seeking to recreate the famous attempted motorcycle jump

Starting point is 00:18:29 across the German-Swiss border as performed by Steve McQueen in the movie. Apart from debunking quite a few of the scenes presented in the movie, there was also a session focused on escape techniques and the role of MI9 in providing creatively concealed escape tools. There were a couple of different concealed compasses, a tissue paper map, playing cards that revealed map segments when wetted, and another map that only appeared when you urinated upon it. They had a sample of one of the relief boxes showing the different items they contained, and it included one of the Monopoly boards with items secreted within it.

Starting point is 00:19:01 It only got a quick mention, but I remember you saying none of them seemed to have survived. I hope this is of interest to you guys. I have only discovered Futility Closet recently, but I have found it very entertaining, and certain friends and family may be a bit tired of hearing me quoting items from the podcast. We weren't able to view the show that Thomas had watched, but Greg had found in his research for Episode 76

Starting point is 00:19:24 that while none of the original rigged Mon that Thomas had watched, but Greg had found in his research for episode 76 that while none of the original rigged Monopoly sets had survived, there were some reproductions still in existence, so possibly that's what had been shown. The idea of maps that appear only when you urinate on them was also new to me, and I didn't find much on this except a mention in an article from New Scientist from 1993 about Charles Fraser Smith, who worked for the British Ministry of Supply during World War II and was responsible for designing many of the ingenious gadgets used during the war, including, according to the article, a handkerchief that has a map printed on it in invisible ink. It becomes visible when developed by the one chemical that is always

Starting point is 00:20:02 available, urine, which really is rather resourceful. And I would imagine that few people that captured the article and even somehow suspected that it did contain something invisible would think to urinate on it. I wonder what he went on to do after the war. I mean, it seems like such an inventive... Oh, I don't know. You know, what would you do with a mind like that if you didn't have a war to apply it to? Interestingly, though, from what I did learn about Frasier Smith, he was the inspiration for Ian Fleming's character of Q in the James Bond novels, the inventor of all of Bond's nifty gadgets. Frasier Smith had called his inventions Q gadgets, named after the Q ships of World War I

Starting point is 00:20:41 that had been merchant ships with concealed weapons that were intended to lure submarines into surface attacks on them. And similarly, many of Frasier Smith's inventions were seemingly innocuous objects that contained hidden tools, such as golf balls containing compasses and flexible wire saws sewn into military shoelaces, and cameras hidden in cigarette lighters, one of which was used to take photos of Hamburg after it was bombed. It was also Frasier Smith's idea to add the garlic to the chocolate that I mentioned a bit earlier, which was a coincidental tie-in to the research I'd done on the exploding manure. And, in addition, I learned that it was Frasier Smith who was assigned to design the container that was used to preserve a corpse in dry ice for Operation Mincemeat, which we covered in episode 84,

Starting point is 00:21:24 in which a body that appeared to be that of a dead British officer ice for Operation Mincemeat, which we covered in episode 84, in which a body that appeared to be that of a dead British officer was found by the Germans floating off the coast of Spain and carrying fake secret documents that were intended to confuse the German military. Everything's starting to tie together. And I have a follow-up to the story of the Immortal P also called the Sienna piano, from episode 6, back in 2014. This was the hard-to-believe story of a magnificent piano that had been built in the early 19th century, had eventually been pretty much lost and greatly abused, and then had garnered incredible reviews in the 1950s for its extraordinary sound quality, after it had been

Starting point is 00:22:02 painstakingly restored over three years by the Israeli piano tuner Avner Karmie. Gregg had reported in 2014 that the last public mention of the piano was when Karmie's daughters sold it in 1996, sometime after his death. And that was the last we'd heard about it, until we heard from James Johnson back in January.

Starting point is 00:22:21 James wrote, I just discovered your podcast a couple of days ago and was listening to episode six on the way into the office this morning and was intrigued by the immortal piano story, so I googled it. Turns out the piano went up for auction yesterday. I thought you would be interested. And thank you for your podcast. It is fascinating. As a child many decades ago, one of my teachers called me a fountain of useless information due to my interest in the Guinness Book of World Records and my over fondness of sharing the things I had learned with my classmates. As you can imagine, your podcast very much appeals to me.

Starting point is 00:22:53 And James sent a link to an article in International Piano about how the Immortal Piano was listed for sale on eBay in January, priced at $2 million. on eBay in January priced at $2 million. The article notes that the piano had been purchased by a private collector in 1996 for $1 million and said that the lavishly carved piano had been given as a wedding gift to King Umberto I of Italy in 1868. They compared the unique sound of this piano to that of a harpsichord or lute and included a link to a YouTube video from 2016 of a performance of a Bach Adagio on the instrument if anyone wants to hear for themselves. The sale of the piano on eBay ended on February 5th, and it appears that the sale was ended by the seller without a buyer, but then I found the piano listed on Invaluable, another auction site, where it looked to me like they were asking for an opening bid of $80,000, and they listed the estimated value of the piano as between one

Starting point is 00:23:45 and a half and $2 million. That sale ended on March 3rd with, as far as I could tell, no bids made. And then I found some news items that the piano was due to go on sale at an auction house in Jerusalem, but that's as much as I could follow it before recording this. I wonder if someone will finally buy it. That'd be interesting. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate all the comments, feedback, and follow-ups that we get. So if you have any that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:24:19 It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Chris Pallant. It's common for people from Iceland who were born before 1987 to joke that they were in all likelihood conceived on a Thursday.

Starting point is 00:24:38 Why? On a Thursday? Was there something going on like to conserve electricity, everybody had to shut off all their electricity at a certain time on Thursdays? No. Oh, because I thought like, you know, if there's no lights, there's no television. I don't know. Okay, that's not it. I thought that was a good answer. Well, you're not, you're not far off. I'm not saying you're a good answer. Well, you're not far off. I'm not saying you're totally off base with that.

Starting point is 00:25:11 Okay, let's back up. Did something happen regularly on Thursdays in Iceland before 1987? Yes. Okay. So something that was like mandated by the government? Yes. Something was mandated by the government on Thursdays and only that day of the week. Yes. In Iceland. Did it have something to do with conserving some kind of fuel or power or? No. No.

Starting point is 00:25:37 Okay. So it's not like people weren't allowed to drive or they weren't conserving electricity. But the government did. Was there some kind of curfew on thursdays no um okay 1987 and and presumably this rule or law changed in 1987 yes is that date significant in a way that i would be able to figure out or understand. No. Okay. Is whatever was going on in Iceland pre-1987, would I associate it with going on in other countries too? No, I think this is just Iceland. Really specific to Iceland.

Starting point is 00:26:17 Okay. So the government was requiring something on Thursdays, government was requiring something on Thursdays. And then that would have, in some way, possibly encouraged people to be conceiving babies instead of whatever else they would have normally been doing on Thursdays. Yes. Was some activity restricted, would you say? Yes.

Starting point is 00:26:44 was some activity restricted, would you say? Yes. Would you say that this was like a business or a commercial activity, like movie theaters weren't open? You're very close with that. So something that people would normally have left the house to do on other days of the week, they wouldn't leave the house to do on Thursdays. No. No. No.

Starting point is 00:27:06 So whatever was changed would have been changed within people's own home. Yes. It had nothing to do with electricity or television. Well. Any other medium? Or it did have something to do with television? Yes. Oh, but not electricity, just television specifically.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Mm-hmm. Yes. Oh, but not electricity, just television specifically. There were only very boring shows on on Thursdays. No, that's not it. Television went off the air at a specific time on Thursdays. No, but you're closer and closer. Okay. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:46 Okay. Something about television. Is there anything about how television works in Iceland that I need to try to figure out, like state-run television or anything like that? No, not for the puzzle, no. Okay. If I lived in Iceland in 1986, could I watch television on Thursdays? No.

Starting point is 00:28:07 I could watch no television on Thursdays. That's basically it. There was no television allowed on Thursdays. Chris writes, the answer is that until 1986, Iceland did not broadcast any TV on Thursdays. The idea was to give people a break from staring at the screen and promote human interaction. Ah, well, human interaction, there you go. Certainly do it. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our awesome listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out the support us section

Starting point is 00:28:47 of the website at futilitycloset.com where you can find a donate button and a link to our Patreon page. At our website, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 trivia tidbits. Browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books,

Starting point is 00:29:02 and see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any comments or feedback for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 287-The Public Universal Friend

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.