John Emerson Roberts: Kansas City's ''Up-To-Date'' Freethought Preacher

By Ellen Roberts Young

John Emerson Roberts (1853 - 1942) was a Kansas City, Missouri, success story. Arriving in 1881 as a Baptist minister, his developing ideas led him to abandon the idea of hell and become a Unitarian. Soon that became too limited for him and he decided to preach on his own as a freethinker. The local press eagerly followed his progress. While his intellectual journey was common in his generation, he was unique in creating a Church of freethought. His sermons and lectures show a mixture of original thinking and conventional ideas typical of his time. As an admirer of Robert Ingersoll, the nineteenth century agnostic, and a friend of Clarence Darrow, the twentieth century atheist, Robertss career spans an era of significant change in both cultural and intellectual history.


This pioneering study restores to memory the life and work of a once noted and popular religious leader, who went from Baptist pastor to Unitarian minister, and finally to an independent role in the Freethought movement. Informed by profound scholarship and a warmly humanist style, this book is a major contribution to the intellectual history of the Midwest.
Fred Whitehead, author of Freethought on the American Frontier.

This biography of the authors great-grandfather evokes vividly the now largely forgotten world of the heyday of liberal religion, free thought, and the urban lecture hall in an age when religion was fiercely competitive in the burgeoning cities of the Midwest.
Peter Williams, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies, Miami University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462876938

Ellen Roberts Young

Dr. Ellen Roberts Young is an independent scholar who has taught American Religion in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This biography grew out of her Ph. D. dissertation, “Discourse vs. Doctrine: Authority and Ambiguity in Late Nineteenth Century Protestant Preaching,” at Temple University.

Book preview

John Emerson Roberts

Kansas City’s Up-to-date Freethought Preacher

ELLEN ROBERTS YOUNG

Copyright © 2011 by Ellen Roberts Young.

Cover photographs courtesy of Jackson County Historical Society Archives, Independence, MO.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2011910358

ISBN:         Hardcover                           978-1-4628-7692-1

                   Softcover                            978-1-4628-7691-4

                   Ebook                                 978-1-4628-7693-8

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For my father

Paul Roberts

Author and Grammarian

1917-1967

Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

Youthful Decision

2

A Traditional Baptist Education

3

Baptist Preacher in Kansas City

4

New Member of the Unitarian Fellowship

5

Return to Kansas City

6

Most Popular Preacher

7

The Church of This World

8

Preaching to Suit the New Century

9

Hopes for Expansion

10

Freethought Colleagues, New Complications

11

Years of Crisis

12

Personal Choices Made Public

13

Sojourn in Chicago

14

Billy Sunday: Threat and Opportunity

15

New Beginning, New Colleagues

16

"Just a Bunch of People Gathered to

Hear Me Talk"

APPENDIX

Extant Publications of John Emerson Roberts

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Sources

Works Cited

NOTES

The name of the church is the Church of This World, and one might very easily fancy the name most appropriate, nor does the pastor of the church resent any such allegation.

We don’t deal with anything of which we have no knowledge, said Mr. Roberts last evening. We have quit fooling with phantoms and ghosts and the future…

The Kansas City up-to-date minister moved off, thus concluding the interview.

Interview with J. E. Roberts in

Grand Rapids, Michigan,

reported in the Battle Creek Daily Journal,

June 10, 1899.

PREFACE

John Emerson Roberts (1853-1942) was a renowned preacher in Kansas City for many decades. He became known and respected as a freethinker well beyond that location but was essentially forgotten by the time he died. A number of factors contributed to this forgetting. Other more important aspects provide good reasons to bring him back to public attention.

The primary factor accounting for his being forgotten is the ephemeral nature of sermons. Sermons as printed documents rarely retain interest as other kinds of writing do. Roberts had many contemporaries, in many denominations, who were powerful and popular preachers. If remembered now, it is not for their sermons. Russell Conwell, for instance, who preached to thousands twice each Sunday for decades, is remembered for founding Temple University or for the lecture he gave repeatedly across the county, Acres of Diamonds. Henry Ward Beecher, a preacher Roberts admired, is remembered for his stance on slavery, his famous sister, or, by social historians, his scandalous trial. Both of these men and many others published volumes of sermons which, if they survive at all, clutter up the back shelves in used book stores unsold. When one adds to this the fact that Roberts lived well into the twentieth century, when oratory of his style was no longer appreciated, and new ideas and concerns pulled thinkers away from the positive views Roberts proclaimed, his being forgotten is no surprise.

Roberts is worthy of a biography now because of the way he was both typical and exceptional in his time. Starting on a trajectory shared with many other educated people, he reached a leadership position and gave it a unique twist. He served as a lens for his era as one of many who abandoned their traditional Christian faith in the face of new ideas. He went far beyond the majority of his peers in using his oratorical skills to proclaim a faith in humanity based on reason. One of a handful of orators who set up rationalist organizations for weekly lectures, he was the only one to call his organization a church, the Church of This World. Where others asked their listeners to abandon faith for reason, Roberts gave his listeners a way to maintain faith—in a divine nature and in progress. His use of religious language in denouncing the old religion made him very popular with people just learning to think as he did. His organization lasted an unusually long time, though his preaching was the only reason for its existence.

In addition to the force and tenacity of his preaching, Roberts’s story brings forward a variety of other freethinkers with whom he came in contact. In addition to men and a few women who spoke before weekly audiences as he did, Roberts was friends with two of the greatest freethought heroes in American history, Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow. Roberts serves as a link between the genteel nineteenth-century world of the former and the harsher, franker twentieth-century world of the latter. Though both were attorneys, Ingersoll and Darrow operated in different spheres which did not overlap. Each came to represent freethought for his era. Observing the world as Roberts experienced it and acted in it across the turn of the last century helps to bridge the gap between them.

John Emerson Roberts was my father’s grandfather. No stories or materials by or about him reached my generation. This might have been different if my father had not died before I became interested enough in my own heritage to ask questions; by the time I had those questions, my family had also lost track of what few cousins we had known. There may be others still living, who could add to this story.

When I began my research, I did not even know Dr. Roberts’s first name, due to an error in my grandfather’s death certificate. As is usually the case for someone who has no descendant anxious to retain his records, the search for information about him was dependent on a wide variety of sources, ranging from small clues in deed records to lengthy but sometimes erroneous newspaper reports. One element which is still unclear is when and how Rev. Roberts became Dr. Roberts. No record has been found of his earning the degree. Did he simply decide to add it to his name? Did others assume it for him, and he chose to let it stand? The use of the title is sporadic, but first appears in newspaper reports in the early 1890s. Roberts is inconsistent in his use of the title in his publications. His later work usually gives his full name, suggesting that he was aware of, and did not want to be confused with, at least one other John E. Roberts.

When I first learned about Dr. Roberts, I wondered how it was possible for someone to make a living as an independent preacher of freethought. As I learned more about the man himself, I found qualities that seem to have reappeared among his descendants. Where speculation intrudes, as it occasionally does, on the factual data and his own words which make up the substance of this study, it is based on these parallels with later family members.

Ellen Roberts Young

April 2011

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted first of all to Dr. Katie Cannon, who taught me how a sermon is constructed and guided me through the dissertation process at Temple University, where I began my research.

Second, but of greater depth, is my debt to Fred Whitehead, freethought historian of Kansas City, Kansas, whom I met through his book Freethought on the American Frontier. He shared his own expertise and mentioned my project to others, who provided many pieces of information and references. He introduced me to people on my first trip to Kansas City in 1994 and has supported my work throughout the process.

On that first trip to Kansas City, I met John Weston, then pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church, and church members who were interested in the history of the organization, particularly Jim Gill, Elizabeth Gerber, and Walt and Caren Wells. The church’s library contains several volumes of Roberts’s sermons. The animosity felt when Roberts drew away many of the church’s members in 1897 has long since been replaced by interest in his service to the congregation and his later work.

I have had invaluable help from genealogical researchers who tracked down documents, especially Fred Lee in Kansas City and Shirley M. DeBoer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. David Jackson at the Jackson County Historical Society and Randy Roberts at Pittsburg State University’s Special Collections have given me needed aid on my visits to their archives. I was also fortunate in living within visiting distance of the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library during much of my work. This good fortune was replaced with another kind of good fortune when I moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and joined a lively community of writers. I am particularly indebted to Wayne Crawford, Joan Glicker, and Susan Bagby for their critique of my work in progress.

I am indebted also to a man who seems to be as elusive as J. E. Roberts was at the beginning of my research. Irving Levy donated to the New York Public Library a large collection of small works under the general heading of Anti-Christianity. It was there that I first found several of Roberts’s published sermons, including The Inevitable Surrender of Orthodoxy and Ingersoll and His Times. It remains the only source I know of for two sermons, Henry Ford’s Attack on the Jews and the Thanksgiving Sermon of 1916.

INTRODUCTION

John Emerson Roberts lived through the transition of the United States from a rural to an urban culture. Born in Ohio in 1853, he grew up on farms but did his preaching in cities, primarily Kansas City, Missouri. Roberts was typical of his era in the way his thinking developed from conservative Christianity to a set of liberal beliefs that left traditional Christianity behind. Trained in rhetoric and elocution at a Baptist college, he became a Baptist minister in 1878, a Unitarian in 1885, and a freethought lecturer in 1897. He was an eloquent speaker in an era when fine lectures were a major form of public entertainment.

The term freethought applies to a long tradition in Europe of those who would think for themselves against the strictures of a state religion. In its most basic sense, a freethinker is anyone who thinks things through rather than accepting any idea or dogma without examination. Freethinkers in American history have been those who opposed religious orthodoxies of all kinds. To a greater or lesser extent, they also have campaigned against religion taking too strong a role in the public sphere. The freethought movement, which has never been very organized because independent thinkers always have disagreements as well as agreements, claims among its American heroes, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, and particularly Thomas Paine. Robert Ingersoll was soon added to this pantheon after his death in 1899.

In 1900, liberal or freethought societies could be found in most major American cities. Some had brief histories, others lasted for decades. Many followed the church schedule of holding lectures on Sunday mornings, others preferred Sunday afternoons or other times. Roberts was unique, however, in that he shared his beliefs in the form of church, creating the Church of This World as his freethought pulpit. Though others lectured on freethought topics on Sunday mornings, only he called his organization a church. The Church of This World survived for over thirty years.

Two entities played key roles in Roberts’s success. The first was Kansas City itself. Roberts’s career was closely linked to Kansas City. When Roberts first arrived in 1881, Kansas City was just moving out of its Wild West phase. He and the city matured together; Roberts found his greatest success there in each of his three religious stages. The young city attracted strong civic leaders and enterprising businessmen who saw its potential. Though it had its times of boom and bust (as did Roberts), it developed quickly, first as a rail hub and later as an industrial center. Many of the city’s business leaders were liberal thinkers, who supported the institutions Roberts developed. Roberts had an optimistic view of life, which Kansas Citians shared.

The second major element was The Truth Seeker, the longest surviving and most widely read freethought publication in the United States. Founded in Illinois by D. M. Bennett in 1873, the paper moved to New York under Eugene M. MacDonald, who took over as editor in 1883. MacDonald was assisted by his brother George, who in turn became editor in 1909, giving the paper long-term consistent leadership. A weekly publication in newspaper format, The Truth Seeker supported the recognition of Thomas Paine and other infidels and published work by people like Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It opposed blue laws and postal censorship and reveled in stories that exposed the human failings of clergy and religious institutions. From 1899, when Ingersoll’s attention to Roberts brought Roberts to the attention of the editors, The Truth Seeker frequently published Roberts’s lectures, often giving them the front page. The publisher also became a distributor for Roberts’s printed works. Although Kansas City was somewhat in the cultural sphere of Chicago, which was second only to New York in the number of freethought leaders and activities, residents of each of these cities probably got the news of activity in the other location through reading The Truth Seeker.

Dr. Roberts had an innate talent for public speaking which was honed in college and seminary. His success depended also on the good fortune of finding the right location and good contacts. He discovered a niche as a popular preacher in Kansas City early on and was able to return there after temporary absences as his ideas changed. When, influenced by Robert Ingersoll, Roberts committed himself to preaching freethought, he soon found a channel to an audience beyond Kansas City in freethought gatherings and publications.

1

Youthful Decision

In 1869, John Emerson Roberts ran away from home. He was sixteen. His father had just died in the Michigan Asylum for the Insane in Kalamazoo. His two elder brothers had left home, leaving him to be the man of the family for his mother and four younger siblings. Perhaps this was more responsibility than he was ready to bear. Many years later, Dr. Roberts told a newspaper interviewer that his plan was to go to New Orleans and become a sailor.

John’s father, William Smith Roberts, was a native of Ohio.¹ The first record of him is in the list of the first class of Granville Literary and Theological Institution (now Denison University) which opened its doors in 1831. William was then twenty-two years old and his home is listed as Sunbury, Delaware County, Ohio; no link has been found to any of the several Roberts families known to be living in that county at the time. Because of his middle name, it is tempting to think that William Smith Roberts might be the son of a couple, John Roberts and Elizabeth Smith, who obtained a marriage license in Fairfield County, Ohio, in 1807. Unfortunately, nothing more is known of this couple, not even whether or where they acted on that license to marry.

The list of students at Granville in 1831 was apparently compiled as they signed up.² There is no order and no classification other than whether they intended to take the Classical or the English course. Thirty-seven men and boys are listed, ranging in age from eight to thirty-seven. All but ten are residents of Granville. On December 13, 1831, John Pratt, newly elected principal, met with those who had so far registered and proceeded to organize the classes. The history indicates that about twenty students were present that opening day. William Roberts is thirty-third in the list, so it is likely that he missed that opening meeting. The historical report states that five members of this student body intended to become preachers, but the five are not identified.

Granville had no graduating class until 1840, when three men received their diplomas; none of the original enrolling students were among them. In those nine years, many students had come and gone, as the college gradually took shape. William Roberts attended for seven quarterly terms, from the winter of 1831 to the fall of 1835. He was in the classical course, heavy in Latin and Greek, which was the traditional training for pastors. Though he received no diploma, he learned enough to be ordained as a minister in 1836. His first church has not been identified.

William began the unsettled and poorly remunerated life of a Baptist preacher, serving churches in four Ohio counties from 1837 to 1855. Many small churches have incomplete records of their early years, and his pastorates are largely unknown. He was in Delaware County in 1839, where he bought a piece of property. He was in Union County in the early 1840s, long enough to meet and marry Henrietta Skinner in 1842. He was a resident of Licking County, where Granville is located, in 1843, when he sold his Delaware County property at a loss. Licking, Delaware, and Union counties are contiguous, forming an east-west band in the center of Ohio, north of Columbus. This was farm country that was filling up rapidly.

William’s most successful pastorate was at the New Carlisle Baptist Church in Clark County, where he served at least from 1845 to 1848; his first two sons, William and Charles, were born there. He left the congregation in good shape, for they completed a new building in 1850. But for William Roberts, things apparently went downhill; in 1850, he and his family, including a third son born that year, were living with Henrietta’s parents back in Marysville, Union County.

Both Aaron and Alice Skinner, Henrietta’s parents, were fifth-generation Americans.³ Alice was the daughter of Thomas Brockway, minister of the Congregational Church in Columbia. Aaron came from Colchester, fourteen miles away.⁴ Alice joined the church at age eighteen, and married Aaron Skinner at twenty. The couple lived in Colchester for four years and then moved to Geneseo, in Livingston County, New York, where they had a typically large family of eleven children, seven of whom reached adulthood. Henrietta was the ninth. At least two were already starting their own lives in the Geneseo area when Aaron and Alice moved the rest of their family to Ohio in 1835.

Though Henrietta never knew her grandfather Brockway, her mother’s respect for the ministry and for education was evidently passed on to her. Alice would no doubt have preferred a more settled minister for a son-in-law—especially if he could be settled nearby. On the other hand, she would have rejoiced in having the Roberts family in her home for religious as well as personal reasons; it was service to God to offer hospitality to a clergyman. And it may be that the home of the successful Skinner family provided the best lodging around.

While Henrietta’s schooling is not recorded, there is a record of her teaching. She taught for one term, the summer of 1839, in the village of Richwood, about fifteen miles north of Marysville. She was then twenty years old. Since the distance from Marysville was too far for a daily commute, it is likely that she followed the usual practice of boarding with one of the families. Only the one term is recorded at Richwood, but Henrietta probably taught at other schools whose records have been lost.

In frontier communities of the mid-nineteenth century, competent adults who could not read or write were not uncommon. William and Henrietta were more than literate. The fact that he had taken college classes and she had been a school teacher made the couple more educated than was the norm. They would raise their children in an intellectual, yet heavily Bible based, environment.

Alice Brockway Skinner and her infant grandson, Lathrop Roberts, both died of dysentery in 1851. Dysentery was one of the diseases that periodically swept through pioneer communities, taking the weak, both old and young, while the strong survived. The two deceased family members were buried in adjacent plots in Oakdale Cemetery.

Within a year of these deaths, William had a new call, to Fredonia, in Licking County. He and Henrietta and their two surviving children were off on their own again. Here, in 1853, their fourth child, John Emerson, was born. But by 1855, the family had moved on to Franklin, Indiana. Two years later, they moved to the Battle Creek area of Michigan. Although William did serve a congregation outside Battle Creek, what drew the family there was the web of Skinner connections. Two of Henrietta’s brothers, T. B. and William Skinner, were becoming successful in the town of Battle Creek; her widowed father moved to the area in the same year as the Roberts family.

The activities of the Roberts family during the decade before William Roberts’s death are reconstructed primarily from deed records. Following their move from Indiana, the family’s first property in Michigan was a five-acre parcel north of Battle Creek, which Henrietta bought in 1858. A year later, they acquired 138 acres south of the growing city. But becoming settled was not easy. Henrietta sold the first property to her brother at a loss in 1860, and two years later they sold thirty-five of their acres to a neighbor. Forty of their remaining acres were mortgaged, and these were sold in 1864.

In 1863, William spent some time in Jackson, serving as chaplain to the soldiers who were encamped there.⁵ Since eldest son William was away at school in Kalamazoo, this left fifteen-year-old Charles in charge of plowing and sowing. John, only nine, probably did not see much change in his chores. The father’s temporary absence to serve as a chaplain was the only immediate impact of the Civil War on the family.

In February 1865, Henrietta purchased a house in downtown Battle Creek. Perhaps she wanted the advantages of town living for her children. Perhaps she wanted medical attention for her husband; it was around this time that William Roberts was diagnosed with melancholia. The life in town lasted a little over two years. In May 1867, Henrietta sold the town property to the Seeley family, from whom she purchased in turn 167 acres in Leroy Township, farther from Battle Creek, a little closer to Kalamazoo. The farm cost about twice what the town property sold for.

The move back to a farm suggests that William was doing better: that at least he had enough energy to work again. By this time, William Jr. was married to Alice Sterling and living in Kalamazoo. Charles was nineteen and John was thirteen. The younger children were Alice (11), Mary (9), Frances (5) and Horace (3). When William’s illness grew worse again, a large burden should have fallen on Charles and John. Yet, in the fall of 1868, Charles went away to college.

The fact that the second son had now gone away to school shows the importance of education in the family. This was the case, although the family was clearly not well off, since they often had to sell at a loss property which should have been a means of gain, especially in this time of local population increase. John’s early years were also characterized by a very conservative religious practice. He would remember all his life the strictness of Sundays when he was a child; they were to him a joyless time that made him long for Monday. John’s childhood lacked stability as the family moved every few years, even after they arrived in the Battle Creek area. Added to poor income, the pressure of being a preacher’s kid and the frequent moves was the fact that John’s father suffered from melancholia, that is, serious depression.

The understanding of mental illness, like the understanding of physical health and illness, was a matter of great debate in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was an era of water cures and extreme diets, of wild and comprehensive theories about causes. Ellen White started the Seventh Day Adventists, with their focus on