Pam Tice is a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group In the spring of 1918, a year after the United States entered World War I, the Manhattan District Attorney initiated a special effort to arrest fortune tellers who charged their clients a fee to contact their soldier sons to check on their well-being or guarantee a safe return. Government officials considered this fraudulent behavior and, as such, it affected public morale during wartime. The war had brought a wide interest in spiritualism, a recently recognized religion, along with numerous other beliefs in psychic phenomena. The Victorians introduced an era of seances, palmistry, fortune-telling, and faith-healing that started before the Civil War but significantly grew during that war as people sought comfort from the trauma of the time. The uncertainty and brutality of World War I caused a new outpouring in Britain that soon spread to the United States. The laws against fortune-telling in the U.S. were based on British Law that declared fortune-tellers and many others “vagrants.” In New York State, they were labeled “disorderly persons,” along with prostitutes, gamblers, and numerous others. Under the New York Code of Criminal Procedure, they were labeled “persons pretending to tell fortunes,” as the law assumed that a future could not be foretold. In general, Americans assumed that fortune-telling was inherently fraudulent. The law was applied when the fortune-teller charged a fee; it was allowed if the fortune-telling was purely for amusement or entertainment. Eventually, arguments would be made to assert that believing that the future could be foretold was a religious belief that would be a protected right. Still, the law had not reached this point during the early years of the 20th century. Since women were often both telling the fortunes as well as seeking them, the efforts to make arrests were led by a new group of female detectives working undercover in the New York City Police Department. In January 1918, Police Commissioner Enright appointed the first woman Fifth Deputy Commissioner, Ellen O’Grady. The undercover female detectives worked under her direction, focusing on juvenile delinquency, fortune-tellers, street corner loafers, women gamblers, and white slavers. The news accounts about the fortune-tellers arrested on the Upper West Side during the 1918 spring all had a female detective posing as a needy female looking for help finding information about a soldier serving overseas. In an earlier post, I covered District Attorney Swann rounding up owners and patrons of chop suey restaurants since they were thought to be places where American soldiers could be exposed to prostitutes. Another Swann crusade in the spring of 1918 was an effort to stop the operations of “fortune-tellers, spiritualistic fakers, and clairvoyants.” On the Upper West Side, these efforts were concentrated in May 1918. Mrs. Aso-Neith Cochran of West 114th Street was well-known for discovering a system of cryptogram numbers with “vibrations.” Her home was referred to as a “temple in Harlem.” There had recently been a legal case in the news that a woman had been manipulated by real estate brokers who played on her belief in Mrs. Cochran’s system. In May 1918, one of Mrs. O’Grady’s undercover detectives went to Mrs. Cochran pretending to be concerned about the fate of a son in the Air Corps. Mrs. Cochran predicted his safety for a small fee, and then she was arrested but soon released on bail. At 902 West End Avenue, Olga Neidlinger of the Church of Nature’s Divine Revelations made her predictions through a medium known as “Willem.” Soon, she was in court supported by her aunt, the secretary of the same church. They offered to help the District Attorney find the fakers, asserting Willem’s true spirit. On West 91st Street, John Hill, the pastor of the Spiritual Church of Advanced Thought, was found disorderly after two of Mrs. O’Grady’s detectives attended his church service on May 3, where he “foretold future events” after a small fee had been collected from everyone attending the service. Also popular, but not arrested during Swann’s 1918 crusade, was Professor Bert Reese of West 99th Street, a well-known psychic who could read messages without seeing them. When he was arrested in 1915, the charges were dismissed as he argued that he was an entertainer, not a fortune-teller. Perhaps the most significant case in 1918 was the one against Pierre A. Bernard, known as “Oom the Omnipotent” of 662 West End Avenue. Born Perry A. Baker in Nebraska and named Peter Coon in San Francisco, Bernard was already known to the NYPD. In New York City, in 1910, he had been charged with assaulting two young women at the Tantric Order Lodge he had set up on the west side at an address on West 74th Street. Although he had spent time in the Tombs, the victims disappeared before the trial was to start, and Bernard was released. He then set up his business on West 74th Street as the “Sanskrit College.” The college is now recognized as the beginning of the practice of yoga in New York but was construed as a shocking place by the detectives who investigated and the newspapers that covered Bernard’s work. Men and women were dressed in tights and “bathing costumes” and said to be “just exercising.” Eventually, the place was closed because the New York State Board of Education found that he was running a college but there was no license and there were no degrees.
Bernard relocated his business to New Jersey but continued activities on West End Avenue. Detective Ada Brady had enrolled in a class and began the process of indoctrination into the “cult.” The night of the raid in early May 1918, participants were charged $50 each to gaze into a crystal ball to learn about their loved ones. Mr. Bernard was not there that evening, but subsequent news reports said that the New York City Police Department was looking for him. A second article two weeks later about his West End Avenue location was particularly salacious in its description of the activities at the house and the printed materials found there that “would have caused the hair of (anti-vice crusader) Anthony Comstock to stand up straight on his head.” But Pierre Bernard was lucky. By 1919, he relocated all of his classes and practices to Nyack, New York, and soon gained the support of Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt and her two daughters. He married a dancer named Blanche de Vries. He built a business at a country club where he offered instruction in Sanskrit, Vedic philosophy, and yoga, making it fashionable to the upper class. Today, he is written about as one of the founders of yoga in the United States. Spiritualism is still strong on the Upper West Side, as one can tell from a quick Google search. Today’s law, which dates from 1967, makes the practice of foretelling the future for a fee a misdemeanor but is usually prosecuted only when it is linked to a more serious crime. Sources www.newspapers.com Book Review: Laycock, Joseph “The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love” Nova Religios: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol 15, No 3 (February 2012) pp 122-123 Laycock, Joseph “Yogo for the New Woman and the New Man: The Role of Pierre Bernard and Blanche DeVries in the creation of Modern Postural Yoga” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 23 No. 1 (Winter 2013), pp 101-136 The New York Times “Telling Fortunes and, From Time to Time, Taking Them” Michael Wilson, August 5, 2011.
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