There was a lot going on in 19th century America. And I mean a lot. It's a period I was never particularly interested in until about three years ago when I proposed to write a book that started in the so-called Gilded Age (roughly 1880 to 1900) with the rise of the robber barons and beginning of the corporation as we know it today. I wanted to write about how nouveau riches industrialists highjacked The University by endowing huge B-Schools (starting with Wharton and Harvard) and thus gained entry to a society that had formerly treated them as uncultured and uncultivated pariahs. (Where "culture" and "cultivation," nota bene, derive from agriculture, and thus are core values of the landed gentry.) Not only gained entry, but took over, the MBA replacing the Ph.D. as the credential of choice by the late 20th century. I'm tempted to tell the whole story here, but there's much more to it. A whole booksworth, in fact.
I did write an article along these lines for Harvard Business Review, but it was rejected. And half-rightly so, as I wrote it in a deplorably slapdash manner and spiced it with way too much snarky attitude. Nonetheless, the real reason they rejected the piece was predicted in the piece itself: business doesn't want to know about anything that, by deus-ex-machina definition, lies outside its own borders, as such context might pop the bubble of heroic myth surrounding and sustaining the whole concept of business: a hermetically sealed recursively self-referential (not to mention self-serving) system of three-card-Monte abstractions and distractions, which, having achieved some notable degree of global traction, we're supposed to believe always existed as it exists today -- part of the natural order of things. Sure. Uh huh.
You see? I still can't resist the snarkiness. Which to me seems no big deal, really. I mean business used to be afraid of bomb-throwing anarchists, with good reason, but today it can't even take a little ribbing. Admittedly, a little ribbing wasn't my objective. It was more like trying to prove the old adage to the effect that, unlike sticks and stones, "words can never hurt you," is a crock. Business knows it; so do I. So here we stand faced off across the barricades. The time is now. Do you know who your children are?
Unfortunately, my publisher and agent thought my amorphous proto-book proposal about the history of business was unlikely to interest anyone in, well... business, and that therefore the only audience for such a book would be longhairs and other throwback ex-acidhead uncredentialed quasi-intellectual free radicals like myself, of which I think there are about 40 or 50 left. A mind is a terrible thing, etc. At any rate, not a great demographic to publish into.
I did revise the (genuinely awful) article I wrote for Harvard Business Review and this revision was included in Business: The Ultimate Resource, a 2208-page monster published in 2002 and now sales-ranked 58,432 on Amazon, which basically bankrupted my publisher. I think my business book would've sold better, but hey, that's just me. And since my own last book, Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, once top-rated by Amazon's editors and Harvard Biz Review itself, no less, is currently sales-ranked 485,757 (i.e., not good) and sells remaindered for 50 frickin cents, you may fairly take my braggadocio, above, with two grains of salt and call me in the morning.
But how many really "get" that Winning Through Worst Practices subtitle? Abject failure is all part of my plan. I'm right on schedule, right on track, you'll see. Save your Confederate dollars or whatever contemporary analog you can think up. Your considerate callers? Your inveterate hollers? Your blog?
Yeah well that's what it all comes down to, isn't it. Ricky don't lose that number, that fire, that password. We came here to bury Caesar, right? I mean, am I right, Dude?
Clearly, this kind of talk confuses Business People, few of them ever having heard of Marc Antony or The Big Lebowski. Ah well, as I once ended a fateful document of yesteryear: We are not waiting.
Are we?
Damn straight we're not.
You wait, you look like this. 
But wait. Didn't I start this with something about spiritualism? Yeah, I'm almost sure I did. Something about Swedenborg, I think,18th century wingnut and inventor of the Swedish meatball. His metaphysical cuisine was sampled by my old pal (not) Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also wrote him up in Representative Men as "The Mystic." Oooh! But this is important, however skeptical I may at first glance (and second, third, ... nth) appear.
Because Emerson -- with that Oversoul baloney he picked up off Radio Free Upanishads via the Bhagavad Gita run through an early prototype of the Enigma machine -- was core to much weirdness that was to follow, including but not limited to the New Thought crowd I wrote about last Friday and... ta-da ...spiritualism. Natch.
And I had planned to relate the brilliant insights of Spiritualism in Antebellum America (see initial grafik, above) to those of The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 1874-1920. As I said, there was a lot going on in the 19th century. Zounds. Stuff you never hear about, or not much anyway. Try this. Go in any bookstore and look in the American History section. Tell me if this isn't what you see: stuff about The American Revolution, stuff about The Civil War, then some stuff about Teddy Roosevelt maybe, then a lot of stuff about Dubya-Dubya Two, then a lot of stuff about plain ol' Dubya, then a lotta lotta stuff about how liberals are the spawn of Satan.
Liberals. Jesus wept. There aren't even any truly scary left radicals left to point to as the Seed of the Dark One.
But that wasn't the point. The point is that both before and after the Civil War, a bunch of other stuff happened. And that other stuff has stealthily grown in the damp cellar of our collective ignorance until it has come to define roughly 85% of what passes for contemporary reality. And the problem I face personally, moreover, is continually hyperlinking from seemingly reasonable analyses of these strange cultic belief systems to, well... perhaps a visual demonstration would explain it better.
So you see what I'm up against. Also, it's somehow gotten to be 5am here in Boulder, so folks are already up on the East Coast, and in their thousands checking CBO for the latest word on the roots of New Age irrationalism and such. I hate to let You People down or make you wait, so I'll exit with this salient bit
from the archives of my ultra-gracious underwriter...
from: Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History, book review by Paul C. Kemeny
source: Church History, 1 March 2004
via: 
HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2004 American Society of Church History
Religion, R. Laurence Moore argues, is always about something else. Following the passage of the First Amendment after the conclusion of the American Revolution, Moore contends, people's sense of the difference between the religious and secular widened considerably. Yet in a free society lacking an established church, religion organized itself in ways that resonated with the free market economy. Consequently, religion was naturally commodified. In Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History, Moore describes ways in which religious and profane interests have been inseparably intertwined in popular culture throughout the past two hundred years....
Clever, witty, and at times dripping with sarcasm, this book is an engaging description of how religious and secular interests have manifested themselves in different dimensions of popular culture. Moore... revisits many of the issues explored in his earlier books, most notably Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans ... [and] ... Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture...
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