A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist

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A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist

R. G. ROBINS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

A. J. Tomlinson

Recent titles in RELIGION IN AMERICA SERIES Harry S. Stout, General Editor

CHURCH PEOPLE IN THE STRUGGLE The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 James F. Findlay, Jr. TENACIOUS OF THEIR LIBERTIES The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts James F. Cooper, Jr. IN DISCORDANCE WITH THE SCRIPTURES American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible Peter J. Thuesen THE GOSPEL WORKING UP Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia Beth Barton Schweiger BLACK ZION African American Religious Encounters with Judaism Edited by Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch GOD FORBID Religion and Sex in American Public Life Edited by Kathleen M. Sands AMERICAN METHODIST WORSHIP Karen B. Westerfield Tucker TRANSGRESSING THE BOUNDS Subversive Enterprises Among the SeventeenthCentury Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630– 1692 Louise A. Breen THE CHURCH ON THE WORLD’S TURF An Evangelical Christian Group at a Secular University Paul A. Bramadat

THE UNIVERSALIST MOVEMENT IN AMERICA, 1770–1880 Ann Lee Bressler A REPUBLIC OF RIGHTEOUSNESS The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy Jonathan D. Sassi NOAH’S CURSE The Biblical Justification of American Slavery Stephen R. Haynes A CONTROVERSIAL SPIRIT Evangelical Awakenings in the South Philip N. Mulder IDENTIFYING THE IMAGE OF GOD Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States Dan McKanan SOME WILD VISIONS Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in 19th-Century America Elizabeth Elkin Grammer NATHANIEL TAYLOR, NEW HAVEN THEOLOGY, AND THE LEGACY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS Douglas A. Sweeney BLACK PURITAN, BLACK REPUBLICAN The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 John Saillant WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Karin E. Gedge A. J. TOMLINSON Plainfolk Modernist R. G. Robins

A. J. Tomlinson Plainfolk Modernist

r. g. robins

1 2004

1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Saõ Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright 䉷 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robins, R. G. A.J. Tomlinson : plainfolk modernist / R.G. Robins. p. cm. — (Religion in America series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-516591-8 1. Tomlinson, A. J. 2. Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.)—Clergy—Biography. 3. Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.)—History. I. Title: Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson. II. Title. III. Religion in America series (Oxford University Press) BX7034.Z8 T667 2004 289.9—dc22 2003019390

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Victoria, Jessica, Jeremie, Emma, and Lea, my fivefold evidence of grace; and to my parents, Milton F. Robins and Betty Lee Ayres Robins, who taught me also to inhabit that truth-telling way where mountains crumble and the walls of Jericho still fall.

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Acknowledgments

A great many institutions and individuals helped to make this book possible. Fellowships from Duke University and the Pew Program in Religion and American History supported my work during its critical early stages. Fuller Theological Seminary, by including scholarship among my archival duties, enabled me to complete it. I owe special debts of gratitude to the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tennessee—where Vartaman White and David Roebuck gave generously of their time and expertise—and to the archives of the Church of God of Prophecy, also of Cleveland. Never before or since have I encountered such consideration and access as that shown to me there by Larry Duncan, and Wade Phillips opened his home and his personal collection to me in the same spirit of warmth and hospitality. The staffs at scores of libraries and archives have graciously volunteered their services and tolerated my importunities. The archives of the following institutions bear special mention: Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Western Yearly Meeting, Plainfield, Indiana; Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana; the Free Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Church, and Christian Theological Seminary, all of Indianapolis, Indiana; and Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky. Equally helpful were the Newberry Library, Chicago; the Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana State Library, both of Indianapolis and the offices of Hamilton County (Noblesville, Indiana) and Cherokee County (Murphy, North Carolina). The municipal libraries of Westfield and Noblesville, Indiana, and Cleveland and Chattanooga, Tennessee, merit recognition as well. Leanna Roberts, Joe Roberts, Myron Robbins, and Charles Conn welcomed me and patiently en-

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acknowledgments

dured my interviews. Harold Hunter provided valuable feedback on my research at various points in its progression. I owe my greatest debt, however, to my advisers, Grant Wacker and George Marsden, whose patient encouragement helped bring this to fruition. It is not their fault, but it could not have happened without them.

Contents

Introduction, 3 Part I: The Radical Holiness World of A. J. Tomlinson, 7 1. Holiness, Modernity, and American Evangelicalism before the Divide, 9 2. Radical Holiness, 27 3. Radical Holiness and Plainfolk Modernism, 37 4. Radical Ethics: Race, Women, and Holiness Considered and Reconsidered, 51 Part II: A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist, 63 5. Family Tradition, 65 6. Portrait of the Patriarch as a Young Man, 77 7. Quaker Holiness, 89 8. The Day of Small Things, 103 9. Guides to Holiness, 117 10. Visions of Eden, 129

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11. Culture Wars, 145 12. Twilight in Eden, 157 13. The Church of God, 167 14. Pentecost!, 183 15. Order in the Courts, 193 16. A. J. Ascendant, 203 Epilogue, 217 Notes, 231 Bibliography, 299 Index, 311

A. J. Tomlinson


Introduction Plainfolk Modernist: The Radical Holiness World of A. J. Tomlinson

When Delilah Hiatt Tomlinson died, in the summer of 1909, her youngest child and only son did not attend the funeral. Neither means nor opportunity, in the strictest sense, prevented him from doing so. A two-week notice of her impending death provided ample warning. The rails ran more or less on time. Money for train fare could certainly have been found. But Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson had pitched his tent, and the battle for souls, in a small town over 400 miles away. His mother, he felt, was in good hands without him, and souls were “valuable beyond any price.” Like the disciples of old, he proved willing to forsake all, including mother and father, to follow Christ. “I have sacrificed going to see my mother,” he repined to his diary, “for the gospel’s sake.” That poignant intimation of loss may have lingered in his mind, but it passed quickly from his diary. The hand had been set to the plow, and he dared not look back from a wondrous revival where the anointed “sang in other tongues in perfect harmony” and danced in “perfect time.” Nightly, signs and wonders confirmed his decision to remain in the vineyard of souls and to let the dead bury the dead.1 The absence of a child, in life as well as death, was nothing new for Delilah Tomlinson. Over the years she had watched her first four, and five of her nine, children die. This did not render her unique among her generation. As a cursory tour of any nineteenthcentury graveyard makes clear, these things had their seasons and left choruses of grief. But with Ambrose it had been different. He had been taken in the prime of life by the zeal of the Lord. That turn of events could not have been expected. Delilah and Milton Tomlinson had always shunned the religious extremes. Though Quakers in culture and at heart, they had eschewed formal

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introduction

religious affiliation since being disowned by their monthly meeting for conducting their marriage out of order and neglecting church attendance. For Milton, that breach had marked a parting of the ways with organized religion. Delilah, on the other hand, had slowly regained her reputation as a devout Quaker, though her church attendance remained irregular. More overtly pious than her husband, she was nonetheless inclined to practice that piety at home, around the family Bible. It had become for her a book of remembrance, and Ambrose gained his earliest impression of its sacredness on the occasions when he watched her while she held it open on her lap and wept. This was the book that held the names of the dead. It was a book of tears. When A. J. Tomlinson applied for membership in the local branch of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, as a newly minted groom contemplating the responsibilities of family life, no one had cause to fear immoderation. Like his older sisters before him, he had merely grafted himself back into an extended family by joining a small meeting, Chester Preparative, founded by his grandfather and now dominated by his uncles and aunts, cousins, and friends.2 The children were, in a sense, vicariously bringing their obstinate father back into the fold against his will. But if A. J. entered the door of formal religion in a way that spoke of family ties and social propriety, once inside he gravitated toward what was then called “earnest Christianity.” He began to keep company with decidedly fervent Friends, eager to spread “Christian holiness” over the land. He taught Sunday school; he began to preach. Soon, he absented himself for short-term missionary excursions under the care of a peripatetic Methodist colporteur. Despite her son’s growing zeal and his inconvenient missions to share News that she agreed was Good, Delilah Tomlinson could not have anticipated the events that unfolded in the autumn of 1898, when A. J. called a meeting of family members to unburden his soul. His father, mother, sisters, and brothers-in-law arrived and spent the night. The following morning, having duly arraigned his guests, A. J. delivered a bold message sufficient, as he confided to his diary, “to clear myself of their blood in the day of judgment.” His testimony provoked “agony, travail of soul” and “groanings that could not be uttered.” Exactly what he said or from whom the groanings came we are not told, though we can well imagine that everyone present felt agony and travail of soul. By nightfall, A. J. Tomlinson, like Christ himself, had borne his testimony at home. Like the apostles, he would now preach first in Jerusalem and then in Judea, Samaria, and “the uttermost parts of the earth.”3 It took a year for Tomlinson to reach the uttermost parts of the earth. He found them in Culberson, North Carolina, a small town nestled in the rugged Appalachian Mountains, a world away from the patterned woodlands of central Indiana. So it was that Delilah Tomlinson lost her only son to a distant region and to a cultural world, American holiness, that though alien to her had long been near at hand.

introduction

5

Lost Worlds The world to which Mrs. Tomlinson lost her only son is itself, a century later, largely lost. Admittedly, that holds true of all things past to some degree: “The future will forget us, or get us slightly wrong, as our history books get the past wrong, and leave out the very texture of life.”4 But the forgetfulness of time—its slight misreadings, its effacement of once-essential textures—has worked with special effect on the American holiness movement. The problem of historical recall in this instance does not so much concern the names and places, the social networks, or the theological ideas that sustained them. These have, in fact, been described with increasing richness and detail. Rather, it concerns the more subtle features of cultural location and self-understanding, the question of whom these people took themselves to be, how they were understood by others, and where they fit among the other American worlds of their time. This fate keenly illustrates a historiographical truism: time accomplishes its sly alterations by refraction, as older worlds are viewed through the lenses of more recent ones. In this case, the intervening lens of greatest consequence is that ground in the second and third decades of the twentieth century by the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy. The topography emerging from that controversy, shaped by alliances formed in the heat of battle and hardened by each side’s caricatures of the other, has been projected ever since onto the prior religious landscape. Above all, it has retroactively separated the previous generation into opposing cultural camps: those who were for and those who were against “modernity.” Counted among the forebears of fundamentalism, ergo “antimodernist,” has been the holiness-pentecostal continuum, which would indeed volunteer its battalions in the later crusade against “modernism.” Its story, consequently, has been read as a retreat from modernity, an illustration of the multifaceted antimodernist impulse in American popular religion.5 That assessment, I will argue, has gravely misrepresented the personality of its subject. The principal aim of this book is to tell the life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson in a way that will help reconcile the holiness-pentecostal tradition to the world of its origins and the trajectory of its subsequent history. I have tried to capture the crux of my thesis in a phrase, “plainfolk modernist,” coined to suggest that both Tomlinson and the world he inhabited expressed a vibrant strain of modernism, though one voiced in the idioms of American plainfolk culture. The two sides of that construction, modernist and plainfolk, are elaborated in the first two chapters. But an emphasis on the “progressive” character of the holiness-pentecostal continuum runs like a thread through the book in its entirety. To set the stage for this endeavor, I first paint a historical diorama designed to locate Tomlinson against the contextual backdrops most relevant to his religious life: late-Victorian evangelicalism, radical holiness, and the religious culture of western Quakerism. Chapter 1 portrays an ecumenical, even latitudinarian moment in American evangelicalism, a brief belle epoque when the

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introduction

holiness movement and its ideology were comfortably situated within the evangelical mainstream. Holiness (and by extension its more radical elements) then formed a major constituency within one of the two dominant progressive wings of American Protestantism—evangelicalism and Protestant modernism—and the chapter stresses the continuities that bound radical holiness to the nation’s religious center and made it a logical extrapolation from it. Along the way, the chapter elaborates the understanding of modernization and modernity that informs the dissertation at large. Chapters 2 through 7 represent concentric approximations, in both geographical and cultural terms, of the world that framed and partly defined A. J. Tomlinson. The first three of these chapters sketch a cultural profile of radical holiness and attempt to capture the texture of its spirituality. To do this, they take soundings in radical holiness at vital points chosen to measure the movement’s character and its correspondence to late-Victorian modernity. Chapters 5 and 6 begin the biography proper of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, tracing his family origins and narrating his life from birth to his religious conversion in 1889. Chapter 7 explores the manifestation of radical holiness within the Society of Friends. As a uniquely representative expression of radical holiness and as the immediate context for Tomlinson’s early ministry, Quaker holiness merits special attention, which this chapter seeks to provide. Chapters 8 and 9 follow Tomlinson’s evolving religious commitments, as well as his early political and entrepreneurial ambitions, between 1889 and 1899. Chapters 10 through 12 give a close reading of his three-year experiment in utopian communalism at Culberson, North Carolina. Last, chapters 13 through 16 trace his transformation, between 1903 and 1910, into a successful movement entrepreneur and recount his emergence as the unchallenged leader of a thriving holiness denomination, which he helped escort into the then-emerging pentecostal movement. A concluding epilogue surveys the final thirty years of Tomlinson’s life. The first four chapters, largely contextual and theoretical, are designated as “Part 1: The Radical Holiness World of A. J. Tomlinson.” The remaining chapters, largely narrative, stand as “Part 2: A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist.”

part i

The Radical Holiness World of A. J. Tomlinson

Because lives are embedded, a good biography will flesh out the biosphere of the life it means to tell. That process is especially imperative for a work that entertains a fair share of revisionist ambitions, as does this one. Revisionism, whether great or small, submits the proposition that a subject’s historiography has gotten the story more or less wrong. It wasn’t like that, we revisionists complain, it just wasn’t like that at all. In this particular case, the argument is rather simple and rather sweeping. As noted in the introduction, I am suggesting that the life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson has been misread as part and parcel of a larger misreading of the particular world within which he lived, moved, and had his being: radical holiness. A prerequisite to any true “rereading” of history is the recovery of historiographical naı¨vete´: the ability to see a past world as if for the very first time. This biography, like any work of history, is a heuristic conceit, an imaginary journey that can only reach its destination if we realize that to go back in time is to traverse a cultural expanse as wide as if we were crossing to another continent. Even when the folks we study are our own social kin, we travel among strangers whose mental world is likely to have been as alien to us as was their material culture. Anyone who has grappled with what it meant to be a “Republican” or a “Democrat” in the nineteenth century, for example, knows that one of the great impediments to historical understanding is “common sense”—the presumptive knowledge that blinds us to the subtle warping of our points of reference over time. With that in mind, the chapters ahead launch a quest for radical holiness as it existed in the context of its times. The story of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, therefore, as I have chosen to tell it, begins with American evangelicalism on the far side of a controversy.


1 Holiness, Modernity, and American Evangelicalism before the Divide

Two decades ago Grant Wacker described the now-strange world of late-Victorian evangelicalism at one of its representative moments: the 1887 meeting of the Evangelical Alliance. Held in the nation’s capital, that meeting drew the preeminent leaders of an American Protestantism rife with tensions but remarkably irenic by later standards. The great majority of those Protestants, as the name of the organization suggests, claimed to be “evangelical.” But the term then encompassed a more expansive range of theological views and religious styles than it does today. The alliance had been convened to assess “the ‘perils and opportunities’ of the age,” and as we would expect, the guest list included many who would soon be counted among the calcified, dismissed by critics as the fundamentalist architects of a narrow world that time forgot. Also present were luminaries from the American holiness movement who read the age through the lenses of dispensational premillennialism and supernatural baptism with the Holy Spirit. But the roster did not end there. At conference sessions and informally in the halls, the protofundamentalists and protopentecostals hobnobbed with liberal new theologians and mainstream conservatives in an earnest, collegial effort to divine the meaning of their times.1 The meeting’s most striking feature, however, rested not in the diversity of its members but, rather, in their commonalities. Socially, they composed a fraternity bound by a “web of social and cultural relationships.” Intellectually, they shared assumptions that encouraged similar diagnoses of, and prescriptions for, those “perils and opportunities” they had gathered to assess. Protomodernists and

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the radical holiness world of a. j. tomlinson

protofundamentalists within the alliance, Wacker argues, possessed “similar genetic blueprints.” He even calls them “biological twins.” The 1887 convocation, then, did not represent a momentary truce that brought wary adversaries to the negotiating table but, rather, a representative exercise in a world in which emerging liberals and fundamentalists, “evangelicals” all, routinely cooperated in scores of ecumenical endeavors.2 Undergirding these endeavors lay a broad common ground of instincts and assumptions, interests and ambitions. This common ground included social and religious activism, concern for authentic religious experience, a related tendency to subordinate doctrine to experience, a deep interest in eschatology, and a hardy dose of American exceptionalism. It also included an exhilarating belief that powerfully transformative winds were stirring the earth and that “wide-awake” Christians would naturally seek to discern the “zeitgeist,” the animating spirit of what all agreed were wondrous times. Those interests converged in a shared fascination with the work of the Holy Spirit. Though they would have discountenanced his Oxford movement ecclesiology, most in the alliance would have fully endorsed the sentiments voiced by Gerard Manley Hopkins a decade earlier: their world was “charged with the grandeur of God . . . Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”3 The same rapturous conviction, in strikingly similar if less poetic terms, would color evangelical perception for decades to come. “The Spirit is brooding over our land again as at creation’s dawn,” exclaimed the early pentecostal journalist Frank Bartleman, “and the fiat of God goes forth, ‘Let there be light.’ ”4 Hopkins’s poetry, that is to say, condensed the lingua franca of an expectant generation. Most evangelicals, enthralled by this new and deeper brooding, understood themselves to be the antithesis of traditional conservatism, which in their lexicon denoted the scholastic, censorious, static, and spiritually feckless element in American religion. In contrast to that imagined counterpoint, both wings of the Evangelical Alliance sought to “flee ordinary religion in search of extraordinary religion.” Though their dialects, as we shall see, had begun to diverge, both spoke “languages of aspiration,” and both presumed that God’s Spirit truly infused the spirit of the age.5 As paradoxical as this family resemblance may now seem, observers at the time often noticed it. To many Europeans, both shared a bumptious and naive activism that identified them as flip sides of a common American coin. At home a chorus of American traditionalists, from confessional Presbyterians and ethnic Lutherans to Primitive Baptists and conservative Indiana Quakers, scored the modernistic means and message of alliance types. Conservatives of this kind, grounded in distinctive configurations of ethnic, sectarian, or confessional identity, dismissed both wings of the Evangelical Alliance as superficial upstarts blown about by the winds of fashion. Both had altered the faith once delivered to the saints by dabbling in novelties like the “modern theory of sanctification.”6

holiness, modernity, and american evangelicalism

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Wide, Wide World If the 1887 convention presents a revealing snapshot of the late-Victorian evangelical mainstream, a more comprehensive family portrait appears in the pages of its most popular journal: the Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Victorian Protestantism’s quintessential paper, the Christian Herald first hit newsstands in 1878 as the American edition of an English weekly edited by the Anglican minister and scholar of prophecy Michael Baxter. Within little more than a decade it had risen from a crowded field of competitors to become the leading religious periodical in America, with a circulation that rivaled those of some of the largest secular newspapers.7 From its inception, the Christian Herald sounded a high-toned and decidedly ecumenical chord. Weekly sermons by Charles Hadden Spurgeon and Thomas DeWitt Talmage, London Baptist and New York Presbyterian, respectively, formed the twin pillars around which the journal garlanded regular contributions from a broad spectrum of distinguished clergymen.8 The SpurgeonTalmage connection placed the Herald at the center of the evangelical “Benevolent Empire” and spoke volumes about its orientation: Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle and Talmage’s Brooklyn Tabernacle—nineteenthcentury superchurches boasting a staggering array of philanthropic, educational, and missionary endeavors—defined the Victorian archetype of the church in its “modern,” activist mode.9 The Herald rested on the structural support of its religious content, but a hearty dose of secular coverage bore witness to larger cultural pretensions. Lead articles celebrated a range of eminences, from American presidents to European royalty. Wealthy philanthropists, military heroes, and arctic explorers also found the spotlight, especially when two objectives could be met at once, as with General Lord Chelmsford, who had been a “total abstainer for more than twenty years.”10 Moreover, a rich undergrowth of cultural exotica satisfied middle-class curiosity about alien peoples and lands. The Herald entertained and edified its readers with expose´s on Chinese peasants or Maori kings and took them on journalistic day trips to spend “Sunday with the Moravians” or explore “Christianity on the Congo.” Missionary travelogues brought news and photographs direct from emissaries such as Talmage “among the Bedouins” or Marion Harland on assignment in Palestine.11 The journal also kept its readers abreast of current news and world events, ever (as in the case of its secular counterparts) with a taste for the sensational. Breathless readers could expect “A Graphic Account” of the British Army’s “Decisive Victory over the Zulus” or timely coverage of any flood, famine, plague, shipwreck, or earthquake of note.12 In addition to covering religion, politics, geography, and world news, the Herald also met the literary demands of its readership. Features on writers such as Samuel Johnson sought to refine taste, but the paper’s standard literary fare consisted of serialized melodramas like “Matthew Mellowdew, a Story with More Heroes Than One.” Through these “splendidly written” didactic tales (said to be “healthy, inspiring, and

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Christian in the highest sense”) readers vicariously embarked on exciting but morally safe excursions into labyrinths of betrayal, deceit, scheming Jesuits, dramatic conflict, sensational escapes, and final, thrilling victory.13 By 1889 the paper had been acquired by Louis Klopsch, enterprising publisher, close Talmage associate, and son-in-law of that famous Methodist, Stephen Merritt.14 Klopsch possessed keen marketing instincts and an “intuitive perception” of what interested the masses, and he quickly promoted Talmage, his pastor and kindred spirit, from featured writer to senior editor.15 Together the men steered the Herald toward what they called “modern” Christianity, by which they meant a cheerful, magnanimous, and practical Christianity far from the stern Calvinism of the remembered past. Talmage began his tenure with an “editorial salute” that read like a prescription for evangelicalism in the Gilded Age. Under his watch, he declared, the Herald would practice “catholicity,” taking the high-minded road above contention and controversy. Moreover, it would emphasize strengths, not frailties, shunning the false virtues of “poor and pious” Christianity. “Do not send us March sleet or December fog,” he admonished potential contributors, “but panels out of the sky of a June morning.” Under Klopsch and Talmage, the Herald assumed its place at the center of latitudinarian evangelicalism and shouldered its middle-class responsibility to uplift, ennoble, and inspire.16 The paper’s form soon matched its sunny content, as Klopsch added lithographs and calligraphy until almost every page sparkled with artistic flourish. The uniquely “modern” feature of the Herald, however, inhered not in its penchant for sweetness and light but in its wholehearted devotion to American industry and drive. As Talmage put it, the paper aspired to be evangelical in a “spirited, enterprising, and . . . wide-awake sense.”17 The new management unabashedly blessed the marriage of Christianity and venture capital and simply presupposed the harmony of the Business Mind and the Mind of Christ. The advantages to be gained when American ingenuity freed itself from a British distaste for salesmanship were soon apparent. Klopsch parlayed his paper’s unassailable reputation and wide circulation into a place “at the top of the ladder for advertising propaganda.” In the process, he became a darling of the fledgling advertising industry. “The religious press has no other . . . representative,” glowed the Printer’s Ink, “who combines evangelical enthusiasm and business methods like Louis Klopsch.” That celebrated combination produced a Herald that teemed with ads touting the wonderworking power of nostrums like Dr. Blosser’s Catarrhal Fumigant, Hood’s Sarsaparilla (which cured “scrofula . . . the most ancient [and] . . . general of all diseases”), and Freligh’s Tonic (a “Phosphorized Cerebro-Spinant” that cured “when everything else has failed”). The credibility of Christian celebrities was converted into the currency of product endorsement, though occasionally with humorous results. As late as 1893, Charles Spurgeon still vouched for Congreve’s Balsamic Elixir, its makers unfazed by the irony of having a dead celebrity attest the curative powers of their product.18 Other ads spoke to the socioeconomic status, or at least aspirations, of their presumed readers. Banks and life insurance companies offered tempting


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investments. Stockbrokers proffered shares in ventures like the Woman’s Canning and Preserving Company, while real estate agents hawked lots in Brooklyn (speculating on the proposed site of the new Brooklyn Bridge); Harvey, Illinois (“Temperance Manufacturing Town”); or Griffith, Indiana (“Ten Lots Will Make You Rich”). Successful investors could order a foolproof metal safe.18 What the Herald did for others, moreover, it could certainly do for itself, and the paper served as a natural marketing outlet for a line of its own products. Among these, the Red-Letter Edition Bible proved to be Klopsch’s most lucrative and representative brainchild. Here the words of Christ leapt from the page in red print, just the thing for fast-paced moderns who needed a quick way to hit the highlights. Taken together, the above qualities describe a paper finely calibrated to the temper of its times. It bedazzled late-Victorian readers with a visual feast and swept them into a bustling emporium where clamoring advertisements embroidered quick-hitting articles and brief news reports. Though first and foremost a religious paper, the Herald spoke to and for middle-class evangelicals who possessed enough sophistication and leisure to be curious about the world they were bent on saving. As the nineteenth-century equivalent of Newsweek, Readers Digest, National Geographic, People, and Christianity Today rolled into one, it met the needs of earthly-minded Christians who were certain that in Britain and America, where so many eminent persons of politics, business, and culture were evangelicals like themselves, world news was their news and all that had to do with civilization had to do with them. Based solely on the foregoing description, contemporary readers might be surprised to find that this worldly-wise and cosmopolitan paper had as its express purpose the propagation of premillennial doctrine and that it championed the divine healing movement and endorsed higher life holiness theology, earmarks all of the later fundamentalist movement. The American edition of the Herald had been launched in conjunction with the first International Prophetic Conference, held in New York in 1878, and its editors promised “to keep alive the expectation of [Christ’s] personal return to the earth.” They held true to their word, and for more than a generation the Herald turned readers’ eyes to “His Appearing—Personal, Premillennial, and Practical.”20 Here was a journal that could follow the latest political, literary, and social events without neglecting to predict the rapture, sometimes down to the very day, no less than seven times in its first fifteen years. Where premillennialism went, moreover, divine healing was sure to follow. Weekly reports from the Bethshan Healing Home, directed by William Boardman and Elizabeth Baxter (wife of the founding editor, Michael Baxter), combined with articles on healing savants such as Charles Cullis and A. B. Simpson to keep readers abreast of the latest developments in that wonder-working field. The point is that none of these commitments, in the waning decades of the nineteenth century, was incompatible with the widest possible embrace or the politest of company. Leading religious figures of all classes strolled through the Herald’s pages, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Gypsy Smith, from Henry Ward Beecher to Sam Jones. All of the great evangelical

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societies—missions, temperance, Bible, youth, alliance—received ample and avid attention. A core of respected leaders, gathered largely from the higher life, premillennial, divine healing, missions, and temperance movements, did hold center stage, but if the Herald played favorites, it still managed to embrace a spectrum of American Protestantism that would strain the imagination a century later.21 In August 1892, the Christian Herald trumpeted holiness prophet-healer John Alexander Dowie’s latest convention, “Salvation, Holiness and Healing.” The following month it reported on the American Institute of Sacred Literature, directed by William Rainey Harper, liberal Old Testament scholar and president of the University of Chicago. The next month brought news of A. B. Simpson’s alliance convention at Old Orchard, Maine, announcing Frank Sandford—soon to be holiness theocrat—among its featured speakers. Examples of such apparent contradictions could be extended indefinitely. One of the most important insights to be gleaned from this excursion into the world of the Christian Herald, so far as the social context of the holinesspentecostal movement is concerned, is that the breadth of that world’s embrace, though remarkable to us now, did not seem unnatural at the time. Despite their theological differences, those within it still inhabited a single realm of discourse, sharing a common language and more often than not a common set of cultural values. The lecture halls of the 1887 Evangelical Alliance meeting and the pages of the Christian Herald together demonstrate that the future bulwarks of fundamentalism—holiness, faith healing, and premillennialism— formed reputable currents in the late-Victorian evangelical mainstream. Furthermore, their overlapping ranks included large numbers of cultured urbanites who took themselves to be tolerant folk uniting inclusive coalitions of Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational, and Reformed believers in the pursuit of higher common ground. Their enterprising leaders, far from sectarian, felt a custodial responsibility to lead Christian civilization in its latter-day mission to the world. Moreover, their conceptual parameters were broadened by the fact that each of these movements formed along a transatlantic axis, linking evangelicals in America with counterparts in England, continental Europe, and the missionary fields of the world. Finally, as systems of belief, holiness, faith healing, and premillennialism then held an aura of novelty and sophistication for those who embraced them. Looking back, it seems obvious that tensions would surface in a journal, and in an evangelical world, that sought to maintain its entreé to political power and high culture while at the same time embracing architects of fundamentalism such as A. C. Dixon and A. T. Pierson. Equally apparent, no journal could long follow the peregrinations of European royalty with one eye and the “Pentecostal Gatherings” of fiery Quaker-holiness evangelists like David Updegraff and Dougan Clark with the other. Year by year the share of the readership interested both in Carrie Judd Montgomery’s healing revivals and in the Institute of Christian Sociology, founded at genteel Chautauqua by Social Gospel pioneers Washington Gladden and Richard Ely, diminished. The Christian Herald, like the evangelicalism it mirrored, composed a world perhaps too spacious to endure.


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Within little more than a generation the evangelical united front would indeed unravel. Yet through the final decade of the nineteenth century its fabric, though frayed, still held, and the Christian Herald remained a forum where a young holiness activist like Ambrose Tomlinson could read about fields ripe unto harvest in South America and where a Methodist colporteur by the name of J. B. Mitchell—who would one day take the young Tomlinson under his wing—could place ads requesting donations of religious literature for distribution to needy souls.22 For that reason, it opens a window to a diverse world in its twilight. Through that window we can see not only the theological differences that would eventually shatter that world but also the latent cultural tensions that, in the case of the holiness movement, would prove even more important than theology in the years to come.

Roots of Alienation Both in Britain and in America, holiness and premillennial doctrine had “trickled down” from the well bred to the population at large.23 As these religious constructs made their desultory way through the social strata, however, they did not necessarily dissolve class antagonisms. To the contrary, holiness in particular evolved into an effective vehicle for the strident expression of plainfolk social ambitions and discontent.24 In the process, it gave rise to the subculture within which A. J. Tomlinson rose to prominence: “radical” holiness. Distinguishing the “radical” from the mainstream in any movement is an intricate task—a fraught calculation of degrees—but the lines of demarcation within holiness seem especially elusive. Doctrine cannot serve as our decoder ring, for it was often indistinguishable across this divide. Instead, the largely self-ascribed term radical referred to subjectively intuited qualities of character, zeal, or manners rather than to any tangible system of belief. Nevertheless, the differences were real and important, and they are to some extent recoverable if sought within the framework of a complex and very mutual process of religious differentiation. Radical holiness, that is to say, reveals itself through connotation, not denotation and, as with many formidable but elusive cultural phenomena, is better described than defined. The traits that formed the amorphous boundary between radical and mainstream holiness, I will argue, were inextricably linked to a widespread alienation of plainfolk evangelicals from the privileged cultural world that dominated the pages of the Herald and the institutions of liberal and mainstream evangelicals alike. Although partisans understood and expressed this reciprocal alienation in religious terms, it had deep cultural dimensions, and they are legible between the lines of the Christian Herald. The paper could be quite generous when composing its guest list, inviting evangelicals from across the social spectrum, but its sentiments fell squarely on the “right” side of the tracks. When Queen Victoria died while Carrie Nation waged war on Kansas saloons, both were covered, but the queen took top billing.25 On another oc-

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casion, a backhanded compliment to the Salvation Army commended its message and results in spite of its “vulgar” methods.26 The imprint of social class lay heavy on the paper’s editorial policy as well. Guided by the irenic manners of gentility, the editors showed more concern to avoid controversy than to report it. Even the acrimonious divorce between Spurgeon and his more liberal Baptist compatriots made nary a ripple in the pages of the Herald. Controversial doctrines such as entire sanctification were finessed. By separating messenger from message, the editors could heartily endorse evangelists who preached entire sanctification without once touching on the doctrine that they preached.27 That policy did not bespeak compromise, nor did it reflect nonchalance about doctrinal matters. Rather, it reflected ingrained, class-specific assumptions about how controversial matters ought to be handled among gentlefolk in a public forum. As the century drew to a close the cultural expanse widened between the social extremes of the paper’s readership. The Herald itself, if anything, drifted upward, increasing in gentility. Plainfolk, though still admitted, were increasingly relegated to the bleacher seats.28 Among the indications of this drift were subtle modulations in the paper’s founding concerns. Premillennialism remained one ingredient in the journal’s recipe for success, but it came now in smaller, standardized doses.29 As premillennialism and holiness grew more controversial, the editors emphasized those movements (missions, philanthropy, temperance, youth and urban ministry) still capable of uniting diverse parties within an increasingly divided American evangelicalism. The Herald had been founded to promote vital currents within the broad, Bible-based evangelicalism of its day. When those currents later diverged, it searched for the new center, gravitating toward eminent figures such as Dwight Moody, J. Wilbur Chapman, B. Fay Mills, and Reuben Torrey who appeared to occupy middle ground. This repositioning was not simply a response to transitions within American Protestantism, such as theological liberalism. That it surely was, but those transitions themselves measured underlying tremors, the shifting plates of American bourgeois culture. A slow alteration in the standards of middle-class belief was under way, a redefinition of what views one might hold in polite company and what the “better class” of society might be expected to espouse. As such, the evolving interests of the Christian Herald offer one more illustration of the perpetual dynamic whereby center and periphery, inside and outside, normative and deviant, continually renegotiate their inchoate boundaries.30 Regardless of the metadynamics, however, as mainstream evangelicalism gentrified, or more scrupulously eluded the controversial extremes, it drew increasingly bitter fire from more radical quarters of the holiness movement. Historiographical hindsight—persuaded by the polemical interests referred to in the introduction and informed by an almost instinctive equation of the bourgeoisie with modernity itself—has interpreted that critique as an expression of antimodernism, not as a manifestation of cultural difference. That conclusion, I argue, misreads both radical holiness and modernity. For one


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thing, the miscreant evils about which radical saints brooded and thundered did not include structural modernization in society and only rarely impinged on creeping modernism in the seminaries or other matters of doctrine and polity. Instead, they had to do with complacency in the pulpits, misbehavior in the pews, and the denominational soul. When A. B. Crumpler, ex-Methodist founder of the Holiness Church of North Carolina and first-rate fulminator, dressed down his former denomination, he did so not for its toleration of “modern” errors like higher criticism but for its backslidden ways. In his view, it had become little more than a social club dominated by its “cigarette-colleges” and “tobacco-using, holinessfighting, secret fraternity–loving ministry and official boards.” The denomination he once loved, Crumpler fumed, had devolved into the “theater-going, whiskey-drinking, card-playing, tobacco-using, secret lodge–loving, oysterfrying, ice cream supper, dancing” Methodist Church.31 That scathing indictment, as Donald Mathews has observed of similar critiques from an earlier generation, bristled with class antagonism and cultural aspiration.32 If the establishment’s gravest sin lay in its conformity to the world, that conformity did not mean “modernism.” It meant social conformity as manifested in moral compromise, spiritual impotence, and cultural pretension. Crumpler’s invective, of course, was no more legitimate than that of his adversaries, and the behavior it targeted was no less worthy of understanding than his own. As disconcerting as it may have been to Crumpler, evangelicals climbing the social ladder naturally adopted widely held Victorian assumptions about how people at their social level should behave, how they should express their faith, and what material aspects of culture should attend, or symbolize, the status and affluence they possessed. The Methodist leaders he condemned had not invented Victorian gentility; they had simply joined the middle class in time to enjoy it.33 But for plainfolk critics like Crumpler, the ascent into respectability was no cultural transition. It was a betrayal of one’s first love. The paragraphs above have stressed two central points with reference to the breach between radical holiness and mainstream evangelicalism. First, doctrine proved less decisive than culture in the widening divide between men like Crumpler and men like Talmage and Klopsch. That observation in no way diminishes the depth or substance of the differences involved. At issue was far more than style. Beneath the denunciations of dress and personal habit lay fundamental disagreements about the nature of religion itself. Cultured religionists saw, in the corporal excesses of popular religion, a decidedly un-Holy Spirit. Conversely, for plainfolk, the restraint and decorum, refinement and order, of cultured religion spoke not of truth and beauty but of a merely human presence, what they in their telling phrase called “nominal Christianity”: Christianity in name only.34 Second, the attempt to make sense of men like Tomlinson, Mitchell, and Crumpler has been hindered by the tendency to read their antiestablishment volleys not as manifestations of cultural difference or ecclesiastical rivalry but, rather, as expressions of antimodernism, sublimated protests against the intellectual ferment and social transitions of the late Victorian era.35 In the sec-

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tions ahead I will elaborate definitions of modernity and of modernism that will allow a more satisfactory account of the behavior and self-understanding of such men and so provide a better context for the biography of A. J. Tomlinson that follows.

Modernity, Modernism, and the Market Cracks in the antimodern portrayal of radical holiness have been visible at least since Timothy Smith’s Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Smith, whose arguments have been extended by scholars such as Donald Dayton, hammered home the socially progressive, reformist side of the holiness movement, particularly in the antebellum years.36 Yet for the more radical wing of postbellum holiness, that antimodern portrayal persists. At the level of popular perception, this persistence may be explained by a confusion of gentility and modernity (most people being willing to grant that the holiness practiced in Phoebe Palmer’s stately New York drawing room or at upscale retreat centers like Wesleyan Grove kept pace with the modern world). For historians of American religion, however, it owes more to the particular definition of modernism that has shaped the historiography of the field for the better part of a century. American religious historiography has consistently defined modernism with reference to the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy of the 1910s and 1920s. Consequently, the liberal Protestants so astutely portrayed by William Hutchison in The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism have served as its very embodiment. Hutchison identifies the central traits of Protestant modernism as the adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture, belief in divine immanence, and faith in human progress.37 In practice, however, his Modernists themselves, not the traits he observed in them, have formed the baseline for future definitions of religious modernism. The intellectual and religious movement described by Hutchison was indeed profoundly influential and self-consciously “modern,” but it remained nonetheless a localized movement rooted primarily in the culture of higher education, the Northern elite, and the leadership of Northern mainline denominations. Though representative of vital trends, it could not stand as a synecdoche for Gilded Age modernism as a whole. For example, a comparison of Jackson Lears’s Modernists with William Hutchison’s Modernists quickly demonstrates that, in the matter of modernism, one scholar’s ceiling is another scholar’s floor.38 Moreover, the traits Hutchison correctly discerns in mainline Modernists appeared as well in many of their avowed adversaries. The most perceptive studies of American religion have obliquely addressed these discrepancies by noting how “modern” many “antimodern” movements in fact are. Martin Marty and other students of fundamentalism have, for that reason, carefully distinguished between “modernism” (the cultural movement) and “modernity” (the social reality).39 That distinction marks an improvement, but it risks posing a further hindrance. By patching leaks, it allows historians


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of religion to defer their obligation to pour new wine into new wineskins and fundamentally reconsider the category of religious modernism. Furthermore, even in its amended form the definition perpetuates numerous inaccuracies. Even when hedged with caveats, the old definition implies a unique correspondence between modernity and the specific cultural movement implied by the term modernism. (Modernity and modernism are presumed to be a more natural fit, for example, than modernity and antimodernism.) Consequently, when historians do observe the essential modernity of a movement heretofore labeled “antimodern,” the observation inevitably bears a hint of expose´, as if unveiling a contradiction at the core of the movement. When we revisit the historical baseline for the prevailing definition, moreover, the problems only multiply. Both “fundamentalism” and “modernism,” we find, encompassed multiple strategies of change and preservation in the face of the social dynamics of their day. Some were guided by “profoundly earnest doubt,” and others, by profoundly earnest faith, but virtually all made critical adjustments to the new arrangements defining twentieth-century America, and virtually none endorsed those arrangements without reservation.40 Both movements, that is to say, directly engaged the “modern” world. Both tried to live relevantly within it. Both availed themselves of its opportunities and tried to redress its wrongs, as they understood them. The same holds true for the leading evangelical movements of the prior generation. The radical holiness saints of the 1880s, no less than the Protestant Modernists of the 1920s, adapted their ideas to modern culture, worshiped an immanent deity, and celebrated human progress. They too imagined themselves to be decidedly “modern” and had reason to believe that others would find that self-ascription plausible. Viewed with reference to the context of their times and the dynamics of social modernization, that self-ascription seems plausible still. The evidence calls for a new definition of religious modernism.

Modernism and Modernity Reinhold Niebuhr once described Americans as “a vast horde of people let loose on a continent with little to unify us by way of common cultural, moral or religious traditions” and “held together mechanically by our means of production and communication.”41 He may have exaggerated, but his instincts were sound, and they correctly suggest that social and economic determiners should form the bedrock of any definition of a social phenomenon like modernism. Therefore, if we abandon the attempt to define late-Victorian modernism in relation to one’s approach to symbolic-moral construction or views of ultimate reality and premise our definition instead on social-structural changes of the longue dureé—to which virtually all Americans, including mainline Protestant elites, were adjusting—then we will have made a significant step toward better understanding the subcultures that are the subject of this book. Modernism, in this respect, derives straightforwardly from social modernization, which for Western history refers above all to the increasing internal coordination and expansion of Europe-based societies beginning in the fif-

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teenth century. The most widely accepted narrative of modernity begins with the European sea powers as they stretched the first sinews of a world economy and proceeds through the scientific and industrial revolutions.42 Already by the sixteenth century, however, its essential reference points (applied technology, the dialectic of capital and labor, government bureaucracy, the market) and its central dynamic (“rationalization”) had emerged. This paradigm of modernization, when stripped of its “progressive” evolutionary assumptions, qualified by the recognition that it was neither uniform nor unilinear, and demythologized by the acknowledgment that its cornerstone was human and environmental exploitation, still holds. For Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson and radical holiness, as for the readers and makers of the Christian Herald, the relevant “modern” moment arrived with what Eric Foner has called “Northern Reconstruction,” when an activist government and aggressive capital joined hands in the wake of the Civil War to fuel the immigration, urbanization, and industrialization that changed the face, and faces, of America.43 America’s postbellum generation witnessed an astounding expansion of its social infrastructure, as a ramifying network of arteries spun out to nourish a burgeoning national and international market. Under the aegis of that market, Americans strove to integrate ever wider breadths of physical and social space and in the process accelerated the growth of a mass culture. The result was nothing less than a New Industrial Order.44 Americans in general and the Northern middle class in particular found the pace exhilarating. Advances in science and technology were particularly celebrated and were viewed by many as the very essence of “civilization.”45 “Progress,” of course, brought malaise to the rich and misery to the poor on a scale that boggles the mind. Yet for all the era’s horrors most Americans, highbrow and low, seem to have shared the progressive spirit: a fundamental optimism about human possibilities, an expectation of ever more grand discoveries, an admiration for efficiency, and a cheerful eagerness to discard the old and experiment with the new.

Defining Religious Modernism If modernization refers to the long-term process of structural change, and modernity, to the state of social affairs engendered by it, then modernism may be defined as the cultural embrace of modernity, an ideological aspect vis-a`-vis these trends that valorizes them and self-consciously adapts to them. Modernism, so defined, had many incarnations. Late-nineteenth-century America was a complex and diffuse nation, constituted of many overlapping, miscegenating, evolving, and persisting communities. As one anthropologist has noted of our own era, it contained many “elective” symbolic-moral centers that competed “for resources, followers, and legitimacy.”46 Consequently, we should expect to find numerous “modernisms” both within and without the world of the religious and intellectual elite. The definition of modernism that guides this exercise in revision, then, does not presuppose a privileged relationship between modernity and either the cultural elite or the cultural mainstream. Rather, it


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presumes that there were (and are) sectarian modes of modernity and a great deal of modernization along the cultural periphery. How precisely might this definition reconfigure our understanding of religious modernism? For one thing, modernism becomes a general social posture with many particular expressions. Mainline Protestant Modernists, for example, developed an intellectual architecture that they believed to be uniquely compatible with modernity, and they were not far wrong. Their reformulation of religious ideas in contemporary terms, their emphasis on the natural order by way of a doctrine of divine immanence, their faith in human progress, and their celebration of change and subjectivity certainly qualified them for the term modernist.47 But though they merited the term, they by no means exhausted it. They did, however, try to patent it, seeking to monopolize the prestige of the term modern and thus to deny the opposition its rightful place in the modern world. This mind-set, based on convictions as deeply held as any fundamentalist tenet, was not necessarily disingenuous, but it was self-serving. By means of this polemical conceit, Modernists consigned to obsolescence the religious views of their opponents and presented their own views as the necessary accoutrements of their age. The struggle to possess the term modern reflected real and important differences, but those differences had little to do with one’s orientation to social modernization. Unfortunately, the Protestant Modernist self-portrait would be largely taken at face value by historians, who naturally accepted the proprietary claims of a cultural elite whose heirs they, by birth or by training, were. The current generation of historians, then, has been left with an inherited wisdom that cannot help but spawn artificial conundrums. Having presumed a singular correspondence between social modernization and one particular expression of it, we have been left to puzzle why fundamentalism in general, and the holiness and pentecostal movements in particular, have thrived so luxuriantly in the modern world and how they have come to possess such (vulgar) technological sophistication. The most astute scholars have sought to resolve these conundrums by recourse to the irony of history. Martin Marty and Robert Anderson, for example, have described pentecostalism respectively as a rebellion against either modernity or the modern capitalist establishment that ultimately proved self-defeating or, worse, was transmogrified by acculturation into the likeness of the very thing it had intended to rebel against. However intriguing such analyses may be, in the end they merely solve a faulty dilemma, one predicated on a misperception of the nature of these movements as they actually existed on the far side of a divide.

Modernity and the Market A generation ago, Thomas Bender outlined a sociological framework featuring the market as the central fact of modern life, the revolutionary force whose agency “separated the late eighteenth century from the late nineteenth century.”48 Pivotal to that transformation, he has observed, was the emergence of

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a new set of social values that coalesced around the welfare of the individual. With the rise of a “translocal market,” the cords that bound the world of trade to its traditional social moorings began to unravel. Increasingly, a moral economy grounded in social roles and relations gave way to a market economy, an “autonomous system of relationships,” that legitimized and facilitated “the pursuit of economic goals outside of the web of social networks and cultural traditions.”49 Where the economy led, Bender has argued, society followed, as increasing sectors of public life and culture evolved into autonomous spheres governed by “economic relationships,” meaning relationships based on qualities and interests inherent in the exchange rather than the exchangers.50 Bender understood that the process was neither simple nor linear: countercurrents defied the general trend, the autonomous market did not mean the end of community, and trade could never be entirely severed from its social context. Nevertheless, the market permanently altered both that social context and the rudimentary conventions of social relations. Bender particularly emphasized the corrosive effects of modernization on the local community, quoting at length the Rev. Henry Bellows’s 1872 lament over the passing of America’s independent small towns, “each with its firstrate man of business, its able lawyer, its skilled physician, its honored representative.” Consolidation and centralization had enthralled those towns to the burgeoning urban centers, “stringing them like beads on a thread, to hang around the neck of some proud city.” Furthermore, by reducing the need for local producers, professionals, and artisans, the rise of a national economy drained small towns of their “enterprising young men.” Those “once content with a local importance” now abandoned small towns for “larger spheres of life.”51 So began the flight of the ambitious, the talented, and the youthful for the bright lights and the far horizons. Bender’s portrait of social modernization has required its share of revision and amendment. His rather sentimental view of the American small town, for example, owed much to the late-Romantic nostalgia of men like the Rev. Bellows, who ignored the fact that, in most parts of 1870s America, Anglo towns were scarcely more than a half century old and who failed to recognize the degree to which such towns were themselves implicated in the modernization process. Nevertheless, Bender correctly perceived the transforming role of market forces in American society. The relationship between religion and those forces has recently attracted considerable attention. For some scholars, it has formed the basis of a new paradigm.52 At the very least both modernity and the market, as categories, have proven to be well suited to the analysis of religious innovation. Modernization meant new forms of rootlessness, voluntary and otherwise, and widespread disillusionment regarding the ability of established institutions to answer the vital questions of modern life. That, in turn, increased the demand for social integration and so for “elective” communities, local and translocal. Finally, the pluralistic and competitive scene, in and of itself, formed an environment conducive to religious vitality and growth.53 Prospects soared for


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vendors of meaning, belonging, and identity: a bull market for those with symbolic-moral universes to sell. Some recent interpreters have emphasized the “supply” side of this religious economy, and “producers” certainly did rise to the occasion with prodigious efforts to reconceptualize—and reinstitutionalize—social and religious order.54 That corrective emphasis has helped to clarify the mechanics of religious mobilization (the “demand” paradigm tended toward obscurantism, as if a groundswell of social stress somehow spontaneously generated new religious movements). But the role of the consumer and the forces that shaped consumer preferences should not be forgotten, and no convincing analysis of the religious market will stray far from the fertile intersection of supply and demand.55 Nor, for that matter, will it lose sight of the dynamics of competition. Peter Berger has described mainstream ecumenism as a form of market regulation, an attempt by the major religious players to restrain competition within their ranks. Ecumenism, then, allowed mainstream denominations to consolidate their gains by declaring a moratorium on depredations of one another’s membership.56 But aggressive new entrepreneurs, bent on carving out a share of the market for themselves, had everything to lose and nothing to gain by observing rules that only protected the interests of the already entrenched. When viewed through a lens focused on the intersection of religion, modernization, and the marketplace, radical holiness snaps sharply into view. The market, and in particular the marketplace of religious commodities, shaped its behavior and its rhetoric.57 Radical holiness vigorously competed for the right to speak authoritatively about cosmic realities and to provide fellowship for the saints. Addressing itself to the autonomous will, it threatened, cajoled, charmed, astonished, and badgered individuals into choosing this representation of the truth, this version of apostolic community, rather than another. Though putatively ecumenical, it behaved in a most unecumenical manner, denouncing other denominations while magnanimously inviting all to come, regardless of affiliation. Like a start-up enterprise bent on gaining a toehold in a tough market, it endorsed its own brand of “ecumenism”: a commitment to proselytize all competitors, without discrimination. The leadership of that movement, furthermore, attracted precisely the kind of “enterprising young men” (and women) described by the Rev. Bellows, gifted and ambitious individuals who left small towns with their eyes on the horizon, scorning “local importance” for “larger spheres of life.” In the name of holiness, thousands of young men and women forsook local allegiances for translocal ones and persuaded others to do likewise. Radical holiness did not signal the end of kinship. In fact, kith and kin often followed, or led the way, in the journey to conversion. But it routinely demanded that would-be adherents choose God or Man, the fellowship of the saints or hearth and home. The movement prospered only because so many were indeed willing to sever the ties that bind and “follow Christ.” Viewing radical holiness through the lenses of modernity and the market will not only enable us to perceive more clearly the temperament and self-

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understanding of its members. It will also enable us to understand better how radical holiness, like many of its rivals, preserved key elements of traditional spirituality by repackaging them as mass-consumable products capable of thriving in the modern world. Many of the basic ingredients of radical holiness spirituality were traditional, but the final product was not. “It is not the old time religion, for I have had that for forty years,” testified one newly sanctified octogenarian, “but is the new kind of religion that . . . turns us loose for God.”58 Rather than old-time religion, radical holiness offered old-time power, new & improved, a liberating faith well suited to its times. The religious marketplace of America has always been shaped by the dialectic of those who provide and those who consume, and the biggest winners have been those who could respond to change most quickly and astutely. In this respect, radical holiness proved exceptionally nimble. Like Methodism in eighteenth-century England, it responded promptly and perceptively to the changing social profile of an industrializing nation. Those who drank deeply at the wells of holiness may have had little else in common with Manhattan ward boss George Washington Plunkitt, but like him they were men and women of action who could say, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”59

Conclusion and Synopsis of Argument There were “antimodern” movements enough in late-Victorian America, but radical holiness was not one of them.60 Men like Ambrose Tomlinson, viewed from the perspective of their times and in relation to their cultures of origin, were progressives. Conservatives denounced them for their “modern teachings,” and the charge had legitimacy because the holiness-pentecostal continuum did adjust its inherited culture in ways that were closer to, and in sympathy with, the trends implied by the term modernity. Nevertheless, those adjustments were couched in the idioms of a plainfolk religious culture deeply schooled in religious primitivism and the rhetoric of poverty and virtually closed to the idioms of mainline modernism.61 For that very reason the answers to the questions of modern life given by men like Tomlinson gained added plausibility for their hearers. Those who flocked to holiness churches, tents, and camp meetings were drawn to the movement not because it resisted some overarching process of “modernization” but because it spoke to their modern needs and aspirations in a language with which they were familiar.62 My theoretical argument, to large degree, continues themes outlined by Timothy Smith over forty years ago in Revivalism and Social Reform in MidNineteenth-Century America. Smith argued then for the continuity of holiness with the American religious mainstream. He delineated its ties to American revivalism and showed that revivalism in turn lay at the very wellspring of American popular culture. Finally, Smith demonstrated the essentially progressive nature of holiness spirituality and culture. I adapt and extend that argument in several ways. For example, I contend that radical holiness should be seen as an antagonistic subculture within one


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of the two major progressive wings of American Protestantism in the Victorian era: Wacker’s “biological twins.” Those two would later collide in the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, resulting in the distortions of memory addressed above. I do not try to argue that radical holiness formed part of the American mainstream, but I do argue that it was directly related to vital currents within that mainstream; that the progression from Protestant mainstream to radical holiness was logical, even natural; and that the distance between holiness periphery and American center was less than it now seems. I also modify Smith’s argument regarding the source and nature of holiness alienation. Like Smith, I relate radical holiness alienation to the gentrification of antebellum popular evangelicalism—but with qualifications. First, I argue that the holiness movement was itself of a divided cultural mind. Indeed, the middle-class core of the movement enjoyed upward social mobility and held its place in the cultural mainstream well into the twentieth century. Second, I place much more emphasis on the role of class and cultural style, cultural alienation, in radical holiness’s breach with the American mainstream. The term alienation, however, must here be used with special caution. In the case of radical holiness it suggests the jut-jawed belligerence of cultural chauvinism more than the despair of cultural deprivation, not disaffected social isolation but, rather, a proud subculture’s unyielding defense of its habits, truths, and folkways. Finally, and perhaps most emphatically, I argue that the difference between radical holiness and mainstream Protestantism had little to do with one’s relative “modernity.” The following three chapters, through a series of valuational and behavioral soundings, will explore the cultural mind-set of radical holiness, both to clarify its relation to modernity and to provide a more richly textured description of the matrix of A. J. Tomlinson’s spirituality. These soundings will show that champions of holiness like Tomlinson were not antimodern. Quite the contrary, they were plainfolk modernists.


2 Radical Holiness

The world to which Delilah Tomlinson lost her only son, the American holiness movement, entered the postbellum era sporting a venerable heritage, eminent representatives, and cultural sophistication. Indeed, the movement had been favored by a touch of gentility virtually from its inception, when a renewed interest in “Christian Perfection” among Methodists—best articulated by Timothy Merritt’s Treatise on Christian Perfection (1825)—took root in the New York City drawing room of Sarah Lankford. Beginning in the mid-1830s, her weekly “Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness” served as a catalyst for the movement and a conduit for its introduction to America’s evangelical elite, not the least of which being her sister and brother-in-law, Phoebe and Walter Palmer. Phoebe, who traveled widely, wrote prolifically, and coedited the Guide to Holiness (founded by Merritt but later purchased by the Palmers), emerged as the matriarch of antebellum holiness. By that time, however, the movement had already outstripped its Methodist origins, as Reformed ministers like Charles Finney and Asa Mahan carried the teaching deep into the evangelical mainstream. The doctrine evolved somewhat in transport. For most Wesleyan figures “Christian Perfection” or “Perfect Love”—the chief synonyms for sanctification—signified a distinct crisis experience, subsequent to conversion and identified with baptism in the Spirit, that “mortified” or eradicated the “Adamic nature.” Reformed holiness figures were harder to pin down on the point of eradication but agreed that empowered Christians could live triumphant lives far above the sullied, earthbound grasp of willful sin. Within the movement, a sense of Christian charity prevailed across denominational divides and despite different emphases.

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Holiness was a cohesive force, one of the factors uniting the evangelical “united” front. Following the Civil War the movement expanded yet further in scope and prominence. The signature vehicle of that expansion was the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Christian Holiness, founded in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1867 by John Inskip and other leading Methodists. It quickly spawned a minor multitude of like-minded local, state, and regional associations. Over the decade Americans like William Boardman, Robert Pearsall Smith, and Hannah Whitall Smith carried the movement to England, where it gave rise to annual conferences held at Keswick, England. The spiritual trade winds bore this Keswick or “higher life” current back to the United States and Canada through figures such as Dwight Moody and his conferences in Northfield, Massachusetts. Along the way it absorbed key elements of two other flourishing transatlantic movements, the first centered on divine healing, and the second, on biblical prophecy and on dispensational premillennialism in particular. Like its antebellum predecessor, postbellum holiness understood itself to be a grand force for Christian unity, and, in fact, the interdenominational alloy produced by this confluence may well have represented the nation’s most ecumenical movement. But the same forces that would fracture the evangelical united front would also render holiness increasingly conflicted and diverse. By the 1880s holiness had become a sprawling world of its own, beset, as we have seen, by class tensions and nascent resentments. No single posture existed vis-a`-vis the evangelical mainstream and its denominational structures. Some were part of the mainstream; others coexisted more or less peacefully with it. But a growing cadre of “comeouters” denounced all existing denominations as enemies of holiness and as manifestations of the disunity that true holiness sought to overcome.1 In the pages ahead I will address the contentious milieu of radical holiness, the context within which it would distinguish itself from the holiness mainstream. In the process I will clarify the adjectives plainfolk and radical, with which I have previously modified modernism and holiness, respectively. The definition of terms will be followed by a definition of culture. Through a series of cultural soundings, I will examine radical holiness with reference to key behavioral and valuational indexes in order to capture its personality and temperament and to locate it on the spectrum of enthusiasm for, and appropriation of, values associated with modernism. Finally, I will address countervailing tendencies within radical holiness that qualify (but do not disqualify) my characterization of it as plainfolk modernism.

Holiness and the Cultural Divide By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the holiness movement had come to resemble a set of overlapping templates or intersecting spheres.2 Beneath a firmament of luminaries such as D. L. Moody, A. J. Gordon, and Reuben Torrey, networks of lesser-known and often more militant saints moved in asym-

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metrical orbits, ranging from a moderate region occupied by groups like A. B. Simpson’s Christian Alliance to a “torrid zone” where aggressive confederations like B. H. Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association held sway. Meanwhile, back in the mainline denominations, thousands of beleaguered holiness sympathizers tenaciously held to their denominational loyalties.3 In the absence of an overarching structure, scores of periodicals exerted perhaps the strongest centripetal force working on the movement as a whole. Influential papers like God’s Revivalist (published by Martin Wells Knapp in Cincinnati), the Way of Faith (published by J. M. Pike in Columbia, S.C.), and the Pentecostal Herald (published by H. C. Morrison in Louisville) set the tone for a boisterous chorus of publications. The holiness press offered an invaluable forum for communication and persuasion and—in symbiotic concert with the assortment of faith homes, bible schools, urban missions, camp meetings, associations, and traveling evangelists on which it reported—served to consolidate the loose coalitions that together composed American holiness. Well-traveled rails traversed this entire social universe, from its highest to its lowest spheres, though travelers might have to make a transfer or two and perhaps catch a branchline to reach their final destination.4 As a general rule, however, the further removed it was from the upper firmament, the more militant the movement’s personality became. Leaders grew increasingly independent in thought and action and decreasingly susceptible to middle-class inhibitions and the force of mainstream popular opinion. Consequently, they were more likely to carry ideologies to their logical conclusions, as they calculated them, and to rethink (and then reconfigure) fundamental social and theological relations.5 Such circles were not so much impervious to social influence, though, as they were subjected to a different sort of social influence. If Victorian propriety circumscribed the holiness one met in the Christian Herald, then ruder currents predominated at the movement’s perimeter. Radical holiness prospered, that is to say, in a plainfolk culture where militancy and nonconformity, under the right circumstances, were not just allowed. They were positively encouraged. By the late nineteenth century, holiness militancy had begun to turn inward, as radicals grew disaffected from the movement’s sophisticated elite. The role of culture is especially apparent in the case of the higher life wing of holiness. Dissatisfaction with learned scholar-evangelists like Pierson, Gordon, and Torrey, who would emerge as stalwarts of fundamental orthodoxy in the years ahead, had little to do with creeping liberalism or doctrinal debates.6 Instead, highbrow holiness drew fire for vague infractions detectable only in degrees of tone, emphasis, and relative zeal. When Talmage made the unexceptionable observation that the world had begun with a theocracy and asked, “Why not close with a theocracy, the personal reign of Christ on earth?” John M. Pike retorted, “Instead of the ‘why not’ and the ‘may be,’ we would that such writers would go to the Word. There are positive statements that fix the whole matter. Jesus is coming. There will be a restoration of the theocracy.”7 Pike used Talmage’s mannerly style as a pretext to question the vigor of his faith, reading into his rhetorical question

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an equivocation that did not exist. Talmage’s real offense, then, was not false doctrine but, rather, excessive gentility. In a similar vein George Watson, one of the radicals’ most widely published evangelists, derided mainline holiness for its complacency and spiritual impotence. America, he insisted, sorely needed “a red-hot sanctified sort of man” to “strike as much terror to the dead pulpits of the church as to the dens of iniquity.” When asked if Dwight Moody was not such a man, he flatly answered no. Moody’s work, in his view, fell short because it lacked “the earthquake attribute.”8 Elsewhere, Watson chided holiness leaders who had once been “hot with holy love” but now lived “like broken down aristocracy, on the faded splendors of the past.” Their religion, he allowed, was decent, sober, orderly, and orthodox. And that was precisely the problem. “Respectability” was the “smooth shroud of virtue” that the devil used to bury a “hot religious experience.”9 Irwin, whose Fire-Baptized Holiness Church led the league in the “earthquake attribute” Watson extolled, spoke more bluntly. “Nothing shall ever . . . extinguish the hot flame of burning love,” he thundered, training his sights, not even the “blighting breath of malice” whipping off the “polar snow fields of tame holiness.”10 When such critics denounced mainstream holiness for its tame respectability, they were denouncing its failure to pronounce the movement’s common truths in idioms that spoke to plainfolk sensibilities.11 A breach had opened in the holiness ranks, and no one articulated its social etiology more clearly than Thomas Nelson, founder of a Free Methodist splinter group known as the Pentecostal Bands of the World. According to Isaiah 53:9, Nelson averred, Christ would “make his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death.” Rightly divided, that text meant that the rich housed a “dead Christ” in their churches. “Vital Christianity,” by contrast, thrived only among the “virtuous poor” because wealth extinguished the “vital spark of real christianity”: Step into a . . . fashionable, city church and take a seat among its wealthy members. . . . What do you find? . . . a moral chill as from a graveyard. . . . [Y]ou instinctively feel you must speak low and tread softly and not disturb the sleeping dead. . . . Such a church is a charnel house, a moral morgue, a religious dead-house, a costly spiritual sarcophagus, a rich man’s tomb in which a dead Christ is embalmed in the spices of worldly respectability and laid away for faithless, backslidden disciples to mourn over.12 What separated men like Nelson and Irwin from the world of the Christian Herald had its doctrinal manifestations, but it was not essentially doctrinal. Rather, it sprang from one’s posture vis-a`-vis powerful cultural traditions that defined proper religious and social behavior. That posture was not rigidly determined by education, level of affluence, or denominational affiliation, though each of these factors played a role. Rather, it emerged from a complex calculus of factors, elective and ascribed, that left one in cultural terms leaning high or leaning low.

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Plainfolk Style I take the category “plainfolk” from scholars of southern religion such as Dickson Bruce and David Harrell, though I employ it more broadly to embrace a swath of popular culture not limited to any single region.13 For me as for them, the category has a real but unstable and ambiguous correlation to social standing. Plainfolk were not necessarily poor folk: the status was largely selfascribed, which allowed both poor and rich to be counted among the number.14 Nevertheless, most came from ranks of society low enough to have grounds for discontent with the status quo but high enough to aspire to reshape it and to have enough resources to form institutions capable of bearing those aspirations. More important to plainfolk status than one’s economic level, then, was one’s appropriation of the lore of the honest, hardworking ordinary American. That folk myth had drawn on earlier social antagonisms to compose, over the nineteenth century, the successive personae of Jeffersonian yeoman, Jacksonian Democrat, and the “people” of American populism. By the latter period the original agrarian romance had broadened to include the whole workaday world, from farmers, artisans, and craftsmen to the new working class. The characteristic traits of that ideal, central to American popular culture ever since, included voluntarism, adaptability, openness to “a plural and competitive religious environment,” and “audience-centered, vernacular, and extemporaneous” forms of discourse that resonated with “the logic of capitalism and liberal individualism.”15 Several litmus tests cued observers to one’s standing in relation to that cultural system. None spoke more tellingly than the “rhetoric of humility.” Regardless of the measure of their bank accounts or the status of their vocations, most plainfolk portrayed themselves in humble and unpretentious terms. “All the evangelists insisted even more than the politicians,” wrote W. J. Cash of Southern plainfolk culture, “on their own lowly origins, and discoursed continually on the theme of the superior virtue and piety of the poor as against the stiff-necked rich, and the certainty that in heaven it would be the former who would sit at the head of the table.”16 The rhetoric of humility, as Cash suggests, translated naturally into the language of divine reversal, according to which God had upended rich and poor, wise and foolish.17 In its more generalized form, however, the rhetoric of humility expressed a secular logic of inversion, a populist egalitarianism that constituted, arguably, plainfolk culture’s most universal and enduring ideal. Egalitarianism linked ordinary Americans to a tradition of cultural opposition reaching back beyond the English Revolution, one that had long repudiated the patterns of deference and the polite civilities that oiled social intercourse in a world of privilege and hierarchy.18 While class defined in Marxist terms has never provided a durable basis for social cohesion in America, class defined as an expression of folkways and cultural tradition has been one of its most important preconditions. This has

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been particularly true for American religion, where revivalism has been the representative religious form of plainfolk culture, providing “a counterculture through which ordinary farmers, artisans, laborers and their families expressed their independence of the world of the gentry and the well-to-do commercial and professional classes.”19 Different socialization produces different religious sensibilities, and individuals are typically drawn to religious movements that correspond to their socially informed sensibilities. In that respect, class, defined as a function of socialization, has been a valuable predictor of religious affiliation, notwithstanding many exceptions. On the one hand, that merely suggests that people accept beliefs to which they have access and find shelter under sacred canopies that are within reach. But it also means that some degree of religious differentiation along class lines has been a persistent feature of American life.20 Plainfolk culture in the late nineteenth century, in just this way, nourished its own religious forms, which responded to modernization in ways that were compatible with its fundamental habits and instincts. Radical holiness was one such form. Its message, of course, was theoretically universal, but it targeted a specialized market and proved most effective at converting those who shared its pre-understandings.

God’s Radicals Along this cultural divide, radical saints parted from their highbrow kin. While their social “betters” turned toward gentility, they seized the banner of plainfolk religion, championing the vernacular idioms that Lorenzo Dow, Shubal Stearns, and Barton Stone had once spoken so fluently and that men like B. T. Roberts passed on to them firsthand.21 Having seized this banner, they eagerly embraced the reputation for radicalism that came with it. This was “radical, fiery holiness,” and its ministries demanded “workers of a more radical type.” Papers like the Way of Faith were extolled for their “radical” qualities, and a departed saint could aspire to no higher compliment than to be eulogized as “radical in [one’s] views of a holy life.”22 In addition to being self-ascribed, “radical holiness” makes an apt designation for this subculture because it captures the movement’s primitivist urge to return to the very root of apostolic Christianity and its utter disdain for any measure of compromise in the process. Furthermore, it allows a healthy degree of imprecision. No clear boundary divided radical from mainstream holiness. The path from one to the other was both beaten and strait and narrow, but one would have been hard-pressed to say exactly where one crossed the line. Moreover, the traffic ran in both directions. Some, like Frank Sandford, traveled from center to periphery. Others, like A. B. Crumpler and G. B. Cashwell, drifted from periphery to center. In the middle stood a great many “tweeners,” like George Watson and Sam Jones, who had entreé into venues on either side. Finally, the term suggests a group defined by matters of degree, an accentua-

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tion or distinctive inflection of characteristics and beliefs common to the larger group. The cultural basis of this divide, and of the religious sensibilities underlying it, surfaced vividly in the most conspicuous example of what it meant to be “radical”: the exercise of “enthusiasm” or religious ecstasy. A dense aura of class antagonism enshrouded both condemnations of and apologies for the practice. “There are some people who think that nobody but poor folks and ‘niggers’ ever shout,” fumed Crumpler. “If that is true it is because nobody but the poor folks and the ‘niggers’ have anything to shout about.” Such practices and pronouncements voiced more than rhetorical style and class antagonism, however. They revealed sharply divergent perceptions of the nature of religion. “Falling, screaming, shouting, running, jumping,” and “laughing,” added Crumpler, were signs of spiritual life: “A corpse never moves.”23 Plainfolk holiness and middle-class Christians did not care to understand each other’s spirituality. They rejected it out of hand. But if men like Crumpler saw no merit in the decorous piety of their critics, they clearly understood the profound meaning of their own. The cultured despisers of radical religion may have seen only random hysteria in the screams, groans, trances, jumping, dancing, and visions that attended holiness meetings, but the “shouters” themselves saw what outsiders did not, namely, that religious ecstasy signified not chaos but, rather, sacred cosmos, an order hidden but to the eyes of faith. “Hundreds pray audibly at the same time,” one saint gushed of a particularly enthusiastic meeting, “and yet there is no sense of disorder or confusion.”24 Here lay the perceptual paradox at the root of a cultural divide. Crumpler is not to be trusted on the other person’s religion, but he spoke reliably of his own. The “dissociative” acts common to radical holiness worship presupposed an interpretive matrix, an inherited mode of ecstatic discourse within which the acts made sense to participants and knowledgeable observers alike. Subtle forms of pedagogy instructed the saints in the methods of entering and exiting ecstatic states and in the types of behavior to be expected while in those states. More importantly, they conveyed the larger meaning of ecstasy. A long-standing tradition of enthusiastic Christianity taught holiness believers to recognize this holy effervescence as the divine imprimatur, evidence of God’s condoning presence and incontrovertible proof of sanctification or salvation.25 Just as fourteenth-century mystics saw the numinous glow of sainthood in forms of self-mortification and anorexia that we might deem pathological, so those instructed in holiness saw in religious delirium the divine hand on a holy life: public and palpable credentials of personal anointing and communal belonging. The psychological value of religious ecstasy, though elusive, was surely considerable. For many it seems to have unlocked their potential for selfcontrol, occasioning the momentary irruption of “disorder” by which they gained the power to live peaceable lives. But more important than any therapeutic benefit, I would argue, was the evidentiary value of religious ecstasy for both the individual and the community. The disquieted soul in its quest for

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certainty, or the discomfited community in its defense of a contested faith, found here the sure consolation known only to those who were “disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious.”26 Religious ecstasy, then, served radical holiness in rich and complex ways. In a sense, the very life of the community depended on it. It spoke eloquently of spiritual integrity, communal legitimization, and personal status. It produced inner fulfillment and strengthened group identity. It was both a ritual of initiation and an experiential catechism. Behavior that spoke persuasively of God’s presence to insiders, however, struck others as “a disgrace to civilized company, to say nothing of pure religion.” To say the least, the God of civilized company did not speak the holiness vernacular. “Christ said ‘Follow me,’ ” wrote one newspaper editor, appalled by what he had just witnessed at a holiness campground, “but we fail to find . . . where Christ jumped, screamed or rooted in the dust . . . like the men and women at the park who profess to be holy.”27 In the collision of these two perspectives—holiness insider and uncomprehending outsider—religious ecstasy reached the pinnacle of its social utility: the fusion of religious difference and class antagonism into a powerful device for the construction and maintenance of cultural boundaries. As an inscrutable term spoken in an alien dialect, religious ecstasy made a perfect shibboleth.

Plainfolk Polemic If religious enthusiasm formed the trademark of radical holiness worship, irascibility must have seemed the trademark of its social relations. To open the pages of a radical holiness paper is to step onto a rhetorical battlefield heavy with the acrid smell of spent invective. Like ecstasy, contentiousness confused, humored, and alarmed outsiders, and like ecstasy, it focalized deep-seated cultural and religious differences. Radical saints took themselves to be God’s Special Forces and positively relished the prospect of battle. “I am in for war—war to the hilt,” crowed B. H. Irwin, “and I just love it.” The equally bellicose Thomas Nelson filled his Pentecostal Bands with modern-day Samsons, “daring spirits who with the ‘whip of small cords,’ dare drive degenerate priests, polluted politicians, and plutocratic money-changers from the temples of piety and politics.”28 But that quarrelsome itch to scrap at the drop of a hat was not born of simple petulance. Rather, it reflected the rough-and-ready canons of plainfolk polemic, the implicit norms that governed how one conducted debate, responded to insult, or defended the integrity of one’s community or the basic moral order. Those norms were in turn grounded in deeply seated notions of personal and corporate honor that, at a minimum, demanded that the saints not cower before their foes. Plainfolk culture, in short, nurtured rules of engagement sharply at variance with those of genteel culture. “It thrills my soul with sorrow,” Crumpler once wrote, “when I hear a Methodist bishop . . . hold up those people to ridicule who profess the experi-

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ence of perfect love.”29 It was misprint as Freudian slip: no one loved a good brawl more than Crumpler. Such provocations kept the adrenaline flowing and invited the crisp counterpunch that so many saints had mastered so well. The sanctified soldier of the cross had, of course, amended the rules of combat to forbid swearing and physical violence. But a wealth of martial options remained, and the creative saint could still gleefully strafe the opposition with biting sarcasm, pungent epithets, and pithy rejoinders. By the end of the nineteenth century a number of factors had conspired to intensify the movement’s disputatious spirit. Methodist bishops, especially in the South, had begun to squeeze out radicals from positions of leadership and in many cases from the denomination altogether. Radical fortunes were not markedly better in other mainline denominations. As a result, the 1890s witnessed a swell of “comeoutism” and the formation of dozens of independent holiness associations. The constituents of these bodies, as one might expect, had axes to grind. But more subtle, and largely internal, factors may also help explain the movement’s exaggerated bellicosity. Polemic, in and of itself, provided an important service to the up-and-coming movement. A good fight bolstered communal solidarity. It raised the stakes and lent a heightened sense of urgency, which in turn increased commitment to the movement and its message. Even when radicals blasted imaginary foes, they did not merely tilt at windmills. Polemic gathered, defined, mobilized, motivated, and inspired the faithful and so proved its worth irrespective of its actual correspondence to any external object. Indeed, as with most sectarian groups that extol purity, the object was not always external. After defecting from a radical branch of the Salvation Army, Henry A. “Harry” Ironside—a name made for polemic if ever there was one— lashed out at his former comrades-in-arms. Ironside told of scores who had “lost their minds” in the pursuit of false holiness, distinguishable from the true by its “cutting, censorious, uncharitable” spirit. He then proceeded to skewer, in what might easily have been mistaken for a “cutting, censorious, and uncharitable” spirit, the “disgusting ‘Tongues Movement,’ ” with its “pandemoniums . . . worthy of a madhouse or of a collection of howling dervishes.”30 Regardless of whether the guns faced inward or outward, the salvos drew their rhetorical form from plainfolk polemic, where this kind of verbal pugilism had a long and venerable history and where physical intimidation and its verbal equivalent had long been the coin of influence among those who had few political and economic alternatives. One need only read seventeenth-century Quaker controversial literature to see the pedigree in sharp relief. But if the form sprang from the canons of plainfolk polemic, the occasion often sprang from another feature of the movement, which was in its own right a vital element of plainfolk religious culture. Like most plainfolk Christians, radical saints practiced a simple, straightforward biblicism. As a people of the Book, they immersed themselves in its language, spoke to each other in its cadences, and instinctively recalled its

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phrases. They interpreted their experiences through the grid of its narratives and modeled their daily lives after those of its paradigmatic characters. In short, they spoke a mimetic language and lived mimetic lives. Those who wished to achieve and maintain status within the community had to master that text and keep it at their command. In the case of the Christian Scriptures, however, the Book was a complex social and literary product, a thesaurus of powerful religious symbols, narratives, and blueprints that had accumulated over centuries. Despite homogenizing forces like canonization and hermeneutical traditions, it remained a richly self-contesting document. Quite naturally, radical holiness—which sought so passionately to incarnate that text—proved equally selfcontesting. And for holiness, as for the Bible itself, that very quality proved to be a source of vitality and power. In mainline denominations the potential for conflict inherent in biblicism could be attenuated by social or institutional controls on interpretation. Within holiness, however, few such controls existed, a liability compounded by the sheer scale of the movement’s diversity. “Every religion,” Robert Ellwood reminds us, is a “collection of tensions.”31 By that measure, radical holiness was quintessential religion. Melvin Dieter once described it as a “microcosm of American religious life,” a survey of nineteenth-century American Christianity within a single dust jacket.32 Given its diversity, its perfectionist mind-set, its hair-trigger polemical instincts, and its grounding in a foundational text that could be described as a schism waiting to happen, it might have been hard to predict that radical holiness would coalesce into one of the nation’s finest manifestations of plainfolk modernism.

3 Radical Holiness and Plainfolk Modernism

Many of the so-called antimodern traits of radical holiness, I have suggested, were not antimodern but merely “plainfolk”: expressions of the discursive style, the moral and religious values, and the social biases of the cultural domain within which radical holiness moved and had its being. Verifying the “plainfolk” credentials of radical holiness, however, does not prove it to have been plainfolk “modernism.” That task falls to this and the following chapter. Having defined modernism as the cultural embrace of social modernization, I will now explore ways in which radical holiness captured, reflected, and embraced the tenor of its times. Two things should become clear. First, qualities associated with modernity pervaded the movement’s culture and ideology. These qualities included the celebration of innovation and change; cultural optimism; the glorification of science, technology, and power; a dialectic relationship with urbanization; the blurring of regional boundaries; and a social ethic that undermined traditional assumptions about race and gender. Second, radical holiness voiced each of these qualities in the idioms of plainfolk culture.

Innovation and Change One of the most distinctive features of a modern worldview involved a shift in the value assigned to novelty, as a traditional preference for ancient wisdom and established authority gave way to a preference for the new. True to the modern mind-set, radical saints approached problems with a built-in attraction to the new solution, and they adopted novel views on a regular basis. To be sure, they did

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manifest jut-jawed pugnacity in defense of their version of orthodoxy. Yet, however adamant they may have been about the truth, they kept revising it. Above all else, radical saints were cocksure “questers,” dogmatic seekers of new light.1 Paradoxically, dogmatism could play an instrumental role in the quest for fresh insight. Sheridan Baker, a well-known holiness writer, recalled that his early reluctance to claim more than he possessed receded when he discovered that “the less ambiguous my statements, and the more positive my confessions, the clearer my light.”2 For Baker, then, the dogmatic mien amounted to a utilitarian spiritual exercise calculated to call forth its own object. The textual cornerstone of that practice, exploited in recent decades by the “positive confession” movement, lay in Hebrews 11:1, where faith is defined as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Holiness saints yearned for “things not seen,” and their dogmatism reflected less the calcification of old ideas than an earnest attempt to call new ones into being. Saying it, they believed, did make it so. The pursuit of innovation was no mere predilection. It shaped the very structure of radical holiness theology. Although thoroughly primitivist, the movement framed its primitivism within a dispensationalist construct— known as “Latter Rain” or “Evening Light” theology—that shifted the center of gravity forward in the dialectic between primordium and present.3 Just as the Morning Light had shone brightly at the beginning of the Church Age, so now, in the Latter Days, the saints expected a corresponding Evening Light. In fact, some taught that the latter would exceed the former in wisdom, power, and glory.4 This theology fostered a profound sense of anticipation within the movement, because new and deeper revelations, sealed up for the Last Days, were expected to unfold before those with eyes to see. Latter Rain/Evening Light theology formed the scaffolding of a general doctrine of progressive revelation, which held that (at least since the fall of the Church under the Emperor Constantine) God had revealed His truths progressively, unveiling only so much as His people could absorb at a given time. Even the great reformers had seen but fragments of light. Now, however, at the end of the age, the Church could expect the truth in all its fullness. Within holiness, of course, truth was inseparable from experience. Progressive revelation inspired a longing for “boundless stretches of ripening experience . . . new light, clearer manifestations of His presence.” As George Watson put it, “brighter vision” would lead to “sweeter experience,” which would in turn redound to yet wider and clearer vision. Sanctified truth and sanctified experience were like two mirrors reflecting “the same image back and forth ten thousand times—the vision ever increasing the love, and the love ever sharpening the vision.”5 The truculent dogmatism of holiness rhetoric, then, belied a theological framework that encouraged innovation and pressed the saints to break new ground in belief and practice. With brighter light and sweeter experience arriving by the day, radicals searched the horizon for “God’s latest things.”6 Indeed, progress was imperative, as Thomas Nelson explained, because “the refusal to advance necessitates a retrogression and that retrogression ends in death.”7 Of course, New Light

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could not emanate from towers choked with ivy or marred by “respectability.” Radical saints were fiercely determined to stand with Christ outside the camp of late-Victorian gentility, bearing his reproach. But if spoken in the right idioms and fitted to the contours of holiness faith and practice, novelties were in high demand.

Cultural Optimism Looking back from the promontory of our times, we might imagine that radical saints would be amazed at what has become of their humble movement: a sprawling array of pentecostal and holiness denominations compounding their millions daily. We would be wrong. They did not exceed their wildest dreams because those dreams were far too wild to be exceeded. The saints had discerned, just beyond the horizon, a gathering “tidal wave of Holiness,” which they expected to sweep over the world in their generation.8 That optimism was in no way diminished by the movement’s premillennial doctrine, normally regarded as a rather pessimistic take on the present tense. By the late Victorian era, as we have seen, premillennialism had been dressed in a coat of postmillennial assumptions, so that the old doctrine now manifested “the same surge of historical hopefulness that irradiated the new theology.”9 Indeed, in radical holiness hands the new premillennial optimism sometimes verged on realized eschatology, especially in the movement’s triumphalist hymnology. While some hymns consoled the beleaguered with promises of heaven, others pronounced the sanctified life to be already a heaven on earth. “This is like heaven to me,” exulted a well-worn chorus: “This is like heaven to me / I’ve crossed over Jordan to Canaan’s fair land / and this is like heaven to me.”10 In sermon and song, radical saints cheered the spiritual potential of the present tense. Holy Ghost optimists shared with other Victorians the self-intoxication of their age. “A year of life at this time, with its wonderful possibilities for God,” enthused Frank Bartleman, “is worth a hundred years of ordinary life.”11 Much of this infatuation attached itself to the fortunes of the nation. Their generation had watched America rise into the ranks of empires, spreading its “protection” over far-flung territories and critical markets, and the saints were not immune to American exceptionalism. Many agreed with the Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, who called Americans a “chosen people . . . a greater England with a nobler destiny.” Thomas Nelson, for example, in the afterglow of the Spanish– American War, drew on the arcane myth of Anglo-Israelitism to predict “the bestowal of the government of the world” on America, favored son of the Saxon race and heir to the inheritance of Manasseh.12 Like Beveridge, radical saints also felt the obligations incumbent on such a destiny: “peoples to be saved, civilization to be proclaimed.”13 Unlike Beveridge, however, they did not grant the leading role in that mission to a secular power. They too believed in Manifest Destiny, but the destiny they saw manifest in world events was that of their own Holy Ghost–inspired movement, destined

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to lead a final, worldwide revival at the end of the age. As premillennialists, they knew that the world was doomed. As optimists, they knew that most folks in it could be swept to safety on that last “tidal wave” of holiness. Holiness optimism also surfaced in heightened expectations for health and well-being. In part, these expectations reflected the era’s growing emphasis on the physical body and the application to the body of values once reserved for noncorporeal realities like the soul.14 The mind–body analogy found its most provocative application in holiness teaching on divine healing, where the same atonement that cancelled sin was said to have banished disease as well: “he was wounded for our transgressions . . . and by his stripes we are healed.”15 Consequently, if the sanctified soul could achieve sinless perfection, the sanctified body had every right to expect perfect health. Disease and debility were demonic interlopers, alien to the will of God and to the natural condition of His sanctified children. When a well-meaning doctor consoled the relatives of a dying child with the assurance that death was “God’s way of bringing His children home,” John Dowie erupted in anger. “God’s way!” he bellowed: “How dare you . . . call that God’s way.” Disease was “the Devil’s work”; God’s way was perfect health for His creation, and those who settled for less defied His will and were treading on dangerous ground.16 Divine healing, however, did not exhaust holiness views on physical wellbeing. Holiness journals featured articles on health and the body and sported weekly columns volunteering “Health Hints” to the holy. The faithful supplemented divine cures with solid tips on preventative medicine, and healthconscious saints shunned pork and banned tobacco, coffee, tea, chewing gum, and other bad habits not simply because they were “worldly” but because they were also injurious to the body (which was, of course, “the temple of the Holy Ghost”).17 In a fundamental sense, they agreed with their liberal counterparts that the Kingdom of God was being made visible “in the redemption of the human body from disease and . . . in the deliverance of nature from the bondage of corruption.”18 In this and many other ways radical holiness reflected the optimistic mood of its culture, its giddy conviction that the present was the grandest age yet and that the future would be grander still.

Science and Technology: The Valuation of Power Radical saints regarded the marvels of their day with the same mix of alarm and encomium common to their contemporaries. For Thomas Nelson, it was “an age of perplexity” wherein “the landmarks of ages are rapidly disappearing before the swelling tide of modern scientific thought.”19 Yet, while acknowledging modernity’s unsettling effects, he paid homage to its “astonishing” achievements. Of course, when Nelson thought of modernity, he imagined modern science and technology—the touchstones of “civilization” and “progress” for late Victorians. As Lears has shown, antimodernists tried to resist, at least symbolically, the rationalization and depersonalization of the new industrial order. Often, they keenly felt the feebleness of their resistance, and


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many suffered the troubled conscience of those drawn inexorably into the very system they protest.20 Advocates of radical holiness, to the contrary, adapted modern secular means to religious ends with sublime oblivion to possible contradictions. As plainfolk, they were rarely technocrats and possessed few of the most advanced amenities, but they nonetheless valorized the technology from which others more fully benefited. Nothing fueled the celebration of technology or confirmed the selfevidence of “progress” so much as America’s transportation revolution. On the occasion of an 1888 family reunion, Asher K. Tomlinson, Ambrose’s cousin, looked back on a shimmering half century of advance in Westfield, Indiana. Year by year, he recalled, the market had drawn nearer, reaching first Cincinnati, then Lafayette, and now Westfield itself. But the most wondrous change of all had been the dramatic increase in the speed and ease of transportation. Trails had given way to dirt roads, and dirt roads had given way to thoroughfares paved in gravel. An ordinary workday could now carry a person, traveling at upward of ten miles per hour, 100 miles from home. But “the progressive part of the people” had demanded, and received, even more: the railroad. Now, Grandfather Tomlinson, who had taken the better part of a ponderous day to trundle from nearby Hendricks County to Westfield, could return to his old home within the space of an hour. The facts were incontrovertible. “You . . . are now living,” Asher told his assembled kin, “in the most progressive age the world’s history has ever known.”21 Radical holiness leapt at the opportunities spawned by the transportation revolution. Americans were by habit a mobile sort, but holiness leaders took mobility to the extreme. Like modern academics, they flitted from meeting to meeting, attending all the key conferences and making brief but influential contacts.22 The more peripatetic saints thought nothing of hopping a train from Chicago or North Carolina to Los Angeles in order to check out an especially blessed revival or of returning by some circuitous route that allowed them to share their findings with a broad sweep of colleagues and friends.23 As grueling as this travel may now seem, to those who endured it, the going seemed fast and cheap, a veritable wonder of the age. Some historians have perceived social strain and dislocation in the migrant wanderings of these transient saints. In fact, their restlessness was a natural by-product of religious zeal added to euphoria over the marvel of modern travel and stirred by the ebullience of a growing movement, all in the context of a society that was extraordinarily mobile in the first place. And mobility, as the saints correctly discerned, was critical to their success. Holiness papers like the Way of Faith printed weekly train schedules for the benefit of their readers, a useful service for ambitious activists cultivating social networks, adapting to demographic trends, and responding to far-flung evangelistic opportunities.24 When the main chance came, they would not miss the outbound train. Technological wonders held more than utilitarian value for radical holiness, however. The discourse of science and technology shaped the radical holiness understanding and portrayal of its world in several important ways. At the most immediate level, the movement exploited the symbolic value of

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technology, as when it appropriated the ubiquitous railroad metaphor in works such as O. M. Owen’s The Celestial Railroad, A. W. Orwig’s All Aboard, and Martin Wells Knapp’s Revival Tornadoes (featuring a spiritual allegory of “Two Railroads”).25 But technological progress played a role in the theological framework of radical holiness as well. First, it served as a sign of the times, one more proof that a brief but momentous era had appeared, resplendent with heretofore unimaginable light. By the logic of analogy, holiness authorities anticipated an outpouring of discoveries in the spiritual realm equivalent to those occurring in science and technology. The result, they postulated, would be the spiritual and material means needed to win the world for Christ. Technological wonders, then, bore multiple layers of meaning within holiness. They introduced powerful new symbols into religious discourse, announced the fullness of time, foreshadowed spiritual wonders to come, and promised the technical means to conduct a last great worldwide revival. Closely linked to the cult of technology—indeed, the salient value undergirding it—was the valorization of “power.” Here also, radical holiness shared the preoccupation of its peers. In part, this emphasis merely echoed Victorian Romanticism, with its fascination for intense experience and the paranormal. Radical holiness, with its supernatural wonders and its promise of a transfigured, sinless life, certainly appealed to those who yearned for the extraordinary. The saints stubbornly refused to accept the mundane as a fait accompli, and they despised nothing so much as mediocrity. Their golden text was Revelation 3:15–16, where the Resurrected Christ excoriates the Laodicean Church for being lukewarm. Holiness saints would not be Laodiceans, and they found in the cathartic tremor of entire sanctification an exhilarating certainty that they had indeed shattered the limits of spiritual mediocrity. Lest any doubt, those who took the medicine offered themselves as proof of its efficacy. In 1896, Crumpler boasted that he had not sinned since his 1890 “second blessing,” giving him “six years of sinless perfection.” The Quaker evangelist Amos Kenworthy had even Crumpler bested. By 1891 he counted twenty-one years without sin.26 But if Victorian Romanticism helps explain the radical holiness taste for extraordinary experience, the cult of technology helps explain how the language of signs and wonders became the language of “power.” Liberals and evangelicals alike, as we have seen, shared a fascination with the Holy Spirit. Liberals, however, tended to conceive of the Spirit in personal or phenomenological terms and therefore placed emphasis on religious experience, conscience, inner voice, or a pervasive zeitgeist working to synthesize the immanent and the transcendent, the secular and the sacred. Radical holiness offered variations on all of these themes, to be sure, but above all it emphasized the Holy Spirit as Power. The movement’s stark supernaturalism, perhaps the least well understood of its attributes, offers a case in point. Many historians have treated supernaturalism as prima facie evidence of antimodernism. Perhaps in certain contexts, such as upper-class occultism, it may have been. But for radical holiness it implied precisely the opposite. Supernatural gifts were the spiritual equivalent


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of modern scientific discoveries, a tapping of the powers of spiritual nature. The astounding miracles and soul-shaking baptisms cultivated within the movement amounted to breakthroughs in the “technology of inner experience.”27 And no one mastered that technology better than Benjamin Hardin Irwin did. Irwin began his career in holiness as a small town boy made good, a former lawyer who had surrendered the bar to pastor a Baptist church in his hometown of Tecumseh, Nebraska. In May 1891 he experienced entire sanctification, which gave him a “new Bible” and his church a “new preacher.” Even after sanctification, however, Irwin did not rest content on the Great Plains of the spiritual life. An “unspeakable soul-hunger,” together with a series of personal crises, forced him into “the very furnace of intensest desire.” For solace and direction he had been reading two books highly esteemed within radical holiness circles: Thomas Upham’s The Life of Madame Guyon and George Watson’s Coals of Fire. Perhaps more importantly, some of his colleagues in the Iowa Holiness Association had informed him of an experience yet deeper than mere sanctification, which they called “the experience of fire.” Chief among them stood evangelist C. P. Carkuff. In fall 1895, Carkuff traveled the 250 miles from Ness City, Kansas, to Tecumseh in order to guide Irwin in his search for holy fire. Near midnight, the anointing came. “A cross of pure, transparent fire” shone above Irwin, and the room flared “luminous with a seven fold light.” As Irwin soon discovered, this had only been the first wave of his baptism. The second wave struck two days later, while Irwin, significantly, was riding on a train. Returning late at night from a trip to Enid, Oklahoma, he suddenly perceived himself to be “literally on fire.” Everything around him was “burning, blazing, glowing,” and he found himself “in the very midst of a burning fiery presence.” Strangely, though, the intense heat of that fiery presence produced not pain but “unutterable ecstatic bliss.” For five hours waves of ecstasy swept over him until “living fire” streamed from “every pore” of his body. At last the waves subsided, and he was left resting in “the measureless depths of an infinite ocean of pure, living fire.”28 Strong stuff. The milieu that fostered Irwin’s “fire baptism” drew sustenance from a quasimystical piety inclined to profound contemplation of the interior life. Indeed, those affective instincts constituted one of the closest resemblances between radical holiness and its liberal “twin,” which likewise exalted “the authority of Christian experience.” But liberal modernists couched those assumptions in the language of theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher or Albrecht Ritschl and spoke of “religious consciousness” or the “experience of reconciliation.”29 Plainfolk modernists, on the other hand, remained within the tradition of evangelical empiricism, the Enlightenment-era “experimental religion” delineated by John and Charles Wesley, the Methodist saint John Fletcher, Jonathan Edwards, and Continental pietism (the wellspring of Schleiermacher’s own spirituality). That evangelical Enlightenment schema, within holiness circles, had by the 1890s been enhanced by new mystical alloys, such as the quietist contem-

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plations of Madame Guyon, which Irwin had read on the brink of his “fire baptism.”30 These currents equipped radical saints for a more discriminating and “empirical” analysis of inner experience. First, some divined discrete stages within the single experience of sanctification.31 Eventually, a few bolder spiritual physicists identified heretofore unknown phenomena, like fire baptism. In hindsight, it seems obvious that a union of mysticism, empiricism, and biblical literalism should have produced a baptism of fire. After all, John the Baptist had prophesied that the Coming One would baptize “with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” For the literally minded, this meant that a baptism “with fire” had followed baptism with the Holy Ghost in the apostolic ordo salutis, and should therefore be recovered by holiness saints in their own day. Irwin, as we have seen, was not the first to recover that baptism, but he was the first to market it successfully for public consumption. After his own fire baptism, Irwin formed the Iowa Fire-Baptized Holiness Association to promote this new high-octane brand of holiness. He met sharp opposition, but he also won support from influential quarters, and by 1898 his organization had chapters in nine states and two Canadian provinces.32 Through vehicles like Way of Faith and Irwin’s own Live Coals of Fire, his influence reached farther still, bolstered by testimonials from satisfied customers who recounted the kind of fiery baptisms that left one melted in “a sea of glass mingled with fire.” Irwin and his followers, moreover, did not stop with fire. From their spiritual labs, some brought forth yet more potent blasts of patented chemical perfection: baptisms of “dynamite,” “selenite,” and “oxynite.”33 When critics condemned Irwin’s “pyrotechnics,” he lampooned their “pyrophobia” and kept on rolling. Nor would his converts, having smelled the powder, be dissuaded. W. E. Fuller, overseer of the African American wing of the Fire-Baptized Holiness Association, spoke for thousands when he praised God for “the blood that cleans up, the Holy Ghost that burns up, and the dynamite that blows up.”34 No mild-mannered religion, this: It was powerful enough to blow sin back to hell. The assumptions of a culture that worshiped applied technology also undergirded the movement’s approach to education. Viewed from the outside, radical holiness might seem a prime example of American revivalism’s putative anti-intellectualism. The saints normally shunned mainstream higher education and disdained purely intellectual disciplines like systematic theology and philosophy. To holiness eyes, these were vain and pretentious pursuits with little relevance to the real business of Christianity: the salvation and perfection of souls. But if radical holiness seemed “anti-intellectual” vis-a`-vis the traditional canons of higher learning, it avidly pursued its own brand of education. Radical holiness matured during a critical phase in the evolution of American higher education and the professionalization of expertise. In 1870, the nation’s colleges and universities counted 52,000 undergraduates and only 200 graduate students. Forty years later the numbers had mushroomed to 355,000 undergraduates and 9,400 graduate students.35 The nature and pur-


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pose of higher education was in flux, and pragmatic minds enamored with the ideals of practical education and applied science increasingly won control of education policy. Amid this ferment, holiness saints sought to reconfigure higher learning to comport better with their own values and pedagogical instincts. The result was an alternative system of Bible schools, faith homes, and training institutes tailored to the tenets of spiritual pragmatism. Like other tough-minded Americans in an age of invention, the saints wanted useful, not theoretical, knowledge. Consequently, they specialized in applied science: the discovery and practical application of spiritual truth. Their institutions, moreover, beautifully integrated form and function. The urgency of their mission called for stark economy, so they fashioned short-term, praxisoriented Bible schools designed to convey essential skills and insights as expeditiously as possible, the more quickly to return students to active Christian work. Like the Missionary Training School and Faith Home in Alliance, Ohio, they promised a “quick, radical training.” Furthermore, they typically combined intensive classroom learning with hands-on experience, such as street evangelism. At the Cleveland Bible Institute, for example, students applied their classroom principles through daily practicums “in real soul-winning work.” In its results-oriented philosophy and its mimicry of the applied sciences, holiness education marched lockstep with modernity.36 Despite their disdain for theoretical learning, however, the saints showed genuine appreciation for systematic thinking, when properly directed. Classical forms of intellection, like philosophy, were anathema. But the study of prophecy, one of the most prestigious of holiness disciplines, drew inquisitive minds into daunting eschatological schemes and complex harmonizations of apocalyptic texts. This was done in a practical and “scientific” mode, to be sure, complete with charts, diagrams, and inductive methods, but it provided nonetheless an outlet for the kind of intellectual undertaking that invited scorn under other labels. Emerging as it did in a nation that idolized the expert, holiness education naturally produced its own technocracy, men and women recognized as experts in the fields of prophecy or prayer, healing or spiritual warfare, evangelism, biblical interpretation, or the inducement of religious experience. The ultimate nature of those specializations, to be sure, remained ambiguous. Sometimes they were treated as “sciences” based on the study and application of spiritual laws; at other times, they were treated as “gifts,” in which case the point of education was not to learn the gift itself but to learn the means of its reception. But whether perceived as the recipient of a gift or the master of a science, the expert played a vital role in the expanding movement. The priorities of radical holiness worship naturally dictated the kinds of expertise most in demand, and because radical holiness had made revivalism normative for congregational life, it privileged the acute over the chronic gifts.37 The pastoral had been subsumed within the evangelistic, making the ideal pastor an evangelist and the ideal church an evangelistic association in which every member was a trained “soul-winner.” Congregational life, then, centered along an axis that joined the auditorium, the scene of collective worship, with

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the street, where personal evangelism occurred. The architectural embodiment of that ideal was the revival tent: vast space for public worship and the rituals of conversion, little or none for Christian education and nurture, and open access to the street. Those who rose to prominence in the movement were not the “tent makers” but the tent masters. Divine healing stood out as the most impressive gift/technique in that tent meeting culture and the surest path to prominence. Here as well, the language and categories of science infused radical holiness discourse. Not only was divine healing “wholly, purely and truly scientific,” one pastor flatly asserted, it was “more scientific than medicines.”38 John Alexander Dowie likewise conflated his case for the scientific character of divine healing with his case against its chief rival, the medical profession. In contrast to divine healing, which was both scientific and scientifically verifiable, there was “not an atom of foundation for science in medicine,” Dowie intoned.39 Ironically, advocates of divine healing often enlisted the presumptive credibility of the medical profession to prove their point, parading doctors before their audiences to testify that, indeed, the sick had been healed, the lame had walked, and the blind had received sight.40 At some level the polemic surely intersected with an underlying competition between professions that were, in terms of power and status, moving in opposite directions. Dowie denounced doctors as charlatans and thieves, defrauding the populace of its hard-earned cash. But his rancor focused with special intensity on the growing power of the medical profession over public policy, where he saw insidious designs behind efforts such as the drive to require universal immunization. These were mere stratagems to advance the profession’s ambition to “keep the whole population in their hands from the cradle to the grave.”41 A simmering professional rivalry, then, pervaded the radical holiness case against regular medicine. But more revealing for our present argument is the means by which healers like Dowie attempted to discredit medical orthodoxy and to credit their own claims. To make their case, they felt compelled to prove that regular medicine was not scientific but that divine healing, by contrast, was.

Radical Holiness and the Urban–Rural Axis Nineteenth-century modernity found its most complete incarnation in the new cities that seemed to sprout full-blown from the Midwestern plains and western valleys of America. These cities were, quite literally, products of the new industrial order, which drew together working families by the thousands to serve its labor needs and in the process spawned “instant cities” that soon pulsed with all the variegated commerce of social life. America’s cities—old and new—formed the vital nodes of an increasingly integrated system of production, distribution, and communication. Moreover, they were physical manifestations of that system’s values.


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One glance at a late-nineteenth-century street plan of Denver, Los Angeles, or Chicago shows how the comparatively balanced eighteenth-century vision of modernization had been transformed by a relentless pursuit of efficiency, productivity, and order. Pierre L’Enfant’s blueprint for the District of Columbia, for instance, had integrated the old and the new, superimposing a rational grid over an asymmetrical pattern of diagonal streets and French-style carrefour, or city squares. This tribute to tradition had disappeared a century later, and the grid now yielded only to rivers and the most stubborn of natural landscapes. Occasionally, the grid might be laid at an angle, but that too sprang from a very modern desire to exploit the forces of nature by maximizing sunlight. The same aspirations surfaced in the new urban architecture. Steel, the quintessentially modern material, allowed architects like Louis Sullivan to design sheer monuments to rationality that rose skyward “without a single dissenting line,” an effect rendered even more striking by the use of plate glass windows, as in Daniel Burnham’s Reliance Building in Chicago.42 The modern city, however, contained an essential irony, which flashed jarringly from the juxtaposition of its physical and social architecture. Beneath the pristine simplicity of plate glass towers, and hurrying along the orderly, perpendicular streets, moved a labyrinthine social world, polyglot and baroque. The disparate groups drawn into forced proximity there could not be as easily refashioned as, for example, the skyline of Chicago after the fire. The city, then, merits its reputation as the high embodiment of latenineteenth-century modernity. On that basis, some interpreters have given the small town roots of radical holiness as evidence of its discontinuity with the same. While they might grant that the movement had urban strongholds, these are portrayed as “outposts” of rural culture, “shelters” under which displaced agrarians might seek refuge from the storms of modernity. The emphasis, moreover, falls on displaced, for it is observed that most of the movement’s urban members were migrants, men and women not born in the city but dislocated there. Although true in a narrow sense, this portrait distorts both the nature of radical holiness and the nature of urban society in the late nineteenth century. Most radical holiness leaders were indeed born in rural or small town settings. The movement did provide a protective canopy for rural migrants and other urban newcomers. But those propositions mean little unless they are read in relation to the social profile of turn-of-the-century America. If we take the state of the movement in the late 1890s as a baseline, almost all of the movement’s leaders would at that time have been born prior to 1880, when well over 70 percent of the nation’s population was rural. Not until 1920 did a majority of Americans live in cities, and even that is misleading. By defining a “city” as any municipality with a population exceeding 2,500, the Census Bureau created a “statistical illusion”: denizens of Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio, joined those of Cleveland and Dayton, Tennessee, who huddled alongside the inhabitants of New York City and Sac Pairie, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois, and Hyden, Kentucky, among the ranks of the “urban” masses.43 The overwhelming

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majority of late-Victorians, then, had what we now consider a rural or small town birth. In and of itself, that fact said nothing about one’s relation to modernity. It merely reflected the demography of late-Victorian America. The new American city, moreover, was a congregation of strangers. As late as 1910 the countryside supplied one-third of all city dwellers, with foreign immigration adding another quarter. A majority of the city’s inhabitants, that is to say, had just arrived from somewhere else. Most would move again within the span of a few years. Urban historians are right to speak of the “urban frontier.”44 So, although most saints in the city were migrants, we should bear in mind that deracination was then the urban norm. If radical holiness represented a marginal community’s “symbolic adjustment to urban life,” then it had this in common with all other marginal communities at a time when most of the city’s population was marginal.45 City saints, then, shared the typical urban experience and employed modes of adjustment—the selective appropriation of symbols from one’s culture of origin, the construction of social boundaries around elective communities, an oppositional definition of identity—that were so common as to be the normative form of urban life. It should be apparent, then, that religious “outposts” or cultural “shelters” were anything but antimodern in the late-Victorian city. Nevertheless, it is misleading to describe urban holiness in this way because such passive terms belie the movement’s real character. Radical holiness did not erect shelters. It erected street markets staffed with bumptious vendors hawking their religious product. That product, furthermore, did not simply distill rural religion. Rather, it transcended urban–rural distinctions, bringing a modified “old-time religion” to the city and urban styles and cosmopolitan perspectives to the countryside. Radical holiness was never more modern than in its creative adaptation of old cultural forms to new social realities. As with the American city itself, the result was at once something old and something new.

Radical Holiness as Transregional Culture Through its dialectic embrace of rural and urban culture, radical holiness revealed its stripes. The same holds true for its blurring of regional boundaries. The extravagant expansion of the nation’s infrastructure—its interlocking systems of industry, finance, marketing, transportation, communication, and political and civil service—undercut regional isolation and distinctiveness. Local character did not evaporate, but Americans of similar class and interest increasingly read the same literature, bought the same merchandise, wore the same clothes, and even believed the same verities, regardless of where they happened to live. Among the forms of distance that might separate Americans, the geographical declined in importance. That accelerating social integration, in turn, fostered the growth of transregional institutions by making it easier than ever to build national constituencies around common religious, social, or political concerns. Like populism, socialism, labor unions, woman suffrage, and temperance, radical holiness seized the day.


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One of the ironies of historiography is that radical holiness should be so often portrayed as a Southern phenomenon. It did from the beginning have enthusiasts in the South, but it began as a predominantly Northern affair. In the decade following the Civil War, institutions like the National Camp Meeting Association downplayed their Northern roots and tried to implement a religious version of Reconstruction. Christian Perfection, its advocates claimed, was the balm of Gilead, able to heal the nation’s wounds. And, in fact, a postbellum world heavy with the stain of mortality did prove quite receptive to the message of holiness. As the movement grew, it attempted to knit coalitions that spanned America’s divided regions and to form a sacred geography that knew no South or North.46 A less sanguine view might see holiness reaping dividends from its investment in Washington’s cultural colonization of Dixie. The message of holiness traveled not only the byways laid out by an older generation of evangelicals but the highways carved southward by a conquering army as well. That fact was not lost on Southerners, who often vilified holiness as another Union invasion, one now aimed insidiously at their souls.47 As the early mission of Ambrose Tomlinson will make clear, radical holiness could at times resemble a form of Yankee cultural imperialism. It took root in the seams of a fractured South, disrupting kinship networks and communal equilibrium. As a syncretistic force dismissive of regional identity, it introduced foreign elements into the “Redeemed” South and blurred the boundaries around which the cult of the “Lost Cause” sought to rebuild Southern pride and integrity. Wherever it went, radical holiness carried with it the translocal impulse. That impulse only intensified, moreover, with the rise of pentecostalism, structured as it was by the universalistic paradigm of Acts 2. These forces interacted with particular intensity in 1906 at the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, which holiness reporter Frank Bartleman dubbed “the American Jerusalem.” Like Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, he exulted, Los Angeles now played host to “every sect, creed, and doctrine under Heaven.” Azusa Street’s most compelling validation, then, came from its transcendence of parochial boundaries. “Thousands are here from all over the Union,” Bartleman gushed, “and from many parts of the world, sent of God for ‘Pentecost.’ ”48 Few matched the universalist paradigm as well as the Azusa Street mission did, but its application there made Azusa all the more subject to mythologization and all the more effective as a conceptual model for the movement as a whole. Radical holiness prided itself on spanning every divide, whether regional, racial, religious, social, or demographic. To a degree, that flattering selfconception held true. Like the expanding national economy, the multiplying roads and railways, the chain stores, and the mail-order catalogs, radical holiness sprawled in all directions. And like modernity itself, it embodied the turbulent blending of regional forces that portended the autumn of localism.


4 Radical Ethics: Race, Women, and Holiness Considered and Reconsidered

For almost half a century, voices in the historiographical wilderness have cried out against the antimodern portrayal of holiness. Almost uniformly, the body of evidence most often submitted on its behalf has been its progressive social values, in particular its views on gender and race.1 Racialism and patriarchy were not in any simplistic way antimodern, but modernization did set into motion trends that eroded their ideological foundations.2 And radical holiness did defy traditional conventions governing the role of women and relations among the races. Nevertheless, radical holiness did not espouse mainstream progressivism any more than it espoused mainstream evangelicalism.3 By exploring its idiosyncrasies, the small shadings of significant difference that set its social values apart from the crowd, we can gain a better sense of where radical holiness fit on the crowded stage of late-Victorian religion. Judged by the standards of the day, holiness women played an extraordinarily active role at every level of their movement. From itinerant celebrities like Maria Woodworth-Etter to local pastors and evangelists, from faith home matrons to ordinary church members, women supplied a majority of the movement’s membership and a significant minority of its evangelists. Approximately one-third of the evangelists in Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association, for example, were women.4 Rare would have been the holiness benchwarmer who had not heard the gospel preached from the mouth of a woman. More remarkable than the fact of women preaching, however, was the gospel that these women preached and the way in which they preached it. Since Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture, historians have observed the increasingly sentimental cast of mainline

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religion in the Victorian era. Ministers came to be associated, like women, with nurture and moral suasion, influence rather than power. Nevertheless, even as the profession “feminized,” it continued to exclude women. The overall drift of mainstream Protestantism (like that of Victorian domesticity in general) may have augured well for the long-term fortunes of women, but that potential remained latent, largely circumscribed by social convention. In the few cases where women did join the ministry, they tended to stress the passive virtues and to adopt the suasive style, as befit their calling and their sex. By the turn of the century, however, domesticity had provoked a growing reaction from America’s threatened manhood. New emphases on health, fitness, and the primal virtues of wilderness merged with American jingoism to promote a more rugged ideal of manliness, ably met in the persona of Teddy Roosevelt, the original “Rough Rider.” Radical holiness imbibed the new manliness more than the old sentimentalism, flaunting its “manly” character through exaggerated demands for bravery, spiritual strength, and the cheerful endurance of physical hardship. Saints expected one another to be willing to forsake all earthy goods and most earthly comforts, to look the devil in the eye and spit in his face, and to obey God even if—or especially if—it meant death or persecution. “Men Wanted,” read an ad in Thomas Nelson’s Pentecostal Herald: “Men with muscles of iron and nerves of steel, in whose tremendous grasp baptized iniquity whimpers like a whipped child.”5 These crosscurrents merged with surprising results for the role of women, many of whom were among the “men” who answered Nelson’s call. Perhaps the movement’s exaggerated manliness lessened the felt need of its men to assert their manhood through the social exclusion of women. Regardless of the etiology, however, the result was that women were admitted to the pulpit, and while there, they were given the liberty to preach as they saw fit. When radical holiness women stepped to the lectern, they did not mouth pious platitudes or do needlepoint for Jesus. As full-fledged, shooting members of God’s Rough Riders, they blasted the fortress of hell with heavy ammunition. Women like Carrie Nation and Alma White dished out the gospel with ferocity enough to make strong men cower. Neither their demeanor nor their symbols suggested the demure sentiments of domesticity. They followed the “Pillar of Fire,” prophesied from the “Burning Bush,” and broadcast “Coals of Fire.”6 Even a model of holiness femininity such as Catherine Booth-Clibborn (Salvation Army officer, one-time Dowie convert, and daughter of William Booth) drew as much praise for her martial virtues as for her feminine grace. In 1897, when Booth-Clibborn left her tour of duty on the European continent, Swiss colleagues extolled her “courageous faith and fearless obedience.” She had “condemned our formalism,” they fondly recalled, “and led us back face to face with the faith of primitive Christianity.” As a token of honor, they called her “the Marshall.”7 Radical holiness, then, encouraged women to adopt a prophetic stance and a militant language that the larger society deemed masculine. The corrosive effect on feminine nature did not go unnoticed. Hulda Rees had been a Quaker minister for some time before her sanctification. But when she began to preach

race, women, and holiness considered and reconsidered

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“in the power of the Spirit,” critics remarked that she was “not so modest and womanly” as before.8 Male colleagues, to their credit, rose to their sisters’ defense. When local pastors opposed sister Mary McGee Snell, the “gifted and wonderfully magnetic” evangelist from Mississippi, E. T. Rinehart explained why. “She preaches equal to any of them, and better than many,” he wrote, and “if there is anything an unsanctified preacher dislikes it is to be excelled in preaching by a woman.”9 For men like Rinehart, sanctification broke the hold of gender prejudice as well as the power of willful sin. Gender roles were not and would never be completely erased. Even where women preached, gender-specific models of ministry did eventually emerge, as one can see by comparing the sensitive healing ministries of women like Aimee Semple McPherson and Kathryn Kuhlman with the pugilistic, devilbaiting manners of men like Smith Wigglesworth, Jack Coe, and William Branham. Nevertheless, radical holiness had opened a breach in the wall of gender segregation, allowing women to assume not only public offices but public styles and public language that had heretofore been reserved for men.10 In addition to its gender inclusiveness, the holiness movement has been often commended for its progressive racial views. Few issues bedevil historians with their complexity more than race, and radical holiness presents no exception. The religious culture of radical holiness contained a profound potential to refigure conceptions of race, and that potential did not go entirely unrealized. Within its boundaries African Americans were able to substantially influence a predominately Anglo-American body. But it should be acknowledged that racist and racialist views remained pervasive among white advocates of holiness. The militant racism promoted by the reorganized Ku Klux Klan rarely appeared in radical holiness, but the sanctified mind did commonly succumb to the garden-variety, “commonsense” racism that then pervaded American culture.11 The views of Quaker evangelists Nathan and Esther Frame are a case in point. Although they eagerly preached to African Americans during their forays into the South, they took pains to affirm their belief in racial segregation. “God made the black man black and the white man white,” they explained, “and we believe the happiness of each race will be greater and the Lord more glorified by maintaining separate social relations.” Social segregation, they opined, would preserve “the highest good of each race.”12 These were not antiquated opinions being voiced by the Frames but, rather, a white Victorian consensus. Bolstered by “scientific” theories and inspired by the lure of medievalism, leading scholars of the day had dropped the anchor of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority into the murky depths of the Middle Ages. The exposition of positivistic laws showing race to be “the driving force of history” and the Aryan race—above all, its “Teutonic branch”—to be “superior to all others” passed for scientific history a century ago. Such racialist views formed one of the great common denominators of white society, an aspect of the “modern” mind shared by lofty intellectuals and lowly plainfolk alike.13 To be fair, holiness leaders did occasionally spin a “scientific” theory that ran upstream. Dowie, for instance, attributed racial differentiation to the fall and

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argued that the prelapsarian estate, “the primitive strength of man,” could only be restored through miscegenation.14 But most of the movement seems to have shared the common “wisdom” of its times. Despite its accommodation to the racial presuppositions of its day, however, radical holiness continued to nurture a logic that undermined the calculus of race. In the South, for example, it carried on the Southern tradition of interracial meetings, which had been the norm in the antebellum South, transmitting root myths and shared religious forms that held black and white in close if conflicted community.15 For all its racism and dysfunctional social machinations, Southern society could never avoid the paramount fact of Southern life, namely, that black and white must coexist in a single society. The compromises of Southern evangelicalism—its mission to masters and to slaves, its endorsement of paternalism, and its racist political and social views—amounted to misbegotten means of negotiating that ineluctable reality. Though muted by the racism of its day, radical holiness also reaffirmed one of the precepts of early evangelicalism: that black and white partake of one communion and, so, are one body, united under “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.”16 That does not suggest that black and white partook for the same reasons or that the symbols and experiences of holiness meant the same things and served the same ends for each. But the movement did inherit the multiracial ideal of early evangelicalism, complete with its innate tensions and ambiguities. And if radical holiness is found wanting by a later and higher standard of social equality, it stood out in its own day for its racial permissiveness, for which it sometimes paid a price in blood. Amid the hardening racial lines of post-Reconstruction America, that achievement merits recognition. The wellspring of the movement’s racial tolerance, I would argue, flowed from its spirituality. Religious ecstasy in particular had profound implications for race relations. As a corporal language, ecstasy by its very nature proved difficult to control. For one thing, its plausibility depended on spontaneity and other signs of transcendent inspiration. A Spirit that blew whither it willed would surely not follow the narrow scripts composed by social convention. Azusa Street, for example, impressed the faithful precisely because it featured the element of divine surprise. According to one observer: “The Lord was liable to burst through any one. . . . It might be a child, a woman or a man. It might be from the back seat, or from the front. It made no difference. We rejoiced that God was working.”17 Ritual theory might suggest that the destabilization of social constraints and the achievement of liminality were the point of such exercises in the first place. Regardless, religious ecstasy offered a kinetic index of spiritual status and divine anointing that did not coincide with indexes based on race or class. To the contrary, it established criteria that reassigned status on religious or ethical, as opposed to social or material, grounds.18 Those criteria, when combined with plainfolk idioms like the rhetoric of humility and the logic of divine reversal, discussed earlier, fostered a paradoxical theology according to which God preferred to work in unexpected places and through those of small repute. Put another way, radical holiness cradled a nascent the-


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ology of the poor. Not only might God choose to reveal Himself through the lowliest members of society, He was most likely to do so. The God who had become incarnate in a manger through a Galilean Jewess had a noticeable inclination for the meek and oppressed.19 If white plainfolk could use this ideological springboard to leapfrog their social betters and land in the spiritual aristocracy, African Americans could do the same. Once a black saint had met the visible criteria for spiritual anointing, white saints had little choice but to accept it. Religious ecstasy, then, joined with plainfolk ideological assumptions to enhance the status of African Americans, the lowliest of the low and of all the most oppressed. Furthermore, by creating a climate in which African Americans could speak authoritatively within the fellowship of saints, holiness formed the conditions for the possibility of Azusa Street: a biracial revival under the leadership of a black holiness minister, “The Promised Latter Rain Now Being Poured Out on God’s Humble People.”20 The effect was not negligible. It transformed individuals and, for the movement as a whole, offered a persuasive instance of self-validation. “God surely broke me over the wheel of my prejudice,” exclaimed one Kansas minister.21 Another Azusa enthusiast, in a flush of rapture, declared that the “color line” had been “washed away by the blood.” It would come back. The racial harmony enjoyed at early Azusa did not truly characterize radical holiness at large. More commonly, the movement displayed an ambivalent mix of racist presuppositions and interracial cooperation, translating the conflicted mind of a nation into its own plainfolk religious terms. If the movement ultimately fell short of its best ideals, then it faired no worse in this respect than other, contemporaneous efforts to bridge the racial divide, such as the populists’ attempt to unite black and white in a common economic struggle. Stretched between the opposing virtues of “respectable” racism and Christian egalitarianism, the saints built a fragile multiracial alliance around the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

Holiness Considered and Reconsidered I have argued at length that radical holiness in general and Ambrose Tomlinson in particular are best understood under the rubric of plainfolk modernism. But pure forms exist only in the mind, and a long train of failed efforts to force historical movements neatly into theoretical boxes, or even to build theoretical boxes neatly to fit historical movements, has made devout nominalists of most historians. Plainfolk modernists, as they actually existed, should be expected to fit the pure form of “modernism” neither more nor less perfectly than, for example, the Protestant modernists described by William Hutchison. Both, to extend Robert Ellwood’s epigram, were “a collection of tensions.” In order to appreciate more fully the texture of radical holiness, and to refine more carefully the argument of this book, it is necessary to confront objections to that argument and to acknowledge ways in which radical holiness may indeed have resisted modernization. These counterpoints and contradic-

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tions, I will perhaps predictably insist, do not disconfirm my thesis. They simply affirm the historical nature of its subject and the contingent nature of historical categories.

Primitive Holiness The most trenchant objection to a modernist spin on radical holiness points to the movement’s deep-seated primitivism. This constitutes, in effect, two objections in one because the movement embodied two kinds of primitivism. Chronological primitivism envisions a primordium from which history has precipitously fallen. It requires one to leap the vast interstice of profane time and recover an original, archetypal pattern. Cultural primitivism envisions a primal order or pristine nature that has been corrupted.22 It demands that one perceive, and then repristinate, a primal nature disfigured by accretions or distorted by error. Radical holiness tried to do both, the first by way of biblical restorationism and the second by way of a more complex antistructural impulse. The objection raised by chronological primitivism can be rather easily addressed, for its function as a strategy for innovation is well recognized.23 Theodore Bozeman has argued for the essentially regressive nature of Puritan primitivism, but he acknowledges that it did ironically facilitate modernization. Though structurally backward-looking, chronological primitivism opens up venturesome possibilities because of its frank irreverence for organic tradition. Primitivism, to be sure, has always been a protean trope, capable of sustaining either change or opposition to change. But for American religion it has typically served the former interests. David Harrell has called it the “most vital single assumption underlying the development of American Protestantism,” and indeed the great majority of our denominations owe their origins to the timehonored, if time-denying, practice of rejecting an immediate tradition in the name of a primitive one and of paying the bills with currency coined on the authority of a mythical past.24 For late-Victorian plainfolk, chronological primitivism played a double role. By then it was the tradition. Americans of cultural provenance high and low, in fact, had come to practice the primitivist’s art of “invented tradition,” the attempt to “fix certain aspects of the shifting landscape of modernity into an unchanging relationship with a symbolic past.”25 Consequently, primitivism supplied both the strategy for change and the reservoir of cultural resonance with such strategies needed to validate that change. Radical holiness, then, blossomed in an environment ripe for the customary primitivist sleight of hand: the framing of discovery as rediscovery, lending even the newest notions the gravity of ancient truth. If chronological primitivism comports well with plainfolk modernism, then cultural primitivism chafes against it. Like its heir, pentecostalism, radical holiness vented a powerful “antistructuralist impulse.” When directed against institutions, that impulse sought “to destroy the arbitrary conventions of denominational Christianity in order to replace them with a new order of primal


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simplicity and purity.”26 When directed against ritual, that impulse sabotaged formal liturgy through “ecstatic excess” and, in the case of pentecostalism, the “deliberate scrambling of human language.”27 At first glance, cultural primitivism seems clearly antimodern. Having defined modernization in terms of increasing social coordination, how else could one characterize anti-institutionalism or the symbolic anarchy of ecstatic worship? The answer lies in a closer analysis of the ritual manifestations and social implications of religious antistructuralism. Antistructuralism, it should first be recalled, has been a vital aspect of radical religion since before the English Revolution. In America, it formed a common denominator among revivalists ranging from Separate Baptists in Virginia to Methodists in the Ohio Valley. The question, then, is whether or not this dialectic of construction and deconstruction has proven to be specifically antimodern. As we have seen, the body of scholarship linking American revivalism to the market revolution has amply attested the compatibility of that tradition with social modernization. Given that history, it seems apparent that the antistructural impulse expressed not anarchy but social competition. Its ultimate aim was never destruction as such. It sought to raze the structures of the opposition in order to replace them with its own. Having said this, it still remains to examine the nature of those newly created structures. Two aspects in particular beg for explanation. First, radical holiness constructed a “realm of [its] own making, a realm of distinctive social networks, cultural symbols, and religious rituals.”28 Second, the prevailing rhetoric within that alternate realm explicitly rejected “the world.” Were these not antimodern elements? When cultural anthropologist talk about the construction of “alternative worlds,” they refer to what students of religion have traditionally called sectarianism, and forty years after the postmodern turn, few would argue that sectarianism is by nature antimodern. To the contrary, the coexistence of separate, defensive, communally constructed worlds is a constituent feature of modernity. At no point would this have been truer than in the Gilded Age. The argument against consensus history, after all, is not that it is no longer true but, rather, that it never was. Consequently, to identify a group as “sectarian” may be to describe its social behavior, its self-understanding, and perhaps its relation to the environing society’s dominant institutions, but it says nothing about its relation to modernity as such. As for radical holiness’s world rejection, that militant rhetoric simply confirmed its place within a primitivist tradition deeply indebted to the Church– world dualism of Johannine Christianity. That rhetoric bore the same tenuous relationship to actual world rejection as the rhetoric of poverty bore to the actual balance in one’s bank account. Aside from a few items of dress and fashion, radical holiness rarely forsook the material reality of the modern world, its tangible body and soul. The saints rejected the world in general, but they nimbly conformed to its everyday particulars, its products, technologies, and pragmatic instincts. Sectarianism, that is to say, did not hinder their adjustment to the society from which they distinguished themselves or their ability to con-

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struct an alternative world that was closely synchronized with the dictates and demands of their age. In the same way, the ritual manifestations of antistructuralism were not the anarchic eruptions outsiders took them to be. As we have already seen, religious ecstasy was in reality an orderly and “ordering” phenomenon. Glossolalia would prove to be the most striking and symbolically potent instance of holiness ecstasy, but a popular misconception has, unfortunately, obscured its cultural meaning and its relation to modernity. Many observers have contrasted the oral emphasis of glossolalia with the putative shift from oral to literary culture in society at large, which would seem to expose the regressive or antimodern nature of the ecstatic practice. The problem with this logic lies in its original premise, namely, the historical misreading behind that sense of discontinuity. The nineteenth century did not witness a shift from oral to literary culture as such. Literacy, of course, did sharply rise, but advances in the dissemination of oral culture proved more astonishing still. The invention of the telephone—a staggering revolution in the range of oral communication—tops that list, but others run close behind. By the late 1880s Emile Berliner’s Gram-O-Phone had turned sound recording into a commercially viable product, unleashing an enormous expansion of the power and importance of the spoken (and sung) word. For the first time, the voices of a nation emerged: heroes of the word whose voices were instantly recognizable to thousands of widely scattered and entirely unrelated hearers. The refinement of radio technology further accelerated the transmission of oral culture, while improved sound magnification enabled ever-larger audiences to press into tents, stadiums, and city squares to enjoy public speech. Late-Victorian modernity, that is to say, meant exponential growth in the production and dissemination of all forms of communication: graphic, written, and oral combined. Furthermore, all forms expanded simultaneously and reciprocally, so that the growth of one did not lessen the importance of another. The paradox of glossolalia, then, is not that it enshrined orality in a literary culture but, rather, that it disrupted speech at a time when speech was becoming increasingly important and increasingly subject to rational manipulation and control. It was a paradox and not a contradiction for two main reasons. First, this “deliberate scrambling of human language” placed more, not less, emphasis on the spoken word. Indeed, it lent speech a quasimagical aura. Second, glossolalia did not in fact defy verbal order. The “weird babel” heard by outsiders impressed those who practiced it as supernaturally perfect speech. It shattered the limitations of human language so as to address directly and flawlessly the heart of God. Here one uttered the unutterable in a language of ineffable purity, simplicity, and power. To be sure, glossolalia was a multivalent sign, and one can distinguish at least three variations on its meaning. First, glossolalia could represent the supernatural acquisition of a literal foreign tongue. Here, from the very fount


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of nature, another language flowed effortlessly and absent the impediment of an untrained tongue fumbling awkwardly with foreign words. Second, glossolalia could represent a heavenly rather than an earthly language. Miraculously, the worshiper transcended mortal constraints and worshiped God or expressed emotions in the very tongues of angels. Here was no blunt instrument, glancing clumsily off pure thoughts or striking just beside the point, but the unerring language of the heart, from deep to deep. Finally, glossolalia could represent the Voice of God Himself. As divine message, glossolalia signified a communication from above that had to be interpreted into the common language by members possessing the “gift of interpretation.” If the Bible derived from the kind of inspiration whereby “men of old wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,” then glossolalia recalled the time when God had conversed with Adam and Eve in person, in the cool of the day, and they were not ashamed. In each of its manifestations, glossolalia implied a profound affirmation of the word, both human and divine. Furthermore, the emphasis lay not on orality as such but on the power of the Word—and the Word as power—in its every form. There are numerous early examples of written glossolalia, and in any case pentecostals were never content with glossolalia alone. They continued the holiness habit of telling their story in word and in print, relentlessly and ad nauseam, over the airwaves, through the press, and on the street corners to any who would listen and to many who would rather have not. Scholars influenced by the history of religions school often oppose two dialectic patterns of religious life, variously designated as emergent and established, outsider and insider, deviant and legitimate, or communitas and structure. The terms correspond to religious forms that respectively simulate or reflect, and invert or scramble, established social forms. Both, however, are premised on a vital correspondence to society and are inseparably engaged with what they perceive its established forms to be.29 Radical holiness shared elements of each of these religious patterns. In its embodiment of the progressive values noted above, it reflected mainstream modernism in a rather straightforward way. In certain elements of its primitivism, particularly its antistructural rituals, radical holiness expressed its “emergent” instincts. In these cases, it mirrored modernity by inverting it or by scrambling and relocating features of modernity that it would ultimately affirm.

Countercurrents in Plainfolk Modernism I have argued that radical holiness reflected many of the salient features of modernity and that it adapted quickly and well to the structural changes reconfiguring American life at the turn of the century. I have argued further that many of the movement’s ostensibly antimodern features were not antimodern at all but, rather, articulations of a particular religious style. But neither the texture nor the originality of the movement can be understood without acknowledging that certain antimodern attributes did inhabit the world that rad-

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ical holiness made. Within its rich and relatively self-contained universe of meaning, it nourished several mental traits and social habits that ran against the grain. For one thing, radical holiness refused to relinquish its totalistic religious claims, resisting the modern trend toward a religious version of separate spheres. Secularization was not, in any simple way at least, a corollary of modernization, but at least two of modernity’s ancillary developments did bear it a strong resemblance.30 First, forces such as specialization and professionalization conspired to foster a growing compartmentalization of life. It appears that by the late nineteenth century a larger share of the population than ever before was enrolled in formal religion, but they seemed more willing to restrict their religion to its own sphere of activity and to allow those of differing persuasions to go about their business unmolested. As a result, ever larger areas of public life operated on the basis of what has been called “everyday reality.”31 By expanding the spheres in which they spoke the lingua franca of a plural society, Americans necessarily constricted the spheres in which they gave full expression to their sacred cosmoi.32 This process of “desacralization,” though not the same as secularization, did involve a general retreat of “religious symbols, rhetoric, and ritual from public life.”33 The world had not been “disenchanted,” but folks seemed to spend less of their time in the enchanted parts of it. On this point, radical holiness swam upstream. It resisted desacralization and declined to suffer charitably its neighbors’ views. Furthermore, its triumphalist claims remained defiantly totalistic, asserting a worldview in which the sacred suffused and governed every sphere of life. In these and other ways, radical holiness broke ranks with modernity and offended the etiquette of an increasingly civil bourgeois America. The second admittedly antimodern feature of radical holiness lies in its relation to late-Victorian materialism. The culture of consumption that rose hand in hand with modernization fostered practical materialism. Americans grew more likely to spend their time and money on the same things, and those things tended to be material objects that added convenience and pleasure to natural life. Taken together, these trends neither lessened personal piety nor diminished religious belief. But they did lead people to behave, in relation to their time and money (and in relation to their work and play), as materialists. Modernization, then, encouraged Americans to become “methodological materialists,” to paraphrase Peter Berger.34 Radical saints bought their fair share of merchandise, but on the whole they bucked the trend. The clearest view of how radical holiness differed from the modern mainstream in this arena is seen in the movement’s distinctive conceptualization of time and money. For the faithful, time and money synthesized contrary instincts, marking the spot where heaven and earth met. On the one hand, the saints (like other moderns) treated time and money as commodities to be measured carefully, used efficiently, and invested wisely. They had, in short, “a pragmatic cast of mind.”35 On the other hand, they treated them as forces of nature, effectively beyond human calculation and control except through the


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providence of God. What influence one had came through religious manipulation: striking the right attitude of supplication or applying the laws of faith by which God administered these resources. With reference specifically to time, radical holiness exhibited the paradoxical sense of chronology common to those who live “in the shadow of the second coming,” to borrow Paul Boyer’s lilting phrase. The imminent rapture produced a heightened sense of urgency and therefore a heightened emphasis on the stewardship of time. Time was a precious commodity, measured by the moment. There was none of it to lose. On the other hand, the towering salient of eternity overshadowed the present. Time, in that respect, had been utterly relativized. Unpredictable and immeasurable, it was not subject to rational calculation or control. This juxtaposition of the temporal and the eternal generated a pronounced ahistoricism within the movement, although this was not in itself an antimodern feature. After all, it could be argued that the rejection of history, or the attempt to transcend it, characterized modernity as a whole. What separated radical holiness from more ordinary forms of ahistoricism, however, inhered in its conviction that not only time past but even time present was ahistorical. Time was tentative, provisional, a plastic commodity in the hands of a God who could make the sun stand still or an hour expand so that His servant might not miss a departing train. The sense that even mundane time was subject to irruption and divine manipulation set radical holiness apart from its modern peers. Money was likewise a Janus. One face looked toward frugality and rational stewardship, where the saints kept records, raised funds, set budgets, engaged in economic schemes, and generally sought to make hardheaded, money-wise good sense. But the other face viewed money through the eyes of faith. Inspired by George Mueller (renowned German pietist and revered architect of “life on faith lines”), many holiness believers kept their financial needs scrupulously hidden, certain that the God who alone knew their needs would move on the hearts of the well-heeled to supply them. And if the well-heeled proved recalcitrant, God had other ways to provide. Radical saints inhabited a world where greenbacks mysteriously appeared in one’s pocket lining, perfect strangers arrived unannounced with cash, and rent money materialized in the nick of time. It was a world where, should God so will, money would grow on trees.36 Radical holiness, then, sustained a world in which time and money served two masters, the natural and the supernatural economies. Consequently, a great part of holiness expenditure followed the dictates of supernatural, even apocalyptic, fiscal logic. The saints gave prodigiously to their churches, sacrificing their needs and the needs of their families for the salvation of souls. They invested their cash in spiritual commodities and used earthly mammon to lay up treasure in heaven. In sociological terms, perhaps, this only meant that they used their time and money to advance the interests of their own alternative community. Nevertheless, that community sustained a mentality that valued nonmaterial objectives, and the result, by and large, was nonconformity to the consumerism and methodological materialism of their day.

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This being said, the saints did not reject modern patterns of production and consumption or consciously retreat from the economic world. But they did apply their material resources to religious ends more consistently than did the vast majority of their contemporaries. Perhaps it was because mammon and godliness, structural modernity and religious ends, proved to be so happily coincident in the end that the transition into the middle class would be relatively painless for future generations.

Plainfolk Modernists: Conclusion Antimodern elements existed within radical holiness culture, but the weight of its habits and values were plainfolk modernist. We have seen this in its social and demographic contours, its language and values, its message and the means by which that message was propagated, and the facility with which it perceived and exploited social change. We can see it also in the selfunderstanding of holiness saints. A man like Martin Wells Knapp, no less than Thomas Dewitt Talmage, saw himself as the editor of an “aggressive, wideawake paper,” and evangelists like Seth Rees took themselves for realists devoted to “rugged facts.”37 But what should we make of the counterpoints and contraindications? Do they show plainfolk modernism to be an oxymoron or that radical holiness fits uneasily within such a rubric? They, rather, suggest the contrary. The interplay of primitivism and progressivism, Paul Carter has observed, characterized the Gilded Age.38 Likewise, the countermodern elements within radical holiness, in light of the movement’s larger modernity, only demonstrate how thoroughly it bore the imprint of its times. Like so many of their generation, radical saints lived amid quotidian contradictions and could have prayed the modern prayer: give us this day our daily ambiguities. They did not readily match their ideological profiles. Not least in this respect were they modern.

part ii

A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist

Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson was born September 22, 1865, just north of Westfield, Indiana, on a sloping farmstead between the Bread of Life Church, GTE North, and Thunder Island. Only the farm was there when Doctor Fodrea delivered the frail child, but in a sense Tomlinson’s life even then was framed by the church, the business, and the amusement park. Thunder Island, the amusement park, is now abandoned, though its remains still deliver their cryptic cautionary tale. Its most prominent feature is a tall, carnivalesque slide: a faded gray Dumbo the Elephant, brave but forlorn, his weather-beaten trunk raised high to greet rollicking waves of children that never came or came in insufficient numbers. Presumably, Dumbo had hoped to bestow generalized happiness and vital momentary thrills, “peak experiences,” at a modest price. Instead, he has devolved into a tired monument, presiding with an aspect stranded between appeal and benediction over communicants whipping past on Highway 31. GTE North, at first glance, bears the aura of a corporate interloper. Like other new-growth industries in the area, it suggests a more recent, subtler form of urban encroachment. The old corporate architecture, proudly vertical, recalls a time when business could presume that its presence would be accepted as a blessing. These new ventures hug the ground in earth tones, like stealth industries trying to pass unnoticed through the small town landscape. The Bread of Life Church, meeting in a converted home, also avoids notice, though perhaps unintentionally. Affiliated with Rhema Fellowship, it represents a small town edition of a resurgent “positive confession” movement within pentecostalism and promises to soon outstrip its modest accommodations.

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a. j. tomlinson: plainfolk modernist

Inhabitants of the twenty-first century might naturally perceive the decline of rural American writ large in the sad pretensions of Thunder Island, the encroachment of a major corporation, and the seductive certainties of a new fundamentalism. But that perception tells more about our own times than about the late nineteenth century. In historical terms, the spectacle, the business, and the church each points to an indigenous predecessor that thrived in the Indiana midlands of A. J. Tomlinson’s boyhood. The world of carnival attraction echoed by Thunder Island had barely reached its adolescence then, and when the Ringling Brothers wagon left its Wisconsin home in the 1880s to trundle about the Upper Midwest, it radiated wonder wherever it went. America’s elephant then was P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo, not Disney’s Dumbo, and he was not tired, though he traveled more extensively. The towns of Middle America witnessed a wide array of lively—and participatory—entertainment, from traveling circuses, drama troupes, and local literary societies to the parades and public spectacles that attended almost any social or political event of note. GTE North, for its part, does not represent a new and ominous intrusion of corporate interests into the virgin hinterland. The Rev. Bellows’s lament notwithstanding, the Westfield of Tomlinson’s youth experienced not small town malaise but small town prosperity. The market economy had its urban epicenters, but it was by no means an exclusively urban system, and towns in liege to regional centers were paid for their social losses in handsome economic gains. Such was the case at Westfield, which from its founding in 1834 had been linked to the national market and linked most closely to that manifestation of the market known as Indianapolis. Finally, the Bread of Life Church can be dismissed neither as a novel expression of end-of-the-millennium anxiety nor as an opportunistic spin-off of televangelistic religion. Rather, it reincarnates an ideology and a spiritual impulse that have long been among the most vigorous currents in the religious life of central Indiana. Ambrose Tomlinson, in a very real sense, was indeed born to a world bordered by the Bread of Life Church, GTE North, and Thunder Island. Tomlinson’s life is noteworthy, however, not for the elements that framed it but for what he did with them. He drew on those ambient currents of piety, pragmatism, and promotion to fashion an institutional and personal legacy that by the turn of the twenty-first century counted a half dozen denominations and some six million adherents worldwide. It did not come easily. Despite possessing the requisite ingredients for success—upbringing, environment, aptitude, temperament, opportunity—the Westfield boy would take his lumps. But as he made his way from stable upbringing through marriage and conversion, from utopian fancies through induction into an exhilarating new movement, from a partnership of equals to institutional preeminence, he never lost his nerve, his audacity, or his singleness of vision. His small town world had prepared him well, and he deftly mastered the restless, frenetic whirl of modern life.

5 Family Tradition

In 1836, Robert and Lydia Tomlinson quit North Carolina for the prospects of central Indiana. They were not alone. Like thousands of other Southern Quakers, they had joined a “Great Quaker Migration” that would displace the demographic center of American Quakerism west of the Appalachians and transform the Indiana Yearly Meeting into the largest such meeting in the world.1 Arriving amid the speculative turmoil of Jackson’s war on the banks but before the Panic of 1837, the Tomlinsons took a few months to find their bearings. Then, in February 1837, they settled on a 200-acre farm in Hamilton County, two miles north of Westfield, which would become the family homestead. No record survives of their motive for moving west, but we can reasonably surmise that they were prompted by the same coincidence of principle and pragmatism that drove the larger migration. On the side of principle, the North Carolina to which so many Irish Quakers—including Robert’s father, William Tomlinson—had immigrated had grown proportionately more noxious to Quaker sentiments as the level of slavery had increased. Morally fastidious enough to perceive the intricacies of systemic evil, Quakers knew that to live in a region whose economy depended on slavery was to be implicated in slavery itself. The conscientious eye saw a thousand ways in which daily life presumed material benefits and social advantages that were ultimately extracted from slavery. When the increasing presence of slavery and its increasing prominence as a moral issue coincided with the availability of “free soil” in the Old Northwest, that long-standing Quaker discomfort was transformed into a stimulus for mass migration. That being said, the push of principle worked in concert with

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the pull of opportunity. The wave of Quakers fleeing slavery merged into a tide of general migration after the War of 1812, most of which could hardly be described as principled. Antebellum American mobility was so pronounced that the 1850 census showed almost one-half of the nation’s nonslave, nativeborn citizens to live outside the state of their birth. Most of that relocation, moreover, moved in precisely the direction taken by the Tomlinsons.2 By 1860 roughly one-half of the nation’s population lived west of the Appalachians, to which they had been drawn not by the fear of slavery but by the lure of opportunity created by federal land policy and general speculation. With respect to the lure of opportunity, three factors in particular would have made Indiana attractive to Quakers in the late 1830s. First, the state had by that time been widely “settled.” Urged on by eastern capital and public policy, the region’s white population had been growing exponentially since 1800. That growth, furthermore, had been accompanied by heavy investment in transportation infrastructure, tying the region to the cultural and economic life of the Northeast.3 The same roads and canals that carried western produce to points east brought back most anything a Carolina boy could want. The Indiana to which Robert Tomlinson removed, that is to say, boasted most of the amenities of “home” and had more in common with New England than with the semisubsistence wilderness of Daniel Boone lore. Second, the unsavory business of conquest, with its turmoil, bloodshed, and avarice, had largely concluded by the time Robert and Lydia Tomlinson arrived in 1837. Over twenty years had passed since the death of Tecumseh, and five years had passed since Black Hawk’s unsuccessful attempt to repossess parts of Illinois for the Sauk and Fox. The final cession of Potawatomi land in northern Indiana, in 1836, had passed without incident. Indiana had been rendered safe, but perhaps more importantly for the scrupulous Quaker, enough time had passed to obscure the means of its acquisition, making settlement there less conspicuously a case of exchanging the collateral benefits of slavery for those of Indian removal. Third, Indiana would have appealed to money-wise Quakers for the favorable price-to-value ratio of its land. Its high value derived from its abundance of flat or gently rolling fields deep with exceptionally rich soil. Its attractive price derived from a combination of standing federal land policy and new presidential politics. Well in advance of the Panic of 1837, Jackson’s assault on the credit system and paper currency had knocked the blocks out from under an earlier round of speculation. That belligerent fiscal policy may have had disastrous consequences for many, but it helped those long on “sound money.” For frugal Quakers with hard cash on hand, it was a great time to buy. Regardless of their motives for doing so, however, by joining America’s antebellum westward migration, the Tomlinsons took part in a singular phenomenon in the history of Western modernity: a startlingly rapid movement of Europeans onto the lands of displaced New World peoples that, in the magnitude of its scale, the rationality of its design, and the nature of its motivating forces, had no previous parallel. The experience of anyone born into the Old Northwest in the nineteenth century would be shaped by the foundational

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contours of that planned mass migration: a legally and politically circumscribed demographic convulsion, orchestrated to serve the social and economic interests of a young nation and its rapidly expanding market economy.

Indiana Quakers, Abolition, and Tomlinson Family Values From the time of their arrival in Indiana, Quakers won praise for their “civilizing” influence on the region. Indiana had been first settled by upland Southerners, and despite subsequent waves of Yankee migration, the stigma of being the most Southern, and therefore the most “backward,” of Northern states lingered.4 No one did more to embellish that unflattering reputation than Henry Ward Beecher, who arrived in Indiana at roughly the same time as the Tomlinsons. Having been sentenced to an Indiana itinerancy after his 1837 graduation from Lane Seminary, Beecher did little to conceal his disdain for the locals: he once described the citizenry of Indianapolis as more “vigilant . . . of each other than of schools, medical arts, agriculture, and the actual commonwealth.” Others were even more severe, like the earlier correspondent who lampooned Indiana as “this new fertile world where ignorance, prejudice, pride . . . and poverty all dwell together in unity.”5 By universal consensus, however, Quakers were an exception to the rule.6 Along with thrift, industry, and high moral tone, they brought a veritable passion for education. Virtually all of their school-age children attended school, and they usually shared their educational resources with the wider community. In Westfield, for example, Quakers founded the first schools, and their diligent efforts earned Westfield a reputation as one of the state’s “most conspicuous literary and educational centers.”7 The Tomlinsons, then, were part of a community that understood itself, and was understood by others, to be one of the state’s most admirable and civilizing forces. The Quaker view of civilization included moral as well as educational uplift, and shortly after their arrival in Indiana, Robert and Lydia Tomlinson began to promote that aspect of the general welfare. Moved by the plight of Southern slaves, they turned to abolitionism. Their zeal would lead them into conflict with the moderate Quakers who dominated the Society of Friends, but it would also secure the family’s place in the vanguard of Quaker social activism. As prominent members of their local congregation, the Westfield Monthly Meeting, it was perhaps inevitable that Robert and Lydia Tomlinson would find themselves embroiled in the abolition controversy, which sharply divided Indiana Quakers. The Indiana Yearly Meeting condemned slavery and endorsed abolition unequivocally, but grave differences arose over the means by which a devout Quaker might acceptably pursue that noble end. The Yearly Meeting insisted that, while Friends should continue to be above all friends of the “colored man,” they should not compromise their commitments to peacemaking or separation from the world in doing so. An 1840 epistle from the Committee on Sufferings of the Indiana Yearly Meeting counseled Friends to “promote the abolition of slavery on peaceable

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principles.” While the committee rejoiced to see others arrive belatedly at a position long held by the Society of Friends, it advised Quakers to labor in their own distinctive way and in their own distinctive “sphere.” Rather than press aggressively for change, Quakers should “wait for divine ability.” Only Jehovah God, not the arm of flesh, could effect lasting reform. Furthermore, the committee cautioned that separation from the world must include separation from the world of “modern abolition,” meaning the antislavery societies then proliferating throughout the North. “Our profession in regard to plainness in dress and address,” it explained, set Quakers apart “not only from the world but from most other professors of the religion of Jesus.” Indiana Friends, the committee resolved, should “abstain from connecting themselves with the abolition and colonization societies.”8 The issues, as complex as they were deeply felt, cut to the heart of Quaker identity. Leaders of the Indiana Yearly Meeting keenly perceived the difficulty of maintaining cultural integrity in a religiously promiscuous environment, particularly one buffeted by winds of social change. Their admonitions regarding abolition reflected that concern and fit consistently within their existing policy on ecumenical intercourse in general. That policy, which sought to erect a bulwark against the very real threat of cultural erosion, had long required Friends to “refrain from the practice of attending the meetings of other societies,” and the violation of that counsel presented one of the most common grounds for disownment.9 In early 1843 an influential block of abolitionist Quakers, rather than separating themselves from the world of mainstream abolitionism, separated themselves instead from the main body of the Society of Friends. Slavery, they felt, represented an enormity of such magnitude that they could not in good conscience excuse themselves from the most effectual means of its removal. When the activists organized a rival society—the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-slavery Friends—the old-line body responded quickly and firmly. “We have . . . been brought into a tried situation,” lamented the Westfield Meeting, “on the subject of the abolition of slavery.” Blame for the “tried situation,” it added, fell squarely on the shoulders of those impetuous Quakers who had “resorted to measures that the Yearly meeting did not approve.” Not only had they forsaken “that meekness and patience which the Gospel recommends,” but by withdrawing into separate meetings they had also shattered “the unity and harmony of the body.”10 The regular Yearly Meeting would have no choice but to disown them. Neither threats of disownment nor appeals to unity and loyalty, however, could dissuade Robert and Lydia Tomlinson from the dictates of their conscience. They promptly joined the new Anti-slavery Society, along with several of their relatives and children, and shared the fate of their fellow activists.11 Why not join other societies? asked the Westfield Women’s Monthly Meeting as it gathered to bear testimony against Lydia Tomlinson. “Let the pretence be as plausible as it may,” it answered, such unions inevitably compromise “our high profession” and risk, for those who so consort, the “shipwreck” of their faith and of “the peace of their own families.”12

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Old-line and antislavery Friends could hardly have been further apart. Abolitionists saw themselves on the cutting edge of Quaker religious life. Their detractors, by contrast, saw them on the assimilating edge, diluting the signal Quaker virtues by collaborating with those who, however well meaning, walked by a lesser light. Both viewpoints had merit. Antislavery Friends had marched to the moral forefront of their community, and in hindsight even those who stayed behind would honor their legacy. By acting decisively, they solidified the Quaker reputation for moral integrity, spiritual authenticity, and prophetic witness. But the leading edge was also the assimilating edge. It cut through protective membranes and opened Quakers to ecumenical influences that did indeed erode the very distinctives that traditionalists feared losing. Antislavery Friends themselves recognized the danger. They did not wish to be conformed to the image of the “world” and took great pains to maintain their nonconformity. They condemned many of the dominant trends of marketdriven American society, including its materialism, its heedless individualism, and the pandemic greed that led every merchant to strive to get the best of every bargain. They also denounced crass majoritarian rule, touting instead their own system: government by consensus under the counsel of the Holy Spirit.13 Finally, by “conforming” to the world of abolitionism, antislavery Quakers proved just how out of step they were with prevailing Hoosier norms. Their fellow citizens had responded to the race crisis first by depriving free blacks of the right to vote, attend white schools, and make contracts and then by forbidding them to settle in the state at all.14 When Frederick Douglass attempted to deliver a whistle-stop speech at Noblesville, Indiana (the Hamilton County seat), an angry mob turned out to greet him.15 Whatever else Robert and Lydia Tomlinson may have been doing, they certainly were not conforming to the “world” of greater Indiana. Activism, then, did not equal conformity, but it did draw the Quakers into the murky realms of social engagement and political influence. Antislavery Friends petitioned the Ohio and Indiana legislatures to end racially discriminatory laws. They petitioned Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, to end the interstate slave trade, to rescind the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law, and to admit no more slave states into the union. They urged their members to vote only for antislavery candidates. Finally, they targeted malefactors’ pocketbooks, boycotting any products tainted by the stain of slavery.16 Quaker antislavery societies were, of course, ripe with irony: schismatics extolling rule by consensus, nonconformists conforming to the tactics of Republican activism. But to their credit they were aware of many of these contradictions and struggled conscientiously with the dilemmas inherent to any community that covets both purity and political relevance, both peace and social justice. As it turned out, the demise of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Antislavery Friends came not by assimilation into the world but by reassimilation into mainstream Quakerism. Shortly after the 1843 rupture, the regular Yearly Meeting began to soften its opposition to abolitionism, and as differences that had once seemed irreconcilable faded, old ties beckoned. Robert and Lydia, among the first to leave, were also among the first to return, rejoining the

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Westfield Monthly Meeting in spring 1850.17 By 1854 the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Antislavery Friends had been discontinued altogether, and Lydia and Robert had resumed the positions of influence they had held before their departure.18 The Tomlinson family had come full circle, but they did not return unscathed. Decisions made in the course of that brief schism would alter Tomlinson family dynamics and local religious politics for years to come. Those alterations are perhaps best seen in the inner workings of a small satellite congregation, the Chester Preparative Meeting of Friends, that Robert and Lydia helped organize not long after they regained membership in the Westfield Meeting.19 A “preparative” meeting, in the Quaker tradition, denoted a subordinate meeting organized either to fill some practical need or to plant a new congregation in a mutually agreed-on area. Those attending the preparative continued to hold membership in the monthly meeting (within which they could also hold office), but they met and conducted local business at the preparative. If a preparative meeting grew large enough and met other criteria, then it could petition for recognition as a separate monthly meeting. The very organization of Chester may have been a legacy of communal ties forged in the antislavery schism. But whether old alienations or new expediencies loomed largest in the considerations that produced the Chester preparative, the new entity provided the stage for a Tomlinson family drama. Of Robert and Lydia’s three elder sons (Milton, Noah, and Allen), only Allen had joined them among the antislavery Friends. Robert would ultimately choose Allen to be the executor of his will, and Allen would serve Chester Preparative as a leader and generous benefactor. Allen’s son Orlando would become an evangelist as well respected as he was well known for his holiness leanings. Of the three sons, only Noah had kept full faith with the regular meeting, retaining his membership and conducting his marriage in good order. Noah, the son who never left, would along with his children emerge as the true pillar of Chester Preparative.20 Milton Tomlinson, the firstborn, simply dropped out along the way. The internecine squabble that split Hamilton County Quakers only partly explains his lapse, but when the family returned to the Westfield fold, Milton was missing, and his name was conspicuously absent from Chester’s organizing petition as well.21 Along with the prosaic legacy of church and family politics, however, a loftier one was born during the Tomlinson excursus into social activism. That legacy would be cherished and memorialized down through the generations, laying the cornerstones of a family folklore rich in tales of moral heroism and of high principle followed to the point of civil disobedience. Even Robert and Lydia’s nonchurchgoing descendants, like Milton Tomlinson and his son Ambrose, would share in that inheritance. The salient tale in that folklore recounted an exploit on the Underground Railroad shortly after Robert and Lydia had joined the antislavery Friends.22 John Rhodes, a former slave, had settled near Westfield after absconding from his owner in Missouri. In 1844, slave hunters finally tracked him down and persuaded the county court to summon him to Noblesville, beyond the reach

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of Westfield Quakers. When authorities tried to escort Rhodes out of town under the cover of darkness, however, the Quakers blocked their path, and in the ensuing confusion someone spirited Rhodes away. For the next several days he was shuttled between safe houses, finally landing at the Tomlinson farm. Unfortunately, Rhodes’s pursuers discovered his whereabouts and descended on their prey. To the rescue came young Milton Tomlinson, twentyfour years of age, who led Rhodes on a perilous flight through a forbidding swamp and to safety at last. That breathless night would be sculpted into a centerpiece of Tomlinson family history. More than eighty years later, A. J. Tomlinson’s cousins staged those events in dramatic form for their annual family reunion. The “Grand Pageant” made headlines in the county paper, which gushed about the crowd of 400 people and, more wondrous still, their 125 automobiles.23 All in all, the pageant told as much about the Tomlinson family as it did about Westfield’s abolitionist past. The family legend and the pageant itself each conveyed a moral. The moral of the legend was the ethical heroism at the core of Tomlinson family values. The moral of the pageant—hosted by pillars of the local community, covered by the local news, and attended by neighbors and relatives decked out in finery and transported by their new automobiles—was the family’s relative affluence and social status, past and present. A Tomlinson’s place, the story and the pageant together suggested, lay at the social and religious fore of the community.

Milton and Delilah Ambrose Tomlinson’s cousins, in their carefully wrought pageant, presented the family past in morally heroic terms. Ambrose himself described it more ambiguously. He had been reared, he said, in a “moral rural district among Quakers.” But environmental morality did not mean deep piety at home. According to Ambrose, his parents rarely attended church, and he himself knew nothing “about the bible or religion.”24 Late in life he would reiterate these memories of an unchurched childhood but with added poignancy. The nearest his family had come to a religious service, he recalled, was on the occasional Sunday morning when “my mother would get out the big family Bible and look over the names of the children that had died.” The young boy watched closely as his mother held the book open on her lap, as if cradling the names of her dead, and quietly wept. He was touched by this private ritual, he confided, “because mother would cry”; but, though moved by the sight of his mother’s tears, he remained ignorant of the message found in the book that she so lovingly held. The Bible, for Tomlinson, remained little more than a family shrine, a neatly bound mausoleum whose leaves held “the names of my dead brothers and sisters.”25 Given the fact that Tomlinson’s closest relatives were pillars of local religious life, we might suspect that his later account of his childhood owed as much to the dictates of evangelical conversion narrative as to the actual realities

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of his home life. That narrative, in its paradigmatic form, called for a radical transition from darkness into light, a crisis conversion typically preceded by an extended phase of searching amid the shadows, punctuated by divine overtures that drew the sinner ever nearer to repentance. For those socialized into an evangelical community and its rituals of “testimony”—the public retelling of personal redemption stories—the power of that narrative structure could leave the malleable stuff of human experience with a considerably bleaker past than it had originally possessed. One might reasonably suspect, then, that Tomlinson either wittingly or unwittingly understated the pious influences on his upbringing. And he did, in fact, remain oddly silent about the religiosity of his relatives, leaving the salient moments of his spiritual pilgrimage to irrupt unforeseeably onto the secular landscape of his life. Nevertheless, Tomlinson’s portrayal of his childhood home life, on further examination, does not appear far wrong. If Ambrose’s grandfather, Robert Tomlinson, embodied the principled impulse in the dialectic of Quaker western settlement, then his father represented the pragmatic. Like the second-generation Puritan who, when asked about his lax church attendance, explained, “My father came here for religion, but I came for fish,” Milton Tomlinson was by all indications an enterprising, earthlyminded man with little regard for organized religion.26 Though a birthright Quaker, he had severed his ties to the Westfield Monthly Meeting, as we have seen, long before Ambrose’s birth during the antislavery schism. That schism, in all likelihood, played a role in his defection. The contention over slavery, as the Westfield Monthly Meeting had predicted and as its censorious policy had ensured, shattered the peace of many families, including that of the Tomlinsons. Faced with his parents and two siblings among the antislavery Friends, his brother among the regular Friends, and the community at large engulfed in a storm of bickering, Milton excused himself from the Society of Friends altogether. He left no account of these events, leaving us to guess at his motives. He may have responded to the religious infighting with cynicism and disgust. To many young Quakers of his generation, the dispute over abolition must have seemed part and parcel of an endemic provincialism and narrow moralism. Quaker minutes of the time abound with cases like that of William Tenney, censured for “attending places of diversion where there was fidling and dancing and . . . for departing from plainness in dress and address.”27 But circumstantial evidence suggests another, more personal motive at work. In the rift that divided the Tomlinsons from the regular Westfield Meeting and from each other, Milton may well have supplied the story behind the story. In February 1842, Milton Tomlinson stood before Justice of the Peace Benjamin Wheeler, with Elias Bradfield attesting, and took Hannah Davis in marriage.28 A civil ceremony, though forbidden by their church, was not uncommon among young Quakers of the time. Whether to circumvent the church’s tedious process of inquiry and approval or to secure the advantages of civil marriage, a steady stream of nuptially inclined Quakers (including all of the Tomlinson brothers save Noah) forsook the meetinghouse for the court-

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house. In the eyes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, however, a sin’s popularity was no grounds for its toleration. The young couple drew a complaint of misconduct for their peccadillo and was charged with marriage “contrary to our discipline.”29 The vast majority of such cases, including this one, involved birthright Quakers from upstanding families who had simply yielded to the temptations of a worldly wedding. Reconciliation was the most common outcome, but that did not mean that it came easily or that the offense was taken lightly. At least, the Westfield Monthly Meeting did not take the Tomlinson case lightly. Its representatives entreated with Milton and Hannah on several occasions, and both spouses indicated their willingness to make “offerings” or public statements discountenancing their own behavior. But the meeting chose to move slowly, somehow not fully convinced that the two were truly repentant or, as the women said of Hannah, “in a disposition fully to condemn her conduct.” The matter dragged on for months while the elders held the couple over the fire. Finally, in fall 1842, the meeting voted to accept the young couple’s offering of repentance. Hannah was seven months pregnant with her first child when she and Milton were finally reconciled to the Society of Friends. On December 19, 1842, Hannah gave birth to her first child, Abigail Tomlinson. It would be her last. One month later, on January 25, 1843, she died, presumably from complications of childbirth. Milton might conceivably have taken solace in the knowledge that his wife had been reconciled to the church in the months before her death. His future actions, however, suggest otherwise. He seems rather to have held the church, which had harassed his wife over the better part of her pregnancy, at least partly responsible for her death. The sting of Hannah’s death may have had wider ramifications as well. Only a few months later, Robert and Lydia left the Westfield Meeting for the Anti-slavery Society of Friends. The evidence, again, is circumstantial, but it comports well with what we might expect of parents wounded by the treatment of their children and struck by the hypocrisy of a church that would strain at the gnat of civil ceremonies while swallowing the camel of human bondage. Be that as it may, with his parents disowned from the monthly meeting, Milton’s days in the Society of Friends were numbered. The October meeting that had accepted Hannah’s offering of repentance had, ironically, also received the membership of Delilah Hiatt, minor daughter of Solomon Hiatt.30 She would soon become the second wife of Milton Tomlinson and provide the occasion for his final breach with the Westfield Monthly Meeting. In November 1844, three months after receiving a deed to forty acres of his father’s land, Milton once again made his way to the courthouse.31 While there he exchanged vows with Delilah Hiatt before Justice of the Peace William Frost.32 Eight months later, the Westfield Monthly Meeting disowned Delilah Hiatt Tomlinson for marriage “contrary to our discipline” and for neglecting church attendance. Her husband’s disownment followed shortly thereafter.33 This time, no offerings would be presented, and no satisfaction would be made. These were Friends whose company Milton Tomlinson did not care to keep.

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Family Business Disownment from the monthly meeting posed no great disability in the larger sphere of worldly Quakers, and although Tomlinson lost his right of membership in the Society of Friends, he retained his Quaker business contacts, his influence in the community, and his prospects for material comfort. In fact, the records indicate that his departure from active church life coincided with a steady increase in his temporal assets.34 Milton never amassed a real fortune, but he did reach a level of affluence that placed him among the top 10–20 percent of farmers at a time when farmers were among the county’s most prosperous citizens. Moreover, he ranked as the wealthiest and most land-rich of all the Tomlinson boys. Even the local press made occasional reference to his rising fortunes, as when the Noblesville Ledger remarked on an impressive addition to “his already spacious barn.”35 Tomlinson put that relative affluence on display in several local biographies. Though publications like T. B. Helm’s History of Hamilton County, Indiana, Illustrated offered at best an uneven social profile of a community, they did feature individuals of means and, perhaps more importantly, individuals who aspired to respectability and social standing. Helm listed Milton Tomlinson as a “Raiser of Fine Stock and Farmer.”36 The description was technically true, yet it hardly captured the full range of his occupational interests. Tomlinson was indeed a farmer but in the new, entrepreneurial style. His grandson remembered him as an enterprising “go-getter” who built roads and sawmills and invested in railroad stock, in addition to having a yen for the best equipment and the latest technology.37 In short, Milton Tomlinson was a farmercapitalist, the kind of small town entrepreneur who funneled his agricultural profits into potentially more lucrative ventures, such as the construction of roadbeds and railways. Like most of his contemporaries, Tomlinson occupied a place in the broad middle of the emerging market economy. The new industrial order, as noted earlier, had its gargantuan industries and its burgeoning cities, but they were never the whole story. A plenitude of thriving towns with their merchants, petty contractors, middlemen, and professionals filled the interstices of the modernizing nation’s economy. Milton Tomlinson—farmer, stock raiser, independent contractor—had carved out a niche in that vast middle landscape of the new market. Although Milton no longer accompanied his brother Noah to Sunday meeting, the two spent their weekdays collaborating on business ventures. So close was their partnership that when a young lad at Chester Preparative was told that “Noah built the Ark,” he quickly retorted, “I bet Milton helped him.”38 The Tomlinson brothers came by their business savvy naturally. Their father, Robert, had also shown a pragmatic nose for where the economic action was, and the business ventures he led offer a revealing view of the intersection of industrialization and rural life in the early nineteenth century.39 As young men the sons helped their father supply apples to crews putting

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the National Road through central Indiana, and over the years the family remained watchful for attractive commercial opportunities, whose rewards could then be parlayed into agricultural improvements. For example, they once used profits earned by transporting sugar to Indianapolis to buy an improved plow (perhaps one of the steel plows cranked out by John Deere’s new factory in Moline, Illinois). Soon after, they purchased the neighborhood’s first mechanical reaper, in all likelihood shipped straight from Cyrus McCormick’s Chicago factory. Agricultural improvements, in turn, led to further profits, which could underwrite new lines of business. The Tomlinson boys hauled boilers to Indianapolis mills, and in 1849 they helped their father build Hamilton County’s “first successful steam sawmill.” The lumber from that newfangled sawmill went into another sign of progress: a railroad bridge spanning the White River at Noblesville.40 Following in their father’s footsteps, Milton and Noah kept a diverse portfolio of business ventures. They were best known, however, as road builders and even gained a measure of local fame for guiding the construction of what is now Highway 31 through a notorious swamp, widely thought impassable. During the 1860s, they helped extend a gravel road from Westfield to Indianapolis. By the 1880s, the brothers could look back on four decades of contributions to the region’s transportation infrastructure, the roads and rails that connected Westfield to markets from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and opened it to the vital flow of people, goods, and information passing through the region. Milton and Noah, for all this, remained “farmers,” a term that belied their place on the leading edge of local change.

Family Politics Bigger barns and biographical sketches did not provide the only measures of Milton Tomlinson’s social standing. Another came with his imprint on local politics. As his membership in the Society of Friends lapsed, his membership in the local Republican Party was just beginning. This was not remarkable, for politics was by then a family tradition. One local historian traced the Tomlinson political lineage to Milton’s grandfather, William Tomlinson, an “ardent Whig.”41 Robert Tomlinson had followed that trajectory into the party of Lincoln when it rose from the ashes of Whiggery, and his sons, as they came of age, joined him in the Republican defense of patriotism, prosperity, moral order, and the federal way. Milton Tomlinson, building on that heritage, became a figure of note in local politics, where he often represented Washington Township at district and state Republican conventions.42 In an era when politics served as equal parts civic duty, moral reform, economic self-defense, team sport, and good-natured entertainment, and at a time when county leaders were the “workhorses of party politics,” Milton’s political involvements placed him at the center of community life.43 Tomlinson’s civic service, moreover, extended beyond the polling place to the circuit court, where he occasionally served as a juror and as a temporary

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commissioner.44 Unfortunately, he attended civil proceedings even more frequently as a defendant. Whether owing to a litigious nature or to the inescapable entanglements of business life, Milton’s name appeared frequently on the civil court docket. From 1875 to 1885 he fended off at least seven lawsuits, as many as five at one time. He proved to be a resourceful defendant, invoking an imaginative array of appeals, changes of venue, and points of order, though usually in a losing cause.45 Lose he might—but not without a fight: he battled two of the seven cases all the way to the State Supreme Court.46 The picture of Milton Tomlinson that emerges from the court records is of a relatively prominent, competitive, even stubborn businessman, with an aversion to compromise matched only by his deep desire to win.

Delilah Tomlinson The public record says less of Delilah Tomlinson than of her husband Milton, and her only son did little to fill in the blanks. What we do know about Delilah is that she spent much of her life in the valley of the shadow of death. She lived to see the first five of her nine children die, three in childhood. A. J.’s most vivid portrait of his mother, as we have seen, highlights her familiarity with the anatomy of loss: that poignant image of a seated, middle-aged woman, quietly weeping over an open family Bible whose pages held the names of her dead children. Perhaps she found solace in the stock consolations of the day, such as those to which her neighbors, Jacob and Mary Bales, had turned on the “inexpressible” loss of a “promising” child. “I trust it is his everlasting gain,” they wrote, “the Lord giveth and he taketh away blessed be the name of the Lord.”47 Regardless of whether and how she found comfort, Delilah’s way of honoring her lost children appears to have been by preserving their memory through expressions of grief. The effect on her surviving children could not have been negligible. Ambrose, for instance, grew up knowing perfectly well that he was an only son by default, simply because “my brothers had all died when they were very young.”48 Of course, he had not attended the solemn words or seen the small bodies lowered to their graves, but he was keenly aware of their departed presences, nonetheless. Finally, if the published biographical sketches of Milton Tomlinson are any indication, Delilah may have labored under another deathly shadow. In those accounts she is virtually eclipsed by effusions of praise to that first, briefly tenured wife, Hannah, who those many years before had died (the better to be remembered, Delilah might have permitted herself to think) after bearing a healthy child.49

6 Portrait of the Patriarch as a Young Man

As the only son of Robert and Lydia Tomlinson’s eldest child, young Ambrose knew his fair share of privilege. He came of age in a locally prominent family accustomed to all the advantages that relative affluence and social standing typically afford. Nevertheless, when viewed through the eyes of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, that upbringing seemed less than ideal. In particular, hints of perceived neglect bleed through his later recollections of those early days. “Father and mother were most always busy and did not take much time with me,” he told his followers in 1941, “except some special times like Christmas . . . and Easter.” In the place of parents, he seems to have felt, he had five older sisters. “I learned almost all I knew from them,” he recalled.1 The intimations of neglect that shadowed Tomlinson’s memories of his youth, however, were in all likelihood born less of neglect than of natural distance. When Ambrose was born, Milton was fortyfive, and Delilah was six months shy of forty. His half sister Abigail, at twenty-three, was old enough to be his mother. (Though unmarried, she was four years older than Delilah had been when Delilah delivered her first child.) A wide age gap need not mean psychological distance between parent and child, but in this case the gap seems only to have widened with time. For Milton and Ambrose, moreover, that gap—sharpened perhaps by the shadings of temperamental difference that might distinguish an eldest child and first of several sons from a youngest child and only son—was mirrored in the stark physical contrast between the two men. Milton, burly and renowned for his strength, cut an imposing figure. Ambrose, on the other hand, was slight of build, so small at birth that he had to be carried on a pillow, suggesting a pre-

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mature delivery. His chance of survival seemed so slim that Delilah is said to have prayed for him to be healed only if destined for greatness. Otherwise, she deemed it better for the hand of Providence to let him pass.2 Ambrose survived but remained small, resembling his Uncle Noah in stature more than his father.3 Despite his size, however, he proved to be quite athletic and was especially adept at footraces. An early indication of both his prowess and his temperament came in an uphill race that, as A. J. later told it, amazed contestants and spectators alike. Though trailing woefully at the start, at the hill’s final and sharpest incline Ambrose surged ahead and won.4 For Tomlinson, the most satisfying aspect of this oft-told victory lay in the fact that, though the smallest and least-regarded contestant, he had won the race. His way of telling the story, moreover, reveals an appreciation for the value of stamina and perseverance and a deep-seated taste for beating the odds. Like that race, Tomlinson seems to have felt, life for him was an uphill run, but through determination and endurance he could still win the day. Having battled long odds and physical shortcomings from birth, in childhood Ambrose faced the loss of loved ones. In a span of less than two years, both Lydia and Robert Tomlinson died, leaving the ten-year-old boy bereft of the grandparents who had been the foundation of his extended family. At roughly the same time a new theme, spiritual awakening, surfaced intriguingly in his life. Looking back from a distance of almost four decades, A. J. would claim that at the paradigmatic age of twelve—the age of accountability, the age at which Jesus first inquired of the priests in the Temple—he had experienced his first religious epiphany. While working in the fields, Tomlinson, like the prophet Samuel in the house of Eli, heard a voice call him by his pet name. Thinking it was his father, Ambrose answered, but his puzzled father assured him that he had not called. Twice again the voice rang out, and twice again his father denied having spoken. Afterward, A. J. said, he kept the strange experience to himself (we are to imagine him “pondering these things in his heart,” like Mary after the shepherds’ visit). But he had been awakened to spiritual things.5 Given the archetypal cast of this account, it is tempting to believe that the forty-eight-year-old Tomlinson’s memory had slightly displaced that religious awakening, rounding it up from his tenth to his twelfth year. In that case the epiphany would have coincided both with the passing of his pious grandparents and with a fervent revival held in Westfield that year by holiness Quaker evangelists David Updegraff and Amos Kenworthy.6 Regardless of the exact timing of this episode, however, Tomlinson’s account of it says a great deal about his relationship with his father. Even if A. J.’s rendering inadvertently borrowed its structure from the biblical call narrative of the prophet Samuel, his appropriation of that narrative, at the very least, is significant. By it he relegated his father to the roles of background presence and mistaken source relative to the mysterious voice that called his name. Whatever we might make of that voice, whether of men, of angels, or of sublimated grandparental loss, we are left to understand that his long journey toward a living faith was not of his father’s making.

portrait of the patriarch as a young man

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We know little about Ambrose Tomlinson’s adolescence, but three things are clear: he was gifted academically; he continued to face illness and misfortune; and his father at least tried to take an active role in his life. The two years of grammar school report cards that survive show a student of exceptional ability. They also reveal a severe illness that caused him to miss approximately one-third of his classes during the 1879–1880 school year.7 No cause of illness is given in the report cards, but the census records of 1880 indicate that he had been stricken by cholera. That physical illness, moreover, was followed closely by yet another personal loss. In 1881, a year after Ambrose’s recovery, his sister Emily died. She was his closest sibling in age.8 We can only speculate as to whether she died of cholera and, if so, how Ambrose would have interpreted her death in contrast to his own survival. During this period of illness and loss Milton Tomlinson took an active interest in his son’s future, preparing him, apparently, for a white-collar career. Milton sent Ambrose to writing schools and encouraged him to practice his writing at home. As a means of compliance, Ambrose began a diary in which he recorded the sundry activities of his every day.9 The evidence, again, is circumstantial, but we might naturally suspect that Milton, resigned to the possibility that his son would never be equal to the hard physical labor on which his own prosperity depended, thought it best to prepare him for a less strenuous line of work. Whatever he may have thought of his son’s prospects, however, Milton Tomlinson followed his son’s academic progress closely during these years, signing off on his report cards more often than Delilah did. Given this level of paternal involvement, the implicit alienation that one reads between the lines (and especially in the paucity of lines) devoted by A. J. to his father seems, again, less a reflection of neglect than a natural consequence of disparities in age and personality, sharpened perhaps by a perceptive son’s awareness of his father’s quiet disappointment. On the other hand, it may simply indicate that, though Ambrose lacked his father’s stature, he lacked none of his father’s strong will. Small and sickly he may then have been, but he would not rest content in the shadow, even the long twilight shadow, of his aging father.

Westfield, Indiana Most of what we know about Ambrose Tomlinson’s teenage years must be tentatively assembled from scattered pieces of evidence or teased from brief allusions imbedded in his conversion narrative. The diaries he faithfully kept over those years have disappeared.10 Nevertheless, we can reconstruct at least the outline of his life and the character of the local world that framed it. At seventeen Ambrose Tomlinson graduated from the Chester grammar school and began attending the local Quaker academy, Union High School, in Westfield.11 The high school catalog that year boasted of the many advantages that Westfield afforded to incoming students. Adorned with many churches but “free from saloons, billiard rooms, and skating rinks,” it claimed an excep-

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tionally refined “religious and moral culture.” But straitlaced and upright did not mean moribund. Westfield, the catalog added, was also “an enterprising place, having all the advantages of natural gas.”12 Here modernity and morality met, and piety and progress kissed in harmony.

“Religious and Moral Culture” Westfield, Indiana—proud of its abolitionist past, zealous of its temperance present—could indeed claim to be long on religious and moral culture. Abolition and temperance formed the twin pillars of nineteenth-century moralism, the two epic crusades that tested the mettle of Protestants in the antebellum and Victorian eras, respectively. Temperance, then, offered Westfield Quakers in the 1880s a means to reproduce the heroism of their parents and grandparents. But the similarities between the two movements went beyond moral heroism. As broad-based, ecumenical movements with an assertive edge, abolition and temperance marked the activist boundary where “modern” Quakerism engaged the larger society and its most vexing dilemmas. As such, each served as its generation’s prime vehicle for Quaker assimilation into the larger evangelical world.13 These two defining movements met, in a sense, one extraordinary day in 1882, the year Ambrose enrolled at Union High. The story begins in 1880 with the opening of the Monon Railroad, which at last brought the “tracks” to Westfield proper. With the tracks came their “other side.” Opportunists quickly saw the potential of that new, transgressive space in a bone-dry town and agitated for the right to open a saloon. Wouldbe liquor vendors abounded, but because no Westfield citizen dared sell or lease them any ground, the presumably lucrative potential of a Westfield watering hole went untapped. Finally, one persistent entrepreneur convinced the railroad company to allow a saloon on its right of way. When the town fathers caught wind of the scheme, they were incensed and exhausted every legal means possible to prevent the outrage. Their efforts, however, were to no avail, and a saloon went up under their very noses. That was when the town mothers took over. Shortly after the last failed legal proceeding, a mob of Quaker women materialized in the streets of Westfield, their sober dress contrasting sharply with the assortment of clubs, axes, and hatchets they were brandishing. The Women’s Meeting of the Society of Friends had obviously resolved the tension between pacifism and purity in favor of the virtue most imminently endangered. As the crowd marched toward its objective it grew larger and more ecumenical, swelling to an interdenominational entourage of teetotal women. Even Phoebe Doan, one of the town’s most prominent Quaker women, rushed from her front porch to join in, leaving her infant daughter, Francis Willard Doan, behind in the care of others. When the temperance mob reached the makeshift saloon, Sarah Barker, an imposing woman even without the axe she was wielding, stepped to the fore. Then the women came face to face with the unexpected. Whether by accident or by design, the saloon owner had sprung a profound dilemma on


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the women: he had posted an African American guard, armed with a revolver, in front of his establishment. Having sliced one Gordian knot, the women of Westfield now faced another. Would it be friendship with the freedman or enmity with the Devil? Like pacifism, abolition proved no match for righteous indignation. The women charged, the guard fired high, and within minutes the saloon had been reduced first to splinters and broken glass and then to a raging bonfire. In the aftermath of events, and perhaps to repair the broken threads that normally held peace, purity, and compassion together in the Quaker ethic, the Friends compensated the owner for his losses. The owner, in turn, brought no charges and poured his remaining stock into the gutter. It was the first and only time that liquor ran like water through the streets of Westfield.14 As this anecdote suggests, Westfield society rallied around a severe evangelical ethic. Moral culture, more than religious, formed the basis of social consensus, with most evangelical denominations damning vice and frivolity as fiercely as did the Quakers.15 Furthermore, townsfolk were not above moral vigilantism, as when a local chapter of the “White Caps” abducted a young man and lashed him for laziness and failure to support his family.16 But if its moral culture provided social common ground, Westfield’s religious culture featured differentiation. Around its Quaker-Wesleyan core swirled eddies of religious contradiction.17 Much has been made of the diversity of American high culture in the late nineteenth century, but that diversity easily met its match in the social and geographical hinterlands. Regions like north-central Indiana, as much home to the socialist Eugene Debs as to Albert Beveridge, the state’s jingoistic senator, nourished a blossoming tangle of religious sects, which clashed with each other and with a lively population of log-cabin agnostics and atheists, socialists and anarchists. To be sure, many of those sects shared common underlying instincts, most prominently the “primitivist impulse” described in chapter 2. The area found its quintessential primitivists, perhaps, in a new sect whose members called themselves simply “Christians.” Indianapolis had become a notable stronghold for this movement, with Daniel Sommer as its most visible local spokesperson.18 Bolder primitivists, on the other hand, could gravitate toward Daniel Warner’s Christian Reformation movement, which called itself “the Church of God.” Nearby Anderson would soon emerge as its headquarters. Westfield’s thriving African American community made a further contribution to the area’s diverse religious life. As we have seen, escaped slaves and free blacks had been settling there since the days of the Underground Railroad, and by the 1880s they composed 13 percent of all households in the township. At least two black families were among the Tomlinsons’ closest neighbors.19 Consequently, Westfield enjoyed an enduring reputation for racial tolerance. “Even to this day,” a local historian declared in 1915, “there is no sharply drawn line between the races in Westfield.”20 In the context of its times that pronouncement was not as hyperbolic as it now seems. Throughout most of central Indiana, African Americans faced daily and tangible perils. Local vigilantes

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were known to greet the threat of miscegenation by braiding a hangman’s noose, and Indianapolis would soon emerge as the national capital of the reorganized Ku Klux Klan.21 Against that backdrop, Westfield stood out like an oasis in a desert of racism. Though present year-round, the African American contribution to Westfield religious culture culminated each summer in a “colored campmeeting” that drew eminent black figures from far and wide and took Westfield’s center stage.22 Looking back on her youth, former resident Lena Howe Sanders counted among her strongest recollections “the annual camp meetings held . . . in Bowman’s woods north of town about a mile.” Whites like Sanders were welcome at the rough-hewn, kerosene-lit campground, but in a reversal of roles they “stayed on the outskirts,” marginals in a society formed by and for blacks. That reversal, moreover, overflowed the campgrounds. “For a week,” Sanders recalled, “the town belonged to the Negroes.”23 African Americans were certainly not alone in the practice of fervent and enthusiastic piety, but nothing did more to popularize it around Westfield than this annual camp meeting. Quakers and sundry evangelicals, black or white, did not have the religious field to themselves, however. The county had its smattering of Universalists and Christian Scientists, and all incarnations of Christianity had to contend with Robert Ingersoll–style rationalists such as Dr. Jasper Monroe, who published a free-thought paper from Indianapolis titled the Iron-Clad Age.24 With its own lively religious environment, and the clashing sounds of Indianapolis a not-so-distant thunder to the south, Westfield could rightly boast of a flourishing religious culture. General interest in the subject ran high, and local newspapers met that interest with sermons from the leading ministers of the day and articles debating such religious topics as the proper mode and time of baptism.25 Religion, along with politics, supplied the community’s daily measure of controversy and simultaneously its reservoir of shared assumptions and common, if contested, preoccupations.

“An Enterprising Place” As the Union High catalog boasted, Westfield had more to offer than Christianity. It had the advantages of natural gas. Time has translated that proud claim from boast into burlesque, but it would have carried real weight for a rural community in the late 1800s, proving it to be no languishing backwater but, rather, a genuine center of “enterprise.” Local citizens hailed natural gas, from the time of its discovery beneath the farm fields of Hamilton County in the 1880s, as a harbinger of progress. In this case, progress meant lighted farmyards, heated henhouses, and gaslit streets. It also meant open flames billowing into the air, around the clock, giving the night sky an eerie, yellowish hue.26 In addition to natural gas, the advent of the railroad gave further evidence of Westfield’s standing as “an enterprising place.” The first railroad had reached Hamilton County in 1851, when the Indianapolis Peru and Chicago, running north–south, passed through the county seat at Noblesville.27 By 1876 it had been joined by the Anderson-Lebanon-St. Louis, running east–west just


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south of Westfield.28 In 1880 the Monon Railroad, linking Indianapolis and Chicago, brought rails to the very outskirts of town. Finally, in 1884, Westfield became the “western terminus” of the Indiana Midland Railroad, fully integrating the town into the rails that ran the nation.29 Folks in a central Indiana town in the last quarter of the nineteenth century would have had every reason to talk about progress and enterprise. As the state’s manufacturing center shifted northward from the Ohio River toward the Great Lakes, large-scale industrialization in the region had come into its own.30 Furthermore, the region lay directly between two major junctions in the nation’s economic nexus. On the one end lay Chicago, the fastest-growing city in the world over the last half of the nineteenth century.31 On the other lay Indianapolis, second fiddle to Chicago but—as America’s twenty-seventh mostpopulous city and capital of its sixth most-populous state—large in its own eyes.32 Theodore Groll’s Washington Street, Indianapolis at Dusk (1895) captures the flavor of that burgeoning city as it grew into the new era. A wide avenue is alive with pedestrians milling around storefronts and outdoor markets. A concert of gaslights makes the dusk navigable along the telephone pole–lined street, and a twilight view of the cityscape shows that church spires have surrendered their preeminence to an imposing capitol building and a handful of cloudscrapers. The carts rumbling over the cobblestone streets and the trolley cars ferrying passengers to and from their evening affairs are still horse-drawn, but electricity, we can be sure, is on its way.33 The central achievement of this painting lies in its ability to convey the juxtaposition of mud and mortar, horse and rail, characteristic of the late-Victorian American city. To viewers today Washington Street may seem suffused by a raw, half-finished light. To the pedestrians and passengers caught in Groll’s brushstrokes, however, it was the translucent sheen of progress. The shaggy urban growth that caught Groll’s artistic eye did not undermine the confidence of outlying towns like Westfield. Strategically situated in the urban “borderland,” they shared the general euphoria of Indianapolis without suffering its most egregious defects. With natural gas, a railroad terminal, and a surrounding county serviced by the finest gravel roads, the citizens of Westfield had no doubt that they had landed in the smack-dab middle of modernity.

Young Man about Town The teenaged Tomlinson who imbibed this Westfield world was by all indications a fun-loving and carefree young man noted for his pranks and good humor: a “live wire,” as his first biographer put it.34 A. J., as he now called himself, wrote little about these years, although he did mention that at seventeen he felt a second spiritual awakening. During his first year of high school, a local revival led most of his classmates to conversion and Tomlinson himself to a state of deep introspection.35 The revival in question would almost

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certainly have been a protracted meeting held by William Wooton during the winter break of the 1882–1883 school year. Area papers reported forty conversions on New Year’s Day, 100 overall.36 Though deeply convicted, Tomlinson had resisted full conversion. Predictably, his spiritual condition worsened, causing his mother “sleepless nights because she feared her boy was going to the bad.”37 Tomlinson may have been turning bad, but the most pernicious vices we can actually identify are political enthusiasm and a penchant for the “intense excitement” of the stage. Throughout his young adulthood, A. J. showed great zeal for the “political issues of the day.” During one hotly contested election he placed a wager with destiny, hoping to influence the outcome. Should his party lose, he swore, he would emigrate to Australia; should it win, he would marry and settle down. “The contest was severe,” he recalled, “and I came near losing my life on account of my reckless enthusiasm.” But in the end his party won, and he kept his vow, marrying Mary Jane Taylor in 1889. She would remain his companion for life. Two historical notes can be deduced from this brief account. First, the near-death experience apparently refers to an episode recounted in more detail by Lillian Duggar. At a campaign bonfire, A. J. snatched a man’s hat from his head and threw it into the flames. The man, infuriated, drew his knife and lunged for his tormentor, but bystanders restrained him in the nick of time.38 Second, the account shows A. J. to have been a partisan Republican: in 1888 Benjamin Harrison narrowly edged out his Democratic opponent, Grover Cleveland, despite losing the popular vote. Neither Tomlinson’s political passion nor his party affiliation would have been remarkable. Great sport in most quarters of post-Jacksonian America, politics generated special intensity in Indiana, which drew disproportionate attention in national races because the balance of power between the parties was so evenly divided there. As we have seen, the young man’s Republican affiliation was equally predictable, for the Tomlinsons, like most other Quakers, property-owning farmers, merchants, and citizens of standing, traditionally held to the party of Lincoln.39 As he prepared to step into the world of adult responsibility, then, A. J. seemed well fitted to the Tomlinson family mold. In January 1889, three months before his marriage, A. J. wrote a casual letter to a Westfield friend and future business associate, Ellis Barker. The letter has survived to become, in the absence of his teenage diaries, our first audience with Tomlinson in his own voice. The playful and carefree tone of the letter may strike us as surprising—but only because it represents that rarest of commodities: a glimpse of Tomlinson’s life not filtered through the prism of salvation history or redrawn to the contours of evangelical narrative. Contemporary and unguarded, it breathes the air of a world different from that of his later autobiographical musings. Tomlinson and Barker knew each other through a circle of friends centered in the local Grassy Narrows literary society, where both performed in a drama troupe. Barker had recently moved, and Tomlinson now wrote with news from home. “Please pardon me for not writing sooner,” he began, “I have no excuse


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to offer . . . only that I just did not get at it.” Rather than tending to his correspondence, he confessed, he had been farming, plowing “twenty two acres last month and this.” Yet hard work did not mean no play. Tomlinson had enjoyed himself “tolerably well most of the time,” sharing “a few laughs” with their common friends. A. J. let Barker know that he was missed, reporting that another actor had taken his place on occasion but had just not been able to fill his shoes. Following the introductory small talk, Tomlinson related two items of special interest. First, he mentioned his courtship of a young woman, the hereunnamed Mary Jane Taylor. Arriving at her Dublin, Indiana, home on Christmas evening, he had over the course of the following days taken her to a “show,” socialized widely, and generally enjoyed a “grand time.” Second, Tomlinson relayed news from Grassy Narrows. His “legal” entanglements at the society’s kangaroo court—an applied civic lesson combining prankishness with practical experience—topped the headlines. Having already been “arrested, tried and convicted once for nonperformance of duty,” A. J. had promptly run afoul of literary society law again: “Last Saturday night I was arrested . . . for stealing Harley Cook’s gloves. The gloves were . . . found in my overcoat pocket. I think someone must have . . . put them [there] for I am sure I am innocent. The trial will be next Wednesday night. . . . I am going to do my best to prove my self clear and if I succeed I think I will sue one or two persons for damage.” Tomlinson regretted that Barker could not be with them but voiced his appreciation for the literary society: “I think we are learning something and having a good deal of fun, too.” Finally, he concluded by wishing his friend success, along with “a dear little blackeyed wife and plenty of children.”40 Tomlinson’s later autobiography knew these years only as ones of superficial enthusiasm. He had pursued political and social excitement, we are told, to escape the pangs of an anguished conscience. In moments of quiet solitude he had begged God for mercy, though he as yet “knew nothing of salvation nor the Bible.”41 We have no grounds to doubt these claims of angst, and such feelings could not have been uncommon among the youth of an area regularly swept by evangelical revivals.42 Nonetheless, the only contemporary witness we have of Tomlinson’s then state of mind bears no hint of anguish, though it amply attests the portrait of young A. J. as a “live wire,” a lighthearted and gregarious character with an eye for fun. There is much to glean from the Barker letter. First, it reveals Tomlinson’s place in the world of small town spectacle. The lure of performance and public acclaim had drawn him onto the stage, and the community drama troupe had apparently offered an at least moderately effective vehicle for those aspirations. Literary society events, after all, were both well attended and well reported in nineteenth-century America. Of course, in the absence of critical reviews we have no means to assess A. J.’s talent. Nonetheless, the experience must surely have refined his stage presence and public speaking skills. If not then a master of the stage, he would eventually become one: the Tomlinson who would found the Church of God would be an accomplished homespun orator who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.

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Second, the Barker letter reveals a young man with social aspirations. Literary societies had as their primary aim a kind of apprenticeship in the duties of civic life, and their members spent much time learning and rehearsing the various aspects of civil government. As one Hamilton County society put it, they prepared young adults “for the responsibilities that they are soon to come in contact with.”43 Grassy Narrows, then, would have attracted bright young men and women who aspired to positions of authority, hoping someday to conduct in reality the civic duties they rehearsed on Wednesday nights. Third, A. J.’s penchant for kangaroo court bears notice. Courtrooms and civil suits must have been a frequent theme in Milton Tomlinson’s household, and family conversation must have abounded in judicial lore. A. J. would naturally have gravitated toward courtroom antics at Grassy Narrows. His father’s legal entanglements and his own mock trials, then, may help us understand why years later he would not hesitate to seek legal recourse despite his standing in a holiness movement that discountenanced secular action of the kind. Though perhaps not litigious, Tomlinson was certainly at home in a court of law. Finally, the Barker letter tells us that, like his father, A. J. had become a farmer. And like his father, as we learn from other sources, he had become a farmer of the activist, entrepreneurial kind. Oral history preserves an anecdote in which A. J. went west and returned with visions of steam plows dancing in his head. His experiments with the new technology failed, however, because he had not foreseen how poorly suited the cumbersome machinery was for the heavy Indiana soil.44 In the family history that anecdote survived as a cautionary tale about an impulsive young man and his imprudent taste for innovation. Viewed differently, it reveals a young man with a progressive and experimental frame of mind. Like Milton Tomlinson, A. J. would not rest content guiding oxen between stands of oak and poplar while the wide world of opportunity lay beckoning all around.

Marriage and Meeting On April 24, 1889, A. J. Tomlinson married his fianceé. Six months later he was a member in good standing with the Society of Friends. The marriage, as we have seen, was precipitated by a wager of less than Pascalian proportions. The religious turn transpired on more dramatic terms. Shortly after his marriage, a violent thunderstorm caught A. J. in the fields. He rushed home to escape the outburst and to keep his wife company, but neither he nor his home would give shelter from the storm. Lightning struck the roof, exploded through the ceiling, and discharged within a few feet of where he sat. That evening, a deeply shaken Tomlinson decided that it was time to pray. Taking his wife’s Bible, he read a few verses and commenced. Prayer did not come naturally to A. J., but he persisted and soon found “a real experience of salvation.” He promptly burned his playing cards and started attending Sunday school.45 Having found salvation, Tomlinson now faced the paradigmatic American


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evangelical dilemma—Which church should he join? “They were all different,” he recalled, “and none of them really satisfied me.” The question marked a critical stage in the primitivist ordo salutis, and replayed a hundred thousand nineteenth-century conversions. It also foreshadowed the answer he knew when he composed the narrative: no then-existing church was True, for God had not yet led him to discover the Church of God. “If I had only known the Bible Church then!” he exclaimed.46 Receiving no clear counsel on this point, and absent even the kind of whimsical fleece that occasioned his marriage, he joined the church closest to his home, “merely for convenience.”47 The nearby church that he joined “merely for convenience” was, of course, the Chester Preparative Meeting of the Society of Friends, organized by his grandparents, built on grounds donated by his uncle, and led by an assortment of cousins, uncles, and friends.48 A neighbor, Eli Stalker, held the meeting’s highest office when A. J. joined, but over the next decade he would share it with five of A. J.’s cousins: Robert, Ruth, Asher, Morton, and Finley Tomlinson. Chester’s spiritual leadership, moreover, mirrored its base of financial support. Almost 40 percent of those on its apportionment list were Tomlinsons, with many close relatives among the remaining names. If the leadership at Chester smacked of nepotism, it functioned effectively nonetheless. In 1889 (like most Quaker meetings in the area) it looked back on a decade of growth and vitality. The path that brought A. J. to the meeting may have been entirely individual, but a great many others were headed in the same direction. For example, Chester’s mother church, the Westfield Monthly Meeting, had only the previous year built a new meetinghouse to accommodate its growing membership. Chester kept pace, and when A. J. joined his extended family he joined a growing church with its eye on the future. If the ambitious young man thought that he could join the family church and take a seat among the Tomlinson pantheon without paying his dues, however, he was mistaken. As a new church member he would start slowly and at the bottom.

Holy Friends Tomlinson would later frame his spiritual journey as that of a wandering and solitary pilgrim pursued by the call of God. It was a personal narrative, which may explain why he only vaguely hinted at the role Mary Jane played in his conversion. After describing how he had turned to supplication in the wake of the storm, A. J. noted that his wife “had been a Christian for some time and could pray.” Indeed, she could. The woman he married had been reared in the Walnut Ridge Monthly Meeting, scene of the 1867 “Great Walnut Ridge Revival” that holiness Friends touted as the first Holy Ghost outpouring among Quakers in America. As the home of fiery evangelists like Micajah Binford, it was known thereafter as a hotbed of Quaker revivalism.49 Yet if A. J. hesitated to give credit where credit was due, his eldest son did not. Mary Jane, Homer Tomlinson later insisted, “led ‘Brose’ to the altar.”50 The devout practice of religion, then, may have been new to A. J., but it

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was not new to Mary Jane Taylor. When she joined the Chester Preparative and the wider circle of Westfield Friends she must have felt right at home. Local luminaries included Nathan Hunt Clark, clerk of the Westfield Monthly Meeting; the eminent biblical scholar Dougan Clark Jr.; and evangelists William F. Manley, John Pennington, and Seth Cook Rees. In the cozy confines of the Chester meetinghouse the newlyweds would socialize with Charles Stalker, a young evangelist eight years younger than A. J. but on a bullet to the top, and enjoy the preaching of A. J.’s cousin, Orlando C. Tomlinson, who rarely failed to visit Chester when passing through his old hometown. What each of these individuals had in common with one another and with the leadership at Walnut Ridge was a commitment to advance the cause of radical holiness within the Society of Friends. A. J. Tomlinson had landed in the thick middle of a host of Quakers who “could pray.” Forty years before, Milton Tomlinson had left a church that frowned on revivalism and disowned its members for fraternizing with Methodists. His son joined a church that fielded evangelists with names like “Lorenzo Dow Williams” and welcomed Methodists whose home congregations had grown too formal or lukewarm.51 The church A. J. joined in fall 1889, that is to say, was not his father’s church. It was the epicenter of Quaker holiness in America.

7 Quaker Holiness

When Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson joined the Chester Preparative of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, he stepped into the prevailing winds of holiness. By 1889 holiness had flourished luxuriantly in the soil of Indiana Quakerism for over twenty years. For many young Quakers, like A. J.’s wife Mary Jane—born near Walnut Ridge, Indiana, the year following the Great Revival of 1867—it was the only Quakerism they had ever known. The rise of the holiness movement within the Society of Friends was an important facet of what Thomas Hamm has called the “transformation of American Quakerism.”1 Though largely a post– Civil War phenomenon, it represented the unpredictable fruition of a previous generation’s husbandry. As early as the 1830s mainstream Friends had begun to follow the lead of Joseph John Gurney (English theologian, banker, abolitionist, and friend of Wilberforce) by dismantling the walls separating them from the wider world of evangelicalism. As good Quakers, these so-called Gurneyites continued to bear witness to the Inner Light, but they enthroned Holy Scripture as the authority by which one might discern between true Light and false impressions, thus removing a longstanding obstacle to ecumenical fellowship.2 The new rapprochement with evangelicalism built on shared values. Friends like Gurney enthusiastically imbibed Victorian middleclass culture and gravitated naturally toward kindred spirits with common concerns. Like their evangelical sisters and brethren, they too believed in the efficacy of rational means to advance moral and religious causes such as abolition, and so they enlisted alongside other reformers in the vast Evangelical United Front. These trends did not go unchallenged, of course, and the swirl of contention that

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engulfed the Tomlinson family in 1843 occurred against a backdrop of controversy over Gurneyite ecumenism. Conservative Quakers rallied around a New England minister, John Wilbur, who sought to stem the tide of assimilation by demanding separation from the world, emphasizing distinctive Quaker dress and conversation, and by reasserting the offended balance between Scripture and the Inner Light. The conflict polarized some Yearly Meetings, but in the West it proved to be rather one-sided. For example, Gurneyites in Indiana easily overpowered their quietist brethren, taking the most important posts and naming their preeminent college after Gurney’s English home, Earlham Hall.3 Like their antebellum forebears, postbellum Gurneyites rolled up their sleeves and lent other evangelicals a hand, though now in the interests of temperance, Bible and missionary societies, Sunday schools, and evangelistic campaigns. Before long, however, American Gurneyites faced their own, internal division. Most Gurneyite Quakers had to this point viewed sanctification as a gradual, lifelong process of Christian Perfection. That consensus shattered in the wake of a series of 1867 revivals, first in Iowa and then in Indiana, that exhibited all the trademarks of radical holiness: emotional preaching, religious ecstasy, and the Good News of entire sanctification. “The most intense excitement prevailed,” witnesses reported, “and remarkable demonstrations; some fell, almost like dead people, while others cried aloud for mercy.”4 Of these revivals only the aforementioned “Great Walnut Ridge Revival” reached epochal status. Though it followed the Iowa revivals in time, it preceded them in memory, becoming “the first [holiness revival] among Friends in America.”5 These revivals ushered in a wave of “New Methods”: altar calls, mourners’ benches, hymns, congregational singing, and the cultivation of raw emotion. The growing cadre of Quaker holiness leaders, however, refused to acknowledge that either the manners encouraged or the methods employed were in fact new. Like Edmund Stanley, president of Friend’s University in Wichita, Kansas, they saw instead a restoration of the “aggressive, evangelizing” character of the original Society of Friends.6 To holiness eyes, then, the notable demonstrations breaking out around them signified a latter-day outpouring of the animating genius of primitive Quakerism. And that animating genius, in its nineteenth-century manifestation, just happened to include the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian Perfection.7 Despite their ahistorical assumptions, holiness Quakers did have grounds to believe that they had resuscitated aspects of early Quakerism. Insofar as holiness piety stressed inward witness, immediate inspiration, and the spontaneous workings of the Holy Spirit, it paralleled the Quaker tradition. And the ecstasies that rocked the American Midwest in the nineteenth century had nothing on those that had shaken the English Midlands two centuries before. Mortified critics then had served up slack-jawed accounts of Quaker “fits, roarings, transings, woundings, passions . . . Agonies and exercitations of body, and extreme tortures.”8 There were differences, of course. Early Quakers, for example, usually justified their behavior with Old Testament precedents, whereas holiness saints preferred to cite the New Testament.9 Nevertheless,

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holiness Quakers had as much grounds as any primitivists to claim that they had restored their particular primordium.

Quakers on the Go Holiness Quakers may have spun the web of their self-understanding from primitivist threads, but they did not live in the past. Like holiness saints elsewhere, they saw themselves as at once the most ancient and the most contemporary of all God’s children, drawn to the moral and spiritual front lines of their times. That self-understanding gained credence when adversaries condemned them as dangerous modernizers. Seth Rees, for example, observed that he was opposed by “the conservatives” but accepted among “the liberals.”10 Even more than in its liberal company, however, the movement’s progressive character showed in the entrepreneurial personality of its leaders. Ambitious, assertive, and innovative, holiness Friends were Quakers on the go. Western Quakers especially had been refreshed by the entrepreneurial breezes sweeping the heartland, and holiness leaders from the region frequently had backgrounds in or aspirations for the world of business.11 In the Victorian lexicon, the presumed virtues of that entrepreneurial spirit were often signified by the rhetoric of “manliness,” which here denoted a particular, hybrid value system that blended ambition, competitiveness, and enterprise with traditional virtues like courage, integrity, and honor.12 A panegyric to “Perfect Manhood” in the literary journal of Tomlinson’s alma mater, Union High School, suggests the stern values inculcated at a Midwestern Quaker academy: “Straight from the Mighty Bow this truth is driven, / They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.”13 Stirred by these manly breezes, even the Lord Himself acquired an altered mien. Evangelist Amos Kenworthy, at one Friends meeting, asked the Lord to “make a chance” for him to speak. The Lord replied, “Jump for thy chance.”14 No one embodied these several traits better than Seth Cook Rees, the Indiana “Earthquaker.” Reared near the Tomlinson farm, he canvassed the neighborhood selling religious books as a young man.15 For Rees, colportage formed the springboard to a dynamic evangelistic career. One admirer described his style as “manliness and Godliness fused into electric effectiveness by the fire of the Holy Ghost.” Promotional flattery of this sort flew in the face of Quaker plainness and surely made conservatives wince. But holiness Quakers relished the hyperbole and cheered when Rees—a “perfect cyclone of sacred eloquence”—sparked a “whirlwind” of “genuine Methodist shouting” at his meetings.16 Those who could not experience the cyclone firsthand could read the latest “burning new book” that had dropped from the “fire-touched lips” of the “fire-baptized earth-quake Quaker evangelist.”17 Some may have questioned Rees’s propriety, but his manliness was never in doubt. Signs of Rees’s driven temperament appeared in his earliest diversions as well as his youthful colportage. As a child he had been an avid fan of the horse races, where he acquired an abiding admiration for the honorable winner. Rees

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carried that attitude with him as he grew older. “To many a railroad locomotive have I lifted my hat,” he enthused of the most conspicuous winner of his day, “in appreciation of her ability to climb the mountains, span the rivers, sweep the plains and drop me at my destination three minutes ahead of her scheduled time.” Rees’s admiration for a winner, of course, was simply the flip side of his own passionate desire to win. “To this hour,” he confided, “my whole being has revolted against defeat. Failure must not be. Win or die!”18 Rees had caught the spirit of his day. In the late 1890s Rees joined Martin Wells Knapp as coeditor of God’s Revivalist. Rees’s presence, together with the paper’s close attention to holiness Quakers like John Pennington and David Updegraff, made it a favorite among sanctified Friends. But its popularity did not rest purely on the reputation of its editors or contributors. The Revivalist also won readers for its contemporary tenor, suited to the exigencies of modern life. According to African American evangelist Amanda Smith, it was “just the thing for poor souls who, like myself, have but little time to read long articles.” In the place of long articles, it served up a smorgasbord of “snap-shot food that one can scoop as they run and sing as they go.”19 Knapp and Rees understood their readers’ practical circumstances as well as their spiritual appetites. Ambition coexisted uneasily with traditional Quaker values like pacifism, but coexist it did. Most Holiness Quakers remained pacifists, but they were pacifists with a desire to win, and winning for Christ demanded that one get with the times. As one school administrator put it, life in an age of progress meant that Friends must adapt “or be relegated to the rear.” Progress, furthermore, was no enemy to the Gospel but, in fact, its truest Friend, and one did not adopt modern means for the sake of worldly conformity but only to “hasten the day when the Gospel shall be preached to the remotest corners of the earth.”20 Midwestern advocates of mission work in Oregon put it in more starkly competitive terms. “Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists are now in the field,” they warned, and if the Friends failed to do their part, “their candle stick will be removed out of its place.”21 God and the Great Commission drove holiness Quakers into the marketplace of religious need. That forward-looking temperament won Quaker holiness a special hearing among the church’s youth. Two of the most important precursors to the events at Walnut Ridge had been a series of youth meetings conducted by Charles and Rhoda Coffin and a student revival at Earlham led by Allen Jay.22 The leading ministers at Walnut Ridge, moreover, enjoyed a special rapport with “the younger Friends.” When Esther and Nathan Frame entered the harvest fields of Quaker revivalism, they too found their warmest reception among “the younger portion of the membership” and their greatest opposition among “elderly and influential Friends.”23 Holiness leaders stood ready to capitalize on a nineteenth-century generation gap. Quaker holiness captured the imagination of the “young” and “liberal minded” in part because it opened vistas to the wider world.24 Both source and symptom of its progressivism, that is to say, traced to fraternization with “other professors of the religion of Jesus,” precisely the behavior that a prior gener-

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ation of mainstream Friends had discountenanced and for which many an antebellum Friend had been disowned.25 Indeed, the affinities between holiness and abolitionist Friends appear most keenly in the predilection of each to consort with other evangelicals. And in both cases, they found their most companionate liaisons among the several varieties of Methodism.

Methodists, Assimilation, and the Wider Holiness World Methodism grew at a staggering rate over the course of the nineteenth century, striking envy mingled with fear in the hearts of its competitors.26 Conservatives of all denominational stripes fretted about the influence of the ubiquitous “Methodism,” which had become a byword for popular enthusiasm, individualism, doctrinal laxity, and experiential piety. Daniel Sommer, the feisty Christian Church apologist, watched with consternation as a Wesleyan tide threatened to wash away his movement’s hard-earned boundaries in a wave of emotion. His Campbellite colleagues, swinging from one extreme to the other, had in his view replaced “Bro. Mossback” with “Bro. Whoop-em-up.”27 Critics like Sommer, by their very objections, documented the enormous influence of Methodism. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Methodists were often flattered in the nineteenth century. Holiness Quakers shared the pragmatic American urge to imitate what works, and what worked magnificently in the nineteenth century was Methodism. The result was a lively axis of interdenominational exchange that left in its wake Quakers with names like “Asbury Fisher” and “Lorenzo Dow Williams” and spurred alarmed traditionalists to pen jeremiads on “The Methodization of American Quakerism.”28 That exchange, however, was a two-way street, and members as well as influence flowed both ways.29 Some folks traveled it more than once in each direction. As early as the 1830s some Methodist and Quaker congregations had discussed union.30 By 1866 the strictures against fellowship with Methodists had been so completely reversed that the Indiana Yearly Meeting entertained a proposal for merger with the Indiana Yearly Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, and Methodist prayer meetings were said to have influenced the revival at Walnut Ridge the following year.31 A generation later, cooperation had become the norm. When the Western Yearly Meeting (newly formed as part of a reorganization of the unwieldy Indiana Yearly Meeting) met in 1884 at Plainfield, Indiana, it published a memorial to the annual conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gathered at nearby Greencastle, declaring its Christian love and congratulating its neighbor on successful missionary work.32 At the local level, monthly meetings routinely commissioned evangelists for labor “among those who are not Friends,” which usually meant “the Methodists,” and Methodist evangelists reciprocated by attending Quaker meetings in areas where they were conducting revivals.33 Close cooperation did not necessarily mean assimilation. In the late 1860s, for example, Methodists in Richmond, Indiana, launched a series of protracted

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meetings and urged their allies to join in. Many denominations, including the Quakers, accepted the invitation, and revival soon erupted in “all the churches.” Yet the general awakening consisted of discrete but simultaneous revivals that left each denomination free to maintain its own distinctive style. In the Friends’ case that meant minimal hymn singing, few sermons, and a decentralizing emphasis on exhortation, Scripture reading, and congregational testimony.34 Increasingly, however, Quaker evangelists did adopt the measures of their Wesleyan tutors, reaching out to the unconverted through tent meetings and Methodist-style revivals.35 Those changes were most pronounced among holiness Friends, where they altered the substance as well as the form of Quaker piety. Laura Haviland, ex-Quaker (soon to become ex-Wesleyan), had once sworn that if she could only find a church “half Friend and half Methodist,” she would join it. When she happened upon a Quaker holiness meeting, she declared, “I have found it here.”36 Ecclesiastical commingling had produced a hybrid. For many it was the ideal New Testament church. As with Ms. Haviland, the spiritual pilgrimage of many a Quaker holiness leader passed through at least one important Wesleyan intersection. David Updegraff, for example, had been converted at a Methodist revival.37 Jacob Baker, an evangelist sanctified under Updegraff ’s ministry, enjoyed fellowship with Methodism through his wife’s family.38 Nathan and Esther Frame, however, were the Methodization of American Quakerism incarnate.39 Nathan and Esther Frame were each born to parents with Quaker connections but no formal Quaker affiliation. Nathan’s father, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, had Quaker relatives. Esther’s mother was a birthright Quaker whose family had moved west in the same Great Migration that had brought the Tomlinsons to Indiana. Her father, of Baptist and Scots Presbyterian derivation, had given her an education suited to her blended heritage, which included stints at Presbyterian, Quaker, and Methodist academies. Esther’s conversion, however, had occurred at a Methodist school, and she met her future husband as both were eyeing ministry in the Methodist Episcopal Church, he as a licensed exhorter and she as a gifted speaker just discovering her call to preach. That call, ironically, would prove to be the stumbling block that gave an occasion to Quakerism. Convinced that Esther’s options would remain limited as a Methodist, the Frames reluctantly determined to “join a church that made no distinction between men and women, so far as gospel work was concerned.”40 That church was the Society of Friends. The Frames began their Quaker career in the Indiana Yearly Meeting, where they found languid congregations and silent meetings devoid of such novelties as singing. “But the spirit that they had waited for so long,” the Frames’ portentously recalled, “was about to awaken a slumbering church and touch many lips with live coals from off God’s holy altar.” The Spirit would have help in the form of Nathan and Esther Frame, who introduced their new friends to Methodist-style exhortation, testimony, prayer, and “praise.” Before long, they noted laconically, the meetings had become “more vocal.”41 If the ministry of Nathan and Esther Frame symbolized Methodist influence on Quakerism, then it also symbolized the growing influence of Quakers

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on radical holiness at large. Like Seth Rees, John Pennington, Dougan Clark, and David Updegraff, they traveled frequently and far, disseminating the Quaker ethos even as they transformed it. Resisting repeated Methodist overtures to woo them back to the Wesleyan fold, they wore the Quaker label proudly, and in town after town the curious and the faithful gathered to see the “Quaker preachers from the North” or the “Quaker woman.”42 Rarely did they leave disappointed. “No heart is pure that is not passionate,” proclaimed Esther Frame, and judging by the religious passions she stirred, she preached to many pure hearts.43 In Ohio the Spirit “swayed the multitude as the wind sways the forests.” In Indiana “a trance like stillness, broken only by . . . sobs and tears” fell over the congregation.44 The Frames typically directed converts to the church of their choice but seldom failed to produce new members for the Society of Friends.45 Clearly, the Frames had a lot to offer their new church, but their new church also had a lot to offer them. Most obviously, it supplied ample opportunity for ministry, but it also provided the new converts with a more subtle commodity. Quakers enjoyed a prestige far beyond their numbers in America and commanded respect even from their competitors. In the evangelical mind, at least, that enviable esteem had been earned less by the Quakers’ peaceable ways than by their uncompromising principles, ethical rigorism, and unimpeachable piety. When Daniel Sommer sharpened his pen and oiled his Indianapolis presses for battle, he judged the Methodists and the Quakers to be his prime adversaries and took them head-on. His specialty was the Socratic dialogue, in which a model Christian (like “Rachel Reasoner”) unveiled truth and exposed error through simple, guileless questions. But whereas Sommer roughed up the Methodists, he dealt gently with the Friends, as when he identified one erring brother as “an excellent old Quaker.” Indeed, he illustrated the proper standard of Christian honesty with an anecdote about a Quaker and his scrupulous conscience: “The writer once heard an old Quaker say that there were a hundred men at the post-office where he had been that day. Then after a moment’s pause he said, ‘I can say there were fifty there and tell no lie about it.’ ”46 Quaker converts, that is to say, acquired impeccable spiritual credentials when they reemerged as full-fledged Friends. The special treatment afforded Quakers reflects the degree to which, in their encounter with other evangelicals, influence ran both ways. While conservatives fretted about assimilation, holiness Friends seasoned the evangelical world with a touch of Quaker piety. Wherever plainfolk apologists blasted “man-made creeds” and empty rituals, decried “human authority in religion,” scored hierarchy and ecclesiasticism, or exalted congregational polity and simple biblicism, they echoed Quaker teachings.47 Even Sommer, determined to be as honest as a Quaker, identified the forerunner of his antistructural Gospel (with its antipathy to “human forms and ceremonies in religion”) as the historic Society of Friends.48 To the degree that holiness saints promoted a similar antistructural gospel, and to the degree that they defined the person and work of the Holy Spirit in terms of spontaneous inspiration liable to irrupt in male or female, old or young, clergy or laity, they stood in the lineage of a Quaker

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spirituality that had leavened popular American piety for over 200 years. Though relatively small in number, this was a hardy strain in the crosspollinating “spiritual hothouse” of American religion.49 That being said, fraternization with the “other” did tend to erode the fraternizer’s commitment to Quaker distinctives. Over time, holiness Quakers modified their views on worship, the pastorate, Scripture, marriage, plainness of dress, and church discipline, not to mention sanctification. But as divisive as these issues may have been, conservatives and progressives only met in pitched battle over two of the most ancient and dear of Quaker boundaries: communion and water baptism. During the 1880s several prominent holiness Quakers, most notoriously Dougan Clark and David Updegraff, concluded that the Society of Friends had erred in rejecting the literal sense of the Christian ordinances. When they subsequently submitted to water baptism and partook of communion, a furious debate erupted, and special conferences were convened at Richmond, Indiana, in 1887, 1892, and 1897 in an effort to resolve these and other controversies.50 The Richmond Declaration, issued in 1887, affirmed the historic Quaker positions but allowed Yearly Meetings to determine for themselves how far to tolerate these novelties. The disputes over baptism and communion had an ironic, and troublesome, effect on Quaker holiness. Whereas other holiness “comeouters” split with their denominations of origin over the doctrine of sanctification—on which they were in general agreement among themselves—a very different circumstance prevailed within the Society of Friends. There the sharpest battle lines formed around communion and water baptism, issues that split holiness Quakers as surely as they split the denomination at large. The conflict left many holiness Friends, unpersuaded of the need for literal sacraments but tolerant of holiness colleagues who differed, caught in the cross fire.51 Even when holiness Quakers disputed the doctrinal particulars, however, they tended to share core assumptions that were more fundamental than their points of disagreement. Whether for or against water baptism, all agreed that the baptism of greatest import was that which had fallen on the Day of Pentecost, a baptism not with water but “with the Holy Ghost and fire.”52 Furthermore, even those who preferred the spiritual to the literal meaning of Scripture in the case of the ordinances tended toward literalism in their reading of the Bible as a whole. Amos Kenworthy, for example, opposed water baptism but insisted on a literal interpretation of Mark 16, with its enumerated signs and wonders. The real question was not “Should we use water?” but “Do these signs follow?” If not, he sneered, then we had as well “take the water baptism and be done with it.”53 This synthesis of the spiritualized hermeneutic of Quaker tradition with holiness literalism constituted one of the singular achievements of Quaker holiness. The resultant compound held explosive pentecostal potential and led many to demand the miraculous as if their souls depended on it. As Kenworthy himself put it, “I don’t believe people have the Holy Ghost if these signs do not follow.”54 Nascent within this new hermeneutic lay the irrefutable logic that

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would inspire others, within little more than a decade, to glory in faith healing, exorcism, glossolalia, and even the taking up of serpents and the drinking of deadly things. Holiness Quakers would remain divided over water baptism, which at least meant that the historic doctrine would survive among them. But that moral victory did little to mitigate the general holiness proclivity to neglect Quaker distinctives, a proclivity amply demonstrated by Seth Rees as he strayed first from the center to the periphery of the Society of Friends and then out into the wide world of holiness. Rees was converted in 1873 under the “fiery ministry” of a well-known Quaker holiness evangelist, Calvin Pritchard.55 For the next decade, however, he was plagued by feelings of spiritual inferiority. By 1880 he had landed in Walnut Ridge, Quakerism’s own “Burned Over District,” where he would have made the acquaintance of one Mary Jane Taylor. There, in 1883, he found the cure for his insecurity in “the mighty Baptism with the Holy Ghost and Fire.” Rees’s baptism so beggared description that he served up an entire compendium of late-nineteenth-century metaphors for sanctification in his efforts to convey it. “ ‘The old man’ was ‘put off ’ . . . ‘the body of sin’ was ‘destroyed,’ ‘the old leaven’ was ‘purged out,’ ‘the flesh’ was ‘cut away,’ ‘the son of the bondwoman’ was ‘excommunicated,’ ‘the carnal mind’ was ‘crucified,’ ” he explained, “and I was dead indeed unto sin.”56 He was dead indeed unto sin and increasingly cold to his old denomination, for as part of the bargain Rees had vowed to surrender even his most cherished attachments for the cause of Christ, promising to follow Jesus even if He led in ways that were “contrary to my previous religious teaching.” Jesus promptly led him into water baptism.57 Outside the Society of Friends most holiness converts progressed from water baptism to baptism in the Spirit. Quakers, as we have seen, often moved in the opposite direction. Those who took the plunge, of course, were not necessarily bidding farewell to the Society of Friends, but they were at the very least acting out an implicit critique of their inherited tradition. Accepting water baptism meant admitting that the Society of Friends, if it had not erred in general, had at least erred in certain particulars. Given the fact that a tincture of error was as good as a full dose in the world of radical holiness, it was for many a fatal admission. Such was the case for Seth Rees, whose strangely warmed heart recoiled at mediocrity. Not long after his baptism, Rees migrated to the Christian Alliance and thence to the directorate of the Portsmouth Camp Meeting in Rhode Island. He later teamed up with Martin Wells Knapp to found the International Holiness Union and Prayer League. Their Cincinnati-based ministry, which sponsored Salvation Park campground, God’s Bible School, and the influential God’s Revivalist, served thereafter as a halfway house for thousands of Quakers on the road to radical holiness.58 Stepping out into that restless world did not guarantee that a young Friend would, like Rees, sell his or her Quaker birthright. But it did increase the odds. Holiness opened a window to exciting alternatives like Dowie’s utopia at Zion, Illinois, or the independent ministries of faith healers like the “trance evan-

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gelist” Maria Woodworth-Etter, or newly minted organizations like Rees’s International Holiness Union.59 Having viewed that world, many a young Quaker would thereafter find the Society of Friends, for all its attractions, decidedly confining.

The Cadences of Holiness The transformation of American Quakerism wrought by holiness has largely been measured by the indexes of doctrine, evangelistic methods, and institutional formation. Those are indeed valid and revealing gauges. The institutional factor, in particular, sustained holiness Quakerism in profound ways and contributed to its disproportionate influence on the holiness movement at large. Given their historic commitment to education, Quakers naturally took the lead in holiness higher learning, producing colleges and bible institutes that embodied the kind of education, holiness style, discussed in chapter 3. Those institutions, moreover, served the movement’s social as well as educational needs. On the one hand, they provided forums for networking, friendship, and matrimony. On the other, they helped to succor and define the holiness faithful within the Society of Friends, now a mixed denominational fold. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, holiness Quakers either organized or adopted a set of competing institutions parallel to those directed by their nonholiness brothers and sisters. In Indiana, for instance, holiness youth patronized schools like Union Bible Seminary in Westfield and the Cleveland Bible Institute or attended such congenial non-Quaker institutions as God’s Bible School in Cincinnati or Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, while their nonholiness neighbors marched off to Earlham College in Richmond.60 They were Quakers all, but worlds apart. As revealing as such developments may have been, however, holiness worked alterations in the Society of Friends no less important, though more recalcitrant to observation, in the domains of language, manners, and cultural style. Holiness Quakers did not practice glossolalia in the late nineteenth century, but they did learn to speak with a new tongue. For one thing, silence gave way to an exuberant rhetoric of praise. Lizzie Rees, Seth’s sister, found enormous amusement in her nephew Paul’s mimicry of his father. “Glory, Glory. Halelujah. Glory to God,” shouted little Paul as he cavorted in her front yard. “Halelujah. Give us the Fire!”61 Such outbursts, which drew on the energetic canons of plainfolk revivalism, were a far cry from Quaker plain speech. The cadences of prayer were altered as well. Dougan Clark and Joseph Smith eulogized their mentor, David Updegraff, with an anecdote that captured his altar-side manner. Taking under his wing a young woman tarrying for sanctification, Updegraff guided her to spiritual victory. “Now sister, pray,” Updegraff began. “A little louder,” he advised: “Pray aloud if it kills you, for whoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” At last, the spiritual novice began to weep and then to sing and shout, “grateful for an emancipation.”62

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The response of traditionalists to such un-Quakerly mannerisms ranged from bemusement, to embarrassment, to denunciation. Holiness Quakers willing to soften the edges might gain an audience in conservative quarters, but those who refused to do so courted censure. “When David Updegraff and Dougan Clark spoke in Twelfth Street Meeting [Philadelphia] they were asked to sit down,” Rufus Jones explained to Carrol Malone (son of “the cyclonic Spirit-filled speaker from Cleveland,” Walter Malone). “But thy Father was not,” Jones continued, because he “did not have the severity . . . which characterized them.”63 But even if cultivated traditionalists were willing to hear Malone out, they did not entirely comprehend him. Elbert Russell, a professor of religion at Earlham and later dean of the Methodist-related Duke Divinity School, described an 1898 dinner at the Malones’ with diplomatic ambiguity. The Malones, he explained, had been “very gracious hosts,” but “their frequent emotional ejaculations—‘Praise the Lord,’ ‘Bless his name,’ ‘Hallelujah’—were novel and at times a little disconcerting.”64 The “severity” of holiness Quakers, so objectionable to their more irenic brothers and sisters, did not inhere solely in the pungent rhetoric that flowed so liberally from their lips. It, rather, traced to the attitudinal wellspring of that rhetoric: a militant and triumphalist aspect on the religious life. “We are an army,” Amos Kenworthy once growled, “not a polite lady-club.”65 Such militancy suited a costly holiness gospel that demanded nothing less than the unconditional surrender of self and soul. When Nathan and Esther Frame opened a revival in Fayetteville, Tennessee, on the heels of an evangelist who had preached an “easy Gospel,” they countered his sin-soothing affect by quoting a smoke-and-thunder Methodist, Lorenzo Dow: “It is said that every town has a Devil, but I believe that every man in Fayetteville has a devil.” The Frames had come to set the town straight on “real conversion.”66 Along with the uncompromising gospel, moreover, came an overweening dose of self-confidence. “One man living in the power of the Spirit,” boasted Kenworthy, “can shake the country for ten miles around.”67 When their militant triumphalism stirred controversy, holiness Friends wore it like a badge of merit. “Nobody objects to half-way Christians,” Kenworthy noted, “but ninety-nine out of every hundred true Christians kick up a fuss.”68 Rees proved especially adept at kicking up a fuss. When he began to preach holiness, he recalled, his Quaker audiences “fell down, in church and out, and prayed and cried, and got up and shouted.” But sharp criticism arose from conservative quarters because he was “too noisy for many of the Quakers.” For Rees, that criticism only confirmed his prophetic calling. Had not Elijah also met the question, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?”69 Although holiness Quakers seemed to relish debate, they remained sublimely oblivious to the substance of the objections raised against them. But if the saints preferred the monologue to the conversation, that only made sense in light of their epistemological foundations. After all, only sanctified eyes had been opened to the higher realms of truth. Those who impugned holiness doctrine and practice were by definition unsanctified, bereft of true spiritual insight, and could therefore be reasonably ignored. With its ideological fortress

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planted on the high redoubt of circular and therefore irrefutable logic, holiness had rendered itself impervious to criticism, insufferable to critics, and ill prepared for intramural conflict among adversaries with equal claim to sanctification.

The Saints at Westfield From the time of the Walnut Ridge revival onward, north-central Indiana had held a central place in the geography of Quaker holiness.70 The year of Tomlinson’s conversion, 1889, was an especially auspicious year for the region’s holiness Quakers. Not a month went by without the Christian Worker and Gospel Expositor (a holiness Quaker paper published in Chicago) broadcasting dispatches from revivals conducted “on the line of holiness.” One of the most dramatic of these rocked Westfield barely a month before Tomlinson’s wedding.71 Beginning in early March, William F. Manley and Abijah Weaver laid siege to Westfield twice a day, every day for a month straight. By April, over 100 had been converted, and thirty-seven had received “the richest of blessings, entire sanctification.” In addition to introducing Westfield Quakers to sanctification, the revival also introduced them to one of the meeting’s prize recruits, William F. Manley. Only the year before Manley had joined the Society of Friends after twenty years of ministry in the Free Methodist Church. He would have a meteoric career among Westfield Friends, flaming brightly and passing on. A scant four months after the Westfield revival he was appointed superintendent of evangelism for the Union (Westfield) Quarterly Meeting.72 A year later he moved on to greener pastures, eventually rising to some prominence in the pentecostal movement, where he and Tomlinson would meet again.73 But within the brief span of his ministry at Westfield he made his mark, conducting fervent revivals, spurring support for evangelism, and promoting Christian holiness to lasting effect.74 The crowning event of that illustrious year, 1889, came in September when the saints convened at Plainfield, Indiana, for the Western Yearly Meeting. What transpired was nothing less than a festival of holiness. Amos Kenworthy opened with prayer, William Manley led devotions, and Nathan and Esther Frame were featured speakers. On one occasion, as the Frames led congregational singing, the auditorium “melted together in . . . contrition and tenderness” and then, “as if by spontaneous impulse,” rose to its feet to pass the peace and shout, “Praise the Lord!” The Christian Worker called it “Pentecost at Western Yearly Meeting.”75 The crescendo had scarcely subsided when Ambrose Tomlinson submitted his request for membership at the Chester Preparative of the Westfield Monthly Meeting. An Indiana thunderstorm had driven him to prayer, and prayer had led him into a pentecostal whirlwind. Over the next decade holiness reached all the way to the spiritual accounting ledgers of many local evangelism committees. At Westfield, a column was added to the register of conversions and renewals in order to record those who

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had received “the blessing of entire sanctification.”76 The practice of reporting sanctifications was never uniform, indicating how remote the ideal of consensus had become for Indiana Quakers.77 But between 1895 and 1896, seven of the Yearly Meeting’s sixteen quarterly evangelistic committees chose to report the number of sanctifications within their jurisdictions.78 And holiness seemed to produce results: membership in the Quarterly Meeting jumped by two-thirds in the five years between 1889 and 1894.79 Those changes and trends reflected growing support from regional leaders like Nathan Clark, who in 1892 issued a report in which he prayed that God might fill the church “with the Holy Ghost” and bring her as near as possible to “the Penticostal model.”80 Advocates of holiness may not have been in the majority, but they enjoyed official recognition and an open door to propagate their message freely within the bounds of the Yearly Meeting. From the vantage point of 1889, an open door must have seemed all they would need to carry the day.


8 The Day of Small Things

When A. J. Tomlinson settled into the Chester Preparative in fall 1889 he met, by all indications, a tepid reception. Perhaps the lines of authority in the small congregation, shaped as they were by family histories, had been drawn too firmly to easily accommodate an unexpected guest. As we have seen, a rough division of church labor seems to have prevailed in the extended family. Of the sons of Robert and Lydia Tomlinson, Allen emerged as a financial pillar. Although his son Orlando gained recognition as an evangelist, the routine governance at Chester fell to the line of Noah, five of whose children (Ruth, Robert, Asher, Morton, and Finley) dominated the clerkship of the small preparative. A. J., on the other hand, arrived late, an interloper from the line of Milton, the religiously estranged son. Under these circumstances Tomlinson found few opportunities for leadership at Chester, and as a result he scarcely left a mark on the meeting records. Like other heads of household he appeared on the apportionment list, which assessed members’ financial obligations on the basis of their relative ability to pay. Starting at the bottom, by 1893 he had worked his way into the middle of the pack, revealing a level of prosperity below established farmers like Allen and Noah but above most of his younger cousins. In 1891 he made the firewood-supply list, followed in 1893 by an appointment to his first committee, building repair. Apportionments, cordwood, maintenance—such was the extent of A. J.’s involvement in the regular life at Chester.1 Perhaps the family matters noted above, or simple small town prejudice against a talented and aspiring local, kept the Chester Preparative from offering at least a minor position of authority to this

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natural-born leader. But the possible role of Tomlinson’s own prejudices should not be discounted. Young A. J. may well have esteemed Chester lightly, and both he and his fellow congregants may have accurately perceived that the little meetinghouse would not long hold the interest of one with so restless and ambitious a nature.

The Home Field Support for this view comes from the somewhat warmer reception extended to Tomlinson by Chester’s mother congregation, the Westfield Monthly Meeting. In summer 1891, for example, he was appointed to its Home Mission and Temperance Committee, which had close ties to his cousin, Orlando Tomlinson.2 That appointment introduced A. J. to holiness-leaning overseers, such as fellow committee members Nathan D. Knight and Solomon Hinshaw, and to the work of home missions as conducted by Indiana Quakers. As a general rule, holiness reinvigorated Quaker missions, which in turn merged creatively with the trademark Quaker concern for benevolence and reform. The most heavily funded missionary endeavors, therefore, incorporated the reform impulse, and nothing married the two more harmoniously than did the “industrial” or “manual labor” school. Institutions like the Ohio Reform School or White’s Manual Labor School in Indiana combined grammar school education, religious instruction, and vocational training in the context of farm labor. That model, applied by numerous denominations in various settings, expressed the Jeffersonian notion of agrarian labor as moral therapy, the conviction that nothing deadened vice or disciplined the soul quite so well as life on the farm.3 Named to connote eighteenth-century “industry” rather than nineteenth-century industrialization, the industrial school removed children from pernicious home environments—be they Irish Catholic, African animist, or American Indian—and subjected them to a regimen of education, indoctrination, and manual labor sure to make self-regulated republicans out of even the most recalcitrant orphans and aliens.4 By 1891 the Western Yearly Meeting sponsored an “Industrial Home” in Indianapolis as well as two industrial schools for Native Americans, and two for white children. All were partly self-sustaining operations where children “not only learned from text books, but [were] instructed in the domestic duties of life, and had a good, moral and religious training.”5 Westfield Quakers enthusiastically supported these endeavors and lavished special generosity on the missions at Indianapolis and Mountain Home, Alabama, the latter of which served poor whites. Home missions would never supplant foreign missions in the hearts and minds of most evangelical Quakers, but the Westfield committee made its case. While acknowledging the importance of foreign missions, it urged Friends to consider the oft-overlooked “home field,” ripe for harvest and “calling for laborers.” Many seem to have been persuaded. Over the course of the decade,

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contributions to home missions grew both in absolute terms and relative to foreign missions giving.6 Home and foreign missions, though natural rivals, conspired against a third interest in a competition that impinged on Tomlinson family dynamics. Missions advocacy, that is, landed A. J. on the far side of a tacit divide that separated missions from peace concerns and Orlando, son of Allen, from Asher, son of Noah. No logical necessity divided the two concerns, and no overt confrontation developed between them, but missions and peace focalized divergent Quaker visions, and those visions met in oblique competition over scarce human and pecuniary resources. A. J. had chosen the winning side. While missions giving flourished and eager recruits queued for their marching orders, the 1892 Peace and Arbitration Committee dryly observed that “the way has not opened for much work to be done on this subject.”7 The remaining years of the decade continued to be notable for their “manifest indifference . . . in regard to the subject of Peace.”8 Indifference did not imply that holiness Quakers had abandoned pacifism. But it did mean that their priorities lay elsewhere, with the salvation of souls. Time would show that Tomlinson’s year on the Home Mission Committee had left its mark. It led A. J. to new acquaintances and a deeper sense of the urgent needs around him. It introduced him to missionary models, like the industrial school, that would resurface in his later ministry. But after a year of service he decided to extend the logic of home mission in a new direction, exchanging the Home Mission and Temperance Committee for a more comprehensive, but no less religious, effort to remedy the nation’s ills. So it was that A. J. Tomlinson joined the Populist Party, just in time for the 1892 elections.

Man of the People In and of itself, a political turn is not surprising for Tomlinson, given his family history. His father, uncles, and grandfather, as we have seen, had been active in local politics. Moreover, most young men of the day found politics alluring. That hybrid of entertainment, patriotic duty, and participatory sport outweighed even the newly organized national baseball leagues on the scale of public interest, as attested by the ample coverage newspapers devoted to it.9 It was also natural that Tomlinson should combine his inherited political zeal with his newfound religion. The only surprising aspect of his political behavior was the cause he chose to champion. From the days of the second party system onward, the Tomlinsons had hitched their wagon to the Whig-Republican trajectory and its gospel of law, order, Protestant respectability, and the civilizing mission of industry. A. J. broke the mold by pledging allegiance to the People’s Party—stepchild of the democracy, heir of the Jeffersonian impulse, and champion of the downtrod-

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den. Worse, he ran for elective office under its banner, presenting himself as the party’s candidate for Hamilton County auditor. The plot of the family drama could hardly have been thicker. While A. J. mustered into the People’s Army, his father marched off as a delegate to the Republican congressional convention.10 Tomlinson left no account of what drew him to the Populist Party, but the attraction it held for young activists with a penchant for righteousness and reform needs little explanation. Populism had fused, with at least modest success, the agrarian grievances of the Farmers’ Alliance with the concerns of industrial labor. As the self-styled last best hope for workaday Americans, its broad agenda resonated with plainfolk Americans in farm fields and—though to a lesser extent—factories alike. A young man made sensitive to human need by missions committee service might naturally have been drawn to such a party. Throughout 1891 and 1892 Tomlinson would have heard the populist gospel preached near to home and at the height of its momentum. Indiana uniquely embodied the convergence of agriculture and industry so central to the movement’s mission. Though most widely known for its farmlands, Indiana boasted a lively industrial sector and a vigorous labor movement.11 Farmers and laborers there had joined forces against capital first in joint rallies held by the Indiana Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor and then in the Indiana People’s Party, which formed in fall 1890.12 Indiana must have seemed a prime recruiting ground to populist organizers, and in spring 1892 The American Nonconformist, a Farmers’ Alliance paper published in Winfield, Kansas, pulled stakes and moved to Indianapolis, where it was reborn as The American Nonconformist and Industrial Liberator.13 During summer 1892 the populist gospel gained new credence and greater urgency. Party organizers had long asserted the existence of a plutocratic conspiracy against the people. Now, local papers showed those plutocrats at work. On the morning of July 7, 1892, Hamilton County citizens unfurled their newspapers to see the world in stark diptych. One side of the front page chronicled the People’s Party convention in Omaha. The other gave a riveting account of an unfolding tragedy at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead mill near Pittsburgh. Westfield lay almost equidistant between them. As the battle between striking steel workers and Pinkerton detectives dragged on through the summer, regular dispatches from Homestead joined with muckraking expose´s on corrupt trusts and monopolies to confirm the populist worldview for the already converted.14 The Peoples’ crusade, then, suffered no lack of moral drama in 1892, and for converts like Tomlinson that drama may have been more compelling than the political details. Nothing that we know about A. J. Tomlinson suggests that he would have been stirred by calls for free silver, farm subsidies, the referendum, or government ownership of utilities and rails. On the contrary, both his prior religious turn and his later holiness radicalism suggest a man drawn to populism less for its platform than for its unique fusion of plainfolk religion and political action.


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“A Pentecost of Politics” When the People’s Party met in Omaha in 1892, gushed one observer, it convened “a religious revival . . . a pentecost of politics in which a tongue of flame set upon every man.”15 The tantalizing connections between holiness and populism have long been noted, but until recently few have gone beyond observing that both movements emerged among roughly the same populations, in the same regions, and at the same time. The impasse has begun to break, as scholars explore the degree to which populism itself formed a quasireligious movement whose political objectives were extrapolated from popular Christianity and expressed in the evocative cadences of plainfolk religion.16 That recognition has opened a clearer view of the shared ethos of the two movements and of the ambivalent relationship between them. The twin pillars of the People’s Party, according to Mary Lease, were “the teachings of Christ and the Constitution of the United States.”17 Like so much of plainfolk religion, populism fused biblical and national myths into a civilreligious primitivism that called Americans, ad fontes, to the Gospel and to the nation’s primal Republican truths.18 Like other strains of American primitivism, moreover, it looked forward, not backward.19 Perhaps, as Lease maintained, the movement merely wished to enact into law “the truths taught by Jesus,” but it sought to refit those ancient truths for service in the “great social, industrial and economic revolution now dawning on the civilized world” and imagined a thoroughly modern millennium in which the wolf and the lamb, “industrial democracy and social justice,” would dwell together in “fulfillment of the teachings of the Nazarene.”20 The shared ethos of holiness and populism included a common assessment of mainstream Christianity as inauthentic, compromised, and complacent. “We have inherited Christianity without Christ,” thundered Ignatius Donnelly: “We have the painted shell of a religion.” Donnelly was certain that when plain, honest folk considered the pulpits of America—seduced by riches and indulgent of the crimes of the (paper) money changers—they would cry out, “Oh . . . for the man of Galilee! Oh! for His uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into devotion to the cause of his poor afflicted children.”21 Donnelly’s critique reflected the same antielite assumptions that animated holiness, assumptions threaded into the fabric of a plainfolk worldview in which uptown churches “trucked with society’s oppressors” while true religion sided with Jesus and the poor.22 Populism and holiness, then, breathed the same cultural air, and their respective efforts to determine the source of and remedy for social evil bore marked similarities. John Alexander Dowie, holiness prophet and divine healer, blasted money changers with a fury that would have made Donnelly cheer. “Listen! You thieves, repent!” Dowie fumed: “Give back what you stole, you scoundrels of stock brokers and Board of Trade bandits who have told lies and boomed or depressed the market, and gained on the falling or rising market.”

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Dowie also excoriated ruthless employers for “grinding down . . . young men and women to the lowest cent,” thereby stealing the “life blood” of their employees. “Repent,” he growled, or “go to hell for your sins!” In fact, mere repentance was not enough. Dowie demanded restitution: “Come, all you stock jobbing thieves; go to your ledgers and write to the people you have defrauded . . . and give them a check . . . if it takes every cent you have in the world.” He was preaching to the choir, and every blistering fulmination sparked riotous applause from his audience.23 Down in Indianapolis, populism met another sympathetic spirit in Thomas Nelson, whose cavalier approach to denominational regularity had led to a breach between his para-church organization, the Pentecostal Bands of the World, and the Free Methodist Church. When Nelson left his old denomination, however, he took its animosity toward elites with him. B. T. Roberts, cofounder of the Free Methodists, had earlier warned of “an aristocracy of wealth more dangerous” than “titled aristocracy.”24 Nelson took the link between holy war and class war a step further, posting a “Men Wanted” ad in his Pentecostal Herald that beckoned warriors “acquainted with the . . . woes . . . of the oppressed masses” and ready to seize the “whip of small cords” and “drive degenerate priests, polluted politicians, and plutocratic money-changers from the temples of piety and politics.”25 Populist organizers recognized an ally when they read one. The Nonconformist feted Nelson’s analysis of the times, The Midnight Cry: or, The Consummation of All Things, with a glowing review, which Nelson promptly reprinted in his own Pentecostal Herald. “The Midnight Cry,” sang the review, “has just been added to the Reform Library. It is a valuable work and calculated to open the eyes of the outraged laboring classes.” Though Nelson addressed the topic “entirely from a religious standpoint,” the writer observed, he nonetheless reached “precisely the same results as our advance labor reformers.” Nelson’s book, the review concluded, could be a veritable “ ‘Krupp gun’ in the reform ranks.”26 The relationship between holiness and populism remains a puzzle to be solved, but clearly the two movements were social soul mates and cultural kin.

A Vote for Tomlinson When A. J. Tomlinson stepped into the political ring, no one could have predicted where that step would ultimately lead. The outcome of his 1892 campaign, however, was never in doubt. Throughout the state and across the board, Populist Party candidates eluded voters in droves, and the People’s bid for the Hamilton County auditor’s seat was no exception.27 Tomlinson finished dead last of four candidates. With but 135 of the 6,200 votes cast, he crossed the finish line 3,000 votes behind the Republican winner. Indeed, Republicans swept the ballot in Hamilton County, where even Benjamin Harrison carried the day in a losing cause. Unlike the case in A. J.’s boyhood footrace, there had been no winning kick at the last incline.


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If we cast an oedipal eye on the political agitations of Populist son and Republican father, the son in this case took a first-rate licking. How A. J. reacted we can only guess, but he could at least have taken some consolation from a relative distinction. He had posted the best showing of any Populist candidate for Hamilton County office. And even with state and national races thrown in, only one other Populist—a candidate for Congress—could match Tomlinson’s share of local support. Among Hamilton County voters, he even bested James B. Weaver, his party’s presidential candidate, by fourteen votes.28 Whether or not Tomlinson could have parlayed that relative success into a political career must remain a mystery, because within months of the election his life had taken a new departure. In hindsight, the year 1893 seems pregnant with paradigm shifts: the nation’s worst depression to date would cost millions of workers their jobs and usher in a reorganization of the American political system, and a brash Midwestern historian would deliver an address at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition that would send generations of scholars chasing after his Frontier Thesis. As for A. J. Tomlinson, he would experience entire sanctification.

A Vote for Jesus In 1913, Tomlinson related his sanctification experience, which had occurred two decades before. It began with a “tremendous conflict” between his heavenbound soul and an “old man” (a common holiness metaphor for one’s sinful nature). Like Jacob he wrestled with his adversary “day and night,” but unlike Jacob he did not initially prevail. “How to conquer him,” he confessed, “I did not know,” and “nobody could tell me [how] or give me much encouragement.” With none to help, Tomlinson pressed on alone. He was farming at the time and prayed row by row throughout the day. After work, he would repair to the open fields and tarry into the small of the night. At last, just before the dawn of a new day, the “final struggle” came: “It was a hand-to-hand fight, and the demons of hell seemed to be mustering their forces, and their ghastly forms and furious yells would no doubt have been too much for me had not the Lord of heaven sent a host of angels to assist me. . . . But it was the last great conflict, and I managed, by some peculiar dexterity, to put the sword into him up to the hilt.” Heaven rejoiced. A “sensational power” struck A. J. like a thunderbolt, and the “old man” lay dead at his feet. Now “sanctified wholly,” his desperate and solitary struggle had culminated in perfect victory.29 Tomlinson’s sanctification narrative is many things. It is a gripping account of the reordering power of the sanctification experience. It is a window onto plainfolk prayer and cosmology in the late nineteenth century. It is a pastoral epic: Pilgrim’s Progress on a bucolic tableau. But when placed in the historical context of contemporaneous religious life at Westfield, it is above all a vivid illustration of the redactional force of holiness narrative structure and of the individualistic bent of Tomlinson’s spiritual psychology. One would not gather from A. J.’s narrative that his sanctification followed two years of esca-

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lating holiness revivalism in the near vicinity. The labors of evangelists like Jacob Baker in 1891 had been followed up in early 1892 by John Pennington and Emma Coffin at Westfield and by a local holiness evangelist, Jackson Morrow, at Chester. Pennington and Coffin, fixing their sights on the “nominally virtuous men of the town” (which they translated to mean “the hypocrites”), had launched a revival “without parallel in the history of the town.”30 Businesses closed shop every morning so that employees and customers could attend—and to good effect. One hundred seventy conversions were reported to the Yearly Meeting. Success bred success, and the Pennington-Coffin revival soon had a parallel. With converts pouring in, the Westfield Monthly outstripped its meetinghouse and decided to build another. In fall 1892, just as A. J. prepared for his showdown at the polls, the new facility stood ready for dedication. Dedication, of course, meant revival, and revival meant Nathan and Esther Frame.31 From the end of October through the middle of December, religion went toe to toe with politics and more than held its own. The Frames drew such crowds that people had to be turned away.32 Nathan Frame disarmed the political factions by insisting that “true christianity would make a Republican and Democrat love each other and a Prohibitionist acknowledge that others could serve God beside himself.” But the crowds came mainly to see Esther, and she did not disappoint. Standing before the packed meetinghouse she delivered what reporters called “the greatest holy ghost sermons that the town has known for years.” Those sermons, tailored not for sinners but for church members just like A. J., stressed the need for “purity of heart . . . complete consecration . . . and a sanctification by His spirit.”33 None of this, of course, survived the years in A. J.’s telling. From the vantage of long hindsight and in the judgment of Tomlinson’s independent mind, these powerful communal events did not seem particularly relevant to his own quest for holiness. Hemmed in by advocates of holiness, he could find none to help him with his struggle. His would be a self-made sanctification. Furthermore, as his spiritual progress reformed in his memory, or at least in his telling, it recapitulated the archetype of holiness experience. From deep yearning, to dark night of the soul, to solitary travail, to dramatic victory, A. J. Tomlinson had relived the “old, old story,” the graven narrative whose very predictability convinced tellers and hearers alike of the validity of the experience it described. Though stereotypical, Tomlinson’s sanctification was not ineffectual. It awakened a craving for “nothing but God” and left his political ambitions stone dead. “My interest in politics vanished so rapidly,” Tomlinson mused, “that I was almost surprised.” The erstwhile enthusiast now regarded the panoply of politicking with sublime disinterest. When two neighbors, the following election year, greeted him with a customary, “Hurrah for M——!” Tomlinson retorted, “Hurrah for Jesus!”34 His transformation was complete. Tomlinson’s friends and neighbors implored him to at least meet his basic civic duty by voting. But he refused. “No,” he replied, “I will only vote for Jesus.” Cynics might have divined wounded pride recoiling from the source of its


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injury in this reversal, but thousands of holiness saints would have understood perfectly. The “world” had lost its “charm”; A. J. was “dead to the world” just as “the world was dead” to him. Indeed, Tomlinson—though perhaps unintentionally—framed the transformation in culturally astute terms. As if speaking the language of mentalite´, he explained that the entreaties of his friends “had no more effect on me than if I had been in another world.” The ballot box and its methods and concerns were a universe away, and so they would remain: “I never have taken any part in politics since, nor gone to the polls and cast a ballot.”35 A. J. Tomlinson had stepped into the Jordon and crossed to the other side. Now he would claim his Promised Land.

Holiness and Populism Revisited Tomlinson’s renunciation of politics raises important questions about the relationship between populism and holiness. If the two shared so much cultural and religious ground, why did the saints consider them to be mutually exclusive? Why could not the sanctified soul enjoy a “pentecost of politics”? A partial answer to that question may lie in the often-observed ferocity of religious fratricide. Fueled by the “narcissism of small differences,” the bitterest cultural disputes often involve siblings so nearly identical that outsiders can hardly tell them apart and concern hairs that others can scarcely see, let alone split. A more complete answer, however, demands that we consider the rational basis of internecine rivalry. Fighting is normally most fierce among those who are closest because they meet most frequently on the field of daily battle and are genuinely the greatest threat to one another’s continued viability. When multiple groups emerge from the same community and appeal to the same pool of potential recruits for their limited loyalties and resources, neither their similarities nor their animosities need much further explanation. Furthermore, because related groups share common assumptions and a common language, their polemic is more persuasive, and therefore more provocative, within the circle of kinship. When communities that occupy different realms of discourse fight, they invariably miss the mark, for their debates amount to little more than parallel monologues. But the rounds fired by close kin land dead center, and no nuance of sarcasm, insult, or disconfirmation is missed. The analogy to religious sibling rivalry, however, only partly explains the complex relationship between holiness and populism. For one thing, competition between the rivals was indirect and asymmetrical. Each movement, of course, was armed for ideological battle. The coherence and survival of social movements, after all, depend on a careful equilibrium of inclusive and exclusive—benevolent and belligerent—features. The former allows recruitment, sympathetic alliances, and a positive self-image; the latter secures clear identity and high levels of commitment. But populism and holiness practiced the dialectic in different ways. Populism, as a political movement, had to win adherents from a wide range of religious persuasions. Consequently, the religious (as opposed to class

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or ideological) component of its self-definition generally fell on the inclusive side of the dialectic. Religion played little role in its basic tenets and nonnegotiable commitments, the stuff of which exclusion is made, and the deeply religious cadences of its rhetoric sprang from a shared substratum of sacred associations and instincts and, therefore, resonated widely with diverse groups.36 Holiness, by contrast, made few political demands but stocked an ample lexicon of religious shibboleths. If holiness placed few explicit limitations on its adherents’ political views, why, then, did converts like Tomlinson feel compelled to reject all political activity? Why did holiness induce Tomlinson to renounce populism when populism had not required him to renounce holiness? The larger answer, it seems to me, is twofold, involving a variant of the above-mentioned social rivalry, on the one hand, and historical inertia, the holiness movement’s received tradition, on the other. Oblique competition did naturally exist between populism and holiness, for both flourished within the same social parameters and tapped the same social resources. That competition was most salient at the level of ideological frames. Both movements, as noted earlier, put forth “coherent diagnoses” of, and prescribed plausible remedies for, the social evils of their day.37 Common causes and common foes muted the rivalry, but to the extent that each approached a totalizing explanation of reality, each rejected the diagnoses and prescriptions of the other as, at best, partial and, at worst, deceptive. Holiness responded to populism in just these ways, portraying it as alternately incomplete, erroneous, or irrelevant. Dowie, the consummate cryptopopulist, exemplified the most belligerent posture. He too envisioned a closely regulated economy and championed uncompromising social justice, but for Dowie these ideals could only be rightly achieved under divine theocracy, and so he denounced populism as a false remedy that imperiled the republic.38 Most holiness leaders, however, seem to have taken the more benign approach, discouraging undue political involvement (populist or otherwise) on pragmatic grounds, not as a positive evil but as a poor investment. One would be foolish to “sink all his capital in some old bankrupt village,” one holiness leader explained, “and refuse a block of real estate in the great metropolis.” The lesson was clear: “If we really believe in the substantial reality of the coming kingdom, we will put all we are worth into it.” Applied to the circumstances of labor, this meant that savvy activists should turn their eyes from strikes and ballot boxes and fix them on the eastern sky. A just God had heard the cry of “the working man,” and a day of reckoning would soon appear when “the money that has been withheld . . . will be paid . . . with a compound interest that will astonish you.” Social justice, then, awaited not the hand of flesh but the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, “the remedy for all our social grievances, the reward for all our social wrongs.”39 Populism, viewed from that vantage point, employed ineffectual means to pursue penultimate ends. In short, it was a feckless diversion that men and women at the brink of time could ill afford. In addition to ideological rivalry, another factor shaped the political


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thought of holiness: cultural inertia. Holiness converts like Tomlinson were apprenticed to political assumptions and definitions that had, in many cases, been passed down wholesale from another place and time. Notions like “separation from the world,” so deeply rooted in the culture of plainfolk religion and so strongly attested by favored passages of Scripture, came bundled with a predetermined definition of “the world” from which one was to remain separate. That definition included, and seemed to have always included, those machinations of power and merely temporal concerns denominated by the term politics. The religious cast of populism could not overcome the deepseated conviction that Perfect Holiness and imperfect politics simply did not mix. Apoliticism, then, formed a tenacious aspect of the holiness inheritance, passed down from an era when politics had been less significant for the common life or at least less open to the participation of common folk. But if the rejection of political means was something of a relic, it nevertheless brought residual benefits. By renouncing every competitor and vanquishing every distraction, the holiness movement cultivated a single-minded devotion to its own social constructions. Like early Methodists who banished vain recreations and idle conversation from their camp meetings, holiness saints laid aside every earthly diversion to build the city of God. Though anachronistic, apoliticism proved its social worth. It is not clear that the movement could have survived otherwise, and any stigma we might attach to holiness apoliticism should be attenuated in light of the longue dureé. Those first, apolitical generations secured institutions that not only endured but flourished, making it possible for their children’s children, more numerous and influential by far, to exercise the prerogatives they themselves forewent, though not perhaps in ways they would have approved. Viewed strictly as a political transaction, when men like Tomlinson sold earth and bought heaven, it may indeed have been a wise investment.

A. J. Tomlinson and the Populist Legacy The social and historical dynamics explored above help us understand how a would-be politician, in the wake of his sanctification, might forsake the voting booth with hardly a second thought. He had seen the light and in that light, the true nature of social, political, and personal evil. For Tomlinson, that epiphany marked the end of pale half measures that left the taproot of social evil unmolested, or that failed to draw fully on the power of the Living God, or that mapped the future without reference to its greatest reality, Christ’s Second Coming. If Tomlinson fled populism without looking back, however, he took a great deal with him when he left. The campaign of 1892 had baptized him into the civic realities he had rehearsed so expectantly at Grassy Narrows. In particular, it had served as an internship in what some sociologists call “movement culture,” intentional societies geared to “mobilize adherents, persuade bystanders,

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and neutralize opponents.”40 Tomlinson’s brief foray into politics did more than educate, however. It facilitated a critical passage in his life. Populism took A. J. one step further from his family and one step closer to holiness. Tomlinson’s political experiment, far from being a secular digression, advanced his Damascus road to holiness in concrete ways. First, it confirmed his estrangement from the bourgeois secularism of his father and his attachment to idealistic reform and ultimate concerns. In this domain at least, he made it clear that he was not his father’s son. Second, it signaled his growing identification with the social margins, where a motley array of critics quarried stones from the nation’s religious bedrock to hurl at its establishment. Finally, populism introduced Tomlinson to an egalitarian society where unpretentious folk from Topeka, Kansas, and Corsicana, Texas, Indianapolis and Sparta, Georgia, united in fervent utopian ambition. It gathered self-proclaimed “outsiders” with an ardent desire to speak to and for the nation. It drew on the symbols and assumptions of plainfolk religion to fashion a biracial alliance that made room on its platforms for women and the rudely educated. An ostensibly “single-issue” movement, it broadened into a totalizing ideology borne of, and sustained by, popular discontent. It was a far cry from heaven, but it was almost holiness.

Favor with God and Man A. J. Tomlinson had found his spiritual bearings. It would be a while, however, before he found his vocation. Advocates of holiness knew that life was “more than meat, and the body than raiment,” and did not wish to squander their time on merely temporal pursuits. After all, Christ had commanded his followers to take no thought for the morrow but, rather, to “seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,” and all those material things would be provided.41 The fact that each day brought another round of hunger, thirst, and requirements for shelter, then, proved no small vexation. Caught between the natural and supernatural economies, Tomlinson tried to serve God and still make a living. Farmer, entrepreneur, church worker, home missionary—A. J. began the sanctified life with multiple and simultaneous endeavors. Tomlinson first sought his livelihood primarily from the family farm, which came with a goodly share of domestic obligations. Milton Tomlinson, now in his mid seventies, and Delilah, increasingly frail, had reached an age where they naturally expected to rely on their only son.42 Furthermore, a growing family added to A. J.’s cares of life. On March 28, 1891, he fathered his first child, Halcy Tomlinson. A year and a half later, on October 25, 1892, Homer Tomlinson was born. Iris followed two years after, on January 8, 1895. The farm yielded Tomlinson’s main income, but with a mind as fertile as the Indiana soil and surrounded by the bustle of small town enterprise, he could no more rest content with the bucolic life than had his father. By 1895 A. J. had launched a well-drilling partnership in league with his old friend from


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Grassy Narrows, Ellis Barker. The venture yoked him unequally with a “Wilburite” believer distrustful of revivalistic innovations, but it held out the potential of enough earthly mammon to support his growing religious interests.43 The idea for this line of work had most likely dawned three years before, when a spate of natural gas strikes in the area brought the Consumers Gas Trust Company of Indianapolis and the lure of sudden wealth to Milton Tomlinson’s farm. From fall 1892 through the better part of 1894, the prospect of fortune held the family in thrall. Then it moved on. But the pipe crews, with all their gear and tackle, surely left an impression and may have convinced A. J. that if no fortune lay below the ground, one could surely be found above ground drilling for it.44 When Tomlinson entered the drilling business in 1895, however, he hedged his bets. Unlike the average wildcatter, “A. J. Tomlinson & Co., Drillers of Marcy Patent Tubular Wells” would drill for a sure thing in a region noted for its abundant aquifer. “All needing a good well of pure water,” his business card explained, “should . . . address us at Westfield, Ind.”45 Surviving records show a trail of debt and modest purchases.46 While Tomlinson’s well-drilling business foundered, his religious endeavors slowly began to prosper. The prophet remained without much honor at his Chester home but continued to enjoy a measure of favor at Westfield Monthly, which he twice represented at the Quarterly Meeting.47 True, that distinction paled in comparison to the honors showered on his young friend and neighbor, Charles Stalker, who though barely in his twenties had been taken under wing by leading evangelists, recorded as a minister, and appointed superintendent of the Quarterly Meeting.48 Although no star of that magnitude, Tomlinson was nonetheless known and respected among the holiness Friends at Westfield. If Tomlinson had recognition in moderation, he had zeal in full measure. The first satisfying outlet for that zeal came in 1893 when he joined the staff of Chester Bible School. Quaker Bible Schools, the equivalent of adult Sunday schools elsewhere, were noted bastions of holiness sentiment. Andrew Mitchell, general superintendent of Bible Schools for the Western Yearly Meeting, had in 1891 instructed his charges not to teach “till ye get the fire of the Holy Ghost, ’till ye be endued with power from on high.”49 In April 1893 Tomlinson, now endued with power, began teaching at Chester. Six months later he had replaced his cousin Asher as the school’s superintendent and treasurer. Chester Bible School under A. J. must have been a lively place. The faculty included Tomlinson and the holiness evangelist Solomon Hinshaw. The student body included Charles Stalker and another holiness evangelist, Jackson Morrow. Weekly attendance almost doubled within a year.50 Emboldened by his success as a teacher and superintendent, Tomlinson made his first tentative efforts to preach. When a revival broke out at a local prayer meeting and the older ministers were slow to respond, A. J. himself stood up to speak. The results were astonishing. After delivering “a few stammering, broken utterances,” he recalled, “the people would fall into the altar and get converted.”51 But though his sermons brought sinners to the altar, they did not bring either Chester or Westfield to acknowledge his gift, as they had

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recently done for Charles Stalker. Whether his message was deemed too radical or his manner, too presumptuous, A. J. would never be recorded as a minister in the Society of Friends. In spring 1894—as if the demands of farming, family, well drilling, Bible School, and the occasional sermon were not enough—Tomlinson undertook yet another venture. He had earlier made the acquaintance of a wizened Methodist colporteur by the name of J. B. Mitchell. A convert of Charles Finney and an Oberlin graduate, Mitchell had devoted his life to relief work and colportage “among the poorest, most neglected people in the mountains of Western North Carolina,” in the interest of which he posted the Christian Herald solicitation mentioned in chapter 1.52 Unlike the leadership at Chester, Mitchell recognized Tomlinson’s potential, and on May 8, 1894, the two solemnized a partnership, the “Book & Tract Co., with cash on Hand to the amount of $1.82.”53 It would change A. J.’s life forever.

9 Guides to Holiness

J. B. Mitchell became the mentor that Tomlinson had never found among holiness Quakers, leading him on summer colportage missions to Appalachia where A. J. witnessed a degree of material poverty and spiritual want that indelibly impressed him.1 Back in Westfield, Tomlinson mailed literature to customers he had presumably met on those journeys, in upland towns and hamlets like Talkingrock, Georgia, and Culberson, North Carolina.2 Colportage widened Tomlinson’s circle of friends and opened him to new vistas of holiness. It drew him toward his childhood neighbor Seth Rees and God’s Revivalist, and alerted him to the heterogeneous array of holiness pilgrims that passed ceaselessly through Indianapolis, one of the movement’s vital crossroads. The Revivalist would have kept Tomlinson abreast of Quaker evangelists like John Pennington, David Updegraff, and Joseph Smith, not to mention a powerhouse lineup of non-Quaker saints such as B. H. Irwin, Beverly Carradine, and Daniel Awrey, the latter of whose posts from Beniah, Tennessee, might have held special interest for a young man engaged in his own, if part-time, Southern ministry.3 Indianapolis, for its part, lured the greatest luminaries in the holiness firmament to A. J.’s doorstep. George Eldridge, Thomas Nelson, and C. W. Ruth called it home. Others, like George Watson, Daniel Warner, and Maria Woodworth-Etter, had strong ties to the city. As a holiness venue, furthermore, Indianapolis had national drawing power, in part because of the ease of travel afforded by the twenty rail lines that served its 150,000 inhabitants and their 100 churches. When luminaries landed, moreover, Quaker meetinghouses ranked high on the appointment list. During his 1895–1896 winter campaign, for example, Watson suspended his campaign at

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the Holiness Mission to hold forth for a solid week from “the old Quaker church” in Indianapolis’s finest neighborhood.4 Of the evangelists who called Indianapolis home, Thomas Nelson may well have been the most important for A. J.’s early development. Nelson had relocated from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in October 1894 and shortly thereafter led his Pentecostal Bands out of the Free Methodist Church and into a period of growth and unfettered holiness activism.5 His need to “come out” of a denomination where “running, jumping, leaping and shouting was all in order” speaks volumes of his temperament and his aversion to institutional encumbrance.6 Nelson’s ministry attracted workers from throughout the Midwest, including Hattie and Alex Carkuff of Iowa, almost certainly relatives of C. P. Carkuff, the evangelist who had initiated B. H. Irwin into his fire baptism.7 The precise extent of Tomlinson’s involvement with these circles remains conjectural, but as the following chapters will show, he knew and interacted with Nelson and Revivalist associates such as Stalker, Knapp, and Rees. It seems reasonable to assume, therefore, that those nearby ministries provided the wider framework for his acculturation into the ambience of holiness, its rhythms, rhetoric, and style.8

Crisis and Breakthrough Between 1895 and 1898 two forms of distress, financial tribulation and spiritual discontent, conspired to provoke a final rupture between Tomlinson and the Society of Friends and to launch him on a lifetime of radical holiness ministry. Spiritual discontent must have been inevitable for any novitiate perusing radical holiness literature. As vital as one’s religious home life may have been, weighed in the balance of radical holiness it could hardly have been found other than wanting. Westfield had its revivals, sure, but in the Oklahoma Territory meetings ran “two nights and a day without intermission,” and worshipers struck down by the power of God lay “twenty-four hours as rigid as if they were dead.” In Winnipeg, Canada, the Holy Ghost ignited “white fire crests of glory on the surface of the sea of glass mingled with fire.”9 The survivors of such visitations grabbed their pens and whipped off eye-popping accounts of their powerhouse baptisms. “Every artery, vein, nerve, muscle, and fiber of my being is thrilling, throbbing and pulsating with the fiery current,” exclaimed one jubilant saint: “This is now my daily experience.”10 Not surprisingly, A. J. began to yearn for “the same experience that was enjoyed . . . on the day of Pentecost.” Yet when he tried to persuade others to “tarry” with him for that ancient collective moment, he was rebuffed. “I was accused of being fanatical,” recalled a defiant Tomlinson, but “I was hungry for God, and did not care who knew it.”11 In his 1913 retrospective, this episode is presented as evidence of a spiritual hunger that the reader is left to suppose went unsatisfied until his pentecostal baptism more than a decade later. His diary, however, tells a different story. There we find that “about March 1896”

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Tomlinson “received the Holy Ghost.”12 At the time, at least, he seems to have felt that his hunger had been filled. The discrepancy raises important questions. If in 1913 Tomlinson claimed to have been sanctified around 1893, then what are we to make of the 1896 experience? Did he understand it as a fire baptized–style “third blessing”? as the consummation of a twofold process of Christian Perfection begun three years prior? or as his “true” sanctification, rendering the 1893 experience apocryphal at worst and preparatory at best? Each of these possibilities bears merit. Given Irwin’s pervasive influence, fire baptism cannot be summarily dismissed. On the other hand, because holiness theology often distinguished between the negative and positive stages of Christian Perfection—purification from sin and baptism with the Holy Ghost—A. J. may have taken the 1896 experience as the dialectic completion of a work of entire sanctification begun earlier.13 The preponderance of evidence, however, suggests that the 1896 baptism occurred in conjunction with a radical new turn in his life, discussed below, and that it temporarily superseded the 1893 experience in Tomlinson’s spiritual reckoning.14 What is most interesting about this from the perspective of religious psychology is that in any of these scenarios, the spiritual terrain would have required some landscaping after Tomlinson’s pentecostal baptism a decade later. Pentecostal soteriology called for a tripartite experience: salvation, sanctification, and Holy Spirit baptism. Whatever 1893 and 1896 had meant at the time—whether two distinct “blessings,” two stages of one blessing, or a false and a true blessing—A. J. would later have felt the need to identify one and only one of these as his authentic sanctification, as distinct from his baptism with the Holy Ghost. If the 1896 experience had been in any way tarnished over time, as I argue, Tomlinson would quite naturally have reverted to 1893 for his orthodox sanctification.15 Be that as it may, the 1896 baptism appears to have been a formative experience that boosted Tomlinson’s missionary zeal to a yet higher plane. The following winter he embarked on his most ambitious missionary journey to date, for which he requested a minute of authorization from the Westfield Monthly Meeting. The minute was issued, though with a rather underwhelming endorsement. At the very same meeting, ironically, a minute was issued to another young evangelist, and the two stand in telling juxtaposition. Carl Stalker, younger brother of Charles and a friend of Tomlinson, had requested a minute for a specified field of service (within the limits of the Western Yearly Meeting) in the company of a recognized evangelist (Orlando C. Tomlinson). “This meeting unites with him,” the minute enthused, “and encourages him to do such service as the Lord may require at his hand.” A. J., by contrast, had requested a general minute for an unspecified field of service in the company of no one in particular. The matter-of-fact minute he received is distinguished only by its lack of commentary: “To whom this may come this is to certify Ambrose J. Tomlinson is a member in good standing among us, and an earnest Christian worker.”16 Even at Westfield, where Tomlinson had enjoyed relative

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favor, the air seems to have acquired a chill. Perhaps the members suspected that he was steering for heterodox waters. If so, they were not mistaken. The coming year, 1897, would lead Tomlinson to Frank Sandford, apostle and prophet, and into the waters of the Androscoggin River near Durham, Maine. We know neither the time he departed nor the details of his appointments, but by midsummer Tomlinson had traveled the length and breadth of America east of the Mississippi and had set foot in eighteen different states. July found him encamped at Greenback, Tennessee, but the first autumn chill sent him north, toward Shiloh, Frank Sandford’s holiness training center near Durham, Maine.17 How Tomlinson fell under the sway of the dynamic evangelist and self-ordained prophet we can only guess—Seth Rees’s camp meeting at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, stands as a likely candidate, as do a score of other junctions on the holiness circuit that Tomlinson must have crossed in that peripatetic year—but Sandford’s appeal to a young holiness colporteur presents no mystery. In a movement that idolized spirit and power, Sandford posed as king of the holiness hill on both counts. After a successful apprenticeship in New England holiness circles, where he enjoyed the support of influential men like A. B. Simpson and Timothy Merritt, Sandford struck out on his own. He quickly emerged as a champion of radical primitivism whose thirst for apostolic power was matched only by his claims to have exceeded it. His newspaper, Tongues of Fire, served up a steady diet of signs and wonders, impressing on its readers the urgency of the times and the certainty that no one understood them quite so well as Sandford did. Shiloh, many came to believe, lay at the very epicenter of God’s plan for the Last Days. As Tomlinson made his missionary rounds in summer 1897, he would have read of Sandford’s “World’s Evangelization Crusade on Apostolic Principles.” The crusade, according to Sandford, had been graced with an outpouring of utilitarian gifts straight from the Apostolic Church, certifying it as “the last great movement of the age.”18 Shiloh’s “most favored movement” status was further confirmed by the fact that it not only duplicated apostolic signs and wonders but also surpassed them. Christ, after all, reflecting in John 14:12 on His own miracles, had prophesied that true believers would accomplish “greater works than these.” Tongues of Fire, with its bulletins from the world of the supernatural, proved Scripture. Readers learned of a “Miss Glassey’s” gift of tongues or breathlessly followed the progress of Shiloh’s spiritual warfare against “demons by the million,” which swarmed over the human race “binding them with fetters worse than iron.”19 A. J. would naturally have been drawn to a movement whose pentecostal truths were so powerfully attested by “Pentecostal power.”20 The day before Allhallows Eve, 1897, Tomlinson stood on the banks of the Androscoggin River, at the brink of a departure. If he harbored doubts, they fled in a swirl of autumn foliage as he waded into that most un-Quakerly of ordinances, water baptism. When Tomlinson emerged from the frigid river, like Christ he heard a voice proclaim, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Though a long train of saintly Quakers had preceded him into the waters of baptism—from the eminent Clark and Updegraff to scores of

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Durham, Maine, locals—A. J.’s decision remained, from his own perspective, singular and underived. “The Holy Ghost led me into it,” he insisted: “No one persuaded or even asked me to be baptized, but Him.”21 Tomlinson’s brief tenure at Shiloh’s “Holy Ghost and Us” Bible School produced a short note in Tongues of Fire: “Among the students is an evangelist from Indiana who has just arrived from work in Tennessee and No. Carolina.”22 Shiloh had left its mark on Tomlinson, and he, in a small way, had left his mark on Shiloh. A month later, Tomlinson was back in Westfield. He returned his minute, which was received without comment.23 The contrast between Shiloh and Westfield could hardly have been more stark. In the flush of Shiloh A. J. had lived the “resurrection life.”24 Back in Westfield he met raw fields turned hard by winter, quotidian encumbrances, and the gnawing reality of debt.

Breaking the Ties That Bind As Ambrose ventured deeper into the world of missionary possibility, his domestic responsibilities steadily increased. Now, the demands of his aging parents and young family gathered toward that critical mass that might spell his own stasis. The window of opportunity, he must have felt, was beginning to close.25 Increasingly, moreover, that imagined opportunity sharpened against a discomfiting backdrop of fiscal failure. In the holiness worldview, I have argued, frugality and wise stewardship jostled uneasily with the concept of money as a force of nature, subject to the winds of God. For those who expected faith to unlock supernatural stores of income, but defined faith as sublime oblivion to the “worldly” calculations of natural income, the tensions could be severe. Tomlinson’s frequent absences in divine service, for example, surely bore some relation to the specter of debt that haunted his drilling enterprise. A business founded in the shadow of the Panic of 1893 would have faced trouble enough without a distracted proprietor. With one, it was a doomed proposition. Already by fall 1895 creditors were on A. J.’s trail. But the winter he returned from Shiloh, his affairs went from bad to worse.26 The year 1898 dawned with an air of promise, but it was the promise of insolvency. A $100.00 debt loomed before Tomlinson, and he had neither the money to pay nor anyone to whom he could turn for help. With a wife and three children to support, the pressure became unbearable. The night before his note came due, Tomlinson collapsed in what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. “Suddenly I fell off my chair weeping, screaming and struggling,” he recalled: “The suffering . . . was intense.” But holiness paid dividends in his hour of need by enabling him to make sense of his suffering. “It was a struggle with Satan,” he discerned, “to loose his grasp on one hundred dollars so God could move someone to help me out.” Having solved the enigma, he came to his senses. A. J. had prevailed, and the very next day— true to the script of a life of faith—the money came from an “unexpected source.” He paid the note, just in time.27

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Such was the story from the vantage point of 1913 and shaped by the canons of holiness testimony. The notes Tomlinson entered in his diary at the time, however, suggest a more ambiguous answer and a more prolonged crisis. His cow had been seized to cover the debt, which could only have occurred if the note had already defaulted, and though “the dear Lord brought her back,” the embarrassment of a visit from the sheriff must have been considerable.28 Milton Tomlinson could surely have come to his son’s aid. But he did not, a telling barometer of the state of family affairs, circa 1898, in the Tomlinson household. If Milton had hoped that a bare-knuckled brawl with the hard realities of life would sober his heavenly-minded son, he miscalculated. The experience had the opposite effect. As A. J. put it, “I have been trusting God for support ever since.”29 What Milton failed to understand was that life’s hardships and privations had been sacralized, and so robbed of their disconfirmatory sting, by holiness. They composed the very terrain of Christian warfare and selfmortification, the trial of faith “more precious than of gold.” Small wonder that the purifying fire only persuaded A. J. to cling more dearly to the evidence of things hoped for, the substance of things not seen.30 The financial crisis, then, strengthened A. J.’s holiness faith, though it may have loosened the bonds of parental affection. It coincided, moreover, with a similar alienation of affection from his church. Throughout the previous year Tomlinson had drawn nearer to Shiloh and further from the Society of Friends. An old question, perennial to plainfolk converts stumped by quarreling signposts at the crossroads of faith, nourished his disaffection: Which of the many was the True Church? No issue posed more difficulty for the Indiana faithful. All agreed, of course, that the marks of the True Church were revealed in the New Testament, but there the consensus ended and the donnybrook began. By the late 1890s radical holiness had grown increasingly critical of all denominations, bar none. As the saints grew more fastidious about ecclesiological rectitude, they grew less tolerant of anything short of a fully Apostolic Church.31 The True Church did not merely permit purity, they felt, it demanded it. Conversely, it did not simply discountenance error, it banished it. If one’s church did any less, then the gauntlet had been cast and one’s “manliness,” contested. As Knapp explained upon leaving Methodism for independent holiness, “I could not retain my manhood and refuse.”32 His colleague Seth Rees, upon exiting the Society of Friends, advised the sanctified to quit their “hopelessly dead Churches” and organize independent congregations based on the simple, apostolic blueprint. “Life is too short, eternity is too long,” snapped Rees, to squander time and energy “cannonading upon an empty battlefield.”33 For every zealot who made the leap, many more were itching to do so. No one urged the reluctant to jump more persuasively than Tomlinson’s new inspiration, Frank Sandford. In word and print Sandford drove home his version of the distinguishing marks of the True Church. First, that church possessed “right authority”: the power to “bind and loose” exercised under the oversight of a divinely appointed apostle. Second, it possessed “right order,”

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being constituted of those and only those who had been properly baptized “by the Spirit of Christ.” Third, it possessed a proper name. God, not one to be unreasonable, had left some latitude on this point, but any True Church would select its name from the divinely sanctioned options found in the New Testament (Sandford preferred “the church of God” and “the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of truth”).34 Denominations might have played a constructive role in the past, Sandford allowed, but those days were gone. The Spirit of God was now departing from them, and anyone who wished to follow the Spirit would depart with Him. “The last great movement of the age” was already under way, Sandford intoned, and the True Church would now rise and go forth “fair as the moon, clear as the sun and terrible as an army with banners.”35 With impeccable holiness logic, Sandford laid out the grounds for separation. It was as absurd to suffer a multitude of churches as to admit “several hundred different multiplication tables.” For deliberating saints reluctant to depart a church that might still be true, Sandford devised a simple litmus test. Did one’s church teach “definite reception of the Holy Ghost following conversion?” Did it practice prophecy and water baptism? Did it cast out demons and separate true believers from the false? Did it have a biblical name?36 By way of illustration, he solved a sample case: “Every Methodist, by remaining one, is a part of a system that is . . . impure.”37 For those who applied the test and found their church untrue, the imperative was clear. “Write your letter of withdrawal AT ONCE,” Sandford thundered. No true saint could justifiably continue “an association which is unscriptural and which you know Jesus Christ would not join were he . . . in your place.”38 What would Jesus do? That was the question. Weighed in the Sandfordian balance, the Society of Friends was found wanting. It had an unbiblical name. It rejected water baptism. It held an equivocal position on baptism with the Holy Ghost. Worse, some of its Yearly Meetings harassed pious saints who had seen the light and submitted to water baptism. In such cases, it went beyond the toleration of error to the active persecution of truth. Whatever it may once have been, A. J. concluded, the Society of Friends was no longer a manifestation of the True Church.

“In the Name of Love”: Parting with Friends Mary Jane Tomlinson had preceded her husband both in the life of prayer and in fellowship with the Society of Friends. Once again she led the way. On March 31, 1898, she submitted a poignant request to the Westfield Monthly Meeting: “Dear Friends: As I believe in being loyal to the Church I love, of which I have always been a member, and as it does not embrace water baptism and I feel it my duty to partake of the same, I kindly ask that my name be dropped from the church books.”39 Two months later A. J. made his own request. It contained little that could be taken for poignancy. The body of his petition was as matter-of-fact as the

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minutes granted to him had been: “I hereby request my membership with Friends to cease together with my minor children.” But his concluding signature captured the animating contradictions of holiness in a single line: “In the love of the Great and Mighty God, Ambrose J. Tomlinson.”40 With a flourish of bravado, Tomlinson announced a separation, in the name of love. Four months later, A. J. convened the family council related in the introduction. Having gathered his parents, sisters, and brothers-in-law, he unburdened himself with a message sufficient to clear him “of their blood in the day of judgment.” That act, in all likelihood, marked a pivotal break with his parents. Henceforth, he would heed no father but God. Now that he had delivered the hard Gospel of sin and redemption, A. J. could take his leave of hearth and home. “As I have witnessed at home (at Jerusalem),” he explained to his diary, “I am to go round about (or in Judea), then a little farther (to Samaria), then to the uttermost parts of the earth.”41 Fatherless and solitary, he strode forth a patriarch in the making.

The Appalachian Trail Tomlinson found the uttermost parts of the earth in the vicinity of Murphy, North Carolina. This was not his first trip to Appalachia, as we have seen, but his removal there seems improbable, nonetheless, until we place it in its larger context. The song of Appalachia was a leitmotiv in the symphony of Quaker and holiness home missions, and Tomlinson, on his Appalachian way, did more than retrace the steps that he and Mitchell had previously taken. He followed the well-trod if not exactly beaten path of some of his closest Westfield friends. Following the Civil War, most home missionaries ministered to the needs of Southern freedmen, Native Americans, western pioneers, or wayward souls caught in the moral vortex of urbanization. By the 1880s, however, a less prominent field drew occasional attention. Quaker home missions provide a case in point. After the war, Quaker compassion inspired numerous orphanages and industrial schools for Southern freedman.42 While aiding freedmen, however, some discerned a second Southern mission. Friends like North Carolina physician Jeptha Garner were moved by the plight of poor Southern whites and urged their coreligionists to apply the same zeal, and the same missionary models, to their relief that were being applied to the relief of freedmen. And that meant the industrial school. In 1872 Quakers established such a school in Marysville, Tennessee.43 A decade later William S. Wooton founded the abovementioned enterprise in Mountain Home, Alabama, which eventually included an industrial school, an evangelistic center, and a college in addition to a growing congregation.44 Wooton emerged as the foremost advocate of this field among holiness Quakers, and Mountain Home became a favored stop on the Quaker evangelical circuit. Nathan and Esther Frame, among others, visited Wooten and left deeply impressed by the spiritual needs and missionary potential of his “Moun-

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taineers.” Afterward, they published a heartfelt endorsement of the mission, one rife with cultural assumptions. The Frames viewed poor Appalachian whites through the same racialist spectacles that colored the great majority of Anglo-American opinion in the late nineteenth century. Those spectacles showed Wooton’s mountaineers to be a tragic anomaly. They were the lost Anglo-Saxons, “a class of people with their own history and traditions” as peculiar in “customs and physiognomy . . . from the educated whites as a people can be who have descended from a common stock.”45 These fallen racial kin stood with hands outstretched, calling for uplift. Precisely for this reason, advocates of the Appalachian mission expected their field to be uniquely compelling and felt a certain indignation at its general neglect. Here were four million whites, Anglo-Saxons most and Teutons all, “who can neither read nor write and who are as ignorant of Bible truth as the heathen.”46 Yet thousands of Anglo-Saxon missionaries, bearing the civilizing gifts of a race singularly endowed with, in Josiah Strong’s words, “pure spiritual Christianity,” lavished their offerings on Africans, Indians, Slavs, and Hispanics while their own kind sunk into a deepening quagmire of ignorance and unbelief.47 Help was on the way, however, and by the 1890s a small chorus of holiness pioneers beckoned laborers to the Appalachian vineyard. Benighted and forlorn, the mountain man stood “with his feet in the ‘miry clay’ unconsciously waiting for Yankee deliverance,” declared one visitor: “How they need free salvation and free schools!”48 Dispatches from the field confirmed that need. One told of a schoolteacher who asked, “Where be the United States?” and of a poor mountaineer who inquired, “Who be that Man, that Mr. Jesus you be a talkin’ to and talkin’ about?” Such darkness reigned a scant “twenty-four hours ride of New York city,” posing “a mission field at our very doors where no foreign language is needed, in a healthful climate,” and accessible at “little expense.”49 Quakers took the field with particular vigor because they believed themselves to have a special advantage in it and, therefore, a special responsibility for it. Many Northern denominations recognized the need but were daunted by the “sectional . . . prejudice” faced by their missionaries in the South.50 Quakers, by contrast, enjoyed a relative absence of malice. After noting the hostility faced by his Northern Methodist friends, one holiness Quaker observed that “such prejudices do not exist against Friends.”51 With their roots in the Quaker Great Migration, moreover, western Friends were expected to have a special feeling for the South. “Many of our most worthy ministers,” Wooton once remarked, “were born among the red hills of North Carolina.” Winking at the social, ethnic, and geographical distance that would have separated a Piedmont Quaker from the folks tilling the hardscrabble farms of Appalachia, promoters framed the Southern mission as a homecoming.52 The result, in their minds, was a perfect match. “I have never seen a field so white unto harvest,” Wooton declared, “and . . . there is no people so well fitted to occupy it as [the] Friends.”53 Wooton’s ministry had acquainted Tomlinson with Southern missions

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well before he met J. B. Mitchell. Since 1884, Mountain Home had held membership in the Western Yearly Meeting, and it ranked as a prime beneficiary of home missions giving. In return, Indiana benefactors received a steady diet of affecting tales about the plight of poor white children (“unfortunate, yet worthy”) in Appalachia and the upland South.54 Shortly before A. J. joined the Society of Friends, moreover, Mountain Home formalized its ties with his home community by transferring its membership to the Westfield Monthly Meeting.55 Among those who answered the Appalachian Call were A. J.’s cousin Orlando and his neighbor, student, friend, and rival, Charles Stalker. One month after Tomlinson formed the partnership with Mitchell that would prompt his own Appalachian forays, Orlando was appointed by the Yearly Meeting to assist Wooton at Mountain Home and in parts of Tennessee. When Stalker requested a minute authorizing him to accompany Orlando, the Westfield Monthly did more than grant the request: it appointed a committee to raise support.56 The Southern mission had by then registered on the holiness map. As Orlando Tomlinson and Charles Stalker deployed to the Tennessee Valley, Martin Wells Knapp founded a holiness school, Beulah Heights, in the Cumberland Mountains near the Tennessee–Kentucky border. According to Knapp, God wanted the school staffed with “fire-baptized teachers,” and fire-baptized teachers came, not only to Beulah but to a sprinkling of other holiness outposts nestled in the Southern mountains, such as an industrial school and “school of the prophets” founded at Beniah, Tennessee, by “fire-baptized” saints with ties to B. H. Irwin.57 In fall 1898, shortly before Tomlinson’s climatic family meeting, Seth Rees visited Beulah Heights and was shocked to discover “three millions of mountaineers . . . practically without the gospel!” But the Appalachian field, he quickly learned, was as fertile as it was vast: “These illiterate people get saved,” he gushed, “with the same vehement demonstrations . . . that New Englanders manifest at the altar.” Such great need, and such great promise, demanded the most industrious of workers, and so Rees prayed to God to send “consecrated young people from the North and East.”58 By the time his old neighbor made this plea, A. J. had been carrying the Northern gospel southward on an occasional basis for at least three years. But his decision to quit Indiana for the stern valleys of Appalachia full-time may have been occasioned by just such an appeal. When Tomlinson set out for Appalachia, then, he did not need to blaze a trail. But if his Southern remove showed no originality, it did reveal an inclination to avoid the crowd. Amid the heady imperialistic winds of 1898, foreign missions—the moral linchpin of America’s Great Commission to cover the globe with the blessings of freedom, democracy, and Protestant Christianity— captured the headlines while home mission receded yet further into the shadow of its more glamorous sister.59 For Tomlinson, this could only have enhanced his sense of rectitude. A streak of nonconformity and a hunch for the rising concern helped steer him along the road less traveled and toward a

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field of labor that, among those available to a home missionary at the turn of the century, may well have been the hardest of them all.

Interlude and Arrival As it turned out, the road to Appalachia passed through Ohio. Unlike Stalker, Tomlinson did not have the luxury of a specially appointed committee to garner his support, so spring 1899 found Tomlinson and Mitchell travailing in prayer and waiting on the money they needed to reach their destination.60 Their network of solicitation—the folks they might expect the Holy Spirit to inspire to donate funds—came mostly from Mitchell. But Tomlinson more than held his own in spiritual warfare, the earnest arts of fasting and prayer that turned the wheels of the divine economy. The notes Tomlinson composed during this anxious interval tell a great deal about the spirituality he had acquired over the past few years. He had absorbed the ubiquitous pastoralism of his day, which presumed the spiritual potentiality of field and forest, brook and wood, but he had filtered it through

figure 9.1. “Bible Missionaries,” Culberson, N.C., ca. 1900. Courtesy of the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tenn.

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pentecostal symbols and archetypes.61 One day’s diary entries captured that distinctive piety with uncommon clarity and unintended humor. Tomlinson had “retired to a shanty in the woods” to pray, but while there he did not wrestle with principalities and powers alone. “The mosquitoes,” he complained, “drove me out of the woods.” Retreat did not mean defeat, however, and he soon resumed his entry from a new vantage point. “I am now in the upper room,” he reported. From pastoralism to pentecost, A. J.’s piety traced an axis of archetypes.62 In May 1899 God responded to Tomlinson’s prayers with words that He had once spoken to Moses: “Arise and go forward.” It would take a while to implement that command; two months would pass before he arrived in the mountains of North Carolina. The delay was caused by the death, on June 12, 1899, of A. J.’s father.63 That death, for all the sorrow it must have brought him, also answered his prayer for provision. His inheritance included thirtyone acres of Indiana farmland and an unknown amount of personal property.65 Milton Tomlinson may not have approved of his son’s ambitions, but his possessions would now go to support them. The Lord had worked in mysterious (and macabre) ways, and the path now lay open for the missionaries to resume their pilgrimage to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. A. J. reached his destination on July 14, 1899, at the head of a small entourage and with Mitchell at his side. (See figure 9.1.) One of his first acts in this new land of promise was to open an accounting ledger, wherein he would dutifully record the financial affairs of “Bible Missionaries Living in Common at Murphy, N.C.”65

10 Visions of Eden

To an industrious Midwesterner, Murphy, North Carolina, must have seemed an unlikely county seat. Though situated on the main thoroughfares of Cherokee County, such as they were, it was the kind of town where in winter the cattle still roamed the streets.1 But for A. J. Tomlinson and his fellow “bible missionaries,” it was not remote enough. Within three months they had relocated to Culberson, North Carolina, a small town less accessible to the outside world and more accessible to the poor mountain whites they hoped to reach.2 Even a town as obscure as Culberson, however, showed signs of the times. The newcomers found a doctor, an optician, and four railroad employees among their immediate neighbors, in addition to a number of farmers.3 That mix of hardscrabble farms, small town professions, and the railroad fairly assayed the core elements of life along the perimeter of the New South at the end of the nineteenth century. Poised between the mountains and the nation’s main streets, Culberson presented an only slightly skewed microcosm of its region. Tomlinson had moved to one of the nation’s most rural states. As late as 1910 only Charlotte and Wilmington claimed populations in excess of 25,000. Of the twenty-two million immigrants who so disturbed the nation’s domestic tranquility in the fifty years following the Civil War, almost none settled in North Carolina. The turn of the century found a state with 99 percent of its population U.S. born. Indeed, 95 percent had been born in North Carolina. But even without the burden and Babel of an immigrant wave, the state faced many of the same social problems that mobilized urban reformers in the North. In 1890 only the New Mexico Territory had a higher

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rate of adult male illiteracy than North Carolina.4 What churchgoing North Carolinians lacked in zeal for education, however, they made up in fidelity to their mainstream evangelical churches. Methodists and Baptists claimed more than 82 percent of the state’s church members. With Presbyterians thrown in, old-line evangelicals owned a 90 percent share.5 Where the statistics suggest stability, however, they lie. The latter decades of the nineteenth century witnessed population growth from regional migration and natural increase, rapid expansion in industry and transportation, an accelerating shift toward a cash economy, growing connections to the national market, and multiplying intrusions from (as well as excursions to) the outside world. Towns like Culberson responded to these changes with ambivalence, affirming tradition while making the necessary adaptations to modernity.6 The turbulent forces sweeping the New South routinely collided, setting off impressive social and political fireworks. Indeed, had Tomlinson retained his interest in politics, North Carolina would have been one of the few places where he might have reconciled the conflicted strands of his political heritage. In North Carolina, Populists had joined not the Democrats but the embattled Republicans, forming a biracial “Fusion” Party that stunned the complacent opposition in the 1896 elections.7 The backlash, however, had been tragic and severe and left a bitter legacy that included the 1898 Wilmington race riots. But the realities and race politics of North Carolina cities like Wilmington, 450 miles to the east, must have been as remote from Tomlinson’s mind at Culberson as the gentle farmland of northern Indiana. He had not come this far to further temporal causes but, rather, to establish on earth an outpost of heaven.

On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Visions of Eden The reports sent out by J. B. Mitchell to the holiness press reveal the Culberson mission to have been a modest affair centered on the distribution of religious literature, home visitation, and local revivals, all amid the harsh conditions of mountain life.8 These small beginnings, however, masked far grander ambitions. In January 1901, the inaugural edition of the mission newspaper, Samson’s Foxes, pledged the group’s allegiance to the “ ‘Hundred Fold’ Gospel,” an allusion to the heroic Christianity practiced by Frank Sandford’s followers at Shiloh.9 While exegeting the parable of the sower, Sandford had divined an ecclesiological principle in its three levels of harvest according to which the “thirty fold,” “sixty fold,” and “hundred fold” yields signified different degrees of church membership. The secondary and tertiary classes, he taught, followed Christ “on lower spiritual lines,” but “hundred fold” believers soared on pentecostal heights, recapitulating the social arrangements of those first, postPentecost Christians who held “all things in common; and . . . sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.”10 According to Sandford, the proper social form of the restored faith—indeed, a prerequisite

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to “the privileges and powers of a new Testament Church”—was Christian communism.11 As at Shiloh, Culberson’s “hundredfold” Christians formed a Bible-based commune, sharing quarters and holding all earthly possessions “in common.” The idealism of the group’s social life, moreover, was matched by its missionary aspirations. A. J. opened a modest grammar school in early 1900, but though he started small, he thought big. Already by the school’s second term and with scarcely two dozen students, Tomlinson had set his heart on a 600acre, $5,000 farm nearby as the future site of a large industrial school and orphanage complex that would inculcate “book knowledge . . . industry and Christianity” in its residents.12 The full scope and nature of his ambitions, however, Tomlinson confided only to his diary. The farm was not destined to house a mere mission, no matter how elaborate. Rather, it would cradle a restoration. When Tomlinson looked out over the landscape, he saw neither a farm nor an industrial school but, instead, a “garden of Eaden where God can come and talk with us in the cool of the day, and we will not be ashamed.” Even in this visionary moment, however, he recognized the down-to-earth need for practical means. “O God,” he prayed, “give me the five thousand dollars for Jesus sake.”13 Tomlinson’s desire to create an Eden in Appalachia, a place where mortals might unmake the fall and refashion the garden as it had been before shame entered, beautifully expressed an elemental impulse of American holiness. His impassioned plea for cold, hard cash expressed another. As we have seen, radical holiness uniquely fused the primitivist instinct and the practical mind, producing a pragmatic supernaturalism that blurred the lines between the spiritual and natural economies. One’s spiritual agenda had to be underwritten by natural means, and the timely provision of natural means validated the spiritual agenda. But the more rigorous adherents of a life of faith added another qualification. Natural provision itself had to be pursued by supernatural means. When the saints needed water, they smote the rock. If Shiloh lay in the foreground of Tomlinson’s designs at Culberson, then the international ministry of George Mueller lay in the background. Mueller was a German pietist who had immigrated to England as a young man to evangelize English Jews. Once there, however, his ministry broadened and evolved into a philanthropic network of schools and orphanages, the most prominent being a vast complex at Bristol. His achievements reached legendary status in the Protestant world, but within holiness he towered especially as the chief architect and exemplar of “life on faith lines.” According to Mueller, his great success came only after he had renounced all earthly machinery of support. That meant “relinquishing his salary; resolving never to ask any man for support; putting from his Church every appliance for obtaining money; selling all he had, and giving to the poor.”14 Mueller scrupulously refused to present his needs even to his most interested supporters and took Jesus’ command to “owe no man anything” quite literally. Such preventive measures insured that he would rely not on the “arm of flesh”

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but on God and God alone to supply the needs of a ministry that was, after all, not Mueller’s but His own.15 In spring 1898 the venerable patriarch died. His passing triggered a wave of renewed interest in his life and work and in the principles of faith that had sustained them. It also called forth a spate of books and articles.16 One of the first entries we have from Tomlinson’s diary finds him “reading ‘life of Geo. Mueller’ and seeking the kingdom.”17 The substance of the Culberson mission would never approach the things A. J. hoped for. But an overawed flatlander first looking into Appalachia can be forgiven for seeing imaginary possibilities veiled in the green-bristling valleys or a church rising like a shrouded promontory above the evanescent mist. And Tomlinson’s achievements, though short of his ambitions, were not negligible in light of the odds against them.

The Work If nothing else, the Culberson mission began with a sense of togetherness. The 1900 census listed twenty souls pressed into a single household.18 (See figure 10.1.) As Mitchell told the Pentecostal Herald, the group had welcomed “the children into our home to care for, feed, clothe and train them free.”19 Such close quarters must have provided a formidable defense against malingering; at least, the group never lacked volunteers for missionary forays into the surrounding mountains.20 The makeshift school that Tomlinson launched in 1900 would endure,

figure 10.1. Samson’s Foxes Mission, ca. 1901. Courtesy of the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tenn.

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under trying circumstances, for the next two years. The greatest accomplishment of its first term, during which it attracted twenty-four students while exhausting two teachers, lay in its mere survival.21 That fall the missionaries managed to purchase a town lot on which to erect a cabin, freeing them from the burden of rent. The 150' ⫻ 200' lot may have seemed small to the natural eye, but Tomlinson saw it through the eyes of faith. Drawing on his glossary of eschatologically potent names, he dubbed it “Zion Hill.” The county recorder must have blinked, but complied, when Tomlinson requested that it be deeded to “God Almighty and A. J. Tomilson [sic], steward or agent.”22 The idea had come from Frank Sandford, who had deeded the Maine farm on which Shiloh was erected to “F. W. Sandford, trustee or steward of God Almighty in the interests of His church at Shiloh, and in accordance with His will as revealed in the Bible.”23 But Tomlinson had gone him one better, deeding his lot directly to God Himself. During winter 1900–1901, dissension of an unspecified nature gathered around one of the workers and his wife.24 But minor troubles in the compound did not prevent the commencement of a second term or the inauguration of the newspaper noted above.25 The new century loomed vibrant, pregnant with potential, and the four-page monthly with which Tomlinson christened it shared its optimism. Samson’s Foxes must have seemed to augur a new era for the fledgling movement, because a newspaper bespoke legitimacy, even gravity, for a holiness ministry. That is not to say that they were hard to come by. Cheap, portable presses abounded, and everyone who was anyone in the holiness movement had access to one. Tomlinson’s printer, James Eads of Bolivar, Missouri (not to be confused with the engineer of that name whose celebrated bridge spanned the Mississippi at St. Louis), typified the business. A migrant printer, he toted his press from town to town, taking work as he found it. But precisely because newspapers proliferated so easily, a ministry to be reckoned with had to have one. And Tomlinson wanted his to be a ministry to reckon with. For a ministry operating on “faith lines,” a newspaper offered something perhaps more valuable than legitimacy: a running chance at solvency. Promoters could notify readers of their needs obliquely, through reports and testimonials (direct solicitation being taboo) and thus improve the odds of garnering financial support. In the process, a newspaper might also leave for posterity a record of the tenor and character, the goals and ambitions, of the ministry it sought to sustain. The inaugural edition of Samson’s Foxes introduced the paper’s name and the nature of its mission. The name, it turned out, had a triple reference. First, each individual paper was to be like one of Samson’s foxes, “turned loose . . . in every direction” with a “burning message . . . of love, and warning of impending judgments.” Second, the graduates of Tomlinson’s school—local children educated and trained for Christian service—were to be sent out, like Samson’s foxes, to spread “the fire of God’s love” throughout their home precincts. Finally, “Samson’s Foxes” was to serve as the formal name of Tomlinson’s movement.26

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In addition to explaining the name, the issue also previewed the “burning message” with which the foxes hoped to set western Carolina ablaze. It opened with a blistering salvo against tobacco and closed with an explication of divine healing and its broader implications for bodily health. Tomlinson began the latter by asserting the commonplace holiness doctrine—most often associated with A. B. Simpson—that Christ’s atonement had purchased physical healing just as surely as it had the forgiveness of sins. From that first principle he deduced what might be called an ethic of divine healing. The physical wholeness that Christ had purchased so dearly on our behalf, A. J. explained, effected a deeper than symptomatic cure; it severed the behavioral taproots of unhealth by delivering the saint from all habits “injurious to the health,” which by Tomlinson’s reckoning included the use of “tobacco, opium, pork, tea and coffee.” Divine healing, then, implied a corollary ethic that governed an entire range of hygienic and dietary behaviors. Tomlinson brought the point home with a peroration that entwined the spiritual and literal meanings of a cherished Bible passage and exuded a fair share of Yankee condescension to boot. “ ‘Filthiness of the flesh’ put away, and ‘bodies washed with pure water,’ are conditions of closest communion with God,” he averred: “Clean hearts, clean spirits, clean habits, clean bodies, clean cloths, clean food and clean homes are all requisits of a pentecostal experience.”27 The Samson’s Foxes mission, in other words, would fully share the assumptions and preoccupations of modern Yankee uplift. According to Jacob Riis, for example, the Children’s Aid Society of New York considered “soap and water” to be “as powerful moral agents in their particular field as preaching.”28 All a Northern evangelist on a civilizing mission needed, it seemed, was a Bible and a bar of Procter and Gamble’s new Ivory Soap. Early in 1901 construction began on Zion Hill, which quickly became the centerpiece of what Tomlinson now called “Mount Zion Mission Home.” All hands—man, woman, and child—turned out to dig the basement and lay the foundation for a projected schoolhouse and headquarters building. Funds for the project trickled in from ten states and Canada, and given the symbolic value Tomlinson attached to Zion Hill, geographic distribution mattered. “Every State in the Union,” he believed, “should have a representation in this structure.”29 By April, with Samson’s Foxes publicizing the cause, eleven more states had pitched in.30 The following months brought the small movement to what would prove to be the pinnacle of its institutional success. Tomlinson prayed for means to purchase the 600-acre farm, published more Samson’s Foxes, and traveled to promote the work in neighboring states. The group sent students and fieldworkers into the surrounding area, “ ‘fire-brands’ ignited, bringing the love of God to humanity and destruction to the ‘work of the devil.’ ”31 Rented farmland allowed the missionaries to take a promising step toward self-sufficiency by raising their own food. Laborers and material support also trickled in: a “Bro. McGraw & wife” arrived from Texas, and provisions came from their most reliable benefactors, a holiness contingent among the Brethren in Christ led by “Mother” Abbie Cress of Talmage, Kansas.32

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By the end of July, Tomlinson could reflect with satisfaction on more than mere survival. The successful conclusion of another school term had coincided with a then-record run of 600 Samson’s Foxes. The work seemed poised to expand. Summer evangelistic campaigns were under way, and new arrivals further reinforced the lines at Culberson.33 His vision for Mount Zion, A. J. could have imagined, had reached the brink of realization. Though a prophet without honor in Westfield, in Culberson he had become “A. J. Tomlinson, Editor and Publisher of Samson’s Foxes” and “Manager of Mount Zion Mission Home, Culberson, N.C.”34 These were grand titles for a modest post, perhaps, but the post was A. J.’s and virtually of his own making. No deep-pocketed patron bankrolled his efforts; no well-established organization steered help and expertise his way. Mitchell, with his scattered interdenominational contacts, constituted his only notable ally; Abbie Cress and her friends, his only reliable support. Tomlinson claimed allegiance to Shiloh, but nothing indicates that Sandford knew him as anything other than one of many young zealots on the periphery of his own movement. A. J. had refused to “build on another man’s foundation,” but he had built nonetheless.

The Crucible of Faith Beneath the surface indicators of activity and growth sketched above moved another dimension of life at Culberson, a dimension in which the visible manifestations of the mission served as props on the stage of a gripping spiritual drama. The Samson’s Foxes movement had as its stated aim the evangelization of mountain whites and the education of their children. But from the very beginning, the target population had to share the limelight with the missionaries themselves. In the spiritual-warrior culture that was American holiness, every mission formed a testing ground, a strenuous and penitential tryworks whose end was the proof and perfection of a missionary’s own soul. Remote, sparsely populated, and with little prospect of attracting reliable financial support, Culberson presented the missiological equivalent of Appalachian agriculture: a subsistence work whose hardscrabble fields might yield a begrudging harvest of souls but only after months of spirit-breaking labor. Nothing short of a miracle could produce a “hundredfold” harvest from such rocky soil, which was precisely what drew Tomlinson and his fellow missionaries to this forbidding place. They would get all they were bargaining for.

Holiness and the Via Dolorosa The ancient spiritual symmetries linking transcendence to suffering, faithfulness to persecution, and purity to poverty resonated with American holiness like a second sanctified nature. For that reason the Spartans at Culberson, like other practitioners of life on “faith lines,” sought out hardship as the terrain

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of sainthood. George Watson urged holiness stalwarts to pursue “that degree of death to self that Paul and Madame Guyon” had known, but he warned that it could only be attained “by suffering.”35 To reach the high plains of holiness, one had to walk the via dolorosa. Paradoxically, however, that stroll along the via dolorosa was billed as pure joy. The souls of the truly sanctified—infused with the “divinely beautiful spirit of self-immolation”—would embrace “suffering as [their] natural food” and welcome hardships as an opportunity for “sweeter union with God.”36 Tomlinson agreed, and he edified his readers by reprinting an article that drew tightly the cords joining Christian Perfection, suffering, and the imitation of Christ. “If Christ had to be made perfect by suffering, much more do we,” explained the author. Those who would be perfect must “drink at least one drop out of His bitter cup.”37 But the most eloquent expression of that view, again, came from Watson. The “spirit of crucifixion,” he explained, would “spread, intensify, and brighten until crucifixion becomes an all-consuming passion, a sweetly sorrowful, sadly beautiful flame of self-abnegation, which takes hold of all sorts of woes and troubles, and mortifications, and pains, and poverties, and hardships, as a very hot fire takes hold on wet logs and makes out of them fresh fuel for more self-sacrificing love.”38 This holiness variation on the ascetic ideal, like all such paradigms, shaped both behavior and self-understanding, influencing what believers did, what they said they did, and what they thought they had done after they had done it. Much has been made of the preponderance of poor and “dispossessed” among the ranks of radical holiness, but that social fact—to the degree that it existed—sprang from a reciprocal dynamic. Holiness could predispose one to poverty just as surely as poverty could predispose one to holiness. “There never was a Pentecost that swept over this globe,” Sandford once declaimed, “that did not take every penny the assembly had.”39 In an environment shaped by such sentiments, thousands of young men and women were tempted, and many persuaded, to reckless acts in the provocation of hardship. They marched to the social brink and, with hardly a moment’s hesitation, jumped, trusting that God would catch them or at least help them to bear the trauma of the fall. Of course, it did not take a distant journey to discover the authenticating virtues of hardship. Hardship could be found rather near to home, just beyond the veneer of the familiar.40 The simple application of faith principles to one’s otherwise ordinary circumstances, for instance, could be enough to do the trick. “Lord, we say good-bye to salary, good-bye to collection boxes,” declared one minister embarking on a life of faith: “We are welcoming suffering into our lives.”41 A rich layer of meaning, then, enveloped those instances when individuals like Tomlinson, taking little more than the clothes on their backs, stepped out the front door of a warm home and kept on walking. It was a choice for principled indigence. And it was a terrifying but thrilling initiation into the life of the young and holy.

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“Father or Mother, or Wife or Children” The parents of such adventurers, when not themselves of the holiness persuasion, suffered untold anguish. Not only did Delilah Tomlinson, for example, watch her only son embark on a distant and dubious undertaking. She watched him take her grandchildren with him. Holiness zealots by the score either abandoned their families or brought them along to share the hardships.42 Earnest Christians in a lost world on the lip of eternity, wrote one saint, could scarcely afford to cling “selfishly . . . to their children, property, time . . . and their homes crimson with the blood of souls.”43 This sentiment flew in the face of Victorian domesticity, the then-ubiquitous celebration of middle-class values that beatified motherhood, idealized childhood, and enshrined the home. Mainline Protestant missions, for example, simply presupposed that domestic virtues were part and parcel of the Gospel by which they hoped to save and civilize the lost.44 Perhaps Victorian domesticity, given its class basis, had not thoroughly penetrated the plainfolk ranks from which most holiness faithful were drawn. Certainly, the “domestication of American Methodism” described by Gregory Schneider was a phenomenon that left many Wesleyans peering at their institutional hierarchy across a gaping cultural divide.45 But when we consider the pervasiveness of domesticity in Northern Protestant culture and the logic of holiness self-denial, the opposite seems more likely. The saints proved their faith by renouncing precisely what they cherished most, knowing that Satan would try to tempt them at their weakest point and, conversely, that the greater the sacrifice, the more acceptable it would be in God’s eyes. For example, the privations endured by Tomlinson’s children weighed heavily on his mind. “It would seem that our children should have a more suitable diet than cornbread & potatoes,” he worried, “but God knows best and I am submissive to his blessed will.”46 The values and attachments of Victorian domesticity only heightened the significance of one’s decision to place “all,” including spouse and child, on the altar of sacrifice.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread Culberson, North Carolina, would have been hard soil under any circumstances, but the application of a simple holiness formula made it positively redoubtable. The principles of life on faith lines plus the militant style equaled an acquaintance with the many faces of affliction. That formula also transposed everyday life into high drama, and Tomlinson’s diary kept a meticulous record of the script: chronic shortages of basic material needs; replicating cycles of want and provision; urgent prayer answered in the nick of time with a few dollars, a sack of potatoes, a barrel of flour, or a load of coal. Such was the life of faith. Sandford had once declared his “daily supplies” to be “as real a miracle as if I were alone in the heart of the Sahara.”47 Tomlinson would have agreed. In spring 1901, the plot of his daily drama thickened. “Corn for horses

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failed yesterday,” he confided: “No human being knows the pressure I am under, and I can seek help of none but God. If He don’t come to my rescue I am totally ruined. 25 mouths to feed, ‘Samson’s Foxes’ to mail which are now several days tardy.”48 This was but the beginning of woes. “Money all gone, not even enough to mail a letter,” he wrote a few days later: “Have received nothing for several days. My faith is being greatly tried.” Tomlinson, in good holiness fashion, responded to the test with a bold demonstration of his confidence in God. He ordered two bushels of corn “by faith,” trusting God to provide the money before the corn arrived. When passing through the darkness, Tomlinson understood, one had to rely on the inner compass. “The Holy Ghost and fire fell upon us and we had an old-fashioned Pentecost,” he exclaimed after one inspiring service: “Though our food is nearly gone, yet we have the blessed evidence that God is with us and has not forsaken us.”49 He was walking by faith, not by sight. The inner compass, however, provided only half the apparatus of holiness navigation. Sooner or later, material provision would be expected to confirm the spiritual evidence. On the other hand, blessings were often deferred, either owing to imperfection in the believer or to the divine will: God heating the flame that purified the soul. When this particular round of affliction persisted, Tomlinson interpreted it as the latter. He recalled I Peter 1:7, a cherished passage so ingrained in the holiness mind that it flowed from the lips as naturally as the Lord’s Prayer. “The trial of your faith being much more precious than gold,” he transcribed into his journal, “though it be tried with fire, might be found unto the praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.”50 If the trial was indeed more precious than gold, he reasoned, then that meant that “this trial of faith for food is better for us than money to buy it.”51 That consolation served Tomlinson well, and often. During one precarious stretch, provision came “one meal at a time” for seven days straight. “I am now becoming so accustomed to this kind of a life,” he shrugged, “that . . . I don’t mind it.”52 During another test he cried out, “O this wonderful strain in the trial of my faith.”53 These were precious privations, fuel for the refiner’s fire. Passing successfully through the fire, however, required more than simple perseverance. The “wonderful strain” had to be borne without doubt or despair and without compromising any of the strenuous principles that had helped create the strain in the first place. Once, with only twenty cents jangling in his pocket, Tomlinson prayed for the strength to keep his needs secret.54 On another occasion he refused to buy food with the money he had on hand because it had been given to him for the building fund.55 And the temptation to borrow money remained ever present. “Paul says ‘owe no man anything,’ ” A. J. admonished himself: “I can’t go in debt, God what will I do?”56 Every test presented an opportunity to fail as well as to succeed. Ultimate victory, furthermore, demanded more than negative rectitude, the avoidance of wrongdoing or despair. It required the positive application of certain divine principles, chiefly prayer, fasting, and “faith” in the sense of

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proleptic possession: the spiritual “claiming” of a desired end in anticipation of its arrival.57 In keeping with these expectations, Tomlinson routinely practiced the austerities of prayer and fasting, and he would often “reach out and take” the object of his prayer by faith. One morning, for example, he thanked God “for the sack of flour He was going to give us today.” Sure enough, by nightfall “Father sent us the sack of flour.”58 The trial was more precious than gold—but only if one passed the test.

Paradigms of Providence The quotidian drama at Culberson, then, casts light on the laws of faith as the late-Victorian holiness movement understood them. It also opens a window onto the movement’s paradigms of providence. One of the most widely diffused such paradigms described a dialectic pattern in the life of faith. “After a season of more than usual poverty,” observed Mueller, “comes a season of more than usual abundance.”59 True to form, the material drought that gripped Culberson in early spring gave way to a May shower of blessings. Friends, neighbors, and the U.S. mail brought waves of gifts, from sacks of flour and boxes of clothing to plain old cash.60 After weeks of grinding poverty the workers greeted these donations with “tears of joy and praises.”61 Tomlinson, however, simply by observing the rigors of the trial, had long foreseen such a blessing. “I am looking for a flood of letters and large amounts of money,” he had prophesied a month before, “if we can fast it through without a murmur.”62 For the faithful, abundance followed want as surely as spring followed winter. While general provision followed a general cycle, particular provision conformed to more particular archetypes. One was the supernatural multiplication of a scarce resource. Tomlinson arrived for dinner one evening only to find that the cooks had nothing to serve. In a self-forgetful gesture he declined to turn up his plate, volunteering to go without. But at just that moment food began to appear from the kitchen and, much to his amazement, kept coming until all had had their fill.63 Miraculously, their meager victuals had been turned into a horn of plenty. Another paradigm of provision involved the inexplicable appearance of goods or money, as if left by an angel. On one occasion A. J. lacked the necessary funds to mail Samson’s Foxes. Though despondent, he felt led to take some papers out of his vest pocket. To his astonishment, he found a dollar bill hidden among them: just enough to mail the paper.64 It was marvelous, indeed, but then again it only stood to reason. “Money is nothing to Me,” God had whispered to George Watson, “it is only My wrapping-paper, and is inexhaustible; just give Me continually your warmest love and perfect obedience, and I will attend to your finances.”65 As pentecostals would later say, God owned all the cattle on a thousand hills and all the gold under the hills. The cruse of oil unfailing, the multiplying loaves and fishes, tax money taken from a fish’s mouth—these were not fables from an ancient book of

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tales but, rather, routine prodigies in a life of faith. The wondrous providences of Tomlinson’s diary had their roots in the subsoil of holiness paradigm, but they sprang through the topsoil of lived experience. A similar dialectic of experience and archetype guided the composition of Tomlinson’s diary itself. George Mueller had acquainted Tomlinson with the tropes and principles of life on faith lines and had suggested the kind of enterprise (school and orphanage) best suited to their application. But he had also pointed him to the literary genre best suited to record such a life—the personal diary as spiritual chronicle and as holiness lectionary.66 The everyday melodramas found in Tomlinson’s diary mimicked those he had read in Mueller’s. “Our money reduced to two pence, halfpenny; our bread hardly enough for this day,” Mueller confided to himself, his God, his diary, and his future public. “Whilst praying,” however, “there was a knock at the door. A poor sister came in, and brought us some of her dinner; and, from another poor sister, five shillings.”67 That story, in a hundred variations, replicated down the years and pages of Mueller’s diary. Tomlinson reproduced, in form and in substance, Mueller’s painstaking iteration of daily crises, mundane victories, spiritual temptations, and lessons gleaned along the way. Like Mueller, Tomlinson sought the confidence of his diary several times a day during the sharpest tribulations.68 Like Mueller’s, his diary seemed from the start to pose for a larger audience.69 Both men appreciated the power of diary, as a uniquely persuasive form of autobiography, to lend the imprimatur of fact to selective or “privileged” testimony. And both would benefit from its capacity to, as one scholar has put it, “endow that principal referent, the self, with a reality it might not otherwise enjoy.”70 When Tomlinson picked up his diary and began to write, then, he poured his daily life into a ready-made form. But even when we grant the powerful influence of cultural paradigms, literary forms, and authorial self-interest on his narrative, an honest bedrock of hardship and perseverance remains. At Culberson, art imitated life as much as life imitated art.

Deliver Us from Evil: The Angel of Death In the great wheel of holiness life, seasons of tribulation gave way to seasons of blessing, which were in turn followed by new seasons of tribulation. So it was at Culberson, where the plenty of late spring gave way to a poignant and bitter summer. The first and most tragic misfortune befell the mission as steamy June passed into sweltering July, and the angel of death paid a call. In early June Tomlinson had felt a prescient urge to reemphasize one of the pillars of holiness doctrine, “divine health as seen in the atonement.”71 Should sickness come, he reminded the group, they must employ neither medicine, nor doctors, nor any other doubt-affirming means but only the prayer of faith. That commitment was quickly put to the test. On June 29 “Baby Jessie,” the infant child of two mission workers, fell gravely ill and was “going down fast.” True to their convictions, the group eschewed medical attention in favor

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of what they took to be the most efficacious course. “We rallied our forces and met the enemy,” Tomlinson declared, and “conquered by the blood.”72 Prayer had purchased a reprieve, or at least A. J., anxious for signs of improvement, was able to report that “the baby played some today.”73 Unfortunately, the praying cure did not hold, and the child’s condition once again deteriorated. In response, Tomlinson called a special prayer meeting on the evening of July 8, and the missionaries waged war against the forces of darkness deep into the night. “Baby Jessie was again seized by the enemy and almost passed away,” A. J. reported, “but we rallied our forces, confessed our sins, begged forgiveness of each other & God, marched out and again met the enemy.” By dawn the prayer warriors had “routed the death angel,” and Baby Jessie was “alive and seems much relieved.”74 Once again, the victory was short-lived. By midday the child had worsened, and this time A. J. and Mary Jane covenanted with Jessica’s parents “to fast & pray as David did until she was either well or gone to heaven.” The choice of allusion spoke volumes, for it appealed to an alternative paradigm—the death of David’s firstborn from Bathsheba—in which even the most earnest prayer and the purest contrition could not stay the hand of death. The infant had reached an extremity that they could no longer deny. This time the enemy would not be turned back. As dusk fell on Culberson, Baby Jessie took her last small breath and passed away. The saints at Culberson had tried heroically to save a child by spiritual means. “We did all we could and turned every stone we knew,” Tomlinson sighed, exhausted: “Thy will be done.”75 The funeral, held two days later, was not “spent in mourning & euligizing the dead.” Rather, it was “directed to the living.” The pale infant in her miniature coffin gave the object lesson for a sermon that drove home the precariousness of life and the certainty of coming judgment.76 With souls dangling over a Devil’s hell, there was no time for regret or retrospection. Amid the pathos of this story we can see the mechanics of divine healing as practiced in many quarters of late-nineteenth-century radical holiness. There, it was a martial art, and it demanded the techniques proper to any such endeavor. Once again Shiloh, where Sandford’s troops were known for their “Shiloh charge,” set the standard: “A shout of battle rages, colors waving, cannon booming, as mid smoke and dust there follows the crash of arms and the fury of mortal combat . . . succeeded by the shouts of victory as the enemy breaks and flees.”77 The saints at Culberson had fought to save Baby Jessie’s life in just this way, through the martial arts of prayer and fasting. These were not exercises for the dilettante. Holiness prayer (sometimes aptly called “travail”) meant effusive, physically strenuous praise alternating with agonizing pleas and wrenching tears for hours on end. Holiness fasting meant total abstinence from food, and sometimes water, for days on end. Among more corporate expressions of holiness, even devout faith, earnest prayer, and absolute fasting did not assure divine healing. To be efficacious, those measures had to spring from a pure and united community. When prayer failed to produce results at Culberson, the missionaries searched their collec-

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tive life for hindrances. They confessed their sins and “begged forgiveness” of one another and of God and, in so doing, showed that they fully understood “the delicacy of this healing virtue,” as Madame Guyon once put it. “Although it has so much power over things inanimate,” she explained in teachings reprinted in Live Coals of Fire, “yet the least thing in man either restrains it, or stops it entirely.”78 Only prayer and fasting, in faith and by a united and pure people, could release God’s healing virtue.

Deliver Us from Evil: Discord among the Brethren In the wake of baby Jessica’s death a new and more unsettling threat appeared: discord among the brethren. To be sure, the specter of evil within had haunted Tomlinson’s mind before, during the starving time that spring. After all, suffering brought ambiguity, even to a community informed by a theology of suffering, because it could be interpreted either as a sign of authenticity or as divine judgment visited on the faithful to punish sin. Hardships that persisted or prayer that proved feckless might point to disobedience among the very elect. Only the past January Sandford had called attention to this danger in an article, “The Destruction of Ai,” which exegeted the passage in the book of Joshua where Achan’s hidden sin led to Israel’s defeat on the battlefield. “Sin, whether known or unknown . . . in a body of people claiming to be one and sharing all things in common,” Sandford warned, “will be sternly dealt with by the great and awful Jehovah.”79 Perhaps inspired by that article, Tomlinson had flirted with such an explanation for the April hardships. When privations continued despite his faithfulness and dedication, the incongruity of righteousness unrewarded led him to wonder if there might not be “an ‘Achin’ in the camp.”80 That crisis had passed, however, and harmony had prevailed even in the valley of the shadow of Baby Jessie’s death. But the very day after her funeral a new source of discord arrived: “Sister Woodward from Knapp’s.”81 On July 8, 1901, God’s Bible School in Cincinnati held its closing exercises.82 It took Woodward, a schoolteacher and Christian worker in attendance there, just five days to make her way to Culberson. For all her trouble, Tomlinson gave her a cool reception: “Don’t know yet what God means by sending her here,” he murmured to his diary, “but she feels she has a mission to fill here for the Lord.”83 We can only wonder if she might not have been an emissary of sorts, sent to steer Tomlinson out of the Sandfordian path that the Cincinnati leadership, alarmed by Sandford’s prophetic claims and exclusivist ecclesiology, strongly discountenanced. Whatever may have brought Woodward to Culberson, however, her presence troubled the waters and threw Tomlinson into a fit of despondency. “I can’t describe my feelings,” he wrote two weeks upon her arrival: “I feel that I am almost alone. I feel that my experience is recorded in Psalms 22.” He further complained of “two persons here who say God sent them [who]. . . . [d]isagree much with our teaching.” One of the two would almost certainly

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have been Woodward. But despite the opposition, Tomlinson was not about to relinquish hard-earned truth. “I feel that all ‘Shiloh’ is at my back pushing me on,” he insisted, “and I dare not go back on the teaching I rec’d at Shiloh.”84 Having run the gauntlet of hunger, poverty, and death, A. J. now had to face the scourge of dissension.

Deliver Us from Evil: The Wrath of Our Enemies The slings and arrows of saintly “friends” pierced deeply, but they were mere thorns in the flesh compared with what outside evildoers would soon inflict. By the time Tomlinson recorded his lamentation on internal troublemakers, he had already launched his own fateful barrage of piercing arrows. Specifically, the July edition of Samson’s Foxes contained an editorial that portrayed his mountain neighbors in decidedly unflattering terms. Though aimed at a Northern audience likely to be moved to compassion by caricatures of the local population, a few stray missiles had landed close to home. Woodward’s obstinacy, he soon learned, presented the least of his worries. A. J. was about to encounter the full force of Southern honor, offended.


11 Culture Wars

Ambrose Tomlinson had spent two solid years cultivating animosity before those errant incendiary Foxes lit up the vicinity. He accomplished the better part of that provocation, we might well imagine, completely unawares. The process involved at least three dimensions. First, Tomlinson’s manner embodied the same antistructural iconoclasm that raised hackles wherever holiness was to be found. Predictably, the confrontational style produced confrontation. Second, Tomlinson, like other holiness missionaries, made room for himself by prying (and plying) his target community’s preexisting fault lines. He survived in the seams of native antagonisms and was begging to be caught in a cross fire. These first two factors were general enough to be almost universal elements of holiness conflict. But the third was more specific. A. J.’s mission bore the crusading flag of Yankee cultural imperialism, and its every benevolent act came shrouded in an aura of condescension.

Holy Warriors The eccentricities of radical holiness worship offended middle-class sensibilities but rarely provoked persecution. That usually came as a direct response to attacks on a community’s foundational institutions. Iconoclastic to the core, holiness seemed to pursue, as if by instinct, a scorched-earth policy of conquest. When evangelizing a community the saints typically excoriated its clergy, condemned its “secret” and fraternal societies, and denounced the dress, leisure, and lifestyle of the vast majority of its citizens.1 The Free Methodist invasion of a place called Miller’s Grove of-

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fers an illuminating case in point. The local newspaper lampooned the “disgusting and extreme” conduct of the “whoopla band of zion shouters,” but Free Methodist worship merited only ridicule, not retaliation. “If to them it seemeth right and proper to roll in the dirt and mire, dance a clog or whoop like Comanche Indians engaged in a ghost dance,” the writer allowed, “they are privileged to do so.” After all, “the Declaration of Independence guarantees to all men life, liberty and the right to seek happiness even in the dirt under the seats of a Free Methodist campmeeting.” But the Free Methodists crossed the line when they publicly declared “all secret and fraternal societies individually and collectively” to be “an abomination in the sight of the Lord.” The Knights of St. John and Malta, the Masons, and the Odd Fellows, insisted the author, were worthy, civic-minded institutions guided by reputable citizens, and any Methodist who condemned them out of hand betrayed “a degree of prejudice and a measure of intolerance which will, unless he repents, prove annoying to him in that country where the people are ‘long’ on coal and sulphur, and where ice is at a premium.”2 The writer was alluding to the Methodist’s eternal reward, but he surely knew of many who were itching to serve up a little hell on earth. It is hardly surprising, then, that the saints found ample aggressions to report and that those aggressions—like the “murderous assault on evangelist B. H. Irwin”— were often perpetrated by an unholy alliance of liberal and conservative pillars, “Cambellites, Unitarians and lodge men,” who together made up “the wealthiest, and vilest, church members” in town.3 Holiness activists seem not to have appreciated their role in the provocation of these encounters. They saw themselves, on the one hand, as innocent victims of the same hostile forces that had crucified Christ. “Down through that awful gauntlet of the world’s hate and the devil’s rage,” Frank Sandford blustered, “we can walk in snowy whiteness with the Son of God.” Real saints would consider it an estimable honor “to be jeered at, hated, despised, reviled, ridiculed,” and so proven “ ‘worthy’ of robes such as the Son of God Himself wears.”4 On the other hand, they saw themselves as a conquering army charging an enemy stronghold on divine orders, and they expected to draw fire. Indeed, Christ Himself had declared that He had come not to bring peace but, rather, a sword. Peace, then, should not be expected. “NO REST, NO QUIET,” fumed Sandford, “UNTIL A COUNTLESS MULTITUDE WHOM NO MAN CAN NUMBER HAVE WASHED THEIR ROBES AND MADE THEM WHITE IN THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYR.”5 Like Sandford, holiness warriors worth their salt would square their jaws and snap, “Let the tribulation come on!”6 Strong evidence suggests that A. J. introduced himself to Culberson in just this fashion. In 1923 Homer Tomlinson penned a short story that fictionalized his father’s early ministry in Appalachia. Though rich in artifice, it also bears marks of authenticity. Some of the names can be independently verified, and the story portrays young A. J. in an uncomplimentary light that Homer, who spent his life lionizing his father, never used elsewhere. In all likelihood the story preserved what had by then become family lore: the portrait of the patriarch as a young zealot, the better to appreciate the older and wiser man.

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A. J. appeared in Homer’s story “The Fanatic” as Calvin Turner, a young holiness firebrand who personified valor without wisdom. Welcomed among a few earnest Christians in “Brown’s Gap,” Turner met resistance from the community in general and its establishment in particular. So he took the offensive. Gathering a small congregation of sympathetic locals, he opened his Bible to a smoke-and-thunder passage from Isaiah and declared war. “Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument,” Turner railed, “thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small.” Lest anyone lack wisdom, he interpreted for them: “I AM THAT SHARP NEW THRESHING INSTRUMENT.” And thresh he would: I am going to pull down those two churches . . . that are dead in their trespasses and in sin. . . . I am going to see that the Backslidden Baptist Preacher either gets religion or gets out. I am going to see that Slagle, pastor of the Methodist Church, reads the Bible on Sunday morning, instead of John Wesley. I am going . . . [to] make those merchants who have been giving groceries for cross-ties come across and pay the right price for those cross-ties. I am going down to Jim McCallister, the bootlegger and crooked merchant . . . [and] make him fall upon his knees and seek God. . . . I am going to the dead church members in this town, whited sepulchres that they are, and start threshing there. Turner then “continued his tirade on Brown’s Mule, Wrigley’s gum, ostrich feathers, Cheney’s neckties, violins and banjos” to the doubtful edification of his humble listeners. The very next day he marched to the middle of town and posted “ten additional commandments for godly living” on a tree in front of the general store: “1) no hog meat; 2) no violin playing; 3) no neckties; 4) plain dress for women; 5) no chewing tobacco; 6) no smoking or drinking; 7) no work on Sunday; 8) pay tithes; 9) no chewing gum; 10) no riding on Sunday.”7 It was a classic holiness calling card, guaranteed to get a rise out of the local establishment.

The Seams of Native Antagonisms Tomlinson, as bellicose as he may have been, did not start the holiness culture wars in Culberson. By the time he arrived, an Appalachian version of that national conflict had long been under way. In fact, Tomlinson gained a foothold in the area by aligning himself with mountain saints who had already broken with the local establishments, often in the most acrimonious fashion. Especially important to him was the family of William F. Bryant, a former Baptist who had been preaching the holiness gospel in the general vicinity for several years before Tomlinson arrived.8 Bryant and another mountain preacher, Richard Spurling, formed the core of a germinal holiness network with ties to firebaptized evangelists headquartered at Beniah, Tennessee.9

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Mountaineers who embraced holiness were promptly excommunicated from their local churches for holding the “modern theory of sanctification.”10 But excommunication was only the bare beginning. Vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, commonly associated with the violent maintenance of racial regularity, showed equal solicitude for the general order, and particularly in the upland South the bulk of their “work” targeted deviant whites. When holiness saints in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee disturbed the domestic tranquility, as did Bryant and Spurling, a running battle with the Klan ensued. Meetinghouses were torched and dynamited, and their leaders were shot at, beaten, and generally harassed. This being Appalachia, the saints sometimes shot back. When the Klan opened fire on Bryant’s home, endangering its occupants and striking Bryant himself with four shot, he reverted to mountain instincts. Lifting his shotgun from the wall, he stepped outside and waited for the posse to stand and deliver a second round: “When they did that I pulled my gun up and let loose. I listened to see if I could hear any body groan, but I couldn’t—I could hear their heels hitting the road. . . . I didn’t want to hurt no body, but we needed protection.”11 Missionaries like Tomlinson seized on these native rivalries and found their strongest allies among holiness preachers and locals with an axe to grind. Wittingly or not, they played on alienations that reached deep into the area’s social history. The fictional Calvin Turner found his chief antagonist in “Jim McCallister” and his prime ally in “John Ballew.” But the initial basis for those alliances had little to do with Turner and much to do with preexisting social dynamics at Brown’s Gap. Ballew allowed his home to be used as a meetinghouse, the narrator explained, not because he cared for Turner or the gospel but because “he hated Jim McCallister.”12 Significantly, Homer linked the animosity of his characters to their socioeconomic status by pitting a “rustic” farmer, Ballew, against a “crooked merchant” and “bootlegger,” McCallister.13 As David Harrell has argued, cultural strains long suppressed by war, defeat, and the Lost Cause resurfaced with vigor in the “New South.”14 However, social fault lines in the upland New South ran in complex directions and exposed numerous social and historical overlays. Economic friction, personal disputes, simmering clan rivalries, and a host of other destabilizing tremors—the decline of self-sufficient farming, the encroachments of a national market, a growing middle class, the influx of new goods, technologies, and recreational opportunities—spawned fissures that transected the region at odd angles, generating new divides or reshaping old ones. In that light, it seems entirely plausible that a holiness missionary like Tomlinson should have gained his first toehold in the clefts of the fractured social life at Culberson. Amid that social welter, holiness saints arrived as late reinforcements in the century-old evangelical crusade against Southern male sinfulness, championing prohibition, Sabbath laws, and restrictions on cockfighting and other blood sports. But they did so with an exaggerated masculinity that resonated with the subjects of such discipline, allowing male converts (and converters) to renounce sin and still hold onto their manhood.15 In similar fashion, holi-

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ness was unequally yoked with middle-class Protestantism, advancing Yankee commercial values while at the same time perpetuating a plainfolk cultural style that struck a chord with those the market threatened to leave behind. Contradictions came naturally to a movement thriving in the asymmetrical margins of Southern society. As a missionary in Appalachia, Tomlinson faced an additional obstacle and an additional opportunity. According to Catherine Albanese, a unique egalitarian ethos impeded the development of strong indigenous leadership in Appalachian society. “To stand out of the crowd in a position of leadership,” she argues, was to threaten “the basic structure of dependence” central to Appalachian patterns of kinship.16 It may well be, therefore, that the mountaineers’ legendary suspicion of outsiders, combined with their equal suspicion of “uppity” kin, created an opportunity for negotiators deft enough to navigate between the two suspicions. If one could overcome the former, then one might capitalize on the vacuum created by the latter. As we have seen, however, those who wished to tap the potential for religious growth and differentiation in Appalachia came into direct conflict with those who had contrary intentions. The native defenders of Southern identity tried to rejuvenate traditionalism through the idioms of a Lost Cause New South and so to save their heritage by reformulating it. Holiness leaders, by contrast, applied a Southern accent to militant Northern perfectionism, with its Yankee willingness to rend the social fabric in the name of personal or religious integrity.17 Perhaps for that reason, radical holiness proved to be an effective vehicle for long-repressed class tensions in the South, which explains in turn why its champions were shot at, beaten, tarred and feathered, or, if lucky, merely run out of town.18 The conditions that allowed religious fragmentation, that is to say, also allowed the fragmentor to be portrayed as a social menace meriting persecution at the hands of self-appointed guardians of the Southern way of life such as the Ku Klux Klan. At the more personal level, every alliance formed on the basis of a new partner’s antagonisms inherited those antagonisms right along with the new partner. The New South, then, presented a field ripe with both promise and peril for holiness missionaries. They could find ground amid this maze of intersecting interests. Too often it was no-man’s-land.

Yankee Cultural Imperialism A veritable fleet of Northern schools, missions, and philanthropic endeavors had steamed into Southern ports after the Civil War, like flagships of Yankee industry atop a wave of northeastern capital.19 Whether or not they saw the connection, Tomlinson and company participated in that cultural invasion. For one thing, they were almost the only Yankees in their entire township. Of 1,660 persons counted in the 1900 census, only one family (that of the secretary of a local marble company) and three or four individuals had been born outside the South. The vast majority of the population had not budged for at least two

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generations from a small mountain quadrant straddling the western edge of North Carolina and sections of northern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee.20 Seen in that context, the missionaries turned Culberson into a lively cultural crossroads. Workers, goods, news, correspondence, and even hard currency passed through at a spry pace for a town of such size in such a location. Notwithstanding all the controversy they engendered, then, the missionaries also fostered regional exchange and stirred the cultural and economic life of the small mountain community. Tomlinson did his part by sprinkling Samson’s Foxes with tributes to industry and progress. One of the first issues closed with a paean to modern corporate achievement in which Mary Fram Selby proposed that the rapid sweep of “transforming events” had now rendered “immortality” thinkable. How so? Because “organization, system, [and] modern machinery . . . wisely used by the Lords people” had brought its prerequisite, world evangelization, to the brink of reality. Consider, she implored, “the Morgan Steel and Iron Combination.” Although “a creation practically of a few days,” it had already become “the greatest of all financial or industrial combinations.” As if to encourage her readers to go forth and do likewise, she prayed, “Oh for a great combination speedily created to carry out the magestic undertaking” of world evangelization. Perhaps it crossed Tomlinson’s mind that the stirrings of such a “great combination” might yet be seen in his own industrious movement.21 Yankee assumptions of this kind left the Culberson missionaries with an ambivalent impression of their neighbors. On the one hand, they admired mountain folk and expressed a nostalgic appreciation for their premodern ways. Mountaineers lacked “social distinctions,” explained J. B. Mitchell, and knew “no aristocracy, no middle class, no lower stratum of society.” Furthermore, they practiced no “division of labor” and showed little interest in the market economy. “The problem suggested to the mountaineer, on seeing an article he wants,” Mitchell remarked, “is how he can make it himself, rather than where he can buy it.”22 But the missionaries easily crossed the line from admiration to patronization. Possessed of an overweening confidence in the superiority of Yankee ways, they had come to uplift their neighbors, not to humor or praise them.

The Guns of August Holiness antistructuralism, the exploitation of native antagonisms, and Yankee cultural imperialism all converged in the “world of small politics” at Culberson in summer 1901, when Tomlinson discovered that the pen, if not mightier than the sword, was surely as provocative.23 Tomlinson prepared the July 20, 1901, issue of Samson’s Foxes, we can imagine, in an agitated state of mind. With malcontents undermining his authority and the agonies of early July fresh in his memory, he was in no mood to flatter the locals. The fateful issue opened with a short poem by Mary Selby, “The Great Combine,” which reiterated in

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verse the sanguine sentiments of her previous article.24 If Selby’s encomium to the Age of Industry leveled the sights, then a state-of-the-mission report dripping with Yankee condescension pulled the trigger. Almost certainly from the hand of Tomlinson, the report introduced the “ignorant whites” served by the mission to the paper’s Northern readers. The region, it began, abounded in “small farmers who could make a comfortable living but for their ignorance of everything that would tend to the improvement of themselves” or their land. Those who would instruct them in needful improvements, moreover, were thwarted by “the dogged tenacity of their . . . prejudice,” which, perversely, existed “in proportion to their ignorance.” But improvements they sorely needed. Their homes were filthy, overcrowded, and devoid of such fineries as good manners, the kind of place where poorly clad children ate with their fingers. Ill bred, they grew to ill health, encouraged on their degenerate path by a diet heavy on “bread and bacon,” with a particular fondness for “bacon gravy and pure grease.” Small wonder that many were “confirmed dyspeptics.” The parents endured lives that were even bleaker than those of their children. “Stupefied, dulled, weakened, either by whiskey, tobacco, or poor fare, or all combined,” they passed “an unvarying round of reduplicated days.” Shut off from the wider world, their children could hope for enlightenment only from education. Unfortunately, the region had no such luxury to offer, for its public schools were haphazard affairs conducted by “incompetent” teachers. As a result, A. J. explained, “very few of the grown people can read as well as a seven year old child any where else.” Even a mountaineer, of course, could tell that “anywhere else” meant “up North.” The report next confirmed that the region’s economic, cultural, intellectual, and dietary deficiencies were matched by those of a spiritual nature. The Bible was little more than “a sealed book” to poor whites in the area because they could not read and had no ministers capable of intelligent exposition. The best they could manage were local “plow handle” preachers, like the one who boasted that he had only to “open his mouth and the Lord fills it.” But A. J. passed from insulting to incendiary when he compared poor mountain whites with “the negro.” The former were said to be more superstitious than the latter and less zealous for education. Blacks viewed education as a “patent of nobility,” but the poor whites—“utterly devoid of ambition”—viewed it with “an apathy only to be explained by their having been for so many generations without its benefit.” Hell hath no fury, the blistering report made clear, like the wrath of an educator scorned. The report ended on what was perhaps meant to be a hopeful note. In light of the apathy and hidebound traditionalism of the parents, Tomlinson reasoned, the most efficient means to awaken the locals from their “degraded condition” lay in educating their children. “Every dollar put into work for little children,” he calculated, “is worth ten, even fifty for work among adults.” Even that would not be easy, of course, because the adults were “perfectly satisfied to have their children remain as ignorant as they themselves are, and as their fathers before them.” Such obstacles gave even a seasoned missionary pause:

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“Under such circumstances how are they to be won?” With that thoughtprovoking question the report concluded, promising “More Anon.”25 More indeed would be coming and very anon. On August 13, Tomlinson recorded “quite a persecution . . . against us in the secular press as well as among the people.” One unfortunate worker, who had arrived only two months before, was roughed up by thugs.26 Two days later a Baptist minister and one of his deacons confronted A. J. with the offending issue of Samson’s Foxes. Outraged by what they deemed to be “false statements in it concerning the condition of . . . the poor whites,” they denounced Tomlinson as a fraud and liar and insisted that he bring his work to a halt. Hoping to turn away wrath with a soft answer, Tomlinson “gently and tenderly” invited the men to join him in prayer. Scorning his olive branch, “they refused and railed upon me for the insult.” Christlike, he then assured his persecutors that his heart held “nothing but love for them” and promised to pray for them as he hoped they would for him. At last, the visitation committee took his hand and parted, leaving behind an atmosphere heavy with foreboding. A. J. knew that he had not seen the last of his persecutors. More than ever before, local opponents saw the mission as an encampment of Yankee interlopers and were determined, Tomlinson knew, “to stop us and . . . our supplies from the north.” In light of the current situation, one coworker wisely advised him to leave town, but A. J. was determined to give his life for his flock, “if needs be.” Furthermore, he claimed to feel pity, not anger, toward his assailants. “Poor things,” he remarked, “they do not realize that they are fighting against God.” Like that greatest of martyrs, he prayed, “God . . . forgive them, they know not what they do.”27 Two days after the pastoral delegation, A. J.’s irenic commitments were once again put to the test when a self-appointed minister of justice paid a call. Asking to speak with Tomlinson privately, he led him a short distance from his home and then suddenly “turned and began a great tirade of abuse, cursed me to everything he could think of.” His purpose, A. J. perceived, was “to get me to take my part so he would have a chance to commence a fight.” Instead, A. J. quietly turned the other cheek, absorbing the abuse “without a ripple in my soul.” Thwarted, his adversary stormed off, spewing a cloud of vituperation.28 Thus, A. J. related the confrontation that would later form the centerpiece of his son’s short story, “The Fanatic.” In Homer’s telling, the antagonist was none other than Jim McCallister. Persuaded that he must “protect his village from this fanatic,” he had packed two pistols for the trip, in preparation for a duel. Having lured Turner from his home, McCallister turned and “told him, as calmly and businesslike as if he was trading two sacks of flour for a load of cross-ties, ‘I have come to kill you.’ ” This was mountain justice, but McCallister would dispense it with honor. “I will not strike a defenseless man,” he boasted, and offered Turner a pistol. Turner rebuffed the offer. “God above fights my battles,” he retorted. “Shoot if you will, but I shall not reply.” The Southern code of honor left McCallister little choice. “I am still man enough not to fight a man who won’t defend himself,” he sputtered and stormed away.29

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The incident, as reconstructed by Homer, showed a young missionary adroitly negotiating between contrary value systems. Turner had spurned the violence-based code of Southern honor while subtly applying its precepts to avoid being shot. Homer’s dramatic setting and thrilling details may well be embellishments, but they in all likelihood adorn the core events of August 17, 1901, as he knew them from family and local history. He certainly claimed as much.30 At the very least, the deadly intent present in his story was true to life. Upon his return from that encounter Tomlinson called his workers to prayer, during which he heard the Holy Spirit’s still, small voice whisper, “Depart.” When the Spirit’s motion was soon seconded by news of a posse that had formed to apprehend him, A. J. kissed his wife and children and quickly slipped away. “Like Jesus, Paul and others,” he wrote the following day, “I was permitted to escape their cruel hands.” It had not been easy. Tomlinson’s midnight flight had traversed dense forests and forbidding terrain where he “fell in ditches, waded water,” and felt his way along through pitch-black darkness. All the while the words were ringing in his ears, “vagabond in the earth” and “hunted down like a sheep killing dog.” He took refuge for the night, ironically, in the home of a poor mountaineer, the uncharitable description of whose type had put him on the run. Tomlinson had not meant to belittle the poor in his state-of-the-mission address. Indeed, he was still Populist enough to frame his persecution in class terms. The friend who now offered asylum was “a poor man, the kind of people we are trying to help,” he wrote, “and the kind the upper classes?”—the question mark bore significance—“are determined we shall not help.” Without a hint of his former condescension, he acknowledged the sacrificial hospitality of hosts who, despite their abject poverty, welcomed him with open arms and fed him from their want. The wife, for instance, had not eaten so that he would have plenty. He again observed that “the children eat with their fingers,” but this time he explained why: “They have not knives, forks & spoons sufficient to set the table.” A. J. now made it clear that material destitution, not moral or cultural defect, shaped the customs of this mountain home. Early the next morning Tomlinson left for Murphy, North Carolina, hoping to catch an eastbound train. Beyond that his plans vanished in the fog of uncertainty, and so to dispel the mist he performed a discernment ritual common in holiness ranks. “Three times I unthoughtedly opened my test[ament],” he related, portentously: “Each time it fell open to Acts chapter 21, where Paul was pressed of the Spirit to go on toward Jerusalem.”31 Like the priests of old, with their Urim and Thummim, A. J. had cast the sacred lot and pierced the mystery of the divine will.

Journey to Jerusalem The divine answer, for all its wonderment, took a bit of interpretation. “I don’t know all it means,” Tomlinson insisted.32 But he probably had an inkling. Frank

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Sandford had for months been issuing cryptic messages about “Jerusalem.” In June he had announced “Jerusalem” as Shiloh’s central theme. Next, a “Jerusalem Convention” commissioned a “Jerusalem Party” for a pilgrimage to Palestine.33 Over the course of the summer, a full-blown revelation began to unfold. “The campaign for Jerusalem,” divulged Sandford, meant that God now willed “to restore Jerusalem as His worldwide spiritual headquarters on earth.” And Shiloh would play a pivotal role. “We, the New Jerusalem,” he explained, “have been called of God to co-operate with Him in seeing that His city is restored.”34 Old Jerusalem would unite with the New in a sacred, end-time axis. Tomlinson did not immediately depart for either Jerusalem, however. First, he made his way to Whittier, North Carolina, where he met up with a holiness minister and friend, “Bro. Yarboro.” Together they journeyed to Waynesville, a small town some thirty miles west of Asheville where Milton Tomlinson’s first cousin, Jerome Tomlinson, resided.35 The travelers met a warm reception in Waynesville, and from their new safe house A. J. monitored events at Culberson. Toughs had assaulted the mission shortly after his departure, throwing stones, breaking windows, and threatening the workers, but God had watched over them, and the work of the mission had quickly resumed. Of course, A. J. yearned to go back and “plead the cause of the poor.”36 But that was unadvisable, and staying put in Waynesville, for a man of his temperament, was intolerable. So, being “greatly exercised in prayer for God to let me go to Shiloh,” he set his face toward the New Jerusalem.37 The last of August found Tomlinson on the rails again—this time alone— and eastward bound. The farther east he went, however, the cooler his reception seemed to get. At Salisbury, forty miles southwest of High Point in the heart of Quaker country, he called on another cousin. This time, the Hoosier scion of the Great Migration was not welcomed home. Perhaps his reputation had preceded him, but in any case his cousin turned him away, and so A. J. pressed on to Thomasville, just outside of High Point. Once again, his request for hospitality was rejected. Chancing upon a hotel late at night, A. J. thought that his luck had changed, but the keeper refused him lodging even though he offered to pay. Like Joseph, he had journeyed to his ancestral home only to find no room at the inn. Eventually, however, the innkeeper relented and allowed him to spend what was left of the night on a hard sofa.38 The next morning Tomlinson walked six miles to the Randolph County home of his brother-inlaw’s brother. Exhausted, famished, footsore, and almost penniless, he found at last a worthy “friend” who received him “gladly.”39 Tomlinson’s fortunes had shifted—but too late to prevent him from verging on emotional collapse. The morning after his arrival, a “very trembling condition” swept over him, followed by “a kind of drop or letting loose” in his soul. For the first time, apparently, he entertained the possibility of failure at Culberson. He had become “too much burdened and occupied” with Culberson, God seemed to say. It had become his endeavor rather than God’s. In that moment of spiritual clarity, A. J. confided, “I consecrated it to God and told Him it was His work and I could not carry it any longer.” Henceforth, the mission could “fail or go on as it pleased God.”40 Renouncing pride and rep-

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utation, confessing his own incapacity and the all-capacity of God, he found peace for his anguished mind through a ritual of release. Tomlinson had freed his inner compass from the distortion of self-will, but it still pointed in the same direction: toward Shiloh, the American Jerusalem. He would have to remain in Randolph County, however, until “God’s Providences” could arrange for his departure.41 So for the next three weeks A. J. worked on a relative’s farm, preached at local meetinghouses, fretted about the work at Culberson, agonized over his spiritual condition, and waited for the means to reach Shiloh. For someone like Tomlinson, waiting must have been the greatest agony. “I am so wonderfully burdened with a desire to go on to Shiloh . . . at once,” he complained.42 Even startling events of national import registered as mere blips on the radar of his fixated regard. “President McKinley died this morning from the effects of a wound received at the hand of an assassin,” he succinctly noted: “ ‘Beginning at Jerusalem’ keeps ringing in my ears.”43 At last, amid the waning days of summer, “special providences” appeared. “God has heard my cry,” Tomlinson exulted, “giving me the desire of my heart.” The timing seemed as providential as the means: “Sunday Sept. 22—1901 . . . My birthday finds me on the Atlantic ocean . . . bound for Shiloh.”44 Two more days and he was there. Unfortunately, Tomlinson’s first stop at Shiloh was not the tabernacle, where a dynamic convention held sway, but “Bethesda,” the compound’s faith healing hospital, where he lay suffering “untold agony.”45 The strains of his monthlong flight had overtaken him just as he reached his goal, but he recovered in time to be baptized in the Androscoggin River—along with more than 200 other conventioneers—by Sandford himself into the “ ‘church of the living God’ for the evangelization of the world, gathering of Isreal [sic], new order of things at the close of the gentile age.”46 The grandiose title of this October 1 baptism befitted its lofty status as the seal of yet another new and startling departure in church history, patented by Frank Sandford. During the Jerusalem Party’s pilgrimage to Old Jerusalem that year Sandford had become convinced that only those who “ ‘observe’ and ‘teach’ every sentence He ever uttered” were authorized to baptize. That condition invalidated “every denominational baptism on the face of the earth,” including his own. Even at Shiloh, Sandford admitted, “we have not baptized people into the Church for we have not had the Church set in order.” But now that had changed. Building on the foundation of a long train of godly heroes (“Luther, Wesley, Calvin, Fox, Simpson, the Salvation Army”) the church had at last been fully restored, fragment by precious fragment, at Shiloh. In Sandford, God had “an apostle of Jesus Christ, one that understands God and the Bible” and “knows how to set the Church of God in order.” In Shiloh, He had “a movement . . . pitched to the key of Elijah . . . commissioned . . . to prepare the people for the second coming of Christ.” To say the least, Sandford was now qualified to administer an authoritative baptism.47 For all the gravity of these events Tomlinson seems to have spent little time meditating on them. He was, of course, a fast learner, and even Sandford’s

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complex revelations could not hold his attention for long. Moreover, his restless temperament inclined to action more than reflection. Having made his destination and attained his spiritual goal, A. J. saw no reason to linger in the sacred aura. After all, he had not come to praise Sandford but to emulate him. “I have victory for our work in the south,” A. J. enthused, “and I feel that I must return there soon in the power and authority of the Almighty God.”48 After two rejuvenating weeks at Shiloh, Tomlinson began the long trek back to Culberson. He departed in the company of a fellow traveler, perhaps owing to Shiloh’s biblical habit of sending out its workers two by two. At Taunton, Massachusetts, Tomlinson received news from Culberson. The school term had begun without him, plagued by tribulations and low supplies. From Taunton the pair proceeded to Trenton, New Jersey. From Trenton, now afoot, they crossed the Delaware and traipsed into Philadelphia, where they took shelter in a Salvation Army barracks.49 Like General Burgoyne on his way toward Albany, the once-buoyant expedition now faltered, ground to a crawl, and foundered. Tomlinson and his friend crossed Delaware—the state this time, not the river—on foot and slept in a barn. The journey now devolved into a forced march, shadowing the Appalachian Trail. For the next two weeks they inched south by southwest, taking refuge where they found it and only occasionally in homes.50 Just short of four weeks into the journey, the evangelistic team broke on the rock of strenuous Christianity. “The man who started to the south with me has proved himself to be disloyal to the truth,” A. J. complained: “I rebuked him sharply and . . . he left me without even saying goodby.” To make matters worse, A. J.’s best shirt was missing, and he had little doubt as to its whereabouts: “I suppose he has taken it.” Tomlinson’s response to that final indignity captures the stark paradox of holiness ethics in a perfect verbal diptych. “The Lord have mercy upon him,” he muttered, “and yet reward him according to his works.”51 At 2:00 a.m. on November 16, in the sixth week of his odyssey, Tomlinson stumbled into Culberson. He had little time to rejoice. Like Moses he had climbed the mountain to meet with God and had lingered perhaps a bit too long. Like Moses he returned to find “a spirit of compromise” in the camp.52

12 Twilight in Eden

The weeks since Tomlinson’s departure had not been easy on those left behind. A hint of resentment pervades Homer’s recollection of the time when his father had left “Mary there with her three children, and two or three households dependent upon her.” At best they had survived on potatoes and corn; at worst they had done without.1 Now A. J. had returned to chastise them for their shortcomings. Like the Moravians at Herrnhut, Tomlinson felt, the missionaries at Culberson had need of “a general sifting,” and he convened “confession meetings” to facilitate the painful but necessary process. “One person has been asked to leave the work,” he reported: “Others are searching their lives.” Shiloh had taught Tomlinson that submission to God’s divinely appointed leader was the nonnegotiable bedrock of apostolic work. Its neglect had spawned, according to N. H. Harriman, the “weaknesses and disgraceful failures of all the holiness work that I have studied.”2 But in Tomlinson’s absence a spirit of compromise had crept into the camp, making some reluctant to acknowledge his authority. Happily, A. J. had his own Harriman in “Bro. Overstreet,” who exhorted everyone to “be true to God’s Apostle.” The group’s present suffering, Tomlinson felt, would be “relieved soon as all things are sifted & purified.”3 As the group’s apostle, it fell to him to stoke the cauldron.

Dark Night of the Soul Purity came more dearly than Tomlinson expected. As had been the case that summer, internal dissent gave way to external persecu-

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tion, and instead of relief, the coming days brought live ammunition. Tomlinson’s antagonists had regrouped, and on the evening of December 11, they welcomed him back with a Klan-style housewarming. As he settled in for the night, “a volley of bullets came crashing through the wall of the house rattling about us like hail.” The assailants fired on other homes in the compound as well. Miraculously, all escaped harm, but the future loomed ominous. “I am told that my life is in danger every day I remain here,” Tomlinson sighed, “but I must be true to God.”4 Having fled once, this time he would hold his ground. Not so his workers. The next morning two missionaries packed their belongings and left. The defections shook Tomlinson: “With our workers deserting us we scarcely know what to do.”5 Like Paul in Macedonia he was troubled on every side, persecution without and fear within. Finally, nature itself conspired against him, and—reminiscent of the prelude to his sanctification a decade before—A. J. collapsed in the throes of despair: “Dark rainy day. I had a great battle against the rulers of the darkness of this world. I was tempted to even hate God, my nearest friends and others and disbelieve the bible. I called my wife and daughter Halcy to my rescue. We wrestled with God for about two hours before the darkness gave way. O, how I feared I would fail God in these hours of trial and purging.” Tomlinson turned back despondency with the help of his kin, his Bible, and his will to believe. But he also found consolation in a devotional article by Bishop J. C. Ryle, “Godliness Rewarded Hereafter,” an article so apt to his circumstances as he saw them that he transcribed it at length into his diary. “If ever there was a case of Godliness unrewarded in this life,” Ryle began, “it was that of John the Baptist.” This was the story that Tomlinson, a faithful servant whose righteousness had earned him betrayal and suffering, needed to hear. When his dark night of the soul had passed he emerged with renewed determination to persevere in a life of Godliness, unrequited. “Though He slay me,” he vowed, Job-like, “yet I will trust Him.”6 Read from another perspective, A. J.’s account of his spiritual ordeal shows that he found his greatest consolations in the archetypal thesaurus of his Bible, from which he summoned a mixed but mighty host of spiritual metaphors to his defense: Paul against the principalities and powers, Jacob wrestling with the Nameless Angel, John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, Job, who though tested, sinned not. And in the end, Tomlinson prevailed. Despair, apparently, had long been a temptation, though A. J. had usually externalized the causes of his despair (for all his introspection, he showed little inclination to self-critique).7 Here as well, Tomlinson posited a range of external explanations for his despair: “compromised” workers, unanswered prayers, financial straits, violent persecutors. But even if he could not bring himself to acknowledge as much, Tomlinson’s own recent conduct may have contributed to his inner turmoil. Had he also been guilty of compromise? Among the “special providences” that had enabled him to leave Randolph County, for example, was a loan from a Carolina relative.8 Owe no man anything, he had so often preached. Finally, he had staked his faith and his reputation on Shiloh. By mid-December he may already have caught wind of developments there

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that would call his discernment into question. Sandford, as if in tawdry imitation of his religious rival, John Dowie, had declared himself also to be Elijah, “Herald of the Restoration.”9 Even the credulous had their limits. As 1901 slipped away the Tomlinsons found themselves alone at Culberson, the last believers. Only John Ballew, the local ally who according to Homer had welcomed A. J. more out of animosity for an enemy than warmth for a new friend, joined them for the year’s final Sunday service. Yet for all his tribulations Tomlinson remained strangely buoyant. “We are not lonely since the other folks all left,” he insisted: “God is caring for us.” Solitary and forsaken, they may have been, but the time was ripe for an offensive. “We are contemplating buying this property,” he boasted.10 The eyes of faith, it seemed, could still see Eden.

Rise Up and Build Tomlinson began the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred Two with a flourish. Only days into it he struck a deal with Ballew that landed the mission seventyfive acres and left Ballew with no small reward for his faithfulness.11 Though short of the 600 acres Tomlinson had once coveted, it amounted to a sizeable plot and a bold step of faith. Having been sifted and purified, he must have felt, the movement now would grow. By the end of the month a talented and energetic colporteur, J. W. Bell, had joined the work. His contributions to Samson’s Foxes would do much to repair the mission’s damaged reputation among the locals, as, for example, when he praised the “hard working industrious” mountaineers and complimented their “loving, kind, gentle, well behaved, bright and intelligent” children.12 In the succeeding months a handful of prodigal workers straggled back into Culberson, including James Withrow, J. B. Mitchell, and Mrs. Overstreet. Meanwhile, new orphans arrived, along with enough students to give Mrs. Overstreet a promising classroom of twenty-three scholars.13 Signs of stress, though, coexisted with the positive indicators. Tomlinson’s diary fell silent in mid-February, not to be resumed for another five months. When he did take it up again, he dismissed the long hiatus with a laconic remark that he had been too busy to keep a “correct diary.”14 Furthermore, Samson’s Foxes suffered from rather haphazard editing and carried few articles from Tomlinson’s own hand.15 Finally, a wave of illness forced the spring term to conclude early.16 But the work progressed, and the June issue of Samson’s Foxes revealed a minor beehive of activity. Colportage, prayer meetings, and Sunday schools were flourishing. Furthermore, June witnessed the triumphant, if long delayed, entry of James H. Eads. In fall 1900 the native mountaineer had engaged to print the very first Samson’s Foxes from his then-headquarters in Walnut Shade, Missouri. Not content to remain a remote printer, he soon determined to join the team in North Carolina. With God as his provider, the penniless Eads bravely embarked on a desultory odyssey through small towns, odd jobs, and

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temporary housing that landed him, a year and a half later, in Grand Junction, Tennessee. During the fourth week of May, Eads, though destitute, felt led of the Spirit to complete the final leg of his epic journey. Together with his wife and children, he set out to walk the last miles of the way. Twenty-five days and 343 miles later, he marched into Culberson.17 “We have been here for nearly three years,” Tomlinson reminisced for the July Evangelical Visitor, “and . . . we see the work only just begun.” The road had not been easy, he confessed, but he reassured potential donors that he had tried always to be a faithful steward: “We have at times done without bread rather than use money that had been sent for other purposes.” Despite hardships, however, the work could now boast four Sunday schools, a grammar school, and active plans for a permanent meetinghouse, all in addition to the orphanage and industrial school with which readers were already familiar. But completing the work, A. J. explained, would require money and workers, in particular a couple of “good lady teachers” prepared for “the hardships incident to a missionary life.”18 As Amos Kenworthy might have put it, this was an army, not a polite lady club. The guarded optimism of Tomlinson’s report to the Evangelical Visitor, however, had disappeared by the time he resumed his diary in late July. There, he acknowledged uneven achievements and uncertain prospects. A household of twenty, including fourteen children, still held forth at Culberson. But the Overstreets had departed, throwing the fall term in doubt, and despair once again crept at the edges of his mind. “I feel somewhat heavy in spirit today,” he confessed: “I can’t write what is on my heart. The burden of the work is heavy upon me. O God, what shall I do.”19 Culberson had been sifted, yet its suffering had not abated. As he had done that winter, Tomlinson responded to adversity with activism. On that prior occasion he had proved his faith with an ambitious acquisition of land. Now, like Nehemiah before the exiles, he gave the call to rise up and build. The entire company stepped out into the sweltering August heat, marched up to Zion Hill, and “commenced to clear away the brush, measure and stretch lines for building, dig for basement, etc.” A week later he hired stonecutters to cut marble for the basement walls.20 This was courageous labor and a valiant step of faith, but in the end it amounted to Dutch drudgery: pumping and pumping to save a few acres of land.21 As summer wore on, Culberson lost more ground than it gained. Most damaging of all was the departure of J. B. Mitchell, who—while the missionaries rose up to build—removed himself to Waynesville, North Carolina, in order to launch “J. B. Mitchell’s Mountain Work,” complete with its own paper, The Mountain Missionary. When Mitchell advised readers of the move, he made no mention either of Tomlinson or of the mission at Culberson, but his new endeavor must have profoundly affected both.22 For one thing, Mitchell used his new paper to solicit support. This did not bode well for A. J. because that support would surely come at his expense. For example, Culberson’s most generous sponsor, Abbie Cress, had always understood the mission to be, at root, “the J. B. Mitchell work.”23 In addition to solicitation through his new

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paper, furthermore, Mitchell now posted his own fund-raising letters in the Evangelical Visitor and the Revivalist.24 Finally, a discerning eye might have noticed that Samson’s Foxes and The Mountain Missionary shared striking similarities. The inaugural edition of the latter reprinted J. W. Bell’s “A Mountain Trip” from the June issue of the former, and the formats of the two papers were almost identical. A discreet byline at the end of Mitchell’s first issue explained the parallels. It read, “The Press of Jas. H. Eads, Culberson, N.C.”25 The fine print told a bold story: Mitchell had left Culberson and had taken the services of Tomlinson’s publisher with him. By September it seemed that everyone wanted out of Culberson. One of the orphans ran away. As noted above, Mrs. Overstreet, having seen enough of the “hardships incident to a missionary life,” had refused to come back for more. Tomlinson’s appeal for volunteers went unheeded, placing the fall term in jeopardy. “I am laboring under great discouragements,” he confided, “but Christ is my king & the Comforter is at home.” Tomlinson’s spirit was willing, but in mid-September his flesh weakened. “Running sores are breaking out on my body,” he observed dryly, “and I feel to be in a kind of dreamy state of mind.”26 The exact cause of Tomlinson’s symptoms may be impossible to determine. Perhaps it was smallpox, but in light of what we know of his hardships, pellagra or some other malady of nutritional origin seems more likely. It was September 18, 1902. Eight months would pass before A. J. again took up his diary. Though his diary fell silent, Tomlinson did manage a final issue of Samson’s Foxes. The format had radically changed, as one might expect after Eads’s defection, and the issue bears no dateline, though evidence suggests a midOctober publication.27 Much of the issue consists of reprinted material, but it contains a long retrospective on the work at Culberson that makes it the most historically important issue of Samson’s Foxes ever printed. Tomlinson surveyed therein the hardships and accomplishments leading up to the present eventful year, 1902, with its seventy-five acres for “the industrial part of the school” and its children’s home on Zion Hill where over “100 loads of marble” had been hauled for a foundation.28 In that last Samson’s Foxes the future seemed bright, plans advanced, the work progressed. It was a fitting epitaph to the first hopeful dreams of Culberson’s “Bible Missionaries Living in Common” and a wan farewell to the ruins of Eden.

The Beginning of Wisdom In late November Ambrose Tomlinson gathered his beleaguered family and departed, exchanging the privations of North Carolina for the relative comforts of Indiana.29 Homer Tomlinson later portrayed the move as a planned leave that his father had promised to take after three years of missionary service.30 Nothing in the contemporary record supports that interpretation, but if so, it was a fortunate promise. To the natural eye at least, there was nothing to stay

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for. With workers gone, school suspended, and the “children’s home” only a pile of marble on a rude foundation, Tomlinson might well have wondered what he had to show for three years of soul-breaking labor but a broken soul. In fact, Tomlinson had accumulated a great deal, though little that the eye could see. For one thing, he had learned hard but valuable lessons, such as the need to leaven one’s ideals with a dash of pragmatism. The first step in that rapprochement with reality may have come in spring 1901, when basic needs like food weighed heavily on his mind. Tomlinson had arrived in Culberson a radical pacifist, which for him implied much more than the mere renunciation of violence; it meant a revolutionary lifestyle. Radicals like Tomlinson leaned hard for their pacifism on texts such as Isaiah 11:6–9: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together. . . . They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” For a minority within radical holiness, the prophet had herein delivered a pacifist mandate so encompassing that it required vegetarianism. How else, after all, could one neither “hurt nor destroy” in God’s holy mountain? While pondering Romans 7:25 that spring—“with my mind I serve the law of God . . . but [while] in this world, my flesh . . . is subject to the law of sin”—Tomlinson’s pacifist rigorism began to unravel. “Instead of living in perfect purity and eating the fruits of the garden,” he perceived, “I am compelled to act in a large measure as people under sin.” Certainly, he did not “eat the flesh of animals thereby causing them pain,” but nevertheless, he admitted, “my shoes are made of leather and I don’t yet see anything to take its place.” It was a painful epiphany. He had to concede that, though his “mind” might “serve the law of God and hope for the time spoken of in Isaiah 11,” he must in certain respects “serve the law of sin which causes destruction.”31 A. J. had caught a glimpse of life’s moral ambiguity and of the degree to which even the sanctified would have to adjust to life between the times. Another perfectionist precept came up for revision that summer. As we have seen, A. J. and his colleagues practiced Christian communism, sharing possessions and a common household. The first signs of dissatisfaction with this arrangement surfaced in late July 1901, when Mr. Overstreet came to join his wife at Culberson. Immediately upon his arrival, the couple broke ranks and set up their own household. It was a timely act. Apparently, the entire group had had about as much community as it could stand, for within a week it had dispersed into five discrete households. After two years of forced intimacy, no one seemed more relieved than Tomlinson himself. “How we appreciate it,” he sighed, “for we feel that it is God’s will.” Such a change might easily have been construed as a betrayal of the “hundredfold” rule of order and therefore presented, for all its advantages, a hermeneutical dilemma. Tomlinson proved equal to the task, accommodating life’s practical realities by means of subtle redefinition, a small but significant retreat from literalism. If the workers no longer lived in a common household, he insisted, they still shared a common social, economic, and spiritual life. Characteristically, he did not waste time explaining his spiritualized definition

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of “in common.” He simply asserted it in a way that preempted charges of compromise. “All our people are victorious,” he exclaimed upon describing the new arrangements, “and we are living harmoniously in ‘Common.’ ”32 Tomlinson had learned an essential key to effective leadership: the “ability to adapt without seeming to compromise.”33 That skill would prove vital to his later success. Tomlinson’s last year at Culberson gave other signs of growing pragmatism. When he purchased land in 1902, he did not deed it flamboyantly to “God Almighty,” as he had done in 1900. This time, he preferred a matter-offact conveyance to “A. J. Tomlinson and wife Mary J. Tomlinson.” And if that 1902 deed showed his retreat from Sandfordian triumphalism, then the final issue of Samson’s Foxes showed his growing doubts about an overly literal application of Mueller’s principles of life on faith lines. Near the end of that final Foxes, A. J. placed a small notice, “How to Send Money.” He had never before given such directions, but the undeclared need and the prayer closet request had not worked financial wonders at Culberson as it had at Bristol. Instructions about procedure stopped short of direct appeal, to be sure (for that he reprinted an endorsement from Abbie Cress in which she urged contributions for “the dear ones at Culberson”). But it was further than he had ever gone before.34 Tomlinson, though his steps were halting and uneasy, had made the pragmatic turn. It was a loss of innocence and the beginning of wisdom.

Sojourn at Home When A. J. Tomlinson resumed his diary in late spring 1903, he wrote from Elwood, Indiana. He had spent the eight months previous working in a local glass factory, saving money, settling affairs, and allowing his children the benefit of a good Yankee education.35 The months had been, at one and the same time, a sojourn and a homecoming. Work at the glass factory seems to have reconnected Tomlinson to some of his old political sentiments, and he found special satisfaction in the entreé it gave him into the “everyday life of the laboring factory men.”36 More importantly, it paid on a regular basis, regardless of spiritual promptings and without hints on how to send money. All said and done, the eight months in Indiana greatly improved Tomlinson’s financial portfolio. The bulk of his father’s real property had been held up in probate court until 1903, and now that it had been released, A. J. added further proceeds from his inheritance to the steady accumulations of his paycheck. Exactly how much he garnered while in Elwood we do not know, but the real estate was worth $1,500, and by May he held over $600 in his checking account alone.37 These months, then, proved a tonic for Tomlinson’s bank account, and they worked an equally salubrious effect on his depleted spiritual reserves. Elwood, a religious hot spot, frequently made the pages of the Revivalist, and in winter 1903 several of its revivals gained coverage in the local press as well,

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including one conducted by George Eldridge, a celebrated Indianapolis Methodist who had joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance and who, like Manley and Tomlinson, would eventually land in the pentecostal movement.38 But only one religious event merited notice in Tomlinson’s diary: a convention led by George D. Watson.39 Watson’s convention earned a place in A. J.’s diary because it drove him to conduct a searching inventory of his soul. One night he left wondering if he had yet been truly “overshadowed, or covered over, or had put on the outer garment viz. divine love.” Another service made him question his willingness “to die for Jesus.” He had indeed “been willing to die,” but the question that brought him to his knees was, “Do I want to die for Him?”40 Watson’s potent spiritual categories and biblical metaphors had ushered Tomlinson into a transforming encounter with holiness mysticism. Two strains of mysticism, or something very near it, can be discerned in radical holiness. Frank Sandford gave voice to what might be called “gnostic” mysticism. It lay claim to esoteric insight or privileged knowledge and offered the keys to divine mysteries or secret power. This strain, given the link between power and authority and the fact that it commonly revolved around a thaumaturgic knower, tended toward authoritarianism. But the strain championed by Watson—perhaps best described as “aesthetic” mysticism—moved in the opposite direction. True religion, in this view, sought an ineffable state of divine union, and it sprang from “a heart quality, a soul essence, too fluid to be held in by words,” that is, from a spiritual sense that preceded and in fact defied the conscious formulation of belief.41 Echoing the language and categories of late-Victorian psychology, Watson located the wellspring of religion in a realm beneath “distinct consciousness,” an interior region where the ambient glow of Godly affections illuminated the soul like “a purple tinge in the finest electric light” or “the shaded background to every picture of Divine grace.” The sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, then, did not unfold in the cool intellect, but rather in the “mighty subterranean empire of cravings.”42 Divine Truth, for aesthetic mysticism, could never be contained in the linear, propositional constructions of traditional dogma. In fact, Watson’s sense of the inadequacy of prosaic language in this respect led him to disdain “superfluous talk” and disputation over “worthless non-essential” doctrines. When “one who has the real baptism of divine silence” overhears others speaking lightly of the deep things of God, Watson explained, “he must unceremoniously tear himself away to some lonely room or forest, where no one can gather up the fragments of his mind, and rest in God.” Ultimate truth so transcended human speech that it was “impossible for even the best of saints to talk beyond a certain point, without saying something unkind . . . or foolish”43 This being so, theological discourse required a poetic voice more suited to its multiform subject. “There are innumerable degrees to the work of the Holy Spirit,” explained Watson: “A hundred earnest souls may plead ‘refining fire go through my heart,’ yet no two of them have the same conception of what it really means.”44 Though Christian life existed as a “unit,” Watson allowed, it was expressed in forms “as manifold as are the living vessels that will receive

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it.” Romantic individualism, with its sense of the sacred and inviolable uniqueness of each person, had found a home in holiness: There are seven colors in the rainbow. Each of these colors can have ten thousand different shades, and each of these shades can be blended with the other colors and shades of color. . . . So out of the element of spirit, soul and body . . . and from the five senses of the soul and the intellectual faculties and the grace of the Spirit operating in the heart . . . each saint shall possess some signal mark of divine favor . . . which will distinguish it from all other creatures in the universe.45 One of the more provocative aspects of Watson’s brand of mysticism inhered in its spiritual eroticism, which blended the quest for selflessness with an earnest pursuit of divine union couched in quasisexual terms. Saints who attained “a very humble and crucified state of mind,” Watson averred, would become conscious of “an infinite loadstone” drawing their “desires, affections . . . and imaginations up into the brightness and sweetness of God.” This was the Spirit’s wooing, and the saint so wooed should “let hours, if need be, glide away unheeded” until he or she could touch “the very bosom of Jesus . . . and make deep and passionate love with Him.”46 The biblical warrant for such passions included the Song of Solomon but drew its strongest endorsement from the metaphor of the church as the “Bride of Christ.” Consequently, Watson argued that such passions would increase as the “wedding of the lamb” approached, because the impending Rapture would stir “secret longings and heartpinings” among the saints “for the coming of their Infinite Lover.”47 Although Tomlinson was moved to search for signs that he had been “overshadowed” by the Spirit of the Most High—an allusion to the Immaculate Conception—mystical eroticism did not take deep root in his spirituality. Of greater importance to his future ministry were the ecclesiological implications of his encounter with Watson. Interior and individualistic, aesthetic mysticism favored an ecclesiology built on egalitarianism and personal liberty. Just as “the air I breathe takes the fashion of my lungs and the tones of my voice which no other in the human race will duplicate,” wrote Watson, “so our loving Lord wants each of us to . . . give some form or voice . . . which none but us can give.”48 That emphasis on the variety of religious experience, with its implied tolerance for differences in expression among the sanctified, seems to have been instrumental in Tomlinson’s disengagement from a Sandfordian model of leadership that virtually precluded real cooperation with peers and colleagues. Watson, that is to say, helped open the door to the next stage in Tomlinson’s career: a partnership in ministry that would produce a successful religious entrepreneur and a pentecostal in the making.


13 The Church of God

In late May 1903, A. J. Tomlinson set out again for Culberson and the work he had left in tatters six months before.1 The sojourn in Indiana had been spiritually and financially renovating, but it had been only a sojourn. Indiana was no longer his true home. He had poured too much of his soul into that other soil, and it had acquired a claim on him that it would not relinquish. This time, Tomlinson must have felt, things would be different. Certainly, his approach had changed, as seen in his choice of way station on the return. His journey to Culberson, like Mrs. Woodward’s two years before, passed through Cincinnati. Homer would later claim that A. J. had attended God’s Bible School while there. No record remains of his enrollment, but these were ephemeral things, and short-term sessions in particular left little trace. We do know, however, that he left Cincinnati armed with $50.00 worth of literature for his new campaign in Appalachia.2 More acts of an uncharacteristic nature soon followed. In the year and a half since his baptism in the chill Androscoggin River, Tomlinson’s attachment to Shiloh had unraveled. He had always been something of an adjunct there, but the affiliation, however tenuous, had given him a sense of being cloaked in the authority of an undeniably true church. In that respect at least, he now found himself threadbare. But while Tomlinson had been losing his church, his friends back in Appalachia had been finding one. That previous spring, Richard Spurling, William F. Bryant, and Frank Porter—three mountain preachers representing a formidable union of Landmark Baptist and Fire-Baptized Methodist holiness— had gathered to organize the Holiness Church at Camp Creek, North Carolina. M. S. Lemons, one of the group’s first additions,

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later described a fledgling church with pocket book doctrine and hardbound ethics. Doctrine filled a short sentence: members promised to use the Bible as their only guide. Morality, on the other hand, took some elaboration. The covenanted saints forswore “tobacco, dram drinking . . . shows, swimming pools with the opposite sex . . . all worldly amusements, all lodges, and insurance of all kinds, where they were under obligation to some secret lodge.” Just for good measure, they promised not to wear gold.3 Shortly upon his return to Appalachia A. J. sought out his old allies. He was now chastened, wiser, and ripe for a new beginning. A year earlier, he had expressed grave doubts about the new organization. “Be careful about this church business,” Bryant remembered him warning: “It is dangerous.” Now he was more favorably inclined to the proposition. What occurred next would loom in long hindsight as a religious epiphany of epochal proportions. Tomlinson, the story goes, paid a call on Spurling and Bryant one evening as they met at Bryant’s home and questioned them severely and at length on the order and biblical basis of their new church. Early the next morning, June 13, 1903, A. J. ascended the mountain behind Bryant’s humble cabin. There, in nature’s own cathedral—the “fields of the wood” prophesied by David in Psalm 132:6—he “prayed and prevailed” for divine guidance. The answer dawned bright like an Appalachian morning: “Arise and shine; for thy light has come,” he heard the Lord say, and so he returned to join what he now knew to be “the Church of God of the Bible.”4 At the time, that epiphany merited but a single terse note in his diary: “I was ordained as minister of the gospel of the Holiness Church at Camp Creek, N.C.”5 Given what we know of Tomlinson’s personality, however, we would not expect him to wax effusive over joining someone else’s movement, and regardless of what he made of it then, that decision would indeed prove epochal. A religious entrepreneur like Tomlinson could typically choose between working as an agent within an established “firm” and launching a sole proprietorship. Tomlinson, however, had struck on a third way. He would join another’s movement and make it his own. “I think Brother Spurling was considered the leader,” Bryant later mused: “It was either one or the other of us at that time.” But, he groused, “when A. J. Tomlinson went into anything, he had to be the head.”6 The Church of God had just found a natural-born leader.

One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism The church that Tomlinson joined that late spring morning embarked on a swell of euphoria, certain of its course and one in heart and mind. But contrary currents stirred beneath the surface of that affective unity. With Tomlinson thrown into an already diverse lot, the Holiness Church at Camp Creek was holiness writ small, a composite movement with all of the advantages, and all of the disadvantages, of a blended heritage. The new church’s founders did share certain universal radical-evangelical assumptions. Like all holiness saints, they pursued the holy grail of apostolic

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church order, agreeing with Dowie that “Primitive Order” was a prerequisite to “Primitive Power.”7 Like all holiness saints, they simultaneously pursued the reunification of Christ’s fractured ecclesial body and construed their primitivism to be the last best hope to achieve that aim. The quest for primitive order expressed a quasi-Gnostic desire for lost secrets, hidden keys that, once found, would unlock storehouses of power and majesty not tapped since the apostolic age. It demanded truths that were particular, exact, and nonnegotiable. The quest for Christian unity, on the other hand, expressed an ecumenical thirst for tolerance and reconciliation. It renounced human instruments of distinction by means of which one group of Christians might be set at odds with another and above all those particular, exact, and nonnegotiable instruments known as “creeds.” The latent incompatibility of primitivism and ecumenism, however, did not dissuade the new church from professing both with equal fervor. Nothing suggests that the founders were even aware of the tension. But neither zeal nor denial could drive the devil from the details, and perfect unity would prevail only so long as the details were left undisturbed. Nowhere would these divergent impulses produce more lasting or more vexing consequences than in the realm of ecclesiology. When A. J. found it, the soon-to-be Church of God represented a merger of two resurgent religious traditions in the New South, Landmarkism and holiness Methodism.8 The group’s informal leader, Richard Spurling, provided the main source of Landmark influence. An evangelist and former Missionary Baptist, he had embraced the holiness doctrine of entire sanctification after breaking with his home congregation over ecclesiological issues.9 Like Richard Graves and the Landmark movement generally, Spurling carried assumptions that had been common to Southern restorationism since the days of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell: straightforward biblicism, a visceral repudiation of creeds, commitment to the freedom of individual conscience, a staunch defense of congregational autonomy, and the ideal of a church united not by ecclesiastical coercion but by the law of love and the bonds of Christian fellowship.10 Spurling augmented those core beliefs with the distinctive Landmark emphasis on the visible church. New Testament references to the church, he argued, connoted not an invisible union of all believers but a literal, visible gathering of saints. No gathering could be considered a true “church of God,” however, until it had been properly set in order. Christians should no more claim to be “the church” without “the covenant of visible unity and fellowship,” avowed Spurling, than a couple to be married without “lawful matrimony.”11 However, although Spurling’s ecclesiology drove home the importance of primitive government, it made no provision for authoritative structures beyond the local congregation. Frank Porter served as the young movement’s primary conduit for Methodist-holiness influence. A Methodist preacher and former Tennessee Ruling Elder in B. H. Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association, Porter left no explicit account of his ecclesiology. Indeed, his background would suggest that he had less interest in ecclesiology than in experiential theology.12 But we

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can guess at his inclination. For one thing, he took a distinctly Methodist angle on the nature of the new church’s worship. Reporting from Luskville, Tennessee, Porter thrilled Revivalist readers with news of “heavenly” meetings notable for their “outward demonstrations” and “old-time, apostolic, Methodist power.”13 Given those Methodist lenses and his former position in Irwin’s essentially episcopal organization, Porter’s ecclesiology is likely to have leaned in an episcopal direction.14 Spurling’s popularity and Porter’s priority notwithstanding, no one would exercise more influence over the organization’s ecclesiology than A. J. Tomlinson. And no one, it would have seemed, could have been more conflicted in their views on the topic. Disillusioned with Sandford, disheartened by his experience at Culberson, drawn but not committed to his acquaintances at Cincinnati, Tomlinson found himself stranded between certainties, searching and impressionable. He would later describe this period of his life in the archetypal cadences of conversion narrative. “I had . . . investigated many movements until my faith in them had completely exhausted,” he sighed: “I seemed to be like a ship at sea with no rudder.”15 The fact that A. J. drew on stock formulas to explain his experience does not diminish the reality of the events he described. The tropes of spiritual pilgrimage, far from banal, offered a vocabulary with which to frame a vital passage in his life. Tomlinson, then, arrived in North Carolina with his ecclesiological suitcase open, packed with sacerdotal robes of many types. It was not clear which he might prefer to don. The oldest garments dated to his Quaker years. The Society of Friends as he had known it was moderately congregational. General bodies like the Quarterly and Yearly Meetings existed, but ultimate authority rested in the monthly meeting (the equivalent of a Protestant congregation).16 Independent holiness, as defined by the associates who had been closest to him since his departure from the Society of Friends, furnished the next ecclesiological layer. While open to men and women of all Protestant denominations, it bitterly opposed any attempt to restrict individual or congregational liberty. “There never was a connected system of government in the church with an earthly federal head,” thundered Thomas Nelson, “till the pope brought it in.” Only God, not any “man or company of men,” could bestow the authority to preach or tell ministers where to preach.17 Likewise, Seth Rees flatly rejected the right of any “outside body” (be they “pope, bishops, or legislative bodies”) to organize or control an individual congregation.18 The prophetic primitivism of Frank Sandford supplied the final and most recent layer of Tomlinson’s ecclesiological wardrobe. For Sandford, apostolic order meant authoritarian theocracy, God ruling His Church through divinely appointed leaders who were to be obeyed as absolutely as if they were God Himself. Not unlike Spurling, he fixated on the details of primitive government and declared his movement to be the literal and visible “True Church.” Tomlinson had gained considerable distance from Sandford by 1903, but he would never fully escape his shadow or forget the thrilling vista Sandford had opened to him of “ONE CHURCH, FAIR, CLEAR AND TERRIBLE,” with “ONE LORD

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TO RULE OVER IT” and “APOSTLES, PROPHETS, PASTORS AND TEACHERS” to control it.19 Sandford’s theocratic authoritarianism, the radical congregationalism of independent holiness, and the moderate congregationalism of the Society of Friends could each lay claim to A. J. by the time he joined the Holiness Church at Camp Creek. His new colleagues, shaped by Landmark congregationalism and fire-baptized episcopacy, contributed their own diverse influences. In Spurling, Porter, and Tomlinson, one could argue, the new church had three men with at least five opinions.

Illusions of Unity The oneness of mind felt by these men despite their diversity sprang from foundational assumptions common to all of the above strains. But it was sustained by the elusive wordplays of holiness rhetoric and by a shared, though problematic, hermeneutic. Holiness saints of every ecclesiological stripe and label denominated their ideal order by the same term: theocracy. They also used the same terms to describe what they rejected in favor of theocracy: ecclesiasticism, denominationalism, creedism, and human authority. On the one hand, that rhetoric, precisely because of its fuzziness, constituted a great strength for the movement. It allowed a core set of terms and symbols to have wide resonance and thus to form the basis for broad coalitions. On the other hand, that rhetoric nurtured the seeds of future controversy because the saints interpreted these terms and symbols in diverse and even contradictory ways. For the Holiness Church at Camp Creek, at least, the balance sheet came out positive. The use of common terms to convey diverse understandings gave the illusion of harmony and bought precious time.20 Though temporary, that first glow of oneness enabled the young organization to forge relationships and build germinal structures that would survive the disputes later to come. The saints at Camp Creek thought that they agreed on ecclesiology, but they also knew that many aspects of Bible truth needed further clarification, if not outright rediscovery. They gained the courage to forge ahead, despite lurking theological dangers, from their untroubled hermeneutic. Never for a moment did the saints doubt the simplicity, perspicuity, and sufficiency of the Bible, when read with a surrendered heart and an honest mind.21 Like their rhetoric, their hermeneutic draped a cloak of unity over a tangle of contradictions. The young church’s first General Assembly, in January 1906, exposed the double-edged nature of that hermeneutic with uncommon clarity. There, the assembly adamantly disclaimed any “legislative or executive” authority. Its authority was “judicial” only.22 What precisely did that mean? As the assembly explained two years later, its authority was neither legislative nor executive because it did not hand down “laws made by the assembly” but, rather, “laws given us by Christ.” The role of the assembly—purely judicial—was merely to

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“search out” and “bring to light” those divine laws.23 That distinction enabled the assembly to allay the fears of “ecclesiasticism” raised by its very existence and still pronounce on topics ranging from foot washing to the use of tobacco. The Church of God had no creed but the Bible, but it could still condemn lodges, “shows,” and “skating rink Nickelo.”24 By distinguishing between legislative and executive powers, on the one hand, and judicial, on the other, the assembly sincerely meant to reject dogmatism and distance itself from more imperious church models. In reality that distinction achieved precisely the opposite effect. Church leaders insisted that their judicial deliberations had nothing to do with “what you or I believe.” Instead, they merely and objectively laid out “God’s law and government.”25 But by denying legislative agency they obliterated the distinction between text and interpreter and erased their own fingerprints from the assembly’s formulations of what exactly God’s law and government might be. The result was to elevate their findings to the level of divine decree. As Grant Wacker has noted of others informed by the same hermeneutic, they “seem never to have doubted that their interpretation of the Bible . . . was just as inerrant as the Bible itself.”26 More precisely, they denied “interpretation” as such, that is, they denied that their pronouncements were anything other than a straightforward restatement of the inerrant Word of God. Though gracious in its intent, that hermeneutic produced a dogmatism more severe, not less, than the “ecclesiasticism” it hoped to avoid. Problematic though it may have been, this hermeneutic proved a fine antidote to doctrinal despondency. Truth was single, not multivalent, changing, or conditioned. Because controversy sprouted from simple ignorance of, or disobedience to, that Truth, honest submission to God and Scripture would resolve even the most intractable debates. “The presence of the Spirit clears up theological difficulties,” Hulda Rees had explained, and that held true regardless of one’s ecclesiology.27 Whether speaking through the congregation, the elders, the General Assembly, apostles, prophets, overseers, or the yielded heart of the humble believer, the Holy Ghost could always be counted on to say the same thing. Leaders like Tomlinson, consequently, could bide their time in doctrinal skirmishes because they believed that unity among the sanctified would flow naturally, if gradually, from an open Bible and an open mind. Sooner or later, every honest, Spirit-filled Christian would come to see things their way. Despite differing ecclesiological instincts, then, the founders of the Holiness Church at Camp Creek joined together in a spirit of unity and common purpose. A. J. would soon feel the need for stronger government and would push the body first toward episcopal order and then toward a more irenic version of the authoritarian polity he had met at Shiloh. But in 1903 that struggle lay well in the future. His first years as a minister in the Holiness Church at Camp Creek were marked not by ecclesiological ponderings but by preoccupations of a more pragmatic nature.

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Movement Entrepreneur: Building the Church of God Following his June 13 ordination, two fields of labor lay open before Tomlinson: the residue of his old Culberson mission and the work of his new church. The old would decrease; the new, increase. Upon arriving in Culberson, he did in fact resume the work he had relinquished the previous fall, rounding up children for his orphanage and school and recruiting a new teacher, Mattie Briggs, to instruct them.28 He did not, however, linger to supervise their progress. His ordination had signaled a new departure. Never before having been ordained by an official church body, he immediately put that ordination to work. Tomlinson’s diary documents a dramatic shift in the nature and style of his ministry. No longer a chronicle of the interior life or a transcript of triumph and travail on the pathway of faith, his diary was reborn as a terse ledger documenting the practical deeds of a tireless minister. “Just arrived home from Tenn. where I have been in revival work for three weeks,” he reported. Furthermore, a new interest in the quantifiable emerged. “About 30 professed salvation . . . I have preached about 45 sermons,” he estimated.29 This was an institutional perspective, from which statistics mattered. By summer 1906, he had begun to circle each reference to a sermon, the better to calculate year-end score sheets: “Preached 196 sermons, anointed 17 for healing. . . . Baptized 15 and traveled about 2686 miles.”30 A. J. had entered a world where success was measured by sermons preached, souls saved, miles traveled, and churches organized, a world in which the subjective perception of one’s spiritual standing was subordinate to—or perhaps dependent on—the indexes of institutional growth. It seemed to suit him. The newly taciturn entries in his diary revealed little about his private thoughts or feelings, yet that very silence seemed to bear witness to a newfound confidence and sense of purpose in his ministry.31 He opened his diary less often now, but when he did, he had something concrete to record in it. In short, the paucity of entries and their preoccupation with work suggest that A. J. loved his job. If Tomlinson wanted work, his new associates were glad to give it to him. The very day he joined the church they handed him the reins of their own Camp Creek congregation. Six months later two more appointments, Union Grove and Luskville, both just across the border in Tennessee, were added to his list. In January 1904 the organization launched a small newspaper, The Way, which Tomlinson edited with the help of M. S. Lemons. By June he had added three more appointments, two in Georgia and another in Tennessee, to the three he already had.32 In July, to facilitate his frequent revivals, he bought a gospel tent.33 Far-flung congregational appointments, lengthy revivals, weddings, funerals, conventions, prayers for the sick and needy, administration, and publishing—his diary attests to prodigious labors.34 The nature of Tomlinson’s spiritual trials changed along with that of his ministry. “I feel very much worn and fatigued after so much labor,” he confided in a rare moment of personal revelation.35 He may have loved his work, but it

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was exhausting nonetheless. The acid tests of privation and persecution, material want and spiritual discouragement, that had marked his early ministry now gave way to the chronic weight of responsibility and overwork. The evidence was convincing. Tomlinson had made the transition from radical utopian to “movement entrepreneur.”36 The remainder of his life would be devoted to the practical work of building, maintaining, controlling, defending, and promoting the Church of God.

Trading Places In fall 1904 Tomlinson moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, a town of 4,500 souls sixty miles west of Culberson. It was a momentous decision.37 The move, he explained, would allow him to engage in mission work at Cleveland and to be closer to his Tennessee appointments.38 Homer later claimed that his father had moved “primarily to have better education for the children.”39 Each of these explanations holds weight. The congregations at Drygo and Union Grove showed promise, and A. J. placed great value on a good education. The driving force behind Tomlinson’s move, however, was the altered character of his ministry and the altered focus of his attention. Increasingly, it seems, A. J. regarded the mission at Culberson with a mixture of dissatisfaction and disinterest. Perhaps the truest measure of those sentiments can be read in its virtual absence from his diary. By 1904 one would hardly have known that it existed, judging by his diary alone. Moreover, the few references found therein generally pertained to evangelistic work he had conducted there. “Preached 2 sermons in the Baptist meeting house at this place,” he wrote; then, as if in afterthought, he penciled “Culberson” into the margin above “this place.”40 Tomlinson had left Culberson well before he moved to Tennessee. By mid-December A. J. had completed the transfer of his ministerial base.41 Geographically, the move covered sixty miles, but much more than sixty miles separated Culberson from Cleveland, Tennessee. For one thing, Cleveland held three times the population of Culberson’s entire township. For another, it rested squarely on eastern Tennessee’s main artery, the Tennessee River Valley, and enjoyed easy access to the goods, services, and social opportunities flowing between Knoxville and Chattanooga, the latter a scant twenty miles to the southwest. With its mills, rails, and factories, Cleveland had more in common with Westfield, Indiana, than with the backcountry scenes of A. J.’s early colportage. In short, Tomlinson had exchanged the remote hamlets of Appalachia, with their poverty and a culture as inaccessible as their communities, for the vibrant towns and small cities of the middle South. Tomlinson would still make excursions into the backcountry, but increasingly he viewed it through the eyes of an outsider. “The rude huts, the rough home made bedsteads, the stone fireplaces and stick and clay chimneys,” he marveled, “reminds one of colonial days.” Faced with such alien realities, he struggled for words: “I can’t describe the rough fare and the kind hospitality there is among these mountain people.”42 Ironically, his forays into the region

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left him with precisely the conviction he had tried so hard to impress on his Northern supporters. “Found people very destitute of both the Gospel and this world’s goods,” he lamented after one such journey: “A great field of labor much of it unoccupied by a Gospel messenger.” A field white unto harvest went begging for laborers.43 Missionary sentimentalism aside, however, Tomlinson had rightly discerned the field truly white unto harvest when he left Culberson. It lay in the bustling midsection of the New South. While Cleveland prospered, the mission at Culberson receded from A. J.’s active attention. But though it virtually disappeared from his diary, it continued to appear in solicitation letters that Tomlinson circulated among various newspapers and potential supporters.44 From that vantage only Tomlinson’s address, not the nature of his ministry, had changed. In a sense, he was justified in giving this impression, for the school at Culberson persisted and his own ministerial work, though now in a different vein and under new institutional auspices, still targeted poor Southerners (though less often mountaineers than mill workers, laborers, craftsmen, petty merchants, and others of the urbanizing lower middle class).45 But on the whole, the letters misled their readers, and in 1907 Tomlinson belatedly intimated his new direction. “We have been giving our attention this year, partly,” he vaguely conceded, “to new fields.”46 By then the “mission” at Cleveland had blossomed into a substantial congregation—twice outstripping its quarters and then building a brand new meetinghouse—and A. J. had long crossed the line separating a mountain missionary from a pastor, administrator, and institution builder. 47

The Organization Man Cleveland, Tennessee, witnessed the first flowering of A. J. Tomlinson’s organizational genius. His missionary background had equipped him well for the task of planting congregations, and he set about it with a vengeance. The real key to his success, however, lay in his commitment to oversight and nurture. “Organized another church,” read a typical diary entry: “Will probably go back there tonight for a few meetings.” A. J. never let a work languish for lack of tending, lavishing his new charges with attention and tutelage. No one understood better than he did that, in the business of church planting, “there is no chance to rest.”48 Tomlinson’s concern for systematic organization extended beyond the individual congregation to the loosely connected association for which he labored. A. J. initiated the group’s first annual assembly by inviting its leadership to gather at Camp Creek—still under his care—in January 1906. (See figure 13.1.) Once gathered, the assembly promptly appointed him to be its moderator and clerk. A tradition had been born. For the next decade Tomlinson would promote, host, and moderate the annual General Assembly of the Church of God.49 If Tomlinson’s success at planting churches might have been expected, his success at organizing an institution must have come as a surprise, not so

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figure 13.1. Site of the 1906 General Assembly. Courtesy of the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tenn.

much because of his holiness primitivism (which, as we have seen, aimed most of its antistructural energies at the institutions of others), as because of his limited aptitude for delegating authority and cultivating leadership skills in others. These talents did not come naturally to Tomlinson; like many authority figures, he inclined toward micromanagement and wished to do as much as humanly possibly by himself. A. J. would never fully break that inclination, but he overruled it well enough to get the job done. He began to actively identify, apprentice, and ordain deacons and evangelists, and when his crowded schedule forced him to relinquish one responsibility for another, he appointed surrogates, building reservoirs not only of potential leaders but of trust and mutual indebtedness as well.50 These institutional skills built on the pragmatic turn Tomlinson had made in the twilight of his utopian experiment at Culberson. Increasingly, the objectives of his ministry and the needs of his growing denomination, not the abstract dictates of a “life of faith,” governed his behavior. When the church at Cleveland needed an organ that it could not afford, Tomlinson bought it on the installment plan. When a “ranter” disturbed a meeting, A. J. had him ar-

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rested. He regretted sending the “poor man to jail,” but, as he explained in an (unfortunate) allusion to the words of Caiaphas, “we felt one man had better suffer than for a number of souls to be lost.” Furthermore, A. J. had seen enough of fund-raising formalities. Before, he would present his needs and then let folks respond as the Holy Spirit led. “But now,” he told readers of a 1907 letter, “I feel like just asking kindly for help.”51 Tomlinson had learned pragmatism the hard way, and it was a lesson he would not forget. Like cleanliness and Godliness for the utopian Tomlinson, pragmatism and professionalism went hand in hand for Tomlinson the organization man, and he pressed to make his young denomination as professional as possible. The first step to becoming a respectable minister, he seemed to believe, was to look and act the part. (See figure 13.2.) “Brother Spurling was a plain old man,” Bryant recalled, “but Brother Tomlinson wanted to dress him up.” According to Bryant, Tomlinson would buy clothes for the old patriarch, all the while puzzling, “What will we do, he is so slouchy?”52 That drive to professionalize also surfaced in Tomlinson’s handling of the General Assemblies, for which he printed high-quality programs formally outlining the schedule of speakers, topics, and events.53 He especially welcomed any tool that could bring both professionalism and efficiency, such as the telephone. Lest his ministry lag behind the times, A. J. installed a phone shortly after moving to Cleveland, so that by early 1906 he could field distant calls that arrived at lightening speed, like a prompting of the Holy Ghost, along thin wires strung by AT&T.54 Somewhere amid this whirl of evangelism, visitation, publishing, mobiliz-

figure 13.2. Ordained ministers in attendance at the Church of God General Assembly, Cleveland, Tenn., ca. 1910. Courtesy of the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tenn.

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ing, and maintaining, Tomlinson acquired another valuable asset: the pastoral touch. His diary reflects a growing affection for, and intimacy with, the people he served. When “baby Jessica” had died tragically in summer 1901, Tomlinson had not mentioned the child’s last name, and her mother and father had existed only as “the dear young parents.” It was as if he inhabited a world of mythic archetypes where individuals collapsed into literary tropes.55 Now, the members of his congregations acquired names. “Funeral yesterday afternoon,” he wrote: “Geo. Freeman’s little Raymond at Union Grove.”56 At first he visited each member personally. When his congregations grew too large for that to be feasible, he appointed a committee to insure that every member would still have the benefit of personal attention and accountability.57 He also showed growing concern for the weak and wounded. Never shy about delivering the hard gospel, he nevertheless sought ways to “handle . . . our unruly members without excluding so many of them” and to restore those who had been excluded. “I . . . want you to know I still love you,” he wrote one alienated church worker: “Any time you will give me a chance I will certainly be a friend.”58

The Ministry of Healing Perhaps the clearest view we have of Tomlinson’s pastoral gift appears in his ministry of healing. A vital aspect of any holiness pastor’s work, it told volumes about the texture, the good and the bad, of holiness culture. Sickness and infirmity, given the movement’s investment in divine healing, were vivid entities in its collective consciousness.59 Consequently, rituals of healing were dense with peril and promise, gathering into a single moment the stuff of personal and communal need. Each recapitulation of that ritual was a highrisk undertaking with the potential to confirm or disconfirm the community and to bind or alienate the individual from the group. But no holiness minister worth his or her salt backed down from the challenge. The real measure of a pastor, however, came not in the public rituals of healing that adorned church services and revival meetings but, rather, in his or her response, over time, to the chronic, random stream of individual calls that might importune a pastor at any hour of the night or day. The frequency and social significance of such calls, of course, were sharpened by the professional competition addressed in chapter 3. “I’d rather die a martyr and do what Jesus says,” M. S. Lemons vowed to the General Assembly, “than to spend all my money for Doctors and then die and the Dr. have to be paid with the money that my wife and children ought to have.”60 The front lines of the war on the medical establishment, one could say, cut through the bedchambers of ailing saints, and as the pastor replaced the doctor within holiness, both the added status and the added inconvenience were considerable. Like the doctor, the pastor was on twenty-four-hour call. “Was called out at midnight to go and pray for a sick child,” Tomlinson recorded on one occa-

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sion. “Have been called up several times lately in the night to pray and wait on the sick,” he wrote on another.61 But the most intimate and inconvenient hours offered the most profound opportunities for pastoral care. Time and again, Tomlinson proved his mettle by departing at a moment’s notice and in the dead of night to minister healing at someone’s greatest hour of vulnerability and need. Rituals of healing, at their best, revealed a noble side of holiness culture. Holiness did not shun the infirm or hold them at arm’s length. Rather, it ushered them to the center of its public forums and gave them leading roles in its cosmic drama. The well laid hands on the sick, showering them with compassion and bathing them in prayer. But divine healing also had its dark side: the onus of one’s healing ultimately rested on one’s own disposition, and communal embrace could quickly turn to reproof if one failed expectations or violated the codes of a life of faith. When called to the bedside of a suffering colleague, J. C. Murphy, Tomlinson boasted that his friend had “refused all remedies and his faith is yet strong in God.” The prayer of faith had not quite raised him up, but A. J. praised Murphy for being “one among thousands who stands for the bible truth and would rather die than to disobey the bible & thus grieve the Holy Spirit.”62 Several months later, Tomlinson again visited the Murphy home, where he found his friend near death. But more disturbing to him than Murphy’s dire condition was his spiritual compromise. “I am very much grieved,” Tomlinson sighed, “because he has resorted to Physicians instead of God after being healed several times before by the Lord.”63 It did not occur to Tomlinson, of course, that if the Reverend Murphy had already been healed “several times” of the same ailment, then he must not have been healed at all. The saints faced a deadly catch-22. With medical help forbidden, only the most desperate of circumstances could drive them to accept it. Consequently, those who sought medical help tended to do so in extremis, when it was likely to come too late. If the patient then died, his or her death simply confirmed the error of consorting with physicians and compounded the insult of dying with the stigma of disgrace. “Preached 196 sermons, anointed 17 for healing,” Tomlinson calculated at year’s end: “All but one got well and he resorted to medical aid.”64 But such incidents proved rare, and on the whole these calls enhanced A. J.’s progress as a pastor and strengthened the cords of affection that bound his colleagues and church members to him. The laying on of hands perfected the pastoral touch.

The Ministry of Words To build a movement, A. J. needed more than organizational skills and a pastoral touch. He needed the performing arts. Organization and nurture built on the foundation of recruitment, which required one to catch the eye, hold the mind, and sway the heart. He proved equal to the challenge. Through tears,

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humor, wrath, and dramatic flair, A. J. established rapport with his audiences, molded their emotions, and created his own distinctive homiletic style. Those who attended Tomlinson’s preaching were typically impressed by his sincerity, compassion, and deep humility. A. J. achieved that effect, in part, by taking the role of the weeping prophet. “I was so affected for souls,” he wrote of one early meeting, “that I stopped a time or two and wept in the stand.” The tears soon flowed freely and frequently, emerging as a trademark of his pulpit demeanor. These open displays of emotion, in which A. J. “preached . . . in tears and prayed with much weeping,” were complimented by overt expressions of humility.65 Tomlinson possessed a self-effacing manner that disarmed hearers and melted hearts. He would often describe his work as a relative failure and humbly conclude, “But I did the best I could.”66 Of course, the conspicuous disjunction between these self-deprecating assessments and the quantifiable success of his ministry only heightened their effect. Over time, A. J. learned to deliver “the truth amid great laughter,” accenting sorrow and humility by seasoning them with humor. During the course of a typical sermon his audience might be “serious then laughing, then serious, then laughing, and so on until finally the power fell.”67 A holiness sermon could not be all fun and tears, however. It also needed Divine Wrath. A. J. had always been able to blast hell with the best of them, and he did not flinch now. Like any self-respecting man of God, he “exposed sin and denounced it in high places,” regardless of the consequences.68 When condemning secret lodges, for example, he explained that he did not wish to give offense but felt duty-bound to “advise Christians against fellowshiping infidels, drunkards, Thieves and murderers.” In a classic Tomlinson homily, tears and laughter alternated with riffs of withering, hellfire fulmination. It was a rhetorical combination of exceptional potency. Whatever mood A. J. invoked, moreover, he invoked it with flair. During one altar call he climbed atop his pulpit and wept as he implored sinners to come forward. On another occasion, Billy Sunday–like, he ripped off his suit coat and finished the sermon in his shirt.69 Tomlinson had emerged as a master craftsman of the public stage, moving his audience to sorrow or laughter, to fear or affection, and then to the brink of religious ecstasy. The ultimate proof that A. J. had arrived as a pulpit performer, however, came in the startling physical manifestations that attended his preaching. “People fell in the floor and some writhed like serpents,” he related of one meeting: “Some cried out until they were released from the devil, some fell in the road, one seemed to be off in a trance for 4 or 5 hours.” All in all, he concluded, “the Church seemed to be greatly edified and blessed.”70 On another occasion, the anguished cries of his audience recalled “the groans and wales of the damned.”71 He had achieved a fine balance of fervor and finesse, and no one described it better than Tomlinson himself. “The Lord gave me a burning humble message,” he allowed, which he delivered “in glorious humility and victory.”72 The old Grassy Narrows player had found a larger stage.

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Surveying Success An impressive array of organizational, pastoral, and performative skills emerged in A. J. Tomlinson as he rounded the corner into his forties. Those skills produced results, and not only in the form of ephemeral ecstasies. Hundreds packed his tents at places like Union Grove and Cleveland, and they joined his churches by the scores.73 These were halcyon days and called for hyperbole. A repeating refrain surfaced in Tomlinson’s diary: “The most wonderful meeting I was ever in,” he wrote of one service. “Yesterday was the most wonderful time in my experience,” he said of another. “I believe yesterday and last night,” he exclaimed a short while later, “was the greatest day of my life.”74 Professional and experiential records fell like dominoes as Tomlinson hit his ministerial stride. Success came with its own brand of spiritual peril: “God help me to keep humble and in my place,” he now prayed.75 But A. J. shrank neither from the opportunities nor from the institutional privileges it brought. When appointed to moderate the 1906 General Assembly that he himself had called, he identified his role as that of “ruling Elder.” No one else had described it in such lofty terms, but he knew that he had served in that capacity. At the following assembly he wrote that he had filled the “executive office.”76 Tomlinson could read the signs. Surveying the success that followed his public ministry and the respect he commanded among his peers, he understood that, though the title was missing, the position was already his. Looking back, we can see that Tomlinson’s ascent to the top of his small denomination depended on something old and something new. The old consisted in his restless energy, which in turn fueled his extraordinary capacity for work. A. J. lived on the go, and that much would never change. Years later, his secretary recalled that he often ran between his office and home to save a few minutes’ time.77 The new consisted in a more irenic and sociable habit of mind, which contributed equally to his success. The younger Tomlinson had burned bridges; the older Tomlinson built them. He renewed old relationships, such as that with his cousin, evangelist Orlando Tomlinson, who now sent him support. J. B. Mitchell came back around. His old neighbor and Bible school classmate Charles Stalker, a minor celebrity now in holiness circles, paid a call, as did Stalker’s younger brother, Carl.78 For the first time, it seems, he had begun to pay attention to social formalities and to cultivate strategic friendships. A. J. shouldered Herculean burdens, but now he also enlisted the help of others, apprenticing potential leaders in the vocational responsibilities of religious life. He corresponded frequently with associates and annually convened his small organization’s leadership for a season of fellowship, planning, and deliberation. He promoted his church tirelessly and effectively through evangelistic campaigns that brought new members and resources into the fold. Cementing friendships, building networks, promoting his cause—the old drive and the new skills were now in the hands of a movement entrepreneur.


14 Pentecost!

On Friday, January 11, 1907, while in session at Tomlinson’s Union Grove congregation, the General Assembly settled on a new name. Under the watchful eyes of a great cloud of unacknowledged restorationist witnesses, from John Winebrenner, to Daniel Warner, to Frank Sandford, the young body agreed to call itself the “Church of God.”1 It must have seemed an oversized title for such a small gathering, but perhaps its leaders sensed that they were about to catch a wave. Almost exactly six years before, students at a small Bible institute in Kansas had begun to practice a form of ecstatic speech that they claimed to be nothing less than the “other tongues” spoken by early Christians on the Day of Pentecost. Moreover, under the tutelage of their leader Charles Parham, the tongues speakers began to teach that this phenomenon and this phenomenon alone signified the true baptism in the Holy Ghost. Reminiscent of Irwin’s fire baptism, Parham’s group now taught a threefold ordo salutis in which salvation and sanctification paved the way for the ultimate spiritual experience: baptism in the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in other tongues. Not until April 1906, however, under the ministry of William J. Seymour and in a city far removed from Kansas, had Parham’s doctrine and experience hit the holiness big time. Reports and reporters radiating out from Seymour’s Azusa Street mission in Los Angeles electrified the holiness world with news of a latter-day pentecostal outpouring. By the end of the year the Church of God, almost in its entirety, would be riding the crest of one of the freshest waves to sweep American religion in generations. Many of the breathless reports circulating in the Southern holi-

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ness press that year came from the pen of one Frank Bartleman, who cast the revival in vivid, almost lurid hues. “A monster truth is struggling in the bowels of the earth, entombed by the landslide of retrograding evil in the church’s history,” exclaimed Bartleman. “But it is bursting forth,” he gushed: “We detect in the present . . . manifestations . . . the rising of a new order of things out of the chaos and failure of the past.”2 The long-deferred but much anticipated Latter Rain had begun. Such reports prompted dozens of holiness ministers to hit the rails for Los Angeles. That number included G. B. Cashwell, an evangelist with the Holiness Church of North Carolina, a small Piedmont denomination not to be confused with the Holiness Church at Camp Creek, North Carolina. What he found at Azusa surpassed his expectations. By December 1906, a month after his departure, Cashwell had received his own “Pentecost” and had returned to share the Good News with his friends in Carolina. On New Year’s Eve he launched a revival at Dunn, North Carolina, that rivaled the wonders of Azusa Street and generated a flood of inquiries from holiness saints throughout the South. The power of the holiness press and the mobility of its ministers had combined to produce a revival that would transform Southern holiness. In early 1907, while the Church of God convened in Cleveland, the revival at Dunn raged on. “All the signs follow me since I received Pentecost,” Cashwell exulted, and other ministers took notice. Within weeks Cashwell had more calls than he could handle, and he spent the next year in constant motion, spreading the pentecostal message as fast and as far as railroad time would allow.3 Tomlinson later claimed that he had accepted the principle of pentecostal baptism in January 1907.4 Persuasive evidence supports him. As early as September 1906 he had mused to his diary that the Lord seemed to be revealing the “gifts of the Spirit” as the inheritance of the sanctified.5 Furthermore, the 1907 General Assembly took on a distinctly pentecostal flavor, with sermons by J. H. Simpson, “Gifts of the Spirit,” and Tomlinson, “The Baptism with the Holy Ghost and Fire.”6 Whatever Tomlinson’s prior disposition, by June 1907 he had taken concrete steps to embrace the new doctrine. Hearing of a revival in Birmingham, Alabama, under the direction of pentecostal evangelist M. M. Pinson, Tomlinson and Lemons caught the outbound train. “Glorious results,” A. J. announced upon his return, “speaking in other tongues by the Holy Ghost.”7 Although they had not themselves received the experience, Lemons recalled, they left “satisfied . . . about the doctrine.”8 The pair next approached Spurling—still regarded as the chief biblical authority of the group—who stamped the doctrine with his approval. If “Jesus and the apostles had it,” he reasoned, it rested on “solid rock.”9 Just in time for tent meeting season, the leadership of the Church of God, none having actually spoken in tongues, had determined to preach “tongues” to its members. In this case, the followers would lead, and the leaders would follow. On July 3, amid the circumambient electricity of that pentecostal summer, A. J. pitched his tent to lay siege on South Cleveland. It would be his most

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successful campaign to date. Two weeks into the revival dozens of conversions had been recorded, and the meetings were still gathering momentum. As in previous years, South Cleveland rocked nightly to the raucous sounds of “shouting, praying, weeping,” and “singing,” but now these ecstasies were punctuated by the exotic strains of glossolalia. The experience still eluded Tomlinson, but tent-goers were finding it. By late July yet another spiritual exuberance had surfaced: “drunkenness on the Spirit.” Rapt audiences were “praying, singing, shouting, reeling like drunken men,” A. J. proudly observed. Those who crowded nightly into his tent formed a “mass of happy people,” indeed.10 The boisterous proceedings under his big top made A. J. notorious in Cleveland. As he walked a city street in early August, a man confronted him about his outspoken views on sinless perfection. Of particular offense had been his assertion that preachers who sinned “were on their road to Hell.” Tomlinson leapt at the chance to convert a city street into an impromptu pulpit and squared off with his adversary over the meaning of key passages in the book of Romans. Unlike the rationalist theological forensics described by Brooks Holifield, however, this debate quickly took a practical turn.11 A. J. swung to the gathering crowd and delivered the perfect holiness challenge: “If my critics . . . can get more souls saved . . . than I can I’d like for them to get at it.” A sympathetic voice called out, “You want to get the world saved as soon as possible.” “Yes,” he answered, “and any way it can be done.” Americans in a pragmatic age well knew that results, spiritual cash value, gave the litmus test of true religion. And this new pentecostal doctrine passed with flying colors.12 The revival at Cleveland blurred into a revival at Union Grove, where more worshipers spoke in tongues.13 When autumn came the action moved indoors. The church at Cleveland, its ranks swelled by the summer harvest, had built a new meetinghouse, and Tomlinson christened it with a revival that ran nonstop, day and night, for over two weeks. With “unknown tongues” added to the usual list of attractions, crowds packed in “so thick” that A. J. “could scarcely move.” Like the tent meetings that had careened deep into the summer nights, these services were not for the faint of heart. “Some shouted while I preached,” A. J. remarked: “Others shouted while I made the alter call.”14 As winter closed in Tomlinson began to orient his services more specifically along “penticostal lines.” Members “tarried” for the “baptism of the Holy Ghost,” which by now clearly meant the baptism of the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues. Finally, with the New Year and its much anticipated General Assembly only days away, Tomlinson “protracted” the meetings, heightening the congregation’s yearning for and emphasis on “the penticostal experience.”15 No one knew better than he how to build toward a crescendo.

With Power from on High The 1908 General Assembly of the Church of God convened in an atmosphere dense with pentecostal anticipation. When conference-goers opened their as-

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sembly bulletins, moreover, they discovered that A. J. had arranged a special treat for the final session: a “Service on Penticostal lines” led by “Brother G. B. Cashwell, of Dunn, N.C.”16 Neither the denomination nor Tomlinson himself would ever be quite the same. Cashwell made his appointment, and the closing service he led that Saturday night roared well past midnight. But Tomlinson still did not “get through.” By now, A. J. had been waiting a full year on his pentecostal baptism. For a man who had known his share of eye-popping experiential wonders, it must have been hard to imagine one to top them all. It would not be hard for long. The next morning Cashwell addressed a Sunday crowd swelled by assembly hangers-on. Near the end of that message, Tomlinson slid from his chair and fell prostrate on the platform. What happened next, as he recounted it to his diary and thenceforth repeatedly to the world, was a baptism of epic proportions. His jaws clamped shut, and his lips, tongue, eyes, and every limb of his body were, in consecutive order, “twisted about as if an examination of them was being made.” He shook and rolled back and forth, and then while flat on his back his feet shot suddenly into the air. Next, his entire body levitated on a “great sheet of power,” darting about in whichever direction his feet happened to be pointing. All the while, his spirit alternated between outbursts of joy and “excruciating pain.” That was just the beginning. Entranced by the Holy Spirit, Tomlinson next embarked on a spiritual odyssey during which he was led first to the mission fields of the world, then to his ancestral home, and finally through the promised signs of the apostolic age. The first leg of that quest traversed the most spiritually destitute regions of the world, beginning in Central America. Here, appalled by the “aweful condition” of the inhabitants, he recoiled in a “paroxism of suffering.” And here at last, as he agonized over the great missionary needs of these foreign peoples, Tomlinson began to speak in other tongues. From Central America he was transported southward, to Brazil, Chili, and Patagonia; then to Africa, Jerusalem, and Russia; followed by France and Japan. Finally, A. J. returned to North America, where he visited the Eskimo before sweeping over Canada on his return to Cleveland, Tennessee. At each step of the way he had seemed to speak “the very language” of the people was visiting (among the Eskimo, “the language seemed to be a little like the bark of a dog”). At each step he had also confronted a piercing question: Would he be willing to go to them? And at each step he had answered yes. Having visited the mission fields of the world, Tomlinson was now led of the Holy Spirit on a second voyage, one that surveyed the challenges near to home and deep within. After a stop at the Cleveland town square, A. J. journeyed deep into his past, retracing the steps that had brought him to Appalachia in the first place. He followed the rails first to Cincinnati and then to Westfield, Indiana, and the small Hamilton County towns of his youth. Once more he met the question: Would he be willing to go? Once more he answered yes. The final stage of Tomlinson’s odyssey turned inward, to the landscape of the soul, and it brought him face to face with the devil, “the awefulest struggle

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of all.” As A. J. wrestled with Satan, the Holy Spirit overshadowed him and guided him through a ritual of “casting out devils.” He now understood that he had entered the realm of Mark 16, where “these signs shall follow them that believe.” While there, he cast out demons, spoke in tongues, and took up serpents. When the Holy Spirit finally lifted, he was struggling to master “healing the sick.” He did not quite make it, but that shortcoming did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. “Oh it was glorious,” he thrilled: “This was really the Baptism of the Holy Ghost as they received Him on the day of Penticost.” All told he had spoken ten different languages, and—true to the archetypal Great Commission etched into the holiness consciousness—he had preached the gospel to every creature, from Jerusalem, and Judea, and Samaria to the ends of the earth; and he had performed the signs that were to follow them that believe.17 As novel as Tomlinson’s astounding baptism may have been, he had previously experienced many of its constituent parts. For instance, the divine gauntlet—the test of his will to consent to increasingly arduous endeavors— had surfaced before. “This morning I felt a special burden for souls in Central America,” he once confided: “I am not sure yet but, Father may have called me to that field.”18 Furthermore, A. J. had long craved more power for his ministry, in particular the attesting power of signs and wonders.19 But his pentecostal baptism uniquely focalized those religious and vocational anxieties, along with anxieties rooted more deeply in his personal past, in a single transforming experience, a potent rite of passage that landed him on the far side of holiness. Tomlinson, that is, had made the short but significant leap from holiness to Pentecost.

Making a Difference As Tomlinson and the Church of God made their way into pentecostalism, pentecostalism itself had only begun to coalesce, evolving from an amorphous subculture within holiness into a nascent movement of its own distinguished by speaking in other tongues and the meaning it attributed to that experience. Glossolalia, in short, had become the catalyst and differentiating feature of an aggressive new force in American life. That glossolalia should have acquired such a transformative role is surprising. Neither the experience of tongues nor the idea of a “third blessing” was new to holiness. Indeed, viewed in the light of that late-Victorian holiness mandate, Mark 16, the restoration of this apostolic gift was a latent necessity. Sooner or later somebody would have to speak in tongues.20 In fact, some already had.21 In addition to being a biblical imperative, glossolalia perfectly complimented a long-standing holiness fascination with inspired speech. For someone like George Watkins, language possessed an animate quality, by which it conveyed one’s essential soul nature. An eloquent sermon might fall flat, and a crude one might “strike fire,” he explained, because “words are chariots in

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which the quality of the heart . . . rides forth to other souls.”22 Holiness saints wanted nothing more than to utter words that would go forth like flaming chariots to “strike fire” in the world around them. The key to such dynamic verbal power, of course, lay at the intersection of human speech and divine inspiration, where mortal words were spiritually vivified by the Holy Spirit. That was the difference between ordinary and extraordinary speech, speech that had no effect and speech that would “quiver with a heavenly electricity,” exuding “a love-quality . . . like the pungent, penetrating heat of sweet spices and aromatic oils.”23 With its textual attribution and interpretive framework already in place, glossolalia should have been greeted simply as a welcome addition to the panoply of holiness signs and wonders. By the time Cashwell addressed the saints at Cleveland, however, it had already become much more. The awestruck dispatches from Azusa and similarly affected centers, the grave solemnity with which tongues and interpretation were received, and the degree to which those who had not received the experience craved it all attested to the perception within tongues-speaking circles that this gift signified, not a serviceable enhancement of the old holiness gospel, but a new dispensation.24 Although glossolalia need not have become the insignia of an entirely new movement, it did alter radical holiness worship in subtle but substantive ways. Tongues, along with the practice of their “interpretation” as required by I Corinthians 12–14, quickly emerged as the effective, if not the ideological, centerpiece of pentecostal worship. Furthermore, the new phenomena occurred within a matrix of complementary worship behaviors that gave pentecostal meetings an increasingly distinctive flavor. As a rule these behaviors were no more than intensifications of stock holiness forms like improvisational order, public testimony, divine healing, and spontaneous outbursts of “shouting” and “dancing” in the Spirit. But other behaviors were new or at least were perceived to be so. One such phenomenon involved the charismatic performance of music and song. A. J. first noted worshipers playing “unseen instruments” under the power of the Holy Ghost, but the visible quickly followed suit, as when a woman “played organ controlled by the Spirit.” On some blessed occasions a full complement of pentecostal behaviors flowed together in seamless choreography: “Sister Clyde run to the organ and commenced playing in the power & some of us began to sing in the Spirit, and finally about a dozen . . . were leaping, dancing and all keeping perfect time. . . . I and Bro. Flavius Lee sang in other tongues in perfect harmony . . . while the others kept the time . . . perfectly with their feet in what might be spoken of as dancing.”25 In its ideal form, pentecostal worship was to be “untouched by human contrivance.”26 Extemporaneous performances of this kind profoundly expressed those pneumatological assumptions. “No regular order, and yet perfect order,” Tomlinson declared of one service: “The singing was led by the Holy Ghost. . . . One would lead a song and someone else . . . would take up the next verse and the whole congregation would join.”27 For participants at least, such experiences validated the pentecostal message more powerfully than any argument or discourse.

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The heavenly orchestration of music and dance were not the only new performance rituals. For example, Church of God services often featured charismatic pantomimes enacted to illustrate sermons or dramatize messages given in tongues. On one occasion the Holy Ghost illustrated A. J.’s sermon text by means of “a number of people under the Spirit performing their part instead of by words from my mouth.”28 On another occasion, two women took turns speaking in tongues while A. J. interpreted in call-and-response fashion. The women then circulated about the congregation, delivering messages to individuals, before gathering Tomlinson in hand and marching to the platform. “The interpretation,” he marveled, was “these are they that follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth and they shall walk with me in white.”29 Not surprisingly, Tomlinson himself often took the leading role in these performances. Once, a seeker had tarried long but to no avail for his Spirit baptism. Tomlinson stretched out the man’s hands and “nailed” them to an imaginary cross, then fell across him writhing vicariously under the throes of death. Next, he mimed piercing the man’s side, severing his head, placing him in a grave, and covering him with topsoil. Finally, A. J. exhumed the body and acted out a ritual of resurrection. “At that moment,” he reported, “the power struck him and he . . . received the baptism.”30 Charismatic performance could produce its share of humor. Tomlinson once dropped to the floor under “2 or 3 paroxisms of weeping.” After “screaming for a while as though my heart would break,” a brother gave a message in tongues. The interpretation was, “Get quiet and hear me speak.”1 In a sense, however, that was indeed the message of all of the performance phenomena, including tongues. Each explored forms of divine-human communication beyond the frame of ordinary speech. And each, in its own creative way, sought to impress on the hearts and minds of gathered saints the solemn meaning of the message to be “heard.” Pentecostal worship broke ground not only in modes of communication but in the cast of communicators as well. Here again, pneumatology nourished the unconventional. Charismata, as we have seen, were to be guided by the sovereign wind of the Spirit. Given the movement’s pneumatological assumptions, this meant that the plausibility of charismatic behavior depended at least in part on its unpredictability. One of the most common forms of divine surprise, and one often cited as evidence of Holy Ghost agency, came in the transgression of age boundaries. Sometimes that meant the participation of the very old, as when “one old Lady over 100 years old shouted all about . . . the room.” More remarkable, however, was the participation of the very young. A. J. noted that children as young as “7 years of age” spoke in tongues and saw visions. A group of young girls once carried on a conversation in tongues “for hours, and sang the most heavenly music.”32 Children could worship as peers in pentecostal services because the Holy Ghost was known to do the unexpected and to speak through the lowliest and most unlikely of vessels.33 The signs and wonders of Pentecost, moreover, were not confined to spiritual gifts and social novelties. After 1908, supernatural prodigies of the most literal kind flew through Cleveland as thick as June bugs on a hot summer

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night. Some, like the biblical sound of a mighty “rushing wind,” straddled the boundary between the natural and supernatural, but others landed square in the realm of stark, wide-eyed wonders. During his baptism, as we have seen, Tomlinson levitated on a “great sheet of power.” Later that year another “sheet of power” enveloped him, with astonishing effect. “My hair stood strait up on my head,” he marveled. There was little to say but, “Glory!” Not long after, Tomlinson saw a “blue vapor” settle over the congregation, which turned the people “pale.”34 By far the most common wonder, however, was fire: balls, blazes, streaks, streams, and sparks of supernatural, Holy Ghost fire. Whether the fire was crossing over tents, passing in front of the church, flashing around Tomlinson, descending and breaking over the saints, striking the church roof, or resting above Tomlinson’s house, the Church of God outstripped the competition when it came to being “fire baptized.”35 In the vicinity of Cleveland, Tennessee, popular folklore and pentecostal ecstasy had converged to produce startling evidence of the power of the Holy Ghost and the authenticity of the Church of God.36 Pentecostal phenomena, then, fostered a distinctive worship experience, if not a separate worship culture. Indeed, the years ahead would see a tentative effort to assemble a typology of pentecostal phenomena: the list included jerks, dancing, talking in tongues, testifying, groaning, laughing, the casting out of demons, the handling of fire, snake handling, and the drinking of deadly poison—the latter being, happily, optional.37 But even the most distinctive features of pentecostal worship can be seen as modulations of, or extrapolations from, stock holiness forms. Behavioral factors alone, that is to say, would not have demarcated pentecostalism from its parent culture. Hard boundaries required hard materials, and for that, self-denominating pentecostals turned to doctrine: the significance of glossolalia. Men like Parham built, and men like Tomlinson reinforced, a double dividing wall between themselves and their former colleagues. The first of these walls separated sanctification from baptism with the Holy Ghost, which most within holiness had previously considered to be coterminous or at least coincident. The second enthroned speaking in tongues as the only—and necessary—evidence of baptism with the Holy Ghost. In two fell swoops pentecostals had disqualified the vast majority of holiness claims to Spirit baptism. Theirs and theirs alone remained valid. Tomlinson seems to have been especially quick to adopt that provocative hard line. Almost immediately after his own pentecostal baptism, he began applying the new, tripartite formula to his spiritual record keeping: “a number of seekers for pardon, sanctification and the baptism of the Holy Ghost.”38 At first, he wrote out the records longhand, as when seventy-five “received the baptism of the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues which is the bible evidence.”39 Soon, no elaboration was needed. When men and women were “saved, sanctified, and filled with the Spirit,” it went without saying that they had spoken in tongues.40 Subtle alterations, logical extensions, selective innovations, and a dogmatic stumbling block—taken together they formed a movement in the making.

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The Windows of Heaven The pentecostal wave sweeping holiness brought more than boundaries and self-definition. It also brought success. With its unique blend of clarity, power, and purpose, pentecostalism energized the individuals and congregations that embraced it. The Church of God had been growing before it joined the fold, but now it grew by orders of magnitude. Cashwell’s January visit alone would have been enough to persuade an impartial observer of the movement’s appeal. Within a week of his arrival, crowds had swelled so large that folks had to be turned away.41 Tomlinson, for his part, knew how to follow up a good lead, and the revivals he held in Chattanooga and Cleveland that summer dwarfed his previous campaigns.42 Before, they had come by the hundreds. This year, 1,000 packed his tent in Chattanooga, and 5,000 gathered lakeside for a baptismal service. Back home in Cleveland, A. J. launched a revival that sparked “fear consternation and amazement” among the people, as crowds reached 2,000, then 5,000 and more. These were self-reported estimates, but A. J. and everyone else knew that a great multitude of people had swarmed in and around his tent.43 The revival so riveted the town’s attention that when a minstrel show set up shop across the street, “not a dozen people attended.” Meanwhile, at A. J.’s tent, thousands “milled around, hundreds staying all night.” What chance, after all, did secular performers have against a revival where blue vapor settled over the congregation and the evangelist’s hair stood straight on end?44 Ten weeks, 225 conversions, 163 baptisms of the Holy Ghost and one trial for disturbing the peace later, Tomlinson rolled up his tent. The campaign had netted his congregation 106 new members.45 One can only imagine the galvanizing effect of a revival where the saints met and socialized in the ambient glow of fervent worship, not weekly but nightly, sometimes night and day, for two and a half months running.46 On New Year’s Eve 1908, Tomlinson composed his annual “Missionary Evangelism” letter. In it he recounted the “most successful year of my life in the way of soul winning.”47 But A. J. did not just bring them in. He organized them. After a season of frenetic evangelism, Tomlinson now turned to consolidating the old gains and expanding in search of new ones. At the General Assembly, in January 1909, A. J. ordained two bishops and five deacons and commissioned three evangelists.48 It was a sign of things to come. Up to that point, Tomlinson, Spurling, Bryant, and Lemons had shouldered the lion’s share of ministry and oversight.49 But A. J. understood that if the structures of management did not rapidly expand, the past year’s gains, and the coming year’s opportunities, would be squandered. A. J.’s gifts as an organizer shone brightest during a spring campaign in Florida, where he went to stake claims for his church in one of America’s most rapidly growing regions. In Tampa, he “set the Lord’s Church in order” with about twenty members. At the Pleasant Grove camp meeting, he “preached on the church,” and his hearers answered with the “greatest time of Church join-

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ing” he had ever seen. In a single day, sixty-four people lined up for membership. The next day, thirty more joined, and A. J. began to examine recruits for the ministry. Finally, he capped his work with an ordination service in Jacksonville, where he ordained six bishops and six deacons and commissioned seven evangelists.50 The Church of God in Florida had a running start. As converts, congregations, and church leaders multiplied under his oversight, Tomlinson observed change along another index. Early Church of God adherents had been drawn disproportionately from the blue-collar class, the “mill and factory hand,” as Homer recalled.51 Now, A. J. surveyed his audiences and remarked on the occasional doctor, judge, or others of “different ranks.” Increasingly, the “great numbers piled into the alter” included representatives of the “higher classes,” while the church parking lot, with its growing congregation of automobiles, mirrored the changing social profile of the altar place.52

Holding Forth Extraordinary gains, institutional expansion, and social mobility came at a price. As 1909 progressed, Tomlinson found himself engaged on three fronts, as an alarming threat to his personal authority, renewed persecution, and a test of his mettle as a movement entrepreneur washed in with the pentecostal tide. The first of these fronts emerged around A. J.’s struggle to control his own denomination and to shape its future course. In that struggle, he positioned himself between two extremes. On the one hand, he fought routinizing forces that wished to impose regularity and order on the Church of God, particularly in the areas of public worship and the role of women. On the other, he met libertarians and localists who resisted his efforts to centralize and bureaucratize their growing institution. The sharpest firefight along this front erupted when a brazen young minister attempted a coup at the epicenter of Tomlinson’s power, his home congregation in Cleveland. These engagements on the home front coincided with others along the border, where a second front pitted Tomlinson and the Church of God against worldly persecutors. Unfriendly interests in Cleveland had determined not to endure passively another season of raucous Holy Roller revivalism. In summer 1909, manifestations of the Spirit would share the stage with vigilantes, injunctions, and courtroom drama. On the third front, A. J. himself took the initiative. Here he competed with other gifted leaders for the spoils of a burgeoning new movement. Early pentecostalism veritably pulsed with unchanneled vitality and, in the minds of leaders like Tomlinson, went begging for organization. From his institutional base in the Church of God, A. J. dreamed of uniting the inchoate movement into one grand communion. The stakes were high on each of these fronts, and the future of the Church of God, not to mention Tomlinson’s stature within it, lay on the line.

15 Order in the Courts

The story of John B. Goins’s audacious attempt to dethrone A. J. Tomlinson at Cleveland begins not with Goins but with Tomlinson himself and in particular with an uncanny talent that he possessed, a strategic role that he played, and the charismatic possibilities that each afforded him. Of all his considerable gifts, none was more important to Tomlinson than his knack for guiding the unseen hand of ecstatic worship. He seemed to find his element in the quicksilver dynamics by which an “undirected” meeting took its apparently spontaneous course; time and again he shepherded the potentially centrifugal force of religious ecstasy in directions that would sustain his authority and counsel rather than contest them. That gift went hand in hand with A. J.’s emergence as an authoritative interpreter of messages spoken in unknown tongues. Based on the apostle Paul’s admonitions to the Corinthians, early pentecostals assumed that the gift of tongues had its corresponding gift of interpretation, and that utterances in an unknown tongue would normally, or at least frequently, be interpreted into the common language for the benefit of all hearers. Consequently, as glossolalia proliferated, the gift of interpretation occupied an increasingly strategic place. Tomlinson ably exercised that gift, delivering as many as fifteen interpretations in a single night.1 Spurling may have been the chief interpreter of Scripture for the Church of God, but Tomlinson was its chief interpreter of the Holy Ghost. Secure in his role as the interpreter of charisma and emboldened by his ability to catch pentecostal lightening in a bottle, A. J. opened his worship services and let the Holy Ghost roll. “About 12 or 14 were under the power at the same time,” he exclaimed after one meeting, “8 or 9 were down at once and several conversations

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were held in unknown tongues.” Another service climaxed when “a brother suddenly shouted out at the top of his voice and the power fell.” The entire congregation leapt to its feet, and in the pandemonium that ensued “200 people were shouting, leaping, clapping their hands and talking and praising God in tongues all at once.”2 Tomlinson, his own spirit perfectly synchronized with the proceedings, saw nothing but harmony. “Dozs. shouting and praising God . . . while others greatly exercised with agonizing crys and groans,” he once noted: “A great commotion and yet all in perfect order.”3 As long as the Spirit led and good resulted, A. J. deemed such manifestations to be decent and orderly, and encouraged more of the same.4 John B. Goins entered the Church of God as one of A. J.’s prize recruits. Tomlinson had ordained the talented young minister in fall 1908 while attending a pentecostal convention in Memphis, Tennessee.5 He returned from that convention, significantly, to an escalating quarrel with an influential deacon, J. H. Simpson, who had taken exception to one of the cardinal doctrines of pentecostalism.6 The Memphis ordination and the Cleveland conflict would soon converge in the most severe test yet of A. J.’s personal and spiritual authority. Tomlinson’s dispute with Simpson centered on the latter’s inability to see why each and every Spirit-baptized person had to speak with tongues. Any spiritual gift, he felt, ought to suffice as evidence of that baptism. As reasonable as this may have seemed to some, A. J. and most of the church’s leaders instinctively understood that, if that were the case, they had as well pack up and go home to ordinary holiness. Efforts to persuade Simpson of his error failed, and a church meeting was called in early January to resolve the issue. That meeting showcased Tomlinson’s unique brand of benevolent authoritarianism. After hearing the arguments, the membership formally pronounced against Simpson. A. J. then “took his hand and with many tears . . . bid him goodby,” assuring the vanquished Simpson that he harbored no malice but only “love and pity.” At this point, Tomlinson explained, “the church took action and excluded him.”7 Simpson, however, was an affluent businessman with considerable leverage in the community, and he did not go gentle into that good night.8 Over the succeeding months he and his family disrupted services and worked behind the scenes to undermine A. J.’s authority.9 Opportunity would shortly knock in the form of an ambitious young minister. In April 1909, Tomlinson traveled to Florence, Alabama, in order to tend the work he had begun the previous fall. Together with Sister Clyde Cotton, he ushered John Goins’s congregation into the Church of God with an eleven-day revival, after which A. J. organized the church and ordained three deacons.10 On the strength of Goins’s manifest ability—Homer Tomlinson remembered him as a “fine young minister” and an “eloquent man”—and with an eye to replenishing the ranks of a leadership thinned by Simpson’s defection, Tomlinson invited Goins to Cleveland that July to help with his summer campaign.11 It seemed like a positive step, but trouble was brewing at home and

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enemies were gathering outside the camp. Ahead lay a season of charisma, courtrooms, and chaos. That past summer, Tomlinson had introduced Cleveland to Pentecost with a high-octane Holy Ghost revival. Now he was back for more. On July 16, 1909, he raised his tent in the smack-dab middle of town, just opposite the county jail. One “Mr. Beard” lodged an immediate and vociferous complaint and hinted at ominous consequences should the “Holy Rollers” persist. A. J., with equal disdain for threat or entreaty, pressed ahead.12 Within a week, Tomlinson had been arrested and charged with violating a city ordinance. He could hardly wait for his day in court, and when it arrived, he fully exploited his legal “privilege of preaching some truth to the officers, lawyers, doctors, as well as a lot of other folks [while] on the witness stand.”13 Whatever the court thought of A. J.’s sermons, it found in the city’s favor and fined him $5.00. The judge, however, recognized a trap when he saw one and tried to evade it by dismissing the fine. Tomlinson had been arraigned the previous summer, for violating curfew and disturbing the peace, only to be vindicated in an unruly proceeding that only enhanced his reputation and the popularity of his meetings. We can well imagine that the judge did not wish to clutter his docket with a drawn-out religious donnybrook, all to the benefit of a Holy Roller evangelist. But it was too late. As soon as the decision was rendered, Tomlinson quipped, a wry smile gleaming between the lines, “We appealed to a higher court.”14 He may have acted on the grounds of pure principle, but he certainly knew that the price of an appeal would buy a courtroom pulpit and several weeks of free press. In that previous brush with the law, the mayor himself had served papers demanding that A. J. close his meetings at a decent hour or be arrested. Tomlinson had stood his ground, refusing to shackle the Holy Ghost, and the specter of religious persecution rallied support to his cause.15 A year later the mood in Cleveland had changed. When A. J. tied up the court with appeals, local toughs took justice into their own hands. First, someone released pepper spray in the tent. The next night a team of vigilantes, led by Beard and a Mr. Hardwick, cut down the tent. A. J. counterattacked, mustering the faithful for a grand procession to the public square, but instead of sympathy, this year’s show of bravado won him a citation for “late hours and loud noises” and an injunction against raising his tent within city limits.16 Tomlinson had gambled heavily by pitching his tent in downtown Cleveland, and he had lost. With the injunction duly served and his tent forcibly removed, he discontinued the meetings, “waiting in the Ballances about what we will do.”17 A. J. had backed down, and it did not bode well for his reputation. Only the past summer, M. S. Lemons and Henegar Trim had been arrested under similar conditions in Chattanooga. When they agreed to move their tent under threat from city authorities, Tomlinson had criticized them for “compromise.”18 Now he was the one calling for pragmatic restraint. Viewed strategically, that may have been a well-advised course. Persecution against Church of God meetings in the area had peaked sharply: Lemons and Trim had also

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had their tent in Chattanooga cut down; the church at Athens, Tennessee, had suffered a chemical attack; and a church in the mountains had been dynamited.19 But well advised or not, retreat did not become a warrior-saint. The king had a chink in his armor.

Season of Discontent In the waning days of August, A. J. pitched his tent in South Cleveland to resume the meetings. Almost immediately, he departed to fill a pastoral appointment, leaving none other than John B. Goins to carry on in his stead.20 Less than a week after reaching his appointment, Tomlinson hurried back to Cleveland. The tent meetings were not going to suit him, he explained, so he had returned to take matters personally in hand. If A. J.’s earlier equivocation had given an opening to the claims of a pretender, it was perhaps his decisiveness that now gave that pretender a cause to act.21 Tomlinson did not reveal the nature of the deficiency that urged him prematurely home, but it may have had something to do with vague allegations of misconduct recently laid against Goins by Goins’s former congregation. Those allegations had surfaced in a most extraordinary manner: a full page of automatic writing had been interpreted to mean, “Watch out for faults prophes my minister I sent hear has fellen a way from his first love . . . he hase got some bad thing coved up in his life he is getting a way from you all to keep you from find out every thing.” In the absence of specific charges or direct evidence, however, A. J. had taken the accusation with a grain of salt, and whatever the cause of his abrupt return, he closed the meetings in mid-September with his faith in Goins renewed.22 It seems reasonable to conclude, however, that the episode had a very different effect on Goins. Perhaps he took the paternalistic intervention as a public insult. That much is speculation. What we know is that Tomlinson left two weeks later on an extended evangelistic tour, placing Goins in care of his pulpit, and that Goins, shortly thereafter, taught Tomlinson the perils of the road. The last week of September 1909, Tomlinson quit Cleveland for the rich harvest fields of Florida, where for the next five weeks he conducted a furious campaign of evangelism, ordination, and church planting.23 Then, in early November, with his eyes fixed on the glowing prospects of towns like Arcadia, Pleasant Grove, and Parish, he was blindsided by a flurry of letters that swept him into what he called the “greatest trial of my life.”24 His young prote´ge´, A. J. learned, had introduced liturgical reforms at Cleveland, reining in the freewheeling worship that had flourished under his own care. Goins, opening his Bible to I Corinthians 14:27–35, had decreed that no one should give a message in tongues without an interpreter being present and that, even with an interpreter, messages should be given “one at a time and not more than 3 in a service.” Then, he had instructed women to hold their tongues in the public assembly. Though a wellspring of personal and

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professional motives may have urged the reformer onward, at the doctrinal level Goins’s measures were pure exegesis. He had simply laid on Cleveland the strictures suggested by that more ancient routinizer of words and women, the apostle Paul.25 Tomlinson fired back a firm but diplomatic letter. “Surely you are not teaching that kind of doctrine,” he exclaimed. Then he offered Goins a way out. Perhaps his young assistant had meant to describe the rules governing church business meetings, as opposed to “worship and evangelistic services.” In that case A. J. fully concurred and asked only that Goins make the distinction clear to the congregation. But if he truly intended to apply these reforms to “our common meetings,” Tomlinson warned, he should either change his mind or consider himself “relieved of the position I asked you to occupy in good faith.” To allow such doctrine from his pulpit, A. J. opined, would grieve “the blessed Holy Ghost” and stifle “the joy of the church.”26 Hopeful but ever realistic, Tomlinson also wrote to the man he had left as Goins’s understudy, Jesse Clark. Goins may have had Paul’s doctrine, but Tomlinson had his style, and he opened the letter to Clark with a prologue worthy of the apostle. “Dear precious brother,” he wrote, “how my heart goes out in love for you as I begin to write your name and get my mind centered on you.” He apprised Clark of the situation and asked him to wait in the wings, ready to take charge should it be discovered that Goins was in fact teaching false doctrine. If the matter were resolved satisfactorily, on the other hand, then no one need know that they had ever corresponded.27 Within days Tomlinson received two additional letters that informed him more fully of the scope of his predicament. The first, from Bryant, explained that Goins had been consorting with A. J.’s old nemesis, J. H. Simpson, and that a majority of the church had been swayed to Goins’s doctrine. Among that majority was Jesse Clark.28 The second letter was a defiantly exuberant missive from Goins himself that removed all doubt about Goins’s teaching. Paul’s counsel had not been confined to the “business meeting,” Goins asserted, and no one had the right “to Break this Rule at any Time or Place.” Furthermore, he had no intention of stepping down. Rather, he saw himself as Apollos to Tomlinson’s Paul. “One will Plant another water,” he pointed out, implying that the elder man’s gift lay in founding churches, whereas his own lay in supplying them with “real government.”29 Goins also voiced sentiments—and resentments—that may have been more widely shared: “Bro,” he declared, “you wont Lord over me as you may over some.” Although he did not wish to cause a “split,” he would not run from one either. “If a truth makes a split,” Goins threatened, then he would go with the truth. “Be teachable,” he admonished his prideful elder in closing, and “god will Bless you.”30 While A. J. pondered his course, Goins took the initiative, using Tomlinson’s letter against him. Goins lay the conflict before the congregation and, in the course of presenting his case, read the letter publicly in what must have been its least favorable light. The results of that meeting reached A. J. in a grief-stricken letter from his wife, Mary Jane. He had been “expelled from the pulpit,” she cried in disbelief, and now faced an ultimatum. Either “stand by

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Bro. G. as preaching the truth” or “be disfellowshiped.” Perhaps herself in shock, she repeated the harshest blow: “You are not even a minister now in the sight of the church.”31 Goins had just entered the all-time annals of audacity. In A. J.’s absence, he had kicked him out of his own church. A week deep into November, Tomlinson’s prospects at Cleveland looked dim. Goins had the advantage of a captive audience that received his views in full-bodied, flesh-and-blood fervor and those of his adversary at best indirectly, at worst in Goins’s own prejudicial telling and subject to unqualified rebuttal. Furthermore, Goins possessed the eloquence and personal charm to capitalize on his advantage. Even Tomlinson’s wife and eldest son saw Goins as an essentially decent and reasonable man: “I believe if you and he were together,” Mary Jane told A. J., “you would understand him, he would help you and you help him.”32 Finally, Goins had the benefit of a fairly straightforward text to bolster his reforms—a powerful asset among the literal minded. Perhaps no one other than Tomlinson himself understood that the older lion still had the stronger hand, and nothing tells us more about Tomlinson and his future success in the Church of God than the strategies, qualities, and resources that enabled him to prove it. On November 9, 1909, Tomlinson composed two masterpieces of epistolary persuasion, both written to the same deacon, each of which displayed his assets with forceful clarity. One of those assets lay in the kind of political savvy that led him to direct these appeals neither to the persuaded nor to the obstinate but, rather, to A. J. Lawson, an influential deacon riding the fence. Tomlinson began the first letter by plying another of his assets: his personal relationship with Lawson and the congregation at Cleveland. “You have stood by me and helped me in so many ways,” he wrote, acknowledging the deacon’s record of service and support: “I will never be able to repay you.” A. J. then turned to the congregation at large and reversed course. Instead of emphasizing his debts to the other, as he had done with Lawson, he now rehearsed the congregation’s debts to him. He had nearly given his life for the church. He had built the church to what it then was. Most of the congregation had been saved, and virtually all baptized with the Holy Ghost, under his ministry and teaching. That ledger of obligations, though it might ring uncharitable in his own mouth, would make a powerful argument if presented by Lawson on his behalf.33 Tomlinson next introduced, wittingly or not, the seeds of innuendo. “As you are my friend,” he confided to Lawson, “I feel under obligations to say a few words, tenderly and softly . . . about Bro Goins and his teaching.” That teaching, as Lawson had received it, may have been unobjectionable, but Goins had conveyed to Tomlinson “other things”—intolerable things—“that I can’t mention.” Though not at liberty to divulge the Unnamed Error, however, he did feel free to tell Lawson that Goins had made “bold accusations against some of our best members and with a very unchristian spirit.” The insinuation of a dark doctrinal secret and the intelligence that Goins had been talking about members behind their backs, if given time, would gnaw at the foundations of his support.34

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Tomlinson’s first letter touched briefly on two additional assets: hard evidence and shared experience. “Bro. you know that I preach a doctrine that the Lord blesses,” he declared: “The very doctrine he says I will have to give up, brought 15 into the Baptism in 6 days, 23 in 10 days and is bringing them in here.” As his street-side audience had understood two years before, practical results were the acid test of orthodoxy. Let theories and Bible verses fly as they might, the hard evidence lay in souls saved, sanctified, baptized with the Holy Ghost, and enrolled in the Church of God. A. J. knew that when the time came to measure deeds, he had a yardstick, and Goins, a 12-inch ruler. Furthermore, shared experience and a common history bound Lawson and the entire congregation at Cleveland to Tomlinson. Goins might point to chapter and verse, but A. J. could point to dates and times when the Holy Ghost had fallen with rafter-rattling power and dozens of saints, Lawson included, had shouted and spoken in tongues simultaneously while some man or woman whose name and family they all knew had entered into the transforming realm of Pentecost.35 What held for religious ecstasy held for the role of women as well. For as long as it had existed, the church at Cleveland had witnessed the power of God speaking through its women. Sister McCanless, Sister Clyde Cotton, and dozens of others had been visibly used of the Holy Spirit, with signs following. Every General Assembly to date had acknowledged, and approved, the ministry of women. “Female ministers had their place . . . in the days of the Apostles,” the assembly had declared only that past January, “and must be recognized in these days.”36 In his debate with Goins, then, Tomlinson could draw on a deep reservoir of shared experience. The protocols of that truth-telling way practiced at Cleveland had been forged and validated through the crucible of events like those ten consecutive weeks of nightly revival the summer before. It would take more than a few stray verses to erase what those witnesses had felt in their hearts and seen with their own eyes, once Tomlinson had a chance to rekindle the memories. Tomlinson had just mailed this apologetic masterpiece when the news arrived of his dismissal. The presuppositions of his letter having shifted so fundamentally, he immediately composed another. This time he aimed straight for the heart and concluded with a daring strategy that transformed liability into strength. A. J.’s second letter wove signs of his blameless character, vivid reminders of his pain, and evidence of the frank injustice of the entire proceedings into a moving appeal for his congregation’s sympathy. “If you all are satisfied with Bro. Goins as pastor, go on and love him and support him,” the aggrieved but charitable Tomlinson instructed. His own affections, however, had not changed: “I still love the church that I gave my life for and time to build up.” Christlike, he blessed faithless disciples and persecutors alike, professing “nothing but love for . . . Bro. goins and the whole Church.” Though full of love, however, he could not hide his pain. Since beginning that difficult letter, he confessed, “I’ve had to stop and weep two or three times.”37 Having demonstrated the purity of his heart and the depth of his pain, he now exposed the patent injustice of the entire proceedings. He had trusted

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Goins. In return, Goins had betrayed him at his most vulnerable moment, while far from home and weighed down with the burden of souls. To make matters worse, the congregation had neither bothered to investigate nor allowed him to present a defense. “I feel something like David did I suppose,” A. J. sighed, summoning a potent biblical analogy, “when Absolum stole the hearts of the people and dethroned him.”38 Tomlinson signed his letter, “lovingly and kindly, A. J. Tomlinson.” But like Beethoven composing a symphony, he could not find a place to stop; the postscript he appended worked its way around all four margins of the letter. Only here did he make it perfectly clear that, contrary to what some might have imagined, time was on his side. “I feel free now to stay in Fla. as long as God wants me,” he announced, “and let you all manage things there as you see fit.” Moreover, his freedom meant their encumbrance: “As you all have relieved me of the responsibility,” he wryly observed, “I’ll let you carry it awhile I guess.”39 Finally, A. J. concluded with a poignant rendition of his trademark humility. “I may not be able to get to heaven, and I may not be . . . ready to meet Jesus, I may not be like Him and get to go into the marriage supper,” he repined: “But I’m trying the best I can.”40 The next day, he dashed off a quick letter to Clark. “No unkind feeling toward any one,” he wrote: “If I never see you any more, don’t forget that I love you in my heart.”41 Tomlinson had vindicated himself magnificently. He had shown the unimpeachable quality of his love and in the process had let the folks at Cleveland know that, if they did not appreciate his labors, others did. There were other fish in the sea. The most impressive aspect of Tomlinson’s long-distance maneuvering, however, rested in his keen perception of the value of absence. A. J. knew how to use time. He understood both the lightness of beginning and the weight of sustaining and had wisely decided to let Goins wilt under the daily strain of pastoral endeavors. His very absence, he perceived, would keep the issue alive, stimulating controversy and preventing closure. Goins would have to deal with the tension and uncertainty while A. J. continued to enjoy the fruits of godly labor in Florida, simultaneously advancing the work there while fattening his resume for the showdown at Cleveland. When he did finally return, the consternation of his enemies, the delight of his allies, and the anticipation of all would be in direct proportion to the length of his delay, provided he did not delay too long. While Tomlinson stalled, his two staunchest allies went into action. M. S. Lemons arrived from Chattanooga and, together with W. F. Bryant, began to soften the beachhead for Tomlinson’s return.42 At last, on November 19, 1909, A. J. made his not-quite-triumphal reentry. Even then he delayed, postponing a final confrontation until more groundwork could be laid. Meanwhile, Goins unraveled under the pressure. Losing composure, he marched to Tomlinson’s house and “railed and ranted” against him. By the time the sides agreed to a meeting, Goins had been hopelessly outmaneuvered. With Lemons moderating before a packed house, Tomlinson won in a landslide.43 Goins threw his ministerial credentials on the pulpit in protest and stormed out of the building.

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Tomlinson, for his part, retrieved the credentials, took them home, and burned them. Goins’s team did not take losing in a sportsmanlike manner. Amid threats of dynamite and arson, the city police had to help the Holy Ghost keep order in the house.44 In the coming days, A. J. would have to ride out a protracted trial, a church brawl, and an open letter enumerating the fanatical abuses Goins had witnessed at Cleveland (“I am accused of bringing division,” he asked with a flash of biting humor, “I ask . . . don’t you think that they were in need of a division?”).45 But when the smoke cleared, Tomlinson was still standing, king of the hill.46


16 A. J. Ascendant

John B. Goins had failed to take the measure of his adversary. As talented as he may have been, he was no match for Tomlinson at the height of his powers.1 But A. J.’s battle to regain his Cleveland, Tennessee, pulpit was neither the only nor the most important application of those powers. The same accumulated resources, political savvy, and personal charisma on display that fall also enabled him to strengthen his hold on a much larger institution—the Church of God—and to pursue a personalized version of Frank Sandford’s dream: the gathering of his own particular “Israel,” God’s pentecostal people. At Cleveland the challenge had come from a routinizer who tried to impose more law on a congregation than A. J. would allow. In the denomination at large, he faced the opposite challenge. In reality, Tomlinson was himself a routinizer, but, rather than regulate worship (the product) within a laissez-faire structure as Goins had attempted to do, Tomlinson wished to regulate the structure (the systems of management and delivery) and let the worship flow freely. To accomplish that objective he would need to overcome the misgivings of his followers and associates, most of whom feared centralization and defended congregational sovereignty. Tomlinson’s career in the Church of God had begun at the top: in a single day he had been received into membership, ordained, and installed as pastor of the organization’s flagship congregation. But only with time and effort did the Church of God become his personal empire. Over a period of years, A. J. superintended important changes that bound the young institution to his own ministry. Luck and ambition helped him on his way, but he could not have succeeded without the organizational skill to simultaneously expand

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and consolidate a movement and the managerial finesse to achieve his goals without unduly alienating friends or empowering enemies. Arguably the single most propitious event of Tomlinson’s career occurred when he pulled up stakes in Culberson and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. His congregation there quickly became the denomination’s largest, and the combined force of his organizing initiatives, his prestige as pastor of the movement’s largest church, and the conveniences of Cleveland made that city the unofficial headquarters of the Church of God. By no later than May 1907, W. F. Bryant and J. B. Mitchell had moved into town. Soon, the entire denomination was coming to Cleveland: from 1908 to 1915, Tomlinson and Cleveland hosted every one of the church’s General Assemblies.2 But location, within an institution, is not everything. Only Tomlinson’s unique gifts as a minister, movement builder, and opinion shaper allowed him to hold sway over the sect for more than a decade. On a variety of procedural and doctrinal fronts, Tomlinson had a clear agenda. But in an organization that had no predefined chain of command and that required him to share authority with other core leaders, implementing that agenda demanded consummate diplomacy and the more subtle arts of persuasion. Tomlinson, as he gently maneuvered the Church of God toward his own evolving understandings of ecclesiology, worship, and Christian doctrine, proved equal to the task.3 An early exhibition of A. J.’s art of persuasion can be seen in the process by which the young organization acquired its name. At the second General Assembly, convened in 1907 at Tomlinson’s Union Grove congregation, the faithful “harmoniously” agreed to call their body the “Church of God.”4 In hindsight, however, old-timers could not quite agree on who had first proposed the name. Indeed, several claimed that honor for themselves. “Brother Lemons says he was the first man that suggested the name,” Bryant recalled. But then again, “Brother Trim said he was first.” When Lemons tried to lobby for his own authorship, he weakened his case by dating it to the fourth General Assembly, by which time the name had already been chosen.5 For the name to have been adopted so “harmoniously” amid so much confusion about its origins, someone must have been working behind the scenes and well in advance. Tomlinson, of course, would later make his own claim to precedence in this respect. Of all the competing claims, his carries the most weight by far. The question of the proper name for the True Church had long been a concern for Tomlinson and the circles in which he traveled. As an Indiana boy reared among Warnerian and Winebrennerian Churches of God, Christians, and Disciples of Christ, he instinctively understood the politics of nomenclature. His apprenticeship under Sandford, moreover, had helped him identify the authorized short list of biblical names and that with a bias for “the Church of God.”6 Moreover, A. J. remembered this as one of the searching questions he had posed to the brethren at Camp Creek. “Well, if you take the whole Bible rightly divided, that makes it the Church of God,” he claimed to have insisted: “Why do you want to call it the Holiness Church at Camp Creek?”7 The strongest evidence for Tomlinson’s authorship of the church’s name,

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however, comes from an editorial comment in the June 1904 issue of The Way. Though he edited the paper in conjunction with Lemons, the opening paragraph of that editorial clearly identified Tomlinson as the author. Up to that time, he explained, he had responded to questions about the affiliation of his work by declaring it to be “strictly undenominational.” Now, though still rejecting “sectism and denominations,” he wished to say that he did, in fact, belong to a church, one known by its simple New Testament name: “ ‘The Church of God, Church of Christ, Church of the First Born, The Church,’ etc. etc.”8 By 1904 at the latest, Tomlinson had applied the Sandfordian list to his new church, and “the Church of God” stood at the head of that list. The decision of January 11, 1907, it would seem, brought to fruition three years of tactful influence, during which time A. J. led his fellow pastors to “discover” the name for themselves. He accomplished that aim so fluently, I would argue, that others later remembered the idea as having been their own.9 The choice of a name, for all its significance, paled in comparison to the thorny question of how best to arrange the collective life of a church so named. Consequently, A. J.’s greatest achievement came with the implementation of his ecclesiological vision. From its inception, as we have seen, the Church of God harbored a mixed multitude of ecclesiological assumptions. Landmark congregationalism mingled with a touch of Methodist episcopacy, all leavened by Tomlinson’s own uniquely blended heritage. By 1906, however, Tomlinson had begun to prod the denomination away from congregationalism and toward centralization in some yet-to-be-determined form of episcopal order. The first indication of that drift appeared in the convocation of the General Assembly itself. Two later developments, however, would prove more important for Tomlinson’s personal role in the denomination. One involved a protracted debate over the correct procedure for pastoral appointments. The other involved the creation of an executive office that fit A. J.’s ambitions like a tailored suit. In 1907 the General Assembly obliquely addressed ecclesiology by debating how best to handle pastoral appointments. Spurling advocated a modified congregationalism in which churches would, under normal circumstances, select their own pastors. Because Paul had occasionally sent ministers to various locations, however, he granted that appointment did have biblical precedent.10 The following year, a more spirited discussion erupted. When no consensus emerged, the General Assembly suspended debate, and the existing practice carried over for another year. Tomlinson, as clerk of the assembly, entered notes that nicely reflect both his views on the subject and his modus operandi. “Continue the plan already in practice (each church choosing her own pastor) for another year,” he reported, “or until more light might be received on the subject.”11 Tomlinson understood the arts of delay, and he knew how to generate light. “In these days,” E. L. Simmons recalled, “when [Tomlinson] wanted something discussed, he had F. J. Lee to discourse the item, and then he would bring it out in the address.”12 In 1909, by all appearances, a similar strategy bore A. J. the firstfruits of a new appointment system. Following a lengthy debate in which everyone except Tomlinson seems to have spoken, the assem-

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bly took a decisive step toward centralized placements. Henceforth, local churches would forward two names to the General Assembly, which would then appoint pastors with an eye to the churches’ own recommendations. But the new system as proposed had a critical flaw. The General Assembly met annually. Would pastoral appointment grind to a halt during the remaining fifty-one weeks of the year?13 The missing link, of course, was an executive officer vested with the authority of the General Assembly while it was not in session. When someone suggested the appointment of a “general Overseer over all the churches,” the proposed office was debated and approved in the form of a “General Moderator.”14 The new officer would be authorized to issue credentials, keep ministerial records, and fill pastoral vacancies either in person or by appointment. He would also act as moderator and clerk of the General Assembly, the very things A. J. had always done. No sooner had the office been created than Tomlinson was elected to fill it.15 The name of that office would change the following year—to the originally proposed “General Overseer”—but for the next decade and a half the person filling it would remain the same.16 Even before Goins ambushed him, Tomlinson had doubted the wisdom of allowing local churches to choose their own pastors. Afterward, he knew it to be pure folly. As he later put it, a church choosing its own pastor was like a child choosing its own father.17 The 1910 General Assembly, abuzz with Goins lore, bestowed yet more prerogatives on Tomlinson, broadening his authority to appoint pastors and creating a questionnaire that bristled with ninety-nine queries for the examination of would-be ministers. The next Goins would have to slip through a tighter sieve. Finally, in 1912, jurisdiction over all ordinations was placed in Tomlinson’s hands.18 The ecclesiological alterations that Tomlinson shepherded through the General Assembly redounded to his personal aggrandizement. But what we know of his character suggests that personal aggrandizement was never in itself his aim. His overriding quest seems always to have been to make himself and his denomination as efficient in operation, and as productive of spiritual returns, as possible. A few of the battles he fought may seem to fit strangely in the larger picture. He worked assiduously and astutely, for instance, to advance his peculiar (and peculiarly rigorous) views on divorce and remarriage and to persuade the Church of God to adopt a hard line on the use of tobacco.19 But even here his concern may have been the church’s reputation, with its long-term repercussions for the harvest of souls.20 And aside from these ethical particulars, all of Tomlinson’s major initiatives aimed squarely at efficiency and productivity as he understood them. He sought control not because he hungered for personal power but because he saw waste, inefficiency, and squandered opportunity everywhere he looked and because—like many a benevolent autocrat—he saw no one better qualified than himself to set things right. As would befit a captain of religious industry, A. J. relentlessly pursued “more compact and systematic organization” for his church.21 “God runs His universe in a systematic way,” he explained to the 1913 General Assembly. Just

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figure 16.1. A. J. Tomlinson and the Council of Elders. Courtesy of the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tenn.

as a “machine must be perfectly adjusted to thresh out grain,” so the Church of God must “get the machinery adjusted perfectly” if it wished to see “apostolic results.”22 (See figure 16.1.) System and efficiency, that is to say, equaled apostolic order in Tomlinson’s mind and if that order could be perfectly restored, then the windows of heaven would open and release a shower of blessings: enough money to support all the church’s ministers and fund its grandest schemes and enough Holy Ghost power to evangelize the world. Tomlinson would prove to be a notorious meddler. More deeply impressed by what a thing lacked than by what it possessed, he never stopped pushing, adjusting, and fine-tuning the machinery of his church, always convinced that even a good thing could be made still better. But despite his perfectionist discontent, he must have found satisfaction when he considered the Church of God, with its growing membership and its multiplying congregations. The certainty of his own calling and confidence in his own ability that had sustained him through so many disappointments had been vindicated. He had laid this foundation and built upon it. Now, as he pushed, prodded, molded, and cajoled his denomination into what he took to be its proper form, he must have felt a certain entitlement, and not simply that sense of entitlement innate to a natural-born leader. He only wanted to impose order on an institution that no one had done more to build than he. If A. J. took satisfaction in his accomplishments, however, that did not mean that he was satisfied. For one thing, the very structure of his ecclesiology

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demanded far more than the maintenance of a religious institution. The Church of God was no mere denomination, after all. Tomlinson envisioned the gathering of all God’s pentecostal children into the One True Church, like the gathering of the nations to Zion prophesied in Isaiah 60 (one of his old mentor’s favorite verses). That compelling dream drove A. J. into the third front, where he met other brazen entrepreneurs with their own plans for a great, latter-day ingathering.

Gathering of Israel By 1908, American pentecostalism had raised the scaffolding on which the future movement would be built. In large part, it was cobbled together by crossconnecting sections of the old holiness grid: clusters of urban missions in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Nashville, Rochester, and New York; independent holiness organizations like the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the remnants of Dowie’s Christian Catholic Apostolic Church; and small denominations like the Church of God in Christ, the Apostolic Faith Movement, the Holiness Church of North Carolina, the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, and Tomlinson’s Church of God.23 Yet those germinal networks—those sets of identifiably pentecostal people, places, and institutions—existed only as a by-product of pentecostal selfawareness, the growing conviction among those who embraced speaking in tongues that what was occurring in their midst was no adjunct to holiness but, rather, a new thing on the face of the earth. After Azusa Street, that happened fast. The embers of revival had scarcely cooled when Ivey Campbell penned “April Ninth, 1907: Anniversary Day for the 20th Century Pentecostal Movement.” That same year pentecostal sympathizer A. S. Worrell wrote “An Open Letter to the Opposers of the Pentecostal Movement,” and in 1908 W. F. Carothers offered “History of Movement” to the readers of his Houston paper. Within two years of Azusa Street the movement had its eulogists, apologists, and historians.24 What the movement did not have was a dominant institution or a universally accepted leadership. But it did have volunteers. Levi Lupton, for example, offered his Missionary Home and Training School as “the headquarters for this gracious Pentecostal movement in this part of the country.”25 A. J. Tomlinson also applied for the job. Perched atop the Church of God, he felt perfectly situated to offer the benefits of structure to this outpouring of holy effervescence. More importantly, he felt providentially called to that end. “The Holy Ghost witnesses,” he perceived, “that it is my mission to gather His people into one.”26 Tomlinson had been called to do the impossible. But if he reached for the stars, he might still harvest the moon. A. J.’s designs on the movement met their greatest impediment in the same thicket that had hindered his ascent within the Church of God: ecclesiological assumptions. Most pentecostals—like most in radical holiness—believed that, while God had One True Church, it was spiritual in nature, com-

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prising “all who are saved from their sins and walking in the light.” To the extent that it had a formal structure, it was “congregational in government, and necessarily independent and amenable to God alone.”27 More libertarian pentecostals went further, condemning organization as such. “Organization intensifies and perpetuates division,” insisted the directors of Toronto’s Hebden mission, who prided themselves on having “no connection whatever with any general organization of the Pentecostal people.”28 Even those more favorably disposed to organization gave wide berth to anything resembling “ecclesiasticism.” Charles Parham’s old Apostolic Faith Movement appointed regional directors, but they disclaimed the right to assert “authority over any branch of the work.” Directors might offer assistance and counsel, especially to novices, but “the older assemblies govern themselves, and the experienced workers and evangelists are free to direct their own movements, subject only to the bonds of love and unity.”29 The pentecostal movement, that is to say, had a built-in resistance to authority. Most of A. J.’s competitors in the scramble to harness pentecostalism played to its anti-institutional bias. The more successful such endeavors (for example, the later Assemblies of God), organized furiously while denying that they were doing so, shunning disreputable terms like ecclesiasticism, denominationalism, and hierarchy as if they were pool halls or polka-dot neckties. Tomlinson, ever the contrarian, posited a counterframe that turned the movement’s holiness ecumenism on its head. God’s people did indeed need to break the chain of ecclesiasticism and repair the scandal of disunity caused by denominations, he allowed. The cure, however, lay not in spiritual autonomy but in accepting Christ’s own government, exercised through His Church Universal and Visible, newly restored. “You will search in vain in the New Testament for a body of men with legislative power,” the Revivalist once asserted.30 But that was precisely the point. All denominations were indeed “men’s organizations,” but in sublime contrast to them, A. J. and his cohorts retorted, God Himself ruled the Church of God. Furthermore, as we have seen, its General Assembly exercised only judicial, not legislative, power, the simple explication of the mind of God. Jesus had prayed that His disciples might be one, but that prayer would only be fulfilled when, from the four corners of the carnal denominational world, those disciples gathered into the Church of God.31 Most pentecostals flatly rejected the kind of apostolic authority that Tomlinson wished to exercise, but some did so on conditional rather than absolute grounds. Carothers, for example, refused to endorse apostolic authority only because, in his opinion, there were no apostles around. “The truth is,” he lamented, “we have . . . no men who measure up to the stature of that office.” Pentecostals would have to get along without them, he believed, until the full gifts and powers of the apostolic church were restored.32 The church with all its gifts and powers had been restored, A. J. countered. It only made sense. “If the experience, lost in the dark ages, can now be refound,” asked one of his associates, why not “the primitive order, the lost church”?33 Even armed with strong counterarguments, however, Church of God ecclesiology would be a

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tough sell among that headstrong host of early pentecostals. But at least the Church of God had established brand recognition, and in so doing had separated from the pack. Tomlinson’s greatest opportunity for recruitment came in the two years following his Holy Ghost baptism, a period that coincided with the high tide of pentecostal ecumenism in the American South. Cashwell’s new paper, The Bridegroom’s Messenger, formed the chief monument to that passing fraternal moment, and A. J. joined ministers from the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church and the Holiness Church of North Carolina on its pan-pentecostal board of contributing editors.34 In April 1908 Tomlinson used that forum to address the then-current yearning for unity with an article entitled “Unity of the Faith.” The article skirted Tomlinson’s exclusivist claims but did stress that unity required acknowledging Christ’s authority, which would require the faithful to “unlearn” much of what they had been taught. What precisely did acknowledging Christ’s authority mean? On this point Tomlinson played coy. “If we follow,” he assured his readers, “we will be led into . . . oneness, that the world may believe.” At about the same time he began circulating a pamphlet, “Oneness,” in which he offered a slightly more explicit glimpse of his ecclesiological presuppositions: Christ had come to introduce “a new system of government,” not merely spiritual oneness; He reigned as “lawgiver and King,” not only as savior; the prerequisite for oneness was submission to “our true Governor, Jesus Christ.”35 Tomlinson reserved his most candid overture, however, for a new journal by an old acquaintance. William F. Manley, the ex–Free Methodist Quaker who had barnstormed Westfield the year of A. J.’s conversion, had himself come into Pentecost and now opened his paper, The Household of God, to Tomlinson. A. J. used the opportunity to define “the Lord’s Church.” The “churches of today,” he explained, distinguished themselves from one another by adjoining various modifiers to the term Church, but the “true church” was known simply as “the Church of God.” The time had come, he averred, for “the Pentecostal people of every land” to unite under that name and unite not in name only but in “doctrine and government” as well. How might such a wondrous eventuality occur? The Holy Ghost would bring it about, Tomlinson insisted, “by persuading us, one by one, and day by day, to throw down our ways and plans, and be subject to Christ in everything.” Having gone this far, A. J. stopped discreetly short of full disclosure. The time was not right. “I see great things ahead,” he hinted, “that I cannot mention now.”36 What he could not yet mention to readers of The Household of God, however, he did commit to his diary. The Holy Spirit had revealed through tongues and interpretation that the manifestations then taking place in the Church of God would “spread and that the real Christian people everywhere would see and flow together.”37 They would flow together, that is to say, into the Church of God. Some flowed, some balked, others counterattacked. When A. J. returned to Florida after wrapping up his business with Goins, he ran head-on into F. M. Britton and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. A camp meeting in Ar-

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cadia had invited the two men to share its pulpit, half and half, in what must have been an extraordinary spectacle of dueling pentecostals. Afterward, Tomlinson complained that “the preaching of F. M. Britton had a tendency to hinder and drive people away.” Furthermore, rumor had Britton boasting that he would “tare up the Lord’s Church.” As it turned out, crowed A. J., Britton had gotten the worst of the bargain. One brother claimed a revelation that Britton was “a Haimen and I a Mortecai,” he confided. “There must have been some truth in the revelation, for he was evidently hanged . . . on the very gallows that he had prepared for me.”38 If so, it would have marked the second time that fall that Tomlinson had left an adversary dangling from his own rope. Britton told a different story. He had split time with Tomlinson “at the request of the people” and had fulfilled his obligation to them and to God by exposing his counterpart’s false teaching, in particular his claim to have discovered the one and only True Church. “They call it the ‘Church of God,’ ” fumed Britton, “and say that they are right and all others are wrong.” But Britton begged to differ: “Every child of God is in the church of God, and don’t have to join it,” because “we enter in through the blood of the everlasting covenant.” Britton next took aim at other alleged falsehoods. According to him, the Church of God taught the “awful error” that “women have no voice in church work” and that “a man can receive the Holy Ghost and still use tobacco.” But Britton claimed to have shut them up: “The great leaders of the so-called ‘church of God’ could not preach these things in my presence.” He did have to admit, however, that they had preached them in his absence.39 Tomlinson stood falsely accused on counts two and three, the role of women and the use of tobacco. He vigorously defended the former and preached foursquare against the latter. Britton, though, had no time to check his facts. He and his associates were losing members right and left. Florida native E. L. Simmons recalled that Britton had evangelized his home area for two or three years before Tomlinson came. Then, someone passed through claiming to have found “the Church of God of which A. J. Tomlinson was the Overseer,” and the winds changed. When A. J. himself arrived, “all the people came together into the church but three.”40 In the long run Britton’s organization would hold its own, but Tomlinson had gotten the best of this round. Tomlinson’s bid for hegemony over the pentecostal movement would ultimately fail. L. P. Adams, H. G. Rodgers, and M. M. Pinson, three influential evangelists with former ties to J. O. McClurkan’s Pentecostal Mission in Memphis, flirted with the Church of God but slipped away. Tomlinson almost drew the small Mountain Assembly Church of God into the fold, but it balked as well.41 No ingathering of pentecostals materialized. The Church of God would continue to grow but only by attracting individuals and congregations, as Tomlinson had suggested to The Household of God, day by day and one by one. For those who did flow together, however, an exhilarating apprehension awaited. We can only imagine the profound impact of Church of God ecclesiology as it fully dawned on the faithful, the shuddering realization that the Church of God was not some spiritual unity running like a gossamer thread through all the world’s believers or an ethereal ecclesia mysteriously present

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in each local congregation but, rather, an actual Church, a particular, concrete, visible organization that no matter how small or unassuming constituted the literal restoration of the very Church led by the Apostles and commissioned by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.42 That realization, for those who experienced it, carried all the world-refiguring power of an epiphany. No distinction existed between the Church Universal and the Visible Church, and that One Church was the Church of God with headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, with Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson as its general overseer. These were no spelunkers casting about for scattered jewels in the vacant caverns of a longlost apostolic age. They were the modern-day equivalents of Peter, James, and John, standing at the helm of God’s only Church, in the fullness of its power and in the fullness of time.

On Top of the World Tomlinson had not quite gathered the pentecostal nations, but he had secured his hold on the Church of God. Together they formed a winning team. Many among the working population of the mill town South had grown alienated from their upscaling evangelical churches. The patterns of religious enthusiasm increasingly shunned by those churches still resonated widely in plainfolk

figure 16.2. The Church of God Tabernacle, Cleveland, Tenn. Courtesy of the Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Cleveland, Tenn.

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circles. This was a “structure of opportunity,” and the Church of God—led by a gifted movement entrepreneur and buoyed by the momentum of a rising pentecostal tide—exploited it magnificently.43 In 1903, Tomlinson had joined a backwoods communion of perhaps two dozen saints. Seven years later, he oversaw a vibrant young denomination boasting thirty-one churches and 1,000 members in six states. Over the next seven years the Church of God grew tenfold, its 300 churches and 10,000 members now scattered over twenty states and the Caribbean. (See figure 16.2.) Five more years and it had doubled again.44 With thousands of visitors pouring into Cleveland each year for the General Assembly and other church business, opposition from the local establishment quickly faded. Like it or not, the Church of God was the hottest thing in town, and Tomlinson was a man to be courted, not taken to court.

The Private Side of Public Life Success came at a price. “Papa is a minister, and he is so good to me,” A. J.’s fifteen-year-old daughter Halcy wrote to her diary: “He isn’t at home near all the time, and oh, we are so glad when he comes home again.” The relentless demands of institution building meant detachment from family life; Tomlinson remembered once being absent so long that “my little children ran away from me thinking I was a stranger.”45 Because of this, his wife and children faced the routine illnesses and passages, hardships and joys, largely without him. “Papa is in Chattanooga,” Halcy once fretted: “I wish he would come back. . . . Seems like we need him, with little Brother sick.”46 But Tomlinson’s work so preoccupied him that his family had little chance to compete. The only hint we find in his diary of his son Milton’s impending birth, for instance, appears in the odd notice that he “did a washing” for his wife. Only two weeks later, when he recorded the arrival of a son, could we begin to imagine why.47 Even Tomlinson’s detachment, however, seems to have played in his favor. Facing hard times, the children went to work at local factories and pitched in with expenses at home. They learned self-reliance and discipline. Though often absent, A. J. communicated the importance of education to his children, and they dutifully conformed to his wishes. At a time when fewer than half the nation’s high school–age youth attended high school, and a bare fraction attended university, Homer finished high school with distinction and continued on to the university of Tennessee. At sixteen Halcy—herself an exemplary student—walked to school alone because no other girls her age, from her part of town at least, were still attending. When it came to education, Tomlinson’s brood persisted and excelled.48 A. J.’s children honored him in church as well as at school. One by one each joined him in the performance of Pentecost, and nothing made him happier. “Homer A. Tomlinson my son delivered the 4 of July oration under the power of the Spirit,” he once gushed: “It was wonderful.” It got even better. “Once while Halcy, my daughter played under the power,” the proud father

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boasted, “Homer sang with her under the power, and Iris was greatly exercised by the power in what was spoken of as dancing.”49 Tomlinson had trained up his children in the way they should go, and they had not departed from it. The model behavior of Tomlinson’s children lends itself to various interpretations, but it most strongly suggests their yearning for the attention and affection of an absentee father. Homer, in later life, told a revealing story. At the age of fifteen, during one of his father’s prolonged absences, he fell blind. With no clue as to the cause, he nevertheless felt certain that if only his father could pray for him, he would be healed. But his father, engaged in earnest evangelism far from home, could not return. After two long months Homer, in the company of his sister Halcy, took a train to one of his father’s meetings. There his father laid hands on him, and he instantly recovered.50 Homer’s letters to his father are also revealing. Full of intimate accounts of his own struggles and achievements, effusive with praise for his father’s work and proofs of his own like-mindedness, and laced with childlike references to “papa,” they reveal a son starving for his father’s attention, volunteering intimacy in the hope of receiving intimacy in return.51 Taken together, Halcy’s diary, Homer’s letters, and the family’s model behavior sketch a portrait of children who idolized their father and yearned for his presence and approval. Once again, a liability had become a point of strength for A. J. Tomlinson. By default he had successfully applied what someone has called “the paternal technique of impressing by remaining distant.”52 A rich irony envelops the process by which an only son, whose paucity of reference to his own father might suggest a psychic patricide, became a patriarch of near mythic proportions in the eyes of his own adoring children—and that by way of his absence in service for the Lord. Success came at a price. And the price bought more success.

A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist In the spring of that eventful year, 1909, A. J. Tomlinson returned to the place of his birth. On the spur of the moment he had accepted an invitation to accompany his old comrade, J. B. Mitchell, to Cincinnati, but what began as a quick trip to Cincinnati turned into a homecoming voyage that seemed to reenact the trance pilgrimage of his pentecostal baptism the year before. From Cincinnati, A. J. proceeded to Cambridge City, Indiana, where he visited his in-laws. From Cambridge City he traveled to Indianapolis, where he spoke at the Pentecostal Mission. Finally, four days after departing Cleveland, Tomlinson reached Westfield, Indiana. Uncles, aunts, cousins, sisters, and mother enthusiastically welcomed the prodigal evangelist whom they had not seen for almost six years. They even invited him to preach at the old Chester meetinghouse, where the Lord gave him a “very impressive message.” For the better part of a week, A. J. visited relatives, renewed friendships, filled pulpits, and told about the marvelous

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providences unfolding under his ministry in the South. He also spent a day almost exclusively in the company of his mother.53 True to his baptismal vow, Tomlinson had borne witness at home. After five days in Westfield, A. J. bid his farewells and caught the evening train for Indianapolis, where he had been booked for a week of meetings at the Pentecostal Mission. While there, God gave him “favor with the people.” But the Church of God, with its duties and opportunities, called, so he telephoned his mother and sister for a last good-bye and caught the southbound train. From Indianapolis to Louisville, overnight in Nashville, a half day of rail time left him in Florence, Alabama, on the banks of the Tennessee River, where the bright prospect of a new congregation with its fine young minister, John B. Goins, awaited.54 Three months later, as he pitched his tent on the Cleveland square, before his season of discontent, with Goins still his eager prote´ge´, Britton but a distant competitor, and injunctions fraught only with opportunity, A. J. Tomlinson received that news of his mother’s impending demise with which this biography began. No more for his mother than for his son could he turn back from a wondrous revival and leave souls to dangle above the gaping mouth of eternity. When the telegram arrived two weeks later bearing news of her death, he expressed remorse. A. J. wanted to attend the funeral, but his responsibilities would not release him. He loved his mother, he reassured his diary and himself, but “she had good care” without him, “and souls are valuable beyond any price.” He sacrificed returning to bury her “for the gospel’s sake.”55 That poignant episode holds a wealth of biographical meaning, with its intimations of distance and loss, its varieties of faith and alienation. But it also tells the story of plainfolk modernism. Tomlinson’s choice placed him squarely among that generation of “enterprising men” who, as the Reverend Bellows put it, scorned “local importance” for the “larger spheres of life.” A siren call had beckoned him into the deep of a new century, and he could not turn back. That new century, however, did not overwhelm him. He learned to master its currents and recognize its opportunities. Most impressively, he grasped what it took to build in this new world where a man could catch the evening train in Indianapolis and disembark the next day in Alabama. In the first decade of that new century, A. J. Tomlinson proved himself to be a quintessential entrepreneur. Stubbornly nonconformist, indisposed to accept authority, disinclined to endeavors not of his own choosing, he set out to launch his own enterprise. He took risks and suffered the consequences. In the end, his drive, insight, nerve, and talent paid off in an organization that he did not exactly launch but did commandeer. Tomlinson became a successful movement builder, mobilizing, organizing, manipulating, peacemaking, negotiating the perilous turns, and crushing or finessing threats to his own authority. In the end, the same arrogance and sense of destiny that had emboldened him to chart the unadvised course proved essential to his progress along it, once those impudent virtues had been chastened by failure and leavened by diplomacy. During his 1909 pilgrimage to Westfield, Tomlinson would have found

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occasion to gossip about the local holiness celebrities: Seth Rees, William Manley, perhaps Nathan and Esther Frame, certainly his young friend Charles Stalker. He must have also reminisced with friends and relatives about the exploits of his uncle and father, Noah and Milton Tomlinson, that duo of builders and movers who had spanned the dismal swamp with a roadbed, stretched railways, and rescued runaway slaves in their time. But A. J. would outdo them all. Already, back in Cleveland he was the chief executive officer of a thriving concern, all the more remarkable for the delicate and specialized nature of its product. His was a manufactory of mental worlds, producing and distributing a flourishing line of sacred canopies. And it was the fastest-growing enterprise in town. “Enterprise,” of course, hardly describes it. There among them at Westfield, shaking hands in the Chester meetinghouse, exchanging small talk in local shops, and quietly passing the time with his mother, stood the general overseer of the One True Church of God. In its deepest sense, that Church must have eluded their view. But Tomlinson saw it, “fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”56 The general overseer of the Church of God had lived his life in the crossroads of plainfolk America. At that intersection he had absorbed the vibrant cultural and religious strains of a restless nation. It had made of him a study in contrasts: an Indiana Quaker baptized in a New England commune, the cofounder of an Appalachian holiness denomination who guided it into the pentecostal movement under the influence of a Los Angeles revival, a Quaker with a yen for ritual, a pentecostal inclined to high-church ecclesiology, a relentless advocate of system and order who urged utter abandonment to the ecstasies of the Spirit, a heedless celebrant of modern technology with unquestioning faith in the starkly supernatural, a Yankee cultural imperialist in the Lost Cause South whose legacy would be preserved by the Southern whites he came to civilize and to save. The composite and paradoxical aspects of his nature did not make an oddity of Tomlinson. They made him revealing, even representative, of his times. God’s latter-day Church, that is to say, had found a latter-day leader: A. J. Tomlinson, plainfolk modernist.

Epilogue

On November 8, 1940, in his seventy-fifth year, A. J. Tomlinson led a small expedition up the slope of a remote North Carolina hill known as Burger Mountain. They were searching for the exact spot where, thirty-seven years before, he had “prayed and prevailed” for knowledge of the One True Church. God had spoken then in the words of Isaiah 60:1, “Arise and shine; for thy light has come,” confirming to Tomlinson that a small group of mountain believers meeting in a cabin below indeed constituted the “Church of God of the Bible.” Tomlinson had visited the hillside several times in recent years, but with no prominent markings the place always had to be refound. To refresh the faded memories W. F. Bryant, cofounder of God’s Church and owner of the cabin in which it had met on that retrospectively fateful day, had agreed to come along. Much had come between the two men since that time. But together then, they were together now: reconvening on the far side of a stormy interval. As the two men shuffled through the leaves, Tomlinson knelt first in one place and then another, trying to divine the exact spot. None seemed “warm” enough. Finally, he called out, “I believe I found it, I believe this is the place!” (See figure E.1.) A reluctant Bryant, unconvinced, joined in as the group piled stones where Tomlinson pointed—building altars. But Bryant did not object. Perhaps he understood that for Tomlinson decision was catharsis, a purging of doubt. “Here is the place that the Lord showed me the Church, right here,” Tomlinson gestured emphatically. “The Bible showed me the Church,” Bryant retorted: “I’m afraid of revelations.”

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figure E.1. A. J. Tomlinson at Fields of the Wood. Courtesy of the Archives of the Church of God of Prophecy, Cleveland, Tenn.

Tomlinson studied his wary old ally. “God doesn’t fool me,” he replied. A. J. dubbed the site “Fields of the Wood.” As with the church, the name was a discovery, not an invention. He had simply found and applied the name that David had already given that hallowed ground centuries before, in Psalms 132:6. Standing on Burger Mountain—the stones now in place that would create as much as commemorate his epiphany—Tomlinson looked east, toward the sea and another site whose significance had recently dawned on him: Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Eleven days later he visited the place where the Wright Brother’s first brief flight, in that same epochal year of 1903, provided the historical counterpart to his own discovery. The very chapter of Isaiah that harbored the words of his own revelation, “rise and shine,” also included a prophetic question, “Who are these that fly like a cloud, and like doves to their windows?” These two events, A. J. had come to believe, framed the meaning of the Last Days just as, in a geographical sense, Camp Creek and Kitty Hawk framed the State of North Carolina. One year later Tomlinson conducted the first memorial service at Fields of the Wood.1 He delivered his sermon while church-leased airplanes droned overhead, dropping gospel tracts in fulfillment of Deuteronomy 32:2: “May my teaching drop as the rain . . . as the gentle rain upon the tender grass.” (See figure E.2.) “The airplanes are the last days product,” Tomlinson told the gathered saints and reporters: “The Church of God is the last days product. And they go hand in hand.” As he had explained to his followers before, “Trace the airplane and you trace the final last days Church.”2 Borne aloft on the marvel

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figure E.2. “May my teaching drop as the rain.” Courtesy of the Archives of the Church of God of Prophecy, Cleveland, Tenn.

of that prophetic insight, the Church of God promptly assembled a “White Angel Fleet” that within a decade grew to eighty-eight craft strong. (See figure E.3.) This interweaving of Camp Creek and Kitty Hawk formed a central element in what Church of God of Prophecy insiders now call, privately, Tomlinson’s “Mountain Theology.” More than any other endeavor, the development of that theology occupied his final years as he searched out the divine symmetries that had knit his life into a single luminous whole. Through numerous sermons and articles Tomlinson delineated the foundational events of the church and expounded their prophetic significance. He also stressed the importance of symbolic action, such as the placement of markers to commemorate those foundational events and the creation and display of a church flag. But A. J.’s Mountain Theology found its preeminent expression in Fields of the Wood, as that first desultory heap of stones evolved into an elaborate memorial park, a pastoral shrine where members gathered to celebrate the core memory of their church.3 At one level Tomlinson’s Mountain Theology represented the cultivation of a myth of origins and the creation of an ecclesiastical calendar for the Church of God. But at a more personal level it represented a man in the twilight of life trying to control his own legacy through symbolic autobiography. Having never trusted such important matters to others, he was not about to start now. But

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figure E.3. The White Angel Fleet. Courtesy of the Archives of the Church of God of Prophecy, Cleveland, Tenn.

the most impressive aspect of this mythic construction may be the degree to which it did, in fact, capture many of the central themes, and paradoxes, of his life. The three decades separating Tomlinson’s excursion to Burger Mountain from the halcyon days of the early 1910s bore witness to notable professional achievements and impressive theological creativity. But those years are best remembered for the wrenching controversies that plagued them. Tomlinson had never lost his Midas touch for church growth, but he had met his match on the bureaucratic battlefield. In the end, however, the same stubborn resilience and personal charisma that led him to the top of the Church of God also redeemed him and left him towering like a legend over the religious lives of thousands of believers.

The Seat of James The decade of the 1910s began with power flowing into the office of the general overseer. But as the prerogatives of his tailor-made office increased, ironically, Tomlinson progressively lost control of his burgeoning church. By 1913, A. J. had won the right to appoint most church officers other than himself, and he either directly or indirectly controlled most of the church’s affairs, including

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its finances, its publishing house, its home and foreign missions programs, and its pastoral and evangelistic ministries. In 1914 his hold on the Church of God reached its apex. At that year’s General Assembly, an extraordinary coincidence of charismatic performance and political choreography persuaded the saints that the Holy Ghost had appointed Tomlinson to be general overseer for life. It all began when the assembly turned to the annual appointment of its general overseer, by which time A. J. had already impressed on his colleagues the vital importance of having God Himself designate the holder of that lofty office. To determine the divine will, Tomlinson directed that he and three key elders disperse to the four corners of the sanctuary where they would pray all night. Finally, at 5 a.m., A. J. arose. When he did so, the others exclaimed, “God has given us a General Overseer.” The next day a message in tongues—interpreted by W. F. Bryant— decreed that Tomlinson should be general overseer, as A. J. put it in his diary, “until Jesus comes or calls.”4 Tomlinson now seemed secure in his own office, and he exercised control over everyone else’s. During that same assembly, furthermore, A. J. erected a sturdy new theological buttress for his office. Having acquired a recent edition of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, he had discovered the exalted role assigned to James, the Lord’s brother, by early advocates of episcopal ecclesiology. According to Hegesippus, James had assumed the government of the Church after Jesus’ death. The Epistle of Clement refers to James as “the bishop of bishops,” and the Recognitions of Clement know him as “the chief of the bishops.” Tomlinson also took notice of Cyprian’s high-church pronouncement: “The bishop is in the Church, and the Church in the bishop; and if any one be not with the bishop . . . he is not in the Church.”5 Tomlinson’s address to the 1914 General Assembly had tied these strands together for the faithful. Formerly, Tomlinson explained, a cloud had hidden the true government of the Early Church, but now the saints could peer “through God’s great telescope that pierces back through nineteen centuries to get a view of that illustrious man of God, James . . . as he sat upon his imperial and mediatorial throne, like Moses of fifteen centuries before.”6 Already attested by signs and wonders (which now included the Marcan miracle of snake handling, with fire handling thrown in to boot), the authenticity of the Church of God had been further confirmed by the rediscovery of the true nature of its highest office.7 Tomlinson’s inexorable march toward unchallenged formal authority, however, belied the more complex reality of his actual control. His growing power was prompting increased anxiety about his authoritarian ways and his unilateral management of church affairs. In 1913, the General Assembly felt compelled to refute rumors that “Brother Tomlinson has put himself in this place to rule over us.” In 1915, A. J. himself addressed those fears, protesting that he was “a servant of God” and not “a despotic ruler.”8 The protestations themselves, of course, underscored the presence of suspicions to the contrary. On that latter occasion, Tomlinson’s sway had been briefly placed in doubt by a cryptic performance ritual, precisely the kind of event that had so often

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redounded to his favor. During one of his addresses, the “anointing” fell, and several women acted out a charade in which they covered his face with a veil. The question went forth: “What will you do when he is gone?” E. W. Simpson, perhaps eager to find out, rose to point out that when the Holy Ghost had installed Tomlinson, He had said that He would remove him at the proper time. Was the Holy Ghost telling the assembly that the time had come for Tomlinson to go? A. J. had always shown confidence in the “correct” outcome of such rituals and had rarely intervened when his own status was at stake, counting on others to interpret the signs agreeably. But times had changed. With the spiritual momentum now threatening to swing against him, he resumed the podium to offer his own reading of the Holy Ghost charade. “Three thoughts,” Tomlinson confided, had passed through his mind as the veil descended over his face. Did the veil symbolize a burial shroud, a sign that the Lord was taking him away? Did it symbolize the mantle of Elijah that had fallen on Elisha? Or did it signify the veil that had covered Moses’ face when the glory of God had radiated from him so strongly that his uncovered countenance would have blinded the multitude? Tomlinson, that is to say, threw his own veils over that first unfavorable interpretation, providing two good reasons to keep him in answer to the one good reason to have him removed. Nevertheless, the charade forced Tomlinson to put the question of his continuation before the General Assembly. As moderator he set the agenda, but based on his “lifetime appointment” the previous year, A. J. explained in tears, he had not submitted his office to the assembly that year lest by doing so he defy God. The assembly accepted his explanation and soundly reaffirmed him as its general overseer. Tomlinson had dodged the bullet with an adroit and timely intervention.9 Seven years later, however, he would face another challenge to his authority, and this time neither force nor finesse would be able to save him.

The Disruption In the years after 1915, three developments set the general overseer up for a fall. First, the denomination and its demands expanded dramatically. Between 1917 and 1922 the denomination doubled in size, growing from 10,500 to 21,600 members.10 Its publishing arm, especially close to Tomlinson’s heart, expanded proportionately. In 1916 the weekly paper had a circulation of 6,200. Three years later it had jumped to 16,000. By 1921 the publishing house had grown into a diversified enterprise with thirty workers on its payroll.11 At A. J.’s urging, furthermore, the church built a new auditorium in Cleveland and launched an orphanage, a Bible school, and an Exchange and Indemnity Department through which the church brokered real estate transactions, sold bonds, and underwrote property insurance. At the center of it all, with unsupervised control of all finances, inhuman demands on his time, and limited

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accounting skills, stood A. J. Tomlinson. It was a recipe for disaster. As one note after another came due without sufficient funds in the appropriate account to cover it, he borrowed heavily to keep the ship afloat.12 A second factor in Tomlinson’s undoing involved his continuing drive to impose discipline on the Church of God. At the 1916 General Assembly he chided congregations for acting too independently and for failing to heed the principles of theocracy. Again in 1917 he stressed the need for God’s people to “bow to authority.” At the same time, he accumulated yet greater control over church finances. By 1920 he had pushed a new “General Treasury Plan” through the General Assembly that sent each congregation’s tithes straight to Tomlinson at Cleveland, who was to remove 10 percent for the general work and distribute the remainder to the ministers, ostensibly in a more equitable manner than before. The new system encouraged arbitrary conduct on A. J.’s part. By 1920 he had long relinquished the fastidious scruples of his Culberson days, and if Peter went begging while Paul had plenty, he assumed that Paul himself would approve a loan if only he understood the circumstances. Moreover, the 1917 General Assembly had told him to publish the paper “regardless of the expense,” promising to make up any shortfall, and Tomlinson took this as a general mandate to apply funds as necessary in an emergency.13 Under those ambiguous terms, when urgent bills came due, Tomlinson borrowed tithes to pay for publishing.14 A third key development involved the creation of an institutional apparatus, partly of his own making, capable of challenging Tomlinson’s authority. Following his revelation about James and the see of Jerusalem, A. J. sought to reconstitute the putative Council of Elders that had advised James. He envisioned a two-tiered system in which a high council of twelve (the apostolic number) and a general council of seventy (the Mosaic number) would assist him in the work of the church. The first council materialized in 1916, its members chosen in a manner calculated to place them firmly under Tomlinson’s thumb. (The general overseer would appoint two bishops, who would then assist him in appointing the remaining ten.) But A. J. would soon discover that his control over the elders roughly equaled that of a president over his Supreme Court nominees. Tomlinson, unawares, had fashioned the machinery of his own undoing. Without an instigator, the new machinery of government, though capable of challenging its leader, would never have done so. The council found its instigator in J. S. Llewellyn, a headstrong carpenter-businessman with his own checkered reputation and a relative newcomer to the church’s inner circle. Llewellyn was in many respects the second coming of John B. Goins. The most important difference, however, lay in the disposition of Tomlinson’s lifelong allies toward his new nemesis. This time, Lemons and Bryant would weigh in on the other side. The assault on A. J.’s office proceeded along two main fronts, the first being an inquiry into his possible misuse of funds. Never shy about making

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a buck, Llewellyn had a pecuniary shrewdness of his own that perhaps inclined him to be dubious of Tomlinson’s regularity, and by 1920 he had emerged as the point man in an investigation of the overseer’s handling of church finances.15 The second front involved an attempt to limit the power of the general overseer or at least to subject him to some form of ecclesiastical accountability. In 1921, these fronts converged. Tomlinson, as noted above, had diverted tithes to avoid defaulting on publishing house debts. Unfortunately, that diversion left a number of ministers in the lurch, waiting on money that never came or came in partial payments. Tomlinson stalled and evaded, buying time until he could repay the shortfall, but he never forthrightly explained his actions. Finally, the elders, with Llewellyn at the head, called for an audit of the church books. Meanwhile, the elders, with Tomlinson’s blessing, drew up a formal constitution for the Church of God. The immediate pretext concerned the need to establish legal ownership of church property in the case of disputes with congregations that departed the fold. And, indeed, the absence of such a constitution, combined with the quasicongregationalist statements of the early General Assemblies, did make it difficult to defeat congregational claims to property in a region where the odds of drawing a Baptist or Church of Christ judge were considerable. At the 1921 General Assembly, Tomlinson himself presented and endorsed the elders’ constitution. It purported to clarify church government and property rights without altering any doctrines or practices, but in fact it contained provisions, to which Tomlinson apparently paid scant attention, that strengthened the power of the elders and established a Court of Justice with the power to impeach any officer of the church, including the general overseer. Bearing A. J.’s imprimatur, the constitution passed with little opposition.16 Over the succeeding months, however, Tomlinson read the fine print. He repented of his support for the constitution and called for its repeal. The elders, for their part, confronted him with financial irregularities exposed by the audit, which, though haphazard and prejudicial, had shown A. J.’s bookkeeping to be a shambles and had identified several thousand dollars in unreconciled receipts. Behind closed doors, Tomlinson came clean, tearfully confessing the unorthodox and arbitrary means he had taken to stave off creditors. By all reports he left the meeting with the majority of his council behind him but carrying a charge to divulge his actions fully, and penitently, at the next General Assembly. When A. J. addressed the 1922 General Assembly he fulfilled his charge to disclose the diversion of funds, but his tone was a far cry from penitent. Much to the elders’ chagrin, he began his address with a frontal assault on their legal underpinnings. Repudiating the constitution as a dangerous departure from theocracy, Tomlinson asserted that the government of the Church of God had been removed from the hands of God and the people and vested in a man-made council propped up by a “creed.”17 With that scathing preface behind him, the general overseer plunged into his full disclosure. In order to rescue the Church of God and its publishing

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house from the “shame and reproach of bankruptcy,” he explained, he had felt compelled to borrow from the tithes. He knew that by doing so he risked his personal reputation, but his first concern was to save his church, and as it turned out, the gamble had paid off: the borrowed tithes had “bridged the awful chasm,” and “the wheels of the publishing house still roll.” Tomlinson insisted that he had only borrowed “a little at a time” and always with the hope of paying it back in a few days. And pay it back he would, based on the careful records he had kept of each minister’s account, though he thought it fitting to note that a number of ministers had “gladly donated” their back pay to the publishing house debt, and he felt sure that most of the others would do the same once they understood the situation. By the end of his address A. J. had won the sympathy of most of his hearers, but the elders were fuming.18 Finding himself cornered, Tomlinson had launched an attack. It proved to be a grave miscalculation. Unlike 1909, this time the opposition had him outgunned, and when A. J. introduced proposals designed to erase the previous year’s decisions, the elders—organized as a Committee on Better Government—countered with a proposal that would reduce the general overseer to but one officer in a ruling triumvirate and place him in the field while the other two handled day-to-day affairs at Cleveland. The ideal of benevolent autocracy—the swashbuckling baron of Gilded Age lore—had lost much of its appeal by the 1920s. Conversely, a new luster attached to committees, which conjured images of reform, regularity, and expertise. Furthermore, Tomlinson no longer had the allies he needed to beat the odds. All of these things worked in the elders’ favor, and when the competing proposals went before the assembly, the elders won. The Church of God had just witnessed a changing of the guard. A bitter round of recriminations ensued. Tomlinson excommunicated the elders. The elders impeached Tomlinson, giving him the dubious distinction of having been impeached by a court of his own appointees. From 1923 forward there would be two main branches of the Church of God, fiercely competing for members, property, and the legal right to be called “The Church of God.”19

Starting Over When A. J. reorganized his faithful remnant, he made sure that no insurrection would ever happen again. All bishops and ordained deacons were decreed to be “elders,” lowering bishops from their pedestal, and councilors served on a rotating basis.20 Having solidified his government, Tomlinson circled his wagons around the old, plainfolk gospel of humility, playing to the issues of class and gender that had, in complex ways, intersected with the disruption. Tomlinson seems to have attracted more than his share of the humble and unlettered, and he gave voice to their resentments by decrying the spirit that had driven a wedge “between the educated and those who have been deprived of educational advantages” and that had robbed the poor of their rightful

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place in the General Assembly. Once again, the old Populist rose to plead the cause of the “common people.”21 Womenfolk as well as plainfolk seem to have aligned with Tomlinson in disproportionate numbers. During one 1924 service, fervent worship segued into another striking instance of inspired pantomime. Two worshipers danced and played the piano under the anointing, while another stood rigid in the center of the room. Yet another laid a Bible at the feet of the one standing. Someone then brought an infant into the room, picked up the Bible, and handed it to another worshiper, who in turn opened the Bible and pointed to II Corinthians 7:1–4, where Paul defends his assailed reputation. The performance had three main messages: the faithful should “stand on the Word of God”; they should be “as submissive to the Holy Ghost as that little child”; and they should have confidence in the integrity of A. J. Tomlinson. Significantly, the cast of that Holy Ghost happening was composed entirely of women.22 When the Church of God divided, perhaps 5,000–6,000 of its 21,000 members cast their lot with the general overseer, but in the chaotic months after 1923 no one could have been sure. Nevertheless, as the two sides clarified their boundaries it became clear that Tomlinson had lost the lion’s share of his denomination. It would take an earnest decade to regain the lost ground.23 A. J. tackled the challenge with a vengeance, tirelessly mobilizing, organizing, and recruiting. Year by year, he recouped his losses. Moreover, the ill wind of 1923 had blown at least some good. Along with the assets, Tomlinson had lost the burdensome debt and the encumbering elders along with the majority of his membership. As a result, he now enjoyed a rebirth of freedom. He could travel and evangelize without fear of subversion on the home front, and he was at liberty to do as he felt led in doctrine and church affairs. The door was open, that is to say, for a flourish of innovation.

The Divine Pageant Secure in his reduced circumstances, Tomlinson was now freed to indulge his taste for spectacle. Aided by his son Homer, who had gravitated to the world of advertising, Tomlinson orchestrated grand parades to inaugurate his church’s General Assemblies. State delegations formed motorcades that wended their way to Cleveland with banners waving, horns blaring, and bands playing. Once there, they arrayed in festive trains of flag-bedecked automobiles, marching saints, and lively brass bands that snaked through town on their way to the assembly auditorium. In 1937, the “All Nations Parade” summoned thirty floats, 123 decorated cars, and three brass bands to Cleveland.24 The conventions matched the parades for pageantry and circumstance, as special decorating committees transformed the auditorium into a riot of flags, banners, ribbons, and regalia. Participating states and church departments delivered “short, snappy,” well-rehearsed programs that were full of “pep.” A. J. wanted the world to know that his were “a lively, industrious and energetic set of people.”25

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The Speckled Bird During the 1930s, Tomlinson introduced several striking theological departures. One of the most provocative grew from a revelation he had about the meaning of Jeremiah 12:9: “Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her.” Tomlinson took the “speckled bird” to be a type of the church, which in turn meant that the church should be “speckled,” that is, a compound of all races and colors. The sign of the True Church, then, was to be its multicultural composition, its “union of the whites, the colored, the browns, the Indians . . . the yellow races.”26 To commemorate this new discovery, the church adopted a famous country song, “The Great Speckled Bird,” as its anthem.27 Tomlinson had long defended the right of African Americans to participate in the Church of God.28 Now, they and other racial minorities had been written into its evidentiary ecclesiology. The presence of people of color was a validating sign, proof positive that the “middle wall of partition . . . between the races and the nations” had fallen within the Church of God.29 Now that the doctrine was firmly in place, only the minorities were missing. Recruitment was not easy, but the Church of God did its best, and when it found minorities it thrust them into the limelight. As General Assemblies grew larger and programs grew more unwieldy, Tomlinson curbed unrestricted time for individual testimonies. But he made an exception. Should a congregation have any people of color, its pastor was instructed to “select one of such race . . . to speak briefly.”30 Stanley Ferguson, overseer for the Bahamas and an African American, emerged as the Church of God’s most prominent minority. When he died in August 1934, church flags were lowered to half-mast for three days as a sign of “mourning and respect.”31 For the rest of his life, Tomlinson would look for ways to increase the nonwhite membership of his church.32

Mountain Theology The same prophetic literalism that underlay the doctrine of the Great Speckled Bird gave birth to other innovations.33 In 1933 the denomination adopted a church flag in obedience to Bible verses that ordered Israel to “lift up an ensign to the nations” and to “lift up a standard for the people.” Through the eyes of faith, Tomlinson could see it waiving “on the mountains, hills and plains of all countries of the world,” spanning the globe with its “folds and meaning.”34 That flag nicely symbolized the proud optimism of a triumphant church, and throughout the last decade of his life Tomlinson drove home the exhilarating privilege of membership in God’s Church at the end of time. “I do not understand why people want to go back to the early Church,” he puzzled: “Those were great days, but look what we are and what is just ahead.” The Church of God was like an “almost-completed building.” (See figure E.4.) Going back would be like razing it to its foundation.35

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figure E.4. A. J. Tomlinson as genial patriarch. Courtesy of the Archives of the Church of God of Prophecy, Cleveland, Tenn.

The grandeur of Tomlinson’s conception of the church was matched by the grandiosity of his expectations for its success. At the 1935 General Assembly he developed a contingency plan for keeping churches open twenty-four hours a day (staff would work three eight-hour shifts) in anticipation of the streams of “Gentiles” that he expected to flow in during the end-time harvest.36 The last days, moreover, were to be days of glory, not of suffering. “This is not the time . . . to court persecutions,” Tomlinson told the faithful, or to wander “in dens and caves.” Instead, the saints should expect to win unprecedented favor among the peoples of the world. “Kings and queens” would “bow down” when they lifted their flag, and strangers would come from all nations to help them build their walls.37 Tomlinson’s attraction to sacred objects and his sense of the majesty of his church soon merged in the creation of sacred space. A first step in this

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direction, so uncharacteristic of pentecostalism, came in 1934 with the “Flags on Graves” program, which encouraged graveside services in which members would place the church flag on the graves of their departed loved ones. A. J.’s eldest child, Halcy, had died in childbirth in 1920. “I can see myself at the grave of my own daughter,” he told his followers, “putting a flag there with a special ceremony in memory of her faithfulness.” That ceremonial tradition, with its poignant braiding of the past, the land, and the dearly departed, soon broadened into a full-fledged commemoration of sacred space. A Church of Prophecy Marker Association was commissioned to place markers at “all the important places where the last days Church had its rise in the new world” and to mark critical sites from ancient church history as well.38 From these small beginnings, Tomlinson elaborated the Mountain Theology that reunited him with W. F. Bryant on that North Carolina hillside in fall 1940. The cultivation of that myth of origins gave Tomlinson his life’s final passion. According to his secretary, the excursions he made to Fields of the Wood, the chief monument to his Mountain Theology, were “the happiest moments of . . . his later years.”39

Death and Legacy By the time A. J. trudged up Burger Mountain with W. F. Bryant, his health had been feeble for several years. In September 1937 he had collapsed with an apparent stroke just four days after that year’s General Assembly. When he had sufficiently recovered, in early 1938, he made out his will and dictated the arrangements for his funeral. Tomlinson’s Mountain Theology, in a sense, simply continued that process, drawing up the legacy and setting the historical house in order. On September 16, 1943, almost exactly six years after his first stroke and again in the wake of a General Assembly, Tomlinson returned from his office near midnight at the end of a typically long workday and collapsed. For the next two weeks he lingered, hardly able to speak. Then, on the morning of October 2, 1943, ten days past his seventy-eighth birthday, Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson passed away. It now seems hard to believe that one could have lived from the age of the warhorse to the brink of the atomic age without reaching eighty. But such was the experience of that generation. Tomlinson’s life had spanned the interim between our nation’s two most lethal wars. He had witnessed the full flowering of the twentieth century, and he died in a world utterly alien to the one of his birth. His legacy includes the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), the Church of God of Prophecy, the Church of God (Zion Hill), the Church of God (Scottsville, Ky.), the Church of God (Original), and the Church of God (Jerusalem Acres). At the turn of the twenty-first century, those churches together formed the third largest denominational family in American pentecostalism, with over one million North American adherents and six million adherents worldwide.

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Postscript: Sons of the Father The legacy that A. J. Tomlinson so carefully pieced together on Burger Mountain would hold firm. But his children struggled mightily over his mantle. His two sons, Homer and Milton, seemed to embody the opposite ends of his personality, as if his own remarkable union of the practical and the prophetic, the common sense and the grandiose, had bifurcated into his two sons. Homer inherited A. J.’s prophetic instincts: the taste for archetype and apocalyptic, the sense of spectacle and self-promotion shading toward delusions of grandeur. Furthermore, Homer served as the self-appointed keeper of his father’s flame.40 Tomlinson had probably intended for Homer to inherit his ecclesiastical office as well, but he had bequeathed his sober streak to Milton, who exuded a quiet, pragmatic sensibility well suited to the management of a growing institution. When the Church of God met in special session to select its new general overseer, the elders, perhaps weary of what one insider called the “Barnumesque” air of the past decade, opted for the younger son.41 Homer returned to New York, where he founded the Church of God (Queens Village, N.Y.). He would later embark on outlandish but good-natured world tours featuring coronation ceremonies in which, nation by nation, he crowned himself “King of All the Nations of Men, Sitting on the Throne of David.” He claimed astounding miracles, swearing that wars ended and famines ceased as he passed by. Every four years, he ran for president of the United States under the banner of the Theocratic Party. And in the end, he forgave the sins of the world. For all the hubris, hype, and megalomania of his behavior, there remained a pure, primitive impulse about it, a compassionate, pathetic urge to gather the whole pained, mortal world unto himself and utter the final healing word. At some level, I am sure, he would have made his father proud.

Notes

abbreviations ACGP HBD HWS IHS MDV1–5

OWYM

Archives of the Church of God of Prophecy, Cleveland, Tennessee Hal Bernard Dixon Pentecostal Research Center, Lee College, Cleveland, Tennessee Hannah Whitall Smith Collection, R. L. Fisher Library, Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana Tomlinson, Ambrose Jessup. Manuscript diary in five vols., Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Office of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, Plainfield, Indiana

introduction 1. Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1 entries, July 16–August 4, 1909. 2. The Chester Preparative Meeting was a satellite congregation of the Westfield Monthly Meeting. Members met at the Chester meetinghouse and conducted local business independently, but their official membership rested with the Westfield Monthly Meeting, to which they sent representatives and on whose committees they were eligible to serve. 3. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 27, 1898. 4. John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 257. 5. Typical is Peter Williams, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 130–150, which views the holiness movement as an essentially defensive phenomenon in which the besieged used

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ethical barriers and religious experience to construct a “realm of symbolic safety” against the encroachments of modernity. Note that the perception of fundamentalists as those whom time forgot is being reconsidered: see Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13–32.

chapter 1 1. Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880–1910,” The Journal of American History 72:1 (June 1985): 45. The best definition of evangelicalism is in George Marsden, “Introduction,” in Evangelicalism and Modern America, ed. George Marsden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984). 2. Wacker, “Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism,” 48. 3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (1877). 4. Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), reprinted as Azusa Street (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos, 1980), 35, quoting his own article from the November 16, 1905, Way of Faith. 5. Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism,” 60–62. 6. Pleasant Hill United Baptist Church of Christ Minutes, ACGP, August 11, 1900. 7. Its combined British and American circulation in 1884 was 250,000. U.S. circulation in the early 1890s probably surpassed 100,000. For contemporaneous religious publications, see P. Mark Fackler and Charles H. Lippy, eds., Popular Religious Magazines in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). 8. Talmage’s sermons had previously run in the English edition. 9. Weekly attendance at Spurgeon’s church reached 6,000; that at Talmage’s, 5,000. 10. Christian Herald (May 29, 1879): 499. 11. Examples are from 1890–1894 issues of the Christian Herald. 12. See Christian Herald (August 14, 1879): 2. 13. Christian Herald (July 2, 1884): 14. 14. The German-born, New York–raised Klopsch had broken into the world of publishing in the 1870s with two journals, Good Morning and Daily Hotel Reporter, each funded by advertisers. His father-in-law, Merritt, had often been featured in the Christian Herald. 15. Charles Pepper, The Life Work of Louis Klopsch: Romance of a Modern Knight of Mercy (New York: Christian Herald, 1910), 309. Talmage shared Klopsch’s entrepreneurial savvy, commitment to success, and penchant for the sensational. Such tendencies led to a trial before his presbytery in 1879 for “improper methods of preaching,” which Talmage survived in a close vote. See J. R. Wiers, “Thomas Dewitt Talmage,” in Dictionary of Christianity in America, eds. Daniel Reid, Robert Linder, Bruce Shelley, and Harry Stout (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 1157. Talmage’s relationship with the paper had always been a close one: In addition to carrying his sermons, the Christian Herald had shown a material interest in his Brooklyn churches, mounting fund drives in 1879, 1889, and 1893 to help retire debt on his churches, which had the distressing habit of burning down. Klopsch held membership at Talmage’s Brooklyn Tabernacle from the early 1880s.


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16. Christian Herald (February 26, 1890). He also employed the latest publishing technology, which he flaunted in December 1894 with a twenty-eight-page, 1.5-millionissue “Premium Edition” in seven colors. 17. Christian Herald (February 26, 1890). 18. Pepper, The Life Work of Louis Klopsch, 320–321. Compare Francis Case: “We are mixing faith with business. . . . They must mix if civilization is to endure” (Handbook of Church Advertising, quoted in R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 396). The classic statement of this view is in Earnest Elmo Calkins, Business the Civilizer (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1928). Examples of products are from 1890 issues of the Christian Herald. 19. Examples are from 1890s issues of the Christian Herald. The Women’s Canning and Preserving Co. was said to be owned and operated by women, with its shares sold only to women. 20. Preface to volume 1 of the American edition Christian Herald (October 28, 1878); Christian Herald (July 3, 1879): 582. The Herald serialized the addresses delivered at the International Prophetic Conference for months following. Note also that the paper’s logo, sheltered in the “C” of “Christian Herald,” featured an angel blowing a trumpet, in allusion to the eighth chapter of the book of Revelation. 21. In addition to those already mentioned, the most prominent personalities included John Inskip, Matthew Simpson, William Arthur, William Taylor, Stephen Merritt, A. J. Gordon, S. H. Kellog, W. J. Erdman, Rufus Clarke, George C. Needham, A. T. Pierson, Horatius and Andrew Bonar, F. B. Meyer, J. B. Gough, Francis Willard, Clara Balfour, Russell Conwell, C. H. Yatman, and Margaret Sangster. 22. Tomlinson’s personal papers include an early issue of the Herald featuring missionary needs in South America; J. B. Mitchell’s letter appeared in the Christian Herald (March 17, 1887). 23. On the cultural sources of British holiness and premillennialism, see David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, Ltd., 1989), chap. 5. 24. The relationship between religious differentiation and cultural antagonism here is consistent with that described in David Edwin Harrell Jr., “Religious Pluralism: Catholics, Jews, and Sectarians,” in Religion in the South, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 59–82. 25. Christian Herald (February 20, 1901): 164. A full-page photo of the queen’s deathbed, inviting reverent readers to the place “Where Victoria the Good Passed Peacefully to Her Rest,” capped a solid month of coverage. 26. Christian Herald (September 11, 1879): 752. 27. When the Herald’s Sunday School columnist, Elizabeth Baxter (esteemed teacher, faith healer, holiness evangelist, and beloved wife of the London editor), used a break in the Sunday School lectionary to publish an article on entire sanctification, the editors politely noted that this had not been quite the article they had expected and that Mrs. Baxter would return to the lectionary schedule the following week. 28. The changing ethos of the Christian Herald can also be followed through the evolution of its “thrilling serial stories.” In the virile adventures of the 1880s, readers met shocking characters like “Buckly,” who, “livid with passion, pointed his gun at his unwary victim and at once SHOT HIM DOWN LIKE A DOG!” The victim’s “blood gushed from his face and temples,” and he fell to the ground with a “scream” (Christian Herald [July 2, 1884]: 14). A decade later they read edifying tales by Julia McNair Wright, Gabrielle Emilie Jackson, and Lucy Ellen Guernsey with titles such as

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“By Love’s Sweet Rule,” “A New-Fashioned Woman,” and “ ‘Unequally Yoked’: or ‘Rosemary and Rue.’ ” The stories had modulated from a Romantic to a Sentimental key. 29. A small weekly column featured distinguished scholars of prophecy such as H. W. Webb-Peploe, George Needham, Charles Imbrie, and Warrand Houghton. 30. On religious traditions renegotiating their boundaries to accommodate a changing sociocultural milieu, see Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97. 31. Vinson Synan, The Old-Time Power (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Advocate Press, 1973), 42, 67; “Manifestations of the Holy Ghost,” Holiness Advocate (September 15, 1903): 3. 32. Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 38. 33. On gentility and social transition within Methodism, see Roger Robins, “Vernacular American Landscape: Methodists, Campmeetings, and Social Respectability,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 4:2 (August 1994): 165–191. For the long-term view, see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 34. See G. D. Watson, “The Ark Brought to Jerusalem,” Way of Faith (July 8, 1896): 7. The intensity of the radical holiness response suggests a further motivation: their lack of success in denominational politics. Anathemas against “aristocratic” leaders who loved “their tobacco, snuff, feathers, jewelry, secret orders and old denominational ties” bespoke the frustration of having lost control of one’s church (Holiness Advocate [April 15, 1901]). 35. For examples, see Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Martin Marty, Modern American Religion: The Irony of It All, 1893–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 238–247, where Marty identifies the holinesspentecostal tradition as “Countermodernism” and lists it among the “Carapaces of Reactive Protestantism.” 36. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon, 1957). Note especially the chapters by Timothy Smith and Donald Dayton in Sanctification and Liberation: Liberal Theologies in the Light of the Wesleyan Traditions, ed. T. Runyon (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981). See also Lucille Dayton and Donald Dayton, “Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Feminism in the Holiness Movement,” Methodist History 14 (January 1976): 67–92. 37. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 38. Hutchison’s “Modernists” were among the most avid consumers of the therapies and aesthetic strategies of Lears’s “Antimodernism.” See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). 39. Marty, Modern American Religion, 11–14. 40. See Paul Carter, Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 1–21. 41. Quoted in Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 140. 42. By this measure, the first best look at modernity followed the European entry into the tropical Atlantic and the subsequent expansion of “the plantation complex.” See Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (New York:


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Cambridge University Press, 1989). Those initiatives triggered a quantum leap in social growth and coordination, promoting economic systems driven by unprecedented capital accumulation and investment, new forms of credit and business accounting, and the “rational” organization of labor to mass produce commodities for distribution through a global market. Together with the large-scale exportation of the European social and cultural forms that accompanied and served them, these developments transformed world societies and produced the salient moment in the history of “modernization.” They also generated a vast movement of populations (human and otherwise) that remade earth’s cultural and biological geography. See Crosby’s concept of the “Columbian Exchange,” nicely summarized in Alfred Crosby, “The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians,” Essays on Global and Comparative History Series (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1987). The long-term trend toward internal coordination did not preclude fragmentation and conflict but, rather, coexisted with it and in fact made greater magnitudes of conflict and fragmentation possible. 43. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 44. For a concise statement of this interpretation, see Peter Stearns, “Interpreting the Industrial Revolution,” Essays on Global and Comparative History Series (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1991). 45. See George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 1–6. 46. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “Witchcraft and the Occult as Boundary Maintenance Devices,” in Religion, Science, and Magic: In Concert and in Conflict, ed. Jacob Neusner, Ernest Frerichs, and Paul Flesher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 230. 47. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. 48. Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978). One misconception about Bender’s work is that he flatly rejects the modernization paradigm. This is hardly the case. Bender demolishes simplistic and doctrinaire uses of modernization theory, as when guided by a linear gemeinschaft–gesellschaft structure or reeking of cultural imperialism. But he also calls on historians to revisit the gemeinschaft–gesellschaft paradigm in its original and more subtle formulation and has continued to employ the language and categories of modernization theory. When stripped of its adventitious corollary, secularization, modernization remains a valuable category for analyzing American religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Once separated from modernization, secularization can itself be rehabilitated as a perfectly serviceable category for describing changes in the nature and location of public religious discourse.) 49. Bender, Community and Social Change in America, 111–113. 50. Bender, Community and Social Change in America, 118–119. Contemporary social historians have emphasized other respects in which the market both gave and took away. For the bourgeoisie it yielded enough affluence to build a culture of domesticity, form the separate spheres, and raise the Victorian “home.” It had a different effect on the working-class family. The forces that kept middle-class women at home drove plainfolk women—and their children—into the workplace, where they preserved the tradition of a family economy but in a dysfunctional form. All members contributed to household income but now as individual wage earners engaged in work separate from the home and as likely to erode familial bonds as to reinforce them.

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51. Bender, Community and Social Change in America, 110. 52. See R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98: 5 (March 1993): 1044–1093. Key figures in this project include Warner, Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and Laurence Iannaccone. On the cross-pollination of religion and the market, see Moore, Selling God. 53. For the correspondence between pluralism and religious participation, see Smith, American Evangelicalism, 73–74, 107. Smith (American Evangelicalism, 89ff.) has elaborated the “Competitive Marketing Theory” paradigm noted above into a more general “Subcultural Identity” theory of religious strength, which comports well with my own argument. 54. Jon Butler (Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990]), emphasizes the institutions that drove religious mobilization and recruitment in America. The “religious mobilization” theory developed by Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone also emphasizes “religious firms rather than . . . religious consumers.” They define “religious firms” as “social enterprises whose primary purpose is to create, maintain and supply religion to some set of individuals” and “religious economy” as “all the religious activity going on in any society. . . . [It consists] of a market of current and potential customers, a set of firms seeking to serve that market, and the religious ‘product line’ offered by the various firms” (“A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33:3 [September 1994]: 232). 55. For a balanced view, see Laurence R. Iannaccone, “Voodoo Economics? Reviewing the Rational Choice Approach to Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34:1 (March 1995): 76–89. Iannaccone emphasizes “market equilibrium” or “the combined actions of religious consumers and religious producers that form a religious market that . . . tends toward . . . equilibrium”(“Voodoo Economics?” 77). 56. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969). See also Kevin J. Christiano, Religious Diversity and Social Change: American Cities, 1890–1906 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 58–60. 57. The holiness prophet Dowie, for example, lauded the practical insight and efficiency of business in contrast to the presumed fecklessness of church bureaucracy. See John Alexander Dowie, “Satan the Defiler: A Sermon by the Rev. John Alex. Dowie,” delivered November 3, 1895 (Chicago: Zion Publishing House, 1899), HWS, 6; and Dowie, “Jesus the Healer: A Sermon by the Rev. John Alex. Dowie,” delivered October 27, 1895 (Chicago: Zion Publishing House, 1899), HWS, 13. 58. Quoted in A. B. Crumpler, “Jesus Triumphs at Ingold, N.C.,” Way of Faith (January 15, 1896): 1. 59. Quoted in James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Christine Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff, eds., Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 689. 60. Examples include Conservative Quakers and Mennonites, confessionalists such as Old School Presbyterians and certain Dutch Calvinists, Protestants drawn to the Oxford Movement, and the High Church Episcopalians described in Robert Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 61. The most trenchant analysis of pentecostal primitivism is in Grant Wacker, “Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism,” in The American


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Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 196–219; and Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 11–14 and throughout. Primitivism, as Wacker makes clear, was not traditionalism. It included antistructural impulses, even a “primordial urge toward disorder,” that could facilitate innovation (Grant Wacker, “The Functions of Faith in Primitive Pentecostalism,” Harvard Theological Review 77:3–4 [1984]: 353–375). 62. The need for a modern but culturally resonate language increased with the upward mobility of the popular denominations (especially Baptist and Methodist) from whose ranks so many in the movement came. This process of disaffection and reaffiliation highlights the subtle but vital difference between denominational history and the history of religious culture. Denominational history follows the institution; cultural history, the religious culture. See Charles H. Lippy, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 5. Religious culture will generally persist, whereas a denomination will generally serve as a vehicle for cultural mobility. According to N. J. Demerath III (“Rational Paradigms, A-Rational Religion, and the Debate over Secularization,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34:1 [March 1995]: 105–112), dominant religions are always secularizing, prompting movements of renewal among the alienated.

chapter 2 1. For a more complete narrative of the post–Civil War holiness movement, see Melvin Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980); Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the U.S. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975); and Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: The Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867–1936 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974). For the movement’s intellectual history, see George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 72–101. The size of the movement has been underestimated: expressly holiness bodies accounted for only part of the movement, and many of those escaped the attention of census takers either because they were too small or because they eschewed formalities like church membership altogether. Advocates within mainline denominations also remained invisible to Census Bureau eyes. Based on census bulletins for expressly holiness bodies and estimates of holiness minorities in various Methodist, Baptist, Christian, Presbyterian, Brethren, Quaker, and Mennonite bodies, my own estimate places the total 1906 adherence at no less than 250,000. The census lists 103,000 members for the known holiness bodies alone. See U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1906 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906). 2. I would suggest at least three general spheres. The highest luminaries would include Christian Herald regulars like Merritt, Spurgeon, Moody, Torrey, and A. T. Pierson. The broad and moderate central sphere would encompass older holiness denominations like the Free Methodist and Wesleyan Holiness Churches; newer denominations like Phineas Bresee’s Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene and Daniel Warner’s Church of God (Anderson, Ind.); and evangelists like Simpson, H. C. Morrison, W. B. Godbey, and Sam Jones. The radical holiness sphere—the “outer limits,” as it were—would include John Alexander Dowie, Frank S. Sandford, Irwin, Maria

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Woodworth-Etter, Alma White, Thomas Nelson, Charles Parham, Martin Wells Knapp, and Seth Cook Rees. I would place George Watson between the moderate and radical spheres. 3. The story of holiness “stay-inners” is one of the untold dramas of this period. Thousands of holiness Methodists, for example, felt stranded between their holiness sympathies and their loyalty to the Methodist Episcopal Church, North and South. Though relatively new compared with sister denominations of Reformation-era vintage, the branches of Methodism elicited uncanny affection from their members, and holiness stay-inners probably outnumbered come-outers. Thomas Nelson (Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [September 15, 1895]), who would himself later “come out” of a Free Methodist church that had already “come out” of old-line Methodism, wrote tracts against “comeoutism” as late as 1895. Many of those who did “come out,” like A. B. Crumpler and G. B. Cashwell, dominant figures in the Holiness Church of North Carolina, escaped the Methodist Church but not its long shadow. Whether to extol or to vilify, Methodism remained their common obsession. 4. For an example of such connections, see an article by Mrs. Baxter, of Christian Herald fame, and a related feature, “Holiness in England,” Way of Faith (November 6, 1895): 3, 6. 5. Compare the independent-mindedness and theological inventiveness of early Pentecostals in Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostalism and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 28–29. 6. On the “higher life” movement, see Marsden (Fundamentalism and American Culture, 72–101), who notes that disputes within the holiness movement had become “noticeably sharp” by the turn of the century. 7. John M. Pike, “Jesus Is Coming,” Way of Faith (June 10, 1896): 3. 8. Watson also characterized the YMCA as a “surface . . . work” (“The Revival Needed,” The Free Methodist [July 16, 1890]: 6). 9. George D. Watson, “Lukewarmness,” Way of Faith (June 10, 1896): 1. Here Watson explains that orthodox belief, circumspect behavior, and a good testimony are meaningless if attended by no “animating spirit. . . . no conscious touch from God . . . no rapt adoration of his majesty . . . no melting, yearning love.” 10. B. H. Irwin, “The Abiding Fire,” Way of Faith (December 16, 1896): 1. 11. For the role of gentrification in these culture wars, see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), chap. 10; and Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 12. Thomas H. Nelson, Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (December 15, 1901): 5. 13. See Dickson D. Bruce Jr., And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk CampMeeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974); and David Edwin Harrell, “The Evolution of Plain Folk Religion in the South, 1835–1920,” in Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Sam Hill (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). In scope I use the term more like Lippy’s “popular religion” (though without his insistence that religion lack “order and organization” to be truly “popular”). See Charles Lippy, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 10. Finally, the differentiation of plainfolk and mainstream evangelicalism is both chronologically and structurally parallel to the cultural differentiation in art and popular culture described in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), especially chap. 3. 14. Bushman notes, “The division between rude and refined only roughly corre-


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sponded to wealth, education, family, work or any other measure of social class” (The Refinement of America, v). Like the populist leaders with whom they shared a common cultural style, radical holiness evangelists often came from socially comfortable backgrounds. A. B. Crumpler was the son of a North Carolina physician, and B. H. Irwin had been a lawyer before joining the ministry. 15. These are traits that Nathan Hatch (“The Puzzle of American Methodism,” Church History 63:2 [June 1994]: 186–188) lays at the feet of Methodism. 16. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, 1941), 296– 297. 17. Victor Turner (“Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas, Part I,” Worship 46:7 [August–September 1972]: 402), notes that social movements built around communitas often draw on “poverty for its repertoire of symbols.” Of course, the symbolism of poverty is deeply conflicted, at least in America, where it appears as the locus of both vice and virtue, ignorance and common sense. 18. Sixteenth-century Quakers epitomized this tradition, refusing to show “respect of persons” and defying conventions that denoted “superiority, nobility, gentility, honor, breeding and manners,” for these things allowed one person to “Lord over . . . another” (an English Quaker, quoted in Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 56). 19. Richard Carwardine, “The Second Great Awakening in Comparative Perspective: Revivals and Culture in the United States and Britain,” in Modern Christian Revivals, ed. Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 91. 20. On scholars who see “social class differentiation as basic to describing popular religion,” see Lippy, Being Religious, American Style, 5. Of special relevance is Ann Taves (Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999]), whose nuanced study of religious ecstasy shows that some kind of supernaturalism and religious ecstasy has been prevalent at all social levels but that social class has had a large say in determining which varieties of such expression one is likely to consider valid and therefore acceptable. Two of Taves’s (Fits, Trances, and Visions, 5) key points are, first, that social location is an important factor in determining which specific communities of discourse one is likely to participate in and, second, that modes of religious experience and explanation are signature aspects—boundary markers, as it were—of any particular community of discourse. 21. For historical sketches of Dow and Stone, see Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1898), 36–40, 70– 71; for Stearns, see Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 23–24. 22. Pentecostal Herald (Louisville) (December 7, 1898): 6; Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (November 1, 1899): 6; The Hoosier Evangelist, “Greenfield, Indiana,” Way of Faith (July 8, 1896): 5; Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (August 1–15, 1897): 5. 23. A. B. Crumpler, “Sermon on Shouting,” The Holiness Advocate (August 1, 1903): 1; see also The Holiness Advocate (April 15, 1901). The corpse, of course, had been positively identified: old-line Methodism, “the church of the holy refrigerator.” 24. W. Mallis, “Progress of the Revival in India,” The Holiness Advocate (May 15, 1906): 8. The same perceptual paradox led antebellum reporters to characterize camp meetings marked by shouts, groans, trembling, shaking, and the piercing cries of anguished sinners as having displayed “good order and solemnity” (“Description of a

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Campmeeting Held on Fairfield Circuit, Lancaster District, State of Ohio,” Methodist Review 2 [December 1819]: 475). 25. See chapters by Kaj Bjorkqvist and Nils Holm in Religious Ecstasy, ed. Nils G. Holm (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1982). See also Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 10, 47ff., quoting Pierre Bourdieu and Paul Connerton on “learning” ecstasy. 26. I Peter 2:4. See Donald Mathews’s treatment of this theme in Religion in the Old South, chap. 1. 27. D. Gregory Van Dussen, “The Bergen Camp Meeting in the American Holiness Movement,” Methodist History 21:2 (January 1983): 87; Craig C. Fankhauser, “The Heritage of Faith: An Historical Evaluation of the Holiness Movement in America” (M.A. thesis, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kans., 1983), 131. 28. B. H. Irwin, “Purcell, Indian Territory,”Way of Faith (July 8, 1896), 1; Thomas H. Nelson, “Men Wanted,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (June 1, 1895): 2. 29. A. B. Crumpler, “The Bishop against Holiness,” The Holiness Advocate (July 15, 1903): 5. 30. Henry A. Ironside, Holiness: The False and the True (New York: Loizeaux Brothers, 1912), 39, 142. Ironside had written, he insisted—his own humble mien an example of true holiness—“with malice toward none and charity toward all.” 31. Robert S. Ellwood, Many Peoples, Many Faiths: An Introduction to the Religious Life of Humankind, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996), 22. 32. Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, 9.

chapter 3 1. Grant Wacker, “Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish: Primitivism, Pragmatism and the Pentecostal Character,” in Religion and American Culture: A Reader, ed. David Hackett (New York: Routledge, 1995), 442. 2. Sheridan Baker, The Hidden Manna (Boston: Christian Witness, 1888), 25. 3. It stood traditional dispensationalism on its head. Dispensationalism originally explained why miracles, having been specific to the Apostolic dispensation, were not to be expected in the Church Age. Now it explained why miracles, along with other signs and wonders, were that age’s prerequisite signs. 4. This was based on the belief that in Palestine the evening light actually shone brighter than the morning light. All data relative to Palestine were subject to typological reading. 5. Hulda Rees, 1891 sermon, quoted in Byron Rees, Hulda A. Rees: The Pentecostal Prophetess (Philadelphia: Christian Standard, 1898), 127; George Watson, Soul Food (Cincinnati: Revivalist Office, 1896), 143. 6. Frank Sandford, Everlasting Gospel (July 1–30, 1901). 7. Thomas Nelson, “The Coming Theocracy: Bearing of the Spanish–American War on the Future Millennium,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (July 1, 1898): 5, reprinted from the Indianapolis Journal. See also John Pike, who notes: “If there be not progress toward . . . higher attainments . . . there is danger of retrogression” (“The Baptism of Fire,” Way of Faith [November 13, 1895]: 4). 8. See W. F. Galloway, “The Rising Tide,” Holiness Advocate (September 15, 1902). 9. Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History (June 1985): 58. 10. Note the title of Grant Wacker’s groundbreaking study of early Pentecostal-


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ism: Heaven Below: Early Pentecostalism and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For triumphalism and hymnology, see Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: The Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867–1936 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974), 37–42. 11. Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), reprinted as Azusa Street (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1980), 37. Compare Edward Kelley, who notes: “It is admitted by all our intelligent writers that we have arrived at the most remarkable age in the history of the world” (“Peace,” Way of Faith [August 12, 1896]: 2). 12. Nelson adds that “the fifth universal empire, the stone kingdom of which Christ is the corner stone, when established shall have taken its material from Saxon quarries” (“The Coming Theocracy,” 5). This conclusion, Nelson asserted, was supported by “the best scholars of the past half century.” For a concise treatment of the scholarship to which Nelson alluded, see Robin Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 100:4 (October 1995): 1078–1094. 13. Albert J. Beveridge, “Speech on ‘The March of the Flag,’ 1898,” in The Meaning of the Times, and Other Speeches (1908), reprint (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 47–57. 14. For the impact of this shift in the fields of moral science and faculty psychology, see Jeffry A. Mullins, “The Moral Mind: Moral Agency, Personal Accountability and Corporeality in American Culture, 1780–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1996). Especially relevant for radical holiness was the influence of these trends on the thought of Thomas Upham. 15. Isaiah 53:5. The other major proof text is Psalm 103:3, which extols the Lord “who forgiveth all thine iniquities and healeth all thy diseases.” 16. John A. Dowie, “He Is Just the Same Today” (Chicago: Zion Publishing House, 1899), HWS, 7. 17. For an article on the body and a “Health Hints” column, see Evangelical Visitor (March 1, 1897): 73–74, 158; Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) also had a regular column, “Holiness and Health.” 18. Wacker, “Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism,” 59. 19. Nelson, “The Coming Theocracy,” 5. 20. For an example, note the arts and crafts movement, wherein craftspersons felt compelled to buy mass-produced supplies and to employ mass-production techniques in order to survive. 21. Asher K. Tomlinson, A Brief History of the Tomlinson and Kellum Families (Westfield, n.d. [ca. 1888]), 11–13. 22. The analogy comes from David Bundy, personal communication, July 1995, Indianapolis. 23. For North Carolina to Los Angeles, see G. B. Cashwell, “Came 3,000 Miles for His Pentecost,” Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles) (December 1906): 3; for Chicago to Los Angeles, see W. H. Durham, “A Chicago Evangelist’s Pentecost,” Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles) (February–March 1907): 4. 24. Way of Faith carried schedules for the Southern Railway Co., the Atlantic Coast Line, and the Florida, Central, and Peninsular Railroad. 25. One reviewer described Knapp’s entire corpus with a sustained railway metaphor: “ ‘Out of Egypt’ may be likened to the instructions for making a steam engine.

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‘Christ Crowned Within’ to the engine putting on steam, and ‘Tornadoes’ to the engine at full speed.” For Owen and Knapp, see The Revivalist (January 1890): 2–3; for Orwig, see Pentecostal Herald (Louisville) (April 19, 1899): 15. 26. On Crumpler, see Vinson Synan, The Old-Time Power (Franklin Springs, Ga.: Advocate Press, 1973), chap. 4; Kenworthy’s record is from Lydia M. WilliamsCammack and Truman C. Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy (Richmond, Ind.: Nicholson Printing, 1918), 100. 27. See discussion of “the ritual technology that generates group emotions and feelings of morality” in Randall Collins, review of A Theory of Religion by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32:4 (December 1993): 402–406. 28. Account taken from B. H. Irwin, “The Baptism of Fire,” Way of Faith (November 13, 1895): 2; see also B. H. Irwin, “Tecumseh, Nebraska,” Way of Faith (November 4, 1896): 2. 29. John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant Christianity Interpreted through Its Development, 2d ed. (New York: MacMillian Publishing Co., 1988), 192, 163–169. 30. Thomas Upham, a professor of moral philosophy at Bowdoin College, played the key role in introducing Guyon to the holiness rank and file. On Guyon and her appropriation by architects of spiritual empiricism like Thomas Upham, see Patricia Ward, “Madame Guyon and Experiential Theology in America,” Church History 67:3 (September 1998): 484–498. For the larger scope of Upham’s thought and its relation to late-Victorian moral science and faculty psychology, see Mullins, “The Moral Mind.” 31. See B. H. Irwin, “The Spiritual Meaning of Luke 15:22,” Way of Faith (August 19, 1896): 2. Irwin describes sanctification as a twofold experience whose negative and positive sides correspond to cleansing and empowerment, respectively. Irwin further equates the initial cleansing with “soul rest” and the subsequent empowerment with “the conscious baptism with the Holy Ghost” (“The Baptism of Fire,” 2). His understanding of the dual nature of sanctification was widely shared; see Way of Faith (November 6, 1895): 6. George Watson (A Holiness Manual [Boston: Christian Witness, n.d. (ca. 1882)], 109) discerned three aspects of sanctification: cleansing from sin (its “negative form”), utter surrender to the will of God (its “receptive form”), and perfect love (its “positive form”). But in common parlance, according to Watson, “sanctification” denoted “the negative side” of the perfecting experience while “the baptism of the Holy Ghost” denoted its “positive side” (Love Abounding [Cincinnati: God’s Revivalist, n.d. (ca. 1891)], 395). 32. “Who can set any limit to the possibilities of holiness?” asked Pike (“The Baptism of Fire,” 4). George Watson concurred: “A great many holiness people are so afraid of what resembles a third blessing, that they . . . never bother themselves about the ocean depths of boundless, melting, fiery love” (“Lukewarmness,” Way of Faith [June 10, 1896]: 1). See also Beverly Carradine: “Father, mother, if you want to save your children, get the baptism of fire!” (“Dr. Carradine’s Letter,” Way of Faith [July 22, 1896]: 4). On the growth of Irwin’s movement, see Synan, The Old-Time Power, chap. 5. 33. Benjamin Wesley Young, quoted in Craig C. Fankhauser, “The Heritage of Faith: An Historical Evaluation of the Holiness Movement in America” (M.A. thesis, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kans., 1983), 122–125. J. H. King credited Sarah M. Payne, a North Carolina native who had moved to Irwin’s Lincoln, Nebraska, of-


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fice, with the addition of “selenite and oxynite.” See Fankhauser, “The Heritage of Faith,” 4. 34. See Synan, The Old-Time Power, 99. Irwin’s pamphlet, “Pyrophobia (A Morbid Dread of Fire)” was advertised in the Way of Faith (October 20, 1897). See also B. H. Irwin, “Pyrophobia,” Way of Faith (October 28, 1896): 2, quoted in Fankhauser, “The Heritage of Faith,” 128. Fuller is quoted in Vinson Synan, The HolinessPentecostal Movement in the U.S. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 66. 35. Edward A. Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 7. 36. Levi Lupton, “Missionary Faith Home,” New Acts 1:1 (October 1904): 5; Byron L. Osborne, The Malone Story: The Dream of Two Quaker Young People (Newton, Kans.: United Printing, Inc., 1970): 32, 66. On Pentecostal education, which shared these characteristics, see Wacker, Heaven Below, 31. 37. On groups that attempt to make a transitional event or passage into a normative state, see Victor Turner, “Passages, Margins and Poverty, Part II,” Worship 46:8 (October 1972): 492. 38. The Rev. Mr. Creassy, “The Scientific Character of Divine Healing,” Way of Faith (November 27, 1895): 3. 39. John A. Dowie, “Doctors, Drugs and Devils: Or, The Foes of Christ the Healer,” in Physical Culture (April, 1895), HWS, 81–86. He cites eminent medical authorities to prove his point on the failings of medical “science,” drawing on the prestige of regular medicine to undermine its credibility and using the profession’s own candid admissions of fallibility against it. Dowie and radical holiness, of course, were allied with a host of other alternative therapies—from Christian Science, Mesmerism, Mental Healing, homeopathy, and hydrotherapy to Grahamism and Thomsonian medicine—in their animus toward the orthodox medical establishment. 40. See the report on the 1891 Alliance Convention in James Bell, “Divine Healing from a Medical Standpoint,” The Earnest Christian 63:1 (January, 1891), 22. 41. Dowie (“Doctors, Drugs and Devils”) also tells of a doctor who testified, “I left my profession and went into business in order to be an honest man.” 42. Louis Sullivan, quoted in James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Christine Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff, Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 697. 43. Davidson et al., A.35 (“A Social Profile of the American Republic”), 836. 44. See Thomas A. Tweed, “An Emerging Protestant Establishment: Religious Affiliation and Public Power on the Urban Frontier in Miami, 1896–1904,” Church History 64:3 (September 1995): 412–437. 45. Peter Williams, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 130–150. 46. J. Lawrence Brasher, “The North in the South: The Holiness Methodism of John Lakin Brasher, 1868–1971,” Methodist History 27:1 (October 1988): 42. A. J. Quattlebaum noted: “Holiness breaks down all barriers and brings North and South together” (“From Quitman, Georgia,” Way of Faith [December 4, 1895]: 1). On holiness as a variant form of “Reconstruction,” see Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the U.S., 33–41. 47. For Southern portrayals of holiness as a Northern gospel, see Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion, 57; and Brasher, “The North in the South,” 36–47. On Southern responses to early National Camp Meeting Association forays into the South, see Fank-

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hauser (“The Heritage of Faith,” 79–80), who notes that Union policy allowed Northern Methodist bishops to fill vacant pulpits in territory occupied by federal troops. 48. Bartleman, Azusa Street, 64–65.

chapter 4 1. See T. Runyon, ed., Sanctification and Liberation: Liberal Theologies in the Light of the Wesleyan Traditions (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981), especially Timothy Smith’s chapter, “Holiness and Radicalism in Nineteenth Century America,” 116–141. 2. The emergence of a market that treated individuals as autonomous producers and consumers comported well with the extension of Enlightenment assumptions about human nature and human rights to women and nonwhites, and it challenged the philosophical foundations of older status criteria, particularly those based on social inheritance. Karl Marx argued that in the logic of capitalism, “differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, English ed. [1888], reprint [New York: Bantam Books, 1992], 26). 3. Note the different options for social activism open to service-minded youth in mainline and holiness circles, respectively. Affluent Protestants sent their sons and newly college-educated daughters to become sociologists, social workers, settlement house residents, or missionaries under mainline boards like the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, whereas the sons and daughters of holiness folk served stints in faith homes, Bible schools, the Salvation Army, and independent holiness missions. 4. At least forty-five of the 141 evangelists listed in Live Coals of Fire (1:21 [June 15, 1900]: 4) are women. 5. “Want Ad,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (June 1, 1894): 2. Other desirable traits, which support the general argument of this dissertation, included a “cosmopolitan spirit [that] recognizes every man their brother, and every land their home” and an acquaintance “with the . . . woes . . . of the oppressed masses.” The “manly” cast of holiness may have aided the movement’s growth in the South: “The South did not undergo that ‘feminization’ of religion that Ann Douglas has discerned in the North” (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholder’s World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50:2 [Summer 1987]: 226). 6. Alma White called her organization the Pillar of Fire. The Chicago-based Burning Bush and Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association each relied heavily on female evangelists. 7. Work for God on the Continent by Mr. and Mrs. Booth-Clibborn, 1881–1897 (Paris, 1906), HWS, 9. 8. Byron Rees, Hulda A. Rees: The Pentecostal Prophetess (Philadelphia: Christian Standard, 1898), 20. 9. Henry Patridge, “A Mississippi Letter,” Way of Faith (November 27, 1895): 1; E. T. Rinehart, “Notes from the Field,” Way of Faith (June 10, 1896): 5. By contrast, “a wholly sanctified preacher can sit down and listen to a woman without any trouble at all.” 10. Compare Grant Wacker’s discussion of women and ministry in early Pente-


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costalism in Heaven Below: Early Pentecostalism and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 158–176. 11. For more virulent racism within the holiness-pentecostal movement, see the views of Charles Parham after his break with William Seymour and Azusa Street: James Goff, Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989), chap. 6. 12. Nathan Frame and Esther Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame (Frame and Frame, 1907), 401–402. 13. Robin Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in NineteenthCentury America,” American Historical Review 100:4 (October 1995): 1061, 1078– 1080, 1093–1094. Especially influential was Henry Adams, Essays on Anglo-Saxon Law (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1905). These racialist assumptions underlay the Frames’ defense of their Southern friends, who remained “a good type of the old Anglo-Saxon”: “The [report] that . . . there is much amalgamation is not true” (Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 603). 14. See Jay Beamon, “Pacifism and the World View of Early Pentecostalism” (paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Cleveland, Tenn., November 1983), 6. 15. This history of interaction complicates any attempt to unravel the relative contributions of black and white to a movement like pentecostalism, which emerged from a culture of revivalism already shaped by over a century and a half of reciprocal influence. 16. On the importance of biracial worship, see John B. Boles, ed., Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); on the racial vision of early evangelicals, see Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), chap. 4. The biblical references are from I Corinthians 10 and Ephesians 4. For biracial holiness meetings, see G. B. Cashwell: “The house was packed with both white and colored” (Holiness Advocate [October 15, 1903]: 8). 17. Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), reprinted as Azusa Street (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1980), 59. 18. As Donald Mathews observed of Southern evangelicals after the Second Great Awakening, they replaced “class distinctions based on wealth and status . . . with nonclass distinctions based on ideological and moral purity” (Religion in the Old South, 38). 19. See George Watson, who noted: “He came to reach people too poor to pay hotel bills. . . . Down, down He descended, till infinite Love lay in a naked, crying infant . . . among the cattle on a frosty night. Lowliness and poverty could reach no greater extreme” (“Birth of Christ,” Way of Faith [December 11, 1895]: 7). 20. William Seymour, “The Pentecostal Baptism Restored,” Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles) 1:2 (October 1906): 1. See Grant Wacker’s treatment of this topic in “Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism,” in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 206. 21. Quoted in Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 123. See also the extended treatment of race in early Pentecostalism in Wacker, Heaven Below, 226– 239. 22. For this distinction, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives:

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The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 356–357. The most common primordia were the Garden of Eden, the Jewish Patriarchs, Ancient Israel, the Primitive Church, the Puritan Fathers, and the Founding Fathers (Richard Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988], chap. 9). 23. See Hughes, The American Quest for the Primitive Church, especially E. Brooks Holifield’s chapter, “Puritan and Enlightenment Primitivism: A Response,” 69–73; and Theodore Dwight Bozeman’s chapter, “Biblical Primitivism: An Approach to New England Puritanism,” 22. 24. Quoted in Hughes, The American Quest for the Primitive Church, 7. 25. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 229. 26. Wacker, “Playing for Keeps,” 209–210. 27. Wacker, “Playing for Keeps,” 209–212; see also Grant Wacker, “Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish: Primitivism, Pragmatism and the Pentecostal Character,” in Religion and American Culture: A Reader, ed. David Hackett (New York: Routledge, 1995), 442–443. 28. Wacker, “Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish,” 442. See the discussion of this theme in Augustus Cerillo, Jr., “The Beginnings of American Pentecostalism: An Historiographical Overview” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, November 1994). 29. For emergent versus established religion, see Robert Ellwood, Alternative Altars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); on the “inversion” of the legitimate, see Jean Remy and Emile Servais, “The Functions of the Occult and the Mysterious in Contemporary Society,” in Persistence of Religion, ed. Andrew Greeley and Gregory Baum (New York: Herder and Herder, 1973), 69; for “outsider” and “insider,” see R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); for antistructuralism, see Victor Turner on the dialectic relation of communitas and “antistructure” to “structure” in “Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas, Part 1,” Worship 46:7 (August–September 1972): 391–398. 30. For a viable restatement of secularization theory, see N. J. Demerath III, who notes: “Secularization is a major trend in modern times, but . . . is not a modern development and does not presage the demise of religion. . . . While secularization progresses in some parts of a society, a countervailing intensification of religion goes on in other parts” (“Rational Paradigms, A-Rational Religion, and the Debate over Secularization,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34:1 [March 1995]: 110). The story of secularization, then, differs depending on the social sphere in question. 31. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 119–120. 32. The modern person learns to move “more or less easily, and very frequently, between radically contrasting ways of looking at the world, ways . . . separated by cultural gaps across which Kierkegaardian leaps must be made in both directions” (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 120). 33. As opposed to desacralization, “secularization would mean decline in religious influence, religious belief, commitment, personal piety, etc.” (Rodney Stark and Laurence R. Iannaccone, “A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33:3 [September 1994]: 235). The distinction is helpful for describing the relocation of religious symbols and language


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without implying that individuals were becoming less religious. In one respect, desacralization merely extended the American habit of practical compromise whereby neutral language was expected to prevail in the public square. Although religious language pervaded America’s state universities in the early nineteenth century, for example, administrators scrupulously avoided controversial topics outside the greatest common denominator shared by the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists who controlled the boards. As American society became more heterogeneous, the (perceived) common denominator shrank to the point where it contained precious little religious content whatsoever, hence the “secularization” of universities in which the majority of faculty and students were still Christian. On the secularization of American universities, see George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 34. Peter Berger has described the ideal sociologist of religion as a “methodological atheist” (The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1969]). See also Paul Carter (Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971], 133–154), who argues that materialism in the marketplace counted for more than materialism in the laboratory for the spiritual crisis he describes. 35. Wacker, “Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish,” 444–446. 36. My contrast of modern and antimodern parallels that between pragmatism and primitivism developed by Grant Wacker in Heaven Below, “Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish,” and elsewhere. 37. For Knapp, see The Revivalist (April 1890); Rees’s “Ideal Pentecostal Church” was “more deeply impressed with rugged facts than by a sick sentimentality” (The Revivalist [August 1897]: 1). 38. Carter, Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age, 155–176.

chapter 5 1. See Thomas Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 13; John William Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1973), 11, 109ff. By 1843 the demographic center of American Quakerism had shifted west of the Appalachians. By 1860 the Indiana Yearly Meeting had become the largest such meeting of any branch of the Society of Friends worldwide. 2. James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Christine Heyrmann, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff, Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 356. 3. Paul S. Boyer, Clifford Clark, Jr., Sandra Hawley, Joseph Kett, Neal Salisbury, Markerd Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 2d ed. (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1995), 188. By 1837 Indiana had enjoyed statehood for more than twenty years. 4. Richard Lyle Power (Planting Cornbelt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest [Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1953], ix) explores the distinctive blend of Yankee and Southern upland cultures that defined early Indiana. Aspects of this dual personality continued into Tomlinson’s youth. Despite rapid industrialization, Indiana sidestepped the waves of foreign immigration that troubled most of the North and remained as homogeneous as many Southern states. From 1880 to 1920 the percentage of foreign-born residents declined

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from 7.3 to 5.2 percent (Clifton J. Phillips, Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880–1920 [Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1968], 368). 5. Power, Planting Cornbelt Culture, 78–79, 82. 6. See Power, Planting Cornbelt Culture, viii. 7. Article written ca. 1900–1910, quoted in Leanna K. Roberts, ed., Our Westfield: A History of Westfield and Washington Township (Noblesville, Ind.: Image Builders/ Rowland Printing Co, 1984), 24; see also John F. Haines, History of Hamilton County, Indiana (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen and Co., 1915). 8. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 9th month, 1840, OWYM. 9. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 1st month, 1843. For an example of disownment, see the Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, which complains against Hervey Wilson Bales for “willfully neglecting the attendance of our religious meetings, departing from plainness of speech and apparel, also for not bearing our peculiar testimonies in regard to war, oaths, the ministry etc. as is evinced by his joining the Methodist society” (4th month, 1840). 10. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 3d month, 1843. 11. See Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting of Anti-slavery Friends, 2d month, 1843; 10th month, 1843; 5th month, 1846, IHS. Westfield was a member of the Duck Creek Quarterly Meeting (the quarterly meeting being the jurisdictional body between the monthly and the yearly meetings). By 1846 Lydia had risen to the office of elder in the Duck Creek Quarterly. 12. The meeting felt it far better to “confine ourselves within our own limits, and let our adorning be that of a meek and quiet spirit which in the sight of God is of great price.” Robert and Lydia Tomlinson were formally disowned the 4th month, 1844. Lydia was charged with “manifesting disunity with friends, neglecting the attendance of our religious meetings, and attending those set up and maintained out of the order of our society.” Their daughter Martha faced the additional charge of “assisting in setting up and holding meetings contrary to discipline” (see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 2d–4th months, 1844). Robert Tomlinson’s testimony of disownment read as follows: “Robert Tomlinson who has had a right of membership in the Society of Friends has manifested disunity therewith, neglected the attendance of our religious meetings and attended those set up and maintained out of the order of our society contrary to our discipline for which he has been treated with without the desired effect we therefore disown him from being a member with us.” 13. See Minutes of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Antislavery Friends (Newport, Ind., 1844), IHS. 14. See Gary Nash, Julie Jeffrey, John Howe, Peter Frederick, Allen Davis, and Allen Winkler, The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society (New York: Longman, 1998), 471; and Davidson et al., Nation of Nations, 395. 15. Roberts, Our Westfield, 14. 16. See Minutes of the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Antislavery Friends, 1843 and after. Their arguments against racial discrimination combined moral, spiritual, and practical elements. Africans should not be discriminated against first because one’s race is beyond one’s control. Civil disabilities assessed on the basis of race punished Africans for something for which they were not morally responsible. Second, because God had given Africans black skin, disabilities placed on them on the basis of the color of their skin were an indirect reproach against God. Third, the African and the European descended from the same primeval parents, and as “brothers” they deserved equal treatment in the eyes of the law. Finally, civil disabilities weighing so


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heavily on such a large part of the population hindered the productivity and prosperity of the nation. 17. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 5th month, 1850. 18. Roberts, Our Westfield, 79. See Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Ministers & Elders), OWYM. Robert and Lydia often represented the monthly meeting at quarterly and yearly meetings. 19. Haines (History of Hamilton County, Indiana, 321–322) lists 1837 as the date of the original petition for the Chester meetinghouse, but the date was almost certainly 1857. T. B. Helm (History of Hamilton County, Indiana, Illustrated [Chicago: Kingman Brothers, 1880], 322–323) puts the formal organization of Chester in 1859, which comports with the available records and with the absence of Milton’s name from the list of signatories (see below). 20. By the 1870s, Noah’s children (Ruth, Robert, Asher, Morton, and Finley Tomlinson) had begun to dominate the clerkship and other key offices of the Chester Preparative Meeting. 21. Robert, Lydia, Noah, Allen, Abigail, and Martha Tomlinson signed the original petition for the Chester meetinghouse (Haines, History of Hamilton County, Indiana, 321–322). Helm (History of Hamilton County, Indiana, Illustrated, 322–323) gives Robert and Lydia Tomlinson as the heads of the meeting and Allen and Noah Tomlinson (along with Joseph Moore) as its trustees. Allen had donated the ground for the meetinghouse. 22. On Westfield and the Underground Railroad, see Roberts, Our Westfield, 13. 23. Noblesville Daily Ledger (September 9 and 12, 1927). 24. A. J. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, n.d. [ca. 1913]), 3. 25. Lillie Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964), 689, quoting White Wing Messenger (November 29, 1941). 26. Nash, 58; Myron F. Robbins (grandnephew), interview by the author, July 3, 1995, Sheridan (Baker’s Corner), Ind. 27. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 1st month, 1850. 28. Milton Tomlinson and Hannah Davis, Certificate of Marriage, February 10, 1842, by J. P. Benjamin Wheeler, Elias Bradfield attesting, Hamilton County Records, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis. 29. For the disposition of their case, see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting (Women’s), 7th–10th months, 1842; and Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 6th–9th months, 1842. 30. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting (Women’s), 10th month, 1842. 31. Hamilton County Deed Records, 1844, Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, Ind. 32. Hamilton County Records, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis. 33. For the disposition of the case, see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 5th–9th months, 1845. 34. A search of Hamilton County Deed Records revealed the following transactions between 1840 and 1890: forty acres from father, 1844; fifteen acres purchased and eighty acres co-purchased with Noah Tomlinson, 1853; thirty-five acres purchased, 1865 (the year of Ambrose’s birth); forty acres purchased, 1881; a complex transaction that netted ten acres, 1886; and twenty acres purchased, 1887. 35. See Noblesville Ledger (September 11, 1874): 3; Ambrose would have been nine years of age. Estimated percentages are based on a spot-check of census records. According to the tax records, by 1864 Milton Tomlinson was taxed on 170 acres of land;

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by 1880, on 215 acres; and from 1886 to 1895, on 235 acres (Hamilton County Tax Records, Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, Ind.). At various points during this period both Noah and Allen paid tax on as many as 220 acres but never on as many acres as Milton did for the same year. The census reports (both agricultural and general) are more ambiguous. While Milton was listed as the most prosperous of Robert Tomlinson’s children in 1860, Noah and Allen had the edge in 1870 and 1880. But these data seem questionable. For instance, Milton listed no land on the 1880 census report, although he paid taxes on 215 acres. It may be that he was less than forthcoming with the census takers. 36. Helm, History of Hamilton County, Indiana, Illustrated, 147. 37. Robbins, interview by the author. 38. Homer Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1 (Huntsville, Ala.: Church of God, 1949), 10. 39. The following account of the family’s economic history is based on Asher Kellum Tomlinson, “A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Noah Tomlinson (1824– 1918)” (Westfield Public Library, Westfield, Ind., 1931), typed manuscript. 40. Tomlinson, “A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Noah Tomlinson (1824– 1918),” 5. This places the Tomlinsons in the supply network of the first major railroad boom in Indiana. According to Richard E. Wood (“Evangelical Quaker Acculturation in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1850–1875,” Quaker History 76:2 [Fall 1987]: 129), the decade between 1850 and 1860 saw a jump from 228 to 2,163 miles of railroad track in Indiana. 41. Portrait and Biographical Record of Madison and Hamilton Counties, Indiana (Chicago: Biographical Publishing Co., 1893). 42. See Hamilton County Republican (February 11, 1869); Noblesville Ledger (February 11, 1876); Noblesville Ledger (May 1, 1878); Republican Ledger (January 27, 1888). 43. James H. Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 215. 44. For Tomlinson as a juror, see Noblesville Ledger (June 4, 1875); for Tomlinson as commissioner, see Hamilton County Deed Records, April 1881. 45. Civil Court Docket, Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, Ind.: Charles White & John C. Pfaff v. Milton Tomlinson & Nathan C. Clark (July 22, 1875); Willis G. Cook v. Milton Tomlinson (November 1875); Valentine Amett v. Milton Tomlinson et al. (November 5, 1876); S. M. Smith v. Milton Tomlinson (September 5, 1876); James Wilson v. Winifred Stilwell et al. (including Milton Tomlinson) (March 5, 1878); Nehemiah Briles v. Noah Tomlinson, Milton Tomlinson, et al. (1884). (Case history: jury finds for plaintiffs and awards damages of $436.87 in dispute over grading of a railroad bed; defendants request appeal; request denied; defendants appeal to State Supreme Court; State Supreme Court declines to hear case and affirms judgment of lower court.) Hamilton County Deed Records: Jasper N. Davidson, Administrator v. William Zion, Milton Tomlinson, et al. (September 22, 1877). White and Pfaff v. Tomlinson and Clark and Briles v. Tomlinson, Tomlinson, et al. were appealed to the State Supreme Court. This search was restricted to Hamilton County courts and therefore is not exhaustive. It did not follow changes of venue except insofar as they returned to Hamilton County. Some of this litigation may have derived from financial troubles alluded to by Homer Tomlinson: “Three Tomlinson brothers . . . as contractors built large sections of what is now the New York Central Railroad through Hamilton County. . . . [T]he parent company went bankrupt, leaving the Tomlinson brothers in very great debt to sub-contractors and hundreds of employees” (The Shout of a King [Queens Village,


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N.Y.: Church of God (Queens), 1968], 16). Homer insisted that the Tomlinson brothers, as a matter of principle, paid their inherited debts “to the uttermost penny,” a conclusion that would seem to be at variance with the court record. 46. Just such a dispute, in just such a losing cause, provides convincing evidence of the social standing of the Tomlinson family. In the Davidson v. Zion, Tomlinson, et al. case, the court handed down a $200.00 judgment against Milton Tomlinson. He apparently refused to pay, and a parcel of his land went on the auction block. When the property came up for auction, however, no one bid. Finally, Noah bid a pittance and purchased the property, which he promptly conveyed to Delilah, thereby returning it into his brother’s hands. Bidder collusion of this kind only occurred on behalf of individuals who elicited strong communal sympathy and support. 47. Jacob and Mary Bales, letter to Asa Bales, September 14, 1827, quoted in Roberts, Our Westfield, 11. The standard reference for the Quaker ritualization of death was Piety Promoted, a collection of final words and deathbed scenes. See Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 116. 48. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 688, quoting White Wing Messenger (November 29, 1941). 49. See Portrait and Biographical Record of Madison and Hamilton Counties, Indiana, 594.

chapter 6 1. Lillie Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964), 688, quoting White Wing Messenger (November 29, 1941). 2. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 18–20; Homer Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1 (Huntsville: Church of God, 1949), 10. 3. Homer Tomlinson listed his father’s stature as 5'7" tall, 168 lbs. (The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, 11). Noah Tomlinson was 5'5", 160 lbs. (Asher Kellum Tomlinson, “A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Noah Tomlinson [1824–1918]” [Westfield Public Library, Westfield, Ind., 1931], typed manuscript, 7). 4. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 18–21; Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, 11. 5. A. J. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God (Cleveland, TN: White Wing Pub. Hs., [1913]), 3. 6. See Ludovic Hill, “History of Westfield Monthly Meeting” (paper presented at the Yearly Meeting, n.d. [ca. 1875]). 7. See Grammar School Reports, ACGP. A. J. was fourteen at the time of his illness. 8. Genealogical records give 1863 as the approximate date for Emily’s birth, making her two years older than Ambrose (“Tomlinson Family,” typescript, personal records of Myron Robbins, Sheridan [Baker’s Corner], Ind.). 9. For the writing school, see Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 738, quoting White Wing Messenger (July 31, 1943). According to Homer Tomlinson (The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1, 15), the diaries began in 1880 and contained daily entries through 1881 and occasional entries through 1898. 10. Homer Tomlinson acquired the diaries from his siblings under the pretext of editing them for publication. Little or none of the material contained in them actually appeared in the (severely) edited version of A. J. Tomlinson’s published diaries, and Homer failed to return the diaries to his siblings afterward. He deposited his father’s later diaries in the Library of Congress but kept the early diaries in his own possession. After Homer’s death they followed Voy Bullen, Homer’s successor to the helm

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of the Church of God, Queens, New York, to Huntsville, Alabama. According to Bullen (phone interviews by the author, August 1995), they were then either lost or stolen from Bullen’s home. 11. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 3. 12. The 1882–1883 Union High School catalog is reprinted in Leanna K. Roberts, ed., Our Westfield: A History of Westfield and Washington Township (Noblesville, Ind.: Image Builders/Rowland Printing Co, 1984), 33. The faculty at Union included Quaker holiness evangelists John Pennington and Charles Coffin. 13. On the identity crisis triggered by Quaker involvement in abolition and temperance, see Thomas Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 14–31. The movements fostered a battlefield camaraderie that led some Methodists and Quakers to discuss union as early as the 1830s and again in the 1860s. For the impact of Quaker involvement in ecumenical reform movements, see also John William Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1973), chap. 5. 14. George Hetherington, “Westfield’s Only Saloon,” unidentified local paper (February 13, 1941), Clippings File, Westfield Public Library, Westfield, Ind. See also John F. Haines, History of Hamilton County, Indiana (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen and Co., 1915), 238. 15. On the region’s moral rigorism, see the Rev. J.W.T. McMullen’s indignant reaction to the teachers of “polite” dancing in the 1880s: “Shall Christians become so contaminated by the foul breath of these itinerant masses of moral putrefaction” as to allow their children to inhale such “pestiferous effluvium?” (from McMullen’s 1885 “Seven Letters” on the Apocalypse, quoted in John L. Smith, Indiana Methodism [Valparaiso, Ind.: Smith, 1892], 173). 16. See Hamilton County Ledger (March 29, 1889); and Noblesville Democrat (February 1, 1889): 2. 17. Figures for 1874 in Washington Township show Quaker membership at 1,091, Methodist Episcopal at 152, Wesleyan at 128, Christian at 120, and United Brethren at 40 (The Peoples’ Guide: A Business, Political and Religious Directory of Hamilton County, Indiana [Indianapolis: Indianapolis Printing and Publishing House, 1874], 45). 18. “Reformation” missionaries John Jones and Chauncy Butler had arrived in Noblesville in 1834, and by 1835 they had persuaded the local Baptist church to join the Christian movement (Augustus Finch Shirts, Primitive History of Hamilton County: A History of the Foundation, Settlement and Development of Hamilton County, Indiana [Noblesville, Ind.: Shirts, 1901], 188–189). 19. In 1880, blacks composed twenty-eight of the 211 households in the local township, not including six single blacks (U.S. Census Bureau Report, Washington Township, Ind., 1880, IHS). In 1866 the Westfield Monthly Meeting’s Committee on the People of Color reported 450 individuals and eighty families residing in its jurisdiction (Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 9th month, 1, 1866). 20. Haines, History of Hamilton County, Indiana, 238. 21. On the threatened lynching of George Harris, a Richmond, Ind., white man, for attempting to marry Maggie Rogers, a black woman, see Noblesville Daily Ledger (December 2, 1892): 3; on Indianapolis and the Ku Klux Klan, see James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Christine Heyrmann, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff, Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 936.


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22. See the Republican Ledger (August 17, 1888), which noted that “several eminent speakers are in attendance” (8). 23. Lena Howe Sanders, “Comment: Westfield History Continued” (n.d. [ca. 1940]), Clippings File, Westfield Public Library, Westfield, Ind. (The reference to Marian Anderson being refused an auditorium, added to the mention of black “accomplishments in 75 years,” suggests 1940 as the date of composition [Anderson was refused use of Constitution Hall in 1939, and seventy-five years from 1865 would place the author at 1940].) 24. On religious diversity in Indiana, see Clifton J. Phillips, Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880–1920 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1968), 460; see also People’s Guide. 25. For a debate on baptism, see Noblesville Ledger (February 8, 1878). See Republican Ledger (1888), any week, for the serialized sermons of Thomas DeWitt Talmage. 26. See Isabelle C. Fearheiley, Hamilton County Stories and Legends (Fearheiley, 1972). The timing of these discoveries and their impact is not entirely clear. The Union High catalog suggests widespread use by the early 1880s. However, contemporary accounts in the Republican Ledger suggest that the major discoveries were not until 1887 and that Westfield did not have adequate gas service until around 1889. See Republican Ledger (1888, especially November 23, 1888, where Westfield residents complain about their poor service). 27. Shirts, Primitive History of Hamilton County. 28. Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Indiana (Chicago: Baskin, Forster and Co., 1876); see also People’s Guide, 132. 29. The Indiana Midland intersected with the Monon Railroad, connecting Westfield to Indianapolis and Chicago (Roberts, Our Westfield, 25; see also Haines, History of Hamilton County, Indiana). 30. Phillips, Indiana in Transition, 48, 271–272, 276–277. The percentage of the state workforce engaged in agriculture dropped from over 50 percent in 1880 to 38 percent in 1900; the rural population over that time dropped from 80.5 to 65.7 percent (Phillips, Indiana in Transition, 363). 31. On the urban dynamic, see David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, eds., The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 32. Peoples’ Guide. By 1880 Indianapolis had emerged as an industrial as well as political center, and its population would more than double over the next twenty years, from 75,000 in 1880 to 170,000 in 1900 (Phillips, Indiana in Transition, 365). By 1880 the city had a phone system in place and was in the process of paving its roads (Phillips, Indiana in Transition, 380). 33. Groll’s painting is held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis. 34. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 20. 35. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 3. 36. Noblesville Ledger (January 2, 1883); see also the report in Christian Worker (Chicago) (March 22, 1883). Two years after the Westfield women’s direct action, hard drink apparently still threatened: Wooton’s revival had done “more to stop whiskydrinking than all the Squires in the township.” William Wooton, with his wife Docia, would soon venture into the “foothills of the Tennessee Mountains” to establish schools and evangelize “the mountain people, most of whom were very ignorant and poor” (Nathan Frame and Esther Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. and Esther G. Frame [Frame and Frame, 1907], 298). The mission they would found there, in Mountain Home, Alabama, would be one of the

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Yearly Meeting’s most visible and heavily financed missionary endeavors, and the Mountain Home congregation would eventually request and receive membership in the Westfield Monthly Meeting; see discussion below in chapter 9. 37. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 4. 38. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 18–20. A more complete treatment of this episode would need to look at the importance of the hat and head in traditional constructions of honor and corporal space, as well as their prominent role in the etiquette of provocation and dueling. 39. James H. Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 209–214. In 1874, 96.4 percent of Quakers voted Republican. Christians and Methodists were Republican by a three-fourths majority; Presbyterians, by a two-thirds majority. Baptists and Catholics provided the religious base of the democracy. 40. A. J. Tomlinson, letter to Ellis Barker, January 14, 1889, personal files of Leanna Roberts, Westfield, Ind. The letter was signed “A. J. Tomlinson,” indicating that by 1889 he self-identified as “A. J.” 41. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 4 42. For a report of a stirring revival conducted in Westfield by the Quaker holiness evangelist David Updegraff, see Republican Ledger (January 20, 1888); on Updegraff ’s style, see Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 207. 43. Noblesville Democrat (February 6, 1889): 3, of activities practiced at the Hazel Dell Literary Society. 44. Myron Robbins (grandnephew), interview by the author, July 3, 1995, Sheridan (Baker’s Corner), Ind. 45. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 5. Homer Tomlinson suggested that his father was converted in a church meeting. In fact, he claimed that his father and Charles Stalker, who would achieve considerable renown in holiness circles, were both converted on the same night at the Chester meetinghouse (The Shout of a King [Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God (Queens), 1968], 17). 46. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 5. 47. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 5. A. J. presented his request for membership in September and was accepted the following month (Minutes of the Chester Preparative Meeting, September 25, 1889, and October 31, 1889, OWYM). 48. T. B. Helm, History of Hamilton County, Indiana, Illustrated (Chicago: Kingman Brothers, 1880), 322–323. 49. For her certificate of membership, received by Chester Preparative from Walnut Ridge Monthly Meeting, see Minutes of the Chester Preparative Meeting, October 31, 1889. On the Walnut Ridge revival, see Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. and Esther G. Frame, 56; Barbour and Frost, The Quakers, 205–206; and Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism, 71ff. On Binford, see Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism, 102. 50. Homer A. Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God (Queens: Tomlinson, 1939), 4. 51. For an example of disownment for fraternizing with Methodists, see chap. 5, note 9. By the 1860s and 1870s union services with the Methodists and other evangelical denominations would be commonplace, as the next chapter will make clear.


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chapter 7 1. Thomas Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 2. See John William Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1973), 40. 3. Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 72. 4. Nathan Frame and Esther Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame (Frame and Frame, 1907), 61. 5. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 56. 6. Edmund Stanley, “Introduction,” in Nathan Frame and Esther Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame (Frame and Frame, 1907), 14–15. 7. Quaker primitivism had two foci: the apostolic Church and the golden age of Quakerism. 8. Edmund Skipp, quoted for the purpose of rebuttal in Richard Farnworth, Antichrists Man of War, Apprehended, and encountered withal, by a Souldier of the Armie of the Lamb (London, 1655), 31. William Prynne cites the following enthusiasms: “extraordinary sudden extravagant Agonies, Trances, Quaking, Shaking, Raptures, Visions, Apparitions, Conflicts with Satan, Relations, Illuminations, [and] instructions in new divine Mysteries” (quoted in Frank C. Huntington Jr., “Quakerism during the Commonwealth,” Quaker History 70:2 [Fall 1981]: 81). Richard Blome added “howling, squeeking,” and “a strange kind of humming noise” (The Fanatick History [London, 1660], 109). 9. Quaker apologists drew up exhaustive compendiums of biblical precedents for “shaking, quaking, and trembling,” but the bulk of their examples came from the “holy men of old.” See George Fox, who noted: “When Daniel heard the Voice, he fell down and trembled: And Habackuk, when he heard the Voyce, his Lips quivered, his Belly shook. . . . And David, when he heard the Voice . . . his Flesh trembled” (To all who love the Lord Jesus Christ [1654], in George Fox, Gospel Truth Demonstrated in a Collection of . . . Bookes Given forth by . . . George Fox [London, 1706], 28). 10. Paul S. Rees, Seth Cook Rees: The Warrior Saint (Indianapolis: Pilgrim Book Room, 1934), 11. Nathan and Esther Frame were likewise chided by conservatives for their “strange fire” but were welcomed “among the more liberal minded” (Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 54, 50). See John W. Oliver, “Progressive rather than conservative, the movement opened Quakers to wider ecumenical involvements such as Bible Societies, Christian Endeavor, and the Student Volunteer Movement” (Oliver, ed., J. Walter Malone: The Autobiography of an Evangelical Quaker [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993], xi). 11. David Updegraff had been a businessman; see S. Olin Garrison, ed., Forty Witnesses Covering the Whole Range of Christian Experience (Philadelphia, 1888), 26. Nathan Frame had also intended a career in business (Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 32). 12. The gendered foundation of that rhetoric was often so thoroughly submerged that it could be applied to male and female alike, though in an overwhelmingly male sphere like business, the risk of calling a woman “manly” remained small. 13. The Aurora (Westfield, Ind.: Union High School, 1899), reprinted in Leanna K. Roberts, ed., Our Westfield: A History of Westfield and Washington Township (Noblesville, Ind.: Image Builders/Rowland Printing Co., 1984), 32. 14. Lydia M. Williams-Cammack and Truman C. Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy (Richmond, Ind.: Nicholson Printing, 1918), 231.

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15. For Rees as a bookseller, see the U.S. Bureau of the Census Report, Washington Township, Hamilton County, Ind., 1880. 16. Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 45–49, quoting reports from an 1898 Ocean Grove camp meeting. 17. Reviewer’s comments on The Ideal Pentecostal Church, The Revivalist (June 1897): 6. 18. Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 5. 19. The Revivalist (June 1897): 6. Carothers explained that he published his history of the pentecostal movement in newspaper—rather than book—form because in the more “convenient and brief ” medium, “he that runs may read.” Books, on the other hand, were “not so cheap, and not so easily distributed” (W. F. Carothers, The Apostolic Faith [Houston] 2:2 [October 1908]: 4). 20. James Beale, Minutes of the Friendsville Quarterly Meeting, June 18, 1895, Marysville Public Library, Marysville, Tenn., where he lobbies for improvements at the Friendsville Quaker Academy. 21. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 408. 22. Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 277–280. The Earlham revival occurred during the 1866–1867 academic year. 23. See Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 50, 61. 24. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 50, 61. 25. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 9th month, 1840, OWYM. 26. Nathan Hatch has called Methodism “the most powerful religious movement in American history” (“The Puzzle of American Methodism,” Church History 63: 2 [June 1994]: 177). 27. Daniel Sommer, “Dialogue between a Methodist and a Campbellite,” Octographic Review. 28. For “Asbury Fisher,” see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, November 29, 1894; for “Lorenzo Dow Williams,” see Minutes of Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1884), OWYM, 43. See “The Methodization of American Quakerism,” Friends Review L (November 10, 1892): 243. 29. For the flow of membership between the Society of Friends and Methodist denominations, see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, October 3, 1889; August 27, 1891; and February 1894. See also Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 278. 30. Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism, 31. 31. Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 278–279. Holiness Quakers adopted John and Charles Wesley into the Quaker pantheon, anointing them as the true spiritual heirs of George Fox. See Lewis I. Hadley, “The Constitutional Error: Unscripturalness and Un-Quakerliness of the Five Years Meeting,” pamphlet, reprinted from The Gospel Minister (n.d.), personal effects of A. J. Tomlinson, ACGP, 5; and Hamm, Transformation of American Quakerism, 56ff. 32. Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting, 1884, 19. The Western Yearly Meeting, headquartered in Plainfield, Ind. (ten miles southwest of Indianapolis), incorporated most of central Indiana, including Westfield. 33. For work among non-Quakers, see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, May 2 and 30, 1889; for Methodist visitors, see the Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting that noted: “Brother J. P. Hatfield, a Minister in the Methodist


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Church while conducting a tent meeting at this place, acceptably attended this meeting. His labors were edifying” (August 2, 1894). See also Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, December 31, 1896, wherein the pastor of the Westfield Methodist Episcopal Church and a visiting evangelist are recorded. 34. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 75– 77. “Union” or “General” meetings, where mainstream Protestants collaborated on evangelistic campaigns, were an important vehicle for reciprocal influence. They also helped to create religious equilibrium. Like the corporate trust, such arrangements stabilized the market and mitigated rivalry among the major providers of religious services. For Methodist–Quaker Union meetings near Westfield, see Hamilton County Ledger (April 1, 1892). 35. The Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting noted: “Morton Bratton, a minister of the Gospel of Christ informed this meeting that he believes it to be right for him to labor in the Evangelistic work by travelling with a tent and holding meetings therein . . . also to engage in some service outside of the Friends Church. This meeting unites with him in his work and encourages him to attend to the service as the Holy Spirit directs” (August 30, 1894). 36. Jacob Baker, Incidents of My Life and Life Work of 84 Years (Richmond, Ind.: Nicholson Printing and Manufacturing Co., 1911), 39. 37. Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 278–289. 38. Baker, Incidents of My Life and Life Work of 84 Years, 27, 36. 39. The following account draws primarily on Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 29ff. Esther’s father was an Indiana state legislator. 40. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 32–36. 41. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 49–51. 42. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 313, 67. 43. Esther Frame was the more prominent of the two and the first to be recorded as a minister (Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 84). Her impact on audiences cannot be divorced from her contemporaries’ impressions of her natural beauty. Press reports described her as “tall, graceful, and commanding in appearance.” Some described her in terms suggestive of a Protestant Madonna: “I wish I could paint you pictures or carve you statues that would express the great beauty of her face, when she talks of her . . . love of God. . . . When in her presence you feel that she is so near Jesus that only a thin veil separates her from the throne of God.” Nathan, on the other hand, was a “light complexioned” and “very practical” man who had composed “many fine poems” (Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 330). 44. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 191. 45. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 216–217. 46. Daniel Sommer, Hydrophobia and Its Cures: By One Who Was a Victim (Indianapolis: Sommer, 1895), 222. Sommer, Hydrophobia, 158. 47. Sommer, Hydrophobia and Its Cures, 223. 48. Sommer, Hydrophobia and Its Cures, 160. 49. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cam-

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bridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 225. Both their relative prominence in holiness circles and their close interaction with Methodists are evident in Garrison’s 1888 collection of holiness testimonies to Christian Perfection, Forty Witnesses. Twenty-five of the forty witnesses were Methodist, including Bishop C. D. Foss, who wrote the introduction. But Quakers came in second, with five witnesses (including Dougan Clark, David Updegraff, and Hannah Whitall Smith). Four Episcopalians, three Congregationalists, two Anglicans, and a Baptist rounded out the volume. 50. Clark was baptized in 1884; Updegraff, in 1885 (Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 289). The meetings were formalized after 1902 as the “Five Years’ Meeting”; see Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 293–294. 51. See Baker, Incidents of My Life and Life Work of 84 Years, 98–99. In Indiana, advocates of holiness like Nathan Hunt Clark (perennial clerk of the Westfield Monthly Meeting and of the Meeting for Ministry and Oversight of the Western Yearly Meeting) tried to defuse the conflict by adhering to the historic Quaker positions but without treating water baptism or communion as a “disownable offense.” However, visiting ministers who practiced the ordinances would be expected “to obey our rules of discipline whilst in our midst.” See Nathan Hunt Clark, diary and notebook, entry for January 19, 1888, IHS. 52. Clark, diary and notebook, 220–223. See also Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 438. 53. Williams-Cammack and Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy, 240. 54. Williams-Cammack and Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy, 240. 55. Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 8. 56. Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 17, quoting a testimony from 1897. 57. Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 17, 22. 58. See Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 24–27, 54. The International Holiness Union and Prayer League was a forerunner of the Pilgrim Holiness Church. 59. John LaRue Forkner, Historical Sketches and Reminiscences of Madison Co., Indiana (Logansport, IN: Press of Wilson, Humphreys & Co., 1896), 293. WoodworthEtter was “reawakened” at a Quaker revival in 1879. For that and an Indiana instance of the ecstasies common to her meetings, see Wayne E. Warner, The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986), 55, quoting Muncie Daily News (September 21, 1885). Various members of the Rees family were deeply impressed by Dowie. See Albert Rees, whose mother was visiting Zion City, “the next place to heaven itself, if not a little better” (letter, Lydia J. Pegg papers, 1899 folder, IHS). 60. Oliver (J. Walter Malone, xiii) gives a list of competing institutions. 61. Rees, letter, 1899 folder, Lydia J. Pegg papers, IHS. 62. Dougan Clark and Joseph H. Smith, David B. Updegraff and His Work (Cincinnati, 1895), 70, quoted in Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 207. 63. Byron L. Osborne, The Malone Story: The Dream of Two Quaker Young People (Newton, Kans.: United Printing Inc., 1970), 22–23. 64. Oliver, J. Walter Malone, 91na. 65. Williams-Cammack and Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy, 233. 66. Frame and Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame, 359ff. 67. Williams-Cammack and Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy, 230.


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68. Williams-Cammack and Kenworthy, Life and Works of Amos M. Kenworthy, 231. 69. Rees, Seth Cook Rees, 11. 70. Instrumental to the region’s status were holiness emissaries like Seth and Hulda Rees, John Pennington, Micajah Binford, and Dougan Clark. The last, the leading intellectual of the movement, was head of the Bible Department at Earlham College and author of books such as The Offices of the Holy Spirit (1878) and The Theology of Holiness (1895) (see Osborne, The Malone Story, 19). 71. See Christian Worker (March 14, 1889): 167. 72. Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, August 31, 1889, OWYM. 73. According to Westfield Membership Certificates (OWYM), Manley transferred to White Water Monthly Meeting on October 2, 1890. He does not appear, to my knowledge, in Westfield or Western Yearly Meeting records after that time, although Thomas Nelson’s Pentecostal Herald has him preaching at the Indianapolis Mission in 1897. By 1909 he had joined the pentecostal movement and was publishing the Household of God from Dayton, Ohio. 74. Manley held at least one other revival at the Friends church in Westfield, in January 1890; see Hamilton County Ledger (January 24, 1890): 5. 75. Christian Worker (September 26, 1889). 76. See Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, November 30, 1889. One hundred ten had been converted, 100 had been renewed, and forty had “accepted the blessing of entire sanctification.” 77. The Yearly Meeting permitted diversity in the pursuit of peace, and its statement on sanctification in the “Richmond Declaration of Faith” gives a classic example of doctrinal equivocation. It affirmed the sufficiency of God’s grace “to deliver from the power, as well as the guilt, of sin, and to enable His believing children always to triumph in Christ.” Furthermore, “whosoever submits himself wholly to God . . . will have his heart continually cleansed from all sin, by His precious blood, and through the . . . refining power of the Holy Spirit.” On the other hand, “the most holy Christian is still liable to temptation . . . and can only continue to follow holiness as he humbly watches . . . and is kept in constant dependence upon his Savior” (quoted in Osborne, The Malone Story, 27–28). 78. Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1895 and 1896). In 1897, however, the practice was discontinued. If this gives a relative indication of holiness influence at the Yearly Meeting, then it peaked in 1895– 1896. 79. Membership grew from 929 to 1,549. See Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, August 31, 1889; Minutes of the Westfield Quarterly Meeting, September 1, 1894 (note the change of name). 80. Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, September 3, 1892. Clark was superintendent of the Quarterly Evangelism Committee at the time. Like Rees, he urged Friends to follow the Spirit even though He might lead “in ways that we have not seen or by paths that we have not known.”

chapter 8 1. Minutes of the Chester Preparative Meeting of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, 1890–1897, OWYM. Tomlinson had higher assessments, for example, than Robert, Asher, Finley, and Morton Tomlinson. 2. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, August 27, 1891. Orlando Tomlinson served as an active home missionary and sometimes superintendent of Home

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Missions for the Union (Westfield) Quarterly Meeting; see Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, August 31, 1889. 3. For the Ohio Reform School, White’s Manual Labor School, and a school in Richmond, Ind., see John William Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1973), 197–204, 218. See also Alice Patterson Green, Whites Institute: A Glimpse into Its Past and Present (Muncie: Scott Printing Co., 1929). Byron L. Osborne (The Malone Story: The Dream of Two Quaker Young People [Newton, Kans.: United Printing Inc., 1970], 103) mentions Willis Hitchkiss’s “Friends Africa Industrial Mission.” For non-Quaker holiness industrial schools, see The Free Methodist (January 6, 1897): 4–5, on the Chicago Industrial Home for Children; and George E. Davis, “A Pentecostal Missionary Life,” The New Acts 3:3 (June 1907): 2, on Samuel Mead’s mid-1880s work in Africa. 4. At White’s school Native American boys learned to “plow, harrow, pitch hay, care for stock, garden, manage teams . . . almost as well as average white boys”; the girls learned to “sew, wash, iron . . . cook, put up fruit, care for the dairy, make butter” along with other rudiments of household economy (Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting, 1884, 34). 5. Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1886), 30. For the Indianapolis home, directed by Anna Mills, see Carrie Wright, “Indianapolis Home Missionary Work,” Christian Worker (July 11, 1889): 438; and Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1890); for the Native American industrial schools, see Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1891), 83. 6. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, September 1, 1892. Home missions’ receipts rose from one-third to two-fifths of those of foreign missions. 7. Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, December 3, 1892. Asher Tomlinson was secretary of the Committee on Peace and Arbitration. 8. Stephen Cox, in Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, February 28, 1895; see also the report of the Book, Tract, Peace and Arbitration Committee: “Nothing has been done in the way of public teaching on the subject of peace” (Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, March 4, 1897). 9. See Hamilton County Ledger (January 24, 1890) or other election-season issues. 10. For Milton as Washington Township delegate to the Republican congressional convention, see Noblesville Daily Ledger (February 26, 1892): 3. He had served as a delegate to the state convention at Frankfurt, Ind., in 1890 (Hamilton County Ledger [January 17, 1890]: 1). 11. In terms of labor unrest, Indiana was the seventh most conflicted state in the union in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. See Clifton J. Phillips, Indiana in Transition: The Emergence of an Industrial Commonwealth, 1880–1920 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1968), 339–351. 12. Ernest D. Stewart, “Populist Party in Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 14 (1918): 332–367; see also James H. Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 219ff. 13. The American Nonconformist and Industrial Liberator 13:1 (June 16, 1892): 6. The People’s Party had been formally organized in Indianapolis at least since summer 1891; see Noblesville Daily Ledger (July 31, 1891): 3. 14. Hamilton County Ledger (July 8, 1892): 1. Both the Hamilton County Ledger and the Noblesville Daily Ledger covered the strike at length, with reports continuing well into September.


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15. Quoted in James West Davidson, William Gienapp, Christine Heyrmann, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff, eds., Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 787. 16. The seminal work for this section is Rhys H. Williams and Susan M. Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism: Civil Religion as Movement Ideology,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33:1 (March 1994): 1–15. 17. Mary Lease, quoted in Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 8. The colorful Lease urged farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” 18. See Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 8. 19. Lease, quoted in Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 8. 20. The 1892 platform of the People’s Party, quoted in Stewart, “Populist Party in Indiana,” 332–367; Norman Pollack, quoted in Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 12. The millennialist cast of populist thought mirrored similar social-millenarian ideals in two of its most important predecessors, the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor. For Williams and Alexander, the interplay of primitivist and presentist impulses was an “ideological balancing act.” They cite Rowland Berthoff, who argued that the nineteenth century was marked by a distinctive “mixture of static peasant-Puritan-republican nostalgia and dynamic secularmillennial progressivism” (“Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 11). 21. Ignatius Donnelly, quoted in Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 8. 22. Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 8–9. 23. John Alexander Dowie, “Jesus the Healer: A Sermon by the Rev. John Alex. Dowie” (Chicago: Zion Publishing House, 1899), HWS, 14–16. 24. B. T. Roberts, The Free Methodist (July 30, 1890): 490, reviewing a Thomas Shearman article on the centralization of wealth that forecast continuing “conflict between labor and capital.” 25. T. H. Nelson, “Men Wanted,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (June 1, 1895): 2. 26. Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (June 15, 1896): 8. 27. For district and county ballots, see Hamilton County Ledger (October 28, 1892); on the fortunes of Indiana populism, see Madison, The Indiana Way, 219. 28. Hamilton County Ledger (December 2, 1892). 29. A. J. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, n.d. [ca. 1913]), 5–7. The account was signed “February 1, 1913,” and the events it describes were said to have transpired “about twenty years ago.” 30. Noblesville Daily Ledger (February 26, 1892); Hamilton County Ledger (March 18, 1892). For Baker at Westfield, see Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, August 27, 1891. For Pennington and Coffin at Westfield and Morrow at Chester, see Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1892); and Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, September 1, 1892. 31. The dedication made front page news in the Noblesville Daily Ledger (October 28, 1892). 32. Noblesville Daily Ledger (December 9, 1992). 33. Republican Ledger (December 9, 1992): 6. 34. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 9–10. The “M” would have been for “McKinley.” 35. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 9–10.

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36. Williams and Alexander note that religion gave affective form to populism’s ideological essence: “In a political culture as thoroughly religious as that of the American Midwest (or South) the language almost had to be religious. Populism’s religious language provided common ground” for “factions separated by cultural differences” (“Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 3). The authors see populism’s religious rhetoric as a genuine expression of the values and assumptions of the movement’s rank and file, not merely a calculated effort “to clothe their movement with the legitimacy of culturally sanctioned symbols” (“Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 3–4). 37. Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 13, of populism. 38. See Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth Century Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 104–106. Dowie preferred the Republican Party as a practical, stopgap measure short of theocracy. 39. “Our Attitude toward the Lord’s Coming,” reprint, Way of Faith (July 22, 1896): 3. The author appears to be A. B. Simpson. 40. Williams and Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric in American Populism,” 3, drawing on the work of Lawrence Goodwyn. 41. The proof text is Matthew 6:33. 42. Tomlinson responded to the challenge in typical Quaker fashion: by keeping meticulous records, charting his own and his parents’ financial fortunes through a double-entry ledger. His 1901 diary was kept on the unused portion of a bookkeeping ledger that included two previous sets of records. One runs from 1893 to 1895 and reads, “Individual Acct. with Father and Mother.” The mainly farm-related transactions show dealings with holiness Quakers such as Jackson Morrow and C. D. Stalker and with T. J. Lindley, the local sheriff who was also an ex-Quaker turned Methodist and an outspoken populist. Lindley’s political heterodoxy did not seem to hinder his popularity. The second set of records runs through 1891 and reads, “Treasurer/1890.” It may pertain to an office A. J. held at the Grassy Narrows Literary Society (Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1, front leaves). Apparently, Tomlinson’s bookkeeping skills were the basis for his run at the county auditorship. 43. Leanna K. Roberts, daughter of Ellis Barker, phone conversation with the author, December 1, 1993. Roberts described her father as a rather staid Wilburite and found it hard to imagine him doing business with a holiness “Gurneyite” like Tomlinson. 44. For oil and gas exploration on the Tomlinson farm, see Hamilton County Deed Records, vol. 9 (July 1893–November 1894): 362–364, Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, Ind. The contract was first signed in October 1892. 45. Business card, personal collection of Wade Phillips, Fields of the Woods, N.C. The company boasted of “heavy automatic machinery for drilling large sized wells.” 46. Records, personal collection of Wade Phillips, Fields of the Woods, N.C. The partners bought $150.00 in supplies from Champion Well Machine and Tools in June 1895 and borrowed $60.00 from the Bank of Westfield in March 1896. The remaining receipts are all in amounts of $50.00 or less. 47. Minutes of the Union Quarterly Meeting, December 2, 1893; Minutes of the Westfield Quarterly Meeting, June 2, 1894. The name change went into effect the first Quarterly Meeting of 1894. 48. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, June 29, 1893. See also Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, December 27, 1894, where the members “ac-


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knowledge the Gift” in Stalker and record him as a minister; for his appointment as superintendent of the Quarterly Meeting, see Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1894). The comparison between Tomlinson and Stalker is illuminating because of their differences in style. Stalker attended to formalities, and one suspects that, if Stalker found ready mentors while A. J. found none, it was because Stalker was willing to abide them. 49. Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1891). 50. Register, Chester Bible School, OWYM. Attendance rose from around thirty to the low fifties, where it remained until he stepped down in spring 1896, which roughly corroborates Tomlinson’s claim (Answering the Call of God, 5) that attendance jumped from thirty to sixty under his superintendency. Note that Seth and Hulda Rees ministered frequently in Westfield during this period (Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, September 28, 1893 and December 28, 1893). See also Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting, (1894), where the Evangelistic Committee of the Westfield Quarterly Meeting reports a Rees revival at Westfield, along with an annual total of 107 conversions. 51. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 5. 52. Homer Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God (Queens: Tomlinson, 1939), 2. Mitchell’s Oberlin years cannot be positively verified, but a John Mitchell of Bucyrus, Ohio (1853–1855), is listed in the Oberlin College Alumni Catalogue, Students 1833–1908, which comports well with Mitchell’s age and Ohio connections. The solicitation is in Christian Herald (March 17, 1887), where “J. B. Mitchell, Colporteur, American Tract Society, Defiance, Ohio,” requests religious literature for distribution among the needy. 53. Tomlinson, MDV1 preface.

chapter 9 1. According to James Beaty (“Time-Line for Early Life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson,” TMs, HBD), Tomlinson engaged in summer missionary excursions beginning in summer 1894. 2. See mailing list for “Manna” in Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1 preface. I take this to be Heavenly Manna: or, A Collection of Prayers and Promises for each Day in the Year (New York: American Tract Society, n.d. [ca. 1890s]). 3. See The Revivalist (January 1894): 3, (July 1895): 6, and (October 1895): 6. 4. George Watson, “Holiness Mission, Indianapolis,” Way of Faith (January 15, 1896): 1. Tomlinson may also have had the opportunity to meet William Seymour, who apparently lived in Indianapolis from 1895 to 1900 before moving to Cincinnati under the influence of Martin Wells Knapp. However, no verifiable record of such an encounter has of yet come to light. 5. Tomlinson would later advertise Nelson’s summer camp meeting in Samson’s Foxes 2:6 (June 1902): 2. This bears note because Tomlinson rarely mentioned other ministries in his paper. On Nelson’s move to Indianapolis, see Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (October 1894): 2. The Pentecostal Bands and Westfield Quakers intersected at numerous points, any of which might have introduced Tomlinson to Nelson. Band members held revivals at Westfield (Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [June 1 and 15, 1898]). William F. Manley held meetings at Nelson’s Indianapolis Mission (Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [June 1, 1897]), where “Bro. Mannly” almost certainly refers to William F. Manley, whose name was frequently misspelled.

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6. Mrs. Nelson, reporting on a Free Methodist Conference in Pittsburgh, Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (October 1894): 2. 7. For the Carkuffs, see Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (March 15, 1897): 4; Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (June 15, 1897): 8; and Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (September 15, 1898): 7. 8. The diaries in which Tomlinson recorded his ponderings and peregrinations remain unavailable but not the mementos he collected. Old issues of God’s Revivalist, the Evangelical Visitor, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and Way of Faith, literature by Seth Rees, the August 1, 1897, edition of Frank Sandford’s Tongues of Fire, and later exchanges with Thomas Nelson’s Pentecostal Herald survive to bear witness to the associations that framed Tomlinson’s thought during those years (miscellaneous records, ACGP). More direct exchanges with Nelson, Stalker, and The Revivalist circles will be covered in the following chapters. According to Homer Tomlinson, of course, his father kept intimate terms with these individuals and every other person of note in the holiness and pentecostal movements. See Homer A. Tomlinson, ed., The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1 (Huntsville, Ala.: Church of God, 1949); and Homer A. Tomlinson, ed., The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3 (New York: Erhardt Press, 1955). 9. C. P. Carkuff, “Holt, O.T.,” Way of Faith (July 29, 1896): 5; B. H. Irwin, Way of Faith (July 29, 1896). 10. “The Baptism of Fire,” Way of Faith (December 23, 1896): 1. The writer had such “victory over temptation” that “the slightest shade of temptation is instantly perceived and repelled.” 11. A. J. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, n.d. [ca. 1913]), 7. 12. Entry for October 30, 1897, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 13. 13. As noted, George Watson observed that in common parlance “sanctification” denoted “the negative side” of the perfecting experience, whereas “the baptism of the Holy Ghost” denoted its “positive side” (A Holiness Manual [Boston: Christian Witness, n.d. (ca. 1882)], 109). 14. The ambiguity itself illustrates one of the problems that pentecostalism would later resolve. As a largely subjective experience, sanctification was a spiritual landmark built on shifting sand, open to question and revision pending further developments. Glossolalia, as the initial evidence of Spirit baptism, would prove less subject to experiential vagaries. 15. Though the context within which Tomlinson “received the Holy Ghost” is not indicated in Homer Tomlinson’s edited edition of his father’s diary, the entry that refers to that experience is devoted to A. J.’s water baptism at Shiloh, Maine, discussed below. Furthermore, the language employed (“received” rather than “baptized in” or “baptized with”) conforms to Frank Sandford’s usage. That would support an experience under Sandford’s ministry, but the question must remain open because Sandford was not alone in this usage. If so, however, it would explain why Tomlinson—far removed from his Sandfordian years and in light of Shiloh’s later disrepute—might choose to ignore that experience in favor of another. The story is further complicated if we accept Homer’s statement (The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1, 99) that his father had been led into sanctification by J. B. Mitchell. 16. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, December 3, 1896. Compare these also to a minute granted the following year to Charles Stalker: “This meeting expressed full unity with him and encouraged him to attend to the service as the Holy Spirit may direct” (Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, October 28, 1897).


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17. Entry for July 2, 1897, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 13. A. J. listed Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama as the states he had visited. 18. Frank Sandford, Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897): 91. 19. Verbatim transcriptions of services and events lent articles a heightened sense of immediacy, as did on-the-scene reports of breaking news. For the Glassey report, news-in-progress bulletins regarding a worker gravely injured during a worship service and accounts of demons, see W. S. Black, “From Liverpool,” Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897) 88–89; Frank Sandford, “The Church,” 88, Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897): 92; Frank Sandford, “The Church,” Tongues of Fire (April 11, 1898): 55; Frank Sandford, “Demonography in Ancient and Modern Times,” Tongues of Fire (August 1, 1897): 115–122. 20. E. R. Leger and M. E. Guptil, “Our Trip to Masachusetts,” Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 50. 21. Entry for October 30, 1897, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 13. One of Sandford’s chief deputies, “Bro. Gleason,” played the role of John the Baptist. This would most likely have been Willard Gleason, who evangelized the area extensively in fall 1897, rather than his brother, Ralph. On local Quakers baptized by Sandford or his emissaries, see Shirley Nelson, Fair, Clear, and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine (Latham, N.Y.: British American Publishing, 1989). 22. “Bible School Notes,” Tongues of Fire (November 1, 1897): 172. 23. The Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting noted: “Ambrose J. Tomlinson now returns the minute granted him in 12th mo. 3rd 1896” (December 2, 1897). 24. Entry for October 30, 1897, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 13. 25. Lillie Duggar quotes Tomlinson: “At the time I was leaving the farm in Indiana I was reluctant to do so because my father was old and I was his dependence for old age, and he so much wanted me to stay and take care of him and the farm. . . . But by and by, the mighty call became so strong that it rolled up before me that I would soon be old and I’d have nothing done for my Master” (A. J. Tomlinson [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964], 635, quoting the White Wing Messenger [August 17, 1940]). 26. Tomlinson’s personal papers include a letter from O. P. Benjamin Manufacturing, dated October 25, 1895, requesting payment of a debt for which Tomlinson had previously issued a draft that had been returned for insufficient funds (ACGP). 27. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 7. 28. Entry for January 21, 1898, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 13. 29. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 7. 30. Entry for January 26, 1898, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 13. 31. See Lewis I. Hadley, “The Constitutional Error: Unscripturalness and UnQuakerliness of the Five Years Meeting,” pamphlet, reprinted from The Gospel Minister (n.d.), personal effects of A. J. Tomlinson, ACGP. Hadley, one of the Western Yearly Meeting’s leading evangelists, denounced the Five-Year Meeting as a deviation from primitive ecclesiology. In his view, the Society of Friends had forsaken theocracy— its only known practice since the days of George Fox—for a government based on human authority and thus as idolatrous “as Baal worship.” 32. M. W. Knapp, Pentecostal Herald (Louisville, Ky.) (August 17, 1898): 4. 33. Seth Rees, “Independent Holiness Churches,” The Revivalist (October 4, 1900): 3.

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34. Frank Sandford, “The Church,” sermon delivered on May 2, 1897, Auburn, Maine, available in tract form and published in Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897): 90–94; and Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 51–56. 35. Frank Sandford, Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 53; and Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897): 91. 36. Sandford, Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 54. 37. Sandford, Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 56. 38. Sandford, Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 56. 39. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, March 31, 1898. 40. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, June 2, 1898. 41. Entry for October 27, 1898, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 14. 42. See John William Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1973), 166ff. 43. See Buys, “Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century,” 176. 44. See the report in which 270 people, including many young people and children, are said to have been converted at Mountain Home (Christian Worker [March 3, 1883]: 141). 45. Nathan Frame and Esther Frame, Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame (Frame and Frame, 1907), 299. 46. “The ‘Mountain Whites,’ ” The Earnest Christian 71:5 (May 1896): 157. See also Rhoda E. Lee, “The Mountain White People,” Evangelical Visitor (November 1, 1895): 339–341. 47. For Strong’s racialist missiology, widely accepted by thinking men and women of the day, see Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor for the American Home Missionary Society, 1885), “The Anglo-Saxon and the World’s Future,” 159–180. For a survey of missions to mountain whites, with an emphasis on Congregational and Presbyterian efforts, see Deborah McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 394–416. 48. Lee, “The Mountain White People,” 339–341. According to Lee, the spiritual malpractice of “native preachers” only compounded the region’s needs. 49. “The ‘Mountain Whites,’ ” 157. See also Grace Funk and Clara Howard, “Mountaineers of the South,” The Earnest Christian 72:1 (July 1896): 28–30. 50. Clara Howard, “Mountain Mission Work in the South,” The Earnest Christian 72:5 (November 1896): 162. 51. Calvin Pritchard, Christian Worker 9:6 (February 7, 1889): 84–85. 52. William Wooton, Christian Worker 19:7 (March 7, 1889): 156. 53. William Wooton, “Mountain Home Revival” Christian Worker 15:39 (September 24, 1885): 483. 54. For membership, see Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting, 1884. For affecting tales, see Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting, 1886, 29–31. See also Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting (Plainfield, Ind., 1888), 70–71. 55. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, March 1889. 56. Minutes of the Westfield Monthly Meeting, June 28, 1894. 57. “Beulah Heights,” The Revivalist (September 1896): 5; Mary C. Henck, “Beniah, Bradley County, Tennessee,” Pentecostal Herald (Louisville, Ky.) (March 15, 1899). The industrial school was founded in summer 1898 by Henck and Dolly Curry; the “school of the prophets” was added in March 1899 with help from Irwin. For more on Beniah, see Harold Hunter, “Beniah, TN: A Case of the Vanishing Flame” (paper


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presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Toronto, Ontario). 58. Seth C. Rees, “A Camp-Meeting Campaign,” Pentecostal Herald (Louisville, Ky.) (October 19, 1898): 2. 59. For a good statement of this Manifest Destiny, circa the Spanish–American War, see Beveridge’s 1898 campaign speech, “The March of the Flag,” in Albert Beveridge, The Meaning of the Times, and Other Speeches (1908), reprint (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 47–57. For a holiness version, see Thomas Nelson: “It is the survival of the fittest: it is the bestowal of the government of the world on a people that God, by providential dealings of 6,000 years, has been preparing for its high trust” (“The Coming Theocracy,” Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [July 1, 1898]: 5). 60. Entries for May 8, 1899, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 14. 61. Pentecostal is here meant in the generic sense. 62. Entries for May 8–9, 1899, in Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3, 14. 63. Tomlinson said that he returned to “nurse my father until he passed over the tide” (Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 635, quoting an article by Tomlinson in the White Wing Messenger [August 17, 1940]). 64. See Washington Township Transfer Book, 1899–1903 (recorded November 17, 1900); and Hamilton County Deed Records, County Recorders Office, Noblesville, Ind., where A. J. receives a total of thirty-one acres in two parcels. This is confirmed by Joe Roberts, attorney at law (letter to Roger Robins, May 25, 1994), who also noted a partition decree issued October 13, 1900, setting off two tracts of land, one seven and one twenty-four acres, to “Ambros [sic] J. Tomlinson.” 65. See ledger, dated July 14, 1899, ACGP.

chapter 10 1. See Murphy Town Council Minutes, January 3, 1899, Murphy Public Library, Murphy, N.C. 2. Entry for October 16, 1899, in Homer Tomlinson, ed., The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 3 (New York: Erhardt Press, 1955), 15. 3. U.S. Bureau of the Census Report, Cherokee County, N.C., 1900. 4. See Census Reports, Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, in North Carolina Clippings File, Library of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, vol. 8, 600ff. The rate improved over the next twenty years, but North Carolina continued to rank among the worst in the nation. 5. See Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1906, Bulletin 103 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906). 6. See Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). 7. William S. Powell, North Carolina through Four Centuries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 431–435. The Fusion Party won the governor’s seat and put 1,000 African Americans into state office. 8. See J. B. Mitchell, “Among Destitute,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (September 15, 1899): 7, where the editor, Thomas Nelson, volunteered an endorsement (“This is real practical home missionary work, and should not pass unheeded”) and offered to accept correspondence addressed to Mitchell; J. B. Mitchell, “Literature

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Wanted,” Evangelical Visitor (October 1, 1899): 375; and J. H. [sic] Mitchell, “Revival Reports,” The Revivalist (December 7, 1899): 11. 9. Samson’s Foxes 1:1 (January 1, 1901): 2. 10. See Everlasting Gospel (January 8, 1901), where Sandford has soured on the “ ‘thirty fold’ or ‘sixty fold’ people,” who are said to be a drain on Shiloh’s spiritual momentum; “all things in common” is the Acts of the Apostles 2:44–45. The communal ideal pervaded American holiness. For a roughly contemporaneous example among the “Burning Bush” saints, see William Kostlevy, “E. L. Harvey: The Price of Discipleship” in James Goff, Jr. and Grant Walker, eds., Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 21–35. 11. Everlasting Gospel (January 29–February 2, 1901): 50. 12. Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 2; Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1, entries for March 1901. 13. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 14, 1901. 14. Abbie C. Morrow, ed., The Work of Faith through George Muller (Cincinnati: M. W. Knapp, 1899), 3. 15. Morrow, The Work of Faith through George Muller, 26, 57. The seminal verses were Matthew 6:24–34. See Frank Sandford, who wrote: “The School stands for abandonment to God’s providences as absolutely as to God’s Word. ‘Seek NOT what ye shall eat . . . drink . . . nor wherewithal ye shall be clothed.’ . . . But rather seek . . . FIRST the Kingdom of GOD . . . and ALL THESE THINGS SHALL BE ADDED UNTO YOU’ ” (Everlasting Gospel [January 29–February 2, 1901]: 66). 16. A. T. Pierson eulogized Mueller in The Life of George Mueller, of Bristol, but more widely read, at twenty cents to Pierson’s $1.50, would have been Abbie Morrow’s The Work of Faith through George Muller, “An Abridge Life of this Mighty Prince of Prayer and Faith.” For advertisements and prices for both books, see The Revivalist (January 4, 1900): 6, 13. 17. Tomlinson, MDV1, March 10, 1901. 18. U.S. Census Records, Cherokee County, N.C., 1900. The twenty included the five members of the Tomlinson family; J. B. Mitchell; Homer, Viena (?), and Alva Burroughs (Indiana neighbors who had followed Tomlinson to North Carolina); Carrie Hall (the schoolteacher); two of W. F. Bryant’s sons (Luther and Julius); and a student by the name of Robinson (perhaps a relative of Bryant’s sister, Ella Bryant Robinson). 19. J. B. Mitchell, “Work in the Mountains,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (July 15, 1900): 8. 20. See J. B. Mitchell, “Evangelism in the Mountains,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (October 1, 1900): 8; J. B. Mitchell, “Work among the Mountain Whites,” Evangelical Visitor (October 15, 1900): 397. 21. Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 2–3. 22. Deed Records, Cherokee County Courthouse, Murphy, N.C. The lot was purchased on October 17, 1900, from S. D. and I. A. Anderson, and the deed was registered on May 14, 1901. See also Tomlinson, who wrote: “I went to Murphy and got the deed to Zion Hill recorded, deeded to God Almighty” (MDV1, May 13, 1901). 23. The story must have been well known in Shiloh circles, and Sandford proudly noted, “It is probably the only piece of property on the face of the earth so deeded and so held” (Everlasting Gospel [January 8, 1901]: 18). I was pointed to the Sandford precedent by Wade Phillips, interview by the author, Fields of the Wood, N.C., July 1995. 24. The nature of the conflict is unknown, absent Tomlinson’s diaries covering


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that year, but Tomlinson alludes to it: “I feel the freest that I have since last winter about the time we fell into that severe trial with Mr. B. & His wife” (MDV1, August 1, 1901). Homer Tomlinson (The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1 [Huntsville, Ala.: Church of God, 1949], 36) identifies “Mr. B.” as Homer Burroughs. Elsewhere, Homer claims that Burroughs had been tarred and feathered by night riders and died two years later from the effects of his mistreatment; see Homer Tomlinson, The Shout of a King (Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God [Queens], 1968), 12. 25. Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 3, 5. The term concluded in June 1901. 26. Samson’s Foxes 1:1 (January 1901): 2. For “Samson’s Foxes” as a common holiness trope, see Fannie Birdsall, “Samson’s Foxes,” Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (July 15, 1897): 1. 27. Samson’s Foxes 1:1 (January 1901): 1, 4. On holiness views of healing and dietary health, see Thomas Nelson, who explained: “Our bodies are the temples of the [Holy Spirit?] and we are commanded not to defile [them?]. He who violates the natural laws . . . thereby breaks the laws of God and is [bound to suffer?] the consequences” (“Take Care of Your Body,” Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [April 15, 1896]: 4). The saints censured “poisonous” consumables such as tea, coffee, cocoa, and chocolate (e.g., Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [March 1, 1896]: 6), but none was so uniformly condemned as pork. See John Fohl, who argued, on “scientific” grounds, that “the outward filth” of the pig “is but an index to his more dangerous inward uncleanness.” Microscopic investigation showed “swine flesh” to be “infested by a small insect called ‘Trichina,’ [which] often bores through the stomach walls . . . and causes many dangerous and painful maladies.” According to Fohl, “Shaking Quakers” avoided pork and “Scrofula and cancer are almost unknown among them” (“Swine’s Flesh,” Evangelical Visitor [July 1, 1896]: 193–194). F. W. Cox noted that “the only prayer Jesus ever answered for the devil was when he asked for the favor of going into the swine” (“Swine’s Flesh,” Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [July 1, 1899]: 6). 28. Quoted in Richard L. Bushman and Claudia L. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” Journal of American History 74:4 (March 1988): 1231. The authors chart the emergence of cleanliness as a nonnegotiable element of middleclass respectability, a means to distinguish between “civilized town life and rural barbarism.” For Ivory Soap, see Bushman and Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” 1236. 29. Samson’s Foxes 1:1 (January 1901): 2. A subscription list (A. J. Tomlinson, ledger, ACGP) apparently dates from this issue, as it lists subscribers in exactly ten states and Canada: Kalamazoo, Chelsae, and Charlton, Mich.; Lake City and Glidden, Ia.; Lebanon, Prairietown, Ashmore, Edwardsville, Morrison, and Greenville, Ill.; Etawanda and Whittier, Calif.; Morgantown, N.C.; Lancaster, Millersville, Lohrville, Cochronton, and Edinboro, Pa.; South Lima, N.Y.; Jersey City, N.J.; Springfield, Missouri; Grand Rapids, Prairie Depot, and Napoleon, Ohio; and Victoria Square, Gormley, Cold Stream, and Peterboro, Ontario, Canada. 30. Samson’s Foxes 1:4 (April 1901): 1. 31. Tomlinson, MDV1, entries for March 7, 8, 10, 25, and 27, 1901; Samson’s Foxes 1:4 (April 1901): 3. 32. Tomlinson, MDV1, June 12, 1901. “Bro. McGraw” may have been the same person who wrote a short article for Nelson (W. D. McGraw, “Why I Don’t Wear Neckties,” Pentecostal Herald [Indianapolis] [May 1, 1899]: 7). Tomlinson responded to the gift from Kansas with “A Letter of Thanks,” Evangelical Visitor (July 15, 1901): 277. See the summary of this period in Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 4.

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33. For listed activities in their respective order, see Samson’s Foxes (July 20, 1901): 2; Tomlinson, MDV1, June 29, July 20, and July 25, 1901. 34. Imprint of Tomlinson’s stationary letterhead and business card, respectively, ACGP. 35. George Watson, Soul Food (Cincinnati: Revivalist Office, 1896), 12. 36. Watson, Soul Food, 134, where he explains the “spirit of crucifixion.” 37. Charles Kingsley, “Discipline,” Samson’s Foxes 2:2 (February 1902): 1. 38. Watson, Soul Food, 136. 39. Tongues of Fire (December 1 and 15, 1900): 207. 40. For a good example of local but efficacious hardships, see R. S. Reed, who wrote: “At first the floods very near washed him away, his tent was covered a foot deep in water, then the lightning struck the house where he was sleeping and rattled things up; then he has had much opposition to holiness, and then the bed bugs has caused him to desert his bed a time or two and sit up in a chair all night, but he keeps faithful and buoyant” (“Indiana,” Way of Faith [August 19, 1896]: 5). 41. Testimony from “a preacher of the gospel,” Tongues of Fire (April 1, 1898): 49. 42. Witness the death of Sarah Brinkman, who contracted pneumonia after her parents, George and Clara Brinkman, took her on their rounds during a bitter Chicago winter. See Larry Martin, In the Beginning: Readings on the Origins of the Twentieth Century Pentecostal Revival and the Birth of the Pentecostal Church of God (Duncan, Okla.: Christian Life Books, 1994), 43. 43. Mattie Perry, “Our Responsibility—How Great,” Way of Faith (December 11, 1895): 2. Note that the challenge to put Christ before kindred comes just in time for the Christmas season. See also George Watson’s admonition: “We must not be fettered by our kindred, our loved ones, human society, or human authority; but surrender all for Jesus and holiness” (A Holiness Manual [Boston: Christian Witness, 1882], 24); and that of Frank Sandford: “No longer can [the Bride of Christ] love even father, mother, brothers or sisters more than God. . . . She must die to all natural affections . . . and even ‘hate’ the natural in her relatives or herself ” (Tongues of Fire [November 1, 1897]: 177). 44. See Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an AngloHispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 63–86. 45. A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 46. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 29, 1901. Note Tomlinson’s ongoing concern over the potential effect of a substandard diet on his children: “God must supply nourishment for their brains in a miraculous way, for we have had no diet for the brain nor nerves for some time” (MDV1, May 7, 1901). 47. Frank Sandford, Everlasting Gospel (March 17–30, 1901): 122. 48. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 10, 1901. 49. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 14, 1901. 50. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 24, 1901. 51. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 29, 1901. 52. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 7, 1901. 53. Tomlinson, MDV1, evening entry, May 1, 1901. 54. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 5, 1901. 55. Tomlinson, MDV1, March 9, 1901. 56. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 30, 1901.


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57. Holiness saints took this to be the proper meaning of Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” 58. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 9, 1901. See also where Tomlinson wrote: “We rec’d the witness that we had prevailed with God for the building money so we stepped over today and thanked God for it” (MDV1, April 30 and August 1, 1901). 59. Morrow, The Work of Faith through George Muller, 79 (diary entry for January 4, 1842). 60. See Tomlinson, MDV1, May 9, 18, and June 12, 1901. 61. Tomlinson, MDV1, June 12, 1901. 62. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 24, 1901. 63. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 24, 1901. For another example of this model of provision, see Everlasting Gospel (April 24–30, 1901): 153. 64. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 29, 1901. 65. Watson, Soul Food, 118–119. 66. For the importance within holiness of “a mystical theology based on the documents of ‘experience’ (biography and autobiography),” see Patricia A. Ward, “Madame Guyon and Experiential Theology in America,” Church History 67:3 (September 1998): 488. 67. Morrow, The Work of Faith through George Muller, 30 (diary entry from November 27, 1831). Morrow also records the following instance: “I said, ‘God will surely send help.’ The words had not passed my lips, when I perceived a letter lying on the table, brought whilst we were in prayer, containing ten pounds” (The Work of Faith through George Muller, 63 [November 28, 1838]). 68. For multiple entries, compare Tomlinson, MDV1, April 24, 1901, with Morrow, The Work of Faith through George Muller, 54 (September 2, 1838). Note Mueller’s reflections of that date: “The Lord has mercifully given enough to supply daily necessities; but He gives by the day now, and almost by the hour, as we need it.” Compare Tomlinson, MDV1, May 7, 1901, where provision comes “one meal at a time.” 69. Passages that imply a public readership include Mueller’s didactic asides, as when he lists the reasons why one should not “remain too long in Bed” (“1. Waste of time. . . . 2. An injury to the body. . . . 3. An injury to the soul”) and explains “how to set about rising early” (Morrow, The Work of Faith through George Muller, 70 [December 31, 1839]). For the public nature of Tomlinson’s diary, note his later tendency to quote directly from his diary in order to establish the facticity of historical events, as well as to render them more vivid (A. J. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, n.d. (ca. 1913)], 14–15). 70. Paul John Eakin, in Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin and trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xxiii. For autobiography as apology or privileged testimony, and on the role of selection and censorship in autobiography, see Georges May, L’autobiographie, 2d ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1984), 41–44, 213–214. 71. Tomlinson, MDV1, June 13, 1901. 72. Tomlinson, MDV1, June 29, 1901. Tomlinson does not mention the last name of the child and refers to the parents only as “the dear young parents” (MDV1, July 12, 1901). 73. Tomlinson, MDV1, June 30, 1901. 74. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 9, 1901. 75. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 10, 1901. 76. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 12, 1901. 77. Everlasting Gospel (January 29–February 2, 1901): 51.

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notes to pags 142–147

78. Madame Guyon, reprinted in Live Coals of Fire 1:3 (October 20, 1899): 3. 79. Frank Sandford, “The Destruction of Ai,” Everlasting Gospel (January 23–29, 1901): 41–43. The article appeared as part of a series called The Art of War. The context for Sandford was a smallpox epidemic at Shiloh, which he interpreted to be “judgment blows beginning at the ‘house of God.’ ” When one member fell gravely ill, Sandford received the prophetic message, “Dead. He said he would hearken unto thee and he hearkened not” (Everlasting Gospel [January 8, 1901]: 19). Of course, the story of Ai was a common holiness theme. For an example closer to Culberson, see R. G. Spurling: “I fear there is like old Achan / . . . They may cause defeat at Ai, / And make the Church of God ashamed; / But we’ll search the camp and cleanse it, / Then victory will come again” (The Lost Link [1896], reprint [Turtletown, Tenn.: 1920], 51). 80. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 10, 1901. 81. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 13, 1901. 82. The Revivalist (July 8, 1901). 83. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 13, 1901. 84. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 25, 1901. The opening lines of Psalms 22 (quoted by Christ on the cross) read, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

chapter 11 1. Such a message, of course, could greatly appeal to a community’s disaffected members. 2. Newspaper article (title missing, n.d.), inserted in a volume of The Earnest Christian, (1896), Archives of Free Methodist Church, Indianapolis. 3. W. E. Stevenson, “A Murderous Assault on Evangelist B. H. Irwin,” Way of Faith (August 12, 1896): 1. Compare W. F. Bryant, who was accosted by a mob that included “one Methodist minister, one deacon of the Baptist church, one deputy sheriff, two moonshiners and two local preachers of the Baptist church” (“The History of Pentecost,” The Faithful Standard 1:6 [September 1922]: 6). 4. Frank Sandford, Tongues of Fire (December 1 and 15, 1900): 201; Frank Sandford, Everlasting Gospel (January 1, 1901): 8. 5. Sandford, Tongues of Fire (December 1 and 15, 1900): 201–206. 6. Sandford, Everlasting Gospel (January 1, 1901): 8. 7. Homer Tomlinson, “The Fanatic,” The Faithful Standard 2:2 (October 1923): 20–22. 8. Tomlinson met the Bryant family during one of his early colportage trips to the area: “The first time Tomlinson came through there, he was traveling and selling bibles. My boys bought a testament from him. They asked him to come to Dad’s and spend the night” (Nettie Bryant, interview by E. L. Chesser, 1949, Church File, HBD). Bryant’s sons, as previously noted, were among Tomlinson’s first students: I have identified two in the 1900 census; James Beaty (“Time-Line for Early Life of Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson,” TMs, HBD) identifies three. Bryant himself performed hired labor for Tomlinson in winter 1902 (Tomlinson, ledger records, 1902, ACGP). 9. Among the key local leaders were William Martin, Joe Tipton, Milton McNabb (Bryant’s cousin), and Billy Hamby. See W. F. Bryant and M. S. Lemons, interview by E. L. Chesser, 1949, Church File, HBD, 2. Bryant and others held meetings in their homes “until Brother R. G. Spurling came in on Coker Creek” and “started a meeting.” The Fire-Baptized Ruling Elder for Tennessee during much of this time, also active among Tomlinson’s allies, was Frank Porter (Live Coals of Fire 1:3 [October


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20, 1899]: 8). Evangelist M. S. Lemons also had ties to both the Bryant–Spurling circles and the fire-baptized movement (Live Coals of Fire [February 23, 1900]). For a more detailed history of Beniah, see Harold Hunter, “Beniah, TN: A Case of the Vanishing Flame” (paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Toronto, Ontario). On the fire-baptized connection, see Wade Phillips, “W. F. Bryant: From Bootlegger to Holiness Leader,” Church of God History and Heritage (Summer–Fall 2002): 13n18. 10. See Minutes of the Pleasant Hill United Baptist Church of Christ, August 11 and September 9, 1900, ACGP, where David Hamby is “disfellowshiped” for “harboring and allowing this modern theory of sanctification taught in his house.” See also Nettie Bryant, transcript, 3–4, where the Bryants are disfellowshiped on the same grounds. On the mountain conflict over sanctification, and the possible contributing role of Unionist sentiments, see Wade Phillips, “Baptist Rejection of Holiness Revives the Church of God,” Church of God History and Heritage (Summer/Fall 2002): 1–2, 8–11. 11. Bryant and Lemons, interview by Chesser, 16. According to Bryant’s account of the events (quoted in “History of Pentecost,” The Faithful Standard 1:6 [September 1922]: 5–6, 20–21), Tomlinson and Lemons were present at the time. Homer Tomlinson (The Shout of a King [Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God (Queens), 1968], 11) claimed to have been there as well. Retaliation, of course, was not the ideal; for most radical saints, the greatest victory was to be won by peacefully enduring such abuse; see Stevenson (“A Murderous Assault on Evangelist B. H. Irwin”), who boasts that “not a single blow was given by the saints of God.” 12. Tomlinson, “The Fanatic,” 20. Ballew and McCallister may be the actual names of the persons on whom the characters were based. A Ballew family was involved in the Culberson mission by 1901, and a John Ballew (as seen below) was a business partner and loyal supporter of Tomlinson in 1902 (Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1, May 12 and December 30, 1901, and January 22, 1902). Receipts from 1902 show purchases from a McCallister (receipt for “R. R. Mcallister,” September 3, 1902, ACGP). Homer Tomlinson (The Great Vision of the Church of God [Queens, N.Y.: Tomlinson, 1939], 5) claimed that McCallister later befriended A. J. 13. Tomlinson, “The Fanatic,” 19–20. 14. On class tensions and religious diversity in the South, see David Edwin Harrell Jr., “Religious Pluralism: Catholics, Jews, and Sectarians,” in Religion in the South, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 59–82; David Edwin Harrell Jr., White Sects and Black Men in the Recent South (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971); and David Edwin Harrell Jr., “The Evolution of Plain Folk Religion in the South, 1835–1920,” in Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Sam Hill (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 15. For evangelicalism and Southern manhood, see Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 16. Catherine Albanese, America: Religion and Religions (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1981), 228. 17. For general discussions of the Lost Cause South, see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1980); and Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). On Northern and Southern concepts of social and moral order, see Elizabeth FoxGenovese and Eugene Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of the Social Order: Religious

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Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55:2 (Summer 1987): 212–213. This is not to suggest that radical holiness required Southerners to give up their Southern identity. Rather, it located Southern identity within a context of universal ambitions. In that sense, holiness, like other movements in the New South, offered a means to restore Southern self-esteem by refiguring it. 18. For examples of persecutions, including the burning of churches and the brutal beating administered to one “Brother Burris,” see M. S. Lemons, “History of the Church of God,” TMs, 1937, HBD, 11, 13. 19. See David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 20. U.S. Census Records, 1900. 21. Mary Fram Selby, “Immortality,” Samson’s Foxes 1:4 (April 1901): 4. 22. J. B. Mitchell, “The Mountaineer,” The Mountain Missionary 1:1 (August 1902): 1. 23. Christopher Waldrep, “The Making of a Border State Society: James McGready, the Great Revival, and the Prosecution of Profanity in Kentucky,” American Historical Review 99:3 (June 1994): 767. Note also Waldrep’s treatment of rhetoric as a “contest for meanings” in the struggle to define “virtue, honor, and even manhood.” 24. Mary Fram Selby, “The Great Combine,” Samson’s Foxes 1:7 (July 20, 1901): 1. 25. A. J. Tomlinson, “Extracts from a Report of Mission School Work among Poor Whites of the South,” Samson’s Foxes 1:7 (July 20, 1901): 4. 26. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 13, 1901. The worker was identified as “Brother McGraw.” 27. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 15, 1901. 28. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 18, 1901. 29. Tomlinson, “The Fanatic,” 22–23. 30. Tomlinson wrote, “The two pistol incident just related is almost the exact words of an incident that happened to the writer’s knowledge” (“The Fanatic,” 23). 31. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 19, 1901. 32. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 19, 1901. 33. Everlasting Gospel (June 1–30, 1901): 184–185. 34. Everlasting Gospel (June 1–30, 1901): 201–202. 35. See Tomlinson, MDV1, August 22 and 25, 1901, where Tomlinson also mentions the “holiness bible woman Mary Ault” in Waynesville. 36. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 22, 25, and 27, 1901. According to Homer (The Shout of a King, 13), one of the missionaries, J. H. Withrow, was struck in the head by a stone hurled through his window, suffering injuries from which he eventually died. The claim is difficult to assess: six years later Withrow was alive and healthy enough to assist Tomlinson in a revival at Cleveland, Tenn. However, he left the meetings after a week, apparently for health-related reasons. See Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV2, July 3 and 9, 1907. The Tomlinsons may have believed that Withrow’s feeble health traced to the injury suffered years before in Culberson. 37. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 29, 1901. 38. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 3, 1901. 39. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 4, 1901. This was almost certainly Jacob Robbins, brother of Isaac Robbins, the husband of A. J.’s sister Keziah (see Tomlinson, MDV1, September 8, 1901). A. J., by the time he arrived, had gone without food for more than a day.


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40. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 5, 1901. 41. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 5, 1901. 42. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 11, 1901. 43. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 14, 1901. The entry is notable for its brevity and for its complete lack of political commentary. Another entry suggests Tomlinson’s frame of mind: Despite receiving news of good progress at Culberson, he struggled to keep his “head above the waves of fear, impatience and discouragement” (MDV1, September 17, 1901). 44. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 22, 1901. 45. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 28, 1901. 46. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 1, 1901. On the October 1, 1901, baptism service, see Shirley Nelson, Fair, Clear, and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine (Latham, N.Y.: British American Publishing, 1989), 162. 47. Frank Sandford, “Authoritative Baptism,” Everlasting Gospel (September 21– October 21, 1901): 273–276. On Shiloh as the capstone of cumulative restoration, see Frank Sandford, Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897): 91. After the Constantinian apostasy, “the best thing God could do was to bring back the truths which had been lost, one by one,” with various reformers restoring their respective individual truths in preparation for “His last movement which was to take the whole truth as revealed in the Scriptures.” The reference to Elijah foreshadowed a forthcoming revelation, noted below. 48. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 5, 1901. 49. See Tomlinson, MDV1, October 9, 12, 18, and 19, 1901; and Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 4. 50. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 20, 21, and 27, 1901. 51. Tomlinson, MDV1, November 3, 1901. 52. Tomlinson, MDV1, November 16, 1901.

chapter 12 1. Homer Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God (Queens: Tomlinson, 1939), 6. An indication of the hardship of that interval may be seen in the degree to which it expanded over time. By 1939, the three long months had become a full year: A. J. had “walked out of the community to be gone a year.” Other alterations had also appeared. New York had replaced Shiloh as the destination of Tomlinson’s pilgrimage, and in the place of Frank Sandford, Steven Merritt had been given the honor of administering A. J.’s baptism. 2. N. H. Harriman, “Divine Order,” Tongues of Fire (August 15, 1900): 146. See also Frank Sandford: “WE MUST HAVE A LEADER, AND WE MUST HAVE THE LEADER GOD SELECTS” (Tongues of Fire [December 1 and 15, 1900]: 199). The lives of Moses and Joshua, Sandford added, illustrate that rebellion is “fearfully punished” (Tongues of Fire [December 1 and 15, 1900]: 205). 3. Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1, December 4, 1901. 4. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 11, 1901. 5. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 12, 1901. 6. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 14, 1901. 7. See Covenant Card, dated May 12, 1901, ACGP, in which the signatory (in this case Tomlinson) confessed to “the sin of doubting, that has led me to discouragement,” and made a solemn pledge “not to WILLINGLY yield to discouragement” again.

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8. See note to J. M. Tomlinson, on the stationary of “H. A. Tomlinson & Co, Archdale, NC,” dated September 20, 1901, ACGP. The receipt is marked as “paid in full” on May 1, 1902. Within two weeks of his struggle with despair, A. J. apparently borrowed again; see note to Nellie A. [Inman?], of Noblesville, Ind., dated December 24, 1901, ACGP. The note is marked “paid” on December 20, 1902. 9. Frank Sandford, Everlasting Gospel (December 13–January 1, 1902): 312. It is not entirely clear when Tomlinson (or the faithful at Shiloh) first got wind of the revelation, although it had been foreshadowed thickly enough for the wise to discern it well in advance of any official pronouncement. For Dowie’s proclamation, see Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth Century Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 57–58. Dowie first introduced the idea on January 21, 1900, but did not formally announce it until June 2, 1900. 10. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 30, 1901. Ballew, of course, may have had deep faith and genuine affection for Tomlinson, but, as seen below, he also had a financial stake in the relationship. 11. On January 4, 1902, Tomlinson purchased two lots totaling seventy-five acres from John Ballew and his wife, M. A. Ballew, for $500, cash payment (Deed Records, Cherokee County Courthouse, Murphy, N.C.). The deed was registered August 1, 1902. See also Tomlinson, MDV1, January 22, 1902, where he notes the purchase. Homer Tomlinson (The Shout of a King [Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God (Queens), 1968], 12) indicates that A. J. purchased the property with funds from his inheritance. 12. Tomlinson, MDV1, January 26, 1902; J. W. Bell, “A Mountain Bible Trip,” Samson’s Foxes 2:6 (June 1902): 1. The same issue announces “The Harvest Home Camp Meeting” of Thomas Nelson and his Pentecost Bands, slated for July 19 at Lafayette, Ind. 13. Tomlinson, MDV1, February 18, 1902; Samson’s Foxes 2:6 (June 1902). 14. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 27, 1902. 15. See Samson’s Foxes 2:2 (February 1902): 2, 4, where the same short article is printed twice. See also Samson’s Foxes 2:5 (May 1902) and 2:6 (June 1902), in which the bulk of the original material seems to have been contributed by “J. W. Bell, colporteur.” 16. Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 4. 17. Samson’s Foxes 2:6 (June 1902). 18. A. J. Tomlinson, “Account of Mission Work in N. C.,” Evangelical Visitor (July 1, 1902): 255. Appended to Tomlinson’s article was Abbie Cress’s “A Plea for Culberson, N.C.,” in which she refers to the orphanage and Tomlinson’s plans for a selfsupporting “industrial school.” 19. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 27, 1902. 20. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 27, August 4 and 11, 1902. Tomlinson (MDV1, August 18, 1902) still had seven men employed as of mid-August. An undated list of hired workers in Tomlinson’s ledger (Horace Turner, Carl Hyatt, Alonzo Culberson, Treno Culberson, Harvey Anderson, Joe Tig., Pat Hickey, Isaac Bruce, John Collins, Allen Dean, Arthur Collins) may relate to this project. 21. The metaphor is from Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1971). 22. J. B. Mitchell wrote, “I have moved . . . from Culberson, N.C. . . . to Waynesville, N.C., which will be my perminant headquarters” (“Notice,” The Mountain Missionary 1:1 [August 1902]: 3). Waynesville is the town near Asheville where Tomlinson had taken refuge the summer before.


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23. See Evangelical Visitor (December 1, 1901): 457, where Tomlinson is the “leading minister and superintendent of the J. B. Mitchell work.” 24. See J. B. Mitchell, “The Mountain Children,” Evangelical Visitor (August 15, 1902): 325; and J. B. Mitchell, “From North Carolina Mountains,” The Revivalist (August 21, 1902): 11. 25. The Mountain Missionary 1:1 (August 1902): 2, 4. 26. See Tomlinson, MDV1, September 11–12 and 18, 1902. 27. The issue can be no earlier than August, for it reprinted Abbie Cress’s endorsement from the July Evangelical Visitor. October is suggested by a post office receipt for postage on nine pounds of Samson’s Foxes, dated October 15, 1902. 28. Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 4. 29. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 10, 1903. 30. A. J. “had promised to take his family back to the Indiana home for a year at the end of three years of service in those mountains” (Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God, 5). 31. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 24, 1901. Note that holiness vegetarianism, though reinforced by dietary arguments, was based primarily on moral grounds. 32. See Tomlinson, MDV1, July 25 and 29, 1901. 33. Adam Gopnik, “America’s Coach,” The New Yorker (September 20, 1999): 129, of Vince Lombardi. Gopnik adds, “This is a good way to run a Church, or a football team.” 34. A. J. Tomlinson, “How to Send Money,” Samson’s Foxes (n.d. [ca. October 1902]): 7–8. 35. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 10, 1903. On these points, Homer’s account comports well with A. J.’s, adding what would naturally have left a greater impression on him than on his father: attendance at the Elwood school. See Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God, 5. 36. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 10, 1903. 37. A. J. and his sister, Ella Kivett, sold a total of eighty acres to Andrew Hinshaw on March 3, 1903, in exchange for $5,080. Only twenty-four acres belonged to A. J., but assuming a rough equivalency in the value of the acreage, his share would have been $1,524. For real estate transactions, see Deed Records, Hamilton County Courthouse, Noblesville, Ind.; and Joe Roberts, TLS to Roger Robins, May 25, 1994. For checking account, see checkbook ledger, ACGP. As late as 1912, $625 equaled the average annual income of a wage laborer (James Roark, Michael Johnson, Patricia Cohen, Sarah Stage, Alan Lawson, and Susan Hartman, The American Promise: A History of the United States from 1865, vol. 2 [Boston: Bedford Books, 1998], 856). 38. The Daily Record (January 19, 1903). The local holiness community also made news when delinquents opened fire on the Holiness Christian Church (Elwood Free Press [April 3, 1903]). 39. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 10, 1903. On Watson’s status in radical holiness, see B. H. Irwin, who wrote: “I believe Dr. Watson to be the ablest and most profound writer on the inner life that lives today” (“Dr. Watson’s Articles,” Way of Faith [July 22, 1896]: 1). The fact that Tomlinson mentions Watson by name and that he reflects directly on the themes presented by Watson seems especially significant in light of the dearth of similar references elsewhere in Tomlinson’s writings. For example, more striking than what Tomlinson published in Samson’s Foxes is what he omitted, namely, any explicit reference to Frank Sandford (let alone Seth Rees or M. W. Knapp). J. B. Mitchell fared little better. Thomas Nelson merited a single ad for his

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camp meeting. In Tomlinson’s diary, authority figures and mentors are likewise virtually absent. Sandford is mentioned by name once, at the 1901 baptism. 40. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 10, 1903. 41. George Watson, Soul Food, (Cincinnati: Revivalist Office, 1896), 132. On divine union, see also John Pike, “Be True,” Way of Faith (January 15, 1896): 4, where the goal of the sanctified life is “a mysterious, perfect oneness with Jesus which is inexplicable.” For the deep imprint of British and continental mysticism on holiness piety, see Patricia Ward, “Madame Guyon and Experiential Theology in America,” Church History 67:3 (September 1998): 484–498. Holiness papers and evangelists often recommended—or reprinted—spiritual readings that reinforced the mystical impulse, including works by Madame Guyon, Fenelon, Faber, Thomas a’Kempis, and John Fletcher (note Fletcher’s “On Evangelical Mysticism,” The Works of the Rev. John Fletcher, vol. 4 (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1883), 7–13). For examples, see E. G. Murrah, “How to Retain the Blessing of Entire Sanctification,” Way of Faith (January 15, 1896): 6; George Watson, “The Dominant Soul Quality,” Way of Faith (July 29, 1896): 1; book list, Pentecostal Herald (Indianapolis) (June 15, 1898); and The Revivalist (June 29, 1899): 12 (which advertises Abbie Morrow’s twenty-cent edition of the autobiography of Madame Guyon). For an example of reprinted works, see Madam Guyon, who noted: “The proper condition for the forming of Christ within us is nothingness; the deeper is this . . . the greater is the fullness of the Word within us” (Mary’s Song, Triumphs of Faith 26:12 [December 1906]: 258). 42. George Watson, “Sorrow for Sin,” Way of Faith (November 27, 1895): 1; George Watson, A Holiness Manual (Boston: Christian Witness, 1882), 48. 43. George Watson, “Loquacity,” Way of Faith (January 15, 1896): 2. 44. George Watson, Way of Faith (November 6, 1895): 2. S. Olin Garrison also understood holiness to be “at war with exclusiveness of doctrinal statement.” Because of the distinction between self and the definition of self, truth and the definition of truth, even “the most devout minds” were often unable to agree “upon the terminology . . . of deeper religious experiences” (S. Olin Garrison, ed., Forty Witnesses [Philadelphia, 1888], 5–6). This spiritual individualism helps explain how an ethically rigorous movement could so readily appropriate popular notions of “conscience” that left room for different ethical standards. Right and wrong were right and wrong, but ultimately one had to obey one’s own conscience. 45. Watson, “The Dominant Soul Quality,” 1. 46. George Watson, “The Divine Pull,” Way of Faith (July 8, 1896): 1. Spiritual eroticism would have been especially important for a movement that repressed physical eroticism as ruthlessly as did American holiness. 47. George Watson, “A Sample of Christ’s Coming,” Way of Faith (August 12, 1896): 3. Though a minor strain in holiness, mystical-erotic piety would survive for generations in parts of the pentecostal movement. Sublimated eroticism is quite pronounced, for example, in the early-twentieth-century narrative of William BoothClibborn (“The Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” reprinted in Assemblies of God Heritage 11: 1 [Spring 1991]: 8–10, 17–19). Booth-Clibborn’s journey to Pentecost began with a conversation in a park, where a young pentecostal friend struggled to convey the experience of Spirit baptism: “ ‘Oh! it’s wonderful. . . . ’ His lips would quiver, and closing his eyes, he seemed momentarily lost in praise and adoration.” Booth-Clibborn “loved him and plied him with questions,” but his friend would only reply, “Wait till you receive!” The two young men shared “a blessed time . . . on that bench in the park. He turned the pages [of his Bible] so devotedly as if it were a great treasure he had there on his lap. Something hurt deep within me.” When at last Booth-Clibborn


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received the experience: “The blessed baptizer in the Holy Spirit laid His hand over and over again upon me. Each time the power of God streamed through my body it left me gasping for breath. . . . My whole frame began to lightly tremble in response. The incoming energy was so strong . . . as to chase the natural breath from me. And ˆ me! Mon yet I panted and cried for more. . . . ‘Mon Sauveur! Le Bijou de Mon A Adore´! [My savior! Jewel of my Soul! One I Adore!]’ . . . Every ejaculation, each recitation was gratifying, satisfying and sufficient! . . . My Lord had become my Lover!” (“The Baptism in the Holy Spirit”), 18–19. 48. George Watson, “The Forms of Divine Life,” Way of Faith (December 4, 1895): 2. This was a recurrent theme in Watson’s writings and presumably contributed to his immense popularity within the movement.

chapter 13 1. Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, MDV1, May 27, 1903. 2. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 27, 1903. See also checkbook receipt, to Mrs. M. W. Knapp for songbooks, December 10, 1903, ACGP. For Tomlinson at God’s Bible School, see Homer Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God (Queens Village, N.Y.: Tomlinson, 1939), 3. The date at least is wrong: Homer has him there in 1899, prior to its founding. 3. M. S. Lemons (“History of the Church of God,” TMs, 1937, HBD, 7) confirms that the church was organized by Richard Spurling and R. F. Porter at the home of W. F. Bryant. The date was May 15, 1902; see E. L. Simmons, History of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: Church of God Publishing House, 1938), 12. Both Porter and Lemons had previous affiliation with Irwin’s Fire-Baptized Holiness Association. A. J. had known Lemons, a schoolteacher and minister, for some time and had preached in his schoolhouse; see W. F. Bryant and M. S. Lemons, transcript of oral interview, n.d., HBD, 15. Lemons’s recollection suggests a church that conformed to the Southern religious disposition described in Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s “The Religious Ideals of Southern Slave Society” (Georgia Historical Quarterly 50:1 [Spring 1986]: 15): it tolerated diversity in esoteric matters of doctrine but demanded consensus on morals and social duty. 4. Bryant, interview, 3; A. J. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God (Cleveland, Tenn., [1913]), 17. On holiness pastoralism, which frequently led Tomlinson out-ofdoors, compare Nathan Frame and Esther Frame, who left “the restless throng in the busy marts” to pray in “the woodland sanctuary, not builded with hands . . . ‘God’s first Temples’ ” (Reminiscences of Nathan T. Frame and Esther G. Frame [Frame and Frame, 1907], 346). My description of the “rise and shine” epiphany depends on Lillie Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964), 666–675. For Tomlinson’s fully developed restoration myth, see Avery D. Evans, ed., A. J. Tomlinson: God’s Anointed—Prophet of Wisdom: Choice Writings of A. J. Tomlinson in Times of His Greatest Anointings (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1943), 7–11. 5. Tomlinson, MDV1, June 13, 1903. The origins of the commemoration of June 13 as an epiphanous event are difficult to determine. Tomlinson (Answering the Call of God), does not mention the mountain prayer scene, only a period of interrogation after which he was satisfied and joined the church. However, Bryant (interview, 4) later recalled that Tomlinson climbed the hill to pray and returned “just a laughing and wanted to shake hands with me. He said, ‘I am satisfied.’ I said, ‘About what?’ He said, ‘the church is right.’ ”

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6. Bryant, interview, 5, 8. 7. Quoted in Philip Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth Century Utopia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 172. The best analysis of this primitivist assumption is in Grant Wacker, “Marching to Zion: Religion in a Modern Utopian Community,” Church History 54 (December 1985): 502–503; and Grant Wacker, “Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism,” in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 207. Daniel Sommer (Hydrophobia [Indianapolis: Sommer, 1895], 61) also taught that restoration included “primitive church government” as well as primitive church doctrine. 8. David Edwin Harrell Jr. discusses the parallel resurgence of these two movements in “The Evolution of Plain Folk Religion in the South, 1835–1920,” in Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Sam Hill (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 34–36. 9. On Spurling’s background and subsequent career, see Wade H. Phillips, “Richard Spurling and the Baptist Roots of the Church of God” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Guadalajara, November 11– 13, 1993). For Spurling’s priority in the original movement, see also A. J. Tomlinson, “The Life of Rev. R. G. Spurling,” TMs, n.d. [1935] 7, ACGP, where A. J. vows to “continue the great work started by our Brother Spurling and his father.” 10. Richard Spurling espoused each of these restorationist themes: “The New Testament is the only infallible rule of faith and practice” and “contains all things necessary for salvation and church government”; the fall of the church came when it issued its first creed; all Christians possess “equal rights and privileges to . . . understand and practice God’s Word as they see it”; primitive churches were marked by “independence and equality” and “united only by the ties of faith and charity”; the only basis for Christian unity is “the law of love” (The Lost Link [1896], reprint [Turtletown, Tenn., 1920], 45, 23, 11, 35, 10–12). Spurling acknowledges his debt to the Disciples of Christ movement by including Campbell among the great heroes of church history, along with Luther, Wesley, Calvin, Wycliffe, and Hus (The Lost Link, 17). 11. Richard G. Spurling, “The Church,” The Way [1904]. 12. Porter was Tennessee Ruling Elder in 1899, the year Tomlinson arrived in North Carolina, but was replaced by Daniel Awrey; see Live Coals of Fire (January 12, 1900): 8. Bryant (interview, 14) notes that Porter was a Methodist preacher. 13. R. F. Porter, The Revivalist (August 6, 1903): 11. The following year Luskville was added as one of Tomlinson’s appointments; see The Way 1:6 (June 1904): 2. 14. The Fire-Baptized Holiness Church ordained three levels of ministry: General Overseer, Ruling Elder, and Evangelist. See Live Coals of Fire 1:3 (October 20, 1899): 8. Bryant would seem to fit somewhere between Porter and Spurling. Though of Baptist roots, he experienced entire sanctification in a holiness revival led by a Methodist preacher. Deeply influenced by the fire-baptized movement (which several of his relatives had joined), Bryant seems to have been more preoccupied by apostolic experience than by apostolic ecclesiology. See Bryant, interview, 2; and Nettie Bryant, transcript of oral interview, HBD, 3–4. Harold Hunter (“Beniah, TN: A Case of the Vanishing Flame” [paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Toronto, Ontario] locates at least two of Bryant’s relatives at the firebaptized mission in Beniah, Tenn. 15. Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 17. 16. Indiana Friends had, however, engaged in fierce ecclesiological debate during Tomlinson’s years of membership, as an increasingly important conference, the Five-


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Year Meeting, posed the specter of encroaching hierarchy. Most holiness Quakers seem to have rallied to the defense of the monthly meeting and the traditional congregationalist style. Tomlinson’s personal papers include Lewis I. Hadley, “The Constitutional Error: Unscripturalness and Un-Quakerliness of the Five Years Meeting,” pamphlet, reprinted from The Gospel Minister (n.d.). Fiercely congregational, it denounces the Five-Year Meeting as a heretical departure from the primitive “theocracy” of traditional Quaker practice. 17. Thomas Nelson, “Primitive Church Polity,” Pentecostal Herald (November 15, 1897): 2. 18. Seth Rees, “Independent Holiness Churches,” The Revivalist (October 4, 1900): 2. He criticizes churches that ape the “craze of this age . . . for great organizations . . . with centralization of government.” 19. Frank Sandford, “Art of the Christian Soldier,” 142–143, quoted in Wade Phillips, “The Corrupted Seed” (M.A. thesis, Church of God School of Theology, 1990), 101. 20. On the group’s perceptual unity and actual diversity, see also Phillips, “The Corrupted Seed,” 140. 21. On the same view of biblical authority in Pentecostalism, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostalism and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 70–76. 22. Minutes of the 1906 General Assembly, in General Assembly Minutes, 1906– 1914: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1992), 9. Simmons preserves a more elaborate statement: “We hope and trust that no person or body . . . will ever use these minutes . . . as articles of faith upon which to establish a sect or denomination. . . . Our articles of faith are . . . written in the new Testament which is our only rule of faith and practice” (History of the Church of God, 16). The structure of American civil government, of course, underlies this definition of the General Assembly’s powers. 23. Minutes of the 1908 General Assembly, General Assembly Minutes, 54–55. 24. Minutes of the 1908 General Assembly, General Assembly Minutes, 51. 25. Spurling, The Lost Link, 34. 26. Wacker, “Playing for Keeps,” 198. 27. Hulda Rees, excerpt from an 1892 sermon, in Byron J. Rees, Hulda A. Rees: The Pentecostal Prophetess (Philadelphia: Christian Standard, 1898), 77–78. 28. See “Surrender and Quit claim” forms, June 16, 1903, ACGP, where J. A. Jordan, of Ranger, N.C., transfers guardianship of two children (Johnie Miles and illegible) to Mount Zion Mission Home at Culberson, N.C. The form reveals the authoritarian cast of nineteenth-century orphanages: the former guardian promises “to have no more communication with them except through the General Manager or his agents” and not to “interfere with any arrangements that may be made by the said home for their welfare.” Briggs is mentioned in Tomlinson, MDV1, December 9, 1903. 29. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 14, 1903. His diary is replete with such entries: “Traveled about 160 miles, held 12 meetings, preached 9 sermons, gave several scriptural lessons” (Tomlinson, MDV1, March 8, 1904). 30. Tomlinson began to circle references to sermons on June 18, 1906; report is from Tomlinson, MDV1, December 31, 1906. 31. On the link between his new vocation and his level of spiritual assurance, see Tomlinson, MDV1, February 19, 1904, where he wrote: “The R.R. has granted me a clergy permit for all this year. I am sure I belong to Jesus. I love Him.”

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32. For Union Grove, Luskville, and Camp Creek, see Tomlinson, MDV1, December 9, 1903, where he also mentioned that he was editing and printing The Way. The Way (1:6 [June 1904]: 2) lists Tomlinson’s appointments as Luskville, Tenn.; Camp Creek, N.C.; Fannin Co., Ga.; Ballknob, Ga.; Union Grove, Tenn.; and Drygo, Tenn. 33. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 5, 1904. 34. Compiled from Tomlinson, MDV1, 1904–1905. Tomlinson conducted his first recorded wedding ceremony—for James Murphy and Margaret Shearer—in December 1903; see Tomlinson, MDV1, December 9, 1903; marriage certificate, ACGP. 35. Tomlinson, MDV1, February 12, 1906. 36. The term is borrowed from Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 37. Tomlinson’s first home in Cleveland, so the legend goes, came cheap because it was reputed to be haunted (perfect for a holiness general short on cash but itching to take the devil head-on). See Tomlinson, MDV1, November 8 and 26, 1904; Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 36; Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God, 7. 38. Tomlinson, MDV1, November 8, 1904. 39. Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God, 7. 40. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 15–16, 1904. 41. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 8, 1904 (entry includes information from as late as December 13). 42. Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson, Manuscript Diary, vol. 2, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (MDV2) July 2, 1907; note also Tomlinson, MDV1, January 6, 1906, where he wrote: “Visited some of the very poorest of homes in the Mts. Saw the effects of the work of the Spirit. . . . Shouting, leaping, clapping the hands, jerking and hand shaking.” 43. Tomlinson, MDV2, October 25, 1907. 44. Solicitation letters from Cleveland include A. J. Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” The Missionary World (April 1906): 2 and Evangelical Visitor 20:5 (March 1, 1906): 15, where he claims to have “eight preaching places among the poor”; A. J. Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” TMs, January 1, 1907, ACGP, where he notes four new congregations, seven revival meetings, and 100 conversions; and A. J. Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” TMs, December 31, 1907, ACGP, where he lists two new church buildings, one new congregation, two Sunday schools, and 245 conversions, in addition to the mission school at Culberson. The letters were not particularly successful, judging by available records; only $100 was donated in 1903 (see A. J. Tomlinson, ledger, ACGP). 45. As late as 1907, the school at Culberson operated with Mrs. Briggs instructing thirty-three pupils (Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” December 31, 1907, 1). Tomlinson paid tax on the property as late as February 17, 1906 (tax records, Cherokee County Courthouse, Murphy, N.C.). For revivals at Culberson, see Tomlinson, MDV1, December 15, 1905, where Tomlinson and “sister McCanless” held meetings at the local Baptist church. 46. Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” December 31, 1907. Despite acknowledging “new fields,” he continued to play on his mission work among the destitute poor: “When I was among Christian influence and refinement in my native ‘Hoosier’ state, I never thought of such a state of depravity . . . anywhere in our beloved ‘Christian America’ as I have seen since the beginning of my travels and labors in these mountains ten years ago” (“Missionary Evangelism,” December 31, 1907). On the other hand, as late as 1908 J. B. Mitchell still claimed Tomlinson as his


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“helper” (“Mission Work in the Mountains,” Evangelical Visitor [February 1, 1908]: 4–5). 47. For the growth of the Cleveland mission, see Tomlinson, MDV1, February 15, 1906, where it moved into new quarters on Middle St.; and Tomlinson, MDV2, September 29, 1907, where it dedicated a new church building. 48. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 28, 1906. 49. For the first four years, he also served as assembly clerk (General Assembly Minutes,). If the assembly at Harriman, Tenn., in 1917 is excepted, Tomlinson hosted and moderated the General Assembly for the next sixteen years. 50. Tomlinson (MDV1, August 4, 1904) began to ordain deacons shortly after joining the church. See Tomlinson, MDV1, April 15, 1905, where he appointed a “Bro. Stewart” to supervise the printing office in his absence; Tomlinson, MDV1, June 2, 1905, where he allowed “Bro. McCanless” to handle a tent meeting; Tomlinson, MDV1, May 28, 1906, where he appointed Mrs. McCanless to preach at Cleveland while he conducted a funeral; and Tomlinson, MDV1, June 6, 1906, where he sent his wife and Mrs. McCanless to visit families in Drygo. 51. Tomlinson, MDV1, March 20, 1906, and December 9, 1903; Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” December 31, 1907. 52. Bryant, interview, 9. 53. See assembly programs, ACGP. 54. Tomlinson, MDV1, April 20, 1906. See also Halcy Olive Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy [ed. C. T. Davidson?] (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1974), 27 (entry for December 1, 1906); and Tomlinson, MDV1, December 7, 1906. 55. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 29, 1901. 56. Tomlinson, MDV2, June 22, 1908. See also Tomlinson, MDV2, June 6, 1908, where he wrote: “I was called to Charleston May 21, to preach funeral of Bro. Lemons’s little baby boy 3 years old, Seth R.” 57. In 1910 A. J. appointed a committee to visit former members who had left the church; in 1913 he arranged for every church member to be visited and examined (Book of Minutes, North Cleveland Church of God, January 8, 1910, and April 13, 1913, HBD). 58. Buford Johnson, “Twentieth Century Moses,” TMs, rev. ed., 1960, HBD, 19, where he also pondered how to handle “preachers that wound and bruise and drive away”; Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 774. The examples are later but reflect the changes that occurred in Tomlinson’s pastoral style during this period. 59. This preoccupation formed one-half of a paradox. On the one hand, radical holiness practiced an austere renunciation of the body, as seen in rigorous fasting, sexual suppression, and the subjugation of the body to spiritual demands like midnight prayers and midwinter evangelism. On the other hand, it elevated the status of the body by placing heightened emphasis on bodily health as an indicator of spiritual condition. Even ascetics could not escape “the timeless bond between physical infirmity and religious anxiety on the one hand and between physical health and religious assurance on the other” (Wacker, “Marching to Zion,” 501). 60. General Assembly Minutes, 37. 61. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 14, 1906; Tomlinson, MDV2, February 18, 1907. 62. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 25, 1905. 63. Tomlinson, MDV1, May 25, 1906. For another example of a sick person whose disposition determined his fate, see Tomlinson, MDV2, April 14 and 19, 1908, where a “Mr. Rogers” at first fails to receive healing because “he was unwilling to meet the conditions” but later is found “submitting to God and getting better.”

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64. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 31, 1906. 65. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 8, 1905, and October 22, 1906. See also Tomlinson, MDV2, February 24, 1908, where he “preached in tears” and “broke down again in . . . blinding tears” at the altar. 66. For this trait in a public forum, see the General Overseer’s report to the 1911 General Assembly, in L. Howard Juillerate and Minnie Haynes, eds., Book of Minutes: A Compiled History of the Work of the General Assemblies of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: Church of God Publishing House, 1922). For this trait in his diary, see Tomlinson, MDV1, February 7, 1906, where he wrote: “I felt like my efforts were a failure, but I did the best I could”; and Tomlinson, MDV1, December 31, 1906, where he noted: “I did the best I could although it is not as much as I would like.” 67. Tomlinson, MDV2, September 2 and November 6, 1909. 68. Tomlinson, MDV2, March 5 and July 22, 1907. 69. Tomlinson, MDV1, August 1, 1906; Tomlinson, MDV2, June 22, 1910. 70. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 5, 1905. 71. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 29, 1906. 72. Tomlinson, MDV1, July 30, 1906. 73. Tomlinson (MDV1, October 8, 1905) reported upward of 500 in attendance at a Union Grove revival; the revival at Cleveland in July 1907 was yet more impressive, though he did not estimate attendance (MDV2, entries for July 1907). 74. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 5, 1905; Tomlinson, MDV2, July 22 and 29, 1907. The record was continually being broken. See Tomlinson, MDV2, August 18, 1908, where he wrote: “Tonight was the greatest meeting and most powerful . . . manifestations and miracles, of any meeting I was ever in.” 75. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 24, 1907. 76. Tomlinson, MDV1, January 22, 1906; Tomlinson, MDV2, January 17, 1907. Note that “Ruling Elder” had been one of the key offices in B. H. Irwin’s organization. 77. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 804. 78. For support from Orlando Tomlinson, see A. J. Tomlinson, ledger records, October 3, 1903, ACGP; for Mitchell, see Tomlinson, MDV1, November 10, 1905; for Charles Stalker, see Tomlinson, MDV1, October 7, 1905; on Stalker as a celebrity, see “Off to the Foreign Lands,” God’s Revivalist and Bible Advocate 16:4 (January 28, 1904): 16; for Carl Stalker in Cleveland, see Tomlinson, MDV1, July 6 and September 15, 1906, and Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy, 22 (entry for August 16, 1906). Other indications of Tomlinson’s networking include support from the Nyack Institute (Tomlinson, ledger records, December 27, 1903, and January 20, 1904) and a pamphlet in his possession from Seth Rees dating to this period (“Rescue Work” [1904], ACGP).

chapter 14 1. General Assembly Minutes, 1906–1914: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1992), 27, see also 45. Although the name was surely meant in the definitive sense, the Minutes of the General Assembly in this period either do not use or do not capitalize the definite article. 2. Frank Bartleman, Way of Faith (December 1906), reprinted in Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles (1925), reprinted as Azusa Street (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1980), 91.


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3. See G. B. Cashwell, “Pentecost in North Carolina,” The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles) (January 1907): 1 and (February–March 1907): 3. 4. A. J. Tomlinson wrote: “In January 1907, I became more fully awakened on the subject of receiving the Holy Ghost. The whole year I ceased not to preach that it was our privilege to receive the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues as they did on the day of Pentecost” (Answering the Call of God [Cleveland, Tenn., (1913)], 10). 5. A. J. Tomlinson, MDV1, September 18, 1906. 6. General Assembly Minutes, 37. 7. A. J. Tomlinson, MDV2, June 14, 1907. 8. M. S. Lemons, transcript of oral interview, n.d., by H. L. Chesser, 1949, HBD, 10. 9. According to Lemons, Spurling “knew the Bible better than the rest of us” (interview, 12). 10. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 21, 26, and 22, 1907. For tongues, see Tomlinson, MDV2, July 17, 1907. 11. E. Brooks Holifield, “Theology as Entertainment: Oral Debate in American Religion,” Church History (September 1998): 499–520. 12. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 7, 1907. 13. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 19, 1907. 14. Tomlinson, MDV2, October 1, 7, and 9, 1907. 15. Tomlinson, MDV2, December 8, 15, and 22, 1907. 16. General Assembly bulletin, notice on closing session, Saturday, January 11, 1908. 17. The baptism episode is reconstructed from Tomlinson, MDV2, January 13, 1908 (fittingly, the longest entry Tomlinson would ever make in his diary). Five years later Tomlinson recounted the experience at length in Answering the Call of God, (10– 13). To validate his account he quoted extensively from his own diary, a telling indication of its status as a public document. The archetypal Great Commission conflated Matthew 28:18–20, Mark 16:15–18, and Acts 1:8, though Tomlinson’s odyssey seems to have been patterned most closely on the latter two texts. For another vision baptism, see Levi Lupton (New Acts 3:1 [February 1907]: 3), who claimed numerous visions during a baptism that left him on the floor for nine hours. For another limb-by-limb examination, see the baptism of W. H. Durham: “I jerked and quaked under it for about three hours. . . . He worked on my whole body, one section at a time, first my arms, then my limbs, then my body, then my head, then my face, then my chin, and finally . . . He finished the work on my vocal organs, and spoke through me in unknown tongues” (Apostolic Faith 1:6 [February–March 1907]: 4). Ann Taves (Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999], 333) analyzes Durham’s experience. 18. Tomlinson, MDV1, December 17, 1905. Tomlinson kept among his personal effects a copy of the Christian Herald containing an article on Pampa and Patagonia (it referred to South America as “the neglected continent”) along with a feature, “Strange Tribes of South Africa.” 19. After one particularly grueling journey, Tomlinson vowed that he would gladly endure such hardship if God would give him “great power in preaching” and confirm his ministry “with signs following” (Tomlinson, MDV2, February 21, 1906). For Tomlinson in “need of more power,” see MDV2, March 11, 1907. 20. On the latent potential of attributional texts, see Ralph W. Hood Jr. and Da-

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vid L. Kimbrough, “Serpent-Handling Holiness Sects: Theoretical Considerations,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34:3 (September 1995): 311–322. The authors are primarily concerned with snake handling, but their analysis is relevant to earlier ritual extrapolations from the same text, including divine healing, exorcism, and glossolalia. They argue that foundational texts typically inscribe potent (and primal) roles rooted in symbolized repressions. Thenceforth, communities sustained by those texts are always liable to recover the roles or symbolized repressions contained therein, even those that have fallen dormant for long periods of time. Typically, the authors argue, a charismatic individual first recovers (“acts out”) the role within a given community, and then the community, persuaded by the combined testimony of leader, text, and act, creates the social matrix and plausibility structure for the normalization and diffusion of the recovered practice. The authors’ psychodynamic theory of symbols holds that “all symbols have their origin in the body.” That categorical assertion may be difficult to substantiate, but it does seem apt for the pentecostal phenomena (divine healing, glossolalia, and snake handling), where the relation to the body is in every case fairly direct. 21. For several important precedents, see Gary McGee, “Theology: Exploring the Historical Background,” Assemblies of God Heritage 13:4 (Winter 1993–1994): 10–12, 27–29. 22. George Watson, Soul Food (Cincinnati: Revivalist Office, 1896), 16. “All words,” he added, “are loaded with the quality of the soul out of which they proceed.” 23. Watson, Soul Food, 16. Watson cautioned against relying on “skill in handling the word of God” rather than “the direct energy of the Holy Ghost” (“David and Goliath,” Way of Faith [November 27, 1895]: 7). 24. Witness the early habit of transcribing messages as would befit dispatches straight from the throne of heaven; see New Acts 3:2 (April 1907): 2. 25. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 4, 1909. Compare the “heavenly choir” described in New Acts 3:1 (February 1907): 4 and 3:4 (July–August 1907): 3; and in Frank Bartleman, “Letter from Los Angeles,” Triumphs of Faith 26:12 (December 1906): 251. According to Bartleman, it surpassed “the best trained choir of our land for harmony and feeling.” 26. Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 81. See also my “Worship and Structure in Early Pentecostalism” (M.Div. thesis, Harvard Divinity School, 1984). 27. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 18 and August 4, 1908, and June 16, 1909. Lillie Duggar (A. J. Tomlinson [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964], 65) relates that an invisible hand played Tomlinson’s violin during a service at his home. 28. Tomlinson, MDV2, November 26, 1908. 29. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 29, 1909. On pentecostal rituals or “sacraments” involving synchronized behavior, see Wacker, Heaven Below, 108–111. 30. Tomlinson, MDV2, June 24, 1909. 31. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 27, 1909. 32. Tomlinson, MDV2, March 16, June 22, and August 28, 1908. Compare Triumphs of Faith 26:12 (December 1906): 247, where Carrie Judd Montgomery noted “the great work of grace in several children”; and New Acts 3:3 (June 1907): 12, where L. P. Adams’s daughter “spoke and sang in an unknown tongue . . . for more than an hour.” 33. They were also counted as spiritual statistics when tallying the numbers saved, sanctified, and baptized with the Spirit. The participation of children in pentecostal worship seems most closely related to its value as a spiritual “sign.” However,


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in sociological terms it could be seen either as an exaggeration of the new valuation (and idealization) of childhood that had developed over the past century or as an indication that many pentecostal communities continued a “premodern” view of children, treating them as little adults rather than as persons occupying a unique and transient social status. Given my larger argument, and the fact that this phenomenon was counted among the signs or wonders (presupposing its anomalous character), I am inclined to the former explanation. 34. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 18, August 4, and September 10, 1908. 35. See Tomlinson, MDV2, September 12, 1908, where “a streak of fire” passed over the tent; January 3, 1909, where “a large ball of fire” passed in front of the church; November 23 and December 6, 1909, where a light resembling “the head light of a locomotive” appeared; February 10, 1910, where “a stream of light, like fire,” flashed up and down near Tomlinson; March 1, 1910, where “streaks of fire” descended and broke over the congregation; and March 6, 1910, where “a big blaze of red light” cast shadows over Tomlinson’s house. See also Tomlinson, Answering the Call of God, 13–14. 36. On the “complex interaction between personal experience, traditional lore about the supernatural, and canons of narrative aesthetics” in true experience stories, see Larry Danielson, “Paranormal Memorates in the American Vernacular,” in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 196–197. 37. “Manifestations of the Spirit,” The Faithful Standard 1:6 (September 1922): 1– 2, 12. This article, which may have been written by Homer Tomlinson, offers a provocative interpretation of the charismatic phenomena and of the relationship between the physical body and the Holy Spirit. Dancing, for example, occurs when “the feet get happy.” Like a “deaf and dumb person,” the feet can only express their gratitude to God “by signs and the dance is a mild and beautiful manner of expression.” Likewise, “talking in tongues” occurs when “the tongue and vocal organs get happy.” The article’s pneumatology is more startling than its typology, as seen in a paragraph on “laughing.” If dancing and glossolalia express the joy of the pertinent members of our physical body, then laughter occurs because “the Spirit wants to laugh.” That is, “the Holy Spirit is without a body, so He uses the bodies of men and women for His happiness.” This is a great mystery, the author acknowledged, but “surely the Holy Ghost is happy when He finds a body to dwell in that will give Him complete control.” 38. Tomlinson, MDV2, March 4, 1908. 39. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 4, 1908. See also Tomlinson, MDV2, June 6, 1908. 40. Tomlinson, MDV2, June 24, 1909. 41. Tomlinson, MDV2, January 20, 1908. 42. For Homer, “the era of Tomlinson’s evangelistic ministry” began in 1908. A. J. had conducted successful meetings well before that time, but Homer is correct to observe this as a turning point; see Homer Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God (Queens: Tomlinson, 1939), 8–9. 43. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 4, 9, 23, and 30, 1908. 44. Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God, 9. The story is confirmed by A. J.: “A show put up on the opposite side of the street but we held the crowd and they tore down their tent and retired” (MDV2, September 26, 1908). Homer repeats the story in The Shout of a King (Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God [Queens], 1968), 32. 45. Tomlinson, MDV2, October 14, 1908.

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46. Tomlinson himself is the source for these estimates, and they should be read with suitable suspicion. Nevertheless, the revival clearly made a dramatic impression on the town, sparked significant growth in local Church of God congregations, and outstripped Tomlinson’s previous revivals. 47. A. J. Tomlinson, “Missionary Evangelism,” TMs, December 31, 1908, ACGP. 48. Tomlinson, MDV2, January 10, 1909. Tomlinson does not name the individuals, nor are they mentioned in General Assembly Minutes. 49. M. S. Lemons, “History of the Church of God,” TMs, 1937, HBD, 14. Lemons wrote, “These four had all the work on them.” 50. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 17 and 28, 1909. Tomlinson (MDV2, May 29, 1909) reported thirty-five more members. For Jacksonville, see Tomlinson, MDV2, June 1, 1909; on A. J. in Florida, see E. L. Simmons, transcript of oral interview, HBD, 2. 51. Tomlinson, The Shout of a King, 45. 52. Tomlinson, MDV2, October 18, 1909, and November 2, 1910. For automobiles, see Tomlinson, MDV2, November 14, 1910.

chapter 15 1. For the dialectic of tongues and interpretation as a routine feature of Church of God worship, see A. J. Tomlinson, MDV2, February 20–21 and March 8, 1909. For Tomlinson and multiple interpretations, see MDV2, March 21, 1909, where he wrote: “I suppose I gave 10 or 15 interpretations.” Tomlinson often worked, in call-andresponse fashion, with individuals especially renowned for the gift of tongues, such as “Sister Clyde Cotton” (Tomlinson, MDV2, March 16, 1909). 2. Tomlinson, MDV2, October 3 and November 10, 1908. 3. Tomlinson, MDV2, October 15, 1909. 4. An article in a church paper later explained that “Manifestations, no matter how queer they seem to be, which produce good results . . . and do not interfere with the rights and privileges of others, may be encouraged and the Holy Ghost honored as being responsible for them” (“Manifestations of the Spirit,” The Faithful Standard 1: 6 (September 1922), 2. Though written more than a decade after the Goins affair, the unsigned article accurately reflects Tomlinson’s guiding principle in the matter. 5. Tomlinson, MDV2, November 26, 1908, where he ordained a “brother Goins of Florence, Ala.” 6. According to Homer Tomlinson, Simpson had at one time been a “dearly beloved brother and right hand man, deacon in the church at Cleveland,” who enjoyed “sweet fellowship” with A. J. (The Great Vision of the Church of God [Queens: Tomlinson, 1939], 9). 7. Tomlinson, MDV2, January 2, 1909. 8. Homer Tomlinson (The Shout of a King [Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God (Queens), 1968], 134–135) identifies Simpson as a “well-to-do” grocer who later became a Tennessee state legislator and whose son later became the Cleveland chief of police. 9. For more Simpson troubles, see Tomlinson, MDV2, January 18 and 24 and February 1, 1909. 10. Tomlinson, MDV2, April 15, 1909. 11. For Homer Tomlinson on Goins, see The Shout of a King, 134–135. Homer adds, “I myself thought he was really great.” 12. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 16, 1909. 13. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 22, 1909.


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14. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 24, 1909. For another instance of Church of God ministers using the courts as a pentecostal forum, see The Chattanooga News (December 18, 1913). Roy Cotnam, pastor of the Sale Creek Church of God, had been charged with abduction, seduction, and kidnapping (almost certainly the complaint of someone whose family had joined his church). In court, Cotnam “Refused to Kiss Bible,” the headline blared, for which he was held in contempt and ordered to the workhouse. Yet more sensationally, one of Cotnam’s church members, Sam Helton, delivered his testimony “in the ‘unknown tongue,’ ” for which he was held in contempt and fined $5.00. 15. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 20, 1908. The mayor wanted Tomlinson to close the meetings “at about 10 o’clock.” In the end, according to Tomlinson, “the officers came and plainly threw open the privalege for us to hold the meetings as long as we want to.” 16. The incident is composed from Tomlinson, MDV2, August 5–7, 1909. Tomlinson later prayed for his persecutors, asking God “to spare them and give them a chance to repent” if they had any hope of salvation, but “if there was no chance for their salvation,” he reasoned, “they might as well be taken away” (MDV2, August 6, 1909). 17. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 10, 1909. 18. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 18, 1908. Lemons and Trim had been arrested for “making so much noise after 10 o’clock at night,” Tomlinson wrote, and “compromized by agreeing to move the tent.” 19. The Chattanooga News (August 13, 1909), Clippings File, HWS; Tomlinson, MDV2, August 20 and 25, 1909. 20. Tomlinson, MDV2, August 25 and 28, 1909. 21. Tomlinson, MDV2, September 2, 1909. 22. Noah Patrick, Oak Waldrip, and Joe Patrick, letter to A. J. Tomlinson, August 15, 1909, Letters File, ACGP; and A. J. Tomlinson, letter to Noah Patrick, Oak Waldrip, and Joe Patrick, August 30, 1909, Letters File, ACGP. A. J. responded as follows: “The accusations against brother Goins is a serious one. And coming as it is by messages and interpretations. . . . This of course makes the Holy Ghost responsible for it. . . . But brethren . . . there may be a mistake about this thing some way. . . . Now if you brethren have anything more to tell me, please write me at once. Investigation will be made and the truth will be revealed.” 23. Tomlinson (MDV2, September 25; October 2, 10, 12, 25, and 27; and November 14, 1909) organized churches in Sobel, Tenn., and Arcadia, Lithia, and Parish, Fla.; ordained four bishops and six deacons; and commissioned three evangelists. 24. Tomlinson, MDV2, November 10, 1909. 25. A. J. Tomlinson, letter to John B. Goins, November 3, 1909, inserted in MDV2. Reportedly, Goins also taught that “no man can have more than one gift” (a plausible interpretation of I Corinthians 12); see W. F. Bryant, letter to A. J. Tomlinson, November 2, 1909, MDV2. For Goins’s views on women, see also M. S. Lemons, letter to A. J. Tomlinson, November 12, 1909, MDV2. The key texts were I Corinthians 14:27–28 (“If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be two or at the most three, each in turn, and let one interpret. But if there is no interpreter, let him keep silent in church, and let him speak to himself and to God”) and I Corinthians 14:34 (“Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says”). 26. Tomlinson, letter to Goins, November 3, 1909. 27. A. J. Tomlinson, letter to Jesse Clark, November 3, 1909, MDV2.

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28. Bryant, letter to Tomlinson, November 2, 1909. 29. John B. Goins, letter to A. J. Tomlinson, November 5, 1909, MDV2; and Mary Jane Tomlinson, letter to A. J. Tomlinson, November 6, 1909, MDV2, which reads: “He said yesterday that perhaps the Lord was going to use you to establish the churches and get them started . . . and he seemed to be as a pastor to go behind you to get the churches in working order” and establish “real government.” 30. Goins, letter to Tomlinson, November 5, 1909. 31. Tomlinson, letter to Tomlinson, November 6, 1909. 32. Tomlinson, letter to Tomlinson, November 6, 1909. 33. A. J. Tomlinson, letter to A. J. Lawson, November 9, 1909a, MDV2. If, after all of that, “the church wants to turn me down and take him,” Tomlinson continued, then “they of course can do so, for the authority is vested in the church and not in the pastor.” 34. Tomlinson, letter to Lawson, November 9, 1909a. 35. Tomlinson, letter to Lawson, November 9, 1909a. 36. Like many pentecostals, they found no precedent for full ordination but licensed women as evangelists with a status equal to that of “unordained male ministers” (General Assembly Minutes, 1906–1914: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1992], 63). The General Assembly was to be composed of the “Elders and chosen men (with the women) from each Church” (General Assembly Minutes, 17); the 1907 General Assembly, responding to an observation that women outnumbered men in the Church of God, noted “the important positions occupied by women in the time of Christ and His Apostles” (General Assembly Minutes, 21); and the 1908 General Assembly recognized and further defined the role of deaconesses in the Church of God (General Assembly Minutes, 49). According to Homer Tomlinson, the “first woman minister set forth was Mrs. S. A. McCandless, in 1905, and right at Cleveland, Tenn.” (The Shout of a King, 45). Note that of the six evangelists listed by Buford Johnson (“Twentieth Century Moses,” revised ed., TMs, 1960, HBD, 18) for the Pleasant Grove campground in 1911, four were women (Ella Simmons, Florence Simmons, Martha Hadsock, and Rebecca Barr). For a contemporaneous statement on the role of women, see Apostolic Faith (Houston), which noted: “In general the offices pertaining to the government of the Church and to teaching belong to men only, while in the prophetic and evangelistic offices women are equally used of the Spirit with men” (2:2 [October 1908]: 7). 37. A. J. Tomlinson, letter to A. J. Lawson, November 9, 1909b, MDV2. 38. Tomlinson, letter to Lawson, November 9, 1909b. 39. Tomlinson, letter to Lawson, November 9, 1909b. 40. Tomlinson, letter to Lawson, November 9, 1909b. 41. A. J. Tomlinson, letter to Jesse Clark, November 10, 1909, MDV2. For another example of Tomlinson’s prepossessing style, see Lillie Duggar, who quotes him: “I sure did think that we had sufficient understanding. . . . But whether it is right or whether it is wrong, I feel like asking you to forgive me for hurting you. I appreciate your love for me, but I don’t think you can love me any more than I love you” (A. J. Tomlinson [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964], 780). 42. One of Lemons’s chief accomplishments was to demonstrate that the action against Tomlinson had been conducted illegally; see Lemons, letter to Tomlinson, November 12, 1909. 43. Tomlinson describes his return in MDV2, November 26, 1909. The church


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business meeting and its prelude are based on MDV2, December 1, 1909. Lemons, as A. J. knew, had been the “hero.” 44. Tomlinson, MDV2, December 1, 1909. 45. John B. Goins (“Holiness Church Doctrines as Viewed by Rev. Goins,” Articles File, HBD) portrays the Church of God as a group obsessed with demons and subject to fantastic ecstasies. Goins’s testimony was deeply prejudiced, of course, but to the extent that it points to actual practices it reveals a group influenced by folk magic and popular lore about the supernatural: “Sometimes they would chase the devil all around . . . the house. . . . I have seen them pick the carpet from the floor and shake the bed clothes to get the evil spirits out. . . . Rev. Tomlinson . . . discerned an evil spirit gnawing on the spine of the sick, and it (the evil spirit) was in the shape of a mud turtle, and . . . they rebuked it and it departed.” For the church brawl, see Tomlinson, MDV2, December 28, 1909; “Holiness Church Row before Magistrates,” Bradley County Journal and Banner (December 28, 1909), Articles File, HBD; and Tomlinson, The Great Vision of the Church of God, 10. For the legal decision in A. J.’s favor, see Tomlinson, MDV2, December 10, 1910. 46. In Homer’s edition of his father’s diary he glossed the Goins entries with one of those stories that, if not true, should have been. Goins had organized a congregation from the Cleveland defectors, but it declined and Goins decided to return to Alabama. Sending his family ahead of him, he placed their earthly possessions on a freight car even though he lacked the money to pay freightage. The money never came, and Goins was left stranded at the station, penniless and in tears. When word reached Tomlinson of Goins’s predicament, he scraped together what money could be found, rushed to the station, and paid Goins’s fare. Homer told the story to illustrate his father’s magnanimity, but it also showed the extent of his triumph. Not only did A. J. defeat his nemesis, he had the pleasure of buying him a one-way ticket out of town. See Homer Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1 (Huntsville, Ala.: Church of God, 1949), 89.

chapter 16 1. Bryant had moved to Cleveland by May 1907 (A. J. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 13, 1907). Mitchell was working out of Cleveland by December 1905 (J. B. Mitchell, “Missionary Work among the Mountain Poor,” Evangelical Visitor 19:23 [December 15, 1905]: 1). On the importance of Cleveland to Tomlinson’s ascendancy, see also Wade H. Phillips, “The Corrupted Seed” (M.A. thesis, Church of God School of Theology, 1990), 147–149. Tomlinson had hosted the previous General Assemblies as well, though not at Cleveland. 2. Wade Phillips comments on Tomlinson’s diplomatic and organizational gifts in “Quakerism and Frank W. Sandford: Major Influences that Transformed A. J. Tomlinson and the Church of God” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Pentecostal Studies, Lakeland, Fla., November 7–8, 1991), 32n11; and Phillips, “The Corrupted Seed,” 74. 3. General Assembly Minutes, 1906–1914: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1992], 27. 4. W. F. Bryant and M. S. Lemons, transcript of oral interview, HBD, 5, 10. 5. Frank Sandford, “The Church,” Tongues of Fire (June 1, 1897): 93, where Sand-

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ford notes that the Bible commonly refers to the Church as “the church of God,” which tops his list of seven biblical names for the Church. 6. Quoted in Avery D. Evans, ed., A. J. Tomlinson: God’s Anointed—Prophet of Wisdom: Choice Writings of A. J. Tomlinson in Times of His Greatest Anointings (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1943), 12; see also A. J. Tomlinson, The Church of God Marches On (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1939), 5, where he wrote: “I then said, This means that it is the Church of God. To this they assented,” and so he joined “with the understanding that it is the Church of God of the Bible.” 7. The Way 1:6 (June 1904): 3. He wrote: “We have received a number of letters during the past five years containing the inquiry, ‘What church or denomination do you belong to?’ ” The time frame exactly matches the duration of Tomlinson’s ministry at Culberson (where The Way itself was published), and the inquiry reflects what must have been a frequent question raised by potential supporters of his mission. 8. Holiness preachers were the perfect audience for such a strategy. As Richard Bauman said of seventeenth-century Quakers, they had “a built-in unwillingness—if not a doctrinally based incapacity—to acknowledge a cultural debt” (Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 9). For Tomlinson and his compatriots, the ideas one absorbed seemed always to have dropped from the sky rather than from the lips of one’s mentors or colleagues. Whatever other factors may help explain that trait, whether the norms of orally based cultures or the lax standards of attribution in nineteenth-century popular discourse, it comported well with holiness pneumatology. In holiness, spoken or written concepts differed qualitatively from truths animated by the Holy Spirit. Such truths, reified in a moment of epiphany, became profoundly and uniquely one’s own. Furthermore, each saint was expected to have his or her own truths, not the warmed-over truths of another. Appropriation, not attribution, was the proper stance toward intellectual “property.” The Holy Spirit was the ultimate author in any case. 9. General Assembly Minutes, 29. This moderate congregationalism resembled that practiced by Indiana Quakers. Individual meetings with “sufficient wisdom and enterprise” selected their own pastors, but absent those elements—as in the case of newly organized meetings—the Executive Board of the Yearly Meeting made the appointment; see Minutes of the Western Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Plainfield, Ind., 1893), OWYM, 51. See also Nathan Hunt Clark, diary and notebook, IHS. 10. General Assembly Minutes, 49. The quest for consensus would have fit well both with Appalachian egalitarianism and with Tomlinson’s Quaker background. 11. E. L. Simmons, transcript of oral interview, HBD, 3. 12. General Assembly Minutes, 61–63. 13. General Assembly Minutes, 67. The author of the motion is not identified. The concept of a general overseer had wide currency within holiness and would have had special resonance among those with fire-baptized roots, for B. H. Irwin had claimed that title. According to Vinson Synan (The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971]), Irwin had been appointed to that position for life and was entitled by it to license, ordain, and assign ministers. John Dowie held the title as well. 14. General Assembly Minutes, 69–71. On the importance of this office to Tomlinson’s control over the organization, see Phillips, “Quakerism and Frank W. Sandford,” 13. 15. General Assembly Minutes, 79.


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16. General Assembly Minutes, 232. 17. The 1910 General Assembly changed the name of the office to “general overseer” and empowered the overseer to “appoint pastors for the different churches, as they give consent to go” (no mention was made of congregations suggesting candidates to the general overseer) (General Assembly Minutes, 79–81). The examination questions are listed in Buford Johnson, “Twentieth Century Moses,” TMs, rev. ed., 1960, HBD, 17–18. See also General Assembly Minutes, 77; and E. L. Simmons, History of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: Church of God Publishing House, 1938), 22. The General Assembly also required churches to prepare annual reports for future assemblies (Simmons, History of the Church of God, 21). The 1912 General Assembly decreed that all ordination must meet the general overseer’s approval: “It is not expected that the General Overseer do all the ordaining, but none to be done without conferring with him either in person or by letter” (General Assembly Minutes, 137– 138). 18. Tomlinson, like many other saints, understood the New Testament to forbid a divorced person from remarrying so long as his or her former spouse was still alive. Based on his reading of Matthew 5:32, he did allow divorce—but only for “the cause of fornication.” However, Tomlinson interpreted fornication to mean “marriage-whileone’s-former-spouse-still-lives.” Consequently, the only justifiable cause for divorce was remarriage! (Not even adultery, which Tomlinson thus distinguished from fornication, provided sufficient cause for divorce.) Consequently, he urged the Church of God to allow all divorced people who had remarried while their former spouses were still living—thus committing fornication—to obtain divorces from their current spouses and then to forbid their subsequent remarriage to anyone other than their original spouses. Only the death of the original spouse could free them to marry again. See A. J. Tomlinson, “Divorce and Re-marriage,” TMs, ACGP. After fifteen years of persistent effort, his views prevailed at the 1922 General Assembly; see Lillie Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964), 56. Tobacco had long drawn Tomlinson’s ire (recall that he had opened his inaugural edition of Samson’s Foxes with a salvo against it), and after a protracted battle he won on this issue as well. Here the debate may have reflected the tensions between Old-Southyeoman-agricultural and New-South-middle-class cultures. 19. Other pentecostals were accusing the Church of God of being soft on tobacco; see F. M. Britton, “Brother F. M. Britton’s Letter,” The Apostolic Evangel (n.d. [ca. January 1910]), inserted in MDV2, 7. 20. Simmons, History of the Church of God, 20; see also Tomlinson, MDV2, December 2, 1910, where Tomlinson reflects on the “importance of systematic work.” 21. General Assembly Minutes, 201–202; see also: “Souls who are now being lost can be saved by a church in perfect order” (General Assembly Minutes, 99). 22. For an overview of the emerging pentecostal network circa 1908, see Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 23. Ivey Campbell, “April Ninth, 1907: Anniversary Day for the 20th Century Pentecostal Movement,” New Acts 3:3 (June 1907): 9; A. S. Worrell, “An Open Letter to the Opposers of the Pentecostal Movement” (1907), reprinted in Assemblies of God Heritage 12:1 (Spring 1992): 16–18; W. F. Carothers, “History of Movement,” The Apostolic Faith (Houston) 2:2 (October 1908): 1. 24. New Acts 3:1 (February 1907): 1. Note that New Acts served as an information clearinghouse for the movement. See New Acts 3:4 (July–August 1907): 1–2, where Lupton reported on pentecostal camp meetings in South Carolina, North Carolina,

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Colorado, Kansas, and Ohio; tried to keep track of the pentecostal press (counting “seventeen different publications in this country and in Canada”); and touted his camp meeting as a pentecostal hub (it attracted fifty preachers from twenty-four states and several foreign countries). 25. Tomlinson, MDV2, November 22, 1910. 26. Thomas Nelson, “Primitive Church Polity,” Pentecostal Herald (November 15, 1897): 2. Compare John Alexander Dowie, who wrote: “There is only one true Church,” but “thanks be to God, you can find that Church scattered amongst all denominations. Yes, even in Rome” (“Jesus the Healer: A Sermon by the Rev. John Alex. Dowie” [Chicago: Zion Publishing House, 1899], HWS, 17); and Rees, who wrote: “We believe each New Testament Church was separate and independent, but at the same time in fellowship with the whole body of Christians” (“Independent Holiness Churches,” The Revivalist [October 4, 1900], 2). 27. Thomas William Miller, “The Canadian Jerusalem,” part 2, Assemblies of God Heritage 12:1 (Spring 1992): 11. 28. The Apostolic Faith (Houston) 2:2 (October 1908): 7. 29. Rees, “Independent Holiness Churches,” 2. 30. General Assembly Minutes, 45. 31. The Apostolic Faith (Houston) 2:2 (October 1908): 7. 32. Sam Perry, “The Church,” Church of God Evangel 3:14 (September 15, 1912): 6. 33. Cashwell’s associate editor was E. A. Sexton; his contributing editors were Tomlinson, H. H. Goff, N. J. Holmes, G. F. Taylor, R. B. Hayes, A. H. Butler, M. M. Pinson, and T. J. McIntosh. 34. A. J. Tomlinson, “Unity of the Faith,” The Bridegroom’s Messenger 1:11 (April 1, 1908): 4; A. J. Tomlinson, “Oneness,” pamphlet (n.d.), ACGP, 2–3, 7. For pentecostal anticipations of unity, see J. H. Pate, who predicted: “This baptism will be a cure for schisms and isms” (Holiness Advocate [May 15, 1907]: 3). 35. H. [sic] J. Tomlinson, “The Lord’s Church,” The Household of God 5:2 (February 1909): 13–14. 36. Tomlinson, MDV2, May 28, 1909. 37. Tomlinson, MDV2, December 28, 1909. On splitting pulpit time, see Tomlinson, MDV2, December 21, 1909. For Britton as a fire-baptized evangelist, see Live Coals of Fire (January 12, 1900). Britton was a founding member of the Pentecostal Holiness Church, formed largely by the merger of the Holiness Church of North Carolina and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church; see W. Eddie Morris, The Vine and Branches (S. I. [Franklin Springs, GA ?] Advocate Press, 1981), 27. Homer Tomlinson (The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, 84) claims that Britton attacked Tomlinson in tandem with J. H. King, a close associate of Britton’s at the time. 38. F. M. Britton, “Brother F. M. Britton’s Letter,” 7. 39. Simmons, interview, 1–2. 40. All three were active in the 1910 General Assembly, with Pinson delivering the opening address (General Assembly Minutes, 75–81). According to Bryant and Lemons (interview, 13–14), the Church of God was reluctant to accept the men because Pinson seemed “a little radical about some things.” Pinson then issued an ultimatum, “ ‘now or never,’ so it was never.” On the Mountain Assembly, centered in Tennessee and Kentucky, see General Assembly Minutes, 130. 41. For A. J.’s construction of Church of God lineage, see Tomlinson, “Oneness,” 5; and General Assembly Minutes, 302. By 1914 he had placed himself in a chain of episcopal succession that stretched back to Moses.


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42. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 43. A good summary of the church’s growth can be found in James Stone, The Church of God of Prophecy: History and Polity (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Press, 1977), 33. Membership was 25 in 1903, 1,005 in 1910, 10,566 in 1917, and 21,673 in 1922. See also the records for the respective years in L. Howard Juillerat and Minnie Haynes, eds., Book of Minutes: A Compiled History of the Work of the General Assemblies of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN: Church of God Publishing Hs., 1922). 44. Halcy Olive Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy [ed. C. T. Davidson?] (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1974), 11 (entry for March 28, 1906); General Assembly Minutes, 200. Lillie Duggar explains that, although “Brother Tomlinson did not give as much attention to his children as some fathers do because of the many responsibilities incident to his position,” he loved them just as much (A. J. Tomlinson, 181). 45. Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy, 33 (entry for March 2, 1907). 46. A. J. Tomlinson, MDV1, October 4 and 19, 1906. Milton’s birth merited less than two lines. 47. For the children’s employment, see Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy, 35; and Tomlinson, MDV1, May 18, 1906. On one occasion, the children bought a carpet with their own money and put it down themselves (Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy, 22 [entry for August 24, 1906]). For academic performance, see Tomlinson, Our Sister Halcy, 16 (entry for May 19, 1906) and 33 (entry for March 28, 1907). 48. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 7, 1910. For his family’s Spirit baptisms, which Tomlinson did record, see MDV2, August 10, 1908 (Halcy); August 18, 1908 (Homer); August 21, 1908 (Mary Jane); and July 23, 1909 (Iris). 49. Homer Tomlinson (The Shout of a King [Queens Village, N.Y.: Church of God (Queens), 1968], 65) gives the year as 1907 and the scenario as an extended campaign in Florida, after which he met his father in Atlanta. Late spring 1909 would seem more likely. After revivals in Florida, Tomlinson returned through Atlanta. While there, he recorded that “Halcy and Homer are here in the city and Homer has been with me most all the time since we came” (MDV2, June 11, 1909). He made no mention of Homer’s blindness, however. 50. See Homer Tomlinson, letters to A. J. Tomlinson, Letter Files, ACGP. A good example is Homer Tomlinson, letter to A. J. Tomlinson, October 12, 1909. 51. Nicholas Lemann, “A Lament for Father’s Day,” The New Yorker (June 21 and 28, 1999): 72. 52. This account is reconstructed from Tomlinson, MDV2, March 29–April 14, 1909. 53. Tomlinson, MDV2, April 14, 1909. 54. Tomlinson, MDV2, July 16 and August 1, 1909. 55. A. J. Tomlinson, The Last Great Conflict (Cleveland, Tenn., 1913), quoting Song of Solomon 6:10 (Frank Sandford’s favorite depiction of the Church).

epilogue 1. See Lillie Duggar for the 1941 Thanksgiving service at Fields of the Wood: “People think it is some spiritual something, but here it is. . . . David found it in a spiritual way in his vision, but it was left for me, A. J. Tomlinson, to really . . . find it here” (A. J. Tomlinson [Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1964], 666).

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2. See White Wing Messenger (September 1941 and April 1942). 3. The central events in the Church of God’s usable past, as Tomlinson defined it, also included the formation of the Christian Union in 1886, the Shearer Schoolhouse revival of 1896, the organization of the Holiness Church at Camp Creek in 1902, and the first General Assembly on January 26, 1906, at Camp Creek, N.C. But the truly seminal event remained June 13, 1903, when Tomlinson prayed three times in the “fields of the woods” and then returned down the mountain to join the Church of God. 4. A. J. Tomlinson, MDV3, November 15, 1914, where A. J. noted “like as of fire” (an allusion to the “tongues like as of fire” that fell on the Day of Pentecost) in the meetings that led to his appointment for life. The account of this service draws on Homer Tomlinson, The Diary of A. J. Tomlinson, vol. 1 (Huntsville, Ala.: Church of God, 1949), 137–138. See also Minutes of the 1913 and 1914 General Assemblies, General Assembly Minutes, 1906–1914: Photographic Reproductions of the First Ten General Assembly Minutes (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1992). 5. See Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2: Fathers of the Second Century, American reprint of the Edinburgh ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), ACGP, where each of the indicated texts has been marked in pencil, apparently in the hand of A. J. Tomlinson. For a discussion of Tomlinson’s Jacobean innovation, see Wade Phillips, “The Corrupted Seed” (M.A. thesis, Church of God School of Theology, 1990), 154–163. Phillips was the first to identify the edition of The Ante-Nicene Fathers on which Tomlinson depended. 6. Howard L. Juillerat and Minnie Haynes, Eds., Book of Minutes: A Compiled History of the General Assemblies of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.: Church of God Publishing Hs., 1922), 163. 7. Between 1914 and 1917, the General Assembly consistently affirmed snake handling and fire handling as authentic apostolic signs and as proof of the validity of the Church of God. However, it refused to allow them as a test of salvation. The attributional basis of fire handling is more complex than that for snake handling; it draws on textual warrants ranging from the book of Daniel (the fiery furnace), to Acts 28 (where Paul is bitten by a snake as he tends a fire), to verses that mention the trial of faith “by fire.” 8. C. T. Davidson, Upon This Rock, vol. 1 (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1973), 423, 443. 9. Book of Minutes, 180–184. 10. James Stone, The Church of God of Prophecy: History and Polity (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Press, 1977), 33. Attendance grew from 10,566 in 1917 to 21,673 in 1922. 11. See Tomlinson, MDV3, January 28, 1916; April 21, 1919; and September 2, 1921. 12. Tomlinson took some pride in his ability to float loans from local banks, an important measure of his status: “The Lord has given me favor with the Bankers and business men until I can get anything I ask for. I have borrowed thousands of dollars at the bank with no security” (A. J. Tomlinson, MDV4, June 16, 1920). 13. Davidson, Upon This Rock, 481. 14. See A. J. Tomlinson, ledger, July 15, 1920, ACGP, which noted: “Transferred this balance to Evangel to help pay machinery.” 15. Llewellyn did considerable business with the Church of God and prospered handsomely. He sold printing equipment to the publishing house and was hired as an “architect” on the Cleveland auditorium, despite a lack of formal qualifications. On


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another occasion, he sold the Church of God a used truck for $1,600 and then “generously” donated $500 of the price back to the church. As it turned out, he had originally purchased the truck for only $1,100, exactly his net take from the transaction. After he assumed control of the Exchange and Indemnity Department, he refused to honor its bonds, even though he had been on the Council of Elders that had approved their issue. While the church’s legal liability on those notes was being litigated, he denied payment to one holder of a $500 note but suggested that he exchange the note for an automobile at a local dealership. Under cross-examination, Llewellyn acknowledged that he had been paid a commission by the dealer in an agreement that netted Llewellyn the note, which he then cashed. See Opinion of the Court of Appeals for the Eastern Division of the State of Tennessee, Church of God v. A. J. Tomlinson et al., (May 1925), 29–32. 16. For a summary of the constitutional issues, see Daniel D. Preston, The Era of A. J. Tomlinson (Cleveland, Tenn.: White Wing Publishing House, 1984), 121–126; and Davidson, Upon This Rock, 542–570. 17. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 214. 18. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 199–201. Dozens of ministers did indeed write to Tomlinson offering to donate their back pay to the church debt. 19. Tomlinson’s branch of the Church of God would eventually adopt its current name, the Church of God of Prophecy, but only after his death. 20. See Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 225–226. 21. Quoted in Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 224, from the Tomlinson-faction 1923 General Assembly. 22. Tomlinson, MDV4, February 28, 1924. 23. Stone (The Church of God of Prophecy, 51) estimates that between 5,000 and 6,000 members followed Tomlinson and that his wing did not reach a membership of 21,000 (the Church of God’s 1922 membership) until 1933. I have not been able to identify membership figures for the last decade of Tomlinson’s life, but approximately 50,000 additions are reported in the General Assemblies between 1934 and 1943. If retention rates reached 50 percent, the 1943 membership would have been approximately 45,000. 24. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 557. 25. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 788–793. 26. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 406, quoting Tomlinson’s 1932 General Assembly address. 27. Homer helped compose an official Church of God version. See Sarah Dillon and Homer Tomlinson, “The Great Speckled Bird,” personal holdings of Wade Phillips, Fields of the Wood, N.C. 28. See Preston, The Era of A. J. Tomlinson, 105, for a 1918 pronouncement. 29. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 406, quoting Tomlinson’s 1932 General Assembly address. 30. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 793. 31. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 440. 32. In 1941 Tomlinson had the Church of God add a new general secretary, devoted to “the colored race,” because of the slow rate of proselytization among African Americans (Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 679). 33. New discoveries, after all, befit God’s Last Days Church. “Since the world is going on with its inventions and forward movements,” Tomlinson asked, “why should there be any objections to our discoveries of things marked out for us before the foundation of the world?” (Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 511).

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34. See Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 426, 429, 464, 487. 35. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 389. 36. See Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 494. 37. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 519. 38. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 677–679. For example, Tomlinson wanted a marker placed on the “Mountain of Hattin,” where in his view Jesus had first set the church in order. 39. Duggar, A. J. Tomlinson, 690–691. 40. A. J. Tomlinson, in this case, fell victim to his curator. Homer’s edition of his father’s diary is a wonderful illustration of what Dominick LaCapra has called “dissemination,” the process of critical intervention through which “a text is . . . rewritten in terms of possibilities that were underexploited or even unexplored by its author.” More precisely, it illustrates an extreme form of dissemination, “Oneiric improvisation,” in which the “associative processes of a waking dream” (“condensation, displacement, secondary revision”) are applied to the source text. The Oneiric Improviser “does not simply copy . . . the text being read” but, in fact, fashions a new reality from it by assimilating “the ‘voice’ . . . of the other” into himself. See Dominick LaCapra, “History, Language, and Reading: Waiting for Crillon,” American Historical Review 100:3 (June 1995): 814–815. Put differently, Homer transformed chronology into collage, rearranging the material at will and supplying so many (often doubtful) interjections that the distinction between author and editor disappears. Nevertheless, for these very reasons the diary remains important. Homer witnessed many of the events he describes, and his perspective was so molded by that of his father that his symbolic reconstruction may at times genuinely reflect his father’s evaluation of the relative meaning and priority of events. The edited diary remains useful, then, as a biography of meaning rather than of “fact.” 41. Tom Elrod, related by Charles Conn, interview by the author, August 4, 1995, Cleveland, Tenn.

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Index

Abolition. See Quakers Adams, L. P., 211 Advertising, the religious press and, 12–13 African-American religion, 81–82 Albanese, Catherine, 149 American exceptionalism, 39 Anderson, Robert, 21 Anglo-Israelitism, 39 “Arise and shine” epiphany. See Holiness Church at Camp Creek, North Carolina Awrey, Daniel, 117 Azusa Street revival, 49, 54–55, 183, 208 Baby Jessie, 140–141 Baker, Jacob, 94, 110 Baker, Sheridan, 38 Ballew, John, 148, 159 Baptism with the Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit), 42, 96–97, 118, 183–187, 190, 194, 285n.17. See also Pneumatology Barker, Ellis, 84–85, 115 Bartleman, Frank, 39, 49, 184 Baxter, Elizabeth, 13 Baxter, Michael, 11 Beecher, Henry Ward, 13, 67 Bell, J. W., 159, 161 Bellows, the Rev. Henry, 22, 215

Bender, Thomas, 21–23 Beniah, Tennessee, 126, 147 Berger, Peter, 23 Beulah Heights, 126 Beveridge, Albert, 39 Bible. See Hermeneutics Bible schools. See Radical holiness Boardman, William, 13 Booth-Clibborn, Catherine, 52 Boyer, Paul, 61 Bozeman, Theodore, 56 Briggs, Mattie, 173 Britton, F. M., 210–211 Bryant, William F., 147–148, 167–168, 177, 191, 197, 200, 204, 217, 221, 223, 229, 280n.14 Campbell, Alexander, 169 Campbell, Ivey, 208 Carkuff, C. P., 43, 118 Carkuff, Hattie and Alex, 118 Carothers, W. F., 208–209 Carter, Paul, 62 Cashwell, G. B., 32, 184, 186, 188, 191, 210 Chattanooga, Tennessee, 174, 191, 195–196, 200 Chester Preparative, 4, 70, 87–88, 100, 103–104, 110, 115–116 Christian Church, 81

312

index

Christian communism, 130–131, 162–163 Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times, 11–17 Christian perfection. See Sanctification Church flag, 219, 227, 229 Church of God, 168, 175, 177, 183–192, 203–225 Church of God (Anderson). See Warner, Daniel Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), 229 Church of God (Elders), 222–226 Church of God, growth of, 213, 222, 226, 295n.43 Church of God of Prophecy, 229 Church of God (Tomlinson), 222–230, 297n.23 Church of Prophecy Marker Association, 219, 229 Clark, Dougan, Jr., 14, 88, 96, 99 Clark, Jesse, 197 Clark, Nathan Hunt, 88, 101 Cleveland, Tennessee, 174–175, 181, 184– 185, 189–192, 195, 204 Coffin, Charles and Rhoda, 92 Coffin, Emma, 110 Commune. See Christian communism Congregationalism. See Ecclesiology Conversion narrative, evangelical. See Narrative Cotton, “Sister” Clyde, 188, 194, 199 Cress, Abbie, 134–135, 160, 163 Crumpler, A. B., 17, 32, 34–35, 42 Culberson, North Carolina, 4, 117, 129– 130, 147, 150, 173–174 Desacralization, 60–61, 246n.33 Dieter, Melvin, 36 Dispensationalism. See Premillennialism, dispensational Disruption, 222–225 Divine healing, 13–14, 178–179, 283n.59 Divine reversal, 31, 54 Dixon, A. C., 14 Domesticity. See Middle-class culture Donnelly, Ignatius, 107 Douglas, Ann, 51 Dowie, John Alexander, 14, 46, 53, 97, 107–108, 112, 159, 208 Drygo, Tennessee, 174

Eads, James, 133, 159–161 Ecclesiology, 122–123, 165, 169–172, 192, 204–212, 220–221, 223–225, 227– 229 Egalitarianism, 31, 149–150, 165 Eldridge, George, 117, 164 Ellwood, Robert, 36 Ethical rigorism, 17, 68, 72, 81, 95, 130– 131, 134, 145, 147, 162, 168, 172, 206, 269n.27, 293n.18 Evangelical Alliance, 9–10 Evangelicalism, 9–15, 148–149 Evening Light. See Latter Rain “The Fanatic,” 146–148, 152–153 Ferguson, Stanley, 227 Fields of the Wood, 218–219, 229 Fire baptism, 43–44. See also Irwin, B. H. Fire-Baptized Holiness Association (Church), 29, 44, 51, 208, 210–211. See also Irwin, B. H. Flags on Graves, 229 Frame, Nathan and Esther, 53, 92–95, 99– 100, 110, 124–125 Free Methodist Church. See Methodism Fuller, W. E., 44 Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, 5, 18, 25 Garner, Jeptha, 124 Glossolalia, 58–59, 120, 183–190, 193, 264n.14, 285n.20, 289n.14 God’s Bible School, 97, 142, 167 God’s Revivalist, 29, 92, 97, 117 Goins, John B. and the Goins affair, 193– 201, 206, 215, 291n.46 Gordon, A. J., 28–29 Graves, Richard, 169 Groll, Theodore, 83 Guyon, Madame, 44, 136, 142 Hamm, Thomas, 89 Hardships. See Holiness asceticism Harrell, David, 56, 148 Harriman, N. H., 157 Hermeneutics, 96–97, 164, 171–172, 285n.20, 292n.8 Higher life movement, 13–14, 28 Hinshaw, Solomon, 115

index Holiness asceticism, 122, 135–139, 141– 142, 283n.59 Holiness Church at Camp Creek, North Carolina, 168–181, 204, 217 Holiness Church of North Carolina, 17, 184, 208, 210 Holiness movement. See also Holinesspentecostal movement; Higher life movement; and Radical holiness and Appalachian missions, 124–127 and cultural alienation, 15–18, 25, 28– 36, 149, 237n.62 and populism, 107–108, 111–114 and Quakers, 94–96, 117–118. See also Quakers and social class, 16, 31–32 and social progressivism, 18 Holiness-pentecostal movement, 5, 21 Holy Spirit. See Pneumatology Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 10 Hutchison, William, 18 Indiana and abolitionism, 68–71 and economic life, 74–75 and politics, 75, 106–108 and Quaker influence, 67 and Quaker migration, 65–67 and Westfield society, 79–84 Indiana Yearly Meeting, 65, 67–70, 93– 94. See also Western Yearly Meeting Indiana Yearly Meeting of Anti-slavery Friends, 68–70 Indianapolis, 83, 117–118, 214–215 Industrial schools, 104–105, 124, 131 Irwin, B. H., 29–30, 34, 43–44, 51, 118, 126, 146, 169–170, 183 Jay, Allen, 92 Jones, Rufus, 99 Kenworthy, Amos, 42, 78, 91, 96, 99– 100 Keswick. See Higher life movement Klopsch, Louis, 12 Knapp, Martin Wells, 29, 42, 62, 92, 97, 122, 126, 142 Ku Klux Klan, 148–149

313

Landmark Baptism, 167, 169, 205 Latter Rain, 38, 184 Lawson, A. J., 198 Lears, Jackson, 18, 40 Lease, Mary, 107 Lee, Flavius J., 188, 205 Lemons, M. S., 167–168, 173, 178, 184, 191, 195–196, 200, 204–205, 223, 272n.9 Life of faith, 131, 136–139, 176. See also Mueller, George Llewellyn, J. S., 223–224, 296n.15 Lupton, Levi, 208 Luskville, Tennessee, 173 Malone, Carrol, 99 Malone, Walter, 99 Manley, William F., 88, 100, 210 Manliness, 52, 91, 122, 148 Market economy, rise and social effects of, 21–24, 64, 150 Marty, Martin, 18, 21 Mathews, Donald, 17 McCallister, Jim, 147–148, 152 McCanless, “Sister,” 199 McClurkan, J. O., 211 McGraw, “Bro.”, 134 Merritt, Stephen, 12 Merritt, Timothy, 27, 120 Methodism and apoliticism, 113 and the Free Methodist Church, 118, 145–146 and the Holiness Church at Camp Creek, North Carolina, 167, 169– 170, 205 holiness critique of, 17, 34–35, 123 holiness movement within, 27, 238n.3 in North Carolina, 130 and Quakers, 88, 93–95, 125 Middle-class culture, 16, 51–52, 137 Middle economy, 74, 83 Mitchell, Andrew, 115 Mitchell, J. B., 15, 116–117, 126–128, 130, 132, 135, 159–161, 181, 204, 214 Modernism, modernity, and modernization, 18–25, 37, 47–48, 66– 67, 215–216, 234n.42, 235n.48 Montgomery, Carrie Judd, 14

314

index

Moody, Dwight, 16, 28, 30 Morrow, Jackson, 110, 115 Mountain Home, Alabama. See Wooton, William Mountain theology, 217–220, 227–229 Mueller, George, 61, 131–132, 139–140 Murphy, J. C., 179 Murphy, North Carolina, 124, 128–129, 153 Myth of origins. See Mountain theology Narrative, 71–72, 109–110, 119, 122, 287n.36 National Camp Meeting Association, 28 Nelson, Thomas, 30, 34, 38, 40, 52, 108, 117–118, 170 New South, 148–149, 174–175 North Carolina, 129–130 Oral culture, 58–59 Ordo salutis. See Soteriology Overstreet, “Bro.” and “Mrs.”, 157, 159– 161 Palmer, Phoebe, 27 Paradigms of providence, 139–140 Parham, Charles, 183, 190, 209 Pennington, John, 110 Pentecostal movement, 21, 49, 183–184, 187–192, 208–213. See also Holinesspentecostal movement Pentecostal worship, 188–190, 193–194, 196–197, 199, 221–222, 226, 285n.20, 286n.33, 287n.37 People’s party. See Populism Perfect love. See Sanctification Pierson, A. T., 14, 29 Pike, J. M., 29 Pinson, M. M., 184, 211 Plainfolk culture, 29–36, 113, 216 Pneumatology, 42–43, 188–189, 193–194, 196–197, 199, 287n.37, 292n.8 Populism, 105–114, 130 Porter, Frank, 167, 169–171, 272n.9 Positive confession, 38 Poverty, 31, 33–34, 122, 135, 239n.17 Premillennialism, dispensational, 9, 13, 28, 38–39 Primitivism, 56–59, 81, 131, 169, 176 Pritchard, Calvin, 97

Progressive revelation, 38 Protestant Modernism, 18, 21 Quakers and abolition, 65–72, 80, 89, 248n.16 and assimilation, 67–69, 80, 90, 93– 98 and civil marriage, 72–73 and education, 67, 98 and Gurneyites, 89–90 and holiness, 87–105 and holiness rhetoric, 98–99 and home missions, 92, 104–105, 124– 127 and Methodism, 93–95 and migration, 65–67 and militancy, 99 and pacifism, 92, 105 and primitivism, 91 and religious ecstasy, 90–91 and sanctification, 90, 96–97, 100–101 and temperance, 80–81, 90 and water baptism and communion, 96–97 and Wilburites, 90 and youth, 92–93 Racialism, 53, 125 Radical holiness anti-modern elements within, 59–62 and anti-structuralism, 56–58, 145, 150 and Appalachian missions, 125–126 and class antagonism, 145–152 and cultural alienation, 15–18, 29–30 and cultural imperialism, 49, 145, 149– 152 definition of, 15, 32–33 and divine healing, 40, 46, 134, 140– 142 and evangelical empiricism, 43–44 and higher education, 29, 44–46, 98 and innovation and change, 37–39 and mainstream holiness, 15–18, 28– 30, 32–34 and militancy, 34–36, 99, 145–147 and mobility, 41 and mysticism, 44, 136, 164–165 and optimism and progress, 39–41, 51, 150–151 and pacifism, 162, 273n.11

index and pentecostalism, 183–184, 187–191, 208 and periodicals, 29, 133 and persecution, 146, 149, 152–154, 157– 158, 195–196, 228 and physical health, 40, 134, 269n.27 and power, valorization of, 42–44 and race, 51, 53–55 and science and technology, 40–46 and spiritual eroticism, 165, 278n.47 and supernaturalism, 42–43 and time and money, 60–62 and transregional culture, 48–49 and urbanization, 46–48 and women, 51–53, 290n.36 and world rejection, 57–58 Rees, Hulda, 52, 172 Rees, Seth, 62, 88, 91–92, 97–99, 120, 122, 126, 170 Religious ecstasy, 33–34, 43, 54, 58, 180 Republican party, 75, 84, 105–106 Rhetoric of humility, 31, 54, 225 Rhodes, John, 70 Richmond Declaration, 96 Riis, Jacob, 134 Roberts, B. T., 32, 108 Rodgers, H. G., 211 Russell, Elbert, 99 Ruth, C. W., 117 Ryle, J. C., 158 Sacred space. See Mountain theology Samson’s Foxes, 130, 133–135, 138–139, 143, 150–152, 159–161, 163 Sanctification, 27, 90, 96–97, 100–101, 148, 190, 242n.31, 259n.77 Sandford, Frank, 14, 32, 120–123, 130– 131, 133, 135, 141–143, 146, 154–156, 158–159, 163–165, 167, 170–172, 183, 203–205 Scripture. See Hermeneutics Sectarianism, 57 Secularization, 60, 246n.30, 246n.33. See also Desacralization Selby, Mary Fram, 150–151 Separation from the world, 57, 67, 113. See also Quakers Seymour, William J., 183 Shiloh. See Sandford, Frank Simmons, E. L., 205, 211

315

Simpson, A. B., 13–14, 29, 120 Simpson, E. W., 222 Simpson, J. H., 184, 194, 197 Slavery and abolition. See Quakers Smith, Amanda, 92 Smith, Timothy, 18, 24–25 Snake-handling, 190, 221, 285n.20, 296n.7 Sommer, Daniel, 81, 93, 95 Soteriology, 119, 183, 190 Speckled Bird theology, 227 Spurgeon, Charles Hadden, 11, 16 Spurling, Richard, 147–148, 167–169, 171, 177, 184, 191, 193, 205 Stalker, Carl, 119, 181 Stalker, Charles, 88, 115, 126, 181 Stanley, Edmund, 90 Stone, Barton, 169 Strong, Josiah, 125 Suffering. See Holiness asceticism Supernaturalism, 42 Talmage, Thomas DeWitt, 11–12, 29 Testimony. See Narrative Tomlinson, Abigail, 73, 77 Tomlinson, Allen, 70, 103 Tomlinson, Ambrose Jessup and Appalachian missions, 4, 117, 119– 121, 124–128, 146–147, 174–175 and birth and childhood, 63–64, 71, 76– 79 and business ventures, 114–116, 121 and charismatic manifestations, 188, 193–194, 221–222, 226 and Chester Preparative, 4, 87–88, 103– 104, 214 and the church constitution, 224–225 and church name, 204–205 and conversion, 86–87, 100 and council of elders, 207, 223–225 in court, 195, 289n.14 and the Culberson years, 129–163, 167, 173–175 death of, 229 and despair, 121, 154, 158, 275n.7 diary of, 79, 137, 140, 173–175, 178, 251n.10, 262, n.42, 298n.40 and divine healing, 178–179 and family life, 4, 114, 121–122, 124, 213–214

316

index

Tomlinson, Ambrose Jessup (continued ) and Florida campaigns, 191–192, 196, 200, 210–211 as General Overseer, 206, 216, 220– 225 and homiletic style, 179–180 and leadership style, 194, 197, 203– 209, 215–216, 220–223, 225 and marriage, 86 as movement entrepreneur. See and organizational skills and objectives and ordination, 168, 172–173 and organizational skills and objectives, 113, 173–178, 181, 191– 192, 203–204, 206–213, 215–216, 223–226 as pastor, 178–181, 204 and Pentecostal baptism, 118–119, 184, 186–187, 285n.17. See also and sanctification and Pentecostal movement, 183–192, 208–212 and political savvy, 197–201, 203–206, 221–222 and politics, 84, 105–114, 153 and the pragmatic turn, 162–163, 176– 177 and race, 227 and return to Indiana, 161–165 and sanctification, 109–111, 118–119, 264n.15 and Shiloh, flight to, 153–156 and Society of Friends, break with, 118, 122–124 and spectacle and performance, 64, 84– 86, 179–180, 189, 226 and spiritual awakening, 78, 83–84 and water baptism, 120–121, 155, 167 and Westfield Monthly Meeting, 104– 105, 214 and women, 192, 196–197, 199, 211, 226, 290n.36 and worship order, 193–194, 196–197, 199, 203 and young adulthood, 79–88 Tomlinson, Asher, 41, 87, 103, 105 Tomlinson, Delilah Hiatt, 3–4, 73, 76–78, 114, 137, 215 Tomlinson, Emily, 79 Tomlinson family, 70–71, 87

Tomlinson, Halcy, 114, 213–214, 229 Tomlinson, Hannah Davis, 72–73 Tomlinson, Homer, 114, 146–148, 152– 153, 157, 161, 167, 174, 194, 198, 213– 214, 226, 230, 298n.40 Tomlinson, Iris, 114, 214 Tomlinson, Mary Jane Taylor, 85–88, 97, 123, 197–198 Tomlinson, Milton, 3–4, 70–79, 103, 114– 115, 122, 128, 154, 163 Tomlinson, Milton A., 213, 230 Tomlinson, Noah, 70, 103 Tomlinson, Orlando, 70, 88, 103–105, 119, 126, 181 Tomlinson, Robert and Lydia, 65–73, 75, 78 Tomlinson, William, 65, 75 Torrey, Reuben, 16, 28–29 Trim, Henegar, 195–196, 204 Union Grove, Tennessee, 173–174, 181, 183, 185 Union High School, 79, 91 Union Quarterly Meeting, 100, 115 Updegraff, David, 14, 78, 94, 96, 98–99 Urbanization, 83 Via dolorosa. See Holiness asceticism Wacker, Grant, 9, 25 Walnut Ridge, 87–88, 90, 97 Warner, Daniel, 81, 117, 183, 204 Watson, George, 30, 32, 38, 117–118, 139, 164–165, 187, 277n.39 The Way, 173, 205 Western Yearly Meeting, 93, 100, 104, 119, 126. See also Indiana Yearly Meeting Westfield, Indiana, 65, 67, 79–84 Westfield Monthly Meeting, 67, 73, 87– 88, 100–101, 104–105, 109–110, 115, 119 Westfield Quarterly Meeting. See Union Quarterly Meeting White Angel Fleet, 219–220 Withrow, James, 159 Woodward, “Sister”, 142–143, 167 Woodworth-Etter, Maria, 98, 117 Wooton, William, 84, 124–126 Worrell, A. S., 208

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