I get a lot of questions about Harry Houdini. How did he do his escapes? Was he really the best magician who ever lived? Did he really die after performing the Water Torture Cell escape, as shown in a 1950s movie starring Tony Curtis?
These questions arise because Houdini skillfully and methodically made his name synonymous with mystery during his lifetime. Even today children know about him, as I discovered during a recent performance. Houdini created a legend that endures. (“My monument,” he called it.)
Fittingly, perhaps, there is plenty of illusion behind the legend when you draw back the curtain: The man who would become America’s most famous magician was European born, in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a struggling rabbi who moved his family to America in the late 1800s. Houdini’s real name was Erich Weiss. Great escape artist that he was, Houdini’s reputation as an actual magician is mixed among magicians. When he starred in a series of silent films in the early 1920s, he was panned as a terrible actor. He died not from the water cell escape but from a ruptured appendix, albeit under suspicious circumstances.
And he was not, we are only now learning, the first magician in America to capture the public’s imagination.
That distinction may belong to one Richard Potter. Potter was born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts in 1783, the last year of the American Revolution. He died in Andover, New Hampshire in 1835 after a long performing career. Like Houdini, Potter lived 52 years, one year for every card in a deck, a fate also shared by another famous magician, Doug Henning. Like both of those performers, Richard Potter was, during his lifetime, the most famous magician in America. Also a skilled ventriloquist, he was in fact the most famous entertainer in America.
Unlike Houdini or Henning, however, Richard Potter was Black. The son of a Black woman and white man, Potter toured for years around the country, including in the Deep South. There, because of his act and costumes, audiences perceived him to be of “Hindu” ancestry, while at home in Boston he was widely recognized as Black. Potter’s performances—his show was entitled, “An Evening’s Brush to Sweep Away Care”—received glowing reviews everywhere he went. Considering that his career spanned the pre-Civil War years, his ability to achieve a sustained, universal celebrity as a Black man is all the more remarkable. You would think you would have heard of him the way you know who Daniel Webster was.
For a blast from the past, watch me demonstrate one of the tricks Richard Potter performed from his evening show, The Rising Card.
And you might still never have heard of Richard Potter if not for a biography published just several years ago, Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2018). Its author, John A. Hodgson, former dean of Forbes College at Princeton University, noted in his preface that, “For too long, Richard Potter, despite his one-time fame, has been missing from the larger theater of American cultural and social history in which he figured so importantly.” Offering that his objective is to correct that omission, Hodgson plays both magician and ventriloquist, writing, “I aim to make Richard Potter reappear; I want to give him, at last, a voice.”
Hodgson’s book, and his words, are simply one modest entry into what I call The Great Unfolding. William Ellery Channing, a contemporary of Richard Potter’s and fellow Bostonian as well as Unitarian minister, once wrote that the meaningful life is one that unfolds toward a likeness to the divine. I’ve always thought that that is a helpful and hopeful way to think about all the challenges we face: that no matter how dire the daily news, we live in a reality that is always unfolding toward something greater and more beneficent than we encountered the day before. We magicians, and then hopefully the larger world, will grow more aware of someone like Richard Potter because we humans are naturally drawn toward making the disappeared reappear, and giving the voiceless back their voices. Because that is the direction of love.
Love only grows and never shrinks; love listens and hears more and not less; love sees an ever-expanding reality and never restricts it out of fear of the unknown, the unfamiliar, or, Buddha forbid, the other. The current forces that seek to silence, shut down, restrict and deny The Great Unfolding spend millions and seek the highest seats of power precisely because they are up against the formidable and unconquerable force of love. Love travels in one direction, never retreating, always advancing. To cite one current example, the truth of our history will only continue to grow despite temporary restrictions on what children can be taught in school, because the truth never ceases to exist, whereas efforts to bury the truth are as temporary as a shovel that will rust and fall away.
Richard Potter will only become better known as time goes on, because the room in our collective hearts for his memory will only grow. That is the direction of love and our inevitable unfolding. (In other words, it isn’t just the universe that is expanding.) I understand that it does not always seem so. Consider, however, that Harry Houdini escaped from handcuffs, manacles, boxes and straitjackets of his own accord. Richard Potter escaped from obscurity because more than 180 years after his death, he came to be loved, and honored, for who he was. It is never too late to make someone reappear or to give them a voice. It is never too late to grow into love. Like a card in a conjuror’s hands, love rises to be seen.
Behind the curtain
I want to acknowledge that a Connecticut conjuror, Robert Olson, has kept Richard Potter’s memory alive since the 1970s by performing an historically accurate reenactment of Potter’s magic act while appearing as Richard Potter. My sons and I saw Mr. Olson perform as Richard Potter back in the 1990s. (I still have his business card.) I did not know then the significance of what I was seeing, but I do now. That’s the direction of love.
