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The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Doug Rossinow
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Abstract

A vigorous Protestant left existed throughout the first half of the twentieth-century in the United States. That Protestant left was the left wing of the social gospel movement, which many historians restrict to the pre-1920 period and whose radical content is often underestimated. This article examines the career of one representative figure from this Protestant left, the Reverend Harry F. Ward, as a means of describing the evolving nature and limits of social gospel radicalism during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Ward, the main author of the 1908 Social Creed of the Churches, a longtime professor at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, and a dogged activist on behalf of labor and political prisoners through his leadership of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, sought a new social order from the early years of the century through the Great Depression of the 1930s. This new order would be the Kingdom of God on earth, and, in Ward's view, it would transcend the competitive and exploitative capitalism that dominated American society in his time. Before World War I, Ward worked to bring together labor activists and church people, and, after the war, he shifted his work toward less expressly religious efforts, while continuing to mentor clerical protégés through his teaching. Ward's leftward trajectory and ever-stronger Communist associations would eventually bring about his political downfall, but, in the mid- 1930s, he remained a respected figure, if one more radical than most, among American Protestant clergy. Organic links tied him and his politics to the broader terrain of social gospel reform, despite the politically driven historical amnesia that later would all but erase Ward from historical memory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Winter 2005 , pp. 63 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2005

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References

Notes

1. Carter, Paul A., The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920–1940 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954)Google Scholar. Other standard works, including Hopkins, Charles H., The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940)Google Scholar, Abell, Aaron I., The Urban Impact on American Protestantism, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943)Google Scholar, May, Henry F., Protestant Churches in Industrial America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949)Google Scholar, Handy, Robert T., ed., The Social Gospel in America, 1870–1920: Gladden, Ely, Rauschenbusch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, and White, Ronald Jr., and Hopkins, Charles H., eds., The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, take the period between 1865 and 1920 as their time frame for the “classic” period of the social gospel. The finest recent account, Gorrell, Donald K., The Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, also ends its story in 1920. Gorrell writes that he wishes to emphasize what he terms “a period from 1913 to 1919 or 1920 that constitutes the missing years of social-gospel history that have not yet been studied carefully” (3), implying that he considers the social gospel to have a history beyond 1920. But his choice of that year as the terminus of his study reaffirms the older works’ conception of the social gospel as a movement that, at least, suffered a loss of cohesion and force with the end of the Progressive Era and represents a declined opportunity to revise the conventional start and end dates of the social gospel.

2. The early, positive evaluation of the progressive movement, focusing on settlement house workers and others influenced by the social gospel, can be found in works such as May, Protestant Churches in Industrial America; Bremner, Robert, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Abell, Urban Impact on American Protestantism; Abell, Aaron I., American Catholicism and Social Action (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1960)Google Scholar; Chambers, Clarke W., Seedtime for Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918–1933 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963)Google Scholar; and Davis, Allen F., Spearheads for Reform: The Settlement Houses and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar. Lubove, Roy, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is slightly less celebratory. Revisionist works propounding the view that progressive reformers sought mainly to gain middle-class control over a restive proletariat are not as numerous as one might think, “social control” serving more often as a slogan for quick dismissal than as the entry point for extended study. Such studies as do exist, and which deal with the Progressive Era, include Pivar, David J., Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; focusing more exclusively on ethnicity than on class relations is Lissak, Riva S., Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert H., Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; and Galambos, Louis D., “The Organizational Synthesis in American History,” Business History Review 44 (1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, urge students of U.S. history seeking to understand the progressive movement to direct their attention elsewhere. Recent works such as Pascoe, Peggy, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, Ellen, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn K., Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work, vol. 1, The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Freedman, Estelle B., Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar, seek to rehabilitate the settlement house workers and to relocate them near the center of the progressive movement, but mainly through the lens of women's history; the place of religion remains a distinctly minor theme.

3. For further thoughts on this matter, see Butler, Jon, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90 (March 2004): 1357–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollinger, David A., “The ‘Secularization’ Question and the United States in the Twentieth Century,” Church History 70 (March 2001): 132–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGreevy, John T., “Faith and Morals in the United States, 1865–Present,” American Quarterly 26 (March 1998): 239–54Google Scholar; and Rossinow, Doug, “‘The Break-through to New Life’: Christianity and the Emergence of the New Left in Austin, Texas, 1956–1964,” American Quarterly 46 (September 1994): 309–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. King, William McGuire, “The Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism: The Methodist Case,” Church History 50 (December 1981): 437 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Handy, Robert T., A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 163 Google Scholar; Milton Mayer (writing in the Progressive magazine in 1953) quoted in Miller, Robert Moats, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: Paladin of Liberal Protestantism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 584 Google Scholar.

5. McClain, George D., “Pioneering Social Gospel Radicalism: An Overview of the History of the Methodist Federation for Social Action,” Radical Religion 5 (1989): 11 Google Scholar; Chappell quoted in ibid., 12. She referred to “a small band of Methodist preachers,” not to Ward individually. McClain became executive secretary of the federation, which changed its name to the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) in 1948, in the early 1970s.

6. Warren, Heather A., “Character, Public Schooling, and Religious Education, 1920–1934,” Religion and American Culture 7 (Winter 1997): 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ward actually followed Coe from Southern California to Northwestern. In 1909, Coe took a position at UTS, with Ward ultimately joining him as a colleague. Handy, Robert T., A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 125 Google Scholar.

7. Beverly Harrison, interview with author, August 7, 2001.

8. See Craig, Robert H., “An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Harry F. Ward,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 24, no. 4 (Summer 1969): 331–32Google Scholar.

9. Ward's papers are gathered in the Harry F. Ward Collection at the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York (referred to here as “Ward papers”). This collection contains much richer material concerning the years after 1929 than for Ward's early career. Hence, I focus here on Ward's many published writings from the period in question.

10. Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 17; Link, “Latter Day Christian Rebel,” 223.

11. On the meaning of the “Social Question,” see Ross, Dorothy, “Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880’s,” Perspectives in American History 11 (1977–1978): 15–16 Google Scholar.

12. Ward, Harry F., The Labor Movement, from the Standpoint of Religious Values (New York: Sturgis and Walton Co., 1917), ix Google Scholar. The authors of the statement were Adolph Lessig, Nathan Herman, Guy Curtis, and John J. Fraser. Ward appreciated the statement enough to include it at the front of this volume.

13. The Chicago reform environment is detailed in works including Destler, Chester M., American Radicalism, 1865–1901: Essays and Documents (New London: Connecticut College, 1946)Google Scholar; Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work; and Schneirov, Richard, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Gorrell, Age of Responsibility, 46–47, discusses Chicago's importance in the social gospel at the turn of the century.

14. Duke, David Nelson, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 50 Google Scholar; Adams, Frank T., James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic, 1897–1983 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 28 Google Scholar.

15. Review of Harry F. Ward, The Gospel for a Working World (Missionary Education Movement, 1918), Nation 108 (March 15, 1919): 407.

16. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 64, 79. Duke speculates that Ward read the writings of Karl Marx during a sabbatical year in 1905–1906 and states that “Marxism provided a theoretical framework for his [Ward’s] indefatigable social passion.” Ibid., 58. Duke does not detail Ward's intellectual engagement with Marxism at this point in his career.

17. Adams, James A. Dombrowski, 38; Coffin, Henry Sloan, A Half Century of Union Theological Seminary, 1896–1945: An Informal History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954), 100 Google Scholar; Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 52.

18. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 52, 59 (quote on 59).

19. These were the words of the meeting's program committee; quoted in Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 44.

20. See Gorrell, Age of Social Responsibility, 90–93, 97–102; Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 289–92; and Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 41–44.

21. Gorrell, Age of Social Responsibility, 133–44; Hopkins, Rise of the Social Gospel, 302–06, and Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 49–51 (quote on 51). On the bishops’ program, see Ryan, John A., Social Reconstruction (New York: Macmillan, 1920)Google Scholar, and McShane, Joseph M., Sufficiently Radical: Catholicism, Progressivism, and the Bishops’ Program of 1919 (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1986)Google Scholar.

22. Ward quoted in Link, “Latter Day Christian Rebel,” 226–27; Ward, Harry F., ed., Social Creed of the Churches (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1912)Google Scholar.

23. Muelder, Walter G., Methodism and Society in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 of Methodism and Society (New York: Abingdon Press, 1961), 62 Google Scholar; Handy, Robert T., “Christianity and Socialism in America, 1900–1920,” Church History 21 (March 1952): 53 Google Scholar. See Lichtenstein, Nelson and Harris, Howell John, eds., Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, and Fraser, Steve, “The ‘Labor Question’,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 55–84 Google Scholar.

24. Ward, Social Creed, 13, 9. Rodgers, Daniel, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 124–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the Progressive language of “social bonds.” He presents it there as a rejection of individualism, but clearly many activists and thinkers held onto individualism while embracing a more social perspective.

25. Ward, Social Creed, 9; King, Martin Luther Jr., “I Have a Dream” [1963], in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Carson, Clayborne and Shepard, Kris (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 82 Google Scholar.

26. Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913)Google Scholar; Smith, J. Allen, The Spirit of American Government: A Study of the Constitution: Its Origins, Influence and Relation to Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1907)Google Scholar; Ward, Labor Movement, 175.

27. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 64; Ward, Social Creed, 9.

28. Ward, Harry F., Which Way Religion? (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 134 Google Scholar.

29. On the rise of fundamentalism, see the classic work of Marsden, George, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, as well as Sandeen, Ernest R., The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Szasz, Ferenc M., The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880–1930 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Boyer, Paul S., When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

30. Ward, Social Creed, 77–78, 85–86.

31. Ward, Harry F., “The Labor Movement,” in Social Ministry: An Introduction to the Study and Practice of Social Service, ed. Ward, Harry F. (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1910; for the Methodist Federation for Social Service), 108, 126Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., 108, 112–13; Ward, Labor Movement, 29–30. In The Labor Movement, Ward included syndicalism (embodied in the United States by the IWW) as a third major component of the labor movement (see 3, 67, 75). But the IWW's career in American radicalism and labor politics ebbed at the end of the 1910s, and the two-part definition of the labor movement was the more consistent one in Ward's writings.

33. Ward, “Labor Movement,” 115; Ward, Labor Movement, 14, 21. On Wright, see Leiby, James, Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origin of Labor Statistics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar. See also Veblen, Thorstein, The Instinct of Workmanship, and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1914)Google Scholar, and Veblen, Thorstein, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921)Google Scholar.

34. Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 61; Roediger, David R. and Foner, Philip S., Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), 228 Google Scholar.

35. Several historians in recent years have examined the work and findings of the commission, whose members produced two reports concluding their work, the official one endorsing labor's grievances against capital and calling for a strong state role in ensuring equity, and a minority report (associated with John R. Commons, who was deeply influenced by the early social gospel) taking up a more neutral position. See Wunderlin, Clarence E. Jr., Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Furner, Mary O., “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in Furner, Mary O. and Supple, Barry, The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1990), 241–86Google Scholar; Stromquist, Shelton, “Class Wars: Frank Walsh, the Reformers, and the Crisis of Progressivism,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working Class Experience, ed. Arnesen, Eric, Greene, Julie, and Laurie, Bruce (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Fink, Leon, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 80–113 Google Scholar.

36. Meyer, Donald, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941, 2d ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 149 Google Scholar, casts a discerning eye on this duality, citing Ward's “sociological anticapitalism” while noting that his hopes for social change “rested in the end upon a pure abstract revivalism, independent of definite social conditions.”

37. Meyer, Protestant Search for Political Realism, 145; Creel to Mrs. Harlan W. Cooley, March 27, 1918, quoted in Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 68; Abrams, Ray H., Preachers Present Arms (New York: Round Table Press, 1933)Google Scholar. While there is no good work on the People's Council, Grubbs, Frank L. Jr., The Struggle for Labor Loyalty: Gompers, the A. F. of L., and the Pacifists, 1917–1920 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, discusses the campaign against it organized by Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor. Ward expressed confidence in the dean's ability to withstand pressure in a letter to George Albert Coe, May 20, 1916, in Ward papers, series II, subseries A, box 4, folder 1, correspondence—G. A. Coe.

Ward's position on the war is a murky issue; different sources make contrasting claims, with little documentation on any side. According to Roger Baldwin, Ward supported the war. Lamson, Peggy, Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 127 Google Scholar. King echoes this view. King, “Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism,” 445. But Link, Labor-Religion Prophet, 64–70, details Ward's outspoken radicalism and his support for war resisters. While Link does not state outright that Ward opposed the war, his discussion strongly gives that impression. Duke's account, which should be the most complete, reflects this confusion, referring to “the kind of antiwar sentiments Ward voiced when he addressed college students” during the war but not stating explicitly either that Ward supported or that he opposed U.S. intervention. Duke relates a revealing anecdote: When J. L. Birney, Ward's dean, read a newspaper article in 1917 tying Ward to the No Conscription League, headed by Emma Goldman, and to the American Union Against Militarism (see the discussion below), Birney demanded an explanation. Ward, who was out of town, replied in writing, “No connection with organization or movement described.” Later, the Lusk Committee in New York State reproduced a copy of a 1917 letter in which Ward said he would serve on the Emergency Peace Committee, which Duke terms “an organization promoting neutrality during the First World War.” But it is not clear that this advocacy of neutrality extended to opposition to U.S. government policy after the United States became a combatant. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 93–94, 117.

38. Harry F. Ward to U.S. Senate Committee Investigating German Propaganda, January 28, 1919, in Ward papers, series II, subseries A, box 1, folder 17, general correspondence—1919.

39. Ward, Harry F., The New Social Order: Principles and Programs (1919; New York: Macmillan, 1923), 13, 12Google Scholar.

40. Ward, Labor Movement, 127, 194, 72; Ward, New Social Order, 31. In The Labor Movement, Ward criticized expropriation when discussing the Sorelian idea of the general strike. He recognized this syndicalist concept as a myth rather than an actual plan of action, but he considered the possibility that workers might act on it anyway.

41. Ward, Labor Movement, 43, 20, 45.

42. For background on the idea of the cooperative commonwealth, see Gronlund, Laurence, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1896; Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, John L., Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Fox, Richard W.'s opposite comments in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 140 Google Scholar. On the Great Community and the Great Society, see McClay, Wilfred M., The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 167–68Google Scholar.

43. Ward, Labor Movement, 48, 49.

44. Ward, Labor Movement, 115, 129.

45. Ward, New Social Order, 18; Ward, Labor Movement, 180, 181.

46. Sassoon, Donald, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1996), 32 Google Scholar. For a brief and vibrant summary of the uprisings, see Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 56–71 Google Scholar.

47. See Lasch, Christopher, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and Filene, Peter G., Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On U.S. policy, see Levin, N. Gordon Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

48. “Bolshevism and the Methodist Church: An Account of the Controversy Precipitated by Professor Ward,” Current Opinion 66 (June 1919): 380–81; Meyer, Protestant Search for Political Realism, 146; Craig, “Introduction to the Life and Thought,” 339–41; Gorrell, Age of Social Responsibility, 312–14. According to Meyer, the offending comments came in the January–February 1919 issue of the Social Service Bulletin (vol. 9), which was produced by the MFSS and sent to both Methodist and Congregationalist instructors. But Craig locates the quoted remark in a subsequent article by Ward, Christian Advocate 94 (February 20, 1919): 240. The Sunday School Graded Lessons had featured Ward's regular “social” interpretations of bible lessons, and his writings also had appeared in the Adult Bible Class Monthly, but no more.

49. Ward, New Social Order, 376; “Bolshevism and the Methodist Church.” 50. Ward, New Social Order, 228, 378. A recent version of this argument, surely less popular now than then, is Mayer, Arno J., The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

51. Ward, New Social Order, 221, 379, 377.

52. Ibid., 242.

53. Ibid., 14, 384.

54. Ibid., 377.

55. Gorrell, Age of Social Responsibility, 314; King, “Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism,” 440, 442, 445; Ward, Harry F., “Which Way Will Meth odism Go?” Methodist Review 104 (September–October 1921): 693 Google Scholar. On the many activities of Ward at the MFSS in the 1920s, see Miller, Robert Moats, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 171, 174–75, 179, 181–82Google Scholar.

56. King, “Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism,” 449.

57. I deal at length with Ward's pro-Soviet activities in “‘The Model of a Model Fellow Traveler’: Harry F. Ward, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the ‘Russian Question’ in American Politics, 1933–1956,” Peace and Change 29 (April 2004): 177–220. There I document Ward's increasingly strong devotion to the Soviet Union as it related to his leadership of the American League Against War and Fascism, the largest nonpacifist peace organization in America during the 1930s, of which Ward became chairman in 1934 and which changed its name to the American League for Peace and Democracy in 1937. It disbanded in 1940 amid controversy caused by the Nazi- Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939. In the late 1930s and after, Ward came to invest in the Soviet Union his longstanding hopes for continuing historical change. His ever more fulsome praise for the USSR, during a period when political opinion in the United States turned dramatically hostile to communism at home and abroad, made Ward persona non grata among Protestant liberals.

58. Nelles, Walter, A Liberal in Wartime: The Education of Albert DeSilver (New York: Norton, 1940), 141 Google Scholar; Cottrell, Robert C., Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 146 Google Scholar; Walker, Samuel, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, 2d ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 51, 60–64, 110–11Google Scholar.

59. A Year's Fight for Free Speech: The Work of the American Civil Liberties Union from Sept. 1921, to Jan. 1923, ACLU pamphlet, Ward papers, series IV, subseries C, box 1, folder 19, pamphlets by ACLU and other groups— 1922–1956; Who May Safely Advocate Force and Violence? ACLU pamphlet, November 1922, Ward papers, ibid.; Donald Johnson, The Challenge to American Freedoms: World War I and the Rise of the American Civil Liberties Union (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1963), 198–99; “Civil Liberty: A Statement defining the position of the American Civil Liberties Union on the issues in the United States to-day,” a pamphlet reproduced in Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics, with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps Being Taken and Required to Curb It (a Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, filed April 24, 1920, in the Senate of the State of New York) (Albany: J. B. Lyon Co., 1920), part 1, vol. 2, 1985.

60. Ward, “Which Way Will Methodism Go?” 690; Ward, Harry F., “Lenin and Gandhi,” World Tomorrow 8 (April 25, 1925): 111–12Google Scholar. King notes that the postwar “social gospel radicalism … could engage in a more comprehensive and penetrating critique of American culture” than the earlier social gospel had tolerated “because it no longer looked for the popular approval of middle-class Americans.” King, “Emergence of Social Gospel Radicalism,” 447. This comment is insightful. My point is that, while Ward and his comrades may have given up hope of gaining “popular” middle-class support at this time, Ward simultaneously was looking more favorably upon exceptional middle-class individuals as candidates for the progressive vanguard. His earlier emphasis upon the labor movement as the vanguard within the vanguard, as it were, fell away.

61. McCarraher, Eugene, Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 41 Google Scholar.

62. Ward, The Labor Movement, 70.

63. Ward, Harry F., “How Can Civilization Be Saved?” Christian Century 41 (September 11, 1924): 1176, 1177, 1178Google Scholar.

64. Charles F. Amidon to Harry Ward, July 15, 1920, in Ward papers, series II, subseries A, box 1, folder 19, general correspondence—1920.

65. Muelder, , Methodism and Society in the Twentieth Century, 136, 137–38Google Scholar; Miller, , American Protestantism and Social Issues, 36, 101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Ward, Which Way Religion? 178 67. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 105, 112; Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 149, 172; Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary, 192.

68. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 130; Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 150; McClay, The Masterless, 183. In Christian thought, kenosis is a “selfemptying,” sacrificial love, involving total obedience; it is modeled on God's sacrifice in sending Jesus to die for humanity's sake. Obedience, self-abnegation, sacrifice of (individual) self: Who can consider these characteristics and simply dismiss the old view, rarely voiced today by historians of radical politics, that those who committed themselves fully to the discipline of the Communist party and movement were not pursuing a new, secular religion? Ward did not become a committed CP fellow traveler until later in the 1930s. But his willingness to sacrifice the self in the name of salvation—social salvation— was clear already.

69. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 150, 151. As noted above, in 1934, Ward took the helm at the American League Against War and Fascism, a united-front organization in which he worked closely with Communists, among many others. Niebuhr was involved in the same organization, but not in a leadership role.

70. Coffin, A Half Century, 101, 102; Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary, 192.

71. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary, 155–56, 80 72. Muelder, Methodism and Society in the Twentieth Century, 277; McCarraher, Christian Critics, 44.

73. Miller, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, 89–90, 191; Muelder, Methodism and Society in the Twentieth Century, 164; McClain, “Pioneering Social Gospel Radicalism,” 15. Muelder (159–69) offers the best account of the controversy. McConnell first got into trouble by siding with labor during the 1919 steel strike.

74. Ibid., 79, 107–8. On Christian medievalism in 1920s America, see McCarraher, Christian Critics, 51–54.

75. Harrison interview, August 23, 2001.

76. Hal Draper, “The Two Souls of Socialism,” http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/twosouls/twosouls.htm, 17–18 (New Politics 5 [Winter 1966]).

77. Meyer, Protestant Search for Political Realism, 186.

78. Horton traveled from Tennessee to attend classes at UTS during the 1929–1930 school year after reading Ward's book Our Economic Morality and the Ethic of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1928). Horton, Aimee Isgrig, The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major Programs, 1932–1961 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1989), 18–19 Google Scholar; John M. Glen, , Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2d ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 12–13, 20–21Google Scholar.

79. Niebuhr to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., quoted in Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, 253; McConnell, Francis J., By the Way: An Autobiography (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1952)Google Scholar. While McConnell's mention of Ward is friendly, it also takes the form of a meaningless anecdote; his erasure of Ward from the story of his career, at the height of the red scare, spoke volumes to those in the know.

80. Hulsether, Mark, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity & Crisis Magazine, 1941–1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999)Google Scholar, provides the best coverage of this reemergence.

81. Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx, 226, 227. Mays made the comment to David Nelson Duke in 1978. In light of other testimony to Ward's subdued style of speaking, I would imagine that Mays was speaking figuratively. See Chappell, David L., A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.