The 1910s: Religion: People in the News

THE 1910s: RELIGION: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

In October 1919 Evangeline Booth, commander of the Salvation Army in America, was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal from President Woodrow Wilson for the services performed by the Salvation Army in military camps during the war.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis, a prominent Boston attorney, was chosen as the chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee at a Zionist convention on 30 August 1914. The Federation of American Zionists, the major Zionist organization in the United States, grew under Brandeis's leadership from 12,000 members in 1914 to 176,000 members in 1919, at which time the group was restructured as the Zionist Organization of America. Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, becoming the first Jew to serve in the nation's highest court.

On 29 November 1911 Archbishops John M. Farley of New York and William O'Connell of Boston were elevated to the cardinalate in Rome by Pope Pius X. Farley later created the New York Catholic War Council, which staffed canteens for members of the armed forces and established hospitals for victims of shell shock.

Eminent Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary after 1915, published The Meaning of Prayer (1915) and The Meaning of Faith (1917), the first two parts of a trilogy on what it meant to be a Christian, a series completed in 1922. Fosdick also published The Challenge of the Present Crisis (1917), a moderate defense of the need for America to take up arms in World War I. In 1918 Fosdick, crossing denominational lines, became associate pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City. He also visited and spoke to American troops on the front in France and Flanders during the war.

Father John Kedrovsky, a Russian Orthodox priest in Hartford, Connecticut, drew sharp criticism after 1917 for his progressive politics. Following the October Revolution in Russia, American Orthodox leaders became anxious to distance themselves as much as possible from Russia's Communists. Archbishop Alexander thought that priests used the language of "reformation and progressiveness" to cover their real intent to "destroy the church with axes, hammers and sickles," and seven priests in New York who supported Kedrovsky were suspended.

The dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School since 1908, Baptist Shailer Mathews served as president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America between 1912 and 1916 and also held the presidency of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1915. He also published Will Christ Come Again? (1917), followed up by a series of articles in Biblical World in 1918 on the same subject. Also in 1918, Mathews published the influential Patriotism and Religion, in which he argued that "for an American to refuse to share in the present war is not Christian."

Thousands of Jewish residents of New York gathered at the Hippodrome on 9 October 1910 to hear a speech by the founder of the International Bible Students' Association (later Jehovah's Witnesses), Charles Taze Russell. His advocacy of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had won him the support of many Jews. In October 1911 Pastor Russell sued the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for $100,000 after its stories about his selling "Miracle Wheat" in church caused a scandal. After his death in 1916, some of Russell's sermons and writings were collected and edited into a volume entitled The Finished Mystery. The book contained negative statements about both war and patriotism in general, and its distribution was later deemed subversive of the Selective Service Act of 1917. In 1918 Russell's successor, former judge Joseph Rutherford, and seven other members of the International Bible Students' Association were sentenced to twenty years in prison each after they were found disseminating Russell's pacifist teachings.

Throughout the 1910s Vida Scudder, a professor of English at Wellesley College, was the country's most vocal and active supporter of Christian socialism. In 1911 she cofounded the Episcopal Church Socialist League, and in the same year she joined the Socialist Party. In 1912 she published her influential book Socialism and Character, whose success led striking workers at a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to ask her to speak on their behalf. When she and a Wellesley colleague did so, the Boston Evening Transcript called for their resignations. Wellesley did not ask her to resign but did suspend her famous course on "Social Ideals in English Letters" for one year. She lectured widely at colleges as a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Her support for the war led to strife within the Church Socialist League, so in 1919 she organized the Church League for Industrial Democracy to accommodate adherents of many different political views committed to social reform.

On 2 May 1917 Methodist minister and suffragist Anna Howard Shaw became chairwoman of the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense, which coordinated the war relief efforts of scores of women's organizations nationwide. She was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by President Woodrow Wilson in May 1919, the first American woman ever to receive that honor. On 19 May of that year, Shaw embarked on a tour of fourteen states with former president William Howard Taft and A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University, speaking in support of President Wilson's peace plan. The tour ended on 5 June, and Shaw died of ill health just four weeks later, on 2 July.

The chairman of the Federal Council of Churches' General War-Time Commission, Robert E. Speer, came under fire for a speech he delivered at Columbia University on 18 February 1918. The speech, "World Democracy and America's Obligation to Her Neighbors," offered examples from the history of the United States, along with many other nations, of the five greatest hindrances to world democracy. Following the address, The New York Times was flooded with letters denouncing Speer as "pro-German" and his speech as "insidiously corrupting." Though the Times printed Speer's rebuttal, in which he insisted that he believed that the war "must be waged in order that war may be destroyed," the issue took some weeks to subside.

Billy Sunday was sued in 1918 by Hugh A. Weir, who claimed to be the ghostwriter of Sunday's book Great Love Stories from the Bible and Their Lessons for Today, Although Weir eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, the scandal that followed, along with complaints about Sunday's accumulated fortune, led to his declining popularity in succeeding decades.

The founder of Hadassah, a women's Zionist organization, Henrietta Szold, resigned in 1915 as president of that group to found the American Zionist Medical Unit, which established itself in Palestine in 1916. In 1919 Szold went to Palestine herself to become director of the unit, which provided much-needed medical care for Jewish settlers in Palestine.

In 1913 Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise and his close friend, Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes, worked together to fight corruption in New York City's Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine. Wise was influential in securing the election of the Republican candidate, John Purroy Mitchel. In 1912 Wise and Holmes had experienced a political disagreement when Wise endorsed Woodrow Wilson's candidacy instead of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party. Wise toured Palestine in 1913, returning to the United States with a new dedication to Zionism. He rejoined the FAZ under Louis Brandeis's leadership and, with Brandeis, helped convince President Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration.