Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building, Washington, DC. (From the Architect of the Capitol website)
Just months after he became the pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, DC, Lloyd Douglas was invited to participate in a rare event at the Capitol Building. On Tuesday, January 11, 1910, a statue of the late Civil War general Lew Wallace was unveiled in Statuary Hall.
General Lew Wallace in his Civil War uniform. (Courtesy of the General Lew Wallace Museum.)
General Wallace had been a native of Indiana, so representatives of that state (Governor Thomas R Marshall and Senator Albert J Beveridge) gave speeches, and the well-known Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote and recited an elegy. Then they all went to the theater to watch the stage version of Ben-Hur. For besides being a general in the Civil War, Lew Wallace was also the author of that bestselling novel.
As another native of Indiana, Lloyd Douglas was invited to give the benediction.
That may not seem like much, but Lew Wallace was a popular author, and this was a big affair. Douglas was fortunate to play a role in it.
The speeches have long been forgotten, and there is no record of Douglas’s prayer. But when the statue was unveiled…
Statue of Lew Wallace in Statuary Hall, US Capitol. (From the Architect of the Capitol website.)
… a photographer for the Washington Evening Star snapped a unique picture. The digital version of that evening’s paper, available online from the Library of Congress, is too distorted to see. The best copy I have of it is in Douglas’s 1909-1915 scrapbook. It’s just a clipping from the newspaper article, and it’s not very clear. Douglas marked an X in his scrapbook and drew a straight line from it down to his own face. Here’s the picture. He’s just beneath the statue, and a little to the right.
From Lloyd C Douglas Papers, 1909-1915 Scrapbook, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. (c) Bentley Historical Library.
Since it’s from a newspaper, I can’t get a good closeup without it blurring, but here’s the closeup. Douglas has black hair and is standing just a little to the right of the statue:
From Lloyd C Douglas Papers, 1909-1915 Scrapbook, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. (c) Bentley Historical Library.
It would take another 32 years before the real significance of that photograph would become apparent. The author of Ben-Hur is memorialized in stone, and at the very moment when the statue is unveiled, at his feet stands the future author of The Robe.
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Besse Porch Douglas wasn’t much older than this when she moved with her husband Lloyd to Washington, DC. (From The Shape of Sunday)
When Lloyd Douglas began as pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1909, his daughters Betty and Virginia were still toddlers. They had no significant memories of life in Washington, but their mother, Besse, told them about it. Here is an excerpt from their book about their father.
In Washington we lived in a house which Mother described to us as being quite unique, a kind never to be seen except in that odd city. It was one of a long row of brown houses all stuck together at the sides. The kitchen was in the basement, dark and dismal even on the finest day. The food came bumping up through the walls on a dumb-waiter to the dining room on the first floor.
No lady could do her own work in that house so we had a cook, a fat colored mammy whose name was Emily. Emily loved us all dearly and Mother became so devoted to her and dependent upon her advice that when we finally moved away she feared for a while she would never be able to manage her house and children alone. The old black lady had lived all her life in Washington and knew all the intricacies of social deportment. There was a kind of etiquette which originated in the highest government circles and sifted on down through the layers of society to the lowest of civil servants.
To our mother, fresh from the back-fence friendliness of Lancaster, it was a cold and baffling experience to stand in the afternoon at the front window and watch through the curtains the ladies sitting in their carriages while their colored drivers came to the door with cards.
The first time Emily brought these to her she looked at them, holding them gingerly between the tips of two fingers. ‘One corner is folded down; does that mean anything?’
Emily said, ‘That means her husband wishes he could come too, but he couldn’t, honey.’
‘It wasn’t much of a call, anyway,’ Mother said wistfully.
‘Never you mind,’ Emily consoled her, ‘some ladies will come and stay for a real chat.’
‘But what’ll I do about these cards?’ Mother was still holding them out as if they were a live insect. She told us how Emily laughed with her stomach hopping up and down under her apron.
But after it was all explained about the ‘at homes’ and the courtesy calls she found it all too formidable and retired as much as she could to the company of her small daughters.
Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 64-65.
The Washington newspapers actually printed names of women who would be “at home” today and “receiving callers.” It was all part of the protocol. Nellie Taft, who was First Lady at the time, also mentions it in her autobiography, Recollections of Full Years. She, too, was a Midwesterner who came to Washington and had to learn the ins and outs of the social scene.
Meanwhile, within his first few months as pastor, Lloyd Douglas was forming not-in-person friendships of his own. In a sermon on December 12, 1909, he was talking about the Parable of the Virgins, some of whom ran out of oil, and that led him to talk about the conservation of natural resources. He mentioned Gifford Pinchot, who was Chief of the United States Forest Service, first under President Theodore Roosevelt and then under William Howard Taft. Although Pinchot had gotten along well with Roosevelt, his relationship with Taft was dicey, since Taft’s Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, was in favor of cutting down forests for commercial purposes, and Taft sided with Ballinger rather than Pinchot.
Douglas came out in support of Pinchot.
He didn’t get involved in politics very often, but when he did, it made headlines. Pinchot read about it and sent him a letter of thanks. I can find no evidence that they ever met, so this was not much of an improvement over the “friendships” Besse was making. But at least Douglas got an autographed letter out of it.
Lloyd C Douglas, 1909-1915 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. (c) Bentley Historical Library.
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When Lloyd Douglas preached his first sermon as the new pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church on October 24, 1909, he knew he had a big job ahead of him. His predecessor, the late Rev. Dr. John G Butler, had engaged in a very ugly fight with his church council during the last several months of his life, and they had taken it to the newspapers. In fact, the scandal was front-page news over the course of several weeks, and it led a number of the members of the church to form a splinter group that began to meet at a location not far from Luther Place. It was a complex and troublesome situation for any new pastor to inherit.
But Douglas was the man for the job.
He did a number of things, right away, that helped the congregation move on.
He made positive changes to the worship service. He had always tried to create a more aesthetically-pleasing service by skillful use of music, and in the nation’s capital he had access to even more talented individuals who could help him accomplish that goal. Douglas persuaded Prof. Emile Mori, organist at the German-speaking Concordia Lutheran Church, to be his choir director, and Prof. Mori quickly put together an ensemble of twenty trained voices.
He paid due respect to Dr. Butler. In his inaugural sermon, he said, “You hold in solemn and sacred reverence the memory of the man who, through these many years past, labored so tirelessly and efficiently in the interests of this church. I have not come here as his rival, but as his successor.”
He also showed respect for the people themselves. “I have not come here to upset what I have found, or ruthlessly destroy that which has been achieved in the past. Those things that have been dear to you will become dear to me; your traditions will be respected; your customs honored; your church usages kept inviolate.”
But he made his own priorities clear. “I have not come here for the sole and exclusive purpose of writing names in a church book,” he told them. “That we will write many names there I have no doubt, and that we shall be most happy to do so goes without saying. We will strive to make Memorial Church great, and when, by patient application to her trust, she shall have demonstrated her usefulness, her greatness is assured.”
He would focus on being the Church of Jesus Christ in this place, and on projecting that image to the larger community. “Our business—mine as a minister and yours as a layman—is to hold the church with a regard so high and a reverence so deep that her welfare and standing in the community shall be one of the supreme desires of our hearts. It is true that church members do not always see eye to eye. It is true they cannot always bring their ideas of methods, polity, doctrine, and administration into perfect juxtaposition. But that does not impugn their sincerity or reflect upon the honesty of their convictions.”
“You may not care whether I am a Democrat or a Republican,” he said, “whether I am in favor of capital punishment for murderers, what is my personal taste in the matter of books, music, art. You have a right to be interested in my conception of the kingdom of Jesus Christ and my individual belief as to the methods of its advancement.”
Finally, he gave them a promise: “That with God as my guide and helper, I shall endeavor, so far as lies within me, to render to Him and to you an acceptable service. And I should be happy if each one of you might silently offer a pledge at this moment that so long as you believe in my sincerity you will give me your hearty co-operation and support.”
Regarding the split in the church, there was another factor working in his favor: one day earlier (Saturday, October 23), the local synod had voted to accept the splinter group as a legitimate Lutheran congregation. Although some members of Luther Place had hoped that Douglas would find a way to lure them back to the fold, the conference action of the previous day had relieved him of that responsibility. Only one thing remained to be done, and he did it the following Sunday (October 31): he “officially recognized the independent Lutheran congregation,” the Washington Herald reported, “when, in the morning service, he offered prayer that its meditations and efforts might be attended by success.” And that was the end of that.
It started out as front-page news and might have hounded him throughout his pastorate, but Douglas had the wisdom to deal with the issue and put it behind him within the first eight days. And for all practical purposes, he never had to deal with it again.
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When he arrived in Washington, DC, to begin his work as pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church in October 1909, Lloyd Douglas made a clever move: he won over the representatives of the DC newspapers by describing himself as a former newspaperman. Although he did spend some time as a reporter for the Springfield Press-Republic in Springfield, Ohio, before attending seminary, he had never put that information to good use before. But now, as he took over the spiritual leadership of a church that had been making headlines for all the wrong reasons, he was able to create a more positive image of the church by hobnobbing with the Press Corps.
The Washington Herald ran this headline on page 1 of their Monday, October 25, 1909 issue:
FORMER REPORTER COMES AS PASTOR
Whoever wrote the article (there were few by-lines in those days) seems to have become a fan. Here is an excerpt:
“From the rattle of typewriters in the city room of a newspaper, from the search of news and the dispassionate probing into the reasons of things, to the pulpit of a house of worship is the story of Rev. Lloyd C. Douglas, who yesterday morning preached his inaugural sermon as the new pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church.
“Immediately after his graduation from college, Mr. Douglas became a reporter on the staff of the Springfield (Ohio) Press-Republic, which has since become the Springfield Daily News. Whatever came up in which the public might be interested, the new reporter was ‘shot out’ on the story. From the rich, in their flesh pots, where freedom from want bred indifference and dried the roots of sympathy, to the poor in their hovels, where poverty had taken crime as its mistress, Douglas made his rounds.”
(See what I mean about going on a bit? But it gets better…)
“His stock in trade consisted of nothing but a soft lead pencil and a bunch of copy paper in an inside pocket; a mind trained to think, and interested in what his fellows did, and a purpose that was destined to bring him, before he was thirty-three years old, to the pulpit of one of the best-known churches of the National Capital, to succeed a man of high caliber, the late Rev. J. G. Butler.
“Mr. Douglas made a good reporter.”
(See what I mean about becoming an instant fan? I wonder if anyone fact-checked that before they printed it…)
“Mr. Douglas made a good reporter. His sympathy gave him an insight into his stories, which won recognition from the city editor. Whether his assignment took him to the chamber of a man who had taken his own life, or to a meeting of prominent citizens in the interests of civic improvement, or to a humble home desolated by sorrow in any one of its many forms, he put ‘human interest’ into the story, and kept his purpose under his hat.
“‘I wanted to get the sort of first-hand experience of life which a newspaper reporter has the best chance to get,’ he said, in explaining his reason for going into the business. ‘I wanted to get at life in the living, to see the seamy side of it, so that I should be better equipped to fight against its unhealthy features later. A newspaper reporter does not have to become calloused and cynical and indifferent, and automatic, unless he wants to; and I did not want to.’
“At the end of a year on the paper, Mr. Douglas made a clean break, and enrolled himself at the Wittenberg Seminary in Springfield, to begin his study of life from the ecclesiastical standpoint…”
This was a clever self-introduction. From that point on, the Press Corps regarded him as one of their own. But it was also an interesting story that surely caught readers’ attention and made them more willing to hear what Douglas had to say. And as I will show in the next blog post, it was an important part of his strategy for overcoming the scandal he had inherited and turning journalists’ thoughts in a more constructive direction.
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Source: The First Century, 1873-1973 (Washington DC: Luther Place Memorial Church, 1973), p. 7. The booklet is housed in the Library of Congress.
When Dr. Butler, the founding pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, DC, died suddenly in the summer of 1909, the church council moved quickly to fill his place, and they invited Lloyd Douglas to come and preach. Although this was not something Douglas had ever thought would happen, it was his earlier networking that made it possible. The Rev. Dr. D. Frank Garland, of Dayton, Ohio, was good friends with Dr. Butler, and he was one of the speakers at Butler’s memorial service. Before they could even pursue the matter, he told the church’s leaders that he wasn’t interested in the position, and he recommended Douglas instead.
Garland was synod president in 1905 when Douglas took over as pastor of the First English Lutheran Church of Lancaster, Ohio, and he was the guest speaker at Douglas’s installation service. On at least one occasion, he and Douglas swapped pulpits (February 1909). He told the church council at Luther Place that they should hear Douglas preach.
On Sunday, August 22, they did. The sanctuary was draped in black, and the mood was somber. In many people’s minds, Dr. Butler and Luther Place Memorial Church were one and the same. Most clergymen would have been intimidated to stand in Dr. Butler’s pulpit less than three weeks after his death and presume to take his place. But Douglas had the instincts of a mature pastor. He spoke to the congregation’s immediate need and tried to lift their sights higher – to the name above all names, the Founder not of Luther Place but of Christianity itself.
“I can well believe that at a time like this,” he told them, “when the interlacing bonds and knotted loves of years have been torn up, your thoughts are likely to linger today very near the late event which has brought you so much pain. You are in no mood for didactics. You are in bereavement – thinking seriously upon life and death and all that great forever. I therefore ask you to engage in meditation upon the most singular death which has ever occurred since the world was – the death of Jesus Christ.”
Dr. Butler had been a fighter, and Douglas confronted that fact head-on. “However holy may be every day and every hour because of critical contests, stirring victories, hard-won battles, battles of blood, and battles of brain, and battles of conscience, and battles of soul – every man must reverently lay aside the petty worships of great human events when Calvary is spoken, and admit that this tragedy, marked by the trampled loam on Golgotha’s heights, is the supreme fact of history.
“Men may dispute over the relative superiorities of epoch-making days as to their bearing on the world’s life, but they will all yield, in common reverence and awe, to the day He died.”
Great heroes of the Christian faith could be named – Luther, Calvin, Knox, Huss, Savanarola – and yet the life and death of Jesus outshined them all. And though he didn’t say it outright, the congregation knew what Douglas meant: that the name of Jesus outshined that of Dr. Butler, too. And Lloyd C Douglas. And everyone sitting there. So in Jesus’ name, it was time to take down the drapes of mourning and continue the work that Christ had called them to do.
It was a masterful sermon, and it took more courage and wisdom than might have been expected from a man only six years out of seminary. But Douglas had a lot more experience with churches than his resume indicated. His father had been a minister during his retirement years (he had been a judge and a school superintendent before that), and Lloyd was the child of his old age. Even as a boy, Lloyd Douglas had tagged along with his father, A. J. Douglas, and helped him at funerals, weddings, and sermons all around the Indiana countryside. From an early age, he had been groomed for the ministry. And in this moment of desperate need at Luther Place, Douglas’s preparation showed.
It was a daring, risky thing, speaking to that congregation the way he did. It could’ve backfired. But these were good people. They were able to accept the message he brought them. And very soon after this, they called him to be their new pastor.
[The two main sources of information about Douglas’s sermon are a short article in the Washington Times, Sunday, August 22, 1909, and a longer one in the Washington Post, Monday, August 23, 1909.]
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From January through March 1909, two Washington, DC, newspapers (the Washington Herald and the Washington Times) gave an unusual amount of coverage to a dispute occurring among the membership of Luther Place Memorial Church. The church council wanted to make changes in the way the congregation was governed, and particularly in the way that finances were handled, but the pastor, Rev. Dr. J. G. Butler, was offended.
In January, the council asked Dr. Butler to announce an upcoming congregational meeting to discuss the issues, but he did not share the announcement with the congregation. A few of the council’s leaders resigned in protest, but since their resignations had to be brought before a congregational meeting, Butler surprised the council the following Sunday by announcing the resignations immediately after his sermon and asking all in favor to say “Aye.” This took everyone by surprise, since the leaders of the council, rather than the pastor, were supposed to preside over congregational meetings. But parliamentary procedures were ignored.
The next day, the story appeared in the local papers. This may not seem like the kind of thing that would make headlines, but (1) churches were considered much more newsworthy in the early 1900s than they are now; (2) Luther Place was considered one of the more significant churches in Washington, DC, and Dr. Butler was arguably the most highly-esteemed churchman; (3) the inauguration of William Howard Taft was just weeks away, but it was a boring story since Theodore Roosevelt, the current president, had hand-picked Taft as his successor (in other words, it was a slow season for news); and (4) perhaps most importantly, it was scandalous. And people on both sides of the conflict made it increasingly scandalous by hurling accusations against each other in the newspapers.
The congregational meeting finally did happen, but Dr. Butler presided over it and, again, parliamentary procedures were not followed. Butler accused the council of trying to oust him as pastor, and he asked for a vote of confidence for his leadership. Some tried to speak but were not given the floor. A lot of people walked out, saying they’d never come back. Of those who remained, the majority voted in favor of Dr. Butler. “The insurgents have been repulsed and are in full retreat,” he told the Washington Times a few days after the meeting (Times, Friday, February 5, 1909, p. 11).
The following Sunday he preached on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. “While we slept,” he said, “the enemy has been sowing tares. There are children of the devil in the church. We have the sheep and the goats among us. Examine yourselves this morning, and see where you stand – among the sheep or among the goats. Those who stand aloof and out of the church at this time of fractional disruption will stand a small chance before the judgment seat. There were factions and schisms in the old church at Corinth, and the Apostle Paul rebuked those responsible for rebelling against God… This church is not to be disrupted by factions and strife.” (Washington Times, Sunday Evening, February 7, 1909, p. 1).
The following Sunday he preached on Matthew 12:30: “He that is not with me is against me.”
This kind of talk did nothing to win people back to the church. The group that the press called “insurgents” or “dissenters” began meeting on Sunday mornings at Confederacy Hall, Vermont Avenue, between N and O streets northwest, which was less than two blocks north of Luther Place. A Congregationalist minister served as interim pastor until they could obtain a Lutheran pastor. When approached for a comment, Dr. Butler told the Herald, “The whole thing is a closed incident to me. These persons have left the church, and the church is getting along without them.” (Washington Herald, Monday, February 15, 1909, p. 1).
Dr. Butler was a fighter. When the War Between the States had begun in 1861, the permanent residents of Washington, DC, were by no means unanimous in their reaction. They lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line, south of two slave-holding states (Maryland and Delaware); the Confederate state of Virginia was just across the Potomac River; and Washington itself had a significant slave population. More than half of the capital city’s families came from either Virginia or Maryland. Geographically and culturally, they had more in common with the genteel South than with the abolitionist North. At the commencement of the war, it was not at all clear whether the village residents would be loyal to the Federal Government. (See Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), volume 1, chapters 9-11).
At that time, Butler was pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, and he did not mince words. Despite the general uncertainty, he did what he could to tip the scale in favor of the Union. In his sermons he opposed secession, and although some of his parishioners left the church in anger, many more joined. Vice President Schuyler Colfax frequently attended, as did a number of congressmen and high-ranking military men. Glad of Butler’s support, President Lincoln appointed him chaplain of both a military hospital and of the 5th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers.
Butler kept up that same fighting spirit long after the war was over, preaching and acting in support of the newly-freed slaves, establishing a health clinic at the church, and helping the poor and disadvantaged within the District of Columbia. And when there was a fire in the church, he rallied his congregation and got them to rebuild it. He was 80 years old at the time. It seems appropriate that, at the rededication of Luther Place following that rebuilding, President Theodore Roosevelt used fighting imagery to describe the state of American politics:
“The forces of evil are strong and mighty in this century and in this country,” he said, and he added that “the people who sincerely wish to do the Lord’s work will find ample opportunity for all their labor in fighting the common enemy” (President Theodore Roosevelt, “At the Rededication of the Luther Place Memorial Church, Washington, DC, January 29, 1905.” In A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1905, Alfred Henry Lewis, ed. (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906), pp. 548-550).
This fighting imagery was very much to Butler’s taste. He was a fighter to the end.
Unfortunately, in the final months of his life, when the members of his own congregation were trying to get organized to continue the work he started, he misinterpreted their intentions and fought back, even using the local newspapers to help him win. It was a sad end to a long and distinguished career – and it truly was the end, for on the morning of August 2, 1909, he collapsed on his bedroom floor and died of a heart attack.
The church council moved quickly. They wanted a new pastor charismatic enough to reunite the warring factions. So intent were they on this course of action that they took a huge risk. They passed over Dr. Butler’s son, the Rev. Charles Butler, his heir-apparent. They by-passed a close friend of Dr. Butler, the Rev. Dr. D. Frank Garland of Dayton, Ohio. They declined the opportunity to hear and evaluate distinguished ministers from the length and breadth of the land, many of whom would have been thrilled at the opportunity.
Only one candidate was invited: a young man who had been a minister for no more than six years and who had spent that time serving small-town parishes in the Midwest. He was thirty-two years old, but the Washington papers said he looked much younger. Within only a few short years, he had made a name for himself as a writer for the Lutheran Observer, and he was considered an up-and-coming progressive.
His name was Lloyd C. Douglas.
[To be continued…]
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By the summer of 1909, Lloyd C Douglas was going places. He was a frequent contributor to the Lutheran Observer, was often mentioned in the local newspapers, and could easily attract a crowd to hear his sermons and speeches. He was invited to speak at churches and events throughout the region and was a favorite with young people, especially at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and a group called Christian Endeavor. In fact, both of these latter groups were trying to get him to work for them. And he was giving it serious consideration.
But no one – not even Douglas himself – could have predicted where he would end up next. For in the summer of 1909, the Reverend Doctor J. G. Butler died, leaving a vacancy at the Memorial Evangelical Lutheran Church in Washington, DC.
The church was five blocks northeast of the White House on a crossroads called Thomas Circle. At the center of this circle was a garden and statue of Major General George H. Thomas. Bisecting it east and west was M Street, north and south was 14th, with Vermont and Massachusetts, in opposite diagonals, forming an X through its center. The Memorial Church sat atop a pie-slice wedge on the circle’s northern side.
Riding around Thomas Circle in a horse-drawn carriage and viewing the church straight-on, one could simultaneously peer down both Vermont and 14th streets, which ran along either side of the church. The building itself, conforming to those boundaries, was triangular. Its front was narrow, with a central entryway and high steeple, then it became increasingly wider, with smaller towers on either side at the structure’s back. Its outer surface was red sandstone, and the Gothic towers were green. And in front of the entrance, facing Thomas Circle, was a replica statue of Luther-at-Worms, holding a massive Bible, his face heavenward as if saying, “Here I stand.” When that statue was added in 1884, people began to call it Luther Place Memorial Church.
It was the Reverend Dr. John George Butler who first dreamed of this place and made it a reality. The War Between the States was still raging—indeed, Confederate cannons were within hearing distance of the nation’s capital—when Butler laid plans to build a unique Lutheran church in Washington, D.C. It was to be a living memorial, expressing gratitude to God for preserving the nation and freeing the slaves. In the front would be two “reconciliation pews” representing Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee. On either side of the sanctuary, the theme of reconciliation would continue with windows memorializing heroes from outside Lutheranism: Luther, Melanchthon, and John Huss would share space with Wesley and Calvin. And looking down upon all this, with outstretched arms of approval, would be an art-glass reproduction of the Thorwaldsen Christ.
Butler was already well-known as pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Washington, DC. During the war, President Lincoln appointed him chaplain of both a military hospital and a regiment. After the war, Butler got people all over the country excited about his idea for the new church, and donations poured in, making it financially possible. The church was built and began operating in 1873. Butler resigned his post at St. Paul’s to become the pastor of Luther Place Memorial, and from that place his name went out even farther than before. He served as chaplain of the House of Representatives for six years (1867-73), then of the Senate for seven years a decade later (1886-93). He did what he could to help advance black men in the ministry. For twenty years he taught homiletics and church history at the Howard University Divinity School, and he helped establish the Church of Our Redeemer in Washington, DC, a segregated congregation for African Americans.
He was a towering figure in the nation’s capital, and Douglas had no way of knowing that he would be the man’s successor. But through a series of coincidences, that’s what happened. (To be continued.)
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In January 1908, Lloyd Douglas began a series of Sunday afternoon lectures designed specifically for men. The Lancaster Eagle reported him saying that “there are many men in the city who have nowhere to go on Sunday afternoon, and who would be glad to avail themselves of the opportunity to spend an hour hearing good music and a sermon-lecture of a popular nature.” If this seems unlikely, bear in mind that most public places were closed on Sundays, and this was the dead of winter. The Gazette added Douglas’s suggestion that there were some men “who may find it more convenient to attend a church service on Sunday afternoon than at the regular hours of service, and who might be more inclined to attend a men’s meeting than one designed for a mixed audience.” The day before the first meeting, the Eagle said that there would be a large male chorus led by “Prof. E. R. Barrington, the noted baritone of Columbus.”
To help spread the word about these meetings, Douglas had the following cards printed, which were handed out to men on the street. The first page was really a half-page, and the man to whom it was handed was invited to flip open the page:
Although it’s hard to believe that anyone would take the time to do this, apparently some men did, perhaps because they were intrigued. They stopped “within” (probably the church) and were given a flyer describing the upcoming meetings:
Then they went outside and handed the “Are You a Man?” card to the next male who passed by.
(This was just the kind of thing Douglas loved, by the way: one person not affiliated with the church handing an invitation to someone equally a stranger to the church. He used something similar years later in his novel, Green Light, when Dean Harcourt of Trinity Cathedral would have a counseling session with a woman who was not a churchgoer, then, on her way out, ask her to introduce the next person who had come for counseling.)
This passing-of-the-cards technique, although interesting, was not the primary way that Douglas got the word out; he also prepared a number of press releases in the days leading up to the meetings, and the local papers ran them. He doesn’t seem to have run any paid advertisements; he didn’t need to. The articles raised enough interest on their own.
When the first meeting was held on Sunday, January 5, 1908, at 3:15 pm at the First English Lutheran Church in Lancaster, Ohio, the Eagle reported it as “the largest assemblage of men ever seen in a Lancaster church edifice… beyond all expectations, the seating capacity of the church auditorium being overtaxed, even the gallery of the church which has not been occupied for many months had to be thrown open and was well filled… It was an inspiring sight to see such a large audience of intellectual men and thrilling to hear the songs as they were rendered by that multitude of male voices.” Another paper (presumably the Gazette) declared the event “a great success” and counted “about four hundred men in attendance.”
Douglas told the story of Esau and his brother Jacob from a man’s perspective. He called Jacob “a mama’s boy.”
“To me,” he said, “one of the most unfortunate mistakes parents can make in their attitude toward their children is to single out one or two and to treat them as favorites.
“I have heard it said many a time, and so have you:
“‘Yes, Jimmy is mama’s boy. Johnny and Billy and Annie and Susie all run after their father but Jimmy is mama’s boy, ain’t you Jimmy?’
“And Jimmy replies truthfully and awkwardly that the allegation is correct.”
“I see a future for Jimmy that is neither bright nor dim – just a sweet twilight. People will say of Jimmy to their own sons:
“‘See here, Thomas, why don’t you keep clean, and play in the house, and say “Yes, ma’am,” and “If you please” like Jimmy does?’
“And so all the boys will come to hate Jimmy…”
Jacob’s brother Esau, on the other hand, “was a born sportsman. As a boy he wandered the fields with his bow and knife. No tent for him. He belonged to the sunshine, and he meant to live in it.”
And with this down-to-earth introduction, Douglas told the story of Jacob cheating his brother out of his birthright. I can’t say I’ve ever heard the story told the way Douglas told it, but it must’ve held the attention of the four hundred men sitting shoulder-to-shoulder that day, for the following week one of the papers said that the church “lacked seating capacity for the large audience that attended,” and another paper reported “one hundred more” in attendance than the previous week.
His messages continued to defy prediction. From the story of Judas Iscariot, for example, he extracted the unusual question, “What do you think about when you’re alone?… What are you thinking about when you take that long walk by yourself out into the country and sit down on some hilltop to survey the landscape?” In reply to his own question, he said, “Show me a stenographic report of five minutes’ meditation up there, and I believe I can tell you what kind of a man you are.”
From the New Testament story of Ananias and Sapphira, he ended up talking about what happens when you let your insurance policy lapse, and then he used that as a metaphor to explain why he thought deathbed confessions were useless.
The fourth and final Sunday he preached on “The Failure of a Loan and Trust Company,” which turned out to be about the Parable of the Talents.
As one of the local papers remarked, “Men of every church in the city have united heartily in these meetings and there have been many men in attendance who have no regular church homes. Perhaps it has been the stirring music, perhaps the peculiar nature of the addresses, perhaps the mere novelty of a service distinctly for men – that has brought forth all this enthusiasm, but whatever it is, the audiences are so large that it has become quite a problem to accommodate them in the church…”
Another unusual feature of the series was the fact that each sermon was printed in full, a day or two later, by one of the local papers.
After the fourth week, as the newspapers noted, Douglas stopped the afternoon meetings but promised to continue the series “at the regular Sunday evening services to which everybody is invited. During the month of February he will deliver sermon-lectures on the theme, ‘Mistakes of Great Men,’ and it is safe to predict that the church will be filled at each service.”
The newspapers reported that he was, indeed, “greeted with a full house” the next Sunday evening, and later in the month “the church was crowded to its utmost capacity” for the evening service – this despite the fact that the United Churchmen’s League of Lancaster, using the momentum caused by Douglas’s afternoon meetings, held a series of its own afternoon lectures for men in the city hall auditorium throughout the month of February. Speakers from around the region (Columbus, Dayton) were invited, and attendance was good at those events, too.
What’s significant about this is that Douglas’s afternoon lectures raised enough interest to sustain not only his own evening services but also a continuation of the men’s meetings, even in his absence. But no one forgot the role he played in getting the men’s meetings started, and when he was invited back to give another lecture at the United Churchmen’s League a few weeks later, the minister who introduced him called him “the godfather” of the afternoon men’s meetings. (This means something very different in our day, thanks to Francis Ford Coppola. They weren’t comparing Douglas to a mafia boss; they were recognizing his important role in getting the meetings started.)
The United Churchman’s League meetings quickly became focused on civic and moral (rather than religious) issues, and when Douglas addressed them a few weeks later, he used the opportunity to push for a more systematic board of charities for the city. The newspaper accounts say that he was interrupted numerous times by applause, and when he asked, at the conclusion, how many would support the board of charities, they gave him a standing ovation.
All of this shows how highly Douglas was regarded in Lancaster by Spring 1908, but there is one more subtle display of admiration that he did not fail to miss. While the “Are You a Man?” card is pasted into the inside front cover of his 1908-1909 scrapbook, he gave the scrapbook a wonderful symmetry by pasting this advertisement to the inside back cover. It was from a local shoe store:
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Douglas had only been in Lancaster, Ohio, for a year when he was honored with an unusual preaching opportunity. The city had a Ministerial Association through which the local Protestant ministers kept in touch with each other and cooperated in certain ways. Each year on Thanksgiving, they held special Union services in a few designated churches around town. Attendance was usually good, considering the fact that the members of the city’s many churches all gathered at only two or three places, chosen in advance by the Association. Because the occasion was Thanksgiving, a special collection was taken, and the monies received were split among the participating congregations.
In 1906, Douglas was selected to preach at the largest of the three host churches, and newspaper accounts say that the place was crowded. The message Douglas delivered that morning made a difference: it altered (at least slightly) the history of Lancaster.
Preaching on the text “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends,” Douglas asked the congregation whether they were Jesus’ “friends.” He dwelt on that question a while, making sure heads were nodding all around the room, then drove home the point that friendship with Christ, who gave his life for us, must manifest itself in “a keen desire to help others.”
There must have been gasps of disbelief as he gave the following description of their annual Thanksgiving Union service:
“We have come together in times past to eulogize ourselves for our prosperity, and readjust our homemade haloes… and brag and boast about what all we have to be thankful for, after the order of the Pharisee’s Thanksgiving prayer, ‘Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men are!’ We have even been so stupidly indifferent to the great tasks that belong to us, that we have divided our pitiful little Thanksgiving offering of nickels and dimes among the various church treasurers for them to use for their respective poor; and the church treasurers, for the most part deeming their own treasuries to be the most poverty-stricken creatures in town, have emptied this treasure into the coffers of their own churches, where it gently and silently evaporated into a calm, sweet nothingness…
“It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Christ wants and has a right to expect something better of his friends.
“If you have a thankful heart this day, reveal it by your sacrifice. Then let this handsome gift, amassed, initiate some fund that will put us on record for having this day, as friends of Christ, remembered in gratitude the boundlessness of his love…”
All of this was prelude. Now came the pitch: it was time to build a hospital in Lancaster.
“Every few days we are confronted with a problem, gigantic and soul-searching. A man is severely wounded. Maybe his home is not appointed to meet the exigencies that have arisen. He must be subjected to an operation. He must receive the most careful subsequent attention. One of two courses lies open. Either he must run the gauntlet with the pitiable circumstances in his humble home… or else the other alternative will be chosen and he is taken on a cot in the baggage car to Columbus for hospital treatment. And if he has not all the odds in his favor, in either case he hasn’t had a fighting chance.”
Douglas went on to argue that it made as much sense from a civic as from a religious perspective to build a hospital in town rather than shipping people off to Columbus for medical attention. He added:
“I believe that the highest adoration to God is rendered by the man who accompanies his ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow’ with a check on his bank account. I believe that a man can express more real, conscientious Christianity with his pocketbook than with his prayer book.”
As one of the local papers remarked, “So effective were his words that at the conclusion of his address Mr. James T Pickering [Lancaster’s Postmaster General] arose and moved that the day’s collection be used as the nucleus of a hospital fund. The motion met with practically unanimous approval and the offertory which followed aggregated over $100.” These were 1906 dollars, bear in mind. One online calculator estimates that it would be $3018.84 in 2021 dollars. By comparison, the collection at the other two Union services totaled $4 ($12 by today’s values).
In 1907, the “Park Street Hospital” opened in a private home in the 200 block of Park Street. It was not unusual for cities of that size to set up their first hospitals in houses. The city where I live (Kalamazoo, Michigan) did the same thing : Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo began in 1889 in a private residence, and what is now Bronson Hospital did the same thing in 1900. (See Jacqueline L Wylie and Anna M Stryd, Bronson Women and the School of Nursing: Journeys Through One Hundred Years (Kalamazoo: Alumni Association of Bronson Methodist Hospital School of Nursing, 2005), pp 4, 9-10.)
Others had pushed for a hospital in Lancaster prior to November 1906, but Douglas’s sermon helped move the project along. Most of us never get a chance to make history, even on the local level, but Douglas did. And it started as nothing more than an opportunity to preach. It tells us something about Douglas that he saw larger possibilities in that invitation.
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One of the biggest boosts to Douglas’s career as both a minister and an author was the invitation to contribute, on a regular basis, to The Lutheran Observer, a weekly newspaper published in Baltimore from 1840 to 1915. The invitation came from the Rev. Dr. Milton Valentine, who was editor of the Observer from 1899 to 1915.
In a letter to Douglas dated June 25, 1906, Valentine described himself as “intently scanning the horizon” for new writers. Douglas had sent him something before, apparently, and he wrote to Douglas on June 2oth asking him to contribute again. Douglas responded quickly. The essay he sent pleased Valentine so much that he wrote to Douglas on the 25th asking him to be a regular contributor:
“The very first communication you sent me showed promise of great aptness for this kind of work, and I think I have not observed a more marked development in gifts for it than in your case. Your style is clean, clear and direct. You not only think clearly but you have the power of finely and forcibly expressing your thoughts. The Church is in great need of just such talents as yours…”
That was all Douglas needed to hear. For the next five years, Douglas’s articles spiced up the Observer, tackling controversial issues with boldness, imagination, and a powerful command of the English language. “There is not another man in our Church who could have written that article of yours,” Valentine said on another occasion (October 11, 1911).
Milton Valentine was a godsend for Douglas: full of praise and encouragement while giving Douglas a free hand. Although the Observer seems to have had a wide circulation within the denomination, Valentine didn’t micromanage, even when Douglas spoke frankly on hot topics (which he did regularly). Douglas’s articles in the Observer made him a rising star within the Lutheran Church in America. These publications, and his many speaking engagements around the country, put his name on many people’s lips within the denomination.
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