The Turbaned Superman 49
though the case was ultimately dismissed and Bernard, together with his new
partner Blanche De Vries, moved to Nyack where he would spend the rest of his
days running what is perhaps best described as a yoga country club. As Bernard
himself articulated it, his philosophy claimed:
The purpose of human happiness is the purpose of Yoga, therefore what
we are to understand by the Tantrik Order is simply that it is a body of
men, Yogis, who for their evolution, for their happiness, follow a certain
system, a certain science of Life, which being in accordance with nature
is best suited to bring about the consummation which everybody desires,
happiness.^80To this end, his disciples spent their days at the Clarkstown Country Club,
according to the Los Angeles Times as “men and women, all garbed alike in
black bloomers and white stockings, romping in the broad lawns or practicing
strange exercises— exercises which appeared to be some weird, fantastic form of
calisthenics.”^81
Finally, there were the Yogis who were not Yogis at all but simply adopted
the persona for a variety of reasons. One such person was Yogi Ramacharaka,
who never had a physical existence at all but was rather the nom- de- plume
of the New Thought author William Walter Atkinson, created to give an
added measure of authority and Oriental mystique to Atkinson’s writings on
yoga. There were also the aforementioned Western magicians who dressed
in a variety of Oriental costumes during their performances.^82 In addition,
there were those who took on Oriental identities because being fetishized
was rather preferable to being lynched. Such was the story of one Reverend
Jesse Wayman Routté, who donned velvet robes, a spangled purple turban, and
his best Swedish accent to keep Jim Crow laws at bay on his trip through the
American South in 1947, introducing himself as an “Apostle of Good Will and
Love.”^83 There were others who straddled the line between marketing tactics
and defense mechanisms in their Yogi impersonations. For instance, Arthur
Dowling, an African American vaudeville performer during the first two
decades of the twentieth century, went by the stage name of Jovedah de Rajah
and billed himself as “The East Indian Psychic.”^84
Yogi Panic
Of course, many Americans had been far more comfortable with Yogis when they
remained on the printed page or at least on the vaudeville stage. Besides elicit-
ing a general xenophobic discomfort that was associated with immigrants of any