Book Review : Sandford: A Study in Contradictions

Fair, Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine by Shirley Nelson (British American Publishing: $21.95, 448 pages)

“The Art of War” was the title of one of the books written by Frank Weston Sandford, founder and ruler of a militant evangelical community in Maine at the turn of the century. He called the prayer sessions he conducted “charges.” They could last three days; he thought of them as military operations toward the final establishment of the Kingdom of God.

Sandford lived in the era of Manifest Destiny, and Teddy Roosevelt was just about the only non-biblical figure he admired. His preaching and his thunderous prayer and purgation sessions with his followers were his own kind of Big Stick.

Pre-millenarian religious communities, based on a conviction that the final war preceding Christ’s Second Coming was already at hand--each regarded itself as general headquarters--were a striking offshoot of American Fundamentalism in the 19th Century. None was more striking, volatile and controversial than Sandford’s Shiloh.

Rigorous Holy Battles

By 1920, when Shiloh had largely disbanded, Sandford had been arrested several times for conducting his holy battles with such rigor as to cause the death of some of his followers. He spent several years in a federal penitentiary, quite cheerfully and sustained by his flock’s continued love. By this time, he had been instructed to regard himself as the Prophet Elijah, and, in some mysterious fashion, as King David.

Warmth and an appallingly arbitrary hardship; fanaticism and child-like sincerity; kindness and cruelty; and the exercise of fearsome power by one man over hundreds of followers--these are some of the contradictions tackled by Shirley Nelson in her book about Sandford and the Shiloh community.

Nelson, a novelist, is the daughter of a Shiloh family. Her mother and father met as children brought up in the community; and left it, with painful soul-searching, at the time of their marriage. Parental soul-searching dominated Nelson’s own childhood. Her father became a fiery and systematic denouncer of Shiloh; her mother was torn between memories of its excesses and its odd sweetness.

For Nelson, then, “Fair, Clear and Terrible”--a reference to the biblical phrase used by Sandford in the periodic purges of his adherents--has been a work of personal as well as historical discovery. Her account moves uneasily between the two.

The large lines of her story are engrossing and often astonishing. Nelson has chosen to avoid an analytic approach; she has attempted to show the life of Shiloh as it looked from the inside and the outside. It is a chronological account; one that relies on the accumulation of detail. Unfortunately, this detail, drawn from memoirs, letters and a few interviews, is unselective, repetitious and often routine; and it overwhelms the story.

Sandford, son of an energetic and respected small-town Maine family, was a handsome and charismatic figure, even as a young man playing semi-pro baseball. Initially reluctant, he was drawn into the revivalism of the Free Will Baptists; a group so prickly and individualistic that much of its energy went into splitting. After serving for a while in a Free Will church, Sandford began a wandering series of tent meetings up and down Maine.

More Cult Than Sect

His community, more cult than sect, took form by the beginning of the 1890s as the Holy Ghost and Us Bible School. By the end of the decade, as adherents and contributions came in, it had built itself a huge and elaborate wooden structure on a hilltop overlooking the Androscoggin River. It had accommodation for 500, a series of outbuildings, and a boat basin bearing the name: Kingdom Yacht Club.

“Kingdom,” of course, referred to God’s; but it was Sandford who ran it. The place was a mind-boggling mix of regality and deprivation. Sandford worked his followers hard but he forbade all labor for money. Those who joined were expected to give up what they possessed; in addition, Sandford seems to have been a genius at getting contributions from outside sympathizers. Just how, we never quite see; it is an essential missing detail.

In any event, much of the money went to Shiloh’s most grandiose project. Sandford bought a lavishly equipped 133-foot schooner, and a larger if shabbier freighter. With a picked complement of the faithful, and several professional sailors, he took his fleet to England and the Holy Land, where he set up missionary outposts.

More spectacular was his system of redemption by peripatetics. Sandford sailed around the world in order to convert it. The author compares this to Joshua marching around Jericho. Passing through Gibraltar, he wrote home that the history of Africa had just changed. Standing off shore, he had the schooner’s brass band and harp play hymns in the direction of Turkey; prayers were offered for the downfall of Islam.

There were storms and privations. For almost three months, Sandford sailed off the U.S. East Coast as far north as Labrador; and refused to land for supplies. By the time he made port, six of the complement were dead of scurvy and general starvation. It was this that landed him in jail.

There were other prosecutions, and recurrent scandals in the press. In Shiloh itself, there was periodic near-starvation and frequent disease; the resources were diverted to Sandford’s Gospel fleet and perhaps to his dining table. He seemed to have lived well. Nelson cites one Shiloite who recalled, as a child, watching Sandford wave a drumstick and asking herself what chicken must taste like.

Apart from material rigors, there was a perpetual scourging of the faithful. Physical violence, except in a few cases, seems to have been avoided, though children were sometimes beaten. Those deemed shaky were ostracized, put on fasts, and screamed at for hours on end. When Nelson’s mother decided to leave, she had to step over the prone bodies of fellow-Shiloites barricading the Durham railroad station. Two ministers boarded her railroad carriage and harangued her all the way to Brunswick.

It is a strange story, though a reader will of course be reminded of present-day all-consuming cults. If there was brainwashing at Shiloh, it was accomplished by tenderness as well as harshness. Twenty thousand presents were exchanged one Christmas; sheets of steaming gingerbread would be brought up to the work details. Popcorn was served even when there was no lunch. And even the many who defected recalled the warmth along with the horror.

Nelson suggests that Sandford was at least partly mad. The length and detail of her account of Shiloh suggests, in fact, the isolation and the repetitive monotony of derangement. A more selective and more analytic account would have been a wiser choice.