Recently, I visited the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, not knowing much about what I would find. I understood that it was a house museum in a beautiful mansion in the green and rolling hills of central Connecticut and that it contained some masterpieces of impressionist art. As advertised, Hill-Stead was an impressive building decorated with several stunning paintings by Monet, Degas, Whistler, and Cassatt, but what I did not expect to discover was that the woman who designed the house, Theodate Pope Riddle, was an early twentieth-century feminist, one of the first American women to become a certified architect—and a central figure in the American spiritualist movement.
A Child of Industry
Effie Brooks Pope was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 2, 1867, the only child of Alfred Atmore Pope and Ada Lunette Brooks. Her father, Alfred, became a wealthy industrialist, eventually ascending to president of the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company. But as an early example of her characteristic independence, at age fourteen Effie rejected her given name in favor of Theodate, the name of her beloved Quaker grandmother. Pope was raised in Cleveland, but in 1886, at the age of nineteen, she enrolled in Miss Porter’s School, an elite women’s boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut. Pope soon fell in love with the hills of central Connecticut, and at Miss Porter’s she built strong friendships with her teachers, including Miss Porter herself, Sarah Porter, and especially a young progressive teacher, Mary Hillard.
After graduation, Alfred and Ada took their daughter on a grand tour of Europe, where Alfred began to collect impressionist paintings. Upon returning home, despite being a young single woman, Pope convinced her parents to let her return to Farmington, where she began to renovate a small house and rekindled her friendships with Sarah Porter and Mary Hillard. At this stage of her life, Pope was not interested in marriage, and she turned down a proposal from one of her father’s business associates. But she was unsure about what to do with her life until her father suggested she pursue architecture. At the time, few women were employed as architects, and many schools of architecture would not admit women students. As a result, Pope’s first major project was the design of Hill-Stead, a large house set on a hill surrounded by 250 acres of land in Farmington, to be occupied by her parents. Because Pope’s only previous project was the renovation of her cottage in Farmington, Alfred Pope hired a young architect from the firm of McKim, Mead, and White to assist his daughter. Alfred and Ada Pope moved into their new home in 1901, and in 1905 Pope launched her professional practice as an architect.
At the turn of the century, it would have been a remarkable achievement for a woman just to be an architect, but Pope’s career was truly historic. She opened an office in New York and became the first woman to be licensed as an architect in New York (1916) and in Connecticut (1933). She designed the Westover School in Middletown, Connecticut, which was founded and directed by her friend and former teacher Mary Hillard and is still in operation today. She also designed the Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut, but perhaps her most prestigious commission was the restoration of the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace on east 20th street in New York City. Brendan Gill, the architectural critic for The New Yorker, called her “one of the ten most distinguished American women of the 20th century” (Katz 2003).
Pope continued to live at Hill-Stead after her parents died, and in 1916, at the age of forty-nine, she married John Wallace Riddle, a former diplomat. In addition to her pioneering work in architecture, she was an important and somewhat overlooked figure in the American spiritualist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Theodate and the Spirits
Spiritualism, spiritualist newspapers, mediums, and séances were all part of the culture of the late nineteenth century, and many believers were also active in the progressive movements of the era. Despite being from a wealthy family, Pope was troubled by economic inequality and promoted socialist ideas to anyone who would listen—so much so that her mother feared her father would leave their daughter out of his will (Katz 2003, 109). Pope was also in favor of women’s suffrage, but out of deference to her father, who opposed the vote for women, she did not become active in the movement until after his death in 1913.
The Pope family hosted many prominent guests at Hill-Stead, including President Theodore Roosevelt, whose sister lived in Farmington, and the American psychologist and philosopher William James and his brother, the novelist Henry James. The James and Pope families were quite close, and William James was an important figure in the spiritualist movement, both in the U.S. and in England. Unlike most of his academic colleagues, William James believed in the possibility of an afterlife and communication with the dead. He had worked with investigators from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in London, and with their support, he founded the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in Boston, which was a hotbed of spiritualism in the United States. I have two biographies of William James on my shelf in addition to a book devoted specifically to his spiritualist research (Knapp 2017), and Theodate Pope Riddle’s name does not appear in the indexes of any of these volumes. But Sandra L. Katz’s 2003 biography, Dearest of Geniuses: A Life of Theodate Pope Riddle, from which much of this article is drawn, reveals that Pope was an important figure in the American spiritualist research effort.
Historically, the popularity of spiritualism in the United States has waxed and waned in relation to periods of great loss. Mediums became very active in the years after the Civil War and again following World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. Theodate Pope’s interest was ignited following the death of her friend John Hilliard. Pope and Mary Hilliard were very close friends beginning with her time at Miss Porter’s School, and eventually Mary’s younger brother John became a good friend, too. John expressed his love for Pope as “a fine sister to me,” but neither were interested in marriage (Katz 2003, 75). John Hilliard graduated from Yale Law School and joined a law firm in New Haven, Connecticut. But in September 1903, at the age of twenty-six, he contracted typhoid fever and died. The expatriate American painter Mary Cassatt was a spiritualist and a Pope family friend, and having heard of John’s sudden loss, she wrote to Pope suggesting that she and Mary Hilliard visit the Boston psychic Mrs. Leonora Piper at the American Society for Spiritualist Research in Boston. On a snowy day in February 1904, Mary Hilliard and Pope, both still devastated by John Hilliard’s loss, made their first trip to Boston to sit with Piper.
Leonora Piper, Boston Medium
During a trip to England in the winter of 1882–1883, William James met members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and after returning home, he helped found the American counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). The primary researcher of the ASPR was Richard Hodgson, who grew up in Australia but came to England to attend Cambridge University. Hodgson had a long-standing interest in psychical research, and the SPR sent him to India to investigate Helena Blavatsky the cofounder of the Theosophical Society. Hodgson concluded that Blavatsky was a fraud, and he further cemented his reputation as a diligent researcher when he assisted in discrediting the Italian physical medium Eusapia Palladino (Houdini 1924; Knapp 2017). James and Hodgson became friends, and in 1887, Hodgson moved to Boston to became secretary of the ASPR (Knapp 2017).
Although James, Hodgson, and others in the spiritualism research community routinely uncovered frauds among the practicing psychics and mediums, both men became convinced of the powers of the Boston trance medium Mrs. Leonora Piper. Piper was not a public medium in the usual sense. She did not advertise her services to all comers for a fee, but she soon became the focus of intense study by James and, especially, Hodgson and was paid $1,000 per year—a sum equivalent to approximately half the salary of an assistant professor at Harvard—by the ASPR (James 1986, 395). Early in her mediumship career, Piper would go into a trance during which she made contact with a “control,” or spirit guide, who was in touch with various other spirits in the afterlife. Later in her career, she employed automatic writing, dashing off notes from the spirit world during her trances.
Although Piper impressed James and Hodgson by revealing information they were certain she could not have obtained by normal means, others who examined her were not convinced. The psychologists Amy Tanner and G. Stanley Hall conducted extensive observations of Piper and concluded, “Mrs. Piper’s controls and those of other honest mediums are but cases of secondary personality, and nothing more, a splitting off from the central self of a part which may take on almost any shape” (Tanner 1910, 301). James believed that Piper knew things about his family that she could only have learned either by telepathy or by communication with spirits, but the editors of his collected works noted that the James and Piper families shared some servants in common, making it likely that information was acquired through the downstairs staff: “It is thus possible that Mrs. Piper’s knowledge of the James family was acquired from the gossip of servants and that the whole mystery rests on the failure of the people upstairs to recognize that servants also have ears” (James 1986, 387).
Theodate Pope and Mary Hilliard had a number of sittings with Piper, and initially Pope was doubtful that Piper was actually in touch with the spirit of John Hilliard. For example, through Piper, John expressed his love for Pope, to which she responded, “You never told me when you were here that you loved me” (Katz 2003, 78). Pope and Mary Hilliard returned to Hill-Stead where they made their own attempts to contact John Hilliard. Mary Hilliard would enter a trance-like state and employ automatic writing, but she was not successful. Pope and Mary Hilliard returned to Boston in March for additional sittings, and Pope also arranged for Hodgson and Piper to hold sessions when she was not present and forward Hodgson’s transcripts of the meetings. Eventually, Pope became convinced that Piper was in touch with John, and she asked Hodgson to try to make contact with Sarah Porter, who had died in 1900. Piper soon made contact and reported that Porter had founded a school for girls in the spiritual world (Katz 2003, 79).
Financial Support, Spiritual Politics, and the Lusitania
Theodate Pope was a very wealthy woman, and soon after beginning her association with Richard Hodgson and the ASPR, she started to make financial contributions to him and to the ASPR. She also became involved in the management of the organization, particularly after the sudden death of Richard Hodgson of a heart attack while playing handball in 1905. Hodgson’s death was a tragic loss for William James and Theodate Pope, both of whom had grown quite close to him, but it also created a scientific opportunity and an administrative problem.
The obvious scientific opportunity was communication with Hodgson via séance with Leonora Piper. Both James and Pope were present for Piper’s first sitting after Hodgson’s death. Piper was not able to contact Hodgson on that first occasion, but Piper’s control suggested that Hodgson should be replaced by Dr. James Hyslop, the current vice president of the ASPR. A week later, Piper made her first contact with Hodgson during a sitting with William James. At a sitting in April 1906, Hodgson’s spirit addressed Pope directly. Piper scribbled, “You are Pope. I see you. You all right?” (Katz 2003, 83).
The administrative problems caused by Hodgson’s death persisted for several years. Hodgson had been arranging all of Piper’s sittings, and soon after his death, Pope was told she could not have some appointments she had been promised. In addition, Hyslop believed that Piper was hostile toward him and proposed replacing her with a medium from Buffalo, New York. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hodgson—speaking through Piper—opposed this idea (!). Ultimately, Piper remained the focus of ASPR’s research, but Hyslop wanted to break away from the influence of the British researchers at the SPR and form an independent organization called the American Institute for Scientific Research of New York. Pope wrote a check for $25,000 (approximation $700,000 in 2021 dollars) to support the new organization.
In 1914, Pope met a promising young Harvard professor, Edwin Friend, whose wife Marjorie was a medium. Pope was so impressed with Friend that she offered him a position in Hyslop’s institute and invited him and his wife to live on the Hill-Stead estate. Hyslop was not pleased with the introduction of Friend to the institute, and a power struggle between Hyslop and Pope ensued. Pope persisted, and ultimately broke from Hyslop entirely with the plan of forming a new Organization of the Massachusetts Society for Psychical Research with Edwin Friend at the helm (Katz 2003). As part of this effort, Pope invited the young professor to accompany her on a trip to London to introduce him to the British psychic researchers and perhaps get their blessing. On May 1, 1915, Pope, Friend, and Pope’s maid, Miss Emily Robinson, boarded the luxury liner RMS Lusitania in New York bound for Liverpool. Edwin’s wife, Marjorie was pregnant and so remained behind at Hill-Stead.
In 1915, World War I was underway in Europe, and there were concerns about attacks by German submarines. The German embassy had published a notice for U.S. travelers that any ship sailing in the war zone under the colors of England or that of any of its allies would be subject to attack. Nonetheless, on May 1, the Lusitania left port with approximately 1,900 passengers and crew on board, including Theodate Pope, Emily Robinson, and Edwin Friend. Six days later, approximately eleven miles south of the Irish coast, the Lusitania was hit by a torpedo from a German U-Boat, and a large explosion resulted. As the ocean liner began to sink, people ran for the lifeboats.
Professor Friend refused to get into a lifeboat because there were women and children still waiting to board, and Pope refused to get in a lifeboat without him. Ultimately, Pope, Friend, and Robinson strapped on life vests and jumped into the water, and Pope managed to grab on to a floating oar. She was eventually picked up by another a boat, unconscious and presumed dead. Fortunately, another passenger, the wife of a minister whose clergyman husband had died that day, touched Pope’s body and thought she saw her eyelids flicker. She summoned two crew members, who were able bring Pope back to consciousness. In the end, only 760 of the 1,900 passengers survived. Among the dead were Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family, theater producer Charles Frohman, Professor Edwin Friend, and Miss Emily Robinson. The bodies of Friend and Robinson were never recovered.
After the Lusitania
Pope was taken in by friends in Cork and remained with them for a long period of rehabilitation. Three days after the sinking of the Lusitania, Marjorie Friend reportedly made contact with her husband in the spirit world, and later Pope had similar success when she sat with Mrs. Chenoweth, an English psychic whom the poet William Butler Yeats had also consulted (Katz 2003).
On her return to Hill-Stead, Pope lost interest in establishing a new spiritualist organization, but she decided to endow a chair at Harvard University for a professorship devoted to the study of psychic phenomena. Earlier she had set up a fund in memory of Richard Hodgson, and now she was inspired to do something in honor of Edwin Friend. The endowed chair was welcomed by Harvard, and Leonard T. Troland was hired to fill the professorship.
Just after her forty-ninth birthday in 1916, Pope announced her intention to marry, John Riddle, a U.S. diplomat. In the years following her marriage, she never gave up her interest in spiritualism, but in part due to what many women saw as the chaos men had created in World War I, she turned more of her attentions to the suffrage movement. She also continued her career as an architect, and in 1926 she was appointed a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (“Women in Architecture” n.d.). The following year the Architectural Club of New Haven awarded her the Robinson Memorial Medal for her design of the Avon Old Farms School (Katz 2003, 231). She died at home at Hill-Stead on August 30, 1946.
Postscript
My primary motivation for writing this article was to show how important Theodate Pope Riddle was to the spiritualist movement of the early twentieth century in the United States. Her financial and administrative contributions have been largely overlooked in previous accounts. But Pope Riddle’s life was notable for at least two other reasons. First, despite having the advantages of great wealth, she was a remarkable woman in her own right. She avoided marriage for many years in favor of pursuing a career that was almost exclusively the domain of men, and she excelled at that career. Second, she was a progressive woman whose concerns for inequality and women’s suffrage were bound up in her involvement with spiritualism. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century spiritualism movement allowed women more prominence than they enjoyed in other domains of life (English 2014; Vyse 2018; Vyse 2020), and women were also at the forefront of many of the progressive movements of the era, including abolitionism, temperance, child welfare, and women’s suffrage.
The mediums and psychics that remain today are more clearly scammers preying on the grief of others for profit (see, e.g., Gerbic 2020), but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spiritualism was a social and religious movement that became an important feature of feminism and several other progressive movements in the United States. Life after death is not a concept that is consistent with science, but the classical spiritualist movement and its relationship to several political and social causes is an interesting feature of American history. The remarkable life of Theodate Pope Riddle provides an excellent example of this mixture of social and spiritual themes, and I am grateful to have stumbled across her unusual story at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut.
References
English, Melissa. 2014. History defined by the Spiritualist passion of Theodate Pope Riddle. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Southern Connecticut State University.
Gerbic, Susan. 2020. Abysmal failure: A skeptical psychic medium attempts to read Susan Gerbic. Skeptical Inquirer (September 8). Online at /exclusive/abysmal-failure-a-skeptical-psychic-medium-attempts-to-read-susan-gerbic/.
Houdini, Harry. 1924. A Magician among the Spirits. New York: Harper & Row.
James, William. 1986. Essays in Psychical Research. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 395.
Katz, Sandra L. 2003. Dearest of Geniuses: A Life of Theodate Pope Riddle. West Hartford, CT: Tide-Mark Press, Ltd.
Knapp, Krister Dylan. 2017. William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press Books.
Tanner, Amy E. 1910. Studies in Spiritualism. New York, NY: D. Appleton Company.
Vyse, Stuart. 2018. William James and the psychics. Skeptical Inquirer (January 30). Online at /exclusive/william-james-and-the-psychics/.
———. 2020. Superstition: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Women in architecture. N.d. Online at https://web.archive.org/web/20120326015010/http://www.arvha.asso.fr/archi_fem/arvha_french/info_arvha/document_info/us-archi.html.