American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

GLADDEN, SOLOMON WASHINGTON

(11 February 1836, Pottsgrove, PA-2 July 1918, Columbus, OH). Education: Attended Owego Academy, 1855-56; B.A. Williams College, 1959. Career: Minister, Brooklyn, NY, 1860-61; minister, Morrisania, NY, 1861-66; minister, North Adams, MA, 1866-71; minister, Springfield, MA, 1875-82; minister, First
Congregational Church, Columbus, OH, 1882-1914 (minister-emeritus, 1914- 18); moderator, National Council of Congregational Churches, 1904-1907.

Washington Gladden was not the first Congregationalist to apply Christian principals to social problems. In their own way John Winthrop·, Cotton Mather* , and other early Puritans held attitudes that later came to be known as the Social Gospel. Congregationalists were, after all, devoted from the start to building a society in "the suburbs of heaven." Gladden was less an innovator than a spokesman for the golden rule in the age of industrialization. Like Horace Bushnell·, whose views he defended, he favored a "practical gospel," directed towards social problems. "It is doubtful," he wrote, "whether any individual can have an adequate idea of his relationship to God except as he learns it in the fulfillment of his relations to his fellow men."

Gladden published more than thirty books and many articles during his lifetime and was widely read in England and America. His writing was less theological than practical, but he did publish several books about contemporary biblical criticism. Despite Gladden's devotion to the Social Gospel, he was usually conciliatory in promoting his views. He opposed socialism, preferring to Christianize the existing social order. "The law of love," he argued, "governs the whole of life." He was capable, however, of a dramatic gesture in pursuit of his ideals. In 1905, for example, he condemned the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions for accepting a $100,000 contribution from the president of Standard Oil. "Tainted money" he called it.

Gladden's popularity and influence was apparent in 1904 when he was chosen moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches. His equable temperament as well as his liberal faith is suggested by his comfortable description of the Christian's relationship to Christ: "Those who have trusted him have found him the kindest, the truest, the dearest of friends."

Bibliography
A: Plain Thoughts on the Art of Living (Boston, 1869); Working People and Their Employers (Boston, 1876); Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (New York, 1886); Who Wrote the Bible? (Boston, 1891); Social Salvation (Boston, 1902); Where Does the Sky Begin? (Boston, 1904); The Church in Modern Life (New York, 1908); Recollections (Boston, 1909).
B: DAB 7,325-27; DARB, 175-76; NCAB 10, 256; NYT 3 July 1918, 13; SH 4, 492-9Jacob Henry Dom, Washington Gladden: Prophet of the Social Gospel (Columbus, Ohio, 1966); Richard D. Knudten, The Systematic Thoughl of Washington Gladden (New York, 1968); George C. Fry, "Washington Gladden: First Citizen of Columbus," Ohio History, 73 (1964), 90-99; John M. Mulder, "The Heavenly City and Human Cities: Washington Gladden and Urban Reform," Ohio History, 87 (1978), 151-74.