MISSIONARY MILLENNIUM: THE AMERICAN WEST; NORTH AND WEST AFRICA

IN THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION

Bryan A. Garrett, B.A.

Thesis Prepared for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS

August 2009

APPROVED:

Nancy L. Stockdale, Major Professor Laura Stern, Committee Member Liljana Elverskog, Committee Member Richard B. McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History Michael Monticino, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies

Garrett, Bryan A. Missionary Millennium: The American West; North and

West Africa in the Christian Imagination. Master of Arts (History), August 2009,

127 pp., references, 99 titles.

During the 1890s in the United States, Midwestern YMCA missionaries challenged the nexus of power between Northeastern Protestant denominations, industrialists, politicians, and the Association’s International Committee. Under Kansas

YMCA secretary George Fisher, this movement shook the Northeastern alliance’s underpinnings, eventually establishing the Gospel Missionary Union. The YMCA and the GMU mutually defined foreign and domestic missionary work discursively. Whereas

Fisher’s pre-millennial movement promoted world conversion generally, the YMCA primarily reached out to college students in the United States and abroad. Moreover, the GMU challenged social and gender roles among Moroccan Berbers. Fisher’s movements have not been historically analyzed since 1975. Missionary Millennium is a reanalysis and critical reading of religious fictions about GMU missionaries, following the organization to its current incarnation as Avant Ministries.

Copyright 2009

by

Bryan A. Garrett

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the support and

motivation offered by my professors. Dr. Nancy Stockdale gave me an excellent

foundation in methodology, allowed me just enough liberty to get creative, and

drew me back to earth in order to focus and complete this document. Dr. Laura

Stern’s endless patience and source of ideas helped me grow into a hopefully

qualified scholar. Dr. Liljana Elverskog presented me with the tools to

understand the Arabic language and in the end, even more so, the English

language. To these three amazing scholars I am forever indebted.

I would also like to thank Ryan Bean at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for his unparalleled assistance and

patience, as well as the staff at the University of North Texas Interlibrary Loan

Office. If it were not for them, I would likely still be drowning in documentation.

And to the love of my life, I regrettably issue forth this work into the world

on your behalf. Though I’m sure you will read this at some point, I am sorry you felt obliged to do so!

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………...iii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..1

2. THE KANSAS-SUDAN MOVEMENT IN THE MIDWEST YMCA……..37

3. MISSIONARY POSITIONS; THE GOSPEL MISSIONARY UNION’S PLANS FOR THE SOUDAN AND MOROCCO…………………………….66

4. THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT AND DIVERGENT TRANSNATIONALISM………………………………………………………..90

5. CONCLUSIONS; THE FARCE OF AVANT TODAY…………………..116

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………..120

iv

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.1

—Karl Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.2

—George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Running the risk of being immediately labeled a Marxist from the onset, I have chosen to begin with the above quote because of the sense of irony it carries throughout my retelling of the history of George Seldon Fisher’s failed

1 “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historical scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.” Marx alludes to populist renditions of prior movements, shaping those precedents to fit the present need just as much as they shape the present to reflect aspects of the past. History becomes a tool of the present, but complicated by multiple variables determined by region, peoples, culture, political precedent, etc.

2 A former student of the American philosopher William James at Harvard University, Santayana uses crude psychological reasoning to emphasize the stages of human life, civilization or lack thereof; where “Progress…depends on retentiveness.”

1 Sudan missionary movement within the YMCA, and his subsequent autonomous

missionary enterprise in Morocco, under the auspices of the organization of his

own creation, the Gospel Missionary Union. This is not only a challenge to the

scant, previous histories on this subject, but in many ways a rewriting of related

historicity and methodology. It is suitable that Marx exposes the class conflict in

French society leading up to the French Revolution, and that the preface to the

1907 English translation in America contains a comparison of that European

event to the “recent populist uprising” in the United States.3 The history of populist movements in the United States inherently privileges social aspects regularly marginalized by consensus historians. To rebut the belief that history can be told from the perspective of elites, it is through marginalized groups that

we can gain a more inclusive recounting of not only those peripheral social

elements, but the ruling apparatus above them as well.

Like the various populist movements throughout the histories of United

States or Africa, historicity entails multiple elements and methods that cannot be

easily pigeonholed into one particular system of thought. Even among Marxists,

Leon Trotsky, like Martin Heidegger, determined that each region and people

follow different historical trajectories given distinctive particular circumstances

specific to their respective situations, and that “History does not repeat itself;”4

3Daniel De Leon, p. i, I believe certain social characteristics beyond mere economic distinction just as potent in defining movements, conflict, and influence, such as religious affiliation or political alignment.

2 explaining why the Russian Revolution cannot entirely resemble the French

Revolution. However, Marx is correct in his assertions that humans retrieve history as a mirror for present circumstances, representing the continuously embroiled philosophical quandary of idealism versus realism. History does not repeat itself; though, agents can and do hearken back to past events as reminiscences and familiarities for contemporaneous conditions. Populist movements are complex and varied, finding different modes of expression and different outlets against dissent aired against different grievances. Manifold variables and preconditions affecting one event in the past are not necessarily present with another event as the two are frequently separated by time and space. Yet, agents and historical actors repeatedly, hermeneutically read their present conditions back onto past events, and vice versa; allowing to make comparisons that appear as repetitions in a linear historicity. In this sense, history can be mobilized as a litmus test to validate or invalidate present or future circumstances; or history can be used to justify certain actions or motivations.

Nietzsche claims that “the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture.”5 In this context, history

4 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (New York: Verso, 2003), 123.

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Peter Preuss, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980), 10, emphasis in the original; “All acting requires forgetting, as not only light but also darkness is required for life by all organisms. A man who wanted to feel everything historically would resemble someone forced to refrain from sleeping, or an animal expected to live only from ruminating and ever repeated ruminating.

3 serves only in a capacity to critically reflect and learn in order to commit to some

semblance of learning from past mistakes, and breaking away from forgetfulness

which begets human reverberations to commit the same mistakes from generation to generation. History then becomes a tool for comparison and admiration, a mirror into which the next generation can gaze, reading the present back into the past and vice versa.

By using conflict as a framework, each participant not only offers up a clearer identification of self and beliefs, but what in turn their opposition believes in or represents. Even marginal groups can have tremendous impact on organizations and even societies; stimulating repercussions that can extend nationally and even internationally. This history is a revelation of particular aspects of one of many populist protests in American history, in order to alter consensus narrative and determine more so this specific group’s antithetical counterpart, as well as how these groups influenced and developed religious, political, and pseudo-scientific categorizations which allowed them to

“empirically” and imperially define the foreign, heathen other as consumer commodities; thus, committing to self-fulfilling prophecies which consistently reified their previously defined and held Protestant American worldview.

So: it is possible to live with almost no memories, even to live happily as the animal shows; but without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all. Or, to say it more simply yet: there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people or a culture.

4 In the late 1880s, George Seldon Fisher, the State Secretary for the fledgling Kansas branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, attempted to found a foreign mission to the nebulous, trans-African Soudan—appropriating

Islamic connotations of otherness in Black Africa, Bilād al-Sudan—independent from and without the tacit approval of the greater YMCA and its church allies.

Fisher’s endeavor caused uproars in printed media, among ministers and evangelists across the country, eventually with the United States and British governments, and most specifically with the official counseling body of the

YMCA, the International Committee. Following this disruption in its ranks, the

YMCA in Topeka, Kansas fell apart. George Fisher continued his missionary enterprise in the Sudan—and later in Morocco, the Islamic other deemed al-

Maghreb, or the West—with his new organization, the Gospel Missionary Union.

Never before has an academic retelling of both Fisher’s time in the YMCA and

his creating the GMU been committed to one narrative; nor has a historian

critiqued both contemporary literature and contemporaneous disagreements

concerning Fisher’s acts or theology.

With his History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America, C. Howard Hopkins, this Yale historian was contracted by the YMCA to produce a hypothetically objective recounting of the then developing organization within the context of a larger American historical framework. For this monograph, Hopkins extensively

5 used YMCA archives to accomplish his task.6 Hopkins is one of two authors that present a narrative concerning Fisher’s activities; Hopkins focuses on Fisher’s time with the YMCA and his so-called Kansas-Sudan Movement. The only academic history retracing the course of the GMU in Morocco specifically is

George W. Collins’ “Missionaries and Muslims: The Gospel Missionary Union in

Morocco, 1895-1912.” Both Collins’ and Hopkins’ treatment on George Fisher’s time with and beyond the YMCA were published before Said’s Orientalism, and

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. While Collins’ article appeared five years after Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, the author does not subject the GMU nor American missionaries to poststructuralist theories. Further, current GMU writers like Evelyn Stenbock-Ditty however, create fictional narratives based loosely on GMU biographies and yellowing copies of the GMU circular, The Gospel Message.

I intend to show, through the periphery, by fitting a small social movement into the larger framework of American Orientalist thought and cultural imperialism, the discursive influences of organizations, between the YMCA, the

United States and foreign governments, and the GMU. Collins presents this subject as a schism within the YMCA rank and file, which is certainly factual; however, this treatment only represents one dimension of a much larger social movement in American history. Fisher’s fissure with the YMCA represents a microcosm in the shift of American missionary focus from pure proselytism per

6 Hopkins, C. Howard, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), vii.

6 se, to conversions under the auspices of university education and

industrialization. The YMCA facilitated the political agenda organized among the

new power nexus among Northeastern politicians and industrialists after the Civil

War, and represents a concerted effort to spread United States influence and

Christianity through college boards westwards, to a more readily accessible

populace in California, and eventually Japan and China. However, Fisher’s

Midwestern, Populist movement—America’s other Bible belt—represented a real

roadblock to these efforts, stretching along the corridor from Dallas to St. Paul.

Concerning American missionary impulses and drives, in his monograph

Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi asserts that the year 1830 marks a turning

point in American foreign policy; when American Indian others were pushed by

the government and settlers beyond the vanishing American frontier, and

Americans seeking to assert individualism and missionary impulses cast their

gaze abroad. Where Makdisi claims that the American missionary impulse

resulted as a response to the failure of Indian conversion and diasporas following

Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy, I assert that the Ottoman territories

presented a new and open field after the French assumed control over Algiers;

removing the corsairs that held America at bay.7 Meanwhile, Muhammad Ali’s

shift of Egypt autonomously away from Ottoman control and the opening of the

Sublime Porte in Istanbul to direct policy and greater inclusiveness for foreign

agents through the Tanzimat concessions also made foreign work in the Levant

7 William Spencer, Algiers in the Age of the Corsairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), ix-x.

7 more attractive for American missionaries. The United States likewise changed

drastically in the 1840s; coming out of a depression, with greatly increased gold

reserves; tremendous westward expansion through war with Mexico, pioneer

settlement and railroad growth; new markets in China; mining companies like

Phelps Dodge—previously an ailing cotton trade entity—re-emerged stronger

than ever.8 Further, movements coming out of the 1850s and 1860s radically

altered the American missionary impulse. Ecumenical gatherings, beginning in

New York in 1854, bolstered by the Student Christian Movement, created an

alliance between young missionaries and universities which would become the

prime mode of missionary activity following the American Civil War.9 Therefore,

the 1830s were not only a time of Indian Removal and opening up the Ottoman

Empire, but also continental expansion in western America to the Pacific with the

Oregon Trail; the missionary impulse among Native Americans does not

completely vanish. A new frontier opened in the American imagination, new

8 Robert Glass Cleland, A History of Phelps Dodge, 30. I could not presently determine the extent to which Phelps, Dodge & Co. was affiliated with the large copper mines in Anatolia, which according to Horace Jared Stevens and Walter Harvey Weed’s The Copper Handbook: A Manual of the Copper Industry of the World (Houghton: Horace J. Stevens, 1905), and Walter Harvey Weed’s The Copper Mines of the World (New York: Hill Publishing Company, 1907) supposedly have some of the purist copper deposits in the world. Further research is required to determine potential reasons for such limited resource extraction of a particularly attractive commodity could be the political confusion brought about by the Young Turk Revolution, or more extremely trade influence of Phelps, Dodge & Co.

9 William Richey Hogg, Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council And Its Nineteenth-Century Background (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952),15, 35.

8 territories and power dynamics following the Mexican-American War and

American Civil War, combined with expanding railroad networks which temporally

constricted these vast expanses, new spaces opened for domestic proselytism

missionary endeavors abroad.

In a 1904 treatise on international affairs, Paul S. Reinsch points out that

“There is a measure of truth in saying the flag follows the missionary and trade

follows the flag.”10 Certainly, Hawaii is the prime example of this paradigm in

American history; this oversimplified framework is linear whereas each imperialist

enterprise reflects an interminable, amorphous entanglement of religion, industry, and politics. The paradigmatic relationship between government, business, and missions is not necessarily linear. Concerning German policy, Bismarck’s main reason behind accepting partitioning the African continent during the Berlin

Conference came from his perception that German markets needed to be protected. Following the multi-national land grab, areas previously opened to multiple Christian sects and missions ossified along the lines of colonial rule.

Catholicism prevailed in French territories, as did Anglicanism under British rule.

In this instance, the flag followed business, and missionary movements realigned along imperial boundaries.11 In the 1830s, Morocco fell within the French sphere

10 Paul S. Reinsch, World Politics: At the End of the Nineteenth Century, as Influenced by the Oriental Situation (London: Macmillan and Company, 1904), 32-3. “As the priority of a nation on unappropriated soil is of great importance under the doctrine of preoccupation, the emissaries of religion who begin the civilizing process are, under the present exaggerated conditions of competition, most valuable advance pickets of national expansion,” 33-4.

9 of influence, and no longer represented a threat to U.S. overtures toward foreign

policy and trade in the Levant and Anatolia.

Missionary enterprises before Fisher’s time were an outgrowth of a

different era, where different organizational forms dominated the missionary

landscape. North Eastern Protestant schools such as Yale, under the presidency

of Timothy Dwight, focused on educating individuals for the sake of not only

teaching them their supposed station in life according to their inherited class, but

also among their religious station, whether or not they may presume to be among

the Calvinist Elect.12 From the perspective of New England religious society

following the Second Great Awakening, education must be based upon self-

effacing Calvinist epistemology, which assumes the Gospel as truth, whereby

religious centered education becomes an extension of this truth.13 By 1820, the

strict predestinarian stance of these congregations, influenced enough by

American Enlightenment thought, adopted aspects of human free will, which

through proper education could lead the Christian soul to redemption, outside of

the group of chosen Elect.14 At the same time, the American Board of

11 Olayemi Akinwumi, “Political or Spiritual Partition: The Impact of the 1884/85 Berlin Conference on Christian Missions in Africa,” in Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage, Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff, and Klaus Hock, eds. (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 13-17.

12 Rao Humpherys Lindsay, Nineteenth Century American Schools in the Levant: a Study of Purposes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1965), 32-6.

13 Lindsay, 39.

10 Commissioners for Foreign Missions15 decided to extend these redemptive,

millennial possibilities to potential converts in Syria via education.16 American

Missionaries—like Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons—focused increasingly on the

Levant as a result of the British-American impasse after the War of 1812, which

limited American access to India because of conflict with Britain, coincident with

the new perception that Protestant missionaries could potentially form an alliance

with burgeoning Wahhabi movement.17 These movements provided the means

to gain popular support in America, where American Christians’ could stoke their

Holy Land fetish18 by establishing a base of operations in Syria, safely distant from the raging Greek Revolution yet close enough to the Levant to propagate millennial intentions through conversion of Jews in the Holy Land, where

Jerusalem—closed at that time to transient foreigners19—could be indirectly

14 Lindsay, 42.

15 The ABCFM was a New England product of the Second Great Awakening, established by Samuel J. Mills and Adoniram Judson in 1812. Though initially interdenominational, it became a vehicle for foreign missions for particularly established denominations along the eastern United States; see Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1-6.

16 Lindsay, 27-8.

17 Lindsay, 61-2. During the War, ABCFM efforts in India were halted by antagonistic Britain, while weak British control in the Eastern Mediterranean offered the U.S. a new strategic base.

18 Lindsay, 66.

11 penetrated. However, the ABCFM’s objectives quickly redirected to conversion

among the various Christian sects of the region as a means through which to

spread American Protestantism.20 Turkish restraints in well controlled Ottoman

domains made Christian literature legal to distribute only to Christian millets,

hampering American efforts to reach out to a more diverse religious base,

including Jews, but especially pious Muslims.21 These restrictions only fell with

the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of World War I.22

The ABCFM and alliances among American politicians and industrialists represent a streamlined, focused projection of American cultural imperialism

primarily into the former Ottoman Levant. The GMU represents an entirely

different approach, devoid of any real political or business objectives. Rao

Lindsay laments the fact that the new historiography of American involvement in

the Middle East, especially during the nineteenth century, as being ex post facto

molded into anti-American, anti-Imperialism, anti-oil, and anti-Israel sentiments—

19 Lindsay, 74; Joseph L Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810-1927 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 7.

20 Lindsay, 71. Particularly among the Armenians; also Grabill, 8, 10, 12- 13, in 1831 the ABCFM explicitly changed its objectives to focus on replacing liturgy and the idolatry perceived - by both Muslims and Protestants - in Eastern Christian communities with Biblical Protestantism.

21 Marr, 85.

22 Joint Committee on the Survey of Christian Literature for Moslems, Christian Literature in Moslem Lands; a study of the activity of the Moslem and Christian press in all Mohammedan countries (New York: George H. Doran, Co., 1923), 60-1.

12 whereas before these later events, American involvement in the region was not

only beneficial to Arabs but also perceived by Arabs as such.23 However,

Lindsay does not base his arguments on the same foundations of his opponents; primarily that U.S. imperialism in the region is not tantamount to direct colonial control; but influence through political, religious and business persuasion. In this light, I believe Fisher’s enterprise in Morocco could easily be claimed by these anti-imperialist writers as missed opportunities—a term frequently used by historians with the benefit of hindsight. Straddling a fine line in the present, we should rather look at present predicaments in order to avoid unforeseeable consequences—in a region of the world that has a recent history of anti-

American sentiment.24 But before making this argument, it is important to note

that these GMU organs were systematically isolated from the mainstream of

American foreign involvement and relegated to minor roles that represented a

very different approach to not only foreign work, but American identity and

23 Lindsay, 3.

24 Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), xxii-xxiii, Khalidi writes on the previous arrangement of manifold Islamic groups “who once were allies, fellow travelers, or salaried agents of the United States and the Middle Eastern governments it supports,” initially galvanized as a bulwark against the spread of Communism and the Soviet Union - especially in Afghanistan, some of which happened to be radical Wahhabis (not without irony a group singled out as potential allies by nineteenth century missionaries)– who in turn aligned against the United States and those Middle Eastern allies following the decline of the Soviet Union. The U.S. harnessed a nearsighted, discrete foreign policy of Containment, using these Muslim agents to perpetrate this policy, but in the process helped to create a new dimension with unforeseeable, devastating consequences, both within the United States as seen with the destruction of property and human life on 9/11 and resultant from American military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

13 intentions. Not surprisingly then, we should find that relations between Morocco and the U.S. are on relatively good terms.

In this light, American missionary service abroad only represents one branch of many of the variegated patchwork of U.S.-foreign relations. Each region contains multiple skeletal remnants of prior organizations; some schools and missions from manifold other American and European Christian groups and governments. As such, each part of the world stretching from Africa to Europe to

Asia which have predominately Muslim populations not only do not share a common heritage but do not share a common relationship with America or the various forms of Protestant Christianity and missionary enterprises within the

United States. From the vantage point of today, each of these unique experiences is equally complex and important, and deserves equal coverage in order to avoid perpetual mistakes, pitfalls, or potential alienation. Instead, we should commit to better understanding of conditions on the ground over time to make more informed decisions, whether from the position of a U.S. government official or a contemporary Christian missionary.

North Africans are heirs to a heritage longer in duration and infinitely more complex than American Christians, yet many of the later group cannot conceive of the possibility that these various peoples do not want to partake in the

American experience, in spite of the suggestion that these peoples inherently cannot incorporate these specific values and experiences, coming from an organically different past and present. History and memory abounds with tales of

14 individuals traveling far and wide to reach the distant shores of an America filled

with endless possibilities and opportunities for success. On the opposite end,

North Africa has a long Christian tradition, including the seminal theologian

Augustine of Hippo and the Berber sorceress Kahina who fought against Muslim

Arab invaders in North African in the seventh century.25 The American

Protestant idea that their particular brand of Christianity is superior to the

Christian aspects that had developed in North Africa is not only an uneducated belief, but an entirely ethnocentric, nationalistic, and xenophobic framework.

This belief revolves around the notion that the particular strands of Protestant

Christianity which were brought to America by European settlers, is

unquestionable truth as opposed to the branches which unfolded outside of the

white European narrative. North Africa witnessed the religiously introspective

quandaries of Augustine centuries before Calvin tread the earth. Missionaries

were fulfilling a self imposed ideology on others, and satisfying an urge created

by their own insular, incubated worldview.

In order to properly place George Fisher’s GMU within a broader historical

narrative, I have found it necessary to facilitate a wide range of historiographical

themes; each encapsulated various elements of all the actors involved in this

international discourse. Not only do I seek to reinterpret Fisher’s missionary

movements, but its place within shifting ideas of foreign mission work in

25 Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996), 84-5.

15 American society at large, particular renditions of American identity and cultural

definitions, as well as identity, religious perspectives and social roles in Africa.

Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New

York on September 11, 2001, two distinct strains of American historical

analysis—though these strains were established discourses before the tragic

event—have flooded academia and the book market since. One strain claims

that the two cultures and backgrounds from which the Arab/Islamic and American

cultures sprung are irreconcilable, espoused by writers who promote the Clash of

Civilizations theory.26 Another strain attempts to understand the complex

variegated frameworks and foundations in their own right, whose authors and

theorists reveal a long, complex, interminable mutually influencing history

between these two seemingly conflicting cultures. Multiple recent monographs

give new treatment to the mutually influential histories of America and the so-

26 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Huntington seeks to realign the dialectical world order coming out of the cold war, pitting West against East, and objectifying the many states across the Middle East and North Africa as Islamic. Though certainly, Islam plays a crucial role in many of these states’ governments, legal systems, and cultures, Islam is by no means all encompassing and the distinct determiner of these states’ actions. Huntington’s thesis perpetuates the dialectical paradigm from histories like the Greco-Persian Wars, Peloponnesian Wars, and more precisely the Cold War, where clear cut distinctions are made between a civilized us and a strange and exotic them. The author claims the Cold War defined geo-politics, where states fell to either one side or the other; but this paradigm does not hold up to the historical test. Though certainly some “third world” states did align with either the United States of the Soviet Union, many states never fully committed to any allegiance, such as Egpyt under Nasr’s regime; a state with a long Islamic tradition. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations paradigm is too rigid a system to allow for nuances of reality; but I suggest that should not necessarily devalue his prior work on transnationalism, which I use below.

16 called Islamic World. Mutually influential politically, socially, and culturally, these

binding discursive histories of Arab-Islamic nation-states and the United States

adorn the pages of Ussama Makdisi’s Artillery of Heaven, Michael B. Oren’s

Power Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present,

Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in

Literature, 1790-1890, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American

Islamicism, and Jonathan Curiel’s Al’ America.27

Makdisi’s work is a tremendous explanation of the dialectical relationship

between American missionaries and foreign religious sects, targeted for

proselytism, within the Middle East. However, Makdisi’s shortcoming is his

exclusion of the religious dialogue occurring in American society during the time

frame of his study. The author seeks to explain to his audience, and rightly so,

that each of these sides of a continuous and unfolding dialogue are not

monolithic and should not be represented as such – that there is no real

substance behind the argument that these two entities are embroiled by a clash

of civilizations. Makdisi’s commendable effort in establishing that the multitude of

religious sects in dialogue, over time, in the Middle East is a direct refutation that

this region and its manifold peoples cannot be considered monolithic, and

27 Michael B. Oren, p. Power Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Jonathan Curiel, Al’ America: Travels Through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots (New York: The New Press, 2008).

17 therefore cannot represent an antithesis to western civilization. Unfortunately,

the scholar represents the United States monolithically – he does not include the

various discourses and disagreements between American religious sects and

political institutions that more accurately represent discourses within American

society.

Using politics as a framework, Michael B. Oren follows the history of U.S.

foreign relations with various countries through the Islamic world, beginning with

the birth of the United States and the influences of warfare with the corsairs

along North Africa. Opting out of paying millions of dollars in precious metals

and goods to the Barbary States, the U.S. rather sought a stronger central

government and military with the new Constitution in part to counter the threat of

the corsairs and prevent further capture of U.S. ships and sailors.28 Oren

likewise reveals direct political and military actions, as opposed to business or

missionary activity, in the Middle East, from American puissance after the Civil

War when “Americans could now afford to fantasize”29 and looking abroad with

the “vague” episode of a failed Syrian revolution in 1868 funded by the United

States, to the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.30

Malini Johar Schueller takes Said’s Orientalism and post-colonialist constructs to analyze American literate responses to conflicts with Barbary

28 Oren, 52-5.

29 Oren, 246-47.

30 Oren, 585.

18 pirates to missionary motivations in the Near East.31 The author frames her

analysis through the literary critical theories of Foucault and Said to discern the

dynamics of power and representation inherent in Western literature which

empowers Western cultures to reorganize and restructure subjected Orients to

the categories prescribed by literature. With the missionary impulses of Fisk and

ABCFM co-founder Timothy Dwight, to Washington Irving’s literary representations of American/Barbary relations and Edgar Allen Poe’s Egyptology tinged short story, Malini Johar Schueller traces the developments of multiple

U.S. Orientalisms, over the course of American historical interactions in different

areas of the globe.32

Timothy Marr critically analyzes American literature in determining the

development of popular imagination and narrative in The Cultural Roots of

American Islamicism. From degradations of tribute payments and acquiescence

to Algerian primacy in the Mediterranean, American writers and artists depicted

North African leaders as violent despots equal in monstrosity to only English

31 Malini Johar Schueller, vii, “the earliest U.S. literary Orientalism was not simply an abstract and mystical phenomenon but an important indigenous discourse in which nation, empire, race, and gender were intimately connected. An important way in which U.S. nationhood in the nineteenth century defined itself was through imaginative control over various Orients, positioned divergently through different historical and ideological contexts: the moral war against the so- called Barbary States; the missionary fervor to head the Western race to save the Orientals; the imperial-hermeneutic imperative (shared by the British and the French) to decipher the real Orient; and the desire to fulfill Columbus’s original mission to “find” the Orient; and the conception of nation as the latest westerly empire (a continuation of the medieval Translatio Imperii), destined for expansion.”

32 Malini Johar Schueller, 2-5.

19 royalty.33 Ingeniously revealing roles of gender during this period of American

crisis, erotic fiction with concubine heroines and insatiable lovers—following the

form of Arabian Nights—set against the backdrop of the love in a despotic orient

“blurred the line between independence and impudence” and presents a “female

sexuality” that “threatened as much as it titillated” the sensibilities of American

audiences.34 Fantastical renditions of the Islamic orient were facilitated to

likewise carve out semblances of American masculinity through narratives of

American males who regained their masculinity and place in independent society

after captivity among the Algerian pirates, situated against emasculated Muslim

pirate captives on display in New York as exotic objects from a distant land.35

The American-Algerian narrative represents first contact between these two

regions, whereas religionist’s subsequent development of the American

eschatological historicism consistently reevaluated and renegotiated Biblical

interpretations and perceptions of Islam to fit changing political, social, and cultural landscapes both in America and in the Middle East.

American millennialism incorporated eisigetical readings36 of the New

Testament in the guise of exegesis—especially Revelations—including methods

33 Marr, 30-4.

34 Marr, 46.

35 Marr, 53, 67.

36 Marr, 89, or rather, a hermeneutical reading history into documents such as the Bible. “Applying biblical verses to understand the reality of Islam was ultimately a process of eisegesis in which Americans read their own fears

20 of Pythagorean numerology to predict the promised time of Christ’s return.

Fitting the Ottoman Empire within this framework as the manifestation of

Antichrist’s army of Saracen locusts, meanwhile pragmatically reinserting the

Papacy as antichrist whenever the political climate permitted, millennialism drew parallels between a wicked, slaveholding Islamic society intoxicated on its false religious tenets, and the need to break the Ottoman hold over the Holy Land and establish a renascent Jewish kingdom as a step toward fulfilling perceived eschatological prophecy.37 What began initially with violent encounters with pirates off the coast of North Africa eventually resulted in Ottoman concessions to Western powers, eastern Christian sects, and the semi autonomy of Egypt, all of which helped open the door of the Holy Land for these Protestant fatalists.

In Al’ America, Jonathan Curiel investigates American history through the lens of irony; that is, that American citizens all too willing to eradicate

Arab/Islamic culture after 9/11 do not realize its influences on their own culture, in spite of the evidence right before their eyes.38 From Christopher Columbus’

reliance on al-Farghani’s geographical theories, the Islamic styled frescoes

recently revealed in the Alamo, and the Arabesque metalwork on New Orleans

and desires into religious revelation as a fantasy of their own cultural superiority. Unwilling to view Islam as a religious system with its own internal logic and practices, and unable to convert Muslims to Christian belief, many American Protestants contained its challenge by interpreting the Islamic world as a theater for imagining and projecting cultural dramas of their own global dominance.”

37 Marr, 95-101, 134-36.

38 Curiel, xiii.

21 buildings, Spain carried Arab/Islamic science and aesthetics to the New World

following the Reconquest.39 Later, Ralph Waldo Emerson used Persian writings

to help mould his Transcendentalist literature; Islamic architectural simulacra

dominated the landscape of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in

St. Louis,40 and nineteenth century Shriners—including American presidents such as Warren G. Harding—wore Moroccan styled clothing and greeted one another with Arabic expressions.41

Concerning Fisher’s pre-millennialist religious stance, Oliver Wendell

Elsbree places such Protestant numerological fascinations in the context of The

Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America. These American Protestants, using

numeric deductions from varying interpretations of Biblical Revelation, attempted

to determine the exact date of Jesus’ return. For these men and women, this

final act of Christian prophecy was a real and inevitable occurrence just over the

horizon.42 In Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now, authors Wes

39 Curiel, 2-10.

40 Curiel, 81-2, at the fair were two simulacra of Islamic architecture; one representing the Dome of the Rock, the other, the Taj Mahal. Additionally, natives of the Islamic world as “entertainers and hawkers” were presented as objects just as those they sold. Among these cultural commodities was the imprisoned American Indian Chief Geronimo. For a contemporary recounting of simulacra and imaginary spaces of Islamic representation, also see Nancy L. Stockdale, “‘Citizens of Heaven’ versus ‘The Islamic Peril’: The Anti-Islamic Rhetoric of Orlando’s Holy Land Experience Since 9/11/01,” in American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Summer 2004, Vol. 21, No. 3, 89-106.

41 Curiel, 38-40, 81-3, 92-7.

22 Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther suggest that pre-millennialism43 represents

a popular theological disposition—a theory entitled relative deprivation—that benefits individuals who feel helpless to the events consistently outside of their power to affect or control. Rapture becomes the outlet through which these individuals and groups access catharsis, damning the proprietors of inaccessible social structures and perceived imbalanced power dynamics to a fate commensurate with those transgressors’ spiritually shallow lives and impiety. In this light, it should come as no surprise that both populism and premillenialism— the likes of which Fisher espoused in Kansas—found fertile ground among poor farmers and the less privileged classes of workers in the Midwestern states which were targets for the industrial Northeastern framework of nationalist

42 Oliver Wendell Elsbree, The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790-1815 (Williamsport: The Williamsport Printing & Binding Co., 1928), 126; Elsbree cites such examples as the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, the neo- Pythagorean proclamation that 1,260 years, exegetically deducted from the Book of Revelation, which elapsed since the recognition of the supposed first papal antichrist, from religionists like Samuel Hopkins were used as signs which point to the world ending in 1866. Of course, when this event does not occur, missionary activity in a pre-millennial context takes on added urgency.

43 Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther, Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (New York: Orbis Books, 2000), 5. The authors define premillenialism as ‘A branch of millennial Christianity in which believers expect that they will be “raptured” by Jesus prior to a one-thousand year reign by Christ (“the millennium”) in which peace will reign. Most pre-millennialists believe that the Rapture will occur prior to “the Tribulation.” Others believe that the Rapture will take place after the Tribulation but before the millennium. Both groups of pre-millennialists see social action, as well as all human endeavor, as doomed to failure and thus the work of Antichrist when seen as the means to solve social problems and to hasten the second coming.’ Additionally, I should note that this eschatological approach to life favors a simple framework of linear historical development and binary categorization of the phenomenal world into classes such as good/evil, right/wrong, etc.

23 identity. Likewise, given that independent, spirited western Americans bought into an American mythology of their own creation about their own character, without question this religious eschatology bolstered such beliefs. This new series of American revivals was in large part based on the beliefs of evangelists

James H. Brookes, Henry Grattan Guinness and eventual Chicago YMCA leader and fellow evangelist Dwight L. Moody.44 George S. Fisher carried these influences to fruition by committing increasingly toward conversion as the primary role of social organizations—both with the YMCA and later with GMU—rather than promoting aspects of physical well being. According to pre-millennialist ideology, social organizations like the YMCA were valueless attempts by unsalvageable men directed at unsalvageable men. The only true benefit would come through conversion. Conversely, by this period in American history, northeastern Protestant sects had already begun to shy away from such stringent doctrines, favoring Enlightenment elements of perfectibility of the human soul over purely rigid Calvinism, and instead promoted roles of social gospel and patrician philanthropy in response to labor iniquities experienced regionally resulting from industrial expansion, just as these denominations less fervently guarded the ranks of the Elect, allowing the Gospel into the college campuses of in places like China, Japan, and the Ottoman realms.

Another historical lens through which to gauge these differing perspective missionary impulses is by populist dissent. George Fisher’s millennialist

44 Howard Brook and Gwyther, 8-9.

24 missionary movement was a particular expression of religious Midwestern

populism within a broader framework of popular American discontent and political

dissent. In Islam: The View from the Edge, Richard W. Bulliet facilitates a

methodology benefiting marginal Islamic groups on the frontiers, where influence

oscillates between centrifugal and centripetal forces to and from the center and

periphery.45 I contend not only is Bulliet’s work valuable for revealing political economy among Islamic agents throughout history, but that by reversing this methodological gaze back onto American society, we can reveal how marginal populist movements throughout United States history influence the mainstream of American popular life and culture, as well as the dominant political structures at the center of the American Republic.

Reverberations of populist ideology manifest in the reformulation the

Republican Party from the 1960s to the 1980s. The Party came to represent the

simple, self-made man against the deeply rooted patriarchal, industrial and

political monopoly of the eastern seaboard.46 Duncan Webster cites examples of

populist sentimentality in the writings of John Steinbeck and the music of Sam

Shepard during the 1980s when the “moral majority” looked back to the golden

age of political dissension of the 1890s. Just as the later populist Republicans

looked back to times past for symbols in American mythology, populists of the

45 Richard W. Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

46 Duncan Webster, Looka Yonder! The Imaginary America of Populist Culture (New York: Routledge, 1988), 10.

25 late nineteenth century selectively invoked American leaders from the golden age

before their time. Populists excavated Jefferson’s agrarian romanticism when

advocating farming and Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the U.S. when looking

for monetary reforms, but excluded these presidents’ heavier handed uses of

central authority—like land settlement in the Northwest Territory and Indian

removal policies—all of which benefited western migration, to allow into the

populist framework such concessions as government ownership of railroads 47

Webster frames populist dissent with the producerism concept; citing Biblical leanings rather than Marxist, the populist binary point to the abuses of societal parasites: industrial robber barons feeding on laborers, the city feeding on the toil of the farmer, the aristocratic politician feeding on the plight of the citizen democrat.48

Like Webster, Michael Kazin does not confine American populism to a

particular political party entity or persuasion.49 The populist impulse had roots in

both American Revolutionary rhetoric and evangelical movements like the

47 Webster, 17-19.

48 Webster, 20-1.

49 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 3, “I do not contend that my subjects were populists, in the way they were unionists or socialists, Protestants or Catholics, liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans. Populism, more an impulse than an ideology, is too elastic and promiscuous to be the basis for such allegiance. Rather, my premise is that all these people employed populism as a flexible mode of persuasion. They used traditional kinds of expressions, tropes, themes, and images to convince large numbers of Americans to join their side or to endorse their views on particular issues.”

26 Second Great Awakening.50 This is yet another dimension in American

discourse that privileges the individual democrat against the wealthy, corrupt,

despotic aristocracies of the world, just as the above authors used American

literature to reveal American perceptions on Ottoman despotism. The elite—an

amorphous concept of otherness, a plastic, symbolic representation fortified by

any imaginable element of anti-American sentiment—is set against an equally

formless body of “the people” armed with the righteous binary producerism.51

The New Right of American politics—white, religious, pro-business, and male dominated—adopted and claimed these symbols of earlier movements as a means to express discontent after Civil Rights movement and political part realignment, just as the “fusion” of the Populists and Democrats in 1896.52

Norman K. Risjord’s Populists and Progressives, part of the

Representative Americans series, outlines influential actors on the American stage, attempting to show how individuals contributed to the variegated and complex American narrative. Risjord perceives the 1890s as a watershed in

American history, a time when industrial moguls—personified by John D.

Rockefeller—pushed the nation to be the most productive manufacturer in the world, when corporations blossomed into fledgling transnational entities through

50 Kazin, 10-11.

51 Kazin, 12-13.

52 Kazin, 1-7.

27 trusts, holding companies as well as vertical and horizontal integration.53 These optimistic, forward-looking, cosmopolitan entrepreneurs were caught between two worlds, one where they became fodder for muckraking journalists, the other a counterweight personified by acts of philanthropy.54 Risjord juxtaposes these

industrial tycoons against supposed pessimistic, backward-looking populist

orators like William Graham Sumner who promoted “government ownership of

railroads and utilities”55 and Social Darwinism, while writers like John Muir and

Henry David Thoreau pragmatically merged religious concepts with the closing

western landscape which in turn gave birth to conservation efforts, the likes of

which made great impact on the masculine expressions of men like Theodore

Roosevelt.56 None of these individuals can be fit into neat categories. For

instance, populists were not necessarily Christians and conservationists were not

necessarily advocating Darwinian evolution. This period of American history is

extremely fluid, and I hope to reveal just how ambiguous political, religious, and social affiliations were.

Whereas Webster and Kazin reveal the tendency for populist movements to read consensual concerns and influences back into American history from a

modern vantage point, finding populist manifestations in the American New

53 Norman K. Risjord, Populists and Progressives (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 3, 180-81.

54 Risjord, 18-23.

55 Risjord, 60-1.

56 Risjord, 217-19.

28 Right,57 Ronald P. Formisano follows the developments of these multiple

movements as “amalgams of contradictory tendencies”58 in his monograph For

the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s.

Formisano claims that the populist historiography is in itself binary; that these

movements are either presented as reactionary or progressive.59 In the Midwest

during the 1890s, populists witnessed an eastern dominated America experiencing rapid change and development, proposing progressive reforms—

often including women in prominent leadership roles—that would situate “the

people” over a government that works for them as a reaction to those rapid

industrial, social, and political changes.60 But the prominent political stance of

the eastern seaboard had gone through a discursive populist movement during

the Second Great Awakening, which oddly enough, in many ways mirrored the

populism of the Midwest, and was equally complex, including elements of

evangelical revivalist movements. Protestant revivalism and evangelicalism

remained a fundamental, immutable core of these movements, movements that

strongly influence both political priorities domestically and focused agendas

abroad, redirecting foreign policy through the lens of religious ideology. Just as

57 Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 1.

58 Formisano, 2.

59 Formisano, 7.

60 Formisano, 11.

29 Anti-Masonic populists responded to their fears of growing industrialism swaying

American values and perceptions of institutionalized Episcopalian tentacles

within the New York government,61 Fisher responded to the newly

institutionalized Western reach of Presbyterian and Methodist congregations,

which fell along the old Western frontier zones of the 1830s, with a more

fundamentalist, evangelical revivalism which had taken root along the

Midwestern states. Just as Fisher and his revivalist evangelical allies challenged

older forms of Protestantism and the YMCA in the United States, these groups

also perceived different avenues through which to reach out abroad.

Despite the seemingly open ended opportunities afforded American

missionaries in the Levant with the unprecedented Ottoman concessions to

foreign powers in the 1860s, and additionally, the rural to urban population

migrations and traditional leadership oscillations in the Ottoman realms between

sectional and tribal warfare, created greater demand for educational

opportunities, opportunities where American’s perceived that their schools could

fill, though their funding was being cut at the time. American society was in the

61 Formisano, 95-7. Formisano shows the political power of “Western” American populist movements, primarily with the example of Anti-Masonic movements in the Northeastern United States, especially in western New York. For the evangelical, agricultural, revivalist people of the relative frontier of the United States, freemasonry represented a threat to family values and freedom of religious expression imbued by Christian congregations set against the Anglican status quo. This movement, springing forth from the Second Great Awakening, mobilized symbols of anti-aristocracy and Christian republicanism; however, these symbols were inherently set against the tenets inculcated and espoused by the Masonic founders of Constitutional America, such as Washington and Franklin. Masonry threatened frontier concepts of family and masculinity via paternal exclusivity and rationality over strict Biblical ethics.

30 midst of major economic and military crises as well during the 1860s. Both the

ABCFM and the YMCA entered a stage of major financial cutbacks and largely scaled back operations, but out of the ashes of this crisis American industrials stepped in to fill the void as unprecedented financial backers for both the YMCA in the U.S. and the American University of Beirut. The industrialist Dodge family injected substantial amounts of capital for both transnational organizations. This capital was economic as well as of a particular, growing nationalist and foreign agenda then gathering strength in the U.S. This agenda was not in any sense a conspiracy thought up in some mysterious, smoke filled room, but rather, an organized coalition between certain Protestant sects—whose bases were situated along the eastern seaboard—Northeastern industrials and politicians with a specific idea of how the United States should be domestically run economically, politically, and morally as well as the proper means to project

American ideals and institutions abroad.

The YMCA retains an entirely separate historiographical sphere. These histories range from retellings more hagiographic than biographic—like Galen

Fisher’s John R. Mott: Architect of Co-operation and Unity and Basil Matthews’

John R. Mott: World Citizen—espousing the great, beneficent acts of individuals as opposed to revealing their human frailties and biases, miscalculations and utter misinformation that resulted in malevolence, to Marxists analyses and

Poststructuralist deconstructions, adding depth to the rather linear YMCA

31 narrative—History of the YMCA in North America—written by C, Howard Hopkins

in 1950.

David Alderson delineates the manifold tangents bound up in the

masculinity of Victorian British Imperialism in his monograph Mansex Fine.

Designating the male role, made up of physical prowess apparent in work ethic; physical strength and brute military force; rational restraint and measured action stemming from Protestant and Enlightenment thought; the author juxtaposes this imperial masculinity to haphazard, emotional, weak and unstable obstacle of womanhood. With its roots in Victorian England, the YMCA was established on these gender perceptions.62 Even in America, I argue that these ideas pervade

the social organizations ideology—what Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt deem

manhood factories63—with later additions to the YMCA creed from William H.

Dodge, and historical examples like Theodore Roosevelt embody the masculine

perspective, making physique interminable from the formation of empire that is the result of God’s favor placed on a blessed nation at the center of religious history and the progress of civilization.64

62 Clyde Binfield, George Williams and the Y.M.C.A.: A study in Victorian social attitudes (London: Heinemann, 1973), 110-16.

63 Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, eds., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 5. 64 David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 1-13.

32 In Making Men, Making Class, Thomas Winter’s analysis of the YMCA, in

terms of bridging the gap of class consciousness in increasingly urbanizing

America by bridging the economic gap between elite industrialists and the

workingman other through discourse of masculinity through work ethic and

upward mobility, reveals how such activity made the organization appealing to

industrialists like William E. and Cleveland H. Dodge and Cornelius Vanderbilt as

an outlet for labor unrest rather than through strikes or political discourse. 65

However, when religious dissenters cannot find an adequate means of

expression, such as the case with George Fisher, this class superstructure

ultimately fails to curtail conflict. With Organizational Change: The Political

Economy of the YMCA, Mayer N. Zald focuses on the political economy of the

YMCA, that is, the increasingly urban and industrial character of the nation and

the organizations’ responses to these fluctuations, and how “as an organization’s

major tasks or problems shift, the locus of power generally shifts to different

groups within the organization.”66

Considering gender and women’s roles in missionary activity, with

Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women, 1800-1914, Nancy

Stockdale reveals the outgrowth of English missionaries in the Levant, and how

their movement challenged patriarchal institutions in the Metropole and

65 Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 13, 65.

66 Mayer N. Zald, Organizational Change: The Political Economy of the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 9, 16.

33 simultaneously empowered women; meanwhile these women became vessels for imperialism overseas, spreading latent ideas of domesticity and English patriarchy abroad. Like Stockdale, Dana L. Robert’s American Women in

Mission and Patricia R. Hill in her The World Their Household, show how nineteenth century missionary movements among women in America allowed these Christian women to challenge Victorian ideas on feminine roles at home, while creating opportunities for professional expertise abroad, among others as teachers and language specialists. Female domesticity changed as American women utilized their ability to infiltrate segregated female spaces of the Orient, attempting to mold the Muslim household by converting women and children.

Central to these new emerging roles however, was education. Education in one sense, became the vehicle by which American women liberated themselves from

Christian ideas of domesticity,67 but in turn undermined traditional social and gender structures abroad—for the case of this study—specifically Morocco.

Other historians and anthropologists have taken to preserving specific manifestations of traditional roles in North African societies. With Moroccan

Folktales, native Moroccan Jilali El Koudia traveled across her homeland and recorded oral tales in an attempt to preserve Moroccan folklore, and the ethnic morality, cultural memory, religious education, gender identifiers, or sheer entertainment value attached to those tales; all of which are threatened by the

67 Patricia R. Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1985), 3-7.

34 ubiquity of encroaching modern electronic media and increasing trends toward popular Western consumer driven culture.68 In this same vein, Daisy Hilse

Dwyer’s Images and Self Images, Hasan M. El-Shamy’s Folktales of Egypt,

Sabra J. Webber’s Romancing the Real, and Monia Hejaieij’s Behind Closed

Doors, record and reveal how folklore and storytelling create constructs within gendered spaces that reinforce traditional roles and mores in North African societies in Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco.

The challenge with defining and categorizing these events and actors within a specific narrative derives from the inherently distinctive concepts of linear historicity from differing perspectives influenced equally by forethought on one hand and hindsight on the other. Missionaries and Imperialists in nineteenth century America perceived a world progressively moving toward an ultimate end of pure civilization emanating from western history—a distinctive tangent moving in one direction with one historical model in mind. Considering this model, there was no room for differing explanations or alternatives to that particular form of civilization. Likewise, there was no room to explain the type of civil society forming in the Middle East—how the modern middle class began to take various forms and guises in places like Syria that only partially resembled the model of western civilization. Variety in education, languages, printed sources of news and polemics, industrialization, business ventures, and consumer commodities blended into a variegated network of manifold religious expressions, tribal

68 Jilali El Khoudia, Moroccan Folktales (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), vii-viii.

35 traditions, and challenged landed elites and traditional structures of power; it also suggests that the Ottoman Empire incubated one of the most metropolitan societies on the planet. How is this not in line with what is purportedly the innocuous American Dream?

Influential Americans, both religionists, industrialists, and politicians, reinforced their particularistic rendition of linear historical narrative both abroad and at home. These societies were not allowed to grow of their own volition, but were increasingly made to fit the categorical models espoused by small groups of powerful alliances. I intend to show that not only did these alliances among puissant northeastern American men confine foreign self-determinism to a western construct of historicism, but organizations within and regions among the territorial United States were made to fall in line with this structure, sometimes by force, an effort that steamrolled by the conclusion of the Civil War. This view of linear historicity favors the breadth of an American industrial agenda under the

Christian god rather than the more nuanced particularistic and detailed explanations of manifold trajectories of specific regions and peoples resultant from numerous dependent variables and perspectives.

36

CHAPTER 2

THE KANSAS-SUDAN MOVEMENT IN THE MIDWEST YMCA

I have known people spit upon the Bible. I have known people spit upon the name of Jesus. I remember some time since speaking to a poor old Jewess; an old woman just dropping into the grave, a poor wizened old creature who was just dying, —I remember when I was speaking to her about Jesus, she turned round like a she-wolf and glared at me.

—Henry Grattan Guinness, Preaching for the Million

My weight has increased 34 pounds and my chest 4 inches!

—1890 YMCA Testimonial

The Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement represents a specific example of the conflict between two very distinct and different ideas about the framework within which American missionaries abroad should function. In New York, the

YMCA International Committee represented a well-established, politico-religious bureaucracy pitted against a particular religious populism and subsequent foreign missionary enterprise manifested in the late 1880s in the YMCA Kansas branch—which was also nominally over Oklahoma and Indian Territories. The

Kansas Missionary Movement has received little historical analysis outside of the

YMCA annals. C. Howard Hopkins—an American historian hired by the

Association to write an official YMCA history—only reveals two aspects of the

YMCA conflict; that is, the theological controversy arising from Fisher’s pre- millennial basis for the Sudan mission, and to a lesser degree the international

37 political response to Fisher’s irresponsibility, using faith healing as a tactic which ultimately led to three deaths, and created the potential for even more casualties in Sierra Leone. These writers have shown the technical reasons behind why the movement drew the ire of the International committee, but fail to reveal just how sensationalized and how dramatic were the responses to and against Fisher’s enterprise. I contend however that in order to fully grasp how the Kansas

Committee further alienated its evangelical church partners, a deeper analysis of his use of YMCA funds to finance the Kansas-Sudan Movement, and the potentially damaging newspaper headlines both exaggerating the deaths in

Sierra Leone and denouncing the movement’s independence from organized evangelical churches. Printed accusations in newspapers revealed the fact that

Fisher was using YMCA funds subversively. Certainly, George Fisher’s actions were irresponsible at least, but that does not necessarily preclude that his critics and detractors performed actions or formulated agendas any less reprehensible.

During the formative period of the YMCA, five specific individuals came to dominate the organization and attempted to streamline the Y’s mission statement, evangelical underpinnings, and emphasis on physical acumen.

Following the American Civil War, Cephas Brainerd; alongside New York industrial mogul and philanthropist William E. Dodge, Jr.; International Committee members Robert Weidensall, Richard C. Morse; and John R. Mott of the college

YMCA, oversaw this social organization’s expansion across the United States

38 and eventually into Asia and the Near East via student movements and

evangelism along the growing networks of railroads.

Cephas Brainerd, a New York lawyer and Abraham Lincoln historian,

chaired the International Committee from 1867 to 1892. Through extensive

correspondence with traveling committee members and distant local branches,

Brainerd facilitated the New York agenda across the various local organizations

which constituted the national YMCA apparatus. 69

Robert Weidensall was an Evangelical Lutheran and so-called “Prophet of

the Association,” Pennsylvania College graduate and theology student, as well

as the Y’s first traveling field secretary beginning in 1867. He heavily influenced

the branches rapidly developing among the Midwestern states—first in Omaha,

Nebraska—and following the winding tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad;

establishing local Associations in Kansas and Iowa, two regions that were

eventually swept up in George Fisher’s millennialist missionary movement.

Weidensall’s introduction to railroads began with his tenure in the Construction

Corps in the United States Army during the Civil War.70

69 C. Howard Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), 117.

70 Hopkins, 119-21. Weidensall’s career began with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, along the many routes spanning the American frontier; which contracted physical time and space with the ease of mass transit. The movement was substantially financed by Cornelius Vanderbilt by the 1880s; $225,000 in 1888, 227-33. Business correspondence, undated, Robert Weidensall Papers, undated Business Correspondence, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; Robert Weidensall held the particular

39 American railroads extending westward had a twofold effect on time and

space. Physically, this mode of transportation shortened time—if we are to

consider time a measurement of movement—and constricted the vast expanses

of desert, plains, and mountains of America’s frontier. Additionally, these

railroads created undefined new spaces of interaction, both for travelers and

railroad workers. As urban environments and boomtowns grew up around these

railroads, towns like Topeka, where growth strongly correlated with railroad hubs,

railroad workers and telegraph operators had easier access to vice in the form of

saloons, brothels, and bathhouses.

The YMCA Transportation Department was set up to directly counter

these threats to morality by injecting Christianity into this new frontier space. An

internal entity—the Reconnoitering Party—infiltrated these local houses of vice to

keep track of patrons. Elaborate YMCA facilities constructed along these roads

included reading rooms abound with literature on Christianity and physical

fitness, plumbed bathrooms, sleeping quarters, organized Bible readings, and

class instruction on topics ranging from algebra to hygiene. These facilities

created new spaces aimed at helping to redirect the energies of workingmen and

sway them from perceived sloth and sin by reformulating their character along

the YMCA’s model combination of Protestant ethics and American masculinity

view that Christ’s kingdom was inherently among people, rather than defined territorial.

40 through physical fitness.71 The Transportation Department was so successful that as early as the 1870s, when the entire YMCA organization was still in early

stages of development, Brainerd and Cornelius Vanderbilt struggled with the

concept of separating the rapidly expanding Transportation Department, but

opted instead to keep it subordinate to the greater YMCA.72

Another International Committee member, Richard Cary Morse, a New

York City native, Yale graduate, newspaperman, and nephew of the inventor of

the telegraph, staunchly supported the fourfold program as the YMCA’s general

secretary during the American Gilded Age.73 Morse streamlined YMCA foreign

work by formulating a constitution to govern over missions begun by the St. Paul

and Minneapolis branches—under the influence of Dwight L. Moody’s

evangelism—and the International committee. Under this constitution, the Y sent

English language teachers under a four denominational oversight committee:

Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Reform Church. Morse helped establish YMCA guidelines for work in Japan in 1888, under the guidelines that the “object shall be carried out in strict harmony with the views and methods of

71 Thomas Winter, “Contested Spaces: The YMCA and Workingmen on the Railroads, 1877-1917” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 65-78.

72 Cornelius Vanderbilt to Brainerd, 15 September 1879, Correspondence, 1879-1887, Transportation and Railroad Department Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

73 Hopkins, 122-23.

41 the various Mission Boards and Evangelical Churches,”74 setting a framework for

future foreign enterprise. By 1888, Morse and Mott affirmed the primacy of church membership over organization membership; the 1869 Portland

Convention unanimously clarified the YMCA’s intent to strictly adhere to an

alliance with Evangelical churches, calling on all Association officeholders to be

officially affiliated with an evangelical church.75

From the end of the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction, industrialist

William E. Dodge, Jr. —co-owner of the largest mineral operation in the United

States by 1874, which contributed the copper wire for the first transcontinental

telegraph line76 and the so-called Christian Merchant—fulfilled the roles of

National Committee Chair as well as President and most influential board

member of the New York YMCA branch. Given its proximity to the International

Committee headquarters—also in New York City—Dodge’s influence reached beyond the city itself, into the national field. During his tenure in office, Dodge’s most profound to the Y’s mission—the fourfold program—an organizational

mission statement included not only “spiritual, mental, social” aspects regarding

the right action and lifestyle of young men adrift in modern, urban jungles. This

mission also included a challenge that the Association should also focus on the

74 Hopkins, 318-19.

75 Hopkins, 362-65.

76 Robert Glass Cleland, A History of Phelps Dodge, 1834-1950 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 57-8.

42 “physical condition of young men,”77 as well. This mantra became the impetus

for YMCA work throughout the United States and abroad; George Fisher would

constantly attack and harass Dodge’s addition throughout his time with the

YMCA in Kansas and afterwards through the printed media of the GMU.

Additionally, it was William E. Dodge, who in 1876 is credited with suggesting the

organization of a YMCA college association based on the model of the college

branch at Princeton.78

Dodge held sway as an unofficial International Committee advisor; an advisor who also happened to consistently contribute the largest sums of recorded funds to the organization.79 The Sunday Mercury—a New York City religious periodical, self proclaimed as the “acknowledged leader of every true evangelical movement in this city”—claimed as early as 1868 that corrupt ties between William E. Dodge, Jr. and the YMCA—exclaiming the organization a de

facto subsidiary of the Republican party—citing “Gross Treatment of Evangelical

Negroes” meanwhile legislating that local government fund the New York

YMCA.80 Attempting to show the solvency and garner financial support from

77 Hopkins, 106-7.

78 Robert R. McBurney, Address at New York University, ca. 1890-92, Robert R. McBurney Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives. University of Minnesota Libraries

79 Hopkins, 118.

80 Sunday Mercury, August 2, 1868, “Hypocrisy Unmasked,” Clippings, undated, 1884-1886, 1891, Cephas Brainerd Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; the paper cites $13,000 (roughly

43 members and donors to add to his $109,000 contribution, Dodge’s testimonial

printed on an 1888 YMCA Pledge Card proclaims that “Merchants and Christian

men now feel and understand its importance.”81 Likewise, during Phelps

Dodge’s economic height in the 1870s, the company was implicated in a New

York Customs House scandal, evading duties on shipped minerals.82 During the

Spanish-American War, the YMCA made tremendous efforts to proselytize

among American soldiers, which only turned out some meager conversions, but

helped to establish YMCA apparatuses for the armed forces and a de facto

alliance with the United States, producing federal government legislation allowing

the Y to build structures on government land, in no small part thanks to donations

and government schmoozing of William E. Dodge.83

American industrialists like Dodge and Vanderbilt utilized the

Transportation Department of the YMCA for its ability to help mold workingmen

$184,000 in 2008 dollars) allocated for the white New York City YMCA branch compared to $12.28 ($173; 2008) allocated for the black branch. Moreover, the periodical accuses the Phelps and Dodge Company of influencing the New York City government into appropriating $5,000 ($70,000; 2008) directly to the local YMCA; though denied by Dodge, these actions were supposedly covered in “every newspaper in this city.” For relative value of money, I used the Measuring Worth website through the Economic History Services portal, located at http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/; http://eh.net/hmit/

81 1888 YMCA Pledge Card, Business correspondence, May 1888 - August 1889, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; Dodge’s contribution equates to roughly $1.5 million in 2008 dollars.

82 Cleland, 58.

83 Hopkins, 454-55.

44 into masculine Christians. Like the Transportation Department attempted to

inject Christianity among working classes, the various college YMCA’s—and later

the greater amalgamated college YMCA—began as attempts to fill the spiritual

and moral vacuum left at American college campuses following the liberalization

of Calvinist theology after the Second Great Awakening, combined with the shift

in professorial rolls from spiritual agents concerned with student morality to

academic specialists in new fields of scientific thought.84 John R. Mott’s

leadership over the college branch of the YMCA, both domestic and foreign,

represents an organizational shift in 1888 from strictly theological rhetoric and

proselytism to physical action, predicated on defining educated, inspired,

masculine Christianity.85 Fisher’s Sudan missionary enterprise fell into this

veritable cleavage in the YMCA’s program. Racism, economics, and United

States foreign policy ensured that college work could not extend to a West

African, British colony, and therefore eliminated the efficacy of Fisher’s mission

abroad.

The New York committee established the framework for the national

organization during the post Civil War era, culminating in a rather rigid structure with specific goals by the end of the nineteenth century. Contrary to a

84 David P. Setran, The College “Y”: Student Religion in the Era of Secularization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2.

85 Setran, 5-6

45 confederated structure, perceived by Jessica Elfbein,86 which the YMCA was only nominally, at best; the Association came to be dominated by an increasingly powerful central leadership.87 That is not to say, however, there was no dissent

within the nationwide apparatus. The Chicago branch, under Dwight L. Moody,

focused more so on promoting the spiritual aspects of young men—based largely

on Henry Grattan Guinness’s evangelicalism—over physical condition.

Evangelism, summer bible camps, and religious conventions typify popular

religious conduct in many of the frontier western states during the nineteenth

century.88 Though the Chicago branch—as the Great Lakes region’s national

political importance, industrial capacity, and local Association assets increased—

would eventually challenge New York’s lead in national YMCA affairs, until the

1890s the major opposition the International Committee faced, and consequently

the New York association, came directly from Fisher’s peculiar western

movement.89

The Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement had auspicious foundations. In

the Kansas YMCA’s Quarterly Report ending in July 1889, State Chair James D.

86Jessica Elfbein, ‘“An Aggressive Christian Enterprise”: The Baltimore YMCA’s Journey to Institutional Credibility and Religious Legitimacy, 1852-1882’, in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 22-34.

87 Mayer N Zald, Organizational Change: The Political Economy of the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 9, 16.

88 Zald, 78.

89 Hopkins, 109; Zald, 79.

46 Husted announced that local revivals required missionary endeavors, and the

State Committee added that they approved and would fund the missionaries to

Sudan, directly tie the movement to the Association through an official

representative—Fisher—but Husted would renounce such sentiments by

October.90 The first disagreements between the International Committee and the

Kansas YMCA began in the autumn of 1889, leading up to the Eighth Annual

Kansas State Convention at Topeka, which ran from 17 to 21 October. Initially

challenged by the Chicago and surrounding Illinois Associations, which

organized independent missionary ventures inspired in by Dr. Henry Grattan

Guinness’s evangelistic fervor, the International Committee approached Fisher’s

Kansas-Sudan Movement cautiously but mildly.91 The Kansas Executive

90 Quarterly Report, Summer 1889, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; “Resolved [as of July 12, 1889]: The State Executive Committee approves the appointment of Missionary Committees by Local Associations for the purpose of aiding the Soudan Pioneer Missionary Movement, or other pioneer missionary enterprises. It was also agreed that some member of the State Committee should be designed as a member for the Soudan Pioneer Mission, who should act for and represent the missionary bands of the Association in this state.”

91 Richard C. Morse to Ober, 5 October 1889, Charles Ober, correspondence, 1882-1892, Richard C. Morse, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; “There was this temptation presented to us entering upon the foreign field. There were those engaged in the general missionary work, outside of denominational organizations, who would gladly use the Association for general missionary and evangelistic purposes, if the Associations were ready to yield themselves up to such services. But, the moment they did this, criticism would be excited. How distinctly it would be worth while for you to refer to Kansas and Dr. Guinness, and the course of the Kansas Committee…we want to be careful not to alienate the Brethren in Kansas farther than is absolutely necessary; and if you can keep the Illinois Associations fully in

47 Committee’s controversial definition of foreign missionary work, formulated

during the State Convention of 1889, caused great stir among the associated

evangelical churches, embroiling the Kansas Executive Committee and

International Committee. What eventually became the controversy of excluding and alienating the YMCA alliance with the manifold evangelical churches, began with the simple inclusion of the word “pioneer” in the State Committee’s definition of foreign missionary work in the Sudan. Husted represented the minority camp

at the Convention—supporting alignment with the churches and missions, only

under the auspices of official church sanction—opposite the Fisher camp’s

missionary fervor and hope to maintain independency from church oversight.92

Fisher had challenged the Husted camp even before the Convention in a letter to

Brainerd:

I do not know of religious work that has appeared on the surface to be so thoroughly right and yet within to be so radically wrong as that of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of America.93

line and compel the wholesome right sentiment, without castigating sharply the brethren elsewhere…In regard to the special need of definite work for young men in Foreign Mission lands, this is precisely what the missionaries of Japan and Madras…Swift’s and Wishard’s work in Japan clearly reveals.”

92 Richard C. Morse to Hague, 15 January 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives. University of Minnesota Libraries; James D. Husted’s State Committee Report, 19 October 1889, “The Committee has no thought of going into general missionary work, nor has it any wish to found general missionary societies or in any way to come into conflict with the societies already formed through the instrumentality of the church of God.”

93 Recounted in letter, Cephas Brainerd to Fisher, 10 October 1889, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State

48

Leading up to the mission in the Sudan, on 3 February 1890 the Kansas State

Committee severed ties with the English evangelist Henry Grattan Guinness, due

to his affiliation with other missionary endeavors and the Institute of Boston, and

his unwillingness to focus on detailing specific theology; which in turn symbolizes

an increasingly radical shift within the Kansas YMCA.94 Morse accused Fisher of

deliberately disregarding calls on the Kansas YMCA dropping the word “pioneer”

from the Convention Report, suggesting that Fisher circulate a memorandum

correcting the gross error.95 Fisher responded that he and the State Committee

never agreed to strike the word from the record, and resented the fact that Morse

had aired the disagreement publicly in the YMCA’s circular, The Watchman.96

Morse’s justification against Fisher’s enterprise was that the missionary committees should be subordinate to the various college boards, organized by

YMCA members directly affiliated with specific churches.97 Through this

Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

94 E. S. Walton to Kansas State Committee, 3 February 1890, Kansas- Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

95 Richard C. Morse to Fisher, 23 April 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

96 George Fisher to Morse, 29 April 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

49 Association shift, Fisher can be more readily aligned with the populist workingmen, whereas Morse and the International Committee thought it more appropriate that missions be proctored by college educated men.

In 1890, George Fisher put the precedent set with the Japanese foreign work to the test through direct action, with his own missionary enterprise, targeting the amorphous Sudan for proselytism.98 Fisher’s intent was that the missionaries should begin at Sierra Leone, and eventually work their way throughout the region known to them as the Sudan.99 Kingman, the former

General Secretary at Topeka and oldest of the missionaries to Africa at 29 years of age, arrived at Freetown on 27 February 1890 on the steamship Congo. The second party to Sierra Leone consisted of eight YMCA members and employees from across the country, though primarily Midwestern followers of Fisher’s evangelical revivalism. Among them, Charles L. Helmick, the former General

Secretary of the YMCA in Marion, Kansas; Frank M. Gates, the gym supervisor at Topeka; John E. Jaderquist and W.J. Harris, both former assistant secretaries

97 Richard C. Morse to Hague, 15 January 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

98 Dr. D. Palmer Ross to Hay, 22 July 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

99 The Gospel Message, 15 November 1893, Vol. II, No. 6, 5; George Fisher claims the Soudan stretched from the West African colony Sierra Leone to Eritrea; “About 4,000 miles long, 1,000 miles wide, containing 90,000,000 of people, speaking 100 languages; the most difficult and most neglected part of the earth.” By this definition, the Sudan was a veritable goldmine for pre-millennial proselytism.

50 at the St. Paul YMCA; Roy G. Comings of Hastings College, Nebraska; Mrs.

Rebecca E. Kingman; Jennie Dick, former assistant to the state secretary in

Kansas; and James Trice, a “colored man from Durham, South Carolina”; set out

on 22 May 1890 after praying the night before until 3 a.m. in the morning.100 In a

letter dated June 2nd, while aboard the steamship Ambrig, Mrs. Kingman wrote

about her “very delightful trip to England,” and professed her faith in God’s

provisions that “He can spread a table in the wilderness and bring water out of

the ground.”101 Fisher’s eight missionaries aboard the Ambrig landed at

Freetown on 13 June 1890.102

By July 9th, Gates and Harris died from illness, two days later, on July 11th,

Mrs. Kingman also died; Trice was removed from his dwelling to the colonial hospital for treatment, and Kingman—running a fever of 104.4°F—forced to capitulate to Dr. D. Palmer Ross’s—the colonial surgeon at Freetown—treatment so as not to “endanger the community” at large, in hopes of not drawing Ross’s political ire and exposing the missionaries to possible deportation. Ross began

100 George Fisher to Kansas State Executive Committee, 22 May 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

101 Mrs. Kingman to Kansas YMCA State Committee, 2 June 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; Rebecca Kingman died within a month.

102 Dr. D. Palmer Ross to Hay, 22 July 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas YMCA State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

51 to take measures to insure that there was no further spread of disease and no

repetition of the “disaster of the year 1884.” The colonial surgeon ordered that

Gates and Harris immediately be buried by the colonial Sanitary Police and that

they “destroy all bedding and clothing of the deceased.” 103

Officially the “Administrator of the Government of the West African

Settlements,”104 Sierra Leone’s colonial governor Captain James S. Hay quickly

made issue of the missionaries’ deaths and illnesses to Lord Knutsford—Colonial

Secretary Sir Henry Holland. Hay mentioned that the missionaries’ intent was to

continue inland to the east, just as Fisher had fantasized. However, Hay

suggested that the missionaries were a “danger to themselves [and] the

community at large,” that these evangelists “who trust alone to ‘Faith Healing’”

only “narrowly escaped” further casualties and could easily “fan the flames into

an epidemic.” Governor Hay’s suggestion to Lord Knutsford, with a July copy of

Missionary Review in hand exclaiming more missionaries were to follow, was that

the British should convince the United States government to impede any future

missionary departures to Sierra Leone.105 By October, the British government

had consulted then U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine—“who was

103 Dr. D. Palmer Ross to Hay, 22 July 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

104 A.B.C. Sibthorpe, The History of Sierra Leone (London: Elliot Stock, 1906), 108.

105 James S. Hay to Government House, Lord Knutsford, 23 July 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

52 instrumental in bringing this unfortunate experience to a close”106 —that the

American Mission House in Freetown had been quarantined, and that the party

should be sent back to the United States.107 Becoming part of a larger global

disease network, in the early twentieth century, Spanish Influenza was first

observed in Fort Riley, Kansas, just miles to the west of Fisher’s original Topeka.

Early strains were also found Freetown, Sierra Leone, where Fisher had

originally sent his first missionary enterprise abroad. The locations are likely

coincidental; my intention in mentioning this episode is that just as missionaries

could contribute beneficially as medical practitioners in underdeveloped regions

of the world, they could also become the hosts and efficient carriers of potentially

disastrous diseases.

In February of 1891, Weidensall intimated to Morse his hopes to avert a

“newspaper controversy” on the Sudan enterprise, as the media had already

created headlines from the missionary deaths. The Kansas YMCA’s missionary

casualties in Sierra Leone had already been sensationalized in printed news

media, receiving coverage locally in New York City and journals published by the

YMCA’s evangelical base in Kansas. One headline, in the 14 August 1890

edition of Joseph Pulitzer’s World, dramatically—and erroneously—read

106 Fifty Years of History: Kansas State YMCA, 1882-1932 (Topeka: Kansas State YMCA, 1932), 9.

107 YMCA Memo on the United States’ State Department’s response, 15 October 1890, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

53 “Butchered by Arabs!” The author claimed that “Gates, Kingman, and

Jaderquist,” as an “advance guard” of “Ten Presbyterian Evangelists…Entered the Soudan of their own Accord,” that they were representing “no society,” died at the hands of murderous “savages.”108 Fisher’s blunder also received coverage in

Topeka with a published sermon by Reverend Dr. Ray in the Topeka Daily

Capital, and articles by James G. Dougherty entitled “The YMCA Soudan Matter” and “Our Sudanese YMCA” printed in Reverend R.D. Parker’s The Kansas

Telephone. Reverend Ray began his sermon with his initial response to the missionaries going to Sudan as a series of “Admiration…Doubts…Fears.”

Additionally, the Reverend denounces the missionaries’ reliance on prayer alone as inspiration from God, implying that their decisions on a day to day basis have no foundation in scripture, making the young missionaries unreceptive to reason and advice, relying on God’s grace for necessities, which was only exacerbated by their lacking real knowledge of an inhospitable region of the world, emphasizing the careless zeal under which this enterprise was propagated.

Moreover, Dr. Ray attacks the pre-millennialist foundation of the movement, claiming that this theology sets the YMCA against its alliance with the various

Protestant churches, and that these millennialist doctrines have little foundation in the Bible, granting that the “Lord’s coming will not be hastened by an unscriptural policy.” In fairness to the movement, the Reverend concluded his

108 The World, 14 August 1890, Kansas State Notes, 1886-1901, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

54 sermon stating it is better to be fanatical about God, “accomplishing nothing but a

martyr death,” even if misguided, than to ignore proselytism, be seduced by

wealth, or “sinful sloth.”109 Dougherty treated the Sudan movement much more

harshly. The author chastised Fisher for using YMCA funds to print material

directly related to the Sudan mission, and cited Morse’s response that the movement was “unauthorized” by the International Committee. Even more radically, Dougherty issued a challenge, playing rhetorically on the deaths of the missionaries, that:

It looks now as if there must of necessity be a funeral. Either the YMCA Soudan business or the YMCA will be the corpse. My fervent prayer as pastor is that it may not be the latter.110

The International Committee had a fiasco on their hands, and Weidensall was

correct in pointing out that the Committee needed to stop the public spread of

discourse about Fisher’s enterprise. Damage control over the missionaries’ deaths helped fuel a harsh response to the Kansas movement. Fisher was further challenged through direct correspondence from John MacDonald, Kansas

State board member and the editor of the Western Journal of Topeka, and the

International Committee.111 He denounced Fisher’s summer bible schools as

109 The Topeka Daily Capital, 26 October 1890, Kansas State Notes, 1886-1901, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

110 “Our Sudanese YMCA,” James G. Dougherty in The Kansas Telephone, undated, Kansas State Notes, 1886-1901, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

55 radical, centered on bible readings and fasting, and citing that the young men

attending relied only on faith for subsistence.112

Attacks on Fisher transcended mere printed media. Personal

disagreements based on character issues embroiled the Kansas secretaries and

eventually the International Committee. James D. Husted challenged his

opponent’s character in letters to the International Committee, accusing Fisher of

sexual infidelity, whereby Fisher defended his position claiming that he fully

intended to marry his unwed mistress. Given the nature of Weidensall and

Fisher’s friendship, Husted alienated himself before the Committee by bringing

his disaffection for Fisher through remarks perceived by Morse to be

slanderous.113 If anything, this dramatic interlude only drew the attention of the

Committee to the dysfunction of the Kansas organization, opening the door for

further scrutiny. This and future challenges grew into larger disputes, and

111 Richard C. Morse to Weidensall, 2 April 1891, Business correspondence, undated, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

112 MacDonald to Weidensall, 6 April 1891, Business correspondence, September 1889 - June 1891, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

113 Richard C. Morse to Weidensall, 8 March 1890, Business correspondence, undated, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; apparently, “H_d” reported to Hague that Fisher was in a relationship out of wedlock—‘death loves a shining mark’—to which Morse responded was just as “slander to the great slanderer.” Morse’s letter to Weidensall is largely secretive, whereby both agree to disregard Husted’s accusations, and keep Fisher’s engagement secret for the time being. The lady in question was most certainly Fannie L. Early, whom Fisher married on 14 May 1890, see The Gospel Message, Vol. 28, No. 10.

56 ultimately refined Fisher’s radical opposition to his detractors and outlook of the

religious and political status quo.

In September of 1890, Cephas Brainerd, Benjamin C. Wetmore, the

International Committee Treasurer; Robert Ross McBurney; former New York

City YMCA President and General Secretary of the International Committee;114

and Richard C. Morse, along with six other International Committee members,

departed from New York for Topeka for a controversial meeting with Fisher and

twenty four other members and Kansas State Committee secretaries in

Topeka.115 Following the meeting of 17 September 1890, Morse prepared a

memorandum for circulation among all the YMCA branches across the United

114 Kautz Family Archives Website, http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/html/ymca/yusa0021.phtml, “Robert McBurney was born in Ireland in 1837, immigrating to the United States in 1854. On arriving in New York City he got a room in the YMCA, where he soon developed an interest in the organization. He became employed as its executive officer in 1862. (The term general secretary was not yet used, but McBurney is regarded as the first staff person to whom the term applied.) McBurney presided over the extensive growth of the New York City association from this time through the 1890s. This growth included increased membership, new branches, and more buildings, including the first in the country especially built for association purposes (1869). McBurney was also active on the state and national levels. He was a founder and leader of the New York State Committee and its president in 1869, the 1870s, and 1875. In the mid-1860s he was the corresponding member of the International Committee from the New York State Committee. In 1869 at the Portland Convention he was elected a full member to the International Committee. He was also active in the General Secretaries Conference since its inception in 1871. He attended World Conference meetings in Europe five times during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1896 the pressures of work caused a breakdown. He moved to a sanitarium and died in 1898.”

115 Richard C. Morse, “Memorandum; Concerning a Portion of the Report of the Kansas State Committee for the Quarter Ending 30 September 1890,” Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

57 States. Fisher’s camp had hoped that the International Committee would lend its

approval to the missionary enterprise, while the minority camp, set against the

mission, hoped the International Committee would officially denounce the

movement and its pre-millennialist foundations. When asked on his position,

McBurney emphatically rejected the notion that a YMCA State Secretary be aligned with a missionary venture without official church sanction; a position about which all International Committee members present agreed. Morse maintained that the International Committee members present did not and could not issue an official decree denouncing the missionary movement; that the

Committee could only fulfill its obligations in an advisory role. Morse also sidestepped an issue brought out by Holmes; the claim that the International

Committee prohibited pre-millennial teachings from YMCA bible classes in that these doctrines were controversial and offensive to the evangelical churches affiliated with the Association, and any such secretary teaching thus was

“conscientiously disqualified” from teaching aforesaid doctrines. The memorandum was just as semantically nebulous as the controversy over the term pioneer in the Kansas Committee’s definition of the Sudan missionary venture.116 After circulating the memo, the great preponderance of YMCA

branches overwhelmingly supported the International Committee’s positions.

116 Richard C. Morse, “Memorandum; Concerning a Portion of the Report of the Kansas YMCA State Committee for the Quarter Ending 30 September 1890,” Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

58 Morse made the correct assessment that despite the fact the International

Committee could not directly issue a dictum denouncing Fisher’s missionary

program, the Kansas Committee was betraying the trust of its allies—primarily its

members and affiliated church—given Fisher was using YMCA contributions to

fund the missionaries and printed media promoting the venture.

To determine not only Fisher’s influence in the region, but the extent to

which he used YMCA funds for the Sudan Mission, I have accessed the very

transparent financial reports of the Kansas Executive Committee. However,

determining the financial solvency of the Kansas YMCA is tricky; Fisher presents

dollar amounts and details on organizational expansion that give the impression

of tremendous growth; however, other figures and regional bankruptcies,

augmented by a depressed economy that helped bring about the panic of 1893,

tell a different story. By February 1890, though not directly related to the State

Association and Topeka branch, the Kansas City branch had amassed a debt of

$80,055.62.117 The State General Secretary claimed, in December 1890 his belief “that for the first time in several yeas the Topeka Association will close the year without debt of any kind.”118 Massive expansion maneuvers in the Midwest

117 Young Men’s Magazine, February 1890, Missouri YMCA State Committee Records, Young Men's Magazine, Kansas City, 1890-1893; equating to roughly 2,000,000USD in 2008.

118 W. H. Holmes to Weidensall, 15 December 1890, Business correspondence, September 1889 - June 1891, Robert Wiedensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

59 left the YMCA overextended financially, a trend that would not reverse until the

early twentieth century.119

A dimension lacking in Hopkins history of this movement relates to how

the Kansas YMCA could be considered directly affiliated with the Sudan

enterprise, aside from motivation. As such, the transparency of the Kansas

State’s finances, included with each quarterly report, are revealing as to how

much of the YMCA’s funds Fisher retained for himself and the mission in the

Sudan. Detailed breakdowns of Kansas State YMCA finances were included in each of the branch’s quarterly report. In 1888, the Kansas State YMCA reported

Fisher’s wages $2,500, and “printing, postage, and stationary” at $1,533.61; the

two largest expenses for that branch.120 For 1889, the Kansas Y set aside its

largest expenditures for Fisher in the form of wages and personal expenses, as

well as for printed and mailed material.121 The relative values of Fisher’s wages

119 George Fisher to Weidensall, 7 March 1889, Business correspondence, May 1888 - August 1889, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; increases in associations, 1887-89: 35 to 64; general secretaries: 9 to 31; raised for state work: $4,400-$15,000 (roughly 97,000USD to 340,000USD; 2008). Fisher also measured success by conversion, showing 494 in 1887 (185 of which affiliated with specific churches) and 844 in 1888 (397 to churches).

120 Kansas State YMCA Annual Report for 1888, State Convention Papers, 1882-1936, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; Fisher’s wages come to roughly 55,000USD in 2008, and the expenses of the printed material to almost 34,000USD. Fisher also received $266 for general expenses (almost 6,000USD in 2008).

121 Kansas State Committee Annual Reports for 1890, State Convention Papers, 1882-1936, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA

60 for today places him squarely in the upper middle class; therefore, I assert that

Fisher would not necessarily identify with the typical poor western farmer who

helped promote the populist farmer movement and the Peoples’ Party. Fisher’s

petit bourgeois leanings make his movement much more nuanced and complex,

and more difficult to identify it with any organized populist movement beyond

itself. However, in the following year, Fisher’s wages dropped precipitously,

losing over half of his wages from March 1890 to September 1890. There is one

correlative during this period, in spite of the fact that Fisher was not in active

disagreement with any other YMCA officer at the time. That correlative in

particular signals the initiation of attacks on Fisher, beginning with his Christian character by March 1890.

Funding was central to the International and Kansas Committee’s disagreement over the YMCA’s church alliance and the Kansas Sudan

Movement. Fisher had earlier attempted to dissociate the Kansas YMCA from the missionaries in the Sudan, with the State Committee report of July 1889 and

later during the State Convention in October 1889.122 In June of 1891, he

reported the largest expenses for the summer Bible school session and another

Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. Fisher was allotted $2500 as wages (roughly 56,000USD; 2008) and $293.35 for “personal expenses,” (roughly 6,500USD; 2008)

122 Fisher to D.D. Hoag, 25 July 1889, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

61 that was “forwarded to Sudan missionaries.”123 Fisher still spent large amounts

of YMCA funds on his pet projects, printing these expenditures transparently on

YMCA stationary with YMCA funds; the accusations hurled at the State Secretary

were founded on clear readings of the Kansas financial reports. This adds

another dimension to Hopkins’ argument that the main issue the International

Committee had with George Fisher was his betraying the trust of the various

evangelical churches.

In March 1891, George Fisher applied to the International Committee for a

railroad pass outside of Kansas state lines. Cephas Brainerd responded to the

request with:

What right has he as a representative, - if he is a representative of the Kansas State Committee, - to solicit the privilege of a pass over the road running out of Cincinnati if you please, except under the special circumstances that he is upon a journey home? I think that a careful investigation would show that Mr. Fisher has not devoted during the last two years one half of his time to the state work of Kansas.124

Some years earlier, Cephas Brainerd had resolved a situation involving the

legality and issuance of railroad passes from major lines that resulted from the

Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. In response to the Act, multiple railroad

lines—including Pacific Railroad Company and Michigan Central Railroad

123 Kansas State Committee Report, State Convention Papers, 1882- 1936, Kansas State Committee Records $673.27 was reported for the summer Bible camp (roughly 15,000USD, 2008) and $420.60 forwarded to the missionaries in Africa (roughly 9,500USD, 2008).

124 Cephas Brainerd to Hicks, 5 March 1891, Transportation and Railroad Department Records, Correspondence, 1890-1894, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

62 Company—revoked passes to YMCA officials who crossed state lines. Brainerd appealed to Cornelius Vanderbilt for resolution, affirming that these railroad companies were essentially overreacting to a bill they did not quite understand.125 By 1891, the International Committee scrutinized every move

Fisher made, as he clearly had pushed these men to their limits. Railroad passes were not uncommon to travelers within the rank and file of the YMCA; however, by using the railroads, Fisher was able to expand his movement into

Minnesota and Nebraska; later with the GMU, Fisher would expand across the

Midwest, from Minnesota all the way to Texas. Brainerd had served just long enough to witness the demise of Fisher’s unorthodox movement among the

Midwestern states, securing his legacy in office as testament to the cementing of the New York alliance’s values across multiple branches of the national organization.

Fisher ran into opposition both locally and with the International

Committee. J.R. Mulvane, President of the Bank of Topeka, asserted economic pressure on Morse, placing emphasis that YMCA funds were contributed strictly for the YMCA, and that the missionaries’ deaths in Africa created a stir that betrays the trust of those who contributed to the organization and received a

125 Lidyard to Ingersoll, 14 March 1887, Transportation and Railroad Department Records, Correspondence, 1879-1887, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

63 completely different and heinous result.126 Following a two-and-a-half hour

interview with Fisher in Topeka, Weidensall reported to Morse on 15 April 1891,

Fisher’s solution to the conflict. The Kansas secretary suggested comprehensive

independence from the various churches affiliated with the YMCA, “complete

separation from the International Committee,” staunchly upheld the mission’s pre-millennialist foundation, and intimated that Holmes, J. B. Larimer—Chairman of the Sub-Committee—and he would otherwise leave the YMCA service, just as many of his opponents had done prior.127 Fisher responded that he and

Weidensall were coming from two differing perspectives, and hoped their

friendship would weather the current crisis.128

Shortly thereafter, in early April 1891, the Kansas YMCA Member for

Railroad Work and Topeka Board President R.B. Gemmell, MacDonald, and two others on the state board, plus Husted and T.B. Sweet of the Kansas Executive

Committee, resigned over the missionary affair.129 At the Tenth Annual Kansas

126J. R. Mulvane to Morse, 10 April 1891, Kansas-Sudan Missionary Movement, 1890-1891, Kansas State Committee Records, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

127 Robert Weidensall to Morse, 15 April 1890, Business correspondence, September 1889 - June 1891, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

128 George Fisher to Weidensall, 15 April 1891, Business correspondence, September 1889 - June 1891, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

129 MacDonald to Morse, 3 April 1891, Business correspondence, September 1889 - June 1891, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; “The situation had become

64 State Committee in 1891, the board officially determined that no Association

member could be affiliated with the Sudan missionary movement.130 This turn,

by the end of 1891 led to Fisher’s resignation, and the assent of W.H. Holmes,

the General Secretary of the Topeka Association to General Secretary of the

State Association.131 Holmes initially supported the missionary enterprise, but in

November of 1891 reaffirmed to Weidensall his sentiment as an “association

man.”132 Fisher took his missionary movement from the YMCA, to his organization—the GMU—and from Sierra Leone to Morocco.

unendurable, the General Secretary [Holmes], controlled as he is and has been by Fisher, goes and comes when his spirit moves him, and that is often.” Holmes apparently never asked permission to take a leave of absence and attend meetings concerning the missionary enterprise in Sudan.

130 W. H. Holmes to Weidensall, 28 October 1891, Business correspondence, undated, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

131 W. H. Holmes to Weidensall, 15 December 1891, Business correspondence, July 1891 - December 1892, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

132 W. H. Holmes to Weidensall, 20 November 1891, Business correspondence, undated, Robert Weidensall Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

65

CHAPTER 3

MISSIONARY POSITIONS; THE GOSPEL MISSIONARY UNION’S PLANS FOR THE SOUDAN AND MOROCCO

What might have been their achievements were not all their lives and ambitions stifled and blighted by the power of Islam?

—The Gospel Message, December 1895

Other lands have had their martyrs…but I never heard of anyone dying for Morocco.

—The Gospel Message, November 1895

In the previous chapter, I illustrated how George Fisher and his

independent missionary movement in the “Sudan” created tension and conflict

with the United States and British imperial governments, and how the greater organizational foreign missionary alliance formulated among the YMCA and colleges in America and abroad. In this chapter I will demonstrate how Fisher’s missionaries created conflict and tension among marginalized social groups in

Sierra Leone, and more importantly, among various authorities, tribes, religions, races and gender dynamics in Moroccan society. Few authors have given any semblance of historical treatment to the Gospel Missionary Union’s foray into proselytism in Morocco: Wichita State History Professor George W. Collins with

“Missionaries and Muslims: The Gospel Missionary Union in Morocco, 1895-

1912”, published a mere five years after Foucault’s The Order of Things and

66 before Said’s Orientalism; and the fiction writer Evelyn Stenbock-Ditty, with her

pseudo-historical rendition of the GMU in Morocco in A Gleam of Light and her

heroic children’s fiction stories MissTerri! and Dave and Neta Jacksons’ Risking the Forbidden Game, where these authors partially reconstruct quasi-historical narratives in more or less hagiographic forms from excerpts of the GMU organ

The Gospel Message.

In his new organization circular, The Gospel Message, George Fisher published accounts and letters of missionaries in the Sudan, meanwhile using the periodical as a platform to continue his crusade against the YMCA and its affiliates. In 1894, Fisher denounced “a bill of certain minstrels who are coming to town to play at the YMCA” with:

“Eccentric Dancing, New Spring Gags,” and other ridiculous and wicked things. May God pity some of the Christian Organizations…whose glory and power is fast departing.133

Fisher also censured Dwight L. Moody, John Mott, Professor H.C. King of Oberlin

College, and Fisher’s old nemeses—the YMCA International Committee—as

apostates supporting evolutionary theory.134 No sooner than the YMCA printed

an article elevating their masculine form of Christianity over the long-haired,

ascetic nature of early Christians, did the GMU denounce the YMCA’s supposed apostasy with:

133 The Gospel Message, 15 June 1894, Vol. III, No. 1, 13.

134 The Gospel Message, June 1902, Vol. XI, No. 1, 10-11.

67 We cannot discover an age in the history of the Christian Church which produced more of an unmanly type of religion than much of the secularized hypocrisy of the present time.135

Fisher struck at the heart of the YMCA and the organization’s gender slanted

brand of religious expression; and the GMU President likewise directed his fury

to the ABCFM’s annual meetings as nothing more than:

An occasion for FUN and light witticisms…its recent anniversary is made a time for FLATTERY and for patting one another on the back…a hotbed of FALSE DOCTRINE.136

The GMU President was correct in noticing the decline of the ABCFM in foreign

missions, but did not directly see how the United States political and industrial

apparatuses had used YMCA college work to solidify Christian proselytism

abroad.

Despite such differences in opinion with the YMCA, Fisher set up the

GMU in many ways similar to the Association superstructure, but in others fashions distinctively adverse, specifically his dissociation with college work. The

GMU retained Fisher’s pre-millennial underpinnings, reinforcing the missionary impulse with the belief that Jesus would return and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Fisher also sought to organize a cooperative mission movement in collaboration with the Missionary Alliance Board of New York and various “other

135 The Gospel Message, 15 April 1895, Vol. III, No. 11, 5.

136 The Gospel Message, December 1903, Vol. XII, No. 7, 12-13.

68 churches and organizations.”137 The YMCA’s main argument against Fisher was

that he stepped outside of the 1869 Portland Convention guidelines and broke

the Association’s pact to maintain missions in accordance with church

preeminence over Association work. However, the organizations and churches

Fisher was aligned with at the time were not yet officially recognized

denominations, but rather budding groups that eventually became discrete

churches—like the Assembly of God, which was distinctively separate from the

group of YMCA recognized churches, e.g. Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian,

which were all driving forces of the Second Great Awakening in America—

following the so-called Third Great Awakening, then occurring in United States

religious communities.

The Gospel Missionary Union organizational structure largely and its

resemblance to the YMCA structure, Fisher established a main committee to

head each State Committee. At the head of the primary committee stood the

President—Fisher—followed by three Vice Presidents, a Recording Secretary,

and Financial Secretary, and a Treasurer. Unlike the YMCA, this central

committee maintained direct authority over each State Committee, which

consisted of a Chairman, a Vice Chairman, Recoding and Financial Secretaries,

a Treasurer, and State and/or County Secretaries; each state with a missionary committee. The GMU was originally composed of State Committees in

Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska, built by former YMCA secretaries and

137 The Gospel Message, April 1892, Vol. I, No. 1, 18.

69 members, including Augustus Nash, former member of the Kansas State

Committee and Nebraska Secretary, as well as James Suydam of the St. Paul branch.138 By 1896, the GMU had local committees in Michigan, Texas,

Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota,139 and like the

YMCA, Fisher set up the GMU to accommodate spreading the Gospel among

U.S. railroad workers and telegraph operators; but contrary to YMCA development, denounced college work.

Concerning Christian college work, Fisher set the GMU directly against the college YMCA and Association men like John R. Mott who used the YMCA department to further missions through college boards. Fisher elevated rural natives over their urban counterparts, claiming that:

Coming from farms, the boys and girls are not so entangled with worldly ambitions and their physical superiority qualifies them for the hardships and privations of mission life.140

Fisher thus further separated the GMU from the urban-centric YMCAs and their emphasis on college work, while extending the new masculine Christian concept of “physical superiority” to not merely male laborers, but female as well; as women missionaries made up a core component of the GMU work abroad, coming from the Midwestern region of the United States where such puissant female agents as Carrie A. Nation lived, committed to dramatic expressions of

138 The Gospel Message, April 1892, Vol. I, No. 1, 2-3.

139 The Gospel Message, 15 February 1896, Vol. IV, No. 9, 2-3.

140 The Gospel Message, April 1892, Vol. I, No. 1, 18.

70 social dissent. This is the clearest example of this rift in ideology between Fisher

and the YMCA’s missionary methods.

Fisher was still vigorously expanding the Sudan mission in Sierra Leone

after severing ties with the YMCA. After Harris, Gates, and Helmick died in 1890,

the GMU was committed to four mission stations in West Africa, and planned on

building six more, to be manned by twelve new American missionaries.141 These houses, “30 or 40 feet long, mud walls with bamboo roof,” with imported windows and doors, were built by natives of the region and cost a total of $50.142 GMU

missionaries moved organizational operations inland from Freetown only by a

few miles, though they believed their route would delve deeply into the Sudan.

By September 1893, the missionaries had explored the Rokel River north of

Freetown, and established a new mission house in the village of Mange, along

the Little Scarcies River.143 Within four months, in January 1894, the

missionaries caused a religious commotion with local political repercussions. An

article, “Training Boys in the Sudan” by Matthew Francis, in the January 1894

edition of The Gospel Message, denounced local spiritual practices—which afforded Krifis (spirits) exceptional power—as fearful superstition. In March of

1894, local tribesmen created a Krifi effigy that they paraded through Mange,

141 The Gospel Message, November, 1892, Vol. I, No. 7, 21.

142 The Gospel Message, 15 March 1893, Vol. I, No. 12, 9; $50 is relative to 1,100USD; 2008; very little by any measure.

143 The Gospel Message, 15 September 1893, Vol. II, No. 4, 6; “we believe we have the best and least expensive route to the interior of the great Soudan.”

71 drawing the ire of the Christian missionaries who took up their cause with the

local king, who naturally supported the local tribes.144 Due to political and

religious unrest in the region, the missionaries decided to abandon the mission

house in Mange, where the structure was burned by local tribes the following day.145 Imperial military movements in the region likewise blocked the GMU

missionaries from more deeply penetrating Sierra Leone.146 Under such adverse

political and social conditions, Fisher’s Sudan experiment slowly ground to a halt.

The U.S. Secretary of State informed Fisher that the GMU’s request to establish

missions in the French Sudan had been rejected.147

Though he remained hopeful throughout his life that the Sudan could be

proselytized, following the temporary failure in Sierra Leone and colonial West

Africa, George Fisher cast his gaze toward Morocco— “The Land of the Setting

Sun” —in 1893, hoping to extend a mission to free the country’s indigenous

population whom he saw as “led captive by the Devil.”148 Financial records

provide further evidence for the shift of mission from Sierra Leone to Morocco.

In 1892, the GMU reported $1,173.61 for the Sudan mission, and $724.20 for the

future venture in Morocco. By the end of 1893, the GMU held a rally for the

144 The Gospel Message, 15 March 1894, Vol. II, No. 10, 4-5.

145 The Gospel Message, 14 July 1894, Vol. III, No. 2, 4.

146 The Gospel Message, 15 January 1894, Vol. II, No. 8, 4.

147 The Gospel Message, 16 March 1896, Vol. IV, No. 10, 3.

148 The Gospel Message, 14 October 1893, Vol. II, No. 5, 6.

72 Morocco mission, taking donations in both cash and items to fund the venture,149 and by 1896, the Sudan mission received only $115.70, whereas the GMU disbursed a not insignificant amount of $2,628.73 to the newly established

Morocco mission.150

The first GMU missionary envoy to Morocco left New York for Liverpool on

the Teutonic in December 1894.151 Along with his family of five, Albert J. Nathan,

affectionately known to the GMU as “the Jew,”152 Henry A. Hammer and their maid Hettie Fernbaugh, arrived in Liverpool in late December; whereby Nathan immediately left his sick children and wife for an ill-fated attempt at proselytizing his Jewish relatives in Hamburg.153 Nathan shirked his obligations to his immediate family—the family he helped create—and instead placed higher

149 The Gospel Message, 15 November 1893, Vol. II, No. 6, 6; the Morocco fund was at $52.92 (a little over 1,000USD; 2008), outweighing the missionaries expenses of $212.89 (roughly $4,700USD; 2008), 12. The Gospel Message, 15 January 1894, Vol. II, No. 8, 3, but with the following month’s rally, the organization collected “$682.88, two bicycles, one clock, one watch chain, one C.E. pin, one gold ring, one pair of opera glasses.” The cash alone equates to roughly 16,000USD; 2008.

150 The Gospel Message, 15 September 1894, Vol. III, No. 4, 2-3 and February 15, 1896. Vol. IV, No. 9, p. 2-3; the relative values disbursed to the Sudan mission are roughly 26,000USD to 2,700USD; 2008, and for Morocco, from approximately 16,000USD to 61,000USD; 2008.

151 The Gospel Message, 15 December 1894, Vol. III, No. 7, 2-3; Nathan’s family included his children Alda of 5 years, Cora of 3 years, Fay of 2 years, Paul of 5 months, and his wife Nellie.

152 The Gospel Message, 15 June 1894, Vol. III, No. 1, 10.

153 The Gospel Message, 15 January 1894, Vol. III, No. 8, 2-12; Nathan was the GMU’s token Jewish convert; a standing example of prophecy fulfilled.

73 priority on his supposed spiritual obligations, and a Jewish family that had initially denounced him after his conversion to Christianity.

After their short stay in Europe, upon arrival in Morocco, the missionaries perceived Tangiers as a reflection of a disjointed, motley alien society, consisting of thirty-thousand lost souls: “8,000 Jews, 5,000 Spaniards, a few hundred

Europeans and the rest Moors.” Henry A. Hammer described the city structurally as having “no system of drainage,” where the “streets are irregular” and the inhabitants as made “no effort at cleanliness”154 The GMU missionaries immediately took a stance contrary to local lines of government via sharifs, “lineal descendents of Mohammed, the false prophet,” as well as Jewish minorities whose “ungodliness superstition and ignorance” was seen as “almost as great as among the Moors.”155 Such conflicting positions drew the ire of authorities in

Darr al-Maiy, where in 1895 the missionaries and those who listened to them were threatened with violence or imprisonment, and the missionaries eventually completely forced to flee from the region.156 In order to deal with such adversity, the GMU missionaries read antiquated Christian scripture into their present situation. These American Protestants likened their experienced hardships and the hard-heartedness of Moroccans they sought to proselytize to the Biblical

154 The Gospel Message, 15 February 1895, Vol. III, No. 9, 3.

155 The Gospel Message, 15 July 1895, Vol. IV, No. 2, 2; Sharifs are more accurately lineal descendents of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, revered among Shiite community.

156 The Gospel Message, 15 August 1895, Vol. IV, No. 3, 2.

74 division between Christian converts and the “scribes and Pharisees.”157 By refracting Biblical precedents, the GMU missionaries in North Africa committed to an inflexible rendition of both contemporary events and theological antecedents; fulfilling a desired prophecy rather than accurately representing any actual discourse on the ground. Another account of likely violence to a Christian convert occurred with the case of one “Drees.” After his conversion, the missionaries decided he should relocate to Tunis to avoid being labeled an apostate; “Had he remained here, bloody persecution would have been the inevitable result even unto stripes, bonds and cruel death.”158

The missionaries served as disconnect between the reality of physical persecution—where endangered converts were perceived rather as spiritual martyrs—and Western modes of perceptual order, categories which stood obverse to a ubiquitous Oriental Eastern, superfluous, automated opposition to

Christianity. One missionary wrote in The Gospel Message:

To show what awful suffering stares in the face of anyone who renounces Mohammedanism, the following incident may serve: A certain Moor gave good evidence of conversion when he stated that he could not dishonor Christ by keeping Rhamadan last year. In order to escape persecution he dressed in European garments and left for another part of the country. But alas! Only a few days and he was discovered and brought back, being dragged with a rope around his neck through the streets to the filthy dungeon, from which after much trouble he was liberated by Christian friends. If this had occurred inland the Moor would probably suffered a Martyr’s death.159

157 The Gospel Message, 15 August 1895, Vol. IV, No. 3, 2.

158 The Gospel Message, 14 September 1895, Vol. IV, No. 4, 2.

159 The Gospel Message, 15 April 1895, Vol. III, No. 11, 2.

75

The Gospel Message refrained from printing converts’ names because of the

potential threat of violence to Muslims who converted to Christianity. In spite of

knowing these potential dangers—in fact, largely inspired that such persecutions

justified their Christian enterprise—the missionaries continued in their attempts to

convert urban Arab Muslims.160 Of course, in spite of this damning evidence on the part of the missionaries, Muslim converts consciously made the decision to change faiths, knowing full well the societal dangers they might encounter. To make a statement contrary would strip these actors of agency. However, we will likely never know—without obvious evidence or whether or not these missionary renditions are truthful—what the possible motivations behind conversion may have been.

Other dangers in the Morocco missionary field included disease.

Recurring seasonal outbreaks of cholera and subsequent quarantines in the city of Tangiers elicited different responses from the GMU missionaries and local

Muslims. I have already shown how the GMU missionaries perceived the city as a disjointed and filthy environment, as well as their belief in faith healing and lack of care towards spreading disease in Sierra Leone, but their waffling between scientific and religious explanations is more readily definable with William

James’s philosophy describing pragmatic synthesis of mutually exclusive beliefs

160 The Gospel Message, September 1901, Vol. X, No. 4; “Here converts meet with abuse and insult and not infrequently they are considered by all to have left the truth and to have become ‘Infidels,’ and to be worthy of death for having apostatized from the true religion.”

76 than particularly hypocritical. Likewise, viewing disease through the lens of religious perspective, local indigenous residents perceived this particular case of cholera as signs of God’s displeasure because they as Muslims “have tolerated

Christians so long in their midst.”161

Due to the multiple instances of steadfast opposition the GMU encountered with Arab Muslims, the missionaries decided instead to reach out from operational bases in Fez, Meknes, and Tangiers, to “mixed race”162 Berber communities in central Morocco for proselytism. Twisting Berber history to fit their mission’s aims, the GMU printed tracts on Moroccan Berbers as:

[T]he original inhabitants of the land, whose forefathers were Christians, and who were driven to the hills and Mountains by the Mohammedan invaders, where they afterwards became Muslims.163

In this short rendition on Berber origins, the GMU not only elevated a largely rural other within a nominally Arab dominated territory, but also simultaneously marginalized the status of urban, Arab Muslims as usurpers to originally Berber held territory. The same argument could be used to denounce Turks, Franks, and even Americans in the United States if followed to its logical conclusion.

These Christian missionaries molded Berber history to legitimize their pre-

161 The Gospel Message, 15 October 1895, Vol. IV, No. 5, 2; the GMU printed a denunciation of local infrastructure in a similar situation in Fez as “Unsanitary conditions in New Fez, and especially the Jewish corner, have been the principal cause of a terrible mortality,” citing 2,300 Jewish fatalities, The Gospel Message, November 1901, Vol. X, No. 6, 2.

162 The Gospel Message, October 1901, Vol. X, No. 5, 13.

163 The Gospel Message, October 1901, Vol. X, No. 5, 6.

77 millennial objective to proselytize among the heathen and justify their choice that

a group of people with a distant Christian tradition would make easier subjects for

conversion.

Initially, Fisher and the GMU left no room for the likelihood that Berber

tribes may have consciously made the decision to convert and accept Islam as a

means to negotiate their new situation among marginally Arab Muslim overlords.

Instead, the American missionaries presented Berbers as some valueless,

amorphous group of lost Christians who were forced to accept the new Islamic

religion of their conquerors; but these various Berber tribes have long historically

verifiable traditions of acclimating to new roles within larger, changing political

situations under manifold conquests by foreign empires.164

Later, following contemporaneous imperialist trends, the GMU attempted to categorize Berbers with class and ethnic identifiers, as well as distinguish their religious predispositions:

They are not black but are about as dark as Italians. They are not at all deeply imbued with Mohammedanism. They usually have only one wife, although by the Koran permitted to have four. The women are often handsome and graceful, especially among the better class, but being regarded as little more than beasts of burden…they look old early in life.165

164 See Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996); Berbers negotiated through conflict and subordination under Roman, Byzantine, French, and Arab rule. For specific details on Berbers’ plastic and mutable alliance shifts during warfare with the Byzantines, see Flavius Cresconius Corippus, The Iohannis or De Bellis Libycis of Flavius Cresconius Corippus, George W. Shea, trans. (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1998).

165 The Gospel Message, January 1902, Vol. X, No. 8, 11.

78 GMU missionaries defined, refined, and redefined representations of Berbers in

Morocco to fit changing conditions that benefited their pre-millennial urge to

convert their desired subject.

If the GMU can be noted for any positive contribution to the peoples which

they attempted to proselytize en masse, translating anything into Berber

dialects166 was the one definitively philanthropic act by the American missionary

society. According to socio-linguist Herman M. Batibo of the University of

Botswana, Tamazight—or the Berber dialect written in the indigenous and

ancient Libyco-Berber script Tifinagh167—was as of 2005 a “highly endangered

language” in Africa.168 Batibo claims that “all human languages are valuable resources as they have much to offer linguistically, culturally and artistically.”169

Preserving languages, like Tamazight, for the sake of preservation, and in the

sense of mere categorization for sterile scientific endeavors or collection like a

linguistic curator, only perpetuates Orientalist pursuits. Maintaining Tamazight, for the sake of the Amazigh peoples speaking and expressing themselves through that linguistic medium, safeguards their ability to self-define as a distinct

166 The Gospel Message, April 1902, Vol. X, No. 11, 2; the GMU began studying and translating Berber language with the “Shilha” dialect of Central Morocco.

167 Mohamed Tilmatine and Yasir Suleiman, “Language and Identity: The Case of the Berber,” in Language and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa, Yasif Suleiman, ed. (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996), 173.

168 Herman M. Batibo, Language Decline and Death in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Challenges (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2005), 145.

169 Batibo, viii.

79 entity; a nation at the highest organizational level, within the boundaries of an

Arab/Muslim state. Tamazight, as a cultural marker, has not to date been

systematized to the degree of Arabic, even in its various colloquial forms. This

Berber language can be written in the Tifinagh, Arabic, or Latin based scripts.

Tilmatine and Suleiman adroitly point out that the dangers of the latter two are their ties to past imperial cultures, while the indigenous Tifinagh script grants the

Amazigh claims to linguistic authenticity and cultural originality.170 Like the 19th

Century Cherokee Nation in what would become Northwestern Georgia,

surrounded by a growing populace and increasingly pervasive central

government, the Amazigh inhabiting the states along territorial North Africa—

Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt—are consistently disenfranchised,

not only by colonialist regimes of Europe and America, but by recolonization171 of

Arab states that self-proclaim their endeavors as decolonization. Rural local populist movements against French colonization, centered on the leadership of

170 Tilmatine and Suleiman, 174-75.

171 Fanon asserts that either these newly decolonized states can begin with new systems of trade and economics and in turn starve, or they can resolve to survive by perpetuating the older systems which were provided for them under colonial regimes; this is one instance of re-colonization. Other instances of re- colonization manifest through divisions such as elite/masses, nation/race, tribe/state, or differing religions, created and manipulated by Western forms of categorization; examples of this would be Hutu/Tutsi in Rwanda, Berber/Arab in Morocco, Christian/Muslim in Sudan, and Islam/Maraboutism in Morocco; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 98-8, 148-49, 160.

80 religious notables and saints, were slowly replaced by urban nationalist headed

in large part by Western educated Arab intelligentsia or reform Muslims.172

In Algeria, this nationalist impulse among the Kabyle Berber tribes,

beginning in the later nineteenth century, culminated in the late twentieth century

movement for constitutional recognition of the Amazigh language. Berber

nationalism had been previously absorbed within the greater struggle against

French domination.173 However, like for the Arab intelligentsia striving for

language driven national identity that developed the century prior, the Amazigh

nationalist movement centered on the increase in literacy among Berbers in

Algeria and France.174 French language was more so a door to greater Berber

expression, just as it had been in the nineteenth century movements concerning

Arab expression. French was only a means to a nationalist end, and not the end per se, like some promoters of language education claimed, as I will show in the following chapter.

Beyond the power dynamics of language, the GMU Morocco mission created new avenues and outlets for local popular dissent, contrary to

172 Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 3- 13; Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-10.

173 Tilmatine and Suleiman, 167-68, under the motto of the Algerian independence struggle: Islam is our religion, Arabic our language and Algeria our Nation, 169.

174 Tilmatine and Suleiman, 171.

81 established channels and social roles in Moroccan society. Frequently, the

missionaries created situations for political unrest, or contributed to already

fragile power dynamics in areas they chose for proselytism. In one instance in

Algeria, the French authorities considered missionaries spies.175

Moroccan women, despite the subservient role attributed to them by the

GMU women missionaries, created their own spaces of discourse, and subsequently, their own spaces of power. Folklore is one of these spaces.

Monia Hajaiej’s Behind Closed Doors lucidly emphasizes the importance of folklore as a transmission of knowledge from woman to woman, and woman to girl in Tunisian society. The author notes how the very act of transmission is the particular manifestation of feminine agency and societal dissent in a culture perceived by westerners to subject women to nothing more than isolated pieces of property.176

Anther indigenous physical and spiritual space the missionary women

challenged concerned literacy and healing. Moroccan women perceived the

GMU women as sorcerers or charm-workers,177 in that indigenous women were

typically uneducated, and the few that were literate profited from their ability to

create charms, amulets, and scrolls that could be used for protection from djinn—

malevolent spirits, much like the Krifi of Sierra Leone—or affect future events.

175 The Gospel Message, January 1902, Vol. X, No. 8, 11.

176 Monia Hejaiej, Behind Closed Doors: Women’s Oral Narratives in Tunis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 3-5.

177 The Gospel Message, September 1903, Vol. XII, No. 4, 2.

82 One GMU missionary condemned these indigenous spiritual expressions and the relationship of North African Muslims to djinn as “oppressive and superhuman spirits who harass them and hold them in fear and bondage.”178

As late as the 1920s and 1950s, Western anthropologists attempted to reveal the innermost workings of the “primitive” mind, and psychiatrists used ethno-psychiatry—the vehicle which Frantz Fanon wrote so strongly against—in order to unravel such primitive thought. While earlier Western anthropologists like Bronislow Malinowski denounced the seemingly primitive actions of natives practicing magic and ritual as lacking any real logical base, later anthropologists like Clifford Geertz reveal how such activities reconcile myth with historical precedent, and ritual with up keeping communal morale,179 and psychoanalyst

Fanon claims that magic and superstition uphold communal status and knowledge, while violence against colonial authorities unifies and purges an individual’s sense of inferiority.180 Richard Keller claims the main distinguishing

178 The Gospel Message, July 15, 1895, Vol. IV, No. 2, 3.

179 Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 90-2.

180 Fanon, 57, 94; Bridging the gap between these two disciplines, Vincent Crapanzano—in his Princeton University, Anthropology dissertation—attempts to develop a system of psychology applicable to the entirety of Morocco; “Human beings insofar as they are members of a society are provided with an idiom by which they structure and evaluate their reality, their world, including themselves, and insofar as the experience of reality can be distinguished from the reality itself, their experience of their reality, of their world, of themselves. Although this idiom is necessarily expressed through language, it is more than language itself. Within it are sedimented traditional symbols and values which form the basis for the schemata by which reality, including always what the Westerner would call

83 factors in understanding medical and mental health claims to imperial authority

lies in the difference between psychoanalysis—which allows the patient, as

subject, agency in determining cure—and psychiatrists—who perceive the

patient as a physically and mentally defective object with no role in determining

their own cure.181

Moreover, gendered spaces and healing extended to tomb cultures in

Morocco. Women, as de facto administrators of saints’ tombs, maintain positions of authority over traditional social practices concerning healing and communal wellbeing. The tradition of tomb dreaming and accessing deceased saints as intercessors for world affairs are types of social dissent and emotional outlets clearly within Moroccan women’s auspices. Men entering these spaces are challenged as sexual predators, just as Western forms of physical and mental healing challenge not only established forms of personal and communal health in

Islamic Moroccan society, but accepted gender roles as well.182

American women missionaries also challenged traditional gender roles in

Morocco. The most infamous of women GMU missionaries, Maude Cary, arrived

“psychic reality,” is interpreted.” Vincent Crapanzano, “Saints, Jnun, and Dreams: An Essay in Moroccan Ethnopsychology,” dissertation, Preinceton University, 1973, 4.

181 Richard Keller, “Action Psychologique: French Psychiatry in Colonial North Africa, 1900-1962,” Dissertation, New Brunswick: Rutgers, May 2001, 8

182 Fatima Mernissi, Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

84 at Fez from New York on 26 November 1901.183 She soon took to learning

Arabic—the language in which she taught young Muslim girls Christian hymns—

and the American feminine domestic ideal of sewing.184 Cary took immediately

to defining Moroccan women in terms of her experience; that of a woman

liberated from direct male oversight in a domestic space, but confined by

patriarchal and imperial institutions abroad. The young, single missionary

woman among Moroccan women in Fez categorized her subjects:

The women differ from men in that they have little to say when the Truth is presented to them—no arguments to bring forth—their minds being so unused to thinking of anything above the affairs of everyday life.185

Western women even teaching the simple act of sewing as a categorically female act within a domestic space challenged gender and religious roles in Fez. In a

1904 edition of The Gospel Message, while the GMU was still attempting to define the various manifestations of Berber piety and customs, one missionary wrote on the local “fuqh” (religious leader; more accurately “ulama”), who was the only consistent attendant at the local mosque, whose primary roles included:

[S]ewing, shaving the men and children, and writing charms for the sick and afflicted. He has no pupils whatever, for the Berbers do not take much stock in reading, as one told me, but when their boys are big enough, they give them a stick and send them out to herd.186

183 The Gospel Message, December 1901, Vol. X, No. 7, 2.

184 The Gospel Message, July-August 1902, Vol. X, No. 2-3, 2.

185 The Gospel Message, January 1903, Vol. XI, No. 8, 2.

186 The Gospel Message, May 1904, Vol. XII, No. 12, 4.

85 In this simple statement, the GMU missionaries admitted to distinct, cultural mores, where for some rural Berbers, subsistence retains higher priority than literacy on a day-to-day basis. Given these differences in cultural priorities and limitations in spite of great attempts by the missionaries to proselytize among the various Berber tribes of central Morocco, the GMU ultimately failed to make any significant rate in conversions among the Amazigh peoples.

Today, fiction author and missionary par excellence, Evelyn Stenbock-

Ditty, perpetuates the paradigm that western women continue to determine the identity and agency of Oriental women and children. Her expertise goes little beyond writing texts on how to write fiction; how to perform children’s Christmas plays and songs; and oddly, instructions on how to set up foreign missions.

Orientalist transnationals, who objectify and attempt to pigeonhole exotic individuals, brandish too much power in foreign fields as unsanctioned representatives of the United States, blurring the lines of government foreign policy and individual freedom.

Stenbock-Ditty’s books on the GMU missionaries create new myths concerning the success of the missions; remapping the GMU’s history and reifying the belief that these failed enterprises were in some ways a success for

Christianity, and symbolic of life-long struggles and personal martyrdom. In Miss

Terri!, Stenbock portrays Morocco as a disease filled land inhabited by proud

86 Moors and savage Berbers, both murderous Muslims.187 Stenbock’s follow-up

treatise on the GMU derived its name A Gleam of Light from the supposed statement made by Henry Hammer pronouncing, “Lift up your eyes, Morocco, for a gleam of light is coming to you,” upon arriving at the shores of Tangiers;188 a

proclamation reminiscent of the John Winthrop’s City upon a Hill sermon, and

other religionists with a flare for the dramatic. The author clearly outlines her

bias in the subtitle The Trials and Triumphs of a Century of Missionary Work in

Morocco; and is resistant to acknowledge any semblance of failure; instead the

GMU is celebrated as a model for Christian missions abroad.

The fiction includes a “Glossary of Foreign Words,” with defined terms such as “fez,” “hajj,” and “muezzin” for the reader unfamiliar with such exotic

realities; but most definitions relate to various traditionally Islamic food dishes.189

Like other Orientalist tracts, Dave and Neta Jackson craft a tale of a young

Moroccan boy’s journey to become a Christian. It is a simple children’s narrative following the shenanigans unleashed when two Arab boys compete to collect mysterious items from Western others. Set in French dominated Morocco, within an Islamic household, young “Jamal” becomes intrigued with sets of pictures depicting Biblical scenes of Jesus’ life, which are passed out as rewards in

187 Evelyn Stenbock, “Miss Terri!” The Story of Maude Cary, pioneer GMU missionary in Morocco (Lincoln: Back to the Bible Broadcast, 1970), 16-20.

188 The Gospel Message, February 15, 1895, Vol. III, No. 9, 2.

189 Ila Marie Davis and Evelyn Stenbock-Ditty, A Gleam of Light: The Trials and Triumphs of a Century of Missionary Work in Morocco (Kansas City: Gospel Missionary Union, 1998).

87 Maude Cary’s Christian classes for indigenous children. This narrative is

offensive to Islam in two ways; that a boy was swaying slowly to Christianity, and therefore an apostate, but also in the fact that these types of iconography are forbidden. Casting blame for such careless social disruption can be doled out to either the Jacksons’, or Cary, depending on whether or not the tale contains any kernel of truth.

Like the amorphous “Jamal” whose heart is slowly redeemed by Christ, supporting characters are equally stereotypical. Jamal’s uncle is a rebellious

Muslim Arab, seeking to disbar French imperialists; meanwhile, Jamal stumbles across a Polish Jew who has defected from the French Foreign Legion. Jamal’s redemption is complete once he offers self-incriminating testimony in order to save the defector from a fate at the hands of a firing squad, claiming that Jesus’ sacrifice for Jamal was his model to give up himself.190 In the end, no harm

comes to any character, and Christian missionaries can claim Jamal as one of

their prized converts.

Comparing the Jacksons’ works to Ed Ksara’s oral narrative reveals

multiple dimensions of alterations and complete fabrications, creating illusions

favorable refractive impressions from her missionary subjects. The Ksara family

was traditionally Muslim unit. Ed Ksara’s father’s line descended from Islamic intellectuals residing in Fez, and his mother’s line, from both German missionaries and Moroccan shurfa; that is, traditional Islamic communal leaders

190 Dave and Neta Jackson, Risking the Forbidden Game (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2002).

88 considered to be descendents of the Prophet Muhammad. The Jacksons’ young

protagonist was based on the life story Ed Ksara’s father, Mehdi Ksara, an Arab

Moroccan boy educated at French schools, who sometimes attended Maude

Cary’s religious classes for children. Despite being well learned in the Qur’an,

with a sense of linear Christian logic that he had learned during sessions with

Cary, Mehdi Ksara questioned his father over the likelihood that Moses and

Muhammad had ever conversed—as was prescribed in the Qur’an—stimulating

an argument which ended with the young man’s expulsion from the expressly

Muslim household, whereby Mehdi Ksara converted to Christianity and chose to

live and work among the GMU missionaries, and ultimately had to commit his

family to a life in exile in the United States.191

The GMU left an indelible influence on its Moroccan subjects. As objects

of desire, Arab and Berber Muslims drove the missionary organizations impetus to spread Christianity and the Christian Gospel in order to bring about the

reassertion of God’s Kingdom on Earth. However, the methods facilitated by

these missionaries abroad both challenged foreign societal structures, religious

authority, and gender roles while creating new roles for American women both

domestically, and in the field.

191 Ed Ksara and Brandy Gerhardt, “My Life Story,” The Ethnic Life Stories Project, Springfield, Missouri, http://thelibrary.org/lochist/els/ksara.pdf, 1-8.

89

CHAPTER 4

THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT AND DIVERGENT TRANSNATIONALISM

[S]hall we be recreants from the nobler crusade of the 19th Century? How much more ought we, today when those same infidel Mohammedans are pressing in upon Africa and Asia – making for more converts than all Christians combined…

John R. Mott, Reflex Influence of Foreign Missions

I charge ALL Christian women neither by style of dress nor adjustment of apparel to become administrative of evil. Perhaps none else will dare to tell you, so I will tell you there are multitudes of men who owe their eternal damnation to the boldness of women’s attire.

—The Gospel Message, June 1901

Amy Kaplan places U.S. colonialism within the context of creating an amorphous, liminal framework for subject colonies and peoples. With the colonization following the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Supreme Court, in its decisions in the Insular Cases, defined colonized areas and peoples as not quite foreign, and not quite domestic; a state of limbo that safeguarded against

the United States necessity to realize its place among the traditionally

monarchical imperialist regimes of Europe, and no need to incorporate and

extend Constitutional rights to inferior races.192 One may contend that we, as

historians, allow a certain sense of exoneration for such inherent racism, given

192 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2-12.

90 the atmosphere in which they lived and functioned. Yet, even George Fisher

denounced the objectives of imperialism and missionaries based on choosing

racial components before the need to spread the Gospel.193

Critical to this new type of missionary alliance, Ecumenical Conferences—

beginning in London and New York in 1854—represent the increased in influence

and growth in cooperation between missions among college students and

organized churches. During the Ecumenical Missionary Conference, primarily held at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1900, Western Christian missionaries

divided the entire geographical world into a binary perception of territorial

boundaries. These various Christian denominations split the world into halves; to

the west was the realm of Christianity and modernity, to the east laid the orient, a

land passively awaiting the arrival of the Christian gospel and the orders of

modernization. Additionally, these Americans and Western Europeans projected their perceptions of the reality of these subject lands and supposed heathens through representation and exhibition, dividing the orient further into national and racial elements, which were compartmentally represented to the “not less than

60,000 persons”194 exploring the partitioned exhibits and stereopticon projections

at New York City’s Lutheran Church of Zion and Saint Timothy.

193 The Gospel Message, January 1902, Vol. X, No. 8, 10.

194 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, New York, 1900: Report of the Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions, Held at Carnegie Hall and Neighboring Churches, April 21 to May 1 (New York: American Tract Society, 1900), Vol. I, 16.

91 Timothy Mitchell—using the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, the

phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, and the Post-structuralism of Michel

Foucault and Jacques Derrida—presents this wave of nineteenth century western exhibitionism within the context of global consumerism and colonial commodities exchange. Each viewer becomes the center of the exhibit, while the foreign pieces and individuals presented as objects of scrutiny maintain no sense of reality that they are supposed to embody, merely representations out of fluid context.195 Being the center of the exhibit, the viewer is naturally—albeit

liminally—aligned with the “eight hundred missionaries and five hundred

societies” who collected and fabricated the Ecumenical Conference exhibit. Both

are at the center of a puissant, ubiquitous panopticon, looking out at defined and

categorically partitioned objects; a worldview taken by those who would and did

venture forth to the actual foreign lands represented. This missionary exhibit

presented individual countries “occupying a separate court or alcove,” as

digestible objects systematically placed and meant for visitors’ consumption,

presented through maps, literature, and orally by indigenous converts and

missionaries in ethnic dress.196

The missionaries physically represented their worldview on the Carnegie

Hall stage; framing each of the manifold denominations and lay proselytizers with

an enormous map, bearing the title “The field is the world, the good seed are the

195 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 7.

196 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 15-16.

92 children of the kingdom.” Displaying the globe into two distinctive spheres, the

western hemisphere stood emblazoned with the call to “Go ye into all the world

and preach the gospel to the whole creation,” juxtaposed to the eastern

hemisphere reading “And they went forth and preached everywhere.”197 This

phrasing only represents a dichotomy within the framework of Christian proselytism, and does not give representation or agency to the multitudes residing in the Orient. All areas of the world lay passively waiting for these missions to emanate from an already spiritually conquered realm—the

Americas—to a newly perceived but ancient land, ready to usurp foreign peoples with the message of the Gospel.

Beyond a dark sea of nearly three thousand seats, upon the glowing, columned main stage of a mere nine-year-old Carnegie Hall, President William

McKinley opened the Ecumenical Conference lavishing praise upon missionaries for their “triumphs for civilization,” their “carrying the torch of enlightenment” as

“willing ministers of peace and good-will” who “should be classed with the world’s heroes.”198 An imperialist who oversaw the national polity during the Spanish-

American War, and who was running for re-election, McKinley focused his

speech on the philosophical underpinnings of the nation-state as the fruition of

ethnic advancement, his distinctively Hegelian national centricity and American

exceptionalist terminology promoted foreign missionary activity for its “value to

197 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 24.

198 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 39.

93 the progress of nations” in an age of optimistic progressive advancement and the

political, scientific, and religious “onward and upward march of humanity.”199

Presidential nominee William McKinley made an opening speech commending college work and education missions; William E. Dodge headed the

Finance Committee; and New York’s Governor and McKinley’s Vice Presidential nominee, Theodore Roosevelt, followed the President’s speech with an address on American missionaries stationed along the western frontier, a region

Roosevelt had personally witnessed during his Indian war adventures. Roosevelt depicted the missionary endeavor as a microcosm of the Christian experience; that is, the progression of wild heathen Indian to civilized Christian as a “struggle of the last 2000 years repeated.”200 Therein, the vice presidential nominee

witnessed the strife of dialectic between the religious expressions of a people

forced onto reservations by a swelling, giant new nation, but neglected to see the

real strife within the subjugated Indians, exiled from their national homes, in favor

of praising American missionaries working against the “forces of evil…striving for

the betterment of mankind,”201 similar nomenclature to George W. Bush’s

religiously tinged foreign politics, “Axis of Evil” binary worldview. There is no

doubt, despite any intentions the future president may have had, that his words

199 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 40.

200 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 11, 40-41.

201 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 42.

94 perfectly fit the pseudo-scientific, altruistically couched orientalist paradigm Said revealed in the later twentieth century:

You can help him to walk, and when you deal with the man who is ages behind us, it may be that your teaching him to walk must last more than one or two generations, but the aim must be in each case to teach the man to help himself.202

Not only does Roosevelt’s speech point to the stagnation of oriental civilization, but connotes images of biological primitivism. This is a strange analogy; suggesting that so-called uncivilized man was not even bipedal!

Beyond the Conference, Roosevelt had made speeches on the benefits of the spread of white civilization to perceived backwards regions of the world. In his 1909 speech on “The Expansion of the White Races,” on the occasion of the

Methodist African Diamond Jubilee, Roosevelt promoted the “lasting benefit” of white racial expansion against criticisms based on “moral grounds.” The

President further decries the Mahdist uprising in Sudan for the death of over half of the region’s population, suggesting self-determination is a destructive force which in some instances natives required European intervention as a

“prerequisite condition to the moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth.” The Mahdist episode of Sudanese history involved Muslims who rebelled against the British and Egyptians under the spiritual/military proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, prophesying the end

202 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 43.

95 of the world and the redemption of Islam.203 Ironically, these peoples

approached millennialism from the Islamic perspective, in the Sudan proper,

while Fisher sought to bring Christian millennialism into the heart of Sudan from

Western Africa.

Moreover, after his tenure in office, Roosevelt continued to espouse his

patrician tinged view of foreign policy, refined minimally to recognize the even

more pressing need to expand western colonialism to area in the throws of self- determinism. In a 1911 letter, a mere year before tacit French rule enveloped

Morocco, Roosevelt proclaimed:

At present the rule of the majority in Morocco means every variety of hideous cruelty, injustice and social and governmental abomination. It would be enormously to the benefit of the people of Morocco if the French took hold of them and did for them what they have done in Algiers. When the people of the Sudan ruled themselves, they were guilty of conduct which not figuratively but literally meant that it would be better that they should all die than continue to rule themselves; as a matter of fact, two thirds of them did die, and justice and liberty came only when the rule of an alien supplanted the rule which, by any action or with the acquiescence of the majority, had been established.204

Roosevelt denounced self rule on the lines of race. Essentially, Roosevelt’s

stance is that though foreign invasion and colonial rule on the surface may

produce more casualties in one instance, self-determination should ultimately be retarded for the sake of immediate results and perceived stability through

203 P. M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898: A Study of Its Origins, Development, and Overthrow (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 22.

204 Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches, ed. Louis Auchingloss (New York: the Library of America, 2004), “Genuine Democracy”: Letter to Charles Dwight Willard, New York, April 28, 1911, 650-51.

96 imperial occupation. North Africa is a region with distinctive historical roots,

interminably entangled with those of America, from being the first state to

recognize U.S. independence,205 to harboring corsairs who seized American

vessels and demanded annual tribute payments from the fledgling nation.206

Likewise, Roosevelt specifically agrees with the quelling of the Mahdi rebellion in

Sudan that has become a vogue of contemporary historians, who explain the

Mahdi uprising as the first modern Islamic jihadist movement. Though this

explanation lacks any real depth or historical verification, the fact remains this

movement was identified by colonial forces as potentially dangerous to western

objectives. As I have noted, the Mahdi revolutionaries were less concerned with

Christians as opposed to Sunni Muslims they believed to be under the control of

ethnically foreign, Turkish Ottomans and reliant upon bastardized Islamic law,

manipulated to allow non-Arabs and their Western allies to rule from the Caliphal

center. However, extending the jihad to Christians was in effect a natural

response to Christian British and Coptic administrators and their projection of

power and vilification of the Mahdi movement.

The Sudan of Fisher’s imagination did not easily reconcile with religious,

political, and social movements of the actual historical Sudan. Simultaneous with

Muhammad Ali’s reorganization—along western models—of an Egyptian state

205 Michael B. Oren, Power Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007), xi

206 William Spencer, Algiers in the Age of the Corsairs (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 136-37.

97 independent of Ottoman rule, the newly reformulated Egyptian army pressed into

the Sudan beginning in 1820.207 More readily controllable by Imperial Britain

after the rise of Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail,208 nineteenth century Egypt

became the vehicle for British expansionism within the Sudan by the 1860s.209

Khedive Ismail reorganized the Egyptian government apparatus along the lines of Muhammad Ali, utilizing what Mitchell cites as the panopticon—a series of controlling institutions and organizations which give the inherent appearance of power emanating from a ubiquitous central authority. These institutions were not only spread to the northernmost regions of Egyptian Sudan, but readily apprehended by British colonial design.

In Sudan proper, the Mahdist regime, though primarily concerned with a jihad against Ottoman Islamic apostasy,210 readily found enemies in foreign

renditions of Christianity. These missionaries, perceived by the Mahdists as

aligned to imperial motives; Turkish and English military officers and political

officials; and anti-slavery movements, Christianity eventually threatened the

207 Holt, 2.

208 Mitchell, 33.

209 Holt, 3.

210 Holt, 14. The Sudanese Mahdists referred to Egyptians and Turkish administrators and military both as simply “Turks,” and even British institutions as Turkish. This is not unlike the Berbers’ use of the term Rumi to denote people of European origin. Like the Wahhabi Sudanese and Muslim Berbers, Fisher had a clearly defined sense of mission against an amorphous other. His Sudan was a great homogenous swath along the horizontal center of the non-Christian African continent, where in reality multiple peoples and tribes with manifold religious dispositions resided.

98 fabric of Wahhabi reforms in the Sudan, whether from missionaries, imperial

English officials, or the participation of Egyptian Copts as Sudanese

administrators.211 In 1887, Muhammad Ahmad’s successor to the Sudan Mahdi movement, Khalifa Ta‘īshī ‘Abdallāhi ibn Muhammad, crushed the internal

rebellion of a lieutenant claiming to be the incarnation of Jesus, returning to

redeem mankind.212 Fisher’s brand of Christian millennialism would likely not

find a warm reception with the Sudanese Wahhabi rebels, and potentially could

have ended violently for the American missionaries if they had ever made it to

the Nile. Kitchener was correct in his assessment that this region was dangerous

to Christian missionaries, especially since the Mahdist rebellion was only recently

quelled in 1898. Yet ironically, the ABCFM’s initial impetus for missions in the

Near East centered on a potential alliance with Wahhabi revolutionaries, and

Fisher’s Sudan enterprise would have given a fertile testing ground for this

objective.213

Like the British stance against Egyptian Sudanese self-determinism,

Roosevelt cites three examples to justify his case for direct external imperial rule,

one of which is North Africa. Beginning with the corporate mischief and social

211 Holt, 15.

212 Holt, 152.

213 Lindsay, 62; Marr, 113, ‘Some Americans even interpreted the rise of the Wahabi movement in the Arabian peninsula far from a form of “fundamentalist” retrenchment, but rather as an Islamic equivalent of the Reformation that would lead to more receptivity to Christian ideas and hence contribute to the downfall of Islam.’

99 violence of Barbary pirates along the North African coast, Roosevelt claims the

“independence of these states was a menace to every peaceful people.”214

Certainly, after dealing with the debacle of Mulai Ahmed al-Raisuni’s kidnapping of a supposed United States citizen, and tribute payments from the U.S. Treasury to Barbary pirates dating back to the very foundation of the American republic, the President could not afford to disregard this particular political stance.215

The Missionary Conference of 1900 stands as a testament to the state of missionary work in the Orient a mere decade after Fisher’s fiasco at Sierra

Leone. Most notably, the far reaching affects of prohibition and foreign policy in the areas George Fisher sought to extend missionary endeavor. Liquor, perceived as an anti-Christian force, represented a challenge to proselytism among “the weak races of the world.”216 While temperance movements gained

traction in the United States, American merchants were not forbidden to trade in

alcohol internationally, despite efforts of missionaries and anti-liquor leagues to

convince the U.S. government otherwise.217 However, in Sierra Leone, an

American “factory” refused to “sell strong drink” to natives of the region due to the

214 Theodore Roosevelt, “Expansion of the White Races,” Methodist Episcopal Church celebration of the African Diamond Jubilee, Washington, D.C., 18 January 1909, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trwhiteraces.html

215 Ronald Hilton, “Morocco: Raisuli, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abd El Krim,” http://wais.stanford.edu/Morocco/morocco_raisuliteddyroosevelt12102.html

216 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 383.

217 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 381-2.

100 women prohibitionists’ influence.218 Religious-based special interests specifically

influenced American business practices in Sierra Leone through morality in the

place where Fisher’s initial missionary enterprise met with abject failure, but the

legacy and reach of Protestant America remained intact. Even in 1900, Fisher’s dream of delving into the Sudan via Sierra Leone could not be realized given that

British occupation had shut off missionaries from proselytizing among the

Muslims of the Sudan following the extended Islamic millennialism revolution.219

Concerning Morocco at the Conference, J. Hargrave Bridgeford of the

North African Mission exalted medical missionaries as “of the highest importance” in making inroads with the people of Morocco, exclaiming that within

“Morocco there is no such thing as any native relief for sickness, and they will come any distance” in order to receive western medical attention.220 However,

these medical missionaries were not exempted from the often dangerous violent

reactions their religious proclamations sometimes induced. David Cooper, a

Christian medical doctor working under the banner of the North Africa Mission,

was murdered for proselytizing among his patients.221 What Hargrave Bridgeford

failed to recognize in his analysis of the conditions in Morocco were the complex

social structures, stigmas, and gender barriers attached to medicine and healing

218 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 384.

219 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. II, 335.

220 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 440.

221 Evelyn Stenbock, “Miss Terri!” The Story of Maude Cary, pioneer GMU missionary in Morocco (Lincoln: Back to the Bible Broadcast, 1970), 40.

101 that are not easily reconciled with European categories of healing. Hargrave

Bridgeford is an easy target, as he did not benefit from the later corollaries of

perception to his Christian worldview, brought about through the social sciences,

which revealed the role of regional Islamic/Maraboutic claims to healing, and the

eventual stigmatization of individuals seeking medical assistance in European

institutionalized healthcare. During their formative stage, these social sciences

were not opposed to the missionary movement, but rather included as a

promotion in order to bolster and justify missionary motives.

In 1900, John R. Mott, General Secretary of the World’s Student Christian

Federation who was considered “father of the ecumenical movement,”222 chaired over the proceedings of April 28th and 29th, as well as presenting his own materials.223 As a major player in the YMCA and federated religious student

movements, Mott’s objectives were diametrically opposed to Fisher’s.

Concerning proselytism within the sphere of Christian students, Mott declared the

substance of this mission as contrary to conversion and detached from

prophecy.224 George Fisher’s purview focused on exactly the opposite: world

222 John R. Mott, “Reflex Influence of Foreign Missions,” Eastern Sunday, Cornell University commencement address at Ithaca, New York, April 1, 1888, General papers, 1889-1899, John R. Mott Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; Mott outline highly racist viewpoints and concerns over the “Negro within our gates,” denounced saloons as a social ill, and outlined the need to educate the illiterate southern United States population rather than extend the Gospel to “the Negro along the Congo.”

223 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. II, 371.

224 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 95.

102 conversion in a pre-millennial age. John Mott, while honoring the progress of

student organizations abroad, promoted foreign missionary work along railroads,

especially in India and Japan—the focal points of the YMCA’s foreign work—

granting easier access through a more readily amenable mode of transportation

for western missionary travelers.225 It is not without irony that I should note the

centrality of railroads for YMCA’s work abroad, while the railroad line from Fez to

Casablanca initially hindered efforts by the GMU to reach out to Berber tribes in

the Moroccan interior. Members of the GMU commented on how Berber tribes attacked this government railway, perceiving it as a European threat and means to subjugating their independent coexistence within an Arab, and later European state. Theodore Roosevelt noted in his 1909 African Diamond Jubilee speech the benefits that European colonialism brought to Algeria, benefits following white governance that Morocco required.226

Events of the Conference show the extent to which the American political

apparatus was tacitly aligned with western attempts to convert Orientals through

missionary enterprises, whether this relationship merely represents political

intentions as electioneering or a truly vested interest in these missionaries’ work.

Even before the Conference, President Grover Cleveland laid the cornerstone at

225 Ecumenical Missionary Conference, Vol. I, 100.

226 Theodore Roosevelt, “Expansion of the White Races,” Methodist Episcopal Church celebration of the African Diamond Jubilee, Washington, D.C., 18 January 1909, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trwhiteraces.html

103 the YMCA’s Kansas City branch in October 1887,227 the building which was

surrendered in order to pay of the $80,000 debt reviewed in Chapter 2.

Theodore Roosevelt, in the capacity of President of the United States three years

after the Conference, laid the cornerstone of the new YMCA structure in a

renewed, economically viable Topeka branch in 1903. One needs look no further

for examples of complicity between Northeastern politicians, business, and social

organizations than the above examples. The YMCA alliance with the United

States government was back to the status quo after the resignation of the

“Kansas Movement” members, and Topeka YMCA branch brought back under

the International Committee’s agenda.

Responding to the alienation wrought by the International Committee and

the changes in American foreign missionary work, by the early twentieth century,

George Fisher fully elaborated his ideas favoring missionary enterprises

independent of official church allegiances and denounced exclusive international

missionary conferences and ventures. Armed with venomous assaults on

organized, denominational religion and vitriolic tirades against American political

leadership with their social organizational counterparts, such as the YMCA, at a

GMU conference, Fisher outlines the objectives of his organization against the

allied political-religious-economic superstructure he so vehemently fought against. Central to Fisher’s theology was the Gospel itself; as an object and

227 Samantha Adams, Robert Butler, Meghan Humphreys, Scott Russell, Jerri Wade, Charting a Course of Service: 140 Years of the YMCA of Greater Kansas City (Kansas City: YMCA, 2000), 11.

104 lifestyle divided into five categories: beginning with believing, loving, defending

and preaching the Gospel, and ultimately suffering the life and death of

martyrdom through a lifelong commitment to missionary work abroad.228 Fisher

fancied himself a reformer, the likes of “Luther, and Knox, and Wyckliffe, and

Bunyan, and Spurgeon, and Brookes,”229 and as such, set out against the Gospel

being “put to death in the house of its supposed friends;”230 specifically the

Roman Catholic, Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist Churches.

As rigid, dogmatic institutions over unquestioning, servile subjects, these

Christian sects were not merely on the side of erring, but intrinsically committed

to apostasy and destroying the very scriptural foundations of reformist theology.

For Fisher, the only means to defend the Gospel was by “withdrawing from fellowship with unsound and wicked religious men and organizations,”231

purported religious men who were more intent on promoting physical fitness,

sportsmanship and social lives over the spiritual well-being of individuals. Fisher

instead promoted leading the life of a martyr and preaching the gospel in foreign lands until death. In this sense, the loss of life during the “Kansas-Sudan

Movement” resonated potently for Fisher’s endeavors, while it had threatened the

YMCA.

228 George S. Fisher, “The Glorious Gospel” (Kansas City: Gospel Union Publishing Company, 1911), 9.

229 George Fisher, 6.

230 George Fisher, 5.

231 George Fisher, 6.

105 Not stopping with eastern dominated religious sects and social

organizations in the west, Fisher systematically dismantled the character of the

professedly Presbyterian President Woodrow Wilson, labeling the US President

and government officials as “no longer safe leaders.”232 That despite

conventions and lifestyles of progressive twentieth century America, a true

Christian must respond to a hypothetical presidential dinner invitation with:

I am sorry that I shall not be able to accept your invitation to attend the White House dinner tomorrow, as you are called a brother and have become an idolater by being one of the Chief Attendants at a Romish idolatrous Mass.233

Clearly, for Fisher, pandering to potential voters by no means allowed even a symbolic gesture if it entailed curtailing one’s beliefs system by any measure.

Not stopping there, Fisher called out “the Edinburgh Conference; the 1911 Bible; the Panama Congress234 as monuments to a spirit of wicked tolerance and

fellowship with evil unsound doctrines and men.”235

Given that Fisher never elucidates the exact reasons why he disproved of

the Edinburgh Conference, any conclusions I derive are based on the best

evidence I may derive from his previous stances and statements. Fisher’s focus

is on the design evil men, and his previous focus on only spreading the Gospel to

232 George Fisher, 7.

233 George Fisher, 7.

234 The Panama Conference was a pet project of U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, the same secretary that shut down Fisher’s Sudan mission under the YMCA.

235 George Fisher, 8.

106 non-Christians rather than focus on any mission to civilize suggests Fisher would

naturally be opposed to a conference dominated by British Imperialists and chaired by John R. Mott of the YMCA.236 Additionally, rather than leaving the

Conference open to public visitation, interest, participation, or general education,

Edinburgh limited membership to officially appointed representatives religious groups spending greater than ₤2000 annually on missionary enterprises, allowing another representative for each equivalent expenditure. Furthermore, no demonstrations or “expression of opinion…on any matter involving any ecclesiastical or doctrinal question” were to be allowed.237 This in affect closed

the proceedings to small scale operations such as Fisher’s, and as I have shown from Fisher’s YMCA and later writings, for him disregarding differences of interpretation would have been likely difficult in the company of Mott. Only a few

years later, following the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Balfour Declaration, and

the Sèvres Protocol, France and Britain partitioned the Levant and laid the

foundations of a Zionist state in Palestine, dividing the region in ways reminiscent of millennialist imaginings of cartography, and further shifting missionary focus and imperial undertakings to the eastern Mediterranean.

In 1946, Mott received the Noble Peace Prize. The presenter at the ceremony, Herman Smitt Ingebretson, fits Mott into the altruistic mould:

236 Galen M. Fisher, John R. Mott: Architect of Co-operation and Unity (New York: Young Men’s Christian Association Press, 1952), 49-64.

237 World Missionary Conference 1910, 7-8; ₤2000 roughly equates to 114,000USD in 2008.

107 Most of those who have received the Nobel Peace Prize bear names which are well known from peace conferences, from congresses on disarmament problems and arbitration treaties, or from their handling of acute political situations when they were able to play propitious roles in finding a solution to great and grievous conflicts. But the venerable John Mott is among us today because he has been faithful to the call which he answered as a young student, and because he has created worldwide organizations which have united millions of young people in work for the Christian ideals of peace and tolerance between nations.238

Further, the speaker exclaimed that Mott “has never been a politician, he has never taken a part in organized peace work.”239 Mott represents the

interminable, threefold transnationalism consisting of Christian missions and

Western-styled university education, directed foreign policy, and industrialism. In

1917, Mott was appointed by Woodrow Wilson as the “Envoy Extraordinary of the

United States on Special Mission to Russia;”240 part of a nine man committee

with the specific aim to formulate Russo-American war objectives.241

In 1921, the Foreign Missions Conference of North America sent

observation committees to twelve, subdivided regions of the “Muslim world”: a

region defined by spiritual boundaries, from the western shores of the African

continent to the Arabic-speaking Uighur communities in China. These teams’

main purpose was to collect and organize data concerning the efficacy of printing

238 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1946/press.html

239 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1946/press.html

240 “Credentials to Serve on the Mission of the United States of America to Russia,” in Basil Matthews,’ John R. Mott: World Citizen (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934), 276.

241 Matthews, 94.

108 presses in largely Islamic countries, as “the next step” in missionary activity

worldwide.242 Even by this time however, though western Christian missionaries

were at least willing to admit potential irreconcilable differences between Islam

and Protestantism, these missionaries retained an orientalist outlook. These

observers claimed that the regional presses could use Medieval Christian

apologetics to convince the local Muslims whose religion had not progressed

since the Middle Ages. While Christianity was constantly replenished with “some

fresh aspect of truth,” Islam retained a “structure that hardly changes with

centuries,”243 and educated Muslim theologians were typically backward thinking

quasi-Christians who relied upon Greek philosophical treatises too extensively.244

With this obstacle in mind, the Protestant committee members realized however, that their position would be attacked as not traditionally Christian by proselyte subjects. Some Muslims pointed out that the scriptures American Protestants used were not the same Bible that Muhammad had approved as officially sanctioned Abrahamic body of religious literature in the seventh century.245

Like their Northeastern Calvinist predecessors, these committee members

viewed scientific principles and individualism of modern western education as a

242 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, v, viii.

243 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 33-4.

244 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 38.

245 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 35.

109 threat which if not properly contained could undermine the religious nature of

their efforts:

We need literature for influencing native thought, in conjunction with the progress of education, in all that makes for individual, family, social, and national well-being—literature on purity, hygiene, temperance, home life, social responsibility and opportunities for service, as well as healthy recreative and instructive literature.246

Protestant missionaries wanted to recreate “the Moslem” in the image of the

American Christian, both religiously and socially, just as men adrift within the

boundaries of America were made to resemble their appropriate station in life, in

the prototype espoused by Northeastern religious sects, social organizations,

industrialists, and politicians.

In spite of such a hardened stance on the differences of culture between

Western Christian and Oriental Muslim, missionaries were aware of discourses

that privileged more favorable perspectives, including tales of women abroad

like—Isabelle Eberhardt—who reveals the “most dignified and most appealing in

Moslem life.”247 A case study of Isabelle Eberhardt represents a unique instance of gender identification, not only among peoples of the Middle East, but within the boundaries of socially constructed gender definitions and categorization of

European mores as well. Even as a young illegitimate child in Switzerland,

Eberhardt’s Nihilist father raised Isabelle privileged to intricate education in

Classical Arabic and equestrianism, though he required her to wear traditionally

246 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 43.

247 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 31.

110 plain men’s clothing.248 Among Sufis of North Africa, despite their knowledge

that Eberhardt was physiologically a woman, her self-proclaimed masculine

identity and her wearing of indigenous male garb, bolstered by her

horsemanship, went unchallenged.249 Eberhardt’s contemporaneous case is a

potent framework against which to analyze the pilgrims of the GMU.

In the case of the missionaries among the GMU, each individual self-

identified as a member of a gender category, not only restricting themselves to

traditionally gendered European wardrobes, but likewise adorning with gendered

regional dress in Morocco. Whereas the Tunisian Qadiriyya Sufi sect250

248 Isabelle Eberhardt, The Oblivion Seekers, trans. Paul Bowles (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975), 8.

249 Eberhardt, 11.

250 J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 40-4, 88. The Qadari line of Sufis became prevalent in North Africa following the Spanish Reconquista. Initiated in the Levant in the eleventh century, the sect spread widely throughout the Islamic world. However, with its introduction into Northern Africa, Qadiriyya Sufism fully adopted elements of saint veneration and lineal transcendence of baraka, incorporating elements of local mysticism while in other regions this sect was becoming more legalistic in nature. This is not surprising as this concept has been widespread in North Africa at least since the time of Herodotus in the fifth century BC. Herodotus notes the Nasamonians of Cyrenaica for their obscure practice “as he swears, lays his hands upon the tomb of some one considered to have been pre- eminently just and good, and so doing swears by his name. For divination they betake themselves to the sepulchers of their own ancestors, and, after praying, lie down to sleep upon their graves; by the dreams which then come to them they guide their conduct,” Herodotus, The Histories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 373. This North Africa tradition differs from the Greek tradition of icubatio, which was prevalent along the shores of the Mediterranean, mainly through the fact that while Greek incubatio maintained the reliance on interpreting visions through a medium—like an oracle—the African tradition empowers the lower classes, granting them agency given that the spirit of the saint or the apparition in

111 accepted Eberhardt as a masculine presence, George C. Reed of the GMU was

relegated to secondary status among the women and children of his client Berber

tribe in times when the group’s men were committed to tribal warfare.251 More

important than their chosen modes of dress were their horsemanship abilities.

Eberhardt learned this at young age, and propelled herself to equal status among

the warriors of her sect, while George Reed had no prior equestrian experience, therefore his client Berber tribe had no use for him militarily, and he could not fulfill the designated masculine role required of tribal warfare in North Africa, which he noted as hurting his Protestant, American sense of masculinity. This foreign world blurred boundaries westerners could not easily reconcile, or pigeonhole into their own particular categorical constructs.

North Africa during the 1920s had about thirty newspapers of various languages in circulation, creating tensions between what the Foreign Missionary

Conference committee for North Africa saw as irreconcilability between stagnant

Islam and secular modernity. “In great cities of high renown as centers of Islamic life, the shrill call of the newspaper boy is as much a part of daily life as the sonorous cries from the minaret above.”252 Viewing Islam as a stagnant,

the dream is the primary interpreter. For further reading, see John C. Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), Steven M. Oberhelman, Dreambooks in Byzantium: Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008).

251 Stenbock, Miss Terri!, 50-1.

252 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 24-5.

112 antiquated religion in a modern world blinded Protestants to the shining example

encapsulated in their own American Christian experience. William James,

himself a Northeasterner, built an entire philosophical system on the premise that

individuals could pragmatically reconcile their religious principles with cutting

edge scientific discoveries, even if these two beliefs created a tension of mutual

exclusivity.253 Western Christians perceived in the Middle East a dialectical tension whereby one aspect would prevail over the other, rather than a new synthesis develop whereby Islam could be reconciled with Enlightenment thought. Islam has a rich history of adapting to changing times, as it had been changing since the death of the Prophet Muhammad. What troubled the missionary committees the most, concerning North Africa, was the ubiquitous nature of an increasingly nationalistic, Arab-centric, anti-Christian Egyptian press.254

Maghrebi regions outside of Egypt, specifically under French influences

where French language could be the vehicle for Christian literature, presented an opportunity to project Christianity to “the long-robed Berber of Kabylia” who was

“caught into the movement faster, perhaps, than the blue-gowned Egyptian

fellah.”255 Again, the missionary movement was enraptured by this strange

Orientalist focus on foreign modes of dress to categorize, but beyond these

253 William James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

254Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 23.

255 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 20.

113 ethnic renditions lies the ultimate goal of cultural imperialism. The authors of the

committee reports viewed the Berber languages as dying and falling away,

making French the vehicle for literate tribal expressions. To these American

cultural elitists, the “underdeveloped races,” including the various tribal Berbers,

would produce no great works in their native tongues, and any focus on adopting

these languages for publication within these “small backward communities”

should be “small in output and rudimentary in idea.”256 The GMU’s biblical

translations fit this model. Though there is no clear operational distinction

between the prescriptions of the Foreign Mission Committee and the GMU’s

actions, the repercussions are quite poignant when viewed from a cultural standpoint. Today, growing Berber nationalism and the pride surrounding Berber culture have produced sentiments whereby many Amazights hope to preserve their dying languages both in schools and in government constitutions.257

Fisher’s missionaries, for all of their Orientalist preconceptions and sense of cultural and racial superiority, not only did not threaten the destruction of Berber languages, but helped foster their perpetuation by learning these various dialects and devoting them to the printed page.

Manifold differences and disagreements kept Fisher from ever reconciling his missionary endeavors with the growing Ecumenical Movement and college missions. This phase in American missionary movements, beginning with the

256 Christian Literature in Moslem Lands, 44.

257 Emma Schwartz, “Giving Voice to a Long-Repressed People,” in U.S. News and World Report, 24-31 March 2008, 29-30.

114 shift in Northeastern United States political dominance after the Civil War, the closing of the American frontier with the expansion of railroads, and the growth of

Ecumenical meetings and the YMCA college work, concluded with World War I.

The GMU witnessed organizational changes after Fisher’s death in 1920, into the

1950s, and it survives today as Avant Ministries of Kansas City, Missouri.

115

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSIONS; THE FARCE OF AVANT TODAY

After George Fisher’s death in 1920, the GMU began the long process of change that resulted in today’s Avant Ministries.258 This new organization, today under the leadership of President Paul Nyquist,259 remains committed to pre- millennial foundations, has maintained the regional alliances among such institutions as Biola University in California, and Dallas Theological Seminary in

Texas. Using missionary endeavors abroad as a means to expose God’s chosen few to the Gospel, Nyquist “speaks” for God in that:

He has chosen and predestined people from every tribe and tongue to be His worshipers. Therefore, as missionaries, we can go forth with hope and confidence, knowing our efforts are consistent with God's sovereign purposes (Romans 8:28–30).260

258 http://www.avantministries.org/

259 “Dr. Paul Nyquist has been the President of Avant Ministries since 2001. Before joining Avant, he served as senior pastor at First Federated Church in Des Moines, Iowa, and Evangelical Bible Church in Omaha, Neb. Paul was also a member of the board of directors for Avant and an adjunct professor at Grace University in Omaha and Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Ariz.” http://www.avantministries.org/international-service-center/paul-nyquist

260 http://www.avantministries.org/theological-basis-for-short-cycle-church- planting-2

116 However, Nyquist has taken the organization in a new direction; away from long-

term missionary commitments abroad to Nyquist’s new business-like model for

Christian missions, the so-called short-cycle church planting:

Short-cycle church planting is based on a belief in innovative practices. With the world changing as rapidly and profoundly as it is today, the only way to have high-quality contacts with people is to think with innovation at all times. As we do, God will provide opportunities to connect with people in powerful ways, just like He did with Paul in Athens (Acts 17:16–34). Innovative methods do not guarantee evangelistic success. That’s in God’s hands. But by creating an environment of innovation on a missionary team where experimentation, creativity and risk-taking (emphasis added) is valued and applauded, we enhance our ability to make a connection with people and gain a hearing.

In just as careless a fashion as Fisher and the GMU, Nyquist and Avant remain unwilling to accept failure, and would rather adjust their mission model in order to keep their dreams solvent and tangible; yet again, like Protestant Americans after

Indian Removal in the 1830s, after the carnage of the American Civil War in the

1860s, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the conclusion of World War I, they continue to redefine the prescriptions for millennium and the return of their

Savior as each era permits and even requires.

Short-cycle church planting is in one sense an admission of the missionary organization’s unwillingness and inability to commit to prolonged proselytism in a particular region over a long duration, due to limited resources, and a new generation of young missionaries admittedly less committed to the lifelong process of proselytism overseas. A short glance at the personal video

revelations of Avant members on the popular internet website Youtube reveals

117 just how these young American missionaries’ personalities and goals differ from

their earlier counterparts.261

Today, Berbers in Morocco still struggle for cultural recognition in a

nominally Arab nation-state, meanwhile Christian journalists agonize over the

Moroccan government’s twenty-first century commitment to rooting out Islamic

militant Arabs, returning from fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.262 Instead

of the hog cholera outbreak of the 1880s—which caused such distress for U.S.

Secretary of State James G. Blaine; negotiating against international bans on

American pork products and new government regulations on pork products263— today, we worry over the Swine flu. Rather than paying tribute to Barbary corsairs, the U.S. government struggles with Somali pirates off the coast of East

Africa and in the Red Sea.

Returning to my previous quotations of Marx and Nietzsche, patterns can be acquired, utilized, and shaped from historically rooted events and manipulated today to fit present circumstances; and vice versa. Ultimately, as historians, we take the charge in continually reinterpreting events from generation to generation. This narrative must inherently be different from Hopkins’ and Collin’s renditions of George Fisher, both within the YMCA and with the GMU.

261 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4or6blkItA

262 See Geoff Pingree and Lisa Abend “Morocco’s rising Islamist challenge,” The Christian Science Monitor, 23 November 2005, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1123/p06s02-wome.html

263 Alice Felt Tyler, The Foreign Policy of James G. Blaine (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1927), 292-301.

118 In her Ambiguities of Domination, Lisa Wedeen aptly divulges how people in a contemporary society can facilitate popular expressions of irony, farce, and humor—in the form of late night talk shows, political cartoons, and satirical tracts—as a psychological outlet for popular protest;264 we can laugh amongst one another and all nod in approval with the confirmation that we indeed mutually grasp the complete inanity of each new situation, while we rest easy and forget each episode to the annals of history in favor of the freshness of tomorrow. Or, we can act upon these assertions and attempt to redraw the status quo, retaining the respect, dignity, and framework that uphold universal human rights in a world we so often do not understand. History is filled with cases of missed opportunities; tomorrow with unforeseeable consequences.

264 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999).

119

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