J. Walter Malone: The American Friend and an Evangelical Quaker's Social Agenda

J. Walter Malone: The American Friend and an Evangelical Quaker's Social Agenda John Oliver* Introduction John Walter Malone was prominent in American Quaker evangelism, missions, and publishing in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thomas Hamm recognized Malone as the leader of the holiness wing of American Quakerism at the dawn of the twentieth century (Hamm 160). Erroll Elliott credited Malone—together with his wife Emma—with leading an Evangelical Quaker movement which "may have saved Friends Meetings in the [American] West from near extinction" (Elliott 152). This article will explore four questions: What was Walter Malone's role in founding The American Friend; What were the positions of Malone and his journals on social issues (the poor, peace and nonviolence , race, women, and the Third World); How do these positions compare with the views of Rufus Jones in The American Friend from 1894 until the appearance of The Soul-Winner in 19021; Why such differences on social issues between Walter Malone and Rufus Jones? The sources I will use for Malone are The Bible Student and The Soul- Winner, which descended from The Messenger of Peace and became The Evangelical Friend. 2 This paper is a postscript to Diana Peterson's article "Rufus Jones and The American Friend: A Quest for Unity" (Peterson 41-48), and to writings by Richard Wood (Wood 212), Thomas Hamm (Hamm 147-48) Richard Sartwell (Sartwell 58-75), Hugh Barbour and Jerry Frost (Barbour and Frost 352).3 Each recognized Malone as one of the founders of The American Friend. Founding The American Friend Walter Malone said nothing about The American Friend or any other publication in his "Life Stories," an unpublished autobiography penciled in a loose-leaf notebook, nor did his obituary in The American Friend credit him with any part in founding the journal (AF 20 February 1936, 82-83). Rufus Jones omitted Malone from his account of the founding in his The Trail of Life in the Middle Years,* and Malone does not appear in biographies of Jones by David Hinshaw and Elizabeth Gray Vining.5 64Quaker History Publicly, Jones explained the founding as the work of one man— reflecting in 1944 at the fiftieth anniversary that "I was once in my life the doctor, the midwife and the nursing mother at a birth. The offspring that came to birth in that travail was The American Friend."'' Privately, Jones gave a different account. Dr. Carroll Malone, a son of Walter Malone—writing one day after a conversation with Jones at Tsing Hua College in China—reported Jones as saying: Thy father and I once did a big piece of work together. ... He had a controlling interest in the Christian Worker, . . . and we had ... a paper called The Friends Review. I asked thy father to come to Philadelphia to consider the merging of the two papers, and he came. The result of our conference was that we merged the two papers and founded The American Friend.1 Later, after the death of Walter Malone, Jones repeated this account in a personal letter: In 1894 I was Editor of the Friends Review . . . with a circulation of about 1800. J. Walter Malone was in the control of the Christian Worker . . . with a circulation of about 4000. It was in debt and it was losing money. I induced Walter to join in a plan to merge the two papers and I created The American Friend. . . ." These somewhat differing accounts do not detract from the great work of Rufus Jones in establishing The American Friend, but they do suggest there may be more to this story than has previously been told. Why did Walter Malone, whose growing Christian Worker had more than twice the circulation of the declining Friends Review, close down his larger paper? Why did Malone give power to lead Quaker journalism in the United States to a man he scarcely knew? Walter Malone's association with the Christian Worker began with the founding of the paper in New Vienna, Ohio, in 1871 . Malone, then a boy of fourteen, could see from the front porch of his home the building where the Worker was published—one quarter of a mile straight across...