The Picture Odyssey of Ben Bloom Elijah

It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.

(P 26)

At about noon on Wednesday, 27 January 1904, the Oceanic Steamship Company's ship Sonoma docked in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, where it would remain until the next day en route from San Francisco to Australia (see Figure 1). The Sonoma has a place in literary history; in 1916, it was the vessel on which W. Somerset Maugham was quarantined in the harbor of Pago Pago, American Samoa, where he was inspired to write "Rain," a short story about a missionary hell-bent on saving souls.¹

The 1904 voyage also had a religious character, for the passengers who debarked in Honolulu included the party of John Alexander Dowie, the leader of a cult called the Christian Catholic Church. By that point in his career, Dowie was wearing Levitical robes as he preached in his tabernacle at Zion City, Illinois,² and he had begun referring to himself as Elijah the Reformer (see cover image).³

The tabernacle and its congregation made an impressive spectacle (see Figure 2). Preaching total immersion, abstinence from alcohol and pork, and healing by prayer, Dowie gathered thousands of followers at Zion City, a capitalist Utopia with streets gridded in the pattern of a Union Jack. It had factories and schools, a university, and, at the heart of the enterprise, a bank. "Where God rules, man prospers," ran the Zion City slogan. But the bank operated on Ponzi principles, and in 1904 Dowie, an old man by then, was desperately touring the world on a mission to convert more depositors.

He was accompanied all the way by excited coverage in the press for his various ministries had been dogged by scandal ever since the 1880s—first in Australia, where he had emigrated from Scotland as a boy in 1860, and then in the United States, where he moved in 1888. Five months after his visit to Hawaii, for example, the 13 July 1904 Honolulu Evening Bulletin reported the following on p. 6:

In Dublin, two days before Bloomsday, the 14 June 1904 Freeman's Journal carried an earlier bulletin from the expedition, this one headed "Dowie in London" and referring sarcastically to "'Dr.' Dowie" (8).

So when Dowie stepped down the gangplank of the Sonoma on 27 January, his arrival in Honolulu was front-page news, and the tone of the headlines was knowing.⁴ But the pictures under the headlines told a different story, and a part of that story's vocabulary turned out to be the now-interesting word "Zionism." There on page 1, the word taught the Honolulu of 1904 to read it in association with a group of portraits nestled in a fashionable matte surface (see Figure 3).

The matte itself is printed with an art-nouveau design. As a term, "art nouveau" may not have been widely known to readers of The Pacific Commercial Advertiser in 1904, but its defining whiplash curve is a living form within which everyone in Hawaii has always been at home. What may have been the fascinating chic nature of the exotic in the Zion City studio of Deacon Ernest Williams, Stenographer and Photographer, was only part of an everyday coiffure in Honolulu, where flowers are generally worn on the body. In Honolulu, as Andrew Marvell observed about a similar locale, all that is made is annihilated to a green thought.⁵ There, under the flowers, sarcastic quotation marks do not really work. In a green space, everything thrives, and everything seems equally worthy of love. You might call the islands another Zion. In accordance with that happy Hawaiian norm, the Advertiser's direct reporting on Dowie's advent came to scoff but remained to pray. It prayed, too, in the language of Dowie's bank: over the sacrament of a miraculously large tip.