At the University of Illinois, Lloyd Douglas worked at the new YMCA Building on the northwest corner of Wright and John streets, at the western edge of campus. He taught classes, wrote anonymous articles about the Y for the Daily Illini (the student-run newspaper), tried to get students to join the Y, and organized events featuring visiting speakers (most notably the organization’s leader, John Mott). Although he was busy, he was surprisingly low-key. He wasn’t in the news nearly as much as he had been as a pastor in North Manchester, in Lancaster, and in Washington, DC.
And there was a reason for that: Douglas had taken this job to get out of “active ministry” for a while and think things over. But he wasn’t the kind of man who needed to get completely away from it all in order to ruminate; rather, he did his best thinking when he knew he had to answer to the public, especially on a deadline. He no longer had to compose two sermons each week (for a.m. and p.m. services on Sundays), but he still wrote articles for religious periodicals (The Congregationalist now, instead of the Lutheran Observer), and he still taught classes at the YMCA and spoke at “smokers” designed to increase YMCA membership. (The university Y shamelessly imitated the fraternities, inviting young men to come and see a “lantern show” of Ben-Hur, for example, and hear an inspiring talk by Lloyd Douglas while enjoying a dessert and cigar.)
The newly-erected YMCA Building at the University of Illinois. Note the horse hooked up to the hitching post. From The Promise of Association: A History of the Mission and Work of the YMCA at the University of Illinois, 1873-1997 (Champaign, IL: University YMCA, 1997)The same structure today. It’s no longer the YMCA Building, though; it’s Illini Hall. I took this picture in February 2015. There were no horses parked out in front.
But he wasn’t nearly as much in the public eye as he had been from 1903 to 1911. He spent time at the library across the street (that’s not a church steeple in the image below; it’s the campus library)…
…and he soaked up the campus culture. He spent most of his time with students, of course, but he was especially impressed with the faculty. Years later he wrote, “I had some exceptional opportunities to develop along the line of a liberal interpretation of religion during my work at the University of Illinois, where I came constantly in contact with a forward-looking group of very intelligent people who comprised the first sizable party of persons I had ever known who were both mentally solvent and religiously inclined. Up until that time only an occasional man of my acquaintance had qualified as [a] high grade intellectual and disposed toward a devout interpretation of religion. I discovered that it was possible for a man to be both religious and preserve his intellectual morality” (Douglas to Dr. Frank C. Ransdell, December 15, 1927. In Douglas Papers, Correspondence 1926-1930, Box 1, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan).
The most important work Douglas did at the University of Illinois was behind the scenes. He talked to people, and listened, and studied, and thought. Our best glimpse of the shifts in his theology comes from newspaper articles about the series of lectures he delivered at other universities during the second semester of the 1911-1912 school year. I’ll tell about that in the next post.
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When Isabel Bevier arrived at the University of Illinois in 1900 to become the head of its Home Economics Department, this is how she reacted: “I thought I had never seen so flat and so muddy a place, no trees, no hills, no boundaries of any kind” (Isabel Bevier, “The History of the Home Economics Department at the University of Illinois, 1900-1921,” University of Illinois Home Economics Library, Urbana, p. 14).
“It takes some imagination to visualize the five buildings on the campus when I arrived,” she said (p. 13).
She may have been exaggerating the sparseness of it, for records say there were more like ten buildings, if you include greenhouses. At any rate, the overall effect was the same.
Although this photo was taken after the erection of several important buildings, it gives us a sense of the wide-open spaces Professor Bevier saw in 1900. This was the view from the north end of the commons, facing south. Beyond the dome-shaped Auditorium is that part of campus that was devoted to agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture. From Jack A. Scanlan Scrapbook, 1907-1911, Student Scrapbooks and Papers, Series No. 41/20/39, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives, University of Illinois. Copyright University of Illinois.
But the situation changed quickly. Fifteen new structures were added between 1900 and the fall of 1911 when Lloyd Douglas arrived, and fifteen more were built during his brief time there (between 1911 and 1915). In contrast to Professor Bevier’s experience of wide-open spaces, Douglas saw a whirlwind of activity, with construction going on everywhere. (From Leon Deming Tilton and Thomas Edward O’Donnell, History of the Growth and Development of the Campus of the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1930), Table: List of Chief Buildings and Tabulation of Building Data, pp. 179-183.)
Using data from a few of these sources, I drew a crude map of the campus as it looked just after Douglas left in 1915. The north end was taken up by the various departments of engineering and by the physics department. A stream called “the Boneyard” runs east-and-west here, as well as Green Street, the commercial district of Champaign.
South of Green Street was the central campus, where most of the other departments were clustered around the commons. The library and the Auditorium were also located here.
Although the School of Agriculture was part of the main campus, the southern section had barns, fields, labs, and greenhouses for agricultural, horticultural, and floricultural research.
As you can see, it was no longer a wide-open place with empty spaces. Many of these buildings were added while Douglas was working at the university.
But it wasn’t just construction that made the place a buzzing hive of activity. For example, Allan Nevins wrote in 1917: “Twenty-six departments of the University are equipped with laboratories, placed in a dozen buildings.” Among them, he listed the following: “The mining engineering laboratory contains materials for drilling, blasting, mine rescue, and ore concentration work. In the mechanical engineering laboratory are large experimental boiler plants and gas engines, and such pieces of special equipment as an ice and refrigerating machine capable of making one and a half tons a day. In civil engineering are satisfactory road and cement laboratories, and in electrical engineering a wealth of machinery – sixty direct or alternating current machines, fifty transformers, experimental telephone switchboards, and so on.” (Allan Nevins, Illinois (Oxford University Press American Branch, 1917), p. 292.
Perhaps the most dramatic of these was the locomotive testing laboratory, which was unveiled in 1913 (while Douglas was there). The train engine was securely locked into place on a suspended track within a warehouse, then the engineer ran it at high speed while technicians measured its “tractive effort,” as well as its consumption of coal and water. The steam from its smokestack was funneled and directed out through the roof of the lab. There were only three other testing sites like it in the United States, and only two outside the US. (From E.C. Schmidt, “A New locomotive testing plant at the University of Illinois” (Chicago: American Railway Master Mechanics’ Association, 1913. Circular no. S-1912-1913).)
I.C. 2-8-0 Steam Locomotive (4) circa early 1910-1930, Locomotive in shop. Found in Box 9, Folder Engineering-Civil Engineering, Negative Number 899, Record Series 39/2/22, University of Illinois Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Copyright University of Illinois.
A reporter for the student newspaper wrote, “The locomotive’s roar, the spinning of its giant wheels, the sight of its glowing firebox, and its sway from side to side, make lasting impressions on the visitors to this department” (“New Building Dedication Begins with Convocation,” Daily Illini, Friday, May 9, 1913, p. 8).
Graduate student Olive Deane Hormel (Class of 1916) summed it up well when she wrote that the university was “tremendously in touch with life.” (Olive Deane Hormel, Co-Ed (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1926)). She used this phrase three times in her book (pp. 10, 26, and 28).
The school was a buzzing hive of restless activity. Students were in training to be architects, engineers, lawyers, journalists, politicians, and lots of other things that were needed in the surrounding communities. By 1912 (while Douglas was there), “women interested in landscape architecture had begun to invade the classrooms of the University of Illinois, taking surveying courses and learning the names and characteristics of plants.” Two young women who were there at the same time as Douglas went on to successful careers: Annette Hoyt Flanders (class of 1918) set up her own practice in New York City in 1922; Florence Yoch (class of 1915) “became one of the leading designers of Hollywood estate gardens and film sets” (Natalie Alpert and Gary Kesler, “Florence Bell Robinson and Stanley Hart White: Creating a Pioneering School of Landscape Architecture.” In Lillian Hoddeson, ed., No Boundaries: University of Illinois Vignettes (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 114-115).
From Melville J. Eames Papers, 1907-1908, Student Scrapbooks and Papers, Series No. 41/20/32, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives, University of Illinois. Copyright University of Illinois.
But it wasn’t all just academics. For male students, daily military drills were also compulsory. That was part of their education.
From Jack A. Scanlan Scrapbook, 1907-1911, Student Scrapbooks and Papers, Series No. 41/20/39, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives, University of Illinois. Copyright University of Illinois.
And then there was the social side of it all. The first several weeks of each school year were taken up with “rushing,” a word that nicely captures the frenetic activity involved. Not only did new students have to get used to the campus and their classes, but they also had to put their best foot forward as they were considered for membership by the various fraternities or sororities. Nor was it simply a question of what their social status would be among their peers. Even with all the construction going on around campus, the university had not yet built a residence hall. Those students who were not selected to join a chapter house were left having to rent a room nearby. For those who were chosen, however, here are a few examples of accommodations, along with a view of the residents, all from student Jack Scanlan’s scrapbook at the university archives:
Here’s a closer look at the main campus:
The chapter houses of the fraternities and sororities were all to the west, located either on John Street or down one of the side streets branching out from John Street. Every day, students by the thousands walked back and forth on that one street – passing right by Lloyd Douglas’s office. For he worked at the newly-constructed YMCA Building, which was on the corner of John and Wright Streets. (The females – the members of the YWCA – were in a house across the road, on the southern side of John Street.) There was all this buzzing activity going on, and Douglas was right in the middle of it.
They called him “the live wire down at the Y,” and yet, compared with the previous several years, he was strangely quiet. And there were reasons for that.
(To be continued…)
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From a sermon entitled, “What Do You Want for Christmas?” preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Sunday, December 14, 1919:
How would a wish like this strike you? To wish for some added grace of character that would make people love you, not for anything you had on, or for the house you happened to live in, or the material possessions you were known to command, but just because you are you.
So that, if the clothes go out of style, or the moth eats them up, or the house burns down, or panic upsets business, and rust corrodes your machinery – you will still be possessed of a grace of character that will make people respect you, and have confidence in you, and be glad when you come into the room where they are, and sorry when you leave.
The ability to wake up every morning with a smile and go to sleep every night with peace of mind and satisfaction of heart.
How would you like a gift that would ensure your happiness, in all kinds of weather; that would hold you independent of the inroads of little disappointments – a sort of perpetual guarantee against despair and dissatisfaction?
Somehow, I believe that if we might today choose, for a Christmas gift, absolutely anything we really wanted, to last us for life, this gift that I have been talking about would meet the demand.
Well, you may have it! Take it, and welcome.
Lloyd C Douglas, “What Do You Want for Christmas?” in Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Sermons [4], Box 3, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
Seems like an abrupt ending, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t he have invited his listeners to come to Christ in that moment? But that was never his way. Douglas was always careful not to “stampede” people (his word) into making a commitment while under the emotional influence of the architecture, the music, and (yes) his own God-given eloquence. He wanted his listeners to continue thinking about it after the service was over, and to hear his question ringing in their ears above the noise of traffic as they headed home. If they truly didn’t know the next step, then he hoped they’d make an appointment with him to discuss it. But he trusted his material (the sermon he had been given) to continue doing its work after it was over.
So here it is, a hundred years later, still doing its work. What do you want for Christmas?
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Sometime while he was pastor at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, DC (between Fall 1909 and Summer 1911), Lloyd Douglas preached a sermon that must have puzzled his parishioners (Lloyd C Douglas, The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 14-21).
He claimed that the local congregation was like the Bethesda Pool in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John. Paralyzed people gathered on porches around the pool because it was rumored that an angel sometimes stirred up the waters, giving them momentary healing powers; the first to wade in would be made whole. Of course, those most in need were never able to reach the water first. “Some of our churches are like that Pool of Bethesda,” he argued. “They are handsomely equipped…. But there seems to be such a noticeable lack of provision for bringing in just the people who are in such obvious need of its curative agencies.”
It was not enough for the churches to welcome visitors, he said. There had to be a way to get the gospel out to people rather than just trying to bring them in. The members of Luther Place Memorial Church must have wondered what Douglas was talking about, because Douglas’s predecessor, Dr. J.G. Butler, had been very effective at reaching out to the larger community, not only by being chaplain of both the House and the Senate, but also by mentoring young black men who were called to ministry. The church even had a health clinic run by one of Butler’s sons, who was a doctor. So why was Douglas saying that the church needed to find a way to get its “curative agencies” out to the people who needed it most?
Because Douglas wasn’t talking about social programs. He was talking about accessing the power of God and putting it to work in our lives, and he was saying that the church had not yet found a way to get this access out to the people who would never come to church. For him, the gospel was not so much about church attendance as about harnessing divine energies to make the world a better place. The mission of the church was to get that power into people’s hands – even people who did not attend church. In his sermon on the Bethesda Pool, he said that, if he knew how to accomplish this, then “by next week I would be figuring in headlines an inch high in a thousand metropolitan papers.” Although this was an expression of youthful hyperbole, it shows just how important this issue was to Douglas. He wanted to articulate a gospel that would have practical effects in everyday life, and he insisted on taking that message to the larger public.
Although no one who heard that sermon probably realized it, he was telling them the thing he wanted to accomplish above all else. And the missing puzzle piece was this: he wanted to reach people outside the church through his writing.
Although his parents groomed him for the ministry from a young age, he seems to have sensed an even deeper calling to be a writer. Nor did he just want to publish sermons and religious essays. For as far back as his scrapbooks take us, he was kicking around the idea of writing something for the mass reading public, and what he had in mind was fiction. In his letters to friends and family, he made light of this aspiration, calling himself “a scribbler” and speaking as though his passion for writing were an addiction.
In a letter to his cousin Edith Kirkwood in 1910 (while he was pastor at Luther Place), he said, “Lately I have revived an old slumbering passion for writing yarns. Not long ago I sold a small ornament off my desk to Eddie Bok [an editor] and the sight of that check, with its beautiful corrugated edges – albeit it was not for more than two figures – started up my old trouble; and the gnawing at my vitals… has compelled me to scribble some more. God help the preacher who isn’t content to stick to his parish duties!… I have a lot of old mummies in my ecclesiastical museum who would feel that Hell had opened up its maw (and its paw, for that matter) to embrace me, were the news to out that I had disgraced the profesh and besmirched the cloth by writing fiction. I shall spare them the discomfort by seeing to it that nobody finds out. I am now on the hunt for a satisfactory nom-de-plume…” (Quoted in Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 66.)
In 1910 he was willing to keep his fiction writing a secret by using a pen name, but a year later, when the YMCA offered him a job and a chance to say “Good riddance” to the “old mummies,” that seemed like a better plan. As it turned out, he didn’t tell his employers at the Y that he was writing fiction, either, but that was all right; his fiction wasn’t good enough to display yet. At this phase in his life, he had a lot to learn about the craft of writing fiction. The point is this: his devotion to “scribbling” went so deep, he couldn’t beat the addiction, even though he felt guilty about indulging in it while being a man of the cloth. But deep down, he always believed he was going to make it as a writer. It may seem like a small thing, but take a look at the opening page of his very first scrapbook in 1903.
That’s more than a signature; if I’m not mistaken, he was practicing his autograph – the same one he used years later to sign copies of his bestselling novels. Here’s a signed copy of the inside page of Forgive Us Our Trespasses, published almost thirty years later, in 1932. It is practically identical:
Lloyd Douglas the Author was always there in germinal form, even while he was working so hard to establish himself as a minister. And he obviously felt those two things were incompatible, at least in the minds of some of his parishioners.
Over the past several blog posts, I’ve addressed the question, “Why did Douglas resign his important post at Luther Place Memorial Church to work for the YMCA?” So far I’ve answered this question in bits and pieces, but now I’m ready to pull it all together into a coherent explanation.
Douglas resigned for many reasons, most of which he kept concealed. He wanted to go back to school and get the kind of education he could only get from a state university. At that institution, he wanted to rethink his theology and align it with the latest, most up-to-date information available. Pursuant to this goal, he wanted to leave the Lutheran Church and start fresh with some other denomination. And he wanted to do all this not only so that he could preach again, but – more importantly – because he wanted to write something… probably fiction. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. If anyone had asked him in 1911, he would have been incapable of telling them what he had in mind. But he did have something in mind, and he sensed that he would never bring it to full expression unless he could shed his current social limitations and start over.
And that’s why Lloyd C Douglas moved his family west to Champaign, Illinois in the Fall of 1911. He had great hopes. But he was taking a tremendous risk.
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When Shailer Mathews traveled the United States to tell the general public about the new biblical scholarship being done at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, his message included a description of the new state-college system that was transforming the social landscape in America.
It had been happening all around us, he argued, and yet we were strangely unaware of it. During the Civil War, Congress had passed legislation mandating that each state set aside lands and funds for colleges, and the state-sponsored schools that resulted were quite different from the colleges and universities that had been in existence prior to that. The old colleges and universities were sponsored by religious organizations and taught a fixed body of knowledge that was assumed to be true for all time. These new schools were research institutions. The professors were engaged in state-of-the-art research, and teaching was secondary. This had a number of ramifications, but perhaps the most important, according to Mathews, was the fact that the teachers and the students in these schools looked at the world through new eyes. Part of the new worldview was a belief in the tentative nature of knowledge: since the members of the faculty were constantly making new discoveries, they taught their students to expect updates, at least once in a while if not constantly. Graduates of these institutions went out into the world with the tools to keep learning throughout their lives. And as they did so, and they participated in the workplace, especially in management and professional positions, they were transforming their society.
This brave new world they were creating was one in which facts were of supreme importance – not opinion, not feelings, not beliefs, but facts. Those facts were gathered systematically, according to procedures that, as much as possible, were developed to mimic scientific investigations. The old institutions of learning had stressed literature, history, and philosophy; the new institutions were – or at least strived to be – scientific. And the young people who graduated from these new schools were quietly changing the world.
Of all the things Mathews said, this touched Douglas most deeply. Douglas had been home-schooled. His mother and father were both educators, and they gave him a rigorous classical education: in other words, an education that emphasized literature, history, and philosophy (or in his case, theology). On more than one occasion, he hinted that he was not very happy with the education he received at Wittenberg College (a Lutheran institution), and he was especially critical of the seminary, saying it did not give him any of the hands-on training that was necessary for being a pastor. When Mathews talked about the new state universities and the influence they were having on American society, Douglas’s imagination soared. He not only wanted to understand what was happening in the state colleges; he wanted the kind of education they offered. Although he was in his late thirties, he wanted to go back to school.
When the YMCA told him they had created a position for him at the University of Illinois, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sometime later, when he was a pastor in Akron, he looked back on the years 1911 to 1921 and said, “I came to you from an experience of about ten years spent upon the campuses of two great universities [Illinois and Michigan], where I daily faced the new problem of a readjustment in religious thought, to make it consonant with the more recent disclosures of the philosophical and scientific world” (Lloyd C Douglas, The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), p. 80).
Although Douglas was going to Illinois to evangelize students, his personal desire was to go back to school. It was a win-win situation for him.
But I still haven’t given you the whole picture on why Douglas left Luther Place Church to work for the YMCA. There was another factor involved, and it was more important than any of the others I’ve told you about so far. I’ll explain in my next blog post.
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Sometime while the Douglases were living in Washington, DC, they attended a series of lectures by Shailer Mathews, Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.
I have been unable to pinpoint where or when they heard him speak. It could have been anywhere in the vicinity, including New York City, and it could have been anytime between Fall 1909 and Summer 1911. Besides his duties at the university, Mathews traveled around the country explaining the new principles of biblical scholarship to the general public. In his autobiography, he says he gave more than 150 speeches all over the US in the years immediately after 1896 (Shailer Mathews, New Faith for Old: An Autobiography (NY: Macmillan, 1936), p. 83.) In these lectures, he pulled no punches. He told the public about the scholarly work being done on the Bible, much of which was difficult for laypeople to hear because it cast into doubt many of the old beliefs about how the biblical books were compiled. (For example: the assertion that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John were not actually written by the biblical characters Matthew, Mark, and John, nor were the first five books of the Old Testament written by Moses.)
We don’t know when Lloyd and Besse heard Mathews speak. This much we know: his lectures changed Douglas’s life. The point at issue, however, is precisely how Douglas’s life changed.
In their book about their father, Douglas’s daughters tell us this about Lloyd and Besse’s experience while living in Washington, DC:
From every direction new and revolutionary ideas rushed at them, rocking the solid beliefs they had never dreamed of questioning. They began to read books and articles of churchmen who were openly criticizing the old theories of religion. They found themselves in sympathy with the new protest against tradition. Not only was religion being held up and examined for mothholes, but in Washington they discovered that all the traditions of American life were undergoing a great change in which only a few scandalizing rumors had ever penetrated the old walls behind which they had been raised.
Together they attended a series of lectures given by Shailer Mathews, an exponent of religious modernism, which left them in a most distressed state of mind. They recognized the reasonableness and were forced to agree with the attack upon the old conceptions, but they heard nothing satisfying which they could grasp to fill the void.
“Daddy became very unsettled in his thinking while we were in Washington,” Mother told us.
She found comfort on one subject at least. Dr. Holt’s book The Care and Feeding of Children, had been a treasure of information to replace her shockingly old-fashioned ideas on child care. “Sometimes I used to wish we could find a book so sane and satisfying on the Care and Feeding of Faith.”
Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 68.
I read this book years before I first arrived at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, where Douglas’s private papers are kept. When I began researching his papers, this was my working thesis: that Douglas had undergone a crisis of faith after attending the Mathews lectures, and that was why he left the Lutheran ministry. To my surprise, however, I could find nothing to corroborate Besse’s description of his mental state after hearing Mathews’ lectures. Eventually I found it necessary to modify that thesis, based on my own research.
I realize that no one was closer to Douglas than his wife, but I have come to believe that her testimony reflects her own reaction much more than it does her husband’s. For a number of reasons, I do not believe that Douglas suffered a profound crisis of faith after hearing Mathews speak. The lecture series did change his life, but not exactly in the way that his daughters claim it did.
There are a couple of very basic facts I need to tell you about Lloyd Douglas before I continue. First, he kept no diaries. Everything we know about his inner state (his thoughts and feelings), we have from his writings. I don’t just mean his published writings; his letters to friends and family are so extremely candid that I’m sure he’d be embarrassed if he knew that they are now available for anyone to read. The unfortunate thing is that, in his letters, Douglas is usually humorous. Whatever his spiritual experiences may have been from day to day, he didn’t express them to other people. And since he didn’t keep diaries, that means we know almost nothing about his inner life.
I can find only one time he ever tried to start a diary, and he only did it for a day or two before he gave up. It was during his first trip (with Besse) to Europe in the 1920s. Why did he give up? Because at the end of each day of exploring, he was so busy writing letters home to his daughters that he didn’t have time to write in his diary. However, in those few pages we get a glimpse of him that we get nowhere else. He tried to describe how he felt pushing off to sea. This was a voyage he had dreamed about for most of his life, and when the moment came, it was mystical. In his letters to his daughters, he never mentioned this. His letters are filled with humor; they contain no hints of any mystical experience. And since those few pages comprise the only diary he ever wrote (as far as I can tell), I can only surmise that we will never know what his spiritual life was really like.
The second basic fact we need to realize about him is that he did most of his thinking at the typewriter. When he was perplexed, he worked it out by hammering away at the keyboard. Then he pulled what he had written out of his typewriter and either presented it from the pulpit (if it was a sermon) or sent it off to an editor (if it was a magazine article), or put it in an envelope and sent it as a letter to a friend. Although his spiritual life is mostly hidden from us, his intellectual life was extremely well-documented. We can trace his thinking by reading his sermons and speeches, his magazine articles, and his correspondence. And when I do that, I find a direct line of thought, uninterrupted by any crisis of faith. He did lose faith in his denomination, but not in God.
The Shailer Mathews lectures seem to have stimulated his thinking rather than troubling him. Douglas already knew the biblical problems that Mathews raised (for example, discrepancies in the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection among the four gospels). Douglas himself had mentioned those same biblical problems in some of his earliest magazine articles during his first couple of years in the ministry, and even in those early articles, he was already pointing in the direction that his thought would go later on. Nowhere do I see him faltering, either during his pastorate in Washington or during his years with the YMCA. Douglas didn’t have a faith crisis, but Shailer Mathews did challenge him to do some serious rethinking. And in order to do so, he knew he needed to get out of his role as a pastor, especially within the Lutheran Church.
He wrote these words in his last article for the Lutheran Observer, just after leaving Washington:
“I used to think that if I could just get out of the active pastorate for a week or two and hie myself away where I wouldn’t need care very much whether my constituency understood my motives or not, and take careful aim and bang away at two or three things that everybody knows need to be ventilated, what a glorious, albeit smellful, event it would be.
“From this safe angle then I modestly pull the trigger, fondly hoping that all who are in the vicinity of the target will promptly squeal in order that we may be able to check up on the efficiency of our marksmanship.”
These were not the words of a man who was “very unsettled in his thinking,” and certainly not one who was “in a most distressed state of mind.” These words evinced a deep confidence in his own ability to formulate a better theology if he could cut loose from the social obligations that were tying him down. That’s why he accepted the position with the YMCA: because he wanted to start over, rethinking his entire theology without having any denominational restrictions placed on him, and without having to answer to his parishioners.
But Douglas had another huge takeaway from Shailer Mathews’ lectures that no one has ever mentioned. I’ll tell you about that in my next blog post.
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Lloyd Douglas resigned as pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church in July 1911, effective September 1. He told his congregation he was leaving to serve the YMCA at the University of Illinois. And that was true, but it was only part of the truth. Another part of it was that he felt an immediate need to leave the denomination.
Douglas had been a Lutheran all his life. When he was very young, his father A.J. Douglas was a Lutheran pastor. Prior to that, A.J. had been an attorney and then a school superintendent, and he had met and married the wife of his old age – Lloyd Douglas’s mother – when she was teaching at his school. Lloyd Douglas had siblings who were a generation older than he was; they were A.J.’s children from a previous marriage, and their mother had died, leaving A.J. a widower until he met Lloyd’s mother. A.J. had promised the Lord that he would be a minister, but he didn’t make good on that promise until he was old. As compensation, he groomed his youngest son for the ministry. A.J. took the boy with him as he made his rounds to see his parishioners and to preach at the multiple small-town churches under his charge. From as far back as Douglas could remember, he had sat beside his father in their horse-and-carriage as A.J. went on his rounds, and together they parsed Greek words and talked in depth about the ministry. The Lutheran ministry.
So it was no small matter sometime in 1911 when Lloyd Douglas turned to his wife on the way home from Luther Place one day and said, “Besse, I’m going to get out of the church.” Besse told their daughters the story years later: “I was terribly shocked,” she said. “He had talked that way before, but this time I felt he really meant it. The first thing I thought was, ‘What will his mother say?'” (Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 72.) (His father had already died.)
Predictably, his mother wasn’t too keen on the idea. Nor were Besse’s parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Porch, also of the Lutheran Church.
But Douglas had to break free, especially now. For in the summer of 1911, the General Synod of the Lutheran Church in America had its annual convention, and they passed constitutional amendments that Douglas could not tolerate.
The conference was held at – of all places – Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, DC. The meetings began Wednesday, June 7 and ended Sunday, June 11. Tickets were needed in order to attend the opening session on Wednesday, which featured speeches by President William Howard Taft, House Speaker Champ Clark, and Rev. Lloyd C Douglas. The legislation that bothered Douglas so much was passed on Friday, June 9.
It had to do with the Augsburg Confession, a detailed statement of faith that was written by Philip Melanchton in 1530. For our purposes, the content of that document doesn’t matter. What matters is that the members of the conference affirmed that “the unaltered Augsburg Confession” is “a ‘correct exhibition of the faith and doctrine’ of the church as founded upon the Scriptures” (Evening Star, Friday, June 9, 1911, p. 3). In the years prior to this, the Lutheran Church in America had treated the Augsburg Confession as “substantially correct,” leaving its ministers free to interpret the scriptures for themselves, without regard to whether their interpretations matched those of the Confession. But this subtle change in verbiage (that the Confession was a “correct exhibition of the faith and doctrine”) now meant that the Augsburg Confession was just as authoritative as the Bible.
Milton Valentine, the editor of the Lutheran Observer who had done so much to help Douglas in his ministerial career, had now, in the past two years, had a chance to meet him in person, since Douglas had moved to the East Coast. During the time that Douglas served as pastor of Luther Place, he and Valentine met on more than one occasion and deepened their friendship. It was Valentine, more than anyone else, who understood why Douglas resigned from Luther Place. He didn’t know all of the factors involved, but he rightly guessed this much of it.
Just after Douglas resigned, Valentine wrote to him. He began by congratulating him, then stated his true feelings: “My regret is that this work will take you out of active connection with the General Synod, where we are so badly in need of men who have knowledge of the times in which they live and are in sympathy with its movements – not theological pedants, obscurantists, but men with their faces forward.” Then he suggested that the constitutional changes made at the church conference were the real reason Douglas was leaving: “From what I know of your mental makeup and habits of thought, I feel that the recent meeting of the General Synod has not been without its influence in your decision to take up this new work. I do not know when the outlook was more discouraging in the General Synod.” He stopped short of asking Douglas to confirm his guess, but he was right.
From Douglas’s very first sermons and published articles, we see in him a note of confidence that was only possible because he felt totally at liberty to think for himself and to share his thoughts with others. Freedom of thought and of expression were things he had always taken for granted. The constitutional changes made at the church conference threatened those freedoms. And Douglas needed intellectual freedom now more than ever. I’ll explain why in my next blog post.
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In July 1911, Lloyd Douglas surprised his congregation by resigning his post at the Luther Place Memorial Church, just blocks from the White House, to work for the YMCA at the University of Illinois. As I told you last time, he did his best to convince both his congregation and the press corps that it was a natural career step for him to take, but of course it was not.
To understand why people were willing to accept his story, however, you need to know a little bit more about the Y.
The Young Men’s Christian Association began in London, England, in 1844. As one history states, “The original idea behind the YMCA was to create an association of men that could counter the perceived threats of the emerging industrial, urban order to individual Christian faith and character. Through prayer meetings, Bible study, missions work, the keeping of a reading room with a library of ‘wholesome’ materials, and a variety of classes and lectures, the London Association sought to strengthen the faith of young men, to rescue them from the city’s innumerable temptations and vices” (The Promise of Association: A History of the Mission and Work of the YMCA at the University of Illinois, 1873-1997 (Champaign, IL: University YMCA, 1997), p. 18).
The idea caught on, and the organization spread to a number of other countries, including the United States. The first YMCA “associations,” as they were called, had nothing to do with athletics. They were part of a movement to help young men sustain their Christian faith in an urban, industrialized environment. Early on, a female branch was established called the YWCA.
One wing of the Y movement, in the United States at least, focused on colleges and universities. In fact, the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) grew out of the Y in 1888. The young man who was put in charge of SVM, John R Mott, had just graduated from college two years earlier, and after another two years (1890), he was made Senior Student Director of the YMCA, at the age of 25. (Information about Mott comes from C. Howard Hopkins, John R Mott, 1865-1955: A Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979).)
This tells us a few important things: (1) that the YMCA was heavily involved in Christian evangelism; (2) that, as the name suggests, it was a youthful organization, run by young people; (3) that it considered America’s college students an important part of its mission field; and (4) that it wanted to enlist college students in global missions, as well.
John R Mott
You probably have never heard the name “John R Mott” before, but it’s much more probable that you’ve heard the slogan he created, because it worked its way effectively from SVM to the Y, and then on to churches and denominations all over the English-speaking world. His slogan was: “The Evangelization of the World In This Generation.”
It was a heady ambition: to bring the message of Christ to everyone, all over the globe, for the first time in history. And behind this goal was the hope that, in doing so, they would be preparing the world for Christ’s return.
To accomplish this daring goal, Mott built the student wing of the YMCA into an organization run by dynamic young preachers, and he sent them around to the nation’s colleges and universities to hold rallies and crusades. Lloyd Douglas was one of the men he chose.
Just after Douglas accepted the call to join the YMCA, Mott wrote to him and said, “I can appreciate what a sacrifice it will be for your church to release you at this time. I cannot, however, regard it as other than a clearly Providential leading which has influenced you to decide to go to this strategic field. From the point of view of the church, your action is most timely. Those State universities of the West are fast becoming the largest universities in the country. They wield an enormous influence. They have been seriously neglected on the moral and religious side. Nothing could be more important for the Christian Church in America during the next half generation than to make them strongholds and propagating centers for a pure and aggressive Christianity.”
Douglas made sure that his congregation read that letter. He also gave it to the press corps, and almost all of them published it. The evangelization of students all along the Mississippi Region of the YMCA was indeed important work, especially when it was viewed as a “strategic” part of Mott’s plans for winning the whole world to Christ.
But Douglas was no evangelist. He was a preacher, yes, and he aimed his preaching especially at young people. But he never tried to convert anyone, nor did he lead even one of his own parishioners through the Sinner’s Prayer, as far as we know. That wasn’t his style, nor was it consistent with his theology.
As at least one of the DC papers noted, the Y had been trying to get him on board for some time, and he had consistently turned them down. I suspect that they became especially interested in him after he and Dr. Clarence Barbour, who was on the Y’s international committee, shared the podium at a DC event on May 8, 1911. But something happened in June that changed Douglas’s mind, and suddenly he saw the job at the YMCA as a life saver.
For by the end of June, Douglas wanted out of the Lutheran Church – immediately.
I’ll tell you more about that in my next blog post.
For a free PDF of the booklet, The Secret Investment of Lloyd C Douglas, fill out the form below:
Lloyd C Douglas in 1910. From Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
It was officially 98 degrees in Washington, DC, that day (107 degrees on “the street kiosk”), but the members of Luther Place Memorial Church must have stopped fanning themselves when they heard the announcement. It was Sunday, July 2, 1911, and as their young pastor, Lloyd C Douglas, ended his sermon and was about to begin administering the sacrament, he said these words, according to the next day’s Times Herald. They are remarkable for their brevity:
“This morning I celebrate the feast of the Lord’s Supper with you for the last time. Probably, too, it will be the last time I shall officiate in this capacity in our church.”
In less than half a minute, he told them two important pieces of information: (1) that he was resigning as pastor, and (2) that he was leaving the ministry of the Lutheran Church. He continued:
“For I have concluded, after most thorough and prayerful attention to a call to the University of Illinois to become religious work director of the Student Christian Association, that it is my duty to accept.”
A little less than two years earlier, he had been given an opportunity to lead this flagship church in the nation’s capital, and now he was throwing it all away to become a campus minister.
From the Washington Post:
“Hardly had the minister concluded his resignation when members of the church surrounded him and pleaded with him to give up the call. The officials of the church were loudest in their insistence that he remain, declaring that he was as much needed in this city as in his new field. To these claims Mr. Douglas replied that he had already accepted the call from the Young Men’s Christian Association and could not alter his decision now.”
From the Washington Herald:
“‘It seems clearly God’s own call,’ said one of the leading members afterward. ‘We are honored, though the regret in having Mr. Douglas go, just as he has really got well started with us, is sincere and universal in Luther Place Memorial Church.’”
From the Washington Times:
“‘I leave my church here with much regret, but I feel that my duty lies in the new field,’ said the pastor. ‘My relations with the church here are most pleasant and only the urgency of the call leads me to leave.’
The reporters at the Washington, DC papers had not yet become either as aggressive or as persistent as they would be in later years, for they all seemed to suspect that there was more to the story, but none of them pursued it. Douglas was giving up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at Luther Place, and his new job at the YMCA was a downward move, although he did his best to make it sound important.
A letter he received from the White House put it in perspective. The note came from Charles D Hilles, secretary to President Taft. “While I congratulate the University on securing your services,” Hilles said, “I very much regret that we in Washington are to lose you. I have no doubt that your pre-eminent success with young men fits you for the task you are about to assume. If I did not know of your fondness for such work, I should be unable to account for your departure from the fine old church in Washington.”
There it was: yes, we know you’re fond of working with young people; and yes, we know you’ll do well. But even taking those factors into consideration, we are “unable to account for your departure.”
It was a different day and time than the one we live in now. No one seriously pressed him about it. But their suspicions were correct: there was more to the story.
For although Douglas had strong feelings about the YMCA and had even been considering working for them when the Luther Place opportunity fell in his lap, this career move was about far more than that. Lloyd Douglas was at a crossroads – mentally, spiritually, and professionally. For reasons known only to himself and his wife Besse, he could no longer continue on his current trajectory. Over the next five blog posts, I’ll tell you about those reasons.
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Whatever might be said about Lloyd Douglas’s contribution to the life of Luther Place Memorial Church, this much is certain: the time he spent in Washington, DC was good for him. These were the years of President William Howard Taft, the “first motoring president.” The Wright Brothers came to town during these years and flew their plane around the Washington Monument. The world was changing, and Lloyd Douglas had a ringside seat.
His daughters said this years later:
As time went on our parents took courage and stepped from behind the protection of their brownstone front, and began to take in the contemporary scene. What innocents they must have been, coming from the small towns of the Middle West where the neighbors knew what time they raised the blinds in the morning and when their lights went off at night, and the very air they breathed was filtered through the stained glass windows of the church.
In Washington their comings and goings were not so closely supervised. They sat in the peanut gallery and thrilled to famous actors and actresses in the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen. They went to concerts and lectures and spent long hours in the art galleries. ‘We had been to college, but we discovered we were very ignorant.’
Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 67-68.
Douglas also wrote some short stories. He had expressed an interest in fiction while he was pastor at North Manchester, Indiana, just out of seminary. In his scrapbook is an announcement about forming a fiction writing group. We aren’t given any indication how well-attended this group was, or whether anything came of it, but it indicates the fact that he was thinking, even then, about writing fiction. Among his papers at Bentley Library are a few short stories he managed to write while in Washington, DC. They were never published. He used a pen name: Lloyd Edgington. “Harold” was a story about a college freshman who needed to learn some manners, and “Maitland House” was a story about mistaken identity, as a young man becomes attracted to a girl he believes is blind. In both cases, his characters are young people, and that also seems to be the audience he had in mind for these stories.
It was while he was in Washington that Douglas got into the military, as the chaplain of a local regiment. It gave him a chance to ride a horse again – something he hadn’t done since he was a boy, and that had been with “a country horse with a wide experience at the plow, but unfamiliar with polo,” as he later wrote to a friend. But it also initiated him into the brotherhood of those who had worn the uniform, and that helped him everywhere he went in the years that followed. He and his horse were involved in the burials of veterans at Arlington National Cemetery, as well as other official events. He enjoyed it immensely, and the Washington papers gushed about the young pastor of Luther Place appearing at these occasions astride his steed.
He continued to be heavily involved in two young people’s organizations – Christian Endeavor and the YMCA – just as he had been in his earlier pastorates. But even in this case, Washington opened new horizons for him. It was in the nation’s capital that he met representatives from the Y’s headquarters, and they were impressed with him. In those days the Young Men’s Christian Association was first and foremost an evangelistic organization and only secondarily committed to athletics. And people in the top leadership at the YMCA had their sights set on Douglas.
To read the local papers, you would have thought that Lloyd Douglas had a long, successful career ahead of him in Washington, DC. His congregation seems to have thought so, too. That’s why it came as such a shock when he stood before them one morning in July 1911, not quite two years after having arrived, and announced his resignation.
(To be continued…)
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