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POSTED
HERE for your consideration are a few parallel
charts of chapters from two of William S. Sadler’s books,
The Sex Life Before and After Marriage (a.k.a. Living a Sane Sex Life), and
The Truth About Spiritualism.
The PDF file for the former book includes charts for three
of that book’s twenty chapters, while the file for the
latter includes one chapter out of seven.
These charts give a first glimpse
into a larger project, which consists in the full-scale
study and analysis of how Sadler put together many of his
books. Each book will be fully paralleled and analyzed,
chapter by chapter, including his most famous book, The
Mind at Mischief.
Sadler was a central figure in the
whole Urantia Book phenomenon, but he remains mysterious. He
destroyed virtually all his personal and professional files,
leaving historians little to go on. His most important
legacy are his numerous books, most of which have not been
read by even the most ardent Urantia Book believers, but
which - thanks to the parallel studies - reveal much about
him.
Most remarkable is the discovery
that Sadler’s techniques of culling and paraphrasing from
his sources (which he often didn’t cite) are surprisingly
similar to those used by the UB author(s) in writing several
Urantia papers. Comparative study of the Sadler parallel
charts and the UB parallel charts, by the intelligent
general reader as well as by linguistic analysts, may shed
unexpected new light into Sadler’s real role in the creation
of the Urantia Book.
The Sex Life Before and After
Marriage/
Living a Sane Sex Life
The first book in this
presentation, The Sex Life Before and After Marriage,
was published in 1938 as a two-volume set, but a one-volume
version was also published that year, under the title Living a Sane Sex Life. In 1944 a second edition of the
one-volume book was published, with revisions made to four
of the twenty chapters. (The 1940s was a bad time for sex
education, and authors of sex-and-marriage manuals were
forced to delete information about birth control and graphic
descriptions of sex activities. Sadler thus removed the
offending passages in the second edition, replacing them
with other information.)
The 1938 editions are credited to
William and Lena Sadler, but William S. Sadler alone is
listed as author in the 1944 and 1946 editions.
The book incorporates lightly
paraphrased material from some of Sadler's earlier books,
including Theory and Practice of Psychiatry, which
had been published two years earlier, in 1936. It also
incorporates - as the attached charts show - material from
several sources, most of them uncited.
It was in 1999 that I happened
upon the first of the uncited sources Sadler used for The Sex Life Before and After Marriage/Living a Sane Sex
Life. The discovery was brought about after a reader in
Finland published an article in a special-interest Urantia
magazine (it was for gays and lesbians and their friends -
the magazine was called GLAAD) in which he speculated that
Sadler's liberal views on homosexuality must have been
inspired by midwayers since the views were so far ahead of
their time. I didn't agree that Sadler's views were so
unique, and went about looking for books which had views
similar to Sadler's.
This was before the days of
www.books.google.com.
But I had already had seven years' experience finding
Urantia Book sources in the old-fashioned way, i.e.
by going to libraries and used book stores and combing the
shelves.
It didn't take long for me to find
a popular sex-education book by Havelock Ellis (The
Psychology of Sex) which turned out to be a clear
source for some of the Sadler book. I later found a few
other sources, but it wasn't until
www.books.google.com
came along, in 2007, that the remaining sources could be
found within days.
As early as 1999, I was shocked by
the discovery that many of the UB's unusual ways of
culling-and-paraphrasing were mirrored by Sadler himself.
For instance, the ways that the UB draws from Sumner &
Keller, in Papers 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 and others, were very
similar to the ways Sadler drew from Havelock Ellis. Never
word for word, never simply a consecutive paraphrasing, but
a more intelligent handling.
On the other hand, I did find,
after discovering other source books, that Sadler did
sometimes do what the UB author(s) never did: large-scale
verbatim lifting in a few cases, and copious, consecutive
paraphrasing in many cases.
In the three sex charts, you can
see examples of both types of culling-and-paraphrasing: (1)
the UB-like way, and (2) the copious consecutive
paraphrasing.
For instance, Chapter 10 uses two
sources - Ellis and Everett. (The key for Chapter 10 fully
names each author and book.) The sections that draw from
Ellis present parallelisms which require concentration to
follow, whereas those that draw on Everett are simply a case
of copious consecutive paraphrasing.
Sadler seems to have been a
"paraphrasing machine" who could paraphrase and paraphrase
and paraphrase dozens of sentences in a row from Everett and
other uncited source authors.
The Truth About Spiritualism
From a Urantia Book perspective,
The Truth About Spiritualism might be seen as
Sadler's most significant book. Here he presents himself as
an experienced debunker of spiritualism, and dismisses all
manifestations of spiritualism except for a few cases,
which he couldn't account for on the basis of fraud or
self-delusion.
The Mind at Mischief is
Sadler's best-known book, but nearly the whole text of
The Truth About Spiritualism was incorporated into it.
About the time The Truth About
Spiritualism was published, in 1923, Sadler gave up
lecturing for the Chautauqua circuit and moved to 533
Diversey Parkway in Chicago (the headquarters of the Urantia
Foundation), where he started the Forum and began to share
with that group the early manuscripts of what became the
Urantia Book.
Since 2007 I've been finding the
sources he used for The Truth About Spiritualism,
nearly all of which are uncited.
In his introduction and throughout
the book, Sadler does not let on that most of his material
was gleaned from recently published books on spiritualism;
he rather presents himself as having gained expertise from
first-hand investigations of spiritualists, mediums and
psychics.
The chapter accompanying this
study is Chapter III - "The Modern Spiritualistic Movement".
Here Sadler presents the fruit of his researches on this
subject. He appears to have used eight sources to write this
chapter, ranging from a Seventh-day Adventist exposure of
the demonic origin of spiritualism, to a rationalist-skeptic
expose of spiritualism's all-too-human origins.
His major influence throughout the
seven chapters is the latter source, Joseph McCabe's 1920
book, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, which Sadler
never names.
papers paralleled 
