Sometimes you don’t know what’s in your own backyard. Last year I wrote about my alcohol-fueled romp through Ulysses; the previous year I wrote about our own local literary history. I never thought these topics would have a chance to intersect.
In writing Ulysses, Joyce was notoriously compendious, cramming the book with references famous and obscure, including many mentions of what was happening in the world of 1904, when the book is set. One name I came across repeatedly was that of John Alexander Dowie. Joyce deemed Dowie important enough to mention him several times without giving any real explanation of who he was.
Dowie actually puts in a couple of appearances as a minor character. At the end of Chapter 14, he pops up to spew forth the following: “Christicle, who’s this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that’s my name, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok. The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition.”
In the extended dream play that constitutes Chapter 15, Dowie shows up to denounce Leopold Bloom thusly: “ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years [etc.] …”
So, who was John Alexander Dowie and what does he have to do with where I live now? He was an evangelist and faith healer, born in Scotland, who immigrated to Australia and then to the United States. He wound up in Chicago in time to take advantage of the 1893 World’s Fair, where his faith-healing business boomed. Dowie decided to put down roots in the Chicago area, and he did so in an impressive way. He founded the village of Zion. This town, which is about 20 minutes’ driving distance straight north of where I am now, was deliberately designed to be a religious utopia. In addition, it was effectively a company town, with Dowie owning all the land and most of the businesses.
Currently, Zion is a fairly depressed town which not long ago hosted a now-shuttered nuclear power plant; driving through the town today does not make one think of utopias, religious or otherwise. Most of the signs of Dowie’s presence, and that of his sect, have vanished. The massive church he built, the Shiloh Tabernacle, burned down in 1937. After Dowie was deposed by a rival in 1905, the city officially adhered to the Flat Earth doctrine and taught it in its schools until the 1940s. Zion retains at least one notable relic of its history as a religious settlement, namely the Shiloh House mansion, built using Dowie’s plentiful funds in 1901.
I have to admit I knew nothing of this until I came across Dowie’s name in Ulysses and became curious about him. In the Internet age, it was easy to satisfy that curiosity.
Oddly, Zion’s official website makes no mention of Dowie by name, though it tells you when and where the town’s first water well was established and where the Zion Cookie Factory used to be located. James Joyce, the obsessive chronicler of urban reality, would probably have appreciated this level of detail.
For further information about Dowie and his role in Ulysses, go here.