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
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      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • 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

SHELDON, CHARLES MONROE

(26 February 1857, Wellsville, NY- 24 February 1946, Topeka, KS). Education: B.A., Brown University, 1883; B.D., Andover Theological Seminary, 1886. Career. Minister, Waterbury, VT, 1886-88; minister, Topeka, KS, 1889-1919; editor-in-chief, Christian Herald, 1920-25; contributing editor, Christian Herald, 1925-46.

Charles Sheldon's career illustrates the popularity of the Social Gospel and "practical" Christianity in turn-of-the-century America. The son of a clergyman,
Sheldon spent part of his youth in a log cabin on the South Dakota prairie. He became interested in urban America while attending college in Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown. As minister in Topeka, Kansas, a rail center, Sheldon had contact with slums, immigrants, labor unrest, and other features of industrial America.

He contributed a series of stories, suggesting the role of Christianity in modem life, to the social gospel movement. Disappointed with the poor turnout at his Sunday evening services, he began substituting stories for sermons. These were so popular that they were serialized in Advance, a religious magazine, and later published as books. He struck a responsive chord when he portrayed several members of a church in a Midwestern railway town agreeing to live one year, asking themselves before any decision, "What would Jesus do?" The stories were published under the title, In His Steps, and became one of the most popular books of all time. Estimates of sales range from six to thirty million. The book's distribution was encouraged by the appeal of it subject-and by loose copyright laws that allowed the book to be pirated and translated into twenty languages without compensation to Sheldon. In 1936 the book was made into a movie. Although he received royalties from only one of the book's many publishers, Sheldon became a celebrated lecturer and writer.

In 1900 the owner of the Topeka Daily Capital invited Sheldon to edit the newspaper for one week-as he thought Jesus would have done. This experiment in walking "in his steps" won national attention. Sheldon turned down news and advertisements that he deemed inappropriate for a Christian newspaper. He published crime stories with comments on the underlying causes of crime. In stories of prize fights and vice he made it clear that such things were evil. The paper's circulation jumped from 15,000 to 367,000, with issues published in Chicago, New York, and London. This unique experiment in Christian journalism ended as one might expect. Advertisers, writers, and the owner eagerly reclaimed their paper and returned to the ordinary way of doing business. But Sheldon was able to turn his hand again to publishing a few years later, when he became editor of the Christian Herald.

Sheldon wrote more than thirty Social Gospel novels and spoke throughout America and England on social problems. He was an ardent prohibitionist as well as a pacifist. In 1914-15 he was a member of a "flying squadron" for prohibition, speaking in 247 American cities in 243 days. Sheldon once remarked that virtually his whole theology centered on the effort to put Christ's creed into practice.

Bibliography
A: Richard Bruce (Boston, 1892); The Crucifixion of Philip Strong (Chicago, 1894); In His Steps (Chicago, 1897; and many subsequent editions); Robert Hardy's Seven Days (New York, 1899); Born to Serve (Chicago, 1900); The Narrow Gate (Chicago, 1903); Of One Blood (Boston, 1916); Charles M. Sheldon: His Life Story (New York, 1925).
B: DAB 24, 740-42; DARB, 408; NCAB 34,368-68; NIT 25 February 1946, 25; SH 10, 390; John W. Ripley, "Another Look at the Rev. Mr. Charles M. Sheldon's Christian Daily Newspaper," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 31 (1965), 1-40; John W. Ripley, 'The Strange Story of In His Steps," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 34 (1968), 241-65; Paul S. Boyer, "In His Steps: A Reappraisal," American Quarterly, 23 (1971), 60-78; Jonathan A. Lindsey, "Sheldon's Serial Sermons," Journal of Library History, 21 (1986), 362-75.