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Freedom Upheld: the Civil Liberties Stance of The Christian Century Between the Wars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

J. Theodore Hefley
J. Theodore Hefley
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History, Eastern Michigan University
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Extract

Across the landscape of liberal journalism which flourished between the two world wars, The Christian Century stands out as a salient eminence. Conveniently identified as a non-denominational magazine of religious thought, the Century also maintained a lively interest in the problems of civil liberties, political theory, constitutional change, the tactics of parties, the place of leadership in politics, and the problems of state and local administration. It was awake to many of the evils of American society since its thinking lay in the main stream of the muckraking-progressive tradition. Finally, it was interested, especially in the thirties, in policies and candidates. Indeed during the depression decade it became as much a political and social journal as a religious one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 1968 , pp. 174 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1968

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References

1. Time, Vol. 49, No. 25 (06 23, 1947), 75.Google Scholar

2. Newsweek, Vol. 29, No. 25 (06 23, 1947), 72.Google Scholar

3. Wolseley, Roland E., Interpreting the Church Through Press and Radio (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1951), 131.Google Scholar

4. Meyer, Donald B., The Protestant Search for Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 44.Google Scholar

5. Cf. Thomas Jefferson: “The land belongs to the living.” The modern social gospel movement arose in the late nineteenth century, its paternity credited to Washington Gladden, pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, and author of Applied Christianity (1886) and other works. There was also an English influence through men like Charles Kingsley who in his novels depicted the conditions of the British working class. At about the turn of the century there appeared the influential Charles Monroe Sheldon (In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?). Later there flourished Walter Rauschenbusch (The Social Principles of Jesus), Sherwood Eddy, international secretary of the Y.M.C.A., and Kirby Page, full-time writer and speaker on the social gospel and pacifism in the twenties, thirties, and forties. See Meyer, supra, 48; see also Wish, Harvey, Society and Thought in Modern America, 2nd. ed., (New York: McKay, 1962), 162–172.Google Scholar

6. The Christian Century (hereafter cited CC), Vol. 37, No. 6 (02 5, 1920), 5–6Google Scholar. Still Morrison would make exceptions in the case of “known and notorious offenders like [Alexander] Berkman and the Goldman woman.” The Berkman incident was one of a rash of horrifying anarchist murders of prominent figures of state which occurred in the United States and in western Europe around the turn of the century. Berkman attempted the assassination of Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnege's second in command, in the Homestead Strike (1892). Emma Goldman was the free-thinking feminist and philosophical anarchist who in addition to her activities in behalf of anarchism advanced emancipated ideas concerning marriage.

7. CC, Vol. 38, No. 12 (03 24, 1922), 4.Google Scholar

8. CC, Vol. 39, No. 42 (10 19, 1922), 1284.Google Scholar

9. CC, Vol. 38, No. 12 (03 24, 1921), 5.Google Scholar

10. CC, Vol. 40, No. 52 (12 27, 1923), 1676–1677Google Scholar. The dialogue is supposed to have occurred essentially as follows: Emerson: “Why Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau: “Why Ralph, what are you doing out there?” Criminal syndicalism, a concept embodied in the antisyndicalist laws of the twenties and thirties, may be defined as any doctrine or precept aiding the commission of crime or effecting political change. The imprecision of such a statute made it useful in prosecuting leftist thinkers.

11. CC, Vol. 40, No. 18 (05 3, 1923), 547.Google Scholar

12. The “clear-and-present danger” test of speech means that an alleged danger to the community, such as riot, must be clear and present before the right to speak may be abrogated.

13. CC, Vol. 40, No. 14 (04 5, 1923), 422.Google Scholar

14. CC, Vol. 45, No. 35 (08 30, 1928), 1041.Google Scholar

15. CC, Vol. 49, No. 4 (01 27, 1932), 112–113.Google Scholar

16. CC, Vol. 55, No. 5 (02 2, 1938), 133Google Scholar. In an NBC broadcast of December 12, 1937, Miss West played the role of Eve to Mr. Don Ameche's Adam. Also on the program Miss West played opposite Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy. Chairman McNinch said the broadcast was “vulgar, indecent, and against all proprieties.” See The New York Times, January 15, 1: 2, 1938.

17. CC, Vol. 55, No. 21 (05 25, 1938), 645.Google Scholar

18. CC, Vol. 55, No. 26 (06 29, 1938), 804.Google Scholar

19. CC, Vol. 48, No. 40 (10 7, 1931), 1229.Google Scholar

20. CC, Vol. 44, No. 16 (04 21, 1927), 486–487.Google Scholar

21. CC, Vol. 44, No. 20 (05 19, 1927), 613.Google Scholar

22. CC, Vol. 44, No. 33 (08 18, 1927), 964.Google Scholar

23. CC, Vol. 46, No. 23 (06 5, 1929), 734.Google Scholar

24. CC, Vol. 46, No. 28 (07 10, 1929), 883Google Scholar. The Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, in which the Century was keenly interested, was signed by representatives of a number of nations in Paris in 1928 and ratified by the United States Senate in January 1929. Morrison, witnessing the ceremony in Paris, wrote that war had been banished from civilization.

25. CC, Vol. 52, No. 1 (01 2, 1935), 6.Google Scholar

26. The New York Times, September 13, 1938.

27. CC, Vol. 55, No. 39 (09 28, 1938), 1148.Google Scholar

28. CC, Vol. 44, No. 37 (09 15, 1927), 1060.Google Scholar

29. CC, Vol. 47, No. 11 (03 12, 1930), 328–330.Google Scholar

30. CC, Vol. 47, No. 17 (04 23, 1930), 517.Google Scholar

31. In this famous case seven young Negro boys were accused of raping two white girls in a railroad car. The circumstances surrounding their trial persuaded the Supreme Court that the boys had been denied due process of law. See Powell v.Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932)Google Scholar. In the second Scottsboro case, the Supreme Court again nullified the boys' conviction on the ground that Negroes had been systematically- excluded from serving on Alabama grand juries. See Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935).Google Scholar

32. CC, Vol. 48, No. 26 (07 1, 1931), 859.Google Scholar

33. Burlingame, Roger, The Sixth Column (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), 59–60.Google Scholar

34. CC, Vol. 55, No. 49 (12 7, 1938), 1491–1492.Google Scholar

35. CC, Vol. 57, No. 41 (10 9, 1940), 1238.Google Scholar

36. CC, Vol. 58, No. 27 (07 2, 1941), 853.Google Scholar

37. CC, Vol. 42, No. 24 (06 11, 1925), 757.Google Scholar

38. Ibid. Unfortunately, these admirable sentiments were not always applied in concrete situations. A month after the above statement appeared, the Scopes case suddenly bloomed in Tennessee. Clarence Darrow, who with the ACLU took over the defense of Scopes, made essentially the Century's case for free inquiry. Regrettably, Darrow's methods were too sensational, especially his textual examination of Bryan who undertook the prosecution of Scopes. The Century thought the questions which Darrow put to Bryan on the Bible merely museum pieces of Bible-baiting. While the press of the country was giving massive coverage to the nine-day trial, the Century paid as little attention to it as possible. Evidently the Century was alienated by Darrow's blunt questions, although it had no sympathy for Bryan's fundamentalism.

39. CC, Vol. 52, No. 18 (05 1, 1925), 564.Google Scholar

40. CC, Vol. 51, No. 30 (07 25, 1934), 967.Google Scholar

41. CC, Vol. 52, No. 13 (03 27, 1935), 387.Google Scholar

42. CC, Vol. 55, No. 29 (07 20, 1938), 885.Google Scholar

43. The Volstead Act, passed in 1919, put teeth into the prohibition amendment by providing penalties for violation, i.e., manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages. The Century hailed this victory as ushering in a new era of moral behavior. For years it denied the obvious extent of liquor violation, and fought repeal of the amendment almost to the point of its accomplishment.

44. CC, Vol. 46, No. 28 (07 10, 1929), 885.Google Scholar

45. CC, Vol. 48, No. 24 (06 17, 1931), 797.Google Scholar

46. CC, Vol. 49, No. 8 (02 24, 1932), 244.Google Scholar

47. CC, Vol. 37, No. 12 (03 18, 1920), 3–4.Google Scholar

48. CC, Vol. 40, No. 11 (03 15, 1923), 324–325.Google Scholar

49. CC, Vol. 42, No. 19 (05 7, 1925), 503.Google Scholar

50. CC, Vol. 43, No. 9 (03 4, 1926), 275–276.Google Scholar

51. CC, Vol. 43, No. 7 (02 18, 1926), 213.Google Scholar

52. CC, Vol. 45, No. 36 (09 6, 1928), 1063.Google Scholar

53. CC, Vol. 39, No. 18 (05 4, 1922), 548.Google Scholar

54. CC, Vol. 55, No. 5 (02 2, 1938), 134.Google Scholar

55. CC, Vol. 53, No. 1 (01 1, 1936), 6–7.Google Scholar

56. CC, Vol. 53, No. 34 (08 19, 1936), 1101.Google Scholar

57. The Babbittonian Captivity (from George Babbitt, the American postwar bourgeois, created by Sinclair Lewis in 1922) embraces much of America's religious climate during the twenties, Miller says, but the liberal, social gospel voices also present have too often been overlooked. See Miller's, excellent American Protestantism and Social Issues (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), chapters 2 and 3.Google Scholar

58. Ibid., 200.