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Adman Hoshor guesses that Father Divine disburses $1,500,000 a year on his dominion, a collection of boarding houses, coal yards, laundries, restaurants, garages operated by the busy little cultist and tenanted and staffed by fanatical blacks who have surrendered their economic as well as spiritual affairs to Father Divine. Author Hoshor estimates Divine's follow-ing at 2,000,000, although other observers set it as low as 20,000. Father Divine himself claims 30.000,000.
Although Divine disciples now like to believe that their "God" was not born but was "combusted" one day in 1900 at the corner of Manhattan's Seventh Avenue and 134th Street, and although the Father in 1932 told a court in Mineola, L. I. that he had been born in Providence, R. I. 52 years before as Major Morgan J. Devine, it is now well known that he was born George Baker in Savannah, Ga. 58 years ago. Biographer Hoshor reveals that the Father's religious life began when he was a hedge-cutter 30 years ago in Baltimore after he had abandoned a wife and four children. From a black preacher called "Father Jehovia," George Baker got the nucleus of his theology: the idea that God is in everyone. Taking the name of "The Messenger," Baker went to Brooklyn, soon became associated with another of Father Jehovia's followers who called himself "The Rev. St. Bishop, The Vine" and let each of his colleagues consider himself not only the repository of a god, but a god in fact. When The Rev. St. Bishop, The Vine was arrested, tried and jailed for a sex offense, Baker once more changed his name, this time to Major Devine. (The improved spelling was a subsequent idea.) With a dozen followers, one of them named Penninah who was to become known as Mother Divine, the onetime George Baker moved to Sayville, L. I. where he founded his first "heaven," a co-operative boarding house where everybody worked except Father Divine. He took care of the wages.
By thrifty management and accepting all the property of those who joined him as "angels," Father Divine was able to serve big and tasty banquets in his Sayville "heaven," attract visitors from Harlem. So many Negroes were journeying thither on Sundays that white neighbors became alarmed and enraged. In 1932 Father Divine, who had come to believe that only he was God, was tried for conducting a public nuisance. He was convicted, sentenced to a year in jail and a $500 fine. Three days later the trial judge died of a heart attack. Said Father Divine: "I hated to do it."
Today Father Divine has 60 heavens in the District of Columbia, 24 States, four countries. The biggest collection, in Harlem, costs $30,000 a year to operate. Besides his Rolls-Royce, he owns an airplane manned by three dusky flying angels. Though the man whom his followers believe to be God gets around to as many heavens as possible, he is to be seen most often in Harlem, sermonizing at length on such topics as: "The super-mental relaxativeness of mankind."