Religion: Divine Week

At 3 o’clock one morning last week in Manhattan, Negroes of all sizes, shapes and shades began gathering at an uptown pier on the Hudson River. Unmolested by police, the blackamoors shouted, stomped, sang, strummed. By 6 o’clock there were 2,000 of them. Then up rolled a big, blue Rolls-Royce out of which popped a little brown man clad in grey suit, panama hat, white shirt and honey-colored tie in which gleamed a $5 gold piece. “Here comes the Body!” bellowed followers of Rev. Major J. (“Father”) Divine. The little man boarded one of two excursion boats moored at the pier. “We got the Body!” shouted Negroes hanging over her rails. Then Father Divine boarded the other boat whose passengers cried: “Now WE got the Body!” At a quiet signal from Harlem’s benign cult leader the two boats churned out, headed up the Hudson.

Seven hours later the excursion arrived at Kingston, N. Y. where Father Divine has lately acquired a “Promised Land,” some 1,000 acres of farmland worth $160,000. Plan is to settle the Promised Land with Divine disciples who do not mind field work. While Kingstonites gawped, the Divine excursionists debarked, formed a parade in which one of Father Divine’s touring cars, with a stuffed white dove on the radiator cap, was preceded by mounted Negroes in berets and riding togs, followed by female “angels” in green and white satin, wearing banners blazoned “Father Divine is God.” Pennons and banners carried by marchers showed that Father Divine has a POLITICAL DEPARTMENT, a RESEARCH DEPARTMENT by which “The Eyes of the Lord Runneth To and Fro Throughout the Whole Earth.” Swinging music for all this was furnished by a band which included not only the usual brasses and wood winds but also violins, harmonicas, accordions, ukuleles, guitars, banjos and a portable xylophone.

Watching the Kingston parade, an American Legionary named Harry Whitney stiffened in patriotic anger when he beheld the announcement, “Peace, Father Divine Is God” stitched on a U. S. flag. He summoned police, who stopped the bearer, a white woman called Fair Angel, directed her to take the flag back to the boat. Later, on the premises of the “Promised Land” where Father Divine was watching a few of his followers swim in a pool whose outhouses were marked for SISTERS and BROTHERS, the police .asked for the flag, got only the little cultist’s soft reply: “I am bringing peace to everyone, even if they don’t want it.”

Out next day was the first full-length biography of Father Divine, God in a Rolls-Royce,* by John Hoshor, 37, a white Manhattanite, onetime stockbroker, now a free-lance adman and investment counsel. Impressed by Father Divine as a self-advertiser, Biographer Hoshor claims to have spent six months in & out of a Divine “heaven” in Harlem, pretending to be a convert and, he says, almost becoming one.

Adman Hoshor guesses that Father Divine disburses $1,500,000 a year on his dominion, a collection of boarding houses, coal yards, laundries, restaurants, garages operated by the busy little cultist and tenanted and staffed by fanatical blacks who have surrendered their economic as well as spiritual affairs to Father Divine. Author Hoshor estimates Divine’s follow-ing at 2,000,000, although other observers set it as low as 20,000. Father Divine himself claims 30.000,000.

Although Divine disciples now like to believe that their “God” was not born but was “combusted” one day in 1900 at the corner of Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue and 134th Street, and although the Father in 1932 told a court in Mineola, L. I. that he had been born in Providence, R. I. 52 years before as Major Morgan J. Devine, it is now well known that he was born George Baker in Savannah, Ga. 58 years ago. Biographer Hoshor reveals that the Father’s religious life began when he was a hedge-cutter 30 years ago in Baltimore after he had abandoned a wife and four children. From a black preacher called “Father Jehovia,” George Baker got the nucleus of his theology: the idea that God is in everyone. Taking the name of “The Messenger,” Baker went to Brooklyn, soon became associated with another of Father Jehovia’s followers who called himself “The Rev. St. Bishop, The Vine” and let each of his colleagues consider himself not only the repository of a god, but a god in fact. When The Rev. St. Bishop, The Vine was arrested, tried and jailed for a sex offense, Baker once more changed his name, this time to Major Devine. (The improved spelling was a subsequent idea.) With a dozen followers, one of them named Penninah who was to become known as Mother Divine, the onetime George Baker moved to Sayville, L. I. where he founded his first “heaven,” a co-operative boarding house where everybody worked except Father Divine. He took care of the wages.

By thrifty management and accepting all the property of those who joined him as “angels,” Father Divine was able to serve big and tasty banquets in his Sayville “heaven,” attract visitors from Harlem. So many Negroes were journeying thither on Sundays that white neighbors became alarmed and enraged. In 1932 Father Divine, who had come to believe that only he was God, was tried for conducting a public nuisance. He was convicted, sentenced to a year in jail and a $500 fine. Three days later the trial judge died of a heart attack. Said Father Divine: “I hated to do it.”

Today Father Divine has 60 heavens in the District of Columbia, 24 States, four countries. The biggest collection, in Harlem, costs $30,000 a year to operate. Besides his Rolls-Royce, he owns an airplane manned by three dusky flying angels. Though the man whom his followers believe to be God gets around to as many heavens as possible, he is to be seen most often in Harlem, sermonizing at length on such topics as: “The super-mental relaxativeness of mankind.”

Divine has organized a “Righteous Government Movement” with a political platform demanding that doctors guarantee cures, “Peace” be substituted for “Hello” as a telephone salutation, life insurance be abolished. Father Divine habitually ends his letters: “This leaves ME Well, Healthy, Joyful, Peaceful, Lively, Loving, Successful, Prosperous and Happy in Spirit, Body and Mind and in every organ, muscle, sinew, vein and bone and even in every atom, fiber and cell of MY bodily form.”

—Hillman-Curl ($2.50).