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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Conservative politically, inured to the new empiricism, and yet the least secularized of the Protestant ideologies, Southern Baptistism was a “guiding light” in the ascendancy of southernness in American education. Its primitivist Christian values—a Christology in which the God of Scripture and the God of Nature were united in the person of Christ (and in the Community of all persons)—tended to reinforce the atavistic, agricultural values of the Old South while blocking the encroachment of avowedly more modern urban-industrial ones. Its appropriation of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century evidentialism added credence to credulity, substituting rational belief for narrow sectarianism. Its ethic of hard work, temperance, and self-sacrifice was bound to the soil and rooted in the southern country and mission school, where agricultural and religious instruction were the traditional mainstays.
1. Link, William A., The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xii Google Scholar; Harvey, Paul, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The theme of northernization is amply represented in the history of the southern education movement. See, for example, Goodenow, Ronald K. and White, Arthur W., eds., Education and the Rise of the New South (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981)Google Scholar, in which Spencer J. Maxey writes that “Southern school reforms took as their model the work done in the North” and that “without the example of Northern city school structures, rural Southern secondary schools would have continued in the quasi-free academy tradition” (67, 54). See also Anderson, James, “Northern Foundations and the Shaping of Southern Black Rural Education, 1902-1935,” History of Education Quarterly 8 (Winter 1978): 371-96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Anderson's book-length treatment, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). There has been a great deal of recent research on the ideals and attitudes of northern schoolteachers and the various benevolent societies operating in the post-Civil War South. These works have gone well beyond the impressionistic and largely unsympathetic account of Swint, Henry L., The Northern Teacher in the South, 1862-1870 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1941)Google Scholar, focusing instead on “the aspirations, struggles, achievements, and missed opportunities of those gentle ‘soldiers’ who went South” ( Jones, Jacqueline, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980], 13 Google Scholar). See Butchart, Ronald E., Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedman's Education, 1862-1875 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Jacoway, Elizabeth, Yankee Missionaries in the South: The Penn School Experiment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
2. See Degler, Carl N., “Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis: The South, the North, and the Nation,” Journal of Southern History 53 (February 1987): 3–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more recently, Silber, Nina, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).Google Scholar On the myth of a “prostrate” South, requiring massive infusions of northern economic aid, see Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar Like a great deal of the rest of the South, Manufacturers' Record, a weekly of southern industrial, railroad, and financial interests, stood for regional economic as well as educational self-reliance, enlisting southern “character” and “manliness” in a Crusade against the emasculating influences of northern “charity” (“Self-Reliance in Southern Education,” Manufacturers' Record 45, no. 16 [May 5, 1904]: 342).
3. Hill, Samuel S. Jr., The South and North in American Religion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 279.Google Scholar
4. There is an extensive literature on all phases of Southern Baptist social thought and ecclesiology. For an understanding of fundamental Baptist beliefs, see Mullins, E. Y., Baptist Beliefs (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1921)Google Scholar; Mullins, E. Y., Baptist Fundamentals (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1920)Google Scholar; The Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 4 vols. (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1958); Tull, James E., A History of Southern Baptist Landmarkism in the Light of Historical Baptist Ecclesiology (New York: Arno Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Baker, Robert Andrew, Relations between Northern and Southern Baptists (New York: Arno Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Baker, Robert Andrew, The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People, 1607-1972 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974).Google Scholar My own interpretation of Southern Baptist social thought and its contributions to educational progressivism draws in part on the material in Kelsey, George D., Social Ethics among Southern Baptists, 1917-1969 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 1 and 2; Eighmy, John Lee, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987)Google Scholar, chaps. 2-5; Spain, Rufus, At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Luker, Ralph E., A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 1830-1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Worry Miles, William Porter Dubs and Edgar Gardner Murphy (New York: Edwin Meilen Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Luker, Ralph E., The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Wilson, Charles Regan, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Grantham, Dewey W., Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Bozeman, Theodore D., Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar The South's historic commitment to science is documented in Ronald, L. and Numbers, Janet S., “Science in the Old South: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Southern History 68 (May 1982): 163-84.Google Scholar
5. Masters, Victor I. quoted in Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity, 77 Google Scholar; Poteat, Edwin M., “The Interchurch World Movement and the Baptists,” Baptist Courier (June 1919): 3.Google Scholar See also Masters, Victor I., The Call of the South (Atlanta: Home Mission Board, 1918)Google Scholar; and Masters, Victor I., “Baptists and the Christianizing of America in the New Order,” Review and Expositor 17 (July 1920): 297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Love, J. F., “Evangelize the Southland,” Baptist Standard (January 9, 1908): 23 Google Scholar, links southern evangelism with the Christianization of the United States as a whole. As Paul Harvey writes, “The image of the corrupted North, popular in Reconstruction days, survived into the age of Progressivism, and bolstered southern Baptists in articulating a vision of their own destiny.” Paul Harvey, “Southern Baptists and Southern Culture, 1865-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1992), 484-85. Where I differ with Harvey is in the belief that education, like social legislation, proved “inadequate for moral redemption.” Education, and not simply a religious education but a broad, general one, posed no real threat to conservative southern beliefs and further would help fit the South for its larger national responsibilities.
6. Harvey, , Redeeming the South, 153 Google Scholar; Woodrow Wilson in a Speech to the New York Southern Society in 1910 in Wilson, Woodrow, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols., ed. Link, Arthur S. and others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966-1994), 22:189 Google Scholar; McCulloch, James E., ed., The Call of the New South; Addresses Delivered at the Southern Sociological Congress, Nashville, Tennessee, May 7 to 10, 1912 (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press Reprint, 1970), 312, 317, 339.Google Scholar
7. Kerfoot, F. H., The Home Mission Work of the Southern Baptist Convention (Baltimore: Baptist Mission Rooms, 1900), 5 Google Scholar; F. H. Kerfoot, “The Demand of the Scientific Spirit upon Theology,” Opening Address for the Session, October 22, 1888 (Louisville: Board of Trustees, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1889), 13.
8. Rosenberg, Ellen M., The Southern Baptists: A Subculture in Transition (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 43 Google Scholar; Bullock, Allen, A History of Negro Education in the South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. Magruder, Edith C., A Historical Study of the Educational Agencies of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845-1945 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951), 114-15Google Scholar; James, Owen, “Booker Washington and the Mission Schools,” Baptist Home Mission Monthly 7 (July 1901): 195 Google Scholar; Rev. N. F. Roberts, “The Influence of Shaw University upon the Public Schools,” Charles Meserve Papers, RG 1183, box 1, American Baptist Historical Society (hereafter ABHS), Manuscript Collection, Colgate-Rochester School of Divinity, Rochester, New York; Fuqua, James H., “Science and the Bible,” in Biblical Criticisms (Philadelphia: American Baptist Historical Society, ca. 1890)Google Scholar; Moorehouse, Henry L., “Sixty-Ninth Annual Report,” Baptist Home Mission Monthly 6 (June 1901): 166 Google Scholar; John E. White, hired by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1898 to investigate Appalachian educational conditions, quoted in Lee, H. Page, “A. E. Brown: Mountain Schools Superintendent,” Baptist History and Heritage 29 (January 1994): 14–15.Google Scholar See Lee, “A. E. Brown,” 16, on the demise of the mountain mission schools.
10. White, Charles L., A Century of Faith (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1931), 242, 113Google Scholar; Tindall, George B., The Persistent Tradition in New South Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 60–61 Google Scholar; Ingle, Edward, The Ogden Movement: An Educational Monopoly in the Making (Baltimore: Manufacturers' Record Pub. Co., 1908), 20 Google Scholar; Torbet, Robert G., A History of the Baptists (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1973), 108.Google Scholar
11. Peabody, Francis G. and Ogden, Robert C. quoted in Dabney, Charles W., Universal Education in the South, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 2:53, 54, 23.Google Scholar
12. Torbet, , History of the Baptists, 324.Google Scholar
13. Kerfoot, , Home Mission Work, 7–8.Google Scholar
14. On the Rockefeller donations, see White, , A Century of Faith, 271 Google Scholar; the medical school dean quoted is Dr. James McKee, Dean of Leonard Medical College, Shaw University, quoted in “Leonard Medical School,” 1896, Charles Meserve Papers, RG 1183, box 1, ABHS. See also Link, William A., The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 4 and 5; and Anderson, , Education of Blacks in the South, 259-60.Google Scholar
15. Kerfoot, F. H., “Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the Home Mission Board,” Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, New Orleans, La., May 10-13, 1901 (Nashville: Marshall & Bruce, 1901), 145 Google Scholar; Tichenor, I. T., “Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Home Mission Board,” Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention, Birmingham, Ala., May 8-12, 1891 (Atlanta: James P. Harrison, 1891), xliv Google Scholar; Tichenor, I. T., “Report of the Committee,” Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention, New Orleans, La., May 10-12, 1877 (New Orleans: A. H. Nelson, 1877), 30 Google Scholar; Tichenor, quoted in Baker, , The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People, 263-64.Google Scholar In 1892, with the Home Mission Board's territories “reclaimed” from the ABHMS, Tichenor was still arguing that the SBC Home Mission Board had “demonstrated its right to live, and had won the confidence of the denominations” (Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 640-41). How- ever, as future events would prove, the board was never able to seize direct control of schools run and financed by the ABHMS (see Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 635-46, for a brief history of the Home Mission Board).
16. Cook, R. B. quoted in “Report of the Committee on the Colored People,” Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the ABHMS 56 (1888): 25.Google Scholar
17. Kelsey, , Social Ethics, 43–44 Google Scholar; Frost, J. M., The School of the Church (Nashville: Fleming H. Revell, 1911), 168-70.Google Scholar
18. See Torbet, , A History of the Baptists, 113 Google Scholar; Wallace Buttrick to Robert C. Ogden, July 4, 1902, box 718, folder 7399, GEB records, Rockefeller Archive Center (hereafter RAC), Pocantico Hills, New York; Buttrick quoted in White, , Century of Faith, 271 Google Scholar; “Report to the Sixty-Ninth Annual Meeting in Springfield,” Baptist Home Mission Monthly 23, no. 7 (July 1901): 191; Leupp, Francis E., Negro Self-Uplifting (New York: New York Evening Post, 1902).Google Scholar On the necessity of white supremacy in the South, see Murphy, Edgar Gardner, The Basis of Ascendancy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1910), 17.Google Scholar
19. Fosdick, Raymond B., Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 6 Google Scholar; Frederick T. Gates to Charles W. Eliot, July 8, 1925, box 389, A-L, Charles W. Eliot Papers, Harvard University.
20. Wilson, , Baptized in Blood, 168 Google Scholar; Daniel Harvey Hill from an article appearing in the conservative southern Journal DeBow's Review in 1868, quoted in Gaston, Paul M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 30 Google Scholar; John D. Rockefeller, Jr., “The Christian Church; What of Its Future,” February 9, 1918, R.G. 2, box 10, Articles and Addresses by Subject—“C,” Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
21. See Gaston, , New South Creed, 72–79, 97Google Scholar; Luker, Ralph E., “Liberal Theology and Social Conservatism: A Southern Tradition, 1840-1920,” Church History (1979): 193–204 Google Scholar; and Luker, , Southern Tradition in Theology, 289–311.Google Scholar
22. It was J. L. M. Curry, widely hailed as the region's greatest educational salesman, who viewed the South's racial crisis as the “white man's burden” (see Spivey, Donald, Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1915 [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978], 79 Google Scholar).
23. Useful for a general understanding of the southern social gospel are Grantham, , Southern Progressivism, 22–23 Google Scholar; Batten, Samuel Zane, The Social Task of Christianity (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1911)Google Scholar, and his address in 1912 to the Southern Sociological Congress, “The Church and Social Service,” in Call of the New South, 275-92; Bailey, Kenneth K., Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964)Google Scholar; and Eighmy, John Lee, “Religious Liberalism in the South during the Progressive Era,” Church History 38 (September 1969): 359-72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A good overview, with selections from the writings of some of the leading social gospelers, is White, Ronald C. Jr., and Hopkins, C. Howard, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 9, “Voices from the New South.” Much of this literature is a reaction to C. Vann Woodward's Standard work, The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), in which Woodward concludes that the social gospel was a relative stranger to southern climes. Documenting the involvement of the Southern Baptist church in the social gospel is Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity, chaps. 4-6; Charles Price Johnson, “Southern Baptists and the Social Gospel Movement” (Th.D. thesis, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1948); Spain, At Ease in Zion, chaps. 6 and 8; Harvey, Redeeming the South; and Harper, Louis Keith, The Quality of Mercy: Southern Baptists and Social Christianity, 1890-1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995)Google Scholar, who finds in the white-only mountain mission schools of Appalachia the most congenial mix of social and missionary concerns.
24. Rauschenbusch, Walter, “Conception of Missions,” in The Social Gospel in America, 1870-1920, ed. Handy, Robert T. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 273, 271.Google Scholar While serving as the pastor of the German Baptist Church in New York in the 1880's, Rauschenbusch kept up a lively correspondence with his parishioner and benefactor John D. Rockefeller, Sr. See “Incoming Correspondence,” R.G. 1, box 32, folder 246, John D. Rockefeller Papers, RAC. In a letter to Rauschenbusch praising his Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907), a classic Statement of the social gospel, Frederick T. Gates singled out for praise its discussion “of the tainting of the church as it comes to mingle with the world” (Frederick T. Gates to Walter Rauschenbusch, December 20, 1909, box 3, folder 63, Frederick T. Gates Papers, RAC). The evangelical sources of the social gospel are explored in Lasch, Christopher, “Religious Contributions to Social Movements: Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel, and Its Critics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 18 (Spring 1990): 7–25.Google Scholar
25. Mullins, E. Y., Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Christian Faith (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland Press, 1908), 204, 205, 208.Google Scholar
26. Anderson, Frederick L., “Historic Baptist Principles,” in Baptist Fundamentals, 24 Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 11.Google Scholar This argument and much of the succeeding material appears in Norman H. Maring's two part series, “Baptists and Changing Views of the Bible, 1865-1918,” Foundations 1 (July 1958): 52-75, and (October 1958): 30-61.
27. “The Brain's Five Servants,” The Child's Gem 24 (June 15, 1902): 2; Mullins, E. Y., Why Is Christianity True? (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1905), 402, 315, 8, 15.Google Scholar
28. Mullins, , Why Is Christianity True? 46.Google Scholar In The Axioms of Religion, Mullins presented six axioms of Baptist belief, denoting them the “Principia”—“the first truths of the Christian religion, just as the laws of the uniformity of nature and of universal causation are among the first truths of science” (77).
29. Bozeman, , Protestants in an Age of Science, 171.Google Scholar See also Maring, “Baptists and Changing Views,” 60-129. According to the Baptist pastor J. O. B. Lowry, “a scientific-philosophical study of the Gospel writings is perfectly compatible with increased practical piety…. The golden age is before us…. The unity of truth should stay our fears, and make us welcome every honest effort to disclose its many-sided beauty…. We should yield absolute allegiance to pure truth” (69).
30. Bozeman, , Protestants in an Age of Science, 164 Google Scholar (see also 3-32, 160-75); Mullins, , Why Is Christianity True? 4.Google Scholar
31. Peabody, Andrew P., Christianity and Science (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1875), 113, 230-31.Google Scholar “All truth is God's truth, however revealed,” wrote another scientific Baptist two years later ( Thomas, J. B., The Old Bible and the New Science [New York: Daniel C. Potter, 1877], 25)Google Scholar; Harvey, “Southern Baptists and Southern Culture,” 525; Mullins, , Why Is Christianity True? 13, 10, 14.Google Scholar
32. Poteat, William L., Laboratory and Pulpit, the Relation of Biology to the Preacher and His Message (Louisville: Baptist Theological Seminary, ca. 1885), 66–68, 69-70.Google Scholar
33. Ibid., 56, 31, 34; Fuqua, “Science and the Bible,” 2, 4, 5, 12; Mullins, , Why Is Christianity True? 162.Google Scholar For a more adverse reaction to evolution and to modern science in general, see Porter, J. W., Evolution—A Menace (Nashville: Southern Baptist Convention, 1922).Google Scholar
34. Buttrick, quoted in Fosdick, , Adventure in Giving, 20 Google Scholar; Ingle, , Ogden Movement, 8.Google Scholar
35. Phillips, U. B., “Conservatism and Progress in the Cotton Belt,” South Atlantic Quarterly 13 (January 1904): 2 Google Scholar; Cornfield, David R., Cotton Field and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 11 Google Scholar; Washington, Booker T., Up from Slavery (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 159.Google Scholar
36. Dawson, J. W., Facts and Fancies in Modern Science (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1882), 17 Google Scholar; Fuqua, “Science and the Bible,” 2, 4; Poteat, , Laboratory and Pulpit, 46 Google Scholar; Grantham, , Southern Progressivism, 25.Google Scholar
37. See Spivey, Schoolingfor the New Slavery, 81 and chap. 4 generally.
38. See Fosdick, , Adventure in Giving, 5–8.Google Scholar
39. Ibid., 6.
40. Ibid., 7.