Walter Rauschenbusch and Meta Chestnutt Sager as Nineteenth-Century People

In his fine biography of Walter Rauschenbusch, the great theologian of the Social Gospel, historian Christopher H. Evans notes that although Rauschenbusch is associated with twentieth-century American theology, his social and cultural influences came from the nineteenth century. Born in 1861, he was very much a nineteenth-century man.[1] In the same way, although she lived until 1948, Meta Chestnutt Sager, born in 1863, was mainly a nineteenth-century woman. In her case, it was not simply the fact that she was born during the Civil War and came of age not long after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. It was also the result of her moving from North Carolina to Indian Territory in 1889, a few days before she turned twenty-six years old. When she was seventy-five, she recalled that upon arriving at Silver City, Chickasaw Nation, "there was not a sound save the prairie chicken's squawk, and no curious eyes save the jack rabbit's stare." She had brought along "clothes for a five year stay," because she knew that there in Indian Territory people "did have new clothes every time the moon changed." This was far from the industrialized world where the twentieth century would soon be dawning.[2]

Notes

[1] Christopher H. Evans, The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), xviii.

[2] Mrs. J. A. Sager, "Some Wildflowers from My Garden of Memory," box 10, Meta Chestnutt Sager file, Historic Oklahoma Biographies Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.