One hundred years ago this summer, when Detroit was nearing its zenith of national and international attention to its industrial prowess, and as it began an amazing 10-year ascension from a population of 450,000 to 1.25 million, a 23-year-old recent graduate from Yale Divinity School stepped off a train at the then very new Michigan Central station on the way to his first parish assignment as a pastor of a small German Evangelical Church.
No one, including probably the young man himself, knew what would come of his decision to turn down offers to lead congregations in Connecticut to come to the loud, clanking, smoky city made famous by Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line and the $5 a day wage.
It's a small part of the story, but the inexperienced pastor wanted his widowed mother to live in his parsonage and do for him what she had done for his pastor father: run the Sunday school and see to the nuts-and-bolts end of things. He would be too busy writing his sermons and articles he hoped to publish to gain public attention for some of his quite different ideas. His mother had spent many years in semirural Missouri and Illinois in the parsonages of her Evangelical pastor husband, Gustav Niebuhr, and was not keen on going as far as the East Coast, so Detroit it was.
What the neophyte cleric discovered was a small congregation of fewer than 60 persons, many of them elderly and expecting to hear sermons in German. Not a problem for him as it was the language often spoken in his boyhood home. His bachelor and master's degrees from Yale had removed what hayseed may have stuck to his shoes, but he was a bit at sea as to what to say to his aging congregation housed in an unexceptional building out on the northwest edge of the booming city.
It was at first from the pulpit of that church -- and, six years on, in the one at a new church his board of trustees had built to provide him a more visible venue as his reputation grew -- that Reinhold Niebuhr began what would turn out to be nearly a half century of preaching, lecturing and writing, thereby giving voice to religious texts and ideas and their application to social ethics that would make him an international figure.
Niebuhr was nothing like Detroit's other clergy. What piety he had he kept to himself. His mission was to connect the contents of the Bible he knew so well to the problems and opportunities of an urban culture that he found in many ways distasteful. He attracted what passed for the city's intelligentsia to the pews of the Bethel Church with his social and political critique, thus making a name for himself.
He took on the great Henry Ford and did so unmercilessly, well aware that the great hospital named for and funded by the pioneer automaker stood on the opposite side of the city's Grand Boulevard just a few blocks east of the new Bethel edifice.
Of Ford and his announcement that $100 million had been spent on the new Model A leaving him with only a measly $250 million in the bank, Niebuhr wrote in his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic: "What a civilization this is! Na�ve gentlemen with a genius for mechanics suddenly become the arbiters over the lives and fortunes of hundreds of thousands. Their moral pretensions are credulously accepted at full value. No one bothers to ask whether an industry which can maintain a cash reserve of a quarter of a billion ought not to make some provision for its unemployed." /1
Ford had abruptly idled thousands of his workers after shutting down the manufacture of the Model T until the factories had been retooled. A seething Niebuhr had calculated that $50 million in lost wages had been a disaster for Ford's employees.
At about the same time, Niebuhr, in an address entitled "Tyrant Servants" before the Detroit Pastors' Union, offered this critique of life in the nation's urban centers, characterizing it as anything but the American Dream:
"It is a real question in the modern day whether the nation has not become as much a foe as a servant of human happiness ... It demands the sacrifice of human and personal values, and makes claims upon the lives of eternal significance for ends that have no eternal values ... We fail to see that the possession of the things which modern industry produces is not an unmixed blessing. It is nice to [have them]. But we have become the slaves of these things."/2
What a sermon to give to clergy whose very livelihood was dependent via the collection plate on the revenue from the manufacture and sale of those "things"!
Niebuhr published similar critiques in such well-known journals as The Atlantic Monthly and The Christian Century, thereby building a national audience. In 1928, he was tapped by the president of New York City's Union Theological Seminary -- the nation's best-known Protestant graduate school of theology -- to teach applied religion.
After a whirlwind 13 years -- one of them serving as chair of a mayoral committee created to deal with the city's racial crisis that arose over the Ossian Sweet case/3, Niebuhr departed for Union Seminary and there became one of the prominent voices in the theory of public policy and its ethical foundations. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1948 when he was at the height of his influence in the formation of Protestant clergy and as the voice of conscience to liberal politicians.
His major works that are still read and taught include The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Irony of American History. To be sure, Detroit gave the world more than the Model T and its many shiny successors down the years.
1/Cynic. Louisville, KY. Westminster/John Knox Press. 1957.
2/Young Niebuhr. New York, NY. The Pilgrim Press. 1977. 166, 170
3/see Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. 2004
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