The Mad Sculptor (9 page)

As Irwin’s message spread throughout the South and Midwest, he met with bitter, sometimes violent, opposition. More moderate holiness leaders denounced him as a “mystical renegade” promoting a heretical doctrine. At one camp meeting, a mob of rowdies broke up his wildly convulsive services, tearing down and burning his tents, pistol-whipping some congregants and hurling chairs at others. At another, one of his closest associates was plunged into a horse trough and nearly drowned.
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Such hostility did nothing to daunt “the apostle of fire.” “People may oppose us,” he declared, “preachers may preach against the experience, and devils may howl, but we have come to preach blood and fire till Jesus comes.” In a pamphlet titled “Pyrophobia (A Morbid Fear of Fire),” he lashed out at his critics, deriding them as mealymouthed defenders of a “fossilized” faith and assuring his followers that “God would soon strike dead those who opposed his ministry.”
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For two years, beginning in 1896, Irwin brought his fiery crusade to two dozen states, proclaiming the glory of the “blissful, burning, leaping, love-waves of God’s living fire” and thundering against the vices of the age, from “the handling of tobacco in every form” to the “use of slang language” to the wearing of such “prideful” adornments
as male neckties (“I would rather have a rattlesnake around my neck than a tie,” he declared).
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Even while decrying every stimulant from cigars to coffee to Coca-Cola, however, Irwin himself seemed addicted to ever-increasing doses of ecstatic experience. By 1899, he was trumpeting a series of new, even more explosive works of grace: the baptisms of dynamite, lyddite, selenite, and oxydite, guaranteed to “utterly demolish” the “strongholds of Satan,” blast “into atoms his deepest laid and most systematic plots and plans,” and “blow sin back to hell.” Critics, convinced of his growing fanaticism, suggested that the only blessing Irwin lacked was “the baptism of common sense.”
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Irwin was at the height of his power and influence when, in 1900, his world combusted. In the spring of that year, his followers were stunned by reports that he had been spotted in Omaha, drunk and smoking a big cigar. Enemies within the holiness movement began mocking him in print as the “Whiskey Baptized” preacher. Rumors of financial chicanery also circulated, one critic claiming that “at times, the collections entrusted to him could not be accounted for.” Later, an even more shocking revelation came to light: that Irwin’s “life for many years alternated between the pulpit and the harlot house. He would go from the pulpit to wallow with harlots the rest of the night.”
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Publicly confessing to a life of “open and gross sin,” Irwin resigned from his church in disgrace and dropped from sight. Several years would pass before he resurfaced.

The modern Pentecostal movement was born on January 1, 1901, in a small midwestern Bible school run by evangelist Charles Fox Parham. A preacher since his early adolescence, Parham had crossed paths with revivalists, faith healers, and holiness ministers of various stripes, including Benjamin Hardin Irwin. Impressed with the wild emotionalism of Irwin’s followers, Parham came to share the belief in a work of grace beyond conversion and sanctification. Unlike Irwin, however, he concluded that the one true sign of this “third baptism” was not an overwhelming experience of holy fire but the
miraculous onset of glossolalia—the gift of tongues, the power bestowed upon Jesus’s disciples on the feast day of Pentecost, as recorded in the Book of Acts: “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.…And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
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Establishing his headquarters in Topeka, Kansas, Parham started an educational institute, the Bethel Bible College. In late December 1900, his students undertook a concerted effort to receive the gift of tongues. At around 7:00 p.m. on New Year’s Day, one of them, thirty-year-old Agnes Ozman, asked her teacher to lay his hands upon her. He did so and began to pray. “I had scarcely repeated three dozen sentences,” Parham later recounted, “when a glory fell upon her, a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.” In short order, the entire student body, along with Parham himself, was speaking in tongues.
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Over the next few years, Parham and a band of young acolytes spread the Pentecostal message into Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. In January 1906, he opened a Bible training school in Houston. Among the twenty-five students who signed up to hear Parham lecture on “the Holy Spirit in His different operations” was William J. Seymour.
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The Louisiana-born son of former slaves, the thirty-six-year-old Seymour had taken up preaching several years earlier after surviving a near-fatal bout of smallpox. Eager to learn from Parham, he was allowed to listen in on a few weeks’ worth of lectures from the hallway outside the classroom, safely segregated from his white brethren. In February 1906—having imbibed Parham’s belief in glossolalia as the true “Bible evidence” of third baptism—Seymour accepted an invitation to preach in Los Angeles. By the beginning of April, he had moved his services into a boxy, ramshackle building on Azusa Street.

Within a matter of weeks, Parham’s preaching had sparked an explosion
of religious hysteria that “beggared description. Men and women would shout, weep, dance, fall into trances, speak and sing in tongues, and interpret their messages into English.”
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In the third week of April, the
Los Angeles Times
ran a page-one story, describing the “riot of religious fervor” at the Azusa Street Mission, where the wildly gesticulating congregants “work themselves up into a state of mad excitement,” which “ends in a gurgle of wordless prayer.…They claim to have ‘the gift of tongues’ and to be able to comprehend the babel.”
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As news of the revival spread across the nation, mobs of people flocked to Azusa Street, some merely to gawk at the delirious antics of the “holy rollers” (as critics branded the worshippers) but most to experience the Pentecostal baptism for themselves. By late 1906, the movement claimed at least thirteen thousand adherents who had spoken in tongues.
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Among them was Benjamin Hardin Irwin.

As he reported in an issue of the holiness magazine
Triumphs of Faith
, Irwin’s embrace of Pentecostalism took place on Christmas Day 1906, when he renounced his former belief in spiritual pyrotechnics and began speaking in tongues.

I felt my lips and tongue and jaw being used as they had never been used before. My vocal organs were in the hands and control of another, and the Other was the Divine Paraclete within me. He was beginning to speak through me in other tongues.…He caused me to use words which I had never heard or conceived of before. I was enabled to speak with greater fluency than I had ever spoken in my native English.…Since that time, I have been used of God in speaking many times in Chinese, Hindoostani, Bengali, Arabic, and other languages unknown to me.

Following this transformative experience, Irwin became an Azusa Street missionary, “leading Pentecostal services from California to Oakland.”
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Exactly what had transpired in the time between Irwin’s scandalous resignation from the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church he had
founded and his reemergence on Azusa Street is, for the most part, a mystery. From the few surviving records of that period, however, we do know one crucial fact. During that six-year stretch, he took a second wife and sired three sons with her.
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Her maiden name was Mary Lee Jordan. Born in Carthage, Texas, in 1870, she came from an old Southern family that, while boasting a number of prominent “businessmen, judges, and men of wealth,” was known for “a certain degree of mental instability.” One of her brothers “was a known sex pervert who had been sterilized after it was found that he had been committing sodomy upon his young nephew.” Another suffered from “mental amnesia.” Her sister was “described as excitable and emotional,” her mother “was adjudged by authorities as insane,” and her father was “said to have been impetuous, highly nervous, and to have been shot by an enemy while on horseback.”
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Surviving descriptions of Mary are full of contradictions. Some say that she was “college trained,” others that she had a “secondary school education.” At times, she is characterized as “easy-going,” at others as possessing a “nervous, high-strung temperament.” She is sometimes portrayed as a semi-invalid who, by her own admission, “was not brought up to work,” though documents indicate that she “worked as a washerwoman and cleaning lady to make a home for her sons.” All accounts agree on one point, however: that her most salient trait was her “extreme religious fanaticism.”
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She dated her spiritual awakening to an experience that occurred in her early girlhood. As she later testified, she “was walking at night” when, all at once, she “saw a ball of light, fell down on her knees, prayed all night and was converted.”
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Soon she was swept up in the fast-rising tide of the holiness movement. She appears to have met her charismatic husband-to-be around the time of his sudden plunge from grace. They were married in Canada in 1902.

Their first son was born the following year. As with all their children, his name would reflect the extravagant zeal of his parents: Vidalin Bathurst Irwin, after the famed Icelandic bishop Jon Vidalin and the Reverend Jess Bathurst, one of Benjamin’s closest associates
in the holiness movement. Their youngest son, born six years later, would be christened Pember in honor of G. H. Pember, English evangelist and author of such works as
The Antichrist Babylon and the Coming of the Kingdom, The Great Prophecies of the Centuries Concerning Israel and the Gentiles
, and
Mystery Babylon the Great
. Both Vidalin and Pember would grow up to be hardened criminals and do long stretches in prison for assorted felonies.

Their middle brother would outdo them both in iniquity. He was born in a gospel tent during a massive camp meeting held in Arroyo Seco Park, just outside Pasadena, on August 5, 1907. No doctor was there to assist with the delivery. His first name was a tribute to one of his father’s spiritual heroes, the seventeenth-century French theologian François Fénelon, while his middle name commemorated the place of his own birth: Fenelon Arroyo Seco Irwin. The world would come to known him by other names: Robert Irwin. The Beekman Hill Maniac. The Easter Sunday Slayer. The Mad Sculptor.

6

The Brothers

B
ENJAMIN IRWIN
’
S PENTECOSTAL
baptism did nothing to reform his character. Even after receiving the blessing of tongues—the supposed sign of his spiritual cleansing—he continued to consort with other women. His long-suffering wife was well aware of his infidelities. “He was definitely immoral,” Mary would later report, “and a slave to his passions.”
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Even worse than his womanizing, however, was a secret she learned after nearly nine years of marriage: Benjamin had never bothered to divorce his first wife. He was not only a philanderer but a bigamist, too. In early 1910, not long after Mary made this shocking discovery, Benjamin Irwin deserted his family, running off with a younger woman.

Burdened with the sole support of three young sons, Mary took on a number of menial jobs. Her chronically poor health, however—which proved resistant to the divine healing promised by her faith—made it impossible for her to work on a regular basis. Often she was bedridden. With the pittance she earned as a part-time house cleaner and laundress—never more than a few dollars a day—she kept her children fed on whatever meager provisions she could afford. Their
diet was heavy on potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. Often, they were reduced to begging day-old bread from neighborhood bakers.

They moved repeatedly from one run-down section of Los Angeles to another, finally settling in a ramshackle cottage on Omaha Street. The place had no indoor plumbing or electricity and was so cramped that the boys took turns sleeping on the porch. Its interior decor featured stretched flour sacking on the walls and a few old sticks of furniture. The sole item of value was Mary’s prized pump organ. A talented musician, she would gather her sons in the evening and lead them in singing “He Calleth Thee,” “I’ve Been Washed in the Blood,” “Resting Safe with Jesus,” and other favorite Pentecostal hymns.
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Religion remained the center of her life. She awoke at five each morning to pray for an hour and spent every available minute at the Azusa Street Mission, seeking respite from her troubles in the ecstatic transports of Pastor Seymour’s revival. Her middle son—“intensely devoted to his mother” in his early childhood—often accompanied her to the meetings. Throughout his life he would carry “memories of religious fervor, fanaticism and terror”—of men and women babbling in unknown tongues and offering witness to the miraculous cures effected by “hysterical prayer.” After one frenzied service, he ran home through a storm, shouting, “I’ll be good! God save me! I’ll be good!”
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His father exposed him to a very different side of existence. Once, when Fenelon was five, Ben paid him an unexpected visit and ended up taking him “downtown to a house where two women lived” (as Irwin later recalled). “These women were very nice to me and they put me in a room and my father went away with these women for an hour or two. The women were about thirty years old.” It wasn’t until many years later, of course, that he understood the purpose of his father’s visit to the house where the two nice women lived.
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