American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • 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
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • 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

TUCKER, WILLIAM JEWETT

JEWETT (13 July 1839, Griswold, CT-29 September 1926, Hanover NH). Education: B.A., Dartmouth College, 1861; B.D., Andover Seminary, 1866. Career: Schoolteacher, Columbus, OH, 1861- 63; minister, Manchester, NH, 1867-75; minister, New York, NY, 1875-79; professor of sacred rhetoric, Andover Seminary, 1880-93; president, Dartmouth College, 1893-1909.

During the late nineteenth century the liberating spirit of progressive orthodoxy prevailed among Congregationalists. Ministers and professors could explore new findings in biology, geology, and history without being accused of heresy. Or so it seemed.

But an important event in the life of William Jewett Tucker suggests that freedom of thought within the church still had its limits. After serving as pastor in New Hampshire and New York, Tucker joined the faculty at Andover Seminary in 1880. A few years later he and four colleagues founded the Andover Review, and in 1886 they published some of its articles under the title Progressive Orthodoxy. The book was too progressive and not sufficiently orthodox for some Congregationalists, who objected particularly to the authors' contention that un-Christianized infants and heathen are not necessarily doomed to hell. During a "second probation," the Andover professors argued, such youths might have another opportunity for salvation. The doctrine made sense to many in an age that was quietly abandoning some of the harsher elements of Calvinistic thought. But some churchmen, particularly the missionary organizations, objected to the innovation.

The result was the "Andover controversy" in which the five professors were tried in 1886 for heresy. One was condemned and the others escaped narrowly, thanks to a tie vote on their guilt. In 1890 the Massachusetts Supreme Court faulted the proceedings, and in 1892 the condemned man was finally acquitted. Even though the charge of heresy did not stick, the proceedings showed that Progressive Orthodoxy, pioneered some four decades before by Horace Bushnell* still aroused suspicions of heresy in some quarters.

Tucker was on safer ground as a social reformer than as a religious liberal. In 1891 he founded Andover House, a highly successful Boston settlement house, later known as South End House. His social consciousness was also apparent at Andover, where he introduced such topics as immigration, labor unions, capitalism, crime, and disease in his courses on pastoral theology.

Tucker became president of a troubled Dartmouth in 1893 and helped strengthen the college, building its enrollment from three hundred to one thousand and modernizing the curriculum. After his retirement he wrote several illuminating volumes on his times.

Bibliography
A: The Making and the Unmaking of the Preacher (Boston, 1898); Personal Power (Boston, 1910); Public Mindedness (Concord, Mass., 1910); The Function of the Church in Modern Society (Boston, 1911); The New Reservation of Time (Boston, 1916); My Generation: An Autobiographical Interpretation (Boston, 1919).
B: DAB 19, 41-42; DARB, 475-76; NCAB 24,242; NYT 30 September 1926, 25; SH 12, 22-24,