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British-Israelism in America

The Early Years, 1870–1928

It was inevitable that British-Israelism would reach America. If Britain was Ephraim, the more blessed of Joseph’s two sons, America sprung from his brother, Manasseh, with a critical though subordinate role to play in the economy of salvation. Although Anglo-Israelites sometimes had their organizational problems, they spread their teachings with vigor, and British-Israel literature soon began to find its way across the Atlantic. No one can say with assurance where such material made its first American impact, but there was a demonstrable American presence by the late 1870s. In this chapter, I shall trace the American branch of the movement through its diffusion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until it began to falter in the 1920s. That interruption turned out to be the prelude to British-Israelism’s American surge in the Depression years, the subject of chapter 3.

The First American Anglo-Israelites?

Whether or not he was the first American Anglo-Israelite, Joseph Wild, pastor of the Union Congregational Church in Brooklyn, was surely among its earliest authors. Although Wild’s pamphlets date from 1879, he tells us that his acquaintance with British-Israelism went back to the late 1850s, when he came upon a copy of John Wilson’s book. At about the same time, he also became acquainted with pyramidology. By 1876, he felt confident enough in his British-Israelite views to begin preaching about them and claimed to have delivered 130 Anglo-Israel sermons in the next three years. Some time between 1876 and 1879, Wild met a fellow Brook-lynite better read on the subject than he, who introduced him to the writings of Edward Hine. Like so many other Anglo-Israel authors, Wild too concluded that “the United States fulfills the role of the tribe of Manasseh,” heir to all that had been prophesied concerning it; “The inference is clearly this, that if England stands for Ephraim, and the United States for Manasseh, why then, politically they must be superior to all other nations.”¹

Wild was not operating in a vacuum. His New York publisher issued and sold British-Israel books, periodicals, and sheet music in amounts ample enough to justify a catalog. Wild, in addition to his regular sermonizing, had another venue for his Anglo-Israel message, an organization called the Lost Israel Identification Society of Brooklyn. This quaintly named group met twice a month “to develope and disseminate the truth of the proposition that the Anglo-Saxon race is descended from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel; and To promote research into the general history of Israel and Judah.” It was open to anyone willing to pay dues of fifty cents a year.²

Other British-Israelites soon followed. By the 1880s, W. H. Poole, a Toronto clergyman, was active in both Ontario and the United States. In 1887, M. M. Eshelman, a Kansas-based writer steeped in Edward Hine’s ideas, published Two Sticks; or, The Lost Tribes of Israel Discovered. Eshelman claimed to have learned about British-Israelism in 1886 from an elderly English expatriate.³

Lieutenant Totten and His Followers

Wild and Eshelman were essentially local figures. Neither devoted himself to the British-Israel cause with the single-mindedness of Hine, and neither sought to shape an American movement. The first person with such grandiose aims was a later and altogether stranger figure, C. A. L. Totten. His name still surfaces from time to time in Christian Identity literature, usually, as in the sermons of Wesley Swift, as “Prof. Totten of Yale.” While Identity writers disdain intellectuals and academics, they seem pathetically grateful for any instance in which the halo of academic prestige shines on their ideas. In Totten’s case, however, the tie to Yale was tenuous indeed.⁴

In 1868, the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale was designated Connecticut’s land-grant college. While that carried financial benefits for the institution, it also obligated Sheffield to provide military instruction for its students. Yale was able to secure a waiver of the drill requirements and was obliged only to provide senior students with a mandatory course of lectures in “military science.” These proved unproductive, and in 1877, Sheffield adopted a slightly different plan in cooperation with the United States Engineering School, whose officers were to provide six lectures each year on strategy, ordnance, fortification, and similar topics. One of the early officers detailed to this position as professor of military science and tactics was a lieutenant in the artillery named Charles Totten, who held the post from 1889 until 1892. Totten’s course appears to have been more successful than earlier military training programs at Yale, but his affiliation with the university was not substantially different from that of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps instructors later on.⁵

Lieutenant Totten’s interest in British-Israelism was of uncertain origin, but it unquestionably predated his days at Yale. He first published on the subject in 1883, and when his work was reprinted in England, it attracted the favorable attention of C. Piazzi Smyth, the astronomer-cum-pyramidologist whom we met in the previous chapter. Piazzi Smyth contacted Totten and subsequently provided the introduction for Totten’s book, The Order of History. Totten turned out to be a prolific writer. He penned a series of articles for the New Haven Register and, beginning in 1890, published a British-Israel periodical, Our Race: Its Origin and Destiny. Totten continued to write and publish from New Haven until his death in 1909, and disciples continued to issue Our Race for another six years.⁶

By the mid-1880s, Totten’s reputation was formidable enough to attract Edward Hine’s attention. Anxious to escape the Anglo-Israel turf wars in England, Hine sailed for America in 1884 on a visit that was to stretch over four years. He first found accommodations in a New York hotel, but Totten soon invited him to New Haven. Hine stayed with Totten several weeks and wrote glowingly at the beginning of December that “Lieut. Totten is a great help to me, and has a good score of marvelous identifications of the Americans with Manasseh…. Professor Totten intends to publish his researches for the Good of America.” After he left New Haven, Hine crisscrossed the northeast quarter of America and adjacent areas of Canada, lecturing from 1884 until 1888. He appeared in New York City, Long Island, Hartford, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor; Windsor, London, Stratford, Guelph, Hamilton, and Toronto, in Ontario; and a host of smaller communities. In the first eleven months alone, he traveled over two thousand miles, speaking to apparently large and enthusiastic audiences. While in Brooklyn during the early part of his American stay, Hine built on the following Joseph Wild had cultivated (although gloating over the fact that the Brooklyn Eagle wrote lengthy reports on him, even though it “never gave five lines to Dr. Wild”). Hine conducted regular services in Brooklyn and lectured to its “Anglo-Israel Association,” which may have been the old Lost Israel Identification Society, before which Wild had appeared. By the time Hine returned to England in February 1888, he had become a highly visible figure in North America, reinforcing his voluminous output of pamphlets and tracts with a forceful platform presence.⁷

While British-Israel doctrine appeared eccentric to many, it was not surprising that some Americans found it attractive and even plausible. There was no shortage of Americans convinced that the country would fulfill a millennial role, and many saw in the history of Israel a template that carried the pattern of American destiny. As Herman Melville put it, “Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” What Melville said metaphorically, others were prepared to regard literally. The Mormons foretold an American Zion to which, in the end of days, the lost tribes would return, and, in like manner, Anglo-Israelites linked biblical prophecy with American fulfillment.⁸

Because Anglo-Israelism had no central structure, the pattern of its diffusion depended largely on the chance acquaintance individuals made with its teachings. Totten’s works, for example, fell into unpredictable hands with equally unpredictable effects. In about 1895, a Maine evangelist named Frank Sandford became acquainted with Totten’s writings. Sandford had founded a millenarian movement known as the Kingdom in 1893, which in turn established Shiloh, a large communal settlement near Durham, Maine. Sandford pronounced Totten to be “to Bible study what Galileo was to astronomy.” Not surprisingly, after that endorsement, Totten’s works became part of the course of study at the Shiloh Bible school.⁹

In 1900, two of Sandford’s Bible students came to Topeka, Kansas, where they met a young local evangelist, Charles Fox Parham. What the Shilohites told Parham excited him sufficiently so that he spent a month studying under Sandford at the Maine commune. He also accompanied Sandford on a month-long evangelistic campaign to Winnipeg. When Parham returned to Topeka, he organized his own Bible college on the Shiloh model. There, on January 1, 1901, speaking in tongues began. This experience led Parham to found the Pentecostalist movement. Pentecostalism diffused through the lower Midwest and the Southwest, and many Pentecostalists, Parham included, eventually made their way to southern California, where the British-Israel themes they incorporated helped prepare the ground for Identity a generation later. It is also possible that Parham had independently become aware of Anglo-Israelism earlier, in 1899, from another source, the midwest-ern evangelist J. H. Allen, who was to become a significant Anglo-Israel figure.

Whether Parham first heard a British-Israel message from Sandford or Allen, his close association with Sandford in 1900 provided a crucial conduit for the transfer of Totten’s ideas from New England to the Midwest and Far West.¹⁰

Whether or not his path crossed Parham’s, J. H. Allen (1847-1930) became an influential figure in the American branch of the movement. He was a vice-patron of the British-Israel World Federation and the author of one of the movement’s central texts, Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright. Originally an Illinois Methodist, Allen moved in 1879 to Missouri and became one of the founders of the Church of God (Holiness), organized in 1883. Doctrinally distinct from Parham’s Pentecostalism, this was one among many Holiness churches established in the late nineteenth century. Their members, often seceding Methodists, were committed to Wesley’s demand for complete sanctification, although without the Pentecostalists’ speaking in tongues.¹¹

Together, Parham and Allen infused British-Israelism into the premillen-nial evangelical sects that were emerging out of midwestern Methodism. As migratory currents took believers westward, they brought their brands of Anglo-Israelism to the Pacific Coast. The most famous of the Pentecostal outpourings, the Azusa Street revivals, took place in Los Angeles in 1906. Parham preached extensively in Los Angeles in 1924, and by 1936, 11.2 percent of all Pentecostals lived on the West Coast. Beginning at the turn of the century, J. H. Allen evangelized throughout the West and eventually moved to Pasadena—hence the rise of Identity in California during the 1930s and 1940s (described in chapter 4) built upon the foundation established by Parham, Allen, and their followers earlier in the century.¹²

Thus Totten’s and Hine’s labors had created three centers for future British-Israel growth in America: the Northeast, where the two had lectured and published; the Midwest, where their teachings struck a responsive chord among some evangelical Protestants; and ultimately, in the Far West, where many evangelicals had moved. In the Northeast itself, Anglo-Israelism continued to grow after Totten’s death in 1909. A major force in nurturing the movement was a Boston publisher, A. A. Beauchamp.

Beauchamp took over Totten’s role as the principal Anglo-Israel publisher in America. Our Race, Totten’s periodical, had ceased publication in 1915. In 1918, Beauchamp introduced his own monthly, the Watchman of Israel, devoted to demonstrating that “the English-speaking peoples of today are the lineal descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel and must fulfill in these latter days the responsibilities decreed for them through the patriarchs and prophets.” Beauchamp’s magazine was a collection of brief and nontechnical religious essays, together with bits of news about British-Israel activities in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Beauchamp also became the publisher of choice for Anglo-Israel writers in North America, including such older figures as J. H. Allen, for whom Beauchamp published a string of books, and rising younger writers such as the Canadian W. G. MacKendrick, who became a significant figure in the 1920s and 1930s under his nom de plume, “The Roadbuilder” (writing was a sideline of MacKendrick’s paving business). Beauchamp’s activities made him a central point of contact for the dispersed and fragmented American British-Israelites.¹³

Foreshadowings: Reuben H. Sawyer and the Ku Klux Klan

One of the far-flung contributors to Beauchamp’s journal was an Oregon clergyman, Reuben H. Sawyer. In 1921 alone, he published articles in five of the twelve issues. His story is instructive not only because it demonstrates the decentralized character of the movement but because Sawyer’s career anticipates those of Identity figures almost half a century later. Sawyer was one of the first British-Israelites in America to combine his religious commitments with active work on behalf of right-wing political causes, prefiguring the fusion of religious and political radicalism so conspicuous in Christian Identity.¹⁴

In spite of ample documentation about Sawyer’s political and religious activities, recent attempts to identify him have been astonishingly incomplete or fanciful. Ralph Lord Roy, in the only previous history of the Identity movement, simply calls him a “West Coast writer.” Stranger still is the theory advanced by Albert Lee in his 1980 work, Henry Ford and the Jews. Lee suggests that there was no such person, and that despite publications by him, “no individual by that name ever made an appearance.” Indeed, he suggests that “R. H. Sawyer” was none other than the pen name of William J. Cameron, the Ford Motor Company public-relations executive whose career as a British-Israel organizer and anti-Semitic editor will be detailed in the next chapter.¹⁵

Whatever else might be said of Sawyer, he could never be accused of not having “made an appearance,” for he was an accomplished speaker in demand for both the pulpit and lecture platform. Born in 1866, Reuben Sawyer was pastor of the East Side Christian Church in Portland, Oregon. By the 1920s, Portland had a vigorous British-Israel group, due in no small way apparently to Sawyer’s efforts. The Anglo-Israel Research Society met twice monthly and supported a bookshop and lecture bureau. Sawyer himself was much in demand as a lecturer. Indeed, by early 1921, his British-Israel activities had become so time consuming that he was compelled to resign his pastorate, much to the distress of his congregation. He lectured throughout the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, especially in Vancouver, a city that was to become critical to the development of Identity ideas in the 1940s. Sawyer was still lecturing in the region as late as 1937, when he was seventy-one and living in Washington State.¹⁶

To the extent that a movement as diffuse as British-Israelism had an inner circle, Reuben Sawyer was in it. In 1919–20 he was instrumental in the establishment of the movement’s umbrella organization, the British-Israel World Federation. He helped draft the federation’s constitution and attended the first federation congress in London in 1920 (as did J. H. Allen). At the congress, Sawyer gave three addresses and presided over a session. He also spoke to large British-Israel audiences elsewhere in England. When the head of the federation, Herbert Garrison, journeyed to Canada in 1929, Reuben Sawyer was on hand in Toronto to greet him, and he appears on the list of the federation’s vice-patrons with the likes of the Marchioness Dowager of Head-fort and Admiral Sir Richard H. Peirse.¹⁷

Busy as British-Israelism kept Sawyer, his religious activities evidently did not exhaust his time, for he was able simultaneously to maintain a second career. This parallel career also involved lecturing and organizing, but on behalf of a very different organization, the Ku Klux Klan. The early 1920s were of course the heyday of the so-called “second Klan,” founded shortly after the end of World War I. Unlike its post-Civil War predecessor, the Klan of the 1920s spread beyond the South to become a powerful national organization, whose support of “Americanism” and traditional morality, together with its contempt for “alien elements,” made it politically formidable in many regions, including Oregon. The leader of the Oregon Klan, Fred L. Gifford, was the most prominent KKK official on the Pacific Coast.¹⁸

The Oregon Klan occupied Sawyer from 1921 until 1924. His first task was to make the Klan acceptable to the general community by packaging its nativist politics in soothing rhetoric. He introduced the Klan to Portland with an address before six thousand people at the Municipal Auditorium on December 22, 1921. Sawyer reassured his fellow citizens that the organization stood only for “a cleansed and purified Americanism where law abiding citizens will be respected and their rights defended, irrespective of race, religion or color so long as they make an honest effort to be Americans, and Americans only.” He spoke in a similar vein the following year in Eugene, where he appeared on a stage decorated with a sword, Bible, flag, and image of a burning cross. When he lectured again in Portland, fifteen hundred people had to be turned away from a packed hall guarded by robed Klansmen.¹⁹

As he had in Anglo-Israelism, Sawyer combined the lecture platform with organizing activities. The Oregon Klan leader, Fred Gifford, was anxious to make a place for women in the all-male organization, and in the summer of 1922 founded a women’s auxiliary, the Ladies of the Invisible Empire (LOTIES). He placed Reuben Sawyer at its head. Sawyer ran LOTIES and wrote its rituals until some time in 1923 or 1924, when he had a falling out with Gifford, possibly over division of the organization’s substantial revenues. In any case, in 1924 LOTIES was dissolved, replaced by a new women’s organization headed by Gifford’s wife, and Sawyer disappeared from Klan affairs.²⁰

Sawyer’s period in the Klan posed a doctrinal problem for him. The Oregon Klan was less hostile to Jews than it was to Catholics, Asians, and the foreign born in general, but it shared with other Klan branches a pervasive anti-Semitism. This obviously presented difficulties for a British-Israelite in the Edward Hine mold, for Anglo-Israelism continued to take a protective, if patronizing, attitude toward Jews. Until such time as the segments of All-Israel were reunited in Palestine, Jews were to be protected and their longing for a homeland supported. Sawyer’s British-Israel writing was very much in this vein. He wrote in April 1919 of “the great Jewish people [and] their brethren Israel.” He was in demand as a speaker before Jewish organizations. After a talk to the Portland B’nai B’rith, the group’s president wrote him that “your reception and the enthusiastic greeting which the members accorded you upon the completion of your address was a physical evidence of how much your auditors enjoyed your remarks.” As late as July 1921, Sawyer presented himself as a protector of Jews against anti-Semitism:

Scarcely the rhetoric of a Klan spokesperson.²¹

And in fact by the time Sawyer emerged as a public Klan figure at the end of 1921, he had begun to leave his philo-Semitic views behind. In his first Klan address in Portland, he spoke about “the Jewish question.” He began by distinguishing those Jews “who are of the true lineage and faith of their father Judah” from “objectionable Jews.” persons who have “usurped [an] ancient and honorable title.” These “objectionable Jews … are not of the same mental and spiritual calibre” as their erstwhile coreligionists. Sawyer even speculated that “true Jews” would be qualified to join the Klan if only Christian rituals were not there to inadvertently offend them. Sawyer also addressed the issue of a Jewish conspiracy, or, as he put it, “a ‘government within our government.” With the Dearborn Independent’s anti-Semitic articles no doubt in the minds of many of Sawyer’s listeners, he went on to warn that the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan opposed any who “attempt to dictate to the American people concerning many important customs, usages and laws which do not meet their approval.” But he hastened to add that such persons were opposed “not because they are Jews, but because of their lack of loyalty to American ideals.”²²

By 1922, however, this innuendo had been replaced by full-blown anti-Semitism that was as crude as it was open:

The transformation is so startling that one wonders at first if it is the same person speaking. The key lies in the distinction Sawyer had begun to make in late 1921 between authentic and inauthentic Jews, the former ill-treated and in need of protection, the latter masquerading as genuine members of All-Israel even as they plotted the destruction of Christendom. As we shall see in chapter 3, this distinction was becoming increasingly prominent in American anti-Semitism during the early 1920s, greatly assisted by the anti-Semitic articles in the Dearborn Independent, overseen and often written by its British-Israel editor, William J. Cameron. In time, as the concept of authentic and inauthentic Jews developed, it became common to assign larger and larger proportions of Jews to the counterfeit category, so that only a minority (the “good” Jews) remained worthy of protection. In the most extreme version of this position, all Ashkenazic, Eastern European Jews were counterfeit, and only Sephardic Jews could legitimately claim Israelite lineage. Since American Jewry was overwhelmingly Ashkenazic, one could maintain a theological position of Jewish defense while excoriating virtually all American Jews as traitorous. This position in fact became increasingly prominent in American and Canadian British-Israelism. As to Sawyer, he obviously saw no incongruity between his British-Israelism and the sentiments he expressed as a Klan leader, for he continued to be active in British-Israel circles throughout and subsequent to the Klan period. Although Sawyer’s contributions to A. A. Beauchamp’s magazine disappeared during his Klan period, doubtless because of the pressure on his time, they resumed briefly in 1924.²³

Beauchamp Defects

The cessation of Sawyer’s articles in the New Watchman (the periodical’s name changed in late 1922) was due less to changes in Sawyer than to a dramatic shift in the affiliations of the magazine’s publisher, A. A. Beauchamp; in 1924, Beauchamp converted to Christian Science. Beauchamp’s shift to Christian Science occurred in the context of a complex interaction between Christian Science and British-Israelism that had begun during Mary Baker Eddy’s lifetime. An English convert, Julia Field-King, had read and been impressed by the work of Totten. Totten had, among other things, engaged in a common British-Israel genealogical exercise, attempting to prove the Davidic ancestry of the British royal family. Field-King sought to extend this dubious project with the even more bizarre hypothesis that Eddy too was a descendant of King David. Eddy herself was briefly attracted by this notion, in part because it might bolster the movement in England. However, Field-King’s genealogical consultations finally convinced her that the idea was without merit, and it was put to rest.²⁴

This, however, was not the end of the matter. Eddy continued to maintain an interest in British-Israelism, although she kept it out of her doctrinal writings. Its attractions remained as Christian Science began to establish itself in England after 1897. After Eddy’s death in 1910, British-Israelism reappeared in a schismatic offshoot from the mother church, the Christian Science Parent Church, organized in 1924 by an English Christian Scientist, Annie Cecilia Bill. A disillusioned Christian Scientist, John V. Dittemore, became interested in British-Israelism and ultimately was a contributor to Beauchamp’s magazine. After Dittemore became a follower of Bill’s, he persuaded Beauchamp that her doctrines were correct. Beauchamp followed Dittemore into the Parent Church and presented the Watchman to his newfound ecclesiastical colleagues. In Bill’s messianic view of history, she was destined to become the head of a universal church and saw this process beginning with the unification of the English-speaking peoples under her spiritual headship. Dittemore’s and Beauchamp’s British-Israelism therefore played to her messianic pretensions and, on the practical side, opened up a new body of potential converts, namely, Anglo-Israelites. This promise was apparently at least in part fulfilled: “Our hope was realized in a large measure: many of the subscribers to the original Watchman of Israel became members of our Church.”²⁵

Beauchamp, of course, did not see this as a defection from British-Israelism. The latter had always been permissive about church affiliations, and, in any case, Bill was at great pains to demonstrate harmony between British-Israelism and her own religious views. Nonetheless, the movement of Beauchamp and his publication into a schismatic Christian Science group effectively ended its role as a central point of communication and coordination among British-Israelites in North America, for it was now, after all, the organ of a specific sectarian group. The result was to leave British-Israelism in America—diffuse at best—in an acutely disorganized condition. Coteries of believers remained, defined by such widely available writings as Totten’s, or maintained by the force of such personalities as Parham and Allen, or consolidated in a few localities, such as Portland. But the movement, which had always been segmented, lacked any structure to bind its parts together or even keep them aware of one another. This condition persisted from 1924 until 1928. In that year matters were taken in hand by a remarkable organizer who would dominate British-Israelism in America through the 1930s and early 1940s, the crucial period that directly preceded the emergence of Christian Identity itself. That person was an obscure Massachusetts lawyer, Howard Rand.