This Week in Texas Methodist History May 30

 

Texas Conference Looks to End of an Era, June 1-5, 1959

 

As the Texas Annual Conference of the South Central Jurisdiction convened on June 1, 1959 in First Methodist Church Houston, they were very aware that the end of an era was approaching.  Bishop A. Frank Smith was presiding over the annual conference as he had done so since 1934—an amazingly long tenure for a bishop.  Adding to the historical significance was the fact that Smith had been elected bishop while serving as pastor the church in which the conference was meeting.  Even more striking was the fact that Smith stayed in Houston after his election in 1930 and was assigned to Missouri Conferences.  There was no requirement that a bishop live in the episcopal area to which he had been assigned, so from 1930-34 Smith presided over Missouri churches while living in Houston. 

 

But in June 1959, everyone knew that mandatory retirement would mean just one more year for Bishop Smith.  His long tenure made him one of the most recognizable celebrities in Houston and the only bishop than many Methodists ever knew. 

 

How should this long tenure be celebrated?  Naturally there would be a retirement banquet and gifts.  There would be glowing tributes and humorous anecdotes, but the Conference had something more lasting in mind---a published history of the conference and a biography of Bishop Smith.  The Chair of the Conference Historical Society (the precursor of the Commission on Archives and History) was C. A. West, and he reported on the desire to publish the two book, and a third one, a new history of Texas Methodism from 1900-1960. 

 

West presented a resolution for the first two of these books, asking that the Smith biography be a joint project with the Southwest Texas Conference.  Smith also presided over the Southwest Texas and Rio Grande Conferences.   West notably omitted the Rio Grande Conference from his resolution even though several of its members such as Alfredo Nanez and Oscar and Minerva Garza were deeply involved in Texas Methodist history. 

 

All three of the books were eventually published.  West is listed as editor for Texas Conference:  Methodism on the March 1814-1960.  It was ready for distribution in 1960.  Demand was overestimated so there are still unopened boxes in the Texas Conference Archives.   It is a committee work rather than a unified interpretive history and included a photo directory of pastors. 

 

The Smith biography went though some growing pains as the personal originally contracted to write it, collected materials, but did not finish.  It was written by Dr. Norman Spellman of Southwestern University as Growing a Soul.   (1979)

 

The third historical volume was Olin Nail’s  History of Texas Methodism: 1900-1960. (1961)

 

 

Nail had just published the centennial history of his home Conference, The First 100 Years of the Southwest Texas Conference, 1858-1958    (1958)

 

 

We are grateful for C. A. West, Olin Nail, Norman Spellman, and the other Texas Methodist historians of the mid 20^th century for their work.

 

 

 

 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History  May 23, 2021

 

Dallas Methodists Place Plaque at Commerce and Lamar, Site of First Methodist Church in Dallas, May 24, 1936

 

 

The decade in which Texans were more conscious of their history as evidenced by the numerous commemorative events was the 1930s.  Previous blog entries have highlighted the Texas Methodist Centennial in 1934, the renewed interest in McMahan’s Chapel, the publication of church histories and other such events.

 

A major oil company produced a comic book history of Texas called Texas History Movies and distributed it to school children.  Secretary of Commerce and Chair of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Jesse Jones, a member of St. Paul’s Houston, helped secure funding for the construction of the San Jacinto Monument.  The MECS conferences in Texas and the Anglo Conference of the MEC met in Houston in 1936 specifically to tour the San Jacinto Battlefield and invite members of the Fowler and Alexander families to address the conferences.  The two African American Methodist conferences of the MEC in Texas were not included in the joint activities---just like Texas History Movies, Texas Methodism embraced a vision of Texas history that excluded African Americans and allowed only a few Tejanos like Juan Seguin and Jose A. Navarro into the story.

 

I have previously written my belief that Texas Methodists tried very hard to tie their history into the Texas Revolutionary narrative. 

 

I interpret the celebrations of 1936 as an attempt to say “We are not Southern!.  We have a distinctive character of our own.”   The preceding twenty years had been hard on the South’s image---the high percentage of rejection of  WWI draftees from the South for reasons of intellectual or health disabilities was shocking.  The popular image of Southerners in such popular novels as Tobacco Road,  helped promote the image of the South was poor, backward, and not really ready to participate in the progress of the 20^th century.   The New Deal had many programs specifically focused on the South. The events of 1936 such as the erection of the San Jacinto Monument and the construction of Fair Park in Dallas were an announcement to the world---We are not Southern.  The cowboy on horseback represents us better than the barefoot tenant farmer behind a mule--Event though population and economic statistics showed otherwise.

 

It is little wonder that Texas Methodists were eager to jump on the historical bandwagon.  One such observance occurred on Sunday afternoon May 24, 1936 in Dallas.   The Men’s Bible Class and the Dallas Historical Society placed a plaque in the wall of a building at Lamar and Commerce, the site of the first Methodist church building in Dallas.  George B. Dealey, a name well known in Dallas history, was President of the Historical Society and Adolph Wherry, President of the Sunday School Class both spoke.   The participants believed that the first church in Dallas dated to 1846 and its organization by Orrin Hatch.  Wherry published a history of church, and there were persons in attendance who had been members of the church on Lamar before it moved to Harwood---

 

Note:  This was the oldest church in Dallas, not Dallas County.  On April 24, 2021, Webb Chapel UMC in Farmer’s Branch, held its final service.  It claimed 177 years of service---back to 1844, not 1846. 

 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History May 16

 

Bishop Baughman Dies En route to Preside over Annual Conference, May 18, 1960

 

 

In 1968 the United Methodist Church was created by merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church.  The EUB Church was a result of a 1946 merger of two Wesleyan denominations sharing a German language heritage.  The Texas Conference of the Evangelical Association had been organized in November 1887 in Temple. It consisted of clusters of churches in or near San Antonio, Temple, Wichita Falls, Denison, and Galveston.  Those churches grew out of missions to recent immigrants from northern states where the EA had long been established. 

 

In 1956 there were only seven active itinerant ministers so it became necessary to merge the Texas and Oklahoma Conferences.  That merger was accomplished on May 29, 1956 in Oklahoma City.  The presiding Bishop of that session was L. L. Baughman.  

 

Baughman had previously presided over two sessions of the Texas Conference which had been held at Lissie and El Campo.  He also presided over the sessions of the Texas-Oklahoma Conference in 1957, 1958, and 1959.

 

In May 1960 he was en route to the Texas-Oklahoma Conference to be held in Wichita Falls.  Unfortunately the sixty year old Bishop never made it to Texas.  He died in a motel room in Wellington, Kansas.  Fortunately Bishop Paul Herrick of Dayton, Ohio, was able to hurry to Wichita Falls to preside over the session. 

 

Statistics for the Texas-Oklahoma Conference in 1960 showed 4,417 members in 29 churches

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History  May 9, 2021

 

 

Controversial Texas Congressman Protested at First General Conference of the Methodist Church, May 1940

 

The Methodist Church was created by the union of its three predecessor denominations in May 1939 at the Uniting Conference in Kansas City.  Although delegates worked all day for two weeks hammering out the details of the new organization, they agreed that some things would be left pending for another year as the boards, agencies, publishing houses, institutions, and other bodies worked out what unification really meant.

 

The first General Conference of the Methodist Church, held in Atlantic City in April and May of 1940. was very focused on resolving those pending issues.  This was intended to be a working General Conference, as shown by the adoption of a five minute limit on speeches.   On the last day, in the rush of unresolved issues,  that time was shortened to three minutes. 

 

Texans were prominent in the General Conference.  Their names would be familiar to readers of this blog.  Paul Quillian chaired a committee.  His parishioner, Ella Fondren, served on the Committee on Hospitals and Homes.  J. N. R Score, Paul, Martin, Joe Z Tower,  Frank Smith, etc all had significant roles.

 

One of the Texans who spoke got more newspaper headlines than any of these mentioned, and he was not even a Methodist.

 

That speaker was Representative Martin Dies, Jr., Chair of the House Committee on un-American Activities (HUAC), and already a controversial figure.

 

Dies was the son of Martin Dies, Sr., who preceded him Congress.  Although Dies had been raised Methodist, by 1940 he not longer was a member.

 

HUAC had been formed in 1938 ostensibly to keep an eye on the KKK and German-American organizations with overt Nazi ideologies.  Dies, however, ignored the KKK and investigated liberal causes which he branded as communistic.  His main targets were labor unions and African Americans.  

 

Although he had been a dependable New Dealer from 1933 to 1937, he turned against FDR, and especially any programs which supplied economic relief to African Americans.  He opposed minimum wage legislation because European American and African American workers would receive the same wage.  In the debate over the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937 he had said on the floor  “you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man."

 

The topic of the Dies speech to General Conference was Christian Citizenship, but his appearance on the program was controversial.  Some “young misguided people”  tried to picket the entrance to the auditorium before Dies spoke.  “Police came of their own accord to stop them.”    “A small group of young people in the gallery protested, and the police took care of them.”   (quotes are from Southwestern Christian Advocate coverage of the Conference, attributed to Bishop John M. Moore, acting editor)

 

Dies continued to be active in Texas politics, running for the Senate twice and winning an at-large congressional seat.  When out of office, he practiced law in Lufkin and wrote books warning of the menace of Communist infiltration in America.  Those books were so radical, that when he returned to Congress in the at-large seat, he was denied a seat on the committee he had created and first chaired, HUAC, because it was believed he was actually hurting the anti-communist brand. 

 

One example of his overreach had occurred during this first tenure on the committee.  A new, leftist newspaper had begun in Paris, and many Hollywood celebrities signed a letter of welcome.   Dies published the names of the signatories and denounced them as communist dupes.  One of them was Shirley Temple---ten years old at the time. 

 

Trivia Question:  What do Martin Dies and I have in common?  We both graduated from Beaumont High School. 

 

This Week in Texas Methodist History May 2

 

Methodist Church Created from Predecessor Denominations, May 1939

 

Last week’s post highlighted what some have called the “original sin of racism” baked into the Methodist Church when it was created by the union of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Protestant Church in Kansas City in May 1939.

 

The two largest denominations, MEC and MECS, have received the most attention from historians, but what about the MP’s and especially the Methodist Protestant Church in Texas?

 

The Methodist Protestant Church was a product of Jacksonian Democracy.  The MEC had adopted an episcopal governance which placed a great deal of authority in the hands of the bishop. Often that authority turned authoritarian—especially in the appointment process.  Upon entering the “traveling connection”, a preacher had to promise to serve any church to which he was sent.  There are hundreds of examples of vindictive bishops punishing preachers by sending them to undesirable churches, appointments made out of ignorance, and so on.  Episcopal authority in  the MEC and MECS seemed out of touch with American democracy.  The MP Church did not have bishops.  Appointments were made at Annual Conference by the Stationing Committee.

 

In 1939 the MP Church had two conferences in Texas—the Texas Conference for European Americans and the Colorado-Texas Mission Conference for African Americans.  On the eve of union, the Texas Conference had 31 appointments and the Colorado Texas Conference about a half dozen—mostly in the Lockhart-Seguin region. 

 

The Texas Conference appointments included just one major city—Dallas and a number of smaller sized cities—Corsicana, San Angelo, Greenville, Paris, and so on.  Most of the churches, though, were in much smaller settlements---Pike, Klondike, Minter, Purley, Blue Ridge, Miles, and so on.  The most significant MP location in Texas was Tehuacana, where it had its college.  It was located there in the original building of Trinity University which became available when Trinity relocated, first to Waxahachie before moving again to San Antonio.  Student pastors and professors could serve churches in the area so there several near Tehuacana such as the one at Wortham. 

 

Both the MEC and the MECS had bishops, but the MP Church had none.  The newly created Methodist Church needed bishops from the MP so at the Uniting Conference in Kansas City, the MP delegates met separately for the purpose of electing two bishops.  The men chosen were James Straughn and John Calvin Broomfield.  Straughn had been the main denominational representative on the committees leading up to Union.  Broomfield was Scottish immigrant.  Both were from the northeast with few ties to Texas.

 

In 1939 the only big city church was Dallas, pastored by Kenneth Copeland.  It reported a membership of 160.   Copeland was a preacher’s son, his father being the pastor at Slocum.  They, and the other MP preachers entered the respective annual conferences of the new Methodist Church and received appointments from bishop—a new experience for them.  Kenneth Copeland thrived in the new denomination.  His talents propelled him to important churches in Oklahoma and Texas and eventually to his election as bishop in the Methodist Church and United Methodist Church.  He was my bishop in the Texas Conference.  His father, though, was near retirement after a career of serving small rural churches.  His last appointment before retirement was the Tyler Circuit in Smith County.  My father was serving an adjacent appointment which led to my father’s inviting Kenneth Copeland to preach a week long revival and visit his parents who were living nearby.  I was an infant at the time, but later learned that the week spent together forged a lifetime friendship between Bishop Copeland and Bishop Hardt.  Kenneth’s brother, Kennard, was also well-known in Texas Methodist circles.  He was administrator of the Methodist Home in Waco.  Kennard’s thesis which he published as the History of the Methodist Protestant Church in Texas, is the only comprehensive history of the denomination in Texas.