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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2011
More than fifty years after delivering the talk “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935” to the American Society of Church History, Robert Handy is still the default authority on religion and the Great Depression. This is a tribute to his remarkable insights, but it is also an indication that the Depression merits more attention from historians of religion. A number of scholars have taken the religious history of the 1930s seriously. Yet we tend to think of the work of Joel Carpenter, Leo Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, Beth Wenger, Kenneth Heineman, and others as primarily about fundamentalist institution-building, New Deal demagogues, or Jews and Catholics in New York and Pittsburgh, and only incidentally about the Great Depression.
1 Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History 29, no. 1 (March 1960): 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982)Google Scholar; Ribuffo, Leo P., The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Wenger, Beth S., New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Heineman, Kenneth J., A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
3 Handy, “The American Religious Depression,” 14; Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955)Google Scholar.
4 Franklin D. Roosevelt to the nation's clergy, September 23, 1935, Box 1, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter FDR Library). Monroe Billington and Cal Clark argue that Roosevelt had little to do with the letter. They describe the likely provenance of the letter in “Clergy Reaction to the New Deal: A Comparative Study,” Historian 48, no. 4 (1986): 509–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Perry F. Webb, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Oct. 20, 1938, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, Franklin D. Roosevelt–President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.
6 Aubrey Mills, “Supplementary Report on Clergy Letters,” Folder: Report of Aubrey Mills, Box 35, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library. Mills broke down the responses by state, and then nationally. For additional evaluation of the clergy letters, see Billington, and Clark, , “Catholic Clergymen, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal,” The Catholic Historical Review 79, no. 1 (January 1993): 65–82Google Scholar; Billington, and Clark, , “Baptist Preachers and the New Deal,” Journal of Church and State 33, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 255–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flynt, Wayne, “Religion for the Blues: Evangelicalism, Poor Whites, and the Great Depression,” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 1 (February 2005): 4–38Google Scholar.
7 The body of literature on the local experiences of the Great Depression is immense. For a sampling, see Blackwelder, Julia Kirk, Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929–1939 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Egan, Timothy, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (New York: Mariner, 2006)Google Scholar; Greenberg, Cheryl, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Starr, Kevin, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
8 Cobb, James C., The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Rushing, Wanda, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 The progressive nature of Protestantism from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries is well documented. See, for instance, Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
10 I follow Paul Harvey's distinction between social Christianity and the Social Gospel: “Social Christianity overlaps with but is not synonymous with the social gospel. Social Christianity involves envisioning a public role for Christians in reforming and regulating human institutions, without necessarily seeing this public role as primary.” Harvey, Paul, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the progressivism of southern churches in the first half of the twentieth century, see Butler, Anthea D., Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Harvey, Paul, Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Harvey, Redeeming the South; Link, William A, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; McDowell, John Patrick, The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886–1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.
11 On churches' financial concerns in the 1920s, see Bailey, Kenneth K., Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Kincheloe, Samuel C., Research Memorandum on Religion in the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937)Google Scholar; Miller, Robert Moats, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Carter, Paul Allen, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920–1940 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956)Google Scholar.
12 Best, Wallace D., Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Sernett, Milton, Bound For the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lemann, Nicholas, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar.
13 “Babson's View of Slumps,” New York Times, September 11, 1930, p. 27.
14 E. F. Scarborough, Holly Springs District Superintendent's Report, Official Journal of the Forty-Second Session of the Upper Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Columbus, Mississippi, December 2–6, 1931, pp. 25–27, J. B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism, Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi.
15 Hamilton, David E., “The Causes of the Banking Panic of 1930: Another View,” Journal of Southern History 51, no. 4 (November 1985): 581–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “7 Arkansas Towns Have Breadlines,” New York Times, January 9, 1931, p. 16; “The Week,” The New Republic, January 14, 1931, pp. 228–29; “Red Cross Remains in Field to Assist Drought-Hit Areas,” Washington Post, March 15, 1931, p. M15; Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth, As Rare As Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern Drought of 1930–1931 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 3–21, 56–65, 102Google Scholar; Johnson, Ben F. III, Arkansas in Modern America, 1930–1999 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 11–13Google Scholar.
16 Open Your Heart: Memphis Cares for Her Own, Memphis Community Fund, 1928, Memphis–Community Chest Clippings File, Memphis Public Library, Memphis, Tennessee (hereafter MPL); 1940 Annual Report, Memphis Community Fund, with Historical Supplement, Memphis, Tennessee, Mayor Watkins Overton Papers, MPL; Biles, Roger, Memphis in the Great Depression (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 55–57Google Scholar.
17 Alldredge, E. P., Southern Baptist Handbook, 1931 (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1931), 37Google Scholar; “Our Present Denominational Situation,” (Arkansas) Baptist Advance, August 7, 1930, p. 1, 9.
18 Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Sessions of the State B.Y.P.U. and State Sunday School Conventions, First Baptist Church, Jackson, Tennessee, July 21–24, 1931, p. 25, Box 3, Samuel A. Owen Papers, MS 151, Mississippi Valley Collection, Ned R. McWherter Library, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee (hereafter MVC); Rev. S. A. Owen and Rev. H. W. Perry to the Baptist Brotherhood of the State of Tennessee, September 18, 1933, Folder 1, Box 1, Owen Papers, MVC.
19 “Text of New President's Address at Inauguration,” Washington Post, March 5, 1933, p. 2.
20 Kennedy, David M., Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131–217Google Scholar; McElvaine, Robert, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers, 1993 [1984]), 138–69Google Scholar.
21 “Substituting Government for Religion,” Mississippi Baptist Record, October 12, 1933, p. 2.
22 J. J. Galloway, Hughes Parish M.E.C.S., Hughes, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 1, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.
23 See, for instance, R. E. Black, V.D.M., Boydsville, Arkansas, to FDR, October 7, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library; George W. Bell, Whiteville M. E. Church, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 28, 1935, Folder: Tennessee, Box 34, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.
24 Aubrey Mills, “Supplementary Report on Clergy Letters.”
25 N. B. Bynum, Brinkley, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 16, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library. Monroe Billington and Cal Clark have written several articles about the clergy letters. See Billington and Clark, “Catholic Clergymen, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal”; Billington and Clark, “Clergy Reaction to the New Deal”; Billington and Clark, “Baptist Preachers and the New Deal.” Wayne Flynt uses the letters in his essay about white southern evangelicals in the Depression: Flynt, “Religion for the Blues.”
26 Rev. Joseph Boone Hunter, Pulaski Heights Christian Church, Little Rock, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 8, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.
27 In addition to the clergy letters, see Bailey, Kenneth, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues; Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1978])Google Scholar.
28 “Southern Baptists Table Jesus,” National Baptist Voice, June 13, 1936, p. 2. This author referred particularly to the Communists' social justice work, but his comment is more broadly applicable as well.
29 I explain this point more fully in my dissertation: Alison Collis Greene, “‘No Depression in Heaven’: Religion and Economic Crisis in Memphis and the Delta, 1929–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010), 190–247.
30 On the relative success of such churches in the 1930s, see Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ; Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again; Sarah Ruth Hammond, “‘God's Business Men’: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010); Roll, Jarod, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
31 Handy, “The American Religious Depression,” 13–14.
