Gary Lachman

Bio & resources

Most political campaigns have a fair amount of mudslinging, but of recent years, the bid for the 2008 U.S. presidential seat has seen some of the fiercest on record. Not surprisingly, much of this has been aimed at Hillary Clinton. On the low end, her opponents on the right have tagged her as ultra-liberal and ultra–left wing—a calculating and deceitful politician who knows what the voting public wants to hear and also exactly how to say it. Mid-range we find Robert Novak of CNN’s Crossfire likening Hillary to Madame Defarge, an evil figure from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities—an ominous allusion for the right, given the novel is about the French Revolution. And supporters of Barack Obama, her challenger for the Democratic nomination, have even presented her as an Orwellian “Big Sister,” in a 1984-style YouTube clip. But the most extreme, perhaps, is the rather bizarre suspicion that Hillary, like her ex-President husband, is really the envoy of the occult secret society the Illuminati, a powerful, hidden cabal that for centuries has been trying to take over the world or, depending on your sources, has already been in the driver’s seat for some time.

More than a century ago, another woman had the honor of being the first of her gender to run for President, and to receive a bashing for it. As irony would have it, she, too, had some claim to occult fame. Her name was Victoria Claflin Woodhull, and as one of the nineteenth century’s most fascinating women’s rights advocates, it’s surprising she is not better known. Among her many distinctions, she was the second woman ever to address Congress (on women’s right to vote), the first to address the House Judiciary Committee, and in 1872, as mentioned, the first woman to run for U.S. President. Her opponents were the incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, and the newspaper giant Horace Greeley. Her running mate was the first black vice-presidential candidate, the ex-slave Frederick Douglass.

Victoria Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio, in 1838. According to her biographer, her father was a con man and thief; her mother, an illegitimate, illiterate religious fanatic. Her early years were full of poverty, filth, and squalor. Victoria displayed mediumistic and paranormal powers early on, and her father put her to work in his traveling sideshow, where she appeared as a clairvoyant and fortune teller. She made successful predictions, could find missing objects, received messages from “beyond,” and possessed “magnetic” healing powers. She also claimed that she was sometimes allowed to visit an idyllic spiritual world, a kind of celestial utopia reminiscent of Emanuel Swedenborg’s accounts of heaven, which must have contrasted sharply with her earthly lot. Her “spirit guides” also informed her that she was destined to become a “ruler of the nation,” an early indication of her brave, but ultimately unsuccessful, political ambitions.

As some feminists have argued, spiritualism itself was a means for women to have a voice in a male-dominated nineteenth-century America, their “messages from beyond” taken more seriously than their more mundane pronouncements. True or not, being a medium was something Victoria made good use of. She and her sister, “Tennie C” (Tennessee) Claflin, jointly “cured” the prominent millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had just lost his wife, and this led to his setting them up with their own highly successful brokerage firm (the first on Wall Street run by women) and magazine, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. (It may have helped that Tennie became the seventy-six-year-old Vanderbilt’s lover.) In the magazine, according to one account, Victoria “preached her doctrines of free love, attacked the rich (though not, of course, Vanderbilt), and espoused Marxism.” In fact, along with its advocacy of short skirts, spiritualism, women’s suffrage, free love, vegetarianism, homeopathy, licensed prostitution, and birth control, the newspaper printed the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto.

The success of the brokerage firm and the newspaper made Victoria famous. In April 1870, she announced her plans to run for President, as candidate for the Equal Rights Party, whose membership included an unusual coalition of feminists, workers, spiritualists, Communists, and “free lovers.” Yet not all advocates of women’s rights were taken with Victoria. Susan B. Anthony, in particular, had her reservations. And while many were willing to talk about free love in salons, fewer were willing to put theory into practice—a double standard that another free love advocate, Mary Wollstonecraft, had encountered almost a century earlier. What was worse, “Mrs. Satan,” as Victoria’s detractors began to call her (it hasn’t quite gotten to that level for Hillary yet), not only advocated free love, she also preached an unholy belief in spirits.

Ironically, it was free love itself that linked Victoria with a scandal that, as the cliché goes, rocked the nation, generating as much publicity at the time as the Monica Lewinsky affair did in the 1990s. It involved the hugely successful preacher and “deafening foghorn of virtue,” Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and was known as the Beecher-Tilton Affair.

Beecher had been caught in an adulterous affair with the wife of Theodore Tilton, one of his closest disciples. Like Tilton himself, his young wife, Elizabeth (Libby), adored and admired Beecher. The charismatic preacher apparently was able to elicit absolute confidence and love from his followers, but in Libby’s case, this took a more-than-platonic form. At first transported by their liaison, Libby soon had misgivings, and eventually, she confessed to her husband. Although naturally furious, Tilton agreed to Libby’s demand not to denounce Beecher. But he couldn’t contain himself and eventually mentioned the affair to the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton then told Victoria, who became as furious as Tilton. Beecher had repeatedly denounced free love from the pulpit and had attacked Victoria personally. Victoria broke the story in her magazine, announcing that America’s most famous preacher privately engaged in the free love he publicly castigated. Beecher was eventually exonerated, though for her sins, Elizabeth Tilton was excommunicated from the church. And Victoria, who did nothing but print the story, was arrested for sending “obscene material” through the mail. She spent Election Day 1872 in jail, a fate many a Hillary-basher would no doubt enjoy seeing repeated.

Most people were happy that Mrs. Satan was getting her comeuppance for slandering one of the nation’s celebrities; apparently a woman telling the truth was a greater threat than a preacher telling a lie. But after a time, many did also realize that defending free speech was more important than denouncing free love, and they came to Victoria’s defense. She was eventually acquitted, but the battle ruined her. She lost the brokerage firm and the magazine and received death threats. There was no legal ground for Victoria’s arrest, and in hindsight it seems clear that the government did what it could to teach Mrs. Satan a lesson, one that future female presidential candidates did well to note. Given the rising rhetoric as Election Day looms closer, it’s a wonder the spirit of Victoria isn’t raised more often.

Gary Lachman is the author of several books on consciousness and culture, most recently Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to his Life and Work (2007). A founding member of the rock group Blondie, he was inducted in 2006 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.