Free The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America by Robert Schneck

critique of the whole project. While praising Spear as a man “doing good with all his guileless heart” and a fearless defender of unpopular causes, he suggested that Spear had mistaken his own impulses for spirit directives or had been tricked by irresponsible entities into carrying out the experiment. Davis also felt that the precision and intricacy of the machine’s construction was proof that higher intelligences were involved because Spear was “intellectually disqualified for the development of absolute science.” He also praised the Messiah’s excellent workmanship and construction; it didn’t move, but it was beautifully put together.(19)
    The Electricizers suggested that a change of air would provide the machine with a more nourishing environment, so the Messiah was dismantled and moved to Randolph, New York, where “it might have the advantage of that lofty electrical position.” In Randolph, it was put into a shed but a mob broke in, trampled the machine, and scattered the pieces. No part of it survived.

    Spear’s High Rock experiment may have been eccentric, but it was also characteristic of the period. New technologies profoundly changed 19th century society, producing industrialization, urbanization, the rise of capital, and a middle class whose values came to dominate society. A conservative reaction to this might have been neo-Ludditism, but Spear was no conservative; he was on a Christ-like mission to transform humanity and believed that technology, the most powerful force of the era, could serve spiritual ends.
    He spent the rest of his life working for reform and acting as spokesman for the Spiritual Congress. When the spirits began preaching free love, Spear fathered a child by Caroline Hinckley (1859) and, four years later, divorced his wife to marry the mother. They went on a six-year tour of England, lecturing and holding séances, but were disappointed by the lack of interest in radical politics among British spiritualists.(20)
    The couple spent several years in California working for women’s rights and socialism before settling in Philadelphia, where they lived contentedly until Spear’s death in October 1887. He is buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery.
    Did an angry mob really destroy the New Messiah? This would have been an exciting conclusion to a story that seemed headed for an anticlimax. According to Spear, the Machine was dismantled and transported hundreds of miles to the small town of Randolph. There it was housed in a temporary structure until a mob—in a scene reminiscent of peasants storming Frankenstein’s castle—destroyed it. Some sources blame Baptist ministers for inflaming local opinion, and the book, An Eccentric Guide to the United States , claims the episode took place in a barn belonging to the Shelton family.
    Spear’s account was reported in the Lynn News , October 27, 1854, but is he reliable? Many questioned his sanity, but no one ever seems to have doubted his integrity or suggested he was a charlatan. The Randolph story, however, is troubling because there is no corroboration and it seems like there should be. Randolph historian Marlynn Olson has searched through contemporary sources and found nothing. In 1854, Cattaraugus County, New York, had two newspapers—one Whig, the other Republican—and neither mentions Spear, a riot, a Mechanical Messiah, or anyone delivering anti-Mechanical Messiah sermons. No known letters or diaries mention the event. “I think,” writes Ms Olson, “the whole thing was a pipe-dream of the Rev. J.M. Spear.” Perhaps, like so many other failed experiments, the machine was discreetly sunk into a pond or buried in the woods.
    If the New Messiah had not vanished, the passage of 147 years would have improved the reputation of both the object and its creator. As a medium, Spear was a failure, but he built a unique, if unintentional, example of 19th-century folk art. And if it had actually moved, it would be as surprising as a Papuan