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  • Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism and Helped Save America by Chuck Fager, and: Angels of Progress: A Documentary History of the Progressive Friends: Radical Quakers in a Turbulent America ed. by Chuck Fager
  • Ellen M. Ross
Remaking Friends: How Progressive Friends Changed Quakerism and Helped Save America. By Chuck Fager. Durham, N.C.: Kimo Press, 2014. vi + 240 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index; and
Angels of Progress: A Documentary History of the Progressive Friends: Radical Quakers in a Turbulent America. Ed. by Chuck Fager. Durham, N.C.: Kimo Press, 2014. viii + 469 pp. Index. $19.99.

These two volumes narrate a fascinating story of the emergence of liberal Quakerism in America. Chuck Fager argues that liberal Friends, and the Friends General Conference (FGC) specifically, can trace a lineage directly back to the 1840s and 1850s in the history and development of Progressive Friends, a vibrant, contentious, and generally-overlooked chapter in the history of Hicksite Friends.

The books constitute a narrative (Remaking Friends) and documentary (Angels of Progress) history of Progressive Friends of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Fager presents Progressive Friends as a “movement,” and the books include voices from the Michigan Yearly Meeting of Friends of Universal Progress, the Green Plain Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends of Ohio, and the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends of Waterloo, New York, among others. Fager focuses on the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends (known as Longwood Progressives), which, although it was not the earliest manifestation of Progressive Friends, did last the longest (Remaking Friends, 50). Remaking Friends is a narrative tribute to the founders of the Longwood Progressives including, among others, Joseph Dugdale, the first Clerk and a link to the earlier Ohio Progressives, as well as the ubiquitous Lucretia Mott. The list of visitors to Longwood Meetinghouse is a roll call of leading reformers and visionaries in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America: Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, W.E. B. Du Bois, A. J. Muste, and A. Philip Randolph, among many others.

“Progress” was at the forefront of the reformers’ minds. Fager documents the Progressive Friends’ causes, including abolition, women’s rights, opposition to capital punishment, anti-war work, peace activism, and temperance. While [End Page 51] Fager explores the extraordinary influence of Progressive Friends in reforming American society in general, he pays particular attention to their transformation of internal Quaker polity from a largely hierarchical structure to a more egalitarian and democratic form. Fager highlights the stories of three influential Progressive Friends who were significant in the emergence of the FGC: Henry Wilbur (1851–1914); Jane Rushmore (1864–1958); and Jesse H. Holmes (1864–1942).

Fager argues that one of the key mechanisms through which the vision of Progressive Friends came to influence liberal Quakerism was by way of the Uniform Discipline of the FGC, issued in 1926: “By 1930 all the FGC yearly meetings had revised their Disciplines, and all [seven] used the Uniform Discipline as a model” (Remaking Friends, 184). The central points in the Uniform Discipline and in the subsequent yearly meeting Disciplines reflect the vision for reform articulated by Progressive Friends in the 1848 “Basis of Religious Association” from Waterloo, New York, and in the 1853 “Exposition of Sentiments” from Longwood: “[F]rom outliers and outcasts, the Progressive Friends and their ideas had become the formative template of twentieth century liberal Quakerism” (Remaking Friends, 184).

There are many subthemes in the books, including attention to the longstanding connection of Quakers and spiritualist traditions, Quaker connections to John Brown, and Quakers and the Civil War.

Chuck Fager’s signature prophetic voice, calling Quakers to action informed by history, is present throughout both books. His engaging and informal manner of storytelling invites a wide readership. His useful introductions and selection of documents in Angels of Progress draws readers into dialogue with the past. Fager tells this too-little-known story in part in order to inform the present and to help individuals and communities to envision the future. These are excellent books for meeting communities to read and discuss together, as well as for general readers and scholars interested in the history of the Society...

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