Mirage Factory: Aimee Semple McPherson and 1920s L.A.

In a new installment of an ongoing series, LARB founder Tom Lutz reflects on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and the significance of the year 1925.

By Tom LutzFebruary 25, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Cultural Studies

• History

Editor’s Note: This is the second of 12 monthly articles on the centennial of 1925; some of it is excerpted from Tom Lutz’s 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia, to be published in March. For multimedia materials, see his website.

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THIS MONTH’S ARTICLE is a hybrid. The first half is an entry from my 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia on Aimee Semple McPherson, perhaps the most paradigmatically L.A. figure in the book. The second half is a review of Claire Hoffman’s brilliant new book Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, out this April from FSG.

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Aimee Semple McPherson

Aimee Semple McPherson sat down in July 1925, in the middle of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and wrote William Jennings Bryan a note of support. She told him that her “millions of radio church membership send grateful appreciation of your lion hearted championship of the Bible against evolution and throw our hats in the ring with you.” She would do her best to stop California schools from teaching evolution too. A Bruce Barton–level expert in PR, she sent copies of her letter to the newspapers and wire services. She also put on a well publicized all-night prayer service, a massive Sunday meeting, and then a Bible parade, all in the service of ensuring the “hanging and burial of monkey teachers.” Her fundamentalism was not of the “turn the other cheek” variety.

It is hard to overstate McPherson’s fame. After just five short years in Los Angeles, she had become the evangelist with the biggest following in the United States, outdrawing even Billy Sunday. Sizing up how “massive” her empire was, H. L. Mencken wrote:

[S]he had a plant almost as big as that of Henry Ford, with an auditorium seating 5300 customers, a huge Bible School, a radio broadcasting station, a flourishing publishing house, three brass bands, three choirs, two orchestras and six quartettes. She is today the most prosperous ecclesiastic in America and her annual net takings exceed those of Bishop Manning.

William Thomas Manning was the Episcopal bishop of New York City, and there is no particular reason for him to appear in this passage except that Mencken believed that one insult should never do where two or more were available. McPherson could command as many as 30,000 people at a revival meeting, sometimes causing the National Guard to be called up to help control the crowds. When she returned from Mexico after her (perhaps) kidnapping (more in a moment), 50,000 people gathered at Union Station to welcome her.

McPherson had a busy summer in 1925, in addition to stirring up her followers about the Scopes trial. She officiated at a wedding on the beach in Santa Monica, where the bride was attended by 20 bridesmaids, the groom by 20 groomsmen, and all 40 of them in bathing suits. Competing evangelist Robert Shuler, who also had a radio ministry on top of his analog flock, called it a “cheap and nauseating” gimmick “on a level with a leg show.” She had disappointed God, he said.

But in this and all things, McPherson knew how to get herself in the newspaper, how to keep people talking about her. In August, she was invited to give a speech on radio and religion at the Pacific Radio Exposition in San Francisco. There wasn’t enough time to drive back for her Sunday services, so she arranged to be flown up to San Francisco and back. The newspapers dutifully showed up to snap pictures of her climbing into the plane and waving goodbye. When the pilot tried to start the engine, however, he couldn’t get it to turn over. He got out his tools, changed the spark plugs, and then it started. They did another set of photographs, her waving to the cameras, and they started down the runway. Going fast, but still on the ground, they hit a large gopher hole, and the landing gear snapped off, the nose of the plane smashed into the runway, and the gas tank cracked, pouring fuel on her and the pilot. They got out safely. Her detractors said it was God telling her to stop the shenanigans. She said it was the Devil trying to stop her from spreading the gospel.

Herbert Hoover, who as secretary of commerce in the 1920s had jurisdiction over radio broadcasting, later told the story of a radio evangelist who would not stay in her assigned frequency on the radio dial (frequencies were unstable and could be hijacked; Hoover was trying to limit the chaos). He revoked her license to get her to comply. According to Hoover, she wrote back: “Please order your minions of Satan to leave my station alone. You cannot expect the Almighty to abide by your wavelength nonsense. When I offer my prayers to Him I must fit into His wave reception. Open this station at once.” This story has never been verified. Some historians believe it to be apocryphal, exaggerated, or misremembered. Jim Hilliker, for instance, claims that “minions of Satan” is a phrase that is found nowhere in the millions of words in the McPherson archives, and that there is no documentary evidence that McPherson sent a letter, or that her station was ever shut down.

McPherson was far from the only preacher with a radio ministry—Edmund Wilson wrote in his journal about hearing a 12-year-old evangelist on the radio in Los Angeles in 1925 “who converted dozens of souls nightly,” saying, “I want to see Jesus, don’t you? My Saviour so faithful and trew!” In 1922, though, she was the first woman to broadcast a sermon. She started on KHJ, the station owned by the L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler, but by 1924, she had opened her own station, KFSG, and taken with her the Times’ chief engineer, Kenneth Ormiston. (Ormiston was well known in the new world of broadcasting, an editor at Radio Doings magazine and a radio columnist for the L.A. Times.) She broadcast six days a week at a time when other religious organizations only aired on the Sabbath. She had services seven days a week, and the radio, she said, was her “cathedral of the air.” Although her anti-immigrant rhetoric and anti-Catholic, anti-socialist, and anti-modern stances belie it, she looked to radio to be an integrative force, speaking to “the black, the white, the yellow; the brown and red man, too. Brothers all sit side by side in the [radio] church with no color line. The rich and the poor, the old and the young, the sad and the gay of heart, the strong and the weak, the sick and the well, all worship at my shrine.”

Reviewing McPherson’s autobiography, In the Service of the King: The Story of My Life (1927), Dorothy Parker wrote, “It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.” Parker had a New York sophisticate’s distaste for everything to do with McPherson and admitted it was based on no firsthand knowledge. “I have never heard Mrs. McPherson preach,” she wrote, “a record which, Heaven helping me, I purpose keeping untarnished.”

Mencken, though, fresh off his Scopes trial coverage in 1925, saw her preach in Los Angeles at the Angelus Temple and developed a grudging respect for her:

For years she toured the Bible Belt in a Ford, haranguing the morons nightly, under canvas. It was a depressing life, and its usufructs were scarcely more than three meals a day. […] She was attracted to Los Angeles, it appears, by the climate. The Bible Belt was sending a steady stream of its rheumatic mortgage sharks in that direction, and she simply followed. The result, as everyone knows, was a swift and roaring success. The town has more morons in it than the whole State of Mississippi, and thousands of them had nothing to do save gape at the movie dignitaries and go to revivals.

McPherson has a “sacerdotal smile […] as wide as a bath towel,” but Mencken detects beneath it a great sadness. She is intelligent, he writes, “and so I suspect that she is by no means as happy as she tries to look.” Her book was published in 1927, after her scandal-plagued disappearance, reappearance, and perjury trial. As Mencken condensed the kidnapping episode to its essence: “[S]he alleged that she had been kidnapped, and the Los Angeles police alleged that she had been on a protracted week-end party with one of her male employees.” Mencken predicted that people would remember the testimony damning her long after they forgot the testimony that acquitted her. What actually happened when she went missing for 32 days has never been fully revealed. The reigning theory has been that she had gone off with Kenneth Ormiston, who had resigned as her engineer the day before she disappeared. Claire Hoffman has recently published the most complete account of this episode in Sister, Sinner (see below).

Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927) and Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927) used the McPherson story. The character of Sister Sharon Falconer in Elmer Gantry relies on “that important assistant, the press agent,” who had trained in “newspaper work, circus advertising, and real-estate promoting.” Lewis doesn’t follow her story strictly, but he indicts her promiscuity, her fraudulence, and her drive for power. In Oil! the newspapers report that preacher Eli Watkins has drowned at a local beach, as they had claimed when McPherson disappeared, and then rumors start that he has run off with a young female employee. Like McPherson, he emerges 30-some days later with a story of having been kidnapped by three people, two of them named Steve and Rosie (McPherson claimed three kidnappers, two named Steve and Rose). He returns to Angel City, where 50,000 people greet him at the train station. When Sinclair was running for governor of California in 1934, McPherson campaigned against him without naming him.

McPherson’s PR-focused, damage-control autobiography was not her only book. Before that, she published The Second Coming of Christ: Is He Coming? How Is He Coming? When Is He Coming? For Whom Is He Coming? (1921) and This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings of Aimee Semple McPherson, Evangelist (1923), both written before the scandal.

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Sister, Sinner

Everyone who writes about Aimee Semple McPherson needs to deal with that scandal of 1926, and since everyone involved was clearly lying, some of the court records have disappeared, and corruption was rampant in every official and church investigation, the record is far from clear. Claire Hoffman has looked at everything and had access to some archival materials from McPherson’s church that no previous researchers have seen. She has put together the most complete accounting yet of what happened. She presents the incident in great detail and with the investigative narrative drive of the Serial podcast.

As a true crime story and a basic, sordid human drama, it is fascinating enough, but Hoffman embeds it in larger frames as well. The first is the history of evangelicalism, which is again a fundamental Los Angeles story, beginning with the Azusa Street missions in the first decade of the 20th century. McPherson’s story is tied to that history from her youth onward, and she is arguably the most influential preacher in the first decades of Pentecostalism. “The spiritual landscape of Los Angeles was ready-made for her,” Hoffman writes, “a breeding ground for radical ideas on how to connect to God and self.” This is true not just for the various Christian sects and denominations—the 1920s also saw, for instance, the founding of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship and the first Vedanta Society temple in L.A.

Hoffman has long been interested in the question of belief, and how it functions in people’s lives. She has a divinity degree, and her previous book, Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood (2016), is a memoir of growing up in a community of followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She spent some time repudiating orthodox Transcendental Meditation beliefs as an adolescent and young adult—she received her mantra when she was not much more than a toddler—but the book is finally about how she came to respect her parents’ commitment and the core beliefs involved. McPherson is in some ways a limit case for such an investigation, given that she was a P. T. Barnum of the revival racket, serially dishonest and hucksterish in ways that make her ripe for the treatment she got from Mencken and Parker. But Hoffman ends the book with a visit to a centennial celebration of the founding of McPherson’s Angelus Temple, the first megachurch, and in talking to people there, she again walks away with a not-even-grudging respect. I’m Voltaire-strength anticlerical by nature—doubting Thomas—but Hoffman, in both these books, brings me along. She, too, can dish out the Menckeniana, for both the Rus (which is what the town kids called people who followed the guru) and for McPherson and her flock. Unlike Mencken and Parker, she has true compassion for the followers. She recognizes them, and like McPherson, it occurs to me, she manages to draw in even the disbelievers.

Hoffman also shows the way other powerful L.A. interests, like the group trying to lure the Olympics to Los Angeles in 1932, for instance, had an interest in quashing any investigation into her kidnapping. The city was selling sunshine, not noir—ironic, of course, because some of the corruption that protected her, like ambitious district attorneys and corrupt city councilmen, are staples of the genre. They wanted the story to die.

But for me, the most interesting section of the book is the epilogue, where Hoffman discusses her earlier work as a journalist doing celebrity profiles. She wrote major pieces on Amy Winehouse, Prince, Michael Jackson, and others, but as those three suggest, she has some experience interacting with ultrafamous people who then died from overintoxication. McPherson’s life, she writes, is another cautionary tale about the corrosive effects of fame. Even as Hollywood became the largest fame factory in the world (or, as Hoffman calls it, a “mirage factory”), McPherson remained among the most famous people in the country, and the story of her undoing is classic tragedy. Following multiple trials and lawsuits (some even with her own family), she died taking too many pills just before her 54th birthday—a truly sad end for a woman who accomplished what few preachers have before or since, and certainly no other woman had.