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 >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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    • American Realities (Book) >
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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

TITSWORTH, JUDSON

(23 October 1845, Shiloh, NJ-9 April 1919). Education: B.A., Amherst College, 1870; B.D., Union Theological Seminary, 1873; D.D., Beloit, 1885. Career: Minister, Westfield, MA, 1873-78; Chelsea, MA, 1878-83; Milwaukee, WI, 1883-1909.

After moving to Wisconsin from New England, Judson Titsworth built in Milwaukee an unusual church. Located in the center of the city, it had no steeple and featured an amusements room and a basketball court. Although still a rarity, similar buildings existed in New York, Indianapolis, and Chicago. Known as "institutional churches," they reflected their pastors' devotion to the Social Gospel.

'Titsworth believed that the church's mission was not so much to rescue sinners from an angry God as to promote the Kingdom of God on earth. He held that in original sin Adam did not so much fall as stumble. According to Titsworth, Adam then "struggled to his feet...the pioneer in that magnificent spiritual movement which is not to cease until humanity is brought to its goal."

In his social ministry Titsworth labored mightily and with good humor to overcome the ills of industrial America. He was an admirer of Horace Bushnell· and a friend of Washington Gladden·, and some of their spirit of progressive goodwill entered Titsworth's ministry. He favored child labor reform, labor unions, profit sharing, and prohibition. In various ways he tried to improve society by using the church as a social center: boys' and girls' clubs met at the church, and dances were held at which the ministers encouraged the socially elite in his congregation to meet with working persons. Blaming greed for many of society's ills, he preached the old Puritan doctrine that any job involves a calling to serve society as well as oneself.

A good businessman, Titsworth argued, should have "a jovial, hospitable, and loving spirit." After visiting England he claimed that capitalism there was more constructive than in America: "England is proceeding on the assumption that opportunity means development and the result is a glad surprise to those who love their fellow men."

Titsworth is less well known than such giants among the Social Gospellers as Washington Gladden, but in his career one sees how the gospel found its way into hundreds of parishes throughout the country. What was required was a particular outlook on life, hard work, and a certain affection for one's fellow humans. In his later life Titsworth described this comradery when he said of the ministry: "In no profession are there such dividends in friendship, in pure, disinterested friendship."

Bibliography
A: Titsworth manuscripts in the Plymouth United Church of Christ Archives, Milwaukee; The Moral Evolution: Lenten Sermons on Sin and Its Remedy (Milwaukee, 1908).
B: WWWA (1897-1942), 1242-43; Quarter Centennial of Judson Titsworth: 1883-1908 (Milwaukee, 1908); Will Bloss Titsworth, The Titsworth Family (Hopkins, Minn., 1964); John Derge, "In Search of the Kingdom in Milwaukee: Judson Titsworth and the Social Gospel: 1883-1909," Mid-America, 66 (1984), 99-109. TUCKER