War, Peace, and Social Conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite Ethics

By Theron F. Schlabach

John Howard Yoder is one of the best-known Mennonite thinkers on peace. But before Yoder there was Guy F. Hershberger, whose reflections on war, violence and peace helped Mennonites navigate perilous times in early to mid-20th century, and who also laid the foundation for what became the Alternative Service Program in the U.S. during World War II. In the 1960s, he played an important role in guiding the Mennonite church’s response to the civil rights movement—nudging them toward greater openness to Martin Luther King’s call for justice for African-Americans.

In this definitive biography, Theron F. Schlabach shows how Hershberger helped Christians live their faith in a world beset by war and injustice, at the same time pioneering creative ways to engage pressing concerns such as civil rights, economic justice and capital punishment.

Says Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School: “What Schlabach has given us is an invaluable, honest account of a life lived in the tensions of the Mennonite church as that church explored the implications of being a people committed to nonviolence. The resulting account is a crucial account not only of Hershberger’s life, but of Mennonite life—an accounting I hope non-Mennonites will find instructive because it may help them understand Mennonites, but more importantly how Mennonites help us better understand what being Christian entails.”

War, Peace, and Social Conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite Ethics was made possible through the generous support of Mennonite Mutual Aid and the Mennonite Historical Society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herald Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9780836198089

Theron F. Schlabach

Theron F. Schlabach taught history at Goshen (Indiana) College from 1965 to 1998. He holds a masters and PhD in U.S. social history from the University of Wisconsin, where he attended as a Danforth Fellow. He was editor of the Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History Series and The Mennonite Experience in America Series, and he served as interim editor of The Mennonite Quarterly Review. From 1995 to 1997 he was Senior Fellow of the Young Center for the Study of Anabaptist and Pietist Groups, at Elizabethtown (Pennsylvania) College. His previous books include: Gospel Versus Gospel: Mission and the Mennonite Church, 1863-1944 and Peace, Faith, Nation: Mennonites and Amish in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schlabach, Theron F.

War, peace, and social conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite ethics / Theron F. Schlabach.

     p. cm.—(Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite history; no. 45)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8361-9426-5 (hardcover)

1. Hershberger, Guy F. (Guy Franklin), 1896-1989. 2. Christian ethics-Mennonite authors. I. Title.

BJ1278.5.H47S35 2009

241’.0497092-dc22

2009009434

Scripture is from the New Revised Standard Version, Copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches in the USA, used by permission.

WAR, PEACE, AND SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

Copyright © 2009 by Herald Press, Scottdale, Pa. 15683

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Herald Press,

  Waterloo, Ont. N2L 6H7. All rights reserved

International Standard Book Number: 978-0-8361-9426-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2009009434

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Reuben Graham; book design by Joshua Byler

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To order or request information please call

1-800-245-7894 or visit www.heraldpress.com.

To all who live and proclaim

or earnestly seek, or diligently study

The Gospel of Peace

Contents

Foreword by Steven M. Nolt

Preface

Part I: Preparation of a Churchman

 1. An Earnest Young Man

 2. Hard Training

 3. Moving Toward Leadership

Part II: Forging a Mennonite Ethical Consensus

 4. The Rights of Conscience: Alternative Service, CPS, and Other Arrangements

 5. War, Peace, and Nonresistance

Part III: Visions for Life and Witness as a People of God

 6. Mennonite Community and Mennonite Church: Subtle Changes in Thought

 7. For Harmony and Noncoercion in Labor Relations

 8. Mutual Aid: Vision and Institution

Part IV: Several Particular Encounters

 9. Encountering Niebuhr: Definitions of Social Responsibility

10. Tenacity to a Fault

Part V: Teacher, Scholar, Biblical Pacifist

11. Teaching and More Writing

12. Race and Another Look at Nonviolent Resistance

13. Engaged to the End

Afterword

Abbreviations in Notes and Bibliography

Notes

Bibliography

Photo Credits

Index

Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History Series

The Author

Foreword

Discerning a path of faithful Christianity, theologians have suggested, is a bit like writing a missing scene for a newly discovered Shakespearean drama. On the one hand, the task demands imagination and originality. On the other, the scenes that precede and follow impose major constraints on the one to be completed. After all, there are already themes, characters, and a plot to be taken into account, and the storyline must move toward the anticipated conclusion. Faithful living, like script writing, involves balance and creativity amid a cast of flawed characters and their props.

Mennonite historian and ethicist Guy F. Hershberger engaged in this sort of creative and constrained work as he sought to articulate, sharpen, and cultivate a social conscience among North American Mennonites during the decisive middle decades of the twentieth century. Hershberger came of age during the First World War and died just weeks after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, living through what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called an age of extremes.¹ Against that backdrop, Hershberger sought to show how Christians might live their part in a world beset by war and injustice. Moreover, he insisted that their part flow from a consistent ethic, unchanged but progressively revealed by God as the story unfolded. As well, any scene-stages today must anticipate in every way the coming reign of God’s shalom, which Hershberger took to be the certain culmination of the divine drama to which he had committed himself.

As a historian and social scientist, Hershberger was keenly aware of the characters and plot lines provided by earlier scenes: his people’s Anabaptist heritage, his own study of eighteenth-century Quakers, and his understanding of the role of institutions in modern life. He also insisted that biblicism and a thoroughgoing theology of the church were constraints that enlivened rather than diminished the story’s characters. The witness of the church would be a collective movement, directed by Christ and involving those who claimed the story as their own.

But Hershberger’s work was equally notable for its creativity and the way his expansive vision transcended traditional parameters. He cast Old and New Testament theologies in new ways, and he understood peace as more than the rejection of war. He nurtured community life in a modern context and pioneered creative engagement with pressing concerns of labor relations, economic justice, and capital punishment. He made space on the stage for Mennonites of color to play leading parts. Along the way, he engaged critics and recruited new talent. In the turbulent scene of human history that was the twentieth century, when chaos and debilitating fear sometimes threatened to stop all the action, Guy Hershberger never gave up patient and persistent efforts at living and refining biblical pacifism.

War, Peace, and Social Conscience is an insightful account of Mennonite life and thought set against a richly detailed backdrop. Historian Theron F. Schlabach is remarkably suited to guide readers in understanding this drama. For many years Schlabach has been immersed in the sources, the historical context, and the theology of the times; no one is more familiar with the North American Mennonite story explored here. This biography is the product of mature scholarship and churchly perspective. Moreover, the book ranges beyond specifically Mennonite themes to engage subjects such as U.S. labor history, the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, and the civil rights movement.

Like the Christian ethics it rehearses, this book is also, in important ways, a product of collective effort. Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History (SAMH) thanks the community of scholars who assisted in reading and commenting on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and particularly professor Rachel Waltner Goossen, who provided significant editorial service. SAMH also gratefully acknowledges support from Mennonite Mutual Aid and its Fraternal Benefits Ministry for a contribution underwriting this volume.

SAMH is pleased to present War, Peace, and Social Conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite Ethics as a contribution to a fuller understanding of the past and to the ongoing process of ethical discernment by communities seeking faithfully and creatively to play divinely inspired parts of hope and integrity in a human drama too often marked by violence and injustice.

Steven M. Nolt, Series Editor

Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History

Goshen College

Preface

Guy F. Hershberger lived from 1896 to 1989, that is, through most of the twentieth century. If may you live in interesting times! really was an ancient Chinese curse, Hershberger might have felt its spell. The century was full of imperialism and racism, of totalitarians who used modern methods to organize brutality and oppression, and of terrible warfare. Nations who championed democracy still embraced the old faith in arms and war for protection, to the point that they exceeded even their totalitarian enemies in developing and using weapons of violence. Meanwhile, science and modernity produced vast changes in the people’s economic and social lives, often with wrenching effects on the established patterns of neighborhoods and communities. Just when Hershberger was approaching his prime years of life, those changes brought a devastating economic depression to farm and factory, triggered sharp and sometimes violent clashes between large-scale employers and organized workers, and added to the already pervasive violence of American racism.

Interesting times indeed, and seemingly cursed. But of course for Christian prophets and others of creative goodwill, such eras are also times to speak out. Whether or not Hershberger deserves the label prophet, he certainly was a Christian of irrepressible goodwill and a human being who faced his times creatively. He did so from a solid foundation of biblical faith, expressed through social engagement based on a distinct version of biblical pacifism. Indeed, if pacifism mainly invokes images of seeking alternatives to international wars, he offered more: for society at home, he set forth a biblical and more-or-less evangelical version of social gospel. Although trained as a historian, and although he also taught sociology, he made his main contributions in Christian ethics. With a strong sense of church, he did so as a Mennonite churchman; but he also gained quite a hearing beyond Mennonites—among other historic peace churches, among both evangelicals and ecumenicals, and now and then among politicians. In certain ways, people of the dominant Protestant school of Christian ethics of his day, those of the Niebuhrian or Christian Action persuasion, also listened.

Nor did Hershberger only articulate ideas academically, among intellectuals and church leaders: he also was a man of the people and of action. This biography is a large one because it needs to tell the stories and probe the issues of the hard work he did to translate biblical pacifism into policies, institutions, and other practical applications. Hershberger taught, wrote, and conducted grass-roots education in congregations and conferences, but he also spent vast amounts of time negotiating labor relations, conducting surveys designed to strengthen Christian communities, traveling for his church to work at race relations, working as a key shaper of the extensive benevolent institutions known as Mennonite Mutual Aid, and more.

Indeed, next to the ways Hershberger articulated Mennonites’ biblical pacifism, a second major theme of his life was how effective he was at creating and shaping new institutions and programs. He grew up in what has been called the Progressive Era of United States history, a time when reformers had great faith that by applying science and intelligence, humans could solve the major problems of an industrialized society. More directly, he grew up after several decades of the Mennonite Quickening, the leaders of which taught youth that new institutions and programs—especially for mission, education, and benevolence— were the signs of a vigorous church, and that being active within them was a strong mark of personal spirituality. As both a trained historian and a teacher of sociology, Hershberger was keenly aware of the times and social circumstances in which he worked. At the same time, he seemed less aware that even the church’s institutions and programs might develop internal ethics and logics that would not always fit well with the biblical pacifism he espoused. Another reason for this book’s length is that I have tried to examine what happened to Hershberger’s own ethics in the actual operation of programs and institutions he helped create.

A third theme of this biography is Hershberger’s persistence in biblical pacifism in an era when all pacifism chafed under sharp and powerful criticism from the most important American Protestant ethicist of the century, Reinhold Niebuhr. Hershberger appreciated some of Niebuhr’s ideas to the point that some scholars have suggested that the Protestant thinker’s pervasive influence goes far to explain key elements of Hershberger’s thought. That suggestion is a question through much of this book, even beyond a chapter on the subject; and I have tried to answer it.

A fourth theme is Hershberger’s frequently complicated relations with critics in his own church. Some prominent ones, even some friends, constantly scrutinized his thought and work, and then spoke and wrote in forthright opposition. He came to call them the radicals; mainly they were an outspoken few among his church’s fundamentalists. Although the disputes sometimes turned on differing ways to read the Bible, most of the quarrels were less about basic doctrine than about whether or how to carry out witness that had social and political implications. To the end of his career and beyond, Hershberger was deeply and personally conscious of this theme. No biography of him would be accurate without it.

In his own church, Hershberger and his ideas largely prevailed—^thus, a major reason for this biography. So was he a heroic figure? Not exactly. Hershberger was no individualist, and with his high regard for church and his firm grounding in it, he never pretended to heroism in either substance or style. He always worked corporately. He always let himself be accountable to fellow believers, even to his critics. Moreover, as this biography shows, in many ways he was quite an ordinary human, with limitations, idiosyncrasies, and antipathies, and occasionally with inappropriate responses. I do not write heroic history; it is not my genre. I trust that readers will find that my critical faculties were active in this work. The Guy F. Hershberger of this biography was an earnest and fairly humble yet influential churchman. But he was not a giant who overshadowed all around him.

Some may call this volume a life and times book, not merely a biography. I have doubts about that distinction, certainly for Hershberger’s case. Given who he was, an account of Hershberger and his contributions has to explore the church of his time. Further, it must often invoke the larger intellectual and American contexts of pacifism and certain other social ideas of his day. Conversely, another major reason to study this ultimately humble and sometimes odd person is to understand the broader Christian networks and communities in which he worked and that he helped build. So this book is a biography and more. If it succeeds, it will clarify and evaluate Hershberger’s model of biblical pacifism. Further, it will offer much about the Mennonite churches and their people in the twentieth century, something about pacifism among Christians more broadly, and insights into certain aspects of American social and ethical thought.

My debts and acknowledgments are many—more than I can mention. During the early stages of my project in the mid-1990s, the Young Center for the Study of Anabaptist and Pietist Groups (now the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies) at Elizabethtown (Pennsylvania) College opened time and other resources for me by appointing me senior fellow in residence for two years. For that I thank the center, its board, Elizabethtown College, and particularly the very reputable and personable Mennonite sociologist who was then the center’s director, Donald B. Kraybill.

In later stages, the Mennonite Historical Society and Mennonite Mutual Aid (now doing business as MMA) gave generous grants for the book’s publication. And as this book’s notes and bibliography show, throughout my research many persons granted interviews in which they were generous with their time, patient with my questions, forthcoming with their answers, and consistently honest. I thank each one, and profusely thank especially two: Clara Hooley Hershberger, Guy’s spouse for more than seventy years, who responded with a generous spirit and a mind that, even in her late nineties, was agile, quick to grasp the subtlest of questions, and always a rich resource; and the Hershbergers’ son, Paul, who was helpful with sources, reflective and candid, enthusiastic, and highly informative.

Meanwhile, my own family gave fine support. Throughout long years of research and writing, Sara Kauffman Schlabach, my spouse now of five decades, responded to it and to me with a deft and loving combination of patience and impatience. Some special thanks go also to our son Gerald, who, being himself a professor of Christian ethics, often nudged this book along with insightful conversation.

Outside the family were those wonderful people, so helpful and crucial to any book of this sort, the librarians and the archivists. I cannot imagine a more service-minded and pleasant set than Joe Springer and Erin Miller in the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College, and Marilyn Voran, Cathy Hochstetler, Ruth Schrock, Dennis Stoesz, and John Sharp of the Mennonite Church Archives. John A. Lapp—fellow historian, long-time friend, and a Mennonite churchman in the Guy Hershberger tradition—carefully read a very long version of this manuscript, caught some errors, and favored me and the book with rich comments and encouragement.

At a later stage I enjoyed even more systematic help from Steven M. Nolt, editor of the Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History series, and from Rachel Waltner Goossen, a fine friend and scholar who generously took up an SAMH request that she help edit this particular volume. Working through the manuscript ever so carefully and insightfully, she made hundreds of astute suggestions for shortening it and improving the wording. Nolt added to that process, got me to remove various glitches, and was gracious when I wanted to keep some wording as I had it. I have been an editor myself, but I know very well that even editors need editors. I thank Goossen and Nolt both for their fine work and for their gracious spirit as they did it.

Finally, my thanks go to all who pick up this book and peruse it. No book achieves its purposes, no book succeeds, without the engaged minds and efforts of its readers. Thank you.

Theron F. Schlabach

Goshen College

Part I

Preparation of a Churchman

1

An Earnest Young Man

Give my whole life to the church—why.

—Twenty-six-year-old Guy F. Hershberger, outlining a letter to a cousin, in 1923¹

In family lore, Guy F. Hershberger’s career as a professor and peace thinker for his church began with his Grandpa and Grandma Kempf. Samuel Kempf and Barbara Mishler married in 1868,² a time when many Amish congregations in North America were choosing whether to be tradition-minded old order or more change-minded Amish Mennonite.³ The majority became the latter, and within fifty years most of them would merge into one or another Mennonite group and lose the Amish name. For his time and place, Samuel Kempf was relatively progressive—dressing neatly, trimming his beard, attending the University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City, and becoming a schoolteacher.⁴ So he and Barbara became Amish Mennonite. In 1879 they and others developed a new congregation, which soon joined the Western Amish Mennonite Conference. Later, part of it took the name East Union.⁵ Situated near Kalona in southeastern Iowa, East Union would be the church in which Guy F. Hershberger grew up.

In those years, youth from Amish families often left the Amish churches. Of six children of Barbara and Samuel Kempf who grew to adulthood (all daughters), three did and apparently three did not. Of those who stayed, one was Dorinda, nicknamed Dora. Somewhat like her father, she also studied at an academy in Iowa City and for a few years was a schoolteacher. On Thanksgiving Day 1895, she and Ephraim Hershberger, an Amish Mennonite from northern Indiana, married.⁶ They settled on the eighty-acre Kempf farm, where Dora’s mother now lived as a widow. After a time they purchased it. On December 3, 1896, their first child, Guy Franklin, was born. Over the next sixteen years, four daughters and four more sons would come.⁷

Ephraim and Dorinda (Dora) Kempf Hershberger, Hershberger’s parents in their youth. The photo was probably taken before they had become members of the Amish Mennonite church.

Guy F. Hershberger’s parents were solid members of the community, but not outstanding. In church Ephraim served as trustee, janitor, and member of a building committee. A grandson’s impression was that even in later life, he was wiry, energetic, and a go-getter. Others have remembered him as leading an orderly home without being overbearing or dictatorial or using harsh discipline. It was he who organized the children for both house chores and farm work. Sons as well as daughters had to help in the house, and that training would pay off for Guy: early in his marriage to Clara Hooley, he would share quite a bit of the housework, as Clara taught school. Dora’s strength was that she continued to be the teacher, apparently quite creatively. At church she regularly taught a Sunday school class and was active in the women’s sewing circle. At home she kept a prominent blackboard on which she displayed Bible verses, changing them as she studied.⁸

Ephraim and Dora’s family participated fully in East Union’s worship and fellowship. At home, along with those Bible verses to learn from Dora’s blackboard, they had daily devotions. However, during Guy’s adolescent years, East Union offered no program specifically for young people’s social life. For that, the youth depended on folk parties, such as bobsledding in winter.⁹

Economically and otherwise, the home of Guy’s parents was modest. Dora made dolls by unraveling Ephraim’s worn socks and rolling the thread, then decorating the dolls with fancy stitches. In his shop, Ephraim made games.¹⁰ He also built some of the family’s furniture. The family was sufficiently well off that in time they had a Buick, not just a Model T Ford. Yet after Clara and Guy lived with them for a time, Clara saw that making money was not their top priority.¹¹ They lived long, and late in life they ran out of cash. Ephraim died in 1959 at ninety, Dora in 1962 at ninety-three.¹²

Currents Affecting East Union

By the time of Guy’s youth, a generation or more had passed since a widespread awakening, or Quickening, in the so-called old Mennonite (later called MC Mennonite¹³) and Amish-Mennonite churches. That movement had brought a much faster pace, a new activism, and new programs and institutions: Sunday schools, publishing, revival meetings, young people’s Bible meetings, home and foreign missions, homes for the elderly and other caring institutions, and colleges. Such endeavors became the mark of Mennonite and Amish progressivism.¹⁴

Congregations in the Kalona area had changed only cautiously, yet as he moved from adolescence to young adulthood Guy Hershberger caught the Quickening’s spirit. Throughout life, as he recalled his boyhood he fondly remembered revival meetings at East Union led by an exceptionally progressive and golden-tongued Mennonite evangelist, John (J. E.) Hartzler, around 1906. But he remembered also that around 1915, when he eighteen, he perceived that Iowa’s Amish Mennonites should be more activist. Perhaps he should have put the date as October 1913, for in that month the continent-wide old and Amish Mennonites held their joint general conference sessions at East Union—an event that no doubt helped widen his vision. In any case, he remembered realizing that, compared to many Amish and old Mennonites elsewhere, East Union was giving less for missions, that Iowa’s Amish-Mennonite youth seemed less active in the church, and that the standards for their conduct and social life seemed low.¹⁵ The young Hershberger did not quite catch the spirit of another powerful movement that was just then swelling into its first big wave: Mennonite Fundamentalism. No doubt he and practically all other southeastern Iowa Amish Mennonites were in some sense generic fundamentalists (small-f) in their general approach to truth, in the way they read the Bible, and in how they applied it in life. But by about 1920, certain outspoken old and Amish Mennonite leaders were moving on to a Mennonite Fundamentalism (large-F) that was more than merely folkish and generic. Like other denominations, the old and Amish Mennonites, just as they were merging, developed their own version. Although still Mennonite, the version was part of a definite, historic movement of Fundamentalism within Protestant churches (hence the large F). In the face of modern science and the critical study of Scripture, Fundamentalism offered partisan theories about the nature of scriptural inspiration. In militant tones it defended those theories and various orthodox doctrines. At East Union in 1913, the general conference took up the question of biblical inspiration and passed a resolution that echoed what Protestant Fundamentalists were saying about Scripture.¹⁶

Guy at age six or seven with siblings (l to r): Jason (Jay), Ralph, and Cora.

Beginning in 1913, the resident bishop of the East Union congregation—Guy Hershberger’s pastor—was Sanford C. Yoder. With some interruption, Yoder remained at East Union until 1924, when he left to become president of Goshen College. Even then he served as the congregation’s bishop until 1929.¹⁷ In doctrine, Yoder may have agreed quite fully with the Mennonite Fundamentalists, but he did not have their divisive and militant spirit. Moreover, where the Fundamentalists were codifiers and rationalizers, he was quite different. Throughout his active life, he still preached in an older Amish sing-song style. And in traditional Amish fashion he led less by codified and rationalized systems than by personality. His manner was that of a wise tribal elder;¹⁸ he simply did not have the Fundamentalists’ style. For Hershberger, Yoder was quite a mentor.

Sanford Yoder may not have been the perfect pastor. O. Ray Bontrager, a gifted Kempf cousin two years younger than Guy, grew up in the East Union church only to become disgruntled. In 1923 he complained to Guy that at East Union the nearest anyone… has ever approached me on the matter of religion has been on occasions when they were armed with hammers and picks bent on destroying. Indeed, he added, no Mennonite minister has ever spoken a dozen words to me on any subject.¹⁹ However, a youthful Guy Hershberger responded differently. In 1909, at age twelve, he made his key lifetime decision to become a Christian and be baptized. When he was about sixteen, the congregation made him superintendent of its Sunday school—for adults, not only for children. Late in life he credited Yoder with instilling much of his lifelong commitment to service.²⁰ At least for Guy, Yoder surely was an effective pastor.

A Budding Teacher

By all accounts, as a youth Guy F. Hershberger was bookish. When he was eleven, a doctor came from Iowa City, laid Guy on the family’s dining table, and removed the lad’s ruptured appendix. For the time of convalescing, an aunt gave Guy a set of classic books, which was suitable. Guy also established no reputation for mischief. He would never care much for sports, as either participant or spectator. Nor did he excel at manual crafts, as his father had.²¹

The earnest young Guy Hershberger was made the Sunday school superintendent of the East Union congregation.

Later in life, Hershberger believed that his parents had taken for granted that he would attend high school, and from 1911 to 1915 he did, making a four-and-a-half-mile trip to and from town each morning and evening. It seems that in Iowa a remarkably high percentage of children aged ten to seventeen attended school: 85 percent of them in 1914, according to a state census. Perhaps attendance in Hershberger’s own community was not quite that high. But his parents encouraged education and did not let farm chores get in the way.²²

The young Hershberger perceived that he might some day be a writer. His grades in school were quite good. He tried a correspondence course in writing and dreamed of making money publishing short stories in magazines. He never finished the course, but a high-school teacher named Esther Thompson planted a more permanent interest: history.²³

On an outing during Guy’s summer of Normal School study at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1916 at age nineteen. Peggy’s identity is not known.

After high school, Hershberger passed an examination to become a schoolteacher, and in 1915, at age eighteen, he began a four-year stint in one of his community’s one-room country schools. He would later recall that he had done so without being ready but yet had managed to get along. In the summer after his first year, he took courses at Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls. Being nineteen, he may not have applied himself fully, for he soon regretted that he had bought a car and generally spent too much money.²⁴ Did he also attend movies? His cousin Ray Bontrager once told another Kempf relative that Guy had attended the same picture shows that Bontrager had seen but that the pastors never confronted Guy the way they did him.²⁵ Whatever the truth, deviation was not much in Guy’s character.

Hershberger almost did not teach for the fourth year, 1918-1919. In 1914, World War I broke out; and in 1917, during his second year of teaching, the United States joined the conflict. Two of his non-Mennonite high-school mates lost their lives in the war, and he later recalled that young, inexperienced Mennonites, scorned for their nonresistance, were tempted to go and fight. But he himself was determined to be a conscientious objector.²⁶

As matters turned out, the U.S. involvement was relatively brief, and by the summer of 1918 the war’s end was in sight. Moreover, Hershberger found himself exempted from the draft. In 1918, Sanford Yoder helped arrange that if Guy were drafted, he might do humanitarian work abroad. Prior to 1920, Mennonite Central Committee, later well-known for global service, did not yet exist.²⁷ Hershberger’s MC church had created the Mennonite Relief Commission for War Sufferers, but being new and without infrastructure, the new agency steered young men into postwar reconstruction work, especially in France, under a Quaker agency, the American Friends Service Committee. Knowing of these developments, and also that Hershberger was afflicted with a hernia, Yoder took the young man to see a sympathetic attorney in Iowa City, who convinced the local draft board to exempt Hershberger from military duty. The board agreed that he might serve with the American Friends Service Committee in France. Hershberger applied, and in the fall of 1918, naïvely expecting a prompt response, he did not teach school. The reply was not prompt, and in the winter of 1918-1919, Hershberger signed a contract to teach in the second term. Soon thereafter, the American Friends Service Committee accepted him. But a contract was a contract, and Hershberger did not go to France.²⁸

Eventually, fifty-four Mennonites joined that Quaker unit. What if Hershberger had been one of them?²⁹ As a group they were bright and eager, many with some advanced education. Had he joined them, who can even guess how the overseas experience and direct contact with war’s devastation might have changed him? Would he have been less cautious, less inclined to patience with the great body of his church in the home communities? As history unfolded, many of the unit’s Mennonites became quite impatient and alienated from the MC church or from its leaders.³⁰

The Clermont Conference

Of the alienated ones, a number had attended the MC church’s first college, at Goshen, Indiana.³¹ By 1918 the church’s confidence in that school was waning, due partly to the college’s poor financial management, partly to complaints from some of the church’s more fundamentalistic leaders, partly to the fact that the college found it difficult (in critics’ minds, unwilling) to bring the campus into conformity with the church’s regulations about dress and behavior, partly to rejection or at least misunderstanding of liberal-arts education, and no doubt partly to aggressive and impolitic attitudes of teachers and students who took cues from American culture.³² In June 1919, at Clermont, in Argonne, France, the Mennonites of the French unit held a conference on the state of Mennonitism in North America. Of the event’s leaders, three-fourths had studied at Goshen College.³³

The conferees at Clermont seemed to favor more cooperation among Mennonites. They also supported working with Quakers and a much more activist version of Mennonites’ historic pacifism. Implying that a new generation should speak for the Mennonite churches, they began working on a constitution for a new organization of Mennonite young people. Back in America in 1920, 1922, and 1923, that organization held three Young People’s Conferences. But MC leaders were cool to the movement. Their official journals Gospel Herald and Christian Monitor did not report the Clermont conference. In an April 1920 editorial, the Gospel Herald’s powerful editor, Daniel Kauffman, seemed to doubt that Conference leaders supported the church’s standards and ideals. Apparently, church leaders’ attitudes were hardening. Yet earlier in 1919 Kauffman and his Gospel Herald had published an outspoken piece by one of the most fiery members of the French unit, Jacob (J. C.) Meyer, in which Meyer had called for a more aggressive and practical form of Mennonite nonresistance. In potshots along the way, he implied that the MC church’s government resembled a Romish hierarchy or a Prussian military system. Kauffman had published Meyer’s piece, although he had followed it with another that opened with calls for strict, true, and willing obedience and true submission.³⁴ In 1919 there was still some exchange of ideas.

Nonetheless, the camps were hardening. By the last Young People’s Conference, in 1923, a young Harold S. Bender, future Mennonite historian at Goshen whose intellectual leadership would help shape Hershberger’s thought, had won considerable control of the youth movement from the more adamant dissenters. He delivered a forthright speech advocating cooperation with older church leaders rather than confrontation. Some fellow Conference leaders heard Bender’s speech as betrayal. Bender himself soon went off to graduate studies in Germany. In 1924, the church leaders had their general conference organize the Young People’s Problems Committee.³⁵ In the same year, the most determined of the dissenters, with veterans of the French unit prominent, began to publish an alternative paper, the Christian Exponent.

Guy Hershberger watched the struggle between MC leaders and their younger critics largely from the sidelines. He was busy attending Hesston College, then teaching there for a year, then entering graduate school. He read the Exponent regularly, he recalled much later, even in graduate school, when he could hardly afford its cost. There were, he decided, many things in the paper that were very much worthwhile. Yet he remembered that he certainly [had felt] that these people were going too far. For himself, I… was definitely committed to working within the framework of the church.³⁶

Who knows how the course of Hershberger’s life, his degree of loyalty to the church, and his interpretations of nonresistance might have been different had he gone to France? What impact would firsthand exposure to war’s devastation have made on him? Would he have followed J. C. Meyer and others and become more confrontational? In 1975 Hershberger and his friend and colleague Melvin Gingerich speculated that he might have, but not necessarily. After all, they reasoned, quite a few young men in the French unit had not become alienated or confrontational. And they noticed that many of the more cooperative had backgrounds similar to Hershberger’s rather than attending Goshen College.³⁷ But who can know?

Attracted to Clara Hooley

Had Hershberger gone to France, he probably would not have married Clara Hooley. She was also Amish Mennonite, born about five months before Guy in 1896, in northern Indiana’s LaGrange County, where Guy’s father had lived. Culturally, her rearing was more varied than Guy’s. During her childhood her parents moved for a time to Elkhart, which was then an urban intellectual center for Mennonites, being home to publisher John F. Funk, his Mennonite Publishing Company, and other institutions that had begun with the MC and Amish Mennonite Quickening. Late in life, Clara could remember sitting on little red chairs at Elkhart’s Prairie Street Mennonite Church, listening to the aging Funk tell stories. After a time back in LaGrange County, Clara’s parents moved their family near to Goshen, eight miles from Elkhart. Here the MC church’s first fledgling institution of higher learning had moved in 1903 to become Goshen College. For high school, Clara mainly attended the college’s academy.³⁸ Although she really wanted to become a nurse, after graduating from the academy she continued at Goshen, taking college-level courses, especially in teacher education. Then, at age twenty-two, she looked for a teaching job.³⁹

The problem was that Indiana had so many colleges training new teachers that many had trouble finding work. So one of Clara’s professors, John Fisher, suggested that she go to his native Iowa. He helped her get a contract for his own home school, Evergreen, near Kalona. In the fall of 1918 Clara and eight or ten other new teachers from Goshen went to Iowa. And as luck (or God?) would have it, the Evergreen School lay directly along a four-mile walk that Guy regularly made between his parents’ home and his own school, Prairie Dale. Soon Guy became curious, as he later told his grandchildren, about the new schoolteacher. As winter set in, Clara began finding that by the time she arrived at her school, a fire was already ablaze in its stove.⁴⁰

Clara Hooley in 1918, the year her courtship began with Guy. Homesick as Christmas approached but lacking money for a trip to Indiana, she had a professional photographer take this picture to send to her family.

By all accounts, the year that Guy and Clara began courting was a good one. Nevertheless, the next year Guy became a traveling book salesman for a Chicago firm. In a day before school systems smothered teachers with lesson plans, many a young teacher was ready to listen to an experienced one and to spend personal money for a set of teacher guides called School Methods. In the wake of World War I, money was fairly plentiful, and Guy’s sales went well; he grossed as much as six hundred dollars a week.⁴¹ Meanwhile, Clara returned to Indiana and taught near Goshen. Once more she dreamed of being a nurse. Earlier her mother, Martha Eash Hooley, had objected on grounds that nurses had to work too hard and died early. But now the mother relented, and Clara and a friend began arrangements to start training during the next fall somewhere in New York state.⁴²

Guy had another idea, however. When he learned of Clara’s plan, he immediately asked her to hold off until he could come by. Soon the traveling salesman had a stop in Indiana, and during it, he proposed marriage. In his way, he made the proposal both idealistic and practical. Instead of just asking, Will you marry me? he inquired, Will you go with me onto the mission field? Did he get on his knees to impress her? No, Clara would recall at ninety-two, in a merry voice, I sat on his lap.⁴³

Clara remembered that the choice had been easy: I chose him over nursing. That wasn’t hard to choose. After church on the first day of August 1920, a Sunday, twenty-four guests gathered in the home of Clara’s parents, now in Goshen, for the wedding. For the occasion Guy wore a dark conventional suit (not one distinctly Mennonite or Amish) and a necktie with bold stripes. For the wedding photo, Clara did not wear a prayer covering, nor was her coiffure severely plain.⁴⁴

Through the next sixty-nine years, the two enjoyed an entirely stable and highly companionate marriage. Although they accepted the idea that Guy was the family’s head, the marriage was not very patriarchal for its time.Of course the two had occasional differences, for instance in how and where to set boundaries for their children’s behavior; and when they did, Clara sometimes prevailed. To run the home, Guy and Clara settled into a kind of mutuality. In Ephraim and Dora Hershberger’s home, Ephraim had done the planning, Clara would say late in life. But in the case of Guy, I let him know that I could plan as well. And he respected me for that. He knew my area, and I knew his, and we more or less complemented each other…. He treated me like a queen.⁴⁵

The Hershbergers’ wedding photo. In other photos from the event Guy was sporting a necktie with bold stripes.

Hesston College

A month after the wedding, the couple enrolled in college. Guy had thought he would attend Goshen, but the East Union congregation had doubts about that school. His mother, herself dubious, advised him to talk first to Sanford Yoder. By that time Yoder was president of the MC church’s board of education. Faced with the turmoil around Goshen College, he advised the Hershbergers to go to the board’s other school: Hesston College and Bible School, at Hesston, Kansas, founded in 1909.⁴⁶

The Hershbergers did, even though in 1920 the school was scarcely a college. When they arrived it had only 168 students, more than half of them (eighty-eight) in its high-school-level academy. In the spring of 1923, when the Hershbergers graduated, there were only twenty-six students at the college level. Of them, only the Hershbergers and five others were seniors. That year the regular teaching faculty for the whole school, including the academy, numbered only twelve—with only three of them (President Daniel H. Bender, Dean John D. Charles, and one other) having degrees higher than bachelor.

Yet however weak by formal standards, in the early 1920s Mennonite colleges were skimming some rich talent from their church’s communities. And Hershberger was inspired. He recalled at age ninety that we got some pretty good stuff, for instance from J. D. Charles. He could have mentioned other very bright people with whom he and Clara had mixed at Hesston. On the faculty were Noah Oyer, Edward Yoder, Elizabeth Horsch, and Paul and Alta Eby Erb. Among the students were future mission leaders Joseph (J. D.) Graber and his eventual spouse Minnie Swartzendruber, plus other future Mennonite educators and intellectuals: three Smith brothers named Willard, Tilman, and Milton; Glen Miller; Verna Graber; and Melvin Gingerich.⁴⁷ A number of these would become Guy’s colleagues at Goshen.

Clara and Guy on their honeymoon, which apparently was mainly traveling from Indiana to Kansas. According to family lore the site was Starved Rock State Park near LaSalle, Illinois.

By bringing a few credits from his earlier teachers-college work at Cedar Falls, Iowa, Guy earned his bachelor’s degree at Hesston in three years. In none of the twenty-five courses he took did he ever receive a grade lower than 89.5 percent. In eighteen of them, his grades were 95 percent or higher. (Clara’s grades were similar, except that she had none below 93 percent.)⁴⁸ But Guy did not establish a strong record by spending all his time with class work. As soon as he arrived on campus, he somehow became associate editor of the campus’s monthly sixteen-page journal—the pages of which, like much else at the school, exuded ideals of noble manhood, a popular theme in America at the time.⁴⁹ (The editor was Edward Yoder, also reared Amish Mennonite at Kalona, a classicist with a mind keen enough to be remarkable anywhere.) Both Clara and Guy were on debate teams, with some setbacks and some success.⁵⁰ Both were members and officers of the Websters, a campus literary and debating society whose programs were sometimes religious but sometimes not—and in at least one case thoroughly racist.⁵¹ In their second year, Guy was president of the sophomore class and Clara secretary-treasurer for the juniors. Meanwhile Clara, a second alto, sang in choruses and quartets.⁵²

The noble idealism that permeated the campus also had a strong theme of service. In that day, mission, more than pacifist humanitarian work, was at the center of Hesston’s ideas of service; and Hesston’s students often spoke in tones of the Student Volunteer Movement, vigorous at the time among Protestants. Guy and Clara embraced the mission ideal fulsomely. They were active in the campus Young People’s Christian Association, in which Guy held several offices. During their senior year, they helped start a Sunday school in a churchless farming community about twenty miles east of Hesston; Guy became its superintendent. He served there during the summer of 1923 while he earned money by shocking and pitching bundles of wheat in the Kansas harvest. And, along with Clara, he kept working in that Sunday school the next year, when he was a teacher in Hesston’s academy and she the dean of women.⁵³

Members of the Websters Literary Society at Hesston College, 1921-1922, among whose activities were vigorous debates. The Hershbergers are in the front row, second and third from left.

A Mission Career?

The Hershbergers had arrived at Hesston to train for a mission field. In the year 1922-1923, two persuasive Mennonite missionaries from India, Peter Friesen, a widower from Minnesota, and Florence Cooprider, a medical doctor reared in the Hesston community, were in town for furlough and to get married. They were prominent at campus missionary programs and worked to prepare the Hershbergers for India. But in the end, Sanford Yoder led Guy and Clara onto another path.⁵⁴

Yoder had been coming regularly to Hesston to hold evangelistic meetings and help teach in an annual six-week Special [or Short] Bible Term." In the Hershbergers’ senior year, when the Friesens were there, Yoder was present all year as a Bible teacher.⁵⁵ In 1922-1923, turmoil around Goshen College boiled to the point that the MC church’s board of education closed the institution for 1923-1924. Of course Yoder, as the board’s president, was deep in that struggle; indeed, the board looked to him to remake the school in ways to regain the church’s confidence. Very quickly he decided to recruit an almost entirely new faculty.⁵⁶

Clara Hooley Hershberger as Dean of Women at Hesston College and Bible School, 1923-1924. The photo is from her graduation from Hesston College earlier in 1923.

Hershberger as a history instructor at Hesston College and Bible School, 1923-1924. The photo is from his graduation from Hesston College earlier in 1923.

One possible recruit was Guy F. Hershberger. In addition to his roles for education, Yoder was the chief executive of the denomination’s main mission board. Yet he told the Hershbergers that the church could find missionaries much more easily than it could find qualified teachers for its colleges. After that, the Hershbergers listened to Guy’s longtime pastor and mentor more than to the Friesens. By January of 1923, at the same time he jotted, Give my whole life to the church—why, Guy also noted, Teaching: Chance to look at needs of our young people and see actual opportunity for doing a great service to our people.⁵⁷

In a final year at Hesston, 1923 1924, Guy moved onto the Hesston faculty, teaching history and Bible. Clara served as dean of women and taught a kind of remedial class in algebra. The couple lived in an apartment on the first floor of a dormitory that many Hesston alumni remember fondly as Green Gables.⁵⁸ Then they moved back to Iowa and lived with Guy’s parents for more than a year while Guy commuted to the state university at Iowa City. Coming from a formally weak, uncredited college, he spent the summer of 1924 taking courses he needed for entering the university’s graduate program. By June 1925 he had earned a master’s degree in history.⁵⁹

Family

If Guy and Clara returned to Ephraim and Dora’s family in 19241925, they also added to it. On July 11, 1924, in Iowa, Elizabeth Anne was born. In Guy, her arrival set off more earnest idealism (plus unconscious comment on what roles he saw as open for women). I have a little girl 7 months old and am making some great plans for her, he wrote privately in February 1925. It makes me think.•.•.•. I care not whether she will be a teacher, a farmer’s wife, a bankers wife, the wife of an aviator, the wife of a preacher, or foreign missionary or whether she will be found in some other position. He did not care, he wrote, "so long as her life is in tune with the Divine, so long as she is a thoroughgoing Christian, is inspired with high ideals and feels and attempt to fulfi [sic] her duties to those around her."⁶⁰

Guy’s attitude is hardly a surprise for its time. Yet even in the 1920s, public discussion of women’s issues was such that he might have commented differently. Actually he was not meaning to comment on women’s issues in that letter: he was urging his brother Jay to be a Christian, as Jay was choosing a career. Jay and two other brothers were taking paths quite different from Guy’s. So also was that disgruntled Kempf cousin, Ray Bontrager.

Even as he and close relatives took different paths, Guy kept in touch with family members and struck a balance. The balance was to challenge them with his convictions and gently admonish them, yet not seem judgmental. His errant Bontrager cousin, supremely sure of his own judgments, commented defensively and caustically to Guy when church officials or other Mennonites criticized Bontrager for smoking and card playing, which he readily admitted, and for sharp use of his Mennonite connections to sell books, which he denied. Evidently Guy dealt with his cousin’s fulminations cordially but forthrightly. Bontrager rejected Guy’s ideals, yet commended Guy. He asked to stop the exchange, but as he did he assured Guy that you have not incurred my ill-will. I am utterly convinced of your sincerity. In your efforts to help, you have always taken the only logical course viz., coming to me. I appreciate that. Bontrager eventually earned a PhD and for many years taught psychology and semantics at a state college in Pennsylvania.⁶¹

As for Guy’s brothers and sisters, from ages ten to fourteen each one responded in East Union’s periodic revival meetings by accepting Jesus Christ as savior. Each was baptized and became a member of the congregation. Thereafter Guy’s four sisters all remained loyal Mennonites, three of them marrying local Mennonite men and living out their lives in the Kalona area. One, Mary, became a trained nurse. Barbara, somewhat handicapped by childhood polio and wearing a back brace, became an elementary, high-school, and college teacher, living part of her adult life in California. One of Guy’s four brothers, Samuel (Sam), thirteen years his junior, had a career as a postal worker at Iowa City. He became quite an active member of the First Mennonite Church in Iowa City and worked for a few years at church relations for the Goshen Biblical Seminary. But the other three brothers, Jason (Jay), Ralph, and Daniel (Dan), made choices quite different from what their Mennonite parents and congregation must have wished.⁶²

Throughout life Guy Hershberger continued to treat all four very much as brothers. He encouraged at least the youngest of them, twins Sam and Dan, to consider teaching, and Sam did teach for a time before joining the post office.⁶³ Dan, however, became a hotel chef and an automotive electrician. In World War II, ironically at the very time Guy was publishing his strongly pacifist War, Peace and Nonresistance, Dan became a mechanic in the United States Navy. He also became a Methodist, although just how devout even Sam, his twin, hardly knew.⁶⁴

As for the other two brothers, Jay and Ralph, one of their contemporaries, who often associated with them in the early 1920s, later suggested that they did nothing desperate or violent but ran with fellows not oriented to the church. Ralph became a devout Catholic while courting a young Catholic woman, whom he then married. In his work also, Ralph diverged from Guy. At about the time Guy was developing a nonresistance-based critique of coercion in labor relations, Ralph, a skilled tool-and-die maker, became an ardent labor-union official.⁶⁵

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Guy’s most intense concerns were with Jay, five years younger than Guy. Jay tried hard to be connected with airplanes, as a pilot or at least a mechanic. For a time he seems to have been in the Air Force or at least living on Air Force bases.⁶⁶ Unfortunately, he seems also to have clashed with the law.⁶⁷ Eventually he moved to Texas and worked as a machinist. He and the Hershberger family occasionally communicated, but as far as the family knew, he never became an active Christian, although he too married a Catholic.⁶⁸

By 1925 Guy, at age twenty-eight, had made many key decisions that would shape his life. In his mid-teen years he had chosen to be active at East Union. Almost by accident he stayed in his community as a teacher instead of going to France, so he inadvertently stayed out of a circle of young people who were intensely critical of church leaders. In his everyday walk to school, he met the talented and attractive Clara Hooley. As the two married, they made another key decision: to attend a Mennonite college, however underdeveloped. At Sanford Yoder’s advice they chose education at Hesston and then teaching in a Mennonite college rather than missionary work.

More and more, Guy Hershberger was becoming loyal not only to Jesus Christ but also to the Mennonite church and its institutions. However mysterious the processes by which the young man made his choices, surely those decisions were not automatic or preordained. How easily might he have made decisions like those of his three brothers or his cousin Ray Bontrager! But at one turning point after another, the earnest young man stayed on a churchly path.

2

Hard Training

[As I entered academic life] I was, of course, not interested merely in history or sociology as such, but had a concern that my work in this field should be integrated with a genuine Christian point of view.

Being interested in the peace question, [the subject of] my PhD thesis… seemed natural…. Once having gotten started in this field, I was led from one of my writings to another, since to keep alive, one must keep on working.

—Guy F. Hershberger, in 1959¹

At Hesston College, Guy Hershberger had enjoyed a stimulating but only fledgling intellectual life. After that, he attended graduate school (earning a master’s by 1925 and a PhD by 1935) and taught at Goshen College. By the end of the 1930s, he had matured intellectually and developed a compelling vision. Its focal point was a pacifism thoroughly grounded in biblicism, and around that point was a remarkably cohesive set of ideas about what following Jesus means for humans’ social and community life. Coming when it did, the vision would be very practical for guiding Mennonites and some fellow biblical pacifists as they had to respond to the militarism of World War II and the early Cold War decades. More broadly, Hershberger offered his vision to his church when its people were sensing profound changes in their social situation and their sociology.

Hershberger did not confine his vision to Mennonites. By mid-century he would enjoy a fair amount of recognition and respect among other Bible-minded Christians and even among mainline Protestant ethicists who, although not so directly biblicist, were willing to interact with Mennonites’ kind of pacifism. And quite a few sociologists listened, particularly some who thought Mennonites and Amish offered models of close-knit, healthy communities.

But while Hershberger and his message were maturing, the years 1924 to 1940 were a time of hard training. The nation offered few resources to a bright person from a working-class family who wanted a graduate education. He worked at a college where finances and relations with its constituency remained tenuous at best, made worse by the Great Depression. And the Hershberger family had to deal with tragedy. Emotionally and to a modest degree financially, they found support in Mennonite family and community. Yet even strong Mennonite families and communities did not yet have habits and structures well suited to a couple struggling with reverses while pursuing higher education.

Earning a Master’s Degree

In the summer of 1924, if Hershberger was to be a college teacher, the Hershbergers’ first order of business was for him to earn an advanced degree. Apparently the choice of the State University of Iowa was practical more than academic. We didn’t have much money, Clara would recount later. Guy knew the place, and it was only nine or ten miles from his parents’ farm near Kalona. Although not flush with cash, Ephraim and Dora opened their home. They loaned Guy a Model T roadster for commuting. And if that university was an easy choice, so was the field of history. Clara later believed that Guy made that choice even before going to Hesston; and once there, taking history under teachers Melvin Landis and J. D. Charles confirmed it.²

Being interested in church history, at Iowa he dipped into Anabaptist history by writing a major paper titled Luther and the Radical Reformers. Another that he wrote on English Methodism also hinted at a feature of his later career, for in it he (being a child of the late-nineteenth-century Mennonite Quickening) seemed to assume that in matters of religion, being aggressive was fine. Neither paper was particularly keen, at least in substance. But for another course he wrote, rather more ambitiously, The Influence of Pagan Thought and Religion, Especially Greek, on Historical Christianity. That one was more mind-stretching and impressive, taking up a question quite provocative for a young Mennonite of his time, namely, whether Christianity might have been the product of history and cultures rather than—or at least along with—revelation or theology. Otherwise Hershberger seems to have started from orthodox assumptions about the nature and development of Christianity, for he rejected any theory that pagan thought had helped shape the Christian faith. His professor noted that most scholars thought otherwise, yet he assigned a grade of A.³

Hershberger, probably in his parents’ Model T Ford roadster which he used to commute to the University of Iowa while studying for his Master’s degree, 1924-1925.

The three papers already showed a lifelong aptitude for writing. Throughout his life, although Hershberger’s writing was not embellished, it was quite artistic by being clear, free of jargon, economical rather than pompous, and suitable for all reasonably literate readers. Despite some mediocre performance, Hershberger showed promise as a scholar.

A (less-than-mature) thesis on Anabaptism. Hershberger began graduate study as if he would specialize in sixteenth-century Anabaptism. By chance, during his first graduate-school year, 1924-1925, Harold S. Bender and a colleague at Goshen College, German historian Ernst Correll, resuscitated the Mennonite Historical Society and began what would be remarkable accomplishments in Anabaptist and Mennonite studies.⁴ Hershberger had not yet developed ties to those scholars at Goshen, but now he advised Bender that he intended to write a paper on the Causes of the Anabaptist Movement. Bender referred him to Correll, who replied at length about issues surrounding that subject.⁵

Correll probably gave more helpful counsel than any Iowa professor could give. Later, in an introduction to his master’s thesis, entitled An Inquiry into the Origins of the Anabaptist Movement, Hershberger used the Goshen scholar’s letter very heavily. He drew directly from it to outline the problems facing a researcher who wanted to discern the causes behind Anabaptism. He did the same to compile a list of archives, often in Europe, where a scholar who would treat the topic thoroughly would have to work. And, still directly from the letter, he listed current schools of thought about Anabaptism.⁶

Unfortunately, Hershberger drew from Correll’s letter so directly, for both information and concepts, that one might easily accuse him of plagiarism—especially since he made no mention of Correll as his source. In the pressure to write his thesis in a few short months, did Hershberger decide that his professors would never discover his source, then somehow rationalize that decision? Or was he still naïve about the ethics of scholarship? Throughout his life, Hershberger was a very honest person. Since that is true, and since his undergraduate education had not been strong, the answer may well be naïvet´. In any case, the introduction showed that Hershberger was still far from mature as a scholar.

Oddly, after borrowing from Correll wholesale for his introduction, Hershberger then ignored Correll’s main advice that, since Hershberger could not go to Europe or spend two years on his topic, he should merely survey other scholars’ interpretations of Anabaptist