Are You My Dead Guy: John Murray Spear

The one where I have to get them to agree they are my dead guy, reincarnated

Aug 29, 2024

Ideas are weird until they work, mocked and ridiculed for their uniqueness until proven useful. For all the successful inventors, there are so many that have failed. John Murray Spear sits among those.

This subject was the winner of my August history raffle. If you want to suggest a topic for me, stay tuned for the September raffle.

John’s story is a lengthy one because everything about him is so fascinating that I simply could not stop learning about him. John was a writer, and several of his old books are available online. Books written in the 1800s are some of my favorite things to read, especially ones written on social change. I’ve linked them at the bottom for you to read too. His words paint the picture of a visionary, a man who fought for good at the risk of his own life. He led a movement, a cult, of free-love spiritualists, creating several socialist colonies.

None of that prepares you for where this story is headed.

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(As a reminder I do not know these men. They are messaging a satirical Facebook profile of me as a conservative.)

Feminism was a step too far for him. Feminism may have been a step too far for John too, and our next charming grandpa will help me elaborate.

Electrically attractive. John, as a religious leader, looking for a woman with an electrically attractive vagina to sweep away the problems of the Earth. I really wanted to love John, the prison revolutionist, the socialist. Not that John.

This next John seems rather unlovable too.

Oh John! I was just getting to the miraculous birth of a baby conceived by the spirits!

It was announced that Miss Caroline Hinkley in 1858 was pregnant by the heaven’s child. Sure John was biologically the father, but actually the father was the spirits. (Women could become mothers but the men impregnating them were never the fathers. It had to be spirits or angels.) The whole matter is really made worse by the fact that John was the one who baptized Caroline when she was a baby.

The desire to be known as a healer continued in John. He referred to himself as a “spirit doctor” who could “visit and counsel the sick and the disharmonized at their habitations.” He could make diagnoses by mail because he used handwriting analysis. Going into this though, he smartly warned it might not be accurate if, “a single word or scratch of pen from another party is on that paper” or, “If the air is impure, or if a tempest comes, or if there has been unpleasant talk, of if persons present have doubts or are suspicious of me, or if another has sat in my chair or has used my writing materials, or if I am hungry or have just finished a meal.”

Besides that it worked perfectly.

In June 1882, John finally returned to his earlier work of actually helping people. What particularly interests me is he got involved in trying to help the men accused of the Haymarket riot avoid the death penalty. Perhaps he went back to actually helping people, knowing he would die soon. He died on October 5th 1882.

Life is sad, play your God if you want. It makes no difference to someone like me who feels all Gods are pretend. He’s just as much a God to me as any other. Had he converted enough followers into believing him, his mechanical baby Jesus really could have been the next Messiah. All Jesus has on John is enough people who believe in him to drown out the opposing voices.

All the Christian people calling him insane then, all those people who prayed to their own God, how dare they say he can’t pretend in his own way to bring himself peace?

How many priests and pastors have the same grandiose delusions? How many other “men of God” feel they speak to their congregation sharing God’s wishes. John is only “crazy” because he didn’t build up enough of a following. He didn’t trick enough people like the previous priests and pastors of the world. Those men too are by nature pretentiously vainglorious, thinking they are chosen to lead a portion of the world. Yet during John’s lifetime, they condemned him for his spirits that spoke to him, and today likely would do the same if they were to read this.

I wonder if people say they hear visions because they don’t have enough confidence to say the idea is their own. Would people have followed John if he had said he wanted to build this without it being a product of divine intervention? Would people come to hear leaders of a Church speak if they didn’t say they were a representation of God’s words? I hope so. The minds of our fellow people can do spectacular things.

John too had some astute ideas. He did not need to involve the heavens. He was an anti-capitalist socialist in search of creating a utopia. He saw beyond the physical with his observations, telling of how we need to recognize that one’s environment and lack of teaching on what is morally okay cannot be fixed by punishment. A poor starving man being punished for stealing food cannot be fixed by punishment. The answer, John said, was not to punish him but to look at why he was so hungry, and the solution was shared property.

He explained how capitalism was hurting people, giving the example of a poor laborer buying corn. The laborer spends his days wage of a dollar on corn. The trader increases the price to $1.50. The laborer now to buy corn loses half a days labor. The employer doesn’t increase the wage. The laborer’s family suffers. “What we need is to get corn at a reasonable rate,” said John. “Ordinary trade must sooner or later be superseded; free, generous and just cooperations and intercommunications will take its place.”

Everything was shared, voluntarily, including after death. There were no wills. “Property should be left to be used for and in behalf of humanity.” He dreamed of a world where people cared for each other. “The good of the individual cannot, cannot, cannot be promoted, in the highest possible degree, unless that individual improves the condition of those about him”

John knew that charities often kept people in the conditions of poverty instead of changing the world so people didn’t need charity. “Up springs a Charitable Institution, into which the sick and the suffering are closely crowded, crushing the weak under the iron foot of oppression.” “Into your crowded streets, garrets, cellars, I look with the greatest amount of pain. So long as person thus inhabit these places, - live in these unfavorable circumstances, so long will poverty, poverty, will all its horrors, stare the inhabitants of your earth in their faces.”

His ideas for a perfect utopia quickly turned to eugenics by his view on biology and a term he called “wombology.” Women could transmit the things that were impressed upon them to their child during pregnancy. A woman then who read astronomical texts, would bring into existence an astronomer. This strange belief led to his idea that they could scientifically breed colonies to “yield biologically superior beings.”

The problem with John’s grand plans, and other men who speak for the heavens, is that he hurt others as he acted out his role as a divine leader. People who participated in the Electrical Infant project, and other projects of his community, later wrote of how John had convinced them they had a higher mission with “great work to do on earth.” The way he tricked them into behaving caused later embarrassment.

He hurt his brother who published the Prisoners’ Friend with him. Those unfamiliar with the prison reform movement mixed his other ideas up with the passion and the point of prison reform. His ideas became a drag on the movement. John had set out to help prisoners, and instead had become a source of confusion.

The Free Love movement also suffered from his existence with people connecting the machine sex, and the alleged immaculate birth with free love. Religious people used it to showcase why Free Love was debauchery. Others in the movement tried to keep distance between the idea that one should be able to love who they please, that they should break the binds of traditional marriage, versus John’s community’s displays of free love.

I don’t ever wish anyone to stop dreaming, to stop inventing, to stop creating. Just remember, those ideas come from you, not the heavens. You don’t need a purpose to life told to you by spirits. You are the one who can make social change.

Sources:

The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear John Benedict Buescher

The Life of John Murray Spear Neil B. Lehman

The Educator John Murray Spear

Utopian Theme With Variations: John Murray Spear and His Kiantone Domain Russell Duino

The Haunted Grid: Nature, Electricity, and Indian Spirits in the American Metaphysical Tradition Darryl Caterine

The Shape of Utopia Irene Cheng

The Prisoner’s Friend John Murray Spear

(By the way, if you find it difficult to read John’s old books because of the very old pages, I recommend using a screenreader. Archive.org has its own built in screenreader that can read the old text my phone sometimes won’t. The voices are very robotic, but if you set a better voice on your phone it should switch to that voice.)

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