All in the
Family: the Witherspoon Society Heritageby
Richard Poethig
[3-4-08]
As the Witherspoon Society looks back over its thirty-five year
history, it is good to acknowledge our socially-engaged forebears,
from the theological legacy of John Calvin to those who have carried
the Reformed social dynamic into issues of U.S. industrial and
post-industrial society.
Starting in the late 19th century,
industrialization challenged the U.S. Presbyterian Church to see its
role in society from a new perspective. Waves of immigrants seeking
economic opportunities, filled American cities, changed
neighborhoods, and provided new energy to the labor force.
Among Presbyterians who grappled with these
challenges was Charles Thompson, who, at the turn of the 20th
century, headed the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, and who saw
immigration in a positive light. Unlike many business-oriented
church members, who saw this new work force as a threat to the
status quo, Thompson sought to bring their energies into the church.
Thompson in turn brought Charles Stelzle on staff
in 1903, to head the Workingman’s Department, with the charge to
awaken the church to the issues of working people. Stelzle had
himself grown up on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, and, as
a worker, was a member of the International Association of
Machinists (IAM). He was a workingman’s preacher and, previous to
his recruitment by Thompson, had been gathering a Sunday School of
1400 at Markham Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, MO. During his 10
year tenure at the Board, Stelzle brought the issues of American
working people to the forefront of the church’s consciousness and
helped bring it as an institution into the Social Gospel Movement.
Stelzle was one of many clergy from many
denominations who responded to the call for change in the social
order. Urban pastors, recognizing the magnitude of the changes
taking place, saw the need for inter-denominational cooperation. The
result was the Federal Council of Churches, which in 1908 summed up
the spirit of the times in its Social Creed of the Churches. Through
a series of resolutions, the creed lifted up the daily realities of
working people. It outlined practical goals, which, if achieved,
would bring the nation closer to an economically just system. This
included on the job protections for workers, the abolition of child
labor, regulations to protect women, a shorter work day, one day off
a week, the minimum wage being set as a living wage, pension and
disability benefits, and the equitable distribution of profits.
At its 1910 General Assembly, the Presbyterian
Church in the USA , called for implementation of the recommendations
of the Social Creed. Rev. John McDowell, the minister who brought
the affirmation before the General Assembly for consideration, had
himself lost an arm in a Pennsylvania coal mining accident at the
age of 12. The focal point of the social statement his committee
sent to the body for a vote was the obligation of wealth to
establish a more just economic order.
Workplace issues raised by the Social Creed became
headlines with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The
chasm between workers and owners of the means of production was
evident in the long unemployment lines, the prevalence of soup
kitchens, and the presence of shanty Hoovervilles that sprang up
across both urban and rural America. Many clergy saw these scenes of
human misery as proof of the need to change the laissez-faire
economics that had taken hold in the United States. They came to
identify themselves with the efforts of organized labor and
channeled their energies in winning support from church people for
economic change.
One of the forerunners of the Witherspoon Society
was the Presbyterian Fellowship for Social Action in the Synod of
New York. It was organized at its 1934 annual meeting in Buffalo, NY
and claimed as members Professor John Bennett, Auburn Seminary,
Edmund Chaffee, head of the Labor Temple in New York, the Rev. Ray
Freeman, Park Central Church, Syracuse, and Shubert Frye, Associate
Executive of the Synod of New York. The Fellowship rooted itself in
the social statements of the 1933 and 1934 General Assemblies:
It
is now evident that the more the industrial depression has been
prolonged, the greater has been the tendency to cut wages, to
increase hours of labor, and to undermine the protection afforded by
labor laws…Under these conditions working people have a right to
look…to the Christian Churches to help create a public opinion which
will maintain the standards of enforcement…and insist on whatever
new laws may be necessary to protect the well-being and welfare of
the people. As the body of Christ, the Christian Church must be the
most swiftly-moving of all institutions to challenge whatever
cripples or dishonors human life, to insist that no economic
emergency justifies human oppression, that if the right to live
interceded with profits, profits necessarily give way to right…
The social pronouncements of the 1934 General
Assembly went even further by criticizing economic competition as a
way of life, and calling for the exploration of public ownership and
the control of natural resources and economic institutions. GA 1934
also suggested that property rights were to be judged by the
function that the property holder was able and willing to perform on
behalf of the community.
The newly formed Presbyterian Fellowship for
Social Action saw its primary task as the support of these social
pronouncements as well as moving similar resolutions through the
Synod of New York Social Service Committee. In 1934, the NY Synod
called for an extension of striker relief, just worker wages as a
primary obligation of industry, education of congregations regarding
labor disputes, adequate housing for workers, unemployment
insurance, an end to child labor, and support for the operation of
public utilities “for the well-being of the masses and not in the
interest of private profits.” Following two hours of debate, the
Synod Assembly voted two to one in favor of the resolution.
Following this action, the Presbyterian Fellowship
for Social Action sent a delegate to the State Federation of Labor
and to lobby the New York State Assembly to pass legislation
limiting child labor. In 1935 it sent an overture to General
Assembly to establish a “social service agency for the whole
church.” After a year of study the 148th General Assembly
of 1936 proceeded to merge the Committee on Social and Industrial
Relations of the Board of National Missions and the Committee on
Social Education of the Board of Christian Education into the
Department of Social Education and Action. Charles Turck, president
of Center College in Kentucky was called to be the first secretary
of the new department.
The role of this new Department was to educate the
church on national social issues, functioning as the forerunner of
the Church and Society Unit of the United Presbyterian Church, USA,
established in 1961. It published “Social Progress,” educational
material for congregations, set up conferences for Presbyteries and
Synods, and promoted study of the social pronouncements of the
General Assembly. It also worked in cooperation with the Department
of City, Immigrant, and Industrial Work of the Board of National
Missions concerning urban-industrial issues facing congregations.
In 1939, Cameron Hall assumed leadership of the
department, becoming a vital link to Presbyterian work in the
economic sphere. Formerly pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church, an
urban mission in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, he was in touch with the
struggles of working people. While there he opened the church to
meetings of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)
during a strike. As head of Social Education and Action, he led the
department to pay more attention to the economic issues facing the
nation. In 1943 he put together a special GA committee, composed of
lay people from both the business and labor communities, to develop
a major statement of the church regarding industrial issues facing
the US. In 1944 “The Church and Industrial Relations” was adopted by
the 156th General Assembly during its meeting in Chicago.
Jacob Long, of the City, Immigrant, and Industrial
Work Department, acted immediately on the report’s recommendations.
Long came out of the building trades and had served a new church
development on the edges of Philadelphia. Concerned about the
growing experience gap between Presbyterian clergy and church
workers and the realties of postwar industry in the US, he saw the
need to prepare church leadership for the flare up of tension
between labor and management that had been set aside during WWII. He
called for the creation of an institute to implement the goals of
the “Church and Industrial Relations” report, resulting in the
establishment of the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations
(PIIR) to be based at New York’s Labor Temple.
Throughout its thirty year history, the PIIR
offered programs that raised the level of understanding and
commitment to justice questions around US industrial society.
Seminarians, pastors and laity participated in seminars and the
“Minister-in-industry” experiences, grappling with issues of
organized labor and the changing nature of industry. They took on
the deindustrialization of the US, the flight of jobs overseas, and
the persistence of hard core poverty in urban areas. Their widening
sense of justice questions in relation to the global economy led
them to engagement with their local congregations, presbyteries, and
the national church.
One obvious question, in this time when
progressive church programs are often so strongly resisted, is how
the proponents of this social mission won the support of the
national church. They did it partly by what today we call
networking. Charles Stelzle, for example, travelled widely and
worked at developing local programs in places where there were
work-place issues. Those who really perfected this were the
inner-city National Ministries staffers in the 1960s.
Of course there was resistance from the very
beginning. Stelzle immediately had his foes, who called him a
"socialist" and tried to cut or reshape his program. He finally
resigned in 1913, but only after he had established the Labor
Temple, which went on to influence many people in social mission.
Until the Great Depression, many Presbyterians had
resisted the notion of "social mission," but the consequences of
economic failure made the need for it too obvious to ignore.
Successive General Assemblies issued social statements that spoke to
the economic realities faced by ordinary church members and working
people in general. It was during this difficult period in American
history that the Presbyterian tradition of social statements and the
development of related educational materials became even more deeply
rooted. Today, in the spirit of Stelze, Hall, Thompson and many
others, Presbyterians remain alert to emerging social justice
issues, engaging congregational and presbytery allies to address
them.
It is from this group that the Witherspoon Society
has drawn its membership and support. This is the family to which we
belong and out of which we live our Reformed heritage.
The author:
Richard Poethig was raised in the working class
East Side tenements of New York. He studied under Reinhold
Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary, worked in new church
development in a Buffalo industrial suburb (1952-56), served as
fraternal worker in urban-industrial mission with the United
Church of Christ in the Philippines (1957- 72), and then as Dean
of the Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations and
Director of the Institute on the Church in Urban-Industrial
Society (1972 - 1982) in Chicago.
