Freedom.
A Journal of Realistic Idealism.
He who dares assert the I, May calmly wait, While hurrying fate, Meets his demands with sure supply.-Helen Wilmans; I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the Solar Year, Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain.-Emerson
1898-1903? Weekly
Seabreeze, FL. Publisher: Helen Wilmans; C.C. Post. Editor: C.C. Post; Helen Wilmans, editor and publisher; Eugene Del Mar, assistant editor
Succeeds: Wilmans Express Succeeded by: Men and Gods
1898-1903(?) 16 pp., $1.00 a year, $1.50 a year in Europe. Continued volume numbering of Freedom Express.

At the time of Wilman's arrest in 1901, the journal was said to have a circulation of 7-10,000, though it advertised a special mailing of 200,000 in January 1903. Helen Wilmans (1831-1907) stands out among the New Thought mail-order hucksters for her energy and focus. She became wealthy from her lessons, books and journals but ended up a convicted felon for her assemblyline absent healing of the afflicted. This last precipitated a series of "fraud orders" from the Post Office, beginning in 1901, and several indictments for mail fraud. On the latter she was convicted in 1904, though the conviction was later overturned. Faced with a retrial and impoverished by the contest, she pleaded guilty to the charges and agreed to pay a fine and to abstain from absent healing. She was an old spiritualist and reformer and an admirer of Walt Whitman, and had edited the feminist The Woman's World in Chicago from 1884 to 1886. Although she was at one time a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins in Chicago and experienced the power of thought in the healing of her husband, she had arrived at her basic realization of the power of mind and will independently of New Thought teachers. In her version of her awakening she was living in Chicago in the early 1880s when she was fired from her job and found herself with rent due and twenty-five cents in her pocket, "stripped of every dependence save that which I had in my lone self." The experience was liberating and exhilarating:

"Then came such a consciousness of power as I never had had before in my life. Everything was swept from me and I stood alone in my own strength. And this naked strength is a tremendous thing to stand in. There is nothing equal to it."

"I held a power in my hands that nothing could quell: that power was the absence of fear-the sense of freedom, and the consciousness of my own independent and unaided strength."

The feeling of total freedom engendered by her situation awakened in her a conviction of her own empowerment and a realization of the power of will: "Man is a Living Will." "'Where there's a will, there's a way.' To put the broadest construction upon this old adage, knocks down all the bars in existence, and liberates man to the freedom of the universe. We have the will." 'I tell you now-because nature demands men and not things-that there is no strength but self strength, and no salvation but self salvation. You have got to declare your personal power and stand alone in the majesty of your own intelligence. You have got to declare your ability to do without help. It is in this attitude that the divinest strength imaginable pours in on you like a river and you begin to realize what a godlike creature a human being is." With her transforming experience, Wilmans became a powerhouse of activity, starting Wilmans Express in Georgia in the late 1880s and Freedom in 1900 in Seabreeze/Sea Breeze, Florida-a town she and her husband, C.C. Post, founded and owned (and advertised in their journals) and where she founded the Home Temple of Mental Science, with branches in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, St. Paul and Cleveland. The journal contained articles by Wilmans and Post and also by the likes of W.J. Colville, Hugh O. Pentecoast, and George W. Carey, and featured Wilmans' advocacy of physical immortality: "Freedom is the only paper published whose leading and constantly avowed object is to overcome death right here in this world and right now. If you want to learn something of the newly-discovered power vested in man which fits him for this stupendous conquest, read this paper and keep on reading it." Besides the articles the journal contained a considerable amount of filler (fire-walking in Fiji, curious dwarfs in the Philippines, etc.) in order to meet the Post Office's requirement for second-class mailing that a journal be more than an advertising brochure, which it otherwise was. It featured letters from satisfied patients, advertisements for her books and lessons, her Metaphysical College and a planned University of Psychical Research, and solicitations for her land ventures in Florida (free photographs on request). By 1900 she was making $25,000-$50,000 a year for her efforts. Noted in "List of Advance Thought Publications," The New Cycle, March 1900, 159-60, and advertised in Weltmer's Magazine, 1901. The issue (7/17) for September 26, 1900 is in the "Helen Wilmans Post Scrapbook, 1906-1931" in the NYPL; LOC microfilm.

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