"The Last Enemy is Destroyed": May Wright Sewall and Spiritualism

In the summer of 1918 Booth Tarkington, enjoying the season at his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, received in the mail an invitation from an old friend from Indianapolis, who was also in Maine, to meet and discuss a manuscript the friend had written. In the letter the friend, May Wright Sewall, did not indicate the subject of her writing, but knowing of her previous work in Indiana, Tarkington assumed that the book would be “something educational.” When he finally received the manuscript, the Hoosier writer was astonished to discover “that for more than twenty years this academic-liberal of a thousand human activities . . . had been really living not with the living, so to put it.”

   

Writing her with his initial assessment of the work, Tarkington told Sewall that he had read the manuscript “very carefully and with an ever increasing interest.” Calling the book “unique,” he added that it proved “its over absolute sincerity from the first, and beyond question; total strangers to you, personally, would recognize that.” Sewall’s manuscript, eventually published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis just two months before her death in July 1920 as Neither Dead nor Sleeping, detailed her extensive experiences in the shadowy world of spiritualism—the belief in the possibility of the living communicating with the dead. 

Sewall’s communion with the deceased, which included extensive conversations with her late husband Theodore, shocked many who knew the no-nonsense teacher, suffragette, and peace advocate. This proponent of spiritualism had played a leading role in helping to establish such Indianapolis institutions as the Girls’ Classical School, the Indianapolis Woman’s Club, the Contemporary Club, the Art Association of Indianapolis (today's Indianapolis Museum of Art), and the Indianapolis Propylaeum. She also worked tirelessly to promote rights for women in the United States—and around the world—during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serving as an invaluable ally to such national suffrage leaders as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sewall also gave the woman’s movement an international focus through her pioneering involvement with the International Council of Women and the National Council of Women. In addition to her work on behalf of suffrage, Sewall had been a leader in the American peace movement, serving as a delegate on HenryFord’s ill-fated peace mission to end World War I.

Anton Scherrer, a columnist for the Indianapolis Times, said that nothing “rocked the foundations of Indianapolis quite as much” as had the appearance of Sewall’s publication, because nobody in her old hometown knew about her contacts with the spirit world. In fact, only a dozen or so people knew about this side of her life. During Sewall’s communications with her departed husband, he had warned her, she told a reporter from the Indianapolis Star, not to relate them “to the world until she had them in such form the world could understand them.” Also, those to whom she related her experiences often expressed the belief that Sewall suffered from a mental delusion. Perhaps realizing that she would be ridiculed by many for her otherworldly experiences, which first occurred in 1897, she decided to relate her spiritualist story to the world only when “extreme feebleness” had taken her once and for all out of public affairs.

Sewall began her commune with the spirits during a visit to a spiritualist camp meeting at Lily Dale, New York, in 1897. The seeds for her communications with the deceased, however, had been planted a few years before during some of the darkest days of her life. A fortnight before her husband’s death from tuberculosis on December 23, 1895, he had told her that his death was inevitable. “I wish now only to say that if I discover that I survive death,” said Theodore Sewall, “the first thing I shall do will be to ascertain whether or not Jesus ever returned to earth after His crucifixion. You know we have not believed it; but, if I find that He did return to His disciples, I shall do nothing else until I shall have succeeded in returning to you, unless before that time, you have come to me.” 

Although her husband’s memory remained fresh in Sewall’s mind during the next few years, she claimed to have forgotten his deathbed promise to communicate with her from the spirit world. In fact, when some Indianapolis friends advised Sewall to visit a local medium in order to see and talk again with her husband, the proposal shocked her. “It seemed to me grossly to violate both reason and delicacy,” she said. Instead of taking them up on their offer, Sewall continued to give her time to her school and work with both the National and International Council of Women. During a speaking engagement in Nova Scotia in June 1897, she received an invitation to give a talk at a “Woman’s Day” program at what she later learned was a spiritualist camp in Lily Dale, New York. “I had held myself so aloof from all means of information about spiritualism,” she said, “that I did not know there were such camps.”

Sewall arrived at Lily Dale’s assembly grounds on August 9, 1897 and was greeted by the chairman of the press committee for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who asked her if she wished to tour the facility and be introduced to some of the famous mediums gathered there for the meeting. “I told her,” said Sewall, “that I did not wish to meet any ‘medium’ however ‘famous’; that to me the word was offensive, being synonymous in my opinion, with the words, deceiver, pretender, charlatan and ignoramus.” Although her audience the next day proved to be “attentive, responsive and sympathetic,” Sewall wanted nothing more than to depart the place for her next speaking engagement at Chautauqua, New York.

A series of unexpected difficulties, however, caused Sewall to stay over at Lily Dale for a time. Giving in to a “compelling impulse which I scarcely realized until I acted upon it,” she participated in a sitting with a famous independent slate writer, a medium who used slates to convey messages from the spirits to their intended recipients. During her meeting with the slate writer, Sewall claimed that the blank slates never left her possession, but when she returned with them to her hotel she discovered that they were covered with “clear and legible writing” and contained “perfectly coherent, intelligent and characteristic replies to questions which I had written upon bits of paper that had not passed out of my hands.”

Through this experience, Sewall said she had acquired “actual knowledge, if not of immortality, at least of a survival of death—I had learned that the last enemy is destroyed, in that he can destroy neither being nor identity, nor continuity of relationship.” Through subsequent sittings with slate writers, trance readers, a trumpet medium, and other psychics, Sewall communicated with several of her deceased loved ones, including her husband, father, mother, half-sister, great-grandfather, niece, and two sisters-in-law.

As she became more attuned to the spirit world, Sewall managed to communicate with her husband herself through automatic writing. Equipped with only a tablet and pencil, she sat in her library and her husband’s spirit would guide her hand to produce written answers to her questions about life beyond the grave. These amazing messages, she later told the Indianapolis Star, came to her as impressions upon her mind. Sewall noted that the experience was as though she received “a blow on the brain—not physically of course—but clear and distinct and without warning. And in an instant comes a complete train of thought—swift—immediate—not arrived at by the slow and ordinary sequence of ideas—a complete train of thought solving some heretofore unsolvable riddle of the universe.” These thoughts—an extensive series of lectures from Theodore Sewall on how spirits return and communicate with the living—could not have come from her own mind, she insisted, for they often concerned themes that she had never imagined in her entire life.

Sewall’s remarkable account of her communications with the spirit world became known to the living through the unstinting efforts of an Indiana writer who had his own experience with unexplained phenomena: Tarkington. When he was fourteen years old and living in Indianapolis, Tarkington discovered that his sister, Hauté, had psychic powers. The Tarkington family hosted séances at its home that drew such distinguished visitors as James Whitcomb Riley. Although Hauté’s powers faded away after her marriage, her devoted brother remained convinced of the reality of his experiences. Throughout his life, noted Tarkington biographer James Woodress, the writer “was tolerant of other persons’ alleged supersensory experience.” When May approached him for assistance in finding a publisher for her spiritualist manuscript, Tarkington proved eager to help.

In the fall of 1918 Tarkington had a stenographer make a copy of Sewall’s manuscript to present to possible publishers. He wrote her that he needed to find a firm willing not only to print the book, but also effectively promote it as well. “I assure you that I will do everything within my power not only to get it printed,” he said, “but to get it ‘pushed’!” Tarkington reiterated his belief that Sewall’s manuscript stood as a “unique document with the air of a classic in human experience.”

By March 1919 Tarkington had decided to place the manuscript with the Bobbs-Merrill Company, which could trace its roots in Indianapolis back to the 1850s and was the publisher for such Hoosier literary lions as James Whitcomb Riley, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, and Maurice Thompson. Tarkington passed along Sewall’s manuscript to Bobbs-Merrill with the understanding that he would write an introduction for the book. He did warn Sewall that a decision on whether to publish her work might take some time.

Tarkington’s warning proved to be prophetic. During the spring and summer, he exchanged a series of letters with Sewall discussing the lack of a decision from Bobbs-Merrill on the book. Although the firm’s literary adviser and trade editor Hewitt H. Howland had told Tarkington he was in favor of accepting the book, and Tarkington wrote Sewall that he was tempted to push the firm about the manuscript, he feared doing so because a “very little push upon a publisher sometimes turns him aside from the right path.” A final decision on the manuscript depended upon the opinion of William C. Bobbs, the company’s president, “and that must take its own time not ours!” said Tarkington.  By the end of July, Tarkington’s patience had been tried enough for him to suggest to Sewall that she write a note to Howland “and hint that you can wait no longer.”

Sometime in August Bobbs-Merrill finally agreed to publish Sewall’s spiritualist book. One of the reasons for the firm’s acceptance might have been its eagerness to add Tarkington to its list of authors. For his part, Tarkington continued to advise the suffragist, sending her suggestions on how to conduct contract negotiations with the Indianapolis publishing firm. “I am sure he [Howland] will be fair and the terms will be customary—it is always about the same thing: 10% gross, I suppose, on sales up to 10,000 and 15% thereafter—some such arrangement,” he told Sewall. “I should let him propose the terms and, if they are like this, accept at once.” The Hoosier writer went on to try to convince Sewall not to believe that his “small” contribution had induced Bobbs-Merrill to accept the book. His efforts on her behalf did perhaps peek the firm’s interest in reviewing the manuscript, but it was the work “itself, and nothing else whatever, that has brought them to their favorable decision.”

During her exchange of letters with Tarkington about her manuscript, the seventy-five-year-old Sewall, who had been in ill health, had been making plans to leave the east coast and return to live in Indianapolis. She had even written her old suffragist friend, Grace Julian Clarke, to seek advice on possible places for her to stay. Clarke wrote back expressing her delight at Sewall’s decision to live again in Indianapolis but reported that the three places she had in mind as possible locations for Sewall to take up residence were unavailable. Undeterred by Clarke’s bad news about lodgings for her, Sewall remained resolved to return to Indianapolis, the scene of many of the triumphs and tragedies in her life. Writing from the Aloha Rest home in Winthrop Highlands, Massachusetts, she expressed to Howland, the editor for her book, her gratitude for accepting her manuscript, adding that it pleased her to have the book published in the city where many of the experiences took place. 

Although Sewall consented to Howland’s request to shorten the second part of the book, she did ask him one favor. She indicated she was quite anxious to have the book come out as soon as possible because numerous publishing firms, including the most conservative ones, were issuing books on spiritualism in order to take advantage of the huge surge in interest in the subject from families who had lost loved ones during World War I. “The war has terribly increased the number of bereaved and bleeding hearts and often the skepticism of the intellect can be broken down only through the agony of a yearning heart,” she said. “I, who have suffered, want to help those who do suffer.”

In early October 1919 Sewall finally returned to Indianapolis, taking up residence at a convalescent home at 1732 North Illinois Street. Although so ill with heart disease that she had trouble breathing and had to be propped up in bed by pillows, Sewall, looked after by some of her former students at the Girls’ Classical School, managed to make corrections on galley proofs of her book.

In spite of her illness, Sewall remained confident about the worth of her manuscript. “I think I never did a better piece of proof reading—and I am perfectly delighted with the book,” she told Howland in December. “I know it will have an ultimate great success.” Sewall’s confidence may have been inspired by the rapport she established with her editor. She apologized to Howland for hindering the work on her book because of her illness but promised to keep herself well enough to correct proof as fast as it arrived.

As winter turned into spring and her book remained unpublished, Sewall began to be apprehensive about the future. “I beg you to believe,” she said in a dictated letter to Howland, “that I am distressed at feeling the need of troubling you, but I have been very ill for several weeks with the prospect of continuing so, or worse; and I am beginning to be very anxious about the possibility of holding out until my book is out.” She went on to say that she did not know if he could do anything to hurry the process, but was sure that if “you could know my distressing situation you would be sympathetically anxious to try and hurry it.” By the time Howland could present Sewall with a complimentary copy of her book on May 8, she had been moved from her Illinois Street residence to Room 131 at Saint Vincent’s Hospital. 

Bobbs-Merrill placed its considerable promotional muscle squarely behind Neither Dead nor Sleeping. Calling the work “The Wonder Book of the Ages,” and labeling its author “one of the best known among the pioneer progressive women of the country,” the firm issued a first printing of three thousand copies and promoted it to book dealers as “a sure-fire seller from the start. It’s the kind the dealer will take home and read and reread himself!”

The Indianapolis company had Sewall autograph copies of the book, which sold for $3 per copy, to be sent to influential literary editors representing such publications as the Literary Digest, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, as well as newspapers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She also prepared signed copies for such influential figures as William Randolph Hearst and his wife. These promotional efforts paid off; Howland reported to Sewall that ten to twelve newspapers had printed a full-page story on the book and as of early June one-third of the first printing of three thousand had been sold.

To help ease the reader into the story of Sewall’s astonishing experiences, Tarkington had contributed a compelling and open-minded introduction for Neither Dead nor Sleeping. In reading Sewall’s story, Tarkington said it seemed to him that her struggle to cure her illness and make herself a proper messenger for the dead were recorded not as a person living in the modern world, but as “some medieval penitent, feeding upon snow by day and lying prayerful upon a bed of cinders at night, seeking to become a spirit.” 

In pondering the validity of Sewall’s spiritualist beliefs, Tarkington had three possible explanations for her story: Sewall was hallucinating her experiences; the communications from the dead were really the work of “an inner self of hers, sometimes called a subconscious”; or the communications were, as Sewall believed them to be, actually from the deceased. For Tarkington, the truth of the matter rested somewhere between the second and third explanations.

Many reviewers echoed Tarkington’s sympathetic treatment of Sewall’s book. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Elia W. Peattie claimed that the book had been written in “good faith” by a “gentlewoman of high veracity.” The author had found, Peattie added, an “escape from illness and sorrow, and there remains but to extend to her sincere and deeply felt congratulations.” 

Reviewing several books on psychic experiences for the New York Evening Post, J. Keith Torbert wrote that both for those who believe and for those who scoff at spiritualism May’s book “has essentials to reveal.” Neither Dead nor Sleeping had, Torbert added, something that raised it above the ordinary. “This is the very human touch to the writing,” he wrote. “The strong, admirable character of Mrs. Sewall appears on every page.” Sewall’s work even received a positive notice in the New York Times Book Review. In reviewing eleven books that discussed the question of what happens after a person dies, the Review highlighted May’s as “one of the most striking—amazing is hardly too strong a word.”

These vindications of her work came as Sewall, now seventy-six years old, lay gravely ill in her room at Saint Vincent’s Hospital, where she finally died at 11:15 p.m. on July 22, 1920. The Indianapolis Star reported that her advanced age, taken in connection “with a gradual physical decline manfesting [sic] itself in the last three months convinced her physicians some time ago that her recovery was impossible.” 

After funeral services at All Souls Unitarian Church, overseen by Reverend S. C. Wicks, May was buried alongside her beloved husband, Theodore, at Crown Hill Cemetery. In the death of May Wright Sewall, the Indianapolis News said on its editorial page, the world lost a citizen. Throughout her life, the newspaper said, “Mrs. Sewall possessed the faculty of transmitting her boundless enthusiasm and her original ideas to the world around her. One could not slumber in her presence for her vitality was contagious.”