Preacher Teacher Hater Fraud by Charles Trantanella
No doubt about it—the twenty-first century is bursting with unsavory influencers, but this type of character has always been around. Social media gives them greater reach and louder voices than those who racked up followers 150 years ago. Yet human nature does not change.
A Life of Intrigue and Notoriety
A new biography of Lilla Mabel Hodgkins, a self-promoter sprung from the vault of history by writer Charles Trantanella, is a case in point. In Preacher Teacher Hater Fraud, Hodgkins, whose life straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is revealed in her various incarnations, drawing crowds and a loyal readership. She gained equal amounts of notoriety through personal scandal and her controversial statements about love, marriage, and motherhood.
Born in rural Maine in 1856, Hodgkins—who assumed various names across the years—left home for Boston at the age of fifteen. Purportedly she became an excellent music teacher but, in 1877, enrolled in a correspondence course to learn stenography and other office skills. Then she went to work for a man with several irons in the fire: a preacher, writer, and editor 16 years her senior who had a whiff of hustle about him.
As William Henry Harrison Murray’s amanuensis (the term for a literary assistant), Hodgkins soon became embroiled in a scandal that made its way into big city newspapers. First Murray, an unfaithful husband, persuaded Hodgkins to spend a monthlong vacation with him in the Adirondack Mountains.
Then the bill collectors tracked him down, the reporters came knocking, and Hodgkins fled to Europe to escape the rumors. It was the first of several ill-considered adventures with men. Yet Murray was of some service to Hodgkins. He introduced her to temperance, universal suffrage, and the principles of equality and charity. These movements animated the Progressive Era and haphazardly shaped Hodgkins’ speeches and writing.
Legacy Beyond the Headlines
Among Hodgkins’ other passions were Christian Science, the Montessori philosophy, white slavery, birth control, and eugenics. The author suggests, however, that Hodgkins was driven less by any particular cause than a desire to become an important voice in American society.
In 1895, Hodgkins suffered a nervous breakdown and spent two years in a sanitarium. Back in the world, she founded a new religion, The Church of the Christ Life. It failed. Unsurprisingly, she moved as often as she changed her name, perhaps out of a need to reinvent herself, to place each new disappointment firmly in the past.
Lilla Hodgkins was not an opportunist. Nor did she peddle snake oil, as they used to say.
Rather, she is best characterized as a late Victorian seeker, a woman adrift in a time of sweeping cultural change. Though Hodgkins sought to become relevant and respected, she did not make much of a dent in history. When she died of cancer in 1928, the news scarcely made a ripple.
Nonetheless, her story resonates today as more people than ever attempt to influence others, and more people than ever seem willing to be followers.
