A Fortean—maybe—haunted by his own religious past, whose life shows how Forteanism was allied with skepticism early on—an odd sort of marriage.
Charles Gold Patterson was born in North Carolina sometime during 1871 to John Henry and Martha Margaret. He would become the eldest of seven siblings. In 1890, his mother converted to the Church of Latter Day Saints. His father converted the following year. By 1900, he and a brother were boarding in American Fork, Utah, where he was teaching and his brother at school. Shortly after that, Charles married Viola, and they had two children, Dale and Ora, by 1910, when they had established their own household, in Salt Lake City, Charles working a white-collar job. Patterson was high up in the LDS hierarchy, serving as Bishop of the American Fork Ward from 1901 to 1903 (http://www.newspapers.com/image/25610835/).
Charles Gold Patterson was born in North Carolina sometime during 1871 to John Henry and Martha Margaret. He would become the eldest of seven siblings. In 1890, his mother converted to the Church of Latter Day Saints. His father converted the following year. By 1900, he and a brother were boarding in American Fork, Utah, where he was teaching and his brother at school. Shortly after that, Charles married Viola, and they had two children, Dale and Ora, by 1910, when they had established their own household, in Salt Lake City, Charles working a white-collar job. Patterson was high up in the LDS hierarchy, serving as Bishop of the American Fork Ward from 1901 to 1903 (http://www.newspapers.com/image/25610835/).
In the 1910s, though, he found himself at odds with the church leadership. The Mormons had created a virtual monopoly on the growing and processing of beets in the intermountain West, which attracted the attention of anti-trusters. At the center of the political fracas was Utah Senator Reed Smoot. Patterson became a muckraker and pamphleteer, attacking the church’s business practices (which provided cover for anti-trusters from the East, whose complaints were sometimes dismissed as anti-Mormon bigotry). In brief, Patterson argued that the church’s actions benefitted the leadership at the expense of the people—a fundamental break with the faith’s dictates. He would go on to investigate railroad monopolies in the state and other religious chicanery.
In the early 1920s, he apparently became fed up enough with the church that he left the state. By that point, he had earned a law degree and in June 1924 appealed to the Oregon supreme court for the authority to practice law there. He and Viola would raise their children there; they would spend the rest of their lives there. His employment fluctuated some: in 1930, he was working in real estate, but perhaps still using his legal training. As Patterson edged toward sixty, he continued to read widely on different religious groups, only slowly giving up the idea that humankind needed religion to live morally. Later he would write,
“I have been over the theological road from the earliest concept of a great white whiskered, stern but just god who never slept a wink but kept books on me every second—as taught me by a very splendid mother. From that back ground, with the understanding that the bible was the exact words of this god of my childhood, I have gone thru life until I have graduated to my present position. I have investigated into many religious sects and thought for the first 60 years of life that religion had something to do with morality. I can’t conceive of any one exploring the religious field more thoroly than I. Starting out as a firm believer in the superstitious I would now destroy, and finding it painful at every step to doubt them I have been hesitant enuf to dispute them.”
Viola died in 1936 (http://www.newspapers.com/image/11932040/)—and, interestingly, her obituary makes no mention of the religious nature of her funeral, which suggests that she joined her husband in breaking from the Mormon church. They had been married for some thirty years, and her death must have hurt him a great deal. He continued to work, though, the 1940 census listing him as an attorney in private practice. And he wasn’t alone: his daughter and her husband lived with him. The son-in-law, Wilmer Fetters, had been a sergeant during World War I.
Toward the end of the second World War, Patterson took the earnings of a lifetime—a not inconsiderable sum, according to a friend—to spread his ideas, and put them into practice. He founded the Institute of Human Fellowship and started publishing Free Mind in March 1944. There were a gathering number of such organizations in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s—the American Humanist Society (run by Fortean Edwin Wilson), founded in 1941, and one of the quintessential secularist groups, noted in 1954 that the number of them kept doubling over the previous years, and could name 180 prominent advocates. Patterson, though, so these other organizations as allies—even if weak ones—rather than strictly comparable. He complained to Wilson, in 1950:
“It is possible and very probable that I fail to fully understand those who call themselves humanists, or Unitarians just as they fail to understand me or each other. With our varied upbringing and diversity of temperament and experience in living I think it is likely that no two persons on earth have exactly the same understanding about anything, except in the filed of mechanics and possibly chemistry. But I, like all the rest of my fellows who have minds of their own and have developed a purpose in life, have quite positive opinions upon things that I have worked out to the point where I find I am driven to a conclusion that I am unable to change upon the evidence available.
As I stated in my former letter, had I been able to reconcile myself to the theory of Humanism, which to me is like Unitarianism, in that none of you question what the other thinks or believes, all you want is to associate together and have such fellowship as you can under the protection of the banner you have chosen, then I would have been with you.
But I fail to see where you challenge anything. While you claim to challenge superstition I fail to find you saying or doing anything that would give a clear concept as to what you regard as superstition. You do not deny god because that would throw you open to the charge of atheism of which all of you seem desperately afraid. Now I admit that I am loath to stir up contention with the unthinking, prejudiced, multitude and believe in working as gently and tenderly as I can with people who are honest in their faith, but I have no regard for the hypocrite in religion, politics or business and do not hesitate to come to grips with them when there is a principle at stake.”
The truth of that is debatable—the American Humanist Association was not quite so sanguine about soi-disant religious superstition as Patterson made out—but there are ways in which Patterson himself had never truly escaped the religious frame of reference. His goal was to build an institution as efficient as the Church of Latter Day Saints—it was explicitly his model—by setting up units of the IHF around the world, with each unit dedicated to improving human welfare. He wrote in a leaflet that “builders” were “wanted”
“To get mankind to understand that it is of one common family, inhabiting one common earth; that it dies to a common death, passes to a common destiny—that each branch of the family has the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as every other branch.”
When he was writing to Wilson, he could only think of the IHF in theological terms, even as he berated himself for it:
“Here is a foundation which sweeps away theology in its entirety and provides a clear field upon which to establish a true religion (I don’t like the word) based upon man and his earth life.”
And for all that humanism—and his own special brand of it institutionalized in the IHF and promoted in Free Thought—valorized reason and championed science as revealing the universe’s true mechanics, his writing suggested that he was concerned about science’s increasing power to define human activity—and, indeed, to destroy all of human life. In that, he was not unlike many other Forteans, from the founders on. That same pamphlet announced
“The Greatest Job mankind has ever faced is the job of building minds int the people which will enable them to live constructively and happily in this atomic age.”
It’s the “atomic age” that stood out. In his letter to Wilson, he wrote more blackly:
“if we are not able to stir the emotions of the human animal thru his relationships with his fellows here on earth sufficiently to make him (or it) a decent, lovable, kindly, glorious animal, then we should encourage the making and use of the ‘H’ bomb and get rid of the species for good.”
Science was even less of an ally than the Humanists and Unitarians. But they had to be accommodated, all of them. When he started the IHF, he thought his only job was destroy the superstitions that had beclouded his own thinking as a youth. But he realized he needed to create as much as destroy—and that in creating, he had to accept the very real, and very uncomfortable, limits science imposed on human society. From the pamphlet:
“That science has so shrunk the earth that all mankind is crowded into one front yard where they must share a common fellowship, must comprehend and respect each other’s rights or there will be such continued brawling and discord that none who live can feel secure and happy.”
Patterson’s name appeared in Doubt 11 (Winter 1944), the first of ten credits to Patterson. Given how common that surname is, it is not clear that all of the mentions referred to Charles Gould Patterson. The initial one certainly did, though, as Thayer thanked him for sending a complete file of Free Mind. And already, the push-and-pull between the humanist movement and Forteanism was evident. Thayer was aware of other secular movements—including the AHA, which would become involved with the Fortean Society a few years later—and dismissed them as only completing half of Fort’s revolution: shrugging off the dogma of religion, but praying to the great god science. Still, Thayer saw that his group was allied with humanist ones, and promoted them.
At the time that Patterson joined, Thayer had just published the pamphlet “The Fortean Society is the Red Cross of the Human Mind,” arguing for a “religion of self-respect”: a religion that valorized individuals over and above old dogmas and championed the freeing of minds. Likely, it was this pamphlet that appealed to Patterson: he, too, was hoping for “Free Minds” and wanted those—as the Fortean Society said they did—willing to entertain new ideas. He was just starting his organization, and so was in the mood to smash old idols, but, as was clear by his relations with he humanists, he was willing to accept allies who had some differences of opinion, and that may account for why he stayed with the Fortean Society.
Or did he?
Other clippings contributed by Patterson—or Pattersons—dealt with mysterious blue balls of light near Joliet, Illinois; the mysterious disappearance of naval vessels; a rain of fish; earthquakes; and similar anomalous phenomena. These may have been sent in by Charles G. Patterson; he was interested in challenging even the ideas he held dear: he told Wilson, for example, “I do not know what discovery may be made tomorrow which may change my views. I am eagerly awaiting new knowledge that would justify me in moving further ahead, or that would justify a modification of my theses.” But these Fortean phenomena don’t seem to provide the kind of evidence that Patterson would value.
The final mention came in Doubt 41(153), with the notice of Patterson’s death. He had passed away early in the years, and the IHF had been absorbed by Wilson’s American Humanist Association. Thayer noted that Patterson was a “non-member” correspondent, but “of marked Fortean tendencies”: a “good rebel.” It is worth noting that none of the citations of Patterson list him as an MFS—which supports the idea that the material was sent in by Charles Gold—but, then agin, Thayer was not consistent in using that honorific. It might be that a reading of Patterson’s Free Mind would reveal an interest in Fort, but that publication is very difficult to find.
In the early 1920s, he apparently became fed up enough with the church that he left the state. By that point, he had earned a law degree and in June 1924 appealed to the Oregon supreme court for the authority to practice law there. He and Viola would raise their children there; they would spend the rest of their lives there. His employment fluctuated some: in 1930, he was working in real estate, but perhaps still using his legal training. As Patterson edged toward sixty, he continued to read widely on different religious groups, only slowly giving up the idea that humankind needed religion to live morally. Later he would write,
“I have been over the theological road from the earliest concept of a great white whiskered, stern but just god who never slept a wink but kept books on me every second—as taught me by a very splendid mother. From that back ground, with the understanding that the bible was the exact words of this god of my childhood, I have gone thru life until I have graduated to my present position. I have investigated into many religious sects and thought for the first 60 years of life that religion had something to do with morality. I can’t conceive of any one exploring the religious field more thoroly than I. Starting out as a firm believer in the superstitious I would now destroy, and finding it painful at every step to doubt them I have been hesitant enuf to dispute them.”
Viola died in 1936 (http://www.newspapers.com/image/11932040/)—and, interestingly, her obituary makes no mention of the religious nature of her funeral, which suggests that she joined her husband in breaking from the Mormon church. They had been married for some thirty years, and her death must have hurt him a great deal. He continued to work, though, the 1940 census listing him as an attorney in private practice. And he wasn’t alone: his daughter and her husband lived with him. The son-in-law, Wilmer Fetters, had been a sergeant during World War I.
Toward the end of the second World War, Patterson took the earnings of a lifetime—a not inconsiderable sum, according to a friend—to spread his ideas, and put them into practice. He founded the Institute of Human Fellowship and started publishing Free Mind in March 1944. There were a gathering number of such organizations in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s—the American Humanist Society (run by Fortean Edwin Wilson), founded in 1941, and one of the quintessential secularist groups, noted in 1954 that the number of them kept doubling over the previous years, and could name 180 prominent advocates. Patterson, though, so these other organizations as allies—even if weak ones—rather than strictly comparable. He complained to Wilson, in 1950:
“It is possible and very probable that I fail to fully understand those who call themselves humanists, or Unitarians just as they fail to understand me or each other. With our varied upbringing and diversity of temperament and experience in living I think it is likely that no two persons on earth have exactly the same understanding about anything, except in the filed of mechanics and possibly chemistry. But I, like all the rest of my fellows who have minds of their own and have developed a purpose in life, have quite positive opinions upon things that I have worked out to the point where I find I am driven to a conclusion that I am unable to change upon the evidence available.
As I stated in my former letter, had I been able to reconcile myself to the theory of Humanism, which to me is like Unitarianism, in that none of you question what the other thinks or believes, all you want is to associate together and have such fellowship as you can under the protection of the banner you have chosen, then I would have been with you.
But I fail to see where you challenge anything. While you claim to challenge superstition I fail to find you saying or doing anything that would give a clear concept as to what you regard as superstition. You do not deny god because that would throw you open to the charge of atheism of which all of you seem desperately afraid. Now I admit that I am loath to stir up contention with the unthinking, prejudiced, multitude and believe in working as gently and tenderly as I can with people who are honest in their faith, but I have no regard for the hypocrite in religion, politics or business and do not hesitate to come to grips with them when there is a principle at stake.”
The truth of that is debatable—the American Humanist Association was not quite so sanguine about soi-disant religious superstition as Patterson made out—but there are ways in which Patterson himself had never truly escaped the religious frame of reference. His goal was to build an institution as efficient as the Church of Latter Day Saints—it was explicitly his model—by setting up units of the IHF around the world, with each unit dedicated to improving human welfare. He wrote in a leaflet that “builders” were “wanted”
“To get mankind to understand that it is of one common family, inhabiting one common earth; that it dies to a common death, passes to a common destiny—that each branch of the family has the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as every other branch.”
When he was writing to Wilson, he could only think of the IHF in theological terms, even as he berated himself for it:
“Here is a foundation which sweeps away theology in its entirety and provides a clear field upon which to establish a true religion (I don’t like the word) based upon man and his earth life.”
And for all that humanism—and his own special brand of it institutionalized in the IHF and promoted in Free Thought—valorized reason and championed science as revealing the universe’s true mechanics, his writing suggested that he was concerned about science’s increasing power to define human activity—and, indeed, to destroy all of human life. In that, he was not unlike many other Forteans, from the founders on. That same pamphlet announced
“The Greatest Job mankind has ever faced is the job of building minds int the people which will enable them to live constructively and happily in this atomic age.”
It’s the “atomic age” that stood out. In his letter to Wilson, he wrote more blackly:
“if we are not able to stir the emotions of the human animal thru his relationships with his fellows here on earth sufficiently to make him (or it) a decent, lovable, kindly, glorious animal, then we should encourage the making and use of the ‘H’ bomb and get rid of the species for good.”
Science was even less of an ally than the Humanists and Unitarians. But they had to be accommodated, all of them. When he started the IHF, he thought his only job was destroy the superstitions that had beclouded his own thinking as a youth. But he realized he needed to create as much as destroy—and that in creating, he had to accept the very real, and very uncomfortable, limits science imposed on human society. From the pamphlet:
“That science has so shrunk the earth that all mankind is crowded into one front yard where they must share a common fellowship, must comprehend and respect each other’s rights or there will be such continued brawling and discord that none who live can feel secure and happy.”
Patterson’s name appeared in Doubt 11 (Winter 1944), the first of ten credits to Patterson. Given how common that surname is, it is not clear that all of the mentions referred to Charles Gould Patterson. The initial one certainly did, though, as Thayer thanked him for sending a complete file of Free Mind. And already, the push-and-pull between the humanist movement and Forteanism was evident. Thayer was aware of other secular movements—including the AHA, which would become involved with the Fortean Society a few years later—and dismissed them as only completing half of Fort’s revolution: shrugging off the dogma of religion, but praying to the great god science. Still, Thayer saw that his group was allied with humanist ones, and promoted them.
At the time that Patterson joined, Thayer had just published the pamphlet “The Fortean Society is the Red Cross of the Human Mind,” arguing for a “religion of self-respect”: a religion that valorized individuals over and above old dogmas and championed the freeing of minds. Likely, it was this pamphlet that appealed to Patterson: he, too, was hoping for “Free Minds” and wanted those—as the Fortean Society said they did—willing to entertain new ideas. He was just starting his organization, and so was in the mood to smash old idols, but, as was clear by his relations with he humanists, he was willing to accept allies who had some differences of opinion, and that may account for why he stayed with the Fortean Society.
Or did he?
Other clippings contributed by Patterson—or Pattersons—dealt with mysterious blue balls of light near Joliet, Illinois; the mysterious disappearance of naval vessels; a rain of fish; earthquakes; and similar anomalous phenomena. These may have been sent in by Charles G. Patterson; he was interested in challenging even the ideas he held dear: he told Wilson, for example, “I do not know what discovery may be made tomorrow which may change my views. I am eagerly awaiting new knowledge that would justify me in moving further ahead, or that would justify a modification of my theses.” But these Fortean phenomena don’t seem to provide the kind of evidence that Patterson would value.
The final mention came in Doubt 41(153), with the notice of Patterson’s death. He had passed away early in the years, and the IHF had been absorbed by Wilson’s American Humanist Association. Thayer noted that Patterson was a “non-member” correspondent, but “of marked Fortean tendencies”: a “good rebel.” It is worth noting that none of the citations of Patterson list him as an MFS—which supports the idea that the material was sent in by Charles Gold—but, then agin, Thayer was not consistent in using that honorific. It might be that a reading of Patterson’s Free Mind would reveal an interest in Fort, but that publication is very difficult to find.
