Beginning in 1883, Albert and Alfred Smiley, twin brothers and devout Quakers, hosted the "Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian." These annual gatherings met at the brothers' Mohonk Mountain House, a 259-guestroom resort nestled in the mountains west of the Hudson River in upstate New York. There, white middle-class Protestant reformers delivered speeches, shared ideas, refined their plans, and issued recommendations. Their goal was to lift up and civilize the American Indian. Their plans always assumed the vitality of education and the necessity of schools.
Many of the attendees held membership in the Indian Rights Association, the greatest such organization of the time, founded and led by William Welsh. Many of them had read Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, which sought to do for Indians what Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, had done for slaves. In the words of historian Francis Paul Prucha, the conferences at Lake Mohonk "had tremendous impact on formulation of federal policy."[1]
Note
[1] Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 161. For an excellent overview of the origins, activities, and legacy of the conferences at Lake Mohonk, see Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), ch. 7. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 5, esp. p. 90, note the significance of the Mohonk conferences to the period that emphasized assimilation and allotment.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Mrs. Sager on Modern Translations of the Bible
On Sunday night, April 28, 1935, Meta Chestnutt Sager wrote to her sister-in-law, Clara Dixon Chestnutt, and complained about preachers and the modern translations of the Bible she heard in the Christian Church at Chickasha, Oklahoma:
. . . the New Testaments the preachers read from, that is when they do read a little squib, they have so much of their own stuff to say the Bible has little place, that these new translations do not sound like the Bible. Tonight, I tried not to listen, the blessed words had been so garbled into modern language that I just despise to hear it. When I do listen I say it over to myself in the old New Testament language. The Bible as it was translated by the old masters is beautiful and charming in its old form, but these modern smart "alicks" have made a mess of that wonderfully beautiful book.[1]
Note
[1] Meta C. Sager to Clara, April 28, 1935, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society. One notes that Mrs. Sager placed alicks in scare quotes and also underlined the word, suggesting that she perhaps thought and wanted to say something else instead.
. . . the New Testaments the preachers read from, that is when they do read a little squib, they have so much of their own stuff to say the Bible has little place, that these new translations do not sound like the Bible. Tonight, I tried not to listen, the blessed words had been so garbled into modern language that I just despise to hear it. When I do listen I say it over to myself in the old New Testament language. The Bible as it was translated by the old masters is beautiful and charming in its old form, but these modern smart "alicks" have made a mess of that wonderfully beautiful book.[1]
Note
[1] Meta C. Sager to Clara, April 28, 1935, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society. One notes that Mrs. Sager placed alicks in scare quotes and also underlined the word, suggesting that she perhaps thought and wanted to say something else instead.
Friday, August 23, 2019
Meta Chestnutt Sager on the Christian Church's Neglect of the Poor and the Social Sources of Denominationalism
The long, rambling letters that Meta Chestnutt Sager sent to her sister-in-law, Clara Dixon Chestnutt, include reflections on religion in America during the Depression era. Here, a bit of context will help. In a 1929 book entitled The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote at length about "churches of the disinherited." These Christian sects emerged partly because they provided religious homes for people whose poor grammar and shabby clothes didn't fit in at the established, middle-class denominations.[1]
Along this line, in a letter to Clara dated April 28, 1935, Meta wrote about the Christian Church in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where she attended:
I tell you the church does not care for the downright poor and uneducated. I'm glad there is a Holiness Methodist Church, a Nazarene Church and other little squads of poor people who worship God in some way. I'm sorry that Christian people have made it necessary for such to exist, but they have so much society doings in the churches that the poor and uneducated have no place in their midst, they are lost, and seldom go long, even if they start. The church is just so many cold storage stations. The most they think of is what they can have next. I tell you I get more joy out of going down to the jail and trying to lead those poor despised skeletons of humanity upon higher ground than I do at all the church services except the Communion service.[2]
According to Niebuhr the academic, and Meta Sager the keen observer, new sects in American did not strike out on their own because they were following some new doctrinal aberration or false teaching. It is tempting to conclude that heresy was not a source, so much as a consequence, of the proliferation of various Christian groups in the U.S.
Notes
[1] H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1929).
[2] Meta C. Sager to Clara, April 28, 1935, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society.
Along this line, in a letter to Clara dated April 28, 1935, Meta wrote about the Christian Church in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where she attended:
I tell you the church does not care for the downright poor and uneducated. I'm glad there is a Holiness Methodist Church, a Nazarene Church and other little squads of poor people who worship God in some way. I'm sorry that Christian people have made it necessary for such to exist, but they have so much society doings in the churches that the poor and uneducated have no place in their midst, they are lost, and seldom go long, even if they start. The church is just so many cold storage stations. The most they think of is what they can have next. I tell you I get more joy out of going down to the jail and trying to lead those poor despised skeletons of humanity upon higher ground than I do at all the church services except the Communion service.[2]
According to Niebuhr the academic, and Meta Sager the keen observer, new sects in American did not strike out on their own because they were following some new doctrinal aberration or false teaching. It is tempting to conclude that heresy was not a source, so much as a consequence, of the proliferation of various Christian groups in the U.S.
Notes
[1] H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1929).
[2] Meta C. Sager to Clara, April 28, 1935, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society.
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Meta Chestnutt Sager on the Depression, Roosevelt, Prohibition, and Repeal
Among the more interesting parts of the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection is a small group of letters Mrs. Sager (1863-1948) wrote from her home in Chickasha, Oklahoma to her sister-in-law, Clara Dixon Chestnutt, who was born in 1865. When the letters were written, during the 1930s and 40s, Clara was living somewhere in the eastern U.S.
Clara was the widow of Isaac Lamar Chestnutt, Meta's only brother and the first of four siblings. Until he died in in 1907, Isaac served as a preacher and educational leader among the Disciples of Christ in North Carolina and Virginia. The Dixons, Clara's family of origin, also provided leadership among the congregations in North Carolina, almost all of which were located in the eastern part of the state, in places like Lenoir, Pitt, Greene, and Craven Counties.
In letters she sent to Clara, Meta Sager revealed much of her political as well as her religious outlook. In one dated March 19, 1933, Sager wrote the following to her sister-in-law:
I suppose you have all felt more or less the depression, and have had the bank "strike." And I suppose, too, that Democrats there as here feel that Roosevelt will turn the nation upside down and set things right again. Well, I hope he can do it, but I'm not so sure be we are nearing the end. There are strange happenings on every side.
How do you people take the position of the President on the liquor question? I believe in the West the people are glad of the repeal, at least we may call it a repeal, for can a man get any drunker on pure whiskey than he can on beer and wine? I think the church people are getting what is coming to them for the manner many of them have acted under the 18th amendment. The church people have not tried in any great material way to have the law obeyed. They have simply passed by on the other side and let the violator be. For my part I will never vote to license the sale or manufacture of any strong drink, altho [sic] I do not belong to any temperance society and never did. The Church embraces everything that is good, and if one can not give his influence for temperance there no outside manmade [sic] organization can be more effective. They have Moses and the Prophets and Jesus Christ, and if they will not hear them, neither will they hear a W. C. T. U. I am nearly seventy years old, and I still believe that the body of Christ established comprehends every good work.[1]
Note
[1] Meta C. Sager to Clara, March 19, 1933, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society. For a good overview of the history and developments connected to the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments to the United States Constitution, see Norman H. Clark, "Prohibition and Temperance," in The Reader's Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 871-75.
Clara was the widow of Isaac Lamar Chestnutt, Meta's only brother and the first of four siblings. Until he died in in 1907, Isaac served as a preacher and educational leader among the Disciples of Christ in North Carolina and Virginia. The Dixons, Clara's family of origin, also provided leadership among the congregations in North Carolina, almost all of which were located in the eastern part of the state, in places like Lenoir, Pitt, Greene, and Craven Counties.
In letters she sent to Clara, Meta Sager revealed much of her political as well as her religious outlook. In one dated March 19, 1933, Sager wrote the following to her sister-in-law:
I suppose you have all felt more or less the depression, and have had the bank "strike." And I suppose, too, that Democrats there as here feel that Roosevelt will turn the nation upside down and set things right again. Well, I hope he can do it, but I'm not so sure be we are nearing the end. There are strange happenings on every side.
How do you people take the position of the President on the liquor question? I believe in the West the people are glad of the repeal, at least we may call it a repeal, for can a man get any drunker on pure whiskey than he can on beer and wine? I think the church people are getting what is coming to them for the manner many of them have acted under the 18th amendment. The church people have not tried in any great material way to have the law obeyed. They have simply passed by on the other side and let the violator be. For my part I will never vote to license the sale or manufacture of any strong drink, altho [sic] I do not belong to any temperance society and never did. The Church embraces everything that is good, and if one can not give his influence for temperance there no outside manmade [sic] organization can be more effective. They have Moses and the Prophets and Jesus Christ, and if they will not hear them, neither will they hear a W. C. T. U. I am nearly seventy years old, and I still believe that the body of Christ established comprehends every good work.[1]
Note
[1] Meta C. Sager to Clara, March 19, 1933, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society. For a good overview of the history and developments connected to the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments to the United States Constitution, see Norman H. Clark, "Prohibition and Temperance," in The Reader's Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 871-75.
Monday, August 19, 2019
R. W. Officer's Letters to Meta Chestnutt 1890
Sometime in June of 1890, the evangelist R. W. Officer sent a handwritten letter addressed to "Miss Meta Chestnutt, Silver City, I.T."
Dear Sister:
Yours to Bro T. B. L. was sent to me by him. Enclosed I send you his. Please, let me know where Silver City is, on or near what R. R. I will try to get to you as soon as I can after I learn where you are. I was near Silver City, New Mex. during the massacre a few years ago, but I am almost sure that is not the place. I am 60 miles N. of Denison, Tex on the M. K. and T. R. R. I hope I hear from you at once.
Your Bro
R. W. Officer
Atoka, I. T.
June, 90
P.S. Since I came to look I can't find Bro L's letter, but will say he requested me to fill his promise to you. R.W.O.
What seems clear enough is that Meta Chestnutt had sent a letter to her mentor and favorite preacher, T. B. Larimore, who lived in northern Alabama. Could Larimore, the popular traveling evangelist, come to Silver City, I.T., to preach to the community there?
In response to her request, Larimore, writing from Alabama, had contacted Officer, already in Indian Territory, to pay a preacher's visit to Miss Chestnutt and her fledgling church. Neither Larimore's letter to Officer, nor Chestnutt's reply to Officer survive. But when she wrote back to Officer, Miss Chestnutt no doubt told him that, already, she and many others at Silver City had moved seven miles west of there to a new settlement the founders called "Minco," a Chickasaw and Choctaw word meaning "chief."
Officer wrote her a second time in letter dated July 3, 1890, the day just before the official founding of Minco, I.T.:
Dear Sister: Yours of June 30th in hand. In reply I will say I start on next Saturday for your place. I think I will be there by Monday or Tuesday anyway. And will remain as long as I can. I will come in a buggy and the roads are not good, I will be bound to guess my way more or less, but I will get there as soon as I can.
Your Bro. R. W. Officer
Atoka, I. T.
Perhaps Miss Chestnutt complained in her letter to Officer about the lack of news in her remote locale. On the back of the foregoing note, he added a postscript: I will send you our town paper. R. W. O.
The correspondence reveals how religious leaders used the postal service and their personal networks in order to advance far-flung ministries in places like Indian Territory.
Source
The letters quoted here are located in box 3, folder 33, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, Okla.
Dear Sister:
Yours to Bro T. B. L. was sent to me by him. Enclosed I send you his. Please, let me know where Silver City is, on or near what R. R. I will try to get to you as soon as I can after I learn where you are. I was near Silver City, New Mex. during the massacre a few years ago, but I am almost sure that is not the place. I am 60 miles N. of Denison, Tex on the M. K. and T. R. R. I hope I hear from you at once.
Your Bro
R. W. Officer
Atoka, I. T.
June, 90
P.S. Since I came to look I can't find Bro L's letter, but will say he requested me to fill his promise to you. R.W.O.
What seems clear enough is that Meta Chestnutt had sent a letter to her mentor and favorite preacher, T. B. Larimore, who lived in northern Alabama. Could Larimore, the popular traveling evangelist, come to Silver City, I.T., to preach to the community there?
In response to her request, Larimore, writing from Alabama, had contacted Officer, already in Indian Territory, to pay a preacher's visit to Miss Chestnutt and her fledgling church. Neither Larimore's letter to Officer, nor Chestnutt's reply to Officer survive. But when she wrote back to Officer, Miss Chestnutt no doubt told him that, already, she and many others at Silver City had moved seven miles west of there to a new settlement the founders called "Minco," a Chickasaw and Choctaw word meaning "chief."
Officer wrote her a second time in letter dated July 3, 1890, the day just before the official founding of Minco, I.T.:
Dear Sister: Yours of June 30th in hand. In reply I will say I start on next Saturday for your place. I think I will be there by Monday or Tuesday anyway. And will remain as long as I can. I will come in a buggy and the roads are not good, I will be bound to guess my way more or less, but I will get there as soon as I can.
Your Bro. R. W. Officer
Atoka, I. T.
Perhaps Miss Chestnutt complained in her letter to Officer about the lack of news in her remote locale. On the back of the foregoing note, he added a postscript: I will send you our town paper. R. W. O.
The correspondence reveals how religious leaders used the postal service and their personal networks in order to advance far-flung ministries in places like Indian Territory.
Source
The letters quoted here are located in box 3, folder 33, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, Okla.