Fear of Yoga

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The federal government was apparently prodded into action by such press reports. 'Agents are now quietly at work investigating the strange spread of these Oriental religions throughout this country,' the Washington Post reported in early 1912. The article listed a roster of female converts and their tragic ends: Miss Sarah Farnum 'gave her entire fortune' for a Hindu summer school. Miss Aloise Reuss, of Chicago, went to live in the Illinois Insane Asylum. Mrs. May Wright Sewell, of Indianapolis, Indiana, was made 'dangerously ill' by the teachings of her yogi.

During the years of the immigration backlash and the morality panic, even into World War I, government agencies enlisted private individuals to go undercover, and journalists did their part. Hearst's New York American, which had been tyrannizing Bernard (a.k.a. the Great Oom) and his yoga followers since 1910, began a new campaign in 1918 to dig up actionable dirt. After a few months, the paper turned over its findings to the New York district attorney's office in return for exclusive access to the bust. The page-one story rambled on for 130 column inches, proudly proclaiming the paper's role in hunting down Bernard's yoga cult. The headline was a classic: 'Twelve Cult Worshippers Taken in a Raid Upon Home of the Great Oom.'

In the 1920s, when tabloids became part of the journalistic landscape, yoga became part of the tabs' new 'love cult' obsession. Reporters found love cults from France ('Rich Worship Love Goddess Along Riviera') to San Francisco ('Orgies of Super-Love Cult Send Five to Jail'). Hearst's New York Journal gave the tabs a run for their money with takeouts like this: 'Latest Black Magic Revelations About Nefarious American Love Cults,' which included Bernard, who had combined yoga with baseball, vaudeville, and circuses in Nyack, New York, in the process convincing members of the Vanderbilt family to bankroll his efforts.

By then, America's second most famous swami, a young Calcutta mystic who went by the name Yogananda, had arrived in the United States. (His Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, is still in print.) Yogananda quickly built an American following for his 'Yogoda' brand of meditation-based yoga through relentless touring and speaking. 'You Americans exercise your bodies and brains too much and your will power too little,' he admonished, throwing himself from lotus position to a handstand in one motion. His followers purchased a hilltop retreat for his ashram outside Los Angeles that later became the Self-Realization Fellowship.

But even this holy man came in for his share of abuse. He was hauled into court on charges of property fraud in Los Angeles and vaguely threatened with immigration proceedings. He was run out of Miami by 200 angry husbands, as one newspaper reported in 1927: 'His life threatened by a delegation of indignant citizens, Swami Yogananda, East Indian love cult leader, was at a hotel tonight determined to stay in Miami 'and fight it out,' despite Police Chief N. Leslie Quiggs's order that he leave town immediately.'

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