Preacher, Prophet, Exile, Sainthood of Theodore Parker

                             

                                                   Rev. Theodore Parker in 1855.

Theodore Parker was born on August 24, 1810 in Lexington, Massachusetts.  His large family had deep roots in New England.  His grandfather was the Captain Parker who commanded the militia on Lexington Green in the opening skirmish of the American Revolution.

He was scholarly and devout but lost both parents and his seven of his nine siblings by the time he was 27, mostly to that scourge of the era, consumption (tuberculosis.)  The losses confirmed his rejection of Calvinist orthodoxy.

As a youth he was unable to afford tuition at Harvard, so he read the entire curriculum on his own.  He dallied as a school master and toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer before he settled on becoming a minister.  After mastering Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, theology, church history, and biblical studies on his own, Harvard Divinity School admitted him even without an undergraduate degree in 1834.

After graduating, Parker married and was ordained by the small West Roxbury congregation.  The light duty of a small congregation allowed Parker time to study more on his own.  With his introduction to German historical Biblical criticism, his views began to evolve away from the generally accepted Unitarian theology.

                                    Young Parker while he still had hair.

First, he began to question the historical validity of miracles in the Old Testament.  That lead to questions about Christ’s miracles and a new view that Jesus was simply more divinely inspired than most men—although divine inspiration was open to all—and that his teachings were great not because they came from God, but because their authority was based on truth.  By the end of the decade his written speculations along these lines were beginning to cause ripples.

Parker naturally fell in with the emerging Transcendentalists.  He attended early meetings of the Club and was soon contributing to their seminal journal The Dial.  Like others in the group, he was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  After the scandal of Emerson’s Divinity School Address, which he heard in person, he was drawn into the controversy that arose after Unitarian traditionalist Andrews Norton launched his furious assault on Emerson’s infidelity.  He soon published his own defense of Transcendental liberalism in the guise of commentary by a “member in the pews”.  The pamphlet, The Previous Question, cemented Parkers reputation as a leading voice of a new movement.

                           

                                         Parker was drawn into the orbit of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

On May 19, 1841 Parker summed up his evolving views in an ordination sermon for Charles C. Shackford at the Hawes Place Church in South Boston, much as a generation earlier William Ellery Channing had launched Unitarianism as a distinct religious movement in the United States at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore. A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity is now considered a foundational document of the evolving Unitarian faith.  But at the time it caused a scandal. 

Most Boston area preachers believed Parker had abandoned Christianity altogether. He became the target an informal boycott of pulpit exchanges. While his Roxbury parish loyally stood by him, Parker went on the offensive with well attended lectures in Boson, which he collected and published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion in the spring of 1842. Soon the informal boycott of pulpit exchanges led to an 1843 attempt to force Parker to resign from the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers, whose members were all Unitarians.   He steadfastly refused to do so and accused his colleagues of trying to impose a creed.

Later in 1843 Parker and his wife briefly escaped the growing controversy by making a European tour, during which time he began to mull social inequality and the nature of Democracy.  When he returned, he began to infuse his sermons with topics of social reform as well as theological radicalism.  Whether the topic was temperance, the rights of workers, or the evils of slavery this new rabble rousing only increased hostility against him by his peers.

In 1844 John Sargeant, employed by the Beneficial Fraternity to preach at a missionary chapel for immigrants, exchanged pulpits with Parker and was reprimanded by the Ben Frat board.  He resigned in protest.  Less than a month later, in December, it was Parkers turn by rotation among all of the members to preach the weekly Thursday Lecture sponsored by the Ministerial association at First Church.  Parker delivered a blunt rebuke of Unitarian orthodoxy, The Relation of Jesus to His Age and the Ages.  The association transferred management of the lecture series to First Church so that Parker would never again be called to speak by rotation.

In January of 1845 James Freeman Clarke, one of the most esteemed Boston ministers and a theological opponent of Parker, decided that his fellows had gone too far in trying to impose conformity and invited Parker to exchange.  Fourteen of the leading families of The Church of the Redeemer resigned in protest, putting Clarke’s ministry in peril.  It would be the last time any Boston minister extended an invitation to exchange.

But Parker’s radicalism did have supporters in the pews in Boston.  They rented the Melodeon Theater to house weekly worship services in 1845.  The rest of the year he preached in the Theater on Sunday morning and in Roxbury that afternoon.  By December the group decided to form an independent congregation and call Parker.

Theodore Parker filled the seats of the Boston Music Hall, second venue for his 28th Congregational Society.

On January 4, 1846, Theodore Parker was installed as the minister of the 28th Congregational Society of Boston, a congregation created for the sole purpose of providing a platform for the maverick, outcast Unitarian and fiery abolitionist in the heart of the Hub of the Universe.  The distinguished Unitarian ministers of Boston were outraged.  Probably even more so when they learned that he broke with precedent and preached his own instillation sermon, The True Idea of a Christian Church—which could only be interpreted as an in-your-face challenge to their moral authority.

Although the core group of three hundred or so supporters who underwrote the new congregation was largely Unitarians, the new congregation was not considered a Unitarian Church, but a Free Church open to all and unbound by any dogma.   Soon upward of 1000 people were regularly attending Parker’s Sunday sermons and Wednesday evening lectures on social, political, and scientific issues.  When that venue became too crowded, services were moved to the Boston Music Hall and attendance doubled. 

Parker could be considered the first pastor of a mega church.  And like the leaders of modern mega churches, he used every medium at his disposal to spread his radical gospel.  Although banned from the Unitarian press, he published articles regularly in both Boston and national periodicals and edited his own journal, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review.  His sermons were collected and published in popular collections and he regularly churned out books on theological, moral, and reform issues.  When he was not speaking from his own pulpit, he lectured widely.  By the 1850’s he was one of the most famous men in America, adored by his followers and cordially hated by his enemies.

Parker on the lecture stump in New York City.  He was one of the most in demand speakers in the U.S.

If the local Unitarian worthies thought that Parker was trouble before, his prominent new pulpit only provided him with opportunities to go even further, particularly on social justice issues.  Parker espoused a new American industrial democracy which he proclaimed was “of all the people, by all the people, for all the people”—a phrase latter borrowed by Abraham Lincoln who read several collections of Parker’s sermons.  To this end he advocated numerous social reforms including free public education, penal reform, and support for the emerging Women’s Rights movement.  But his greatest attention was turned to the mortal flaw that kept industrial democracy form truly flourishing—slavery.

He had already denounced the Mexican War as an attempt to expand slavery and led Boston opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  He was a minister at large to the Black community for the Abolitionists and as chair of their Vigilance Committee arranged for support and abetted the escape of fugitives.  He personally harbored at least two in his own home.  In 1855 he was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for conspiracy to violate the Fugitive Slave Act.  Although his popular support in Boston led to the eventual dismissal of the charges, he was branded an enemy of the South and worked with a pistol on his desk to defend himself from constant threats on his life.

Parker was one of the secret 16 abolitionists who funded John Brown in Kansas and one of the very few to publicly defend him after the Harper's Ferry Raid.

Parker was now in league with the fieriest of abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison.  With the outbreak of guerilla warfare between pro-slavery and Free Soil partisans in Kansas, Parker raised money to buy weapons for the Free State militias, including arming a firebrand named John Brown.  When Brown came to Boston to plead for support for a plan to foment a slave rebellion he was one of the secret committee that helped finance and arm Brown’s failed Harper’s Ferry Raid in October 1859.  Parker was one of the few to publicly support Brown, penning John Brown's Expedition Reviewed a public letter defending Brown’s actions and the right of slaves to kill their masters.

By that time Parker was exhausted.  His always fragile health had began to deteriorate two years earlier.  The strain of his tireless abolitionist efforts and a packed schedule of preaching and lecturing took a toll.  The tuberculosis that had killed so many in his family was wracking his body.  He had to give up preaching in January 1859. 

He and his wife sought relief with a cruise to the Caribbean during which time he wrote a long autobiographical letter and final confession of faith to his former congregation which was published as Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister.

The old establishment was not prepared to forgive or forget.  Knowing Parker was critically ill and likely dying, the 1859 annual meeting of the Harvard Divinity School Alumni Association rejected a motion to extend personal sympathy for his suffering.  

Parker and his wife continued on their journey to Europe.  On May 10, 1860 Parker died in Florence, Italy.  He was buried in the Strangers Cemetery, the final resting place of stranded, exiled, or expatriate Protestants.  The Boston Ministerial Association declined to send condolences to the widow.

As much as Parker was despised by the old guard, he was already lionized by a whole younger generation of ministers who would go on to lead Unitarianism in the later 19th Century.  His theology broadly trumped a more conventional Christianity and he was held to be the model of prophetic ministry.

A rare, late picture of a bearded Parker illustrates a profile in a popular magazine shortly before illness forced his retirement.

In the modern Unitarian Universalist Association, with its heavy emphasis on social justice, he has become an even more canonical figure. 

Earlier in the 21st Century, a minority movement emerged that wished to tone down “political” action and emphasize congregational autonomy and enriched spiritual content, criticized Parker for his disruptive, un-collegial behavior, his willingness to defy the law and endorse violence, and surprisingly for one of Unitarianism’s deepest theological pioneers, for a lack of spirituality. 

                            

                                        Parker's grave in the Stranger's Cemetery in Florence, Italy.

Those biting gnats did no serious damage to the reputation of the man who inspired Martin Luther King with his words, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Edgar Lee Masters was an Illinois Poet with a Restless Soul

                             

                                                   Edgar Lee Masters as a young man.

Edgar Lee Masters was the author of one of the greatest single volumes of American poetry ever—The Spoon River Anthology.  That book in which the denizens of a small 19th Century Illinois village graveyard tell their stories, is still a shock and an eye opener for anyone who bought into the Disney version of small town life as a kind of perfect idyll.

Masters was born on August 23, 1868 in Kansas where his father briefly established a law practice.  When that failed the family moved back to his grandparent's farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois.  In 1880 the family moved again to nearby Lewistown where the boy attended high school and showed an interest in both writing and following his father’s shaky footsteps in the law.  He had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News—a Democratic challenger to the dominance and hegemony in the state of the Republican Chicago Tribune.

Masters' modest boyhood home in Petersburg has been preserved.

In the late 1880’s he attended Knox Academy, the prep school for Knox College but was forced to drop out when his family could no longer support him.  After that he read law at his father’s office.  His dad was the village Freethinker and thus something of an outcast.  The practice revolved around the margins of local life, petty civil cases for those who could not afford the lawyers who hobnobbed with the judges and bankers--criminal cases, divorces, anything that exposed the underside of the community.  It was an eye-opening experience.

After passing the Bar, young Masters hot footed it out of town to Chicago in 1893 where he hoped to advance both his legal and writing careers. He went into practice with Kickham Scanlan and began to publish poetry under the name Dexter Wallace.

In 1898 he married the daughter of a prominent lawyer and began a family that grew to three children including a daughter Marsha who grew up to be a poet and a son Hilary who became a novelist.  But the union grew stormy due to Master’s extramarital affairs.

                               

                                                Masters--the lawyer/poet on the cusp of fame.

In 1903 Masters went into partnership with Clarence Darrow, already noted as a top labor and defense attorney.  They were united in their Democratic politics, instinctive radicalism, Freethought, and admiration for the labor Democrat hero, Governor John Peter Altgeld.  As a junior partner in the firm, Masters handled mostly routine criminal and civil cases for the poor, often pro bono.

Despite an amicable beginning, the partnership foundered in 1908 and formally broke up in 1911 due to a business dispute with Darrow and a messy, scandalous marriage.    Despite the bitter personal falling out, he remained an admirer of Darrow.

Masters published two little noted volumes of poetry under pen names in 1898 and 1910.

During his hiatus from the active practice of law as his partnership with Darrow disintegrated, he began work on writing and polishing poems inspired by his hometown.  In 1914 he began to publish these in Reedy’s Mirror out of St. Louis under another nom de plume, Webster Ford.  A year later the poems were collected and issued as The Spoon River Anthology with the assistance and encouragement of Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine to instant critical and popular acclaim.

 

                                 

                                           The first edition of Spoon River Anthology. 

Suddenly the obscure lawyer was famous.  He gradually wound down the practice of law to concentrate on a literary career.  Although he was embittered in old age that none of his subsequent work got the attention of that classic, he produced prolifically and with great skill.  In all there were 19 more volumes of verse including a sequel, The New Spoon River, 12 plays, 6 novels, and 7 biographies.  Among the subjects of his biographies were fellow Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman to each of whom he owed a debt of gratitude.

His 1931 bio Lincoln the Man was a highly controversial self-proclaimed de-mythologizing of the Prairie President.  In part it was a direct refutation of fellow Illinois poet Carl Sandburg’s lyrical and lionizing biographies.  His jealousy of Sandburg was well known, but he seems to have been most influenced by loyalty to the Democratic Party of the 19th Century which was already vanishing outside the Deep South.  He pictured Lincoln as a Whig tool of the banks and railroads from the beginning in service to concentrated wealth against the common man.  He was pictured as tyrant who rushed the country into an unwanted war to the applause of Eastern elites.  The book was a popular success in the South, but it virtually destroyed his own reputation with the liberal literary establishment, many previously admiring critics turning against his whole body of work.

Masters's feud with rival poet Sandburg of the reputation of Abraham Lincoln attracted national attention.  Sandburg triumphed and Masters's reputation was sullied.

Masters quit the practice of law entirely by 1920 and moved to New York to concentrate on writing.  He finally divorced his first wife in 1923 years after abandoning the family.   In 1926 he married Ellen Coyne with whom he had another son, Hardin.

Although Masters won plaudits and honors including the Mark Twain Silver Medal in 1936, the Poetry Society of America medal in 1941, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1942, and the Shelly Memorial Award in 1944, he never matched the fame and glory of his contemporary Carl Sandberg and often felt snubbed by the Eastern and academic poetry elite.  He was not experimental enough to be ranked with the Imagists and modernists.  

Masters' grave marker at the Petersburg cemetery that inspired the Spoon River Anthology.

He died March 5, 1950, in a convalescent home near Philadelphia and was buried back home in Petersburg in the cemetery that inspired his greatest book.

Here are samples of Masters’ work.  First from The Spoon River Anthology:

Jim Brown was the trainer of a famous trotting horse, Dom Pedro.

Jim Brown

While I was handling Dom Pedro

I got at the thing that divides the race between men who are

For singing “Turkey in the straw” or “There is a fountain filled with blood”—

(Like Rile Potter used to sing it over at Concord);

For cards, or for Rev. Peet’s lecture on the holy land;

For skipping the light fantastic, or passing the plate;

For Pinafore, or a Sunday school cantata;

For men, or for money;

For the people or against them.

This was it:

Rev. Peet and the Social Purity Club,

Headed by Ben Pantier’s wife,

Went to the Village trustees,

And asked them to make me take Dom Pedro

From the barn of Wash McNeely, there at the edge of town,

To a barn outside of the corporation,

On the ground that it corrupted public morals.

Well, Ben Pantier and Fiddler Jones saved the day—

They thought it a slam on colts.

 

—Edgar Lee Masters 

Masters was not so down on Lincoln in those days as reflected in one of the most famous pieces from the collection.  Ann Rutledge’s grave, not far from the poet’s, is now marked with this poem.

 

Ann Rutledge

 

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficient face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

 

—Edgar Lee Masters

 

And finally, from a later collection a glimpse of the restless soul, the Freethinker taunted by a spiritual yearning he barely understood.

Inexorable Deities 

 

Deities!

Inexorable revealers,

Give me strength to endure

The gifts of the Muses,

Daughters of Memory.

When the sky is blue as Minerva’s eyes

Let me stand unshaken;

When the sea sings to the rising sun

Let me be unafraid;

When the meadow lark falls like a meteor

Through the light of afternoon,

An unloosened fountain of rapture,

Keep my heart from spilling

Its vital power;

When at the dawn

The dim souls of crocuses hear the calls

Of waking birds,

Give me to live but master the loveliness.

Keep my eyes unharmed from splendors

Unveiled by you,

And my ears at peace

Filled no less with the music

Of Passion and Pain, growth and change.

But O ye sacred and terrible powers,

Reckless of my mortality,

Strengthen me to behold a face,

To know the spirit of a beloved one

Yet to endure, yet to dare!

 

—Edgar Lee Masters

Sneak Preview--Austrian Drone Balloons Bomb Venice in First Assault by Air

This probably fanciful depiction of the balloon bombing of Venice show bombs carried by multiple balloons exploding over the city raining shrapnel down on the population.

On August 22, 1849 a British newspaper carried a somewhat garbled account of an unusual attack on Venice.

It fell to—and on—the unlucky people of Venice to be the first targets of bombs dropped from the air in war.  It was on July 15, 1849 and the lovely old city of canals was under siege by the Austrians who were upset that romantic rebels had proclaimed the Republic of St. Marks to establish independence from Hapsburg dominance.  The proud old city, once a world power on its own that nearly dominated the Mediterranean and challenged the mighty Ottomans, was defiantly holding out against a tightening noose in the vain hope that other Italian cities and principalities would rally to her side.  But few of the dynastic houses of Europe had sympathy for any republic after the wave of uprisings and rebellions that swept the continent the year before.

Of course, lighter than air military aviation was not entirely new.  It took the French less than ten years from the time the Montgolfier Brothers elaborate hot air balloon first carried passengers over Paris for the edification and entertainment of King Louis XVI in November 1783 and Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers demonstrated a hydrogen balloon a couple of weeks later for them to deploy balloons for military purposes.  Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle, Captain of the Aerostatic Corps successfully flew an observation balloon in Flanders during the War of the First Coalition in 1792.  The intelligence gathered from the flight was credited with the French victory in the Battle of Fleurus.

But despite other successful operations, Napoleon Bonaparte dismantled the Corps. If he had not, he might have learned of his enemy’s movements at Waterloo and history may have taken a very different turn.

In the years since the end of the Napoleonic Wars there was tepid interest in ballooning for observation, but no other nation developed an operational unit.  Some dreamed of using balloons to drop bombs, but the problems of unreliable craft at the mercy of the winds made such applications untenable.

                 Austrian inventor and artillery officer Franz von Uchatius.

Enter Franz von Uchatius an extremely clever Austrian engineer and artillery officer.  In his career he developed stronger alloys for cannon, worked on smokeless powder, and in order to lecture students on ballistics developed a type of animation projector in 1853.   Uchatius was 38 years old and a senior artillery commander when he began to apply his singular analytic mind and perhaps even more important computational skills to solving the vexing problem of guidance and control. 

First, he discovered that the wind in Venice blew reliably from the sea about 90% of the time.  That meant balloons carrying bombs would have to be launched from ships offshore.  That, in turn, ruled out using balloons large enough to carry a human crew from the limited deck space of a ship.  He would have to use small, unmanned balloons.  That led to the problem of how to release the bombs when they got over the target.  And frankly, we don’t know exactly how he did it.  No detailed notes or drawings have survived.  We have only a couple of paragraphs after the surrender of the city on August 22 in the British Morning Chronicle:

The Soldaten Freund publishes a letter from the artillery officer Uchatius, who first proposed to subdue Venice by ballooning. From this it appears that the operations were suspended for want of a proper vessel exclusively adapted for this mode of warfare, as it became evident, after a few experiments had been made, that, as the wind blows nine times out of ten from the sea, the balloon inflation must be conducted on board ship; and this was the case on July the 15th, the occasion alluded to in a former letter, when two balloons armed with shrapnels ascended from the deck of the Volcano war steamer, and attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms in the direction of Venice; and exactly at the moment calculated upon, i.e., at the expiration of twenty-three minutes, the explosion took place. The captain of the English brig Frolic, and other persons then at Venice, testify to the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants.

A stop was put to further exhibitions of this kind by the necessity of the Vulcan going into docks to undergo repairs, which the writer regrets the more, as the currents of wind were for a long time favourable to his schemes. One thing is established beyond all doubt (he adds), viz., that bombs and other projectiles can be thrown from balloons at a distance of 5,000 fathoms, always provided the wind be favourable.

We do not know the size of the balloons or the weight of the explosives delivered.  Most importantly we do not know what kind of timer was used to either drop the bombs or detonate in the air, only that the device had to be adjustable to precise calculations of wind speed at the time of launch from the deck of a ship that had to maneuver to be in an ideal position. 

Secondary accounts supposedly based on observations in Venice claim that as many 200 balloons were launched in two separate operations.   That would indicate small balloons and grenade size bombs.  But it would seem to be at odds with the account authored by Uchatius in the British press.  However, some historians believe that the account in the Chronicle was garbled and referred to two sorties of swarms of small balloons, not just two single balloons.

That would also mean that the little balloons could not carry enough explosives to do much damage to buildings and property.  Instead, the use of shrapnel meant the bombs were anti-personnel weapons designed to indiscriminately kill and maim the civilian population of the city.  It was terror bombing pure and simple.

We can also credit Uchatius with the first use of drones in combat.

However terrified the Venetians were of the appearance of death from the sky, it was not enough to break their will.  The balloon bombs had no effect on the outcome of the siege.  But shortly the Austrians brought up massive heavy artillery and began pounding the city, which was already suffering from starvation and cholera epidemics, with more than a thousand rounds a day.  The old city had no ultimate choice but to surrender.

Inflating a Union Army Balloon during the Civil War.  Photo by Mathew Brady.

The aerial bombardment was quickly forgotten.  Neither Austria nor any other European power followed up with development.  The next military use of balloons was by the Union as artillery observation platforms in the American Civil War.  During the Franco-Prussian War and Siege of Paris in 1870 they were also used by the French to ferry personnel, messages, and supplies over enemy lines.

The first aerial bombardment from heavier than aircraft was launched by the Italians in 1911 in the Italo-Turkish War, essentially hand dropping grenades.  A year later in the First Baltic War the Bulgarians developed the first modern aerial bomb with improved aerodynamics, X-shaped tail stabilizers, and an impact detonator as well as an aircraft specifically designed as a bomber.  On October 16, 1912, they dropped two of those bombs on the Turkish railway station of Karağaç.  The Bulgarians sold plans for their bomb to the Germans which used them throughout World War I.

As for Venice, it once again came under Austrian bombing on May 24, 1915 when Italy switched to the Allies in the Great War.

The United States has become the world leader in the use of attack drones and used them extensively in lieu of boots on the ground.  It has also supplied drones and support technology to allies and surrogates.  Both sides have relied heavily on drones of various sizes and configuration in the War in Ukraine.  Russian frequently deploy them to civilian targets while Ukraine has used them with great effect in selective attacks on key facilities including bridges, highways, Black Sea naval forces and in largely symbolic raids around Moscow itself.  This collage shows a fixed wing Ukranian drone and an attack in the Black Sea.

Since those first bombs fell relatively ineffectively on Venice, untold millions of tons of explosives have wrecked death and destruction from the air all around the world.