At the time he established his communities in Ulster County,
Father Divine, an African American, was based in Harlem, He was one of the best known Americans of his time. He was also highly controversial.
Time Magazine called him slick and inexplicable. When his followers were beginning to move into Ulster County, the New Paltz News reported that the county s people resent the very thought of their arrival.
Father Divine lifted the despairing from the gutter to self respect, but his methods troubled many observers. He commanded much wealth, but he mystified many critics as to where it came from. In the 1930s and 1940s, his movement was one of the most completely interracial movements in the US, but large numbers of Americans found this to be offensive.
During the Great Depression, when Divine s movement was feeding thousands of the hungry, he established his first community in Ulster County, in New Paltz. in 1935. His communities survived in the county until 1985 when the last one, in Kingston, was sold off.
Divine s communities were idealistic, nondenominational, unconventional. They were communities which Divine followers called collectively the Promised Land. After his death in 1965, the political scientist Leo Rosten called him adorable, and claimed he taught a sweet and beneficent faith, but added that he was also a fraud, a mountebank.
Divine s communities in Ulster County included farms, resorts, hotels, groceries , garages, and restaurants. They stretched from Milton, in the southern part of the county, north to the town of Saugerties, close to the Greene County border, and west into the Catskill Mountains near Samsonville. The location where these communities were most concentrated was High Falls. The most famous of these communities was Krum Elbow, directly across the Hudson River from President F, D. Roosevelt s home in Hyde Park.
In these utopian communities, the workers refused to be on relief. They refused to drink, smoke, gamble, use drugs, or borrow money. Only volunteers, they worked without pay, but accepted the food and housing and other necessities provided them. They were taught to work hard, sell their produce below market prices, and think positive. They were taught to have faith in God, but in the context of an unconventional interpretation of the Christian tradition, they were taught to regard Father Divine himself as a special manifestation of God. They were taught to avoid insurance, avoid Social Security, avoid engaging in sex, avoid medical care, but to believe in eternal life. During World War II, Divine taught nonviolence, as he long had, and he led many of his followers to refuse to fight.
While Divine s movement is now in decline and no longer exists as such in Ulster County, it survives elsewhere. It is now headed by the second Mrs. Divine, and is centered in the Philadelphia region.
The author,
Carleton Mabee, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. A retired Professor of History at SUNY, New Paltz, Mabee is the author of several books related to the mid-Hudson region. He lives in Ulster County, in Gardiner.
Author Mabee found himself fascinated by the Divine movement from the time he was a student at Columbia University in New York, and visited Divine communities in Harlem. He found himself wanting to understand what their practices were, and whether some of them worked and some did not.
Mabee's previous books include two biographies, one of Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and an artist, the other of Sojourner Truth, who grew up a slave but remade herself into a national figure as an advocate for blacks and women. They also include two books on railroad history, one on the Wallkill Valley Railroad, which ran from Kingston through Rosendale, New Paltz, and Gardiner, into Orange County, the other on the old railroad bridge over the Hudson at Poughkeepsie which is now being remodeled into a public walkway.
