PART I
CHAPTER 1
In March 1933, the United States stood on the brink of financial ruin. Twenty-five percent of the population was unemployed, and countless Americans were without work for many years. Industrial production was cut in half from its 1929 level. The situation was even worse in large cities, where unemployment sometimes surpassed 50 percent. Yet the real worry of the era cannot be captured by statistics alone. There was a sense of fear that was palpable to those who lived in that uncertain time.1 As the economy cratered, and as countless governments overseas collapsed, nobody was sure what would come next. This was the situation Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited when he was inaugurated that month as the thirty-second president.
The challenge before Roosevelt was of such immensity that only the Bible captured for him, and for much of the nation, the task ahead. As he delivered his inaugural address in Washington, DC, in the cool March air under an overcast sky, he offered his listeners an account of devastation but also redemption. The economy was in tatters and hardworking men and women were destitute. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated,” Roosevelt told the crowd gathered in front of the East Portico of the US Capitol. “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” Like the biblical story of Jesus forcibly expelling the money changers and merchants from the temple, Roosevelt promised to restore Christian morality to the nation. “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” the new president announced. “We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”2
Roosevelt’s words give us a glimpse of a nation that in many ways no longer resembles the United States today. Roosevelt spoke in Christian idiom, often hinting at antisemitic tropes, to a public he presumed to be Protestant. “This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance,” Roosevelt would later tell a private audience that included Jews and Catholics.3 Roosevelt, an Episcopalian, also spoke on behalf of a Protestantism that saw science and religion as compatible, tolerance as a social good, internationalism as a Christian endeavor, and the state as an ally of Christian social work. Roosevelt spoke, in other words, on behalf of an ecumenical Protestantism that dominated the public sphere in the 1930s.
Despite appearances, Roosevelt’s use of ecumenical Protestant themes at his inauguration belied a troubled relationship between Roosevelt, the spokesperson for a new political liberalism, and the Protestant leaders who spoke on behalf of theological liberalism. Between 1932, when Roosevelt won the presidential election, and 1936, when he won a landslide reelection, political liberalism and religious liberalism drew closer together through the conscious work of leaders of the Federal Council of Churches, denominational heads, missionary directors, academics and seminary heads, everyday churchgoers, labor leaders, and politicians. The coming together of the two liberalisms—political and religious—helped cement a close working relationship between ecumenical Protestant leaders and the federal government. As Roosevelt’s words show, liberal Protestantism was the language through which some Americans—including the president himself—understood the reforms of the New Deal.
Historians have not fully appreciated how central ecumenical Protestants were to mid-century liberalism. Beginning with Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 history of the New Deal, called The End of Reform, it became conventional wisdom that the New Deal shed the Protestant moralism of the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. This wisdom held that, beginning in the 1930s, a coalition of tough-minded groups discarded the religious moralizing of the past. This “Roosevelt coalition” governed the country until it fell apart in the 1960s.4 This view is misleading because it neglects the transformation of Protestant groups themselves. By 1932, ecumenical Protestants had moved beyond Progressive Era politics by adopting a political reform platform that prefigured many of the changes brought on by the New Deal. Influenced by developments abroad, they came to see the political arena as the best means of making Christian theology a living reality. Like Roosevelt, ecumenical Protestants experimented politically in the 1930s. As this chapter shows, ecumenical Protestantism emerged as a sophisticated political movement by the end of that decade and took its place among the groups that formed the core of American political liberalism.
The Triumph of Theological Liberals in the 1920s
The stock market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed sent shockwaves through American Protestantism. The money to pay ministers’ salaries, to help the poor, and to build new churches dried up. More importantly, the Great Depression came as a shock to theologians and clergy who had spent the prior decade feeling confident that civilization was making steady progress toward building the Kingdom of God on earth.
The 1920s had been a good decade for Protestantism’s Progressive Era causes. Prohibitionists finally won their decades-long battle in 1920, when the Volstead Act made the sale of alcohol illegal nationwide. Pacifists also had cause to celebrate. Recoiling from the horrors of World War I, peace groups sprung up from churches, and their work culminated in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which made war illegal under international law.5 The economy was booming in the 1920s, and it funded an ever-expanding number of churches, charitable organizations, and missionary groups. It was in 1925 that Bruce Barton published his blockbuster book, The Man Nobody Knows, which reimagined Jesus as the world’s greatest salesman and the apostles as his board of directors.6 According to Donald Meyer, in these years, “Protestantism spoke with a degree of confidence and self-assertion befitting only men who felt themselves at the opening of a new era—and themselves responsible for that opening.”7
A theological crisis emerged in the 1920s over the relationship of science and religion, but ecumenical leaders mostly viewed it as a yet further sign of progress. On one side were self-proclaimed modernists, who believed that science and religion went hand in hand and who argued that a critical reading of the Bible would yield a more enlightened religion that could withstand the demands of the modern age.8 On the other side were fundamentalists, who saw themselves as defenders of Christian orthodoxy. They listed nonnegotiable articles of faith, which were a line in the sand meant to defend what they saw as true Christianity from heresy.9 The conflict between the two groups erupted in Dayton, Tennessee, over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Although the Scopes “Monkey” trial was substantially about majoritarian control of schools and intellectual freedom of teachers, it was popularly understood as a battle between science and fundamentalist faith.10 Fundamentalists won the trial but lost the public, which only bolstered ecumenical confidence in the 1920s.
Confrontations between modernists and fundamentalists in the 1920s also took place within Christian institutions—churches, seminaries, and missionary organizations—and they centered on doctrine. The popular preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick became a lightning rod for these debates because of the attention he drew with his sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”11 The sermon was printed and distributed to nearly all of the 140,000 Protestant ministers in the country, informing them that he did not believe in the Virgin Birth, the inerrancy of the scriptures, or the Second Coming of Christ. Fosdick’s conservative opponents admitted his popularity. But “the question is not whether Dr. Fosdick is winning men,” complained conservative Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen, “but whether the thing to which he is winning them is Christianity.”12
Fundamentalists demanded an investigation into whether Fosdick upheld the Presbyterian Confession of Faith. When an investigative body cleared him, fundamentalists demanded an investigation of the New York Presbytery for permitting heresy in its pulpits. It too was cleared of wrongdoing, thanks in part to the skillful work of their young lawyer, Presbyterian layman John Foster Dulles. Although Fosdick would indeed resign—the Baptist minister was asked to become a Presbyterian, and he refused because of his deep commitment to ecumenism—he soon took over the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York, the cathedral of ecumenical Protestantism.13 Mobilizing their prestige, intellectual rigor, and a widespread belief in progress, advocates of a liberal theology prevailed over their fundamentalist coreligionists. By the time of the Great Depression, theological liberals, like Fosdick, had taken over much of the institutional machinery of American Protestantism.
G. Bromley Oxnam and the Internationalization of the Social Gospel
As Protestants grappled with the Great Depression, they drew on earlier traditions focused on combatting poverty. The social gospel was foremost among these. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, theologians and activists came to two new insights as they recoiled at the terrible conditions that prevailed among the working class in that era. The first was that the clergy needed to minister to workers’ bodies as well as to their souls. The second was that salvation was not just for individuals but that it also had a social dimension. They relegated the idea of the salvation of individuals to an agrarian past that was no longer tenable in the industrial landscape of Hell’s Kitchen in New York or the railroad yards of Los Angeles.14
Figure 1. G. Bromley Oxnam was among the most influential ecumenical Protestant leaders of the twentieth century. Before he became a household name in the 1940s, he accompanied socialist evangelist Sherwood Eddy on annual trips across the world, including to India and the Soviet Union. Image courtesy of DePauw University Archives and Special Collections.
Methodist minister G. Bromley Oxnam found himself working in the Los Angeles neighborhood in the 1920s. Oxnam was part of a new generation that would take control of Protestant institutions during the Great Depression. Like others in his cohort, he was reared on the social gospel and on international travel. In the 1940s, Oxnam would go on to lead the World Order movement, become the president of the Federal Council of Churches, and a co-founder of the World Council of Churches. Along with other members of his generation who came of age in similar circumstances and institutions in the 1920s, Oxnam would play an important role in the founding of the United Nations and the promotion of human rights.
The son of an engineer, Oxnam grew up in Los Angeles and attended the University of Southern California before studying at MIT and Harvard and finally receiving a doctorate from the Methodist-run Boston University School of Theology. Like other young Christian idealists, Oxnam was drawn back to his hometown to work in a neighborhood that was rapidly transforming from a middle-class Protestant quarter to a multi-ethnic industrial zone. The Methodist church he founded there, called the Church of All Nations, “had virtually ceased to be a church,” according to a 1926 report by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, “and had become rather a Christian social center.” “It has been almost three years since we had regular church services,” explained Oxnam in 1927. Instead, the Church of All Nations functioned along the lines of Hull House, the famous settlement house in Chicago founded by Jane Addams. Methodists looking for a Sunday sermon were directed to a nearby church. The Church of All Peoples offered instead a medical clinic, day care center, athletics, and a meeting space for events that were conducted not just in English but also in Spanish, Japanese, and Yiddish.15
After World War I the social gospel became less popular among American Protestants but internationalism was on the rise. A now-classic account identifies the 1920s as a period of the “decline” of the social gospel before its dramatic “revival” during the 1930s.16 But what such accounts miss about Oxnam’s generation is how the interplay of Wilsonian internationalism and the social gospel changed their views and their politics. Like others of his generation, Oxnam’s social gospel inheritance had been reshaped and sharpened during his many trips abroad. For nearly a century, American Protestants had gone abroad to proselytize as missionaries. Oxnam, however, was part of a new venture, the study mission, designed to be a dialogue rather than a lecture. Organized by the wealthy socialist evangelist Sherwood Eddy, study missions gathered bright and promising young Protestants to tour foreign nations, meeting with dignitaries in order to promote mutual understanding. In December 1918, a month following the armistice of the Great War, Oxnam took a leave of absence from his Los Angeles church and went on one of these tours as Eddy’s personal secretary. Sailing from San Francisco to Japan, Oxnam was stuck inside his cabin reading forty books on Russian history and politics given to him by Eddy. Oxnam was tasked with underlining everything that was important enough for Eddy to read himself. After a brief stay in Japan, the group toured China and Southeast Asia, making their way to India, where the group would reside for six months. The journey brought Oxnam in touch with foreigners and into conversation with the latest literature on the countries and colonies he visited.17
In India, Oxnam toured churches, mission stations, and YMCAs, in addition to hospitals, asylums, prisons, and factories. He was left with an impression of the degradation of the lower rungs of Indian society. He felt sympathy for the poor and wrote in his diaries that the experience reaffirmed his faith in the social gospel. But Oxnam gained little appreciation for Indian culture and frequently got into altercations with locals. When a train conductor asked him to move his bags from a train compartment, he recalled in his diary, “I shouted at him, ‘If you move one of those bags, you’ll land on the floor so blamed fast that you won’t know what hit you.’ ” Oxnam’s impressions of the local religion were no better than those of train travel. Indian temples were filled with images “so vile that they would put the lewd Parisian post cards to shame.” Hindu priests “commit every form of immorality” on “women pilgrims,” he claimed.18
Others on this trip in 1918–19, including the famed evangelist E. Stanley Jones, gained a respect for the cultures they were encountering. Jones had been working periodically as a missionary in India for the Methodist Church since 1907. He ministered to educated Indian elites and was exposed to their criticism of Christianity. In order to promote Christianity in India, Jones started to “disentangle Christ from the accretions which the centuries had gathered around him,” he would later write.19 Jones was doing the work of inculturation—adapting Christianity to Indian culture—but he took this process further than other missionaries at the time. He became more critical of American racism and British colonialism. “The old imperialism is gone, is dead, or dying!” he explained. When he joined Eddy and Oxnam on their trip, Jones was still unknown. But, two decades later, Time magazine pronounced that he was “the world’s greatest missionary.”20 Through popular publications, like his bestselling book The Christ of the Indian Road (1925), he promoted anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and interfaith dialogue to millions of Americans.21 Eventually, Jones would win over many of his fellow ecumenical Protestants to his views.
Oxnam, on the other hand, remained sympathetic to British imperialism. Having witnessed a riot in 1919 and recoiling at the burning of several Christian churches by Hindu and Sikh nationalists, he praised the actions of the British troops at the Amritsar massacre, which left 379 unarmed protesters dead. “The Indians little realize the power of modern weapons, but I understand they were taught something of a lesson at Amritsar,” he wrote in his diary. “One feels terrible over the whole situation. It means that mission work will be slowed up for years.”22
When he returned to Los Angeles in 1919, Oxnam was hailed as an expert on East and South Asian affairs and was asked to give regular talks at his church and to civic groups. At a time when there was little academic interest in these regions, Protestant intellectuals like Oxnam and Jones served as the main interpreters of the non-European world for the US public. Protestant missionaries and travelers had been influential interpreters of events overseas since the nineteenth century, and they held on to this role until they were displaced by academic experts in area studies during the early Cold War.23
Oxnam’s next trip with Eddy’s new “American Seminar” in 1921—no longer called a “mission”—proved more transformative.24 The group headed eastward from the United States, first arriving in London, England, where it stayed at the world’s first social settlement house, Toynbee Hall. Oxnam went to work interviewing British political leaders, and his commitment to the social gospel meant he was receptive to their ideas. He began by interviewing the Labour Party leader, Ramsay MacDonald. As Oxnam took dozens of pages of careful notes of his conversations with MacDonald, as well as later talks with British social reformers and socialists, including Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney, Sydney Webb, and G. D. H. Cole, he was learning more than the minutiae of labor relations and municipal reform.25 In these conversations Oxnam saw new political possibilities. The Labour Party was respectable, according to Oxnam’s middle-class sensibilities, but it was also visionary and politically effective. The party was unlike anything back home in the United States, where one of the country’s periodic Red Scares had just taken place.26 While American officials deported socialists and anarchists, here was the Labour Party proclaiming the coming of a new economic order. “The individualist system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital,” had ended, the Labour Party announced. Webb and others were calling on Britain to create what would become many of the hallmark features of the New Deal in the United States, including social insurance, democratic control of industry, regulation of work, and full employment.27 Oxnam was taking part in a transatlantic exchange of ideas, ones that would shape the New Deal.28
When Oxnam returned to Los Angeles in 1921, he decided to get involved in politics. He was so inspired by Christian socialism in Britain that, in 1923, he ran for a seat on the local board of education. It led him to experience the reactionary politics of Southern California firsthand. The Los Angeles Times ran a string of red-baiting attacks against him. It reported that the Department of Justice’s chief investigator announced during a speech in Los Angeles that “soviet propaganda is being directed toward American public schools” for the purpose of “inculcating the principles of radicalism into the nation’s future citizens.” The Los Angeles Times editorialized, “As the famous criminologist spoke he emphasized his statements by bringing his right arm down before him in such a manner as to repeatedly point a seemingly accusing forefinger at the face of G. Bromley Oxnam, radical candidate for the Board of Education.”29 Unable to overcome these attacks, Oxnam lost the election. But he nonetheless remained confident in the potential of a progressive politics of the kind he had witnessed firsthand in England. International travel had given Oxnam a perspective that allowed him to see beyond the narrow valleys of the conservative politics of Los Angeles.
On Oxnam’s third trip with Eddy in 1926, he visited the Soviet Union for the first time. After interviews with the British prime minister and the German president en route to the USSR, Eddy’s group reached Moscow in August 1926, meeting with top officials in the country, including Stalin. In these encounters, Oxnam saw glimpses of his earlier Asian travels. “Russia is not the most Eastern of Western Nations,” he wrote in a published memoir of the trip, “but rather the most Western of Eastern nations.” Oxnam’s experience in India was an asset in understanding Russia, he believed. “Some of the members of our party, untraveled in the Orient, found themselves judging Eastern mental attitudes and activities by Western standards, and thereby drawing incorrect conclusions. This was due to the fact that Russia is actually more Oriental than Occidental,” Oxnam opined.30
Oxnam observed that religion had diminished in the Soviet Union but that it could not be done away with entirely. After a visit to Lenin’s tomb, Oxnam left “with mixed emotions.” “I noted that, along with Karl Marx, Lenin is quoted by the Communist with something of the authority with which the fundamentalist calls for proof texts.… Leninism seems to have become a cult, and its shrines evidence elements of religion,” Oxnam wrote, concluding that religion was not going away in Russia anytime soon.31
Oxnam urged Americans not to rush to judgment about religion in the Soviet Union because “the situation is much more complex than such surface contacts suggest.” The problem was with the Russian Orthodox Church or, as a section heading in his memoir called it, “The Degenerate Church.” It “was shot through with repugnant superstition,” Oxnam wrote, and had been used to enslave workers and peasants. No wonder, then, that “the destruction of religion became a part of [the Marxist’s] revolutionary program, since he sought to destroy every capitalist weapon.” Oxnam lamented that Protestant groups in Russia also did not live up to “the standards of the ethical and spiritual concepts of Jesus.” In these denominations, “one finds a theology which out-fundamentalizes our most rigid fundamentalists.”32
Oxnam’s bitter attitude toward fundamentalism, whether Orthodox or Protestant, was shaped by personal experience. In 1923, famed Pentecostal minister Aimee Semple McPherson had sent members of her Los Angeles church to Oxnam’s Church of All Nations. They occupied the church and prayed that its members would forsake their socialism and convert to true Christianity. Oxnam once again resorted to violence. As Oxnam’s sympathetic biographer Robert Moats Miller put it, “the cohorts of the notorious Aimee Semple McPherson” entered All Nations to stage their protest but they soon “retreated when Oxnam gave them something they had not prayed for.”33
The domestic and international experiences of Oxnam reinforced one another. Encounters with fundamentalists in Los Angeles shaped Oxnam’s views of the Soviet Union, and his experiences in the USSR sharpened his worries that fundamentalism could lead people to abandon Christianity entirely. The problem, as Oxnam saw it, was that the communists are “men who believe themselves loyal to science, but who are in fact largely unacquainted with the religious and scientific thought of the present generation.”34 Oxnam believed that communists were opposed to religion because they were only familiar with the backward religious views of the Orthodox Church and Russian fundamentalist sects, which he also abhorred.
In the Soviet Union, as in the United States, Oxnam was optimistic that “a rising generation at home in modern science but still asking for ultimate explanation, will produce leaders who will be able to bring to the hungry souls of Russia an answer that will satisfy.” Before that happens, Oxnam wrote, “I feel that the suffering [of Russian Christians] will be of value.” Oxnam was perhaps thinking of his own ministry in Los Angeles when he wrote, “It will bring the priest in close touch with the poverty of the masses, it will force the churchman to face the implications of a scientific and democratic age, and out of suffering, which has ever been an asset to our Christian movement, may come a rebirth of religion that will be of significance to Christendom.”35 Oxnam was taking the fundamentalist-modernist controversy into the international arena to counter the charge that his own faith was a slippery slope toward atheism. Instead, he argued that fundamentalist Christianity could lead to no Christianity at all, as had happened in Russia.36
One of the starkest changes in Oxnam’s outlook during his 1926 Russia trip was his about-face on imperialism. Oxnam met with Soviet foreign minister Georgii Chicherin and was very impressed. Oxnam “was struck immediately by the number of pictures of Oriental leaders,” from China, Japan, and other Asian countries, that adorned the walls of Chicherin’s office. “We realized immediately that he was a man at home in the state craft of yesterday, well read in history, highly cultured, and with full knowledge of where he was going.” Oxnam understood that Soviet leaders “sought to guarantee to the formerly oppressed nationalities self determination or cultural freedom.” Quoting Grigorii Zinoviev, Oxnam wrote that the Russian model “is naturally a shining beacon of hope for the enslaved masses of Asia.” Russia was successfully breaking British imperialism in Persia, winning great sympathy from China, and making peace with Japan. This was having a remarkable effect on world politics, he reasoned. “We will have to recognize the changed status in the East, as England is already beginning to do, and be willing to sit down around the table, treat these nations as equals, and through treaty agreements work out the problems of the Pacific in the interests of the nations involved and for the good of the world.” If we cling to imperialism, Oxnam now instructed, we will find that “there are lined up in the East one billion out of a total world population of one billion seven hundred or eight hundred million.”37
Oxnam’s change of heart was part of a broader reevaluation of imperialism by ecumenical Protestants. Missionary work, in particular, came under scrutiny in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1930s a Rockefeller-funded project sent a team of experts headed by Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking to assess missionary work in Asia. Hocking’s 1932 report, Re-Thinking Missions, sent shockwaves through American Protestantism for its condemnation of the missionary project. Missionaries ought to focus more on social work than conversion and they should pay heed to nationalist movements demanding independence, Hocking argued. He also insisted that the spread of modernity—including the proliferation of technology, science, industrialization, and liberal religion—was creating commonalities among the world’s peoples and religions. Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims were becoming more and more like Christians, according to Hocking. The development of this “world culture” meant that conversion and imperialism were becoming less necessary. In fact, they were inimical to the growing unity of the world, whose promotion was the true task of Christianity. Re-Thinking Missions marked a broader transition among ecumenical Protestants toward religious pluralism and away from supporting imperialism.38 It also signaled a desire to separate Christianity from the West, a move that undermined Christian nationalism. Oxnam’s trajectory from supporting imperialism during his 1919 trip to India to disavowing it during his 1926 trip to the USSR was part of this pattern.
In developing his critiques of communism, fundamentalism, and imperialism, Oxnam’s social gospel inheritance gained a global dimension. Like others of his generation, travel abroad helped Oxnam see beyond the American Protestant obsessions with liquor and Darwin. Through these trips he encountered, face to face, reformers and politicians whose ideas would inform the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Travel moved Oxnam to think about the problems of labor and poverty as universal problems demanding universal solutions. In a similar vein, the Great Depression and the New Deal would soon force ecumenical Protestants like Oxnam to position themselves in relation to global forces—fascism, communism, and social democracy—that offered competing solutions to the crisis of the era.
The Great Depression and the Revival of the Social Gospel
The Great Depression came as a shock to the Protestant establishment. Partly, ecumenical Protestant leaders responded to the poverty they saw all around them. Partly, it was the experience of having religious institutions decimated that changed their mood. By 1932, hundreds of missionaries were being recalled from Asia because of financial shortfalls. That same year, Methodists had not raised enough money to pay their bishops. The Congregationalists had planned to gather in 1932 to decide how to respond to the Depression, but they could not afford to.39
With the economy in free fall, the public voice of American Christianity passed from established Progressive Era moralists to the social gospelers, like Oxnam. Many social gospelers had been at work for decades, building a Protestant left on the margins of ecumenical institutions. Sherwood Eddy’s American Seminar disciples were some of the most important leaders of this movement. As Michael Thompson shows, an “oppositional community of discourse” emerged among ecumenical Protestants in the interwar period. In the 1920s and 1930s, popular Protestant ministers like Kirby Page, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr railed against the evils of capitalism and nationalism.40 Also active in this movement were older social gospel advocates, like Francis J. McConnell, who were closer to the center of ecumenical Protestant power. McConnell, who was Oxnam’s mentor, had a decades-long track record of advocating for workers by the onset of the Great Depression.41
Social gospelers like McConnell and Oxnam took the reins of their denomination during the Great Depression because they had a clear explanation for the economic catastrophe and offered concrete solutions. McConnell believed that the Depression was caused by corporate greed and inequality, and that the government must take responsibility for the people’s welfare. The presiding bishop at the 1932 Methodist national meeting echoed McConnell, declaring, “We know now that the Kingdom of God cannot be built upon the poverty of the many and the absurd and cruel wealth of the few.” The Methodists voted to send a delegation headed by McConnell to Washington, DC, to press for immediate federal relief.42
The social gospel spread like wildfire from denomination to denomination during the early years of the Great Depression. The Northern Baptists gathered in 1932 to declare that “all the wealth and all labor power are intended by the Creator for the highest good of all people.” Individuals were only entitled to “a normal living” and no more than that. The violation of this standard—that the individual does not have a right to be rich when others are poor—resulted from “an excessive and naïve dependence upon competitive private trading as a method of distributing goods and services.” The Northern Baptist leaders declared, “The people have the natural right to hold, and can safely be entrusted with, the power of democratic control over their economic life.”43 This denomination joined a growing chorus calling for greater economic equality, support for the vulnerable, and more federal regulation of the economy.
The Federal Council of Churches gathered its leaders in 1932 to unite these denominational voices crying out for the government to do more. The synthesis took place bureaucratically in the form of the “Revised Social Ideals of the Churches.” The original Social Ideals were pioneered by Methodists, including Francis McConnell, and adopted by the Federal Council in 1908. Plans for revision of the Social Ideals had been made in 1928, when activists wanted to add planks supporting the outlawry of war. When revisions to the document were made in 1932, point 16 of the newly Revised Social Ideals now listed “repudiation of war, drastic reduction of armaments, participation in international agencies for the peaceable settlement of all controversies; the building of a co-operative world order.”44
But it was the economic planks in the 1932 version of the Federal Council’s Social Ideals that caught people’s attention, including Franklin Roosevelt’s. “Cooperation” was the key term tying the document together—cooperation among nations and cooperation among classes, which the ecumenists thought should express itself in democratic fashion, from the League of Nations internationally to industrial democracy in the United States. The Revised Social Ideals began with a general principle that a Christian society required “the subordination of speculation and the profit motive to the creative and co-operative spirit.” The second plank called for “a wider and fairer distribution of wealth” and “a just share for the worker in the product of industry and agriculture.” There were also planks that anticipated the specific reforms of the New Deal. For example, plank 5 called for “social insurance against sickness, accident, want in old age and unemployment.” Plank 8 called for “the right of employees and employers alike to organize for collective bargaining and social action.”45 These economic ideas were not new—Oxnam had encountered them when traveling through Europe in the 1920s—but they were now being advocated by some of the most important religious leaders in 1932, just as Americans were electing a new Congress and a new president.
Not surprisingly, this left turn among American ecumenical Protestants began attracting attention from politicians. Among them was Franklin Roosevelt, who was running for the presidency in 1932 and began echoing the ideas swirling among ecumenical Protestants. In one of his most substantive speeches on economics, delivered in Detroit during the election season, Roosevelt felt “as if I had been preaching a sermon.” He castigated the philosophy of “let things alone” and mocked the idea that “if we make the rich richer somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle through to the rest of us.” Instead, he proposed “social justice, through social action” and called on the federal government to secure the welfare of the poorest Americans. This “ideal of social justice of which I have spoken—an idea that years ago might have been thought overly advanced—is now accepted by the moral leadership of all of the great religious groups of the country.” Were his proposals radical? “Yes,” he sarcastically told the audience in Detroit, “and I will show you how radical it is,” quoting at length from the recent Labor Day pronouncement of the Federal Council. “The concentration of wealth carries with it a dangerous concentration of power. It leads to conflict and violence,” quoted Roosevelt. “To suppress the symptoms of this inherent conflict while leaving the fundamental causes of it untouched is neither sound statesmanship nor Christian good-will.” The Federal Council helped legitimize Roosevelt’s proposals and shielded him from criticism. The presidential candidate claimed that he was no more radical than the spokespersons of American Protestantism.46
Roosevelt also acknowledged a growing sentiment that the United States was a “tri-faith,” or “Judeo-Christian,” nation.47 The president quoted from Rabbi Edward L. Israel and an encyclical from Pope Pius XI, along with the Federal Council’s text. After he was elected, Roosevelt maintained the loyalty of most Jewish and Catholic voters throughout his long tenure in the White House. He did so despite repeatedly airing antisemitic views in private. “You and I … are old English and Dutch stock,” he told Senator Burton Wheeler. “We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins.” But Roosevelt took care to criticize antisemitism publicly. Jewish organizations and the broader Jewish public also supported the policies of the New Deal, and about 15 percent of administration appointees were Jewish. Even when tensions between Roosevelt and Jews increased in the late 1930s over Jewish refugees, the ties remained firm.48
Catholics, on the other hand, had a more complicated relationship with Roosevelt. Catholic leaders were initially enthusiastic about Roosevelt, but a few years into the New Deal they began asking whether the expansion of the state threatened to undermine the work religious organizations had traditionally done, like providing relief to the poor. Catholic leaders urged Roosevelt to work through the churches instead of working around them. Meanwhile, Catholic churchgoers, many of whom were joining unions, began to vote for Roosevelt in large numbers. Roosevelt pulled many Jewish and Catholic voters into a “New Deal coalition,” while alienating some of the Catholic leadership.49
While religious pluralism was a growing sentiment among some parts of the American public, ecumenical Protestant opinion was prized above all others in the 1930s. And politicians were not the only ones seeking approval of America’s most influential religious leaders. American Federation of Labor president William Green was at ease with Bible passages and theological argument. “Trade Unions are idealistic and spiritualistic,” he repeated to religious audiences ad nauseam. “Wages mean life and living, not profits. Trade Unions direct their efforts toward the elevation of living standards, toward the advancement of educational, moral and spiritual welfare of workers.” Labor unions found common cause with churches because, as Green explained, “human betterment means spiritual betterment. The Church cannot make an effective appeal to those who are experiencing the pangs of poverty. It can appeal to those who enjoy decent living standards, in decent homes, in decent communities.”50
In the 1930s, Green would invite ecumenical Protestant leaders to play a special mediating role in American politics. He argued that the church was universal, standing above class divisions. “What agency can more properly and soundly lead in the development of a national social conscience, social outlook and a sense of social responsibility than the Church? It occupies a strategic position in all the affairs and activities of human life,” he declared on the occasion of the Federal Council’s twenty-fifth anniversary. “For this reason, it cannot be regarded as a special pleader for a particular class.”51
Protestantism was moving leftward, and the public was picking up on this new rhetoric. In the turmoil of the 1930s and the ascendancy of the Left, the Federal Council’s Revised Social Ideals would serve as the basis for a lobbying effort that sought greater security for vulnerable Americans and the recognition of the right of labor to organize. Other ecumenical Protestant organizations followed the Federal Council’s lead. Most ecumenical denominations, the YMCA, the YWCA, and the Home Missions Council adopted the Revised Social Ideals statement as their own. This gesture was a sign of what would come next: Ecumenical Protestants would play an important role in the creation of the New Deal.
Reconciling with Roosevelt
The economic views of ecumenical Protestants shifted dramatically between 1929 and 1932, but they had not yet been translated into a political program. Although they widely endorsed social democracy, ecumenical Protestant leaders who came of political age in the Progressive Era continued to stress priorities that seemed old-fashioned by the time Roosevelt came into office in March 1933. For them, social democracy was inextricably tied to the sobriety of the working class, to the moral uprightness and incorruptibility of politicians, and to a rejection of violence at home and abroad. The tension these priorities created with Roosevelt can be seen in the pages of the Christian Century, ecumenical Protestantism’s flagship journal.
The Christian Century was run by Charles Clayton Morrison, a Disciples of Christ minister in Chicago. Morrison transformed the Christian Century from a struggling denominational journal debating the merits of immersive baptism into an influential ecumenical magazine known in academic and political circles as the place to go for Protestant debates about pressing topics. Morrison had grown up in Iowa and went to a small Disciples of Christ college in Des Moines before taking up a pastorate in Chicago. His church stood just west of Jane Addams’s Hull House, which was a hotbed of urban reform. Further south was the University of Chicago Divinity School, a center of the historical study of the Bible and of theological liberalism. When Morrison enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1902, however, he declined to attend divinity school. Instead, he enrolled in the philosophy department and worked with John Dewey, whose interests had strayed from the concerns of Protestantism. Morrison’s choice of mentors signaled his willingness to engage with ideas beyond the Protestant milieu, something that was also reflected in his commitment to ecumenism and his coverage of politics. Morrison, a committed pacifist, prohibitionist, and reformer, was at the helm of the Christian Century’s coverage of Roosevelt.52
Virtually all of the Christian Century’s coverage of Roosevelt during the year he ran for office was critical of the candidate. Morrison focused attention on Roosevelt’s ties to the corrupt Tammany Hall, his foreign policy proposals, his opposition to Prohibition, his “subservience to the [Catholic] hierarchy,” and his unwillingness to frankly discuss important issues. Missing in the Christian Century was any mention of Roosevelt’s economic proposals. Roosevelt was partly to blame for this, since his mercurial campaign avoided in-depth discussion of policy. He preferred to take advantage of Hoover’s unpopularity.53 For Morrison, Roosevelt was the embodiment of the corrupt machine politics that Progressive Era Protestants had worked so hard to combat. For these reasons, in February 1932 the Christian Century predicted Roosevelt’s political death. “As the months have passed the political weakness of the New York governor has grown distressingly clear,” an editorial declared. “Such a man would never have made the President that the exigencies of the present situation demand.”54
Yet, in the same issues of the Christian Century were far-reaching proposals for the complete transformation of the economy, many of which would become the hallmarks of the Roosevelt presidency. One author wrote about an employer he knew, who was an upstanding Christian. “Not only does he attend church every Sunday, listening with admirable tolerance to ministerial suggestions for social progress, but he has done all within his power to humanize conditions in his industry.” But it was not enough. The author wrote that moral suasion, a longstanding tactic of Protestant reform, had reached its limits in this economic catastrophe. “I see no hope for improvement except in establishing within our democracy a supreme economic council with dictatorial powers.” Like the National Industrial Recovery Act that was passed one year later, this 1932 proposal suggested that “the supreme economic council could declare, for instance, uniform wage scale for all the operations in the cordage factories of America.”55 These kinds of drastic proposals appeared regularly in the pages of Protestantism’s most important magazine.
By the summer of 1932 it became clear that the Christian Century was mistaken in its prediction of Roosevelt’s demise. Roosevelt reached out to Protestant leaders in a speech in Detroit, which tried to enlist them in a fight for “social justice through social action” based on religious “fundamentals.”56 Roosevelt talked about the Fall of Man, the Flood, and other biblical stories. He appealed to religious sentiments that had undergirded past efforts to abolish child labor, pass workingmen’s insurance, and eradicate disease. These same values, Roosevelt argued, demanded an active government. Roosevelt was picking up on the rhetoric of ecumenical Protestants, but Morrison barely noticed. An editorial declared that Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate for the presidency and an ordained Episcopalian minister, espoused policies and values that cohered most closely with Christianity. But Thomas was a third-party candidate with little hope of winning, the Christian Century’s editors wrote. Roosevelt and Hoover, the editors concluded, offered little in terms of policy differences. But if someone had to be entrusted with government planning, surely it should not be Roosevelt, a crony of Tammany Hall. In the fall of 1932, the Christian Century endorsed Hoover for reelection. Hoover’s economic policies may have been lackluster, but at least he embodied the values of the Progressive Era that continued to have currency in some ecumenical Protestant circles.
That the mainstream Christian Century had seriously weighed endorsing a socialist for the presidency in 1932 was a sign of the rupture created by the Great Depression—an event that opened new political possibilities for American Protestantism. In the breach, new voices emerged. Among the most important was Reinhold Niebuhr, who gained notoriety in 1932 with the publication of Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr’s acerbic criticism of both liberals and communists, in a book full of wit and apposite observations, was designed to stoke political change. Niebuhr was running for Congress in Manhattan on the Socialist Party ticket and he was actively backing the party’s presidential candidate, Norman Thomas. Electoral politics was on Niebuhr’s mind as he finished the book during the summer of 1932, before devoting all of his energy to the coming fall campaign. The book came out in December 1932, a month after the Socialist Party was trounced in the election. The Democrats won large majorities, with big gains by the party’s liberal, non-Southern wing. But the book was written at an earlier, more optimistic moment for Niebuhr, when the political winds were at his back. Ironically, at the moment that Moral Man proclaimed liberalism’s impotence, it was the Socialist Party that seemed unable to make headway in conditions that favored it. Niebuhr received a disappointing 4.4 percent of the vote, while Thomas received just 2.2 percent.57
Ecumenical leaders, like Oxnam, emphasized cooperation as the solution to the Great Depression, but Niebuhr took a more confrontational approach. He argued that individuals were capable of living moral lives, but in social life—in the life of groups—such moral behavior was impossible. “The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with all of the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience,” he wrote.58 He claimed that class prejudice and institutional imperatives make the social sphere irresponsive to moral suasion. This, he asserted, was the problem with Christian moralists and secular liberals alike: They believe that education and persuasion will solve all of our social problems. These innocents were unable to see that groups are ultimately unresponsive to moral sentiments and therefore liberals were not offering real solutions to the Great Depression. According to Niebuhr, we must recognize society’s corruption and choose the least-worst route toward justice. For him, this meant going all-in for the working class.
Niebuhr’s assessment of groups expressed itself most clearly in his ideas about international affairs. Like Oxnam, Niebuhr was a rising star in American Protestantism in the 1930s whose concern was increasingly global. Some of Niebuhr’s newfound exuberance for dramatic social change was a result of his 1930 trip to the Soviet Union with Eddy’s American Seminar. Niebuhr came away from the trip even more excited by the Soviet project than Oxnam had been four years earlier, and more willing to make generalizations about what he saw. Reinhold’s brother Richard complained that “Reinie has been in Europe for a few weeks and he already thinks he knows all about it.”59
The words “energy” and “vitality” recurred in Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings about the trip to the USSR, even though he found the communist society “shot through with brutality.” He universalized and brought back home in his writings what he saw abroad. The participation of average Russians in the construction of a new social order dedicated to the welfare of future generations was “not the product of communism at all, but simply the vigor of an emancipated people who are standing upright for the first time in the dignity of a new freedom.” According to biographer Richard Fox, Niebuhr was “spellbound” by the Soviet experiment and “wondered if that kind of social energy could be mobilized in America.” By the following year, before writing Moral Man, Niebuhr believed that it could be. As Fox explains, “With his Soviet visit of the previous summer firmly in mind, he asserted that religious energy was dangerous—it was closely akin to fanaticism—but necessary.”60 A year later, in Moral Man, Niebuhr would repeat this line: “The absolutist and fanatic is no doubt dangerous; but he is also necessary.”61
In the Soviet Union Niebuhr also found an antidote to the nationalism emergent in that era, most dramatically in Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascism. Through nationalism, the state “transmutes individual unselfishness”—the desire to be a part of something greater than oneself—“into national egotism.” Niebuhr dwelled on this paradox at length: The more altruistic and selfless the individual becomes in their devotion to their national community, the more power it gives to the selfish ends of the nation. The selflessness of individuals creates big problems with no easy solutions. “What lies beyond the nation, the community of mankind, is too vague to inspire devotion,” Niebuhr thought, and “the lesser communities within the nation, religious, economic, racial, and cultural, have equal difficulty in competing with the nation for the loyalty of its citizens.” Even “religious missionary enterprises” were prone to patriotism and inclined toward “cultural imperialism,” he worried.62 Nothing, it seemed, was capable of restraining nationalism.
In Niebuhr’s view, there were only poor candidates for taming national egotism, but support for the working class was the best among them. At a moment when much of the American Left believed that US participation in World War I was driven by financial institutions and the armaments industry, it made sense for Niebuhr to suppose that proletarian control at home would mean less crusading for markets abroad.
But at the moment Moral Man was published, a 4.4 percent share of the vote for Niebuhr hardly constituted an endorsement of his views. Niebuhr quickly moved away from the working class as the source of America’s salvation. Making this move easier were attacks by former friends and colleagues, whose sharp rebukes appeared in the pages of the Christian Century. Niebuhr was frustrated with the magazine’s tepid response to the 1932 election and especially Morrison’s call for “disinterested citizens” to deliver votes to the party most willing to back progressive ideals. For Niebuhr, who was already annoyed about the magazine’s dismissal of Norman Thomas, this was nonsense: You had to choose sides. “Disinterested politics” was an oxymoron because “all history proves the futility of expecting that men of power will divest themselves voluntarily of their power and their privilege.” Morrison was not happy with this line of reasoning, and a back-and-forth ensued. But the last straw was the Christian Century’s review of Moral Man. It accused Niebuhr of endorsing violence in the name of class conflict. The reviewer concluded, “To call this book fully Christian in tone is to travesty the heart of Jesus’ message to the world.”63
The harsh reception of Moral Man pushed Niebuhr to focus less on attacking liberalism in general, and to focus more specifically on Protestant liberalism. “I have discovered since writing my book that the liberalism of American Protestantism has turned into a rather hard orthodoxy which turns vehemently upon every heretic who questions its assumptions,” Niebuhr wrote.64 Breaking with pacifists and those he derisively labeled “idealists,” Niebuhr reinvented himself as a “realist,” opposed to naive religious liberalism, which he now saw as his main enemy.
In the fall of 1933 Niebuhr was invited to take part in a group that would come to define Christian realism. The first meeting of the Theological Discussion Group included a disproportionate number of participants in Eddy’s American Seminar, including Georgia Harkness, Samuel McCrea Cavert, Henry Pitney Van Dusen, and Niebuhr himself. They went back to first principles, rethinking the problems of human nature in a political world that seemed to be falling apart.65 Their theology would become popular in Protestant circles during World War II and emerge with full force during the early Cold War.
As Niebuhr searched for a new political outlook, Morrison reevaluated his attitude toward Roosevelt after he had won the presidency decisively in November 1932. Morrison began to change his mind when Roosevelt first made public his plan for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) just weeks before his inauguration in March 1933. Roosevelt proposed creating a public corporation to coordinate the construction and operation of twenty-nine dams along the Tennessee River, a massive project that would eliminate flooding in the region and bring cheap electricity to residents of seven states, many of whom had previously relied on power produced by animals and tolerated the stench of kerosene lamps. The plan’s ambition caught Morrison’s attention, and the emphasis on large-scale planning and uplift of rural communities matched the new economic vision of many ecumenical Protestants. The TVA was also a reaffirmation of the rational social planning Morrison had defended against Niebuhr’s calls for fanaticism. “We hail it with joy as evidence that the new President is approaching his task, not merely thinking of details of local action, but realizing the necessity for planned national action on an unprecedented scale,” the editors of the Christian Century wrote. “There is nothing impossible in Mr. Roosevelt’s scheme. Let it be tried!”66 Soon after, an assassination attempt elicited the editors’ sympathy for the president-elect. But it was not until his inaugural address that the journal approved of Roosevelt’s whole program.
Roosevelt’s inaugural address, which hit on themes of evicting the money changers from the temple and returning to religious values, was an expression of the liberal Protestantism he had learned as a student at Groton Academy from its Episcopalian headmaster, Reverend Endicott Peabody.67 Rather than seeing calamity in Old Testament terms—as Abraham Lincoln had done, when he evoked the notion of divine punishment in his second inaugural—Roosevelt’s story emphasized human agency and social salvation that was well in line with the ecumenical Protestantism of the day. It was within the means of Americans, collectively, to restore the American economy by going back to the root values embodied by religion. Earlier presidents had evoked America’s political traditions inaugurated by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Constitution as the means to build a good society. But in the 1930s liberalism and parliamentary democracy appeared to some observers as being too weak to withstand the Great Depression and the threats that fascism and communism posed without the aid of religion. Hoover had talked about the Constitution; Roosevelt spoke of faith.
Roosevelt’s inaugural address struck all the right chords for Morrison and the Christian Century. “In his inaugural he looked not only at the emergency but beyond it to the construction of an order in which such emergencies will not occur,” the editors wrote. The president’s speech had also stressed “matters of inner renewal without which no legislative or executive policies, however cleverly devised, can get us out of the mire.” Quoting Roosevelt’s references to the “false money changers” approvingly, the editors recognized the broader message that they had been pushing for years. “To a great extent,” the editors wrote, “we have made [the money changers] what they are, and the moral renewal must go much farther than merely putting them in jail.”68
Almost immediately, during Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days, the flurry of legislation and executive action spelled out what moral renewal would mean for the country. Amid these “revolutionary” acts, which included a bank holiday, executive powers over the budget, and departing from the gold standard, “the public has almost lost the capacity to be startled,” the editors wrote. “Had a communist entered the white house on March 4, could he have set up a more vital dictatorship? Constitutional lawyers shook their heads; the nation cheered.”69
The Christian Century embraced what they viewed as a revolutionary program. “His banking program is clearly headed toward socialism’s government-controlled system of banking. His currency program, with its inflationary possibilities, could as easily be made to produce a redistribution of wealth as socialism’s capital levy. His public works program—the Tennessee valley scheme, with its adjuncts—is as completely socialist in method and aim as any Russian five-year plan.” The editors grasped the magnitude of the changes taking place during the First Hundred Days and they endorsed it wholeheartedly: “The events of the past few months have made it abundantly clear that we need a new United States.”70
Ecumenical Protestants and the Making of the New Deal
The working relationship between the ecumenical Protestant elite and the Roosevelt administration was not only rhetorical. It also meant that they would occasionally work together in the muddy world of Washington politics. The Federal Council placed James Myers in charge of transforming the organization’s pronouncements into social action. Myers’s interest in the labor movement began at a moment when employers were embracing “welfare capitalism.” Following the strike waves of 1919, large employers began offering perks to employees, like days off and company baseball games, and created committees that listened to employee complaints. This welfare capitalism was designed to keep employees from unionizing. Myers, a committed pacifist, had lost his pulpit at a Presbyterian church during World War I and found a job as the head of one of these committees. With this experience, he was hired by the Federal Council in 1925 to head its Industrial Relations Committee.71
It was Myers’s middle-of-the-road approach that made him attractive to Federal Council leaders. Myers was committed to nonpartisanship and shied away from aligning himself with the fortunes of any given party. “I almost joined the Socialist Party back in Auburn Seminary days,” he later recalled, “but balked at the ‘Party discipline’ pledge. Later I came to feel (whether rightly or wrongly) that in my work with the Federal Council and labor, I could do more effective work in my particular role without being a member of a party.”72
That same commitment to nonpartisanship carried over to Myers’s view of labor unions. Myers, like Oxnam, did not value labor unions as an end in themselves. Rather, he saw unions as a means of bringing balance to an industry dominated by too-powerful business owners. “While I do not believe in class hostility,” Myers wrote to a colleague, “I do believe in democracy which means free and untrammeled organization for the workers and an opportunity to have a voice in management of industry.”73 In the 1930s, Myers became a big booster of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, which became a form of escapism for the Protestant Left. It allowed Myers to imagine a future in which Christian principles would not have to be expressed in the tense world of labor-management relations.
Nevertheless, in the here and now, Myers could not help but take sides. In 1929, he visited mill towns in North Carolina and Tennessee, where textile workers had gone on strike. He went to document events, and what he found shocked him. Managers had increased the backbreaking workloads to unbearable levels while cutting already low pay by 10 percent. He documented attacks by private security firms and, in Elizabethton, Tennessee, he discovered that a Presbyterian elder was involved in a kidnapping attempt of a union official. When strikes broke out, most of the clergy looked away or sided with employers, instructing congregants that unions were unchristian and that “servants should obey their master.” During a visit Myers paid to Gastonia, North Carolina, the clergy in the town “were defensive, cold, unresponsive to a degree I have never met before in a group of ministers.” In response to these conditions, Myers helped raise relief funds for striking workers, and he went to Washington to lobby Herbert Hoover, but found the experience of speaking with the president to be like “talking to empty air.” He returned to DC in the spring of 1933, to a more receptive climate, and testified at congressional hearings on the textile codes of the National Recovery Administration, but to little avail.74
In May 1935, Myers put his years of investigating violence in the textile industry to good use. He drafted a petition on labor and civil liberties, and circulated it among hundreds of clergy. The petition asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate nationwide infringements on civil liberties that aimed “to repress demands for economic change on the part of labor and to maintain special privileges and power which [employers] now enjoy.” Social gospel stalwarts like Francis J. McConnell and Harry Emerson Fosdick signed the petition, along with Catholic Monsignor John A. Ryan and Rabbis Stephen Wise and Sidney Goldstein—an expression of religious cooperation in economic matters that Roosevelt had encouraged. In response to the petition, the Senate formed the La Follette Committee, named after the progressive Republican senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. The committee investigated attacks on the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, oversaw the unionization of the Ford Motor Company, and involved itself in both iconic and mundane labor organizing drives of the 1930s.75
The La Follette Committee was performing oversight work for the National Labor Relations Act, known popularly as the “Wagner Act,” which was passed in 1935 with the help of Myers’s lobbying efforts. The Wagner Act reestablished the right of most workers to unionize, after the Supreme Court had struck down an earlier law. Under the Wagner Act, workers had the right to hold elections by secret ballot and employers were required to bargain with unions. And an oversight board made sure that employers did not circumvent this process through unfair tactics or through employer-sponsored unions.
When the Wagner Act was being debated in Congress in early 1935, Myers went to work. First, he formed an interfaith committee of Catholic and Jewish representatives to lobby for the bill. He maintained a personal correspondence with Senator Robert F. Wagner, the sponsor of the bill. And he worked to promote coverage of the bill, writing directly to Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, who ran the article “Three Faiths Back Wagner Labor Bill.” During the Wagner Act debates, Myers served as a clearinghouse of information. He was also the last speaker during congressional testimony on the bill. Myers had connections with America’s political elite, direct access to the public sphere, and a decade of investigatory reports to draw upon. His important role in the passage of the Wagner Act was one expression of the political mobilization of ecumenical Protestants on behalf of the New Deal.76
Figure 2. James Myers, Rabbi Edward L. Israel, and Rev. R. A. McGowan waiting to meet with Herbert Hoover to discuss economic relief in 1931. Myers frequently joined tri-faith delegations, which became increasingly common during the Roosevelt administration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The same Protestant-Catholic-Jewish trio backed the “Wagner-Lewis Economic Security Bill,” now known as the Social Security Act, that same year. They organized labor, business, and religious leaders to petition the Senate to pass the bill, calling on Congress to fulfill its “solemn covenant with the people.”77 For Myers, the bill would fulfill the promise of the 1932 Revised Social Ideals, which advocated for “social insurance against sickness, accident, and want in old age and unemployment.” He spent less of his energy on behalf of Social Security compared with his efforts on behalf of the labor bills. He did not testify on the bill’s behalf (and representatives of Protestant pension funds lobbied against it). But he could draw on a public rhetoric, developed years earlier by the Federal Council of Churches and ecumenical denominations, that identified social security as a Christian principle. Myers’s ability to quickly mobilize the cultural capital of Christianity in the public sphere on behalf of the New Deal was an important part of Roosevelt’s success during his first term in office.
The New Deal and the Revolt of the Laity
Convinced that Roosevelt was taking the United States in the right direction, ecumenical Protestant leaders brought their values into their churches, hoping to persuade everyday churchgoers that these big changes were socially justified and religiously sanctioned. At the United Church of Hyde Park, a uniquely cooperative venture between the Congregationalists and Northern Presbyterians in Chicago, and a tangible example of ecumenism, the minister Douglas Horton asked the congregants to personally respond to the new sense of social responsibility pervading Protestantism in 1934. Horton, who would soon head the Congregationalist denomination, encouraged his flock to write social creeds for individual professions. This largely middle-class congregation of lawyers, bankers, teachers, housewives, and doctors was asked to study, reflect upon, and respond to the Revised Social Ideals.78
The response Horton received from his congregants in 1934 widely endorsed the proposals of the Revised Social Ideals and backed some of the initiatives of the Roosevelt administration. “I stand … for publicly supported old age pension systems for the present, and the development of contributory old age insurance for the future; and for such financial and economic control as may be helpful in preventing a recurrence of the loss of savings which so tragically destroyed the security of this generation,” wrote Olive H. Carpenter. Another participant declared, “I must stand for leaders who see problems as part of a whole and stand for social planning and control of the credit and economic processes for the common good,” including social insurance. “I must stand for the fair distribution of money,” the congregant added.79
Carpenter also called for greater gender equality, which resonated with the Federal Council of Churches’ views on women. According to Marie Griffith, the Federal Council “continued on a steady course in a progressive direction on birth control and sex more generally” in the 1930s.80 Carpenter endorsed “the right of families of all social ranks to such knowledge of birth control as will assure the best home life; for social, civil and economic equality of the sexes [and for] effective public health services, and in such systems of medical group care as will make expert diagnosis and treatment available to all.”81
The broad support given to Roosevelt’s new liberalism was tied together with pacifism and family values for many congregants at Horton’s United Church. For some, who called for “Aid-to-Mothers,” social benefits were meant to ensure the stability of the family. They were to go hand in hand with laws that discouraged hasty marriages and that “controlled” movies, books, and radio programs that threatened to undermine family morals.82 A congregant urged “government control and sale of alcoholic drink” and opposed “free love, lax divorce laws, and anti-marriage and anti-home sentiment,” as well as “indecent movies” and “nudist colonies.”83 The churchgoer was also deeply concerned about the possibility of war and therefore backed the outlawry of war “under the sponsorship of social and religious groups for all the world.”84 The two great moral imperatives of Progressive Era Protestantism—protection of the family and the diminution of war—were understood by some of the laity to require economic stability. And economic stability required peace and good morals.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the New Deal at Horton’s church. Irene Crandall maintained that it was her duty to “fight against bureaucracy and government control of industry, education or religion, and the regimentation of our lives.” Hard work was the best means of dealing with the Depression, according to Crandall. There was room for Christian charity, she wrote to Horton, but the weak must be helped in such a way that they do not unnecessarily drag down the strong.85 Her economic views were in the minority at the ecumenical United Church—at least among those who chose to respond in writing—but she spoke for a section of churchgoers in disproportionately middle- and upper-middle-class ecumenical Protestant denominations.86
Chicago’s United Church was one of the many sites where serious political discussions were taking place among everyday churchgoers. These spaces were important because churchgoers could experiment with new ideas within a safe community, surrounded only by like-minded Protestants. These spaces also offered women, who constituted the majority of churchgoers in Protestant denominations but were often missing in leadership positions, a place to debate and organize on behalf of political causes. And finally, Horton’s church and others like it were helping constitute the kind of rational public the Christian Century worked to cultivate. Rather than exhortation or the chilling warnings about impending doom coming out of the fundamentalist churches, Horton’s approach encouraged different affective work. It was tailored to middle-class sensibilities, telling congregants not to react too strongly, not to jump to conclusions, to be even-handed and deliberative in their analyses, and, above all, to think about today’s political questions in relationship to the values of liberal theology, the social gospel, and ecumenism.
Congregants in Protestant churches were by no means passive recipients of clerical guidance, contemplating solemnly the details of the Revised Social Ideals under the supervision of clerical tutors. At times, churchgoers formed an active and organized opposition to the more radical elements in Protestant denominations.
When Congregationalist leaders appeared to be criticizing capitalism and the profit motive, the laity organized a national protest against the clergy. In 1934, the same year Douglas Horton was discussing the Revised Social Ideals with his flock, national Congregationalist leaders met for the first time in four years. Traditionally, Congregational churches had a great deal of autonomy, and their congregational polity meant that the national organization had no doctrinal authority over local churches. When they met in Oberlin, Ohio, that year church leaders decided that their denomination must change in order for it to effectively respond to the Great Depression.
The most vital of these changes was the creation of the Congregational Council for Social Action (CSA). The CSA included some young radicals, like Buell G. Gallagher and John C. Bennett, who were members of Niebuhr’s Fellowship of Christian Socialists. The majority, however, were old social gospelers, like chairman Arthur Holt. At least one member joined because he wanted Congregationalists to engage in charity more effectively, but he opposed the New Deal.
Officially, the CSA was an advisory committee that would research social problems and report the facts to the churches and let each one decide what, if anything, to do about them. The new organization was tasked with investigating international affairs and peace, rural life and rural-urban conflicts, industrial relations, and race relations. Unofficially, this new group tasked itself with activism and, on occasion, lobbying. Referring to a clause in its charter that nobody gave much thought to in 1934, which read that “the Council may, upon occasion, intercede directly in specific situations,” the CSA created a legislative committee in 1936 to watch over Congress.87
This concentration of power was all the more troubling to some churchgoers because the CSA appeared to be siding with the political Left and criticizing the heart of capitalism. On the last day of the 1934 Oberlin conference, when many ministers had already left, the remaining conference-goers passed a resolution called “The Social Gospel and Economic Problems” by a vote of 130 to 17. The innocuous-sounding resolution had, in fact, denounced “the profit motive” and called on the denomination to abolish the “legal forms which sustain it, and the moral ideals which justify it.”88 This included abolishing private ownership when it “interferes with the social good.”89
The protest against this “profit motive resolution” was not simply a matter of economic policy at a volatile moment in 1934, when the New Deal was being attacked from both the Left and the Right. Some asked whether their denomination still practiced its libertarian-democratic tradition. A denomination with an organized hierarchy, like the Episcopalians or Presbyterians, could clearly say that interpreting the gospel was not up to each individual church. But for some Congregationalist churchgoers, who held fast to local autonomy, the very idea that the denomination could go on record in support of a political position—especially something that sounded Marxist—was a nonstarter.
Ecclesiology, in this case the decentralized congregational model of church governance, mattered. Congregationalist churchgoers shared a demographic profile with Episcopalians and Presbyterians. All three denominations were composed of disproportionately wealthy members. And yet, Congregationalists expressed stronger preferences for economic individualism compared to their peers in more hierarchical denominations.90 For many churchgoers, decentralized religious life and economic individualism went hand in hand. The objections to the profit motive resolution combined fears of a centralized government and a centralized church.
Although the creation of the CSA and the profit motive resolution were distinct measures, they were conflated in the debates that followed the 1934 Oberlin conference. Critics feared that the CSA was created to combat capitalism. As one layman put it, “I am shocked beyond expression to learn the church I have loved and supported all my life—the church for which two centuries has carried high the banner of human freedom … has seized the first opportunity to align itself with the most dangerous political philosophy yet devised.”91 Russell J. Clinchy, a dissenting member of the CSA, would later complain, “Frankly, we are Congregationalists and as such we cannot speak or act for others in social realms any more than we can in theological realms.… No minority can speak for the whole.”92 The leaders of the CSA protested, putting out a statement that declared they were followers of Jesus, not Marx or Roosevelt. But the clarification changed few minds. Protests broke out across the country as conservative activists and business leaders organized in the name of the “laity.” It was men who “provided the emotional energy behind the widening controversy,” writes Margaret Bendroth. These groups “became a vehicle of masculine resentment against higher forces beyond popular control.”93 As angry businessmen and well-connected laypersons—mostly men—mobilized for congregational autonomy and against the denunciation of the profit motive, they called the laity into being.
The laity was made in the 1930s in response to debates about the New Deal state. To be sure, the laity as a theological category was longstanding in Protestant thought. But as an identity, the “laity” must be treated in the same way as historian E. P. Thompson treated the “working class”—not as a transhistorical category but as a meaningful identity and solidarity that arose at a specific moment in time and whose creation was a response to specific economic, social, and political contexts. We have to ask, under what circumstances did some churchgoers come to understand themselves as members of the laity? In this sense, some churchgoers in the 1930s came to believe that they were members of the laity not only because they wanted to differentiate themselves from the clergy but because they wanted to differentiate their politics from the politics of the clergy. As this and later chapters demonstrate, the laity became a meaningful identity in the mid-twentieth century because of concerns about the New Deal, antiracist initiatives, and certain forms of internationalism. As some churchgoers started thinking of themselves as members of the laity, they were not only mobilizing a theological tradition but also taking on a political identity and staking out a position on ecclesiology.94
For anti-clergy activists, laity meant something more than simply nonclergy churchgoers. They argued that the wealthier, more responsible members of the church should have a louder voice in policy debates. And so, although the mobilization against the denunciation of the profit motive likely represented a broadly held belief in economic individualism among Congregationalist churchgoers, such revolts against clergy were almost always organized by very narrow segments of the denomination. The subtlety of values and political positions among everyday churchgoers expressed at Horton’s church were lost in the writings and speeches of the laity.
Facing a laymen’s revolt in the 1930s, the Corporation of the General Council—Congregationalism’s governing body—took the unusual step of rescinding the profit motive resolution, announcing in March 1935 that it should be regarded as an “unauthoritative minority pronouncement.”95 With the resolution rescinded, Congregationalism returned to the traditional position of letting each church decide how it felt about the profit motive. The protests died down, but the laity raised broad questions about the relationship between religion, democracy, and economics that would not go away for decades and exposed a gap in values between clergy and laity. And the groups organized in the 1930s to fight the profit motive resolution would reemerge in the early Cold War with new vigor.96 Nonetheless, the CSA remained intact and its resources would grow over the years. Congregationalism emerged out of the debates over the profit motive, like most other denominations in the 1930s, more divided and yet more critical of capitalism, more politically adept, with much of the institutional machinery in the hands of social gospel clergy.
When Douglas Horton was elected to head the Congregational denomination in 1936, there were no easy answers to the questions about ecclesiology raised during the profit motive debate. Horton acknowledged higher authorities than majority rule and expertise, although he could not entirely dismiss the demands of the churchgoers he worked so tirelessly to move leftward in the 1930s. He had little appreciation for the laity, which was attempting to seize the cultural capital of Christianity on behalf of its wealthiest members. Horton was not a socialist or even very enthusiastic about the social gospel, but he nonetheless opposed the growing threat wealthy churchgoers posed to what he viewed as Christianity’s social mission.
The laity, however, was not the only threat to Horton’s social politics during the Great Depression. Fundamentalist Protestants, who had been routed in the 1920s battles over denominational control, kept a watchful and wary eye on ecumenical Protestants and the political leaders they supported, especially Roosevelt. They were angered that Roosevelt helped end Prohibition and upset that his policies seemed to toe the line of groups, like socialists and labor unions, that they considered atheistic. For many fundamentalists this was enough to make them stalwart opponents of the New Deal. Others saw the New Deal in global terms, as part of the fulfilment of a prophecy about the end-times. They subscribed to dispensationalist premillennialism, which was a theory, derived from the most obscure passages of the Bible, predicting that history went through stages and that the coming of the Antichrist was imminent. Many fundamentalists saw Mussolini’s attempt at restoring the Roman Empire and Hitler’s antisemitism driving Jews to Palestine as a prelude to the Rapture. Roosevelt’s charisma, his increasing power, and his internationalist sensibilities were seen in this global context, according to Matthew Sutton, in which “New Deal liberalism was the means by which the United States would join the legions of the antichrist.” Suspicion ran high from the very beginning—at the Democratic Convention in 1932, Roosevelt had received exactly 666 votes.97
Four years after Roosevelt’s election, national ecumenical Protestant leaders gave broad support to the New Deal, much to the chagrin of some laymen, business leaders, communist hunters, and fundamentalists. In 1936, hoping to undermine Roosevelt’s chances of reelection, W. B. Riley, the founder and former head of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, helped organize a conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in support of capitalism and religion and railing against its enemies. Riley, a rabid antisemite and future mentor to Billy Graham, was joined by professional communist hunter Elizabeth Dilling, author of Red Network, along with Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran ministers, laymen, and educators.
Conference speakers had two targets: Reds in the churches and Reds in the White House. They saw the New Deal largely as a religious problem. Professor Theodore Graebner of the Lutheran Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis and editor of the Lutheran Witness, believed that the New Deal was based on the false theology expressed in the Revised Social Ideals. Speakers insisted that “much New Deal legislation has been enacted at radical churchmen’s behest as easy steps toward Moscow.” Another speaker argued that the Methodist youth “is being fed homeopathic doses of socialism and communism through Sunday school literature.”98 Although concerned about the New Deal, they saw it as a symptom of a much deeper spiritual problem: theological liberalism. Opposing bad religion and its false political prophets was their central concern.
Both Roosevelt and ecumenical Protestants kept an eye on these developments, especially during the election year of 1936. Stanley High, the former editor of the Christian Herald, who was then working as a political operative for Roosevelt, warned the president that the “strongest opposition” would come “not from the economic reactionaries, but from the religious reactionaries.”99 But neither Roosevelt nor the ecumenical Protestant elite were seriously worried. The attempt to rally the enemies of the New Deal and sway the election toward the Republican nominee Alf Landon—whom a Presbyterian college president called “a solid typical church-going, church supporting American”—was a failure. In November 1936 Roosevelt won 99 percent of the popular vote in the college president’s home state of South Carolina. Roosevelt also won 98.5 percent of the electoral votes nationwide in one of the largest landslides in American history.100
One big barrier for fundamentalist politics was its religious intolerance. Fascist ministers, like Gerald B. Winrod, had shown up to the Asheville conference and “attempted to inject Nazi ideas into the convention’s deliberations.”101 The attempt to include Jews and Catholics at Asheville erupted into an orgy of religious bigotry. Pastor Charles Vaughn of Los Angeles led the opposition to the very marginal Jewish participation. Defeated on the first day of the conference, he and other attendees organized a competing Protestant-only meeting at a nearby church. In a bizarre turn of events, Vaughn claimed to have been punched and knocked unconscious when returning to his hotel room, which he attributed to “sinister forces.” When he came to, he found that 250 letters in his possession that had been addressed to anticommunists had disappeared. After investigating, Asheville police concluded that the whole affair had been a hoax.102
These theatrics only encouraged ecumenical disdain of their fundamentalist and anticommunist opponents. It also kept respectable business leaders and all but the most reactionary laypersons away and undermined alliances between anticommunist Protestants and Catholic and Jewish sympathizers. Charles Clayton Morrison delighted in listing the leaders of the American National Front and the American Nordic Folk—distributors of the antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—alongside conservative Protestant laymen and fundamentalist preachers. The Christian Century blasted the “attempted alliance between the organized militaristic patrioteers, the anti-Semitic and ‘Nordic’ enthusiasts, some extreme fundamentalists, some economically conservative laymen, some southern republicans and some anti-Roosevelt southern democrats” for their shameful effort at “giving religious and patriotic sanction to a political program.” And Morrison rightly understood that in the 1930s this was a nonstarter: “This kind of gun is much more dangerous at the butt than at the muzzle.”103
While fundamentalists had trouble rallying their constituency against Roosevelt, ecumenical denominations appeared hard-pressed to get their churchgoers to vote for him. The sense among ecumenical leaders that their values and politics were not shared by many churchgoers was laid bare in the mid-1930s through a new technology: polling. George Gallup’s survey techniques gained widespread attention during the 1936 election, when he successfully predicted the reelection of Roosevelt from only a small sample size. By 1940, 8 million Americans were reading the results of Gallup’s polls in syndicated columns across the nation.104 Protestant leaders had occasionally queried their publics before, but the advent of polling gave this technique added importance. Now it was possible for social scientists to bypass the clergy entirely and query what the “average” Protestant was thinking.
Ecumenical Protestant leaders did not like what polls told them about their religion. Horton made headway in promoting his ideals at his United Church of Hyde Park. But for the two denominations that joined together to create this church—the Congregationalists and the Northern Presbyterians—churchgoers remained resistant to the Democratic Party. While Roosevelt won in a landslide in 1936, 77 percent of Congregationalists voted for Republican Alf Landon, FDR’s opponent, in that election. Landon ran on a progressive Republican platform that criticized some aspects of the New Deal while accepting others. And yet hostility toward the idea of the New Deal remained persistent among ecumenical Protestant churchgoers. A 1940s-era survey found that 72 percent of Congregationalists and 65 percent of Northern Presbyterians disapproved of the New Deal.105
This did not mean that Horton was not getting through to his flock but only that they did not switch their party loyalty. “Political preference is a less stable index” of values than other markers, Protestant leaders themselves observed.106 The extent of the shift in values among ecumenical Protestant churchgoers in the 1930s is difficult to gauge. In the long term, it appears that many remained loyal to the Republican Party but gravitated toward its respectable, liberal wing. But whatever steps they took leftward, for ecumenical leaders this was hardly enough. A gap existed between the values of Protestant clergy and laity. Deciding how to deal with the clergy-laity gap would become a perennial problem for members of the Protestant establishment, who would struggle between the two great forces that shaped their politics: their faith and their congregants.
By the time of Roosevelt’s reelection campaign in 1936, there was more support for him than there had been in 1932. To be sure, there was opposition among the laity and criticism of FDR among the left-leaning clergy. But by 1936 there was a sense that ecumenical Protestant leaders could work with Roosevelt and that his major accomplishments—the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority—were in accord with Protestant principles.
The previously hostile Christian Century celebrated Roosevelt’s Democratic convention speech in 1936. “It moved on a plane above these matters of partisan apologetic and polemic,” the editors wrote. “It was the statement of a philosophy of government based on a realization that men who are in economic bondage cannot be politically free.”107 The relationship between ecumenical Protestant clergy, the spokespersons for Protestant liberalism, and Roosevelt, the spokesperson for political liberalism, had strengthened by 1936. Initially suspicious of Roosevelt’s political ties to machine politics and the Catholic Church, and critical of his opposition to Prohibition, ecumenical Protestants now celebrated Roosevelt as a prophet of a new economy rooted in Christian values.
“A Summons for Us to Stand Together”
In 1934, G. Bromley Oxnam traveled once again on Sherwood Eddy’s American Seminar, now in its fourteenth year. When the party arrived in Germany, where Nazi officials had gotten wind of Eddy’s antifascist remarks, Oxnam took over as the seminar’s leader. On an earlier trip to Italy, Oxnam was fascinated with fascism, noting that Italians went “about their business with a new spirit,” and he judged Mussolini to be “the greatest orator I have ever heard.” What he witnessed in Germany in 1934, however, felt far more sinister. Two weeks after the Night of the Long Knives, Oxnam listened to a speech by Hitler defending the murder of his opposition. As Oxnam stood listening, standing near Göring, Goebbels, and a throng of SS members, he saw Hitler as “a modest person of awful dignity and compelling magnetism; a mystic, a man of purpose, a personality in repose, yet ready to deliver devastating blows for a cause, a man tender at heart but willing to become ruthless in his messianic mission.” Hitler’s opposition “lives in terror,” Oxnam wrote in his diary. “The concentration camp, the firing squad and exile loom like specters of the night in his mind.” Soon, he concluded, Germany would go to war with its neighbors.108
Roosevelt noted the danger as well. In 1932, Roosevelt had evoked religion on behalf of a new economic program. In 1936, he began mobilizing religion again to confront the new fascist threat. “Religion in wide areas of the earth is being confronted with irreligion; our faiths are being challenged,” he told a nationwide radio audience. “The very state of the world is a summons for us to stand together.”109
By 1936, the New Deal was largely spent.110 Its tremendous accomplishments—the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the passage of the Social Security Act, and the Wagner Act—all benefited from a Protestant Christianity that was publicly associated with liberal causes and whose institutions were largely in the hands of supporters of the New Deal. That Roosevelt began using Protestant language to describe his foreign policy lent a great deal of attention to those issues and would eventually pave the way for American involvement in World War II. The change in emphasis likewise worked against further domestic reforms, as Protestants followed Roosevelt’s lead in focusing on the Nazi threat to the detriment of new economic initiatives.
Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection bookended the remarkable transformation of the nation’s economy and of the country’s religious life. A new generation, including Oxnam, Horton, and Niebuhr, took on leading roles in Protestant institutions. In 1936, Oxnam became a bishop in the Methodist denomination. That same year, Horton became the national leader of the Congregationalists. Niebuhr became a celebrated author. With their rise, Prohibition and other Progressive Era concerns faded away. As ecumenical Protestants became more politically organized they worried about the difficulties of justifying their politics theologically to churchgoers. Nevertheless, four years into FDR’s presidency, the assumption that the New Deal was an expression of Protestant values was widespread. It would be more accurate to say that during the Great Depression, the spokespersons for religious and political liberalism improvised, began speaking the same language, and finally made common cause. Whether they would do the same for the looming war was another matter.