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JOEL BEAN AND THE REVIVAL IN IOWA Thomas D. Hamm* In the spring of 1870 a leading Iowa Quaker visited the meetings constituting Bangor Quarterly Meeting in the central part of the state. What he found there heartened him. "The Lord's work is progressing in many localities and deepening in many hearts," he wrote to the Friends' Review. "A true work of grace was begun, and has been carried forward. The Lord visited his people. Sinners were awakened. The worldling's rest was disturbed. The unbeliever was made to tremble , and many were awakened from the lethargy of a lifeless profession ." There had been some excesses over which he expressed regret, but, he argued, "we may no more conclude that the religious movement out of which they have sprung, is all wrong, than that the rise of Quakerism was wrong, because of the Ranterism which so soon followed it." The Iowa Friend concluded with a question and an observation for doubters: "What Reformation has not been attended by some excesses? How rare the vigorous growth that needs not the pruning hand."1 The language of this eminent Iowa Friend would become familiar to Orthodox Quakers in the 1870s as a wave of revivals identical to those common in evangelical denominations swept through their meetings. This enthusiast was not, however, David B. Updegraff or John Henry Douglas or Esther Frame or any of the others whom we have come to think of as stalwarts of the "Great Revival." He was none other than Joel Bean, who within fifteen years would become not only the revival's foremost opponent but also its famous victim. At one time Joel Bean was one of the best-known Friends in the United States, connected by marriage with the Philadelphia Shipleys, widely traveled in the ministry, and, in the 188Os and 1890s, the center of one of the most ferocious controversies ever to divide American Friends. After his death in 1914, however, Bean was largely neglected by the great Quaker historians and almost forgotten save as the grandfather of Pendle Hill co-founder Anna Cox Brinton.2 In the 1960s Bean re-emerged into Quaker historical consciousness. ?Thomas D. Hamm is visiting assistant professor of history at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis. 1.J.B. letter, Friends' Review, 7th mo. 9, 1870, 730-731. 2.See for example Friends' Intelligencer, 1st mo. 24, 1914, 60. 33 34Quaker History In 1960 Howard Brinton published "The Revival Movement in Iowa," a long reminiscence that Bean wrote for Rufus Jones in 1906. Then in 1969 Bean was the central figure in David C. LeShana's Quakers in California, a revision of a University of Southern California dissertation. LeShana provided the first scholarly account of Bean's life and restored him to his central place in nineteenth-century Quaker history. Three years later Errol T. Elliott included Bean in a series of sketches of leading American Friends, although he based his account largely on LeShana's work.3 LeShana's work, while important, balanced, and path-breaking, does have its limitations. First, LeShana did not have access to Joel Bean's voluminous personal papers which did not arrive at Swarthmore College until 1976. Bean's diary and carefully preserved correspondence with hundreds of English and American Friends now form one of the outstanding resources for understanding nineteenthcentury American Quakerism. LeShana apparently was also unaware of the significant group of Bean letters in the Timothy Nicholson Papers at Earlham College, letters in which Bean freely expressed his views in the 1870s and 1880s. Secondly, LeShana's treatment of Bean, perhaps because of space limitations, is in many ways static. LeShana's discussion of Bean's understanding of Quakerism is based largely on three published articles , two written in the early 1880s and one in 1894. What is missing is a sense of how Bean changed over time, how his views of Quakerism and Christianity evolved. The Joel Bean of 1860 was a very different person from the Bean of 1880, and that Bean would in turn be different from the Bean who was deposed from the ministry in 1893. A reconsideration of Bean and the development of his understanding of...

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