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Summary:
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From Pat Deveney's journal database:
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly.
Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives! Breaking the Way for Future Generations.
Other titles: Woodhall and Claflin's Journal
1870--1876 Weekly
New York, NY. Publisher: Victoria C. Woodhull & Tennie C. Claflin. Editor: Victoria California Claflin Woodhull, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, Col. James Harvey Blood.
1/1, May 14, 1870-12/2 (# 288), June 10, 1876 (intermittently suspended). 8-16 pp., $3.00 a year. The format of the journal was changed in January 1875 from four columns with advertisements on the cover to three columns with two pages of advertisements in the back. This was the leading and most outrageous of the radical spiritualist magazines, featuring the political battles of Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), the first woman nominated to run for president of the United States, in 1872), her war against Henry Ward Beecher and advocacy of "free love," and the lucubrations of Stephen Pearl Andrews on Universology and the Pantarchy. Woodhull, Claflin, Blood and Andrews contributed most of the content, all along the lines of radical reform, communism, anti-clericalism, and free love. In its prospectus, the journal advocated as parts of the new social order:
"1. A new political system in which all persons of adult age will participate.
2. A new land system in which every individual will be entitled to the free use of a proper proportion of the land.
3. A new industrial system, in which each individual will remain possessed of all his or her productions.
4. A new commercial system in which ‘cost,' instead of ‘demand and supply,' will determine the price of everything and abolish the system of profit-making.
5. A new financial system, in which the government will be the source, custodian and transfer of all money, and in which usury will have no place.
6. A new sexual system, in which mutual consent, entirely free from money or any inducement other than love, shall be the governing law, individuals being left to make their own regulations; and in which society, when the individual shall fail, shall be responsible for the proper rearing of children.
7. A new educational system, in which all children born shall have the same advantages of physical, industrial, mental and moral culture, and thus be equally prepared at maturity to enter upon active, responsible and useful lives." (Advertisement, Hull's Crucible, November 5, 1874, 2, and in the journal January 2, 1875)
As part of this program, the journal published Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto" for the first time in the United States in English, and featured interviews with and a biography of Marx--even though Marx and Engels promptly expelled Woodhull and her group from the First International when they learned of the oddballs she had gathered around her. The journal was devoted to freethought and anti-clericalism (primarily anti-Catholicism), secularism in public life ("The New Religions--Universal Justice"), "stirpiculture" (the predecessor of eugenics), co-education, feminism (and opposition to "Masculine Sexual Tyranny"), free love ("Free love is the regulation of the affections according to the conscience, taste and judgment of the individual, in place of their control by law,which, since they are of natural and not of legal origin, can have no rightful or proper dominion over them"), and shared the ambivalence of contemporary radicals about the fate of the newly freed slaves. The journal devoted considerable space to spiritualist topics and writers since both Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie (Tennessee Claflin Cook, 1845-1923) had begun their careers as fortune tellers, clairvoyants and mediums. (The money Victoria gained for her clairvoyant business advice to Commodore Vanderbilt--as well as for more intimate services--supplied the capital for starting the journal.) In November 1874 it reprinted H.P. Blavatsky's "Marvelous Spirit Manifestations" from the Daily Graphic. The issue for August 23, 1873, precipitated the great purge of radicalism, especially free love, from organized spiritualism by carrying Moses Hull's frank confession that he had taken advantage of the opportunities for philandering he had encountered on his lecture tours promoting spiritualism. The issue of April 22, 1876, has Charles Sotheran's anonymous "The Kobolds Have Come," a devastating review of Emma Hardinge Britten's Art Magic. Letters and articles by Luna C. Hutchinson, Alexander Wilder, H.T. Child, Anna Kimball, George Sand, Austin Kent, Edward Maitland, W.F. Jamieson, Helen Wilmans Baker, Parker Pillsbury, Juliet H. Severance, Warren Chase, Petroleum V. Nasby, and others grace its pages. After the radicals had revealed their true colors at the tenth annual national spiritualists' convention in 1873, of which Woodhull was president, the journal precipitously lost 5,000 subscribers. To recover its standing, it announced a "New Departure," veiling its radicalism and promoting Woodhull's interpretation of the (sexual) mysteries of the Bible. This pleased no one, including the journal's radical base, and in June 1875 the journal in a plea to subscribers to pay up added "The Weekly is a thousand times more radical to-day than it was two years ago. Truth is always radical." This proved ineffective and the journal ceased in mid-1876. The last issues prominently featured a notice, "A Rare Opportunity," to buy a half interest in an unspecified "profitable" and "perfectly legitimate" business -- obviously the journal -- but there were no takers and the journal ceased in June. Woodhull moved to London the next year, where she married into a wealthy banking family. It appears that the journal was started again in London under the name Woodhull and Claflin's Journal in the 1880s, since Woodhull in her The Human Body, the Temple of God (1890) several times quotes from issues dated in 1881, but the revived journal seems to have been devoted solely to countering the recurring slanders and libels against Woodhull. In later years, she and her daughter, Zula Maud, published The Humanitarian, a purely reform journal, in London. NYPL microfilm; Duke University; LOC; etc.
Portions of this run contributed by Hamilton College.
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