You must know by now in what esteem I hold Ralph Waldo Emerson. I feel so familiar with the guy that I've lately been inclined to call him merely Ralph Waldo. But I can't because, unlikely as it may seem, there was another Ralph Waldo who lived from 1866 till damn near into the '60s. Ralph Waldo Trine, the prolific New Thought screedster, must certainly have been named after the other Ralph Waldo we all know and love. We are told by
this web page mini bio that Trine...
...was much influenced by the writings of Fitche, Emerson and the Scottish scientist/evangelist, Henry Drummond. His What All the World's A-Seeking expanding on a number of the themes covered in Drummond's inspirational classic, "The Greatest Thing in the World." His remarkable seminal book, In Tune with the Infinite [a bunch of which is online here] was launched in 1897 and went on to sell over 2 million copies, and has stood the test of time for over a century. It was read by such luminaries as Queen Victoria, Janet Gaynor and Henry Ford. It is interesting that Henry Ford, pioneer of mass produced automobiles, attributed his success directly to having read In Tune with the Infinite. After reading the book, Ford ordered it on mass, and distributed copies freely to high profile industrialists. It's a true mark of how powerful the book was and still is!
The following saccharine sentiments are from Trine's "powerful" book...
Every day is a fresh beginning,
Every morn is the world made new;
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,
A hope for me and a hope for you.
Ah the past things are past and over,
The tasks are done, and the tears are shed.
Yesterday's errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday's wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.
Let them go, since we cannot relieve them,
Cannot undo and cannot atone.
God in His mercy receive, forgive them!
Only the new days are our own.
Today is ours, and today alone.
In the same "remarkable" book, Trine also writes:
It was Virgil who in describing the crew which in his mind would win the race, said of them -- "They can because they think they can." In other words, this very attitude of mind on their part will infuse a spiritual power into their bodies that will give them the strength and endurance which will enable them to win.
Personally, I would not have turned to Virgil as the source of this principle, but rather to
The Little Engine That Could. However, re atonement, forgiveness and "yesterday's errors," let's explore a little further, shall we?
So enamored was Henry Ford with Trine's powerful, remarkable -- as I think we've sufficiently demonstrated -- book, that he undertook a lengthy discussion with the man, the transcript of which was originally published in 1929 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company as The Power That Wins -- succinctly subtitled "Henry Ford and Ralph Waldo Trine in an Intimate Talk on Life - The Inner Things - the Things of the Mind and Sprit - and the Inner Powers and Forces that Make for Achievement." Whew, huh?
In this book, which I was reading until dawn yesterday, Trine and Ford have quite a bit to say about the benefits of various vegetables, Trine going to some length to describe how he obtains spinach water from a local restaurant. Absolutely galvanizing stuff. Trine, indeed, seems quite the garrulous fellow, droning on about all sorts of tangential things (no doubt Of the Mind), such as a band that plays tunes like Carry Me Back to Old Virginny -- "accompanied by darky steps," he informs us.
But far more compelling is this mind-blowing revelation by Henry Ford...
This globe has been inhabited by intelligent people millions of times; and very ancient peoples, I believe, were highly developed in the arts and sciences. I believe they had all or most of the things we think are the creations of modern progress, and some things we haven't heard of yet. I am sure they had the automobile, the radio, the airplane -- everything that we have, or its equivalent, and perhaps many things that we have yet to discover.
Could he have been speaking of any civilization other than... Atlantis? Wow, Henry Ford. I mean:
wow! He also says he believes in reincarnation -- yes, Virginia, we're talking about
that Henry Ford -- and there's a strong suggestion at one point that he's familiar with Gnostic ideas. But skipping over all that, I can't mention Atlantis without thinking of
Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Edgar Cayce.
Could Ford have been reading Cayce (see tasteful cover graphic) before 1928 when his conversation with Ralph Waldo Trine took place? I'm not sure, but it seems not impossible. He surely could have read theosophical or anthroposophical tracts. Here's some general context on this crowd from the never-at-a-loss--for-words HighBeam Research database:
from: A geologist's adventures with Bimini beachrock and Atlantis true believers by Eugene A. Shinn
source: Skeptical Inquirer, 1 January 2004
via: 
HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2004 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
My father had long held an interest in Atlantis because of the emphasis placed on it in the work of Rudolf Steiner [*], the remarkable teacher and philosopher who founded the Anthroposophical movement and the Waldorf schools in Germany during the early decades of this century. Through his clairvoyant reading of history, Steiner claimed to have witnessed the unfolding of Atlantean civilization over the course of thousands of years, as well as the gradual birth of our own civilization from out of its ruins. The notion that a part of Atlantis lay in the Bahamas, however, had come not from Steiner but from another Atlantean clairvoyant named Edgar Cayce -- the famous "sleeping prophet." A mild-mannered Midwesterner who began his life as a stationery salesman and Sunday-school teacher, Cayce gained an enormous following as a result of his ability to diagnose and cure illnesses while in a state of trance. In the course of these diagnoses, Cayce was given to making lengthy asides on other topics, many of which took the waking, everyday Cayce quite aback when he heard about them later. A good number of these strange asides concerned Atlantis. It was the entranced Cayce's opinion that the lost continent would re-emerge in the late twentieth century from the depths of the Atlantic, where it had lain since its submergence in a great cataclysm that occurred some 10,000 years ago.
* NOTE: Elsewhere I wrote of Rudolf Steiner: "...Rudy was a Theosophist until 1913 or thereabouts, when he got cheesed off at Annie Bessant, who had taken over for The Madame [Blavatsky] after she prematurely discorporated a decade short of fin-de-siècle (and several bricks shy of a load), and had, with the help of some other dude who was very likely gay as a pagan maypole, dug up this East Indian pretty-boy whom we would later come to know (those of us who did) as Krishnamurti." The rest is on
this page, though you are strenuously cautioned
not to go there if you are easily offended by "free expression" or High Weirdness.
But getting back to Henry and yesterday's wounds, which according to Ralph Waldo II are purportedly healed, first consider what Ford says to Trine about "human kindliness"...
All other qualifications being equal, the humane man has the edge on the hard man.
Then consider the following passage written by Ford a decade earlier...
"...There are no stronger contrasts in the world than the pure Germanic and pure Semitic races; therefore, there has been no harmony between the two in Germany; the German has regarded the Jew strictly as a guest, while the Jew, indignant at not being given the privileges of the nation-family, has cherished animosity against his host. In other countries the Jew is permitted to mix more readily with the people, he can amass his control unchallenged; but in Germany the case was different. Therefore, the Jew hated the German people; therefore, the countries of the world which were most dominated by the Jews showed the greatest hatred of Germany during the recent regrettable war. Jewish hands were in almost exclusive control of the engines of publicity by which public opinion concerning the German people was molded. The sole winners of the war were Jews."
from "Germany's Reaction Against The Jew"
Chapter 2 of The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem
by Henry Ford, Dearborn Publishing Company, 1920
Note: The link above goes to the book page on Amazon, as reprinted in 2004 by Liberty Bell Publications -- as a public service, no doubt. Be forewarned: the linked site is as neo-Nazi as they come.
According to the opening paragraph of
The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich -- and not surprisingly, given the above quote and the four volumes of hate-filled spew it introduces -- a portrait of Ford occupied "a prominent position behind Hitler's desk" when the latter rose to power.
Ralph Waldo Trine and New Thought. American eugenics and rabid anti-semitism. National Socialism and The Final Solution. Theosophy, Anthroposophy and the lilly-white ever-so-metaphysical New Age. Do these players, events and influences bear any connection to each other? Please feel free to join me in taking a wild guess.
