The joys of fraud and balderdash, of confidence men and women

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, April 12, 1998

Page: M4

Section: Books

And so, I am always on the lookout for books that don't shrink from showing the close relation between social improvement and hogwash. I found such a work in Barbara Goldsmith's ``Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull'' (Knopf, $30). I haven't read a book so much to my taste on these lines since, a couple of years ago, I tore through Peter Washington's monumental and exuberant ``Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America'' (Schocken, $14). Goldsmith takes a sympathetic view of her main subject and, of course, of the struggle for women's rights. But she brings the milieu in which feminism flourished, from right after the Civil War until the late 1800s, into uncomplimentary focus. She shows the improbable links that existed between disparate parties and enterprises, between sense and nonsense, and, all the while, unveils astounding acts of hypocrisy, cowardice, venality, venery, and vengeance.

Victoria Woodhull was a most interesting case: She was burdened with a profoundly awful, freeloading family that (with the exception of one sister) consisted of drunks, dope fiends, sadists, libertines, and con artists. As for herself, she was a medium, a prostitute, a blackmailer, and, above all, a campaigner for women's rights and free love. Hers is a truly great yarn, but it is particularly fascinating to me as it intersects with the story of that wonderfully loathsome man of God, Henry Ward Beecher.

Oh, how I did rejoice in that preacher's ``Gospel of Love,'' his charismatic perfidy, his sanctimony and cant. He had a predilection for the wives of his parishioners, whom he regularly seduced. His other causes were noble when it was safe, forward-looking in a vague way, and lucrative. Things threatened to unravel, however, when he cuckolded a man of whom he had made an enemy in business. Scandal loomed, threatening not only his comfortable position and the sales of his forthcoming ``Life of Jesus Christ,'' but even the Northern Pacific Railroad whose interests he was promoting in his religious newspaper. (Having been given $15,000 in stock for his endorsement, his anxiety about the venture was understandably intense.) The situation was made very much worse -- and exquisitely funny -- by Victoria Woodhull and his sister, Isabella, who were calling on him to stand forth, admit to being a practitioner and advocate of free love, and so usher in an era of tolerance and freedom. Such scrambling for cover and bloviating on the great man's part is a perfect delight to read, as is every other part of this excellent book.

``Pleasure, comfort, wealth,'' observes Goldsmith, ``were what God had willed for Henry Ward Beecher and for his parishioners.'' Today, it seems, we can all cash in, for, as Brother Ty reveals in the fourth of his 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth, ``Money is God's way of saying `Thanks!' '' Want to learn more? An initial investment of a mere $20 will get you ``God Is My Broker'' by Brother Ty himself, with Christopher Buckley and John Tierney (Random House). The book is a romp, a hilarious little excursion into the wild world of get-rich self-help. The authors are connoisseurs of earnest flapdoodle: Not only are their contributions to the species pitch-perfect, but they quote liberally from my absolute favorite practitioner, Deepak Chopra, MD. One could never improve on the doctor's own words, but here they find a most worthy setting.

But let us return to the remarkable mental creations of the past and their promoters. There is no better time and place to find them in abundance than 17th-century England, a juncture that boiled with controversy and plot. It was, too, the battleground of the Ancients and Moderns, a tumultuous scene of competing and incommensurable views of order and knowledge as the Aristotelian version of reality finally gave way to empiricism. Here flourished a luxuriance of marvelously peculiar conceits, many of which appear in Iain Pear's ``An Instance of the Fingerpost'' (Riverhead Books, $27).

Two weeks ago in these pages, Robin W. Winks maintained that this book may be the best historical mystery ever written; that, in any case, it's the best he's ever read. Well, me too -- though I will add that, at almost 700 pages, it is a bit longish for the busy professional reader. Still, the novel is a work of huge ingenuity in that it successfully conflates the question of who committed a murder with questions about evidence and knowledge itself. Indeed, as well as being enormously entertaining, it succeeds better than most histories of ideas do in showing the tortuous, often bizarre path that Western reasoning took to emerge, finally, as scientific rationality. And even more impressive than that, perhaps, is the book's relevance to the present postmodern imbroglio over the nature of truth: whether there is such a thing as objectivity, or whether the concept of objectivity itself simply expresses a relationship of power.

The book's bewildering title refers to the philosopher Francis Bacon's assertion that the disinterested, educated observer, a gentleman with no ax to grind and whose pocket won't be affected by his conclusions, is the most reliable witness and his testimony is most likely to serve as a ``fingerpost'' pointing the way to the truth. From the 18th century until a couple of decades ago, that seemed mere common sense, but it was revolutionary in the 17th century. The novel shows the emergence and power of this point of view in the context of political and diplomatic duplicity, social brutality, medical fancy and the murder itself.

Today, of course, fingerposts, despised or irrelevant, have been taken down. Brother Ty puts it this way: ``As long as God knows the truth, it doesn't matter what you tell your customers.''