This Week in Texas Methodist History  December 1

Emmet Jay Scott of Trinity Methodist Church in Houston, Recognized in Conference Resolution, December 1917        

The Texas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church met in Orange during the first week of December, 1917.  Like all the rest of the nation, clergy and lay delegates were intensely interested in U. S. participation in World War I.   Delegates passed a resolution supporting the war specifically refuting the sentiment in some African American circles that “the Negro has nothing to fight for in this war.”  

Delegates saw African American doughboys in the tradition of those soldiers who “followed Roosevelt, Shafter, and Wheeler up San Juan Hill, and thus helped free bleeding Cuba.” 

The resolution also thanked Secretary of War Newton Baker for naming Emmett Jay Scott as his Special Advisor for Negro Affairs.  This made Scott the highest ranking African American in the Wilson administration.  (Wilson was well known for bringing Jim Crow segregation into the U. S. Government, including the Post Office.)

Scott was born in Houston in 1873 and was a part of the historic Trinity Methodist Church.  He attended Wiley College for three years, but left to work for the Houston Post, a white-owned newspaper.  Scott worked his way up from janitor to reporter at the Post, and in 1893 was a co-founder of the Texas Freeman, Houston’s first African American newspaper.  

His journalistic prowess gained the attention of Booker T. Washington so he moved to Tuskegee as Washington’s personal assistant, ghost writer, speech writer, and in 1912 as the Tuskegee Secretary-Treasurer.      

When Washington decided he could not be away from the U. S. for an extended period, Scott took his place on a delegation to Liberia to help create a new government there.  

One of Scott’s achievements in his World War I role was the accreditation of Ralph Waldo Tyler as the only journalist accredited by the War Department to report on African American soldiers in World War I.    Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, is still the starting point for researchers in the field of African Americans in World War I and is still available for purchase.  

After the war ended, Scott became Secretary –Treasurer of Hampton Institute.  When World War II broke out, he returned to the war effort, this time working for the Sun Shipbuilding Company of Chester, Pennsylvania.  

Scott died in 1957 in Washington, D. C.  

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 24

George Morelock Speaks to 300 Men at First Methodist Dallas, November 1945

 It took decades to get  Methodist Men's organizations off the ground.   Women had formed both home and foreign missionary societies in the 19^th century, but an official Methodist Men (today United Methodist Men) was not organized until the mid-twentieth century.  

The current UMM may be traced to the MECS General Conference of 1922 which created a Board of Lay Activities.  George Morelock (1880-1967), lay leader of the Memphis Conference, was selected as its first chief executive.  

In 1924  the   General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church authorized Wesley Brotherhoods. Morelock creates the Methodist Layman, a quarterly magazine for men of that denomination.

In 1928    men of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church South created the Joint Committee on Men’s Work, one small step on the way to unification of the MEC and MECS. 

In 1942, after unification, the official name Methodist Men, was adopted. 

Morelock continued as executive through the unification and on the day before Thanksgiving, 1945, came to Dallas from Chicago to address 300 men at First Methodist Dallas.  His speech started with the question “What are you going to do about the Atomic Age?”  His speech talked about the annihilation now possible with the splitting of the atom.  He then offered an alternative to world destruction,  “Band together all the men in First Church and all the other Methodist Churches and all their energies will be bound together to create peace and order.”   Methodist Men, Morelock said, could “overcome the power of Satan with the power of changed lives.” 

 First Church Dallas Methodist Men  had invited Morelock to bring the charter for their newly-organized unit.   Men from other  Dallas churches including Kessler Park and Owenwood also came to be inspired to start their own chapters. 

Morelock retired as executive officer in 1947 and died in 1967,  

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 17

Sunday School Class in Port Arthur Urges Controls on Liquor To Help War Effort, November 1942

The Men’s Bible Class of First Methodist Port Arthur, led by its teacher, C. V. Palmer, wrote a letter to all the Texas U. S. Senators and Representatives urging them to suppress the liquor traffic to help the war effort. 

 The United States had imposed rationing for civilians so that the U. S. military could have the gasoline and rubber necessary to fight World War II.   Some members of the Sunday School class were incensed when they saw that a beer distributer had obtained a new set of tires for his truck, and a dairy could not get tires for his truck.  They composed the following letter for the representatives.

The fifth columnists have been given the credit for whipping France two years ago, and drunkenness was one of the chief weapons.  We are convinced that we have plenty of fifth columnists in the United States who are fully aware of France’s predicament and are working to keep the liquor flowing freely in the U. S. army and navy camps.  We feel that strong drink is detrimental to our armed forces and is bound to be harmful to the strength, efficiency and clear headedness of our men in uniform.

The President gives fireside chats on the radio and tells us to be unwasteful.  This is very fine and we are suggesting that the removal of liquor will enable our country to take care of several items that are now being pinched, such as milk for the children and sugar for family use.  Under the present rulings, dairymen cannot have rubber tires to deliver milk to children but a beer concern here in Port Arthur has secured new tires for a delivery truck. 

The facts and statements are familiar to you as well as many we have not mentioned.  And we close this letter by repeating our solicitation of your earnest cooperation in the task of eliminating, or greatly reducing the worse than wasteful liquor business; which, we feel constitutes a national enemy ranking well up with Germany, Italy, and Japan. 

As readers of this column know, Port Arthur and the rest of the Golden Triangle, was one of the most important producers of gasoline, aviation fuel, ships, lubricants, and other vital war materiel. 

This Week in Texas Methodist History November 10

Texas Conference Calls on Churches to Celebrate Centennial of Texas Methodism,   November 1916

The Texas Annual Conference met in Lufkin from November 8 to 13, 1916.  Bishop McCoy presided over a most interesting session.  

Bishop E. E. Hoss came to Conference as the speaker in a special service in honor of the 100^th anniversary of the death of Francis Asbury.   The conference recognized the ethnic diversity in the Brazos Valley by appointing Francisco Zito to the Italian Mission and Josef Dobes and William Brichta to the Bohemia Mission all three were in the Navasota District.   Brichta came with ordination papers from the Presbyterian church and delighted the attendees with an account of his former life as a Roman Catholic priest. 

The Conference also called on churches to celebrate the centennial of Texas Methodism the following year, 1917.  What!???  I thought Texas Methodists celebrated that centennial in 1934.  

The 1917 date was chosen by relying (incorrectly) on Homer Thrall’s statement that William Stevenson organized a Methodist class in the Red River region in 1817.   Subsequent scholarship has shown that Stevenson actually preached south of the Red River even earlier than 1817. 

The resolution called for each pastoral charge to celebrate in May 1817 by compiling a history of that church, and that presiding elders were directed to write up a history of the district.  Each Methodist school in Texas was instructed to write up its history. 

The committee did not stop there.  It directed the secretary of each annual conference to compile a history of the sessions of that conference from its origins to 1917.  It further directed the Advocate to compile a Centennial Yearbook for all of the conferences in the state.

The resolution in 1916 sounds very much like what happened in 1934—even down to the compilation of a Centennial Yearbook.

This Week in Texas Methodist History  November 3

Umphrey Lee Inaugurated as 4^th President of SMU, November 6, 1939

On November 9, 1939 Umphrey Lee was inaugurated as the 4^th president of Southern Methodist University.   Lee, born in 1893 in Indiana, moved with his family to Brownwood, Texas in 1909.  He attended Daniel Baker College, then received his A. B. from Trinity University in 1914.  SMU opened in 1915, and Lee enrolled for graduate work in the new university.  He was a member of the university’s first graduating class.  He later received his doctorate from Columbia University. 

Lee served Highland Park Methodist Church in Dallas for thirteen years, and taught homiletics at SMU.  In 1936 he moved to Nashville and was Dean of the School of Theology at Vanderbilt University.  

At the 1938 General Conference of the MECS Charles C. Selecman was elected bishop.  In November, 1938 SMU trustees named Lee as his successor.  

Monday, November 6 began with a religious convocation at which Bishop Selecman presided.  The main speaker was Bishop Charles L. Mead of Kansas City who had formerly been a bishop in the MEC.  Later that day Bishop Ivan Lee Holt presided over the formal inauguration.  Chancellor Oliver C. Carmichael of Vanderbilt University was the main speaker.   Bishop A. Frank Smith, Chair of the SMU Trustees formally invested President Lee. 

Lee’s inaugural address made reference to the fact that SMU was a comparatively young institution.  He said that the school it could not fall back on the authority of ivied walls and ancient characters, it could profit from a century of educational experience.  His address stressed how SMU should follow a middle path stressing the human relationship between student and teacher.  He wanted to reject the dogmatism of classicism and the other dogmatism of vocational education.  

Lee spent 15 years as SMU President.  Those years were marked by significant expansion of the student body, physical plant, and academic programs.  Lee also wrote several books.  

He died in June 1958.  He was succeeded by Dr. Willis Tate.