The Blessed Golden State
Most people chiefly think of Chicago’s Parliament of Lectures held in 1893 as the occasion where Swami Vivekananda made his impactful appearance as far ass his work in America is concerned. While the Chicago lectures definitely made him well-known in America of the day, he did a lot of intense work for more than four years in America over two visits (1893-96) and 1899-1900.
He closed his work in America by spending six months in California, spread almost equally between Los Angeles in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area in the North. He personally considered the work in California as the best he did in the West.
Oddly enough, during his first visit when he stayed in America for three years, he never got to visit California. Perhaps the best was reserved for the last.
A Brief Background of the Second Visit to the West
The Swami, as is well known, first came to the United States via the Pacific route in August 1893. He attended the Parliament of Religions, which brought him immediate celebrity. He continued to work in America, spreading knowledge about various aspects of India’s rich civilization and its spiritual heritage. Around 1894, he began to focus more intensely on imparting spiritual teachings and also began to groom an intimate band of Western disciples. He published his four classics of spiritual life – Bhakti Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga, and Karma Yoga and thus put forth an integrated vision of different aspects of spiritual life. The Swami was clear that his ideal was to preach unto mankind their divinity and help them find ways of manifesting that in every movement of their life. He visited England too twice during this western sojourn and spread his message of Vedanta in that island nation, before he finally returned to India.
The news of his success had continuously reached India during the years he was in the West. Therefore, upon his return, Indians swarmed to welcome him as a national hero. His carriage was drawn by princes and common people alike. Seldom, it is said, had anyone been received in India anytime before, with so much natural affection and warmth as him. The Swami had then delivered a series of rousing lectures throughout the country, awakening his countrymen to their rich spiritual heritage and the concomitant responsibility to harness it for their own good and that of the whole world. He also pointed out the inadequacies in applications of the grand philosophy of Vedanta because of which, he was convinced, various social ills had crept in the Indian society. The Swami, as it were, awakened India from its slumber into a phase of conscious and constructive action. But his patriotism was no mere nationalist supremacism. He loved India profoundly and wanted her to grow to its full potential as he knew the world’s future welfare also depended on the exalted teachings that lay in the bosom of this hoary civilisation. At the same time, he also wanted India to learn things which other nations were better poised to offer. He always considered any civilisation as a work in progress than a neatly finished product.
In May 1897, Vivekananda also founded the Ramakrishna Mission Organization, formalised its aims and objectives, and framed basic norms and directive principles of training of monks. The Belur Math, the Order’s main seat, was established in the subsequent year in a piece of land purchased on the western banks of Ganges, across Calcutta. The Swami also continued his travels to in India, both in 1897 and 1898. During the latter year, many western disciples and followers, accompanied him to various parts of the country.
But the Swami’s health had undergone a marked deterioration, and he had to spend many months in recuperation, particularly in Darjeeling. While the vision of the Swami was no less than grand, both spatially and temporally, cutting across many a continent and several future centuries, it was, at the same time, severely impaired as far as financial resources were concerned. On many occasions the monastics and young entrants in the Order barely had any decent meals. Meanwhile, on his own pre-monastic family front, there were several challenges. His long-widowed mother, who had never got her due share of the ancestral property, had been living in great hardship. There was a litigation going on with the relatives for several years. The Swami, was deeply worried about his mother and two younger brothers. His western friends and followers, strongly suggested him to take another journey to the West, hoping that it would have a positive effect on his health. The Swami also thought that the visit might enable him to raise resources for his plans in India as well as help him propagate the highest teachings of Vedanta in the western world one more time. With this intent, along with his brother-disciple Swami Turiyananda, and Sister Nivedita, he left Calcutta in June 1899, with a plan to visit America after a brief interlude in England.
The Swami with his group arrived in England In July. After spending a month he came to the East Coast of the United States. There he spent time mostly at the Ridgley Manor (in Stone Ridge in upstate New York) in close company of people who understood him well, and were deeply affectionate and devoted to him and his mission. It was not even known then that a very prominent chapter of his work in the West, indeed his work as a World-Prophet in fullest stature, was still to come. It was only towards the end of November that the Swami decided to visit California, which, as mentioned before, he never had the occasion to explore, during his first sojourn in the United States.
Arrival
It was a stroke of special circumstances which brought him to the West Coast. The Swami along with two of his brother-disciples, Abhedananda and Turiyananda, and a few more disciples and admirers had been staying at Ridgeley Manor, a property belonging to the Leggets (Francis and Betty) who were admirers of the Swami and had been associated with him since 1895. The Swami had stayed at the same place on two occasions during his first visit to the West. In the summer of 1899 it was thought that Swamiji needed to rest and recuperate from his much-strained health. For this reason, the Leggetts had offered to host him at Ridgeley. His devoted friend, and Betty’s sister, Josephine Macleod was also there. Swamiji stayed there for around nine weeks.
It was during the stay at the Ridgley Manor that Joe, as Swamiji used to call Josephine, received a communication from a lady in Los Angeles that her brother who had been living in California, and whom she had not met for ten years, was severely ill. Joe decided to travel westward to see her brother who was not expected to live long. The lady who had called was one Mrs. Blodgett, wife of a business partner of Joe’s brother. When Joe was leaving for California Swamiji told her that he might visit the west coast should she be able to arrange some classes there among people interested in Vedanta.
Upon reaching the Blodgett house, Joe was surprised to see a large photograph of the Swami on the wall, just above the bed where her brother was lying. She asked Mrs. Blodgett whether she knew the man in the picture. Mrs. Blodgett composedly responded that if there was a god on earth then it was this man. Mrs. Blodgett then went on to tell Joe as to how completely awestruck she had been upon seeing and listening to him at the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago seven years before. Joe then revealed that Vivekananda was at that time staying as their guest in upcountry New York and asked whether she would want to host him at her place. Surprised as well as excited, Mrs. Blodgett readily expressed her wish to host Swamiji.
Joe’s brother passed away on 2nd November and in a month’s time Swamiji, who had stopped enroute at Chicago to meet his dear Hale family, stepped for the first time in California. He had boarded the AT & SF railway (popularly known as Santa Fe) at Chicago’s Dearborn Station on 30th November, immediately after the Thanksgiving, and after a sixty-five hour journey reached Los Angeles in the afternoon of 3rd December.
Swamiji, however, did not come immediately to Mrs Blodgett’s home but spent the first week in California with one Miss Spencer. Miss Spencer lived at the Stimson House, located at 2421 S Figueroa. Miss Spencer’s sister was Mrs. Stimson, a very wealthy widow whose husband had made great fortune in the lumber business. They had a fabulous house, indeed the most expensive house built in the city till then. Mr. Stimson had also built the first high-rise of six stories in Los Angeles, which was known as the Stimson Building. The house still stands but is now a convent for the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondelet.
Miss Spencer along with her elderly mother had moved to her sister’s Mansion just a year before Swamiji’s arrival in the city. For many years she had been nursing her ailing elderly mother in the last stage of her life. Miss Spencer was also related to Mrs. Blodgett and it is quite likely that the Spencers got to know about Swamiji through her.
Swamiji spent many an hour sitting on the floor observing in silence the life-force receding from the elderly Mrs. Spencer. He would say that death like birth was a mysterious phenomenon and thus Miss Spencer’s mother’s condition in her last days presented a study to him. Swamiji and Joe did not stay at the Stimson House for more than a week and moved to the house of Mrs. Blodgett.
In the weeks before the Swami’s arrival, Joe, always brilliant in her networking abilities, had done some groundwork regarding the latter’s upcoming visit. As she had visited India earlier and toured many places with the Swami, she was invited to speak at a Judge’s place. This Judge, one Mr. Cheney, was not just an eminent man in his field but, besides that, also a Unitarian, a lecturer at the University on constitutional law, and in his later life also an author of a popular book on metaphysics, “Can we be sure of Mortality?”
Besides Judge Cheney, Joe also met an equally, or perhaps an even more gifted person – Bernard Baumgardt – who hearing about Vivekananda became immediately enthused about meeting him. Mr Baumgardt was a young polymath – a master printer, expert seaman, mathematician, astronomer, connoisseur of music and art, and a polyglot fluently speaking nine languages. Mr Baumgardt offered to arrange Swamiji’s first lecture in the city on 8th December under the auspices of the Southern California Academy of Sciences of which he was a key member.
Interestingly, even before Swamiji’s arrival in the city, a Los Angeles weekly ran a long article on him titled ‘A Prince from India’. It announced: “Los Angeles is to be royally favoured in a very short time in the visit of Swami Vivekananda to this city. He is in very truth, an Indian prince – Prince in intellect, in knowledge and in that strange realm we vaguely call spiritual. There will be lectures presumably, and other mediums through which the men and women of the extremely western city may drink from the fountain of the Eastern Seer’s rare mind. It is a strange element to come into our modern world – a man who has lived the life of wisdom in the forest and mountains, and who nevertheless, is able to cope with our manners and customs, with our sentiments and interests, like one of the rest of us.”
The venue of the inaugural lecture was chosen to be the Blanchard Hall, a very prominent place in the town. The lecture was at eight o’ clock in the evening and the subject was the Vedanta philosophy. There were about six to eight hundred persons in attendance. The audience were enchanted upon hearing Swamiji who ended the lecture by saying “I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute.”
At the house of Mrs. Blodgett
After the initial few days at the place of Miss Spencer, Swamiji and Miss MacLeod moved to Mrs. Blodgett’s house. He stayed there for nearly three weeks, though it is possible that in between he accepted hospitality of a few more persons for shorter intervals. In her reminiscences Josephine MacLeod recalled:
“Every morning we would hear Swami chanting his Sanskrit from the bath, which was just off the kitchen. He would come out with tousled hair and get ready for breakfast. Mrs. Blodgett made delicious pancakes, and these we would eat at the kitchen table. Swami sitting with us; and such discourses he would have with Mrs. Blodgett, such repartee and wit, she talking of the villainy of men and he talking of even the greater wickedness of women! Mrs. Blodgett seldom went to hear him lecture, saying her duty was to give us delicious meals when we got back.”
A much longer description of the time is obtained through a letter from Mrs. Blodgett to Joe written within a couple of months of the Swami’s passing away. She recalled:
“he would come home from a lecture where he was compelled to break away from his audience, so eagerly would they gather around him, and rush into the kitchen like a boy released from school with ‘now we will cook.’
“I knew him personally but a short time, yet in that time I could but see in a hundred ways the child side of Swamiji’s character, which was a constant appeal to the Mother quality in all good women. He depended upon those near him in a way which brought him very near to one’s heart.
“Do you remember the time,” Mrs Blodgett continues in her letter, “he was showing me how he wound his turban about his head and you were begging him to hasten as he was already due at the lecture room. I said, ‘Swami, don’t hurry. You are like a man on his way to be hung. The crowd was jostling each other to reach the place of execution, when he called out. ‘Don’t hurry. There will be nothing interesting until I get there’. I assure you, Swami, there will be nothing interesting until you get there.’ This so pleased him that often afterwards he would say, ‘There will be nothing interesting till I get there’ and laugh like a boy.”
Swamiji also took a few informal classes during his stay with Mrs. Blodgett. After lunch if nothing interfered, Swamiji would lie in the garden hammock reading the classic ‘L’Homme et la Terre’ (‘The Earth and its inhabitants) – a six-volume work by the famous French geographer and social philosopher, Jacques Elisee Reclus.
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