November 19, 2014 • 35 mins
Aimee Semple McPherson was an extraordinary figure in the early 20th-century religious landscape. As an evangelist, she rose to incredible popularity in the 1920s ... and then vanished. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we're
going to talk about an evangelist today, and evangelist who
broke all kinds of barriers and rose to incredible popularities
(00:22):
in the nineties and then vanished. And there are still
mysteries surrounding that disappearance, but they might not be the
mysteries you would expect, and just an interest of expectations management,
we're not really gonna dig particularly deep into this evangelists
religion and doctrines. We'll talk about it as it relates
to the events of her life, uh, and sort of
(00:43):
how she became famous and then had this sort of
huge public turning point. But in the interest of time
and sticking to history rather than theology, we're not going
to break down her views in relation to other Christian views.
And there were certainly some debates and disagreements within the
church about sort how she handled things versus how other
sets handled things, and we're not really digging into that.
(01:05):
She's also a person whose life is extremely well documented,
So if you have heard of this person, and you
may know her story. You may be like, hey, they
didn't mention x, y or z. Uh. That's because this
podcast runs very long already, and we're kind of just
trying to cover what sort of led as I said,
to her fame and sort of how that built up
and then how her life shifted pretty suddenly. Uh So,
(01:28):
if we've left anything out, it's really for the interest
of time and kind of trying to keep the story
on track, because there are many, many different things we
could talk about in relation to her. But the person
we're talking about, in case you were wondering or maybe
even guests, is Amy Simple McPherson. And she was absolutely
a really extraordinary figure in early twentieth century religious landscape.
(01:51):
She preached both in the US and abroad, and at
a time when most women were expected to stick to
the roles of wife and mother, Amy dedicated herself above
all to her ministry and opened the door for other
women to be religious leaders on that sort of huge
scale public level. Uh So, first we will talk about
sort of her origins. Amy Elizabeth Kennedy was born on
(02:14):
October nine, eight nine, in Ontario, Canada. Her parents were
James Morgan Kennedy and Mildred Pierce Kennedy, and they were
very religious. James was the organist and choir director of
their Methodist church, and Many, as her mother was called,
had been raised by Salvationists after being orphaned as a child,
(02:36):
and Amy was a little bit rebellious by nature. Early
on in her life, she kind of went through a
phase where she chewed her parents religion. Uh. That appears
to have been brief and kind of just one of
those developmental phases where like young adults sort of test
their parents and their boundaries, because later she rebelled even
more vehemently against the teaching of evolution in her school. Uh.
(02:57):
She really spoke out against the theory of luction a
lot throughout her life. That's another thing that we're not
going to go into depth in, but if you wanted
to research that, there's certainly a wealth of information about it.
By the time she graduated high school, though, Amy was
very devoted to her faith. When Amy was just seventeen,
she got married for the first time. Her groom, Robert Simple,
(03:20):
was an Irish Pentecostal missionary that she'd met at a
revival that had been really pivotal and cementing her commitment
to her religion. He was ten years older than she was,
and the two of them got married on August twelfth,
nine o eight, in the Kennedy's Apple Orchard. Robert's missionary
work took them to Stratford, Ontario, and then London, Ontario,
(03:41):
and eventually Chicago, Illinois in early ninten nine, and there
they were both ordained as ministers. They started touring the
United States and Canada on evangelical tours, and back when
Robert and Amy were still courting, they had actually hatched
this dream together of serving as missionaries in Nina, and
after their or datement and their early faith tours in
(04:03):
North America, they really felt like they were ready and
it was time to make their move into international ministry ministry,
so in nineteen ten they left Chicago, and her autobiography
The Story of My Life, Amy described the final exchange
in their decision to leave for Asia as her husband
putting his arm around her and saying, Darling, I feel
(04:24):
the time has come for us to leave for China,
and her reply was I am ready, Robert, anywhere in
the world with you. And the Simples did not go
directly to China. They first went to Belfast, Ireland to
visit Robert's home and his family, and from there they
traveled to London. They also traveled to the Suez Canal
before eventually making their way to Asia and they arrived
(04:46):
in Hong Kong in June of nineteen ten, and at
this point Amy was pregnant. She was very pregnant. She
UH was into her third trimester. Just a few weeks
after they got to Hong Kong, both Amy and Robert
got sick and they had both contracted malaria. While Amy recovered,
(05:07):
Robert eventually died from his illness on August, so young
Mrs Simple found herself pregnant and penniless in a foreign
country and a widow at the age of nineteen. And
because at this point she was so late in her
pregnancy UH and she was still in a week in
state from her own bout of malaria, she had not
(05:28):
recovered fully, but she was close to recovery, Amy had
to stay in Hong Kong even after Robert had died,
and so she gave birth to her daughter, ROBERTA Star,
just a month later, still in Hong Kong, on September seventeen.
And although Robert was gone, he continued to be a
really significant influence in her life. Yeah, there have been
(05:50):
some discussions, Uh if you read in various autobiographical accounts
of hers and also biographies written by others that kind
of hinted the fact that because Robert died when they
were still very early in their marriage and she was
very young, and uh, he became a little bit idealized
in her head and kind of became this model of perfection.
(06:11):
And there have been some debates among historians about if
Robert had lived, would she has still held him in
the same high esteem for the rest of her life,
or would they have settled into a more mundane sort
of equals relationship instead of sort of the hero worship
that she carried with her um. But not long after
the arrival of her daughter, about a month after ROBERTA
(06:33):
was born, Amy made her way back to the United States,
and this time she settled in New York City and
her mother joined her there, both to help the new
mother out and because many had an interest in working
with the Salvation Army, Amy also did the same thing,
and they both worked to collect money, like they would
go into movie theaters and collect money and they also
served food in the rescue mission there. It wasn't long
(06:56):
before she met an accountant named Harold Stewart mcphe gerson
in the city, and the two of them became friends
and then gradually started courting. Many wasn't really enthusiastic about
the relationship. She was concerned that Amy's involvement with Harold
would lead her away from her religious calling. Yeah, all
of their work with the Salvation Army had really cemented
(07:18):
certainly for Many and to Amy as well, that you know,
ministry of one former another was going to be her
her life's work. And even though Many did not oppose
Harold as a person, she didn't find anything wrong with him.
She was just worried that, like falling in love again,
was going to kind of derail the vision that Amy
(07:38):
had for her life. And uh, in fact, that kind
of came true for a bit. Uh. In nineteen eleven,
Amy moved with her daughter Roberta, to Chicago, where she
married Harold on October twenty four of that year, and
less than a year into their marriage, the McPherson's moved
to Providence, Rhode Island, and on March twenty third of
(08:01):
the couple welcomed their son, Ralph Potter McPherson. He eventually
his middle name changed from Potter, which had been I
believe the doctor who delivered him, to Kennedy, which had
been her maiden name, and away from Potter. Amy had
been involved with their church in Chicago, but her religious
fervor really intensified after Ralph was born. She made a
(08:21):
go of a life as a housewife and providence for
several years, but to be really blunt, she was unhappy.
Harold had hoped that she would find fulfillment in motherhood
and in life as his wife, but it just didn't
work out that way. And at one point, one thing
that comes up repeatedly throughout any biography of hers is
that she sort of had like a long series of
(08:44):
just odd health struggles. Uh. And at one point during
this time, Amy became very very ill. She required to
his direct me, she had to have surgery for an appendicitis.
Her condition was very grave. They had called her mother
to the hospital because they thought she was going to die,
so Harold had made sure the family knew was going on.
And during this time, when she was you know, lingering
(09:07):
near death, Amy describes being called to by a voice,
which she believed to be God, saying now will you go,
and she felt that she would answer with yes, she
would indeed go. She knew it would either be to
the afterlife or to ministry, and at that point she
just gave herself over to whatever was going to happen. Uh.
(09:27):
And she immediately, she said, felt the pain leave her body.
And after that, over the course of the next several weeks,
she made a full and rather wrapping into some descriptions,
almost miraculous recovery. Her health turn around convinced Amy that
the only path for her was full time ministry. She
packed up the kids and left Harold while he was
(09:48):
out one night in June of nine. First, she went
to her parents farm in Canada, where she dropped off
the children, and then she sent Harold a telegram that read,
I have tried to walk your way and have field.
Won't you come now and malt walk my way? I'm
sure we will be happy. Amy had basically chosen the
ministry over Harold, and in turn, Harold, when he received
(10:12):
this note, decided he would choose Amy over life. In
Rhode Island, he followed her and he joined her in
her ministry. Um traveling from tent revival to tent revival,
and he would travel ahead of her to the new
sites and make sure that they had all the required
permits to have these revivals, and that you know, tents
were set up and all the needs are arranged, so
that her ministry could just run smoothly and she could
(10:34):
focus on the religion and her message and not have
to worry about all the sundry, mundane sort of nuts
and bolts of setting up these events. After the first
two years of traveling revival ministry, Amy also started up
a magazine called The Bridal Call to spread her messages
and her teachings through the written word. So much of
(10:54):
the modern day personality might try to expand their reach
using social media to engage with an aunts. Amy's magazine
drew her new followers. Yeah, it was very popular. Uh.
And while she felt that she was following her calling
and doing all of this, Harold really always felt like
he was just following Amy. He continued to hope that
(11:15):
she would somehow find happiness in their family and fulfillment
in their marriage, but his hopes never manifested. Uh, you know,
he sort of recognized that he was just kind of
a a secondary part of her life, and Amy remained
devoted to her ministry and to some degree to her
deceased first husband, who had really sparked this passion for
(11:36):
evangelical preaching in her, and those elements combined with this
life on the road which was really rudimentary. Read about
them kind of washing their clothes and streams and sleeping
outside at night and having to deal with you know,
bugs out in camping situations, and just you know, it
was not a life of luxury by any means, and
it really started to take a toll on their marriage.
(11:58):
So Harold event returned to Providence and they were divorced
late in the summer of From nineteen nineteen on, Amy's
ministry really took off, and her approach had always been
really entered denominational, but she wound up being credentialed by
a number of churches as though she was actually affiliated
with their official ministries, even though she had never sought
(12:20):
out those credentials. She was very well liked and gained
a devoted following, so a lot of churches just wanted
to have her associated with them in some way, And
in addition to being welcoming to all people, her revivals
and sermons were different from a lot of what had
come before, and that they were very positive in tone.
She focused on the loving, accepting image of Jesus rather
(12:42):
than preaching as many ministers did at the time, and
had for many years of sort of the more vengeful
fire and brimstone vision of God. And faith healing was
also an important part of her ministry, and her sort
of uplifting spirituality and her passionate but upbeat and cheerful
approached the whole thing was incredibly appealing in post World
(13:03):
War One America. It was different and it was fresh,
and people were really drawn to it. On top of
her traveling ministry and her magazine, Amy also started publishing
books in the late nineteen teens. She was a prolific
writer and produced numerous volumes about herself and her teachings
over the years, including This Is That and Divine Healing Sermons.
(13:24):
In one Amy decided that it was really time to
find a permanent home for her ministry, and she bought
land near the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, California,
to begin fulfilling a mission that she believed God had
given her, which was building the Angels Temple there, and
this was a time when Los Angeles was growing at
a really incredible rate. So Amy was sort of smart
(13:45):
slash fortunate, uh one or the other or both to
secure the land for the temple. When she did, she
kind of got in just as the real estate market
was really about to explode. To raise funds for the construction,
she spent the next two years a rigorous tour, first
driving back and forth throughout the United States, traveling as
was usual with her mother and children in the car.
(14:08):
Then she expanded her ministry and the financing of the
temple with a tour of Australia. And it was while
she was touring the US in two so during this
sort of fundraising tour that Amy, while she was giving
a sermon in Oakland, California, was inspired to envision what
would eventually become the Four Square Church which she founded.
(14:31):
And this was based on the four identities of Jesus
that she was preaching about as a savior, as a healer,
as a baptizer in the Holy Spirit, and as the
coming King. Finally, on New Year's Day of nineteen three,
the Angelus Temple was dedicated. It could seat five thousand
three hundred people, and the Four Square Church was founded there,
(14:52):
although it took several years for that to be formally incorporated,
and later in ninety three she also founded the Lighthouse
for International Four Square Evangelism Bible College so that she
could educate others to be evangelists. In ninety four, she
gave a sermon on the radio for the first time
at Los Angeles station kf s G. Later she'd become
(15:17):
the first woman to be issued a license to operate
a radio station. And yeah, she was really reaching out
into new markets. She's often talked about is something of
a contradiction because in many ways she was preaching really like,
you know, old school values, but with a very sort
of modern approach to how she was spreading this word.
(15:38):
And so like the magazines and the books and the
radio appearances, it was all sort of some people found
it hard to reconcile her traditionalist values and her modern
approach to spreading them. Um. But basically, her popularity was soaring,
and just as it reached a fever pitch, she was
one of the most famous people in the United States,
(15:59):
and indeed she had a pretty big global following. She
vanished and before we talk about what happened and sort
of how that all played out. Did you like to
take a word from a sponsor? So back to Amy
Simple McPherson. By the mid nineteen twenties, she was preaching
up to twenty sermons a week and her writing was
regularly published. She was overseeing the training of her ministerial proteges,
(16:22):
and she was sort of running the business of the church.
And she was, as we said before the ad break,
just incredibly popular. On May eighth, Amy, who was working
on a sermon, went to the beach at the urging
of her mother to take a much needed break from working.
She went with her secretary, Emma Schafer, so that she
(16:42):
could keep working on her sermon, and reviewer notes, Amy
decided she needed a break and she went into the
water for a swim, and she did not return from
that swim. At the services that were scheduled that evening
for Amy to preach at, she did not appear, and
instead her mother, Minnie, gave the sermon in her place,
and at the end of the service, many quietly announced
(17:04):
what had already been rumored throughout the city all afternoon,
and it was now appearing in the local evening papers. Sister,
as Amy was called in her ministry, had gone to
the beach at Ocean Park and had vanished while swimming.
Sister is gone, many announced to the congregation, we know
she is with Jesus. The next day, a full tilt
(17:24):
investigation went into gear. There were dozens of reporters and
hundreds of onlookers that appeared on the beach to see
what was happening. As the investigation got underway, the Coast
Guard had boats traversing the coastline. They were looking for something,
anything that might offer a clue as to what had
happened to this beloved evangelists. Teams of divers scoured the
(17:46):
waters in search of a body or of clues, and
one diver actually lost his life in the search effort.
There was also another fatality when a young woman who
had been a member of the Church of the Four
Square Gospel, who was just grief stricken at the loss
of their spiritual leader, actually drowned herself. On Memorial Day,
which was twelve days after the disappearance, the angelist temple
(18:10):
was packed. More than twenty five thousand people showed up
at the beach where Amy had vanished to grieve and
set out remembrances. Police were concerned at what might happen
if her body were to be found that day, so
they worked on action plans for handling that kind of
grim discovery that did not happen, but they were definitely
like ready to kind of address potential crowd control issues.
(18:34):
And eventually, you know, this was now a couple of
weeks in church members finally accepted that Amy must have died,
and in an effort to recover the body, they actually
the church actually paid to have the bay dynamited in
the hopes that the body would surface somehow, but it
did not. Some members of the church believed that she
would be resurrected, and so they prayed and waited for
(18:54):
her to return, and many Her mother arranged a memorials
of us at the temple, and that was scheduled for
June twenty and more than seventeen thousand people showed up,
far too many than they could fit in the building.
While all of that morning was going on, there had
been a whole other school of thought about what had
happened to Amy. Rumors began to circulate that Amy had
(19:18):
probably not died, but had instead purposely removed herself from
the public eye for some possibly nefarious personal reason. There
were whispers of plastic surgery, talk of affairs, a pregnancy
that she might intend to abort, and all of these
rumors made their way around California and eventually the country.
Really a detective claimed to have spotted her at a
(19:39):
train station, and more sighting started to crop up after that.
This will no doubt sound familiar if you've listened to
our Judge Craater episode or any other missing person's story.
Almost every day throughout the United States, papers ran stories
of the latest Amy sightings. There were also two rants
(20:00):
letters that came about. The first one that Minny Kennedy,
Amy's mother received, made it clear that police should not
be involved and that she should turn over fifty thousand
dollars if she wanted to see her daughter again. The
second letter, which came a bit later, said that Amy
was going to be sold into slavery if a ransom
of half a million dollars wasn't paid. But they really
thought she was dead at this point and that these
(20:21):
might be hoaxes. Three days after her memorial service, Amy
simple McPherson emerged from the Mexican desert and Agua Priates
the Sonora, a small Mexican town just south of the
border from Douglas, Arizona. She collapsed after telling a couple
that she had escaped from kidnappers and had been traveling
(20:43):
on foot for hours. Amy was of course rushed to
the hospital and after that a phone call was made
to her mother, and authorities working with her mother were
able to confirm the evangelists identity based on information Many
provided about a scar that was on Amy's finger, and
after Amy was able to provide the name of her
pet pigeon, which many wanted for validation that it was
(21:06):
it was the correct person. So at this point the
lost beloved Minister was found. After she was able to recuperate,
she gave an account of what had happened to her.
She said she had been lured by a couple to
their car as she got out of the water from swimming.
They told her they had a sick baby that they
wanted her to pray over, and when she leaned into
(21:27):
the back seat to see the child, which was not there,
she was she was pushed down into the floorboards and
then driven away, and according to her account, she had
held been held by a woman named Rose a man
named Steve and another man, and she said that she
had been drugged and tortured and kept in a shack,
and that she had eventually escaped. She wriggled out of
(21:49):
the ropes that she had been tied with and ran
through the desert and estimated twenty miles before she reached
Agua Prietta. Douglas, Arizona, where Amy was hospitalized, became a
focus of national attention. Reporters and followers poured into the town.
The telegraph lines were overloaded with well wishes, and her
story was headline news. But for some people that tide
(22:14):
actually turned uh. Similar to how there were people that
didn't think her disappearance quite added up. There were some
people that thought her reappearance also had some suspicious elements
to it. The Coaches County sheriff was suspicious of her story.
He thought that the condition of her clothing was far
too tidy to have been through what she claimed it happened. Additionally,
(22:37):
police from both Douglas and Agua Prieta were unable to
find any traces of the kidnappers or a shack in
the area that she had described. She even accompanied search
teams into the desert, but was unable to find the
shack herself. McPherson had, however, received multiple threats through the
years as her fame grew, so some people sort of
(22:59):
held that up as you know, evidence that this was
entirely plausible. There had been people threatening to do things
to her, to kill her, and even to kidnap her
for a while. Just a year prior to the disappearance,
a plot to kidnap Amy had been discovered and foiled
by the l a p D. Before we talk about
what happened after she got home, let's have a record
(23:19):
from a sponsor, and now let's hop back into our
tale of evangelism. As Amy and her mother headed back
to Los Angeles from Arizona, the train that they were
in was basically greeted all along the way by wellwichers,
So whether they stopped or not, sort of every town
that they went through there were people by the sides
of the tracks kind of waving, throwing flowers, et cetera.
(23:42):
But even as they got back to Los Angeles, the
media circus around her alleged kidnapping was really just beginning.
Not only did papers have new suspicious persons to mention
on an almost daily basis that they thought could be,
you know, the possible perpetrators of this kidnapping, but speculation
about Amy's own possible involvement in some sort of deception
(24:03):
were also abundant. An engineer at the radio station owned
by Angelus Temple had disappeared at the same time as Amy,
which led some people to speculate that the two of
them had been having an affair. The man in question,
Kenneth Ormiston, was married, so this would definitely have been scandalous. Eventually,
he admitted that he was cheating on his wife, although
(24:26):
he was adamant that the mistress was not McPherson. Police
dusted a cottage in Carmel where Ormiston and a woman
had been spotted, but none of the prince matched Amy's
and there was even a case assembled UH to press
charges against McPherson for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. So
(24:47):
there was a trial that was arranged for January seven,
but the charges were dropped before then as the Los
Angeles District Attorney named Asa Keys started to realize that
many of the witness accounts that he had built his
case upon we're really not credible. And then as another
side story that sometimes comes up when you're looking at this.
He had his own sort of legal problems bubbling up,
(25:10):
but so basically the whole thing fell apart. No arrests
were ever made in the kidnapping, which remains unsolved, and
no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Amy McPherson
has ever come to light. She wrote about the event
in her book In Service of the King, The Story
of My Life, and once the fear of the kidnapping
(25:31):
and the alleged conspiracy had died down, Amy could still
be found at her ministry. She had in fact been
there all along, throughout all of these headlines and investigations. Basically,
she went right back to work as a minister and
an evangelist and a faith healer when she returned home
from Arizona. One of the things she became famous for
is her work feeding the needy. In seven the Angelist
(25:55):
Temple Commissary opened its doors, and this facility is credited
with feeding more of than one point five million people
during the depression, even when it was struggling financially itself.
Amy's community outreached through the Commissary, was based as her
ministry on the principle that everyone was up welcome, regardless
of their position in society, their religion, or their color.
(26:18):
And she also organized a lot of other um charitable
work through the Commissary and also just through her ministry.
But despite all of the good work that was going
on in the name of the Angelist Temple, Amy never
really regained the popularity and the positive press that she
had enjoyed in the early nineteen twenties, and she also
found that she had some troubles at work that had
(26:40):
not been there before. At one point, her mother quit
due to arguments over the handling of the Angelist Temple finances.
The choir also walked out. While many and many of
the choir members returned, there was ongoing tension and strike,
some of it centering on how Amy's style had shifted
to more modern and fashitable attire rather than the old
(27:02):
style of dress that many felt her position really demanded.
Many who really was indispensable to the Four Square Church
resigned a second time in nineteen thirty, and just a
month later, Amy had a nervous breakdown. After the breakdown,
she took a cruise to tour Asia with her daughter Roberta.
They stopped in Honolulu and they went to Hong Kong
(27:25):
to visit Robert's grave before eventually heading to India, where
McPherson was planning on quote studying the women's movement in
connection with the campaign for independence. In nineteen thirty one,
McPherson married a third time to an actor in one
of the Angeli's Temples plays. His name was David L. Hutton.
He was nine years younger than she was, and he
(27:45):
came with all kinds of baggage, including a woman seeking
legal action against him for breach of promise, claiming that
he had promised a betrothal to her before marrying mcperson.
Hearing this news was such a shock to the minister
that she passed out, hitting head and fracturing her skull.
And after she recovered from this injury, or was at
(28:05):
least partially recovered, it was suggested that Amy go on
a holiday, so she took a recuperative cruise to Europe,
accompanied only by a nurse. While she was traveling, Hutting,
much to the chagrin of the church administration, began using
his status as Amy's husband to promote himself in theatrical
endeavor endeavors outside the church. He also had a reputation
(28:29):
as a womanizer, and the whole union was viewed with
just disease by the church, in part because it was
frowned upon for a divorced person to remarry so long
as their former spouse was alive. Harold McPherson was still alive,
although he had remarried. In all likelihood, if Hutton had
been better liked as probably would not have been that
(28:49):
big of an issue. Yeah, people just kind of saw
him as a little bit of a con man. He
was a Vaudilian, and you know, I think there was
a general trust of his sort of theatrical background and
that he was just playing her. Uh. And On July
eighteenth of nineteen thirty three, the Chicago Tribune ran a
story entitled quote Hutton seues to divorce Amy for baby hoax.
(29:13):
Hutton had filed for divorce while McPherson was still out
of the country, claiming that he had been the victim
of ongoing mental cruelty in the marriage. He said that
Amy had told friends before she left for Europe that
she was planning to divorce him when she returned, and
that she tortured him by pretending to have given birth
to their child while in Paris, when in fact she
had undergone an abdominal surgery and if you remember earlier
(29:36):
in this episode, we talked about the fact that she
had a hys directomy years before this, So it's all
kind of it takes on a very sort of soap
opera e crazy, he said, she said, drama turn. At
this point, Hutton was also plotting to sell emotion picture
story that revolved around a female evangelists, but once the
(29:56):
marriage was behind her, uh MC person seemed to dismiss
this as a huge mistake. Yeah, I think she started
to see him the same way everyone else did, as
someone who was just trying to take advantage of her
name and make a few bucks off of it. Uh.
And while Amy's work carried on, uh you know, she
continued to minister, media interest in her ministry really had
(30:20):
been eclipsed by interest in the more sensational and sometimes
CD and UM theoretical aspects of her life, like the
ones that people were just sort of guessing it. Amy
died in Oakland, California, in ninety four at the age
of fifty four, a kidney ailment that had some complications
(30:41):
combined with the ingestion of seekingal which was sleeping pills,
and she wound up dying due to an accidental overdose.
With mc pherson's death, the ministry passed to her son, Rolf,
who served as president of the Four Square Church until
nine at which point he retired, and the Four Square
Church remains today. It has more than nine million members.
It's still very popular, and it was all started by
(31:05):
this one woman who had a vision and felt she
had a calling. And it's kind of fascinating to me
to see how this this sort of grew and kind
of juxtaposed against sort of modern evangelism. It's very interesting.
She was really groundbreaking in a number of ways. Do
you also have some listener mail? I do, indeed, Uh,
I have one that I will read and one that
(31:26):
I will merely reference. These are both related to our
Halloween Candy podcast. Okay, I'll read this and then we'll
talk about it for a minute. So there are letter
is from Ron and he says you mentioned Sweetest Day
on your Halloween Candy podcast and mentioned that Detroit may
still celebrate it. Being born and raised in the suburbs
of Detroit and still living there, I can say with
(31:47):
one certainty that yes, we still do celebrate it. However,
it's not as candy centric as as it may once
have been. It now actcess somewhat of a second Valentine's Day.
Flower shops run specials, restaurants are full, and it is
also a very popular day to have a fall wedding.
It wasn't until my mid twenties that I finally realized
that it wasn't celebrated everywhere when I asked a now
(32:09):
former co worker of mine from New Jersey what he
was doing with his wife for Sweetest Day and received
the most awkward blank stare I have ever seen. We
got so much mail about Sweetest Day, in fact, verifying
that it is alive and well in many many areas,
primarily sort of that you know, uh, like Michigan down
(32:31):
into Ohio. A lot of people from Cincinnati wrote, Yeah,
it's really cool. I love the idea of having a
second Valentine's Day. I love Valentine's Day, uh, I think
I said before, like completely aside from all of the
the romantic baggage that sometimes comes with it, My family
always celebrated it kind of as a family holiday, like
it was a date of like probably more like what
(32:53):
Sweetest Day was usually pitched as like, did you know
give little gifts to friends and family members and just
kind of a appreciate the people in your life. So
I love the idea of two of those days a year.
That sounds fun to me. Plus sugar. Uh. And on
the point of sugar, I will um as I said,
not read, but sort of relay information from an email
we got from our listener, Michael, and he is responding
(33:16):
to my sort of questions slash interests, slash theory that
working in the candy industry with all of these sort
of molten sugar mixtures must have been incredibly dangerous. Michael
did work in the sugar in the candy industry for
a while, uh, and he verifies and in fact that
it was very dangerous, and that candy burns happen all
(33:39):
the time and they can be horrifying. He gave us
some very specific examples, which I will not read because
they're they're intense. I will tell you, Michael, that as
I was reading this after your email arrived, I was
at home reading. I was sitting in the dining room
reading my email, and my husband saw me kind of
squirming and clutching my stomach and making horrible faces, and
he thought I had been stricken with an ill us
(34:00):
and might be sick, but no, it was just the
horrible physical reaction to the description of some of these burns.
So thank you for verifying that it is in fact
dangerous and he Michael says that even now some of
the smaller companies still don't have that full automation, so
there is still dangerous work going on in the in
making candy. If you would like to write us and
tell us about injuries or burns, you don't have to
(34:21):
do that. You can share happier and prettier thoughts, but
we don't judge or request that you send one or
the other. You can do that email us at History
Podcast at house to Works dot com. You can connect
to us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in history.
We are on Twitter at Misston History. We're at Miston
History dot tumbler dot com. We're on pinterest dot com
(34:42):
slash missed in history, and you can visit our spreadshirt
store at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com for
a variety of goodies, and we occasionally have some really
good sales there, so check that out. Uh. If you
would like to research a little bit about what we
talked about today. Go to our parents site, how stuff Works.
Type in the word religion into the search bar, and
one of the really cool and interesting articles that comes
(35:04):
up is is the brain hardwire for religion. It's kind
of an interesting discussion to have if you would like
to visit us at our homesite that's missed in history
dot com, and we have all of our old episodes
going way way way back too long over the time
Tracy and I were even involved in the show, and
there are show notes. There are some cool blog posts
here and there, so we hope that you visit us
(35:26):
at house top works dot com and missed at History
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because it has to works dot com.
Welcome to you stuff you missed in history class from
how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we're
going to talk about an evangelist today, and evangelist who
broke all kinds of barriers and rose to incredible popularities
(00:22):
in the nineties and then vanished. And there are still
mysteries surrounding that disappearance, but they might not be the
mysteries you would expect, and just an interest of expectations management,
we're not really gonna dig particularly deep into this evangelists
religion and doctrines. We'll talk about it as it relates
to the events of her life, uh, and sort of
(00:43):
how she became famous and then had this sort of
huge public turning point. But in the interest of time
and sticking to history rather than theology, we're not going
to break down her views in relation to other Christian views.
And there were certainly some debates and disagreements within the
church about sort how she handled things versus how other
sets handled things, and we're not really digging into that.
(01:05):
She's also a person whose life is extremely well documented,
So if you have heard of this person, and you
may know her story. You may be like, hey, they
didn't mention x, y or z. Uh. That's because this
podcast runs very long already, and we're kind of just
trying to cover what sort of led as I said,
to her fame and sort of how that built up
and then how her life shifted pretty suddenly. Uh So,
(01:28):
if we've left anything out, it's really for the interest
of time and kind of trying to keep the story
on track, because there are many, many different things we
could talk about in relation to her. But the person
we're talking about, in case you were wondering or maybe
even guests, is Amy Simple McPherson. And she was absolutely
a really extraordinary figure in early twentieth century religious landscape.
(01:51):
She preached both in the US and abroad, and at
a time when most women were expected to stick to
the roles of wife and mother, Amy dedicated herself above
all to her ministry and opened the door for other
women to be religious leaders on that sort of huge
scale public level. Uh So, first we will talk about
sort of her origins. Amy Elizabeth Kennedy was born on
(02:14):
October nine, eight nine, in Ontario, Canada. Her parents were
James Morgan Kennedy and Mildred Pierce Kennedy, and they were
very religious. James was the organist and choir director of
their Methodist church, and Many, as her mother was called,
had been raised by Salvationists after being orphaned as a child,
(02:36):
and Amy was a little bit rebellious by nature. Early
on in her life, she kind of went through a
phase where she chewed her parents religion. Uh. That appears
to have been brief and kind of just one of
those developmental phases where like young adults sort of test
their parents and their boundaries, because later she rebelled even
more vehemently against the teaching of evolution in her school. Uh.
(02:57):
She really spoke out against the theory of luction a
lot throughout her life. That's another thing that we're not
going to go into depth in, but if you wanted
to research that, there's certainly a wealth of information about it.
By the time she graduated high school, though, Amy was
very devoted to her faith. When Amy was just seventeen,
she got married for the first time. Her groom, Robert Simple,
(03:20):
was an Irish Pentecostal missionary that she'd met at a
revival that had been really pivotal and cementing her commitment
to her religion. He was ten years older than she was,
and the two of them got married on August twelfth,
nine o eight, in the Kennedy's Apple Orchard. Robert's missionary
work took them to Stratford, Ontario, and then London, Ontario,
(03:41):
and eventually Chicago, Illinois in early ninten nine, and there
they were both ordained as ministers. They started touring the
United States and Canada on evangelical tours, and back when
Robert and Amy were still courting, they had actually hatched
this dream together of serving as missionaries in Nina, and
after their or datement and their early faith tours in
(04:03):
North America, they really felt like they were ready and
it was time to make their move into international ministry ministry,
so in nineteen ten they left Chicago, and her autobiography
The Story of My Life, Amy described the final exchange
in their decision to leave for Asia as her husband
putting his arm around her and saying, Darling, I feel
(04:24):
the time has come for us to leave for China,
and her reply was I am ready, Robert, anywhere in
the world with you. And the Simples did not go
directly to China. They first went to Belfast, Ireland to
visit Robert's home and his family, and from there they
traveled to London. They also traveled to the Suez Canal
before eventually making their way to Asia and they arrived
(04:46):
in Hong Kong in June of nineteen ten, and at
this point Amy was pregnant. She was very pregnant. She
UH was into her third trimester. Just a few weeks
after they got to Hong Kong, both Amy and Robert
got sick and they had both contracted malaria. While Amy recovered,
(05:07):
Robert eventually died from his illness on August, so young
Mrs Simple found herself pregnant and penniless in a foreign
country and a widow at the age of nineteen. And
because at this point she was so late in her
pregnancy UH and she was still in a week in
state from her own bout of malaria, she had not
(05:28):
recovered fully, but she was close to recovery, Amy had
to stay in Hong Kong even after Robert had died,
and so she gave birth to her daughter, ROBERTA Star,
just a month later, still in Hong Kong, on September seventeen.
And although Robert was gone, he continued to be a
really significant influence in her life. Yeah, there have been
(05:50):
some discussions, Uh if you read in various autobiographical accounts
of hers and also biographies written by others that kind
of hinted the fact that because Robert died when they
were still very early in their marriage and she was
very young, and uh, he became a little bit idealized
in her head and kind of became this model of perfection.
(06:11):
And there have been some debates among historians about if
Robert had lived, would she has still held him in
the same high esteem for the rest of her life,
or would they have settled into a more mundane sort
of equals relationship instead of sort of the hero worship
that she carried with her um. But not long after
the arrival of her daughter, about a month after ROBERTA
(06:33):
was born, Amy made her way back to the United States,
and this time she settled in New York City and
her mother joined her there, both to help the new
mother out and because many had an interest in working
with the Salvation Army, Amy also did the same thing,
and they both worked to collect money, like they would
go into movie theaters and collect money and they also
served food in the rescue mission there. It wasn't long
(06:56):
before she met an accountant named Harold Stewart mcphe gerson
in the city, and the two of them became friends
and then gradually started courting. Many wasn't really enthusiastic about
the relationship. She was concerned that Amy's involvement with Harold
would lead her away from her religious calling. Yeah, all
of their work with the Salvation Army had really cemented
(07:18):
certainly for Many and to Amy as well, that you know,
ministry of one former another was going to be her
her life's work. And even though Many did not oppose
Harold as a person, she didn't find anything wrong with him.
She was just worried that, like falling in love again,
was going to kind of derail the vision that Amy
(07:38):
had for her life. And uh, in fact, that kind
of came true for a bit. Uh. In nineteen eleven,
Amy moved with her daughter Roberta, to Chicago, where she
married Harold on October twenty four of that year, and
less than a year into their marriage, the McPherson's moved
to Providence, Rhode Island, and on March twenty third of
(08:01):
the couple welcomed their son, Ralph Potter McPherson. He eventually
his middle name changed from Potter, which had been I
believe the doctor who delivered him, to Kennedy, which had
been her maiden name, and away from Potter. Amy had
been involved with their church in Chicago, but her religious
fervor really intensified after Ralph was born. She made a
(08:21):
go of a life as a housewife and providence for
several years, but to be really blunt, she was unhappy.
Harold had hoped that she would find fulfillment in motherhood
and in life as his wife, but it just didn't
work out that way. And at one point, one thing
that comes up repeatedly throughout any biography of hers is
that she sort of had like a long series of
(08:44):
just odd health struggles. Uh. And at one point during
this time, Amy became very very ill. She required to
his direct me, she had to have surgery for an appendicitis.
Her condition was very grave. They had called her mother
to the hospital because they thought she was going to die,
so Harold had made sure the family knew was going on.
And during this time, when she was you know, lingering
(09:07):
near death, Amy describes being called to by a voice,
which she believed to be God, saying now will you go,
and she felt that she would answer with yes, she
would indeed go. She knew it would either be to
the afterlife or to ministry, and at that point she
just gave herself over to whatever was going to happen. Uh.
(09:27):
And she immediately, she said, felt the pain leave her body.
And after that, over the course of the next several weeks,
she made a full and rather wrapping into some descriptions,
almost miraculous recovery. Her health turn around convinced Amy that
the only path for her was full time ministry. She
packed up the kids and left Harold while he was
(09:48):
out one night in June of nine. First, she went
to her parents farm in Canada, where she dropped off
the children, and then she sent Harold a telegram that read,
I have tried to walk your way and have field.
Won't you come now and malt walk my way? I'm
sure we will be happy. Amy had basically chosen the
ministry over Harold, and in turn, Harold, when he received
(10:12):
this note, decided he would choose Amy over life. In
Rhode Island, he followed her and he joined her in
her ministry. Um traveling from tent revival to tent revival,
and he would travel ahead of her to the new
sites and make sure that they had all the required
permits to have these revivals, and that you know, tents
were set up and all the needs are arranged, so
that her ministry could just run smoothly and she could
(10:34):
focus on the religion and her message and not have
to worry about all the sundry, mundane sort of nuts
and bolts of setting up these events. After the first
two years of traveling revival ministry, Amy also started up
a magazine called The Bridal Call to spread her messages
and her teachings through the written word. So much of
(10:54):
the modern day personality might try to expand their reach
using social media to engage with an aunts. Amy's magazine
drew her new followers. Yeah, it was very popular. Uh.
And while she felt that she was following her calling
and doing all of this, Harold really always felt like
he was just following Amy. He continued to hope that
(11:15):
she would somehow find happiness in their family and fulfillment
in their marriage, but his hopes never manifested. Uh, you know,
he sort of recognized that he was just kind of
a a secondary part of her life, and Amy remained
devoted to her ministry and to some degree to her
deceased first husband, who had really sparked this passion for
(11:36):
evangelical preaching in her, and those elements combined with this
life on the road which was really rudimentary. Read about
them kind of washing their clothes and streams and sleeping
outside at night and having to deal with you know,
bugs out in camping situations, and just you know, it
was not a life of luxury by any means, and
it really started to take a toll on their marriage.
(11:58):
So Harold event returned to Providence and they were divorced
late in the summer of From nineteen nineteen on, Amy's
ministry really took off, and her approach had always been
really entered denominational, but she wound up being credentialed by
a number of churches as though she was actually affiliated
with their official ministries, even though she had never sought
(12:20):
out those credentials. She was very well liked and gained
a devoted following, so a lot of churches just wanted
to have her associated with them in some way, And
in addition to being welcoming to all people, her revivals
and sermons were different from a lot of what had
come before, and that they were very positive in tone.
She focused on the loving, accepting image of Jesus rather
(12:42):
than preaching as many ministers did at the time, and
had for many years of sort of the more vengeful
fire and brimstone vision of God. And faith healing was
also an important part of her ministry, and her sort
of uplifting spirituality and her passionate but upbeat and cheerful
approached the whole thing was incredibly appealing in post World
(13:03):
War One America. It was different and it was fresh,
and people were really drawn to it. On top of
her traveling ministry and her magazine, Amy also started publishing
books in the late nineteen teens. She was a prolific
writer and produced numerous volumes about herself and her teachings
over the years, including This Is That and Divine Healing Sermons.
(13:24):
In one Amy decided that it was really time to
find a permanent home for her ministry, and she bought
land near the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, California,
to begin fulfilling a mission that she believed God had
given her, which was building the Angels Temple there, and
this was a time when Los Angeles was growing at
a really incredible rate. So Amy was sort of smart
(13:45):
slash fortunate, uh one or the other or both to
secure the land for the temple. When she did, she
kind of got in just as the real estate market
was really about to explode. To raise funds for the construction,
she spent the next two years a rigorous tour, first
driving back and forth throughout the United States, traveling as
was usual with her mother and children in the car.
(14:08):
Then she expanded her ministry and the financing of the
temple with a tour of Australia. And it was while
she was touring the US in two so during this
sort of fundraising tour that Amy, while she was giving
a sermon in Oakland, California, was inspired to envision what
would eventually become the Four Square Church which she founded.
(14:31):
And this was based on the four identities of Jesus
that she was preaching about as a savior, as a healer,
as a baptizer in the Holy Spirit, and as the
coming King. Finally, on New Year's Day of nineteen three,
the Angelus Temple was dedicated. It could seat five thousand
three hundred people, and the Four Square Church was founded there,
(14:52):
although it took several years for that to be formally incorporated,
and later in ninety three she also founded the Lighthouse
for International Four Square Evangelism Bible College so that she
could educate others to be evangelists. In ninety four, she
gave a sermon on the radio for the first time
at Los Angeles station kf s G. Later she'd become
(15:17):
the first woman to be issued a license to operate
a radio station. And yeah, she was really reaching out
into new markets. She's often talked about is something of
a contradiction because in many ways she was preaching really like,
you know, old school values, but with a very sort
of modern approach to how she was spreading this word.
(15:38):
And so like the magazines and the books and the
radio appearances, it was all sort of some people found
it hard to reconcile her traditionalist values and her modern
approach to spreading them. Um. But basically, her popularity was soaring,
and just as it reached a fever pitch, she was
one of the most famous people in the United States,
(15:59):
and indeed she had a pretty big global following. She
vanished and before we talk about what happened and sort
of how that all played out. Did you like to
take a word from a sponsor? So back to Amy
Simple McPherson. By the mid nineteen twenties, she was preaching
up to twenty sermons a week and her writing was
regularly published. She was overseeing the training of her ministerial proteges,
(16:22):
and she was sort of running the business of the church.
And she was, as we said before the ad break,
just incredibly popular. On May eighth, Amy, who was working
on a sermon, went to the beach at the urging
of her mother to take a much needed break from working.
She went with her secretary, Emma Schafer, so that she
(16:42):
could keep working on her sermon, and reviewer notes, Amy
decided she needed a break and she went into the
water for a swim, and she did not return from
that swim. At the services that were scheduled that evening
for Amy to preach at, she did not appear, and
instead her mother, Minnie, gave the sermon in her place,
and at the end of the service, many quietly announced
(17:04):
what had already been rumored throughout the city all afternoon,
and it was now appearing in the local evening papers. Sister,
as Amy was called in her ministry, had gone to
the beach at Ocean Park and had vanished while swimming.
Sister is gone, many announced to the congregation, we know
she is with Jesus. The next day, a full tilt
(17:24):
investigation went into gear. There were dozens of reporters and
hundreds of onlookers that appeared on the beach to see
what was happening. As the investigation got underway, the Coast
Guard had boats traversing the coastline. They were looking for something,
anything that might offer a clue as to what had
happened to this beloved evangelists. Teams of divers scoured the
(17:46):
waters in search of a body or of clues, and
one diver actually lost his life in the search effort.
There was also another fatality when a young woman who
had been a member of the Church of the Four
Square Gospel, who was just grief stricken at the loss
of their spiritual leader, actually drowned herself. On Memorial Day,
which was twelve days after the disappearance, the angelist temple
(18:10):
was packed. More than twenty five thousand people showed up
at the beach where Amy had vanished to grieve and
set out remembrances. Police were concerned at what might happen
if her body were to be found that day, so
they worked on action plans for handling that kind of
grim discovery that did not happen, but they were definitely
like ready to kind of address potential crowd control issues.
(18:34):
And eventually, you know, this was now a couple of
weeks in church members finally accepted that Amy must have died,
and in an effort to recover the body, they actually
the church actually paid to have the bay dynamited in
the hopes that the body would surface somehow, but it
did not. Some members of the church believed that she
would be resurrected, and so they prayed and waited for
(18:54):
her to return, and many Her mother arranged a memorials
of us at the temple, and that was scheduled for
June twenty and more than seventeen thousand people showed up,
far too many than they could fit in the building.
While all of that morning was going on, there had
been a whole other school of thought about what had
happened to Amy. Rumors began to circulate that Amy had
(19:18):
probably not died, but had instead purposely removed herself from
the public eye for some possibly nefarious personal reason. There
were whispers of plastic surgery, talk of affairs, a pregnancy
that she might intend to abort, and all of these
rumors made their way around California and eventually the country.
Really a detective claimed to have spotted her at a
(19:39):
train station, and more sighting started to crop up after that.
This will no doubt sound familiar if you've listened to
our Judge Craater episode or any other missing person's story.
Almost every day throughout the United States, papers ran stories
of the latest Amy sightings. There were also two rants
(20:00):
letters that came about. The first one that Minny Kennedy,
Amy's mother received, made it clear that police should not
be involved and that she should turn over fifty thousand
dollars if she wanted to see her daughter again. The
second letter, which came a bit later, said that Amy
was going to be sold into slavery if a ransom
of half a million dollars wasn't paid. But they really
thought she was dead at this point and that these
(20:21):
might be hoaxes. Three days after her memorial service, Amy
simple McPherson emerged from the Mexican desert and Agua Priates
the Sonora, a small Mexican town just south of the
border from Douglas, Arizona. She collapsed after telling a couple
that she had escaped from kidnappers and had been traveling
(20:43):
on foot for hours. Amy was of course rushed to
the hospital and after that a phone call was made
to her mother, and authorities working with her mother were
able to confirm the evangelists identity based on information Many
provided about a scar that was on Amy's finger, and
after Amy was able to provide the name of her
pet pigeon, which many wanted for validation that it was
(21:06):
it was the correct person. So at this point the
lost beloved Minister was found. After she was able to recuperate,
she gave an account of what had happened to her.
She said she had been lured by a couple to
their car as she got out of the water from swimming.
They told her they had a sick baby that they
wanted her to pray over, and when she leaned into
(21:27):
the back seat to see the child, which was not there,
she was she was pushed down into the floorboards and
then driven away, and according to her account, she had
held been held by a woman named Rose a man
named Steve and another man, and she said that she
had been drugged and tortured and kept in a shack,
and that she had eventually escaped. She wriggled out of
(21:49):
the ropes that she had been tied with and ran
through the desert and estimated twenty miles before she reached
Agua Prietta. Douglas, Arizona, where Amy was hospitalized, became a
focus of national attention. Reporters and followers poured into the town.
The telegraph lines were overloaded with well wishes, and her
story was headline news. But for some people that tide
(22:14):
actually turned uh. Similar to how there were people that
didn't think her disappearance quite added up. There were some
people that thought her reappearance also had some suspicious elements
to it. The Coaches County sheriff was suspicious of her story.
He thought that the condition of her clothing was far
too tidy to have been through what she claimed it happened. Additionally,
(22:37):
police from both Douglas and Agua Prieta were unable to
find any traces of the kidnappers or a shack in
the area that she had described. She even accompanied search
teams into the desert, but was unable to find the
shack herself. McPherson had, however, received multiple threats through the
years as her fame grew, so some people sort of
(22:59):
held that up as you know, evidence that this was
entirely plausible. There had been people threatening to do things
to her, to kill her, and even to kidnap her
for a while. Just a year prior to the disappearance,
a plot to kidnap Amy had been discovered and foiled
by the l a p D. Before we talk about
what happened after she got home, let's have a record
(23:19):
from a sponsor, and now let's hop back into our
tale of evangelism. As Amy and her mother headed back
to Los Angeles from Arizona, the train that they were
in was basically greeted all along the way by wellwichers,
So whether they stopped or not, sort of every town
that they went through there were people by the sides
of the tracks kind of waving, throwing flowers, et cetera.
(23:42):
But even as they got back to Los Angeles, the
media circus around her alleged kidnapping was really just beginning.
Not only did papers have new suspicious persons to mention
on an almost daily basis that they thought could be,
you know, the possible perpetrators of this kidnapping, but speculation
about Amy's own possible involvement in some sort of deception
(24:03):
were also abundant. An engineer at the radio station owned
by Angelus Temple had disappeared at the same time as Amy,
which led some people to speculate that the two of
them had been having an affair. The man in question,
Kenneth Ormiston, was married, so this would definitely have been scandalous. Eventually,
he admitted that he was cheating on his wife, although
(24:26):
he was adamant that the mistress was not McPherson. Police
dusted a cottage in Carmel where Ormiston and a woman
had been spotted, but none of the prince matched Amy's
and there was even a case assembled UH to press
charges against McPherson for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. So
(24:47):
there was a trial that was arranged for January seven,
but the charges were dropped before then as the Los
Angeles District Attorney named Asa Keys started to realize that
many of the witness accounts that he had built his
case upon we're really not credible. And then as another
side story that sometimes comes up when you're looking at this.
He had his own sort of legal problems bubbling up,
(25:10):
but so basically the whole thing fell apart. No arrests
were ever made in the kidnapping, which remains unsolved, and
no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Amy McPherson
has ever come to light. She wrote about the event
in her book In Service of the King, The Story
of My Life, and once the fear of the kidnapping
(25:31):
and the alleged conspiracy had died down, Amy could still
be found at her ministry. She had in fact been
there all along, throughout all of these headlines and investigations. Basically,
she went right back to work as a minister and
an evangelist and a faith healer when she returned home
from Arizona. One of the things she became famous for
is her work feeding the needy. In seven the Angelist
(25:55):
Temple Commissary opened its doors, and this facility is credited
with feeding more of than one point five million people
during the depression, even when it was struggling financially itself.
Amy's community outreached through the Commissary, was based as her
ministry on the principle that everyone was up welcome, regardless
of their position in society, their religion, or their color.
(26:18):
And she also organized a lot of other um charitable
work through the Commissary and also just through her ministry.
But despite all of the good work that was going
on in the name of the Angelist Temple, Amy never
really regained the popularity and the positive press that she
had enjoyed in the early nineteen twenties, and she also
found that she had some troubles at work that had
(26:40):
not been there before. At one point, her mother quit
due to arguments over the handling of the Angelist Temple finances.
The choir also walked out. While many and many of
the choir members returned, there was ongoing tension and strike,
some of it centering on how Amy's style had shifted
to more modern and fashitable attire rather than the old
(27:02):
style of dress that many felt her position really demanded.
Many who really was indispensable to the Four Square Church
resigned a second time in nineteen thirty, and just a
month later, Amy had a nervous breakdown. After the breakdown,
she took a cruise to tour Asia with her daughter Roberta.
They stopped in Honolulu and they went to Hong Kong
(27:25):
to visit Robert's grave before eventually heading to India, where
McPherson was planning on quote studying the women's movement in
connection with the campaign for independence. In nineteen thirty one,
McPherson married a third time to an actor in one
of the Angeli's Temples plays. His name was David L. Hutton.
He was nine years younger than she was, and he
(27:45):
came with all kinds of baggage, including a woman seeking
legal action against him for breach of promise, claiming that
he had promised a betrothal to her before marrying mcperson.
Hearing this news was such a shock to the minister
that she passed out, hitting head and fracturing her skull.
And after she recovered from this injury, or was at
(28:05):
least partially recovered, it was suggested that Amy go on
a holiday, so she took a recuperative cruise to Europe,
accompanied only by a nurse. While she was traveling, Hutting,
much to the chagrin of the church administration, began using
his status as Amy's husband to promote himself in theatrical
endeavor endeavors outside the church. He also had a reputation
(28:29):
as a womanizer, and the whole union was viewed with
just disease by the church, in part because it was
frowned upon for a divorced person to remarry so long
as their former spouse was alive. Harold McPherson was still alive,
although he had remarried. In all likelihood, if Hutton had
been better liked as probably would not have been that
(28:49):
big of an issue. Yeah, people just kind of saw
him as a little bit of a con man. He
was a Vaudilian, and you know, I think there was
a general trust of his sort of theatrical background and
that he was just playing her. Uh. And On July
eighteenth of nineteen thirty three, the Chicago Tribune ran a
story entitled quote Hutton seues to divorce Amy for baby hoax.
(29:13):
Hutton had filed for divorce while McPherson was still out
of the country, claiming that he had been the victim
of ongoing mental cruelty in the marriage. He said that
Amy had told friends before she left for Europe that
she was planning to divorce him when she returned, and
that she tortured him by pretending to have given birth
to their child while in Paris, when in fact she
had undergone an abdominal surgery and if you remember earlier
(29:36):
in this episode, we talked about the fact that she
had a hys directomy years before this, So it's all
kind of it takes on a very sort of soap
opera e crazy, he said, she said, drama turn. At
this point, Hutton was also plotting to sell emotion picture
story that revolved around a female evangelists, but once the
(29:56):
marriage was behind her, uh MC person seemed to dismiss
this as a huge mistake. Yeah, I think she started
to see him the same way everyone else did, as
someone who was just trying to take advantage of her
name and make a few bucks off of it. Uh.
And while Amy's work carried on, uh you know, she
continued to minister, media interest in her ministry really had
(30:20):
been eclipsed by interest in the more sensational and sometimes
CD and UM theoretical aspects of her life, like the
ones that people were just sort of guessing it. Amy
died in Oakland, California, in ninety four at the age
of fifty four, a kidney ailment that had some complications
(30:41):
combined with the ingestion of seekingal which was sleeping pills,
and she wound up dying due to an accidental overdose.
With mc pherson's death, the ministry passed to her son, Rolf,
who served as president of the Four Square Church until
nine at which point he retired, and the Four Square
Church remains today. It has more than nine million members.
It's still very popular, and it was all started by
(31:05):
this one woman who had a vision and felt she
had a calling. And it's kind of fascinating to me
to see how this this sort of grew and kind
of juxtaposed against sort of modern evangelism. It's very interesting.
She was really groundbreaking in a number of ways. Do
you also have some listener mail? I do, indeed, Uh,
I have one that I will read and one that
(31:26):
I will merely reference. These are both related to our
Halloween Candy podcast. Okay, I'll read this and then we'll
talk about it for a minute. So there are letter
is from Ron and he says you mentioned Sweetest Day
on your Halloween Candy podcast and mentioned that Detroit may
still celebrate it. Being born and raised in the suburbs
of Detroit and still living there, I can say with
(31:47):
one certainty that yes, we still do celebrate it. However,
it's not as candy centric as as it may once
have been. It now actcess somewhat of a second Valentine's Day.
Flower shops run specials, restaurants are full, and it is
also a very popular day to have a fall wedding.
It wasn't until my mid twenties that I finally realized
that it wasn't celebrated everywhere when I asked a now
(32:09):
former co worker of mine from New Jersey what he
was doing with his wife for Sweetest Day and received
the most awkward blank stare I have ever seen. We
got so much mail about Sweetest Day, in fact, verifying
that it is alive and well in many many areas,
primarily sort of that you know, uh, like Michigan down
(32:31):
into Ohio. A lot of people from Cincinnati wrote, Yeah,
it's really cool. I love the idea of having a
second Valentine's Day. I love Valentine's Day, uh, I think
I said before, like completely aside from all of the
the romantic baggage that sometimes comes with it, My family
always celebrated it kind of as a family holiday, like
it was a date of like probably more like what
(32:53):
Sweetest Day was usually pitched as like, did you know
give little gifts to friends and family members and just
kind of a appreciate the people in your life. So
I love the idea of two of those days a year.
That sounds fun to me. Plus sugar. Uh. And on
the point of sugar, I will um as I said,
not read, but sort of relay information from an email
we got from our listener, Michael, and he is responding
(33:16):
to my sort of questions slash interests, slash theory that
working in the candy industry with all of these sort
of molten sugar mixtures must have been incredibly dangerous. Michael
did work in the sugar in the candy industry for
a while, uh, and he verifies and in fact that
it was very dangerous, and that candy burns happen all
(33:39):
the time and they can be horrifying. He gave us
some very specific examples, which I will not read because
they're they're intense. I will tell you, Michael, that as
I was reading this after your email arrived, I was
at home reading. I was sitting in the dining room
reading my email, and my husband saw me kind of
squirming and clutching my stomach and making horrible faces, and
he thought I had been stricken with an ill us
(34:00):
and might be sick, but no, it was just the
horrible physical reaction to the description of some of these burns.
So thank you for verifying that it is in fact
dangerous and he Michael says that even now some of
the smaller companies still don't have that full automation, so
there is still dangerous work going on in the in
making candy. If you would like to write us and
tell us about injuries or burns, you don't have to
(34:21):
do that. You can share happier and prettier thoughts, but
we don't judge or request that you send one or
the other. You can do that email us at History
Podcast at house to Works dot com. You can connect
to us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in history.
We are on Twitter at Misston History. We're at Miston
History dot tumbler dot com. We're on pinterest dot com
(34:42):
slash missed in history, and you can visit our spreadshirt
store at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com for
a variety of goodies, and we occasionally have some really
good sales there, so check that out. Uh. If you
would like to research a little bit about what we
talked about today. Go to our parents site, how stuff Works.
Type in the word religion into the search bar, and
one of the really cool and interesting articles that comes
(35:04):
up is is the brain hardwire for religion. It's kind
of an interesting discussion to have if you would like
to visit us at our homesite that's missed in history
dot com, and we have all of our old episodes
going way way way back too long over the time
Tracy and I were even involved in the show, and
there are show notes. There are some cool blog posts
here and there, so we hope that you visit us
(35:26):
at house top works dot com and missed at History
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because it has to works dot com.
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