More war against Spiritualism, less...whatever the rest of that was

 

⭐⭐

Boy, this book has promise that it just absolutely does not live up to. I was vaguely aware of Harry Houdini's crusade against Spiritualism (a system of beliefs/maybe a religion that's based on being able to communicate with the dead in various ways) and his disagreements with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the topic, so when Lincoln's Ghost: Houdini's War on Spiritualism and the Dark Conspiracy Against the American Presidency popped up, I was interested--particularly with the hook about Lincoln and the presidency.

I can tell you right off the bat that there's very very little about a "dark conspiracy against the American presidency" in this book. Author Brad Ricca uses a series of Congressional hearings about a Spiritualism-related bill, one in which Houdini seemingly played a large part, as a framing device for the book, and in those sections are snippets about various First Ladies and members of Congress attending seances--and even seances occurring in the White House itself. There are also some mentions of mediums perhaps foretelling the deaths of some Presidents. But...that's about it.

Mostly, the book bounces around in the 1910s and 1920s, focusing mostly on various ways Houdini went after Spiritualists. But sometimes it's about other people going after Spiritualists. And sometimes there's a long digression about whether John Wilkes Booth died at the Garrett farm in Virginia in April of 1865. (He did.) It is a very long digression and it's obviously right in my wheelhouse, but Ricca never actually connects it to Spiritualism, other than noting that Mary Todd Lincoln was into it. (Spiritualism. Not Booth surviving.) There is a recurring question about how much Abraham Lincoln was into Spiritualism, but it was hardly the driving story of the book.

Part of my problem is the way Ricca wrote the book. It's very much written like a novel, with dialogue that he couldn't possibly know and inclusions of what people were thinking and feeling at the time. It almost borders on historical fiction at times, with Ricca even noting at the end of the book that "This book is not meant to be a chronological transcript of history but a narrative built around it" and that he has "characterized certain scenes and even, in a few spots, dialogue that I have taken from other sources of the same speaker or imagined around facts" (loc. 4524).

I think I would've preferred just a chronological laying out of facts, particularly since he includes some things throughout the book that are confusing, until he explains them much later on. For example, there are excerpts of letters from Houdini to his wife, and one mentions his son becoming President. It's only at the end of the book that Ricca explains that the couple made up imaginary children and had them live imaginary lives.

This is partially so he can end with some, I guess, "gotchas" about Houdini and his wife, who may or may not have had a particularly medical disorder. Which isn't discussed until the Epilogue and is clearly something Ricca thinks should completely change how we view Houdini and has absolutely nothing to do with Spiritualism. (Or Lincoln. Or the presidency.)

There is a lot of jumping around in time, which has been annoying me in many books lately anyway and Ricca does not handle with any sort of aplomb. It's hard to remember when anything happens, particularly because there's a time jump between chapters and then there are random anecdotes with time jumps within chapters before we wind up back where we began. I couldn't tell you whether certain events happened before or after that Congressional hearing. And just so many names.

Ricca also winds up...I'm not going to say "alluding to," because that implies that he didn't spend a lot of time with these topics, which he did. He goes a bit into immigration, and anti-immigration sentiment in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He discusses the KKK a bit. There's a digression into one of the mediums being the president of an organization called the Patriotic Order of America, which did things like try to "end ballot manipulation" and "fight against 'discrimination' of white men" (loc. 3633). He implies that the man who gave Houdini that fateful punch did it because he was anti-Semitic, but I'm left wondering if that was actually the case. He spends a decent amount of time here, undoubtedly in response to, you know, *gestures at the world.* But it comes across awkwardly, even as I'm sympathetic to what he's saying.

Also, there were a handful of factual errors (no, Robert Todd Lincoln was not at Ford's Theatre with his father the night of the assassination [loc. 3526]) that I sure hope got changed before this book was published. But they're enough--along with Ricca's writing style, honestly, and note about imagining things--to kind of make me question other things in the book. And I hate to say that, as someone who has published books with an error (...or two) and gotten angry emails saying that now the reader can't believe anything in the book.

Honestly, if Ricca had taken his research and given a good (chronological!) history of the more well-known Spiritualists and how the religion worked (there's a chapter about a journalist infiltrating a Spiritualist camp that was particularly fascinating), with details about Houdini turning on it and how he crusaded against it--his reward for anyone who had a reading he couldn't prove was a trick, his showing up at Spiritualist events, even, yes, the proposed bill in Congress--I would've loved it. It doesn't make a book more interesting to mess around with timelines, and authors, you can't include all of your research, because research is full of digressions that aren't germane to your thesis.

I honestly can't really recommend it, though there are very interesting stories within.

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the advance reader copy.