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THE BALLARD SHOW GOES ON THE ROAD

 
 
By Gerald B. Bryan
 
In this first ten-day class held at Chicago in the summer of 1934 was a man who innocently, it seems, became the victim of the Ballard strategy. This man was one of William Dudley Pelley’s faithful workers, whom we mentioned in the last chapter, a prominent Silver Shirter and treasurer of the organization. He had read the Ballard book, Unveiled Mysteries, then just out, and, after some correspondence with its author, went to Chicago to attend this first ten-day class.
 
Here was an opportunity for the financially embarrassed Ballards to really start their movement and get out of their economic doldrums. This man’s wide experience with the Pelley organization could be used, and his contact with key Legionnaires throughout the country would be just what they needed to promote their own religion-patriotic movement. So they did what they could to swing him their way.
 
No doubt the former Pelleyite was influenced into sincerely believing the Ballards had something to give the world. He had battled hard for Pelley in the court action against him in Asheville, N.C., and now he was discouraged and somewhat disillusioned as well. The Ballard metaphysics seemed a heaven compared to what he had gone through in fighting Pelley’s political battles. The two metaphysical systems were very similar, but the ideality and beautiful summer land of ease and plenty pictured by the Ballards in their book intrigued him as nothing else ever had.
 
Were not the never-failing Ascended Masters in charge of the new order and not a storm-centered Pelley? They in their divine power and wisdom would bring in the new Republic. They would bring a heaven on earth. They would emancipate humanity from the three thieves-disease, poverty, and death. It would all happen in perfect divine order, without revolution, court actions, militant Legionnaires, racial hatreds, brown shirts, white shirts, silver shirts, or any of the storm-troop trappings of a world besieged by human leaders dominated by fascistic desires and principles.
 
All this and much more, in effect, had been stated in that marvelous new book for the New Age — Unveiled Mysteries. Lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and even hard-headed business men had read it, and, after looking over the topsy-turvy world, were persuaded in spite of themselves to believe it. So was Pelley’s treasurer. Was it not a way out of all the mess?
 
The “Accredited Messengers of the Ascended Masters” lost no time in their efforts to crystallize these thoughts. In a letter to Pelley’s treasurer dated September 6, 1934, written and signed in pen and ink by Guy Ballard himself, the senior messenger says:
 
“Blessed Brother, I have no right to say this, but I know it is right to cut yourself completely loose from Pelley in every way.” The outcome of the matter was the Pelley’s trusted employee became the “Associate Director of the Saint Germain Activities.” For three months he promoted the Ballards on the lecture platform in the east until an automobile accident, which happened when he stepped out of the Ballard car, cut short his usefulness to “Saint Germain” and his Messengers.
 
Pelley in a special bulletin to his people describing his difficulties with the courts of North Carolina, which he graphically entitled “The Battle of Asheville,” commented on the defection of his former supporter in this wise:
 
“One real shadow cast over the proceedings was the word received on the fourth day of the trial that our former Treasurer, who had quit the Silver Shirt work called Liberation people together to sell them instead on the work of the Ballard King Group in Chicago, had suddenly met with a terrible auto accident in Baltimore and been rushed to the Johns Hopkins Hospital with a fractured skull and compound fracture of the left leg.”
 
“Strange, strange indeed,” very meaningly commented the Silver Shirt chief, “are the denouement of events in the lives of those who take up the Silver-shirt work and then turn back.” And then he goes on to recount the misfortunes of other workers who had deserted the cause.
 
Again the parallelism between the two movements, and their methods of holding their people, is inescapable. But the Ballards and their “Masters,” as we shall find, have gone much further than the Pelley in putting the fear of disaster into the minds of those who “turn back.”
 
As might be expected, considering this former treasurer’s influence among the Pelleyites, the first “I AM” audiences were recruited largely from members of the Silver Shirts organization. And so the Saint Germain “Mighty I AM” movement got well under way right from the start. “Saint Germain: had started to build his movement on the foundation of another one, just as he had planned.
 
Through the efforts of the former Silver Shirter the first out-of-town class was held in Philadelphia during the early part of October, 1934. The Ballards chose not to use their real names, for reasons which will later be clear, and so they were introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Godfre Ray King, “Accredited Messengers of the Ascended master Saint Germain.”
 
This was the real start of the movement, although the foundation for it had been made in 1932, and even a year a two before when Edna Ballard was holding secret classes while her husband was “traveling in the Far East,” or for other reasons (to be discovered) only occasionally showing up at the classes.
 
From 1934 on, beginning at Philadelphia, the Mighty I AM movement began to take hold of the imagination and fancy of metaphysical and patriotic people. Starting with thirty persons the first night, the attendance grew until toward the end of the ten days a hundred and fifty were in attendance.
 
People wanted the things that Mr. and Mrs. Godfre Ray King so authoritatively promised, and they were willing to pay for them. At the close of the class the Ballards and their Associate Director divided 300.00 between them as clear profit.
 
It was sadly needed, for despite the enormous stores of gold assertedly held by Saint Germain in his private retreat in the mountain, the Ballards were in most straightened financial circumstances. They made no secret of the fact that they even used their rent money due on their modest Chicago bungalow to pay their railroad fare to Philadelphia to start their movement.
 
Saint Germain with his discourses was most liberal, but with his gold he was most penurious. Despite the fact that her assertedly had gold nuggets, coins, and “Spanish gold lost at sea,” all neatly stored away in a secret retreat in the mountain, his own Accredited Messengers had to beg, borrow, and bargain to get out this “Ascended Master” gentle-mans’s own books. Not one cent of it came from the stored wealth of this modern Croesus. It came from the pocketbooks of the “Beloved Students” in dimes and dollars and gold, for the audiences were requested in the early days not to put copper pennies into the collection plate. Gold and not copper was to be the symbol and god of this cult.
 
From Philadelphia the Godfre Ray Kings went to New York, then to Boston. In both places they stirred the psychic waters to some degree with their claims and promises. By the time these lectures were over, the expectant students in Philadelphia were clamoring for more “Ascended Master Miracles.” These miracles, of course, were only on paper, as it were, but they were accepted by the Beloved Ones on a sort of Psychic promissory note.
 
So a return engagement was staged in the City of Brotherly Love, with similar successes for the Ray Kings, but without the promised miracles for the Beloved Students.
 
And before a month was scarcely up, the hurrying New Yorkers were calling for another ten-day class, This Saint Germain graciously agreed to, but again it was without benefit of miracles.
 
The great Mighty I AM movement was now well under way, both financially and metaphysically speaking. But in those early days it was only a dim shadow of its coming grandeur, only a side show compared to the later five ring performance which swept on from city to city luring the unsuspecting with psychic pink lemonade and other sure-fire circus ballyhoo.
 
Like most road shows the Ballard extravaganza followed in the wake of the seasons. In the winter it was found in sunny California or Florida, with, however, the Golden State winning out most of the time. In the spring and fall it traveled to favored eastern cities. In the hot summer months it lingered near the cool breezes of the pacific. “Saint Germain,” the director of the show and the one responsible for its itinerary, has always been most sensitive to the physical comforts of his Messengers.
 
Fresh from these early successes on the Eastern Coast, the two Kings and their son Donald moved southward, stopping over for a ten-day class at out Nations’s capital during the early part of January, 1935.
 
It must have been with strange feelings of personal possession that the Ballards parked their newly acquired Ford car in political Washington. Here, allegedly, was the scene of the political labors of their mysterious Comte de St. Germain in his endeavors to bring about his “New Government” in America. He had promised his “Friends of Long Ago” —the growing “I AM” family— they would have a part in it. And surely his own “Accredited Messengers,” would not exactly be forgotten in the new dispensation.
 
Indeed, Guy Ballard, so we are informed, had held a very high office during a former incarnation in this very city of Washington, and had a name to which all Americans, including little school children, pay special reverence on stated occasions. We shall a little later tell all about this.
 
So here was Ballard, his wife and son again back in the city of his past achievements. And right at his elbow was the mighty Saint Germain and a whole legion of “Ascended Masters.”
 
After this little sojourn at the American capital, Ballard and his family moved on for further fields to conquer, but left a promise to return to this center of the Nation’s life with more power of the “Light Rays” than before.
 
Their design was to take in the solid South and bring it under “Ascended Master” domination. But Circumstance is ever the maker and breaker of empire, and their day was not exactly to break with full glory in the South.
 
The tragic accident to their Associate Director, which occurred on the night of their last lecture in Washington, intervened to check their fast-building Ascended Master empire.
 
As this man stepped out of the Ballard car, he was hit by a fast-moving automobile which came tearing along in the early morning hours of January 13, 1935, and this faithful servant of the Ballards, one whom Saint Germain frequently called his “pal,” lay maimed and apparently dying in the roadway.
 
For months he was totally incapacitated for any further use either to Saint Germain, who had promised faithfully to protect him from any harm, or to the Ballards who had guaranteed him the protection of the entire Cosmic Host. However, apparently not having any faith in their own powers of healing or those of their Master, they wired a physical-plane mental healer in a nearby state for help, and left their friend and Associate Director in a critical condition in the hands of the surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
 
With recovery came gradual disillusionment for this man. He wrote us in 1936, shortly after we had published the first brochure exposing some of the hoax of this cult. We are indebted to him for supplying documents and information concerning the early beginnings of this movement. Below are a few excerpts from his correspondence at that time:
 
“You may be interested in knowing that I am the poor Sap who found the Ballards stranded out in Chicago, and thinking they really had something that would benefit humanity, I took them out and started them on their mad conquest.
 
“I took them to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Washington; and after finishing at Washington and leaving there, I was hit by an auto, thrown a hundred feet and then run over. I was terribly mangled, my head being terribly fractured and my left leg broken. . . .
 
“I was driving their car. . . . They gave out that my accident happened because I wasn’t in the circle of Light with which they had surrounded the car; yet, later on, in St. Petersburg while Ballard, with Don driving, was in the car, they had an accident. The car was so demolished they had to get a new car and Ballard couldn’t finish the classes. I was told he had a rib or two broken. . . .
 
“I surely should like to see them stopped from their lying and deceiving. They told it here in Philadelphia that the real _____ [naming himself] died in the hospital and the present _____ [himself ] now walking around is another entity occupying this body!
 
“I had no business to tie up with such people. It is a terrible thing to me and has preyed terribly on my mind and my soul for releasing and starting the terrible thing which they represent.”
 
After the accident to this man, the three divinely-appointed Messengers turned their Ford car southward and continued doubtlessly in a none-too-happy frame of mind toward the sunny climes of Florida. They passed through Richmond during a blinding snowstorm with Mrs. Ballard fighting a throat cold which she had acquired during the two closing days of the Washington class. At last they reached West Palm Beach for their scheduled ten-day class, but the South was not so easily taken in as the North, financially or metaphysically, causing Mr. Ballard to write: “The Love Gifts were less in West Palm Beach than usual.”
 
It was in Miami, however, that the Messengers met with the most provoking circumstances. The Ballard contact-man there, a former Silver Shirter, was delegated to make the arrangements for the usual ten-day class, hire a good hall, and do the other things which good lecturers like to have well done.
 
But the hall selected was not very satisfactory. In fact, Mr. Ballard wrote to a friend on February 7th in his own handwriting saying: “The hall he got here isn’t fit for a dog fight, let alone an Ascended Master Activity.”
 
It seems that Saint Germain, who attends so well to more important matters, not only let his own Messengers down in the matter of a lecture hall, but other matters as well, for on March 13th Messenger Ballard, who promises his students absolute mastery over circumstances, wrote: “You will never know the forces we have been pitted against since we left Washington.”
 
What some of these “forces” were will now be told.
 
It appears the Ballard contact-man in Miami had come to the conclusion that despite the Accredited Messengers’ claims and vaunted power over circumstances, they were just like other ordinary people — subject to little provoking happenings as well as to tragic events. He found that Mrs. Ballard was suffering from a cold, that daddy Ballard had a temper when things didn’t go right, that son Donald could use on occasions un-Ascended Master invectives, that their Associate Director had just had a tragic automobile accident in the service of the Ascended Masters, and that Saint Germain himself was conspicuous by his continued and unexplained absence at the hall and elsewhere.
 
He forthwith decided that the whole thing was a hoax and concluded he might as well play this little game of “Saint Germain” himself. So one night he got down to the hall early before the crowds had arrived, padlocked the door and put a sign on it reading:
 
“CLOSED BY ORDER OF SAINT GERMAIN!”
 
 
Mr. Ballard in describing this tragic little incident in a letter dated February 12, said:
 
“He is a fiend, the most vicious I have met, and don’t anybody try to tell me he is not. On the door in typewriting, read, ‘Closed by Saint Germain’s Order,’ showing he was trying to assume my Authority with Saint Germain. That is Insanity.”
 
We learn here that instead of Saint Germain having authority over his own messenger, Messenger Ballard has authority over his own Master — a queer reversal of the time-honored relationship, giving the suspicion that the high and mighty Saint Germain is nothing more than Ballard’s man Friday.
 
Such incidents as related were but some of the forces against which Ballard said they had been pitted since leaving Washington, as we shall see, proving that “Whom the Ascended Master loveth he chasteneth.”
 
Under the instruction of Saint Germain himself, they were told to arrange classes at St. Petersburg, but as this all-knowing Ascended Master from the Seventh Octave of Light did not know that this saintly old city exacts a $500 lecture fee for itinerant lecturers, which was not forthcoming from his gold reserves at his secret mountain retreat, the idea of lecturing there wasn’t exactly feasible even for Saint Germain’s Accredited Messengers.
 
His Messengers, therefore, had to arrange for their class at Pass-a Grille, a fishing town about twelve miles from St. Petersburg, which did not exact a cover charge to this feast of the Mighty I AM.
 
But here new tragedy struck out of the blue. Messenger Ballard had told the good Florida people about his marvelous protection, that nothing could hurt him, and the Magic Presence manuscript had told of his body of “Immortal Endurance.” Mrs. Ballard was holding the fort at the lecture hall in Pass-a-Grille waiting for her husband and son to show up so that the meeting could begin. Minutes passed, then hours, and not even Saint Germain, who knows all the secret agreements of European diplomats and the sublime mysteries of the universe, divulged the news to the waiting audience that son Donald had driven their new Ford car into a ditch, and with it Saint Germain’s own senior Messenger!
 
Donald, not having a body of immortal endurance, was uninjured, but Mr. Ballard’s immortal body sustained a couple of broken ribs.
 
To the faithful, such a thing will doubtless seem impossible, but we quote from Guy Ballard’s letter written to a friend under date of April 2, 1935:
 
“Your beautiful letter received at Pass-a-Grille and I would have answered it from there but out car turned over and my ribs were fractured and I am just now catching up my correspondence.” These happenings, however, did not permanently dampen the Ascended Master ardor of the Accredited Messengers. The goal was westward toward the peaceful Pacific, to the land of promise, Southern California, and especially to that favored Los Angeles region which has ever been the mecca for things metaphysical and unusual.
 
Saint Germain’s advance agents, mostly disillusioned Silver Shirters, had been contacted and everything was ripe for the entry of the Accredited Messengers of Saint Germain into the city of the Angels.
 
Glowing accounts of these marvelous people had been spread among the metaphysical elect of Los Angeles, and they in turn had passed the good news on to their students and friends. No bill boards splashed the countryside, but the telephonic wires were hot with the news of the near-arrival of Comte de St. Germain’s Accredited Messengers.
 
A few of the more prominent metaphysical leaders and teachers were invited to meet the Messengers privately at their hotel when they arrived. These private interviews and first classes were largely successful because of the enthusiastic acclaim for the Messengers by a man of prominence in the occult field, both here and abroad, whom the Ballards had been fortunate to secure as their new manager after the unfortunate accident of their former Associate Director.
 
At these private interviews and during the first classes Mrs. Ballard dressed simply and unostentatiously. It was not until the flood gates of wealth opened up in Los Angeles through the book sales and love gifts of students that this simplicity changed to the gorgeousness which later has characterized her every appearance. During these first interviews and classes she spoke with seeming authority of her close contact with her beloved Master. And while Mr. Ballard, meek and spiritual looking, let his more expressive wife do most of the direct selling, the far-away mystic look in his eyes spoke volumes.
 
This effective and characteristic teamwork put them over with many of the metaphysical leaders, and, as a result, these Los Angeles teachers announced to their classes the arrival of the Accredited Messengers of Comte de St. Germain, “Der Wunderman” of 18th-century Europe. They urged their students to hear these marvelous people, and some even closed their classes to have their students attend en masse.
 
This gesture of friendliness and cooperation, however, was late regretted by many of these teachers. With chagrin and astonishment they heard Count St. Germain’s Messengers proclaim to their own hard-earned students that the “old occult order had been set aside,” had become obsolete and even dangerous and thenceforth, the “Saint Germain” teachings, as put out only by Mr. and Mrs. G. W. Ballard and son Donald, would have charge over the occult destinies of mankind!
 
The result was a sudden and disastrous swing of metaphysical students to the new leadership and the old was left out very much in the metaphysical cold.
 
All is fair, it seems, in love and war and with the Mighty I AM of the Ballards, tending to prove at least superficially that the end justifies the means among occult dictators as well as among the political variety.
 
 
 
(Psychic Dictatorship in America, chapter 4)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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