On June 13, 1894, Iowa College Professor of Applied Religion George Herron delivered a commencement address at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. You won’t find mention of it in too many histories, but at the time the address titled “A New Political Vision,” was heard by newspapers as far away as New York because it spoke about the widespread discontent and the reasons for it.
History periodically spits out people like George Herron who become the proverbial canaries in a mine shaft warning about toxic conditions. The jeremiads they preach raise much-needed alarms we ignore at our peril. They reverberate into the present with a message for those institutions that have largely been absent during the rise of the Counterrevolution and the first five months of the current administration. This is especially true of a budget that Herron might describe as the most immoral in recent history with its plan of cutting taxes for the richest Americans while curtailing food and medical assistance for the poorest.
George Herron
Largely forgotten today, George Herron was one of the most effective orators for the Discontented and the Social Gospel Movement. One newspaper termed him “the great moral teacher of the age.” Another observer made an incendiary analogy, comparing his impact to a “dynamite bomb…thrown in a public square.” He preached such powerful jeremiads that at Iowa College (today Grinnell College) his classes flowed into the hallway, forcing administrators to move them to the college chapel, which was a more fitting setting.
Few comets flamed so high, so fast, and then so quickly fell as George Herron. As a teenager, he worked in a printing shop under what he later described as “depraved and sinful conditions.” Like many leaders of his generation he experienced a period of restless wandering, dropping out of Wisconsin’s Ripon College, briefly working for the Ripon newspaper, and moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. There he experienced a religious conversion he likened to groping in “the horror of darkness which settles upon a soul when it knows there is no sound thing in it.” Fittingly, what moved Herron was a jeremiad delivered during the Great Awakening of the previous century, Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
A charismatic speaker with a stork-like body and hyper-kinetic mannerisms, Herron spoke in a high, penetrating voice that had his contemporaries comparing him to his avian namesake. He was part of the faculty at a college heavily involved in the Social Gospel\ Movement, whose mission Herron described as laying “the axe of Christianity at the root of the trees of social wrong.” He and others hoped that they might start a second Reformation, “a Christian reconstruction of society.”
Herron attracted attention with rhetoric that plucked all the right strings of the Discontented from “remorseless enginery” to “selfishness” and “brute cunning.”
We see torn, bleeding, mangled, sorrowing, famishing multitudes beneath the wheels of its remorseless enginery; we see that greed and not love is the power that moves our civilization; we see politics, commerce, and the social club moving on the economic assumption that selfishness is the only considerable social force, and assuming that civilization can advance only through the equal balancing of warring, selfish interests; we see men valuing brute cunning and the low instinct of shrewdness more than whiteness of soul.
The 1894 Commencement Speech
The forecast predicted light rain, but it held off as Herron stepped onto the stage of that tumultuous summer. Wheat prices were less than half what they were in 1870. On May Day, Jacob Coxey’s Army arrived in Washington. By the end of the year, there would be 1,300 strikes involving 600,000 workers, resulting in over $37 million in lost wages. Hyperkinetic politician and newspaper editor Ignatius Donnelly penned a piece headlined, “Civil War: It Already Is Upon Us.” Contributing to the tension was the great drought of 1894 that left “crumbling soddies as so many tombstones standing at the grave of buried hopes.”
The graduates, their friends, and relatives represented those who could afford to send sons and daughters to college during the century’s worst depression. Mixed among them was a more edgy crowd that had chosen to endure a hot June day to find inspiration. Several notable Nebraskans may also have attended. Willa Cather was a student at the university. William Jennings Bryan and his wife Mary lived in Lincoln. Mary was active in various university groups, perhaps even helping to choose the speaker.
The university scheduled the event in the morning to avoid the midday heat, so people who traveled any distance began their journeys as the sun broke the horizon. When they hitched their teams, it was relatively cool—in the upper sixties; when Herron finished the thermometer reached into the eighties. The heat he generated was considerably higher.
Some in the crowd were well aware that a month earlier, Herron had stirred up a raucous Populist gathering in nearby Omaha.
There is not one kind of right for God and another for man; one for the church and another for the market; one for the individual and another for the state; one for men acting singly and another for men acting collectively as a commonwealth or a financial corporation.
Acknowledging “the mutual dependence of all,” Herron affirmed, “Association, not individual liberty, would be the movement’s watchword and hope of glory.”
Not long into the commencement speech, Herron threw his first bomb, asserting, “We Americans are not a democratic people.” Then he assaulted corporations that “exist as parasites upon the body politic,” bringing “bribery and corruption, from one end of the land to the other” and, most of all, obstructing, defeating, or cheating “the will of the people.”
An audience much more familiar with the Declaration of Independence than we are would have realized his words echoed that document, reinforcing that they were fighting for a renewal of the principles that had founded this country. Like the Declaration, Herron’s speech rested on a structure of defining grievances, identifying their causes, and proposing solutions. Its power comes from coupling the Declaration to the jeremiads preached by the Social Gospel. When you work Jesus and Jefferson into the same oration, you are playing with dynamite. Herron’s daring consisted of bringing the match closer and closer as his audience wondered if he would light the fuse.
As he condemned the nation’s moral cowardice, Herron shocked them as surely as Jonathan Edwards’ loathsome spider when he asserted:
God sent this American nation to be an example to other nations of the earth. We have failed. We have forsaken our trust. We are a fallen nation. Except the nation repent it cannot survive.
His stunning conclusion must have momentarily frozen the audience.
They only can wield the sword of Christ’s right who will sell their cloaks, part with their very garments, throw away their reputation, renounce all that they have, deny themselves, take up their cross, and move steadily to the Calvary of the nation’s redemption… Are we ready to be offered?
When George Herron left the stage, he had accomplished what people wearing clerical collars and academic robes should do—raise uncomfortable questions. The sweat running from the brows of listeners in favored places that sultry summer day was probably due to more than the weather. The day became more heated when Nebraska Governor Lorenzo Crounse offered a stinging retort to Herron as he handed out commissions to the cadet battalion.
I feel called upon to repudiate what he has said as unwarranted in fact and damaging and discouraging to the youth just entering upon the battle of life. I do not believe that this country is wholly bad, and tottering on the verge of destruction.
The New York Tribune commented Herron was “really far more dangerous than the criminal fanatics who throw loaded dynamite bombs into a crowd of innocent men and women.” The New York Sun took a “love it or leave it” view: “If Prof. Herron should leave the country, though it might not bring pleasure to him in his irredeemable pessimism, it would at least be for the country’s good.” Several condemned his words as “socialistic.”
Where Are Our George Herrons?
One of the most puzzling questions of our times asks, where are the people like George Herron, people who once arose to hold the nation accountable? Ministers, priests, and rabbis played prominent roles in the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests, yet they have been largely silent about the sins of the Counterrevolution. Admittedly, attendance at mainline churches has fallen, but that should not prevent religious leaders from speaking. One could even argue, as Herron might, that the decline in attendance is tied to the increasing retreat of these churches from society.
The absence of moral voices from the pulpits of churches and synagogues has created a vacuum that evangelicals have been more than happy to fill. Their alliance with the Republican Party and positions on abortion and rights for LGBTQ people has been well-documented. As some evangelicals have even elevated the current occupant of the White House to the status of an avenging angel, mainline churches have been silent. This is especially true with the proposed Counterrevolutionary budget. Were George Herron alive, he would be delivering jeremiads about it. Instead, no major church leader and certainly no major denomination has come out against it.
Herron also reminds us of a time when places like Iowa College were leaders in giving voice to the Discontented and advocating policy positions to aid them. Many of those colleges were leaders in the Social Gospel movement. Iowa College president George Gates even dared to take on the textbook trust with a pamphlet that contained a forceful defense of academic freedom and independent thinking. Not long after Herron’s speech the college sponsored a summer Chautauqua session addressing the nation’s social needs.
Over a century ago the Discontented could see people like George Herron fighting for them. Institutions like Iowa College were fighting for them. Organizations like unions and the Farmers’ Alliance were fighting for them. Feisty editors like Ignatius Donnelly gave voice to their grievances. The current lack of resistance from institutions and organizations that were once advocates for equity and justice breeds anger and a sense of powerlessness.
George Herron’s commencement address reminds us that it is institutions that sustain this country. His story offers a lesson in why institutions are more important than individual leaders. At the time he delivered that speech, he was involved in a scandalous extramarital affair that would ultimately cost him his job, but the Social Gospel Movement persisted.
Institutions are important because through them we act together, bridging our differences to advocate for the common good. Herron’s words remind us that institutional failure to act in the face of inequality and injustice leaves us all alone, afraid of the onset of darkness.
Given Herron’s condemnation of greed, it is ironic that the major reason for much of the institutional silence is money. Universities fear losing grants and contributions. Religious institutions fear losing members and donations. In the past this has not served as a barrier, but it is today.
We need to exert a countervailing force, figuratively pounding on the doors of the institutions that are central to our lives and communities to demand they fight for our country. In a piece written two weeks after George Herron’s speech, Ignatius Donnelly wrote words that bear repeating:
If liberty dies on the continent it dies over all the world; not from this generation onlybut for many generations.