The Ecumenical Movement and the Origins of the League Of
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IN SEARCH OF A GLOBAL, GODLY ORDER: THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 1908-1918 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by James M. Donahue __________________________ Mark A. Noll, Director Graduate Program in History Notre Dame, Indiana April 2015 © Copyright 2015 James M. Donahue IN SEARCH OF A GLOBAL, GODLY ORDER: THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, 1908-1918 Abstract by James M. Donahue This dissertation traces the origins of the League of Nations movement during the First World War to a coalescent international network of ecumenical figures and Protestant politicians. Its primary focus rests on the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, an organization that drew Protestant social activists and ecumenical leaders from Europe and North America. The World Alliance officially began on August 1, 1914 in southern Germany to the sounds of the first shots of the war. Within the next three months, World Alliance members began League of Nations societies in Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and the United States. The World Alliance then enlisted other Christian institutions in its campaign, such as the International Missionary Council, the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., the Blue Cross and the Student Volunteer Movement. Key figures include John Mott, Charles Macfarland, Adolf Deissmann, W. H. Dickinson, James Allen Baker, Nathan Söderblom, Andrew James M. Donahue Carnegie, Wilfred Monod, Prince Max von Baden and Lord Robert Cecil. This dissertation is the first to examine the multinational, religious origins of the League of Nations. It shifts the focus off of the League’s most famous advocate, Woodrow Wilson, and places the designs of the League within a broader Protestant movement that recruited politicians and transformed churches into avenues for pro- League propaganda. The first three chapters outline the movement’s international scope and worldview, whereas the final four chapters focus on the movement in the national contexts of the United States, Britain, neutral Europe and Germany. The World Alliance possessed two intertwined aims: firstly, a union of Christian churches that could complete the Christianization of the globe in their generation; and, secondarily, the establishment of a international federation of states, bound together by a free covenant before God, that would prevent Christendom from ever again descending into civil war. In the minds of the earliest advocates of the League of Nations, these two objectives were intertwined to the extent that many ecumenical organizations began to redefine themselves according to this new political orthodoxy, while the League movement became saturated in moral and pseudo-religious terms. CONTENTS Common Abbreviations……….................................................................................iii Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………….…….iv Introduction………………………………………………………………….………1 Chapter 1: Political Internationalism in a Religious Key, 1907-1909……….……..21 Chapter 2: Losing the Peace: The Antebellum Ecumenical Movement, 1907-1914…………………………………………………….…….85 Chapter 3: The First World War As Catalyst for Protestant Internationalism, 1914-1918…………………………………………………………..161 Chapter 4: The Religious Origins of the British League of Nations Movement, 1914-1918……………………………………………..257 Chapter 5: Protestant Internationalism and the League of Nations Movement in the United States, 1914-1918………………………..332 Chapter 6: The League of Nations Movement in the Allied Nations and Neutral Europe, 1914-1918…………………………………………429 Chapter 7: The League of Nations Movement in Germany and Its Ambivalent Ecumenical Base, 1914-1918……………………….…461 Chapter 8: Conclusion ………………………………………………………………542 Bibliography Archives……………………………………………………………………..550 Primary Sources……………………………………………………………..551 Secondary Sources…………………………………………………………..570 ii COMMON ABBREVIATIONS CEIP Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (U. S.) CODP Central Organization for a Durable Peace (headquartered in Holland) CPU Church Peace Union (U. S.) FCCCA The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (U. S.) FOR Fellowship of Reconciliation (headquartered in London and New York City) IMC International Missionary Council LEP League to Enforce Peace (U.S.) LNS League of Nations Society (Great Britain) LNU League of Nations Union (Great Britain) WILPF Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association (headquartered in Geneva) YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association (headquartered in London (1855 – 1930), and then Geneva (1930 – present)) WA The World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches (headquartered in London (1914 – 1920), and then Geneva (1920 – 1946)) WSCF World Student Christian Federation iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the University of Notre Dame, Swarthmore College, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the World Council of Churches for their financial support. I would like to thank the Rylands, Marianne Chow and the Pendle Hill Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation for providing homes away from home during my research. I especially want to thank my professors and role models who encouraged me to pursue my dream of becoming a historian: James McGoldrick, Thomas Lynch, Claudio Fogu, Alan Beyerchen, Dale Van Klay, George Marsden, Doris Bergen and Julia Thomas. Finally, I would like to give a special acknowledgement to Mark Noll and Jennifer Dear, who helped drag this dissertation across the finish line. To all of you, I owe so much. iv INTRODUCTION “A study of history from generation to generation constantly reveals God’s ways of creating the forces for recovery in the midst of disaster, and in the cycles of divine revelation and evolution, the forward sweeps are ever longer than the backward. The World Alliance started a long trail which has not reached its end and which still points the way to a new world order.” -Charles Macfarland, Pioneers for Peace Through Religion (1946) The YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy famously quipped in 1924 that “the first casualty of war is the truth.”1 He was wrong. Plans are the first casualties of war. Case in point: As evening approached on July 31, 1914, seventy-six disoriented travelers converged on the southern German town of Konstanz exhausted from having had to negotiate a continent on the verge of a world war. Parliaments and monarchs across Europe had just declared martial law, giving military commanders the authority to seize command of the borders in order to carry out the meticulous, foreordained schematics demanded by modern mass mobilization. The delegation from France had been on the last car to pass through the Franco-German border before it closed. Meanwhile, at the Swiss-German crossing, Swiss soldiers awoke a group of Americans 1 Sherwood Eddy and Kirby Page, The Abolition of War: The Case Against War and Questions and Answers Concerning War (New York: George H. Doran, 1924), 53. 1 and brusquely demanded they disembark the train because the Germans had blown up the tracks. While scrounging for an early breakfast at the nearest station the Americans witnessed a group of Frenchmen push a German woman to the ground and take her bags. A fistfight soon erupted that had to be put down by the local police. Once rerouted and across the border on a different train, the group witnessed German children pelting foreigners with rocks. A few even claimed to have witnessed German officers shooting two conscientious objectors against the wall of a train station.2 Those who entered Germany through the northern borders experienced even more harassment. Just outside of Cologne the German army seized control of an entire train line, forcing the British passengers to hitchhike into the city. Leaving Cologne the delegates had to share their car with German soldiers headed to the French border. One melancholic draftee sat next to Joy Hodgkin, an English Quaker headed to Konstanz, and relentlessly showed her pictures of his wife and newborn son. Joy remarked in her letter home that the rest of the soldiers, which had seemed so menacing at first, now seemed like “boys, lighthearted and happy, looking much more as if they were off for a holiday than starting out on the most serious job of their lives.”3 Not everyone made it. One hundred and fifty-three guests had been expected, but only seventy-six showed up. No one from Belgium, Denmark, Holland or Austria managed the journey.4 Two American pastors who stopped to take pictures of some 2 These accounts and others can be found in Frederick Lynch, Through Europe on the Eve of War: A Record of Personal Experiences; Including an Account of the First World Conference of the Churches for International Peace (New York: Church Peace Union, 1914), 1 – 25. 3 H. G. Wood, Henry T. Hodgkin: A Memoir (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1937), 147. 4 EZAB 51/D-I-b-2: “List of Delegates.” 2 German zeppelins found themselves in an army prison for the next several days.5 Many French delegates had to report to the military themselves, while many Germans found that the war precluded their ability to leave home. One German count felt he had to stay put after the army commandeered his Alsatian estate to quarter troops. The respected pacifist Otto Umfrid blamed his wife; she would not let him miss the last day with his son before he left for the front. Ernst Dryander, the head pastor of Berlin’s largest cathedral, also skipped the conference at Konstanz to spend a few days with his son stationed in the Black Forest.6 Some German delegates simply felt that the war itself made the conference at Konstanz an exercise in futility.7 The original goal of the men and women descending on Konstanz on that warm Friday night had been to organize a “World Congress of Churches” for the summer of 1915. That assembly would be held concurrently with the Third Hague Peace Conference in order to demonstrate the support of the Christian churches for the erection of a world court.