Holy Humanitarians

American Evangelicals and Global Aid

Heather D. Curtis

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780674985889
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

On May 10, 1900, an enthusiastic Brooklyn crowd bid farewell to the Quito. The ship sailed for famine-stricken Bombay, carrying both tangible relief—thousands of tons of corn and seeds—and "a tender message of love and sympathy from God's children on this side of the globe to those on the other." The Quito may never have gotten under way without support from the era's most influential religious newspaper, the Christian Herald, which urged its American readers to alleviate poverty and suffering abroad and at home. In Holy Humanitarians, Heather D. Curtis argues that evangelical media campaigns transformed how Americans responded to domestic crises and foreign disasters during a pivotal period for the nation.Through graphic reporting and the emerging medium of photography, evangelical publishers fostered a tremendously popular movement of faith-based aid that rivaled the achievements of competing agencies like the American Red Cross. By maintaining that the United States was divinely ordained to help the world's oppressed and needy, the Christian Herald linked humanitarian assistance with American nationalism at a time when the country was stepping onto the global stage. Social reform, missionary activity, disaster relief, and economic and military expansion could all be understood as integral features of Christian charity.Drawing on rigorous archival research, Curtis lays bare the theological motivations, social forces, cultural assumptions, business calculations, and political dynamics that shaped America's ambivalent embrace of evangelical philanthropy. In the process she uncovers the seeds of today's heated debates over the politics of poverty relief and international aid.

1

A RELIGIOUS PAPER THOROUGHLY HUMANITARIAN

“My entire theology has condensed into one word, and that a word of four letters, and that word is ‘help,’ ” the Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage told his parishioners one frigid Sunday morning in January 1879. “How shall I help the people?” In an era of intensifying urbanization, ongoing instability in world financial markets, escalating immigration, expanding unemployment, labor unrest, rampant poverty, and rapid globalization, his was a pressing question for American evangelicals. Since accepting a call to the Brooklyn Tabernacle ten years earlier, Talmage had been experimenting with ways of applying the Bible to the problems of contemporary society through passionate (some said sensational) sermons, public lectures, and forays into journalism. These efforts earned him fierce detractors who dismissed him as a “mountebank” or a “buffoon” and tried to have him defrocked. Yet Talmage’s fervent attempts to reach the masses and to offer help for all who were “finding life a tremendous struggle” won praise from fellow evangelicals seeking to alleviate affliction at home and abroad amid the turmoil of the Gilded Age.¹

For admirers such as the former felon and aspiring publisher Louis Klopsch, Talmage’s determination to address the “hunger and suffering and want and wretchedness” that plagued the modern world proved particularly inspiring. Talmage’s call for sympathy with the downtrodden especially appealed to a young man who had been forced to quit school at an early age to help support his struggling immigrant family. When Klopsch’s escapades landed him in prison, he came face-to-face with men for whom crime had seemed the only means of providing food for their wives and children. These experiences shaped Klopsch’s perspective on affliction in profound ways, drawing him to Talmage and causing him to question the popular notion that the poor were to blame for their plight.²

Throughout the nineteenth century, many Protestants insisted that indigence was the product of indolence, intemperance, or iniquity. Wealth came to the worthy who worked hard, stewarded resources wisely, and lived virtuously. Although mishaps might sometimes cause unmerited hardship (especially for widows and orphans), most often the destitute were responsible for their distress.³

By the time Klopsch found his way to the Brooklyn Tabernacle after his release from jail, some evangelicals had begun to challenge these assumptions. The scale and severity of the social crises Americans confronted in the decades following the Civil War prompted a number of Protestant leaders to recognize the role of structural conditions in the production of poverty. A financial panic in 1873 provoked a devastating economic depression throughout the United States, resulting in unprecedented unemployment, heightened tensions between employers and workers, and a massive railroad strike in 1877. That same year, federal troops withdrew from the Southern states, leaving African Americans vulnerable to increasing violence and discrimination. Meanwhile, financial and social hardships overseas fueled massive migrations to the United States, crowding American cities and pressuring labor markets and neighborhood infrastructure.

Although the nation’s economy improved after 1879, conflicts between capital and labor continued—coming to an explosive head in the Haymarket Affair of 1886. This incident exacerbated concerns about the rise of socialist, communist, and anarchist movements in Europe and on American soil, aggravating fears of revolution but also undermining confidence in the fundamental tenets of laissez-faire capitalism. Within this tumultuous context, evangelical leaders like Talmage began to acknowledge that inequality and indigence were not simply the result of individual moral failings but the products of broader social forces. Rather than condemning the poor, Talmage insisted, Christians ought to empathize with those whose misfortunes and “evil surroundings” contributed to their distress, dissipation, or even delinquency.⁴

For Klopsch, an ex-convict with scant education and few social advantages trying to make good in a volatile economic environment, Talmage’s gospel was good news. Klopsch was attracted to the Brooklyn Tabernacle for obvious reasons. In the 1880s, he became actively involved as a Sunday school teacher and a trustee. During this period, he also worked to cultivate both a personal and professional relationship with his popular pastor. After achieving some success in the publishing world, Klopsch approached Talmage in 1885 with a proposition to syndicate the minister’s weekly sermons to several hundred newspapers. Eager to expand his audience (and also to supplement his income), Talmage agreed to the “plan of a world-wide pulpit.” Within several years, his messages of sympathetic service to the poor were being printed in over three thousand periodicals and reportedly reaching twenty million readers in the United States and other English-speaking countries, as well as being translated into several foreign languages.⁵

Emboldened by this achievement, Klopsch began to consider ways that he and Talmage could capitalize on their partnership and exercise an even greater influence on evangelical conceptions and practices of philanthropy. By the time the two friends departed for the Holy Land in October 1889, Klopsch had devised a plan. Rather than solely reprinting Talmage’s sermons in other newspapers, he and his pastor would produce their own periodical. Convinced that popular media could play a crucial part in educating American evangelicals about the plight of suffering people in their own neighborhoods and around the world, Klopsch arranged to purchase the Christian Herald and persuaded Talmage to serve as editor.⁶

In the several years following their acquisition of the Christian Herald, these two entrepreneurial publicists cultivated common perspectives on poverty as well as shared habits of relieving affliction. Confident in the coming kingdom of God, the partners enthusiastically embraced modern journalism’s innovative technologies and sensational tactics to advance Jesus’s reign of righteousness, justice, and charity within and beyond the United States. “How shall I help the people?” Talmage asked in 1879. From 1890 onward, he and Klopsch would work out a variety of answers to this question in the columns of the Christian Herald.⁷

Beginning with a spring 1892 campaign to feed starving Russian peasants, Klopsch and Talmage strove to make their publication an “instrument by which … God’s people all over the country could work out their plans for the betterment of humanity.” During this initial foray into foreign aid, they developed fund-raising techniques, established operational procedures, and articulated theological motivations to guide future relief efforts and to distinguish the Christian Herald’s humanitarian enterprises from other philanthropic endeavors. By presenting their approach as exceptionally reliable and explicitly religious, Klopsch and Talmage worked to establish the Christian Herald as a major force in American aid abroad at a time when the United States was playing a more prominent role in world affairs.⁸

Encouraged by their ability to cultivate compassion for overseas sufferers, Klopsch and Talmage turned their energies to escalating concerns about the plight of the poor and working classes at home. As debate intensified about how to solve the social crisis, these evangelicals encouraged readers to support a variety of legislative measures, reform movements, and religious enterprises designed to mitigate the adverse effects of laissez-faire capitalism among the nation’s most vulnerable populations. When an economic downturn in the autumn of 1893 resulted in widespread unemployment, the Christian Herald announced the opening of a food fund to help the hungry and homeless in New York City.

Although this relief campaign was a great success, the newspaper’s coverage of the financial crisis exposed ongoing disagreements among American Protestants about the causes of poverty and the proper conduct of charity. When proponents of scientific philanthropy criticized the Christian Herald’s efforts to assuage suffering, Klopsch and Talmage insisted that no one was beyond redemption. Uplifting the downtrodden, they contended, was a religious duty that blessed the afflicted but also united evangelical benefactors at a time when this community was increasingly challenged by doctrinal controversy, social diversity, and regional discord. Through its humanitarian mission, these publicists proclaimed, the Christian Herald not only would bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted struggling to survive amid the profound dislocations of modern life, but also would help heal the divisions that threatened to undermine evangelical unity in this fractious era.

A NEW MEDIUM FOR EVANGELICAL AID

Klopsch and Talmage chose an auspicious time to experiment with evangelical media as a means of influencing perceptions of poverty and practices of philanthropy. In the months leading up to their acquisition of the Christian Herald, a terrible disaster highlighted the role popular publications could play in stimulating concern for those who were suffering. On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam on the Little Conemaugh River failed, unleashing a torrent of water on Johnstown, Pennsylvania. At least 2,200 people were killed in the flood and the ensuing fires, which engulfed the small frame tenement houses by the river that were home to the employees of Cambria Iron and Steel Company and their families. The tragedy resulted in the worst loss of civilian life in American history to that point and created an outpouring of sympathy for the victims.⁹

When Talmage visited the devastated area shortly after the flood, he was shocked by the desolation and took up a collection among constituencies in Brooklyn and New York that ultimately amounted to $95,905 (according to his records). Newspapers moved quickly to publicize the catastrophe through graphic accounts of the “awful holocaust,” and called on readers from across the nation to contribute to relief efforts. Donations poured in to various charitable agencies, including the fledgling American Red Cross (ARC). For Clara Barton, the Johnstown calamity offered an opportunity to build her organization’s reputation as a civilian relief agency that was especially well equipped to deal with disasters of this magnitude. “Sickness, sorrow, and destitution, in the proportions existing there,” one reporter argued, “can be alleviated only by systematic, well-organized effort; and this is precisely what Miss Barton’s experience fits her to supply.” As Klopsch worked to formulate plans for his own charitable enterprise, he aimed to combine this emerging emphasis on efficiency with the demonstrated power of popular journalism to invoke sympathy for sufferers. The lessons of Johnstown showed that a well-run newspaper with a wide circulation could serve as an effective vehicle for inspiring compassion and easing affliction.¹⁰

Klopsch’s confidence in the capacity of modern periodicals to arouse concern for the distressed arose in part from his convictions about God’s work in the world. Like many evangelicals of the era, Klopsch and Talmage interpreted advances in science, engineering, commerce, education, government, and—perhaps most importantly—popular media as harbingers of Christ’s coming kingdom. This postmillennial optimism bolstered their assurance that an innovative religious newspaper dedicated to humanitarian causes could hasten the extension of justice and mercy around the globe. Although Protestant leaders since Martin Luther had deployed print technologies to promote their message, recent improvements that allowed for faster reproduction of text, a wider range of visual imagery, and more efficient distribution methods had revolutionized the publishing industry and helped make popular journals more pervasive than ever. As a result, these evangelicals believed, the newspaper had become “the most important agency for influencing the public mind” and “making the world better.”¹¹

Motivated by these millennial expectations, Klopsch and Talmage set out to make the Christian Herald a potent force for advancing God’s kingdom. During the first few months after they acquired the newspaper, the partners took several steps they hoped would move them toward this goal. In his initial greeting to subscribers, Talmage acknowledged that the Christian Herald had already accomplished a great deal under previous management. In fact, longtime associate editor J. B. Fernie, who had moved to New York from London in 1878 to help establish the American version of the newspaper, maintained his post under the new leadership. Although they valued Fernie’s experience, Klopsch and Talmage also believed it was time to recruit some additional talent. First, they hired George H. Sandison, a successful newspaperman who worked for Joseph Pulitzer’s influential New York World, to serve as managing editor. Over the next several years, Klopsch and Talmage also enlisted well-known journalists such as William Willard Howard and Sylvester Scovel, along with popular authors and hymn-writers like Amelia Barr, Fanny Crosby, Marion Harland (Mary Virginia Terhune), and Margaret Sangster, to write for the publication. At the same time, they expanded the newspaper’s art department to include famous illustrators such as Albert Hencke and, eventually, professional photographers. With this staff in place, Klopsch and Talmage contended, the Christian Herald would be better positioned to address the challenges of modern society and help usher in the millennium.¹²

Harnessing the power of the press for these purposes was especially urgent, they argued, given the competition religious periodicals faced from secular publications advancing a very different agenda. As proponents of “new journalism” such as Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst strove to “reach the masses with entertaining, low cost, and visually stimulating newspapers,” many evangelical leaders worried that the content and style of these increasingly successful publications degraded the tone and character of national discourse. B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A Religious Paper Thoroughly Humanitarian
• 2. Cosmopolitan Compassion
• 3. We Are Fighting for Philanthropy
• 4. Almoner of the World
• 5. The Limits of Evangelical Benevolence
• 6. To Safeguard Christian America
• 7. A Shifting Landscape
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index