PROBLEMS AND GOOD FORTUNE
Armstrong’s successor as superintendent of the Chicago City Missionary Society was the Reverend Reuben L. Breed, D.D., assistant secretary for the National Home Missionary Society in New York. Breed assumed his post on March 1, 1916. Born in Utica, Michigan, in 1875, he had graduated from Olivet College in 1893 and the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1896. He had served pastorates in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa before going to New York City to join the Congregational Home Missionary Society as national secretary. Breed came to Chicago with a deep and purposeful commitment to the city. Pasted on the flyleaf of his Bible was a poem that encouraged him to leave the field for the city, to “set [his] face to the town” and “leave the flowers for the crown.” [1920 A.R., 3] At the time that Breed assumed his post the war in Europe had been raging for a year and a half. Within little more than a year, the United States would enter the conflict.
The consequences were soon felt by the Society. It directed its immediate efforts to strengthening the Waukegan Congregational Church, located near the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and to providing speakers and teachers for the “numerous services” held at Great Lakes and Fort Sheridan. But the effect of the war on all aspects of its activities was pervasive. The burdens the Society carried and the spirit in which it dealt with them were conveyed by Breed in the annual report for 1918:
The entire year’s work has been accomplished under most unusual conditions. The Great World War has been always with us. The service flags in our churches until November 11th were constantly growing larger, necessarily interfering with every activity of the churches and especially, of course, our Sunday School and Young Peoples work. In many of our Chicago churches the helpful ministry of the Ladies Benevolent, or Ladies Aid Society, has been swallowed up in Red Cross activities, while a large proportion of the masculine leadership in the morning congregations has been drawn away for Home Guard drills and dress parades. The indebtedness the nation owes the church during this year of stress and strain is incomparable. It has been her joy to render unusually sacrificial service. [1918 A.R., 8]
When the war ended the churches throughout the land were filled with a sense of triumph and patriotism, rejoicing not only in the victory abroad but in the realization of goals on the domestic front. Among these was the passage of the 18th Amendment, implementing the long-fought-for goal of prohibition, and the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the vote. Many Protestant churches had been behind both these efforts, working through such organizations as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League as well as the woman’s suffrage movement.
Moreover, as one historian has noted, at this time “American Protestants were learning from the war experience how rapidly and efficiently their divided denominational and interdenominational forces could be organized into a single campaigning unit to raise money, propagandize the masses, and enlist personnel during a great emergency for a righteous cause.” [Ernst, 25] In common with other Protestant clergy, the leaders of the Society would apply the lessons learned during the war to the postwar ministry.
A striking example of this was the policy adopted by the Society to strengthen its churches by eliminating those which had lost membership because of population shifts and by uniting others with neighboring churches of their own denomination or federating them with churches of other Protestant denominations. The Society believed it could have a greater impact on the city by encouraging and participating in denominational cooperation. Indeed, it was in the Society’s own interest to avoid undertaking work that duplicated or was in competition with that of other city missionary agencies. The outcome of this policy was that over the next decade the number of Congregational churches decreased but the total membership of the remainder was “larger by several thousand.” [50th Anniversary, 1932]
The advantage of federation was that a church could keep a standing in both denominations. Thus, the Lake View Congregational Church and the Belden Avenue Presbyterian Church combined to become the Seminary Avenue Federated Church in 1919, and in the same year a Congregational and a Baptist church formed the Auburn Park Federated Church. In the following year the California Avenue Congregational Church joined with another church to create the Monroe Street Federated Church, and in the city of Harvey, the Harvey Congregational Church formed a union with a nearby Presbyterian church to establish the Harvey Federated Church.
With the abatement of the wartime emergency, Superintendent Breed turned his attention to improving “the standard of professional service in the aided churches.” In his first annual report in 1916, Breed had already noted the inadequate training of many of the field force, pointing out that “at the beginning of the year we had in our service 15 men who were not ordained, 12 who were not licensed, who had no college course, and 13 who were not as yet Congregationalists.” Although he recognized the dedication and good will of these workers he was disturbed that “men so inadequately trained should be face to face with tasks demanding the wisdom and experience of the expert.” [1916 A.R., 11]
As serious as the poor preparation of the pastoral staff was the frequent turnover. In 1916, for example, the Maplewood, Grace, and Cortland Street churches, located near one another, were all without a pastor.* pg. 47 footnote As Breed would note in the report for 1918, this was a period of “kaleidoscopic changes in the ministry.” To help solve these problems Breed had proposed that the Society appropriate money for higher salaries because “We need the strongest, best trained men for our mission churches. We have some. We can secure others if we can pay salaries at all commensurate with the tasks.” [1916 A.R., 21]
It is important to note that the Society’s postwar efforts to strengthen and aid churches and communities did not extend to Chicago’s South Side black neighborhood known as “Bronzeville.” More than 100,000 blacks resided in this once all-white, middle-class area. From 1917 to 1919, tensions between blacks and whites resulted in 24 bombings directed at blacks or at real estate agents who were selling property to blacks. Carl Sandburg, then a reporter for the Daily News, went to the South Side on July 13, 1919, to write a series of stories on “life in Bronzeville,” and reported one real estate agent’s message to the blacks: “We might as well be frank about it. You people are not admitted to our society.” [Farr, 336-37]
The situation was exacerbated by a trolley men’s strike and a heat wave. On July 27, 1919, a stone-throwing incident on the segregated 31st Street beach resulted in the drowning of a black youth. During the next five days of violence, 14 whites and 22 blacks lost their lives. Finally Mayor William Hale Thompson sent the militia to quell the riot. In the aftermath “commissions and committees sprang up to study what had happened and...[they reported] the obvious: Negroes and working class whites lived at best in a state of temporary truce where the exigencies of metropolitan housing crowded them together.” [Mayer and Wade, 284 ff.] More simply, the poor were fighting among themselves for too few jobs and too little housing, and even a small incident could spark a major crisis.
It is a most significant point that the Society’s annual report of 1919 did not even mention this race riot. No programs or mission activity addressed the needs or the issues that had been raised by this violence. The Society’s attention was directed toward internal matters.
Despite the leading role played by the Congregational churches in the organization of the Chicago City Missionary Society, the latter had been founded as an independent corporation, with the power to elect its own directors and set its own programs. Shortly before the war the National Council of the Congregational Association moved to strengthen the ties among the Congregational organizations. This sparked a similar movement in Chicago, and in 1918 a joint committee of the Chicago Congregational Association and the Chicago City Missionary Society reported on the desirability of consolidating the two organizations. The committee’s report was favorably received at the Society’s annual meeting of 1919. As the minutes of the meeting record:
The Secretary was then directed by the President to read the rest of the new Constitution and By-Laws, as proposed by the Board of Directors after most careful study and conference with a committee from Chicago Congregational Association, which, as previously announced, was to be the chief matter for consideration at this meeting. On motion to adopt the report, vote was taken by ballot with the following results:
Total number of life members, 912
Total number of annual members, 53
Grand total, 965
Total votes cast in this election—
Affirmative, 488
Negative, 1
The total number of affirmative votes cast being greater than fifty per cent of the total membership of the Society, the President declared the Constitution and By-Laws duly adopted. In addition to becoming an integral part of the Chicago Congregational Association, it should be especially noted also that the adoption of the new Constitution and By-Laws marks the passing of the name “Chicago City Missionary Society” and the adoption of the name “Chicago Congregational Missionary and Extension Society.” [1919 A.R., 5]
By the new constitution all the voting members of the Chicago Congregational Association became voting members of the Society and constituted its annual membership. In the other category of membership, any “evangelical church” whose faith agreed “essentially with the well-known historic creeds of the Christian Church and the declarations and polity of the Congregational churches” could nominate one Life Member yearly for each $250 contribution to the Society. In the second important change, the members of the Nominating Committee of the Chicago Congregational Association became the nominating committee for the Board of Directors of the Society.
By the time of the next annual meeting, the Society had suffered the loss of its leader. Reuben Breed died the week before the December 7 meeting, at which he was much eulogized. The Reverend Charles S. Laidman, the Society’s assistant treasurer and pastor-at-large since May 1919, became the acting superintendent.
He would serve in this capacity until the appointment in 1922 of Dr. John R. Nichols.
Nichols, pastor of the Rogers Park church, was well suited for his post. A member of the board of the Society, he had served as first vice-president for six years and had sat on most of the key committees. During his superintendency the Society would receive several important bequests.
The Society had long shown a strong concern for children. Prior to 1916, the Ewing Street Church had been the only Congregational Church to conduct a Daily Vacation Bible School (DVBS) during the summer, but in that year Breed had been proud to say “we had one-eighth of all Vacation Schools in the city [5 of 40] with one-fifth of the total enrollment.” There were 1,423 enrolled and an average attendance of 587 at the Ewing Street, Cortland Street, Bethlehem, Leavitt Street, and South Chicago churches, where 69 teachers, “young men and women, largely college folk…invested six weeks of tireless service.” [1916 A.R., 19] Two years later there were 12 schools in the Congregational Churches. At this time the overall Daily Vacation Bible School program encompassed 197 schools and was managed by “a Federation Committee composed of representatives of the four largest city missionary societies [Baptist, Congregational, Methodist Episcopal, and Presbyterian].” [1918 A.R., 13] The program had been viewed as appropriate only for the mission churches, but by 1921 there were 29 schools throughout the Congregational Churches and “a decidedly livelier interest in the movement.”
The annual report for 1922 announced a bequest from E. K. Warren which would substantially expand the Society’s opportunity to provide vacations for city children. Warren’s will gave the Society and the Congregational Conference of Illinois{1} a property which included:
200 feet frontage on Lake Michigan and…a splendid house equipped with modern conveniences. It is about 80 miles from the loop by automobile and is only one mile from the magnificent paved road M-11.
Located two miles from Sawyer, Michigan, the property, known as Tower Hill Camp, would make it possible for “many Congregational ministers and their families to have a restful vacation, who would otherwise be unable to enjoy it, and to give thousands of children from the congested city areas an outing away from the City’s noise and grime.” It also would provide conference and meeting facilities for other denominational and Society activities. [1922 A.R., 5]
Mr. T. M. Kingsley of the Bethlehem Church immediately made use of the camp by hosting “about 400 people of all ages” during the summer of 1923. The Conference and the Society jointly administered the facility and began at once efforts to acquire new buildings and equipment. During the following years Tower Hill Camp would be much used.
The Conference and the Society were establishing a close relationship in other respects as well. In the annual report for the following year, for example, Superintendent Nichols noted, “it affords me pleasure to bear witness to the spirit of cooperation and good will which has existed throughout the year between the State Conference and the City Society, which is typified by the fact that we are now occupying adjoining offices on the thirteenth floor at 19 S. LaSalle Street, with a door between which swings freely in and out as we pass back and forth in mutual co-operation….” [1923 A.R., 21]
Part of the relationship of the Society and the Conference included a new agreement on apportionment which gave the Society more stability and a broader financial base. As Nichols went on to point out, “After careful conference between the representatives of the State Conference and the City Society, a new system of percentages has been worked out by which the City Society will get 17 percent of all monies contributed by the churches of Illinois and the State Conference will get 12 percent.” The remainder would go to national programs.
This matter of financial support was important, for the Society was finding enthusiasm to be waning for “our supreme, common task, which is, the moral and spiritual redemption of Chicago.” Nichols lamented:
Materialism is already enthroned in the life of the modern city with its attendant evils--graft, luxury and indulgence--and paganism is knocking at the door.
The people whose influence would be the most salutary to the life of the city have fled to the suburbs and are fleeing in increasing numbers….Who is to save Chicago unless organized Christianity as represented in the Societies like this are encouraged, strengthened and supported in their work? [1923 A.R., 2]
But the situation did not improve. In the following year, the Berea Church work was discontinued altogether, ten of the forty aided churches “lost their pastors,” and “For the third year in succession we have to confess with humility and confusion…we have organized no new churches. In the same period several of the leading denominations have organized from three to five Churches per year.” [1924 A.R., 19] Although some of those denominations were the beneficiaries of significant immigration, it was nevertheless clear that the Society had lost momentum. In the previous few years death had deprived the Society of some of its leading figures and at the same time its financial position had deteriorated. When the receipts of $38,225 in 1923 were compared to the $25,705 in 1913 and adjusted for inflation over that tumultuous period, the Society found it actually had less money for missionary and extension work than it had had at its disposal ten years earlier. Sadly, the 1924 annual report pointed out that “the Apportionment Plan does not now, nor will it for some years to come, yield resources adequate to the urgent demands, if we are simply to do our fair share . . ..It is time for the renewal of our loyalties and a reinvestment of our lives and our resources....” [1924 A.R., 24]
Within the year, the benevolence of a single donor would change the Society’s prospects for all time. Victor F. Lawson, the proprietor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, and a long-time supporter of Congregational efforts, died on August 19, 1925, leaving to the Society a trust which would quadruple its yearly income.
Born in Chicago in 1850, Lawson was the son of a Norwegian immigrant who had made his fortune in real estate. When he was still in grade school, Victor went to work for the Chicago Journal in its circulation department, and on his father’s death in 1874 he took over the elder Lawson’s newspaper, the Daily Scandinavian. The next year he purchased the Chicago Daily News.
In 1879 Lawson joined the New England Congregational Church, where he became a member of the choir and met his future wife, Jessie S. Bradley. Her father, William Henry Bradley, would later become an incorporator and director of the Society. Lawson was a trustee for 18 of the 47 years he belonged to the New England Church, and during this time rarely missed attending Sunday services or mid-week prayer meetings.
After Lawson’s death, a Daily News editorial stated, “In his boyhood, and as he said in later years, one source of character building and of moral education that he found of great value was Sunday School. He remembered all his life the benefit thus gained by him of Sunday afternoons.” [Hansen, 81] It may have been the Society’s involvement with the Sunday schools and the churches that attracted Lawson’s interest, but not that alone, for in a letter to Graham Taylor in 1916, Lawson had written, “I charge myself with a measure of responsibility for the support of every cause that appeals for social justice.” [Hansen, 80]
The Lawson will provided for gifts to several charitable causes including the Chicago YMCA and the Chicago Theological Seminary. The large sum of $4 million was left in trust to the Chicago Congregational Missionary and Extension Society. There was no major restriction as to how the Society was to use the income except for the injunction that a small amount be given annually to the New England Congregational Church. This stipulation was qualified in that this sum would not be paid “whenever a majority of all the trustees” of the Society felt it was unwise to do so. Because the gift was “wholly unexpected” and received “without restrictions or conditions,” the directors were “profoundly impressed with the responsibilities imposed upon [the Society].” [1925 A.R., 6, 36] It has been assumed that Lawson expected the Society to continue to function as it had in the past, since he was well acquainted with its programs, having saved the annual reports and marked in them the statements and descriptions of work that related to meeting the needs and welfare of the city. [Hansen, 79] According to the Daily News, as later quoted by Niel Hansen:
It was in Dr. Armstrong’s day that Mr. Lawson became most interested in the work of the Society. For years [Armstrong] enjoyed the confidence and friendship of Mr. Lawson and frequently they conferred about the work in needy centers of the city. “I tell you,” he said, “No finer crusader for a better city and a better nation has ever lived than Victor Lawson. He has ceased his earthly journey, but the torch which he carried has been yielded to others. In giving it over, he has made provision for oil for the lamp for unnumbered years ahead. A century from now Mr. Lawson will be living still in the hearts of millions of people.” [Hansen, 77]