Part 5 – A Hypothesis: Oahspe and the Shalam Colony

Let’s reexamine Margaret’s art during hers and Walter’s busiest period, 1957-1964 because we now know there’s no truth to the ‘war-wracked waifs’ tale. Yet, it remains true that her art contained something that resonated with the American public, who bought her images by the millions. Over this period, the Keanes’ became the biggest selling living artists of their day.¹ The question is: is there something as yet undefined in what drew people to Margaret’s art?

If Margaret was, as she said, searching for meaning in occult literature there is one text unlikely to have escaped her attention.

Emerging from the wave of spiritualism that had captivated the United States and Europe since the mid-1800s, Oahspe (1882) is a book with an astonishing origin story, makes astonishing claims and resulted in one of the most astonishingly tragic American stories.

It was written by John Ballou Newbrough (1828 – 1891) a New York dentist, former prospector and spiritualist who claims to have channelled the new bible under automatic control by an intelligent light that guided his hands to operate a typewriter. As the legend goes Newbrough didn’t think about it at all, or review his words, he turned each page face down as they emerged from this inspired typing process.  

Claimed to be the work of Newbrough alone, typed each morning over the course of fifty weeks, the over nine-hundred-page-book (surely too long to be the hoax²) is a staggering work that makes the, not insignificant, claims to provide a twenty-four-thousand-year history of the earth, cosmology and the creation of the universe. Its publication was announced on newspaper front pages across the United States.³

The name OAHSPE, it claims, is derived from an ancient Paneric word – a word from the lost continent of Pan believed to be submerged beneath the pacific ocean – meaning Earth, Air and Spirit. It sets out to explain the falsity of the world’s other religions, there being only one true god above all, which it names Jehovih. 

But what might be of most relevance to the life and works of Margaret Keane is how the final books of Oahspe, the Book of Jehovih’s Kingdom on Earth, containing the prophetic Book of Shalam, were applied in practice. 

Just a year after the publication of Oahspe a group of faithists –  the name given to adherents to the disciplines of the text – met in New York and put in motion plans to establish a colony as prescribed in the book of Shalam. This colony was to be located Out West away from the corrupting influence of cities. It was “pledged to the resurrection of man”, its building blocks “the world’s cast-a-way children” ; it would be a “colony of babes [infants] from which a new and better race would evolve.” .

The colony’s goal therefore was to provide a solution to the problem of evil that had plagued restless minds. Minds like Margaret’s. 

Newbrough, his wife Frances Van De Water, and colony co-founder and wealthy financial backer, Andrew M. Howland would use newspaper stories and advertising to source unwanted babies and young waifs from America’s troubled cities and bring them to the colony that was established in 1884 on 1400 acres of land by a bend in the Rio Grande, six miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico.  

At first the faithists lived in tents but with the financial support of Howland, who hired Mexican labourers, several buildings were constructed including the Faternum, a single story building with a courtyard and a grand brick building named the “Children’s house”. They were noted to be the finest buildings in the area. The children, of all different ethnicities, were to be raised as equals, provided a vegetarian diet, and were to be instructed in various practical trades so that they too could help raise subsequent generations. The targets outlined in Oahspe were ambitious: “By the time the first 1000 children reached the age of 14 they would be masters of horticulture, botany, engineering and general mechanics” .

However, in an area barely impacted by the industrial age the difficulties of establishing a self-sufficient colony were compounded by the harsh terrain and the engineering difficulties associated with improving the land. There were misunderstandings about the colony’s mission and hierarchy. The variable work ethic of some of the members also caused friction. Despite great plans for the colony to sustain thousands – it at times employed hundreds of day labourers – but it never had more than fifty Faithist members. Some abandoned it due to the unending workload and several babies died during an outbreak of influenza that also claimed the life of the colony’s founder, Newbrough, in 1891.

Despite the loss of the faithist spiritual leader the drive to create the world anew was taken up by Newbrough’s financial backer Howland. Over the next ten years he married Newbrough’s widow, Frances Van De Water, invested in livestock and technologies to improve the land utilising novel irrigation systems, and provided assistance for the faithists by establishing a second nearby colony, named Levitica, that offered housing to those willing to work on the upkeep of the Shalam colony proper. Despite some years of progress the colony, having met with various environmental setbacks, became too impractical and costly to run. Floundering, it eventually closed in 1901.

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Newspaper archives provide a window into the living conditions at the Shalam colony. It was widely reported that the Shalam orphans were well looked after. Bathed daily, they had rocking horses and tricycles at their disposal, but also “the best books, the best music, the best amusements”. This insight is shared by Alice Parker, in an 1893 Boston Globe article. A new faithist convert about to head to the colony to dedicate her life to the upbringing of the children, she also says this about Newbrough’s reason for starting the colony, “…his sympathies were called into play by his going among the poor in New York. Particularly was he moved by the suffering of the children.”⁴

In 1945 writing in the aftermath of the Shalam colony collapse and writing under the name Jone Howlind, Newbrough’s daughter Justine B. Newbrough, shared this sentiment; “I feel quite sure that it was these pitiful little children, the plight of under-privileged children to be seen on every hand in large cities, that finally decided Newbrough to start Shalam colony” .⁵

The colony’s orphans, aged between three and fourteen years old, were reportedly adopted into new homes in Alabama, Dallas and Denver but little else is known about them or how they adapted to normal life after their unusual start.

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Summary

• Oashpe was a bizarre new American bible that made extraordinary claims
• Shalam colony was an experimental “communistic”⁶ project that collected children from around the United States.
• The children were the priority at the colony. They were well looked after.
• What happened to the children when the colony closed is mysterious.

Continue to Part 6 – Why it is Likely Margaret Discovered Oahspe

References

Footnotes

1. Bohemians With a Mansion, The Peninsula Times Tribune, 18 January 1964
2. It is believed by some that because Oahspe is so long, its point of view being as if written from above the Earth looking down, and because its cosmology appears to have gotten some things correct ahead of them being accepted by science – such as that planets form in swirling vortexes of space debris – that it could not have been a hoax. Martin Gardner writes in Urantia – The Great Cult Mystery (1995) “If Oahspe is a true revelation…it has to be the greatest book ever written, even more important to mankind than the Bible. If not true, it is either the work of a psychotic, or a monstrous hoax.”
3. The Pantagraph 20 Oct 1882
4. ON TO SHALAM, The Boston Globe, 1 April 1893
5. This implies that Newbrough consciously wrote the book of Shalam and that the idea for the colony came from him and his experience, and that it was not actually the product of automatic writing
6. The opinion of George Baker Anderson, writing in Out West journal, November 1906 shortly before the sale of the failed colony’s land