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From Pat Deveney's database:
To-morrow.
A Monthly Hand-Book of the Changing Order / A Magazine for people who think / Freedom's Own: Not Dominated or Guided by Money, Party, Creed or 'isms.
You should send for To-morrow, Today
1905--1909 Monthly
Chicago, IL. Language: English.
Publisher: To-Morrow . Editor: Oscar L. Triggs; Parker H. Sercombe.
1/1, January 1905-1909. This was one more of the radical reform journals of the period that "fearlessly exposed" current ills and endlessly expounded remedies therefor, all the while having an occasional good word to say about spiritualism (including in this case Lois Waisbrooker) and New Thought. Parker Holmes Sercombe (1860-1944) was born poor in Milwaukee and worked his way as a newsboy and editor and then invented the Parker Sercombe Racing Bicycle, which made his fortune. When the bicycle fad faded he headed to Mexico and founded the dubious but successful American Surety Bank and then returned to Chicago where with Oscar Lovell Triggs he founded the Spencer-Whitman Center, named after Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman, which came to house this journal's offices and which in 1906 and 1907 played a leading role in the police investigation of the pair's free love colony and then in Triggs' sensational divorce, which centered on the intimate activities of the colony's devotees. The journal also featured a poem by Whitman and published the poems of Carl Sandburg, who traded poems and his editorial work for room and board at the Spencer-Whitman Center. He described Sercombe as a "foggy philosophical anarchist." He was that. After the dissolution of his free-love colony, Sercombe survived as a lecturer and universal expert, gas station operator in Mexico, and then salesman in Los Angeles. As was to be expected in a commercial age, the journal also promoted its own "To-Morrow Health Home," which promised to "check debaucheries that 'preaching' and praying have never touched," and "To-Morrow School of Clear Thinking," and carried the advertisements of dozens of fringe New-Thought and radical schemes and institutes to gain wealth and success. Advertised in The Mountain Pine and in The Swastika, 1907-1908.
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To-Morrow Magazine, published at Chicago from about 1905 to 1907 by Parker Sercombe and associated with the Spencer-Whitman Center, is a characteristic product of that city's advanced-thought scene, in which New Thought, social radicalism, health reform and freethought were all one project. Its psychology is New Thought — success, concentration, the power of mind over circumstance — but its subject matter is politics and reform. It argued against imperialism and the large standing army, for Filipino independence, and against organised charity as a form of patronage that manufactures beggars; it defined democracy as a square deal for all and special privilege for none, and denied the name to anyone still wishing to exploit or be exploited. Alongside this run the drugless-living enthusiasms of the period, diet and vegetarianism, breathing and physical culture, and the anti-clerical inheritance of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. The magazine treated self-culture, social progress and bodily reform as a single continuous programme, and it is a good record of how easily those currents mixed in Progressive-era Chicago.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
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