All Things Human: Henry Codman Potter and the Social Gospel in the Episcopal Church

Notes

225 notes Introduction 1. Ronald C. White Jr. and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), xi–xix; William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1–44, 141–78. 2. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 9–22. 3. Churchman, 8 March 1884, 262, New York Sun, 1894, and Hammer and Pen (September 1905) quoted by Clyde Griffen, “An Urban Church in Ferment: The Episcopal Church in New York City, 1880–1900” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1960), 56 and 76; Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 182. 4. On the origins of CAIL, see Harriette Keyser, Bishop Potter, the People’s Friend (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1910), 18–21; Griffen, “Urban Church in Ferment,” 390–415; Spencer Miller Jr. and Joseph F. Fletcher, The Church and Industry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930), 52–76; and C. Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), 150–52. On HCP’s 1886 pastoral letter, see Keyser, Bishop Potter, 21–26; and White and Hopkins, Social Gospel, 63–65, for a portion of the letter. On the Joint Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor and diocesan social service commissions, see The Journal of the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity Assembled in General Convention, 1901 (printed for the convention, 1902), 125–26; Journal of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 1904 (printed for the convention, 1905), 95–98 [hereafter cited as General Convention Journal]; General Convention Journal 1907, 528; and General Convention Journal 1910, 110, 177, 534. See also Keyser, Bishop Potter, 140–49, 155–61; New York Times, 20 October 1904, 6; Hammer and Pen, 6.11 (November 1904): 90–91; and National Civic Federation Review 1 (15 November 1904): 1, 14. 5. James Sheerin, Henry Codman Potter: An American Metropolitan (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1933), x. C. H. Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 35, 93, 102, 150– 52, notes that in the late 1870s “the sensitive social conscience of Henry Codman Potter” led him “to preach on the perils of wealth, indifference to social need, the duties of citizenship, children in the slums, the tenement problem, and kindred topics growing out of his parish work.” He also maintains that HCP’s work on the conflict between labor and capital was particularly important, both because of his 1886 pastoral letter and his role in CAIL. Similarly, May, Protestant Churches, 132–35, notes the importance of HCP’s letter, calling it “Perhaps the most striking Social Gospel reaction to the dramatic events of 1886” largely because it was “a repudiation of the standard economic view of labor as a commodity, a theory that had been pronounced by clerical authorities consistently since of the time of Potter’s father.” May, Protestant Churches, 178–79, also cites HCP’s response to Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay, “Wealth.” Aaron I. Abell, The Urban Impact on American Protestantism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1962), 55, 113, 183–84, likewise notes HCP’s significance. White and Hopkins, Social Gospel, 63–65, include HCP’s 1886 pastoral letter in their anthology of social gospel texts; Ronald C. White Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877–1925) (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 21–23, 211– 12, 262, discusses HCP’s work with the American Colonization Society in the context of the social gospel and racial reform; McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, 174, includes HCP among the moderates who were “probably the best-known Social Gospelers”; Donald K. Gorrell, The Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1988), 15, lists HCP first among those who “continuously challenged [the Episcopal Church] to social activity”; and Bernard Kent Markwell, The Anglican Left: Radical Reformers in the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church, 1846–1954, Chicago Studies in the History of American Religion (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1991), 99, 100, 111, 132, cites HCP as a moderate reformer compared to radical Episcopalians J. O. S. Huntington, W. D. P. Bliss, and Vida Scudder. (Note, however, that Markwell’s index incorrectly identifies HCP’s father, Alonzo Potter, as the subject of these four references .) The...