To add on on I'd also like to hear more about their early efforts to enlist celebrity support and what other recruiting tactics they used which maybe separated them from other, similar cults of the time.
If anyone has a good book or three to recommend then that would be swell.
The precursor to Scientology was Diantetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. The criticisms levied against it persist throughout Scientology's history as it lays the basic process for "auditing" and "going clear", core practices of the Church. Here are some excerpts to contemporary reviews of that text, which were generally skeptical, to say the least.
"I must confess I have never been confronted by such a bold and immodest mixture of complete nonsense and perfectly reasonable common sense, taken from long-acknowledged findings and disguised and distorted by a crazy, newly invented terminology. Most revolting is the repeated claim of exactitude and of scientific experimental approach, for which every trace of evidence is lacking." - The New Republic, August 14, 1950
"The importance of Dianetics, in this reviewer's opinion, is that it so clearly illustrates the most common fallacy of our time in regard to psychological ills... Books like this do harm by their grandiose promises to troubled persons and by their oversimplification of human psychological problems." How to Backtrack and Get Ahead, Rollo May, The New York Times, July 2, 1950.
These reviews focus on the lack of evidence, scientific procedure, and generally extraordinary claims made in Dianetics. In 1950, the APA issued a response in 1950 which states, "In the public interest, the Association, in the absence of such evidence, recommends to its members that the use of the techniques peculiar to Dianetics be limited to scientific investigations designed to test the validity of its claims." APA Chapter 11
Paulette Cooper wrote a critical expose, "The Scandal of Scientology," in Queen Magazine in 1968 that was later adapted into a book of the same name in 1971. While critical of the steep fees for courses, the litigious pattern of retribution for speaking out against the organization, and the lack of confidentiality between scientologist and auditor, she does state in the preface, "Every day there are new directives, cancelling old policies and creating new ones so that the nature, beliefs and practices of Scientology are constantly changing. It is to Hubbard and the Scientologists' credit that the direction is generally a positive one, and that some of the less laudable practices outlined in this book appear on the wane." As she became the victim of a harassment campaign titled "Operation Freakout," she was particularly wrong in that assessment.
Beginning in the mid 70's, the Tampa Bay Times and the St. Petersburg times began covering the church of Scientology following its secretive purchase of the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, which eventually became the Church's "Flagship Land Base" or simply "Flag" in Scientology parlance.
Does anyone have any good sources for Hubbard's military career? I have read a few things about his time in the Navy and he seems to conform to a certain type of officer that I encountered myself in the military; Full of ego, yet completely inept, and convinced that just around the corner was a glorious destiny. But I have never really seen any good sources for this information so I am not sure how reliable it is.
Interestingly enough, L. Ron Hubbard spent a lot of time in the early 1960s traveling places like Greece, Morocco, Australia, Rhodesia, and South Africa.
Sources indicate that when L. Ron traveled to South Africa, he got a fair amount of support. In 1966 he moved to Rhodesia and bought a house, but he was eventually ejected from the country by the government for essentially being percieved as a troublemaker, a crackpot, and a radical.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/apartheid.html
It is hard to measure the actual number of members in a period due to inflated numbers, but there are a lot of interesting anecdotes of scientology in their formative years. You can also see the religious personification of the places he chose to evangelize, which is interesting. For example, his attempt to try and integrate his religious/social movement with the whole continent of australia and the white business class of rhodesia show how he wanted to advance the religion throught influential social networks.