S. N. Haskell (pdf) 9780816361748

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S. N. Haskell Adventist Pioneer, Evangelist, Missionary, and Editor Gerald Wheeler

Cover design by Steve Lanto Inside design by Aaron Troia Cover image from AdventistArchives.org Copyright © 2016 by Pacific Press® Publishing Association Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved The author assumes full responsibility for the accuracy of all facts and quotations as cited in this book. You can obtain additional copies of this book by calling toll-free 1-800-765-6955 or by visiting http://www.adventistbookcenter.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wheeler, Gerald, author. Title: S. N. Haskell : adventist pioneer, evangelist, missionary, and editor / Gerald Wheeler. Description: Nampa : Pacific Press Publishing, 2017. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016030368 | ISBN 9780816361748 (hard cover) Subjects: LCSH: Haskell, Stephen Nelson. | Seventh-day Adventists—Biography. Classification: LCC BX6193.H32 W34 2017 | DDC 286.7092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030368 December 2016

Dedication Adam and Andrew Senghor and Aravis Fifth generation in the church S. Haskell devoted himself to

Contents Foreword Preface I. Young Bridegroom II. Son of New England III. Childhood Influences IV. A Product of New England V. Puritan Culture VI. A Strong-Willed Personality VII. Innovative Leader VIII. Distributing the Printed Word IX. Creating an Educated Church X. Haskell Goes Abroad XI. A Most Frightening World XII. Around-the-World Survey XIII. Mary Haskell in California XIV. The Bible as the Voice of God XV. Death of Mary Haskell XVI. Africa Again XVII. Back Down Under

XVIII. Proposing to a Prophet XIX. Unholy Holiness XX. Haskell Visits the American South XXI. A Struggle to Reorganize the Church XXII. Urban Evangelism XXIII. Battle Over Inspiration XXIV. Book Author XXV. Nashville, Tennessee XXVI. The Struggle for Independent Ministries XXVII. Transformations in California XXVIII. Temperance Struggle in Maine XXIX. Death of Ellen G. White XXX. Twentieth Century Unlimited XXXI. Last Days XXXII. New England Flint With a Heart of Gold Photos Epilogue Index

Foreword n Adventist pioneer who seemed to be everywhere, forever. Such was Stephen N. Haskell. With a ministry extending seven decades, Haskell was not only among the earliest advocates of Seventh-day

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Adventism but also, along with John N. Loughborough, one of the last of the denomination’s pioneers. Also, like Loughborough, Haskell was a man of many talents who made a wide variety of contributions to the developing church. Serving in such posts as pastor, conference president, writer, evangelist, publisher, teacher, self-supporting entrepreneur, and foreign missionary, he touched every aspect of the developing denomination. Beyond holding the wide variety of posts (the all-too-common lot of the foremost leaders of early Adventism), Haskell also had unique aspects in his life. Perhaps the most interesting is that he was, to the best of our knowledge, the only man who proposed marriage to the widowed Ellen White. She turned him down on the grounds that she needed to keep her pen name, but readers of his biography might speculate that there were other reasons, most likely related to character traits that could at times make him controlling, narrow in outlook, and parsimonious in personal finances. Of course, he could also be a visionary and extremely generous financially to the church and to people in need. Like most of us, Haskell exhibited a variety of somewhat contradictory characteristics. At any rate, Ellen White successfully pointed him to the energetic Hetty Hurd, who was young enough to be his daughter. That was quite a contrast to his invalid first wife, who was old enough to be his mother. Another unique aspect of Haskell’s life was that he was undoubtedly the

most well-traveled Adventist leader in the nineteenth century. His most extensive journey was a nearly two-year pilgrimage in which he circumnavigated the globe, searching for future overseas sites for a church on the verge of missionary explosion as it extended to the far corners of the earth. Added to that General Conference assignment would be repeated terms of service in Africa, Europe, and Australia. Haskell was a man on the move. Gerald Wheeler’s S. N. Haskell: Adventist Pioneer, Evangelist, Missionary, and Editor is the first scholarly treatment of his life. The only other book-length biography was published by Ella M. Robinson fifty years ago as S. N. Haskell: Man of Action (1967). That book provides a helpful overview by a person who knew Haskell personally, but it did not provide the depth of treatment that the denomination needs or the man deserves. Wheeler’s insightful study brings not only much new data to the table but explores new facets of his work and life. One of the most important contributions of S. N. Haskell is its extensive development of the larger context in which he and his beloved church existed. This approach provides many valuable insights. The present volume is the eleventh in the Pioneer series, an unprecedented project in Adventist biography. Thus far the series has featured biographies of James White (also by Gerald Wheeler), Joseph Bates, W. W. Prescott, John Harvey Kellogg, E. J. Waggoner, Lewis C. Sheafe, A. T. Jones, John Norton Loughborough, Uriah Smith, and A. G. Daniells. Other volumes already scheduled for publication include Ellen G. White, W. C. White (2018), J. N. Andrews (2019), G. I. Butler (2020), and Dudley Canright (2021). And those titles are merely the beginning of a series that will, we hope, include more than thirty volumes. Each book will focus on the individual’s major contribution(s) to the church and will be written by a person well versed in the topic. Meanwhile, we are indebted to Gerald Wheeler for enabling us to

understand more fully that bundle of dedicated energy that history knows as S. N. Haskell and the church he spent his life serving. I trust that reading S. N. Haskell will be a fascinating and profitable journey. George R. Knight Series Editor Rogue River, Oregon

Preface tephen Nelson Haskell began his life with no social status or significant family connections. He had little or no formal education. At the age of seventeen, he made a life decision that should have destroyed

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the few opportunities then available to him. But he would go on to make great contributions to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, shaping its structure and outreach for more than half a century. Haskell adapted new marketing techniques being developed by British and American booksellers in order to create a publishing distribution system that would evolve into the Adventist Book Centers and the global literature evangelism system. He fostered personal ministries; founded several schools; traveled around the world to research how to introduce the Adventist Church into new areas and cultures; pioneered Adventism in Australia and New Zealand; served as president for many conferences as well as held many other leadership posts; wrote countless articles and a number of books; and personally led hundreds if not thousands to Christ. With his second wife, he began a program of urban evangelism that most closely followed the approach to the cities that Ellen G. White considered necessary. In later years he became, perhaps, of all the early Adventist pioneers, the closest associate of Ellen G. White. And that is only part of what he accomplished in his long life. Whenever anything significant was going on in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, you could be sure to find him involved. His name constantly appears in church records of meetings and decisions. Adventism today still bears his fingerprints. But how did he do it? The world he grew up in would provide him with unique skills,

motivations, and opportunities that would spur him to overcome his lack of formal schooling. The nineteenth century was a time when many felt that the future seemed limitless, and they seized those new possibilities. Haskell, in his own way, would follow their example. It was an environment that he shared with other Adventist pioneers and that would nurture them, too, as they founded and spread a global religious movement. To understand and to appreciate fully S. N. Haskell’s life and all that he did, we must know the world that he lived in. Thus one of the things that I have attempted to do in this biography, at least in a preliminary way, is to relate Haskell to the larger culture and events of his North American context. Ella M. Robinson, in her 1967 biography of Haskell, focused on the narrative of his life story.1 Much study of denominational history has had an internal focus, concentrating primarily on church events and theology. But the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church did not live in complete isolation from what was around them. That reality, however, creates a problem for us today. The Adventist pioneers dwelt in a world ever more remote and less comprehensible to us in the twenty-first century, and especially to the vast proportion of church members outside North America.2 Just as we need to study ancient Near Eastern history to better understand the Bible, so we must explore nineteenth and early twentieth century United States history to grasp fully what shaped the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and to see how God worked through its contemporary culture and events.3 I have included in the endnotes many sources to help the interested reader to explore in more depth the world in which Haskell played out the drama of his life and in which the Seventh-day Adventist Church played out its mission.4 Space does not permit us to examine all the currents that have coursed through American culture. Some have been sending ripples and even tidal surges through the United States since its founding—and still do. Several had only minor impact during Haskell’s lifetime but have

assumed major roles in more recent years. Others have been more fleeting or even vanished, leaving modern Adventists wondering exactly what they were.5 But we will touch upon enough, we hope, to see that neither Haskell nor the Seventh-day Adventist Church has existed in isolation from the world.6 Adventists have not been able to escape the influence of social and other forces around them. Recognizing that they were in many ways part of their world in no way diminishes what the pioneers did; instead, it allows us to see how God works through the cultures and times of His human agencies. Stephen Haskell and the church were part of both the secular flow of history, as well as such religious trends as the Millerite and Restorationist movements. They employed new developments in transportation and publishing technology, and were part of the constant American westward migration. Then, with the outbreak of the American Civil War and the rise of Sunday laws, Adventists had to deal with specific political and legal issues. In addition, they responded to educational, temperance, and other health/medical currents, evolving social perspectives, and new business practices. American history has been an unending series of cultural shifts that have touched every aspect of daily life, including work, food, education, politics, media and entertainment, transportation and travel, economics, and countless other areas that we might not immediately think of. Adventists were also inevitably affected by these shifts.7 For example, in the area of business, Ellen White had to confront publishing-house administrators who sought to emulate the aggressive style of large-scale American commerce. Also, it is interesting that she began to protest against “kingly power” in church leadership about the same time as the trust-busting movement emerged in American politics. Did the expansionist mind-set that drove Americans to begin trade with all parts of the world and to establish international corporations make it easier for Adventist leaders to conceive of traveling to foreign countries to determine

the possibilities for evangelism and to search for sites to build mission stations and other denominational institutions? Without doubt, the organization of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is heavily indebted to the American political and business worlds for nomenclature, structure, and ways of doing things. Thus Adventists, though they might be working to bring about the Second Coming, were in no way immune to the surrounding culture. Each generation could (if they stopped to think about it) recognize much of how their contemporary culture and events had shaped them, but the next generation would have little idea of all the sources of the heritage that they had received. Later, church members would assume that the world they currently know has always been that way or even that all the tradition had been divinely inspired.8 The world of the Adventist pioneers is constantly becoming more distant and, thus, more alien. We read the pioneers’ writings but do not always understand what they had in mind or what they were contending against or for. The necessity to become familiar with their long-lost world is especially vital for correctly interpreting the writings of Ellen G. White.9 In this biography I hope to show not only how Haskell’s world shaped him but, also, how he responded to those external forces. He is, I believe, an excellent example of what has been popularly called the “self-made man,” people who overcome educational and other limitations to become influential in their world.10 American history has been replete with such individuals. Possibly only in American culture—especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—could so many have accomplished it. The “self-made” or “self-improved” ideal had both great strengths and weaknesses, and Haskell’s life illustrates both aspects. I hope this biography will contribute to a greater understanding of the cultural world of our pioneers and thus will deepen our insights into who we are as Adventists. I hope, too, that this deeper understanding will help us define more sharply the message that God has called us to present to our

current world and will further clarify what we must maintain, at all costs, in order to keep us true to our heritage and mission. I wish to express my appreciation to Merlin Burt and his staff at the Center for Adventist Research at Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. The late Stan Hickerson was a great help in tracking down certain elusive facts, and Adventist scholarship will miss his enthusiasm for the church’s historical heritage. Gil Valentine made many valuable observations on a preliminary draft and directed me to additional resources, as especially did George R. Knight. The staff at the General Conference Archives has been a special help. Thanks also to Jerry Moon and Michael E. Campbell, who read various drafts. Gerald Wheeler

1. Ella M. Robinson, S. N. Haskell: Man of Action (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1967), 7. Eileen Lantry wrote a book for young people focusing on Haskell’s experiences in Australia during the founding of the Avondale School. See Eileen Lantry, He Chose to Listen (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1983). Also, Norma Collins devoted three chapters to Haskell and his wives in her Heartwarming Stories of Adventist Pioneers, Book 2 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2007). 2. Even Robinson attempted to recreate a bit of that now-distant world. See S. N. Haskell, 38, 39. 3. We also need to know more about the time period to understand and interpret the counsel of Ellen G. White. The White Estate is attempting to fill in such background with its new annotated series of her writings. 4. I especially focus on major forces and periods that are sadly little known to the average modern American. 5. This has often been a problem when it comes to understanding some of Ellen G. White’s counsel —we do not always know exactly what she may be referring to. 6. Most early research on the historical context of Adventism has been on the Millerite movement and the areas of contemporary health and medical concepts. The latter research has produced such works as, for example, Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008) and George W. Reid, A Sound of Trumpets: Americans, Adventists, and Health Reform (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1982). Many other areas, though, still await scholarly attention. As just one example, Ellen G. White’s counsel on what constitutes good reading has yet to be fully examined in the context of the Victorian approach to reading (for a summary of

American mid-nineteenth-century expectations, see Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 30–47. 7. One of the most helpful explorations of the constantly transforming America, in the view of the present author, would be the trilogy by the Smithsonian historian Daniel J. Boorstin. The volumes include: The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage, 1958); The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vintage, 1965); and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1973). The second and third volumes cover the life period of Stephen Nelson Haskell. 8. When I once explained to a church leader how the denomination had adapted certain cutting-edge nineteenth-century practices for a specific program of the church, he commented that he had assumed until then that they had come directly from Ellen G. White. 9. Mrs. White’s many comments about what we would today call the “consumerism” of her times, to cite just one simple example, become more insightful in light of the words of one observer about the limited incomes of the late nineteenth century. Asking how people would even consider buying such things as phonograph players, cameras, and telephones, he then states, “One bought them anyway, even at the cost of necessities, because America, in this period between [the Civil and First World] wars, was an aggrandizing society, voracious for novelty, committed to the dogma that life was lived in order to be improved. It was a curiously adolescent society, full of objective desires, and pulsating with the energy to get them satisfied.” Ben Maddow, A Sunday Between the Wars: The Course of American Life From 1865 to 1917 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 265. 10. For an overview of this theme in American history, see Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Chapter I

Young Bridegroom ow far does one go to honor the request of a dying friend? Stephen Nelson Haskell made a decision that provides at least a partial answer. And it would change his life forever.

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He worked as a farmhand for a man named Howe.1 Mr. Howe discovered that he had a terminal disease and did not have much longer to live. On his deathbed, Howe asked Stephen “to take care of ” his sister, Mary.2 The sister, regarded by many as “a hopeless invalid, confined to her bed,”3 was about 38, slightly more than two decades Haskell’s senior.4 Mr. Howe had reason for concern. A person in Mary Howe’s situation would, during the nineteenth century, face a potentially grim future. With no Social Security disability–type programs, pension plans, or other public aid in existence in the United States, the elderly or disabled could survive only through the protection of family or immediate community. Throughout history, the expectation was that younger family members would take care of those who could no longer physically contribute to the support of the family as a whole.5 Apparently Mary Howe had no family members able to assume responsibility for her. Her father, Calvin Howe (born 1775), had died July 12, 1849.6 Her mother was now in her eighties. Having received an inheritance from her father, Mary Howe was not immediately destitute. She could hire people to work for her, but how long would the money last, and who would help an invalid when it was gone? In her brother’s mind, Mary needed a long-term solution. Thus, Mr. Howe’s desperate plea on her behalf. Clearly he trusted Stephen Haskell

and hoped he could solve the problem. Haskell’s commitment to his promise to take care of the woman reflected an ingrained trait of his personality. If he decided to do something, he would follow through no matter what. His dedication to a promise or a task would enable him to accomplish much during his life. He rarely gave up on a task or project, and he could be a strong leader. But sometimes that same sense of commitment could get him into needless trouble, as he expected others to share his own dedication and example. At that moment, Stephen could think of no way of fulfilling the brother’s request except to marry his employer’s sister.7 After much soulsearching, he proposed, and she accepted. On April 7, 1851, they filed their intent to marry, and were married on April 10, 1851.8 He was not yet eighteen.9 The marriage would last more than four decades. Haskell’s biographer, Ella M. Robinson, states that he believed that the cultural and educational advantages she offered to his life minimized their age differences.10 As we shall see, Mary did much to help him be a success. (They had no children, however. Instead, Stephen would become a father figure to many of the young people he encountered in his work.) About the time he got married, Haskell paid his father $150 to compensate for the loss of the income that he would have brought to the family had he remained at home until the age of twenty-one. Stephen said the amount “was far more than I was worth to him.”11 The concept of reimbursing parents for lost income because of offspring leaving home early puzzles the modern mind. But it made sense in Haskell’s time. Until recently, in most societies children were an economic asset. As soon as they were physically able, they would begin working around the home, the farm, or in the family crafts and trades. The more children a family had, the more help they would provide or the more money that they would bring in through their labor. American colonial homes would often send out children as young as six or seven to work as

servants or farmhands in the homes of neighbors or other family members.12 The custom extended into the nineteenth century.13 Both law and social custom at this time gave a father a powerful claim on his children’s labor until they were grown.14 Thus, by marrying so young, Stephen deprived his parents of the additional income he would have otherwise generated through his work. They would now have to hire someone to perform the tasks that he could have normally done (a challenge because New England had a persistent shortage of labor, especially in rural areas). A staff member of Atlantic Union College in South Lancaster, Massachusetts, the town where the Haskells lived for many years, remembered Mary Howe Haskell as “a plain little lady, determined in her manner and a bit eccentric; old residents tell of her skill in handling spirited horses. But why not? She was a farmer’s daughter.” Elsewhere Purdon described her as someone “with firm set lips and a powerful will to move any mountains in her way.”15 Tradition said that she wrote poetry.16 She had a large library for the time, and when South Lancaster Academy started, she lent books to the students. Mrs. Haskell puzzled many of those who knew her. Many years later, Arthur W. Spalding wrote that “traditions take in ample territory about Mrs. Mary How [sic] Haskell. Thus: She was an invalid; she could manage spirited horses as few men could. She was a martinet with firm set lips; she was a loving wife, who rose at an unearthly hour to greet her husband, back from a two-year world-girdling journey. She was a cultured woman, a poet, whose large and carefully selected library was the mecca of thoughtful students in the early days of the South Lancaster school; she was a recluse, who was seldom at home to visitors. But each and every purveyor of these several tales agrees without scruple to the legends of others. A remarkable woman!”17 Two or three years into their marriage, Mary and Stephen believed that she was “miraculously healed,”18 reminding one of the improvement of the

health of Elizabeth Barrett after her marriage to the poet Robert Browning. Could there possibly have been a psychosomatic aspect to her condition? Two decades after Stephen and Mary got married, Ellen G. White wrote an extensive letter to Mrs. Haskell, confronting certain habits and practices that had contributed to her invalidism.19 Mrs. White stated that the traits “have long held you from good” and that she had “understood [her] case for years,” suggesting that Mary’s problem was one of long standing and may have extended back before her marriage.20 Diagnosing medical or psychological conditions through historical records is always a speculative thing, but one wonders if Mary Howe Haskell reflected the not-uncommon behavior of some nineteenth-century women of retreating to their beds and to a life of invalidism in order to escape some problem (such as the difficult character of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father). Mary’s fellow Massachusetts native, Eunice Bullard Beecher, wife of famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, also used poor health and illness as a way of coping with life and getting attention.21 They were not alone. Many nineteenth-century women employed physical weakness or infirmity as a socially acceptable defense mechanism. At one point, Ellen White mentions Mary’s expending greater effort in order to get others to do something for her than if she had done it herself.22 While Mary Howe’s marriage to Stephen did grow into a love relationship, could one motivation of her initial acceptance of his proposal have been a desire to have someone to do things for her? Nearly sixty years later, Haskell wrote to Ellen G. White that “physicians said [that] were she healed she could not walk as she had lost the use of her muscles by being bed ridden. I thought God would heal her. This He miraculously did the second or third year after our marriage. We were at this time Methodists but we had become acquainted with God. My wife had for years experienced true Bible sanctification.”23 Ellen White, however, may have seen that “healing” slightly differently—that Mary’s invalidism was as much of the mind as the body.

Testimonies to Mary Haskell Ellen G. White wrote at least two testimonies to Mary Haskell that Mrs. White later had published.24 Both deal with the area of health. The first testimony was a joint one to both her and Stephen, and among other things stressed their need to improve their diet.25 Apparently the couple was so ascetic (and frugal) when it came to what they ate that they were endangering their health. In addition, they were also trying to force their beliefs on others, especially Stephen with his position on the use of pork (we will discuss his attitude more fully later).26 The second testimony concerned several practices that Mary indulged in that Ellen White felt were worsening her invalidism.27 One was Mrs. Haskell’s fear, shared by many at that time, about bathing. Not only was it difficult (hauling water from a distant well or spring and heating it was a great chore), but it was also risking one’s health when done in the drafty and poorly heated dwellings of the time. People could easily catch colds, leading to chills and premature death. In fact, the state of Pennsylvania during the 1840s considered passing a law banning bathing between November and March, in order to protect people from its seeming risks.28 Many looked upon frequent bathing with great suspicion. The early colonial settlers regarded the Native American habit of bathing as an example of their savage lifestyle.29 But Ellen G. White, expressing a different concern about Mrs. Haskell’s health, wrote her a long letter stressing the need and health benefits of regular bathing. Mary believed that bathing would make her chilly. Mrs. White, with a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the relationship between body and mind, explained that Mrs. Haskell’s blood vessels were responding to her conviction that she would be cold in a bath, and as a result she actually did become chilly. The second problem was that Mary was convinced that too much physical activity would make her more of an invalid than she already was. She based her belief on “experience,”30 and believed that this “experience”

had taught her certain things about her personal health. Mrs. White emphasized that such “experience” could not be trusted and that it must be tested against physiological laws. Mrs. Haskell, she suggested, needed to go to the new Adventist health institute and accept the help of the physicians. Mary needed more physical activity, but she thought herself incapable of it. She concluded, for example, that she did not have the strength to take care of her husband’s clothes. Although Stephen and their friends wanted her to do more, she feared that such exertion would worsen her problems. They simply did not, she felt, understand her condition. Ellen noted that Mary was physically capable of getting in and out of a carriage. Thus, she could use those same muscles and physical effort in other activities, especially walking. While Mrs. Haskell might pray for God to heal her, she also had a role to perform. Despite their age differences, and the unusual circumstances of their marriage, the couple would work together and accomplish much. Besides being a homemaker, Mary took every opportunity to join Stephen in his work for the newly formed Seventh-day Adventist Church. The nineteenth century was a period in which women increasingly became involved in religious and humanitarian causes, as new avenues opened up for them to participate despite society’s traditional gender-role limitations. The inheritance Mary Haskell had received from her father was soon gone. She and Stephen used it to spread the teachings of the Adventist Church. She was now truly dependent on the support of a husband.

1. The 1850 federal census documents a Howe family residing next to the Haskells. Mary E. Howe was then living with an eighty-year-old Mary Howe (her mother), who is listed next to Calvin Guild Howe, noted in a genealogy as the younger Mary’s half-brother. Records indicate the birth of Calvin G. Howe just three days before his mother’s death, suggesting that the woman died of birth complications, a frequent danger of the time. Her husband then married Mary, the mother of Mary E. Howe. If Calvin Guild Howe was the one who asked Stephen Haskell to look after Mary E.

Howe, he was a half-brother. Ella Robinson and Rowena Elizabeth Purdon spell Mary’s surname as “How,” as does The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2013), 403. But Stephen spells it in his letters with an e, as in, for example, S. N. Haskell to Mrs. Anna C. Fay, May 19, 19— (year not filled in). 2. Arthur White refers to Mrs. Haskell as Harriet, possibly either a typographical error or because it was her middle name. Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White: The Early Years, 1827–1862 (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1985), 382. 3. In the obituary he wrote for Mary immediately after her death, he stated that “she was an invalid for over sixty years. For about fourteen years she was confined to her bed. This [the fourteen years] was before she embraced the advent doctrine.” S. N. Haskell, obituary of Mary E. Haskell, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 20, 1894, 127. 4. Writing years later to Ellen White, Haskell guessed that his first wife was about forty when he married her. Jerry Moon observes that Mary Haskell “was 81 at her death in January, 1894. Assuming she would have been 82 later in the year, she would have been born in 1812, hence 38 in 1850. For some years Haskell didn’t even know his own birth date for sure, so it would not be surprising if he was uncertain about hers.” Jerry Moon, “S. N. Haskell: A Three-fold Cord” (research paper, Center for Adventist Research, Andrews University, 1989), 18. 5. Mary did inherit some property from her father that she and Stephen used to support their evangelistic activities (Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 29), but whether it would have sustained her the rest of her life is another matter. As an invalid, she would have needed at least a housekeeper. 6. See Massachusetts Town and Vital Records, accessed through www.ancestry.com. According to a letter Haskell wrote decades later, Mary’s mother had moved from Rutland, Vermont, to join her. See S. N. Haskell to Mrs. Anna C. Fay, May 19, 190—. The year on the Bible Training School stationary is not filled in, but it had to be sometime after 1905, since he mentions the printing of his book The Story of the Seer of Patmos, published in 1905. 7. Rowena Elizabeth Purdon refers to the incident as “an interesting legend.” That New England School (South Lancaster, MA: College Press, 1956), 18. Ella Robinson, as she reconstructs it, comments, “As the story goes.” S. N. Haskell, 13. One could sense here a hint of dubiousness, that there might be a bit more to the story than Haskell acknowledged. Generally, though, most have accepted his version. 8. Register of Birth, Marriages and Death in the Town of Princeton, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 40. Accessed through www.ancestry.com. 9. Purdon has him at the age of nineteen. See Rowena Elizabeth Purdon, The Story of a Church: Presented on the Occasion of the Diamond Anniversary of the Founding of the South Lancaster Seventh-day Adventist Church, April 28 & 29, 1939 (South Lancaster, MA: College Press), 7. 10. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 13. 11. Ibid., 15; S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, March 23, 1905. 12. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, 2nd ed. (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000), 72, 120–122, 147. 13. Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988), 14, 15. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. Purdon, The Story of a Church, 7. For a biographical sketch of Purdon herself, see Randall Blackie and Neal Norcliffe, “Four Influential Women at AUC,” Adventist Heritage, Spring 1994, 44. 16. Purdon, That New England School, 18. Cf. Purdon, The Story of a Church, 7. The alumni association of Atlantic Union College preserved a sampler that Mary had made at the age of ten. For a photo of it, see Purdon, That New England School, 23. 17. Arthur W. Spalding, Footprints of the Pioneers (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1947), 11. 18. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 19. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 4th ed. (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1948), 3:67–79. 20. Ibid., 69. 21. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 100, 101. 22. White, Testimonies for the Church, 4th ed., 3:77. 23. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 24. White, Testimonies for the Church, 4th ed., 1:204–209; 3:67–79. 25. Ibid., 1:204–209. 26. Near the end of his life he would spark a still-continuing controversy by trying to force his views of an issue on the church, that of the topic of the “daily” of Daniel 8:11. See pp. 252–263 in this book. 27. White, Testimonies for the Church, 3:67–79. 28. Molly Harrison, The Kitchen in History (New York: Scribner, 1972), 114. 29. Linda Grant De Pauw, Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 114. George Washington recognized that his troops needed occasionally to wash, and he set aside time on Fridays for them to do so—but no more than ten minutes at a time (ibid., 185). 30. Perhaps part of those eccentricities that Purdon alluded to.

Chapter II

Son of New England tephen Haskell was born in Oakham, Massachusetts. He claimed that his birth had been on April 22, 1833, though town records indicate the year as 1834.1 During his life he would tell people that he was proud

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that he had been born in the year of the falling of the stars, a reference to the dramatic November 12–13 Leonid meteor display that Adventists regarded as a sign pointing to the second coming of Christ. Oakham is 17 miles west of Worcester, 66 miles west of Boston, and 177 miles from New York City. But the town would have a different history than any of those cities. Secluded in the gently rolling hills of northwestern Worcester County, Oakham was first settled in 1749 and officially incorporated in 1775. Time seems to have passed it by, allowing it even today to maintain its rural tranquility. The town center has changed little since the nineteenth century. It has a small commons surrounded only by the city hall, a fieldstone library, a classic white New England–style Congregational church with steeple, and a scattering of houses among the trees. It has no stores or commercial center of any kind. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the town still had less than two thousand inhabitants and was still 98 percent native-born white.2 It is a remnant of an almost vanished America. Not only has Oakham remained rural, but about fifteen miles west of it sprawls the Quabbin Reservoir, created during the 1930s to supply drinking water for Boston. Submerging four communities in the Swift River Valley, the thirty-nine-square-mile body of water has 181 miles of

shoreline. But it has become more than a water supply. The land around it has reverted to what New England was like even before the arrival of the colonists. A scenic place of hemlocks and hardwood forests populated by deer and muskrats, it is far more lush than even Haskell would have known it in his time. Yet while his birthplace may seem to have been caught in a time warp, Stephen would definitely become a part of the rapidly evolving rest of the country. Though he spent his childhood in a community that still continued to reflect in many ways life in a rural and small village of his ancestors, much of the rest of the United States—especially the North and particularly New England—was starting to enter the modern world.3 We need to consider some of those rapidly evolving changes if we are to understand more fully the man Haskell would become and what he accomplished. In the next few chapters we will look at some of those historical transformations and briefly show how they shaped him. Then, in later chapters, we will examine a few of them in greater depth. One fundamental shift (though perhaps not immediately obvious) was that the view of history was transforming from a cyclical pattern to a more linear one, at least partially derived from a growing awareness of the scriptural notion that history was going somewhere. One potential significance of such a worldview would be especially important in Haskell’s life—specifically the concept of the Second Coming and the promised establishment of God’s eternal kingdom.4 Although the viewpoint would be strong in much of American Protestant Christianity, it was particularly so in the Christianity of Haskell’s New England culture. Historian John Demos noted that the Puritans “lived with the fervent expectation of ‘millennial’ outcomes. In their view, human history was (as Jonathan Edwards put it) a ‘work of redemption,’ a work to be completed, sooner or later” by that longed- for Advent.5 A linear view of history is vital even from a secular perspective, because you cannot have progress as the modern world understands it if life keeps

following the same rhythmical patterns, whether seasonal or cultural, as in the rise and fall of some golden age. History must have a destination, a goal. Thus the more linear worldview of the Bible would help prepare modern society for the idea of progress. Scripture has God guiding historical events in a linear fashion. But the concept of history moving forward would shift from the divine intervention of the Second Coming to one of material progress occurring through human science and technology. People of the nineteenth century would increasingly see progress in technology, the spread of democracy, and new developments in business and economics as inevitably leading to a better world dominated by enlightened human beings. Beginning in the middle of the century, this concept of unceasing progress would eclipse the biblical one of God’s restoration of a fallen humanity and world.6 But while he might use the results of increasing technology and American development, Stephen N. Haskell would do everything in the context of the Second Coming. As the core of the biblical concept of history, Christ’s return would be the motivating factor behind all that he did. He would preach, teach, and travel the globe, because that return of Christ promised to bring an infinitely better world than secular progress could even imagine. While the Seventh-day Adventist movement would continue to focus on the Second Coming, much of its administrative structure and practices would emerge from, or reflect, the new world shaped by constant technological and cultural change. The early Adventist Church would be unquestionably a product of nineteenth-century America but also, at the same time, transcend it.7 Though change seemed constantly to speed up as the nineteenth century went by,8 another kind of motion would dominate America and, in turn, profoundly affect Adventism. The availability of vast areas of unsettled land had begun to shape American culture and outlook from the beginning of its history.9 Until the end of the nineteenth century, it would draw

Americans ever westward—and Adventists along with it. A church that began in New England would spread across the nation. New forms of transportation would not only encourage westward migration but also trigger other major changes in society, transforming the rural world of Oakham into the urban society of today.10 At first, networks of canals opened up commerce and brought together raw materials for large-scale manufacturing. The Erie Canal hauled flour and raw materials east and carried people west. Adventist pioneers began to establish their travel itineraries around the route, as illustrated by the familiar story of James White lifting his wife aboard one of the departing boats and Joseph Bates leaping after them with their fare, only to plunge into the water.11 Then in the 1830s came what scholar Ted Widmer has called the “Internet of its day”—the railroad. Commenting on its total impact, Widmer observed: “To put it bluntly, people who had followed certain kinds of agrarian folkways for a millennium, in America and the Europe of their ancestors, were now feeling, for the first time, the mighty effects of unrestrained capitalism.”12 That capitalism would reshape Haskell’s New England into the manufacturing hub of the nation and make new challenges for Adventist evangelism as a result of the growth of large cities. Haskell would become a pioneer in developing new ways to reach the cities with the Adventist message. Railroads especially built modern America. Besides the realm of transportation, they radically altered the nation in such areas as economics, production, management and labor style and relationships, and national policy.13 Winter had always isolated most Americans, but railroads overcame that problem, freeing Americans from a seasonal cycle.14 The railroad system, along with water and steam power, enabled the development of large-scale factories. Those factories stimulated the need for new machinery and other innovations that would increasingly transform manufacturing and retail business and, in the process, further

restructure the entire fabric of society. For Adventists, railroads allowed its evangelists and missionaries to spread far and wide in a manner never possible before, as well as permitting church leadership to have more contact with the budding denomination’s scattered membership. Church officials could rush from meeting to meeting. The early issues of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald were full of accounts of James White and others “taking the cars” to one destination after another. Haskell would be a prominent part of that constantly roving administration. The new railroads became so vital to church activities that the Advent Review regularly printed the timetables of those lines serving Battle Creek. By the middle of the nineteenth century, progress had become an American obsession, not only in technology and science but also in every other aspect of life, including religion.15 Many would see the world— especially the United States—advancing to a millennium on earth. A significant percentage of Protestant Christians in America believed that the world would become perfected before the Second Coming, not after it.16 Maury Klein cites the invention of the telegraph as an example of still another transformative agent. Just as the railroad transported freight and people more quickly and regularly, the telegraph moved information. Newspapers no longer had to wait days or even weeks to obtain news. The use of the telegraph led to the formation of press organizations. Telegraph lines followed the railroads and helped them operate more efficiently, then leaped ahead of them to cross the nation to the West Coast and began tying California and other new states to the older ones, which was especially important during the American Civil War. By 1866, most of the individual telegraph companies had merged into one large firm, setting a pattern that, first, regional railroads and then other businesses could copy. The telegraph altered not only the way railroads dispatched their trains but American business as a whole.

Transactions that once took weeks or even months by letter could be completed in days or even hours by parties located in distant cities. This ability to move information quickly changed the way bankers, brokers, merchants, and speculators did business. It fostered the rise of New York City as the nation’s commercial hub and Wall Street as the center of financial markets. Later it enabled growing companies to centralize their operation in one city while maintaining close touch with plants or stores or other facilities across the nation. In this way the telegraph helped create the rise of regional and national markets. The rise of big business could never have occurred without the communication ability offered by the telegraph and later the telephone.17 The new invention would also allow Adventists to conduct church business across long distances and transmit church news instantaneously for the next issue of the Advent Review. In addition, steam-powered presses and new methods of making paper would dramatically speed up printing and lower its cost, making publishing a major factor in the spread of Adventism. And Haskell would be in the thick of Adventist publishing. But the telegraph reshaped more than business organizations and procedures. Klein says that it also transformed American culture itself. “Like the railroad, it became one more instrument speeding up the pace of American life, which in turn pressured language to become more succinct as well. Gradually the leisurely, flowery flow of Victorian prose gave way to the terse, snappy vignettes of the telegram, where more words meant higher cost.”18 Adventist journalism would generally reflect that more concise style. As Adventist presses printed thousands of his news reports and articles, Haskell’s own literary style would shun flowery prose. That new world—unleashed by the railroad and the economic, technological, social, and intellectual forces it stimulated and spread— would not only alter Haskell’s personal life,19 but he (and other Seventh-

day Adventists) would increasingly use numerous elements of that emerging world to advance his religious vision. He would employ his Yankee ingenuity to do more than create just a gadget or two. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin said that “the greatest resource of New England was resourcefulness.”20 And S. N. Haskell would always be a resourceful individual.

1. Purdon, That New England School, 19. Such confusion was common before hospital birth records became standard. Until then, if people recorded birth dates at all, they would be listed in baptismal records or in family Bibles. Some would arbitrarily choose a date to celebrate as their birthday. See Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 18. In a letter dated December 26, 1899, Haskell mentions that while visiting his hometown of Oakham, Massachusetts, he discovered, “I am two years older than I supposed I was. . . . I shall be sixty-seven in April [1900].” 2. Interestingly, as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, the definition of an urban area was that it had a population of 2,500 or more. Yesterday’s urban is now today’s rural. Adventists, though, would continue to flourish best in the smaller towns that still retained much of their rural character. Lura Beam, A Maine Hamlet (Thomaston, ME: Tilbury Publishing House, 2000). A classic reminiscence of the world that Haskell and most of his fellow believers would have known is that of Beam’s A Maine Hamlet, an accout of the years she lived in Marshfield, Maine, as a child from 1894–1904. 3. For an overview of the various social, political, economic, and technological forces driving the radical shift in outlook until the American Civil War, see Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006). Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) provides a more detailed look at changes extending through the early years of Haskell’s life, including religious movements (see especially chapter 8, “Pursuing the Millennium”). Carl J. Richard, The Battle for the American Mind: A Brief History of a Nation’s Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) surveys intellectual trends in American history, including religion. 4. John Demos, Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 25–56. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. Gunnar Pedersen, “The Bible as ‘Story’: A Methodological Opportunity,” in Exploring the Frontiers of Faith: Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Jan Paulsen, ed. Børge Schantz and Reinder Bruinsma (Luenburg, Germany: Advent-Verlag, 2009), 239, 240. 7. Seventh-day Adventism has spread around the world and penetrated many other cultures. They,

in turn, are beginning to influence the church in various ways and send it in new directions. Ultimately Adventism as a whole will become less and less North American in nature. 8. For a brief overview of the kinds of dramatic changes that took place during the nineteenth century in just a single state—Ohio—see Kevin Phillips, William McKinley (New York: Times Books, 2003), 10–15. 9. Demos, A Little Commonwealth, 187–190. 10. For a description of what it was like to travel the primitive roads of early America, see the diary of Henry Rogers in Tracy Lawson, Fips, Bots, Doggeries, and More: Explorations of Henry Roger’s 1838 Journal of Travel From Southwestern Ohio to New York City (Granville, OH: McDonald and Woodward, 2012). It depicts the kind of world the earliest Adventist pioneers lived and traveled in. Eric Sloane’s classic American Yesterday (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003) gives many helpful insights, especially through its delightful drawings, of what life was like in the nineteenth century, including roads, road tolls, and wooden bridges. 11. Ellen G. White, Life Sketches of Ellen G. White (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1915), 112, 113. 12. Ted Widmer, Martin Van Buren (New York: Times Books, 2005), 98. 13. Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 (New York: Vintage, 2008). For a case study of the railroad’s impact on the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago, see his chapter “Rome of the Railroads” on pp. 27–53. 14. Patrick Allitt, “How the Railroads Defeated Winter,” Invention and Technology 13, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 55–67. 15. See, for example, William R. Williams, Religious Progress (Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1850). An excerpt, “Religion a Principle of Growth,” appears in Carl Bode, comp. and ed., Midcentury America: Life in the 1850s (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 136–139. 16. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a classic illustration of the belief that events were preparing a millennium in which the world would get better in preparation for Christ’s coming. The subsequent sad events of history have largely discredited that belief, and premillennialism has become dominant in the American religious world of today. In The Great Controversy and other writings, Ellen G. White would combat the idea that society would get better to prepare the way for the Second Advent. 17. Maury Klein, The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 108. 18. Ibid. 19. The Everyday Life in America Series offers a chronological survey of the changes in every aspect of American culture. Those examining the years of Haskell’s life include: Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840; Daniel E. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1989); Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America:

Transformations in Everyday Life 1876–1915 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991). 20. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 10. Although an older work, Boorstin’s section on New England provides a good survey on the impact the region made on the United States as a whole.

Chapter III

Childhood Influences he transformations that were remaking America did not immediately touch Haskell, however. As a child he grew up in a still-rural New England family. Late in his life, Stephen described his parents, Nelson

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Haskell (1798–1886) and Philena Pepper Haskell (1802–1853):1 “My father was very peaceable and would rather suffer wrong than defend his own rights. My mother did not fear anyone if she thought they did wrong and would contend for her own rights.”2 Stephen would perhaps reflect his mother more than his father in those two traits. But, eventually, social forces from the larger world of America began to sway him. At the age of eight he signed a temperance pledge and joined the Cold Water Army.3 That seems a simple decision to us today, but it was not so in his time. Because of the often unsanitary sources of much water back then (especially in more urban regions), drinking only water could be quite risky. Many people, even children, drank ale, beer, and hard cider. The alcohol in these drinks would kill some of the pathogenic organisms in the polluted water added to the beverage.4 While Louis Pasteur had not yet discovered the germ origins of much disease, people still sensed the danger of public water sources. For example, a nineteenthcentury father lamented in a letter to his son visiting Philadelphia that the younger man would have to use the local city water rather than his usual cider. While alcohol-containing drinks might give some protection from polluted water, it had its own dangers. Alcoholism had become a major

problem in the United States. The heavy drinking led to family abuse and poverty, and it threatened to unravel the social fabric. Americans drank after the Revolution more heavily than at any time in the nation’s history, even now. By the late 1820s, Americans consumed, per capita, almost four gallons of pure two-hundred-proof alcohol per year.5 Temperance societies, especially active in New England, formed to meet this threat to society. Thus, by 1840, consumption had dropped to one and a half gallons annually per capita.6 American temperance lecturers promoted their reform, seemingly everywhere, in the northern states. One came to Haskell’s hometown and spoke to his Sunday school class, urging the young people to sign a pledge not to drink alcohol. Two of his sisters did,7 but Stephen hesitated, not sure that he could actually live up to it, especially since he liked sweet or unfermented cider. Would it be wrong to use that? What would happen to him if he broke the pledge? Finally he decided to sign it, but his questions indicate the seriousness behind his decisions.8 It was an early example of his dedication to anything that he chose to do, the same radical commitment that he would later show in his fulfillment of his promise to take care of his employer’s sister by marrying her. Eventually it would be the foundation of his dedication to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, its teachings, and its mission. But commitment can cover a wide spectrum, ranging from total dedication to obstinacy. Stephen would exhibit all such facets at some time or other during his long life, but overwhelmingly that of complete dedication. And that dedication was a power that drove what he made of himself. He lived in a world of seemingly endless possibilities. But he had to choose to seize them, even if not everyone else did. A Self-Taught Man The new United States, lacking most of the rigid class structure of Europe, provided an ideal climate for highly motivated individuals to

advance themselves, despite initial limitations of social class, education, or wealth. With the aid of developing education and technology, there began to emerge the concept of the “self-made man.” Traditionally attributed to a speech Henry Clay made on the floor of the American Senate in 1832 (not too long before Haskell’s birth), the phrase began to appear everywhere, including on numerous book titles.9 Yale historian John Demos has commented that, though the idea of selfmaking had strong overtones of “success,” it was much more. It evolved from the concept of self-culture to self-improvement. “Dip into the nineteenth-century records of almost any local community and you find folks endlessly going to lectures, study groups, ‘recitations.’ And the subject, the goal, was usually ‘improvement,’ in one aspect or another.”10 In America, people were not permanently trapped in their ancestral land, class, or profession. They did not always have to do the same things in the same way as did those before them. Whether a single individual or a whole society, it was possible to escape the cycles of the past and progress to new and better things. And countless Americans would do exactly that. A few years before Haskell’s birth, a tailor named Andrew Johnson (later the seventeenth president of the United States) set up a shop in Greeneville, Tennessee. As he sat laboring atop his worktable, his wife, Eliza McCardle Johnson, read books and government documents aloud to him. Johnson had never had a day of schooling in his life, but he had taught himself to read, and people later remembered that he always seemed to have his nose in a book. His wife, however, had a better-than-average education for a woman of the time, and she helped him learn how to write and speak well (though his spelling remained atrocious).11 Interestingly, Eliza Johnson, like Haskell’s wife, was an invalid much of her life, suffering from what physicians of the time diagnosed as consumption (tuberculosis). In addition, both she and Mary Haskell spent much time separated from their husbands, who were often away on business.12

Like Andrew Johnson, Haskell had little or no formal education and had grown up poor. Puritan culture emphasized the value of education, and New England, often described as the “land of schools,” had an extensive system of schoolhouses supported by local taxes.13 But the desperate need for help on family farms and businesses often prevented children from attending school even a few weeks out of the year. Haskell’s wife, like Johnson’s, would also help her husband overcome his lack of a formal education. She had teaching experience and a personal library and used both to educate her young husband. In addition, Mrs. Haskell would also lend her books (many of which were collections of poetry) to others. Stephen worked hard to overcome his educational limitations in the best “self-made man” tradition. Most likely, though, had anyone used the “selfmade” phrase in his presence, he would have probably replied that he was a “Spirit-made man.”

1. Haskell’s parents married on April 29, 1830. See Massachusetts Marriages, 1633–1850, online database accessed through www.ancestry.com. 2. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, December 29, 1909. 3. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 14. 4. Long before, in what is now the Czech Republic, people had noted that those who could drink beer lived longer than those who could not afford it. The reason again would be that the alcohol content would kill disease germs in the water. 5. Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 286. 6. Ibid., 296. For the history of drinking in America and the tremendous social problems it caused, see ibid., 281–286, 295–297, 301; W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 7. The 1850 federal census for Rutland, Worcester, Massachusetts, lists five children: Ruth Elizabeth (born 1831), Stephen Nelson, Sarah Philena (born 1836), George Washington (1838– 1864; killed in the Civil War), and Mariah Louisa (born 1841 and sometimes recorded as Louisa Mariah. The 1850 census also contains the Howe family. Accessed through www.ancestry.com. 8. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 14. 9. While one must acknowledge that the “self-made man” was more an ideal than actuality even

during the middle of the nineteenth century, enough examples did happen to encourage many individuals to break free from class and other restrictions and seize the new opportunities of an expanding America. While changing economic and political factors, especially the rise of the industrial working class by the end of the century, would increasingly limit what people could do, conditions were still much better in the United States than in the Old World. By seeking education and through hard work and innovation in new fields, some could still achieve great things (such as in new technologies and businesses as well as in the unsettled western United States). Haskell would become part of a developing church that provided him with countless opportunities to do new things. It is an inspiration that has not yet totally vanished from American thought. And the Adventist educational system has continued to produce many examples of people from limited backgrounds reaching new levels of success. 10. Demos, Circles and Lines, 79. 11. Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 21, 24, 29–31; Frank B. Williams Jr., Tennessee’s Presidents (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 70. 12. For Eliza Johnson, see Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, 28, 29. 13. Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 34.

Chapter IV

A Product of New England o fully understand the impact that Stephen Nelson Haskell made on the Seventh-day Adventist Church, we must particularly recognize how his New England heritage motivated him within what was itself,

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initially, a New England denomination. His life and his faith might have been quite different had they originated elsewhere. First, through his early years, Haskell worked at a number of different jobs, a common New England practice. The New World did not reflect the restrictive and hierarchal work structure of England and the rest of Europe. And because New England always had a shortage of labor, its people had to become adept at doing all kinds of things. Haskell’s life reflected this cultural pattern. In a mood of reminiscence, he once wrote to Ellen White that he had “been in all sorts of businesses from a horse Jockey, Mastic roofer, Soap maker, Pickler, both honest and dishonest business.”1 Daniel J. Boorstin titled a section about New Englanders in one of his books as “The Versatiles,” because of their willingness to try new and different things.2 Haskell definitely lived up to the image. For a time he, too, joined the disproportionate number of young New England men who, during the nineteenth century, traveled the rough roads of the eastern United States as itinerant peddlers or job seekers.3 Shaping American Society But there is even more to Haskell being a New Englander than his abilities as a jack-of-all-trades. Modern America has to a great extent forgotten the powerful role New Englanders once had in shaping the

nation. They would have a great impact on American society in such areas as business, invention, industrialization, and transportation, as well as in many other aspects.4 And that involved not only the practical but also the intellectual—including religion. Many historians have studied what they refer to as the “burned-over” area of western New York, a region of constant religious experimentation and social ferment.5 While this took place in what many scholars call “Greater Yankeedom,” the phenomenon actually began long before in New England proper and New England settlers carried it with them to New York State. “Originating and organizing new religious sects has always been a favorite New England pastime,” Edwin Valentine Mitchell wryly commented many years ago. “Strange creeds, some of them brand new, others very old and revived, have cropped up like weeds, and no matter how noxious or far-fetched they were, all seem to have succeeded in attracting at least a few adherents. Most of them, of course, proved shortlived. They had their little day and ceased to be. Their brief chronicles are scattered throughout the town histories of the region.”6 Mitchell regarded the growth of such religious phenomena as “largely attributable to the bleakness and austerity of New England life and the atmosphere of religious revivalism that frequently prevailed for long periods over the region.”7 He also suggested, probably tongue-in-cheek, that perhaps something in the New England character itself made them more open to such movements.8 But whatever the reason, they took that tendency with them wherever they went. In the words of Michael Barone, “The Yankee diaspora produced a flowering of religious enthusiasm and new religious sects as copious as any in American history.”9 Most would abandon their New England Congregationalism and either join other churches or found new ones. Haskell would first leave the Congregational Church for the Methodists, then become part of a religious group that also originated in New England—Seventh-day Adventists. New Englanders had long devoted themselves to improving both the

intellectual and the practical sides of their lives. Robert K. Leavitt said of his Maine-raised grandmother that “she could make soap and translate Horace with equal facility and mordant effect.”10 Haskell might not have been able to translate Horace, but he did exemplify both the New England love of learning and the ability to find new and better ways of both learning and doing things. While Stephen did not know Greek or Hebrew, he sought out the nuances of the original biblical text by reading various translations. Perhaps that is one major reason that most of his biblical exposition holds up even today. He took advantage of every opportunity for learning available to him as an individual without access to formal education. Still another trait of New Englanders was their ubiquity. The region’s people spread not only across the nation, but in the areas of business, diplomacy, and religion they would traverse the world. As a leader of Adventism, Haskell would join his wandering cultural kinspeople in the service of his church. By the end of his life, he had worked on five continents. His denominational career, as he recognized himself, was one of almost constant motion, of continuous travel and of doing many different things. Late in life he commented to General Conference president Arthur G. Daniells, “My manner of life from my youth up has been one of going from one place to another, for when seventeen years of age I bought my time of my father for one hundred and fifty dollars and began business on my own responsibility, and never knew what it was to settle down to local business untill [sic] I went into the School at Avondale.”11 He may have “settled down” in Australia, but even then he was frequently on the go, and it would only increase when he returned to the United States. His life would be one of doing many kinds of things in many places. Haskell was a microcosm of New England. Besides his devotion to a new religion that had originated in New England culture, his life was also filled with many professions and the ability to make things and accomplish

different skilled tasks, again reflecting his cultural heritage. As a child, Ella M. Robinson remembered watching Stephen, dressed in overalls and rubber boots, as he worked “with a group of students building a wooden bridge. He was a favorite leader of the work teams. No matter what the job, whether plowing or planting, building fences or draining land, he always found the best and easiest way of accomplishing it.”12 Because Stephen also shared the Yankee trait of tinkering and love of gadgets, New England Adventists remembered him long after his death for a device that tradition claimed that he had created to help with dismantling camp meeting tents. Nicknamed a “haskell,” it consisted of a lever mounted on wheels. With it, one could easily pull up tent stakes.13 Besides being a jack of all manual trades, he would perform many types of leadership roles after he joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, including such areas as evangelism, publishing, education, and the training of members in practical religion. The New England resourcefulness of those earliest Adventist pioneers was vital for a people having to found a whole denomination from scratch. Soap Salesman Haskell later wrote that after his marriage he worked for a man named Roper (apparently near Princeton, Massachusetts), but because of illness left his employment. Stephen then “traded” for a place along the road to Sterling, Massachusetts, property owned by individuals he named as the “Richardsons” and “Reeds.” The Haskells lived in a small house owned by a Mrs. Wilder, whose husband was the town postmaster. The Wilders had a son and daughter, and Stephen remembered that when Mrs. Wilder was past the age of fifty, she had another child.14 The stage coach to Oakdale, Massachusetts, would pass by the Haskells’ home each day.15 Between his early preaching appointments, Stephen, as we have already noted, supported himself as a soap maker. He would sell his product as he traveled around Worcester County with a horse and cart.16 At that time of

the nineteenth century, many New England households turned such rural activities as blacksmithing, leather working, wheel and barrel making, and milling into small-scale, often seasonal manufacturing of metal goods, hides, harnesses, shoes, textiles, tools, wagons, and furniture and other wooden items as a way to bring in extra income.17 While soap making was a common farm necessity, Stephen either produced or obtained it for resale on a larger scale. Unfortunately, Yankee peddlers had a reputation for sharp practices, such as offering fraudulent products. They would sell to unsuspecting customers nutmegs, hams, and blocks of cheese all carved from wood. In addition they would convince housewives to purchase soap for 10 cents a batch (a steep price for the time) when they could get the same thing locally for less.18 While we don’t know for sure how much he emulated some of his fellow itinerant salespeople, his comment about “dishonest” business suggests he might have indulged in the practice, at least in the case of soap. As he journeyed along on his sales trips, he would often let his horse take its lead while he worked on algebra problems. Rowena Purdon has suggested that Mary Haskell may have urged Stephen to study the subject as a way of learning logic and in order to improve the structure of his sermons.19 As for Haskell himself, he was convinced of algebra’s usefulness in teaching order and system. It was his own new approach to learning. Once during a camp meeting sermon at South Lancaster, Massachusetts, he commented, “If a young man asks me what book he should study if he wants to be a preacher, I tell him, aside from the Bible, an algebra [book].”20 But wives and extensive reading cannot completely substitute for formal education. Just as Andrew Johnson struggled with poor spelling throughout his life, Haskell’s subjects and predicates often went their separate ways, refusing to agree with each other.21 And he retained his rural New England accent.

Voracious Reader Besides receiving the help of his wife, Haskell began a constant program of self-learning. Like so many individuals who made their mark during the nineteenth century, he was a voracious reader. Andrew Johnson had immersed himself in political and classical works, but Haskell first began with Scripture. My Bible was my principle study for two years from the time I heard the first sermon on the coming of Christ. I carried it under my arm every day, and put it under my pillow every night. I do not think for two years it was ever five feet from me day or night. During those years I got out a chronology from the Bible alone. I knew so little of other books, that I did not know of any chronology ever gotten out by any other person. I offered it to the Worlds Crises22 if they would publish it. I was then informed of the many chronologies published, and began to obtain a library, and as a result it created a taste for reading works on that subject and other Bible themes, until in the course of 15 or 20 years, I had a library that was worth about $2,000.00.23 It consisted of ancient histories, commentaries, Bible dictionaries, and books of like character.24 Although an extremely frugal man in most ways, he was willing to spend money on books, including those on religious topics by authors belonging to other religious perspectives. He continued the practice even after Adventists began writing their own books. “My attention was soon turned to the obtaining of different translations [of the Bible], until as I sit writing [in 1914] I count on my shelves about twenty different translations, some of which I count very rare. These I found to be the best commentary; as the texts are put in different words to convey the same thought.”25 Although he would always love and use the King James Version of the Bible, Stephen was apparently not afraid of

new translations as many of his later fellow Adventists would be. Haskell would steep himself in Scripture. He recorded that during his lifetime he read the Bible through seventy-six times.26 The Bible deeply captivated him. H. M. S. Richards reported that “he hardly dared take out his Bible while waiting at a station for a train, for fear Stephen would become so absorbed in studying some line of truth that he would lose all contact with time. His train could come and go and he be left sitting there in the station still studying his Bible.”27 New England Moves West Both the dedication to educating himself and his concentration on Scripture were further reflections of his New England heritage. In my biography of James White, I briefly noted some of the influences White’s New England/Maine heritage had on his life and career.28 Besides James and Ellen White, Joseph Bates and a large number of the earliest Adventists were New Englanders.29 As a result, New England thought and practices would naturally be a powerful element in the development of early Seventh-day Adventism. Denis Fortin regards the Puritanism of New England as a major current flowing through Ellen White’s extensive writings.30 (We will discuss the influence of Puritanism and its culture on Haskell’s life in the next chapter.)31 Even after the Adventist pioneers began moving west, they still remained steeped in New England culture as they continued to live in areas settled by Yankee migrants seeking better opportunities.32 Wherever they went, Yankee migrants seemed determined to replicate New England culture, one that non-Yankees would disparagingly call the “universal Yankee nation.”33 New Englanders had been constantly moving onward as population growth34 and exhaustion of the land35 drove many, first into northern New England, and then constantly westward. One historian has observed that New England’s greatest export was its people. It is estimated that

Connecticut emigrated alone a number equivalent to three times its nineteenth-century population.36 Connecticut-born Harriet Beecher Stowe even recognized, in her time, New England’s impact on the new nation when, in 1869, she proudly declared, “North, South, East and West have been populated largely from New England, so that the seed-bed of New England was the seed-bed of the great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.”37 Reading early Sabbatarian Adventist history quickly reveals that many of those leaving New England were also Seventh-day Adventists. An unsigned note in an 1855 Advent Review and Sabbath Herald38 acknowledged that fact and tried to put the best light on it when it noted that many of our Eastern Brethren think of moving West. We would say that the West is a wide and promising field for those of experience, who wish to do good in spreading the truth. The advancement of the cause of truth should be the great object with all believers. A good brother in Vermont, when speaking of going West, said that he should not wish his brethren who may go from the East to settle by him, but to settle 40 miles apart, and in each place raise the standard of truth, and make a home for the traveling servants of God. With such views and feelings, we would say to these dear brethren in the East who think of going West, Go in the name of the Lord, and may your endeavors to raise the standard of truth in the great West be blest of the Lord.39 As fertility rates peaked in New England during the 1830s,40 some sought work in the region’s developing manufacturing centers. But many more joined the tidal wave sweeping westward. First they headed for western New York during the 1800s and 1810s, next moved to Ohio and Indiana, and then settled Michigan during the 1820s and 1830s.41 In the

case of Michigan, the largest group of settlers in the state during the first five decades of the nineteenth century had either come directly from New England or had been born in New York as the descendants of Yankee migrants.42 Historians soon came to refer to the region extending west from New England through upstate New York, Ohio’s Western Reserve, the southern half of Michigan’s lower peninsula, northern Indiana and Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and southeast Minnesota as “Greater New England,” “Yankeeland,” or even “Yankee West.”43 As Adventist pioneers entered these new regions, they felt comfortable with the culture, and those already there were more receptive to the Adventist message because it came from people with their same heritage. Battle Creek, Michigan, especially, was in many senses a transplanted New England town. Its New England culture would provide the seedbed for Seventh-day Adventism until it had grown and matured enough to spread to other cultures and regions. From the viewpoint of the history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the various forces driving New Englanders across the continent are not just historical curiosities. They were factors that would shape early Sabbatarian Adventist development and, among other things, keep it from becoming just a regional movement, as happened to some other denominations, especially in the American South. At the same time, that restlessness would ironically maintain a Seventh-day Adventist sense of community. As Americans migrated westward, they depended upon the assistance of kin and neighbors to find new land, help them make the journey there, and then clear the land and build new homes.44 Similar patterns show up among Adventists both in their personal moves (for example, the Waukon, Iowa, Adventist colony that had migrated en masse from Paris, Maine, in 1855) and the development of Adventist institutions (such as the publishing house). James and Ellen White, after living with others in various New England states, moved to Rochester, New York. The living arrangements of those working in the little Rochester publishing house

offer a good example of the early nineteenth-century American practice of printers and other craftspeople rooming or at least taking meals with their employers.45 Then the Whites accepted an invitation to go to Battle Creek, Michigan, making the move with the financial support of believers in that state. Once relocated to Battle Creek, the Adventist publishing house would reflect the manufacturing system that had since developed in New England. Employees lived in small boardinghouses or their own homes. As Boorstin has pointed out, American settlement and expansion, beginning with the Puritans, has always occurred within the context of community.46 The same applies to intellectual beliefs such as religion or politics. A church or political party is a community. They must constantly create a new and growing community or they will perish. Those who spread Adventism across America, and then around the world, were always looking for ways to foster Adventist community. And Haskell would encourage that with his emphasis throughout his life on practical Christian living, especially personal evangelism and the constantly growing community it can create. Michigan The earliest Michigan community of Seventh-day Adventists had persuaded the Whites and a number of other early Adventist leaders to settle in Battle Creek. Their arrival occurred not long after the state had finally begun to develop. For many years before the Adventists arrived, the growth of the state of Michigan had stagnated, partly because of its swampy terrain and the diseases that lurked there. (Malaria was so endemic in the state that it became known as the “Michigan shakes.”)47 The slow rate of population growth prompted Michigan to become one of the first states before the Civil War to make concerted efforts to attract immigrants.48 Large-scale settlement did not begin to take off until after the government reduced the price of land and the size of the minimum purchase required. In fact, one-fifth of all federal land sold during 1836

was in Michigan.49 Many of those who purchased it were those everrestless New Englanders. As already mentioned, Battle Creek, the headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church for half a century, was part of a large region of Michigan that had become populated with former Yankees.50 It would also draw many New England Adventists to it, including at different times Stephen Nelson Haskell, though he would never really make it his home. Thus, Adventism did not immediately leave its New England roots behind but for many decades followed the culture’s expansion across the northern tier of the nation. Even its early growth in California was in the San Francisco Bay area, a region, as we shall see later, settled by New Englanders who had come to the area by sea either around South America or across the Isthmus of Panama in hope of striking it rich. North American Adventism long kept much of New England culture, including its wanderlust. At the same time, as America’s westward expansion lured Adventists across the country, it also exposed them to new ideas and ways of doing things that would increasingly affect the church. Even the New England culture transplanted to northern California would be subtly transformed, especially in matters of social behavior.51 The Golden State would develop its own version of New England Adventism, and Haskell, particularly as president of the California Conference, would play a major role in that transformation. Although Stephen N. Haskell would remain behind in New England longer than many of his fellow Adventist pioneers, he would in time roam the globe itself.

1. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 2. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 3. 3. See Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 209. For the traveling conditions he would have endured, see 211–226, 229, 230.

4. For an overview of the dramatic impact on American culture by New Englanders, see the study done many years ago of those ultimate Yankees, the people of Connecticut. W. Storrs Lee, The Yankees of Connecticut (New York: Henry Holt, 1957). 5. The classic work on the subject is Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (New York: Harper and Row, 1950). 6. Edwin Valentine Mitchell, It’s an Old New England Custom (New York: Bonanza Books, 1946), 151, 152. In his chapter “To Thirst After Strange Gods,” he gives a number of examples of religious movements that developed long before the rise of the “Burned-Over District.” 7. Ibid., 167, 168. We will look at the revivalist currents later. 8. Ibid., 168. 9. Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics (New York: Crown, 2013), 83. 10. Quoted in New England in a Nutshell: Quotations About the People, Places, and Particulars of Life in the Six New England States (Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2002), 58. 11. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, March 23, 1905. 12. Ella M. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 9. 13. For a drawing of the contraption, see Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 11. W. Storrs Lee observed that a “good Yankee was lazy; he hated drudgery and was always on the lookout for a way of saving himself an hour’s hard work. . . . The great majority of Connecticut inventions were in labor-saving implements and tools.” Lee, The Yankees of Connecticut, 111. 14. Many people of the time were unsure of their exact age. 15. S. N. Haskell to Mrs. Anna C. Fay, May 19, 190- (year line not filled in). Mrs. Fay had apparently known of the Haskells when Stephen lived in the Princeton area, and Stephen reminiscences about people they would have both been acquainted with. 16. Purdon, The Story of a Church, 8. 17. Clark, Social Change, 103–105, 162, 163. 18. Lee, The Yankees of Connecticut, 149. 19. Purdon, 21. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 22. 22. The World’s Crisis and Second Advent Messenger was a Boston weekly periodical published by the Advent Christian Publishing Society, a first-day Adventist publishing house. 23. This was during a time when the average income was $300–$500 a year. Two thousand dollars would be equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars today.

24. S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, quoted in “Reflections of a Pioneer: An Autobiographical Letter of Stephen N. Haskell,” Adventist Heritage, July 1974, 56. 25. Ibid. 26. North Pacific Union Gleaner, December 31, 1940. 27. Quoted in Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 8. 28. Gerald Wheeler, James White: Innovator and Overcomer (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2003), 18–20, 29. 29. Sadly, even though the Seventh-day Adventist Church began in and was nurtured during its first decade or so in New England, the almost sixteen-hundred-page Encyclopedia of New England (ed. Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005]) does not mention Adventists in its religion section (see pp. 1271–1331) except in a chart on p. 1291. 30. Denis Fortin, “The Theology of Ellen G. White,” in Denis Fortin and Jerry Moon, eds., The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2013), 258–262. 31. Adventism has faded in New England itself. A growing percentage of church members are no longer Anglo stock but immigrants of other ethnic groups. The denomination has done better in the New England–settled areas of the West Coast of North America, however. 32. For the geographical area of the United States shaped by New England culture, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 887, and especially the map on p. 51. 33. For a helpful discussion of the Yankee trait of replicating its culture wherever it went, see Michael Barone, Shaping Our Nation, 51–103. Barone parallels New Englanders’ attempts to reproduce their culture with that of the South and its desire to spread its slavery-structured one. 34. Clark, Social Change, 82, 85, 89, 90. 35. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Overwhelmed by the sheer presence of so much available land, New Englanders fell into practices that quickly wore out the land. “As in the process of clearing, colonial farmers treated their land as a resource to be mined until it was exhausted, rather than one to be conserved for less intense but more perennial use” (152, 153). Instead of being careful with it as they would have had to have been in Europe, the Puritans would just move on and clear more forest for new soil. Later New Englanders, as they migrated to distant states or to the region’s developing manufacturing towns and cities, abandoned still more land. Much of the area once farmed has reverted to forests. Today New England has more forested territory than it did during the colonial period. The process of reforestation is still going on in Maine. The son of a forest ranger there told me that part of his father’s responsibilities was finding a homestead’s well after someone discovered the foundation of a long-vanished farmhouse. The authorities would then seal the well to prevent hikers from falling into it. 36. W. Storrs Lee, The Yankees of Connecticut, xx.

37. Quoted in New England in a Nutshell, 5. 38. Most likely written by James White. 39. “Going West,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 4, 1855, 36. 40. Clark, Social Change, 162. 41. Ibid., 145. 42. George S. May and JoEllen Vinyard, Michigan, the Great Lake State: An Illustrated History (Sun Valley, CA: American Historical Press, 2005), 51, 53. 43. Susan E. Gray, The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 1, 2. 44. Clark, Social Change, 149–151. 45. Ibid., 171, 172. 46. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 51–57. 47. The cause of James White’s death appears to have been at least partly complications from malaria. 48. Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 81. 49. Clark, Social Change, 149. 50. Kevin Phillips, in his biography of President McKinley, makes the following observation about the otherwise increase in Republican votes during the 1896 McKinley-William Jennings Bryan campaign: “The biggest surprise [in voting results] came in Michigan, a more volatile state with a two-decade history of giving 8–15 percent of its vote to Greenback, Populist, and Prohibition splinter parties. Bryan’s redemptionist rhetoric drove large numbers of Catholics and Lutherans toward McKinley. However, it also encouraged the old Yankee core of southern Michigan— abolitionist, food faddist, Seventh Day [sic.] Adventist, and so on, including the city of Jackson, the GOP’s 1854 birthplace—to chalk up Bryan’s banner Midwest gains. In contrast to Yankee-settled regions farther east, Michigan Yankee counties had been friendly to Greenbackers and Populists and showed the biggest Bryan trends.” Kevin Phillips, William McKinley (New York: Times Books, 2003), 83. Phillips’s statement reminds us of Ellen G. White’s comments about church members’ too enthusiastic responses to the politics of the era and the increasing influence that external social forces were having on the denomination. The historical context may help us today to better understand her intent. 51. People in the New England–settled area north and east of San Francisco quickly lost their New England frugality in the aftermath of the 1849 gold rush. Early converts to Seventh-day Adventism had a hard time giving up their love of jewelry and a more “relaxed” lifestyle. See Brian E. Strayer, J. N. Loughborough: The Last of the Adventist Pioneers (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2014), 182. However, they had a reminder of their New England heritage every time they went to church in their New England colonialstyle structures. J. N. Loughborough personally drew up the

blueprints for most of the early Adventist church buildings in California (ibid., 198).

Chapter V

Puritan Culture askell’s New England background shaped who he was, what he would accomplish, and how he would do it.1 The same applied to the church he joined, especially the religious climate in which the

H

denomination would develop. And the dominant strand of the New England religious world was Puritanism. For Adventism, two elements of it especially stand out. First, as David Hackett Fischer points out, more than the other three major English cultures that originally settled North America, Puritan culture emphasized the importance of education.2 Second, Puritan worship focused not on the Eucharist as in the southern Cavalier or coastal culture; not on the moving of the Holy Spirit upon individuals as in the Quaker culture of the Mid-Atlantic states; and not on the community-oriented camp meetings and other gatherings of the Scottish-Border County culture of those who settled the American backcountry. Instead it emphasized the primacy and clear teaching of the Word.3 Fischer observes that “every part of the religious ritual of Congregational New England was thus centered on the word of God—the design of the meetinghouse; the enforcement of Mosaic law; the structure of the sermon; the pattern of Puritan prayer; the form of psalmody. This communal harkening to the word of God was the primary purpose of Puritan worship.”4 As another historian has expressed it, the Puritans “put the pulpit in place of the altar.”5 Instead of ritual or liturgy, Scripture presented through the sermon became the center of religious life.

The emphasis on the sermon and the teaching of Scripture had a long history in Puritanism. Puritans believed that the Holy Spirit especially worked through the sermon and the reading of Scripture.6 In England the state church had often disdained the sermon, preferring liturgy and standardized homilies. When its clergy did preach, the sermon was often ornate, abstract, and dry. But the Puritans “cultivated a ‘plain style’ of preaching in which they applied the lessons of Scripture to the lives of individuals in a logical, direct form of presentation couched in a language appropriate to the audiences.”7 That did not mean that Puritan preaching could not be quite dramatic or highly emotional. Many Puritan clergy employed techniques that were a foretaste of later evangelical preaching. Haskell and his fellow Adventists would share his culture’s outlook on the centrality of the Word. Everything that he preached, taught, or wrote the rest of his life would revolve around the meaning of Scripture. He never forgot that principle. Furthermore, Puritan culture had a long history of wanting to proclaim God’s Word to the New World.8 As New Englanders expanded westward, they brought and taught their religious beliefs much more than did some other North American cultures. Haskell would reflect this incentive during his lifelong mission of service for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. But before he became a Seventh-day Adventist, Haskell went through a brief religious pilgrimage. At the age of fifteen, he joined the Congregational Church of his parents. Congregationalism, the heir of Puritanism, had been the dominant form of religious belief in New England, and it was the state-sponsored denomination of Massachusetts until 1833, the year Haskell long regarded as that of his birth.9 But new denominations were exploding in New England and elsewhere in the United States. They would not only change the religious landscape but start many kinds of reform movements that would reshape the nation,10 open up unexpected opportunities for Haskell, and provide a milieu for the rise and spread of the Seventh-day Adventist Church that he would

eventually join. The Second Great Awakening At the time Stephen and Mary married, they were Methodists. Unknown to them, they were part of an ongoing and radical transformation in American religion. Methodism, with its stress on spiritual equality, selfimprovement, and self-discipline, especially attracted craft workers and those, like Haskell, who ran small businesses that sold items that they personally produced.11 And it would have appealed to Stephen for still another reason. For the first century of American history, religion, whether Congregationalist in the North or Anglican in the southern colonies, had been dominated by a trained and professional clergy chosen by society’s elite. But in the eighteenth century, new forces began to alter American worship practice, especially after the arrival of evangelist George Whitefield in 1739 and the emergence of the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening.12 What came next was what religious historians now call the Second Great Awakening. Flourishing during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, like the first one, it began in New England and then spread across the rest of the nation.13 In New England itself, besides an emphasis on the possibility of salvation for anyone who would accept God’s grace (and thus a rejection of traditional Calvinistic predestination), the movement prompted churches to start “organizations to fight sin and convert the nation—indeed, the world. The benevolent empire fought liquor (the American Temperance Society was formed in Boston in 1826), handed out moralizing pamphlets (the New England Tract Society), organized Sunday schools (the American Sunday School Union), and sent missionaries far and wide. The church leaders and their organizations raised funds, signed petitions, held rallies, and indefatigably organized still more uplift societies.”14 In addition to their impact on society as a whole, “the revivalists

emphasized personal discipline—sobriety, piety, and hard work. This focus came just in time to help the United States negotiate the transition to industrial capitalism, a shift that was largely centered in the New England states. Inculcating personal virtues helped break the inefficient habits of an artisan and farm economy (no more lunchtime rum or spontaneous afternoons off). Christian discipline would bend the workers to the regulated, clock-driven monotony of mill and factory. Entrepreneurs and ambitious young professional men eagerly signed up for what would later be dubbed a ‘shopkeepers millennium.’ ”15 The religious fervor generated by the Second Great Awakening “reorganized American morals for a new era of broad markets and mass democracy.”16 The intense religiosity even shaped attitudes toward politics and determined what kind of person joined what kind of political party. In New York, during the late Jacksonian period, for example, evangelicals tended to join the emerging Whig Party,17 while non-evangelicals or those of no religious affiliation at all generally favored Andrew Jackson’s Democratic party.18 The new religious mood also convinced many people that a transformed America would usher in the Second Coming. James A. Morone observes that “most 1919 The Awakening sought to transform society by changing people. (Later social movements, such as the Progressivism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, would focus more on transforming individuals by modifying the social institutions they were a part of.) “Protestants frequently transmuted dependence upon God into liberation from dependence upon others. Conversion stiffened the will to follow the dictates of conscience, as the conscience became a magnet for nineteenth century reform impulses.”20 Haskell’s life illustrates this longing to change lives in a number of ways (as we will note later), though he would always do it within a Seventh-day Adventist understanding, specifically within the context of religious evangelism.

The Second Great Awakening would lead to such social reforms as temperance and abolitionism. Haskell signed his temperance pledge, and many Adventists—especially Ellen G. White—would support the antislavery campaign. However, the fallout from the Awakening—at least from the perspective of the emerging Seventh-day Adventists—would encourage efforts to enforce strict Sunday observance21 as well as resistance to the biblical teaching that Jesus would suddenly return before the millennium. Haskell and the Sabbatarian Adventists that he would soon become a part of would have to struggle constantly against the results of the latter two trends.22 Still another element of the transformation of American religious life would have a more immediate impact on Haskell’s life. The new religious movements opened their ranks to much more lay participation. As previously noted, until then preachers had to meet certain educational standards and be licensed. Even itinerant preachers found themselves under pressure to obtain such licenses. The “settled” or permanent clergy had strong religious, social, and even political influence in their parishes, and they resisted those who sought to preach within what they considered their mandated territories. The new religious groups, such as the Methodists, allowed people with little or no education to become “exhorters” and evangelists. Although Haskell did not yet know it, that change in religious practice would open opportunities that would lead him around the world. In the words of noted historian Joyce Appleby, “By relying upon the self-knowledge of a conversion experience, revivalist preachers unknowingly filled ordinary men and women with a sense of their spiritual importance unfiltered by clergy or doctrine, generating self-respect for the part they played in the moral rearmament of the nation.”23 Methodism was one especially powerful current in this spiritual tidal wave that swept across the new nation.24 By 1844, when American Methodism split into northern and southern factions, it had become the

nation’s most popular creed. It had more than one million members and about 12,000 local and itinerant preachers.25 Just six years later it had grown (including children) to 2.7 million.26 Thus Methodism provided numerous opportunities for those with limited education, such as Haskell, to enter the ministry. But he would abandon its growing prestige for participation in the lesser-known Sabbatarian Adventist movement. Stephen Haskell, Young Preacher Haskell heard his first sermon on the imminent Second Coming in 1852. The nineteen-year-old kept talking about it to another man he was visiting until that person became annoyed and suggested that Stephen preach on the topic himself. Haskell told him that he would if the person would get him an audience. To Stephen’s surprise, the acquaintance did assemble a roomful of people, and Stephen found himself forced to repeat the sermon he had most recently heard. The next year Haskell went to Canada, convicted that he should preach. He did not have a license to preach at a time when the local authorities usually required such legal authorization. Many years later he wrote, “I made it a test, that if the Lord would give me some converts who would want to be baptized, I would take that as a call to preach. I spoke in a schoolhouse about five miles from Trent [Ontario, about 60 miles north of Toronto]. I did not say one word to a soul privately about their salvation, during the two weeks that I preached. It took me all of each day in the woods to study up something to say at night. The schoolhouse was crowded each night, and they stood on the outside at the open windows.” But the people did not seem to respond other than just to listen. Finally, he gave up and decided to go to another neighborhood where they had invited him to hold some religious meetings. Because he had neither horse nor conveyance to ride or money to pay for transportation, he set out to walk to the location of the new meetings. “On the way to this neighborhood, a man with a farm wagon overtook

me and asked me to ride with him. I found he had attended my meetings and had been converted, and wished to be baptized. He also said that his wife had been converted, and she also wished to be baptized.” Later, when he returned to the site of his first series of meetings, he began contacting those who had attended and was surprised “to find, if I remember correctly, twenty-five converted and wanting baptism.”27 Although Haskell was not ordained, he baptized the twenty-five individuals after his ten-day evangelistic series. Years later, Stephen remembered that he performed the baptisms by moonlight with the whole village watching.28 One woman wanted to be baptized but explained that if she tried to do so, her husband, a physician, would drag her away. She asked what Haskell thought she should do. He replied that all he knew was for her to believe and be baptized and leave her husband in God’s hands. At the baptism, the man did show up and prepared to fulfill his threat. But, as she waded into the water, the Spirit of God came upon him, and he, too, requested baptism. Encountering the Seventh-day Sabbath The Second Coming was not the only biblical doctrine that would drastically alter Haskell’s life. The teaching of the Sabbath also captivated him. In England, the Anglican Church had encouraged recreation and sports for the masses on Sunday as a means of diverting them from activities that might threaten the government. That policy appalled the Puritans and would be one of the motivations for them leaving England and going to Holland. But even in Holland, the more easygoing attitude toward Sunday among the Dutch motivated the Puritans to leave there as well.29 In reaction to what they considered the dissolute behavior of their homeland, once they began settling New England, the Puritans established a program of social regulations that have become known as blue laws.30 They especially focused on how properly to observe Sunday as a religious

day. Cotton Mather wrote of Sunday, “Tis Gods Time, and will not admit any Pastime.”31 Besides making church attendance mandatory, the laws banned travel, work, and recreation from sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday. In fact, the first instruction the company sponsoring the Puritan colonization gave its governor, John Endicott (or Endecott), was that the people must cease work at 3:00 P.M. Saturday afternoon.32 The Puritans considered proper “Sabbath” observance as part of the covenant between God and the Puritan community. Puritan writer Thomas Shepherd declared, “Our children, servants, strangers who are within our gates, are apt to profane the Sabbath; we are therefore to improve our power over them for God, in restraining them from sin, and in constraining them (as far as we can) to the holy observance of the rest of the Sabbath, lest God impute their sin to us, who had power (as Eli in like case) to restrain them and did not; and so our families and consciences be stained with their guilt and blood.”33 New Englanders and their cultural descendants would continue to introduce or implement laws favoring Sunday wherever they went across the continent. A concern for Sunday observance became a major strand in the fabric of American reform movements, especially among the emerging middle class. Craig Harline observes that the Sunday question was the longest of all national debates during the nineteenth century, preceding and outlasting even more heated debates over temperance and slavery. Those Americans in favor of a Puritan-like Sunday relied on plenty of age-old arguments, such as the English notion that more play meant more work, or that as Sunday went, so went the nation, or that a spate of recent “natural” disasters was in fact supernatural punishment for violating the Sabbath. Little more original, though now in an American context, were assertions that lax Sundays were part of Satan’s effort to destroy the burgeoning land, and that God granted extra material prosperity to those who had

faith enough to rest from worldly labors once a week—how else to explain the prosperity of those trading giants, England and the United States?34 Eventually, New Hampshire senator H. W. Blair introduced a Sunday bill into the United States Congress mandating, in all federal territories, Sunday as a “day of worship.” For many years he was the leading proponent of Sunday legislation. The New Englanders who settled the San Francisco Bay area pushed state Sunday laws for California, and decades later Haskell would have to confront that challenge. New England had a tradition that emphasized what Puritanism considered as proper Sabbath observance and that would have been of interest to Haskell. But, besides the issue of how to honor the day, there was the matter of which was the right day. That question would catch his attention next. After attending a first-day Adventist camp meeting at Winsted, Connecticut, in 1853, Haskell and two or three fellow neophyte preachers stopped in Springfield, Massachusetts. Haskell planned to go from there to visit the little group of Adventist believers he had started in Canada. But taking his trunk along with him would be a problem. He had to do something with it until he returned. William Saxby, a tinsmith who worked for the local railroad, offered to store the trunk for him. Saxby was a Sabbath keeper, the first one that Haskell had ever met. For some reason, Haskell’s companions began discussing, in Saxby’s presence, the topic of Sunday observance. As Stephen listened, he soon concluded that they had no biblical support for the custom. To his chagrin, he realized that he could not think of any evidence for it either, and decided to learn something about the issue. Overhearing the conversation, Saxby started to broach the topic with Haskell, but Stephen rebuffed him, declaring, “If you want to keep that old Jewish Sabbath, you can do so, but I never shall.” Saxby dropped the

subject for the moment. That evening, Haskell and his friends received an invitation to a meeting of the local Sabbath believers. Remembering what he had heard at the railroad station, Stephen decided that he and the other first-day Adventists might have a hard time defending Sunday observance, he declined. Declaring illness, Saxby also announced that he did not feel well enough to attend, but he did invite Haskell home with him. Once there, he hung up a chart and began explaining to his guest the core Sabbatarian Adventist doctrines. “Although I did not at all believe in the explanation which he gave,” Haskell wrote forty-three years later, “I then made up my mind that I would examine the subject, and be prepared for him or any one else who ever in the future should present such views to me.”35 Haskell lodged with Saxby until he departed for Canada. His host refrained from raising the issue again, however. But he did give Stephen a few religious tracts, including one entitled The Sabbath, by Elihu.36 While traveling by boat to some meetings at the head of Consecon Lake in Canada, Haskell read and re-read the tract and compared its claims with the Bible. Saturday morning, the boat stopped about five miles from his destination. Deciding that he would like to study the Sabbath issue without any distractions, Haskell got off at Trent, Ontario (about sixty miles north of Toronto) and hiked into the woods by himself. There he spent the rest of the day reading his Bible and praying for guidance. “Finally, before night, I came to the conclusion that, according to the best light I had, the seventh day was the Sabbath, and I would keep it until I could get further light. So I have kept it ever since.”37 What Haskell meant by his statement that he would observe the Sabbath until he received further light is not completely clear. In a talk he gave at a General Conference session more than a decade later, he told about his encounter with Seventh-day Adventists in the person of Joseph Bates. During the winter of 1854–1855, Bates—at the request of William Saxby

—visited the Haskells while they lived in Hubbardston, Massachusetts. During his stay, and as was his practice, Bates conducted a marathon Bible study. “I knew nothing about the Seventh-day Adventists at that time, but a short time afterward Elder Joseph Bates came to my house, having been advised by this same brother [Saxby] to come and see me. Brother Bates preached to us (there were only two of us) from morning until noon, and from noon until night, and then in the evening until the time we went to bed. He did that for ten successive days, and I have been a Seventh-day Adventist ever since. That was the beginning of my keeping of the Sabbath.”38 Did Stephen accept the Seventh-day Sabbath only in theory at first, after reading the Elihu Sabbath tract, or did he observe the day only partially until after Bates’s visit? Or did he, in his reminiscences, simply conflate the two incidents? After he personally adopted the seventh day as the true worship day, Haskell then expected “to convert everybody to the Sabbath in about ten minutes, for I supposed everybody believed the Bible.”39 But when he and his wife attended a conference of first-day Adventists in Worcester, Massachusetts, with the specific intention of preaching about the seventhday Sabbath, he quickly found out that the others did not share his interest. They would not allow him to present even one sermon on the topic. Out of pity, a man named Thomas Hale invited Stephen and Mary to come with him to his home in Hubbardston, where a small group of firstday Adventists met under the leadership of itinerant preacher S. G. Mathewson. There the couple rented a room from Hale for several months, and Haskell preached to the little group. He persuaded Hale, his wife, two sons, and a number of other Adventists to accept the Sabbath. Organizing themselves into a church, they held meetings on Sabbaths, Sundays, and one or two evenings each week. They practiced the ordinance of footwashing, a custom new to Haskell. Also, when he learned that some

refused to eat pork because the Bible labeled it as unclean, he abandoned its use in 1854. Unclean meats were an issue that he would become adamant about. Eventually Mathewson returned to check on his flock. When he learned that they had adopted the seventh-day Sabbath, he attempted to convince them that their stand was wrong. As they listened to both Haskell and Mathewson, a number in the little congregation grew increasingly confused. Going to Haskell, they told him that when he explained the subject, it seemed plain enough that the seventh day was the Sabbath. But Mathewson, on the other, made it appear that the law had been abolished. They wanted Haskell and Mathewson to sit down and discuss the issue so that they could see which one was right. More than four decades later, Haskell remembered agreeing to do so, “but I was frightened almost out of my wits at the thought of it.”40 At the end of one of the evening meetings, several of the little church’s members raised the topic, and Mathewson agreed to discuss it with Haskell. The two men sat, one at each end of a long table, and the others lined up along each side to listen. Mathewson spoke first, impatiently asking Haskell what was his strongest proof that the seventh day was the Sabbath. Thinking for a moment, Stephen nervously replied, “The fourth commandment. That says the seventh day is the Sabbath, and I do not know anything to prove God ever contradicted it.” Rejecting Haskell’s argument, Mathewson cited a scripture that he felt would support his position, quoting “it in a way that would make it appear to establish his claims.” When Haskell countered that the passage did not really say what the pastor claimed, Mathewson would argue that it did. Stephen then suggested that they find the text and read it out loud. Mathewson complied, but in a manner that seemed to support his interpretation. “At the same time,” Haskell later recalled, “I would look it over, and notice as particularly as I could how it did read, and I failed in every instance to see in it what he said was in it. Then I would read it and

say, ‘It does not appear to me that way.’ It seemed to me afterward that the Spirit of God was in my reading, for I not only failed to see any force in his reasoning, but as I would read the scripture, the others thought the same; and I think Mathewson himself saw I was correct, for he never referred to the same text after I would read it.”41 After the discussion had gone on perhaps for an hour, Mathewson offered Acts 20:7 to buttress his argument that the disciples met together for worship on the first day of the week. By now Haskell had become thoroughly suspicious of any text that the first-day pastor used. Although Mathewson quoted it correctly, Haskell automatically said that he did not think the passage really stated what the pastor claimed and again suggested that they read the verse directly from the Bible. Frustrated and “evidently thinking his weak position would be manifest to the others, and they would see its fallacy as in the other instances, in a fit of anger [Mathewson] closed his Bible, and threw it down upon the table, saying as he arose, ‘I have heard enough about that old Sabbath question. I do not want to hear any more.’ ” The rest of the group left convinced that Mathewson had failed to prove his argument. Back in his room at Hale’s house, Stephen looked up Acts 20:7 and discovered to his surprise that the minister had cited it correctly. The next morning Mathewson told him, “That scripture did read as I quoted last night.” Haskell replied simply, “Yes, I found it did.”42 After Joseph Bates’s visit to their home, Stephen and Mary decided to become Seventh-day Adventists.43 Shortly afterward the couple subscribed to the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, the periodical that held the new Sabbatarian Adventist movement together, and bought a copy of every publication issued by the little Adventist publishing house in Rochester, New York. Soon Haskell himself began writing for the Advent Review. The card index to the Review and Herald located in the library of the (now closed) Review and Herald Publishing Association building had nearly a foot of

cards listing him as author of some item or another. Many are reports of his constant journeys on church business, but others are articles on a wide spectrum of religious topics, from practical Christianity and the Christian life to advice on literature distribution and operating tract societies, on diet and health, and studies of the book of Revelation and the sanctuary doctrine. His first piece in the Advent Review was a response44 to James White’s editorial on the Laodicean church of Revelation 3:14–22.45 Haskell agreed with White that the Laodicean message applied to the Sabbatarian Adventists instead of other groups, as many Sabbath observers had previously assumed. In addition to the Advent Review, Haskell began submitting material to countless other denominational publications, including some that he started himself. His byline would become well known throughout the church. Besides theological and practical Christianity articles, he became known, perhaps more than anything else, for his news notes. They reported the decisions of administrative councils and the development of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the events at camp meetings where he constantly spoke. Apparently fascinated by statistics, he would often fill his articles with them. A Lay Leader Haskell may have not yet joined the great New England migration westward, but he did a lot of traveling in New England itself. It would be a pattern that dominated his life, as well as that of other pioneer Seventh-day Adventist leaders. All spent long periods away from home and family, sometimes for a year or more. Decades later, Haskell wrote in his obituary of Mary Haskell about his years of service to the church. “During this time I have been from home for periods varying from a few months to two years; and in this she [Mary] never complained nor asked me to return, even when she did not expect to live; but on the contrary she always encouraged me to go, and remain as long as duty made it necessary, saying, ‘We will take our visit in the kingdom of God.’ ”46

For now, Haskell was dealing with New England’s highly individualistic people. Beginning in the late 1850s, he “preached, organized churches and Sabbath schools, ordained elders, paying my own expenses,47 etc., but I was not even licensed.48 Did not know it was necessary to have a license to preach. At that time, in the East, many of the Sabbath keepers were much as Brother White described them, like an old bag of buttons, of all shapes and sizes. There were more different beliefs among them than heads or horns on any of the beasts in the Bible. But I was good to them all, so all were friends to me.”49 Seven years later he described the New England situation in a similar manner: “There was quite a number of Sabbath keepers in this territory, but they were agreed on two points only, first, that each individual would agree with no other Sabbath keeper or anybody beside themselves, and I hardly think they agreed with themselves on all points. Second, all were agreed that they did not, neither would they believe in the spirit of prophecy.”50 Stephen may have been alluding to such individuals as Samuel (“Sammy”) Cooley Hancock and Gilbert Cranmer, who stirred much emotional fanaticism combined with an active hostility toward Ellen G. White and her prophetic gift, especially in New England.51 Despite all the contrariness of the members, Haskell faithfully visited and encouraged them, even in rugged New England winters. The author of his life sketch in the Advent Review, published after Stephen’s death, concluded it with, “My first acquaintance with Elder Haskell was when I was a lad at my father’s home in Washington, N. H. Elder Haskell visited the church there when the snow was deep and the weather extremely cold. I remember seeing him pushing his way with his horse through the deep snowdrifts, visiting all the members of the church in the neighborhood. This was characteristic of his life and labors throughout the long years of his ministry.”52 Seeking Unity and Structure

New England was not unique in its crippling diversity. Sabbatarian Adventists were coming to recognize the need not only of unity but of organization. The process—beginning with the establishment of a legal structure to own the publishing house founded and operated by James White, as well as the selection of a name for the new religious group (in 1860)—would lead to the formation of local state conferences. These were: Michigan, 1861; Southern and Northern Iowa, Vermont, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New York, all in 1862; and, finally, an overarching General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in 1863.53 In their search for unity and organization, Seventh-day Adventists echoed a similar problem convulsing their homeland. Those interested in Adventist history rarely stop to consider that the struggle for denominational organization took place in the context of the American Civil War. The United States itself suddenly found itself forced to forge a truly national identity. Until the 1860s, it had for all practical purposes thought of itself as a loosely associated collection of largely autonomous states. Politicians and editorial writers would often declare “The United States were,” using the plural verb instead of the singular verb as today. Whenever a crisis arose during the decades after the American Revolution, someone would suggest secession as a way of dealing with it. Early in the nineteenth century, New England considered breaking away. Later, South Carolina threatened secession until the state actually did so in 1861. But the formation of the Confederacy in the South forced the North into a stronger union. It began the development of a national identity that would, in time, spread to the rest of the country. In the midst of this national struggle, the fiercely independent Sabbatarian congregations would complete their own battle for a denominational identity and a structure that, likewise, made them one people. They would follow the new American custom of majority decision and rule. In Europe, those in leadership—employing tradition, hierarchy, wealth, social class, or other forms of power—established, sometimes with the aid of special

counselors, what would be done. Authority was the domain of elites. But isolated in the New World from such ancient patterns, Americans operated through temporary and often relatively informal gatherings.54 Such decision making worked best in groups of a few hundred or less, as in New England town hall meetings, among the members of wagon trains heading west, the inhabitants of early mining camps, or, for Adventists, conferences of the still-small numbers of believers. Although the denomination soon developed a committee structure, it would continue the “decision by majority vote” pattern in its constituency and General Conference sessions and other meetings. While Stephen N. Haskell sat on the sidelines of the original organization of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, he would be more intimately involved in its further development and eventual reorganization in 1901.

1. As I pointed out in the James White biography, Fischer’s Albion’s Seed is a vital guide to understanding America’s regional cultures and their continuing influence and hold on American society. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). While Fischer sought to show the replication of regional British cultures in what is now the United States, other writers have focused on those cultures currently existing in North America. For example, Colin Woodard in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Viking, 2011) sees North America (he expands his study to Canada and northern Mexico) as consisting of eleven distinct “nations” that include the six outlined by Fischer, with specific traits and ideals that dominate how their inhabitants think and live. These realities are not just academic. They shape who people are—even Seventh-day Adventists. Consider, for example, the differences between Adventists who live in the Midwest, the Bible Belt, and California. Those differences create some of the tensions in the church in the North American Division. Interestingly, Oakham, Massachusetts, Haskell’s birthplace, was in a pocket of North British Border County settlement. The Border County immigrants shared another culture that Fischer also discusses, but they arrived nearly a century after the Puritans and mainly went to the backcountry of the American South. As for Haskell himself, he clearly reflected the more dominant Puritan culture. 2. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 130–134. 3. Anglican devotional liturgical approach of the Cavalier Southern coastal region, Fischer, Albion’s

Seed, 332–340, 795; Delaware region Quaker Spirit approach, ibid., 522–526, 796; backcountry settlers with their field meetings, ibid., 703–708. 4. Ibid., 124. 5. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 308. 6. Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society From Bradford to Edwards, rev. ed. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 21. 7. Ibid., 25. 8. Henry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 54–57. 9. For background on the historical forces that led to the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in Massachusetts and would create the environment and greater freedom of religious expression that allowed someone such as Haskell to begin his lifework, see Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 219–225. 10. For a survey of many of the reform and related movements emerging during this period, see Carl J. Richard, The Battle for the American Mind (Lanham, MD: Rowman & LittleField, 2006), 185–210. Richard mentions William Miller and Seventh-day Adventists as part of this series of reform movements. 11. Clark, Social Change, 175. 12. For a concise history of the First Great Awakening, see Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America, The Penguin History of the United States 1 (New York: Penguin, 2001), 338–362. Douglas A. Sweeny summarizes the two great religious awakenings from an evangelical perspective in his The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005). See pp. 66–74 for the Second Great Awakening. 13. For the effect that the waves of revivalism emanating from the Second Great Awakening had on the culture of the New England–settled area of western New York—the so-called Burnt-Over District—see Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 178, 179. 14. Feintuch and Watters, The Encyclopedia of New England, 1324. 15. Ibid., 1325. 16. Ibid. 17. Named after the opponents of the English king during the seventeenth century and then during the American Revolution, it emerged during this period in opposition to President Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party. It sought to develop American infrastructure (roads, canal, harbors, etc.) and establish a national economic policy and national bank. The Jacksonians generally resisted spending government money on such projects. Those “reformers” who wanted to change the status quo gravitated toward the Whigs. 18. Watson, Liberty and Power, 185–187. Cf. 194, 195, 220, 223, 226, 242, 245, 246; Applegate,

The Most Famous Man in America, 181–183. Cf. Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Culture (New York: Free Press, 1970) and Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 19. Feintuch and Watters, The Encyclopedia of New England, 1325. 20. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 232. 21. Watson, Liberty and Power, 57. 22. Postmillennialism and the idea that the world would perfect itself became dominant during the decades before the Civil War (see Richard, The Battle for the American Mind, 194–198, 209–211). Events of the twentieth century have largely killed postmillennial concepts in the Western world. Several of Ellen G. White’s early statements about the Second Coming respond to the widespread belief in postmillennialism of her time and can be puzzling when viewed in light of today’s conditions. 23. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, 232. 24. For background on this spiritual revolution that began a century before Haskell’s birth, see the chapter “Trafficking for the Lord” as well as the summary on p. 208 in Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. 25. Sidney E. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 447. 26. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 177. 27. S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, 1914. 28. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 29. Craig Harline, Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 96, 97, 280. Harline compares the Dutch attitude toward Sunday observance with that of the Puritans (pp. 67–97). 30. David Thomas Konig, “Blue Laws,” in Feintuch and Watters, The Encyclopedia of New England, 907, 908. 31. Cotton Mather, The Day Which the Lord Hath Made (Boston, 1703), 18. 32. Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan and David, 1975), 215. 33. Quoted in Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, new ed., revised and enlarged (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 7. 34. Harline, Sunday, 281, 282. 35. S. N. Haskell, “How I Accepted the Sabbath,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 7,

1896, 217. 36. A later version has a note on the first page declaring, “This little work was placed in the hands of Eld. James White, in 1853, in tract form without date, bearing simply the signature ‘Elihu.’ Since that time he has published and distributed 20,000 copies of the work. And such has been its acceptance with the friends of the Sabbath, that the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association now issues the present edition of 4,000 copies, August, 1862.” 37. S. N. Haskell, “How I Accepted the Sabbath.” 38. S. N. Haskell, “Preparation for Reception of the Holy Spirit,” General Conference Bulletin No. 7, May 21, 1909, 92. Cf. S. N. Haskell to W. W. Prescott, August 23, 1907. Haskell mentions in his talk of meeting at the General Conference session the son of the man who had given him the Sabbath tract. But also see Haskell’s “How I Accepted the Sabbath,” in which he concludes his account of studying with a Sunday-observing minister before Bates’s arrival by saying, “This was my first experience in Sabbath-keeping, and the manner of embracing it.” 39. S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, 1914. 40. S. N. Haskell, “How I Accepted the Sabbath.” 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. John Norton Loughborough claimed to have baptized Mary Haskell. 44. S. N. Haskell, “A Few Thoughts on the Philadelphia and Laodicean Churches,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 6, 1856, 6. 45. [James White], “Watchman, What of the Night?” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 9, 1856, 184. 46. S. N. Haskell, obituary of Mary E. Haskell, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 20, 1894, 127. The fact that he mentions his prolonged absences would suggest that he had very mixed feelings about them. 47. In 1918 Haskell gave the statistical secretary of the General Conference a chronological summary of his life. Under the period 1854–1870 he stated, “For sixteen years labored as a selfsupporting worker, organizing churches and helping to establish the work in New England.” “Elder Stephen N. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 14, 1922, 17. 48. Elsewhere he wrote that he “organized churches, ordained elders, organized Sabbath Schools, and was not even licensed to preach. I did not know any better. I suppose that now were such a thing done we would have to have a church trial and disfellowship a man if he should do any thing of that kind.” S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 49. S. N. Haskell to W. W. Prescott, August 23, 1907. 50. S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, 1914. 51. For background on the two men, see André Reis, “The ‘Old Spirit of Blind Sammy Hancock’:

Meeting a Colorful Early Adventist Preacher,” Spectrum, July 29, 2013. 52. “Elder Stephen N. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 14, 1922, 17. Ella Robinson identifies the author of the life sketch as Eugene Farnsworth. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 9. 53. See George R. Knight, Organizing to Beat the Devil (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2001), 48–66. 54. For examples of how this approach operated in early nineteenth-century America, see the section entitled “The Transients” in Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience.

Chapter VI

A Strong-Willed Personality askell might have commented about New England’s rampant individualism, but he shared that aggressive streak himself. Once he took a position on something, he could be adamant and even aggressive in

H

his advocacy of it. An early example is his rejection of the use of pork. Stephen had stopped eating it in 1854. A few other Sabbatarians also eliminated it from their diet, but most did not. Although Adventists began to discuss the issue, they could not come to any consensus.1 James White was leery of the topic for at least two reasons. One was that it distracted believers from some things that he considered more important, such as the message of the Sabbath in the context of the end times. The other involved the fact that those who opposed the consumption of swine’s flesh defended their position by citing Old Testament passages condemning unclean meats. But White felt uncomfortable with such an approach. He based his position on conflating the vision of Acts 10 with the decision of the Jerusalem council of Acts 15, and then reading into it the idea that the Judaizers were criticizing Gentile converts for eating something that Jews considered an abomination. In an article he wrote for The Present Truth, White commented, “Some of our good brethren have added ‘swine’s flesh’ to the catalogue of things forbidden by the Holy Ghost, and the apostles and elders assembled at Jerusalem. But we feel called upon to protest against such a course, as being contrary to the plain teaching of the holy scriptures. Shall we lay a greater ‘burden’ on the disciples than seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and

the holy apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ? God forbid. Their decision, being right, settled the question with them, and was a cause of rejoicing among the churches, and it should forever settle the question with us.”2 Haskell, however, was persistent in his opposition to pork—to the point of stirring up a distracting controversy. He believed that discarding it should be a test of church membership. Ellen White found herself forced to confront him about it, and did so on October 21, 1858. She told him that “if God requires His people to abstain from swine’s flesh, He will convict them on the matter. . . . If it is the duty of the church to abstain from swine’s flesh, God will discover it to more than two or three. He will teach His church their duty.”3 It was not Stephen’s responsibility to legislate the issue for everybody else. Apparently he had a strong ascetic streak and great self-control and could not understand why others did not share it. Because other believers did not see things from his perspective, he would become suspicious of them. Also, he would hear rumors and jump to wrong conclusions. His opposition to pork was a manifestation of certain basic character flaws that were creating a number of problems, traits that would plague him at times throughout his life. After receiving a vision that at least partly concerned Haskell, Ellen White wrote in 1858 to Stephen and Mary, “I saw that all was not right with you. The enemy has been seeking your destruction, and endeavoring to influence others through you. I saw that you both take an exalted position that God has never assigned you, and that you both consider yourselves far in advance of the people of God. I saw you looking to Battle Creek with jealousy and suspicion. You would place your hands in there, and mold their acts and doings to what you consider would be right. You are noticing little things that you do not understand, that you have not the least to do with, and that in no way concern you.”4 Ellen White felt that Haskell and his wife needed to acknowledge some of their character defects. She wrote to them “that God wants you to turn

your attention to yourselves. Try [examine] your motives. You are deceived in regard to yourselves. You have an appearance of humility, and this has influence with others, and leads them to think that you are far advanced in the Christian life; but when your peculiar notions are touched, self rises at once, and you manifest a willful, stubborn spirit. That is a sure evidence that you do not possess true humility.”5 The couple needed to deal with Stephen’s ascetic tendencies. I saw that you had mistaken notions about afflicting your bodies, depriving yourselves of nourishing food. These things lead some of the church to think that God is surely with you, or you would not deny self, and sacrifice thus. But I saw that none of these things will make you more holy. The heathen do all this, but receive not reward for it. A broken and contrite spirit before God is in His sight of great price. I saw that your views concerning these things are erroneous, and that you are looking at the church and watching them, noticing little things, when your attention should be turned to your own soul’s interest. God has not laid the burden of His flock upon you. You think that the church is upon the background, because they cannot see things as you do, and because they do not follow the same rigid course which you think you are required to pursue. I saw that you are deceived in regard to your own duty and the duty of others. Some have gone to extremes in regard to diet. They have taken a rigid course, and lived so very plain that their health has suffered, disease has strengthened in the system, and the temple of God has been weakened.6 The ascetic traits were part of a larger problem. Stephen and his wife were sowing discord in the young church. In a manuscript entitled, “Testimony Regarding the work in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts,” Ellen White wrote of a vision she had had.

I then saw Stephen Haskell and wife. Said the angel, “He is not sound in the faith. Mark them that cause division among you. An undercurrent is at work. They are coworkers with the evil angels and know it not. Confusion and a deathly [word missing] mark their track.” I saw that the views that Stephen Haskell and his wife have advocated concerning mortifying the flesh are all erroneous and will lead to deadly evils and the destruction of souls, and instead of increasing moral purity will hasten and strengthen moral pollution. Said the angel, “God reads the heart.” I saw that S. Haskell has tried to make it appear that he was in union with the church when it was not the case. He has scattered evil, error, and division every place he has entered, and this has been a sly undercurrent that has been at work to destroy confidence in [Ellen White’s] visions and in those who have charge of the work at Battle Creek. These things are all marked by God. S. Haskell and his wife have strengthened the hands of Stephen Smith7 in his rebellion, and have strengthened the hands of other disaffected ones, and have affected some conscientious souls who were constantly fearful that they should not do everything they could to deny self. They have drunk down his errors that he has talked to them, and these errors have been scattered here and there all around where he has traveled; coworker with the evil angels.8 Apparently the Haskells were starving themselves. “I saw that as God gave His beloved sleep, so He was willing that they should have nourishing, strengthening food, and I saw that if S. Haskell and his wife were baptized with the third angel’s message they would see enough precious, saving truth to dwell upon, and they would not have time to dwell upon error, dangerous error, and scatter it among God’s people. . . . The third angel is leading out a people and fitting them for translation.”9 Instead of transforming themselves through self-denial and ascetic

practices, “they are to be purified through truth.”10 “Some, I saw, had made crosses for themselves and killing duties to break down their will over. But I saw that there were crosses and duties enough in God’s Word to slay every individual without getting new duties or tests. I saw that a time of trouble was before us, when stern necessity will compel the people of God to live on bread and water; but I saw that God did not require His people to live so now.”11 Ellen White believed that if Haskell had kept himself busy earning a decent living instead of traveling around stirring up trouble among the believers, God would have been much more pleased.12 Stephen’s behavior sprang from a hostility toward the Whites that he had picked up from associating with opponents of the couple.13 In her letter to the Haskells, Ellen White reminded them that the Lord was in charge of the church, not them. God is leading out a people, not a few separate individuals here and there, one believing this thing, another that. Angels of God are doing the work committed to their trust. The third angel is leading out and purifying a people, and they should move with him unitedly. Some run ahead of the angels that are leading this people; but they have to retrace every step, and meekly follow no faster than the angels lead. I saw that the angels of God would lead His people no faster than they could receive and act upon the important truths that are communicated to them. But some restless spirits do not more than half do up their work. As the angel leads them, they get in haste for something new, and rush on without divine guidance, and thus bring confusion and discord into the ranks. They do not speak or act in harmony with the body. I saw that you both must speedily be brought where you are willing to be led, instead of desiring to lead, or Satan will step in and lead you in his way, to follow his counsel. Some look at your set notions, and consider them an evidence of humility. They

are deceived. You both are making work for repentance.14 Fearlessly Ellen White focused on Stephen’s specific character flaws, which had caused more problems than just his agitation on the unclean meat issue. For example, he had grossly distorted the normal New England frugality. She told him that he was naturally close and covetous. You tithe mint and rue, but neglect the weightier matters. . . . God requires economy of His people; but some have stretched their economy into meanness. I wish that you could see your case as it is. The true spirit of sacrifice, which is acceptable to God, you do not possess. You look at others, and watch them, and if they do not bring themselves to the same rigid course that you follow, you can do nothing for them. Your souls are withering beneath the blighting influence of your own errors. A fanatical spirit is with you, that you take to be God’s Spirit. You are deceived. You cannot bear the plain, cutting testimony. You would have a smooth testimony borne to you; but when anyone reproves your wrongs, how quick self rises. Your spirits are not humbled. You have a work to do. . . . Such acts, such a spirit, I saw, was the fruit of your errors, and the fruit of setting up your judgment and notions as a rule for others, and against those whom God has called into the field. You have both overreached the mark.15 In addition, Haskell had appointed people in positions that they were unqualified for. Apparently he had made his choices without consulting others. These individuals were hurting both themselves and the church as a whole. If he did not change his management style, God would be forced to let Haskell suffer the consequences of his decisions. It would be a tendency not easy for him to overcome. Years later, Ellen G. White would again have to warn him about being dictatorial toward others.16 It would not be the last time that Ellen White had to counsel Haskell

about his driving character. She wrote to him more than any other single person outside her family. (Fortunately, most of it was of a more positive nature.) Haskell struggled with how to relate to this particular letter. He began to refer obliquely to his previous attitude and to publicly support Ellen White’s visions.17 But the experience remained a vivid memory the rest of his life. In 1910 he told her, “I know what it is to drink at the cup of despair 50 years ago or more. It was over your first testimony to me. I had to work my way out. I had no one to help me but my wife. But God set me free.”18 He acknowledged that initially he had felt “enmity” toward her husband, James White, and anyone else who tried to confront him during the difficult situation, but he believed that God had touched his heart and removed the hostility, a transformation that lasted the rest of his life.19

1. A number of scholars have explored the issue of how Adventists originated their position toward unclean foods. For example, see Ron Graybill, “The Development of Adventist Thinking on Clean and Unclean Meats” (Ellen G. White Estate pamphlet, June 10, 1981); Takashi Shiraishi, “Unclean Food and the Seventh-day Adventists: Its History and Present Problem,” term paper prepared in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the course, “Studies in Seventh-day Adventist History,” Andrews University, May 11, 1965; Richard Hammill, “An Inquiry Into the Beginning and Development of Seventh-day Adventist Thinking in Regard to Clean and Unclean Foods Up to the Year 1872,” term paper in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a class in research techniques, Andrews University, November 1945; David M. F. Giles, “The Development of the Doctrine Concerning Unclean Foods in the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” paper presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the course, “Seventh-day Adventist History,” Andrews University, March 1977. Haskell wanted a quick answer to the question, so eventually he led the church to cite the passages in Leviticus. Scholars still struggle on how to handle the teaching while isolating it from other ceremonial prohibition passages. Some have been attempting to approach the topic through the Noachian laws of Genesis. 2. [James White], “Swine’s Flesh,” The Present Truth, November 1850, 88. 3. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 1:207. For a summary of Ellen White’s developing view on unclean meat, see Jiří Moskala, “Unclean Food,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 1234–1236. 4. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 1:204.

5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Smith became a “spiritualizer” (held the position that Christ had come in a “spiritual” form on October 22, 1844) during the 1840s and then supported a belief that Christ would return in 1854. 8. The Ellen G. White Letters and Manuscripts With Annotations, vol. 1, 1845–1859 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2014), 570, 571. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. Roland Karlman, the annotator, suggests that Stephen’s lay ministry was either a minor, part-time activity or went unreported in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. The 1860 US census listed his occupation as master roofer. But whatever the extent of his ministry, his behavior disturbed Ellen White. 13. Ibid., note 10. 14. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 1:207. 15. Ibid., 1:207, 208. 16. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, November 8, 1880. 17. S. N. Haskell, “Self,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 10, 1859, 198; “From Bro. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 19, 1862, 95; “From Bro. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 23, 1863, 31. 18. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 24, 1910. Jerry Moon believes that Haskell is here referring to Ellen White’s 1858 testimony to him (Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 7). The experience, though, helped Stephen to be more compassionate to others going through such difficulties. Commenting on a situation many years later, he mentioned to Ellen White that he did not attempt “to say any thing to [H. W.] Cottrell save treat him kindly and not shove him off.” S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 24, 1910. 19. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 24, 1910.

Chapter VII

Innovative Leader vents in America were more and more directly affecting the newly emerging Seventh-day Adventist Church. As the church spread, it lost more of its comparative isolation. Church leaders would have

E

increasingly to deal with the nation’s social and political currents. The United States had not always lived up to its name. From the beginning it had often been a fractious nation, with some region or other threatening to break off and go its own way. Ironically, Haskell’s own New England had been one of the most consistent advocates of withdrawing from the union.1 But now the South would actually do what the New England states had only talked about, and New England would reverse itself and become a leader in fighting to preserve the union. Up to this point Adventists had primarily lived in rural areas and small towns and could generally ignore many national problems. But things were changing rapidly. The main issue now tearing the United States apart was slavery.2 It had begun touching almost every aspect of life, including that of religion. The question of slavery had shattered a number of denominations into regional factions, especially the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Seventh-day Adventism escaped that particular difficulty. But Adventists had to first decide whether they should be involved in the abolitionist movement and then, later, how they should respond to the war that the issue spawned, particularly as to how its young men should relate to the draft and service in the military.3 Primarily living in New England and Quaker-settled areas of the North

and on the West Coast, most church members favored abolition and opposed slavery. Joseph Bates and Ellen G. White had taken strong stands against the practice.4 Adventists had little contact with the South until well after the American Civil War. Among the general populace, a strong hostility existed toward free blacks in many areas of the North, largely caused by the fear that they would, by accepting lower wages, take jobs away from whites.5 Fortunately, such prejudice against blacks does not seem to have been a major issue among Adventists. A few free blacks had begun to join Adventist congregations, such as the William J. Hardy family in Michigan.6 Although slavery had gradually disappeared in the North (it had been much more extensive than most people today realize, with large plantations in Connecticut and Rhode Island), New England’s powerful economy based on trade and industry had prospered from the slave trade itself and the cheap labor and products it generated.7 Many Northerners recognized how intricately the country was built upon slavery and tried all kinds of compromises to hold the nation together. While few Adventists supported slavery,8 they still found themselves part of a world inescapably influenced by it. As the war loomed, many Americans did not take the impending conflict seriously. They expected that nothing would actually happen or that a single battle might settle the whole thing.9 Then when the conflict broke out, slavery’s various issues began touching the people in more dramatic and personal ways. Ellen G. White warned the church that the war would be a long and bitter one and that both sides would suffer for slavery’s legacy. Church members experienced that painful reality in their own families.10 Because Adventists did not actively support the Northern cause as actively as many outside the church expected, they came under some suspicion. Some equated them with those Northerners who opposed the war effort.11 Male church members soon found themselves under pressure to serve in

the armed forces. For a time, the government allowed individuals to escape military service if they could find a substitute to take their place, or they could pay a fee and receive an exemption. Perhaps this was what Haskell had in mind when he wrote decades later that he “was drafted to go to war but paid my fine and did not go.”12 His brother George Washington Nelson did join the army and gave his life for his country, but Stephen focused on his church duties. An Increasingly Religious America Besides the national conscription laws, a number of other trends were developing that would affect Seventh-day Adventists. A prominent one was the increasingly aggressive role of religion in American culture. Many who had led the American Revolution and helped draft the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and the Bill of Rights took a cautious, indifferent, or even hostile attitude toward religion. Part of that mind-set resulted from the influence of the philosophical trends of the Enlightenment, with its strong emphasis on reason. The intellectual leaders of the Revolution exhibited a variety of religious views, ranging from traditional Christianity to agnostic and free-thinker positions. Perhaps one of the most common perspectives among the most influential leaders was some form of deism. Thomas Jefferson saw Unitarianism as the wave of the future, and scholars have yet to define with any assurance what George Washington really believed about religion. But most of the prominent thought leaders wanted to avoid any form of established or state-sponsored religion, especially on the national level.13 Jefferson and others frequently expressed their hope that a variety of religious persuasions would lead to a balance that would prevent any single one from gaining political control of society. The persecution of religious minorities in a number of the colonies had intensified the distrust toward established religion.14 Contrary to popular belief, the very early Americans were not a

particularly religious lot. Scholars estimate that in 1776, only 17 percent of Americans held membership in a church. But by 1832, shortly before Stephen Haskell’s birth, the percentage who held church membership had doubled.15 As the proportion of the population attending church grew, many wanted to see a stronger role for religion in public life.16 The American Constitution, with its limited and vague references to God and religion, particularly disturbed them. As a result, many of the various reform movements that sprang up during the nineteenth century called for a dominating religious force to implement them.17 During the Civil War, the National Reform Association urged Abraham Lincoln to alter the Preamble to the Constitution to establish Christ as the source of American authority and law. Their proposed revised Preamble declared, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, The Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the Nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government . . . do ordain and establish the constitution of the United States of America.”18 Presbyterians, Methodists, and some other denominations supported the concept and began petitioning Congress and the president to implement it. A group of ministers visited Abraham Lincoln to urge his endorsement. “The general aspect of your movement I candidly approve,” he told them, but then he reminded them that doing anything about it would take time and careful study, because “amending the constitution should not be done hastily.”19 Lincoln never referred to America as a Christian nation,20 but plenty of others did. The chaplain of the Senate, Byron Sunderland, declared in a sermon preached in the House of Representatives that the constitutional protection prohibiting established religion did not mean that the nation’s founders “intend[ed] to make us an infidel nation, nor our Government an impious and God-forsaken iniquity.” Raising the question, “Shall we be a

Christian nation?” a Presbyterian rejected any “senseless clamor about church and state.” An upset Methodist complained that “our Presidents dare not speak the name of Jesus in their messages.”21 President Lincoln responded to the request in a courteous but noncommittal way, and nothing came of it. But the National Reform Association pushed its campaign more forcefully after the Civil War, and these efforts directly affected Seventh-day Adventists. The intensifying American interest in religion that had opened up the ministry for Haskell was evolving in ways that would at the same time threaten persecution for his new religious minority. Even during the Civil War, one could see potential negative outcomes for a religious group that fell out of public favor. One of the major problems the North faced in its struggle to subdue the South was stopping the constant smuggling between the two sides, especially cotton from the South. Such illicit trade helped the Confederacy to survive. One area especially active in such smuggling was the supposedly neutral state of Kentucky. Jews, though few in number, had become prominent in trade in the Paducah area. Even without any real supporting evidence, many assumed that the Jewish businessmen were supporting the South through smuggling. To stop the alleged black marketeering, General Ulysses S. Grant issued his infamous General Orders No. 11, which called for the expulsion of all Jews as a class from Paducah within twenty-four hours. Although quickly rescinded, the order must have seemed like a hint of things to come for Seventh-day Adventists.22 Move to South Lancaster In 1864 Stephen and Mary Haskell moved from Hubbardston, Massachusetts, to South Lancaster, Massachusetts. Sabbatarian Adventists had extensively evangelized Maine and Vermont, and they had set up state conferences after the establishment of a denominational structure in 1863.

But southern New England was still a struggling missionary field. The Haskells bought an old Odd Fellows Hall building to live in at South Lancaster. There they joined the small group of Seventh-day Adventists that J. N. Loughborough soon organized into a church of eight members. The Haskells were two of the eight who signed the covenant to form the church. Signing a covenant to establish a new church was an old Pilgrim custom23 and became the practice among early Seventh-day Adventists. At first the little congregation met in the front room of the home of Lewis Priest, an early Adventist. The tiny group chose Haskell as leader and Lewis Priest Jr. as local elder. When the room in the Priest home became too small for the growing attendance, Stephen fixed up a room in his home for them to assemble in. The church met there for four or five years. Most ordained Seventh-day Adventists were at the time either church leaders or traveling evangelists. Local congregations had to provide their own preachers, and Haskell often filled the role of speaker. His religious activities began to overshadow his own business affairs; as he helped out not only in the little South Lancaster congregation but also in other nearby small groups. Haskell also witnessed to his business contacts. Adventist leaders convened a general meeting in South Lancaster during December of 1868 to discuss the growing activities of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in New England. Apparently at this time, the Haskells first met James and Ellen White. Haskell had created his own report blank for the New England churches to fill out. It collected such information as the number of congregations and Sabbath Schools, the members who were making regular payments to the Systematic Benevolence fund (the predecessor of the tithing program), and other data. During the South Lancaster meeting, Haskell passed around one of his homemade report blanks. Many years later he recounted the incident.

I was not at this time evened licensed [as a minister]. I well remember when Brother White read the [report] blank, he passed it around to J. H. Waggoner and J. N. Andrews, and smiled one of his knowing smiles. I suppose at the present day under such circumstances I would be reprimanded. But a committee was appointed and they brought in a recommendation, in substance as follows: We recommended this conference of four States be organized, and S. N. Haskell be ordained to the ministry, and be its president. If I had been nominated as pres. of the U.S. it would not have surprised me more.24 Haskell claimed years later that sometime during the 1860s James White sent a letter to him declaring that he would make Stephen bishop of New England.25 Whether White intended to use such terminology for area leaders or was employing it figuratively is not known. (Haskell was a credentialed and salaried minister for fifty-four years.) It is puzzling how Haskell, who received such a positive reception from White, could then turn against the church leader and cause such problems that Ellen White had to labor with him, as we saw in the previous chapter. The actual organization of a New England conference did not take place until 1870 and would include New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. James White, J. N. Andrews, and J. H. Waggoner ordained Haskell and elected him its president. Stephen would head it from 1870 to 1876 and from 1877 to 1887. During his career he served as president of a number of local conferences. At one point he was president of three at the same time. Growth of the church had slowed in New England when compared to regions farther west. It needed a spark, and even before the actual organization of the New England Conference, denominational leaders asked Merritt E. Cornell, in July 1869, to begin full-time evangelism there. After ordering a large tent in Boston for $500, Cornell gave Haskell a list of pledges for $220 for him to collect and then assigned him the task of

raising the rest of the money. Cornell dubbed him the “Treasurer of the Tent Fund.” Since the New England congregations had only one tent to use in evangelistic meetings, Haskell decided that they needed another one. He and evangelist C. P. Rodman bought a fifty-foot tent, hoping to raise enough funds to pay for it in three months. The tents came in handy for another purpose. The December 1868 session had also voted to hold a camp meeting in New England, “either before or after haying.”26 The New England Adventists used the two tents for their first camp meeting, which began on September 5, 1869. People from Vermont and other New England states and also New York attended the weeklong session. As was often done during the nineteenth century, Haskell arranged for the local railroad to operate special trains to the campground. It was a practice as common then as employing tour or shuttle buses today. Sometimes cooperative railroads would even construct a temporary spur to Adventist camp meeting sites. Trains from Worcester, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire, brought perhaps four thousand people to South Lancaster, the location of the camp meeting. Adventists conducted such early camp meetings as evangelistic meetings as much as retreats for church members, and many non-Adventists were attracted to them during a time before the distractions of television, sports events, and other activities.27 Besides arranging for the camp meeting, Stephen also immediately went to work in his new role as conference president. “I accepted my charge as bishop . . . ordained elders, as fast as we could separate the precious from the vile . . . and tried to bring the brethren up on every point of doctrine then held by Seventh Day Adventists.”28 By the time of its first annual session on August 24, 1871, convened in Amherst, New Hampshire, the New England Conference consisted of sixteen congregations totaling less than three hundred members. It had only two ordained ministers and two licensed ones. The widely scattered

membership struggled to maintain and share their faith in a world that, at best, was indifferent and, at worst, hostile. Driven by a divine sense of mission to share what they had learned from Scripture and to build communities of common faith, believers turned to what resources they had, especially the one form of mass communication they had access to— publishing.

1. For an overview of America’s continual desire to fragment, see James L. Erwin, Declarations of Independence: Encyclopedia of American Autonomous and Secessionist Movements (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007). 2. Countless books have been written about the American slavery issue and the struggle against it. A recent and helpful survey of the topic is Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War (New York: Da Capo, 2013). 3. For a summary of Ellen G. White’s perspective, see Douglas Morgan, “Civil War,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 718–721. 4. For a summary of her writings on the subject, see Trevor O’Reggio, “Slavery,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 1168–1171. 5. For an account of one major outbreak of prejudice against Northern blacks, see Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6. See Wheeler, James White, 111, 112. 7. See Anne Farrow, Joel Long, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery (New York: Ballantine, 2005). 8. One exception was Alexander Ross. Ellen White had to confront his pro-slavery position. See Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 1:358–360. 9. Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War: 1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10. See a summary of Ellen White’s views in Douglas Morgan, “Civil War,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 718–721. Not only did she see the war as a long one, she regarded the fundamental issue behind it as slavery. After the war ended, many Southerners tried to recast the conflict as a struggle for states’ rights. Some historians still argue for this position. But the evidence is clear. Those who called for secession did so for just one right: the right to own slaves and control them as property. See Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2001). 11. Strayer, J. N. Loughborough, 129–141.

12. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 13. See the conclusions of such researchers as Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Alf. J. Mapp Jr., The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Brooke Allen, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006). For a more recent attempt to make George Washington more religious, see Michael Novak and Jana Novak, Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 14. For example, James Madison, who authored and pushed through the American Bill of Rights, had seen how the Baptists had suffered under Virginia’s state-supported Anglican Church. See Garry Wills, James Madison (New York: Times Books, 2002), 15–19, 39, 155, 156; Richard Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162, 163. 15. Brooke Allen, Moral Minority, 144. 16. For a case study of how one of the most prominent politicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped his political philosophy around his religious beliefs, see Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). 17. An example is William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade against slavery. See Thomas Fleming, A Disease of the Public Mind, 101, 102. 18. Cited in David McAllister, Christian Civil Government in America (Pittsburgh: National Reform Association, 1927), 21. 19. Cited in George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 337. 20. Lincoln’s attitude toward organized religion has been a widely debated conundrum. For an evangelical attempt to understand him, see Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln’s Battle With God: A President’s Struggle With Faith and What It Meant for America (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012). 21. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, 337. 22. See Jonathan D. Sarna, When General Grant Expelled the Jews (New York: Schocken, 2012). 23. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 57. Puritan churches formed when a group of “saints” “covenanted” to live the Puritan lifestyle. Boorstin, Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage, 1958), 18. 24. S. N. Haskell to W. W. Prescott, August 23, 1907. 25. S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, 1914. 26. Haying season was an important period in nineteenth-century agricultural life. The hay that was mowed would keep the herds and work animals alive during harsh winters. 27. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 28, 29.

28. S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, 1914.

Chapter VIII

Distributing the Printed Word y the middle of the nineteenth century, the printed page had become the most influential communication medium in America. A number of technologies and social trends were working together to give it a

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powerful impact in the expanding nation. Three areas of innovation especially transformed publishing: new ways to make cheaper, woodbased paper instead of the traditional rag based; the development of powered printing presses; and the use of printing plates instead of movable type. The United States was also free from the heavy taxes on publications that hampered publishing in Europe. Furthermore, the spread of canals and then railroads made the circulation of printed material much easier and cheaper. The desire of American evangelicals to spread the Bible and religious tracts in inexpensive formats further spurred the growth of largescale printing and publishing in the United States.1. While newspapers were the most widespread and influential form of publication, individual books also had the power to reshape American life and thought. One such book was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, a work that played a major role in events leading to the American Civil War.2. Stowe’s book was an instant success. After an initial printing of five thousand copies in March 1852 (a large printing for the time), it reached one hundred thousand printed copies by June.3. In its first year it would sell 310,000 copies.4. Everything had come together to make such a spectacular success possible. The publication rode a confluence of forces, a fact recognized even at the time.

“ ‘Such a phenomenon as its present popularity could have happened only in the present wondrous age. It required all the aid of our new machinery to produce the phenomenon; our steam-presses, steam-carriages [railroad trains], iron roads; electric telegraphs.’ ”5. The new publishing climate would also shape Seventh-day Adventism; and S. N. Haskell would be one of the most influential leaders in implementing it. The Adventist pioneers already had a tradition of publishing. The Millerites had employed it in a dramatic way, with Joshua V. Himes a master at using print media. It seemed that whenever Millerite preachers established a presence in an area, someone would start a newspaper or other periodical that promoted the doctrine of the Second Coming. The Christian Connexion group that James White and Joseph Bates had belonged to also spread its beliefs through the printed page. Some consider the Connexion’s Herald of Gospel Liberty to be the first religious journal published in the United States. The earliest Sabbatarian Adventists also used publications. James White started The Present Truth and the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. He soon added tracts and books to the publishing program. But Seventh-day Adventist publishing had not yet scratched the surface of its potential. In December 1868, James and Ellen White had invited Haskell to visit them in Battle Creek. During his stay, Stephen became particularly impressed with Ellen White’s appeal to circulate tracts and other publications everywhere possible. Having himself become convinced of the Sabbath truth by the Elihu tract at an earlier time, he returned to Massachusetts determined to spread the printed page throughout New England. Since printed publications had become the most powerful communication medium in American society, he wanted to harness it even more for Adventism—a desire that would motivate him throughout his long career. Thus, during the 1870s, Haskell began creating a new approach to reaching nonmembers that further built upon the long Sabbatarian

Adventist tradition of using printed materials. Ellen White, after experiencing a vision at a meeting in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in November 1848, told her husband, James, that he must start “a little paper.” Although it would be small at first, it would become “like streams of light that went clear round the world.”6. The Advent Review, the periodical that James White launched, would hold together the slowly growing body of Sabbatarian Adventists, giving them a sense of identity and acting as a forerunner to today’s social media networks. It and other periodicals played the roles that telephones, e-mail, and social media do today. The printed page allowed believers separated by great distances to share ideas, concerns, and encouragement. And magazines provided a means to introduce Adventist teachings to people and areas that the small community of believers could not visit in person. As Adventists have often noted, the denomination had a publishing house long before it had any other institution or any kind of formal administrative structure. Periodicals could employ the expanding United States postal system to spread their influence. But the mail service had its limitations. While some cities had free home delivery, those living in rural areas—comprising the overwhelming majority of the American population—had none. Mail for people living in the country went to the nearest local post office, usually in a general store. Recipients had to pick up their mail when they made their weekly trip to town for supplies. Even as late as 1887, a town had to have a population of ten thousand to qualify for free home mail delivery, and in 1890, three-quarters of the American people still had to trek to a post office to get their mail. Not until 1906 did the basic structure of rural free delivery come into being.7. Books did not have even that delivery system. Except in the larger and oldest American cities, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, bookstores or book dealers were few. Customers could not order books by mail. The post office did not acquire the legal right to deliver parcel post

until January 1, 1913.8. In addition to the difficulties of getting access to books, they were expensive, and those bookstores that did exist had gained an image as the place for intellectuals, not the ordinary person, to gather. If a local general store did stock any books at all, they would usually consist of Bibles, hymn books, primers, spelling and arithmetic books, and almanacs.9. Publishers did not advertise to the general public; they assumed that only the wealthy with leisure time on their hands would be interested in reading. Because of such perceptions and limitations, printers and publishers had to develop other forms of distribution. Auctions, which sold printed material along with other merchandise, brought the printed page to a wider range of people and to areas where no bookstores yet existed. During the early part of the nineteenth century, additional ways of selling books started to appear. “As the tide of settlement rolled west, the book salesmen joined the circuit rider and the district schoolmaster in bringing culture to the new territories. In his saddlebag or his cart he carried Bibles, dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, histories, the classics, children’s books, and handy guides to farming, law, medicine, and cookery.”10. James White, head of the Adventist publishing house, sold many of these types of materials during his travels in an effort to keep the fledgling institution afloat. English book dealers started sending agents to America, beginning about 1820. They specialized in Bibles, quickly selling seven to eight hundred thousand copies.11. A more specialized form of distribution became known as subscription sales. After 1825, the term “subscription publishing” referred to the distribution of books directly to the customer instead of through book agents, bookstores, or other retail outlets. Subscription salespeople might sell a book in twenty-four- or forty-eightpage sections, which would be bound together for a fee after the customer had purchased all the signatures, or they might collect a down payment and deliver the book later, when the customer had more money (usually

after harvest time in rural areas). Subscription sales also provided a way to raise funds to finance an expensive book project. After James Audubon was unable to find a publisher that could afford to produce a costly book and he could not obtain a loan from any of the few banks then existing in America, he employed this method to produce his Birds of America. By having people “subscribe” to the books, he managed to raise enough money to hire artists and other staff. The types of books offered through the subscription approach included encyclopedias (Appleton’s American Annual Cyclopædia sold, by 1884, an estimated million and a half volumes at an average price of $6 a volume), historical and descriptive works with wood engraving illustrations, and books about Indian wars and the settlement of the American West.12. The American author Mark Twain was especially active in promoting his works on a subscription basis. Subscription sales reached their peak after the American Civil War. Seventh-day Adventists adopted the subscription concept for a literature evangelist program. But the denomination began with what became known as the New England Book and Tract Society, its first structured distribution system. Both the book-and-Bible houses and the door-to-door literature evangelism program were the Adventist version of cutting-edge 1850s American marketing. But they would evolve through the Vigilant Missionary Society, created by Mary Haskell. Tract and Missionary Societies The Vigilant Missionary Society emerged from a prayer group that Mrs. Haskell had started with three other women—Mary Priest, Roxie Rice, and Rhoda Wheeler. Each Wednesday afternoon, they would meet together in the Odd Fellows Hall, which served as the site of the local church, to pray for their children, neighbors, and former members of the Advent movement, as well as isolated Sabbath keepers. Early nineteenth-century American society restricted the roles of women

outside the home, including in the sphere of religion. But voluntary organizations such as the one these women formed became widespread, especially in the exploding evangelical circles. This allowed women to participate in religious and reformist activities in what most viewed as a socially acceptable and nonthreatening manner. Such groups became increasingly influential, and women often assumed leading positions in such areas as temperance, abolitionism, care of the mentally ill, and other social reforms.13. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ellen G. White had become active in interdenominational temperance societies. Seeing what they were accomplishing, Stephen Haskell actively encouraged his wife and the other women to form the Vigilant Missionary Society (VMS), the first lay-organized ministry of the new Seventh-day Adventist Church. Haskell formally organized the society on June 8, 1869.14. Roxie Rice served as president, Mary Haskell as vice president. Its ten members were all women. During its first year, the society distributed a thousand pages of pamphlets. Soon the VMS members began sending out, at their own expense, hundreds of tracts and booklets, first across New England and then to foreign countries. They worked to get Adventist books into local libraries. The women also wrote letters to individuals interested in the Seventh-day Adventist message. If they received a reply, they would read it to the other members at the weekly meeting. Their activities expanded beyond the United States. Two members learned foreign languages so that they could correspond with people in other countries. Maria Huntley, who had come from the little Seventh-day Adventist center of Washington, New Hampshire, and would become president of the society, studied French so that she could write to people in that language, and a Mary Martin taught herself German to witness to those who spoke German.15. Building upon the concept, Haskell encouraged the women to establish the first conference-wide Tract and Missionary Society in the newly organized New England Conference. It began on November 6, 1870.

(Haskell retained the original name of Vigilant Missionary Society for the women’s auxiliary.) Parceling its territory into districts, he appointed a director for each one. The local director would select a “librarian,” who would order publications as well as collect donations for purchasing and sending materials and remit funds to the district leader. The librarian would also conduct quarterly training sessions on the operation of the society in each church. Every three months, the cash receipts would go to the tract society office, initially located in the home of Lewis Priest Jr. in South Lancaster. One of the society’s goals was to place at least three Seventh-day Adventist books “in all the best libraries in the conference.” Representatives in individual or groups of churches would promote books and tracts to their members.16. James White, who had been selling books and other printed material by hauling them from place to place in his luggage, soon became interested in the program. He and Ellen White traveled to South Lancaster, Massachusetts, to examine what Haskell was promoting. After spending a week in the home of Stephen and Mary, the Whites were greatly impressed by what they observed. Reporting the visit in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, James declared: We are happily disappointed [an expression equivalent to the more well-known “happily” or “pleasantly surprised”] at finding the New England Conference in so prosperous a condition. The President of the Conference, Bro. Haskell, is an excellent manager, and has good brethren to second his efforts. A few years ago this was missionary ground, and a discouraging field. Ministers from other States, who then labored here as missionaries, were largely sustained from the treasury of the General Conference. Now the Conference fully supports its own ministers, meets the expenses of those who labor among them from other States; and besides this, puts annually,

several hundreds into the General Conference. A few years since the territory of the Conference . . . was regarded as a hard field, principally from the existing disorganizing spirit that prevailed generally. But now, in this very field, under the welldirected efforts of Bro. Haskell, our people are in advance of those in any other part of the field, in systematic, energetic action for the advancement of the cause of truth.17. After commenting especially on things the conference had done to support the publishing house and program financially, White suggested, “Let Eld. Haskell go to New York, Michigan, or some more western Conference, and give others the benefits of his financial talent, and let Eld. Canright, or Eld. Butler, or some other efficient preacher, come to this Conference to give himself wholly to the word. Things having been set in order by Eld. Haskell can be managed by those brethren who may be called helpers.”18. Before long, Haskell would go west to another conference. But first, James White convinced Stephen to accompany him back to Battle Creek in order to begin developing a greater distribution program. In March of 1872, Haskell helped set up the New York Tract and Missionary Society, then presented the concept to that year’s General Conference session. A committee appointed him as a representative to urge the establishment of tract and missionary societies in the state conferences. White published a book in support of the organizations. He saw them as a powerful tool to fulfill the mission of the church, one that would involve more of a too-passive membership. “Our people generally are spiritual dwarfs,” he declared, “when they might be giants in the Lord. They are waiting for the few ministers among us to warn the world, and, at the same time, carry the churches on their shoulders, while they feel at liberty to plunge into the world, and become buried up in its rubbish. The only remedy we have to suggest for them is to lay aside unnecessary cares

of this life, and to put forth individual effort for the good of those around them. In fact, this is, in our opinion, the only remedy.”19. It was also an opinion that Haskell could heartily endorse. As for Haskell, in 1873 the General Conference asked him to visit all the organized state conferences to promote tract and missionary activities. In addition, he served on the General Conference Committee (for almost forty-eight years), the Publishing Association, and the Health Institute (later renamed by John Harvey Kellogg as the Battle Creek Sanitarium) board. He would spend the next decade and a half visiting individual churches, where he promoted tract and missionary societies while continuing to serve as New England Conference president, as well as president of the California and Maine conferences simultaneously. As he traveled to those and other appointments, he wrote endless letters and articles on the subject of tract and missionary societies. Under his influence, tract societies soon appeared in Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The November 14, 1873, General Conference Session voted a General Tract and Missionary Society to coordinate all the various state and local societies. The 1874 General Conference Session formally organized it, with James White as its first president and Haskell as its business agent. George I. Butler was vice president. Maria Huntley became treasurer. Another woman, Jennie Thayer, was her assistant.20. The presence of White and Butler serving here as well as on countless other committees and organizations showed a weakness of denominational structure that would increasingly cripple its function. People had more responsibilities than they could handle. Not only was James White interested in Haskell’s distribution program but so also was Ellen G. White. The letter she wrote to Stephen (one of many she would pen to him during her lifetime) discussed extensively the issues involving the printed page.21. As was his nature, Haskell threw himself into the work of the society.

His constant and varied activities as business agent were a major factor in its success. At first the organization published a monthly periodical, The True Missionary, to promote its program. The magazine printed reports and letters dealing with society activities and contacts; offered instruction on how to operate the local units; provided programs to present and promote them; and contained articles to motivate the members. Stephen filled his own articles with such inspirational sayings as “It is when sacrifices that cost something are called for that the heart is tested”22. and “Love is an active principle, and cannot live without works. . . . The soil in which it grows is not the natural heart; but love is a heavenly plant, and it flourishes only in a heart renewed by the grace of God.”23. The magazine lasted only during 1874; it then merged with the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, a frequent pattern among denominational periodicals. In 1876, Haskell became the General Tract and Missionary Society’s president. Once he had the societies going, he had to maintain the initial enthusiasm and deal with lagging payments for the publications. He encouraged church members to continue their activities and helped them to raise funds to eliminate a local society’s indebtedness to the denominational publishing houses. Because he spent so much time in the middle of the United States, Haskell decided to make Battle Creek his base of operation and bring his wife there. Mary would board with the Chinnock family. He bought Mary Chinnock and his wife a horse and buggy to use while he was away. Soon the various societies were distributing nearly five million pages of material a year, resulting in as many converts as produced by the traditional evangelistic preaching series. The General Tract Society established a fund-raising program to send packages of tracts across not only the United States but around the world. Ship captains would carry printed material to distant ports and leave them on the docks. (The vessels’ crewmembers, with time on their hands during the long voyages, often read anything they could get their hands on and might peruse the material

before it was dropped off at its destination.) As a result, Seventh-day Adventism first started in many countries from someone finding and reading those publications. Besides being printed in English, tracts and periodicals began to appear in Swedish, French, German, Italian, and other languages. In 1884 the Society reached one of its goals, having placed ten thousand Seventh-day Adventist books in public libraries in many states. At an annual meeting in Rome, New York, the Society changed its name to the International Tract and Missionary Society (frequently shortened to the International Tract Society). The new organization began to distribute systematically in other countries. The British Tract and Missionary Society had already come into existence in January 1880. Later Ellen G. White would comment that the organizational and procedural structure of the societies had become too complicated and cumbersome and turned into a “yoke of bondage.”24. She urged Haskell not to make “Sabbath School work like a machine.” Instead, he should “cling more firmly to simplicity.”25. Stephen’s work reflected the American love of reports and statistics, but the elaborate procedures and forms had seemingly become an end in themselves. Bureaucratic paperwork (in a pattern shared by other expanding organizations in the United States) drained the societies’ time and resources, as well as their evangelistic zeal, preventing them from accomplishing their mission. During the 1880s, the state tract societies would implement the colporteur system of door-to-door book sales already used by secular publishers, one that became identified with the church around the world.26.

1. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 123–129. 2. For a fascinating study of its impact on American history, see David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). Ellen White was uncomfortable with the book (see Testimonies for the Church, 1:516, 519), approaching

it from the issue of reading fiction. But it had other themes that must have disturbed her if she read it. Reynolds’s book explores the visionary and spiritualistic elements. In addition, Mrs. Stowe’s family had some strange spiritualistic leanings (for example, see Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword, 18, 19). 3. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, quoted in Putnam’s Monthly, January 1853. 4. Within that first year, one million copies sold in Great Britain and more than two million worldwide. In the same year, translations appeared in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, and Hungarian. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword, 128. 5. Ibid., 127, 128. 6. Ellen G. White, The Publishing Ministry as Set Forth in the Writings of Ellen G. White (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1983), 16. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of her statement is that it envisioned a global mission at a time when Sabbatarian Adventists still held to the “shut door” concept—that salvation had closed as the 2,300 days ended in October 1844. Thus “the little group could not comprehend that there was either the time or the possibility for them to bear a message to the world at large.” The Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, 2nd rev. ed., (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1996), 251. It would take decades for the church to grasp the full implications of that vision. 7. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, 130–132. 8. Ibid., 134. As a result, the Adventist literature evangelist system that eventually developed required hand delivery of the books sold, a practice it continued even after the introduction of parcel post. 9. Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840, 36. 10. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: Bowker, 1972), 1:238. 11. Ibid., 239. 12. Ibid. 13. For a study of the developing role of women in social reform, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 14. Purdon, The Story of a Church, 10. 15. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 28. 16. The Review and Herald Publishing Association attempted to revive a similar program among the churches in the early twenty-first century. 17. James White, “Eastern Tour,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 14, 1871, 172. 18. Ibid.

19. James White, An Appeal to the Working Men and Women in the Ranks of Seventh-day Adventists (Battle Creek, MI: Steam Press of the Seventh-day Adventist Pub. Assn., 1873), 19. 20. Women frequently served as secretaries and treasurers at all levels of church organization during the early days of the denomination, even though they were greatly restricted in the secular society. Later they would disappear from church positions for a number of reasons, including the opposition to feminism that developed in Fundamentalism. The need to cut payrolls, while keeping heads of households employed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, further decimated the number of women in church employment. Mary Hunter Moore, who lived through the Depression, pointed this out to the author during the 1960s. Later, Kit Watts made a study of the history of women in the church and came to the same conclusion. See also Patrick Allen, “The Depression and the Role of Women in the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” Adventist Heritage, Fall 1986, 48–54. 21. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, October 12, 1875. 22. S. N. Haskell, The True Missionary, 87. 23. Ibid., 29. 24. Ellen G. White, Publishing Ministry, 328, 329; Ellen G. White, Letter 8, 1881. 25. Ellen G. White, Letter 1, 1881. 26. Sadly, changing marketing practices in the larger society during the latter part of the twentieth century would cause it to fade away in North America, where it had once been widespread in the Adventist Church. Adventist publishing had started out with cutting-edge distribution techniques. Unfortunately, the church did not adapt to the times. Its ways of doing things became frozen, and many assumed that the practices had been divinely ordained and thus must not be changed.

Chapter IX

Creating an Educated Church esides Stephen Haskell’s intense activity in publishing (he became a member of the General Conference publishing committee) and what Adventists today would call personal ministries, he expanded his

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involvement into still more areas. He became a member of the General Conference committee in 1873, as well as a member of the publishing committee located in Battle Creek. His administrative responsibilities increased as Adventists on the West Coast elected him president of the California Conference (1879–1887) while he was still head of the New England Conference. Because of the lack of experienced leaders in the growing church, many had to hold multiple positions. Stephen would fill both presidencies simultaneously for eight years, though for California we might better consider him mostly as president in absentia. During his visits to California, however, Haskell would have probably felt quite at home among the new converts. Adventism in California first sprang up around San Francisco and the northern part of the state, the area most heavily populated by people from New England. Arriving by ship, the Yankees did not settle as far inland as those coming overland from the Appalachian culture–dominated regions. But the New Englanders did have a strong influence on the region. The first president of the California Conference had been Daniel T. Bourdeau, a French-Canadian who had spent much time in New England. The second president was John Norton Loughborough, from New England. Now in S. N. Haskell the California

church would have a leader from Massachusetts, the true core of New England. Seventh-day Adventists would themselves put yet another Yankee stamp on California through the architecture of their church buildings. Designed and constructed by J. N. Loughborough, the earliest Seventh-day Adventist church structures reflected the white, wooden, New England– style edifices that he had known when he was growing up in the Yankee areas of New York.1 In 1874 James White began the publication of Signs of the Times, which at first he had printed at a commercial establishment in Oakland, California. But, as earlier with the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, he felt uncomfortable using a secular print shop and appealed for funds to start a second denominational printing facility, just as he had done with the Review and Herald Publishing Association. A camp meeting at Yountville, California, raised $19,414 in gold and pledges, and White obtained an additional $10,000 in pledges from Adventists in the east.2 The Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association organized on April 1, 1875, and Orrin B. Jones, who had erected the Review and Herald facilities in Battle Creek, came west to construct a building for the new publishing entity in Oakland, California. James White edited Signs of the Times from 1874 until just before his death in 1881. He also served as the Pacific publishing house president from 1877 to 1878 and 1879 to 1880. His sons Willie and James Edson managed the manufacturing plant. The facility grew until it soon had a dozen presses and employed 125 persons. With the establishment of the publishing house and the presence of the White family as well as other prominent leaders such as J. N. Loughborough and Stephen Haskell, California was becoming an Adventist center that, in many ways, rivaled Battle Creek. Membership growth was stronger in that state than almost anywhere else. The Signs magazine sought editorially to speak to both church members and non-

Adventists. The appeal to church members could be seen as a threat to the older Advent Review, and through the years, tensions sometimes arose as to how to relate the roles and audiences of the two periodicals. And even at this early period, one can sense a rivalry between the two publishing houses. Despite such difficulties and tensions, the church would soon begin to create still another kind of institution: schools. And Haskell would participate in their development. Adventists and Education Adventists in Battle Creek began to see the need for a denominational school, both to prepare young people for service in the church and to protect them from outside influences. In April 1872, James and Ellen White met with the local congregation to discuss what should be done. The church itself appointed a study committee, with Advent Review editor Uriah Smith as its chairman. Some began to despair about the project, however. Because dissension and factionalism had frequently disturbed the Adventist congregation in Battle Creek, church leaders began to wonder about the advisability of opening a school in the city. It seemed a spiritually dangerous place to bring vulnerable young people. James White wrote that, given the Adventist community’s “present feeble strength, it is simply preposterous to think of establishing a permanent school, which might call hundreds of our dear young people to the place to be exposed to unsanctified influences.”3 Then a religious revival among the Battle Creek membership began to improve the situation,4 and the Whites and others felt more comfortable with the prospect. The local church study committee shifted the matter to the General Conference executive committee, which consisted of George I. Butler, Stephen Haskell, and Harmon Lindsay. Haskell, who had no formal schooling, would now be actively involved in the start of the Seventh-day Adventist educational system, including raising funds for its first college.5

Goodloe Harper Bell, a teacher who had become an Adventist while receiving care at Battle Creek Sanitarium, had remained in the city to start a private school for the children of his new faith. The General Conference Committee now chose Bell’s school as the church’s first official educational institution. It designated June 3, 1872, as the start of its first summer term.6 It would soon evolve into Battle Creek College. In later years, Haskell was involved in starting other schools of higher learning, first South Lancaster Academy, which would eventually grow into Atlantic Union College; Healdsburg College, which would become Pacific Union College; Avondale College in Australia; and finally Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute, which became Madison College, in Tennessee. Adventists were not alone in establishing their own college, however. While Ellen G. White and other church leaders had a divine rationale for a Seventh-day Adventist educational program, their efforts may have been made easier by the contemporary desire for each community and religious group (especially the latter) to have the prestige of its own institution of higher learning. As Americans moved westward, they began planting colleges in many places. Louis B. Wright observed that “sectarian competition . . . helped to generate activity and spur religious groups to extraordinary efforts in establishing churches and schools. Nearly all of the frontier colleges which sprang up like mushrooms in the nineteenth century were religious in origin. Each denomination felt that it must have a college if it expected to keep pace with its rivals.”7 Daniel J. Boorstin labels such schools as “booster colleges,” since they enhanced the prestige of both the denomination that established them and the places where they were located.8 While Battle Creek may no longer have been on the western frontier, many of the church members flocking to church headquarters there came from nearby “western” states and would have been infected by the college enthusiasm of the time. Wright comments that religious denominations saw colleges as a powerful tool of unifying their

membership,9 though they would often downplay their denominational origin to gain financial and other support. Battle Creek College, however, would seek a strong church identity. Above everything else, Ellen White saw Adventist colleges as a way of preparing young people to advance the church’s mission. The new college would spend the rest of the century struggling to find its exact role within the church,10 a search shared in various ways by most institutions of higher education in the United States as they sought to discover their place in a rapidly changing American society.11 Battle Creek College wrestled with two major dilemmas. The first was its location. Ellen White wanted a rural site, away from the hothouse environment of a denominational center. She and James White visited many farms in the area and focused on the 160-acre J. L. Foster farm, near Goguac Lake, but its owner wanted $50,000 for the property. Then the Whites switched their attention to the city’s fifty-acre former fairgrounds. The property was on the market for $10,000. Both the Whites urged the new school to acquire it. The site had enough land for the students to cultivate gardens as well as operate educational industries to earn their tuition and expenses. The fairgrounds would also have enough space to relocate what was becoming Battle Creek Sanitarium. But the other church leaders preferred the twelveacre Hussey homestead. Located not too far from the Health Institute, it would allow students to work there part-time. Although the property cost $16,000, instead of the fairgrounds’ $10,000, the committee voted to purchase it.12 The decision greatly disappointed Ellen White, who was by then in California. Stephen Haskell had heard the Whites discussing her desire to have the denominational college in a country setting, and he never forgot it. The second problem involved the nature of the school’s academic program. Ellen White wanted more from the school than what was typically offered by a traditional college of the time. For centuries, almost

all colleges had followed a program based on the Greek and Roman classics. Now many college educators were calling for specialized training in such disciplines as agriculture and the sciences, and practical fields such as engineering and business. Although Ellen White urged the educators at Battle Creek College to make its course offerings more relevant, it followed the traditional classics approach for many years. But, in time, the school would begin to try new things. Many of the approaches that Battle Creek College would experiment with echoed those explored by other American schools.13 Some of the new ideas succeeded, while others did not.14 The college was particularly progressive in admitting female students when most other American colleges ignored them. Besides academic issues, the new school had to struggle with the kind of personality conflicts and problems that troubled other educational institutions. Being on the General Conference executive committee, as well as numerous other committees in a small denomination in which the same individuals held multiple roles, Haskell often found himself in the middle of those difficulties. As Ellen White called for a new, more “Adventist” approach to higher education, the college’s leadership grappled with understanding and implementing her perspective. In the process, the faculty found itself divided into factions—those who wanted to follow her approach and those more comfortable with the traditional academic program. The acting president, Sidney Brownsberger ( James White had been, technically, president of the school while he still lived) had a classical education from the University of Michigan. For the six years that he headed Battle Creek College, he followed the system he knew best. But Ellen White was insistent that the school should go in a new direction. Finally, in 1881 Brownsberger resigned, apparently intending to work at the less frustrating profession of being a logger near Cheboygan, Michigan, though the town soon hired him to teach at one of its schools.

(Eventually he would head the denomination’s Healdsburg College in California, implementing a program more in line with Ellen White’s viewpoint.) Battle Creek College now needed a new head. It found one in Alexander McLearn, a Canadian Baptist minister with a Doctor of Divinity degree. He had accepted Adventist teachings just days before the denomination asked him to assume the post (he never officially became an Adventist Church member). Unfortunately, tensions developed over the issue of student discipline and a personality conflict between McLearn and longtime teacher Goodloe Harper Bell. Bell was a strict disciplinarian, while McLearn took a more relaxed position, apparently from a desire to gain the support of the student body. McLearn also continued the traditional classical academic program, which disturbed Ellen White. When the annual General Conference session convened at Battle Creek in December 1881, she presented a talk entitled “The Need for Christ’s Spirit in Our College” to church leadership.15 In it she stated that the school had followed a secular model that kept students so busy that they had little time for any religious life. Although established as an Adventist school, Battle Creek College offered little in the way of religious courses (for many years it listed only one Bible class, taught by Uriah Smith). Yet one of the school’s primary purposes was to prepare ministers for the denomination. And, besides the academic aspect, students needed a practical education that would enable them to earn a living. Ellen White was well aware of the feelings among the faculty, especially on the part of Bell toward the others. He had been at the school since its beginning and naturally felt a proprietary interest in it. While Ellen White urged him to avoid unkindness, harshness, and severity, she also asked Bell’s critics not only to remember his years of service but also to examine their own behavior. The college board decided to emphasize the Bible more in the school’s curriculum and recommended that Uriah Smith conduct the additional

classes. Many years and many intense discussions would have to pass before the college restructured its approach to religion courses.16 Not until 1893 did the college actually make religion classes mandatory. (Previously the single class listed had been an elective, and since Smith had not been the most stimulating teacher, few students took it). Bell saw the proposal as a bargaining chip to regain the academic freedom he was used to, which a number of other church leaders supported because of his long experience. Unfortunately, many of the rest of the faculty opposed the plan and threatened to resign if the board adopted it. McLearn and Bell launched charges and countercharges against each other, and other faculty members joined the fray. Many felt that Bell was too vocal in his criticism of fellow teachers, and McLearn sought to destroy Bell’s influence. But, in the process, he began to demoralize the students. As chair of the college board, Uriah Smith conducted a series of eight hearings on the issue. (He was hardly impartial on the matter, because his own children disliked Bell.) The board members examined Bell’s record, even inviting students to testify before them. As for McLearn, the students liked him to the point that 176 of them signed a petition in support of him as school president.17 Though most of the board supported Bell, it did finally censure him, as well as McLearn. Smith, however, leaned more in favor of McLearn, and a few students circulated a petition asking Uriah to submit a “minority” report. The controversy continued to grow, even after the hearings ended. Eventually both Bell and McLearn resigned, and the school closed for a time. While the conflict in Battle Creek centered on the college, it had been further fueled by issues originating in California, as we see in a letter that General Conference president George I. Butler sent to Willie White. In a hint of an attitude that would flare up more dramatically in the 1888 Minneapolis General Conference debate on righteousness by faith, some saw the college problem being aggravated by events happening on the

West Coast. Among other things, they regarded Willie White’s editorship of the Signs of the Times as rivaling Smith’s position at the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. Because the Signs slanted its articles both to church members as well as non-Adventists, it did compete with Smith’s Advent Review and appeared to threaten Uriah’s role as official spokesperson in the church. Furthermore, some clearly felt that Pacific Press, its staff, and California leaders were attempting to take control of the church away from its historical headquarters at Battle Creek. (Apparently the suspicion toward California Adventism is not simply a twentieth-century development.) And Haskell, because he was president of the California Conference, got caught up in the conflict. “I have never seen anything like this in Battle Creek,” Butler declared to Willie White. “Some of that side seem to me to have a Satanic spirit and the positions of all seem most unreasonable. I find a bad, yes, a bitter spirit against Haskell and you for the part you took at Conference. It reaches high up in the Office. Such talk as this, I hear that Haskell and you came from California determined to put out McLearn. Poor Bell is made the starting point of this, and that you wanted to get Uriah shelved up in the college so the Review would be deprived of him, and that Haskell wanted to do this so the Signs could take the lead.”18 Unfortunately, some years earlier, James White had written to his son Willie that he thought Signs better edited than the Advent Review.19 Later that month, Butler wrote to Haskell about the college controversy, explaining that Uriah Smith was the primary problem. Regarded as the main opponent to the college board’s position, he reported to people in the community what Butler and other leaders said in the meetings, taking “a square stand against us on nearly all points,” thus spoiling “much of the effect of what we do or say.” When the board requested that McLearn and two other teachers resign, Smith protested. He charged that “this was a ‘conspiracy’ to get McLearn out, which you [Haskell] and Will [W. C. White] started in the conference and this was but a step in the plan. I tell

you he was not the quiet Uriah he generally is.”20 Despite many challenges, Battle Creek College survived. Countless other boom colleges of the latter half of the nineteenth century would eventually vanish. The Battle Creek institution continues today as Andrews University and has a major role in Adventist education and in shaping the worldwide Adventist Church. Supporter of Education Although he was a self-taught man, Haskell would continue throughout his life to encourage and endorse, at every opportunity, a formal educational system within the denomination. Once, during a series of talks on how to study the Bible at a General Conference session, he suddenly felt compelled to deal with the claim that church members could go to nonAdventist schools and “get certain instruction just as well, and even better, than they could get in our school. I do not believe a word of it. If they can, it is because we have not God in our schools. I am patriotic for God’s institutions. I believe God has established them in his providence, for a purpose; and to ignore them is to ignore God’s purpose.”21 Although Haskell had participated in the establishment of Battle Creek College and encouraged many young people to go there, he wanted to expand educational opportunities elsewhere, especially in his native New England. That way they would not have to go so far from their homes and perhaps not get caught up in the constant westward migration of New Englanders, one that kept draining the region of Adventist believers. He may have had another motivation. The struggle between McLearn and Goodloe Harper Bell at Battle Creek College had created an impasse that led to the school suspending operation for a year.22 Seeing a void in the denomination’s higher education, Stephen apparently decided to begin filling it. Also, the experienced Bell was available and could be talked into joining the project. He was one of the few in the denomination who already knew how to start a school.

Early in 1882 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Stephen convened the quarterly meeting of the New England Tract and Missionary Society, but with a specific topic to consider. Stephen wanted to discuss the “propriety of establishing a Seventh-day Adventist school at some point in New England.” He wanted to determine the potential clientele of such a school and whether church members in the region were willing to support it. Most who spoke during the February 4 and 5 meetings strongly favored the concept. As was the custom then, the delegates passed resolutions indicating their endorsement of the project. They named Dores A. Robinson and F. W. Mace to serve on a school committee that also included the New England Conference committee (Haskell, C. W. Comings, and J. C. Tucker). The committee chose South Lancaster as the site of the new institution and announced it would open near the beginning of April. It also appointed Bell as the first principal. The first term started April 19, 1882, with nineteen students in attendance. The school facilities consisted of a single eighteen-by-twentyfour-foot room remodeled from a former carriage house. Its teachers also included Haskell, Dores Robinson, and Maria Huntley. For a time, the institution did not even have a formal name. Reports and articles in the Advent Review simply referred to it as “that New England school.” Since the institution owned no land the first year, it rented twenty-six acres that the male students tilled to raise food. The girls performed the necessary domestic chores around the school. As the enrollment increased, the fledgling institution moved from the single room to the basement of the South Lancaster church, where it remained from September 1882 until June 1884. On November 29, 1882, the end of the fall term, the New England Conference voted to establish a permanent school organization that would be legally organized according to the proper state laws. The conference would also raise $15,000 to purchase land and construct needed buildings.

On December 12, 1883, the body elected a board of managers and incorporated the school under Massachusetts law as South Lancaster Academy. The board bought land and erected buildings, dedicating them on October 29, 1884. Meanwhile, the California Adventists had been developing a second denominational college, Healdsburg College (later moved to Angwin, California, and named Pacific Union College). The school had started as an academy and would expand into a college. Willie White was involved in the establishment of the California school, and Haskell indulged in “a little pleasant rivalry” with Willie as to which of the schools would open first. On April 5, 1882, California members purchased a two-story structure that had previously housed the defunct Healdsburg Institute, enabling the California school to open eight days ahead of the one in South Lancaster. After reading about Healdsburg’s start, Haskell wrote to White, “I had to build mine; yours was already built.”23 The denomination had now begun educating its young people on the college and secondary levels but so far had done little for those in the primary grades. Although an Adventist elementary school system would not develop for many years, Haskell wanted to do something about the lack of Adventist education for the church’s younger children. In the April 14, 1885, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald he urged students to attend South Lancaster Academy to learn how to conduct summer schools for Adventist grade-school children. “It has been the object of the school at South Lancaster not only to prepare laborers to engage in the cause of God as ministers, colporteurs, canvassers, and Bible-readers [Bible instructors],” Haskell wrote, “but also to fit teachers to go among our churches and labor for the youth and children of our own brethren who could not have the benefit of the academy. . . . It was not designed, however, that these teachers would take district [public] schools where they would be under restrictions as to methods of teaching or what would be taught; but that these efforts would be more directly turned to

instructing in those things that pertain to our faith and a preparation for the time of trouble which is before us, as well as instruction in the common branches.”24 Haskell envisioned such schools as providing spiritual training that would supplement what Adventist children were learning in public schools. Even though it might total no more than a few months or even several weeks a year, public education in the northeast was far in advance of most of the nation at the time. With the addition of the summer sessions, Adventist children would be receiving more education than most Americans. Adventist teachers had already tried the summer program in New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York.25 Although primarily a secondary school, South Lancaster Academy did offer college-level courses through the years, but not until 1918 did it become a junior college. Its name then changed to Atlantic Union College. In honor of Stephen Haskell’s role in establishing the school, it designated its administrative building as Haskell Hall. Eventually the school became a full four-year college.26 Educating the Ministry The denomination had begun a program to prepare future ministers and church employees. But what about those already serving the church, especially its clergy? Almost none, if any, of the ministers had a formal ministerial education. The only training they had received came from their experience as assistants to older ministers. Like so many among Methodist, Baptist, and other churches that had flourished during the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, the Adventist ministers had sensed a divine calling and plunged right in without any formal theological education. To correct the situation, soon after the start of Battle Creek College, the denominational leadership inaugurated a series of ministerial institutes “to give instruction theoretical and practical in regard to the presentation of

present truth.” The first convened in Battle Creek during December 1874 and January 1875.27 A second one took place in Oakland, California, during the spring of 1877.28 There, James White and Uriah Smith gave sixty-four lectures on such topics as the Sabbath, prophecy, and the state of the dead. Apparently the material focused on specific objections that Adventist ministers might encounter in their evangelism rather than offering a systematic approach to such Christian teachings as the doctrine of Christ. Stephen Haskell became interested in the ministerial institutes and organized a three-week series at South Lancaster for the New England ministers and Bible teachers. Broken into three sessions each day, the institute offered two sessions of Bible studies and a third devoted to “miscellaneous exercises, such as a drill on the pronunciation of Bible names, spelling of uncommon words, construction of sentences, parliamentary practices, & etc.” Ever the practical New Englander, Stephen had the attendees participate in physical work as well, noting that “a good-sized wood pile at the door, and a fence to be built, gives them an excellent opportunity to exercise an hour each morning.”29 Uriah Smith probably did most of the lecturing at the South Lancaster institute. Many considered him the church’s chief theologian, and he tended to dominate in such programs. But Ellen White soon began urging that a variety of individuals should teach Bible courses. In an institute Smith conducted in March 1878 for Adventist ministers in New York and Pennsylvania, he shared the presentations with Haskell. Even then, Uriah taught thirty-one of the thirty-five topics listed, Stephen offering the other four. Attending and participating in the various ministerial institutes may have given Haskell the background and experience he needed to conduct Bible instructor training schools in later years. However, educating ministers was one thing; paying them a regular salary was another. Adventists also needed to address that problem.

Paying for a Church Although Adventists had established an organizational structure in 1863, financial problems continued to hamper its activities. How could it fund its growing ministerial force and meet other expenses? It was not a new problem. As early as January 1859, the leaders of the Battle Creek congregation had adopted a plan they called Systematic Benevolence.30 Under this concept, the church recommended that members eighteen to sixty years of age pledge specific amounts each week, ranging from 5 to 20 cents for men and 2 to 10 cents for women. Those who owned land were urged to give 1 to 5 cents for every $100 of value. A meeting in June 1859 adjusted the rates to 2 to 25 cents for men and 1 to 10 cents for women. By the end of the year, some began suggesting that believers donate a tenth of any income derived from property. The system lasted for about twenty years but was clearly not sufficient for an expanding church. During the 1860s and early 1870s people increasingly suggested that members give a tenth of income from all sources. Something had to be done to strengthen the church’s financial situation. Finally, in 1878, that year’s General Conference session appointed a committee of five to “prepare a work on the Scriptural plan of Systematic Benevolence.”31 Haskell, probably chosen because of his financial record in the New England Conference as well as his being part of the General Conference committee, was chosen as a member along with James White, D. M. Canright, John Nevins Andrews, and Uriah Smith. The next year the committee issued a seventy-two-page pamphlet titled Systematic Benevolence; or the Bible Plan of Supporting the Ministry. Expanded from Advent Review articles that Canright had written in 1876, it called for a tithing program based on one-tenth of members’ income. Haskell in the West During the 1879 camp meeting season, Haskell had appointments in

California and Oregon. In the latter state he saw in action a young man who would in the future have a powerful impact on the church: Alonzo Trévier Jones. Stephen enthusiastically wrote to James White, “Bro. Jones is a splendid man. Think he will make a stir. Give him a country and he will cut his own fodder.”32 Three decades later, Haskell would rue his words.

1. Strayer, J. N. Loughborough, 198. 2. Ibid. From the beginning of Adventism in California, members there seemed to have more wealth than did many of those in New England and the Midwest and were sometimes more liberal in their lifestyle, a trait that would disturb other Adventists for generations. 3. James White, “Statements and Suggestions,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 23, 1872, 45. 4. See Michael W. Campbell, “ ‘Not by Might nor by Power’: The Forgotten Revival of 1873,” Adventist Review, February 19, 2015, 18–21. 5. S. N. Haskell, “Calebs and Murmurers,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 5, 1916, 2. 6. Emmett K. Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers: The Intriguing Story of the Men and Women Who Made the First Institution for Higher Learning Among Seventh-day Adventists (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association, 1972), 18. 7. Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), 177. 8. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 152–160. 9. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier, 177. 10. See Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers. 11. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront, 101–136. 12. Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers, 21. 13. For example, Woodrow Wilson, during his presidency of Princeton University, advocated a system in which students and selected faculty lived together and shared dining rooms and other facilities. See Stockton Axson, “Brother Woodrow”: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 126, 127. Battle Creek College tried a similar program of “school homes” (see Vande Vere, 57, 58). The concept must have been in the educational air of the time. The issue of manual or practical training created much discussion both at Battle Creek College (Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers, 53–57) and many other American colleges (see Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront).

14. For a discussion of early Adventist thought and experimentation, see Floyd Greenleaf, In Passion for the World: A History of Seventh-day Adventist Education (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 2005). For the struggle of Battle Creek College to develop and implement a Seventh-day Adventist philosophy and program, see Gilbert M. Valentine, W. W. Prescott: Forgotten Giant of Adventism’s Second Generation (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2005). 15. Ellen G. White, Manuscript Releases, 20:182–187. 16. See Valentine, W. W. Prescott, 93–109 for the struggle to make Adventist higher education more Bible based. 17. See Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers, 42–47 and Allan Lindsay, “Goodloe Harper Bell,” in Early Adventist Educators, ed. George R. Knight (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1983), 59–65, for more background on the incident. 18. George I. Butler to W. C. White, January 29, 1882. 19. James White to W. C. White, July 21, 1875. Whether Uriah Smith ever saw the letter or not, he must have been aware of James’s feelings, and it would have festered in his mind. 20. George I. Butler to S. N. Haskell, January 30, 1882. 21. S. N. Haskell, “The Study of the Bible—No. 5,” Daily Bulletin of the General Conference No. 3, January 31, February 1, 1893, 78. 22. Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers, 46, 47. 23. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 52, 53. 24. S. N. Haskell, “Church Schools,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 14, 1885, 233. One did not need a college degree or even a high-school diploma to teach during the nineteenth century. Formal teacher education was only just beginning to come into existence. In many places one could become a grade-school teacher just by passing a test. In fact, James White had taught school after less than a year of formal education. Wheeler, James White, 23. 25. See also E. M. Cadwallader, A History of Seventh-day Adventist Education (Lincoln, NE: Union College Press, 1958), 286. 26. During the early twentieth-first century, however, finances and other problems forced the college to suspend operation. 27. Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 29, 1874, 120; December 1, 1874, 184; January 8, 1875, 12. 28. Ibid., March 29, 1877, 104. 29. Cited in Gary Land, Uriah Smith: Apologist and Biblical Commentator (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2014), 111. 30. Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 3, 1859, 84. 31. Ibid., October 17, 1878, 121. 32. S. N. Haskell to James White, June 4, 1879. For a definitive biography of Jones, see George R.

Knight, A. T. Jones: Point Man on Adventism’s Charismatic Frontier (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2011.). Ellen G. White shared Haskell’s admiration of the young preacher. She had written to her husband about Jones the previous year. See Ellen G. White to James White, June 27 and July 3, 1878.

Chapter X

Haskell Goes Abroad he General Conference decided to send Haskell on a tour of European missions. Traveling to Europe to expand one’s knowledge in science and technology, business, or art was a common practice for

T

Americans during the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 But Stephen went to inspire and teach as much as to learn. Also, as mentioned earlier, a people or belief spreads through an expanding community. Isolated believers would soon vanish. Individuals had accepted Adventist teachings through reading the publications Haskell and others had mailed or sent by cooperative ship captains, but that belief would usually not last long unless someone brought the person into a supportive community. During his travels on the European continent, Stephen not only would organize and counsel the developing Adventist institutions but would also search for isolated believers and seek to create or expand Adventist fellowship. He left New York City for Southampton, England, on the freighter Persian Monarch on May 7, 1882, happy to have learned, as he was leaving, that his South Lancaster Academy had doubled its enrollment. Haskell in Great Britain In today’s world of airport security checks and no-fly lists, it is hard to believe that well into the twentieth century one could travel around the world without a passport. Also, until the 1920s, most Americans going abroad were the wealthy.2 They traveled on passenger ships operated by such newly formed companies as the Black Ball Line, Red Star Line, Swallow Tail Line, the Dramatic Line, and others catering to the elite.

Haskell and other Adventist pioneers, however, sought the spartan accommodations aboard cargo vessels. Seventh-day Adventism in Great Britain had started through the efforts of William Ings, a native of Hampshire who grew up in the United States, worked for the Review and Herald Publishing Association, went to Basel, Switzerland, to assist in publishing, and then returned to England. There he began selling magazines and distributing tracts door to door. Soon he had convinced a number of people to observe the Sabbath, and he appealed to Adventists in America to send a minister to help in evangelism. John Norton Loughborough and his wife left for England in December 1878, and a little later, Maud Sisley would come over as well. Ings’s story had many echoes in the early days of Adventism in Europe. What most Americans do not know is that it was quite common for immigrants to the United States to return to their homeland. Large numbers came just to earn money so that they could go back to their native lands and live a better life. Others left because they could not adjust to the new country.3 Immigrants who became Adventists had still another reason to go back to their homeland—to evangelize their people. Besides Ings in Great Britain, other converts went back to start the outreach of the Adventist Church in such areas as the Scandinavian countries (John Gottlieb Matteson), German-speaking regions (L. R. Conradi), and Russia (Philipp Reiswig). Early Adventist missionaries especially focused on northern Europe because so many converts in America had either recently come from those areas or could still speak and write in those languages, and thus could produce periodicals and tracts for them, or they had family members in the old country whom they wanted to interest in their new beliefs. The British Adventists assigned J. W. Gardner as Haskell’s guide in England and later interpreter while they visited other countries. Stephen met him in Southampton, England. Haskell was happy to learn that the new English converts were selling Adventist magazines and sharing tracts.

The organization of a national tract society especially pleased him. It had already begun publishing its own paper, first as a supplement to the Signs of the Times shipped from America, and later as the British Present Truth. Not only did the English Adventists send packages of denominational publications by ship around the world but they gave material in the Scandinavian languages to immigrants who passed through the British Isles on their way to the United States. The French Revolution In June of 1882, Haskell and Gardner left for the continent. One of Stephen’s goals was to give a new spark to the struggling publishing program in Europe, and he went to Switzerland by way of Paris. The city had been the scene of the infamous French Revolution. Twenty-firstcentury people cannot understand the horror those events created in the minds of nineteenth-century men and women. Since then, humanity has lived through countless revolutions, and Americans especially see their own in a positive light. But even Americans could not approve of the French Revolution. It created feelings of pure terror, because it had overturned every philosophical certainty that had undergirded Western thought until that time. Militant atheism was something incomprehensible to people of that era. They could conceive of someone supporting a rival religious belief, or even indifference toward religion, but for a society to reject belief in God completely? The very idea was mind-boggling. During turbulent times, most people regarded religion as what held society together and kept it from collapsing into total chaos. The horror of the French Revolution even became an issue in American presidential politics. Because Thomas Jefferson supported it, his opponents charged that he would ban religion in America, as had happened in France.4 And the French Revolution would become a part of Adventist eschatology, as depicted in Ellen G. White’s The Great Controversy.5 As Haskell traveled around Paris, he could not stop thinking about what

had happened in that city. It affected him the way that someone today would be affected by a tour of a Nazi death camp, the killing fields of Cambodia or Rwanda, or the World Trade Center site in New York City. What he saw, he said, “called to mind scenes in the French Revolution, as well as in connection with the impious worship of the goddess of reason.” He visited Notre Dame Cathedral, where the revolutionists had extolled reason above God. The lingering horror seemed to cling to everything in the city. In fact, he declared, “there is scarcely anything in or about the city of Paris which is not a reminder of the influence which has been so strongly exerted against God and religion.”6 In Basel, Switzerland, he found John Nevins Andrews rapidly succumbing to the final stages of tuberculosis. By now Andrews could speak only for short periods before lapsing into coughing fits. But he continued editing the French Adventist magazine Les Signes des Temps. In addition, he prepared articles and tracts by dictating to others. Later that month, Stephen visited Tramelan, Switzerland, the site of what most consider the oldest Seventh-day Adventist church in Europe. Michael Belina Czechowski, acting as an independent missionary after the Adventist leadership in Battle Creek took little interest in supporting his work in Europe, had founded it on September 15, 1867. Daniel T. Bourdeau would reorganize the congregation after a more American pattern on December 15, 1883.7 Haskell and his party arrived in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway, on July 6, where they attended the baptism of eleven people and participated in the celebration of a communion service. Then, on July 12, Stephen went with J. G. Matteson, director of the Scandinavian mission, to neighboring Sweden. There he helped organize a local tract society. Next Haskell and Gardner went to the Netherlands and then, after spending a weekend in Germany, returned to Switzerland. During August, Stephen visited a small group of Sabbath observers in Torre Pellice, Italy, a group also founded by Czechowski. Gardner

translated for Haskell into French, then locals translated into the regional dialect. While there, Haskell wanted to experience the region’s religious heritage. He and Gardner sought out some of the nearby caves in which the Waldensians, one of those reforming groups that Adventists identify with, had hidden during periods of persecution. The big-bodied Stephen preferred to view the narrow caves from outside, while Gardner, smaller and more venturesome, crawled inside one. Along with Haskell, Adventist delegates from Norway, England, and Switzerland met for three days (September 8–11) at Tramelan to share ideas and prepare plans for new evangelistic programs. Afterward, a larger gathering convened at Basel. It was the first session of what would become known as the European Council of Seventh-day Adventists. The administrative structure that Haskell helped to develop would bring unity and cooperation among the scattered Sabbath believers on the continent. Oriented as always toward the printed page, Haskell recommended the publication of Adventist material in more languages. A publishing house began to operate in Christiania, and the Imprimerie Polyglotte became the chief Adventist publishing institution in Europe. More tract societies formed in various places, and local literature evangelists began selling the new publications. Haskell spent about six months in Europe, visiting almost every country that Seventh-day Adventism had so far penetrated and conducting conferences and councils in them. He shared his experiences in operating with limited financial and personnel resources. Developments at South Lancaster When he returned from his European trip, Haskell checked up on his beloved South Lancaster Academy. He wrote in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald: “We found the school at this place prospering finely. Everything seemed to be moving like clock-work, and perfect harmony prevailed among the students.” As a good New Englander who lived by

always being busy, he reported the development of an early student industry program. “A wood-yard has been opened in the interests of the school. The students labor three hours per day, and by this means they have in some instances been enabled to nearly pay their board. There has been an outside sale of wood during the last two weeks of over $100 worth. . . . The land cultivated by them last term has yielded a profit of about $60, which had been freely contributed to the school.” Most important of all, he was pleased to announce that “a good religious interest already exists among the students and nine have been baptized.”8 The school had by now outgrown all available temporary quarters. It needed permanent structures. On Thanksgiving Day, November 29, 1883, Ellen White visited the institution for a special fund-raising program. After Haskell and others appealed for money to buy land and to erect school buildings, Mrs. White spoke. “When I remember how forward our brethren in New England have been to respond to every appeal for means for our missions and the various enterprises connected with present truth, even calls coming from the Pacific coast, I feel very anxious that now, when the cause in New England is in great need, the brethren in other sections may reciprocate their liberality.”9 The meeting raised $12,500 in a little more than a half hour. A permanent school building went up the next year. The school added more student industries, including tent making, printing (a program used in many early Adventist schools), harness and broom making (another popular small industry in the nineteenth century), cobbling, carpentry, and dressmaking.10 The school press published The True Educator, an eight-page monthly. Haskell, the self-taught man, frequently wrote for it, as did Ellen G. White, Dores A. Robinson, and Goodloe Harper Bell. By now Bell had returned to the re-opened Battle Creek College after training a young woman, Sara J. Hall, to head the English department at South Lancaster. D. A. Robinson soon replaced Bell as principal.

Haskell’s love for the school was both a great strength and, at the same time, a great weakness. He had left detailed instructions on how its leadership should operate the academy in his absence, a fact that disturbed Ellen White. The guidelines reflected his sometimes stern New England heritage. Although he was fond of young people, he did not always understand them, perhaps because he had assumed adult roles and responsibilities at such a young age, as well as having no children of his own. Ellen White felt that if its administration followed his rules rigidly, it could cause much damage to the students. “Heaven Is All Smiles and Gladness” In an echo of her earlier warning about his sometimes hard-nosed leadership style, she again counseled him to be more gentle in his approach. “I advise and exhort those who have charge of the youth shall learn how to adapt themselves to meet the youth where they are. . . .” “I verily believe that few know how to deal with the young,” she said, expressing her concern.11 The faculty needed to exercise its own tact and wisdom, and always treat the young people with the utmost sympathy. Apparently Stephen did not approve of close relationships between staff and students. Ellen White countered, If anyone has a motherly influence that tries to help and encourage the young do not let the idea be entertained that she is teaching them to be rebellious; because there is a kind, courteous spirit manifested to help the young do not let this be interpreted as working against the instruction of youth. It will certainly be a contrast to the attitude of some, and the children will prefer to be in the company of those who have a sunny temperament, who possess some joyfulness and gladness; but this should not create envy or jealousy or evil surmising. This spirit of cheerfulness and hope and joy must be an

element in your school, or it will never flourish and grow up and become a missionary field as every school should be.12 Ellen White warned against dealing too severely with the students. Adults must always protect the feelings and rights of their charges. They should be kind, cheerful, and courteous, and bind the hearts of the youth to their hearts by the strong cords of love and affection. Do not be afraid to let them know that you love them. If the love is in the heart give it expression, do not smother it. When they gather about the table to partake of God’s precious bounties make this a season of cheerfulness. Do not make it a season of grave decorum as though they were standing about a coffin, but have it a social season where every countenance is full of joy and happiness, where nought but cheerful words are spoken. And the youth should not feel that they are under an eye that is watching them, ready to reprove and condemn. Approve whenever you can; smile whenever you can; do not arrange your countenance as though a smile would bring the condemnation of heaven. Heaven is all smiles and gladness and gratitude. I wish we all knew more about heaven and would bring its pure, healthful, holy influence into our lives, for then we would bring sweet joy into many a life that needs it.13 Many of Ellen White’s readers today especially should hear two sentences that she wrote to Haskell: “I will work against this cold, castiron, unsympathizing religion as long as I have strength to wield my pen. The Lord knows there is enough of this element in the churches in our land.”14 City Missions In 1883, the church established what it called “city missions” in New York City and some other large urban areas. They were, in reality, evangelistic

centers. Such missions would provide living quarters for their staff. Besides space for literature evangelists and Bible students, some had readings rooms (a common practice of many organizations during the nineteenth century) for those interested in Adventist publications, while other mission sites had lecture halls for evangelists and other meetings. The missions trained members in personal evangelism, especially as Bible instructors. The staff of such missions often sold books and periodicals to support themselves, and denominational leaders encouraged church members to donate food. The goal was to make each mission selfsupporting, but that rarely happened. Because of confusion with social service or welfare institutions operated by other groups under the name of missions, the 1889 General Conference Session relabeled them as “canvassing stations.” And, instead of training Bible instructors at each mission, as had been the church’s previous practice, leaders decided to educate most of them at its Chicago Bible school. Haskell would later become active in the program, establishing what would become a model of how to conduct such evangelism. In 1884 Haskell became president of the newly organized Maine Conference, a post he held for two years while still president of the California and New England conferences. Although immersed in administrative duties, Stephen did not forget his interest in practical, dayto-day Christianity. He wanted to find new ways to present biblical teaching in a manner meaningful to the average person. The Bible Readings Method Haskell was especially interested in Bible study, both for personal spiritual growth and as a witnessing method. At a California camp meeting near Lemoore in May 1883, Haskell asked his friend Willie White to pray with him so that he could more clearly understand a counsel from Willie’s mother that urged Stephen to do “less preaching and more teaching.”15 Soon afterward, while Haskell was preaching, a rainstorm began such a

drumming on the tent roof that it drowned out his voice. Abandoning the pulpit, he stood by the center pole of the tent and began “asking questions and giving out Scripture texts to read in answer.”16 A few minutes later, Ellen White inquired from some people passing her tent what was going on in the main tent. When they explained what Stephen was doing, she said, “That’s what Elder Haskell should do; this is the way our people should be instructed.” Later she told him that “what he had done was in harmony with the light she had received” about him spending more time teaching than preaching.17 Soon he would popularize the use among Seventh-day Adventists of the Bible-reading format of Bible study that many evangelical groups already employed. He taught a ten-day course on it before General Conference meetings in Battle Creek. Healdsburg College in California and South Lancaster Academy offered courses on the approach. The Bible-reading method was effective for providing a basic background in the Bible and its teachings. At times, though, the questions could seem somewhat artificial or contrived. A biblical text would be turned into a question somewhat in the manner of the television quiz program Jeopardy, in which the subject of the selected category must always be phrased as a question: “What is . . . ?” A form of catechism, this method did not always encourage deep study of context and background. While in Michigan during September, Haskell reported the success some had experienced using the concept in California and Nebraska. His presentation influenced the conference’s leaders to begin having literature evangelists employ the method. The conference also arranged a ten-day Bible Readings Institute, which started October 30, just before that year’s General Session. In November, the General Conference endorsed the use of such a question-and-answer format by authorizing a monthly magazine, The Bible-Reading Gazette. The periodical offered subscriptions for $1 to those

who would write one or more Bible studies for it, while charging $5 for regular subscribers. Church members sold or gave subscriptions to the interested public. The Review and Herald Publishing Association produced it only during 1884, and its editors included Uriah Smith and W. H. Littlejohn. The twelve issues contained a total of 162 Bible studies consisting of 2,800 questions, prepared by both ministers and laity active in evangelism, though Haskell was a major contributor. The studies covered fundamental areas of Adventist doctrines. They give an overview of what doctrinal topics especially interested Adventists at the time and included: The sanctuary (149 questions) 2,300-day prophecy (72 questions) Spiritual gifts (126 questions) Law of God (111 questions) Sabbath (61 questions) United States in prophecy18. (157 questions) Tithing (98 questions) Conversion (58 questions) New Earth (48 questions) The Bible (27 questions) While more than twelve thousand copies were circulated, the publishing house still had a large inventory of material left over in its warehouse at the end of the year. As an experiment, the Review bound the copies in book format, and literature evangelists sold them in the state of Ohio. The project was successful. Then the Review and Herald prepared another series of Bible studies (also by various authors) and published them in 1891 under the title Bible Readings for the Home Circle, a work that would replace the volume compiled from the Gazette material. Bible Readings sold tens of thousands of copies and went through a number of

revisions through the years, with the most recent published in 2008.19 Adventism Reaches Down Under Pleased by what Haskell had done earlier in Europe, the November 1884 General Conference Session put forth Recommendation 14: “That Eld. S. N. Haskell go to California in time to attend the fall camp-meeting, and as soon after then as possible go to Australia to superintend the establishing of a mission there; and that Eld. J. O. Corliss and other laborers who may be selected go at the same time to labor in the mission.”20 If we read between the lines of the report in the Advent Review, we get the impression that the idea stirred up a discussion. Apparently some wanted Haskell to leave sooner and recognized that such a trip would take longer than leadership was allowing for. The delegates requested further consideration of the suggestion, and General Conference president G. I. Butler offered a substitute recommendation: “That Eld. S. N. Haskell, as soon as possible, go to Australia to superintend the establishment of a mission there; and that Eld. J. O. Corliss and other laborers who may be selected go at the same time to labor in the mission; and that Eld. Haskell attend the California camp-meeting in 1885.”21 The discussion continued at the next meeting on November 9. Some continued to urge that the GC send Haskell to Australia, while others objected for reasons not stated. The recommendation was referred back to the committee that had proposed it but “without instructions” as to what it should do. Finally, it came back to the delegates as “Rec. 25: That, in view of the great importance of spreading the truth to earth’s remotest bounds, and of opening a mission in Australia as soon as possible, Eld. S. N. Haskell go to Australia next May, taking with him a competent corps of laborers to establish a mission, and that he return in time to attend the next General Conference [two years away].”22 Initially, the resolution appointed Corliss and William Arnold, but others would be added later.

The idea of going to Australia had apparently been simmering for nearly a decade. In early 1875 Ellen G. White told of a vision she had had in which she saw the denomination developing all around the world, especially the aspect of the publishing program. Haskell was present at the meeting. Stephen later reported to the 1901 General Conference Session, I shall never forget the time, because of the circumstances that were connected with it. Brother James White and myself were sitting right by the side of the rostrum, and it was a time when we had heard something about Sweden by Brother Parmalee down in Indiana. Sister White told what he had told me, and what I had told Brother White so clearly, that I said to him, “You have told Sister White what I told you.” And with that he stopped her right in her speaking. He asked her if she were telling what somebody had told her, or what she had seen. She said, “I am telling you what I have seen, and I have seen that there are fields all ready for the truth that we have not entered, and that have not been thought of, and that there will be papers published in those fields.”23 Again James halted her, and he inquired what parts of the world it might be. “She said she could remember but one, that the angel had mentioned, which was Australia.”24 Stephen did not forget the reference to that continent, especially since another church leader inquired if Haskell wanted to go there to convert kangaroos. Finally, on May 10, 1885, Haskell departed from San Francisco with a group that would, indeed, visit the kangaroos and establish the denomination in Australia. It included J. L. Corliss and M. C. Israel, with their families, along with a Bible instructor and printer named Henry L. Scott. William Arnold went along and would sell Thoughts on Daniel and Revelation to interested individuals. Haskell stayed a year and started a periodical, The Bible Echo, and established a printing facility.

One of the things Haskell took with him on the journey was an early model of the typewriter. Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had been working on an automatic numbering machine. A friend suggested that he develop a letter-printing machine instead, and in 1868 he obtained the basic patents for what would become the typewriter. Stephen Haskell would always have one of the devices with him for the rest of his life. He first used it to compose articles recording his voyage to Australia. The trip gave Haskell time to regain his health. Throughout his life he periodically drove himself into exhaustion or illness. Just a few weeks before the trip, while preaching, he had had to sit down and let someone finish the sermon. Then he had spent a few days at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. The sea voyage forced Stephen to take life a little easier. He did, however, speak about spiritual matters with some of his fellow passengers, and Corliss held religious services at their request. Stopover in Hawaii The freighter Haskell and his party sailed on stopped at Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands, then an independent monarchy in the process of coming under the control of American business interests. Its people had been largely converted to Christianity as an outgrowth of the Second Great Awakening. Inspired by the religious fervor, Congregationalist missionaries from New England had come to the islands and rapidly evangelized the Hawaiians. The missionaries brought many elements of Haskell’s New England culture, especially education. Their descendants, remaining in the islands, turned to business interests, however, using their New England skills to gain a dominant role in the islands’ commercial, political, and social realms. A saying arose in Hawaii that the New Englanders “came to do good, and did well.” The American expatriates wanted the United States to annex the territory. It was part of a larger American mind-set. Before the Civil War,

Southerners had attempted to buy such countries as the Dominican Republic and other Spanish holdings in order to extend slavery. (Unlike in British territories, which had outlawed slavery, the practice was still legal in the Spanish colonies.) Now Americans sought to build an empire for commercial reasons, eventually taking advantage of the Spanish-American War to seize control of other parts of the dying Spanish empire: occupying the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, and dominating Cuba. Less than two decades after Haskell’s visit, American business interests would stage a coup and depose the Hawaiian queen and establish a provisional republic until lobbyists convinced the American government to annex the territory.25 The American drive for empire would eventually have ramifications for the Adventist Church. Arriving in Hawaii a little after midnight, Stephen and the other ministers hired a carriage to take them to the “International Tract and Missionary Rooms,” where Abram La Rue26. and a literature evangelist named L. A. Scott conducted personal evangelism. These two men spent their time distributing Adventist publications door to door, passing out printed material to ship crews that came from all around the world, and operating a free reading room.27 They had already succeeded in converting thirteen individuals. After a three-hour visit with La Rue and Scott, Haskell and the other missionaries had to return to their ship. During the voyage, the Adventist missionaries placed tracts in empty wine and beer bottles to wash ashore and be picked up by sailors and the inhabitants of isolated islands. Before they reached Australia, the missionaries encountered the problem raised by the International Date Line, an issue that still causes difficulties for Adventists living along it even into the twenty-first century.28 “Our last letter was mailed at the Samoan Islands,” Haskell reported to the Advent Review as they neared Australia. “Since then we have crossed the day line, and had the experience of losing a day in the Pacific Ocean. But it so happened that there was no time lost. We reached the 180th meridian at the close of the

Sabbath, May 28; so the proper day to drop from the calendar was Sunday, May 29. Thus, according to the argument made by our opponents against the Sabbath, there is no more Sunday to be kept.”29 After a four-hour stop at Auckland, New Zealand, on June 1, they arrived at Sydney, New South Wales,30 on June 6. After the sun had set, Stephen went to a telegraph office and asked when a telegram he planned to send would arrive in Massachusetts. “To-day, about this time,” the agent replied. After being transmitted to Asia, Europe, and then via the transatlantic cable to the United States, it would reach Massachusetts about the same local time as it had been in Australia when he would be sending it. After reaching Sydney, the missionaries temporarily split up. Except for Haskell and Israel, the group took a coastal steamer south to investigate the area around Melbourne. Stephen, who, years before, had encouraged a project of placing Adventist books in public libraries, checked to see if any had become part of the collection of the Sydney library. “We found thirteen of our principal bound books in their catalogue,” he happily told Advent Review readers.31 His report again shows his love of statistics, a growing interest among Americans32. and one that he ardently shared. “The library has 60,000 volumes, and during 1884 it had 155,000 readers. In the Sailors’ Home we found a small library; but on the table were six of our pamphlets, all much soiled by use. On the first page of each was stamped the following ‘From the International Tract and Missionary Society, Free Reading Room, 21 Boyleston Place, Boston, Mass. A. T. Robinson, Manager.’ ‘Sailors’ Home’ had also been stamped on them. It was like meeting old friends.”33 Stephen viewed the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales not only as launching pads for the spread of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to the other colonies but also as potential bases for reaching the islands of the South Pacific. He saw many parallels between the spread of American culture across North America and that of the British settlers across the

continent of Australia. As he began his research on the new land and its culture, Haskell had no manual or guidelines to follow. While he had his experience in the United States and Europe, he still had to invent much of what he did in Australia as he went along. Haskell contacted and interviewed leaders in business, industry, and education as well as religion, seeking to learn everything he could. The Adventist missionaries especially sought to make friends among Melbourne’s professional and business community, hoping to clarify their intent and to dispel any suspicion toward them as newcomers. Some in the community did respond positively, seeing in the Adventists a possible way of creating an interest in religion among some segments of the often secular Australian population. Stephen apparently kept alert for any religious groups that might share distinctive doctrines with Adventism, beliefs that he could use as points of contact. As in years past, he was always on the outlook for anyone who observed the seventh-day Sabbath. After studying the situation for a month, Haskell and the rest of the party decided to begin ministry in Melbourne, finding quarters in the large suburb of Richmond. Unfortunately, their limited funds would not cover the expense of a meeting hall. And because it was now winter south of the equator, they could not use a tent. Instead, they began going from house to house, conducting Bible studies and what they called “home meetings” whenever possible. They also gave away much printed material, which helped to overcome the widespread perception of Americans as always involved in some form of moneymaking scheme. (Americans of the time, unfortunately, did much to reinforce that impression.)34. Within a few weeks, Stephen could report a number of people meeting for Sabbath School. One man, who had received a copy of Signs of the Times mailed from San Francisco, came and told the Adventist missionaries that he, his brother, and an unmarried cousin had decided to begin observing the Sabbath.35 Despite the missionaries’ best efforts to establish good public relations,

some resistance began to grow toward the Americans. Both religious and secular publications started to print material against Adventism. One major Melbourne newspaper contained three anti-Adventist articles in a single issue. Ministers warned their parishioners not to allow the missionaries into their homes, and some clergy even threatened those who might do so. One pastor, who denounced Adventism, said it had originated in the “obscure State of New England.” While he mistook the region for a single state, he was correct in saying that the area had been a source of both good and bad social and religious trends, and that the movement started by William Miller had led to Seventh-day Adventism. Haskell left his fellow Adventist missionaries in Melbourne and visited the other Australian colonies. Having a list of names and addresses of people who had received Adventist publications from America, he made contact with those individuals. Going to the island colony of Tasmania, he spent ten days touring and signing people for subscriptions to Signs of the Times. Besides receiving invitations to speak to the local YMCA and other organizations, Haskell also continued a practice he had begun in the United States of donating copies of Adventist books to the public libraries, this time in Hobart and Launceston, the island’s two major cities. The interest in Seventh-day Adventism often spread through families. For example, a Presbyterian deacon, after attending a few evangelistic meetings and reading some tracts, accepted the Sabbath. His brother and sister-in-law, upset by his decision, sent their well-educated son to change his uncle’s mind. He spent almost the whole night talking with him. Instead of persuading the uncle to abandon the Sabbath doctrine, the nephew went away convinced of its correctness. Soon he began studying with other relatives, and thirteen out of a family of fourteen members joined the Adventist Church. Also, a successful building contractor led nine relatives into Adventism. Until recently, most people in the Western world worked a six-day week, Monday to Saturday. During the nineteenth century in the United

States, some began a five-and-a-half-day schedule, laboring on Saturday until noon. Not until well into the twentieth century did the forty-hour workweek become common, even in America. Converts to Adventism with unsympathetic employers found it difficult to observe a Saturday Sabbath. But even those who had their own businesses faced challenges. The contractor who had converted nine of his relatives told his employees that he would no longer have them labor on Saturday. Those who disliked the idea, he paid off and let go. As for the others, he said that they could get their six days of work into five through overtime. But since the contractor was already behind schedule on a government contract, the men could not see how they could possibly finish by the deadline. Both they and their employer knew that if they did not finish the project on time, he would forfeit the commission. His employees could see no option but to work on Saturdays. When the contractor suggested that they work on Sundays, his men protested. But as he explained the situation to the government official overseeing the project, the individual agreed with the proposal. The local police could not accept the idea of Sunday work, however, and threatened to arrest the contractor. First, though, the police decided to seek legal counsel. The lawyer they contacted suggested that the police should drop the matter, and they did so. Members of the local community, hearing what had happened, requested the contractor to explain why he wanted to work on Sunday and rest on Saturday, instead of the other way around. He arranged a public meeting to present his convictions. To his surprise, a sizeable group came to hear his reasons for Sabbath observance. Publishing in Australia Haskell had used Signs of the Times as a means of creating interests. But people began suggesting that Adventists publish a periodical in Australia. To print a paper locally would have a number of advantages. First, it took

a month for a copy of Signs to arrive from the United States. The Present Truth, the British version Adventists now published in England, spent an average of forty-two days in travel. In addition, postage from Melbourne to the other Australian colonies and surrounding islands was much cheaper at one cent a copy or two cents a pound for bundles of several issues. Differences in spelling between American and British English (the English used in Australia), as well as American idiomatic language and illustrations, created a sense of foreignness in the Signs. Finally, an Australian Adventist magazine would lessen the appearance of Adventism as an American cult. Haskell, with his interest in the printed word, wanted to start a publishing facility. The General Conference had voted $2,000 to begin one, but the money was slow in arriving. William Arnold, the literature evangelist who had come as part of the missionary party, attempted to sell Adventist books, but six weeks passed before he could make his first sale. Finally, he had some success and donated $1,000 (two to three year’s earnings for the average person of the time) to buy the main press for the new facility. John A. Corliss purchased the steam engine to run it, and Haskell bought a job press for small printed items. They installed the equipment in a rented building in Melbourne. W. H. B. Miller and J. H. Woods, two young converts who were partners in their own printing company, sold their business and joined the Adventists to set up a publishing company. Haskell kept an eye out for individuals who could serve as circulation agents. While Corliss held a number of tent evangelism series, Haskell decided in October 1885 to sail to the British colony of New Zealand, where he would not only check the potential for evangelism but also hoped to find some distribution channels for the future Bible Echo as well as Signs of the Times. He brought with him a letter from the American consul in Melbourne to his counterpart in Auckland. When Stephen asked the captain of his ship about a place to stay in the city, the officer suggested a

boarding house operated by an Edward Hare. In Auckland, Haskell encountered a denomination that called itself simply “Christians” and seemed to share many ideas similar to those of Adventists. A number of its members met on Thursday evenings to explore doctrinal issues. Someone invited Stephen to speak to them about the distinctive Adventist teachings. Soon Haskell found himself discussing the Sabbath with the church’s pastor. Learning of another study group in the Mount Eden suburb of Auckland, Stephen presented the doctrine of the physical second coming of Christ to them. His personal contacts and preaching interested a number in the Sabbath, and they began observing it. The Hare Family One of the new converts was Edward Hare, in whose home Haskell stayed. Quickly Edward took a liking to Stephen. The Hares belonged to a study group that met every Thursday evening to discuss theology. Edward invited Haskell to speak there, and Stephen presented the topic of the Sabbath. Intrigued by what he had to say, the Hares began studying with the Adventist missionary. Soon they accepted Seventh-day Adventist teachings. Hare began distributing Adventist publications around the country and introduced Haskell to other family members. Mr. Hare asked Stephen to visit his father and stepmother, who lived in Kaeo, 160 miles north of Auckland. Joseph Hare, Mr. Hare’s father, was the patriarch of a blended family of twenty-four sons and daughters, most of them living in Kaeo. Before immigrating to New Zealand, Joseph had been a schoolmaster in Ireland for twenty years, and he now served as a local preacher for the Methodists. Haskell spoke in the elder Hare’s church for three Sundays. In addition, he presented meetings in a hall and, as his custom was, visited people in their homes. As a result, the elder Hare and a number of his sons accepted Seventh-day Adventism. One of them, Robert, would see his fiancée break their engagement because of the young woman’s rejection of the Sabbath. A few weeks later, Robert Hare

traveled to the United States to attend Healdsburg College in California. In the coming years, the Hare family would become prominent in the Adventist Church, not only in New Zealand and Australia but elsewhere.36 Returning a few months later, Haskell conducted two sets of baptisms. Then he organized a church of seventeen members. The interest in Adventism continued to spread among the Hare family, and by September 1885, forty relatives were keeping the Sabbath. By now, Mary Haskell was in her seventies and feeble. She had been living with an attendant in a dormitory in South Lancaster Academy’s South Hall. As was the case with many early denominational leaders, fiftyyear-old Stephen had been away from home for a long time. During the Australia trip he had been gone thirteen months and one week. Mary had kept herself busy with her letter writing and encouraging lonely students. Learning that Stephen’s train would arrive at six thirty in the morning on Friday, May 7, 1886, Mary rose early, dressed, and, with another person’s help, made it to the door so that she could open it to greet her husband.37 Despite his long absence from his wife, however, Haskell could not wait to share with others his experiences down under. Ella Robinson reports that after breakfast that day, he hurried to the school chapel to tell stories of his adventures in Australia and New Zealand.38 Back to Europe In 1887, the denomination again sent Haskell to Europe. He was acquainted with the situations and leadership there and had established much of the church’s emerging administrative structure. In June he attended the first Adventist camp meeting in Europe, held on an island in the bay at Moss, Norway, not far from the Swedish-Norwegian border. Unfortunately, the encampment had only eight tents. The other tents, ordered from the United States, did not arrive in time. Many attendees had to find lodging in the area. Still, meeting and living in tents would be a new experience for most European Adventists.

Held with the camp meeting was the annual session of the denomination’s European Council. Five years earlier, Haskell had organized it. Now he chaired its fifth session. Ellen White and her son Willie, who spent two years in Europe, attended as delegates at large. By now, delegates to the meetings could report that Seventh-day Adventists had established a number of churches in Western Europe and had even begun to penetrate Russia. On a more negative note, sporadic persecution had surfaced, and local authorities had arrested some members for selling Adventist books or doing evangelism. Publishing matters occupied much of the session’s time, as one would naturally expect with Haskell in charge. The council voted to conduct, for at least three months a year in each mission, a school to train literature evangelists. Scandinavian Adventists had already held two of them during the previous year. To have material to sell, writers and editors would now prepare manuscripts for translation. When the council closed, Haskell left for England, where he was serving as the British Mission superintendent. A few weeks later, Ellen White and her party visited him on their way back to the United States. Always interested in education, Haskell saw the need for a school in England to prepare the English young people to serve the church. It was obvious that he could not get enough people to come over from the United States to grow the church in Great Britain, so he announced in the Advent Review, “After looking the field over we have come to the conclusion that the most effective way to work will be to establish a training mission where individuals of the better class, selected from different parts of the country, may receive an education in the work.”39 Renting three buildings in London, he started a small school in one of them, a large house. D. A. Robinson and his wife would supervise it.40 Unfortunately, the school did not last long, and not until the twentieth century did Adventists have a permanent educational institution in the country. Three Bible instructors—Jennie Owen, Helen McKinnon, and Hetty

Hurd, who would later become Stephen’s second wife—had recently arrived in England from America. Haskell would use them to start a Bible instructor’s training school in London. The Adventist missionaries lived on the second floor of the house where the school operated using the lower level as a meeting hall. During the winter, J. H. Durland, who had earlier led the English Mission, conducted an institute for eight potential literature evangelists at Wellingborough. With the help of D. A. Robinson, who had come from South Africa, Stephen would eventually organize a church in Great Britain’s capital city. Assuming the editorship of the English denominational journal The Present Truth, Haskell moved the fledgling Adventist publishing facility from Grimsby to London, as he had urged five years before. The era when people would willingly read periodicals consisting of nothing but columns of type had passed. The public now wanted their reading material to be illustrated. Stephen had brought a number of stock woodcuts with him from the US and would use them to liven up The Present Truth. The circulation reached five thousand, with a thousand going to South Africa and six hundred to Nova Scotia. In addition to his editorial responsibilities, Stephen worked with John Norton Loughborough and others in holding evangelistic meetings, and he personally presented Bible lectures in Southampton.

1. David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011) gives examples of the impact the city of Paris alone had on Americans seeking advancement in such disciplines as medicine, literature, art, architecture, and other fields. 2. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, 514. 3. About one-fourth to one-third returned home. See Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformation in Everyday Life 1876–1915 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 11, 12; see also Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982). The vast majority of Chinese immigrants eventually returned, in a large part because of hostility from whites.

4. Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign (New York: Free Press, 2007). 5. See Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, chapter 12. 6. S. N. Haskell, “From Europe,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 1, 1882, 488. 7. Jacques Frei-fyon, “M. B. Czechowski in Switzerland,” in Michael Belina Czechowski 1818– 1876: Results of the Historical Symposium About His Life and Work Held in Warsaw, Poland, May 17–23, 1976, Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of His Death (Warsaw, Poland: Znaki Czasu Publishing House, 1979), 250, 252. 8. S. N. Haskell, “Home Again,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 14, 1882, 720. 9. Ellen G. White, “Notes of Travel,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 15, 1884, 34. 10. School industries would become a fundamental part of the Adventist educational system. Countless students paid all or part of their expenses by working in them until the late twentieth century, when changing financial conditions made them increasingly vulnerable in their traditional form, and most schools either sold them off or abandoned them. 11. Ellen G. White, Manuscript Releases, 6:92. 12. Ibid., 93. 13. Ibid., 92. 14. Ibid., 93. 15. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 6:87. 16. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 66. 17. Ibid. 18. The material in later editions brought the Review and Herald Publishing Association near to getting into trouble with the American government during World War I. 19. The 2008 revision contains 175 readings consisting of almost 2,900 questions. 20. “General Conference Proceedings,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 18, 1884, 728. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 729. 23. General Conference Bulletin No. 1, Extra 11, April 15, 1901, 232. 24. Ibid. 25. See Julia Flynn Siler, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure (New York: Grove Press, 2012). Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes (New York: Riverhead, 2011) offers a more informal account of the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands. Interestingly, the first ethnic Hawaiian governor of the state, who served during the centennial of the American takeover, was a graduate of a university founded by another group of New Englanders

—Andrews University. 26. The elderly La Rue, later settling in Hong Kong, would become a pioneer missionary in Asia, and Haskell would again meet him there. Although relatively obscure, La Rue’s dramatic life has attracted the attention of Adventist writers, resulting in at least two books: May Carr Hanley and Ruth Wheeler, Pastor La Rue: The Pioneer (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1937) and Eileen E. Lantry, Dark Night, Brilliant Star (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1981). 27. While this was a common practice of the time, the Christian Science religious organization is one of the few groups that continue to operate such facilities. 28. See “Celebrating Sabbath in the Island Nations Near the Dateline,” South Pacific Division of Seventh-day Adventists, http://www.adventist.org.au/samoa-dateline-change-2011. Confusion has reigned through the years as the locals have sought to determine the right day for Sabbath. 29. S. N. Haskell, “New Zealand,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 28, 1885, 473. Actually, Sabbath was May 30, and apparently Haskell miscounted and got his dates wrong. 30. Australia was at the time a cluster of independent colonies. 31. S. N. Haskell, “Australasia,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 4, 1885, 490. 32. See Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, 165–244. 33. S. N. Haskell, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 4, 1885, 490. 34. As Americans had flocked to the gold discoveries in California during the 1850s, they would also rush to the Australian ones at Ballarat and Bendigo in Victoria and later ones in Queensland and Western Australia. 35. Advent Review and Sabbath Herald July 28, 1885, 473; Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 75. 36. For an older list of Hare family members serving the church, see Spalding, Origin and History of Seventh-day Adventists, 3:364. The author of this book had Leonard Hare as one of his college teachers. 37. Purdon, The Story of a Church, 8. 38. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 87. 39. S. N. Haskell, “A Word From England,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 2, 1887, 489, 490. 40. Gideon David Hagstotz, The Seventh-day Adventists in the British Isles 1878–1933 (Lincoln, NE: Union College Press, 1936), 151.

Chapter XI

A Most Frightening World hortly before the opening of the General Conference Session in Minneapolis, Haskell wrote an article promoting the dissemination of a special issue of the church’s religious liberty publication, the American

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Sentinel. In it he declared that what Adventists had taught for forty years was now coming to pass. On May 21, 1888, New Hampshire senator Henry William Blair had introduced, during the first session of the Fiftieth Congress, Senate bill no. 2893, a bill “to secure to the people the enjoyment of the first day of the week, commonly known as the Lord’s day, as a day of rest, and to promote its observance as a day of worship.”1 Although Blair saw his proposed law as preventing enforced work on Sunday, Adventists regarded it as an attempt to legislate a religious issue. More than that, it confirmed their belief that the end of the world was near. While the bill was the first potential national Sunday law since the failed attempt to ban Sunday mail nearly sixty years earlier, it represented a long tradition of attempts to deal with a general decline in American observance of Sunday as a day of public and religious rest. It had become still another of the countless reform movements that sprang up in nineteenth-century America. For example, a group of New Yorkers concerned about fading Sunday observance had organized petition campaigns, boycotted businesses that opened on Sunday, and in 1828 established the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath.2 Soon, chapters sprang up from Maine to Ohio. However, the efforts of such Sunday reformers more often alienated people than attracted them to the

cause. The crusaders did not give up, and proponents of the restoration of Sunday observance would remain a significant part of American reform movements through the rest of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, additional groups supported the concept of Sunday legislation. Established by representatives from eleven Protestant denominations, the National Reform Association was active in lobbying for Sunday laws, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had added a Sabbath Observance Department the year before. Both the American Sabbath Union Party under the leadership of Reverend Wilbur Crafts and the Prohibition Party took stands for Sunday laws in 1888. Because those advocating such legislation emphasized the need of the working classes to have at least one day off per week, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, the nation’s most prominent Catholic leader, endorsed the Blair law. Haskell saw Gibbons’s involvement as the beginning of the “union of Catholics and Protestants” that Ellen White had foretold.3 The recent events seemed the fulfillment of prophecy. Haskell now suggested that believers would quickly lose their freedom to observe the Sabbath and that they would soon have to defend their faith and present the church’s message in courts and prisons, perhaps even under torture.4 In discussions of Seventh-day Adventism’s struggle during the 1880s over righteousness by faith, Adventist scholars such as George R. Knight have pointed out that one important factor in the tension was a belief that the last days were indeed looming over the church. But few Adventist historians have explored the extent and cause of the events that made Adventists firmly believe that the end of the world was then imminent. It was more than just the threat of Sunday laws. The full Adventist prophetic scenario seemed ready to reach its climax. America in Turmoil While, during the 1880s, Adventists became especially concerned about the growing Sunday legislation movement in the United States, labor

conflicts and numerous other events also caught their attention. Although labor tensions had been growing during most of the century,5 they exploded in the 1870s. All in all, trends in America were reflecting what Ellen White had been predicting would take place during the last days. Adventists saw everywhere the things they could not dispute as signs heralding an approaching Second Coming.6 Just in terms of labor-management conflicts and other civil disorders, the 1870s and 1880s have been considered the most violent in American history.7 Almost 37,000 strikes involving more than seven million workers would disturb the United States between 1881 and 1905.8 Periodic financial recessions and collapses devastated the American economy, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work and further intensifying the social conflict. The years 1882 to 1885 were particularly bad financially. Secular historians have noted one year—1877—as especially significant because of its political, social, and racial conflict.9 It was a year that violently altered and reshaped the nation’s history, for both good and bad. Historian Allan Nevins commented that “the year 1877 may rank as one of the blackest in the nation’s annals.”10 What happened during this period would have a lasting influence on American thought, one that continues to this day. “Turbulent labor-capital struggles bred fears of a second civil war or widespread urban anarchy; such confrontation also contributed to the growth of state power to impose social order. Following the bloody and destructive railroad strikes of 1877, a network of new armories were erected in large cities to house a standing ‘national guard.’ Public and private police forces, militias, and detective agencies all expanded in numbers and presence in Victorian America.”11 (In later periods, such as during World War I, the nation would turn more to public surveillance and restrictive legislation instead of military might in its attempt to deal with such perceived threats.) Other social trends were equally disturbing and often contradictory. The Northern states had thought that they had fought the Civil War to restore

democracy to America. But a wide range of forces soon destroyed that hope. Instead of an expansion of freedom for the downtrodden, the years after the great conflict witnessed the rise to power of big corporations and restrictions on the individual, especially minorities. Through such tactics as bribery and legal manipulation, the legislative and legal systems gave civil and other legal rights to big business while denying them to the recently freed slaves and other downtrodden groups in American society. In the process, big business acquired greater power than the government itself, while much of the black population of the South, as well as many poor whites, found themselves forced into another kind of slavery, the economic bondage of sharecropping.12 Increasingly, state and local governments snatched away their right to vote. Legislators and judges would flip-flop to whatever position appeared most expedient at the moment. California state court justice Stephen J. Field, who engineered his rulings in ways that allowed corporate business to acquire rights that laws and courts increasingly denied individuals, once argued in a dissent against a ruling that struck down a Sunday law. He argued that the blue laws were necessary so that employees could get at least one day off each week.13 But his view this time was the exception to most of his arguments. The rest of the time—especially when he became a member of the US Supreme Court—he put business demands above those of employees. He would consistently rule in ways that abolished individual rights and gave increasing power to corporations. Field used an interesting argument. Reconstructionist Republicans had pushed through the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, in order to protect the rights of the freed slaves. But Field and others turned the amendment on its head, claiming that it made corporations into “persons” from a legal perspective, with all that category’s rights and privileges. The post–Civil War years thus were a time during which President Rutherford B. Hayes could write, “This is a government of the people, by

the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations.”14 Not only was big business seemingly in charge, but corruption tainted every level of government, and government itself appeared unable to cope with the countless problems it faced. Factory workers, farmers, and others sought to resist the growing power of corporate business, leading to a classic struggle between labor and capital—one that Adventists saw as fulfilling a prophetic interpretation of James 5. Not only would the last third of the nineteenth century be filled with labor strikes,15 but riots, mob violence in the South, and other traumatic events increasingly swept the nation. Big business and other conservative elements would twist such events to their own advantage. For example, political excesses—especially nascent communism both here and in Europe—created hostility toward the unemployed and other elements of the underclasses in America. In the backlash, some in the privileged class began to call for epidemics and firing squads to do away with the poor and other “undesirables.” The New York Times suggested that the only way to deal with the poor was to let “the natural laws of trade” work themselves out16—what we would call today “market forces,” or economic Darwinism. The opportunities that had once allowed the “self-made” American to advance in life now had either become extremely rare or had vanished altogether. Not only had corporate business taken control of politics, but politics itself had become increasingly corrupt and partisan. Bribery was open and rampant. Instead of working through lobbyists as is done today, corporations—especially the railroads—would offer legislators blocks of stocks or bundles of cash. Vote buying was extensive and frequently determined the outcome of elections.17 Some historians have cynically suggested that the high voter turnouts of nineteenth-century elections were actually the result of the money and other inducements to vote for a particular party or candidate. Partisanship reached extreme levels. Political

campaigns fought not over the issues themselves but over which party should best be in control. Many recent political scandals actually pale in comparison to some in the nineteenth century. Such was the frightening world Adventists and all Americans lived in. Dramatic and often terrifying events daily filled the newspapers. And even if the events did not touch individuals directly, they at least affected them financially, causing the loss of jobs and life savings (because of failed banks)18 and forcing many to struggle ever harder just to survive. The nineteenth century was not a time of happy and carefree summer days but a period of constant concern and, at times, real danger, particularly in the major cities. It was just as disturbing a world as the one we live in today. All this was an environment that the Adventist Church would, unfortunately, have to find its way through, sometimes fighting against social currents, other times being swept along by them or even succumbing to them. Throughout his life, Haskell would participate in those various efforts, especially in his later work in the American South and in the large cities of the nation. Such events caused Adventists truly to believe the world was coming to an end. And the greatest sign to them of the soon Second Coming, of course, was the sudden spread of Sunday laws.19 Ellen White had been prophesying such things since the beginning of her ministry. Now they were rushing, it seemed, toward fulfillment. A favorite of largely middle-class Protestant American reformers, Sunday legislation was a hydra-headed creature that erupted in place after place during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State after state passed various forms of it.20 (Haskell would have to deal with a particularly strong outbreak during his final term as a conference president.) Its supporters often targeted Seventh-day Adventists. Only the death of Tennessean Adventist R. M. King, who had appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court, may have prevented a ruling of the nation’s highest court in favor of such laws during the late nineteenth

century. Minneapolis General Conference21 At Minneapolis the threat of Sunday laws from outside the church became entangled with the issue of new theological understandings within the denomination. As George Knight has pointed out, Sunday legislation provided the background against which the controversies that raged at Minneapolis would play themselves out.22 As a member of the General Conference committee, Haskell had no choice but to be involved in the theological struggles that raged during the epic Minneapolis General Conference Session of 1888. He had been chairperson of the ministerial institute held before the session,23 and then when George I. Butler, the General Conference president, did not attend because of illness, the delegates elected Haskell as temporary chairman of the session.24 He and Ellen and Willie White urged that Jones and Waggoner’s controversial topics be included on the agenda, thus going against the argument that their ideas undercut prophetic certainty. When Butler resigned as president, the denomination elected O. A. Olsen as the new president and Haskell as interim president until Olsen, then in Europe, could return to the United States. Stephen, however, managed to escape the responsibility, and it went to Willie White while he had stepped out of the room to confer with his mother.25 Although Haskell was not a major speaker in the conflict over righteousness by faith at Minneapolis, he would become active in its promotion afterward, beginning with the first major series of meetings that Ellen White conducted to teach the new understanding. He was with her at the revival that broke out at South Lancaster Academy the following January. The meetings that began January 11, 1889, were supposed to last just three days. But the conference went on for ten days, and the academy suspended classes for the duration. Haskell described its events for the readers of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald.

The calmness of the meetings and the impact they made on those attending greatly impressed Stephen. “It is certain that God has come near to his people in a manner never before realized at any general meeting in New England.”26 He saw that response in the context of the Sunday law agitation in the United States. “God is wanting to manifest himself to his people, and fit them for the closing work of the gospel,” he concluded. “The merciful character of Christ has never been fully realized by many who profess to love and serve him. May God hasten the time when the conflict will be over, and the saints be gathered to inherit the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world.”27

1. For the full text, see American State Papers Bearing on Sunday Legislation, rev. and enl. ed., compiled and annotated by William Addison Blakely (Washington, DC: Religious Liberty Association, 1911). Senator Blair was also the first to introduce a prohibition law into Congress. 2. The founders of the General Union attempted to explain the purpose and goal of their organization in a document first published in the Christian Watchman of May 30, 1828, and reprinted in Joshua D. Rothman, Reforming America 1815–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 31–34. 3. S. N. Haskell, “Catholics and Protestants,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 18, 1888, 794; Haskell, “Who Has Changed—Papists or Protestants?” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 1, 1889, 10. For further analysis of the Sunday law issue and the time period, see Douglas Morgan, Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a Major Apocalyptic Movement (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 45–48; George R. Knight, Angry Saints: Tensions and Possibilities in the Adventist Struggle Over Righteousness by Faith (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1989), 15–19. Even though the Catholic religion was a minority one in America, some voices of Catholicism could be quite militant. As far back as 1850, John Hughes, archbishop of New York, had delivered a lecture entitled “The Decline of Protestantism and Its Cause.” Published as a pamphlet, it predicts a time when, from the president on down, all of the American people would have converted to the Catholic faith. Hughes also made a swipe at William Miller and lumped him together with Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons. For an excerpt, see John Hughes, “The Decline of Protestantism and Its Cause,” in Carl Bode, Midcentury America (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 1972), 146–149. Famine and social chaos drove more than a million Irish people to the United States in the mid-1800s. Father John T. Roddan, editor of the The Pilot in Boston, commented that “God made Ireland need America and he made America an asylum for Ireland.” As a result, he predicted, “a majority of Americans in the year 1950 will be Catholics.” Boorstin, The Americans: The

Democratic Experience, 251. Such statements would naturally have frightened an American public wary of the intent of the Catholic religion and its foreign immigrant adherents. For an example of the fear expressed by one group that organized to resist “papal” influence in America, see Thomas R. Whitney, “A Defense of American Policy, as Opposed to the Encroachments of Foreign Influence” (1852), in Rothman, Reforming America, 90–94. 4. S. N. Haskell, “The Present Crisis,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 16, 1888, 648, 649. On the whole, Haskell’s article was a sensible approach to responding to the crisis as well as a strong recognition of the church’s prophetic ministry to witness to the whole world. It reflects little of the conspiracy-theory paranoia of some contemporary groups obsessed with last-day events. 5. For examples of earlier protests against the decline of craft-oriented production and the rise of unskilled labor controlled by large-scale businesses and their ever more wealthy owners, see Douglas T. Miller, Then Was the Future: The North in the Age of Jackson 1815–1850 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 29–83. 6. For firsthand accounts of personal life during the period between the Civil War and World War I, see Ben Maddow, A Sunday Between Wars. The world depicted in them is a tragic and cruel one. Maddow focuses on material from the lower socio-economic classes, the sphere of most Adventist Church members of the time. 7. Schlereth, Victorian America, xiv. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. See Michael A. Bellesiles, 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently (New York: The New Press, 2010). An older study of that pivotal year is Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970). 10. Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Modern America, 1865–1878 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 304. 11. Schlereth, Victorian America, 59. 12. For details of the sad history of this radical transformation, see Beatty, Age of Betrayal, especially chapters 5 and 6. 13. Beatty, Age of Betrayal, 152. 14. Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 495. 15. For descriptions and background of three of the most infamous nineteenth-century labor strikes, see James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Anchor Books, 2006); Beatty, Age of Betrayal, 269–302 (the Pennsylvania Railroad strike) and 346–359 (the Homestead Steel strike). Also see Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 36–71, 110–115, 121–124. For a more sympathetic look at the role of business in the last half of the nineteenth century, see Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American

Supereconomy (New York: Owl Books, 2005). Morris gives helpful overviews of the development of technology and business approaches that enabled the rise of mass consumer products and marketing, trends that quickly reshaped America and the rest of the world. A highly readable book on American capitalism is H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865– 1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010). As always, Adventism had to live and work within this constantly changing and highly charged environment. 16. Beatty, Age of Betrayal, 153, 154. 17. For specific examples of political behavior in the nineteenth century, see Kenneth D. Ackerman, Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield (New York: Caroll and Graf, 2003); Roy Morris Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). With so much corruption, scandal, and bitter partisanship going on in politics, one can understand why Ellen White discouraged certain Adventists from entering into or letting themselves be caught up in political strife (Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 5:340; ibid., 7:252; Ellen G. White, Fundamentals of Christian Education (Nashville: Southern Publishing Assn., 1923), 475, 479, 483, 484; Ellen G. White, Selected Messages (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1958), 2:336, 337. 18. A number of Adventists, stung by failed banks, preferred to lend their savings to Adventist institutions such as the General Conference and sanitariums rather than risk them in a bank. But even Adventist institutions could default. Haskell would have to deal with a situation in which a fellow Adventist lost money in an Adventist organization. See S. N. Haskell to Nellie H. Druillard, August 19, 1907. 19. For a fascinating history of the sometimes contradictory religious and social trends swirling around Sunday observance and shaping the laws relating to it, see Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840, 252–254, 275–278, 300, 301, 303; Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876, 78, 80–87; Schlereth, Victorian America, 263, 264; Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). See also Craig Harline, Sunday: A History of the First Day From Babylonia to the Super Bowl. 20. The Yankee settlers in California had lobbied for the state’s Sunday laws, but when appealed to the state supreme court, dominated by judges of Appalachian origin who did not like such restrictions, the court invalidated them. See Colin Woodard, American Nations, 222. 21. The 1888 General Conference Session has been the topic of much discussion through the years. One of the leading contributors to Adventist understanding of this monumental meeting has been George R. Knight. He has written three major works on the topic: From 1888 to Apostasy: The Case of A. T. Jones (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1987); Angry Saints: Tensions and Possibilities in the Adventist Struggle Over Righteousness by Faith (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1989); and A User-Friendly Guide to the 1888 Message (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1998). More concise presentations appear in his A Brief History of Seventh-day Adventists, 2nd ed. (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2004) and A Search for Identity: The Development of Seventh-day Adventist Beliefs (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2000).

22. Knight, A. T. Jones, 30–32. 23. S. N. Haskell, “The General Conference Institute,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 16, 1888, 648. 24. S. N. Haskell, “S. D. Adventist General Conference: Twenty-Seventh Annual Session,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 23, 1888, 664; Daily Bulletin of the General Conference No. 1, October 19, 1888. Ella Robinson, in her biography of Haskell, does not discuss the session except to say that its delegates elected him temporary chairman, either ignoring or being unaware of the fact that he escaped the responsibility (Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 94). In fact, she does not deal with any controversial theological issues at all except for the holy flesh movement at the turn of the century, for which she asked Arthur L. White (p. 11) to write the chapter on the topic (pp. 168– 176). 25. Knight, Angry Saints, 35. 26. S. N. Haskell, “The General Meeting at South Lancaster, Mass.,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 29, 1889, 73. Immediately following Haskell’s report is an article entitled “Protestants and Catholics Uniting in Behalf of the Sunday Law.” 27. Ibid.

Chapter XII

Around-the-World Survey s the biography on James White notes, he and Ellen traveled more extensively than most people in human history before them. Such tours soon became an integral part of Adventist leaders’ work for many

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reasons, including a new one: As the Seventh-day Adventist Church began to grasp its mission to the world, its leaders also realized that they needed to know what that world was like. While Haskell and others had been to Europe and Australia, the leadership decided that the church needed to learn even more about the world it intended to reach with the gospel. They decided to send some leaders on a global survey. The days when mission societies simply sent individuals out and hoped they would learn to cope and survive were fading. Cross-cultural evangelism demanded planning, and planning required facts that could be gained only by traveling to where the evangelism would take place. Such trips would often keep leaders gone for months or even a year or more. Having already been to Europe twice, and to Australia, Haskell would now take his New England wanderlust heritage to even more distant realms. He was the first Seventh-day Adventist official to make a full global tour as part of his official duties. During 1889–1891, at the request of General Conference leaders, Haskell and Battle Creek student Percy Magan embarked on a world tour to investigate potential sites for future denominational mission activities. It was Ellen G. White who suggested Magan as a secretary and traveling companion for Stephen. She wanted Magan to be able to visit his

homeland of Ireland and, while there, perhaps reestablish a relationship with his estranged father.1 Haskell agreed, but only if the younger man would act as his valet, porter, guide, and (if necessary) nurse. His nursing duties would primarily consist of giving Stephen hydrotherapy treatments, the first resort of many Adventists at that time for whatever ailed them. Haskell also wanted Percy to learn shorthand to take his dictation. Magan agreed. The two men visited Europe, southern Africa, India, China, Japan, and Australia, all the while reporting their experiences in a series of articles in the Youth’s Instructor, forty-nine of them signed P. T. M. Haskell wrote additional material for the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. Such accounts would not only let North American church leaders know the evangelistic potential and problems of various regions of the world but would also inspire many young Adventists to enter mission service, reflecting a development already happening in the larger Protestant world. And, as was his custom, Haskell kept church leadership informed about what he was doing and thinking, particularly through a series of letters to General Conference president O. A. Olsen.2 Occasionally, as he did in his correspondence through the later years of his service, he would mention his various medical complaints. In one letter he enclosed a photograph of the Taj Mahal in India. As always, he could not resist sharing facts and figures. Haskell began his journey on February 15, 1889, when he departed from New York City. He left without Magan, who would join him after finishing his school year at Battle Creek College. First Stephen went to England, where he held evangelistic meetings. Next he and the newly elected General Conference president, Ole A. Olsen, attended church conferences and councils during March and April in the Scandinavian countries. After visiting Grythyttehed, Sweden, Stephen journeyed northward with a minister named L. Johnson to Christiana (now Oslo) and Trondheim, Norway, and then to Bodø, a town within the Arctic Circle.

But that did not fully satisfy his wanderlust. Leaving the Swedish minister behind to hold meetings with a group of Adventists, Haskell went three hundred miles farther north to Tromsö. In Tromsö he encountered a literature evangelist whom he had met as a student at a training school conducted in Christiana the winter before. The man brought two friends to visit Haskell at his hotel. “They could not speak English at all,” Stephen later wrote, “and as I had learned only a few words of Norwegian, we found we were much in the same condition as the man who, while on board of a ship, was asked to pray (he being a professor of religion [that is, someone who claimed to be religious]) when they came into a storm. He said that he had learned but one prayer, and that it was not fitting on an occasion like that. This was my situation exactly. The words I had learned were not suitable for the occasion. Yet we communicated considerable information to each other.”3 Haskell was not only adventuresome but adaptable. A Man of Many Duties By early August, Magan had joined Stephen after stopping by his childhood hometown of Dublin, Ireland. Haskell kept the younger man constantly busy. Besides taking dictation (sometimes being awakened from sleep to do it) and typing letters and periodical articles, Magan would act as researcher for material for the articles. During their stopovers at various ports, he would scour books and contact travel agencies for the kind of statistical data that Stephen loved. Their reports read like travelogues. Arriving in Calcutta, for example, Percy collected all the information he could about India’s history, geography, customs, caste system, and religions. Haskell then incorporated much of it into what he wrote. In addition to those activities, Magan obtained travel reservations, kept track of luggage (seven large suitcases and a typewriter4), and handled currency exchanges. When funds ran low, he would take a temporary job until the checks from the United States caught up with

them.5 Leaving Europe, they headed for South Africa on the Warwick Castle. When their ship stopped at Lisbon6 to refuel, they went ashore and toured some of the still-surviving ruins of buildings destroyed by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Besides being a destructive event in and of itself, the catastrophe had raised many disturbing philosophical issues.7 The rise of newspapers and improved communication created a media frenzy, and the disaster became the talk of Europe. Catholics struggled to explain why God would allow so many to perish while they were attending religious services in church (it happened on All Saints Day).8 Protestants of the time regarded it as a punishment on the medieval Catholic Church, as well as a prophetic marker. Because of the Adventist interpretation of that particular earthquake as a sign of the approaching Second Coming, what the Adventist missionaries saw made a special impact on them. Mr. and Mrs. Alma Druillard joined the party. They would later be missionaries in Africa. He, a businessman, served as publishing secretary in South Africa, and she as secretary-treasurer of the tract society there. Magan already knew Mrs. Druillard well as she had been his teacher in Nebraska and had helped him to attend Battle Creek College. Nellie Rankin Druillard had also served as treasurer of the Nebraska Conference and would become known to hundreds of Adventist youth as “Aunt Nell” or “Mother D.” The paths of Haskell, Magan, and the Druillards would often cross during the coming years. Travels in Africa After stopping at the island of Madeira, the Warwick Castle arrived at Cape Town on August 9, 1889. The small group felt great relief at reaching their destination. “To properly appreciate our feelings,” Stephen reported, “one should take a sea voyage of three weeks, and the last two weeks have it rough seas, so that, except from time to time, some particular article of diet is the only thing desirable.”9 Sea voyages during

the nineteenth century were not pleasure cruises. Adventists often went by freighters that had only limited and sometimes even primitive passenger accommodations. Storms could more easily toss about the smaller ships of the time. Traveling around South Africa by train, stage coach, horseback, and small steamships along the coast, Haskell toured a number of Protestant missions and studied their methods to find out how best to set up Adventist mission stations. The nineteenth century was a sad era for Africa, as European nations carved up the continent to add to their empires and exploit the land’s people and resources. But at the same time it opened a window to Christian missionaries, including Adventists. They could use the new river steamers, railroads, and other forms of transportation to reach the interior more easily, and the developing industrial base in South Africa and a few additional centers would supply the printing and other needs of the missionaries. The Adventist Church, through Haskell, was poised to take advantage of such opportunities. Something that caught Stephen’s attention during his travels and particularly disturbed him was that the African converts appeared, in his view, to be making only limited advances in their spiritual lives. He regarded them as too passive in their religious growth, too dependent upon what the missionaries did for them. When he wrote up his observations for the Advent Review, he noted, While we would not in any way underrate the missions or the labor of the missionaries (for doubtless many of them are conscientious and God-fearing men and women, and have made noble sacrifices for the cause of God, and a great and good work has been accomplished by them), yet there seems to be something in their teachings that leaves their converts a dead weight upon those who would seek to lead them nearer to the Lord. It would appear that the missionaries had two points in view; first, to get the natives to formally renounce idolatry

and confess Christ as the only object of worship; and, second, to educate them so that they can read and write in their own language. But to impart to them an inspiration to reach up and grasp knowledge, is a principle with which many of them are wholly unacquainted. This, however, may be owing in part to peculiarities of the race. Even when they do possess a desire to obtain more knowledge, they seek it only through the channels by which they received their primary instruction. There are, however, one or two tribes which are exceptions; and where Christianity has taken a strong hold, these have more of a desire to read and understand for themselves.10 Always oriented to the printed page, Haskell regarded publications and self-supporting literature evangelism programs as his favorite entering wedges. But his travels in southern Africa made him soon realize that such methods would not work in African tribal culture. To be successful in Africa, Adventist missions would have to take another approach. He became interested in education as a means of not only reaching people but of preparing them to work for the church. “Sowing for Eternity” During his and Magan’s travels, one institution particularly caught their attention—the Huguenot Seminary located about forty miles from Cape Town. (The term seminary was frequently used for a girls’ school in the nineteenth century.) First opened in 1874 and modeled after the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Hadley, Massachusetts, the oldest institution for the education of women in the United States and now Mount Holyoke College, the South African school prepared girls for mission and other forms of Christian service. Haskell greatly admired what he saw there and in other mission schools that he toured. The experience further stimulated his already great interest in education as well as revealed a willingness to learn how others did things that might be useful for the Adventist Church.

The latter was something that he had already demonstrated in the area of the distribution of publications for Adventists when he adopted the secular marketing and distribution techniques of the time. “To educate the mind of the youth, to train it so that its inclination will be to twine around those things that are heavenward in their trend, is the most delicate work that has ever been committed to mankind,” Haskell wrote in the Advent Review. God has offered no grander opportunity to those who would be his servants, and laborers in his vineyard, than to go to a foreign country, there to educate the young, and instill into their minds pure and sound principles, which will fit them, not only for the practical duties of after life, but for a place of radiant brightness in the kingdom of God. Here is a wide door of usefulness, and one which in the past has not been fully appreciated by Seventh-day Adventists as a people. If all of our schools under the control of religious teachers kept before their pupils some such missionary work, they would accomplish ten times as much for humanity as many do now. It is sowing for eternity, planting seeds that will blossom in the earth made new. We are in the world for the benefit of humanity, and it would be bigotry in the extreme to suppose that all good methods of instruction, in this enlightened age of the nineteenth century, are confined to any one denomination or class, or even to people whom God has called to a special work.11 Stephen goes on to give a long report of what he saw at the school and of its history. Their observation of various educational methods and programs would also have an impact on Percy Magan. Not only did the visits to various schools create an interest in education on his part, but he would employ some of the things he saw during his later days working at Battle Creek College, especially in the aspect of vocational education.

The trip taught Haskell an important concept that he explained at the March 1891 General Conference Session. He shared a letter he had written earlier that emphasized that the denomination needed to educate potential church employees in their home cultural environments. He primarily had in mind British colonials such as those who had settled Australia and New Zealand, and thus urged the development of a school in Australia, but the principle applied to every culture when he declared, “Being educated on their own ground, among their own people, consequently preserving their own customs, they become more successful workers.”12 To send them elsewhere could easily cause them to lose touch with their home culture or encourage them to remain in the United States or wherever else they attended school. Time has repeatedly demonstrated the reality of his warning. Many students have not, indeed, returned to their homelands after completing their education in other countries. On to Asia Haskell and Magan next traveled to India aboard the freighter Umtata. During the days of slow sea voyages, travelers often experienced things missed by airplane passengers as they hurtle high overhead. Leaving Port Durban in the Natal on January 11, 1890, they, for example, at first encountered some rough seas and winds, and then the weather calmed and the ocean “looked like one great sheet of glass, more smooth than many of the little lakes that dot the surface of North America.”13 The voyage to Africa had been one of heavy seas, but leaving the continent, they encountered waters as calm as could be. Arriving in India, they visited Calcutta and then toured mission stations and studied the indigenous religions. The Parsee sect especially caught their attention.14 But some of the places they went to were more in the nature of tourist sites, such as the Taj Mahal and the palace of Akbar the Great. And like many a tourist since, they had a ride on an elephant, an experience they vowed never to repeat.15 These latter activities would

firmly set the tradition of denominational leaders visiting sites such as game parks and other attractions during their official travel. Haskell did later claim that he prepared a book of Bible lessons that he had printed while in India.16 On April 10, the two men boarded the steamship Rohilla for Hong Kong, stopping along the way at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Singapore. After a brief stay in the British colony, they went to Japan. There, besides the beauty and culture of the country, Haskell and Magan would have witnessed some of the results of the nation’s rapid and forced modernization. After Japan, they sailed back to China in June 1890 on the French ship Natal. They spent two weeks in Shanghai, a city divided into Western spheres of economic interest. The American, French, and British areas operated under their own governments and systems of law. The Western powers were attempting to turn China into a vast market for their agricultural and manufactured products. The United States, especially, was producing more than its own consumers could absorb, and it desperately needed new outlets, leading to American empire building in Asia. American diplomats and business influences would resort to secret alliances and other deceptive international practices that overthrew legitimate governments such as the ones in Korea and Hawaii.17 Such activities would reap terrible consequences in World War II and in the rise of Chinese communism afterward. Adventist missionaries in China would have to deal with the results of the tensions created by such political and social currents until the communists forced them out of the mainland. The spread of communism also halted missionary activities in other parts of Asia. Today, that major segment of Adventism remains isolated because of what Western intervention started. But all of those developments were in the future when Haskell toured China. Stephen had grown up and lived most of his life in the strongly

Christian culture of his native New England. He and his fellow New Englanders had searched for biblical truth within that context. But now he was being exposed to non-Christian cultures, and he began to realize the difficulty of introducing them to Christianity, let alone to Adventism. “Imagine,” he wrote, “a nation that for centuries has had its shrine in every home of the rich and poor, high and low, and whose every member from babyhood, both by example and theory, has been taught to bow before it, offer incense, and do sacrifice.”18 As in Africa, he saw an educational system as mandatory for reaching the people and enculturating them into a new and strange religion. Again, as in Africa, he visited and studied the mission schools already established. “To have a school of some kind and a place to gather the people seems to be a necessity for successful work,” he concluded.19 Open-Minded to Other Cultures By now Haskell’s travels had convinced him that—at least in non–North American situations—Adventist missionaries must be open-minded to the cultures they encountered and had to be willing to use new and innovative approaches. At the March 1891 General Conference Session, he emphasized that theme. Speaking on “The Education of Missionaries,” he stressed that they must be willing to look at things from the perspective of the cultures they sought to reach. “In such fields as India, China, et cetera, we find customs which to us appear as nonsense, but not so to the” people of that country or culture, he declared. “And when they see in the foreigner a disposition to conform as far as possible to their ways, it disarms prejudice, and awakens a feeling of friendliness in their hearts. Many of the disasters which came upon the first efforts of the missionaries were due to the failure to appreciate this principle.”20 While Haskell was in India, he had mentioned to a longtime missionary that his denomination was interested in preparing people for overseas service, possibly including India itself. When Stephen asked what should

be the core element of their education, the missionary said, “First adaptation; second, adaptation; third, adaptation; and fourth, adaptation. When they get that learned, let them come here, and I will find them work.”21 In Hong Kong, Haskell again encountered Abram La Rue, whom he had briefly visited in Hawaii. Coming to the British colony in May 1888, the old sailor had spent several years selling books to those who could read English. He had hired a local man to translate into Mandarin the chapter, “The Sinner’s Need of Christ,” from Ellen G. White’s Steps to Christ, which he then printed and sold as a tract. It was one of the first Seventhday Adventist publications in the Chinese language. Besides the Ellen G. White material, he had another tract on the prophecies of Daniel 2 and 7 translated and published.22 As for Haskell himself, he later claimed in a letter to A. G. Daniells that he wrote a series of lessons on the Ten Commandments used in church schools in Shanghai and a history of Seventh-day Adventists for a book on various religions for the Chinese.23 During his time in Hong Kong, La Rue continued the widespread Adventist practice of distributing printed material to sailors aboard the ships in the harbor. Haskell would add his appeal to that of La Rue for the denomination to send official missionaries to China. ( J. N. Anderson and his family, the first sponsored missionaries, would not arrive until February 2, 1902.) Twenty-eight years after his visit to Asia, Haskell said that he had baptized one individual in China and another in Japan,24 though no other documentary evidence beyond his own word supports his claim.25 He retained an interest in the Chinese and Japanese, especially those who had emigrated to California, where he served as conference president. In January of 1907 he recommended that the church begin evangelizing the Asian population in California, as well as start a school for Japanese children. Elements in the state (especially labor organizations) hostile to Japanese immigrants had forced laws through the legislature forbidding

them from attending white schools, and Stephen saw a school for immigrants as a way of reaching this ethnic group.26 Later the next year, he repeated his concern for the tens of thousands of Japanese in the San Francisco Bay area, lamenting that the church had just “one poor little Japanese feeble mission” in Oakland.27 “It is not enough for us to drop a quarter on the plate for the work in China and Japan, and do nothing for the people from these countries in our land,” he lamented in the Pacific Union Recorder. “We expect to pay large sums to carry on the work in Japan, and it is right we should. Is it not equally as important to carry the message to the Japanese in Oakland? . . . Above all else, we wish that you would pray for the little taper-light that has been kindled for the heathen Japanese within our own borders.”28 Haskell was also interested in evangelistic activities among Korean immigrants in Sacramento.29 From Hong Kong, Haskell and Magan traveled to Sydney on the freighter Guthrie. Haskell had visited Australia five years earlier. Now he had the chance to see how Australian and New Zealand Adventism had grown since then and began attending every possible church meeting or conference. Magan, however, soon returned to the United States. After arriving back in Battle Creek, Magan wrote, “We have traveled over 44,000 miles, and have taken a year, three months, three days, and an hour to accomplish the trip. By land and by sea we have been safely preserved to reach our home again.”30 He had been the first person to complete a round-the-world trip in the service of the church—the first of many such trips by Adventist leaders. Haskell appreciated the insights such extensive traveling brought. It broadened one’s outlook. Many years later, fussing about some of the chauvinistic positions of one prominent church leader, Stephen observed to Willie White, “It would do A. T. Jones good if he could go around the world, and find that every nation is on the earth’s axis; that every nation has got the ‘best government in the world;’ and that we are barbarians to the Japs, and the Japs to us as heathens.”31

While in Australia, Haskell met Herbert Camden Lacey. The son of a British civil servant, he had been born in England and went with his family to India, where his father held a position in the colonial India civil service. When Herbert was eleven, the family moved to Tasmania, Australia. A couple of years later, the Laceys joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Lacey’s younger sister, Mary, married Willie White, bringing Herbert into close contact with Ellen G. White. Mrs. White helped Herbert financially so that he could attend Healdsburg College in California, finishing the two-year ministerial course in 1892. After pastoring in California from 1890 to 1892 and then in Michigan during 1893, he enrolled at Battle Creek College, earning a degree in the classics. Graduating in 1895 and marrying Lillian Yarnal of California, he returned to Australia. There he would again come into contact with Stephen Haskell; as the two attempted to work together at the new Seventh-day Adventist school established at Avondale. It would be a difficult if not interesting relationship.

1. Merlin L. Neff, For God and C.M.E.: A Biography of Percy Tilson Magan Upon the Historical Background of the Educational and Medical Work of Seventh-day Adventists (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1964), 31. 2. See, for example, S. N. Haskell’s letters to O. A. Olsen in 1890: March 6, 16, 19, 22; May 30; June 28; July 11; September 25; October 23; November 20. Many of the letters indicate that Stephen dictated them to Magan. 3. S. N. Haskell, “Camp-Meeting in Sweden, and a Visit to Northern Norway,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 13, 1889, 521. 4. See Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 40. 5. Ibid., 34. 6. Denominational histories often cite Haskell as the first Seventh-day Adventist minister to visit Portugal. 7. For background on the Lisbon earthquake and the intellectual issues it raised, see Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (New York: Viking Group, 2008), especially chapter 6.

8. The Portuguese king Joseph I and his court survived because he had gone to the royal retreat at Belém instead of the special masses. 9. S. N. Haskell, “From London to Cape Town, South Africa,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 24, 1889, 602. 10. S. N. Haskell, “The Canvassing Work in South Africa,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 19, 1889, 729. 11. S. N. Haskell, “Educational Interests in South Africa,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 3, 1889, 761. 12. S. N. Haskell to O. A. Olsen, in General Conference Daily Bulletin, March 11, 1891, 68. 13. P. T. Magan, “Round the World—16,” Youth’s Instructor, June 11, 1890, 94. 14. P. T. Magan, “Round the World—33,” Youth’s Instructor, October 29, 1890, 173, 174. 15. P. T. Magan, “Round the World—31,” Youth’s Instructor, October 15, 1890, 165, 166. 16. S. N. Haskell to Brother Daniells, July 24, 1904. 17. James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (New York: Little, Brown, 2009); H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 498–527; Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Random House, 2011); Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes. 18. S. N. Haskell, “Mission Work in China,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 7, 1890, 617. 19. Ibid. 20. “The Education of Missionaries,” Daily Bulletin of the General Conference No. 3, March 9, 1891, 45. 21. Ibid.; Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 123. 22. Hanley and Wheeler, Pastor La Rue, the Pioneer, 174. 23. S. N. Haskell to Brother Daniells, July 24, 1904. 24. Ibid. He tells Daniells that the man from Japan then left for America, and he reported as his China baptism a man named Oleson who was then in Hong Kong. In another letter (S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, March 14, 1905) he states that the convert was an Englishman who ran a hotel. See also “Editorial,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 14, 1922, 7; “Elder Stephen N. Haskell,” ibid., 17. 25. However, in a letter written sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century to Mrs. Anna C. Fay in which Haskell briefly recapitulates his life, he states that he “baptized the first convert to the Sabbath truth in Japan, China, and several other countries” (S. N. Haskell to Mrs. Anna C. Fay, May 19, 190- [year not filled in]). Clearly, in his mind the baptism loomed as part of a series of “firsts.”

26. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, January 13, 1907. 27. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, October 22, 1908. 28. S. N. Haskell, “Our Japanese Mission,” Pacific Union Recorder, July 9, 1908, 5. 29. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 25, 1908. Stephen used the older spelling of Coreans. 30. P. T. Magan, The Youth’s Instructor, July 1, 1891, 101, 102. 31. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, March 9, 1900.

Chapter XIII

Mary Haskell in California ary Haskell’s declining health had been increasingly complicating Stephen’s life for several years in the 1880s. At times he had to cancel or rearrange his travels because of her condition. He had discussed

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the situation with General Conference president O. A. Olsen, who then shared the problem with Ellen G. White.1 Mrs. White began to urge that Stephen should take his wife to California. It concerned her that his constant traveling left Mary home alone so much. At one point she wrote that she “should be glad if your wife could have your company more than she has had, poor woman!”2 Haskell was willing to take Mary to the West Coast, but he was not sure how to do it. Traveling by train seemed a problem for her, and he wondered if her going by boat might be better. So he waited. During the summer of 1891, Haskell managed to make his usual round of camp meetings and conference sessions, particularly those on the West Coast. While there, the California Conference again elected him president. At that time its area included the territories of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. In later years, reorganizations and the establishment of new conferences would reduce its boundaries. But he would head its core territory until 1894. As Haskell continued to spend time on the West Coast, his wife, Mary, began to ask to join him in California. Perhaps she had heard Ellen G. White tell how much she liked its climate, which was especially good for growing flowers.

Stephen wrote to Ellen White that his wife “wanted to come with me to California as never before, more to be with me or where I could come see her once in a while.” He explained that, besides the difficulties of travel for Mary, he had not taken her to the West Coast before then because they had not been able to find a caretaker for her.3 After obtaining the help of a woman named Anna Rasmussen to assist Mary in her daily activities, Haskell rented a cottage on the grounds of St. Helena Sanitarium. He next purchased a carriage in San Francisco for his wife, and for the next few months Anna and Mary took daily rides. “This is her life,” he informed Ellen White. “But she has to be helped up and down stairs and also into the carriage. She has a horse that is perfectly safe and is in no sense a lazy one but is full of life, but afraid of nothing and would not run away if left entirely alone. And it seems the angels watch over it and her. I believe the Lord does have a special care for her.”4 By now Mary Haskell had grown even more feeble. Still, her health improved as she took daily hydrotherapy treatments at the sanitarium. Later that summer, Stephen explained to Ellen White, “I think that it is my duty to spend more time with her than in the past although she never says a word against my going away, only she clings to me as never before.” Perhaps uncomfortable with memories of how much he had been gone during their married life, he said, “I owe her a debt of gratitude and have a duty to her.” He had decided that it was “not duty for me to leave her when she is sick.”5 (Duty seems to have been a frequent word on the lips of early Adventists.) But Haskell could not stop traveling for the church. Both he and the denomination needed him to do it. Experienced leaders were too few, and he was driven to serve the church. As his wife gained some strength, he accepted requests to attend camp meetings in the Upper Columbia and North Pacific conferences. Then he returned to St. Helena for a health convention for ministers and other church employees. As part of the meetings, the organizers conducted a Bible class that

studied the subject of the Holy Spirit. It generated such interest that sometimes the devotional meetings would last from six thirty in the morning until one in the afternoon. Soon the church wanted Haskell to travel even more widely. In the spring of 1893, the leadership asked Stephen to attend camp meetings in Europe. But that created several problems for him that he felt he must solve before he could consider any such request. First, he was paying rent for living quarters both in California and Massachusetts. The little, sparsely furnished house at St. Helena cost him as much as the one in South Lancaster. Just as frustrating was the fact that his beloved library was scattered between the two places.6 As with Ellen G. White and many other Adventist pioneers, he valued the resource of books, including nonAdventist ones. Second, Mary Haskell loved the hilly country around St. Helena, but Stephen worried about accidents as she and Anna Rasmussen drove its winding roads. Because the daily rides were important to his wife, he wished she lived in more level terrain. He thought the area of the Napa Valley would be safer. Checking out the possibilities there, he found a furnished house with a barn, cow, and chickens for the same rent as the place at the sanitarium. But would Mary like it? Fortunately, when she saw it, she immediately wanted to move there.7 With Mary’s encouragement, Stephen felt that he could again travel further from home, and he set out for Europe.

1. S. N. Haskell to O. A. Olsen, May 21, 1891; S. N. Haskell to O. A. Olsen, September 3, 1891 (Stephen spelled the name “Olson”). 2. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, January 14, 1887. 3. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 28, 1892. 4. Ibid. 5. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, August 10, 1892.

6. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, January 27, 1893. 7. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, undated letter, 1893.

Chapter XIV

The Bible as the Voice of God ne of the reasons Haskell received so many requests to attend camp meetings and other events was that he had long acquired a reputation as an authority on Bible study. Church leaders asked him to

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give a series of presentations on the subject at the Ministerial Institute preceding the 1893 General Conference Session.1 The talks provide us not only with insights on his understanding of Scripture but may offer us clues as to why he took certain positions on some controversial issues. His approach in the lectures was not so much a methodology as a mindset or perspective. He thought one should teach the concepts of the Bible in as many ways as possible, suggesting that he did not cling to a single, specific way of studying Scripture itself.2 Rather, he focused on what such study could do for a person. First of all, Haskell saw the Bible as the voice of God to each of us as individuals, not just as a source of arguments to use against religious opponents (as so many Adventist preachers seemed prone to do)3 or a mere collection of rules to follow. Furthermore, he believed that God had seen every individual from eternity and had inspired the Bible to meet our specific needs. Thus it was especially meant for us. But that help can be accessed only through the aid of the Holy Spirit. The Bible teaches that God does not only forgive sins, he said, but restores.4 Scripture seeks to return to humanity the true wisdom it had lost in the Garden of Eden (and Solomon partially regained). Thus one could find in it the basis of all other knowledge, especially the sciences. All true

science has its source in the Bible.5 Study of Scripture expands a person. It makes them more than they were before. “The Bible is the best book in the world to train the intellect and quicken the memory,” he declared. “My memory about gave out a few years ago and I could scarcely remember anything, but I got hold of that text in John, which says that the Spirit will bring things to our remembrance. I believe God will do something for the memory. There is not a good thing God will not give a man. It is all in the Bible and it will come to those who love his law, and can see his works in his law. Let us let our minds expand. It will make us love the world as the work of God, it will make us love the heathen and want to go to them.”6 Reading Scripture is a transforming experience. Stephen reminded his audience that “not only must we believe the word as being the word of God addressed to us, and believe that it is a restorer to bring us back to what we would have been had we not sinned, and a preserver to keep us from sin, but we must believe the word as a creator, we must believe that the word creates in our hearts principles taught in that word, that it does it as we study that word.”7 In addition, every part of the Bible speaks to believers in the last days, not just the New Testament or some particular canon within the canon.8 One must read the entire Bible.9 But, most of all, Scripture presents Jesus Christ and reveals who He is and what He is like. Christ is the theme that runs through all its pages. To Haskell, Scripture was “simply the revelation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the first line of Genesis to the last testimony we may have of the voice of the Spirit of God.”10 His understanding of Scripture was decidedly Christological. During his talks on Bible study, Haskell sometimes read from the writings of Ellen G. White almost as much as he did Scripture itself. It demonstrates the importance he felt was in her self-proclaimed role as the lesser light pointing to the greater. In fact, at one point he sees in her writings the same transformative power he found in Scripture. “I do not believe we can ever appreciate the testimonies that we have from the spirit

of prophecy, showing how God looks upon us, and how we should study the Scriptures, until we take them as containing the creating power of God.”11 In another series, “The Missionary Work,” presented at the General Conference session itself, he described the New Testament as the “unfolding” of the Old. Then he asked, “And now what position does the Spirit of prophecy hold as it comes to us in this nineteenth century with the messages from God? It is the unfolding of truths that have been taught before. It is the same old gospel, the same old truth, but every additional line of divine revelation is an unfolding, a placing in different words, a bringing out in different ways the same old truth.”12 Will There Be More Prophets? One of the issues that began to face the Seventh-day Adventist Church was the gift of prophecy itself. Since its beginning, Ellen G. White had been a fundamental presence in the Adventist Church. Adventists had actively defended the continuing role of the spiritual gift, especially focusing on Joel 2:28, 29. But some members struggled with certain questions. What if the Lord did not return before Ellen White died? Would God appoint a replacement? Furthermore, Joel spoke of the Spirit being poured out on men and women in the plural. Would additional prophets besides Mrs. White arise? During late 1892 and into 1893, the denomination was stirred by what many felt was an additional manifestation of the prediction of Joel 2. They saw what they regarded as the Holy Spirit bestowing the gift of prophecy on a larger scale than just the ministry of Ellen G. White. The most wellknown individual regarded as possibly a prophet was Anna C. Rice.13 In 1892, she began having what she interpreted as prophetic experiences or visions and started writing out what she had seen in them. Church leaders such as A. T. Jones, E. J. Waggoner, and W. W. Prescott began supporting her. Prescott read her letters in the Battle Creek Tabernacle, the most prominent church of the denomination. J. H. Durland, a Bible teacher at

Battle Creek College, made copies of the letters for his students. Soon Anna Rice’s writings spread throughout the denomination. They triggered a wave of religious enthusiasm, especially in Battle Creek. Anna Rice, however, wanted to make sure her experiences were real. She decided to try to contact Ellen G. White about their validity. Unfortunately, Ellen White was then in Australia, and Anna could not talk directly with her, so she approached other denominational leaders instead. J. N. Loughborough did not consider her as a possible voice, but Stephen Haskell did encourage her and urged her to seek the advice of A. T. Jones.14 Because of Ellen White’s backing of Jones in the 1888 controversy and his teaching of righteousness by faith, some had come to regard him as almost a direct channel to God Himself. They considered her support of him as a kind of divine endorsement. Whatever he said or thought thus had supernatural approval. If Jones accepted her experiences as prophetic, Rice concluded, then her gift was genuine. As already noted, Jones was enthusiastic about her “testimonies” and encouraged her, at least until February 1894, to continue to write them down. He presented her writings in various public meetings as an indication that God had begun to shower the “later rain” on the church. W. W. Prescott and Jones saw her “testimonies” as evidence of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit while at the 1893 General Conference Session. But GC president O. A. Olsen would not let them present Rice’s writings in the meetings. When Olsen traveled to Australia, Jones and Prescott did read them publicly, which then created charismatic excitement in Battle Creek, some of it questionable. Ellen G. White learned of these events when, to her surprise, she read in a Melbourne, Australia, newspaper a report of an offering taken at the Tabernacle totaling $21,347 (an amount equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today). The newspaper account linked her writings with those of Rice and presented details that particularly disturbed Ellen White. She sent several letters that would bring the interest in Rice to a

halt. In mid-February, A. T. Jones received a letter from her declaring that he had been wrong in endorsing Anna Rice.15 Ellen White explained that denominational leaders had employed the young woman’s writings “without sufficient evidence of their genuine character.”16 She did not fault Anna for what had happened. Rather, she saw it as the result of overenthusiastic church leaders. Anna quickly gave up any claim to prophetic inspiration and would later become an active Bible instructor. As was so often the case with her letters, Ellen White intended that Jones share the document with others. One letter arrived when Haskell was in Walla Walla, Washington, and Prescott had been about to read some of Rice’s “visions” to the students at the Adventist college there. Ellen White’s letter left Prescott mortified. He immediately did what he could to stop any further circulation of the young woman’s material. Later Stephen would consider Prescott irresponsible because of his use of Rice’s writings, but Haskell himself had become involved in the situation by telling her to contact A. T. Jones. Still, while Stephen had not openly questioned the validity of Anna Rice’s experience, he had not approved of their public use. He particularly frowned upon how certain influential leaders handled them and the sometimes extreme religious fervor their promotion led to. Clearly he did not like the danger of fanaticism. “Had they [Jones and Prescott] consulted with Uriah Smith17 and some of those who have been in the background, and are looked upon as being ‘out of date,’ it would have saved them from this mistake,” he pontificated.18 Did he regard himself as one of those individuals the men should have consulted? While Haskell had had to deal with some eccentric church members during his early days as a lay leader in New England, he had joined Adventism after the post-Millerite fanaticism that James and Ellen White had had to confront. Thus even he knew of that period mainly by hearsay. Although Haskell was absolutely right in his recognition that Jones,

Prescott, and others should have sought the counsel of more experienced leaders, could there be here emerging some generational tension, as well as an example of how someone who has put themselves body and soul into developing an organization eventually begins to resist further change of that entity? Did his caution possibly also result from a sense of protectiveness toward Ellen White and her role, because of his close friendship with her? After all, one could regard another prophet as in some way a rival to the current one. Whatever the reason, Haskell did have a strong negative opinion of Prescott’s involvement, and it would linger in his mind. The well-educated and sophisticated Prescott and the self-made and unpolished Haskell were quite different personalities, which added to a growing tension between them. Ellen G. White, however, viewed Stephen as too critical of both Prescott and Jones in their support of Rice. In a letter to Haskell that she clearly intended for him to circulate, she reprimanded those who took advantage of the situation to gloat over the two men’s mistaken enthusiasm.19 Unfortunately, many church leaders, including Haskell, refused to forget Prescott’s involvement in the Rice affair. And it would add one more element to what would become a growing wariness toward the younger Prescott on Stephen’s part.

1. Daily Bulletin of the General Conference, 1893. 2. Ibid., No. 3, 79. 3. Ibid., No. 1, 2. 4. Ibid., No. 3, 75. 5. Ibid., 54. 6. Ibid., No. 4, 97. 7. Ibid., 116. 8. Just as Haskell believed that every detail of the Bible was relevant for the believer today, he would later apply the same principle to the controversy about the “daily.” 9. Daily Bulletin of the General Conference, 1893, No. 2, 31; No. 3, 57.

10. Ibid., No. 3, 53. 11. Ibid., No. 4, 116. 12. Ibid., No. 10, 233. 13. See Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, s.v. “Rice, Anna C. (Phillips),” by George R. Knight; Knight, A. T. Jones, 92–116. 14. S. N. Haskell to Anna C. Rice, July 28, 1893. 15. For more background on the Anna Rice incident, see Knight, A. T. Jones, 130–141. 16. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 2:92. 17. Uriah Smith had enough of his own problems to make him an unsuitable counselor. See Gary Land’s biography, Uriah Smith. 18. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 20, 1894. 19. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, June 1, 1894.

Chapter XV

Death of Mary Haskell askell left California for Europe on May 25, 1893. There he attended the Adventist camp meeting at Moss, Norway. During his long life Stephen appears to have suffered from frequent periods of illness,

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perhaps aggravated by the way he drove himself. One such bout of sickness struck him at Moss. “Sometimes it seemed I could not walk to the house after I got through speaking,” he wrote Ellen White. “But before the meeting was over, I was better. I simply lie in His hands. If I go whether I feel well or not, . . . while speaking I am strengthened. God truly helps me.”1 After the Moss camp meeting he visited others in Scandinavia and central Europe then went to England on the way back to the States. When he got to England, he received a telegram urging his immediate return to California. He arrived in South Lancaster, Massachusetts, on September 22 and reached California by October. While Mary often had bouts of delirium, his arrival did rally her strength to the point that he thought he could resume his administrative duties. Yet these duties continued to cause him to be frequently away from home, at both the conference office and at Pacific Press, both in Oakland. But he did remain in California to be near his wife. Then, after more than forty years of marriage, Mary Haskell died of a stroke on January 29, 1894, at an age estimated at between 78 and 81.2 During the final few years, her health had gradually deteriorated, especially after she moved to California. Although she had suffered a

series of partial strokes, she was not bedfast until the final three days. One stroke had affected her hearing and also made it no longer possible for her to see well enough to read or write (she would dictate letters to her husband). After a time, she became unable to recognize friends, though Haskell stated that she continued to know who he was. Stephen reported that “Sabbath, Jan. 27, was the first day she did not rise to be dressed. A large portion of the day was spent by her in audible prayer.3 She requested that the fourth chapter of John be read to her, which was done by one who was caring for her. She repeated the words, ‘He was touched with the feeling of our infirmities,’ with other quotations and expressions of joy, as she heard the word of God. On Sunday a great change came over her, her disease taking the form of erysipelas [a skin disease producing reddish inflammation].” As was so often the case during their life together, Haskell was away from home on church business. “I and a few others were telegraphed for. I arrived Wednesday morning; but she had quietly, and peacefully fallen asleep in Jesus, on Monday night. So peacefully came death upon her, that not a muscle was seen to move, and those watching by her bedside scarcely knew when she had passed away.”4 Shortly after Mary’s death, Stephen wrote to Ellen White in typewritten capital letters: “I LOVED HER AND SHE LOVED ME.” In an experience that he had after her death, we find another indication of Haskell’s intense feelings for Mary. He described it a few months later, when visiting the A. T. Robinson family in Cape Town, South Africa. One night soon after my wife’s death, I fell asleep repeating the promises of God, for I felt very lonely. I had not been asleep long when I was awakened by a light in the room. Opening my eyes I saw standing beside my bed, a bright shadowy form. I heard a voice speak: “Stephen, I have come to bring you comfort. I shall ever watch over you to comfort you, for I am nearer to you now than when I

lived on earth.” It was Mary’s voice, so natural, so sweet. My first impulse was to reach out my arms to her. But at that moment there sounded clearly in my consciousness, though no audible words were heard, “The dead know not any thing.” I drew back in fear. “O Stephen, don’t you know me?” Love, longing, and pathos were in the voice. I gathered all my strength, and answered boldly, “No! I never knew you! You are not my Mary. You are an evil spirit sent by Satan to deceive me; and, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command you to depart, and to trouble me no more.” The spirit vanished. But in the going, for one brief instant, the gentle expression on that face turned to one of baffled rage, the most malignant that I ever saw on the face of any man, or in the pictured likeness of any evil demon. It left me all of a tremble and in deep distress of mind.5 New England culture has always seemed especially attuned to a sense of the supernatural. The region is still filled with tales of haunted houses and ghost ships.6 Stephen would have absorbed that awareness during his childhood, and the devil would naturally have sought to use it to exploit his feelings for Mary. But his experience was not unusual during this period of American history. Widespread Spiritualism America in the nineteenth century had a great fascination with spiritualistic phenomena, and Haskell’s contemporaries would not have been surprised at his encounter. Few today realize how widespread the belief and practice was or the varied reasons it attracted so many. The modern development of spiritualism began with the Fox sisters, Margaret (c. 1833–1893) and Catherine (1839–1892). In 1848 they began claiming that they had

communicated with a departed spirit haunting their farmhouse near Rochester, New York. Their story caught the public’s attention, especially in what was then the northwestern frontier of America, and a large-scale movement sprang up around the belief of spiritualism. It attracted people for a number of reasons. First, it seemed to offer empirical evidence of an afterlife that appealed to a society increasingly influenced by science and its methodology. Spiritualists regarded the séance as a controlled and “scientific” test of the existence of life after physical death. This would especially comfort Americans struggling with the massive death toll of the American Civil War. That conflict resulted in an estimated 650,000 to 850,000 military deaths7. and 50,000 civilian deaths. The loss of life touched one out of every four American families8. and would be higher than the number lost in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. Until the development of modern medicine, the high death rate from disease also meant that people constantly had loved ones snatched from them. Thus, they could never escape the presence of death and the questions it raised. Spiritualism’s following in the United States swelled from two million to seven million by 1863.9 One spiritist publication, the Banner of Light, claimed ten million adherents after the war ended, showing a gain of one million a year during the Civil War. Spiritualism helped persuade many that the vast numbers of young men who had perished because of the conflict had “passed over” to a realm just beyond the living, where they could be called upon to comfort and support the loved ones they had left behind.10 Séances allegedly brought messages from deceased soldiers, though often the names offered could not be matched with any known casualties.11 Many major scientists, especially in Great Britain, participated in the movement. And the interest in spiritualism even reached into the American White House. After the death of her son Willie, Mary Todd Lincoln began

holding séances there with her friends.12 She was not the only presidential family member to dabble in spiritualism. James Garfield and his mother believed in séances. Jane Pierce, wife of Franklin Pierce, used the Fox sisters as mediums.13 But it had far more appeal than just assurance that death was not the end of existence. Scholars have seen the belief system as meeting a number of interests in the evolving American society. To some at the time it seemed to represent a particularly American form of religion. Aware of the novelty of the democratic experiment, [Americans] yearned for a faith capable of expressing its fresh values. For a time, Spiritualism served. It was said to be the most democratic of religions because it did not depend on the authority of the past or of an entrenched hierarchy; instead, the role of medium was open to all. Women especially found in Spiritualism a faith that not only seemed particularly sensitive to their feelings and concerns but also afforded them opportunity to exercise spiritual leadership—if only by giving voice to spirit mentors—then denied them in almost all other religions.14 Early spiritualism became active in many of the reforms of the time. Mediums channeled messages from the spirits, urging the abolition of slavery, prison reform, the rights of women, and the protection of workers against exploitation. Spiritualism especially appealed to educated middleclass northerners.15 Historian Jean H. Baker claims that by the mid-1850s, northern cities such as Boston and New York had more spiritualists than abolitionists.16 As for Haskell, he did not dismiss the incident of the evil spirit as just an attack on his loneliness. He thought it must have more significance and soon worked out a rationale in his mind, one that especially appealed to his New England Puritan culture’s emphasis on the centrality of the Word of

God. Also it reflects his tendency to make things into practical learning situations. As he wrote about the incident, he characteristically sought to find a specific lesson in it. “Why had such an experience come to me?” he asked rhetorically. Had I failed somewhere and shown some weakness, that the devil dared to approach me in this manner? I prayed and asked God to reveal to me any unknown sin. But instead of the conviction of some unrepented wrong there came into my mind clearly and emphatically, words that I had read many times in the book Early Writings: “I saw that the saints must have a thorough understanding of present truth, which they will be obliged to maintain from the Scriptures. They must understand the state of the dead; for the spirits of devils will yet appear to them, professing to be beloved relatives or friends, who will declare to them unscriptural doctrines. . . . The people of God must be prepared to withstand these spirits with the Bible truth that the dead know not anything” (page 262). So with the knowledge that these evil spirits will appear even to the saints, we need have no fear that such experiences indicate God’s displeasure, but that they are permitted as a test of our faith in the revealed instructions from heaven. I thanked and praised God that He had warned us against our subtle enemy, who is seeking our destruction. “For the living to the dead?” Never! What light can come from that source? Bright, shining messengers, direct from the throne of God can bring us light, comfort and joy, even in the time of greatest sorrow.17 Haskell would spend the rest of the decade as a missionary in Africa and Australia. Frequently struggling with loneliness and depression, he drew much encouragement from the letters he constantly received from Ellen

White until he joined her in Australia, where he could be in her presence. And, because of health problems, he dropped his California Conference responsibilities.

1. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, June 30, 1893. 2. S. N. Haskell, obituary of Mary E. Haskell, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 20, 1894, 127. Haskell gives her age, in the characteristically detailed style of the time, as 81 years, four months, and six days. 3. Victorian Americans were fascinated with a dying person’s last moments. They looked for a “good death” as a sign of the individual’s spiritual state. See Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 6–31; Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 18, 19. Although Adventists did not share the popular belief that a person went directly to heaven at the moment of death, they would still be interested in how one approached the time of dying as a clue to the kind of relationship the individual had with God. 4. S. N. Haskell, obituary of Mary Haskell. 5. Cited in Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 128, 129. 6. Edwin Valentine Mitchell, who wrote much about New England culture, gives many examples in his It’s an Old New England Custom, 169–214. Going into any New England bookstore today and seeing the countless books on the supernatural in the region will quickly convince of this New England fascination. 7. J. David Hacker, “The War’s True Toll,” in Secrets of the Civil War, U.S. News & World Report special report, 2012, 88. Cf. Thomas Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind, ix, x, and 321, footnote 1. 8. For the impact of the loss of life during the Civil War on America, see Faust, This Republic of Suffering. See also Matthew Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham and the Soldier’s Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 32. 9. Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 78; see also Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 180–185. Contemporaries such as Harriet Beecher Stowe estimated surprisingly higher numbers even before the Civil War. See Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 181, 307, footnote 20. 10. Ibid., 139. A similar fascination with spiritualism took place immediately after the carnage of World War I. See Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 417, 418. 11. Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 183–185.

12. Ibid., 30–32. At least one spiritualist medium began giving political advice, telling Mrs. Lincoln that all her husband’s cabinet officers were his enemies (p. 96). See also Jerrold M. Packard, The Lincolns in the White House: Four Years That Shattered a Family (New York: St. Martins, 2005), 142–144, 165. 13. Carl Sferrazza Anthony, America’s First Families: An Intimate View of 200 Years of Private Life in the White House (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 228, 229. 14. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 1023. 15. The Encyclopedia of New England, 1326, 1327. 16. Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 218. 17. Cited in Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 129.

Chapter XVI

Africa Again he General Conference requested that Haskell spend the spring and summer of 1894 attending camp meetings in Europe. Perhaps some thought that it might distract him from his grief over the recent death of his

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wife. From there he went to South Africa, arriving in Cape Town on August 29. The denomination now had a local conference in South Africa. It had been organized on December 4, 1892, with A. T. Robinson as president, I. J. Hankins as secretary, and Nellie Helen Rankin Druillard as treasurer.1 Mrs. Druillard was also conference auditor, secretary of the conference’s tract society, and somehow managed to squeeze in time to help in the conference’s small sanitarium. The South Africa Conference also had established Claremont Union College (eventually relocated and renamed Helderberg College, in Somerset West) and an orphanage in Plumstead. The high death rate of the time made the latter institution a necessity, even among health-conscious Adventists. Although many church members would adopt or take in orphaned children of deceased Adventist parents, many children still had to go to orphanages. The denomination, for example, had recently started one in Battle Creek, named the Haskell Memorial Home.2 Despite the fact that membership did not exceed 250, the tiny conference could develop and support such institutions because of the large tithe given by the Wessels family. After the discovery of diamonds on the family farm, they had sold the property to the De Beers diamond company for £350,000, making the father what would be a

multimillionaire today. The first Seventh-day Adventist in South Africa was an American named William Hunt, who had been a miner in Nevada. Lured by the search for diamonds in the region, he brought tracts and magazines that he distributed. The church’s first converts in South Africa came from the white population, and then some from the Cape Coloured community joined. The denomination would not gain any black African converts until sometime later, but some would be significant individuals in the work. Richard Moko During his five-month sojourn in southern Africa, Haskell explored possible sites to plant mission stations. First, though, he conducted evangelistic series among the white settlers. He and conference president Robinson held one in the city of Kimberley. Later Stephen told how, one Saturday afternoon, an African man named Richard Moko wandered into the session and became intrigued with what he heard.3 Born in 1850 and descended from a long line of Amaxhosa tribal chiefs, he spoke the Dutch dialect of Afrikaans, the language of the Boer settlers, and English, as well as his native tongue, and had served as a court interpreter. He accepted the Adventist message and was reportedly baptized in 1895 at the second camp meeting held in South Africa. Soon, though, he encountered persecution. His wife fought against his new beliefs, but then she also became a member of the Adventist Church. Other religious groups hated to see Moko involved in the strange foreign faith and promised to pay him well if he would abandon the Sabbath, join them, and present their doctrines. One of the largest and most influential non-Adventist churches in the city of Port Elizabeth offered him its pastorate and a large salary, but he turned it down, instead earning his living by selling Adventist books in both the native townships and the main cities of Cape Province. Eventually the non-Adventist missionaries in the region regarded Moko as an apostate.

Haskell sometimes hired Moko as a guide for his travels in the interior. One area he particularly explored was the African kingdom of Basutoland, now known as the nation of Lesotho. During the late 1700s and early 1800s, a series of ethnic conflicts had swept across southern Africa, almost completely wiping out a number of tribal groups. The survivors had fled into the mountainous region of what is now Lesetho. There, an African chief named Moshoeshoe built a stronghold on a hill about fifteen miles from the site of the modern city of Maseru. He united the refugees into the Basotho nation. David Kalaka While the two men were in Basutoland, Moko introduced Haskell to a number of individuals, including local chiefs. Unfortunately, being associated with Moko raised suspicions in their minds about Stephen. Despite that fact, one man, David Kalaka, was willing to work for Haskell. Born about 1844, Kalaka had attended a French Evangelical mission school. The French missionaries had educated him so that he could help translate the Bible into Sesuto, the main language of the region. He had then worked for fifteen years in a printing facility. For a time, Basutoland had been incorporated into the British Cape Colony. Then, in 1894, the British colonial authorities reestablished the kingdom as a separate protectorate and allowed its people autonomy, except in the area of capital criminal cases. In all other ways, the native chiefs ruled the land and enforced tribal law and customs. No one could sell land or even enter the kingdom without the permission of the paramount chief and his tribal council. To establish a mission station there, Adventists had to get the approval of the native authorities. Haskell hired Kalaka as his guide and interpreter and set out to visit the chief. Non-Western cultures do not usually rush into negotiations. When Haskell and Kalaka reached the headquarters of Lerotholi, the paramount chief, the two men sat outside the royal hut with the chief while he

presented a long tale of his frustration with the under-chiefs who comprised his council. It disturbed him that his counselors could never seem to agree among themselves when he consulted them for advice. It particularly bothered him that, when he had an idea of how something should be done, the council would not go along with it. As he listened while David Kalaka translated, an idea occurred to Haskell. Directing the chief’s attention to a nearby tree, he said, “Do you see that tree? There are no two branches on that tree just alike. Then can you expect that men will be alike in their opinions?” The observation seemed to impress the chief. Before Stephen departed, the man expressed his wish that Haskell would start a mission station among his people. Later, in 1899, when Adventist missionary J. M. Freeman, with Kalaka as his interpreter, went to Basutoland to find a site to establish the new mission station, they met resistance from the under-chiefs. Other religious groups had apparently persuaded them to vote against it. But the paramount chief, Lerotholi, remembering Haskell’s imagery of the tree limbs, overruled them and granted the land for the station at a site at Kolo.4 During his travels with David Kalaka, Haskell later reported to the 1901 General Conference Session, he was careful to avoid the appearance of trying to convert his guide. He does not explain why he followed such a course. Perhaps he did not want to create suspicion toward either Kalaka (as had already happened to Moko) or himself in the minds of those who opposed the new American faith. Stephen might have wished to avoid being accused of using the subtle pressure of “superior” Western culture and power against the African native. Whatever the reason, it must have been difficult for a man who had spent most of his life actively sharing his faith to then keep quiet about it. In particular, Haskell explained to his fellow church leaders, he “was careful not to say the word ‘Sabbath’ to him [Kalaka], and not to say anything to him to proselyte him over to our faith.”5 But that did not mean that Stephen refrained from a more subtle form of witnessing. He started a

practice of each day reading the Bible with his guide. Stephen chose passages important to Adventist belief, and as he read he would emphasize certain words. When he did that with the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts, Kalaka thought about what they had read and, encountering a small stream, expressed a desire to be baptized. Unfortunately the stream was too shallow for performing the rite properly. Kalaka carefully observed Haskell and eventually recognized the church the American represented. One day, as the two arrived at a mission station, Kalaka, to Haskell’s surprise, introduced him to the mission director as a Seventh-day Adventist. The mission leader told them that he knew about Adventists since he had regularly received an Adventist periodical. The official then asked Haskell to teach his theological class about the books of Daniel and Revelation. Feeling that he could not take the time right then, Stephen demurred, only later to feel regret at passing up what he considered a God-given opportunity.6 Eventually Haskell arranged for Kalaka to translate Ellen G. White’s Steps to Christ into Sesuto, one of the first translations of any of Ellen White’s writings into a non-Western language, and for him to attend an Adventist meeting in Kimberley. However, Haskell left Africa before Kalaka arrived in the Cape Colony. General Conference president Ole Andres Olsen would baptize David Kalaka, the first convert from Basutoland. Solusi Mission Controversy As we have noted, the Adventist Church’s first adherents in South Africa came from among the white settlers. C. L. Boyd, who had arrived with D. A. Robinson in July 1887, became interested in evangelizing the native tribes. However, personality conflicts with his fellow Adventist missionaries kept him from gaining any support for the idea. Then church headquarters recalled him to the United States. The influential Wessels family urged the General Conference leadership

to see if the denomination could obtain land for a mission station in territory recently occupied by the British South Africa Company. Robinson and Pieter Wessels arranged a meeting with Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony and chairman of the British South Africa Company. The two Adventists requested land for a mission station among the Ndebele people in Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe). At first the two men thought the interview with Rhodes had been a failure, but at its close they received a sealed letter with instructions to deliver it to Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’s representative in Bulawayo, Rhodesia. The Adventist leaders discovered that it offered them as much land as they might need. They requested twelve thousand acres, and Pieter Wessels, Alma Druillard (who reportedly became a “favorite missionary” of Rhodes and Jameson), and others selected and marked off a site thirty miles west of Bulawayo. At first called Matabele Mission, after the major people group in the area, it eventually received the name Solusi Mission, after a local African chief, Soluswe, who lived nearby and helped during the early days of its establishment. The missionaries began to develop the mission in 1894 but were soon caught up in a controversy raging among prominent church leaders in the United States. In 1879 Haskell had prophesied that A. T. Jones would “make a stir with something.” Jones had lived up to the prophecy in theological matters, such as the doctrine of righteousness by faith that Ellen G. White enthusiastically supported. But now the stirring was becoming more problematic. His beliefs would now begin to frustrate Haskell and Ellen White. As George R. Knight has pointed out in his biography of Jones, once the man took a position on something, he would often force that viewpoint to its most extreme conclusion. Jones had been the church’s champion in the defense of religious liberty. But he now seemed determined to go beyond just protecting religious belief. He began to call for complete separation of church and state in every way imaginable, rejecting such common American practices

as military chaplains, Bible reading in public schools, national days of fasting and prayer, tax exemptions for churches, and financial aid to religious schools and charities.7 He saw Christians as having their rightful citizenship in heaven only, and as a result, they could not be true citizens of any nation on earth.8 Under his influence, the 1893 General Conference Session took a position rejecting tax exemption for Adventist church property. The delegates on February 28 discussed a statement that declared: “Resolved, that we repudiate the doctrine that Church, or other ecclesiastical property should be exempt from taxation; and, therefore, further . . . Resolved, that henceforth we decline to accept such exemption on our own behalf.”9 However, Jones was not fully satisfied with the resolution. He thought the Seventh-day Adventist Church should do more than just refuse the exemption—it should work to repeal all legislation that permitted the practice. Willard Allan Colcord, a delegate from the General Conference and an editor, added an amendment to the resolution, and the denomination took a public stand on the issue. Unfortunately, complications soon arose. John Harvey Kellogg had been attempting to get a bill approved in the Michigan legislature to obtain taxexempt status for medical missionary institutions. The bill failed to pass, and the General Conference position antagonized other religious groups that did not want their property taxed.10 A. T. Jones saw the Adventist Church’s acceptance of land from the British South Africa Company—the de facto government of that region— for the Matabele Mission as a violation of the separation of church and state. In reaction, he began to agitate for the denomination to return the Rhodesian property, using the 1893 General Conference resolution to support his argument. The denomination was caught up in a two-year struggle over the issue. When Haskell heard about resistance to the Rhodesian land offer, he began a letter-writing campaign in support of Adventists accepting the

gift.11 He asked what the Adventist religious liberty leadership would have done if they had been alive when the king of Persia gave financial and material aid to the Jews at Jerusalem. “Does not God’s word plainly teach us,” he asked, “that God runs the kingdoms of the earth in the interest of His own cause?” The Adventist missionaries in Africa were doing only what their spiritual forebears had done centuries before.12 Unfazed, Jones continued his campaign against the church’s acceptance of the land grant. In the November 1, 1894, issue of the denomination’s religious liberty magazine, an editorial claimed that Jones and coeditor C. P. Bollman could prove that the British South Africa Company was “nothing less than a British Colonial government.”13 Then, three weeks later, another editorial commented, “How the missionaries who have thus sold themselves for a mess of African pottage will succeed in serving two masters, remains to be seen.” The magazine reminded its readers of “our Lord’s declaration that it cannot be done.”14 When Haskell saw the November 22 editorial, he wrote a series of letters to GC president O. A. Olson, to Willie White, and to Francis M. Wilcox as well as to A. T. Jones.15 One of the letters came to the attention of Ellen G. White, and she penned a series of articles entitled, “Lessons From Nehemiah,” which she published in The Southern Watchman magazine. In them she dealt with the issue of accepting large gifts from secular rulers and others outside the church. As Haskell had previously pointed out, Nehemiah had used gifts from the Persian Empire to restore Jerusalem after its destruction. In the first article she wrote, Some may question the propriety of receiving gifts from unbelievers. Let such ask themselves: “Who is the real owner of our world? To whom belong its houses and lands, and its treasures of gold and silver?” God has an abundance in our world, and He has placed His goods in the hands of all, both the obedient and the disobedient. He is ready to move upon the hearts of worldly men,

even idolaters, to give of their abundance for the support of His work; and He will do this as soon as His people learn to approach these men wisely and to call their attention to that which it is their privilege to do. If the needs of the Lord’s work were set forth in a proper light before those who have means and influence, these men might do much to advance the cause of present truth. God’s people have lost many privileges of which they could have taken advantage had they not chosen to stand independent of the world.16 She concluded her article by declaring, “O that Christians might realize more and still more fully that it is their privilege and their duty, while cherishing right principles, to take advantage of every heaven-sent opportunity for advancing God’s kingdom in this world!”17

1. Many early conferences had women treasurers and occasionally a woman secretary. 2. Named in honor of the husband of a donor, Mrs. C. E. Haskell. 3. General Conference Bulletin, Extra No. 11, April 15, 1901, 233. The Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia entry on Moko does not mention any connection with Haskell and has him accepting Seventh-day Adventism in 1893, which would be the year before Haskell arrived in Africa. 4. General Conference Bulletin, Extra No. 11, April 15, 1901, 234. 5. Ibid., 233. 6. Ibid. 7. It had become a fairly common practice in New York, where the Tammany Hall political machine arranged for state funding for Catholic schools and charities as a way of attracting the votes of Catholic immigrants. See Kenneth Ackerman, Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 66, 77, 82. 8. For a fuller discussion of Jones’s view, see Knight, A. T. Jones, 151–164. 9. “General Conference Proceedings,” General Conference Bulletin No. 20, March 1, 1893, 437. 10. J. H. Kellogg to O. A. Olsen, May 12, 1893; J. H. Kellogg to W. C. White, August 7, 1895. 11. S. N. Haskell to O. A. Olsen, October 9, 1894. 12. Haskell’s irritation toward Jones’s position on the land gift seemed to last at least into the next

century. See S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, June 12, 1906. 13. American Sentinel, November 1, 1894, 344. 14. American Sentinel, November 22, 1894, 368. 15. S. N. Haskell to O. A. Olson, January 1, 1895; S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, January 1, 1895; S. N. Haskell to A. T. Jones, January 1, 1895; S. N. Haskell to Francis M. Wilcox, January 3, 1895. 16. Ellen G. White, “Prudence and Forethought,” The Southern Watchman, March 15, 1904. The articles were published as a book under the same series title in 1999 by the Review and Herald Publishing Association, Lessons From the Life of Nehemiah. 17. Ibid.

Chapter XVII

Back Down Under hile in South Africa, Haskell again met Hetty Hurd (they had first met in 1887 in London) when he and Robinson visited believers in the town of Beaconsfield, the site of the first Adventist church in that

W

country. Hetty had accepted a call to Cape Town as a Bible instructor. At that moment she and two others were selling books and giving Bible studies in the Kimberley area. Stephen and the Robinsons held twenty-four meetings during the two weeks they remained there. Some of the sessions began as early as five thirty in the morning so that people could work the rest of the day. Hetty would then conduct Bible studies with the converts. Impressed with all that she could do, Haskell wrote Ellen White, “Sister Hurd runs what she has on her hands with a stiff team.”1 He liked her nononsense efficiency and drive. Born January 23, 1857, in Jacksonville, Illinois, Hetty had been converted at the age of eight, but when her father died five years later, she lost interest in religion. In 1884 she taught at a large district school in Lemoore, California, while living with the family of her brother-in-law, William Gray. She received a salary of $75 a month, a good sum for a woman teacher at the time.2 The parents of her students liked her so much that they asked her to teach there for life. In the summer she worked in Gray’s orchard and vineyard. The Gray family planned to attend an Adventist camp meeting at Oakland, California. Mr. Gray invited Hetty to accompany them, but she declined. Then he suggested that she camp with them but skip the

meetings. Afterward, they would all visit the beach, the nearby rocks where seals congregated, and various tourist sites in San Francisco. Reluctantly she agreed but announced that she would stay away from the meetings themselves. Once she arrived on the camp grounds, the singing intrigued her, and she began listening outside the tent. Finally she slipped inside. J. N. Loughborough’s popular sermon titled the “Saint’s Inheritance” and his description of the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation especially impressed her. Afterward she told Loughborough that she said to herself, “I will be there,” referring to the New Jerusalem. William Healey gave her Bible studies, and she requested baptism, joining the Lemoore church. Later, Loughborough and William Ings conducted a series of meetings, during which they emphasized the mailing of batches (called clubs) of Signs of the Times magazines to potentially interested individuals. Those who sponsored the magazines would follow them up by writing personal letters to the recipients. At the session in Lemoore, Loughborough observed Hurd’s reaction. “I noticed . . . that Sister Hetty was greatly moved. Her face flushed, and then turned pale; she trembled and held on the back of the seat in front of her. She finally rose to her feet, and in a tone that moved all in the house to tears, said these words, ‘Brethren and sisters, God wants me,’ and said no more.”3 William Gray had invited Loughborough and Ings to his home for dinner. Hetty remained in her room until just before the meal. Then she emerged, holding something in her cupped hands. Approaching Ings, she announced, “ ‘Hold fast all I give you.’ ” Then she slipped into his hands a gold watch chain, some rings, breastpins, and other items of jewelry. Ings asked if she intended the items as payment for the Signs subscriptions. “ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘that is for the conference missionary society. I can pay for the papers otherwise.’ ”4 In May 1885, when she finished her teaching, Hetty went to San

Francisco, where she attended one of the first Adventist Bible instructor schools. She then began thirty-four years of service to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Hetty served as a Bible instructor and trained other Bible instructors in California and England (1887–1892) before going to South Africa in 1892. Mrs. White in Australia At this time, Haskell had become interested in Australia and its possibilities for evangelism and often talked about it, to the point that Mrs. White wondered if it had become an obsession with him. In 1887 she wrote to him, “Now, my brother, I have some fears in regard to your dwelling with pen and voice so constantly upon Australia. It will be well to talk a reasonable amount and write about it, but dwelling upon it so much, I am afraid it will not bring the blessing of God into your present labors. You are not now in Australia. Put your energies and your thoughts into your present labor. Again, I am sure by a dream that was given me, we are searching for fruit and berries at great distance, when there is excellent fruit close by us. We want to pick not an inferior kind of fruit, but make efforts to get the large and sound fruit. I will write my dream to you soon.”5 But Stephen did not abandon his focus on Australia. He thought of the idea of Ellen White herself going to the region after he completed his trip to South Africa and the South Pacific, feeling that her presence would be a great help to the development of the church there. As he discussed it with others, they too became interested in the proposal. Delegates to the March 1891 General Conference Session considered it. Eventually the Foreign Mission Board voted a formal resolution: “Whereas, In our judgment it would be a great blessing to the cause in Australia and adjacent colonies for Sister White to visit that field; Therefore,— . . . Resolved, That we hereby invite her to do so, as soon as the coming autumn, if her judgment, and the light she may have on the matter, shall be in accordance with this

request; it being understood that W. C. White shall accompany her on this visit.”6 Ellen White was not sure whether to accept the invitation or not, as we see in her diary entries during August 1891. She had hoped the church would not ask her, still remembering the difficulties that had surrounded her trip to Europe. Furthermore, she had hoped to concentrate on a book that she wanted to write on the life of Christ. While denominational leaders had been careful not to appear as in any way forcing the request on her, she still sensed that some at least would be more comfortable if she were away for a time.7 Still, she wanted to respect the will of the church and agreed to go.8 Although she may have been reluctant to travel to Australia, what she did there would have a significant impact on the church—and the life of Stephen Haskell. Travels With Uriah Smith The spokespersons for righteousness by faith were not the only ones invited by church leaders to do some traveling. Uriah Smith had been one of the strongest resisters to the new theological understanding. Church officials felt that he needed to expand his horizons. In April 1894, Haskell informed Ellen White that the General Conference hoped to arrange for Smith to accompany him to Europe. Stephen told her that he felt that if Smith could grasp the new insights and “bring them out in the paper [the Advent Review], he [could] work wonders with his pen.”9 By the end of the month, the church’s Foreign Mission Board had voted to send Smith and Haskell to a series of church meetings in Europe. Uriah’s son Wilton would go along with them to help his father. (Uriah had an artificial leg that made travel difficult for him.) Together, Uriah and Haskell attended conference meetings in New England. Then the Smiths visited their New England relatives. Finally, on May 14, father and son and Haskell headed for New York City.

The men almost missed their departure on May 16. T. A. Kilgore, who had charge of their tickets on the White Star Line steamship Majestic, had forgotten them when he accompanied the men to the dock. He had to go back to get them. Just as the ship’s crew was about to pull up the second gangplank, Kilgore raced up with the tickets. The Smiths and Haskell were the last to board. As was customary with Adventist missionaries, they traveled second class. The voyage had smooth sailing the first two days, but then the vessel encountered rough seas near Newfoundland. Both Uriah and Haskell became seasick. “Friday morning,” Uriah wrote to his wife, “I was able to get down about half a breakfast, which I surrendered before noon, and skipped my dinner, but was ready for supper.”10 When the waves calmed down, Smith became more interested in food and reported, “As for fare, if one likes pork in its various forms of sausage, ham, bacon, Irish stew, etc, he would have no lack. But we have had besides, broiled steak, roast mutton, roast beef, chicken, and fish, which has all been good. But the drink—ugh! The coffee is about the most execrable decoction, I ever tasted. I tried a cup of tea, and it made me sick. Then I fell back on hot water, but it tasted as if it had had salt mackerel boiled in it. So nothing was left but cold water, minus the ‘cold.’ It tasted well enough, but was lukewarm.”11 Haskell, however, had a harder time finding something to eat. Trying to be a vegetarian, he usually wound up with only bread and butter and cheese. Uriah’s son Wilton enjoyed watching Stephen’s frustration. But it especially amused him when “one day they had some corned beef and that was too much of a temptation. In spite of all the articles he has lately been putting through the Review,12 and the prospect of his soon writing a book against meat, he could not resist that corned beef, but put into it as though he hadn’t anything to eat for a week. Once or twice after I believe they had the same, and he never refused.”13 Wilton would record later that Haskell did much better in adhering to vegetarian principles during a sumptuous

banquet hosted by a paper supplier to the Adventist publishing house.14 When Haskell and the Smiths embarked for the continent from England to Holland, they again had second-class tickets on the steamship. Wilton, however, led them to the first-class cabins, assuming that if they immediately went to sleep, no one would order them out. The next morning they paid the extra six shillings fare. Smith’s son wrote to his mother that the first-class accommodations were well worth the price.15 For the next two months the three went from meeting to meeting, with the Smiths slipping sightseeing into their schedule whenever they could. Haskell would sometimes skip the latter, as when he declined to visit the Rhine Falls, declaring, “All we could see would be some water falling over some rocks.”16 On August 8, Stephen left them for London, from whence he went to South Africa. The Smiths traveled through Europe to Turkey and the Middle East. The Avondale School In her attempts to implement a new approach to Adventist education at Battle Creek College, Ellen White had encountered inertia and even active resistance. The school’s administrators and faculty knew and were more comfortable with the traditional classics system. But Australia gave her a chance to start from scratch and establish a school that was both Bible oriented and practical. Australian Adventists had opened a Bible training school at Melbourne, Victoria. Beginning with twenty-five students, it functioned from August 24, 1892 to September 1894. Ellen White urged the purchase of 1,450 acres at Cooranborg, and the denomination decided in 1895 to locate a school there. From 1896 to 1899, students and faculty, living in tents and at a hotel in Cooranbong, would erect buildings by day and hold classes during the evening. The school needed a staff committed to Ellen White’s philosophy of education. She had in mind at least one person whom she believed would

enthusiastically support her approach. Church leaders had asked her to go to Australia, but in 1896 Ellen White issued an invitation of her own to Stephen Haskell and urged him to return to Australia. “Make our home your headquarters,” she suggested.17 She knew that he would endorse her efforts at educational reform. Soon Haskell received an official request to conduct evangelism and teach at the newly established Avondale College. It would be his third trip to the continent, and he and Ellen White would face some difficult situations. One of them was the extreme financial problems sweeping the globe at that time, causing economy after economy to collapse. These developments would affect not only Haskell and Ellen White personally but would have a dramatic impact on the Adventist Church well into the twentieth century. The Panic of 1893 A year before Haskell went to Africa, the United States plunged into an economic collapse known as the Panic of 1893.18 The American economy had been on a cycle of boom and bust throughout the nineteenth century, but the financial panic that started in 1893 was the worst in United States history until that time, and the economy did not begin to recover until near the end of the decade. Triggered by the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, stocks plunged on May 5, and the market nearly collapsed completely on June 27. The situation was worsened by a loss of faith in the value of the American dollar as foreign investors struggled to recoup bad investments by seeking payment in gold instead of paper currency. American gold reserves quickly began to disappear, creating more financial fear. Between six hundred and eight hundred banks closed their doors, causing thousands of businesses to go under. People who had put their life savings in the banks lost everything. Seventy-four railroads were forced into receivership. Unemployment rose to at least 20 percent,19 and many

men, known as hobos, wandered the country in a desperate search for work. The prices of consumer goods fell, leading to the longest and worst period of deflation in American history.20 American Empire As noted earlier, the desperate need to find new markets for American goods put pressure on the nation to create a trade empire. Alfred T. Mahan’s book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History convinced such individuals as Theodore Roosevelt that, since Britain dominated the world through its navy at that time, a strong American fleet would help the United States in its business interests. US secretary of state James G. Blaine began eyeing Hawaii for its naval base potential.21 The thirst for an American empire was increasing. Quick victories against a decaying Spanish empire brought new prestige and global power to the United States. But it then became immersed in a savage guerrilla war in the Philippines.22 Such imperial ambitions and the self-proclaimed mission of bringing civilization to the rest of the world could be seen as evidence for Uriah Smith’s prediction of the rise of the United States to global power on its way to becoming the beast of Revelation 13:11–13.23 Smith editorialized that America’s policy in its newly acquired territories and spheres of influence violated the nation’s constitutional principles and saw this as a clear indication that the United States was turning into the two-horned beast and, furthermore, that the Second Coming was very near.24 Exciting as such prophetic trends might have seemed, the church still had a mission to enact, one that required financial resources. As increasing numbers of American Adventists found themselves out of work, tithe and offerings dropped, crippling the advance of the church. The depressed real estate market made the frequent land gifts to the church of less and less value. Others had lent money at interest to the denomination and now needed those funds back. The church’s financial situation became even

more precarious as the Wessels family of South Africa, who had loaned thousands of dollars to the General Conference, now demanded immediate repayment. The American economy began to improve in 1897, but that of the denomination lagged behind. At the end of 1898, the General Conference treasury had a balance on hand of only $61.20. The economic effects of the Panic of 1893 were a major factor in forcing the reorganization of church administrative structure in 1901. Because the global economy was increasingly becoming linked to that of the United States, and the effects of the Panic of 1893 would ripple around the world, the consequences had followed Haskell when he went to Australia. There, a devastating drought compounded the effect of international financial problems. Ellen White struggled not only to find funds to develop Avondale College and other new institutions but even to pay her household and editorial staff.

1. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, July 26, 1895. 2. School boards during that period regularly paid women teachers significantly less than their male counterparts. 3. J. N. Loughborough, “Life Sketch of Mrs. S. N. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 20, 1919, 24. 4. Ibid., 25. 5. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, January 14, 1887. 6. General Conference Daily Bulletin No. 19, April 13, 1891, 256. 7. Some church historians have suggested that the leadership of the time wanted to disperse those debating the righteousness by faith issue so as to reduce the controversy. For example, in 1895, church leaders sent A. T. Jones to Europe and the Middle East and W. W. Prescott on an aroundthe-world tour. 8. See Gilbert M. Valentine, The Prophet and the Presidents (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 2011), 315–319, for her struggle as to whether to accept the offer and how to interpret it. 9. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 20, 1894. 10. Uriah Smith to Harriet Smith, May 22, 1894.

11. Ibid. 12. For some random examples from through the years, see S. N. Haskell, “Thoughts on 1 Tim. 4:15,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 17, 1874, 163; Haskell, “Man’s Diet and Eternal Life,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 8, 1894, 297, 298; Haskell, “Did the Lord Eat Meat With Abraham?” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 15, 1894, 313, 314. 13. Wilton Smith to Annie Smith, May 25, 1894. 14. Wilton Smith diary entry for June 21, 1894. His father wrote a glowing description of the meal to his wife, Harriet, telling her that “the first course was boiled salmon, with new potatoes in cream; second course mutton chop, with green peas; third course, young chickens served in halves; fourth course, roast veal, with Saratoga chips; fifth course, lettuce & egg salad; sixth course, a pudding, like a corn starch pudding, with some kind of a red dressing; the nature of which in my verdancy, I do not know; but the more initiated afterward said that it was a rum pudding. Whew! But it was good all the same. Seventh course, fruit, strawberries, pineapple, melons & cherries; eighth course, nuts of all kinds, with cream dressed cookies; ninth course, ice cream which was cream. For drink we had raspberry juice in water, and raspberry & apricot soda water. When we got through we felt as if we had had a genteel sufficiency.” Uriah Smith to Harriet Smith, June 24, 1894. 15. Wilton Smith to Harriet Smith, May 29, 1894. 16. Wilton Smith to Harriet Smith, August 1894. 17. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, June 1, 1896. 18. Americans referred to financial downturns as “panics” until Herbert Hoover’s administration began substituting the term depression, which Hoover considered a less frightening label. William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Times Books, 2009), 104. 19. Estimates of the number out of work range from one and a half million to four million, with at least one out of five unemployed. See Cashman, America Enters the Gilded Age, 271. 20. Scott Miller, The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Random House, 2011), 24; Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 162, 163; Schlereth, Victorian America, 174, 175. 21. Siler, Lost Kingdom, 182, 183. Some American strategists also wanted the Samoan Islands for coaling stations. See Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 271. 22. See Gregg Jones, Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream (New York: New American Library, 2012). Fortunately for Adventist missions, American involvement did not create a lingering hostility in the Philippines as did Western intervention in China and other parts of mainland Asia. 23. Smith had been one of the earliest Adventists to see the United States in the two-horned beast. Besides his monumental commentary on the books of Daniel and Revelation, his most complete work on the subject is his The United States in the Light of Prophecy; or An Exposition of Rev. 13:11–17 (Battle Creek, MI: Steam Press of the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing

Association, 1872). 24. Uriah Smith, “ ‘The Nation’s Promise Broken,’ ” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 18, 1901, 395, 396; Smith, “The Decisive Signal,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 28, 1902, 56. Smith was not the only Adventist to see sinister implications in the American drive for empire. Church administrator and Bible teacher O. A. Johnson regarded the desire for overseas possessions as part of the forming of the image of the beast of the book of Revelation. See O. A. Johnson, Bible Text-Book (Battle Creek, MI: Review and Herald®, 1900), 161.

Chapter XVIII

Proposing to a Prophet n Australia, Haskell now had Ellen White’s physical presence instead of a connection through letters only. As the days passed, he began spending more and more time with her. The many letters of stern counsel

I

that she had sent him through the years about his character flaws and administrative style do not seem to have inhibited his deepening interest in her. The brother-in-law of her son Willie, Herbert Camden Lacey, noticed the growing relationship. He often drove Ellen White around the countryside, and during one such ride he decided to ask her point-blank about the possibility of her marrying Haskell. “She told me,” Lacey wrote later, “that he had proposed to her, but that she felt it would not be best to take another name, in view of the many books she had written as Ellen G. White; and then she had her son Willie, who could take good care of her till the Lord came, or her work was done. Now at this distance [1947] I cannot vouch for the precise words of her reply, but the tenor of her answer I remember well!”1 Ellen White’s excuse for rejecting Haskell’s marriage proposal seems weak. She could have easily kept writing under the name Ellen G. White. Women authors even in the nineteenth century sometimes employed a pen name in place of their married name. The real issue may have been that Ellen’s marriage to James White had been at times a challenging relationship,2 one that may have made her cautious toward becoming involved in marriage again.

Adventist historian Jerry Moon cites two other reasons that Ellen White raised as to why she would not remarry. First, she did not want to place on a husband the many heavy burdens that she carried in her prophetic role. Second, she did not want to face the inevitable claims that he was exercising undue influence on what she wrote and said.3 By his very nature, Haskell would not have feared to express his strong views to her. A couple examples in the area of denominational politics illustrate the point. In a February 8, 1905, letter, he suggested that Willie White should resign from the General Conference because of certain conflicts, and a few weeks later he advised Willie not to hold any office in Washington, DC, to protect his mother from any conflict of interest.4 To further complicate matters, Haskell had been involved in some incidents that had hurt James White through the years. James had used his influence as chair of the Health Reform Institute to get John Harvey Kellogg into the role of chief physician. But later, working with Haskell and General Conference president George I. Butler, Kellogg had maneuvered the replacement of James White with the more pliable Haskell as chair of the Battle Creek Sanitarium Board.5 Kellogg had also involved Haskell in at least one project that threatened White’s publishing interests.6 Stephen could be dictatorial at times, something that Ellen White had had to counsel him on.7 Finally, his actions during the “daily” controversy (see the chapter, “The Daily”) suggest the kind of behavior he could have indulged in even as the husband of a prophet. Also, as some Adventist writers have noted, Ellen became much more active in denominational affairs after James’s death, and the volume of her writing greatly increased. No longer absorbed with the duties and responsibilities (not to mention the cultural limitations of that time) of being a wife, she seemed free to do more in her prophetic role. She may have thus seen remarrying as potentially restricting the time and effort she could devote to it. Haskell could be a man of strong opinions, just as James White had

been. Perhaps Ellen had something like this in the back of her mind when she wrote many years later, “Since twenty-one years ago, when I was deprived of my husband by death, I have not had the slightest idea of ever marrying again. Why? Not because God forbade it. No. But to stand alone was the best for me, that no one should suffer with me in carrying forward my work entrusted to me of God. And no one should have a right to influence me in any way in reference to my responsibility and my work in bearing my testimony of encouragement and reproof.”8 But Ellen apparently had a still more personal reason for not remarrying —her continuing affection for James White, a difficult personality though he may have been at times. She hoped to be rejoined with him through the resurrection. Many years after his death, she wrote that she had “the assurance that if I follow on trustingly, faithfully doing God’s will as a faithful messenger, my husband and I will be reunited in the kingdom of God. I have not one particle of doubt regarding my husband’s preparedness to lay off the armor.”9 She would even dream about being reunited in heaven with James.10 Mrs. White’s typed letter included a handwritten note following that statement. She wrote, “One made the remark to me you must be [re]married to a faithful servant of God. I said never will I allow another to take his [James’s] place. I will do my best with the help of my two sons.”11 In the words of Jerry Moon, “She didn’t believe anybody could ever compare with James.”12 Marriage to Haskell could have caused her great difficulties in her role as prophetic leader of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. James White had usually been accepting of her work, but even he had his struggles with it.13 How would other nineteenth-century men handle it? Ellen White still lived in a male-dominated culture. The early group that would later become the Seventh-day Adventist Church had gone through a major struggle just to accept the concept of a woman prophet.14 Not every issue with it was yet settled. Haskell probably thought he could be a support for her, but could

he handle properly the role of being married to a prophet? Besides, her relationship with her son Willie had always been much more easygoing. Unlike his brother Edson, W. C. White had been more willing to defer to his mother and to assist her in her work. After James’s death she had developed a working relationship with Willie and others that the introduction of a new husband would have possibly complicated and disturbed. Thus for many reasons she could declare, “I have not the slightest idea of marrying again.”15 Although she declined Haskell’s proposal, Ellen White held him in high regard. Commenting on his activities in Australia, she observed that “his experience and knowledge of the truth, commencing in so early a stage of our history as Seventh-day Adventists, was needed in this country. From his youth upward, he has been a self-denying, self-sacrificing man. Now his age and grey hairs give him the respect of all who know him.”16 As a result, Ellen White had great confidence and trust in Haskell. When, after her return to America, she recognized problems with the leadership of the California Conference, she saw in Stephen a solution and encouraged him to accept the position of president. Also, when she sought ways to preserve her estate and safeguard her writings after her death, she again turned to Haskell. She was concerned about what certain elements in the church leadership might do with them. On October 6, 1901, she had Nellie Druillard draw up a will for her. It left her estate in the guardianship of her two sons, Edson and Willie. A note attached to the will stated that her sons and Stephen Haskell were to hold her writings jointly “as a perpetual trust.”17 Willie White, who did not know about the document until later, said his mother had it composed “when the administration of the General Conference affairs did not stand high in her estimation.”18 Ellen White felt that Haskell would protect her heritage, even if the General Conference leadership did not.19 As for Stephen’s finding a new partner in life, Ellen White suggested that Hetty Hurd would make a good companion for him. She told him that

in a vision an angel had placed one hand on Haskell’s shoulder and the other on Hetty’s, saying to Ellen, “Have I not raised up two [Stephen Haskell and Hetty Hurd] to stand by you?”20 Haskell accepted her suggestion of Miss Hurd as a prospective life partner. While he was in New Zealand doing evangelism, he happily informed Ellen White that Hetty was planning to come to Australia.21 The romance between the two was blossoming. When Hetty arrived in Australia, because of local concerns about smallpox that one passenger aboard her ship had contracted, she had to remain quarantined on her vessel in Sydney harbor for three weeks. Stephen had asked to go aboard to see her, but the port authorities told him that if he did, he would have to remain there until the quarantine period ended. Since he had evangelistic meetings to conduct, he decided to stay ashore. Haskell married Hetty on February 24, 1897, the same day she was at last able to disembark. The ceremony took place at 9:00 P.M. in Elder William Lemuel Henry Baker’s parlor. Baker was president of the New South Wales Conference, a position that Haskell himself would eventually hold. Honeymoon in a Tent Immediately after the wedding, A. G. Daniells summoned Hetty to be a Bible instructor in Adelaide. Stephen assumed that he should then join Eugene William Farnsworth in the latter’s evangelistic program, but Ellen G. White told Hetty and Stephen that they should remain at Avondale because the new school needed them.22 The couple did so and spent part of the first few weeks of their married life in Ellen White’s personal camp meeting tent near her home, Sunnyvale. Ellen White had outfitted the tent with a floor and furniture for them. They and the rest of the Avondale staff and students went about constructing buildings for the new school. Hetty helped to nail the wooden structures together. When the school opened, Haskell served as head Bible instructor, beginning with a

class on the book of Daniel. His wife taught a verse-by-verse study of the book of Revelation, though her main responsibility was school matron. Despite a somewhat challenging start, the marriage would last for twenty-two years. Hetty took a much more dynamic role in Stephen’s career than Mary had, traveling constantly and working closely with him, while his first wife had remained largely at home. Of course, times had changed. During Stephen’s first marriage, society expected that the wife would stay within the confines of the home, and Mary was older and regarded as an invalid as well. Even so, his constant round of travel and activity with Hetty was unusual even during the early twentieth century. And according to Stephen, his wife had the distinction of receiving a ministerial license from the denomination.23 The couple had a shared ministry. The correspondence Hetty left behind suggests that she had an even more forceful personality than Mary had. In her letters, Hetty had a habit of referring to Stephen as “the Elder.” She was close to the same age as Mary was when Stephen had married his first wife. He was now sixty-four, which would explain Hetty’s constant protection of him during their camp meeting travels. She would make him rest in their tent and stand guard so that no one would disturb him.24 She also kept careful track of his health. In that era, when most Americans had an average life expectancy in the forties, he would already have been regarded as quite elderly. Although the couple were clearly devoted to each other, their relationship may have had at least one unusual aspect. Like some others in the work, they may have chosen a platonic relationship.25 Friendly Correspondents Although Ellen White turned down Haskell’s proposal of marriage, she did continue a special fondness toward him. It seems to have been more than the closeness she felt to all the other early Adventist pioneers, such as Uriah Smith and J. N. Loughborough. During her life, she sent more letters

to Haskell than any other individual outside her immediate family, while Stephen would write back two or three to every one she sent him.26 The first letter came in 1875, and though long periods went between letters initially, in later years they became quite frequent (nearly three hundred in total, usually at least one a month during the latter years).27 After Stephen remarried, Ellen White would often address the letters to him and Hetty. The last one she sent to the couple was dated June 27, 1912. Because of her declining health, her son Willie began answering correspondence for her in the years just before her death. The exchange of letters not only kept Ellen informed of what was happening in the church, especially when she was out of the country, but she used them as an avenue to present her counsel and views to the wider church, knowing that Haskell would read or report their contents to others. Furthermore, their correspondence could be a safe sounding board for her own thoughts, concerns, and feelings. She kept a photograph of Stephen prominently displayed in her later home at Elmshaven.28 The relationship between the two church leaders was reciprocal in many ways. Naturally, she had a powerful influence on him theologically. For example, when she began using Trinitarian language in The Desire of Ages, he was one of the first to begin echoing it in his own articles.29 He did so at a time when the Adventist Church’s historically semi-Arian position was still dominant and many still resisted the concept of the Trinity. On the other hand, while her counsel influenced Haskell, sometimes he could sway her. For example, perhaps impressed with her success in publishing Steps to Christ through the major publishing firm of Fleming H. Revell, he convinced her to send her book Early Writings to be printed and distributed by a non-Adventist publisher. He saw it as a way of eliminating the financial debt that she had accumulated when her royalties did not match her expenses in preparing her books for publication. (She paid the publisher out of her own pocket for the editorial, typesetting, and plate-

making costs.) But when representatives from the non-Adventist company came with the contract to sign, she saw an angel shaking his head no and declined to ink the document. Apparently she felt that to have published the book through a non-Adventist organization would have been financially unfair to denominational publishing houses.30 “Not a Funeral” When Avondale erected its main building, Bethel Hall, the school family held a little ceremony in which Ellen White laid a symbolic corner brick. She saw that everybody was caught up in the solemnity of the occasion. Glancing around at their expressions, she suddenly said, “Cheer up, children; this is a resurrection, not a funeral!”31 It was a reflection of her statements years before to Haskell about how the staff should conduct the school at South Lancaster: their religion should be one of smiles and cheer. Haskell as Educator Because Cassius Boone Hughes, who was to become the first principal of the school, did not arrive until after classes had started, those already present, including Haskell, had to organize the school program. Stephen had taught various classes through the years but knew little about setting up full-scale educational programs. As a result, Herbert Lacey, who had recently graduated from Healdsburg College and the classics course at Battle Creek College, had to take charge of the program for the first few weeks. He later reported that he “was, virtually, principal of the school,” besides teaching “Bible, Physiology, History, Literature, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and some other subjects.”32 Lacey had made a favorable impression on both Australian Conference president A. G. Daniells and on W. W. Prescott. Prescott had been studying the book of John as preparation for writing a year’s worth of Sabbath School lessons on the gospel. For several years he had been coming to a fuller understanding of both Christ’s role in salvation and His position in the Godhead. Authoring the lessons increased his growing

conviction about the significance of Christ. Because legal complications had delayed the transfer of the land for the new school at Avondale that prevented the construction of buildings in time for the planned date for starting classes in March 1896, Daniells decided to convene a monthlong Bible and education conference. W. W. Prescott’s preaching on the Gospel of John and the divinity of Christ comprised a major part of the session. Herbert Lacey also spoke at the meetings. He became both an observer and participant in the new theological developments and the acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity.33 The new understanding of the Godhead would appear prominently in Ellen G. White’s The Desire of Ages, which she was writing at the time. The theological interests Lacey shared with Daniells probably influenced the union president to consider him for the leadership of the developing school. During this time, Lacey and his wife boarded with his younger sister, who had married W. C. White. He thus became part of the extended Ellen G. White household. He got to know Mrs. White well. But, as we shall see later, that did not mean that she considered him suitable to head the new school. Teaching From the Bible Ellen White saw Avondale as an opportunity to implement her philosophy of Seventh-day Adventist education. Haskell was determined to help fulfill that vision. For example, Ellen White had urged that Adventist teachers focus on the Bible as their primary textbook.34 A number of them took her plea literally and assumed that every subject should use the Bible as its only textbook, including such subjects as science, literature, and even bookkeeping.35 Stephen did not take Ellen White’s counsel quite that far. As he explained to Advent Review and Sabbath Herald readers, “The Bible has had the foremost place in the school. It has been the foundation of all study. Text-books have been used for terms and descriptions, but the Bible

for authority.” He then gave an example. “The study of geography, both physical and descriptive, has had its foundation in the first chapter of Genesis. The names of seas, oceans, lakes, and rivers, descriptions of various countries, and the peculiar characteristics of the people, were taken from any and every text-book that could be used to profit; but the lessons that God designed to teach by these mountains and rivers, by the light and heat of these countries, and their effect on man, were drawn from the Scriptures.”36 But sometimes Stephen did push Ellen White’s desire to teach things from a biblical perspective a bit too hard. Lacey taught a course in advanced arithmetic, with a section called “Recurring Decimals.” Haskell repeatedly urged Lacey to tie the material on “recurring decimals” somehow to the Bible. Finally, in frustration, Lacey said to him, “ ‘Now Brother Haskell, you know the Bible far better than I do; come and teach my class Recurring Decimals from the Bible!’ And do you know what he said[?] ‘Certainly I would, if I understood Recurring Decimals!’ ”37 Lacey couldn’t resist the urge to rub in Haskell’s ignorance of the topic, and he soon incurred the elder’s hostility. It eventually reached the point that Ellen White had to intervene and tell Haskell to ease up on Lacey and that “the Lord had a work for him to do in the school, too!”38 As for Haskell’s classroom abilities, Lacey considered him “an excellent Bible teacher; or, perhaps I should say, to be truthful, Bible preacher!”39 Stephen scheduled his classes (“talks,” Lacey called them) at six in the morning, a problem for the often sleepy younger students. Haskell often invited Ellen White to speak during the classes. During that same school year, a convention took place at Cooranbong, and someone asked Lacey to present some talks on astronomy. Lacey had a small telescope and was especially interested in the topic. So I drew diagrams of the Southern Cross, showing how all the wounds of Calvary are depicted there (the two wounds at the feet, one

at each hand, the bleeding head under the crown of thorns, and the “cascet of Jewels” where the heart was pierced); then I showed how the Milky way runs round the whole heavens from the foot of the Cross, with the brightest section on one side, and a dark hole, apparently (called the Coal-Sack) on the other—representing wonderfully the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus, the penitent thief, who (so far as he was concerned) went to Heaven from the Cross; and the impenitent thief who went to Hell! And all humanity is represented by those two thieves! Then I diagrammed the twelve “Signs of the Zodiac” identical in all ancient zodiacs, and showed how the Gospel of Salvation is depicted there—from Aries, the first Sign (the Lamb) whose two leading stars are known as the “Bruised” and the “Wounded” down through the circle till you come to Aquarius (Noah’s Flood) and Pisces (Fish, the only survivors outside the Ark.) Now the very fact that the constellations don’t look like the things named, and are identical in all nations, up to the Flood, proves that some one just after the Flood, either Noah himself or (say) Shem, wrote them as it were up there in the starry heavens for all subsequent generations to read, and understand God’s message of Salvation. And then such striking lessons can be connected with Taurus, the Gemini, Leo, Virgo, (with Spica the “Seed”) etc, and Orion, with its Nebula through which the New Jerusalem is finally to descend to the earth! And so on. Well, Elder Haskell came to me afterwards and said, “Now Brother Lacey, that’s what I mean! Now you are teaching Astronomy from the Bible!” Of course I didn’t argue with him: he was too old to understand: but I was glad he was pleased with the presentation, no matter how fanciful it would seem to a real astronomer! And we were the best of friends after that.40 Lacey might have thought he and Haskell had become better friends, but

Ellen White grew increasingly concerned about the younger man. The school was to be the pattern for a whole new approach to Adventist education, and she feared anything that might threaten its success. It made her doubly protective of the project. When, under Daniells’s influence, the Avondale school board appointed Lacey as principal of the school, she felt that Lacey was not yet mature enough for that role and was upset that Daniells had not consulted her first. That fact left her greatly “aggrieved,” because “not one reference [was] made to me or my judgment or my opinion.”41 In her view, Lacey lacked experience—he was “a boy among boys.” Ellen White felt that once young people graduated from school, they needed “to go through another process of education, and unlearn many of the things they have acquired.” Lacey had picked up some attitudes in college that he needed to unlearn, such as the use of debate, which was immensely popular in the nineteenth century, and an argumentative approach when presenting Scripture. (Both traits were a constant problem among nineteenth-century Adventist ministers.) Nor was she a fan of the Greek and Roman classical education that he had received at Battle Creek College.42 Ellen White had long opposed the traditional academic program offered at the college. She wanted the Bible taught in “pure, unadulterated simplicity.” The art of debate employed rhetoric, or form, and emotion as its primary focus, with less emphasis on evidence or reasoning. How something was said was often more important than what was said. The ancient Greek and Roman authors, the core of the traditional nineteenth-century college instruction, had first written about such rhetoric, and the classics courses stressed it. In religious circles, debate had become prominent in the Disciples of Christ movement. Alexander Campbell, one of its founders, held five widely publicized series of debates between 1820 and 1843. His followers continued the practice, and Adventist evangelists often participated in debates with Disciples of Christ ministers, not always to the Adventists’ advantage.43

Because of their New England heritage, Seventh-day Adventists were particularly prone to debating. Connecticut-born Henry Ward Beecher once observed, “There is nothing that a New-Englander so nearly worships as an argument.”44 Debating was simply a type of highly formalized argument. When she had helped Lacey to go to school in America, Ellen White had encouraged him to attend Healdsburg College in California instead of Battle Creek. Determined not to let the Avondale program reflect that of Battle Creek, she said that she had to “speak plainly” to keep out “the breezes coming from Battle Creek.”45 As Haskell became more and more frustrated from working with Lacey, he apparently began to hint about going somewhere else. Ellen White did not want to lose her old friend. As a result, she wrote Daniells, “As sure as Elder Haskell leaves, I shall leave also.”46 Daniells caught the hint. The board of directors replaced the young teacher. Lacey gracefully accepted his removal. Ellen White said that he “had broken his heart before the Lord” and “manifested a good contrite spirit.”47 She then defended him to Haskell.48 Because college-educated individuals to staff the school were in short supply in the denomination, Avondale kept Lacey on, and he continued to teach at Avondale until 1900, spending his summers selling Adventist publications and holding evangelistic meetings. Then from 1900 to 1902 he pastored and conducted evangelism in New Zealand. Returning to the United States, he taught religion at Healdsburg and other Adventist colleges. While Lacey might have had his difficulties with Haskell, Mrs. White thoroughly enjoyed Stephen’s presence, as well as that of his wife, at the school. “In Brother and Sister Haskell the Lord has sent us the right kind of help,” she told General Conference president Olsen. “He presents truth in a clear, simple, earnest manner that carries its own evidence with it to the hearts of those that hear it. As a matron and teacher, Sister Haskell

could not be excelled. She is firm as a rock to principle, and she has no special favorites. She loves all, and helps all.”49 To Gilbert Collins, a man who several times lent her money for projects in Australia, Ellen wrote about Hetty, “She takes hold most earnestly, not afraid to put her hand to any work. She does not say, ‘Go,’ but she says, ‘Come, and we will do this or that’; and they cheerfully do as she instructs them. We have had most precious instruction from the word from both Bro. and Sr. Haskell.”50 During this period, Lacey was not the only person with whom Haskell had a strained relationship. Before coming back to Australia, Stephen had spent five weeks touring South Africa with W. W. Prescott. The time he spent with the younger man seems to have intensified the aging pioneer’s reservations about him. Even though Prescott worked closely with Ellen G. White for ten months in Australia as they defined and implemented a Seventh-day Adventist philosophy of education, the experience did not change Haskell’s attitude toward him. Nor did the fact that Ellen White hoped that Prescott would be the next General Conference president.51 “As the years passed,” Gilbert Valentine observes, “Haskell became increasingly antagonistic to anything associated with the ‘unsafe’ Prescott. On the other hand, the professor considered Haskell too narrow and legalistic in outlook.”52 When the school term ended for the year in November, the Haskells bought a house named Coonioo in Stanmore, a suburb of Sydney. Stephen immediately launched into evangelism, and the couple soon established a church in the area. Hetty, being much younger than Stephen, was full of energy, teaching a Bible class each morning and conducting twelve individual Bible studies each week. She had about forty people studying with her at a time. After these students began observing the Sabbath, she started a series of cooking lessons for them. Her husband focused on building a church. When the holidays ended, the couple resumed teaching at Avondale.

Stephen again taught Bible, and Hetty had courses in beginning physiology, beginning geography, and advanced geography. Stephen commuted regularly to Stanmore to visit interests and continued to oversee the construction of a church. During July of 1898, W. L. H. Baker left for the United States and Haskell replaced him as New South Wales Conference president. After the current school term ended, the Haskells went to Brisbane in October and began camp meeting and tent evangelism. Stephen spoke each evening, and because spring and summer in the Southern Hemisphere are opposite to those in the Northern Hemisphere, he had to preach in hot weather during December. While Hetty enjoyed the warm temperatures, they were draining on him. His body preferred a New England climate. On December 23, 1898, the group of Adventists at Brisbane put a down payment on a piece of property. By April 2, 1899, they could dedicate the church. Later that month the Haskells reported forty-five baptized and ten more preparing for baptism, all meeting in a building free of debt.53 Next the couple rented and remodeled a storefront in Walsend, New South Wales. It served as a meeting place and housing for several Bible instructors. Soon the Haskells commenced evangelistic meetings in it. By now, though, Stephen had decided that he and Hetty should return to America. After attending the union conference session at Avondale in July, they departed on August 5, 1899, for San Francisco aboard the SS Alameda. General Conference president George A. Irwin accompanied them. Back in the United States, Stephen would act as Ellen White’s eyes and ears, keeping her informed through his constant stream of letters about what was happening in the denomination stateside. At the same time, he would serve as her voice in the homeland, sharing her views and insights on various matters. In her letters, Ellen often discussed issues facing the church in North America with the expectation that he would spread what she wrote among his fellow administrators.

The Haskells immediately began attending the later summer camp meetings in Kansas and Nebraska, then they visited the institutions that John Harvey Kellogg had established in Chicago. After speaking to students from Kellogg’s American Medical Missionary College, Stephen and Hetty went to Battle Creek. There he attended administrative meetings, met the employees of the Review and Herald publishing house and the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and spoke every night at the Dime Tabernacle. Hetty taught classes for Bible instructors. Stephen also collected funds for church projects in Australia. Although the couple kept extremely busy in the service of the church, the years after their return to America were especially challenging financially. Their letters constantly reveal their struggle to obtain even the funds owed them. The church was still grappling with the lingering impact of the financial collapse that had hit the world economy during the 1890s, which had particularly devastated the Adventist Church’s inefficient organizational structure. “Woman Ministry” As the nineteenth century reached its last decades, the numerous reform movements that had flowed through American life began to take newer and stronger forms, especially under the direction of the growing middle class, and the country entered what historians call the Progressive Era.54 Although it touched everything from economics, business, and labor to education, divorce laws, the rights of women, and class conflict, one of the strongest currents in the progressive mainstream was temperance, increasingly referred to as prohibition. One of the leading temperance organizations was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Sarepta Myrenda Irish Henry had become one of its prominent leaders and evangelists.55 During the latter part of the 1880s, Henry became ill. A heart condition left her an invalid by 1895. The next year she went as a patient to Battle

Creek Sanitarium. The witness of its staff led her to accept Seventh-day Adventist beliefs. Healed while in prayer, she was able to return to her activities for the WCTU. In 1898 she began focusing on a strand that had long been a part of the fabric of nineteenth-century reform: the role of the mother in the moral development of society. Not only did she promulgate it across North America but she also started presenting the concept to Adventist congregations and wrote articles for the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. Other than through the writings of Ellen G. White, the denomination had not yet done much to aid parents and women. Soon Henry formed an organization called the Women’s Gospel Work. Through her articles and books, such as Studies in Home and Child Life, Studies in Christian Principles, and the inspirational book The Abiding Spirit, Henry sought to help women to be good parents and deal with the many problems that faced them. She began to develop programs to involve women more actively in the church, in what she called “women ministry.” Though she made a significant impact on the denomination at the time, Sarepta Henry’s death in 1900 ended her programs. Her secretary, Grace Durland, and a committee headed by Mrs. G. A. Irwin and Hetty Haskell, attempted to continue her work, but it did not last long.56 Sadly, the church was not ready to maintain such a program without a dynamic and forceful individual as Mrs. Henry to lead it. Not even Hetty Haskell could substitute for her.

1. H. C. Lacey to A. W. Spalding, April 2, 1947. Lester Devine is cautious toward the incident because documentation is limited and the description came long after the fact. See Lester Devine, “Evangelist and Administrator,” Record, September 15, 2012, 18. Still, one wonders why anyone would make up such a story when people who might refute it were still alive. A sense of propriety and a desire to protect Ellen White’s privacy would have probably discouraged those people aware of Haskell’s interest from discussing it publicly at the time it happened. Gil Valentine suggests that the warmth of Mrs. White’s invitation to come to Australia may have encouraged Haskell to see a romantic possibility in their relationship. Gilbert M. Valentine, “Secrets of Love and Life in the E. G. White House: Men—Lost and Found,” Spectrum 44, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 53.

2. See, for example, Wheeler, James White, 209, 218–223. 3. Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 9. 4. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, March 14, 1905. 5. Richard W. Schwartz, John Harvey Kellogg: Pioneering Health Reformer (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2006), 65. 6. James White to W. C. White and Mary White, December 12, 1880. 7. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, November 8, 1880. 8. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 3:66, 67. 9. Ellen G. White to Fannie Ashurst Capehart, February 28, 1906. 10. Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, vol. 6, The Later Elmshaven Years, 1905–1915 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1982), n.p. 11. Ellen G. White to Fannie Ashurst Capehart, February 28, 1906. 12. “The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia,” Focus, Winter 2014, 24. 13. See discussion in Wheeler, James White, 218–223. 14. For some background, see Ginger Hanks Harwood and Beverly G. Beem, “ ‘It Was Mary That First Preached a Risen Jesus’: Early Seventh-day Adventist Answers to Objections to Women as Public Spiritual Leaders,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 45 (Autumn 2007): 221–245. 15. Ellen G. White to Fannie Ashhurst Capehart, February 28, 1906. 16. Ellen G. White to Brother and Sister John Wessels, May 18, 1897. 17. Gilbert M. Valentine, The Struggle for the Prophetic Heritage: Issues in the Conflict for Control of the Ellen G. White Publications 1930–1939 (Muak Lek, Thailand: Institute Press, 2006), 43. The 1901 will was one of four that she had prepared during the last twenty-four years of her life. 18. W. C. White, handwritten note dated January 22, 1933, and attached to the 1901 will. 19. For more on Ellen White’s various wills, see James R. Nix, “Will and Testament, Ellen G. White’s Last, and Settlement of Her Estate,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 1267–1271. 20. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, December 10, 1906. See also S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 7, 1908. 21. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 11, 1896. 22. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 26, 1897; March 2, 1897. 23. S. N. Haskell to W. A. Spicer, May 20, 1903. 24. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 160. 25. When Haskell returned from Australia and dealt with the various fanaticisms that had developed during his absence, one of them concerned a belief in a literal interpretation of the 144,000 of

Revelation 14. The teaching held that whenever the Seventh-day Adventist community reached that number, Jesus would return. Some began urging Adventist women to have as many children as possible as well as to adopt children. They saw it as gaining children to the Lord (though Ellen White saw it also as adding some to the devil). In Hetty Haskell’s words, “Young people who wish to work for the Lord in the field instead of raising babies are hunded [sic] like deers by the dogs.” Young women came to Hetty seeking advice on how to relate to the pressure on them to bear children. One woman, the physician wife of another doctor, asked Mrs. Haskell what she should do. She explained to Hetty that she and her husband both wanted to be full-time medical missionaries, and therefore they had quietly “lived a life of social purity.” Social was a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century euphemism for “sexual.” “Social purity” was a widespread theme among several social movements, primarily dealing with the problem of prostitution. Immediately after the phrase “lived a life of social purity” in the letter received by Ellen White there appears a handwritten notation, “!!!—like the Haskells—ar,” possibly added by Anna Rasmussen, who lived for a time in Mrs. White’s home. It seems that “ar” regarded the Haskells as having a perhaps platonic relationship (see Hetty Haskell to Sister White, July 1900). 26. Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 10. During the years just before her death, as her health declined, Ellen’s son Willie began to reply for her to Stephen’s constant stream of letters. 27. George R. Knight, Walking With Ellen White: The Human Interest Story (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1999), 78. 28. Valentine, W. W. Prescott, 236, note 17. 29. Denis Kaiser, “The Reception of Ellen G. White’s Trinitarian Statements by Her Contemporaries, 1897–1915,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 50 (Spring 2012): 25–29. Despite the fact that Haskell accepted her Trinitarian position, he did persist for a while in referring to the Holy Spirit as “it” (see ibid., 32). 30. Ellen G. White, The Publishing Ministry, 208. 31. H. C. Lacey to A. W. Spalding, April 2, 1947. 32. Ibid. 33. Gilbert Valentine, “Clearer Views of Jesus and the Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” Spectrum 42, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 66–74. 34. See such passages as Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 6:162–167; Fundamentals of Christian Education, 231, 384. 35. Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers, 1972, 85. Vande Vere mentioned in a conversation with the author that the Battle Creek College instructor who thought he could teach the principles of accounting from the epistles of Paul projected into the Pauline writings such concepts as the doubleentry principle of accounting. 36. S. N. Haskell, “The Avondale School,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 29, 1898, 768. 37. H. C. Lacey to A. W. Spalding, April 2, 1947.

38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ellen G. White to A. G. Daniells and E. R. Palmer, June 27, 1897. 42. Ellen G. White to J. E. and Emma White, May 30, 1897. 43. For a summary of rhetoric and oratory in American education at the time, see Boorstin, The Americans, 462–466. 44. Quoted in New England in a Nutshell, 47. Ellen G. White noted that her husband, James, loved a good fuss, something that she naturally did not approve of. See Ellen G. White to James White, September 2, 1871. Interestingly, a large proportion of documents surviving from the Puritan colonial period consists of lawsuits. The Puritans did not assault or kill each other—they sued. 45. Ellen G. White to W. C. White, May 6, 1897. 46. Ellen G. White to A. G. Daniells and E. R. Palmer, June 27, 1897. She would, though, eventually decide that the American church needed Haskell’s presence more than Australia did. 47. Ellen G. White to A. G. Daniells, June 6, 1898. 48. Ellen G. White to Brother and Sister Haskell, March 3, 1898. 49. Ellen G. White to O. A. Olsen, August 19, 1897. 50. Ellen G. White to G. N. Collins, June 9, 1897. 51. Gilbert M. Valentine, “W. W. Prescott: Adventist Education’s Renaissance Man,” Journal of Adventist Education, February/March 2014, 16. 52. Valentine, W. W. Prescott, 123. 53. Letter of April 27, 1889. 54. For an overview of the period, see Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). One historian describes the reformers as “urbane, middle-class, and intellectual, including the most articulate, literate, and expert members of the professional classes. Their leaders were usually white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from affluent backgrounds and with a college education, who occupied a professional or commercial position that allowed them a certain economic independence and social status. By virtue of their education and their Christian ideals, they were particularly sensitive to exposure of mismanagement, corruption, and accounts of economic and social distress. They were also equipped with the necessary eloquence and with leisure time to engage in serious and considered protest.” Cashman, Gilded Age, 363. Religion was a strong element in the movement, and the interest in the protection of Sunday created problems for Seventh-day Adventists. 55. For biographical background of Mrs. Henry, see Mary Henry Rossiter, My Mother’s Life (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1900) and Margaret R. White, Whirlwind of the Lord (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1998).

56. Arthur W. Spalding, Origin and History of Seventh-day Adventists (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1962), 3:199, 200.

Chapter XIX

Unholy Holiness hen Haskell returned to America after his four years in Australia, he found that strange ideas had begun spreading within the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Among the social and economic trends

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that had impacted the church at that time, religious ones affected it as well. The Holiness movement of the late nineteenth century had begun to influence Adventist thought and theology through such individuals as A. T. Jones, E. J. Waggoner, and Luther Warren.1 The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald carried advertisements for books by Holiness authors. A number of Adventist thought leaders would take ideas found in them, drop them into the continuing Adventist discussion about righteousness by faith, and then give them unexpected twists. Faith healing became a popular theme for Jones, Waggoner, and others on the revival and camp meeting circuit. Thus Haskell, who had spent much of the past decade away from the United States, was greatly astonished at many of the ideas and teachings he encountered when he returned to North America.2 In addition, it was also a time of religious speculation, even among Adventists. Forms of pantheistic thought now stirred up controversy. Beyond that, Adventists have always been addicted to “new light,” searching for some new theological understanding or insight. Evangelists have often looked for a unique prophetic key or interpretation to promote in their meetings, something that would catch the attention of the public. All these factors were creating great confusion. Ellen White believed that the denomination needed Stephen Haskell

back in the United States to meet such theological challenges head on. Shortly after he left Australia, she sent him a letter in which she wrote, “I awake at eleven o’clock, unable to sleep. We were assembled in a meeting, it seemed in Stanmore [Australia], and we were listening to one of authority [a phrase she often used for an angel guide in her visions] who seemed to be counseling one and another of the ministers. He said to you, ‘The Lord has a work for you to do in America.’ ”3 Sensing the importance of what Haskell must confront there, she urges Stephen to “show a firm, undeviating trust in God. Be ever true to principle. Waver not; speak decidedly that which you know to be truth, and leave the consequences with God. . . . You are to meet with people of perverted judgment.”4 Stephen would be Ellen G. White’s eyes and ears on the theological situation in the United States. His letters provided much of the information on which she would evaluate and respond to the new currents flowing through the American church. He wrote to her that he had encountered “such queer doctrines preached by some of the leading ministers of the rising generation, and they are doctrines which are so subtle and the Testimonies and Bible is quoted to prove it that one not grounded in the principles of the messages would be carried away with them.”5 Haskell stated that one of the “strangest doctrines” he had met with was that “the Seal of God cannot be placed on any person of grey hairs, or any deformed person, for in the closing work, we would reach a state of perfection both physically and spiritually, where we would be healed from all physically [sic] deformity and then could not die, etc.6 I said to Brother [Almon Jacob] Breed and also to the brethren in reply that I expected the next I would hear, we could get a new set of teeth in this life, etc. Well, Bro Breed said that was preached by some.”7 One woman had enthusiastically (“she wept as she spoke”) told him how her friends would be convinced when they saw her hair color suddenly restored. Another man, deaf in one ear, claimed to be regaining his hearing in that ear. As Haskell watched and listened at such meetings,

he declared that he “was astonished at the sight and more astonished that such preaching should have any effect on the people. And still more astonished to hear such preaching from a mission of such repute and from one that stood at the head of a mission.”8 Some taught that people should not kill insects because all life came from God,9 making each creature sacred, and that God will Himself remove them as part of His restoration of all things before the Second Coming;10 that those with physical deformities must be fully healed to become a part of the 144,000; and that even one gray hair could prevent an individual from receiving the seal of God.11 Others argued that even after the Fall, if someone had been as good as Enoch, that individual would not have died.12 Still others wanted to throw away the old prophetic charts as now unnecessary.13 Stephen reported to Ellen White his attempts to counter the aberrations by employing her own writings at the various meetings where he spoke. Once again he was functioning as her spokesperson. When, after one meeting, he had listened to a long session of testimonies claiming that people would be healed of all physical problems so that they could no longer die, the next day he read to his audience a testimony. It was written years earlier to Jones and Waggoner about how the two men had carried “the praying for the sick to an extreme,” something that he felt perfectly described what he had endured the night before. When Haskell explained to them that Ellen White had sent her testimony to “correct errors and suppress fanaticisms,” someone in the audience “cried out as an unanswerable argument, what color would have been the color of the hair if the man had not sinned. I at once answered ‘WHITE’ as that was the color of Christ’s and God the Father’s, and in this life a hoary head was the nearest to it if found in the way of righteousness. It would be made WHITE by the glory of God, etc.” Sensing that his reply satisfied many of those present, he explained that God could still seal people even if they were not physically perfect.14

The problem of such theological aberrations was widespread. After describing meetings that he had attended in Oakland, California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Battle Creek, Michigan, Stephen informed Ellen White, We have found various doctrines afloat over here springing up around among our brethren. These are not confined to our lay brethren but ministers preach boldly what to me appear grievous errors. I will mention a few. There will be probation until the sixth plague.15 The seal cannot be placed on any who are diseased, crippled or even have gray hairs. So it becomes all who ever expect to be sealed in the Third Angel’s message to have their hair turn black or to its natural color. Then there is another view and that is understood quite universally believed among the leading fraternity [sic] the 144,000 are those who live through the time of trouble and does not include those who die in the third angel’s message. There will be a partial resurrection of course of those who die in the message but they do not include the 144,000.16 Hetty Haskell, who could be quite forceful at times in her comments, quoted F. M. Wilcox, at the time serving as chaplain of the BoulderColorado Sanitarium, as declaring, “ ‘There are more cranks and strange doctrines to the square foot in Colorado than any other part of the world.’ ”17 The new theories were, of course, especially prominent in Battle Creek. Stephen commented to Ellen White, “I would be the most unpopular man that there was in Battle Creek in a few weeks, if I was connected with this church here; for I should have no faith or sympathy in these doctrines that were ‘popping up’ all the time, which were in such direct opposition to the old landmarks. There is a queer soil in Battle Creek. Anything and everything grows that is evil, and some that is good.”18 Once Stephen had begun reporting to Ellen White what he had

encountered, she replied, “I am glad you are where you are. Do not become discouraged. Meet the people with a courageous front. Keep the eye steadfastly fixed on your Leader. Dark and cloudy faces will confront you, but the bright beams of the Sun of Righteousness will melt away this feature, and you will have the victory in God.” She encouraged him to “expect everything possible that God can give. Do not talk doubts; do not ponder doubts. God has a people true as steel to principle, but they are confused. They are walking like blind men. Help them, for Christ’s sake, help them.”19 A couple of weeks later she addressed another letter to Stephen and General Conference president George A. Irwin in which she labeled the things the two men had described to her as “simply foolish imaginings.” She said that for such individuals to present such ideas showed that they “need to learn anew the principles of our faith. . . . To make the statements they make, and hold the notions they hold, is like descending from the highest elevation to which the truth of the Word takes men to the lowest level. God is not working with such men. Having lost the grand truths of the word of God, which center in the third angel’s message, they have supplied their place with fables.”20 As for the idea that God must restore His people to physical perfection before He returned, she pointed out that “the Lord has afflicted ones, dearly beloved in his sight, who bear the suffering of bodily infirmities. To them special care and grace is promised. Their trials will not be greater than they can endure.” The apostle Paul had a physical problem, but God refused to remove it and told him not to ask to be healed. Those who saw gray hair as a barrier to salvation were wrong. God honored that gray hair, because of the life those people had lived. “It is the white robe of Christ’s righteousness that gives the sinner admittance into the presence of the heavenly angels. Not the color of his hair, but his perfect obedience to all God’s commandments, opens to him the gates of the holy city.” Rather, “in the great day of God all who are faithful and true will receive the

healing touch of the divine Restorer. The Life-giver will remove every deformity, and will give them eternal life.”21 After her husband had attended place after place, Hetty, tongue firmly in cheek, told Mrs. White, “In some of the states they have been having ‘most wonderful and glorious’ meetings preaching some doctrines that seem to be contrary to all sound doctrine. Elder I [Irwin] is anxious for Eld H. [Haskell] to be there and preach the 3d Angel’s Message. It is almost amusing sometimes. They keep Eld H preaching the same things over and over. At each place, he says to Bro I ‘Well, what shall I preach on.’ Bro I is sure to reply I wish you would give the 3d Angel’s Message, and Bro I listens each time with as much interest as if he had not heard it before. There is nothing that interests the people like the old time subjects. They seem tired of the new fancys [sic] and hungry for solid rock bottom principles.”22 Naturally, though, Haskell did not hesitate to confront the new ideas. He spoke to the teachers at the church’s Battle Creek College first on how to interpret Scripture correctly and then against the belief that it was wrong to kill insects. But he discovered that many of those proposing the new theories tried to base them on the writings of Ellen G. White. He told her that “everybody nowadays when they advance some cranky idea they will pull out some of your writings to prove it.” Fortunately, he could remember the context of the particular statements and thus set people straight.23 Holy Flesh Movement The so-called holy flesh movement, perhaps the most spectacular of the new teachings (and the one best remembered today), focused not on Christ but what the individual believer needed to be. Called by its proponents the “Cleansing Message,” it took some of the various new ideas circulating through the church in another direction and to another extreme. The teaching was especially prominent in the Indiana Conference, led by R. S.

Donnell. Adventist pastor S. S. Davis started the movement, and later Donnell added his support.24 During September 13–23, 1900, Stephen and Hetty, along with Almon J. Breed, the superintendent of District Number Three,25 and his wife attended the Indiana Conference camp meeting at Muncie. Haskell’s wife reported to Ellen White that the holy flesh faction promulgated what they called “ ‘translating faith,’ that if one became ‘holy flesh’ like Christ they could not see corruption any more than he did, that they would live to see him come.”26 Hetty quoted her husband as comparing the Indiana phenomenon to “the old spirit of blind Sammy Handcock [sic],” who had created so many difficulties for early Adventists. André Reis traces at least some elements of the Indiana Conference holy flesh movement to the fanaticism stirred up during the early days of Adventism by Samuel Cooley Hancock and Gilbert Cranmer. He suggests that it was a streak of radical worship style that developed in New England and largely remained dormant until again triggered by A. T. Jones’s “receive ye the Holy Ghost” movement.27 Certain Adventists may have learned such worship practices from the Methodists or other religious groups that flourished during the Second Great Awakening, especially on the American frontier. At least some elements of Methodism had earned the nickname “Shoutin’ Methodists” from their boisterous worship. Haskell had himself been a Methodist for some time, and he may have absorbed something from “shoutin’ Methodism.” For example, when he became involved in intense prayer, he would do so loudly enough that it would worry people.28 Staunch New Englander that he might have been, Stephen was not always traditional in all his worship practices. But what he encountered at Muncie greatly disturbed him. He wrote to Ellen White, “I do not know what kind of words to use to describe it; but it was an awful bedlam, and I am glad that we got out of it alive.”29 Davis, who first promulgated the Cleansing Message concept, had been

impressed by his contacts with local Pentecostals as well as the preaching of A. F. Ballenger. The emphasis that Ellen G. White made on receiving the Holy Spirit during this period may have also shaped Davis’s developing theology. The music used at the camp meeting especially disturbed Hetty. “We have a big drum, two tambourines, a big bass fiddle, two small fiddles, a flute and two cornets, and an organ and a few voices,” she reported to Sara McEnterfer. “They have Garden of Spices as the songbook and play dance tunes to sacred words. They never use our own hymnbooks except when Elders Breed or Haskell speak, then they open and close with a hymn from our book but all the other songs are from the other book.”30 Stephen compared the music to that used by the Salvation Army. Gary Land sees the background of the movement as in some ways echoing the teaching of such non-Adventist Holiness preachers as A. J. Gordon and A. B. Simpson, though he believes that within Adventism it first spread through the preaching of such Adventists as A. F. Ballenger.31 Donnell and his conference evangelist, S. S. Davis, then took the basic concept in a more extreme direction. “They taught that true conversion replaces corruptible earthly flesh with incorruptible ‘translation’ flesh, an experience through which Christ had passed in the Garden of Gethsemane and that now must take place among those believers expecting to be alive at Christ’s return. In contrast to these ‘born’ sons, Christians who did not have this experience were ‘adopted’; they would die and then be resurrected at the Second Coming.”32 A few days later, Stephen described the situation as he saw it. “One of their great burdens is moral purity (which you know all about), and ‘holy flesh,’ and ‘translating faith,’ and all such terms, which carry the idea that there are two kinds of ‘sons of God’—the ‘adopted’ sons of God, and the ‘born’ sons of God. The adopted are those who die, because they will not have the ‘translating faith.’ Those who are born, get ‘holy flesh,’ and there is no sin inside of them, and they are the ones that will live and be

translated.”33 Haskell considered the whole concept “a false application of righteousness by faith.”34 By now he began to long for Mrs. White herself to return to the United States and help with the situation. “There is a general interest to see you back to this country,” he reported to her, “and we are almost daily asked if you are not on your way here.”35 “We shall be very glad to see you in this country. . . . There never was a time when your testimony was more needed or when it would accomplish more than now.”36 A few weeks later he told her, “I know it will cause you sorrow of heart to meet some things over here, yet I think it is the Lord’s will that you should come. If there was ever a time your presence was needed it is now.”37 At one point during this period, Haskell had observed to Willie White, “When I came over here [to the United States], I felt as though I hardly knew what my message was [that I should preach], until we began to learn of the various doctrines which have gone through the country and have been endorsed by some of our brethren.”38 As Stephen had first considered returning to the United States during his stay in Australia, Ellen White had apparently hesitated about encouraging him to do so. He later remembered her reaction. There is one thing that you said to me while in Brisbane when I talked about coming over here [America] and what you said when I did come which I thought I would mention to you. While at Brisbane you said, “It is not time for you to come, you have not your message.” Of course I said no more about it at that time and went to work there till I came down to Wallsend. Then when [I] talked of coming you said “now you have your message.” As far as I individually was concerned I felt no different and knew no different. But when he arrived and saw how things were going, he wrote, As never before I realized I had a message at every place I went. The

truth never opened more precious to me, and I never had such a message to present the underlying principles of the message. In visiting the various districts [organizational territories that were the predecessors of union territories] we presented the foundation principles of [the] message in every place. I think the message was timely. . . . The rank and file of our people are sound in the principles. But many of our ministers are young and have been swayed by the more modern preaching, thinking the peculiar views we hold should not be dwelt upon.39 Apparently Ellen White had at first sensed that Stephen was not yet ready to deal with the issues he would face in America, but once he was, she encouraged him to return. Circumstances had forced Haskell, as he would put it, into becoming a defender of the “old landmarks.” As a patriarch with a long heritage in the church, he was the right one to confront the hydra head of new theological aberrations threatening the church. Ellen White had been correct in her belief that the denomination needed him in the United States at that time. He became a stabilizing force. But, as we’ll see later, at times his readiness to protect what he considered traditional Adventist belief could also lead him to cause great difficulties for the church when it was genuinely advancing in new understandings, as would be the case with the “daily” issue. Haskell’s years of experience in the cause may have been needed at the turn of the century to lead younger ministers back to the core of Adventism, but there could also be times when he could learn something from them. While he could teach them many things, he in turn could gain some important understandings from them. And his dealings with Jones, Waggoner, and certain members of the younger generations may have prejudiced him in the new century against the possibility that others of the rising generation of ministers had important truths to present.

1. See George Knight’s discussion of the impact of the Holiness movement on Adventism in A. T. Jones, 192–195. Although Jones and Waggoner’s ideas had influenced the holy flesh advocates, Jones himself rejected their extreme interpretation. 2. For background on the development of such theological ideas, especially in light of the righteousness by faith movement within Seventh-day Adventism, see Bert Haloviak, “From Righteousness to Holy Flesh: Disunity and the Perversion of the 1888 Message” (research paper, General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, April, 1983). He quotes contemporary letters on the issues and the situation by Ellen G. White, S. N. Haskell, and others. 3. Ellen G. White to Brother and Sister Haskell, July 30, 1899. 4. Ibid. 5. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 3, 1899. 6. The underlying assumption seems to have been that any perfecting of character must have been accompanied by a physical transformation, that a “perfect” character could only exist in a physically perfect body. 7. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 3, 1899. 8. Ibid. 9. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, November 23, 1899. Haskell wryly observed to Willie White that “when a person would come in contact with a lousy headed student, or to spend a night where there are plenty of bedbugs and centepedes [sic], I think it would cure any sane man of that doctrine” (S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, December 26, 1899). 10. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, February 5, 1900. 11. Haskell reported “that [during] the last term of school in Battle Creek where Elder Durland was an instructor, it seems that he had a burden to present some views respecting the 144,000. . . . The ideas were these: As John in Rev. 7 makes the 144,000 the ones sealed; and the ones sealed, according to their view, were the ones who live through the time of trouble; therefore the 144,000 of Rev. 7, 14 and 15 are the only ones sealed; and the evidence of being sealed was that they were restored to health, free from any physical infirmity, not even possessing a gray hair.” 12. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, May 9, 1900. 13. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, c. May 25, 1900, a letter written from the Oregon camp meeting. Haskell would later reprint one of the earliest prophetic charts, only to receive a rebuke from Ellen White. 14. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 3, 1899. 15. Haskell attributed the concept to a Brother Fifield. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, December 26, 1899. 16. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 25, 1899. 17. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 27, 1900.

18. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, November 10, 1899. 19. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, November 29, 1899. 20. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell and G. A. Irwin, December 15, 1899. 21. Ibid. 22. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, June 24, 1900. 23. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, November 23, 1899. 24. Katrina Blue has presented additional background on the movement and its teachings based on more recently obtained documents. See Katrina Blue, “Threads From an Old Fabric: New Discoveries Regarding the Holy Flesh Movement in Indiana (1899–1901) and Ellen White’s Response,” in Ellen White Issues Symposium 8 (2012): 6–34. 25. Districts were the predecessors of the unions set by the 1901 church reorganization. 26. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, September 22, 1900. 27. Reis, “The ‘Old Spirit of Blind Sammy Hancock.’ ” 28. See the incident Ella Robinson records in S. N. Haskell, 80. 29. Quoted in Blue, “Threads From an Old Fabric,” 14. Haskell may have been using hyperbole in his reference to “getting out alive,” but probably not, as suggested by his overall reaction to the Muncie meeting. 30. H. H. Haskell to Sara McEnterfer, September 17, 1900. 31. Gary Land, “Holy Flesh Movement,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 873. 32. Ibid., 873, 874. 33. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, September 25, 1900. 34. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, July 27, 1900. 35. Ibid. 36. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, August 12, 1900. 37. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, September 13, 1900. 38. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, February 5, 1900. 39. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, August 12, 1900.

Chapter XX

Haskell Visits the American South hile the New England diaspora had largely moved West across the northern tier of the United States, a few had gone to the American South, some becoming prominent in business and politics and often

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adopting the southern attitude toward slavery, as stereotyped in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional character Simon Legree. But after the Civil War, many New Englanders traveled to the former Confederacy to teach and help the newly freed slaves. Seventh-day Adventism, a New England–born faith, had not yet ventured there, however. And New Englander Stephen Haskell would spend many years helping to bring the message to that region. For many reasons it would be an extremely difficult area for the denomination to enter. First of all, the American Civil War had devastated the South, leaving it in ruins and deeply wounded socially and emotionally. Six percent of those serving in the Union forces had perished in battle or from disease, while 18 percent of the South’s white male soldiers aged thirteen to forty-three had died. And a much higher percentage of the Southern population had served in the military than in the North, creating an even greater loss to the South. Property destruction in the South had been tremendous. Union forces systematically wiped out farms, plantations, and the South’s more limited railroad and industrial basis. The devastation was horrendous.1 The South had already seen major social, economic, and political fractures, and the Civil War only intensified them.2 The North had employed starvation as a military weapon,3 and, as scientific study has shown, that would have an

effect on the next generation of Southerners and create significant health problems, which would complicate the restoration of the region. All this would contribute to the myth of the “Lost Cause,” a propaganda-like perspective that helped to ease the pain of the South’s defeat. It is hard for us today to grasp the vast difference between the thriving pre–Civil War South and the impoverished region afterward. A large part of the South’s prewar economic value had consisted of slaves. Recent studies suggest that the pre–Civil War South may have been even wealthier than the North (an estimated $3 billion in slaves and another $3 billion in land), and, on a per-capita basis, the states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia were likely the four wealthiest in the Union. Only two Northern states (Connecticut and Rhode Island) appeared in the top twelve richest states. The $3 billion of slaves as property was a greater value than the North’s investment in factories and railroads. If the South had been a separate country in 1860, it would have been classified as the fourth richest nation in the world. Only France, Germany, and Denmark had a higher per-capita income.4 Emancipation erased that advantage. The freeing of the slaves wiped out their “property” value, and without such cheap labor to work the land, the South’s economic worth plummeted. By 1870, five years after the war’s end, the South’s economic output had regained only three-fourths of its 1860 level. Southern average annual income returned to the 1860 mark only around 1890. In 1860, workers in the South had incomes of 75 percent of the national average. Yet, by 1890, Southern income had fallen to only half of the national average. The Panic of 1893 further worsened conditions. A high percentage of the resulting bank failures were in the Southern states. Decades of the widespread growing of crops such as tobacco and cotton had exhausted the soil. Poor agricultural practices led to extensive erosion that destroyed large areas of farmland. Much of the South remained an economic and social backwater well into the 1930s.5 Such economic devastation created all kinds of problems and social

conditions that Adventist evangelists had to contend with. The intense poverty would in time encourage Adventist missionaries to the South to turn to approaches that would help people economically. For example, they would teach them how to grow new cash crops.6 Besides the economic conditions, Adventists had to deal with still another fundamental factor as they sought to evangelize the South. Before the Civil War, slave owners had, with the help of federal authorities, created what historian Clement Eaton has labeled an “intellectual blockade” to shut out any new ideas from the North that might undermine their social control.7 Their defeat by the Northern armies had destroyed that structure, but the widespread fear of things connected with the North reasserted itself in more subtle ways. Decades of such a mind-set had instilled in many Southerners the attitude that if something was from the North, particularly from New England, it must be a threat to everything they valued.8 In addition, before the conflict, the region had, just as with the case in New England, attempted to export its slave-owning culture.9 But its defeat had destroyed that hope. As Michael Barone observes, “The Civil War can be seen as the Yankee conquest of North America.”10 Having lost its attempt to create a separate political nation, the South now set out to develop a stronger cultural identity in opposition to the North, especially New England. Adventism, unfortunately, as a religion that had originated in the North (particularly New England), was, then, to be feared. In fact, one of the leading and most effective apologists for slavery, George Fitzhugh, had, in the years just before the Civil War, cited Millerism as one of those wicked Northern movements that threatened what he perceived as a stable Southern society.11 One could not expect Adventists, the religious heirs of the Millerite movement, to be received with enthusiasm. The North had fought to abolish physical slavery,12 but blacks and many poor whites were soon thrust into sharecropping and other forms of economic servitude.13 Many in the South were determined to restore

slavery (and its national power) in all but name,14 and they succeeded to a large extent. The southern elites rammed through laws restricting the rights of freed slaves and used terror and force to keep them in submission. In the blunt words of South Carolina politician Edmund Rhett, southern states passed a series of black codes so that the recently freed slaves would “be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible, and as far from the condition of the white man as is practicable.”15 Lynchings, murder, and other violent acts were constant facts of life for southern blacks, which only worsened every time a political election came around as the ruling party sought to keep them from voting. One of the worst examples was what has been called the Colfax Massacre, in which an organized mob of two hundred whites shot, bayoneted, or burned to death more than a hundred blacks in a little town on the bank of the Red River, 225 miles northeast of New Orleans.16 The white population’s resentment over the South’s military loss and subsequent military occupation would fester for generations after Reconstruction officially ended. For a time, certain factions of the Republican Party attempted to help the former slaves, but most soon wearied of the almost impossible challenge and eventually cut political deals with the South to end Reconstruction and thus protect their greater strength in the North as well as business interests in the South.17 The Church Enters the South It was within this difficult environment that Seventh-day Adventism, a movement that had begun in the North, now sought to gain converts in southern states. Adventists would encounter intense hostility and prejudice, especially because of their efforts to reach and help the black population of the South.18 The depressed financial condition in the South created the need for the denomination’s program of self-supporting institutions and shape their development. Converts in the South would not have the financial resources to support church structures the way the frugal

New Englanders had when the denomination began to form in the North. Nor, because of the lingering effects of the 1893 financial panic, did the General Conference have the funds to spread the church in the South. The General Conference was barely surviving as it was. At times the church’s treasury would be down to just a few dollars. All of this would handicap the spread of Adventism. But Stephen Haskell explored the American South for its potential for the church, just as he had researched the rest of the world during his global travels. Haskell entered the South gradually, first traveling to meetings with those Adventist pioneers who had gone to the region earlier, then living in major southern cities while holding evangelistic meetings and conducting training schools. But he did not cease his constant travel across the United States and would frequently return to the North, including his beloved home of New England. During January of 1900, Stephen and Hetty attended an educational convention at Graysville Academy, Graysville, Tennessee. There the couple met most of the southern workers. Stephen and General Conference president George A. Irwin made plans to crisscross the country until April. Later in January, Haskell visited Oakwood Industrial School. The denomination’s first school to educate young blacks beyond the elementary school level, located on an old 360-acre farm near Huntsville, Alabama, Oakwood Industrial School opened with four teachers and sixteen students on November 16, 1896.19 Haskell would later become quite involved with it. From Oakwood, he and Hetty went to Yazoo City, Mississippi, and then to Vicksburg. There he toured Edson White’s Morning Star. The vessel impressed Stephen, and he wrote that his wife was having a “holiday.” Next they traveled to the new school in Keene, Texas, before attending the Arkansas Conference meetings. After the Arkansas meetings Haskell swung back into the Midwest and Far West. Then, beginning in January of 1905, he lived for extended periods of time in Nashville, Tennessee.

1. William C. Davis argues that such total destruction was what defeated the South, not any loss of will or other factor. See his The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), especially chapter 7. 2. William W. Freehling, The South Vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War (New York: The New Press, 2008). 3. Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011). See also David J. Eicher, Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 4. See Fleming, A Disease in the Public Mind, 208, 209. 5. For background and a general survey of all aspects of the South, including religion, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 15th-anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); see also Clark, Social Change in America, 249–296; Beatty, Age of Betrayal, xi–xvii, 109– 147, 211–215, 377–389. An older but concise survey of the pre–Civil War South appears in Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, 169–218. For the Jim Crow period extending into the twentieth century, see Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 182–202. 6. The little town of Portland, Tennessee, used to ship boxcar-loads of strawberries until labor costs forced the commercial raising of the berries to other countries. E. K. Vande Vere once mentioned to the author in a conversation that Adventist self-supporting missionaries had started the strawberry industry in the region. 7. Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 335–352. A powerful mind-set based on the concept of honor dominated the pre–Civil War South that lingered afterward in more subtle forms, further complicating the difficulties that anything from the North would encounter as it sought to penetrate the region. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 25th-anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8. Colin Woodard, in his discussion of how distinct and permanent cultures have shaped American history, explains how three of them in the southern states (Tidewater, Deep South, and Appalachia) began to cooperate to resist and purge from the region anything they identified as northern (Woodard, American Nations, 263–267). 9. Barone, Shaping Our Nation, 51–103. 10. Ibid., 103. 11. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 103, cited in Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword, 158, 159. Fitzhugh lists Millerites along with Spiritists and women’s rights advocates. The promise of the Second Coming that offered release from slavery would undermine the slave owners’ control. 12. For President Ulysses S. Grant’s failed attempt to preserve what the North had struggled to

accomplish, see Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Times Books, 2004). Interestingly, Bunting observes that “Grant’s hero Abraham Lincoln apart, blacks have never had a more constant or solicitous president than Ulysses Grant” (146). 13. While much of the attack on blacks consisted of legal and economic restrictions and forced debt, other efforts were much more extreme and outrageous. For some egregious examples, see Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008). 14. Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 83–88. 15. Hodding Carter, The Angry Scar: The Story of Reconstruction (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 136. 16. Beatty, The Age of Betrayal, 114–117, 136–141, 213, 278, 279; Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt, 2008). 17. For example, see Morris Jr., Fraud of the Century, 21–45; also Beatty, Age of Betrayal. 18. A classic study of the difficulties Adventists faced as they evangelized in the post–Civil War South is Ron Graybill, Mission to Black America: The True Story of Edson White and the Riverboat Morning Star (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1971). See also Louis B. Reynolds, We Have Tomorrow: The Story of American Seventh-day Adventists With African Heritage (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1984). Some Adventists have expressed puzzlement and even disappointment at what appears during the final decades of the nineteenth century as a retreat on the part of Ellen White in her counsels about race relations in the South. But the more one learns of the overwhelming domination of the southern attitude toward blacks and the deliberate use of every means to create and maintain white power, one can understand more clearly what she and the other Adventist pioneers faced in the South as they sought to introduce Seventh-day Adventism in the former Confederacy. In many ways, life in the South was as repressive as any totalitarian regime. 19. The Adventist Church’s experiences in establishing the Oakwood school and shaping an educational program there are parallel to that of African-American higher educational systems in the post–Civil War South as a whole. See, for a convenient summary, Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront, 115–121.

Chapter XXI

A Struggle to Reorganize the Church

A

s Haskell returned to labor for his church in the United States, the

new century brought still more major changes to America, and at an ever accelerating rate.1 The explosive development and growth of electricity during the final two decades of the nineteenth century, for example, was transforming not only American manufacturing and transportation but society itself.2 Electric lights meant that work and other activities did not have to cease at sunset, and the new power source permitted new industrial processes, such as the processing of aluminum, to take place much more easily and inexpensively. Electric streetcars allowed cities not only to move people around more efficiently (creating suburbs) but also to banish horse manure from its streets, eliminating a major urban health hazard. But technology was still shaped by sociology. Although the streetcars gave Americans new freedom to get around, social forces could immediately restrict that freedom. While Haskell lived in Nashville, Tennessee, newly enacted segregation laws began limiting where American blacks could sit on the new forms of transportation. The tension became so strong in the city that Stephen felt that a “race war” might break out at any time, curtailing any further attempts to evangelize the South. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, as always, would not be immune from such transformations. Not only would electric streetcars now rumble past Adventist church offices and homes, but electric lights and telephones

also began to be featured in the buildings themselves. While the national electric grid was yet in the future, first emerging on a large scale around Chicago during the 1920s, Adventist publishing houses and sanitariums began installing their own generating facilities.3 Pushing Back the Night Electricity is such a fundamental part of modern Western life today that we are oblivious to it, but it has changed almost every aspect of how we live. Until the turn of the twentieth century, most people worked from dawn to dusk and then went to bed. Lighting was expensive and limited in its availability. People could not afford to stay up after dark and had to squeeze most activities into the daylight hours. Evangelistic meetings could not compete with work time, so they had to be convened only on Sundays, when most people were available but would be attending their own churches or visiting, or the evangelist had to struggle with kerosene lamps. The spread of electricity opened up free time after dark that evangelists could take advantage of. The nightly meetings, so long a part of Adventist evangelism, would have been difficult if not impossible until the widespread use of electricity. Electric slide projectors and, later, in the 1920s, an occasional movie projector would augment evangelistic and other lectures.4 And, if the local conference could string up a temporary power supply, camp meetings would no longer have to use candles or kerosene lamps in flammable canvas tents. Haskell could hold his 6:00 A.M. Bible studies even if the day were heavily overcast. The spread of electricity led to still other changes. First telegraph and telephone, and now Internet and video conferencing have altered how quickly the church makes its decisions and then carries out its mission. Instead of letters taking days or even months to get a response, information and decisions could be exchanged within hours or even minutes. But the church’s administrative structure at the end of the nineteenth century could not, unfortunately, keep up with the pace. Because of its organizational

structure, decision making either took a long time or did not happen at all. And, even beyond such physical and social changes in the church, the very numerical growth of the denomination was forcing it to make major shifts that would involve both structural and theological issues. A Universal Problem What Adventists faced was not a unique problem, however. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, both the United States as a whole and the Seventh-day Adventist Church faced a dilemma in how to deal with such massive growth. The United States, long a nation of small farms and rural villages and towns inhabited by craftsmen and small businesses, now had to figure out how to cope with large industries and businesses, as well as transportation systems that ran for hundreds of miles. In addition, the American population looked to government to provide more and more services that touched the entire nation. Frustrated, both national and business leaders searched for organizational structures that could cope with their ever-expanding size and complexity, a process complicated by the extreme individualism of many Americans. Eventually the country learned to manage its escalating growth through the development of centralized bureaucracy—a system that most people profess to hate but in reality is absolutely necessary. It must be controlled rather than dispensed with.5 The Seventh-day Adventist Church had both numerical growth and an increasing variety of institutions and complexity of programs. It attempted to deal with such programs and services as education, health and medical facilities, religious liberty issues, Sabbath Schools, and missions by creating separate organizations to oversee each area. More than just reinventing the wheel, they were constantly duplicating it. But such an administrative structure became increasingly cumbersome and inefficient.6 Furthermore, because the denomination had a limited number of leaders and administrators, the same small group of people had to fill the positions

in each organization. Not only cumbersome, it created interlocking directorships that produced all kinds of conflict of interest, especially at General Conference sessions that were supposed to be opportunities to inject new blood into leadership.7 The previous administration would name the session’s standing committees, including the nominating committee. In addition, the current GC executive would continue to operate. All this made any change difficult as, consciously or unconsciously, each administration would seek to perpetuate itself. To further complicate the situation, Adventists at the same time had to deal with their own manifestations of too-rabid American individualism, particularly on the part of J. H. Kellogg, A. T. Jones, and E. J. Waggoner. Such individuals had power and were determined to wield it and maintain it. Church leadership began to recognize the problem.8 Ellen White repeatedly urged the General Conference administration to make changes.9 But neither she or the other leaders knew exactly what to do. Many assumed that getting the right leader would solve the problem. They discussed the problem extensively during the 1897 and 1899 General Conference sessions but could come to no conclusion. The discussion at the 1897 session was so extensive that the nominating committee could not make its report until the last two days of the meetings.10 By now a rising star in Adventist circles, W. W. Prescott11 urged major organizational changes, especially in the area of education. Haskell resisted them. Part of the tension must have resulted from the temperament and background of the two men. The younger Prescott had a degree from prestigious Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and had worked in journalism and other areas outside the church. On the other hand, the older Stephen had little formal education. Exposure to a larger intellectual world had made Prescott more open to new ideas, while Stephen was more intellectually rigid. Even though the ideas Prescott presented in 1897 reflected concepts that Ellen White shared with Haskell in letters and manuscripts, Stephen still opposed them.12

It is distinctive of human nature that even the most progressive innovators will later want to protect from change what they have pioneered or accepted in the past. Haskell, who had brought so many developments into being in the church, now sought to defend the structure that he had become a part of so many years before. As General Conference leaders discussed the desperate need for new ways of doing things, Stephen protested that the organizational structure of the 1860s had been divinely ordained and therefore should not be altered. Now in his sixties, Haskell had long since made most of the major changes in his ideas and practices during his early years as a Seventh-day Adventist. He had reached a stage in his thinking that, while he might polish or modify ideas now and then, the basic concepts and methods should remain inviolate. However, Adventist missionaries in South Africa and Australia had encountered the British system of operating large international businesses and organizations through centralized bureaucracies. The British Empire had centuries-long experience of such necessary administrative structures. Church leaders working in these areas began to conceive of what would become the conference departmental system and started to experiment with it. The church in Australia began its institutional development during what that nation’s historians refer to as the rise of Australian federalism. The British had settled the region as a cluster of independent colonies. By the 1890s, the six largely self-governing colonies moved to join into a single nation with a unified government. During 1897 and 1898, a federal convention drew up a constitution that the Australian people approved in 1901. Adventist leaders there would have been aware of the national trend toward reorganization to solve the colonies’ common problems, and it must have influenced their own search for new and more effective administrative structures. George R. Knight notes that the three main architects of change at the 1901 GC Session—Ellen G. White, A. G. Daniells, and W. C. White—all had experience outside the United States,

particularly Australia.13 Arthur G. Daniells, who had been exposed to Australian federalism as well as the Adventist Church departmental system pioneered both there and in South Africa, brought elements of it to the 1901 General Conference Session.14 By now, Haskell, under the encouragement of Ellen White, had changed his attitude toward reorganization and was ready to support it. When A. G. Daniells brought a resolution to the floor of the session that moved that the usual rules and procedures be dropped and a general committee be appointed to develop and bring items to the delegates (a committee that included Haskell),15 Stephen questioned whether the committee would be a permanent one or just for the current GC session.16 Daniells explained that it would be a temporary one, and Haskell endorsed the concept before the vote on the motion. “It seems to me that we need something of this kind,” Stephen said. You know that in our General Conferences before, every measure has been left to a committee, and then brought before the conference. It has not been a representative committee of the different institutions, and that is one point in particular concerning which the voice of God has spoken [through Ellen White] this morning. A representative committee can appoint as many committees as they please; but they are the working committee for the Conference only, so that, in that sense, it relieves the Conference of the care and burden of recommending plans to bring matters before the Conference. It does not cut off anybody, but simply unifies the whole work, and brings matters before the brethren to act on when they have some point to present.17 The traditional system in which leaders elected in the previous term planned the agenda for the next GC session was a self-perpetuating system

that blocked needed change. A whole new approach was necessary. Besides reshaping denominational administration, the session dealt with a number of other issues. One of them involved the debt that had accumulated on the growing system of denominational schools. Leadership devised a plan for students and others to sell Ellen White’s book Christ’s Object Lessons and apply the proceeds to erasing the debt. The General Conference session promoted the project. Haskell, always ready to support the distribution of Adventist printed matter, spoke in favor of the plan. Then he shifted to another topic, one also heavily discussed at the meetings: the long-debated move of Battle Creek College to a more rural site. Ellen White was again urging that the college leave Battle Creek. “There is another thing I will speak of,” he commented, and that is the location of the school. I remember the time when the present site was selected for the college in Battle Creek. I remember also what Sister White then said to her husband, “Why do you not go up here and buy the fair ground?” The fair ground at that time, if I remember right, contained fifty acres. Brother White said, “We have not the money.” When they talked the matter over with Sister White, she always said, “Get the school on some land outside of the thickly settled city, where the students can work with the land.” I wanted to say that in view of what Sister White said here [at the 1901 GC Session]; as I was present at the time.18 Stephen had not forgotten the incident three decades earlier. At the 1901 Session, the General Conference finalized the college’s transfer to Berrien Springs, Michigan. The 1901 restructuring of the church would also alter one of Haskell’s major legacies to the denomination. It folded the work of the International

Tract and Missionary Society into the new General Conference publishing department, a process of change that lasted from 1902 to 1913. Then the lay evangelism aspects of the former society were spun off to a General Conference Missionary Department (now handled in the Personal Ministries Department) and a parallel establishment of home missionary secretaries at all levels of church organization. The publishing department would focus on the creation and manufacture of print materials. Wrangling With Royalties Shortly after returning to the United States from Australia, Haskell began working on a problem that had particularly troubled some of his close friends: author royalties. It was a complex and sensitive issue that had simmered for many years. One of those individuals was Ellen G. White. As already alluded to, she would personally cover all initial publishing expenses for her books, such as copyediting, typesetting, proofreading, and plate making, out of her own pocket. Often she had to take out loans. Then she would repay them from her book royalties. Beyond that, she would use the income from royalties to support countless mission and other projects.19 Unfortunately, during the late 1890s, the management of the Review and Herald Publishing Association had begun reflecting the big business practices of the late nineteenth century. As had become common in many companies at the time, the Review’s top officials paid themselves large salaries while cutting the pay of ordinary employees and reducing every expense possible. The depression of 1893 intensified the pressure to slash costs. And it was not easy to find competent managerial personnel who could handle complex organizations but were willing to work for minimal wages. The publishing house was not making enormous profits. While the church needed many of the products the Review produced, sales did not always cover their development costs. Repeatedly Ellen White counseled

with Review management about finding ways to come up with material that church members could purchase inexpensively and distribute widely. But to do that required other products to bring in more income. Such a balance was extremely difficult to achieve, and the publishing houses constantly struggled to break even. Members of management felt that they had to take drastic measures just to survive. One of the business expenses the Review leadership sought to reduce— if not eliminate altogether—was that of author royalties. During the publishing house’s early days, James White had apparently given half of the income from a book to the author. Eventually the Review reduced royalties to 10 percent. By 1907, management wanted royalties to remain with the company and even argued that anything written by a Review employee automatically belonged to the publishing house. When Ellen White was ready to publish The Great Controversy, Review leaders wanted to cut her royalty drastically. Eventually she accepted a smaller rate. In return, the house promised that it would get the book out as quickly as possible. But after the Review printed the volume, management consigned it to the warehouse for nearly two years and, instead, pushed its own title, Bible Readings for the Home Circle. (Ironically, Ellen’s nephew Frank Belden had prepared the latter book for publication.) Pacific Press followed the Review’s example, also promising to promote aggressively The Great Controversy if Ellen would accept a lesser royalty. Then it, too, let the book sit on the shelf.20 Because she had taken out loans to prepare the book and to contribute to other causes, Ellen landed in financial difficulty that lasted for the rest of her life.21 She especially borrowed large amounts shortly before her death, and when she died, her estate was in arrears, an issue that was not resolved until August 1939.22 The Review had also cut Uriah Smith’s royalties on his many books until he was receiving almost a pittance. He, like Ellen White, sought to use his author royalties for church causes. He had promised $1,000 to denominational projects in Australia, wanted to repay what it had cost the

church to send him to Palestine, and desired to return what he considered as having been excess wages. Stephen Haskell fussed to Ellen White that the Review had “jewed” Smith’s royalty down drastically.23 After a new management team took office at the Review in 1900, Haskell decided to see what could be done about the royalty situation, not only for Smith but for others, including Edson White. But Ellen White cautioned Stephen against aggressively going after back royalties, aware that to do so could jeopardize the publishing house’s precarious financial situation.24 She was willing to forgo her own royalties to avoid damaging the Review and Herald.

1. For a snapshot of some of those developments, see Edward Wagenknecht, American Profile: 1900–1909 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). Besides technological, social, and economic trends, Wagenknecht examines such areas as home furnishings, publishing, art, music, popular entertainment, the food industry, religion, and education. In his discussion of the food industry, he explores the Seventh-day Adventist contributions to the new dietary developments (pp. 144–148). Many at the turn of the century recognized how much the world had changed, and they assumed even greater changes would come in the twentieth century. For a sampling of those expectations at the start of a new century, see Judy Crichton, America 1900: The Turning Point (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 4–6. 2. For the development and spread of electricity, see Klein, The Power Makers. Ernest Freeberg examines many of the ways electric lights alone changed American society in his The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (New York: Penguin, 2013). He even has a section on John Harvey Kellogg’s pioneering use of light in medicine. 3. The fire that would eventually destroy the Review and Herald Publishing Association plant in Battle Creek in 1902 may have started in or near the building’s dynamo, or electrical generator, room. L. A. Smith, “Total Destruction of the Review and Herald Printing Plant,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 6, 1903, 12, 13. 4. Howard B. Weeks alluded in passing to some of these technological developments in his Adventist Evangelism in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1969). 5. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), chapters 6 and 7. For bureaucracy in the area of business, see especially p. 181, and for national government, see pp. 188–195. 6. George R. Knight, Organizing to Beat the Devil, 67–96. See also Valentine, The Prophet and the Presidents.

7. Gilbert Valentine has extensively discussed the problems that such conflicts of interest created. See his paper, “How We Did Business: Conflict of Interest and General Conference Electoral Processes, 1897–1926,” submitted to the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Historians Triennial Conference, Union College, Lincoln, Nebraska, March 21–24, 2013, http://www.sdahistorians.org/2016-asdah-conference-papers.html, accessed September 11, 2016. 8. Perhaps the best summary of the difficulties facing the church and how it responded is found in Knight, Organizing to Beat the Devil, 67–131. 9. Valentine, The Past and the Presidents and Knight, Organizing to Beat the Devil. 10. For a summary of the frustrating session, see Valentine, “How We Did Business,” 8, 9; see also Valentine, The Past and the Presidents. 11. See Valentine, W. W. Prescott for a full survey of this significant leader’s life. 12. Valentine, W. W. Prescott, 126. 13. Knight, Organizing to Beat the Devil, 105. 14. For a more in-depth study of the 1901 reorganization, besides George Knight’s works on the subject, see also Benjamin McArthur, A. G. Daniells: Shaper of Twentieth-Century Adventism (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 2015). 15. General Conference Bulletin, April 3, 1901, Extra No. 1, 27. 16. Ibid., 28. 17. Ibid., 29. 18. “A Statement Regarding the Disposition of the Battle Creek College Property,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 26, 1903, 19, 20. 19. Ellen G. White, Sermons and Talks (Silver Spring, MD: Ellen G. White Estate, 1994), 2:254; White, The Publishing Ministry, 234, 235. 20. White, The Publishing Ministry, 207, 208. See also Valentine, The Prophet and the Presidents, 75–77. 21. White, The Publishing Ministry, 206–208, 237, 354, 355. For more on Ellen White’s difficulties with the Review and Herald Publishing Association, see Gerald Wheeler, “Review and Herald Publishing Association,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 1103–1105. 22. Valentine, The Struggle for the Prophetic Heritage, 45, 46, 130. While the GC considered the debt as concluded in 1939, final accounting details were not worked out until April 14, 1941. See also James R. Nix, “Will and Testament, Ellen G. White’s Last, and Settlement of Her Estate,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 1267–1271. Ironically, the Review and Herald and Pacific Press were asked to each pay one-fourth of her funeral expenses. Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, vol. 6, The Later Elmshaven Years, 444, 445. 23. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, May 28, 1900. 24. Ellen G. White, The Publishing Ministry, 236–238.

Chapter XXII

Urban Evangelism askell had attended the momentous 1901 General Conference Session not only as a delegate-at-large but, as he had been for decades, an active participant. Not only did he participate in the

H

discussion, but he gave a series of Bible studies, presented a report on his experiences in Africa, offered prayers and benedictions, and gave the charge to a minister who was being ordained before heading to a mission field. But the session would involve him even more. In addition to voting a major overhaul of church administrative structure, church leaders “invited S. N. Haskell and wife to make New York City and vicinity their field of labor.”1 From 1901 to 1912, Haskell and his wife were especially active in urban evangelism, working in New York, Nashville, San Bernardino and Oakland, California, and Portland, Maine. Their work in the cities has not received the attention it deserves. In many ways it was a role model for how, according to Ellen White, the church should evangelize urban areas. She sought to expand the church’s focus from that of small towns to the exploding cities.2 Ellen White had been urging the church to become more active in reaching major urban areas, especially New York City,3 and the delegates must have hoped that Stephen and his wife would make the breakthrough that she so desperately longed for. It would be a major new adventure for a denomination that had grown up in small villages and towns. America was rapidly urbanizing, and the church needed to adapt to a changing

environment. Adventism had to expand to where people were now increasingly living. Throughout the nineteenth century, urban areas had attracted an increasing proportion of the American population.4 Farmers unable to succeed in rural areas migrated to the cities in search of work, at first largely in New England. A rising number of factories began locating in towns and cities, because that was where the people they needed to work in them lived in the greatest density.5 And as industrialism expanded, it drew still more Americans into urban living. A Flood of Immigrants People from rural areas were not the only ones to flock to the cities. In the middle of the nineteenth century, immigrants from Europe, either fleeing oppression or seeking economic improvement, began to flood the nation. The massive waves of immigrants were changing the face of the cities. By 1890, adult immigrants outnumbered native-born adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with populations of more than one hundred thousand, while in New York and San Francisco, 42.2 percent of the inhabitants were firstgeneration immigrants.6 Although many dreamed of buying land and setting themselves up as independent farmers, few had the financial resources to do so. Instead, more and more of the newcomers found employment in cities. Although some still hoped to earn enough to purchase land, most—just to survive— accepted jobs in urban factories and shops as soon as they arrived on the docks of major ports. They did not assimilate as easily as earlier immigrants, and they were willing to work for cheaper wages. Big corporations used them as strikebreakers to replace costlier and more skilled employees. Also, because the immigrants spoke so many different languages, they found it harder to organize into unions, a fact that their employers took advantage of.7 Men often could not earn enough to support their families, so wives and children had to work and pool their meager

incomes.8 Crowded into unsanitary and dangerous tenements, poorly educated, and isolated by language and culture from the larger society,9 such immigrants (as well as those who had moved from the countryside to find work) created a situation that could explode into social chaos at any time.10 American Protestants sought to convert and assimilate the diverse populations. Many denominations sent young people abroad to learn the languages and culture of the immigrants, then established special congregations for them. For example, Haskell’s childhood Congregational Church had, at one time, 724 churches and missions for the foreign population groups that ranged from Armenians to Turks. The Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists were also active in such programs.11 Seventh-day Adventists also developed specific language or ethnic congregations, especially for Scandinavians, Germans, and Italians. In addition to foreign-language publications, they established schools catering to specific languages, such as Hutchinson Theological Seminary (originally Danish-Norwegian Seminary) and Clinton Theological Seminary (German).12 Still another way of dealing with the problem was developed in the approach known as “social work.” Spearheaded by such individuals as the reformer Jane Addams, it provided the increasingly educated Victorian American women an outlet for their talents and desires to serve others beyond the traditional role of teaching. The settlement houses they established created channels to help improve the lives of the large numbers of immigrants crowded in squalid urban conditions, as well as offering a way of Americanizing them. Such programs, their supporters hoped, would reduce the possibility of class conflict.13 John Harvey Kellogg had become interested in such social programs and developed an extensive system as part of his Chicago Medical Mission.14 Ellen White, while sympathetic to the concept, felt that Adventists did not have the resources to participate in such programs to the

extent that Kellogg wanted. Some conferences that had attempted to operate such missions had nearly bankrupted themselves. She felt that the church should leave such things to others.15 In her understanding, the church should not spend its money on making immigrants and the poor into middle-class Americans but on creating Adventists. While she repeatedly urged the church to enter the crowded cities, it was for evangelism, not for social work in and of itself. Adventists could use some of the techniques and programs of the settlement houses but as a way of reaching people for its mission. Haskell followed her suggested approach. Experiment in New York City His first attempt, in a major way, would be in New York City. The city is the center of a unique American culture that Colin Woodard calls New Amsterdam. Besides being an urban environment with all its characteristics, challenges, and problems, the metropolis is a distinctive culture itself. It is the heart of a region also labeled New Netherlands, which spreads across northern New Jersey, western Connecticut, western Long Island, and the New York counties immediately adjacent to the city. Founded in 1624 on Manhattan Island as a Dutch trading post, the colony had a hard time attracting settlers, so the Dutch encouraged anyone willing to come there. Its population soon included Lutherans from Poland, Finland, and Sweden; French-speaking Walloons; Catholics from Ireland and Portugal; Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers from New England; and eventually refugee Jews who in later centuries would become a significant part of its population.16 For such disparate groups to get along, they had no choice but to be tolerant of each other. New York City and the surrounding areas developed a multiethnic, multireligious society oriented toward commerce and real-estate speculation. It would continue to attract diverse immigrants, becoming the major entry point for the massive waves that would surge into the nation. New Amsterdam would have a profound impact on the development of individual rights and religious liberty in

America.17 Being unlike any other city in the United States, New York City has been a constant challenge to Adventist evangelism. Stephen Haskell would perhaps have the greatest success of any Adventist evangelist there. The introduction of iron and, later, steel girders, as well as the invention of the elevator, allowed the construction of high-rise buildings, culminating in the American skyscraper. These buildings particularly impressed Haskell, who had spent most of his life in a world of two- and three-story structures. “In this city there are some buildings over thirty stories high,” he informed his Advent Review readers. “In the building where we live there are fifty-three families. The building is seven stories high, and two elevators run day and night.”18 Stephen and Hetty immediately faced the diverse nature of the city, stating that they could “work among all classes of people.” When the couple went to New York, the metropolis had only four Adventist churches, two in Manhattan and two in Brooklyn. Two were ethnic,19 German and Scandinavian, and the other two English-speaking. The couple rented a sixth-floor suite of rooms just a few blocks from the southwest corner of Central Park. “Do not let our brethren forget to pray for us,” he urged Review readers. “Do not forget the address. It is 400 West 57th St., New York City.”20 They began giving Bible studies to their apartment-house neighbors, besides conducting a training school. Using multiple approaches to reach people, they assembled a team that began with seven individuals (six female and one male) and would eventually total twenty. It included homecare nurses, Bible and cooking school instructors, and young people who sold books and magazines on the city streets. Selling forty to sixty items during an afternoon, at 70 percent profit, would bring a person about $3 a day at a time when many laborers still earned a dollar a day. Those working at the mission would pay a certain amount of their sales income for room and board. Thus income from the sale of the publications and

fees charged by the nurse—when combined with Mr. and Mrs. Haskell’s salaries ($10 and $8 per week), as well as gifts from businesspeople and others—made the group self-supporting. However, what the church was paying his wife disturbed Stephen. Hetty had received $10 a week as a Bible instructor until she had married him, more than she was now paid. He poured out his frustration to Ellen White, explaining that she did the work of “three paid conference laborers,” gave “as many Bible readings [lessons] as any one of the conference laborers in the mission,” did evangelistic work equivalent to a full-time minister, and did the mission’s bookkeeping, often not finishing until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.21 Because the project was a training school as much as an evangelistic center, the group spent the morning in classwork. After a Bible study from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. and then breakfast, Hetty, beginning at 9:00 a.m., instructed those with some experience in witnessing and then at 10:00 a.m. taught a class for new staff members. Afternoons were devoted to selling books and periodicals, personal visitation, and Bible instruction. During the evenings, they would either do more of the same as in the afternoon or conduct public meetings.22 Although local Adventist church members brought names of individuals for them to visit, Hetty would decline, explaining to Ellen White that they were “trying by God’s help to ‘pick the bushes near the wagon,’ ” an allusion to one of Mrs. White’s visions that compared evangelism to picking berries.23 Hetty responded to such requests by telling them that “if they have friends interested to work for them in the fear of the Lord, . . . God will help them. That we have not come to the city to do their work; but to work for souls nobody else is working for, and when we tell them of the hungry souls we find right within a stone’s throw of our own home, they usually say it is all right, and they will work for their friends and pray for us. By working near at home our workers can do more, they can hold readings [topical Bible studies] in an afternoon even in hot weather.”24 By February 1902, two nurses had joined the team. “They are medical

missionaries,” Hetty reported to Ellen White, “not medical nurses without the missionary. During the last week we have had someone in for treatment, I think every evening.” Charging $1 for a massage when the person came to the mission headquarters, and $1.50 when giving it at an individual’s house, the staff offered such procedures as “shampoo,25 hot bath, salt glow, hot and cold to the spine, and simple treatments and massage.” Hetty proudly announced, “Our nurses are sowing seeds of truth as well as health.”26 Perhaps with tongue in cheek, Stephen Haskell compared his evangelistic team with David’s followers described in 1 Samuel 22:2. “They belong to three different classes that went to David in the wilderness. They are the ‘oppressed,’ the ‘discontented,’ and those in ‘debt.’ Nearly all of them are those that were not specially connected with the cause before coming here. We have advanced money to pay the debts for some, on which we are paying interest.”27 Several of those helping the Haskells were recent converts. Stephen wrote to A. G. Daniells about three men converted just three months after he and Hetty arrived in New York City. One was “an experienced Baptist minister who, with his wife, has embraced the Sabbath, pays his tithe, and as far as he knows, has adopted the health reform; these [the three men] are anxious to enter the work as soon as they have had sufficient instruction to do so.”28 Another individual had been unfairly disfellowshiped after getting at cross-purposes with an Adventist pastor.29 Hetty Haskell trained him to be a lay evangelist, and two years later he went to Scotland as a self-supporting missionary.30 Not only did the Haskells train people in witnessing techniques, but also they sought to prepare the team and its converts to be able to sustain their spiritual lives after Stephen and Hetty moved on. “We told the brethren it was not our intention to remain with them as pastor, for we had none in any of our churches, but we had local elders, etc., that we only designed to remain till they had been educated to care for themselves, and we would

go somewhere else.”31 By September 1902, the evangelistic team members led by the Haskells were holding meetings at three different sites, all within about a sevenminute walk of its headquarters at 400 West 57th Street. E. E. Franke The Haskells were not the first to do evangelism in the city, a fact that caused Haskell much frustration and grief. A younger man, E. E. Franke, had begun working in the city during the late 1890s. His earlier successes in the city had impressed Ellen White to the point that she considered him as someone “especially fitted to labor for unbelievers in our large cities.” She believed that he could reach secular people in a way that few others could.32 Unfortunately, Franke and Haskell were too different from each other to work well together. Haskell had first met Franke in November 1900, when Stephen substituted for A. G. Daniells as General Conference representative at a New York Conference session in Brooklyn. Although Franke preferred to work by himself, he and Stephen got along well when they labored together at the 1902 Vermont camp meeting. They developed plans to cooperate in their evangelism in New York City that fall.33 Unfortunately, Franke was flamboyant in his approach to things, liking the spectacular, including his style of advertising. As an example, during an earlier evangelistic series in Kankakee, Illinois, he had, in the words of G. A. Irwin, employed “a two-horse wagon, with a large platform upon it, with a bell fixed in the center, and over that a small tent. Around the whole platform he had banners, upon which were printed, ‘Which day do you keep?’ and ‘Which day is the Sabbath?’ et cetera. This was driven through the streets . . . , a boy inside the platform ringing the large bell to attract attention.”34 Ellen White saw other flaws in him, such as his “theatrical style of preaching” that mingled “truth with common, worldly methods.”35 He indulged in “extravagance and display.”36 Besides his evangelistic

style, he also had problems with interpersonal relations. “Elder Franke is impulsive,” she noted, “and he often treats church members as if they were school children. Then when his authority is questioned, he loses control of himself, and a tornado of angry words fall from his lips. Afterward he is sorry for this explosion of feeling.”37 For his New York City evangelistic series, Franke would print hundreds of large posters, as well as small advertising cards, all emblazoned with “E. E. Franke, Evangelist.” Haskell wrote to A. G. Daniells that he estimated that Franke spent “hundreds, if not thousands” of dollars on promotion for his meetings.38 Franke attracted people in large part through his strong personality and skill in preaching. Using his charismatic personality, he created a personal following. Stephen, however, was leery of such an approach. “I have noticed,” he wrote some years later, “that when large companies are brought out simply by preaching, after a few years many of them are lost to the church.” He had seen it happen after his evangelism in London, England, many years before. “These people come out largely through preaching instead of through individual study of the Bible, and therefore, when adversity comes, they do not know how to stand firm on the Bible alone.”39 Stephen preferred to reach people through personal contact, including the activities of literature sales and home nurse visits. When he mentioned to Ellen White some years later his plans to begin some new evangelism in the Bay Area, he observed, “We cannot enter San Francisco with a big flourish of trumpets. It will have to be a quiet, house to house work, getting the people to read, and then opening a hall and holding meetings when an interest has been awakened.”40 While Franke might momentarily capture an audience, Stephen wanted to gain the trust of others by genuinely helping them. Furthermore, Haskell had a New England reserve and fiscal caution. Unlike Franke, he would spend as little as possible on promotion. The team did give out thousands

of advertising cards on New York City’s elevated railways41 every week. Fortunately, such cards were quite inexpensive. Hetty Haskell reported to Mrs. White that “some of the friends who did not understand how the Lord is working for us, came to us with the remark that it must cost immensely to advertise, that we must spend hundreds of dollars each week for the advertising we were doing. When we told them that we usually average from six to nine dollars a week,—simply the cost of printing our cards,— they looked incredulous, and I really think they hardly believed that we were actually giving facts.”42 The contact with the crews of the elevated trains benefited the Haskells’ group in other ways. “The train men have been so very kind to them that they have even passed them from one station to the other without their paying any fare. . . . As a result of our distributing in the elevated roads, several of the families of conductors are greatly interested in the truth. The gentleman who has charge of starting the trains, down at what they call ‘the barn,’ where all the trains start from, is having Bible readings in his home.”43 Having seen its value many years before, Haskell obtained free advertising in local newspapers. “Although we have had notices in the papers most every week now for some time, . . . yet we have not had to pay.” Hetty explained that “Elder Haskell has always maintained that the Lord owns the newspapers, and therefore it is perfectly right to expect the Lord’s notices to be printed in his own papers free of charge. And the Lord has honored our faith.”44 Rival Evangelists The two evangelists could have kept busy in separate areas of the large city, but then Franke opened a series of meetings in the expensive Carnegie Hall, only three blocks from the headquarters of the Haskells’ mission. Stephen had obtained a lease on the much cheaper Metropolitan Hall and had arranged for Luther Warren to speak there. But now he

worried that the more sedate Warren could not compete with the more charismatic Franke. Frustrated, Haskell wrote to Ellen White about the situation.45 At some point she contacted the president of the newly formed Greater New York Conference and urged him not to let Franke compete with the meetings organized by Haskell. Also she stated that “according to the light given her we ought not to encourage Elder Franke to return to labor in New York City.”46 Franke protested that he had already distributed ten thousand advertising fliers, advertised in various newspapers, arranged for music (he often used non-Adventist choirs), and rented a hall.47 Ellen White then recommended that the younger evangelist concentrate elsewhere in the city since “there is abundant room for you both.”48 Despite the problems, she hoped that the two men could work in unity. While she continued to point out Franke’s problems to him,49 she also felt that Haskell had some responsibility for the deteriorating situation. She chastised him for the failure on his part to do what he could to reconcile with the other evangelist.50 Stephen later would have similar difficulties when church leaders in California asked him and Hetty to work with a younger evangelist named William Ward Simpson.51 As with Franke, Ellen White was impressed with Simpson’s evangelistic approach,52 but Simpson’s style was different enough from Haskell’s that they were not comfortable working together. In November 1901 Ellen made the decision to travel from California to discuss the matter with Franke and Haskell. For a time, her efforts seemed to ease tensions. She supported what Haskell was doing but suggested that he relocate himself and his staff to a more isolated place. The aging Stephen must preserve his strength.53 The situation worsened sometime during the summer of 1902. Franke abandoned his intent of cooperating with Haskell and turned against him. At the Greater New York Conference Session in October, he began accusing Stephen of trying to remove his ministerial credentials. Hetty

wrote Ellen White that Franke “opened his sachel [sic] and took out one of [Dudley] Canright’s books that he had ready with leaves turned down all through it and began reading a lot of the lies Canright had written against Elder H.”54 Apparently Franke wanted to become conference president and saw Haskell as a threat. Quietly Stephen slipped out of the meeting until after the election. No one defended Haskell until just before the vote. Then, in Hetty’s words, “Bro. Uchtman rose and read, ‘A bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not self-willed, not soon angry,’ and sat down.”55 Franke failed to get either the president’s or vice president’s position. After all the conflict, the Haskells moved to Brooklyn, where they wouldn’t be so close to Franke. The next year they left New York City. During their fifteen months they had gained between seventy and eighty converts in New York and another twelve who joined the adjacent New Jersey Conference.56 Stephen was proud that the whole project had cost the local conference only $60, the first month’s rent on their apartment headquarters.57 As for Franke, a few months after Haskell’s Brooklyn meetings, the General Conference leadership withdrew Franke’s ministerial credentials.58 Eventually he would lead a New Jersey congregation out of the denomination and then leave Adventism himself. First Black Church in New York City A number of blacks attended the meetings in Metropolitan Hall, sponsored by the Haskells. Because whites tended to stay away from evangelistic series because of the presence of numbers of blacks, Haskell began holding special sessions just for his black audiences. That separation of the races triggered some criticism,59 a reaction that has continued to the present. Despite that, on Sabbath, August 16, 1902, Stephen organized his black converts into the first African-American Adventist church in New York City. The members of the new congregation would pay their rental expenses by selling Adventist publications.

While free blacks had long lived in New York City and other large northern cities, former slaves and their descendants began to swell those communities. The city’s black population rose from 91,709 in 1910 to 152,467 by 1920.60 The mass exodus from the South would especially explode from World War I onward.61 The greater freedom and opportunity to succeed in life that blacks found in urban areas, particularly in New York City, would express itself in a number of ways, both in general society and within the denomination. Thus, the population growth of blacks in the North had its own influence on the Seventh-day Adventist Church. New York City’s black Adventist congregations would assert more independence, a current that eventually led to a push for black regional conferences. As for the Haskells, they continued their urban evangelism in other cities. In 1906 they organized an evangelism program in San Bernardino, California, in which the couple alternated health lectures with doctrinal talks. Stephen would preach on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Hetty either conducted or arranged for a cooking class or presentation on health on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights.62 While the variety of programs could attract the interest of more people, it was also physically demanding on them. Hetty Haskell was the main Bible instructor for the team, trained the other Bible instructors, coordinated the cooking and health classes, and supervised the staff of between twelve and twenty people. It left her exhausted.63 The couple also conducted major evangelism in Nashville, Tennessee, Oakland, California, and Portland, Maine. Bible Training School The nineteenth century was a period during which magazines on countless topics suddenly appeared and then disappeared just as quickly. Adventist publishing has reflected a similar pattern as specialized periodicals started, merged, or ceased. One that lasted longer than most was the Bible Training

School, a sixteen-page monthly publication that the Haskells inaugurated in New York City as a resource for all aspects of door-to-door and home evangelism. Stephen wrote to Willie White that they intended it “to give instruction in Bible Readings to those who cannot get to attend any [lay evangelism] institute. There are good books of [Bible] Readings published, but to strickly [sic] follow them destroys the individuality out of a person. And it is our object to try and give instruction as to how to study the Bible so as to preserve their individuality.”64 Stephen and Hetty Haskell, Ellen White (who often had the lead article), and J. N. Loughborough were the main writers for the publication. Particularly aimed at literature evangelists, Bible instructors, and Sabbath School teachers, it covered all kinds of topics, including biblical and doctrinal subjects, prophecy, denominational history, comparative religion, practical Christian living, witnessing approaches, advice on healthful living, and even techniques of home nursing. Each issue contained one or more prepared Bible lessons that Bible instructors or other church members could use in their personal witnessing. The periodical carried the subtitle, “A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Interest of House-to-House Bible Work.” A subscription cost twenty-five cents a year, forty cents for Canadian and foreign addresses. Tract societies bought batches of subscriptions (referred to as clubs) for their activities, and church members would sell individual copies on the street or from home to home. Because church members often subsidized the production costs of some of the special issues, those issues would bring in especially good income. During the journal’s lifetime, the Haskells published six issues a year plus the special numbers in a total of eighteen volumes. Stephen’s letters indicate that he kept careful track of the magazine’s circulation, especially since it received no denominational funding. The Haskells often used the sale of special issues to raise funds for special projects. By buying lots of ten thousand copies at three cents each, church members could then sell them at retail for ten cents. Some could sell up to

150 copies a day. Fifteen dollars would be more than a week’s wages for many during that time. Students at South Lancaster Academy would earn school scholarships by selling the periodical. Others used it to start or fund missionary activities and institutions. Some protest did surface against church members selling the periodical on the streets of southern cities. The fear was that it would affect the sale of The Ministry of Healing, a work that the denomination was using at the time as a fund-raiser. Haskell responded to the concern by relating Aesop’s fable about the gnat that paused to rest on an ox’s horn. The insect apologized for disturbing the large animal. “The ox blandly informed him that he did not know he was there. . . . Now selling a few thousand of the Training School compared to the Ministry of Healing is as the gnat on the ox’s horn.”65 He also pointed out that he had taken individuals whom conferences had dropped or refused to hire and trained them to be successful, some of them selling as many as 150 copies a day. Stephen saw it as another proof that he was not competing with the denominational publishing program. When he became president of the California Conference for the final time, Haskell decided not to use the periodical in that state, lest it be perceived that he was promoting his own publication at the expense of regular denominational ones. In fact, he vowed to sell thirty thousand copies of a special issue of Signs of the Times in the San Francisco and Oakland area.66 When the Haskells left New York City, they published the periodical from South Lancaster, Massachusetts, in a little cottage the couple set up as an office. The periodical ceased publication with the January 1920 issue. As editor, Haskell would respond to those who wrote to him with theological and other religious questions. For example, a Mrs. Anna C. Fay, a self-proclaimed “independent” Sabbath observer, wrote to him in protest of the use of pictures in periodicals, regarding it as a violation of the second commandment that prohibited graven images. Mrs. Fay

received a prompt reply from Haskell, and afterward they continued a sporadic correspondence.67 The Bible Training School published at least some tracts. One, entitled “The Wine of the Bible,” was a six-page leaflet that had the Bible Readings style of listing Bible texts with brief comments, plus an allegorical drawing of the fate of the drunkard on the “Dark Valley Railroad.” It sold for one-half cent or a hundred copies for fifty cents. Witness of the Pioneers Six decades by now had passed since the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844. The organized denomination itself was approaching the halfcentury mark. As the first generation of Adventist leaders and preachers now rapidly died off, those still remaining found themselves in great demand at camp meetings and other gatherings. Church members wanted to hear from those living links with the church’s beginnings and take photographs of them. As a result, Haskell, J. N. Loughborough, and others received countless invitations to speak. They became Adventist celebrities. During the summer of 1908, for example, Ellen White, Loughborough, and Haskell spoke at the Lodi and Melrose, California, and Reno, Nevada, camp meetings. The Review billed them as “the three oldest, active pioneers in this cause.”68 In a revised version of his earlier denominational history, The Rise and Progress of Seventh-day Adventism, Adventist chronicler Loughborough sought to preserve the witness of his fellow pioneers. He began to collect the fading memories of those early Adventists who still survived. In 1904, he interviewed Haskell as he worked on what would become his Great Second Advent Movement, published the next year.69

1. General Conference Bulletin, April 21, 1901, Extra No. 16, 355. 2. See the helpful discussion in Jerry Moon, “Seventh-day Adventist Medical Evangelism: Three Models, 1892–1922” (research paper, May 1989). See also George R. Knight, “Cities, Living in,” in

Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 714–716; R. Clifford Jones, “City Evangelism,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 716–718. 3. For a selection of her statements calling for the evangelizing of major cities, see Ellen G. White, Ministry to the Cities (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2012). 4. For an older survey of the growth of American cities at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, see Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963). 5. For a period, some New England textile mills located in semirural areas, and the wives and children of farming families would spend part of the year in special dormitories while they worked to earn extra income. The mill owners eventually abandoned the practice. Clark, Social Change in America, 164–167, 185, 186. 6. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 146. 7. Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 119–121. 8. For more background on this economic and social situation, see Beatty, Age of Betrayal; Rauchway, Murdering McKinley; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent. 9. Although it is an older work, Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951) explores the deep isolation the immigrants experienced as they came to the United States. 10. The most famous exposé of the dreadful conditions of the urban poor in the nineteenth century was Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner, 1890). The Dover reprint of 1971 has a hundred of Riis’s photographs that the printing technology of the 1890s did not permit to be reproduced. The original 1890 publication had to have engravings of the photos. For a biography of Riis, see Tom Buk-Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America, trans. Annette Buk-Swienty (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 11. See Page Smith, America Enters the World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 833, 834. 12. The sheer number of immigrants soon produced a strong reaction, however, as Anglodescended Americans began to fear being overwhelmed by the new arrivals, especially those from eastern and southern Europe, who were mostly of the Catholic faith. The older settlers feared that they would lose their traditional supremacy. Three groups particularly fought against immigrants. Labor unions regarded those foreigners who took jobs at low wages as a threat to their attempts to organize workers. Many social reformers felt that immigrants intensified the massive problems facing the rapidly expanding cities. And Protestant conservatives feared that the non-Protestant immigrants would destroy the traditional Protestant power in America. The hostility toward Catholics was especially intense, and Catholics themselves often did not help the situation as, for example, they demanded government funds to expand their parochial school system, an act seen as a threat to Protestant-oriented public education. Sadly, Adventist writers such as Uriah Smith began to echo the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic rhetoric. While

Seventh-day Adventists saw the papacy as fulfilling a particular prophetic role, Smith went far beyond that, using similar anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant invectives to those employed by nonAdventist groups. His editorials and other writings morphed into almost venom-filled attacks, though in fairness to him, he was writing in the sensationalist editorial approach expected at the time. He also displayed the northern European sense of superiority so many Americans felt, claiming that the best immigrants were of Scandinavian stock. For documentation, see Gary Land, Uriah Smith. 13. Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 132–135; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 52–54. 14. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, 168–176. 15. For example, see Ellen G. White, Manuscript Releases, 4:419, 420. 16. Woodard, American Nations, 66. What was happening in the Dutch colony reflected the earlier experience of the homeland itself. The Netherlands had become the melting pot of Europe as refugees from all over the continent fled there. The many groups had little choice but to learn tolerance. The Puritans, who would eventually settle in New England, had spent a number of years in Leiden. Unfortunately, they did not learn the lesson. They left because they were afraid of tolerance. See Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York: Vintage, 2004), especially pp. 45, 46, 95, 96, 125, 126, 158–160, 244, 245, 252, 274–277. 17. For a full study of the development of the Dutch colony and its impact on early America, see Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World. 18. S. N. Haskell, “The Bible Training School in New York City,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 12, 1901, 739. 19. A pattern even more dominant among Adventists in the city today. New immigrant groups have replaced the European ones of the early twentieth century. 20. S. N. Haskell, “Addresses,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 9, 1901, 448. 21. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, May 23, 1902. Equal pay to women for equal work with men remained a sensitive issue in the church (especially North America) until almost the end of the twentieth century. 22. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, July 18, 1901. 23. See Ellen G. White, Gospel Workers (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1915), 136–139. 24. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, July 27, 1901. For a vivid account of what conditions could be like in New York City, especially during a major heat wave, see Edward P. Kohn, Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 25. Washing facilities were still quite limited in most homes. People living in apartment houses would still have to share bathrooms, and showers were scarce. Simple things that most people now take for granted were often unavailable.

26. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 14, 1901. 27. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 17, 1902. 28. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, September 19, 1901. 29. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 26, 1900; H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 16, 1900. 30. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, June 6, 1902. 31. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 17, 1902. 32. Ellen G. White to A. G. Daniells and W. W. Prescott, October 9, 1903. 33. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, September 5, 1902. 34. G. A. Irwin to Ellen G. White, November 8, 1900. 35. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell and wife, February 5, 1902. 36. Ellen G. White to Brother and Sister Haskell, September 23, 1901. 37. Ellen G. White to A. G. Daniells and W. W. Prescott, October 9, 1903. 38. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, September 19, 1901. 39. S. N. Haskell, “Two Methods of City Work,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 2, 1912, 5, 6. 40. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 24, 1911. 41. The predecessor of the city’s subway system. 42. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 14, 1902. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, January 4, 1902. 46. Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, vol. 6, The Early Elmshaven Years 1900–1905, 134. 47. E. E. Franke to Ellen G. White, October 25, 1901. 48. Ellen G. White to E. E. Franke, October 31, 1901. 49. For several examples, see Ellen G. White, Manuscript Releases 3:277, 279; 6:230, 244. 50. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, July, 1902; Ellen G. White to Brother and Sister Haskell, September 23, September 29, October 31, 1901; Ellen G. White to E. E. Franke, October 5, 1900. 51. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 14–17, 1906. 52. Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, vol. 6, The Later Elmshaven Years 1905–1915, 113. 53. Ellen G. White, MS 127, November 26, 1901. 54. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, September 5, 1902.

55. Ibid. 56. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 14, 1902. 57. The rent was later increased to $150 per month as the Haskells had to rent more rooms to house their expanding team. 58. A. G. Daniells to W. C. White, October 14, 1904; April 14, 1905. 59. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, August 16, September 5, 1902; March 7, 1903. 60. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 4. 61. Perhaps the most extensive exodus from the South was to Chicago, though it echoes what happened in other northern urban areas. See Grossman, Land of Hope. 62. Mrs. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, May 14, 1906. 63. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, August 1, 1906. S. N. Haskell to W. T. Knox, August 1, 1906. 64. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, May 21, 1902. It is a concept that the church needs to relearn in a time when some are selling prepackaged evangelism kits and promising that anyone can do evangelism if they will use their product. 65. Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 36. 66. Reference April 1908 letter 67. According to Jocelyn Fay, great-granddaughter of Anna. The author has a copy of one letter (S. N. Haskell to Mrs. Anna C. Fay, May 19, 190-) of what must have been a more extensive correspondence. The stationery Haskell used, besides showing a photo of his books, Daniel and Seer of Patmos, as well as an issue of the Bible Training School, has an inset drawing of a calf standing in front of a blazing altar and a yoke and plow with the motto above it, “Ready for Either”—that is, either to serve or to be sacrificed. (This is possibly also an allusion to the story of the call of Elisha [1 Kings 19:19–21].) The symbols varied in size through the years, and the letterhead often would list Haskell’s books, the Bible Training School magazine, and the Circulating Library for the Blind. 68. “The Lodi (Cal.) Camp-Meeting,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 16, 1908, 17. 69. For background on Loughborough’s historical works, see Strayer, J. N. Loughborough; Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Haefeli’s book gives a more nuanced presentation.

Chapter XXIII

Battle Over Inspiration uring the first decade of the new century, a major conflict in Seventh-day Adventist circles arose concerning a theological issue that was at the time referred to as the “daily” controversy, but was at its

D

core a debate about the nature of divine Inspiration. Most theological disputes ultimately involve specific understandings of the issue of how God inspired the Bible and thus how one should interpret Scripture. The “daily” controversy caused confusion and distrust, and it would divide leading denominational administrators. Haskell was a major initiator of the controversy and a fiery and determined leader of one of the factions. The episode graphically illustrates the damage caused by theological controversies that get out of hand and, even worse, personal. The issue involved the meaning of the “daily sacrifice” taken away by the little horn in the vision of Daniel 8. The early Seventh-day Adventist pioneers shared the view of most Millerites that the removal of the “daily” referred to the action of Roman paganism.1 But a new view had developed among some Adventists that saw the removal of the “daily” as the taking away of the knowledge of Christ’s priestly mediation in the heavenly sanctuary by the papal ecclesiastical structure and the establishing of a false sanctuary system in its place. L. R. Conradi first published the concept in German, and then W. W. Prescott in English.2 Church historian Jerry Moon sees the new understanding as differing from the earlier one on two basic points. First, the new view simplified the exposition of Daniel 8 by

identifying the three occurrences of the English word “sanctuary” in verses 11, 13, and 14 as the same sanctuary, the heavenly (although two different Hebrew terms stand behind the English word “sanctuary” in these verses). Second, the new view changed the focus of attention to the ministry of Christ, thus highlighting “the true sanctuary service” as the context of Daniel 8:14. The new view also claimed to correct some of the historical argumentation set forth by supporters of the old view, although the historical conclusions of the two sides were virtually identical.3 To Haskell and those who shared his position, the controversy hinged on the interpretation of a statement Ellen White had made in her book Early Writings in reference to Daniel 8:11–13: “Then I saw in relation to the ‘daily’ (Dan. 8:12), that the word ‘sacrifice’ was supplied by man’s wisdom, and does not belong to the text; and that the Lord gave the correct view of it to those who gave the judgment hour cry. When union existed, before 1844, nearly all were united on the correct view of the ‘daily,’ but in the confusion since 1844, other views have been embraced, and darkness and confusion have followed. Time has not been a test since 1844, and it will never again be a test.”4 Haskell’s loyalty to Adventist historical positions sometimes compelled him to defend them regardless of any new understandings that might later emerge. And many of the issues challenging Adventist theology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries needed to be forcefully confronted. For example, some had raised questions about the sanctuary doctrine itself, insisting that Christ must have entered the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary immediately after His ascension.5 Haskell observed that “among the most common errors” urged by those who rejected the traditional Adventist understanding of the sanctuary doctrine “are those drawn from the fact that God’s throne of judgment is in the most holy place, and therefore His throne is always looked upon as being

located there, and He never moves, but like a wooden god sits there forever and ever and ever.” But, Stephen reasoned, “the chief cornerstone of our position lies in the fact that . . . God’s throne was a movable one and was in the outer apartment.”6 Seventh-day Adventism has had a philosophical understanding of truth as being progressive—that is, there is always a “present” truth for each generation to discover. But that idea is easier to deal with in theory than in practice.7 In the issue of the “daily,” Haskell sadly failed because he clung to a specific and early formulization of a particular understanding of Scripture. To be fair to him, though, we must see why he reacted as he did. In his mind, the question of the “daily” involved more than just historical theology. He believed that the very validity of Ellen G. White’s prophetic gift rested on keeping the old view. Because of his relationship with her, he had always been supportive and protective of her role in the church. As just one example, in a Bible study that he presented at the 1901 General Conference Session, he said, “I desire to call to your attention to another thought, and that is the gift of prophecy. If any people should be thankful for that, it is Seventh-day Adventists. While other people have gone into confusion, God is leading this people.”8 Every Detail a Spiritual Lesson Stephen was terrified that the “daily” issue could lead to the abandonment of Ellen White’s gift, resulting in theological chaos in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. While some might have argued that one should not build such a big case on what was just a passing reference to the view of the “daily” held by the Millerites, he could not ignore her statement. In his 1893 Ministerial Institute series, he had stated that every part of Scripture was relevant for believers at the end of time. He constantly applied the principle in his Bible teaching. Once, during his Bible class on the book of Daniel at Avondale, he stated that he believed that every bit of Scripture contained some spiritual lesson. According to Ella Robinson, one of his

students challenged him on this assertion. The young man felt that some things in the Bible were merely background details. The student offered as an example Paul’s request for Timothy to bring to him the cloak and parchments the apostle had left at Troas (2 Timothy 4:13). Haskell immediately replied that a self-supporting missionary such as Paul would rather wait for Timothy to retrieve the items than spend unnecessary money for new ones.9 Many modern biblical scholars would agree with Stephen’s basic concept that the details of the concise and highly structured biblical messages can have great significance and that the biblical author specifically included them to make a point. But Haskell took the same position toward the writings of Ellen White. In his view, no statement she made could be ignored or downplayed. One of the reasons he took her role so seriously may have been an incident early in his career in the church. When Haskell was a young minister, James White, “as his custom” was, had taken him aside and given him “some fatherly advice.” Haskell reports, Among other things he said, God has led you and he will lead you if you will be led. Let no man be your director in His work. He can lead you and instruct you by His spirit as well as others to instruct. I understood it meant He would instruct me by the Testimonies of His spirit [and that I should] depend on the Holy Spirit for guidance, especially in theological matters, and not depend on others. Since then while from time to time I have sinned and greatly come short of God’s glory your [Ellen’s] testimonies as far as I have understood them have been my counsellors.10 Haskell took James White’s words to heart but apparently began to see Ellen White’s prophetic gift as in some way the primary channel of the Holy Spirit. As Stephen now looked about him in the church, he wrote, “[I] see quite

clearly there are breakers ahead. I also see there must be some who will give the Testimonies that you have given no uncertain sound.” He determined to be one of those defenders of her writings. “If not so, then the cause will be undermined by errors creeping in. They are coming from all sides. Some one must be more familiar with your writings so from the Bible and your testimonies be prepared to defend the truth. Some times I feel I ought to rest and reread the light you have given so [as to] have a fresh testimony. I am tired and fear I shall make mistakes. I want you should pray for me.”11 As Haskell defended the traditional position, he declared emphatically that because Ellen White had always taught it, to introduce any other viewpoint would give ammunition to those who did not believe in her.12 Eventually he concluded that “one might think that the Controversy [about the “daily”] will in the end, be among Seventh-day Adventists whether [Mrs. White’s] writings as given in the past will stand the test or not.” As for Haskell himself, he told Willie White, “Of course you know where I stand.”13 The “daily” issue became not so much about a specific interpretation of inspired writing as about the ways to interpret such inspired writing. It boiled down to what exactly is the essence of Inspiration and how we should approach it. Adventists, including Ellen White herself,14 have written much about the nature of Inspiration,15 but ultimately it retains much mystery. We cannot reduce Inspiration to a simple and mechanical formula. Those who worked with Ellen White in her prophetic ministry, although they accepted the validity of her gift, still struggled to grasp its subtle working. The first and perhaps most important attempt to grapple with how inspiration operated through the ministry of Ellen White was one that took place near the end of Haskell’s life: the 1919 Bible and History Teachers’ conferences.16 During those gatherings, Herbert C. Lacey, along with A. G. Daniells and W. W. Prescott, urged that the church adopt a more accurate view of how

Inspiration had actually operated in Ellen White’s ministry and the preparation of her writings. Those who had worked closely with her realized that Inspiration was more complex than most realized. Unfortunately, those who participated in the meetings decided not to release the transcripts, fearful that the membership could not cope with the issues the conferences had wrestled with. The only thing that did become public were rumors and suspicions, mostly spread by individuals who had not attended the meetings. Following the Bible and History Teachers’ conferences, Lacey became a target of ultraconservative pastors. Rumors even accused him of claiming that he had written The Desire of Ages. The minutes of the meetings, which might have dampened some of the worst allegations against him and others, or at least brought some of the issues into wider discussion, remained undiscovered until the 1970s. Haskell’s own understanding of how Inspiration shaped Ellen White’s writings is ambiguous. Jerry Moon, who has carefully studied Haskell’s life and letters, feels that he did not believe in verbal inspiration, though “he did appreciate the sense of authority carried by her [Ellen White’s] personal experiences, regardless of grammatical or punctuation defects. He objected to extensive editing [of her writings], and if he could get it, he preferred her handwriting to a secretary’s typewriting—even though he wrote practically all of his letters on a typewriter.”17 Herbert E. Douglass, on the other hand, concludes that Haskell did hold to some form of verbal inspiration.18 And George R. Knight definitely regards Stephen as a verbalist and inerrantist.19 Even if Haskell may have intellectually rejected a verbal inspiration position, his practice was almost indistinguishable from it. The issue becomes more complicated when one considers the fact that Haskell regarded Ellen White’s ministry and writings as an infallible interpreter of Scripture.20 He seemed oblivious to the implications of such a position that, in essence, put her on a higher level of authority than even

Scripture itself. After all, what one uses to evaluate and interpret something else must have a greater authority than the thing being judged or evaluated. Unfortunately, many Adventists have held a similar viewpoint to that of Stephen and have often put that viewpoint into print.21 While Haskell placed great authority on Ellen White’s prophetic role and on every word she wrote, at the same time he sought to let her know what was happening—as if the Holy Spirit might forget to tell her. In the case of the “daily,” he persistently requested from W. C. White and C. C. Crisler an appointment with her to discuss the subject22 and present what he saw as the proper perspective. The “daily” issue was not just a matter of interpretation of a specific passage of Scripture. It had been compounded by even more factors that troubled the denomination. Bert Haloviak sees the apostasies of John Harvey Kellogg, A. T. Jones, and others as driving Adventists into the two camps of how to interpret the nature of the inspiration of Ellen White’s writings.23 Finally, representatives of both viewpoints of the “daily” came together for a meeting in one of Mrs. White’s offices. Clarence C. Crisler (her private secretary), her son Willie White, Dores E. Robinson, A. G. Daniells, and Prescott met with Stephen and Hetty Haskell and J. N. Loughborough. Hetty Haskell regarded the meeting as a failure. Afterward she told Daniells, “Brother Prescott is so sure he’s right and everyone else wrong.” It annoyed her that Prescott had spent four hours presenting his position before allowing Haskell and Loughborough to speak. She said that “two old men over seventy-four years of age” had “hardly a fair chance” to respond to the much younger Prescott’s arguments.24 The meeting in many ways had only further polarized the issue. Defender of Tradition As the controversy intensified, Stephen let it be known that he would defend the traditional position against those who sought to introduce new

interpretations. For example, he earlier wrote to Uriah Smith to encourage him in his efforts to maintain long-accepted Adventist theological positions and perspective. “It is beginning to be found out the old principles of the Third Angel’s Message are right so there is quite a whirligig in that direction.”25 Haskell also corresponded with Smith’s son Leon, who, like his father, served the church as an editor. In his letter, Stephen spent four pages detailing his understanding of the “daily.” One of the main differences between his and the new viewpoint involved the year “508, the date when the period [the 1,290 days] began, and the way prepared for the papacy.” He protested, “Prescott and Daniels say that there is nothing in history to show that date to be authentic. It makes no difference. Just as surely as [the] 1335 [day period] ended in 1843, Jewish time, just as surely 508 was marked by the Spirit of God.”26 Stephen was not shy about identifying by name those he thought were threatening the traditional arguments for the daily. He wrote Ellen White about “leading brethren” who were proclaiming ideas that “undermine present truth.” Haskell regarded their “errors” as “very dangerous.” One person especially concerned him. “There are many who know that Prescott and I differ and are really waiting to see how that will yet come out.”27 The attacks would escalate, and others would join in. They used what one can only describe as innuendo and even character assassination. For example, Haskell and G. B. Starr spread stories about Prescott losing Mrs. White’s friendship and confidence.28 The cloud that Stephen and his supporters put Prescott under soon took on a life of its own and would last the rest of his life.29 Haskell’s attacks on Prescott had still other ramifications, including the fate of Ellen White’s writings themselves. The White Estate office at Elmshaven had files of letters she had written as counsel to numerous leaders, often of a highly personal nature. Stephen had used allusions to some of them in his campaign to defend the traditional view of the “daily.”

After Ellen White’s death, the question surfaced of what to do about such sensitive material. Naturally, Daniells and others, the recipients of many such letters, would be reluctant to have them published. Who controlled Mrs. White’s materials? And what guidelines should be followed in their handling? Should everything she wrote be published or some restricted, perhaps permanently? Within weeks after her death, church leaders either laid off or transferred most of her Elmshaven staff, leaving Willie White working alone or with an occasional part-time secretary. He found himself greatly reduced in his role and authority, including whether he could release previously unpublished letters and manuscripts. A. G. Daniells took the position that only the General Conference committee could approve the release of new material. Furthermore, he stated that committee members of “strong conviction” insisted that “not one sentence should be made public by the [Ellen G. White Estate] trustees unless it had been printed in some form while Mrs. White was alive.” It was an issue that would take many years to resolve.30 In the meantime, Haskell and Starr wondered out loud if those administrators who held such a viewpoint even believed in Mrs. White’s prophetic role.31 Eventually Daniells would assure Willie White that the General Conference officers were “not unbelievers in the Spirit of Prophecy. They are true men, who have the welfare and triumph of this cause as seriously at heart as any who live.”32 As we have repeatedly seen, Ellen White had great regard for Stephen Haskell, especially because he was a fellow pioneer of the church. They had together struggled to create and advance the Seventh-day Adventist Church. She wrote, “A few of the old standard-bearers are still living. I am intensely desirous that our brethren and sisters shall respect and honor these pioneers. . . . Let every believer respect the men who acted a prominent part during the early days of the message, and who have borne trials and hardships and many privations.”33 Thus, even if she did not

always agree with them, she regarded them highly. For example, she had frequent differences with Uriah Smith and had to confront him at times for his actions.34 His stubborn conservatism several times led to his dismissal from the editorship of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. But when he regained the office, she could sound ecstatic. “I feel a strong sympathy for Elder Smith, and I believe that his name should always appear in the Review as the name of the leading editor. . . . When, some years ago, his name was placed . . . first, I wept, and said, ‘Thank God.’ ”35 She also had had a long struggle with George I. Butler over the issue of righteousness by faith. Butler resigned from the General Conference presidency because of the issue and remained out of denominational employment for many years. But when he returned to church leadership, she declared, “It is with feelings of satisfaction and gratitude to God that we see Elder Butler again in active service. . . . We welcome him into our ranks once more, and regard him as one of our most valuable laborers.”36 Her fondness and loyalty to such pioneers as Haskell must have made the controversy about the “daily” even more difficult for her. When Stephen took the side of the older view, Ellen White was torn between one of her fellow pioneers and the proponents of the new understanding, and Stephen’s attitude made her situation even more difficult. In May 1910 she called for “a meeting for prayer and Bible study” in which the proponents of the two viewpoints would discuss the issue. Unfortunately, the supporters of the traditional understanding refused to participate. Haskell wrote her that such a meeting would be a waste of time. “There is no hope of these old people [himself and his faction] who lived back in the early days of the Message being converted to this new light even if they [Prescott and those who shared his understanding] bring volumes of histories to prove it. Because they [the traditionalists] give more for one expression in your testimony than all the histories you could stack between here and Calcutta.”37 Ellen White herself stated that she did not grasp all the issues involved.

However, she did sense that the issue was not worth tearing apart the church. By 1910 she was forced to rebuke those who fought over “the true meaning of ‘the daily,’ ” declaring that she considered it “not a subject of major importance,” one on which she had “no instruction on the point under discussion.”38 Because of that, she specifically instructed, “My ministering brethren . . . shall not make use of my writings in their arguments regarding this question.”39 It must have greatly frustrated her when such a good friend as Haskell, whom she had worked with so well for decades, should persist in stirring up what seemed to her a needless controversy. In fact, Haskell himself admitted that the topic was of minor significance.40 Ellen White saw the whole conflict as a great distraction that played into the hands of Satan. It made the Adventist movement’s past experience seemed flawed, and to allow that would raise questions in people’s minds. Both sides, in her view, had spent extensive time and effort dwelling on minor aspects that fomented needless and potentially dangerous dissension.41 The men opposing each other were tearing the church apart over an issue that she felt had no salvational importance. In Jerry Moon’s view, her “main opposition was directed toward the disunity, the rancor, the time spent in debate, and the distraction from evangelism.”42 Significantly, she did not demand that either side relinquish their position, but instead that they should put aside the controversy “for the moment.”43 Also she did not want to lessen the influence of long-published books just because they might contain elements that might now need correction.44 As far as she was concerned, those involved did not need controversy on the “daily”; they needed daily conversion.45 Haskell, however, did not understand her seeming reluctance to take a position. As we have noted previously, Stephen often served as her eyes and ears to what was going on in the church, especially when she was overseas or on the other side of the country. He would inform her in great detail of what was happening in a particular situation. Then when she had

something to say about an issue, he would often act as her voice to others. We saw that illustrated in the Solusi Mission property controversy. But she did not respond now except to state that the issue was “not a subject of vital importance” and requested that the contention cease. Haskell could not understand her refusal to take a prophetic position on the matter. In his mind, she was not acting as she had during past crises. Undermining the Prophet Willie White did not regard what Haskell was doing as the least bit helpful. In fact, he saw Stephen’s position as threatening to undercut the very prophetic role that Haskell claimed to be protecting. By now the issue had expanded beyond the “daily” question to the nature of the historical data in her writings. When Haskell and William Walter Eastman46 contacted Willie about some questions Prescott had raised concerning certain historical dates in The Great Controversy, White drafted this response: Regarding Mother’s writings, she has never wished our brethren to treat them as authority on history. When Great Controversy was first written, she oftentimes gave a partial description of some scene presented to her, and when Sister Davis made inquiry regarding time and place, Mother referred her to what was already written in the books [Thoughts on Daniel and Thoughts on Revelation] of Elder [Uriah] Smith and in secular histories. When Controversy was written, Mother never thought that the readers would take it as an authority on historical dates and use it to settle controversies, and she does not now feel that it ought to be used in that way. Mother regards with the greatest respect those faithful historians who have given their [lives] to the study of the working out in this world’s history of God’s great plan, and who have found in this study a correspondence of the history with prophecy.47

After some comments about overemphasizing details of chronology, Willie continued, I believe, Brother Haskell, that there is danger of our injuring Mother’s work by claiming for it more than she claims for it, more than Father ever claimed for it, more than Elder Andrews, Waggoner, or Smith ever claimed for it. I cannot see consistency in our putting forth a claim of verbal inspiration when Mother does not make any such claim, and I certainly think we will make a big mistake if we lay aside historical research and endeavor to settle historical questions by the use of Mother’s books as an authority when she herself does not wish them to be used in any such way.48 Willie White took the first draft of his letter to his mother for her critique. She agreed with his response, as seen in a comment she wrote on one of the copies of the letter. In his second draft he modified his comment on Mrs. White’s writings as an authority on history by adding “on the dates or details.” He would expand the point even more in his version of the letter to W. W. Eastman.49 Knight observes that the tragedy of the interchange between W. C. White and Haskell is that Haskell advocated a position that Ellen White explicitly rejected in her postscript to one of her son’s letters to Haskell. On a carbon copy of the October 31 [1912] letter to Haskell . . . in which Willie stated in no uncertain terms that Haskell and others were . . . claiming too much for her writings, she wrote, “I approve of the remarks made in this letter.” She then signed her name. It was unfortunate that Haskell never saw that note. Quite probably W. C. White never saw it himself, since several carbon copies of that letter existed. If he had seen the copy with her postscript it would have been natural to send it to Haskell as a clincher to the argument. But he didn’t.50

A year later, Willie repeated his position that Haskell was hurting matters. He told him that some denomination leaders “feel that one of the most serious difficulties in holding their brethren loyal to the Testimonies is the fact that a few men of age and experience insist upon pressing on them the theory of verbal inspiration which Mother does not stand for, which the General Conference does not stand for, which my father never stood for. Some have expressed the opinion to me that the extreme and extravagant positions taken by a few men, including yourself, are doing more to bring the shaking over the Testimonies than any other element in the work.”51 The devotion Stephen felt toward her prophetic role in the church was now undermining it. Haskell had done much to encourage others about Ellen White’s role, the consequences of which lasted for decades. For example, in 1928, Percy T. Magan, Haskell’s long-ago traveling companion and then president of the College of Medical Evangelists (CME), had to tell John Harvey Kellogg that the medical school could no longer permit its graduates to accept internships at Battle Creek Sanitarium and Hospital. Kellogg demanded to know if Magan and CME taught its particular principles of health only because they had their source in Ellen G. White. “I must tell you,” Magan replied, “I do not understand all these things the way you do from a scientific standpoint, and much of my teaching is based upon the word of God and the spirit of prophecy rather than upon scientific demonstration.” “Then, Magan,” Kellogg retorted, “I am very sorry that it becomes necessary for me to tell you that I have a very poor regard for your intellectual capacity and ability. I cannot understand how a man whom I have always thought to have the intelligence which I have attributed to you could do the way you say you do.” “That is all right with me,” Magan answered. “Your statement does not worry me a particle, and now I must tell you something. If I am an imbecile or a moron, or both, as you intimate, if I am a creature of low

intellectual capacity because of my faith and belief in the word of God and the spirit of prophecy, there are two men52 who are responsible for my present adumbrated condition. One of these is now dead and gone, the one whose name you recently mentioned—S. N. Haskell. It was my privilege to spend quite a period of time with him when I was a lad in this work. I loved him very dearly and respected him very much, and I have always felt, and ever shall feel, that S. N. Haskell had deeper insight into the meaning of what we term the spirit of prophecy than any other man who ever lived and wrought and walked amongst us. His teachings made a lasting impression upon my mind.”53 Despite having done much for decades to build confidence in Ellen White’s writings and in her role for the church, Haskell, in claiming more for her role than she did herself, was putting her in a vulnerable position. His understanding of her would encourage church members to employ her writings as that of an infallible commentator and a source of all knowledge and detail. Then, when believers began to notice even minor problems, these issues would threaten their faith and confidence in her, as we have seen especially during the 1970s. Haskell was a valiant defender of Ellen White, but sometimes that loyalty led him to go too far. The very respect that church members had for him either blinded them to the extremeness of his position on the “daily” or confused and troubled them. Today the “daily” conflict may seem meaningless to members of a church that has largely accepted the viewpoint advocated by Conradi and Prescott. But old conflicts never really seem to die. Surprisingly, even after the church’s general acceptance of the newer position for so many decades, the “daily” issue occasionally still surfaces. In 2007, Angel Manuel Rodriguez, then head of the General Conference’s Biblical Research Institute, wrote an article on the subject for his column in the Adventist World NAD Edition.54 One of the letters responding to it cited Ellen G. White’s apparent support in Early Writings of the old concept.55

1. For a helpful overview of the background to the issue, see Denis Kaiser, “Ellen White and the ‘Daily’ Conflict,” in Ellen White and Current Issues Symposium 6 (2010): 6–34. 2. For a concise summary of the controversy, see “Daily, The,” in The Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia (rev. ed., 1976, pp. 366–370) and Jerry Moon, “Daily, The,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 751–754. Jerry Moon observes that O. R. L. Crosier came close to such a view in the early Adventist periodical The Day-Dawn, but Seventh-day Adventists remained oblivious to it. 3. Jerry Moon, “Daily, The,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 752. 4. Ellen G. White, Early Writings (Battle Creek, MI: Review and Herald®, 1882), 34, 35. 5. Albion Fox Ballenger was one of the major critics of the traditional Adventist sanctuary doctrine. For an overview of his life and positions on the topic, see Calvin W. Edwards and Gary Land, Seeker After Light: A. F. Ballenger, Adventism, and American Christianity (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2000). 6. S. N. Haskell Letter, June 11, 1906. 7. For an insightful essay on the challenges of progressive truth, see Rolf J. Pöhler, “Keeper of the Flame or Preserver of the Ashes? To Be Faithful to Past Means to Move Forward in the Spirit of Our Predecessors,” in Børge Schantz and Reinder Bruinsma, eds., Exploring the Frontiers of Faith (Lüneburg, Germany: AdventVerlag, 2009), 157–167. 8. General Conference Bulletin, April 3, 1901, Extra No. 1, 32. 9. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 150, 151. 10. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 29, 1909. 11. Ibid. 12. S. N. Haskell Letter, November 18, 1907. 13. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, May 16, 1920. 14. See especially Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 1:14–76. 15. Alberto R. Timm wrote a three-part series on the history of the Adventist understanding of Inspiration. See Alberto R. Timm, “Adventist Views on Inspiration 1,” Perspective Digest 13, no. 3 (2008): 24–39; Timm, “Adventist Views on Inspiration 2,” Perspective Digest 13, no. 4 (2008): 29– 49; Timm, “Adventist Views on Inspiration 3,” Perspective Digest 14, no. 1 (2009): 44–56. Part 1 covers the period of Haskell’s life. 16. Much of the stenographic report of the discussion was reprinted in Spectrum, June 1982, 19–34. 17. Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 8. 18. Herbert E. Douglass, Messenger of the Lord: The Prophetic Ministry of Ellen G. White (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 1998), 120. 19. George R. Knight, “The Case of the Overlooked Postscript,” Ministry, August 1997, 9–11.

20. See his statements in S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, June 30, 1907; February 25, 1909; December 6, 1909; S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White and W. C. White, November 18, 1907; S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, December 6, 1909; S. N. Haskell to C. C. Crissler [sic], March 30, 1908; April 15, 1908; S. N. Haskell to W. W. Prescott, November 15, 1907. 21. For a discussion of the Inspiration of Ellen G. White, see George R. Knight, Reading Ellen White: How to Understand and Apply Her Writings (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1997). 22. Valentine, W. W. Prescott, 218, 219. 23. Bert Haloviak, “In the Shadow of the ‘Daily’: Background and Aftermath of the 1919 Bible and History Teachers’ Conference,” research paper presented at the Meeting of Seventh-day Adventist Biblical Scholars, November 14, 1979, 18, http://ellenwhite.org/content/file/shadow-dailybackground-and-aftermath-1919-bible-and-history-teachers-conference-df-920#document, accessed September 13, 2016. 24. H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, January 26, 1908. 25. Uriah Smith had once again been demoted at the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald because of some of his reactionary positions, and Stephen urged him not to resign from the publication. For all anyone knew, Smith might become editor in chief once again. S. N. Haskell to Uriah Smith, March 20, 1896. Later that year, Smith sent Stephen a letter that reflected the melancholy that people often feel as they realize that time has grown short for them and they wonder what their lives have accomplished. Smith’s conflicts through the years with other denominational leaders and a frustration that the Second Coming he had so confidently expected had not yet taken place—it all seemed almost to overwhelm him. He told Haskell, “At my age there is more behind than there is before, and everything that comes within the field of memory is tinged with regret rather than gladness.” Knowing that Stephen would understand and that it was safe to unburden himself to his friend, Uriah said, “My whole life, compared with what it might have been, seems like a poor failure” (Uriah Smith to S. N. Haskell, November 10 [?], 1896). Such feelings as Smith expressed would have stiffened Haskell’s determination to defend what his generation had believed and taught since the beginning of Seventh-day Adventism. 26. S. N. Haskell to Leon A. Smith, January 21, 1909. 27. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, June 30, 1907. Ironically, Prescott may have influenced Haskell to take a verbal inspiration position. Writing to L. E. Froom many years later about the early Adventist position on the nature of Inspiration, W. C. White said that the “statement made by the General Conference of 1883 [on the issue of Inspiration; see Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 27, 1883] was in perfect harmony with the beliefs and positions of the pioneers in this cause, and it was, I think, the only position taken by any of our ministers and teachers until Prof. Prescott, president of Battle Creek College, presented in a very forceful way another view— the view held and presented by Professor [Louis] Gausen [sic]. The acceptance of that view by the students in the Battle Creek College and many others, including Elder Haskell, has resulted in bringing into our work questions and perplexities without end, and always increasing. Sister White never accepted the Gausen [sic] theory regarding verbal inspiration as applied to her own work or as

applied to the Bible.” W. C. White to L. E. Froom, January 8, 1928. Although the Swiss scholar Gaussen denied a mechanical concept of inspiration (see Jud Lake, “D. M. Canright, Ellen White, and Inspiration: A Crisis in the Making,” in Ellen White Issues Symposium 8 [2012]: 39, 40, 60), the two English translations used the word dictated when discussing Inspiration. Also Lake points out that, contrary to W. C. White’s claim that the pioneers did not hold verbal inspiration (ibid., 48), some did. Still, Prescott’s advocacy of Gaussen’s book apparently strengthened Haskell’s understanding of a verbal inspiration model. 28. Valentine, W. W. Prescott, 244. 29. See the closing chapters of Valentine’s book, W. W. Prescott. 30. See Valentine, The Struggle for the Prophetic Heritage. 31. Ibid., 81. 32. A. G. Daniells to W. C. White, July 22, 1925. 33. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 2:226, 227. 34. See Gary Land, Uriah Smith. 35. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 2:225. 36. Ibid., 226. 37. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, May 30, 1910. 38. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 1:164–168. Ten years earlier, Conradi had written to Ellen White to inquire if she had any insight on the matter, and since she said that she had none, he published his book on the topic in Germany. 39. Ibid., 164. 40. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, January 27, 1908; S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, December 6, 1909; S. N. Haskell Letter, December 6, 1909. 41. Ellen G. White to W. W. Prescott, June 24, 1908; Ellen G. White to W. W. Prescott, May 22, 1908. 42. Jerry Moon, “Daily, The,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 753. 43. See Ellen G. White to “My Brethren in the Ministry,” August 3, 1910; Ellen G. White, “Errors and Dangers of Prescott and Daniells,” MS 67, 1910; Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, August 29, 1908; Ellen G. White to W. W. Prescott, July 1, 1908. 44. Ellen G. White, Selected Messages, 1:164. 45. I quote the words of Denis Kaiser. For his insightful observations on the conflict, see his “The Word, the Spirit of Prophecy, and Mutual Love: Lessons From the ‘Daily’ Controversy for Conflict Resolution,” a paper read at the 2013 annual meeting of the Adventist Society for Religious Studies, Baltimore, Maryland. http://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/church-history-pubs/31, accessed on September 13, 2016.

46. Haskell had come to know Eastman in Nashville, Tennessee, where Eastman was involved in publishing. 47. W. C. White to S. N. Haskell, October 31, 1912. 48. W. C. White to S. N. Haskell, November 4, 1912. 49. W. C. White to W. W. Eastman, November 4, 1912. 50. Knight, Reading Ellen White, 108. 51. W. C. White to S. N. Haskell, January 15, 1913. 52. The other was Kellogg himself. 53. P. T. Magan to W. A. Spicer, August 6, 1928. 54. Angel Manuel Rodriguez, “What Is the Continual?” Adventist World NAD Edition, August 2007, 40. 55. R. W. Fanselau, “What is the Continual?” Adventist World NAD Edition, December 2007. See also Marc Alden Swearingen, Tidings Out of the Northeast: A General Historical Survey of Daniel 11 (Coldwater, MI: Remnant Publications, 2006), 39, 40, and Denis Kaiser’s review in Andrews University Seminary Studies 47, no. 1 (2009): 154–157.

Chapter XXIV

Book Author hrough the years, Haskell had written countless reports and articles for various denominational periodicals. Now he decided to prepare full-length books. One would be in response to Ellen White’s frequent

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comment that the church needed material on Daniel and Revelation that was shorter and not as detailed as Uriah Smith’s Thoughts on Daniel and the Revelation. “I have been instructed,” she wrote, “that the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation should be printed in small books, with the necessary explanations, and should be sent all over the world. Our own people need to have the light placed before them in clearer lines.”1 In 1899, Stephen talked with Uriah Smith about writing on the two prophetic Bible books. During the winter of 1900–1901, Haskell experienced one of his periods of illness. He used the time to prepare brief commentaries on the prophetic books as he thought Mrs. White had suggested. Smith went over the manuscripts only to check the accuracy of the historical references. Haskell told Ellen White that Smith refused to deal with interpretive issues or write any of the commentary himself. Instead, he vowed to limit himself to correcting errors and offering stylistic suggestions. Eventually, though, he did prepare an introduction to Haskell’s book. Stephen was happy with his help, telling Ellen White that Smith “has taken an interest it from the beginning.” In fact, he said, “he also has given me the best note of it of anyone.”2 Haskell published The Story of Daniel the Prophet in 1901 (and an illustrated version in 1907). It had an unusual format. He quoted and cited

thousands of biblical texts in the margins of the pages to further illuminate his interpretation of the prophecies. Then, in 1905, he released a companion volume, The Story of the Seer of Patmos. Stephen included study questions at the end of it. Some questioned the book for a time, discouraging Haskell, but eventually the three American Adventist publishing houses, as well as the Australian church publisher, took it on.3 Unfortunately, the books were not quite what Ellen White wanted. She had in mind a far simpler format—just the biblical text and a few explanations, and even the comments might not be necessary.4 “This is the suggestion that I made to Elder Haskell which resulted in the book he published,” she said after The Story of Daniel the Prophet came off the press. “The need is not filled by this book. It was my idea to have the two [biblical] books bound together, Revelation following Daniel, as giving further light on the subjects dealt with in Daniel. The object is to bring these books together, showing that they both relate to the same subjects.”5 Despite her reservations, Haskell still claimed that he had written both books at her direction. He explained to Spencer Curtis, general manager of the Review and Herald Publishing Association, that he would not have gone to the effort to prepare them “if [I] had not received direct testimony from Sister White telling us to write them, and more than that it was repeated several times before we even felt that we could do the work.”6 Haskell offered either book to those who obtained twenty new subscriptions to his Bible Training School periodical. Also, to those who sent in the $1 price for one of the book volumes, he would give them a year’s subscription to the paper. Later Haskell wrote The Cross and Its Shadow (1914), which he published through his Bible Training School organization in South Lancaster, Massachusetts. It explored Old Testament typology pointing forward to Christ in such areas as the sanctuary and its offerings, the yearly feasts, and the Levitical laws and ceremonies. Although the format of his works on Daniel and Revelation had somewhat disappointed her,

Ellen White prized this new book and often referred to it in her personal study. Clarence C. Crisler, her personal secretary, happened to be present when her copy arrived. “She is much pleased over the thought of you remembering her thus with the first fruits of your long labor of love in preparing the book and in seeing it through the press,” he wrote to Haskell, adding, “Several times when going into her office-room, I have found Sister White with your book in hand. . . . So far as I have been able to observe personally, the possession of your books has always given Sister White real pleasure; and this latest one has brought her comfort and cheer, and is kept within easy reach, close by her own volumes to which she frequently refers.”7 Her long friendship with Haskell probably intensified her interest in the book. Unfortunately, not everyone admired it. Some even felt prejudiced against it because Haskell had it printed at South Lancaster Printing Company and not one of the three American Adventist publishing houses. Hetty Haskell thought such a reaction unfair. She protested to Willie White that South Lancaster “prints Elder Miles Dictionaries that have no message in them and he sells them and the Washington brethren [consider] that is all right, but because they print our [the Haskells’] books that carry the message they denounce the printing house and call the New England Conference disloyal and are trying to stop it.”8 Stephen had struggled with the same apathy and even hostility toward his earlier book, The Story of Daniel. When the Review and Herald Publishing Association decided not to take the book, the general manager, Spencer Curtis, wrote Haskell a letter that Stephen understood to mean that the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald magazine would at least print a notice about the book’s existence. Haskell could accept the refusal to distribute the book as long as the publishing house handled orders for it and occasionally ran ads for it. He wanted to cooperate with the Review as much as possible.9 But when the Review asked to publish the forthcoming The Story of the

Seer of Patmos, Stephen hesitated. He wrote to Curtis, Now, we would be very glad indeed to have the publishing houses take the book and sell it, if they will do it, but we notice that since the publishing houses have taken the Story of Daniel, there has been little or nothing done in its circulation that we have known of except in the South [largely by the Southern Publishing Association]. We see catalogues out for the Christmas trade, advertising all kinds of books, some that do not contain present truth at all, but we have failed to see the Story of Daniel advertised in any of these lists. We had counted on the holiday trade doing a good deal in the sale of the Story of Daniel, if we had not sold it to the publishing houses. Of course, from your standpoint this may look all right, but from our standpoint it looks a little queer that the book is left out of all notices and not mentioned in any way.10 If the denominational publishing houses would not promote his books, Haskell believed, God would give him the strength and means to circulate them. While the royalty did help him and his wife in their many projects, “it is not a financial scheme with us. We have not published the books for the sake of making money. As I said we would never have dreamed of it if we had not received word from the Spirit of Prophecy to that effect, therefore our consciences are quite clear in the matter of pushing the books. . . . It is not money, but souls, I am after in the circulation of the book. I have never aimed to make money out of the third angel’s message, and never expect to.”11 Haskell wrote lengthy and detailed letters explaining his reasons for publishing the book, his negotiations with the Review and Herald to get it printed and distributed, and what it had cost him to produce the book, as well as requests that he be paid for the sales that had already occurred.12 He had incurred considerable expense on illustrations. Then he then

borrowed money to purchase the printing plates from the publishing house, all of which was putting him in a severe financial bind. Furthermore, the Review had not bound all the copies they had printed, and many had been lost in the 1902 Review fire. Stephen protested that Evans, then the publishing house manager, was demanding that Haskell sell him books at a price that was less than actual cost, causing Stephan to lose money on each book that the Review might purchase. Hetty Haskell recognized the effect such persistent opposition had on her husband. “Many times the last year or two I have heard Elder Haskell say, ‘I am tired of this continual fight with the brethren; if it was not that I believed this message with all my life I would throw up the whole thing and let them go; every man that does any aggressive work will be knocked in the head if they can possibly down him.’ ”13 Stephen told Willie White that E. R. Palmer, a later manager of the Review, wanted to consolidate all church publishing in the three American denominational houses.14 The publishing houses saw any independent printing as competition and thus a threat, especially when they were already struggling financially. Despite Ellen White’s disappointment with the books on Daniel and Revelation, they and The Cross and Its Shadow would find a niche and a continuing interest in the denomination. Both books and the periodical, Bible Training School, served as witnessing tools and sources of income to help support the Haskells’ various programs.15 In addition, Haskell gave away many of the books. Reissued by Southern Publishing Association in the Adventist Heritage series during the 1970s, the books were then ironically transferred to the Review and Herald Publishing Association, which had ignored them when first published.16 During the summer of 1911, Haskell began to develop a project to produce several books in braille in 1912. By 1917, he had ten books available, comprising thirty physical volumes. Four had been done in American Braille, the other six in New York Point. Most of the titles were

books by Ellen White, though the list also included Edson White’s The Gospel Primer and Haskell’s own The Cross and Its Shadow.17 The American Printing House for the Blind produced the eight-volume version of The Acts of the Apostles. Haskell used proceeds from the sale of the Bible Training School magazine to cover publication costs. As he had done with Adventist publications in the past, he worked to get the braille books into public libraries, and several times in his correspondence he expressed frustration that Catholics were doing a better job of placing their books in such institutions.18 Haskell published his final volume, Bible Handbook, in 1919. A collection of Scripture texts arranged by more than 220 topics and interspersed with Ellen White statements and historical quotations, the little volume is still in print. Many of the Bible studies had first appeared in his Bible Training School publication. He designed the work as a quick and practical reference for giving personal Bible studies. Although Adventists today might no longer agree with every interpretation in it,19 the book is still useful and illustrates Haskell’s pragmatic approach to lay Bible study.

1. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, 8:160. 2. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, October 3, 1899; May 18, 1900; January 13, 1901; July 18, 1901. 3. S. N. Haskell, March 4, 1907. Haskell apparently combined the Daniel and Revelation material that he had published in Australia under the title Prophetic Waymarks: The Story of Daniel and the Seer of Patmos (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Signs Publishing, 1905). 4. Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1923), 117. As far as this author knows, no one has yet followed up on her suggestion. 5. Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers, 117. 6. S. N. Haskell to S. N. Curtis, December 4, 1904. 7. C. C. Crisler to S. N. Haskell, December 24, 1914. 8. H. H. Haskell to W. C. White, October 8, 1907. 9. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 10, 1904.

10. S. N. Haskell to S. N. Curtis, December 4, 1904. 11. Ibid. 12. For example, see S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, December 1, 1903; December 5, 1903; October 3, 1903; November 14, 1903. 13. H. H. Haskell to W. C. White, October 8, 1907. 14. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, September 1907. 15. Ellen White believed that because of Haskell’s zeal to spread the Adventist message as widely as possible, he had priced his books too low and hurt himself financially. Ellen G. White, The Publishing Ministry, 335. 16. All three book titles were still in print at the time of the writing of this biography. 17. S. N. Haskell, “Literature for the Blind,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 11, 1917, 14. Haskell happily reported a letter written to him from someone who had accepted Seventh-day Adventism after reading a braille copy of The Ministry of Healing. 18. For example, see S. N. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, undated. General Conference archives copy stamped “Rec’d Dec. 1, 1916.” 19. For example, he has the book of Nahum predicting automobiles with headlights; Nahum 2:5 as a “description of the conductor of any rapid train of cars, as he recounts his passengers and collects fares”; and the locusts of Nahum 3:16, 17 depicting airplanes. S. N. Haskell, Bible Handbook (South Lancaster, MA: Bible Training School, 1919), 19, 20. Several of the statements in the study “Bible Etiquette” would no longer be considered politically correct. Ibid., 179, 180.

Chapter XXV

Nashville, Tennessee he Haskells moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1904 to start one of their Bible Training Schools. For a few months they had the assistance of a returned missionary couple, Luther J. and Georgia Burgess,

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with whom Haskell had worked in southern Africa.1 Some years earlier, the owner of a gambling resort had become friends with Haskell and eventually asked if he could live with the couple. Stephen agreed, provided that the man would spend one hour a day reading the Bible with him. As Haskell hoped, the man became interested in Adventism. Soon he decided to sell his gambling operation and equipment and asked Stephen what he should do with the proceeds. Haskell knew exactly where he thought the money should go. He suggested sending it to a missionary friend of his in India, Georgia Anna Burrus Burgess. Born in 1866, Georgia Burrus had joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church at the age of sixteen, despite the objections of her family. After working her way through Healdsburg College and teaching at the Bible Training School in Oakland, California, she became interested in mission service in India. Encouraged by Haskell, she volunteered and began selfsupporting work among the secluded Hindu women in Calcutta in 1895. The next year she opened a girls’ school with another woman, Mae Taylor. In 1903 Georgia married Luther J. Burgess, secretary of the new India mission. Luther’s health soon forced the couple to return to the United States,

and so they came to work with the Haskells in Nashville. Mr. Burgess worked on the farm at the recently opened Madison school, while the Haskells employed his wife as part of their evangelistic staff. Stephen and Hetty lived frugally. He received a salary of $12 a week and she received $10 (women were traditionally paid less even for equivalent work, though Stephen himself would see his own salary cut when reassigned from the General Conference to the Atlantic Union Conference2). The couple paid $4 a week in living expenses and $19.50 in wages to their staff.3 Although the Burgesses wanted to return to India when the husband’s health improved, the mission had no funds for their travel expenses. The couple thought of a way of earning the money to get back to India. As Haskell had so often done himself with his Bible Training School magazine and books, they sold twenty thousand copies of the periodical at ten cents a copy to obtain enough for the return voyage. In addition, during the next year they raised more than $1,500 for missions in India. The Burgesses left to return to India in November 1905. By then they had sold twenty-three thousand copies of Bible Training School. (The total circulation for the periodical during 1905 was 246,000 copies.) In a letter a few years later, Stephen reported that he and his wife had raised funds to “carry all of the expenses of the native work among the Hindustanis” until then.4 The Burgesses would spend a total of thirty-two years working among the Bengali-, Hindi-, Urdu-, and Khasi-speaking peoples.5 George I. Butler, now back in denominational service as president of the new Southern Union Conference, wanted to conduct evangelistic services in major southern cities, including Nashville. But he needed a tent. While attending the 1903 General Conference Session in Oakland, California, he asked for funds. The California leadership raised $604 for a sixty-foot tent plus two twenty-foot panels to create a tent sixty by one hundred feet. The plan was for Butler to bring the tent to Nashville, where those enrolled in Haskell’s Bible school would visit potential interests, conduct Bible studies, and distribute religious publications. Stephen would preach

with Butler. Unfortunately, the tent did not arrive in time for any meetings to take place, at least in 1903. The next year, Haskell, Louis A. Hansen, and others searched for a site to erect the tent. Because of prejudice against the northern religion, no one would rent any property to the Adventists, or they would object to the Adventists’ potential use of it. Then, in 1905, the local Adventist leaders found a suitable lot and obtained a written contract from the owner, who lived in another state. As the evangelists began putting up the tent, they learned that another individual claimed to have a multiyear lease on the property and did not want it used for evangelistic purposes. So they had to keep searching for a site. Louis A. Hansen had been one of the pioneer missionaries in the American South. He had come to Nashville in 1897 to set up a health food exhibit for Battle Creek Sanitarium at the Tennessee Centennial Fair. The city was considered one of the most liberal in the South. Church leaders saw it as a possible denominational headquarters for the region. Soon Hansen opened a hydrotherapy and treatment center. One of his patients was a woman who owned a large and well-known business. When Hansen mentioned to her his problem in finding a site for a tent, she offered him the use of a lot near the Fatherland Street church, which Hansen and his fellow Adventists had recently obtained from a Baptist congregation. She assured Hansen that she would ignore any objections that anyone might raise. The fact that Adventists now owned a church building in Nashville seemed to defuse some of the suspicion toward the denomination. Perhaps some had viewed the evangelists as itinerant religious con artists who would soon disappear after fleecing the gullible. Attendance at the meetings averaged one hundred twenty-five and went as high as two hundred. A number of those coming belonged to the upper classes. Several members of the old Baptist group attended the meetings, and its former pastor gave a testimonial in support of the Adventists.6 But getting converts was difficult. One of the challenges that Adventists

had to deal with was the perception “that S.D.A.’s mix the blacks and whites.”7 Early in February 1904, Stephen rented a house on Belmont Avenue, “one of the best streets and in a good part of the city away from the colored part,” for $30 a month. He would use it not only for himself and Hetty but also to house his extended evangelistic group, totaling eight people. (The Haskells seemed to like living and working within an extended “family.”) Nearby they set up a group of tents that students and teachers from Graysville Academy would live in during the evangelistic meetings. Haskell thought the cluster of tents would resemble a camp meeting and attract public interest.8 The students would attempt to pay for their expenses during the evangelistic series. In May, Stephen wrote to A. G. Daniells, “We have a family of fifteen. All seem happy and are doing well. We never had a more promising class of workers, or those who worked more earnestly.” Considering the young people with him as fine singers, he hoped to have good music during the tent meetings.9 Later, when it came time to renew the lease for the house, Stephen was unsure whether to remain in Nashville or work somewhere else. The slow results of their efforts there frustrated him. “In all of my experience since I began publick labor in present truth I have never labored as long in one place as here without seeing greater results, either in this country or in foreign fields. And I have tried both.”10 In another letter he told Daniells that for him “to settle down and not have a tent meeting in such a place as Nashville and not to see more souls embracing the Truth does not make me feel as contented as when I am on the move.” For forty years he had been constantly on the go. Accepting some requests to speak at camp meetings in Illinois,11 Texas, Georgia, and Florida now tempted him. “When I settle down and do not see any thing really accomplished for months it makes me feel that I must get out and do something. So I think to visit a few camp-meetings would not be against my health.”12 In addition, he felt his efforts were receiving little or no financial

support from the denomination. The local conferences were not contributing funds or personnel to the Nashville evangelistic project. Because so much of what the couple did was self-funded, they would find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to ask for money when it was slow in coming. Hetty wrote to Daniells, explaining their financial situation. We have received our audit [of money due them] from Bro. [William Thomas] Bland [appointed the previous year as acting GC treasurer], but find it only covers last year to Dec. 31. [It was now the middle of August.] We have been borrowing and scraping along as well as we could[,] thinking that when the audit was given it would at least be up to May first and it would help us out. We have to pay our own board and pay our stenographer and made all the lack there is in the Bible Training School Bills each month. If we just lived on our wages like some it would not out us for our individual expenses are not much, but we have the work we are carrying on to help spread the message and our wages is all we have to depend on. We prefer to spend our wages scattering the truth than to put it into houses and lands, think it will bring a larger interest invested in souls[.] You can see we have had to advance considerable and now if we could have wages up to July it would save us from much embarrassment. We have some five hundred dollars due that is pressing us much at present and hoped that the audit being given would help us out, but are not helped much by it. I have written to Bro. Bland but understand he does not pay out money without an order from you.13 Having no specific place to go to if he did leave Nashville, Stephen wrote to GC president A. G. Daniells for his advice. After explaining what he thought he might do if he remained in the city, and expressing his

concern about his difficulties with the hot Tennessee summer weather, he told Daniells, “The situation resolves itself in this. Had we better hold on here another year or quit. You may say, ‘Do as you think best’ ? If I knew what was best I should not have written you about it. It is hard for me to remain so long in one place and see no more accomplished.”14 Despite the difficulties, the Haskells decided to stay in Nashville for the fall and winter months of 1904–1905. Interest in Seventh-day Adventism slowly grew, especially as a result of the efforts of the young people from the Graysville school. Mrs. Haskell continued to plead for more helpers and for the denomination to provide salaries for them.15 Southern Publishing Association When Ellen G. White’s son James Edson White arrived in Nashville in 1900, he first set up a print shop in a former chicken house at a suburban estate named Rokeby near Vanderbilt University, which was then being rented by Louis Hansen to house those employed in his hydrotherapy treatment rooms.16 Building a small shed to serve as an office and using a tent to shelter the gasoline engine that powered his press, Edson founded the Gospel Herald Publishing Company. Later in December of that year, the Southern Missionary Society, in which he had been one of the most active leaders, bought a small property and a two-story brick store at 1025 Jefferson Street. Its name now shortened to Herald Publishing Company, Edson’s publishing entity moved there in March 1901. Ellen White visited the place that spring. Although Edson White had owned the Herald Publishing Company, it soon became a denominational institution, reportedly organizing on May 16, 1901, and incorporating on June 1 as the Southern Publishing Association (SPA, a stock company, as had been the Review and Herald Publishing Association, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and other early Adventist institutions).17 By that summer, SPA had raised enough funds to complete a larger structure adjoining the Jefferson Street building.

Sunday laws continued as a frequent source of frustration for Seventhday Adventists. In 1904, the Nashville authorities ordered the closing of Southern Publishing Association on Sundays. Americans still normally worked six days a week with only Sunday off, while the employees of SPA labored on Sunday with Sabbath off. (Those at the Review and Herald Publishing Association worked seven days a week, going in after sundown on Saturday.) The forced day off gave SPA employees the opportunity to distribute Adventist publications on Sunday. In addition, the closure drew attention to the issue of Sabbath observance. By the beginning of 1905, the SPA’s Jefferson Street facility had deteriorated so badly that the publishing house had no choice but to move. Its board examined several potential new sites.18 By now Haskell had been appointed vice president of the house’s board of managers, replacing Edson White. Along with Calvin P. Bollman and Louis A. Hansen, Stephen argued for a property on Gallatin Road near Madison, Tennessee.19 But, as unfortunately often happens, personal interests shaped the ultimate decision. On October 31, the publishing house bought a seven-acre site owned by Edson White on 24th Avenue North. There the publishing house remained until 1973, when SPA constructed a new plant at 1900 Elm Hill Pike.20 Madison School In 1904, along with his former traveling companions Percy T. Magan and Nellie Druillard, Haskell served as a member of the group that selected the 414-acre Nelson farm property that would become the site of Madison Academy, Madison College, and Madison Hospital.21 Some had objected to the site, stating that it was worn out, as so much agricultural land had become in the South. But Ellen White, who was also a part of the survey party, insisted that it was where God wanted the proposed school. It would give students experience in working with the kind of depleted soil that they

would encounter elsewhere in the region, and it was near Nashville, where they could conduct evangelism. Haskell saw it as another example of a concept that he had already come to accept during his overseas travels: young people needed to be educated in the region and culture where they would serve. “If the argument is good that in foreign fields laborers should be trained on their own soil, in their own field, it is doubly true with the peculiarities of the Southern people in order that there may be success, the workers to a large extent should be trained here upon their own ground.”22 After the purchase of the property, the leaders requested Haskell and his wife to hold the title to it in their names and to act as trustees until they could incorporate the kind of organization that Ellen White insisted that the new venture needed. The founders chartered it as Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute, under the General Welfare Act of Tennessee. (The name would change to Madison College in 1937.) The first meeting of the corporation convened on July 4, 1904, at Emmanuel Missionary College in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Hetty Haskell was elected to the board of managers, along with Ellen G. White.23 Stephen would also serve on the institution’s board for a number of years, and he visited the school whenever he traveled through Nashville. In addition, he counseled with those working at the various “rural units” founded by the Madison self-supporting leadership.

1. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 196. 2. A. G. Daniells to G. I. Butler, July 3, 1903. 3. Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 36. 4. S. N. Haskell to S. N. Curtis, June 13, 1911. 5. Through the years the Haskells would frequently write church leadership either interceding for or endorsing the Burgesses. For example, see H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, August 2, 1905; S. N. Haskell to W. A. Spicer, April 20, 1909; S. N. Haskell to J. L. Shaw, September 23, 1919; J. L. Shaw to S. N. Haskell, October 3, 1919. 6. Louis A. Hansen, From So Small a Dream (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Association,

1968), 142, 143. 7. H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 10, 1904. Mrs. Haskell, like her husband, consistently spelled Daniells’s name with one l. 8. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, February 11, 1904; S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, February 17, 1904. 9. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, May 18, 1904. 10. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 10, 1904. 11. Storms and wild swings of weather made the Illinois camp meeting memorable (S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, August 20, 1904; H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, August 28, 1904). 12. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 24, 1904. 13. H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, August 12, 1904. 14. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 10, 1904. 15. H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 20, 1904. 16. For the early history of Southern Publishing Association, see Hansen, From So Small a Dream, 101–106; Gerald Wheeler, “Southern Publishing Association” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 1181, 1182; “Southern Publishing Association” in The Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 2:677–680. 17. The lack of laws for nonprofit organizations at the time forced Adventists to incorporate under regular business laws. The stock certificates would later create problems for the church, such as when it had to move the Review to Washington, DC, and during the struggle for control of Battle Creek Sanitarium. 18. Hansen, From So Small a Dream, 106. 19. Ibid. 20. Although the 24th Avenue North location was originally outside the city, Nashville eventually engulfed it. In later years the neighborhood deteriorated until it became unsafe. The author remembers one of the periodical editors being robbed outside his office window. The Gallatin Road area toward Madison remained much more stable. 21. For a more detailed account of Madison College’s founding, see William Cruzan Sandborn, “The History of Madison College” (research paper, George Peabody College for Teachers, August 1953). 22. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 10, 1904. 23. Golden Anniversary Album: Fifty Years of Progress at Madison, 1904–1954 (Nashville, TN: Student Association of Madison College, 1954), 27. The minutes of the first meeting of the board of trustees of what was then called the Nashville Agricultural and Normal School appear in Sandborn, “The History of Madison College,” 16–19. They outline the goals and pattern of the new school. Madison College was the only institution where Ellen White accepted a position on its board, and

she remained a board member until 1914, when declining health compelled her to resign.

Chapter XXVI

The Struggle for Independent Ministries

I

mmediately after the Civil War, Northern Protestant churches began

sending teachers and others to help the newly freed slaves. Eventually, as southerners regained their political powers and Reconstruction ended, they expelled such missionaries. But near the end of the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventists—under the leadership of Ellen G. White’s son James Edson—began a program to teach and convert blacks.1 Others, taking an interest in white southerners, also came to help, not only in evangelizing them but aiding them in other ways. Such missionaries established schools, of which Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute became the first of a series of self-supporting institutions. It would be the nucleus of a spreading system that included not only schools but sanitariums, usually located on farms, as well as vegetarian restaurants and hydrotherapy treatment facilities in such southern cities as Nashville, Knoxville, Louisville, Memphis, Birmingham, and Asheville. The rural schools were especially appealing to people in parts of the South that had few or no public schools. Being independent of the official denominational structure, that fact would be both the system’s strength and a weakness. Because Haskell had much experience working on his own and raising his own funds while developing such things as the book and tract societies from scratch, he could cooperate well with the self-supporting movement. In fact, he once wrote to Willie White that he believed that “wife and self” had a “calling to train workers to be self-supporting.”2 He was a natural

bridge between the two approaches. But many denominational leaders felt uncomfortable or even threatened by independent institutions. They either sought to get them under church governance or attempted to block their activities. Haskell frequently protested the resistance and obstruction that such institutions, especially the Madison school, encountered. Because Ellen White had encouraged its founding, one would have assumed that church leaders would naturally support something that she was so heavily involved in. But it was not so. Stephen wrote to her son Willie, pointing out that those at Madison were only “seeking to carry out [Mrs. White’s educational] testimonies; they have paid a faithful tithe into the Southern Union Conference, they have given no outward evidence of rebellion or fault finding. Why should they not be recognized in some way?”3 Many people donated funds to the new institutions, money that did not go through regular denominational channels. This upset the leaders of a denomination struggling to survive financially. Apparently suspicious of such donors, or at least wanting to know who they were so that they could themselves tap their resources, church officials demanded that Madison give them the names of contributors and the amounts. Haskell expressed his feelings of the unfairness of such actions and supported the right of legitimate groups to raise funds outside of “regular channels.” He thought it highly unfair when someone directly contributed a certain amount to an institution, and then, in response, denominational leadership deducted an equivalent sum from the institution’s official appropriations. Stephen considered it a form of communism and a disincentive to work.4 Such creative accounting on the part of the church created suspicion and distrust. Haskell himself had a somewhat similar experience. He wrote to Willie White in exasperation, saying, “[We] had $400 donated to our mission in New York and given to H. W. C. [Hampton Watson Cottrell, the Greater New York Conference president as well as Atlantic Union Conference

president] to be sent on to assist in defraying the expenses of the work we were conducting in New York City, and instead of giving it to us as a donation, he paid our wages with it. The man that gave it to him says he [Cottrell] misapplied it, but he [Cottrell] says that he didn’t, that the man consented to it and wanted he should do it, and he did it just as he requested.”5 Furthermore, some leaders wanted the local conference to audit Madison’s books. Stephen argued against that because the school was not even conference owned.6 In addition, some feared that Madison would draw away students from denominational schools, and letters began circulating to urge that young people not enroll there.7 Uncomfortable with the fact that the denomination did not hold title to the Madison facility, conference leaders wanted it deeded over to them, or at least have it bought out. Haskell wrote to Southern Union president George I. Butler, explaining that Sutherland and the other Madison leaders retained the deed to the property lest they be “turned out” as had happened to them when they had administered Emmanuel Missionary College at Berrien Springs, Michigan.8 The resistance to the Madison leadership began to wear on the Madison employees. In a lengthy letter to Ellen White, Haskell told her, “While they claim they are not discouraged, there are but few among our people that would ever go through what they have gone through. The health of Sister Druillard, Brother Sutherland and his wife is poorly, Brother Magan has to go away for his health, and Sister DeGraw has gone home to her grandfather’s. It is fortunately that your testimony did come just in time to save them from being swallowed up by those who have not appreciated their work.”9 A year later, Haskell returned to Madison for the denomination’s first self-supporting convention. Eight representatives from the General Conference attended, but, to Stephen’s disappointment, the leaders, instead of expressing appreciation at how much the program had accomplished,

raised concern about whether the new self-supporting schools were teaching “organization.” Haskell wrote, “I think it would be a blessing to Elder Daniels if some of his friends would take him to some Wartburg10 for a year or so as they did Luther. I think Daniells has wrestled with the Amelekites at B. C. [Battle Creek] until there is danger of a perverted judgment in some things. Some remarks were made not calculated to leave the best impression . . . upon the minds of some.”11 One can understand why General Conference president Arthur Daniells must have been frustrated by the Madison institutions. After all, Ellen White had urged the church to establish stronger organizational structure, and the denomination had done exactly that in the 1901 and subsequent reorganizations. Then she began supporting the Madison school program with its strong streak of independence. He must have felt a sense of contradiction in her actions. Eventually, though, the southern conferences became less hostile to the self-supporting schools, and Willie White sought to temper Haskell’s strong streak of New England independence. In his increasing role as spokesperson for his mother, Willie wrote a long letter explaining the new circumstances, particularly in relation to a school in North Carolina, which would later become Fletcher Academy. He invited Stephen to participate in the discussion between the school’s leadership and that of the local conference. “Mother requested me to write to you asking you to take an interest in this work, to visit it and to give counsel to the brethren and sisters in North Carolina.”12

1. Graybill, Mission to Black America. 2. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, October 5, 1907. 3. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, October 3, 1906. 4. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, February 8, 1905. 5. S. N. Haskeell to W. C. White, May 8, 1911.

6. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, August 4, 1907. 7. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, November 21, 1906. 8. S. N. Haskell to G. I. Butler, April 10, 1907. For the incident Haskell was apparently referring to, see E. K. Vande Vere, The Wisdom Seekers, 104–118. 9. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, June 30, 1907. 10. The castle where Martin Luther’s supporters hid him from his opponents. 11. S. N. Haskell Letter, October 20, 1908. 12. W. C. White to S. N. Haskell, June 8, 1911. The letter not only presents the issues at play at the time but also has hints of the concern some had begun feeling about how Ellen White’s declining health might be affecting the clarity of her thinking.

Chapter XXVII

Transformations in California ot only did Haskell labor to reach the white population of Nashville and the rural South—especially in his work with the self-supporting schools—he also had a strong interest in reaching the region’s blacks. He

N

often visited Oakwood Industrial School (now Oakwood University) and helped in fund-raising for Oakwood and also for other small black schools. As he did almost everywhere, Haskell would enlist the students in selling a Bible Training School special issue. The money raised would go to help construct small school buildings elsewhere. Unlike so many of his time, Haskell seemed comfortable associating with blacks. Perhaps it was partly a result of the abolitionist heritage that so many of his fellow New Englanders shared, but possibly even more, it came from his experience traveling and working with blacks during his mission explorations in Africa. While busy in the South, Haskell also remained active elsewhere. Years earlier, he had been a bicoastal conference president, serving as leader of the California (1879–1887, 1891–1894) and Maine (1884–1886) conferences. Later he returned to California and again held the position of president (1908–1911). Between those periods, a catastrophic event occurred that would affect both Californian and Adventist history, one whose impact continues today. On April 18, 1906, a devastating earthquake rocked San Francisco, and for the next three days a massive firestorm incinerated much of the city, including buildings that had been widely advertised as fireproof.1 The San Francisco quake shows how a

natural disaster can have unexpected and long-lasting effects on religious history. The devastation stunned everyone who saw it. Beginning with the April 26, 1906 issue, the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald would publish many articles on the quake, including eyewitness reports. Signs of the Times devoted a special issue to the catastrophe. The Adventist churches in the city had escaped the fire (reportedly only twenty-seven of the seventy Protestant churches survived). The Laguna Street Adventist church suffered only fallen plaster and warped windows. The firestorm stopped two blocks short of the Laguna Street church and four blocks from the denomination’s Valencia Street Hall building.2 Other Adventist institutions and members did not fare so well. Pacific Press Publishing Association, which had recently moved to Mountain View, California, experienced heavy structural damage, though most of the equipment remained intact.3 The publishing house erected a temporary wooden building, but a fire destroyed it on July 20, 1906.4 The Advent Review printed appeals for funds to reconstruct the Press and other California Adventist institutions. Although San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, the quake forever changed not only the city but the rest of California. It gave a strong nudge to a new trend in the state’s development. For more than half a century, San Francisco had been the largest city in the American West. But now Los Angeles, once a sleepy little town in the south of the state, soon overshadowed the city by the bay.5 Southern California seemed a safer place to live than devastated San Francisco. Adventism had first penetrated the state around the Bay Area. But, as with California’s growth itself, the church’s growth would now shift farther south, and the denomination would spread rapidly around the Los Angeles area. Not only did it gain many members and form several new conferences, but it established schools and medical institutions, including the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University) and White Memorial Hospital. Hetty Haskell, along with Stephen, would become especially involved

with the latter. Many saw in the destruction of San Francisco a divine punishment on its proverbial wickedness. Shortly after the event, Ellen White published an article that discussed a general judgment on evil cities.6 Others saw the leveling of San Francisco as a direct and specific sign not only of divine displeasure but of divine validation for a new religious movement. Creating a religious trend that increasingly affected the Adventist Church, it provided the spark that ignited what would become known as Pentecostalism, a cluster of new denominations that thrived during the rest of the twentieth century and continues to do so. A small group of Pentecostals had begun meeting under the leadership of William Seymour in a partially burned-out stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles just before the earthquake. Frank Bartleman, an itinerant preacher helping Seymour, saw the disaster as a sign from God indicating His punishment of San Francisco. He quickly wrote a tract that proclaimed the quake as the “voice of God.” It gave Seymour’s church “an aura of respectability, a divine imprimatur” and launched the Pentecostal Movement.7 Initially, Pentecostalism would not affect Adventism so much in the United States, though evangelists and others soon encountered the movement, especially its practice of speaking in tongues, as illustrated by an article by W. A. Spicer in the Review.8 Spicer met the phenomenon during a world mission tour. It had perhaps its greatest impact outside the United States, especially in Latin America. The majority of those who converted from Catholicism in the region would increasingly join Pentecostal churches. The trend has increased in recent years. As late as 1996, Latin American countries were still 81 percent Catholic and only 4 percent evangelical. But during the next decade and a half, the percentage of Catholics fell to 70 percent, while evangelicals climbed to 13 percent. The shift in Brazil has been especially dramatic. Once 99 percent Catholic, it had changed to 65 percent Catholic and 22 percent evangelical by 2013.9

Such growth has been a rival to the spread of Adventism in those regions, though the denomination has done well in Brazil, passing the millionmember mark. The situation is being replicated in North America. In the twenty-first century, the Pentecostal religious movement that began in the United States returned to that nation with great force. The growing Latino immigration to the United States sparked an explosion of Pentecostal Protestantism. In the early part of the century, first-generation Latino immigrants tend to be about 70 percent Catholic and 13 percent evangelical. That changes to 21 percent evangelical by the third generation in the US.10 Adventists have been able to reach new immigrants fairly well, especially the newest arrivals, but the spread of Latino evangelical churches and ministries means that Adventists must compete with them. Research indicates that with each generation it is less likely that a Latino will convert to Adventism, especially if they have already found community in an evangelical church. They have Americanized, and Latino evangelical churches appear to provide a broader road to such assimilation than the present Adventist Latino structure. The heritage of the San Francisco earthquake is still having an impact on the Adventist Church. In the aftermath of the quake, Haskell had more immediate concerns. In 1908, he was once more elected president of the California Conference. At first he was reluctant to accept the office because of his age and continuing health problems, but then he agreed at the encouragement of Ellen White.11 The conference constituency voted him in with the understanding that Mrs. White approved of his taking the position. She had called for the replacement of the previous president, Walter T. Knox, because of his domineering and controlling management style. In her view, the conference had not grown spiritually under his leadership. Sunday Law Crisis Haskell immediately had to face a number of issues. One was a strong

push for Sunday laws in California. It was not an isolated problem. The church was dealing with it throughout the country. It seemed that almost every issue of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald contained stories of Sunday-law enforcement and other religious liberty incidents. The publication also ran as a regular feature, Religious Liberty Notes, as well as a lengthy series that year entitled, “The Rise and Fall of Religious Liberty in America.” Church religious liberty leaders were touring the country, but especially Missouri that year, making presentations before legislative and other groups. Adventists circulated petitions protesting certain proposed legislation and distributed countless tracts and periodicals on the topic. The Johnston Sunday bill, calling for Sunday observance in the District of Columbia, especially concerned the church. Adventists feared it might be a foretaste of later national regulations. With blue laws mostly dormant in America in the early twenty-first century, it is difficult for people today to understand the constant fear of the laws that Adventists experienced during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The California drive was an especially active one, and the denomination geared up to fight it.12 After the legislature convened on January 4, 1909, proponents introduced three Sunday bills13 and a state constitutional amendment to make them constitutional (the state supreme court had years before ruled an 1883 Sunday law unconstitutional).14 Wilbur Crafts, editor of Twentieth Century Quarterly, official journal of the International Reform Bureau of Washington, DC, and one of the leading proponents of Sunday laws, spoke in many places around the state in favor of them.15 G. L. Tufts, the Bureau’s secretary, would head the forces pushing the California law. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union sent two of its best spokespersons to lobby the legislators, because, the organization proclaimed, “The Seventh-day Adventists are hard fighters; they have some good talkers, and their arguments appeal to the legislative mind.”16 Adventist church members and leaders collected signatures on petitions against the bills.

Tufts, the author of the bill itself, tried to reassure Adventists that they had nothing to worry about from the legislation, that it had exemptions to protect them. He wrote to John O. Corliss, “You need have no fear from this bill. I have framed it carefully. There is not an ecclesiastical or religious word in the bill. It is drawn for better citizenship only. We wish to secure the passage of the Sunday Rest law; and if you will agree not to circulate petitions, we will not do so. I am sorry we can not see the same regarding this law. I wish you could be convinced that the law would be an advantage to your church. This bill has been drafted with great care.”17 The church ignored Tuft’s request not to circulate petitions. Collecting 35,535 names from every county in California, religious liberty leaders sent them to Sacramento.18 As the resistance to the legislation mounted, its drafters began revising its contents.19 Soon the attempt to get a constitutional amendment failed.20 The Sunday law bill faded, and although Tufts raised the possibility of reintroducing it at the next legislative session, such legislation was dead for the time being in California. Haskell could turn his attention to other matters. He also had to deal with religious fanaticism within the church. A member named Steele launched vicious attacks against Ellen White, as did Ellen’s nephew Frank Belden, who had become embittered because of, among other things, the way the Review and Herald Publishing Association had handled the royalties from his musical publications. The Berkeley church voted a resolution putting Steele, along with A. T. Jones, on a period of probation, hoping that “at the end of three months a change can be made.” Confrontation With A. T. Jones As president of the California Conference, Haskell had to deal with the problem of A. T. Jones’s church membership.21 The person whom he had once seen as having great potential now continually undermined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Yet Jones still considered himself a church

member. Denominational leaders decided that the time had long passed when Jones needed to make a full break from the church. Because he was still on the books of the Berkeley Adventist church, Haskell persuaded the congregation to appoint a committee to evaluate the renegade minister’s status among them. Not yet convinced that Jones had actually apostatized, the church voted a resolution of censure only, promising to formalize specific charges three months later. Naturally, Jones resisted. Traveling to California on August 22, 1908, he met with a number of the Berkeley leaders and argued that their censure was contrary to biblical teaching. The charismatic preacher, reflecting his theology of radical individualism, “spoke at length on Christ as the sole head of the church and exhorted” them to allow “no man or set of men in Christ’s place.” As for their vote of censure, he said, they were allowing the California Conference and Pacific Union Conference to engineer through them what was clearly an unjust action. After all, he was just preaching the same doctrines that he always had. Nor was he in any way tearing down the denomination. If the Berkeley members were ethical, he argued, they should rescind the censure. Most outrageously of all, he claimed “that he had never been labored with by any one” for his actions.22 Jones managed to sway a number in the Berkeley church. On August 29, 1908, a prominent member moved that the congregation void Jones’s censure. Only the immediate intervention of Haskell and Pacific Union Conference president Hampton Wade Cottrell persuaded the congregation to uphold its original resolution.23 The executive committee of the California Conference then voted to bar Jones from preaching in any of its churches.24 Haskell was also involved in the closure of Healdsburg College (renamed Pacific Union College in 1908) and the eventual transfer of the school to what is now Angwin, California, on Howell Mountain. The school had been struggling with financial losses, some unsuccessful attempts to establish a student work program, and other problems.

Ellen White was especially concerned because the town of Healdsburg had grown up around the campus. She and her son Willie had searched for a new location. The conference appointed a committee consisting of Stephen Haskell, then California Conference president Walter T. Knox, and Pacific Press Publishing Association president Hampton W. Cottrell to investigate a number of potential sites. The committee was to conduct their search “following the counsel of the spirit of prophecy.” For a time, the leaders were interested in a property near Sonoma, California. But difficulties with the title and other issues caused the negotiations to fall through. Eventually the conference purchased a two-hundred-acre property in Angwin, near St. Helena Sanitarium. Even before the move, Ellen White had requested Charles Walter Irwin to come from Australia to head the school. His leadership at Avondale College had impressed her, and she felt that he would be able to turn the California institution around. Haskell was concerned about who would teach at the college. Hetty Haskell reported to Mrs. White that her husband “has not been unmindful of the fact that there must be a faculty for the school; but he is very fearful of getting some of the ‘popular teachers’ who walk about in broad-cloth and take no interest in industrial work.” A good New Englander who was not afraid of hard work with his hands, Stephen felt that “the majority of our teachers think it beneath their dignity to get out and hoe and dig with the students.”25 In addition to the Sunday law threat and religious fanaticism, Haskell had to deal with a number of problems unique to California. In a foreshadowing of a time to come, when denominational employees would consider a job offer in California as coming straight from heaven, pastors were drawn to the state because of the climate in certain areas. As Haskell muttered in a letter to A. G. Daniells, “In some respects California is unfortunate, and in other respects it is fortunate. It is unfortunate in having people flocking here because of ill health, and have a great desire to be on our pay role [sic] in some way.” As a result, the conference had “a list of

names that amount to over a hundred dollars a week to poor, and disabled, or aged ministers.”26 (This was at a time when a pastor’s salary would have been $10 a week or less.) In addition, those pastors already in the conference would often seek to relocate from the hotter parts of the state to more temperate areas, particularly the Bay Area and Northern California. As Haskell put it, if they got a touch of malaria, they would pack up and head for the coast.27 Besides being a drain on personnel, the Bay Area was a more expensive region to live in. Resources and institutions were collecting in one small part of the state, much to the annoyance of members elsewhere. Most of the schools and health and medical facilities were concentrated in the north of California. It would take the introduction of air conditioning, as with the American South, to open up the southern part of California to large-scale church development. Until then, Haskell would have to find people who didn’t mind living in the hotter regions of the state and assign them there. By the end of his first one-year term, Haskell had decided what he wanted to do if reelected. He wanted “to break up the Combination and centralization at Mountain View [California].”28 This could be done by “removing the headquarters of the conference and Tract Society to Oakland [California] or near here” because “where a few men only get together and run everything it destroys individuality.” Ellen White had counseled him in the past about being controlling and trying to run everything by himself. Apparently some of the counsel had soaked in. In addition, alluding to some statements she had made about impending divine judgment hanging over the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, he believed “there should be no means spared to scatter the reading matter [Adventist tracts and other publications] in these bay cities.”29 As he led his fellow Californians in developing a plan to break California into additional conferences, he mapped them out not only by available forms of transportation (primarily railroads, since the state, like the rest of the nation, had few good roads) but particularly by climate

zones.30 Haskell hoped that, by organizing conferences into areas of like physical conditions, it would reduce the gravitating of pastors and other church employees to more temperate regions. People used to hotter areas, for example, would be more likely to stay there if getting a different pastorate or job involved the difficulties of moving out of a local conference with its administrative complications, rather than a simple transfer within the same conference. Still another factor he took into account when deciding on the boundaries of the new conferences was the relative prosperity of a region and its impact on tithe and offerings. He intuitively recognized what would make an area prosperous in coming decades, such as farming in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys and oil fields elsewhere.31 Interestingly, one objection raised was that the new conferences would take someone out of the “field” and into administrative duties, thus wasting a salary and hampering growth. Haskell pointed out that during his administration he was often away from the conference by request of Ellen White and other leaders, yet the conference had still grown.32 One reason that the conference had grown was that, besides his administrative and other duties, Stephen continued to be active in evangelism. The early twentieth century was a time when traditional evangelism was particularly effective. The state was filling with newcomers, people who had pulled up their roots elsewhere and were receptive to putting down new ones. The Seventh-day Adventist Church offered them new roots. As people became more settled in California, however, evangelism would become more difficult. But that was yet in the future. The church was still growing rapidly in the state. Stephen was noted for carefully preparing his converts for church membership. He would spend the time necessary to ground them in their new faith. There were no short evangelistic series for him. As his wife observed, “Elder Haskell does not rush through a place as rapidly as some but he always likes to leave a company behind him that are established in

the truth and settled in all points of the faith, and not like some that are to be found that are baptized ‘Unto John’s baptism’ and ‘Have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.’ ”33 Besides evangelistic series, Stephen continued his lifelong pattern of promoting the sales and distribution of publications. Hetty trumpeted to W. A. Spicer in 1909 that the California Conference “led every local conference in the whole world in the sale of publications last year several thousand dollars and that Calif. leads every state in the union in the sale of Life and Health and Liberty most every month.”34 Stephen was also proud of his encouragement of younger pastors and church personnel. He wrote to A. G. Daniells that many who have visited this Conference during the past two years have remarked at the large number of youn[g] men in our Conference doing successful work. They have thought that we have more young men in this conference than there is in others. But we have not; we simply try to put responsibility upon them by giving them work to do and by allowing them to use their own judgment. Only, we stand by and if we see they are making misstakes [sic], step in and counsel them. But as long as they carry on their work successfully, even if they do not do it exactly as we would if we were doing it ourselves, we allow them to use their own judgement. And most of the work that has been done in this Conference this year has been done by these young men; and I think I am perfectly justified in feeling very proud of the large number of young men in this conference who are developing into strong men.35 Clearly Haskell had overcome some of the dictatorial tendencies of his early days. But, perhaps conscious of his advancing years, he did have a caveat about such youthful individuals. Responding to an observation of the

General Conference president about how much Haskell and fellow pioneer George I. Butler could still do at their age, Stephen told Daniells, “Even in worldly matters, where the devil rules, a person who has had forty or fifty years of experience in a certain line of work is always expected to accomplish more than younger men.”36 Permission to Retire As Haskell faced the many challenges of conference administration, his mood would sometimes swing from one extreme to the other. When exhausted, he would consider resigning the post, but at other times he questioned whether to do so would be against God’s will. Finally, Mrs. White gave him permission to retire from the conference presidency. “I feel very thankful about what you said about my being released at the next Conference [session],” he wrote. He speculated that former GC president George A. Irwin might be his successor. However, Eugene W. Farnsworth, who had worked with Haskell in Australia, New Zealand, and the Atlantic Union Conference, replaced him, and Irwin became president of the Pacific Union Conference. The California Conference constituency session met February 9–19, 1911, in Fresno, California, and voted to divide the existing conference into three new ones: the Central California Conference, the North California-Nevada Conference, and a restructured new California Conference.37 The delegates elected presidents for each one, and Haskell could retire, knowing that he had Ellen White’s approval to do so. He was now seventy-nine, but despite his age he still presided at all fifteen business sessions of the meeting and was an active participant in their deliberations. Haskell was especially impressed by how smoothly the meeting to divide the California Conference had gone. In all my experience I do not think that I ever attended a conference

where it was more evident that the Lord himself was directing things than at our late conference in Fresno. We had prayed for months that, if the division was made, it might be made peaceably, so there would be no division of feeling and thus no sectional jealousies come in between the new conferences. The first meeting was Thursday night. Friday morning we organized the Conference, seated the delegates, and appointed the principal committees; and the rest of the day was devoted to spiritual meetings. We had seasons of prayer and testimony meeting, and all day Friday and Sabbath was spent in trying to get nearer to the Lord, so His mind might be wrought out in all that was done. A large proportion, I think nearly one half, of the delegates came to the conference feeling that a division would be disastrous to the work, and, if we had mentioned division on Friday, I think we would have had a division, indeed and in truth; because our California brethren are not slow to assert their rights, or to speak out their minds very freely, if they are opposed to any matter. There were so many delegates present that the center of the church was not sufficient, and we had to take the right side of the church for delegates, also, requiring the visitors to take the left hand side and go into the gallery. In all there were over two hundred delegates. I think the large number of delegates helped to convince many that it was time to divide. They had not realized how large the conference really was until they saw the delegates seated. Sunday morning I read my address. They were distributed throughout the entire audience, every one in the audience having a copy, so they had the map before them, and also could see the strength of each of the proposed divisions. And any sensible person could see that the Conference would not be weakened, but strengthened by the division. We had a large committee on plans, consisting of six members

from each of the three divisions; and we had tried to choose the best men in the Conference for this committee, and placed W. C. White as chairman of it. He did excellent work and enjoyed it, I think. He loves committee work, anyway, and he had something worth tackling in that. Tuesday the subject of division was presented and voted through just as quietly as though everybody was in favor of it. No one raised any objections to the division. Some little changes were made in the division of the territory, and there was some little talk about that, but it was soon settled and every one seemed to be contented with the arrangement. . . . All could see the justice of this change and it was decided without any difficulty.38 Despite the various challenges Haskell had faced, he considered his final period as a conference president as “the pleasantest three years of my life, in connection with conference work . . . and the most marked success of any conference during my administration has been during these three years.”39 He felt that he had accomplished much. Reminding Ellen White of her promise that God would sustain him and his wife if he assumed the presidency, he said that he and Hetty left the position “with greater joy than we came in, and our hearts feel to praise God for His goodness and mercy that has been manifested towards us.”40 During those three years as a conference president, Haskell had thrown himself into his duties. “We have tried to carry out the charge you gave me when I took the presidency,” he wrote to Ellen White afterward. “You said a different mold should be given to the Conference; and for this reason we have managed our own camp-meetings, and our Committee meetings; and presided at every Conference. We have watched over the interests of the cause with a godly jealousy, as far as we understood our duty. We have not left one stone unturned to carry out the charge you gave me up in your upper room when I consented to take the presidency of this Conference.

And when I think of what has been accomplished during these three years, —the change that has come over the people,—I am astonished beyond measure.”41 During his tenure, the conference had added twenty-six new churches and many church schools. Stephen did not believe that he had been successful because of his own abilities. It was rather because he had followed Mrs. White’s spiritual leadership. What he had accomplished, he said, “was not because of me, or because of any superior judgment of mine; but God has done all this because I have tried to be faithful to your testimonies. And He has also done it to vindicate what you said to begin with. I have felt it was an honor to bear responsibilities by your counsel and your advice, and the Lord has blessed in it.”42 When W. C. White evaluated Haskell’s tenure, he felt that Stephen had been particularly successful—despite the many attacks by critics against Ellen White—in establishing confidence in his mother’s Testimonies and also in encouraging believers to seek to accomplish great things, and in working to erase the indebtedness of the conference’s schools. Still, despite his sense of success, both Haskell and his wife felt tired. He wrote to Willie White, “My wife and myself are on the point of a break-down physically. We have tried for weeks to take treatment and keep ourselves going; but if I should break down completely, I shall leave this part of the country all of a sudden.” Then he added, “I do not know that I have felt more used up since the early days of the Message, when your mother gave me the first testimony, and I was in despair for six months. My wife is also just about used up.”43 He told Arthur G. Daniells how Hetty and he felt: “We need about three months rest, and then we will be ready for anything that comes along.”44 For most of his career in the church, Stephen Haskell had alternated his service primarily between New England and the American West (specifically California), with frequent and major sojourns overseas. Now he would focus his attention on the American South and New England.

The month after his retirement from the California Conference presidency, he moved to Nashville and bought a house and lot from Edson White, at 1713 Cass Street. Hetty wrote to Mrs. White that she was pleased that her husband now had a place to escape the cold winters, especially those of New England.45 But he would not stay away from the region for long.

1. For a discussion of the human flaws and events that compounded the tragedy, see Philip L. Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). The year 1906 had perhaps the most destructive series of earthquakes of any period of the twentieth century. See Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: The Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 23–28. Winchester’s massive work not only examines the San Francisco earthquake in the larger context of modern plate tectonics theory but offers much California and San Francisco history to complement Fradkin’s account of the disaster. 2. E. J. Hibbard, “San Francisco,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 3, 1906, 18, 19. 3. “Earthquake Experiences: The Pacific Press Plant Wrecked,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 3, 1906, 14, 15. 4. Harold Oliver McCumber, Pioneering the Message in the Golden West (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1946), 137. 5. Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World, 332. 6. Ellen G. White, “The San Francisco Earthquake,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 24, 1906, 7, 8; cf. Testimonies for the Church, 9:92–96. 7. Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World, 335–342. 8. W. A. Spicer, “Speaking With ‘Tongues,’ ” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 10, 1908, 3, 4. 9. Howard Chua-Eoan, “Pope of the Americas,” TIME, March 13, 2013, accessed November 22, 2016, http://world.time.com/2013/03/13/pope-of-the-americas/. 10. Elizabeth Dias, “Intensity, Isolation, and Fiesta: ¡Evangélicos!” TIME, April 15, 2013, 24, 25. 11. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, February 5, 1908; S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 24, 1911. 12. A. S. J. Bourdeau, “Religious Liberty Campaign in California,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 31, 1908, 21; H. W. Cottrell, “The Camel’s Nose,” ibid., 21. 13. For the wording of the proposed legislation, see W. A. Colcord, “The California Sunday Bill,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 18, 1909, 21.

14. For the wording of the constitutional amendment, see W. A. Colcord, “The Proposed SundayLaw Amendment to the California Constitution,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 11, 1909, 20. 15. Haskell was happy to report, though, that when Crafts went to the largest Presbyterian church in Oakland during July 1910, only about twenty people came out to hear him. 16. W. A. Colcord, “California a Storm-Center Just Now,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, January 28, 1909, 18. 17. Ibid. 18. W. A. Colcord, “Does the Petition Work Amount to Anything?” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 4, 1909, 19. 19. W. A. Colcord, “Making Concessions,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 18, 1909, 21, 22. 20. W. W. Prescott, “From California,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 4, 1909, 21. 21. For a full discussion of the church’s difficulties with Jones in the later years of his career, see Knight, A. T. Jones. 22. Minutes, Berkeley, California, Seventh-day Adventist church, August 22, 1908. 23. Ibid., August 29, 1908; October 7, 1908. 24. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, August 19, 1908; S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, August 23, September 30, 1908; H. W. Cottrell to A. G. Daniells, September 12, October 5, 1908; S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, October 8, 1908. 25. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 31, 1908. 26. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, January 4, 1911. 27. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, January 19, 1911. 28. Haskell was a member of the board of directors of Pacific Press. 29. Reference 30. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, January 19, 1911; February 2, 1911. 31. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, January 19, 1911. 32. Ibid. 33. H. H. Haskell Letter, April [n.d.], 1906. 34. H. H. Haskell to W. A. Spicer, July 13, 1909. 35. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, February 2, 1911. 36. Ibid. 37. S. N. Haskell, “The Division of the California Conference,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 16, 1911, 17.

38. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, February 23, 1911. 39. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 24, 1911. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, January 16, 1911. 44. S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, February 23, 1911. 45. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 1911.

Chapter XXVIII

Temperance Struggle in Maine emperance and prohibition were major American issues during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alcoholism was not only a significant problem in itself, but it had become the symbol of a host of

T

other difficulties facing American society. The Prohibition Party and other Populist and Progressive reformist groups attempted to deal with it. Many felt that if alcohol could be controlled, they could solve a long list of other threats to society. Haskell had first encountered the issue as a child, when he pledged to join the Cold Water Army. He had written and spoken about temperance for many years. In Africa, he had met a tribal chief named Khama who especially impressed him. The chief’s people, the Bechuana, were “strictly temperate; no liquor is sold in the country, nor is the making of Kaffir beer allowed. The penalty of banishment is rigidly enforced upon all, both white and black, who violate this just law. They are loyal to the king and to the principles he inculcates among them.”1 Mrs. Nellie Druillard, who had accompanied Stephen to Africa, had become secretary of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in South Africa. She wrote to the United Kingdom’s Queen Victoria, explaining Khama’s temperance convictions and requesting that the British monarch instruct her officials in Africa to support the chief in his attempts to prevent the sale of alcohol in his kingdom. Seventh-day Adventists now became involved in the prohibition campaign in Maine.2 The first total abstinence society had been founded in

Portland, Maine, in 1815, and the state had passed the first prohibition laws in the United States. By 1846, lawmakers sought to stop the sale of all alcohol except for medical or industrial uses. Then, in 1851, the state outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks.3 The issue had become a part of the lengthy national drive for prohibition.4 In 1911, Ellen White wrote to Haskell, urging him to hurry to Portland but not explaining why. When he reached Maine, he discovered that he had arrived just a few weeks before a statewide referendum on the issue of prohibition. The outlook did not look good for the “dry” faction. When Stephen talked to the Maine Conference leadership, he learned that they had been so preoccupied with other matters that they were barely aware of the upcoming vote. He determined to do something about the situation and began to plan a campaign.5 The conference president, J. F. Piper, called the conference committee together to hear Haskell present his case for entering the temperance struggle. Stephen had brought with him a copy of the March 7 Youth’s Instructor special issue6 on the topic. Showing it to them, he urged them to get a supply and scatter them throughout the state. The committee agreed that it seemed like a good idea but pointed out two problems. How could they distribute the publication and, more fundamentally, how would they pay for the copies? Haskell explained that they would work with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as well as with other local prohibition organizations. The committee members reminded him that the WCTU had rejected Adventist materials because the church opposed Sunday laws, something the WCTU supported, with even a unit set up to promote blue laws. Unable to come to any decision, the committee session broke up. But Stephen was determined to get the conference involved. He ordered twelve thousand copies of the special temperance issue from the Review and Herald, saying he would accept financial responsibility for them. The publishing house sent the publications, charging eleven thousand to the

Maine Conference and donating the other thousand. But Stephen still needed people who would pass them out. Not even waiting for the materials to arrive, Hetty Haskell contacted Lillian M. N. Stevens, the national president of the WCTU. A longtime advocate of temperance and women’s rights issues, the president lived in Maine.7 When Hetty went to her appointment with Stevens, she wore her white ribbon badge, indicating her membership in the WCTU. Stevens agreed to participate and helped obtain some YWCA rooms to serve as a storage and distribution center. The Maine Conference began to get behind the push. Conference president Piper contacted the chairman of the state Prohibition Committee, who asked for ten thousand copies of the Youth’s Instructor temperance issue. Adventist conference staff from other states came to the aid of the Maine Conference. George B. Starr and his wife found a number of nonAdventist ministries willing to pass out copies. One minister had the young men of his congregation distribute three thousand copies. Other clergy handed them to their members as they left their church services. As the distribution campaign spread from town to town, the Maine Conference needed still more copies, and the Review received an order for twenty-three thousand more. That ran the conference bill up to $2,000. The publishing house refused to ship the new order unless Haskell would personally accept responsibility for payment. By this time, Ellen White had sent him a telegram urging him to push ahead in the temperance program. Stephen told the Review to ship the issues. If necessary, he would beg for the money to cover them. Hetty protested that her husband did not have that kind of money, but Stephen determined to continue. Adventist members were becoming more active. The previously scheduled Maine camp meeting got involved and held two temperance rallies. Attendees passed out fourteen thousand copies of the Youth’s Instructor temperance issue. “I do not think the brethren in Maine have been so stirred before, especially in these late years,” Haskell commented.

“They came up to the camp meeting full of courage and hope, for they began to see that they could actually do something.”8 Eventually the temperance advocates distributed nearly fifty-four thousand copies of the special issue. The public mood appeared to swing more and more toward the prohibition side, but to the disappointment of temperance advocates, when the balloting ended, the liquor forces seemed to have won by a thousand votes statewide. However, some were suspicious of the results. A recount uncovered the fact that town clerks in three areas had apparently misinterpreted instructions and reported “In favor of license” instead of “Not in favor.” The probation side had actually won by seven hundred votes. Many on both sides of the referendum credited distribution of the special Youth’s Instructor temperance issue with changing the outcome. Haskell commented that “even our enemies confessed that the Seventhday Adventists saved the state to prohibition.” In a letter that month to Willie White, Haskell mentioned that Wilbur F. Crafts, whom A. T. Jones had strongly opposed during the Sunday law fight of the early 1890s, now sent a letter of sincere appreciation for the Adventists’ help in the temperance issue. At the same time, Stephen obtained the funds to pay for the temperance periodicals. After the referendum in October, Adventists distributed fifty thousand copies of a tract based on Ellen White’s chapter, “Liquor Traffic and Prohibition” from The Ministry of Healing. As before, the WCTU helped deliver them statewide. In September Haskell had rented a tenement in Portland to house a group of evangelistic staff. Unfortunately, the Maine Conference felt that it could not afford the salary of even one individual. Haskell then volunteered to fund the entire city mission out of his and his wife’s wages from the General Conference. He not only recruited the staff but personally supported them. The Maine Conference did eventually assume the mission building rent of $22 a month, but that was all.

Haskell had gone to Maine expecting to be there temporarily, but in 1912 he moved from Nashville to Portland, Maine. Ellen White, having grown up in Portland, retained an interest in her childhood home. She hoped that the Adventist message would return to the eastern United States after its greater success in the western part of the country. It had begun in New England culture, thrived in New England–settled Northern California, and she hoped it would return to its cultural roots. The cause of Prohibition and her desire to see Portland evangelized had encouraged Haskell to move. In Portland he began his usual routine of distributing printed materials and visiting people in their homes as well as reaching them through the programs operated by his urban evangelistic team. For many years Stephen had struggled with bouts of pneumonia. Naturally, he and Hetty began to worry about what the rugged Maine winters might do to him. Fortunately, the winter that year was relatively mild. Some days were the warmest they had been in forty years. He wrote to Ellen White that thus far the weather in Portland had been “no more disagreeable than a California winter.”9 For six months the Portland city mission held either a cooking or health school every week in the Portland church. The following summer the mission had three nurses giving massages and treatments and conducting general nursing services. In August, the mission held two cooking schools. Portland would be the location of Haskell’s last major evangelistic series. During the late autumn of 1912, the Haskells transferred to South Lancaster.10 Although Stephen had gained only a few converts, he wrote, “We consider a foundation has been laid here in Portland for a substantial and fruitful work.”11 He continued to develop his publishing program for the blind, supporting it through the sale of issues of the Bible Training School publication. As Haskell labored in New England, another event, largely unnoticed at the time, would change the world for Seventh-day Adventists. On December 1, 1913, in Detroit, Michigan, Henry Ford put into operation the

first moving assembly line. It could now assemble an entire Ford Model T in just ninety-three minutes. Not only would the new manufacturing system drop the price of an automobile to an affordable range for a large part of the buying public, but it would also alter social forces in ways that would especially affect Adventists in their daily lives. As more and more church members acquired cars, they would have not only new freedoms but also new temptations, particularly the young people. The assembly-line factories would put pressure on Adventists to work on Sabbath. Furthermore, the vast factories would stimulate the rise of labor unions, which church members would have to deal with one way or another. But Haskell could still ignore such issues as he evangelized and prepared converts for church membership.

1. S. N. Haskell, “A Visit With Chief Khama,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 5, 1895, 153. 2. From its beginning in the 1850s, the Republican Party had employed what many regarded as a preachy morality as well as extensive Protestant imagery and traditions in speeches and platforms. While it appealed to those with a longer American heritage, this approach drove the bulk of the newer Lutheran and Catholic citizens into the Democratic Party. As the GOP, particularly in the Midwest, actively supported prohibition and Sunday closing laws to block immigrants from patronizing their beer halls and thus encourage their Americanization, it further turned the two groups against Republicans, a danger recognized by prominent Republican politician James G. Blaine when he encouraged Benjamin Harrison to leave out references to Sunday laws in the president’s first message to Congress. See Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier President (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, 1996), 133, note 20. It took William Jennings Bryan’s heavy use of Protestant revivalism in his presidential campaigns to reverse the trend temporarily. See Phillips, William McKinley, 78; cf. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 88. Phillips observes: “Bryan’s redemptionist rhetoric drove large numbers of Catholics and Lutherans toward McKinley. However, it also encouraged the old Yankee core of southern Michigan—abolitionists, food faddists, Seventh Day Adventists, and so on, including the city of Jackson, the GOP’s 1854 birthplace—to chalk up Bryan’s banner Midwest gains. In contrast to Yankee-settled regions farther east, Michigan Yankee counties had been friendly to Greenbackers and Populists and showed the biggest Bryan trends.” William McKinley, 83. As for prohibition, Adventists did not view it as a way of suppressing immigrant culture and remaking the upper and lower classes into the image of the middle class but as an aid to improving the general welfare.

3. In the twenty-first century the state posted along its highways signs declaring that Maine had passed a strict DUI law for the safety of its motorists. 4. The temperance strand of the American series of reform movements would lead to the passage of the prohibition amendment to the United States Constitution, but in the end it would have perhaps the least lasting impact on American society. Still, it proved a vehicle for the Adventist Church to make itself visible to the public, especially its reform-minded influential leaders. 5. As had been his custom throughout his career in the church, Haskell kept the General Conference well informed about what he was doing. For example, see S. N. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 11, 1912; May 26, 1912. 6. “Temperance Number,” Youth’s Instructor, March 7, 1911. 7. For a brief biography of Mrs. Stevens, see Kate Kennedy, More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Maine Women (Guilford, CT: TwoDot, 2005), 29–39. 8. S. N. Haskell to W. T. Knox, September 18, 1911. 9. S. N. Haskell to E. G. White, December 17, 1911. 10. Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 55. 11. S. N. Haskell, “Portland, Maine,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 12, 1912, 14.

Chapter XXIX

Death of Ellen G. White n February 13, 1915, Ellen White tripped and fell as she entered her study at home. An X-ray taken at the nearby St. Helena Sanitarium revealed that she had suffered an “intracapsular fracture of the left femur at

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the junction of the head and the neck.”1 Breaks of the hip are especially dangerous in the elderly because they limit mobility and often confine them to bed, making them more vulnerable to pneumonia and other complications. Mrs. White’s health had been declining for some time, and family and friends knew that she could die at any moment. They had to make plans for her funeral. General Conference president A. G. Daniells would have been the natural person to conduct the funeral, but he was planning to be away on a trip to the Far East for several months and did not expect to return until fall. During April, Haskell received a request to be prepared to preach the sermon in Battle Creek. After Ellen White died on July 16, 1915, a series of three funerals was planned. The first took place on the lawn of Mrs. White’s home, Elmshaven, on Sunday, July 18, for a group of about four hundred friends and neighbors. The next day a service occurred in Oakland, California. It attracted approximately a thousand people. Then Ellen White’s body was sent by train to Battle Creek for the third and largest funeral service, as well as burial beside her husband, James White. An estimated four thousand people crowded the Battle Creek Tabernacle on Saturday, July 24.2 Not only did Adventists attend but also

pastors and members of a number of surrounding non-Adventist churches. General Conference and North American Division officers participated. Physicians and nurses as well as patients at the nearby Battle Creek Sanitarium also came. Some of the patients arrived in wheelchairs. Six Adventist ministers took twenty-minute turns as pairs of honor guards, one minister at the foot of the casket, the other at the head. The coffin was plain black, decorated only with a metal plate engraved with “At Rest.”3 It stood directly in front of the pulpit. The powerful scent of numerous floral pieces filled the Tabernacle. In the extravagant style of the time, whether the occasion was a society banquet, political convention or rally, as well as funerals and other important gatherings, banks of palms, ferns, and complex floral displays crowded the auditorium. Pacific Press Publishing Association had sent a design of an open Bible made of white and pink carnations. Purple flowers spelled out the words “Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me.” The Tabernacle had given a floral piece representing a broken wheel, while the Review and Herald Publishing Association’s tribute was a broken column surmounted by a crown. A cross of white roses hung in front of the pulpit. A ribbon on it recorded Mrs. White’s final words: “I know in whom I have believed.” The funeral service began at 11:00 A.M. as a double quartet sang “Asleep in Jesus.” F. M. Wilcox, editor of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, read from Revelation 21:1–7, 22:1–5, and Isaiah 35 and then offered prayer. Professor Frederick Griggs sang “Rest for the Toiling Hand.” Arthur G. Daniells, who had cut short his overseas trip, presented Mrs. White’s life sketch. Haskell presented a talk that morning that was a mixture of evangelistic sermon for non-Adventist visitors and comfort for those who mourned the loss of a denominational leader, prophet, mother, and beloved family member and friend. Citing several encouraging passages from the book of Revelation, Stephen emphasized that, despite the fact that death is

humanity’s enemy, God has made it into a rest for His faithful followers. Speaking of the saints mentioned in the book of Revelation, he said, “Although they may have expected to live until truth triumphs finally, to live to see Christ come in the clouds of heaven, yet if they die, no terrible misfortune befalls them; for ‘blessed are the dead that die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit; that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.’ ”4 Applying the passage to the woman they had gathered to honor, Haskell declared, I do not know what words could be framed that would seem to arouse greater interest in those that believe in the truth brought to view here than these words concerning those that may die in the message. We have no question in reference to the faithfulness of our dear sister. She has been faithful and true as far as lay in her power to accomplish the work that God gave her to do; yet she is dead; but “blessed are the dead which die in the Lord henceforth.” She rests from her labors; she has ceased to live; she has met the foe, Death; she has surrendered; but her works live. Being dead, she speaks and will speak as long as souls can be saved in this world. What we need is confidence in God and in his Word to carry out the same work that she did as far as we shall be able and time shall last.5 God’s people would see Ellen G. White again at the resurrection. And, Haskell stressed, she would be fully the person that they had known and loved. By implication he rejected the idea that the resurrected Ellen White would be some vague spirit. Instead, she would once more be the individual she had been in this life, a reality that Haskell sought to carefully demonstrate from Scripture. Christ possessed individuality when he rose. It is no doubt familiar to you all that Mary was the first one to go to the sepulcher in the

morning of the resurrection, and she ran and told Peter and John that the tomb was empty. And so Peter and John came to see. “And he [John] stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulcher, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.” Now it may seem to us strange that John should write this particular, but there is something more to it that is more marvelous still. “Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulcher, and he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.” Why did John believe? He saw Christ’s very habits manifested right there in the tomb. John saw the napkin laid by itself, and he saw the linen clothes laid by themselves; and yet he did not know the scripture that Christ must rise from the dead; but when he saw this, and saw the body gone from the tomb, he said, That is Jesus. He is risen from the dead. The scripture he did not know, but he knew Christ was raised, by the orderly way in which the linen clothes were left.6 Haskell further developed his point by noting Mary’s reaction to her encounter with the resurrected Jesus. After she mistook Him for the gardener, “ ‘Jesus saith unto her, Mary.’ That is all—‘Mary.’ She had heard that voice many a time before. ‘She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.’ How did she recognize him? It was the same voice that she had heard call her name time and again before he died. Then she must have recognized him by his voice when he said ‘Mary,’ and she looked up and there he, Jesus, stood right by her side.”7 God would raise to life His beloved saints. “So it will be with our friends finally. They will come forth like our Saviour; we shall behold them, we shall see them; and while we cannot hear the voice of our sister

any more in this world, yet her influence lives, and in the resurrection, if we are so faithful as to have a part with the people of God, then we shall recognize her. We shall see her and know her. It will be so with all God’s people.”8 Haskell concluded his sermon with a call for all those present to be among those who would greet Ellen G. White at the resurrection and become part of the kingdom of glory. After a final song and prayer, the casket was moved to the vestibule of the church. The entire congregation passed it in single file. The procession to Oak Hill Cemetery, in which James White and other members of the family were buried, consisted of more than a hundred carriages and automobiles. Others wishing to attend the brief graveside ceremony crammed into nine streetcars chartered for the occasion.9 Even though the overcast sky had threatened rain, it held off until the people had returned from the cemetery. Stephen Haskell had preached to those in the Dime Tabernacle that they must wait until the resurrection to see Ellen White again. Now, the funeral over, those words took on ever deeper meaning for him. His long-time friend and spiritual mentor was gone. In fact, the world and most of the people he had known were now rapidly passing away. The special issue of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald devoted to the funeral of Mrs. White must have especially engraved this reality on his mind. The Review had filled its pages with pictures of Adventist pioneers, now dead, such as Joseph Bates, James White, John Nevins Andrews, and Uriah Smith— poignantly reminding Haskell of the dwindling ranks of his peers who had founded and built up his beloved Seventh-day Adventist Church. One of the most difficult aspects of growing old is the death of friends, and Stephen had lost, apart from his first wife, perhaps his closest friend.

1. W. C. White, “A Letter From Elder W. C. White,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March

11, 1915, 17. 2. F. M. Wilcox, “The Final Funeral Services of Mrs. Ellen G. White at Battle Creek, Mich. July 24, 1915: Death of a Mother in Israel; She Rests From Her Labors,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 5, 1915, 3–13. 3. A sheaf of wheat as a symbol of the resurrection had adorned the casket at the Oakland service— a detail supplied from personal reminiscences to the author by Mary Hunter Moore, who attended the service as a young person. 4. Wilcox, “The Final Funeral Services of Mrs. Ellen G. White,” 9. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 9, 10. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Ibid. 9. Streetcar systems of the time always liked to have a cemetery or amusement park at the end of at least one line, because such places generated much passenger traffic during a time when few people had automobiles to make visits. See Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915–1945, 217.

Chapter XXX

Twentieth Century Unlimited hile the Haskells were living in Nashville during 1915, Stephen received a telegram from Portland, Maine, telling him that, after years of struggle, the Portland church was finally free of debt. The

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completion of the project would encourage the membership to try a major program of evangelism. For some years, Ellen White had been urging the church to begin extensive urban evangelism. She especially put pressure on GC president Arthur G. Daniells to take the lead. As had been the case of her plea to reorganize the denominational administrative structure, she pointed out the need but did not offer any plan. The constant call for city evangelism without any specific instruction left Daniells frustrated.1 But then events created an opening. The quiet work Haskell had done in Portland a few years earlier now seemed to be coming to fruition. As is often the case, the construction of a new building had brought a sense of unity to the Portland congregation. Then a spirit of revival spread among the membership. The Adventist leadership in the region became interested in conducting evangelism and asked the GC president to speak at some of the meetings. Daniells had just returned from a world tour. Especially in Australia and New Zealand he had noticed a new interest in the public about last-day events as a result of the outbreak of World War I. As conflict spread across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, people wanted to know what the future might hold. Adventist leaders in Australia had arranged for him to present lectures in large municipal halls, and Daniells received a good

response, to the point that he felt encouraged to attempt urban evangelism. The Maine Conference rented Portland’s new Civic Auditorium for the Sunday nights of January 23 and 30 and Wednesday night, January 26, 1916. The Sabbath before the first meeting, the members of the area churches spent the day in prayer and fasting for the success of the evangelistic series. They felt confident that people would fill the auditorium. Daniells was not so sure. He admitted afterward that “personally I felt that if five hundred persons came to hear us, I should feel encouraged.”2 To his pleasant surprise, nearly two thousand attended “as he explained with vigor how the present world crisis is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy.”3 He had titled his talk, “Changing the World’s Map” and believed that “the present scramble for Turkish territory must result in the removal of the Turkish capital to Jerusalem and that the deliverance of God’s people will soon follow.”4 It was an application of the old Adventist teaching on Turkey as the King of the North in Daniel 11 to the current situation. At the time, many saw in the conflict between Western military forces and the Ottoman Empire the events that would lead up to a literal battle of Armageddon. Denominational historians have viewed the success of the series in Portland and later evangelistic meetings in Pittsburgh and on the West Coast as a breakthrough in urban evangelism.5 Haskell’s hard work in Portland must have created a base and an interest that later events could build upon. White Memorial Hospital One of the last major projects Stephen and Hetty Haskell worked on together was the development of the Ellen G. White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. As California’s population growth shifted from the San Francisco Bay area to the southern part of the state, Adventists had established a number of medical and educational institutions there, including the College of Medical Evangelists. As part of American

medicine’s increasing professionalization, the nation’s medical establishment sought to upgrade the training of physicians. Ellen White had pushed for the denomination to establish a qualified medical school. But that required CME to meet the new standards being promoted by medical school accrediting teams. Unfortunately, the American Medical Association (AMA) gave CME a substandard rating of C. The Adventist medical school needed strengthening. One of the school’s greatest weaknesses was the lack of a clinical training facility.6 The medical-education accrediting body of the American Medical Association had mandated that all medical schools must have a training hospital in a large city.7 In 1913, CME had established a small clinic on First Street, next to a tannery in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Its director equipped it with secondhand instruments that he hauled to the clinic in a wheelbarrow. The staff and medical students would provide free care to patients. But the clinic was hardly adequate for accreditation. Church leadership faced a painful choice: raise money to develop a fullfledged facility by diverting mission funds to the school and bring home a significant number of foreign missionaries or close CME. Ellen White had worked hard to see the medical school set up. Now the denomination faced the possibility of throwing away all her efforts just a few months after her death. The church’s 1915 Autumn Council met in Loma Linda. A major topic of discussion was what to do about CME. A subcommittee appointed to study the issue eventually recommended shutting down the medical program. Then, unexpectedly, a group of four nondelegate women asked to speak to the session. The group consisted of Hetty Haskell, her widowed sister Mrs. Emma Gray, Dr. Florence Armstrong Keller (a pioneer woman physician in New Zealand),8 and Mrs. Josephine Gotzian, a wealthy widow and frequent contributor to the church’s mission programs.9 The women offered to help raise $61,000 to build and equip the much-needed clinical

hospital. Furthermore, they suggested that the medical facility be named after Mrs. White, who had so long pushed for the medical school. As Mrs. Haskell put it, in words that show her admiration of the church leader and personal friend, “Because of the heavy burden carried by the servant of the Lord for the medical school, it seems fitting that the hospital should bear her name. No building or column of granite could be a fitting memorial of the noble life whose influence, under God, has molded the lives of so many; but if she could speak, we think her choice would be some humble building where the poor and needy could receive spiritual and physical help. Such will be the work of the hospital when completed.”10 After the Autumn Council delegates voted to keep CME open,11 the four women— referred to as the “Women’s Committee on the Los Angeles Hospital”12— went to work.13 Stephen Haskell’s old world-traveling companion, and later associate in Nashville, Percy T. Magan, after spending many years as an educator in the church, had decided at the age of forty-two to enter the University of Tennessee medical school. Magan had been one of the members of the committee appointed to represent CME, in February 1915, before the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association. When the AMA turned down a request for a B rating for the Adventist medical school (a level required for states to recognize the medical degrees conferred by any school), he urged that the school do everything possible to get an A rating.14 He would play a major role at the 1915 Autumn Council in convincing the General Conference to develop a fully accredited medical school at CME.15 Impressed with Magan, church leaders voted him the school’s dean a few days later. The development of the College of Medical Evangelists in response to the transformation of the American medical profession, especially in the area of medical training, is one of the most obvious examples of how the American context shaped Seventh-day Adventist thought and programs and institutional structure. The denomination took the Adventist

philosophy of health and shaped it in reaction to social forces at work in the United States. Postcards of the Pioneers Magan encouraged Mrs. Haskell and the other women in their fundraising. (He also supported the naming of the hospital for Ellen White, despite resistance from others.16) One of the women had noticed that those attending the meetings included a large number of ministers of more than seventy years of age. In fact, five of them (J. N. Loughborough, G. I. Butler, S. N. Haskell, H. W. Decker, and J. H. Rogers) were more than eighty years old. She gathered them together and had their photographs taken, with the plan to have the pictures made into postcards as a fundraiser project for the hospital.17 “When the aged brethren heard that their photographs were to be sold for money, they at first objected,” Hetty, the chair of the women’s committee, wrote in a promotional article in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, but when they learned that the money secured from the sale of their photographs would be used to build The Ellen G. White Memorial Hospital, they were glad to help in equipping the school for which Sister White carried such a heavy burden the last few years of her life. It is the long years of self-sacrificing labor these aged workers have spent in the upbuilding of the cause we love, that endears them to us. Some of them are too feeble to do aggressive work in collecting funds for this enterprise, yet the sale of their photographs will give them a part in this work.18 The photographs would be sold for fifty cents each, and on the back were printed the name, age, and years of service of each minister depicted. Hetty worked with Mrs. G. A. Irwin, Percy T. Magan, Lida Scott, and others in the fund-raising program.

Leaders set a date to collect a special offering for the hospital and requested I. H. Evans, Newton Evans, Percy Magan, and Mrs. Haskell to compose articles promoting the project. As for her article, Hetty wrote T. E. Bowen that she “knew the brethren [writing those] preceding my article would set forth the general needs, and I thought it would not be amiss for me to present it from the women’s side of the question, showing God designed our women should be medical workers and make a special plea for them.”19 In her article she urged church members to “remember the millions of shut-in women of heathen lands that can be reached only by women medical missionaries, and give liberally to equip our medical school so that our young women may be educated as medical missionaries to minister to their sisters waiting in heathen darkness for light.”20 Stephen also took an active role in the development of the clinical facilities. Some protested that establishing such a hospital in an urban setting violated Ellen White’s counsel, since she had urged that Adventist institutions be established in rural areas. Haskell wrote an article defending the decision to establish the hospital in Los Angeles, balancing one aspect of her counsel with that of another. It shows his strong faith in her prophetic leading. After recounting previous occasions in which some Adventists had resisted new developments because of lack of funds, or the shortness of time before Christ’s return, or other arguments (situations he had often been involved in), Haskell declared, If we had allowed the murmurers to direct the work in the past, this movement would have died in its infancy, instead of circling the globe. The murmurers base their conclusion on human policy, but the man of faith says, “Let us know what God says should be done, and in his strength we will go forward and do it.” God has never left his people in the dark; he has always given them light. “But,” says the murmurer, “has Sister White said there should be a

hospital built in Los Angeles?” In the Medical Evangelistic Library, No. 6, pp. 30, 31, we read: “The light given me is, We must provide that which is essential to qualify our youth who desire to be physicians, so that they may intelligently fit themselves to be able to stand the examinations essential to prove their efficiency as physicians. They are to be prepared to stand the essential tests.” This necessary equipment is to be provided so that our medical students “will not need to connect with worldly medical schools conducted by unbelievers.” Notice, we are to provide all the essential equipment, that our physicians may be able to pass the State examinations. The laws of the land require that the medical students shall spend much of the last half of their course in hospital work, where there are many poor, that they may have the necessary practice in treating the actual sick before they are accredited physicians. In order to do this, we must have a hospital. “But,” says the murmurer, “why not let them get this instruction in large worldly hospitals?” We are instructed that the young people while taking the medical course are to be guarded religiously, and that we are to provide what is necessary so they “will not need to connect with worldly medical schools conducted by unbelievers.” To those who argued that Mrs. White said such training should be done at the Loma Linda medical school, he reiterated her admonition that “ ‘we must provide that which is essential.’ ” He explained that a hospital in a large city where there is many poor is one of the essential things required by the laws of the land, and as we are told we must provide it, we are building it in Los Angeles, the nearest large city. Loma Linda is out in the country. The hospital will be built in the nearest place it can be built and meet the demands of the law.

The first two years of laboratory and book work will be spent by the medical students in the quiet country, away from the allurements of the city. The last two years of their course will be spent in Los Angeles in our own hospital, under the instruction of our own godly physicians. After telling of the sacrifices many had made to teach at the medical school, he concluded, quoting from Ellen White, “ ‘What we need now is Calebs, men who are faithful and true.’ ” “ ‘While the cowards and murmurers perished in the wilderness, faithful Calebs had a home in the promised Canaan. “Them that honor me I will honor,” saith the Lord.’ ”21 In addition to the postcard project, and speaking and writing in support of the clinical facilities, the Haskells appealed for funds for the hospital at every place they spoke or held some kind of meeting. In California alone they solicited funds in twenty-five churches. Wherever they went, they obtained contributions for the hospital. At first called the Los Angeles Hospital, the training facility moved to another location in 1917 and continued to be strengthened. Three years after the decision to build, Stephen attended the dedication of White Memorial Hospital on April 21, 1918. During the ceremony, as Dr. Magan gave a speech, a strong earthquake shook the speaker’s stand, a reminder of how seismic activity would continue to influence California’s development. Shortly afterward, the Council on Medical Education accreditation body upgraded CME’s status to B. While not yet at an A level, the institution’s medical degrees would at least be recognized and graduates could sit for their board examinations and receive state licensing. World War I The outbreak of World War I once again placed the Seventh-day Adventist Church more directly in the flow of events outside the denomination. In

Woodrow Wilson’s drive for victory over Germany, the American president interjected the force of government into almost every aspect of American life.22 That presence first affected the church’s young men. They soon found themselves in a difficult position relative to military service, especially after the passage of the national Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917. As was the case in the American Civil War, the church had to work hard to get governmental recognition of the noncombatant status of Adventist draftees, as well as their release from unnecessary Sabbath duties.23 A number of Adventist conscripts went to prison because of their stand. During the war, the Woodrow Wilson administration determined to stamp out anything that might subvert American loyalties and hinder the war effort.24 Waves of nativist activity and antihyphenism (fear of and hostility toward such groups as Irish-Americans,25 German-Americans, and Jewish-Americans) swept through the United States.26 The discovery of a German sabotage group operating in the country introduced the nation to the fear of international terrorism.27 Various governmental and private groups spied on German-Americans and others, compiling files and dossiers, confiscating property and resources that might aid the German Empire, and arresting anyone considered a threat. Newspapers and magazines faced censorship, and some leaders sought to restrict freedom of speech. America in Prophecy Adventists were caught up in the hysteria. The church’s teachings on the role of the United States in Revelation 13 disturbed some in the nation. The May 1918 Sedition Act, passed at the height of war fever, denied mail delivery of anything “uttering, printing, writing or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, the armed forces and their uniform, and the flag.28 Anyone convicted of violating the law faced up to $10,000 in fines (two decades of

earnings for a laboring person) and twenty years in prison.29 The Adventist view on America’s prophetic place in prophecy, as depicted in the widely sold book Bible Readings (the book that Haskell’s Bible reading program had brought into existence), triggered enough complaints that the Review and Herald Publishing Association felt it best to revise the material.30 Bible Readings had already undergone a five-year period of revision, concluding in 1914, with the newest edition coming off the press in 1915.31 Adventists had protested the wave of proposed laws restricting freedom of press and speech and had received a positive response from other editors,32 but the mood of the country was against them. To ensure the necessary supplies and equipment for the war effort, the government—through a series of hastily established committees— regulated the production and distribution of raw materials. The authorities urged people to conserve food. For example, new directives encouraged them to go without wheat products or meat several days a week so that food could be sent overseas to meet military and humanitarian demands in Europe. The government committees decided whether or not a specific periodical article or topic was worth receiving scarce paper for its publication. At times the Adventist publishing houses had to obtain official permission for special allotments of paper in order to meet their publishing needs. Historian Michael McGerr has noted that “for some Americans, the enormous expansion of federal authority—conscription, economic controls, prohibition, the loyalty campaign—constituted an unwarranted invasion of individual and state’s rights. Conservatives angrily labeled the wartime government dictatorial and autocratic.”33 One popular journalist of the time, Mark Sullivan, protested “our submission to autocracy in government.” He complained that “every male between 18 and 45 had been deprived of freedom of his body. . . . Every person had been deprived of freedom of his tongue, not one could utter

dissent from the purpose or the method of war. . . . Every business man was shorn of dominion over his factory or store, every housewife surrendered control of her table, every farmer was forbidden to sell his wheat except at the price the government fixed. . . . The prohibition of individual liberty in the interest of the state could hardly be more complete.” Sullivan believed that what had happened in America was “the greatest submission by the individual to the state that had occurred in any country at any time. It was an abrupt reversal of the evolution that had been underway for centuries. Now in six months, in America the state took back, the individual gave up, what had taken centuries of contest to win.”34 It was not a new reaction to danger, but one that had long troubled American history. The Alien and Sedition laws, passed during the presidency of John Adams, may be its first manifestation. In his study of Jacksonian America, historian Henry L. Watson writes of what he described as a crucial development in popular political culture. Voters increasingly responded to politicians who could point to a conspicuous enemy of public liberty and equality and pledge to destroy the “monster.” The pugnacious stance [that President Andrew Jackson took] against the Cherokees [forcing them to move west and free up their land for whites] would be soon directed against other targets. Particularly in the South, even planter politicians who opposed the President’s basic program and received meager support from nonslaveholders could gain a measure of public approval by directing attacks against alien enemies—Indians first, then the federal government and its tariff policies, and finally the abolitionists. In their turn, Northern voters were also learning to follow these attacks, first against certain secret societies, then against banks, immigrants, Roman Catholics, and finally the “slave powers.”35

After the Civil War, those dangerous “outsiders” came to include anarchists lurking among the exploding numbers of foreign immigrants. Then emerged the German threat of World War I, the Bolshevik and Red Scares of the following decades, the Axis spies and agents of World War II, and the potential nuclear apocalypse of the Cold War. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, international terrorism has emerged as the latest alien danger, and politicians have, as usual, taken full advantage of it. The anarchist throwing a dynamite bomb was just as frightening to the nineteenth-century American as the terrorist flying a fully fueled airliner into a skyscraper is to a citizen of the United States today. Thus, the post– September 11, 2001 fear of international terrorists is only that cycle’s latest manifestation. Such fear has touched the church in the past, both in America and more frequently elsewhere in the world, as it will in the future. Stephen Haskell’s prediction in the 1880s that the church might have to do part of its mission during difficult times still awaits its greatest and most dramatic fulfillment. Adventists coped as best they could. The war would affect the church in still other ways. Some of them were quite personal and touched individual church members, including the Haskells. Hetty Haskell attempted to help one individual caught up in the international crisis. Some years earlier, she and Stephen had met a German immigrant named Louise Scholz.36 The woman had accepted Seventh-day Adventism in her homeland while taking a nursing program at one of the largest hospitals in the country. When required to work on Sabbath, she had dropped out of the course just two months before she would have received her diploma. The hospital had asked her to put her convictions on hold for those final months of coursework, but she refused. German Adventists suggested that Scholz emigrate to the United States. After some difficulties, she made the voyage to America and headed for Battle Creek about the time John Harvey Kellogg began making his break

from the denomination, a situation that greatly puzzled her. Scholz worked at the Battle Creek Sanitarium for a week or two, until, one Saturday, her supervisor ordered her to clean some recently vacated rooms. When she declined, her boss sent her to Dr. Kellogg. After she explained to him that she had had to abandon her program at the hospital in Germany because of her conviction about the Sabbath, he replied that her tasks could wait until after sunset. Even so, disappointed at the mind-set at “the San,” she moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she finished a nursing program. Then she traveled to San Francisco, where she began working for a German doctor. The Haskells, who often hired nurses for their personal health problems37 as well as their evangelistic activities, became greatly impressed with Louise Scholz. Hetty wrote to T. E. Bowen in the General Conference, “We found her a person of real ability and deep conviction. In fact of all the nurses who have been connected with us in our home the last twenty years we have never found one who had as great a burden for souls as Louise. From that time on we have always told Louise to consider our home her home and she has looked to us as about her best earthly friends.”38 Eventually Scholz became a missionary in India. When war broke out, the British authorities sent all missionaries of German extraction back to their homeland. The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, learning what had happened to Louise, recommended that the European division employ her. As for the Haskells, they hoped that she would return to the United States, something that Scholz apparently also desired. Unfortunately, the denomination in Europe did not offer Louise a job. Frustrated about her situation, she wrote to Mrs. Haskell, who then contacted T. E. Bowen. She wrote, It seems to me, Brother Bowen, that they have not treated her quite right in Germany. I don’t understand it at all. In her letter of course she didn’t dare say much because every thing is censored,39 but she

says that Elder Conradi does not care for her, and other expressions show that they have not taken much interest in her. Of course as all the letters are censored she does not dare write very much. In her letter she says, “He (Elder Conradi) had no use for me after he found out I would not stay after the war and work in the German Mission. He has not even asked me if I had any need of anything. He has only told me to work in the Red Cross until the war is over and then go to East Africa.40 My reception at Hamburg41 was anything but warm. When I returned from the conference in our Union I was asked to vacate my room as they had no boarding house there.”42 Scholz had told Hetty that the Red Cross had sent her to what Mrs. Haskell believed was Romania to care for a hundred and fifty people, of whom fifty or sixty were extremely ill. Louise’s own health broke from the strain, and she was transferred to a hospital in Germany. Mrs. Haskell quotes her as writing, “ ‘I only pray that God may keep me in health that I may stand through this terrible war and not be a burden to any one. If I should ever be in need of the daily wants, Hamburg would not look after me. But I must not allow these thoughts to come up. The Red Cross is giving me a chance to rest at present for two months and I believe the Lord will sustain me and give me strength for future work again.’ ”43 In his reply to Hetty, Bowen acknowledged that Scholz had requested furlough back to America but that because of the current conditions, denominational leadership had felt that she would be more useful in Germany and had informed European leaders so. They realized that no non-German missionaries could be sent to work there. While Bowen would have liked to notify General Conference secretary William A. Spicer about Louise’s situation, he feared that he could not risk it because of censors, both in the US as well as Germany. He possibly could not even get a letter to Spicer, who was traveling in Europe, hoping to get into Germany. To try to explain the problem would only attract needless

attention and create more problems. Bowen did assure Hetty that the church would take care of Louise and, if necessary, would see that she got back to America. He observed, “This is not the first time American workers sent over there have received the cold shoulder from the Hamburg headquarters.” He also thanked Mrs. Haskell for her willingness to open her home to Scholz.44 In her response to the church official’s letter, Hetty explained that she recognized why Scholz had accepted a position with the Red Cross (the woman was under close surveillance after being expelled from British India). It would have made things even more difficult if Louise had refused to nurse wounded soldiers. Mrs. Haskell assured Bowen, “All that I am interested in is that the poor girl get away [from the present situation] before her health is completely broken. She is a valuable worker, one that nurses for the sake of winning souls than the money received for the work.”45 Despite the American embargo of direct mail service to Germany, the Haskells kept track of Miss Scholz. Letters went back and forth by circuitous routes. Stephen and Hetty continued interceding for her even after the war ended. But by then Stephen was being distracted by Hetty’s suddenly poor health.46 Some of the responses that Adventists made to the war would later have unexpected consequences. Evangelists, using the war concerns as a way of attracting public attention, predicted that the battle of Armageddon would take place when a British expedition advancing into Palestine from Egypt met Turkish forces stationed there—all in fulfillment of the long-held Adventist belief in Turkey’s prophetic role. At first the emphasis brought many converts into the church. But when the battle did not materialize, many of those new members vanished. The failure of Turkey to collapse and retreat to Palestine—a prediction long taught by Adventists—began the decline of the denomination’s traditional belief in Turkey as the King of the North in Daniel 11,47 a position that Haskell had presented in his

The Story of Daniel the Prophet.48 Although Adventist commentators would continue to watch events in the Middle East, hoping to see the fulfillment of the traditional understanding of a literal battle of Armageddon,49 at least some would shift the emphasis to other themes, such as being personally ready for the Second Coming.50 World War I would have a major impact on the church that lingered for many years, especially in Europe.51 Surviving the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic The new hospital in Los Angeles would open just in time to face a global health crisis: the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. Although the worst outbreak struck San Francisco rather than Los Angeles, 52 it would still swamp the facilities of White Memorial Hospital, and would leave even Percy Magan severely ill. While it seems to have originated from China, the disease may have started in the US in an outbreak at a military camp in Kansas. From there it spread through the movement of troops across the United States and to Europe and, finally, around the world. It killed at least 675,000 out of a United States population of between 103 and 105 million, and an estimated 50 million, but perhaps as high as 100 million, out of a world population of 1.8 billion. Approximately five percent of the world’s population died in two years, most within a span of twelve weeks during 1918.53 Adventists did not escape the pandemic. It touched mission stations in Africa and elsewhere, though church members may have suffered a smaller percentage of deaths than did the general population. The denomination printed articles in the Advent Review54 and church health magazines on how to cope with the disease. One publishing house prepared a special tract entitled Epidemics for members not only to help people prevent or deal with influenza but also as a witnessing tool to introduce the whole Adventist health program to the public. Life and Health magazine released a sixteen-page extra. Its cover announced, “This

Extra is issued for the cause of humanity in a great world crisis. Will the reader do his utmost to place a copy in every home in his community?”55 Normally influenza kills the very young and the elderly, but that was not the case in the 1918 outbreak. One form of it especially devastated those between the ages of twenty and forty. Their stronger immune systems reacted so aggressively that it could cause the death of a victim within hours.56 Although Haskell had struggled with a number of health problems through the years, the aging leader, with his weaker immune system, ironically had a small advantage over younger people. Post-War America Dramatic changes did not end with the war. The year 1919 was one of violent unrest. Labor, racial, and economic strife tore at the fabric of the United States and disturbed other countries around the world.57 But the year would also stir turmoil in the Seventh-day Adventist denomination because of the Bible Conference that met July 1–19, 1919, and the Bible and History Teachers Council of August 9, 1919.58 The conference would influence events that, perhaps, reflected in the Adventist Church some of the suffocating atmosphere of concern and fear that had so greatly impacted the surrounding culture. At the time, many of the participants did not immediately sense how divisive the topics discussed would turn out to be. Arthur G. Daniells reported that the Bible and history teachers, the editors, and the members of the General Conference Committee, who came together from all parts of North America, rejoiced to find themselves in agreement on all the great fundamental truths of the Bible. It was the first time that all these men had compared their views and teachings in this way. Time and again there was expressed the deepest gratitude and rejoicing over the unity and harmony that prevailed regarding the vital, saving truths of the gospel. There was manifested throughout the conference,

a cordial, brotherly spirit. No unkind word was uttered by any one when discussing the differences of views regarding minor questions. It was a good and profitable meeting.59 Unfortunately, some in the church did not have such a positive image of the meetings or its participants. One was Claude E. Holmes,60 an unofficial attendee at the conference. He wrote against the conclusions of the meetings and particularly attacked two of the participants: E. F. Albertsworth and H. C. Lacey, Haskell’s compatriot from Avondale days. One of the individuals to whom Holmes protested was J. S. Washburn, who had been involved in the “daily” controversy. Washburn saw the Bible conference meetings as an outgrowth of that theological conflict.61 Events that Haskell had helped to set in motion years earlier were still playing out. The controversy about the nature of Ellen White’s inspiration had continued to fester since the emergence of the “daily” issue. The year after the 1919 conference, Haskell commented to W. C. White that there had developed in the Adventist Church “two classes of critics of the sharpest kind.” One side challenged everything that it did not consider in harmony with Mrs. White’s writings while the other tended “to show in some way [that her writings] cannot be relied upon.” It amazed him that individuals in both factions seemed to be well acquainted with the contents of her unpublished letters. He also considered the two sides as headed “for a battle of the fiercest kind.” From his perspective, one group sought to “defend the old position,” no matter what the cost, while the other was determined to “improve” various church positions in light of the “present status of society.”62 Death of Hetty Haskell During the winter of 1918–1919, as the world struggled to survive the influenza epidemic, Mrs. Haskell had her own health crisis. She began to

tell others that she did not feel well, and she started losing weight. After she and Stephen attended the New Jersey camp meeting and arrived in South Lancaster in July, her condition suddenly worsened. A series of Xrays taken ten days later at the Clinton, Massachusetts, hospital revealed a serious problem, but she hoped that God would heal her, as she believed that He had done in the past. Although she had miraculously recovered from various diseases six or seven times previously, it would not happen now. She was transferred to the New England Sanitarium on July 28. The physicians there decided to operate on July 31. As Dr. W. A. Ruble commented later, “Nothing but a mighty miracle of God’s power could accomplish her healing.”63 On September 9, 1919, Stephen sent a telegram that expressed his concern for his wife and his perspective of the situation: “Satan working. Pray earnestly for wife. Notify Wilcox and others.”64 General Conference leaders began to offer their support and encouragement. For example, one wrote to Stephen, “Our brethren in Washington have been seriously concerned over the condition of Sister Haskell’s health, and frequent prayers have arisen to the great Physician that he would sustain his servant in the battle in which she is making against the inroads of disease. We feel confident in seeking God in her behalf, believing that her life is surrendered to the Master, to do his service wherever duty may call. We shall continue to pray that the great Physician who healeth all diseases may continue to her needs, and bring to her health and strength once again.”65 After struggling with the illness for several weeks at the New England Sanitarium, she died October 21, 1919. Some must have noted that the next day would be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Great Disappointment of October 1844. William A. Spicer, the secretary of the General Conference, sent Haskell a letter notifying him of an action that the General Conference Committee made when it learned of Hetty’s death. It had

felt a desire to place upon the General Conference minutes their appreciation of Sister Haskell’s labors, and to send to you an expression of their brotherly sympathy in this hour. The following action was taken: “Voted, That we express to our brother and fellow laborer, Elder S. N. Haskell, our deepest sympathy and love in this hour of sad affliction, assuring him of our prayers that the God of all comfort may sustain and bless him in sorrow, and give to him health and strength to continue his testimony in behalf of the truth and work of God to which he and his companion have devoted their lives; and we further place upon the General Conference records our sense of the loss the cause has sustained in the death of Sister Hetty Hurd Haskell, whose labors and service are known in the churches in many lands, and whose faith and devotion will ever be an inspiration and help to those who have known her.” All our brethren send their personal greetings to you in this action. May the dear Lord’s sustaining grace uphold you. Your brethren of the General Conference Committee, Per Secretary66 Arthur G. Daniells, Frederick C. Gilbert, and other prominent individuals conducted Hetty’s funeral. She was buried in Eastwood Cemetery near South Lancaster, Massachusetts. Even though he was sixty-four when he married Hetty, Stephen had outlived her. A few days later, he wrote to Spicer, thanking him for his letter and the GC committee for its expression of sympathy. After a brief description of his own service to the denomination, Stephen wrote his own appreciation of his wife and her influence on him. Twenty five years ago my first wife died while I was away from

home. Two years after I was married to her who now sleeps in Jesus. She bore a three[-]fold burden from day of our marriage, [sic] First she was my right hand helper under God Spiritually. Always ready to step in in any spiritual work. Second Physically, she always by night or day to help me by giving treatments or in any way possible. Third Financially. She was a good financier kept an account of all my affairs except my expense to the General Conference. Now she sleeps and none can appreciate my feelings save those who have passed through the same. But I would not have it otherwise for it is my God that has done it. You can imagine my appreciation of words of Sympathy and prayers, with out it I could not live. With it and the privilege of bearing my testimony in behalf of the message is my only life and hope. I go to New Haven next Sabbath [sic] It is my only hope. Bro. Loughborough will write wifes obituary as he led my wife to embrace the truth in 1884 and to engage in the work in 1885.67 For a quarter century, Hetty had hovered over Stephen like a protective mother hen, guarding his health and strength, defending his work. Her life had centered on supporting and defending “the Elder” or “Elder H,” as she often referred to her husband in her correspondence. Now her death brought many changes into his life. One effect was to prompt his decision to cease publication of The Bible Training School. He and Hetty had edited it together; now it seemed too much to carry on alone. Its last issue was dated January 1920. However, the periodical’s office in South Lancaster did continue to sell materials for the blind, tracts, charts, and books a while longer.

1. Valentine, The Prophet and the Presidents, 288–290. See also McArthur, A. G. Daniells, especially chapter 9. 2. A. G. Daniells, “Developments of the Work in the East,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 6, 1916, 7.

3. H. W. Carr, “The Work in Maine,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 24, 1916, 14. 4. Ibid. 5. Weeks, Adventist Evangelism in the Twentieth Century, 84–98. 6. For a fuller discussion of this period of Loma Linda University’s history, see Richard A. Schaefer, The Glory of the Vision, Book 1 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 2010). 7. Percy T. Magan, “The Need of the Ellen G. White Memorial Hospital,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 21, 1916, 2. 8. She became the physician to the royal Maori family during her nineteen-year stay in New Zealand and the first woman and first medical doctor elected to the board of management of all hospitals in Auckland, New Zealand, despite the fact that she was not even a citizen of the country. Later she would join the faculty of CME. Even at the age of 92 she continued to see patients and perform surgery six days a week. 9. She and her husband had become wealthy in the shoe industry. After joining the Adventist Church she became a close friend of Ellen White and used her wealth to help purchase various sanitarium properties, including Loma Linda Sanitarium, and provide loans to students at the recommendation of Mrs. White. See “Gotzian, Josephine,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 389. 10. Hetty Haskell, “The Veterans’ Aid to the Hospital Fund,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 27, 1916, 20. 11. Supporters of the medical school made their case for it and the need for the required clinical facilities. Later, after the church voted to maintain CME, Magan wrote to Hetty Haskell, “I think that all felt that the talks of Elder Haskell and Elder Daniells were the two which really saved the day.” P. T. Magan to H. H. Haskell, December 9, 1915. 12. “Autumn Council of the Executive Committee of the North American Division Conference: Final Report,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 16, 1915, 8, 9. 13. The letterhead of the committee’s stationery lists Mrs. Haskell as chairperson, Mrs. G. Irwin as secretary, W. T. Knox as treasurer, and P. T. Magan as solicitor of funds. 14. Neff, For God and C.M.E., 168, 169. 15. Ibid., 175, 176. 16. Ibid., 179. 17. See sample promotion for the photographs, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, April 27, 1916, 20. 18. Haskell, “The Veteran’s Aid to the Hospital Fund.” 19. H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, August 23, 1916. 20. Hetty Haskell, “Do We Need a Thoroughly Equipped Medical School?” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, February 24, 1916, 19, 20. She included a draft of her article with August 23,

1916, letter to T. E. Bowen. 21. S. N. Haskell, “Calebs and Murmurers,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 5, 1916, 2. 22. John M. Barry, in his discussion of the global influenza pandemic that broke out near the end of World War I, provides a summary of what Wilson did and particularly how it shaped the ways America responded to the devastating disease. John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), 121–132, 300–302. Countless biographies of Wilson and histories of the period discuss the president’s autocratic tendencies. 23. For a summary of the church’s struggle for its young men, see Richard W. Schwarz and Floyd Greenleaf, Light Bearers: A History of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 2000), 367–371. 24.Wilson did something else that would create problems for Adventists, in this case in the area of race relations. Garrett Epps sees the election of Wilson, who was born and raised in the South, as, from a racial aspect, the final victory of the South in the restoration of its ideology and power. Epps, Democracy Reborn, 265, 266. Wilson segregated the employees of the United States government, something that had not been done before. The South may have lost on the military field, but it had been winning in legislatures and courts. The explicit and implicit support of segregation would lead to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and even greater problems in race relations that Adventists would have to deal with in the South. 25. Irish-Americans were hostile to Great Britain because of its occupation and control of their home country. They opposed any support by the United States for the British war effort. 26. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 298–300, 302–305, 309, 310. 27. Howard Blum, Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (New York: Harper, 2014). 28. Cited in David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of Six Presidents (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 141. For more background, see Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 274–286. 29. For a discussion of some of the legal and other issues involved in the censorship of this period, see Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media, 274–286. 30. Schwarz and Greenleaf, Light Bearers, 372. The rare-book vault in the Review and Herald Publishing Association long contained a marked copy of the 1914 edition of Bible Readings indicating the changes made. 31. E. R. Palmer, “ ‘Bible Readings for the Home Circle,’ Revised,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 11, 1915, 18. For the type of changes made in the 1914 edition, see Charles E. White, “Bible Readings for the Home Circle” (research paper, March 7, 1968, 7, 8). 32. See, for example, Walter L. Burgan, “Editors Oppose Press-Muzzling Bills,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 11, 1915, 24.

33. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 302. 34. Cited in McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 302. 35. Henry L. Watson, Liberty and Power, 112. 36. The name is variously spelled in the correspondence. 37. Haskell often mentioned his health difficulties in his letters. For example, see S. N. Haskell to Hooper and Irwin, February 27, 1901. 38. H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, December 17, 1916. 39. Since the United States had not yet entered the war against Germany, one could still send mail to America from that country. 40. Most likely the former German colonial territory that after the war was broken up into what are now the modern countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and a part of Mozambique. 41. Adventist headquarters in Germany. 42. H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, December 17, 1916. 43. Ibid. 44. T. E. Bowen to H. H. Haskell, December 21, 1916. 45. H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, December 31, 1916. 46. T. E. Bowen to H. H. Haskell, June 3, 1917; H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, June 11, 1917; Louise Scholz to S. N. and H. H. Haskell, January 12, 1919; H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, March 9, 1919; T. E. Bowen to H. H. Haskell, March 12, 1919; H. H. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, April 1, 1919; S. N. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, April 21, 1919; T. E. Bowen to S. N. Haskell, August 31, 1919. In his August 31 letter, Stephen asks Bowen to pray about Hetty’s health. 47. Weeks, Adventist Evangelism in the Twentieth Century, 99, 100. But Adventists would continue to support it even after the conclusion of World War I. See, for example, the editorial by C. P. Bollman, “The Eastern Question Still to Be Settled,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 11, 1921, 8, 9. 48. Haskell, The Story of Daniel the Prophet, 247–249. 49. See, for example, L. L. Caviness, “Sick Man of the East,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, May 6, 1920, 32; C. P. Bollman, “The Outlook in the Near East,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 1, 1920, 4, 5; C. P. Bollman, “In the Watching Time,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 8, 1920, 4, 5. 50. C. A. Holt, “The Chief Concern in the Eastern Question,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 12, 1922, 7, 8. Editorial writer Holt comments, “The most important phase of the Eastern Question to you and me is our personal relation to God and the condition of our own hearts.” 51. For the impact of the conflict on Seventh-day Adventism, see the papers presented by the Institute of Adventist Studies during a symposium, “The Impact of World War I on Seventh-day Adventism,” at Theologische Hochschule Friedensau in Germany, May 12–15, 2014.

52. Barry, The Great Influenza, 374, 375. 53. Ibid., 397. 54. W. G. Dunscomb, “Influenza and Its Treatment,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 4, 1919, 26–28. 55. “An ‘Influenza Special,’ ” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 27, 1919, 31. 56. Barry, The Great Influenza, 238, 239. 57. Ann Hegedorn, Savage Peace; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 344–380. 58. Michael W. Campbell, “Bible Conference of 1919,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 657. For further insight into the 1919 conference, see Bert Haloviak, In the Shadow of the ‘Daily’: Background and Aftermath of the 1919 Bible and History Teachers’ Conference (Washington, DC: Office of Archives and Statistics, General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 1979); Molleuros Couperus, “The Bible Conference of 1919,” Spectrum 10, no. 1 (May 1979): 23–57; Michael W. Campbell, “The 1919 Bible Conference and Its Significance for Seventh-day Adventist History and Theology” (doctoral dissertation, Andrews University, 2008). Michael W. Campbell, “Bible Conference of 1919,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encycolpedia, 657–659. 59. A. G. Daniells, “The Bible Conference,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, August 21, 1919, 4. 60. See “Holmes, Claude E.,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 413, 414; McArthur, A. G. Daniells, 403, 404. 61. Bert Haloviak and Gary Land, “Ellen White and Doctrinal Conflict: Context of the 1919 Bible Conference,” Spectrum 12, no. 4 ( June 1982): 19–34. For minutes of the meetings, see “Report of Bible Conference, Held in Takoma Park, D.C., July 1–19,” August 1, 1919. They may be accessed at www.adventistarchives.org. See also the discussion in McArthur, A. G. Daniells, chapter 11. 62. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, May 16, 1920. 63. J. N. Loughborough, “Life Sketch of Mrs. S. N. Haskell,” 24. The descriptions of her condition suggest cancer, a diagnosis that, because of the attitude of the time, would not likely have been acknowledged publicly. 64. Copy available in the General Conference Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland. 65. J. S. L. to S. N. Haskell, October 3, 1919. 66. W. A. Spicer to S. N. Haskell, October 22, 1919. 67. S. N. Haskell to W. A. Spicer, October 26, 1919.

Chapter XXXI

Last Days lthough alone now, Stephen continued to attend camp meetings and denominational institutes until shortly before his death. For him, to live was to be constantly busy, and even now he could not alter that core

A

trait of his New England personality. Haskell kept on doing as much as he could. But he could no longer throw himself into evangelism. He shifted from an outward focus to an inward one: his emphasis now was almost exclusively on the church’s historical heritage. He was less and less aware of the world outside the denomination. Can the World Possibly Change Still Faster? The United States, as well as the rest of the world, passed through a number of transformations that would further shape Adventism for much of the twentieth century. Adventists of the twenty-first century might be tempted to look back on the period as one of relative tranquility, but that seeming peacefulness was deceptive. The world of the early twentieth century was increasingly changing in ways that the church could not escape, let alone ignore. The continuing shift from a rural lifestyle in America to an urban one not only speeded up but would create an in-between world of suburbs that became the home of most Americans, including Adventists. The Fourteenth Census of the United States (1920) had certified the nation as 51.4 percent urban.1 In 1900, 32 percent of the American population worked on farms. By 1935 that figure would drop to 20 percent.2 In addition, the purchasing power for many wage earners increased 20

percent between 1915 and 1926, creating a society focused more on consumption than on production.3 The percentage of white-collar jobs increased dramatically as the nation began to transform into today’s service economy.4 This would reshape the financial base of the Seventhday Adventist Church. Adventism had begun in a rural and small-town environment. Early Adventists had been primarily farmers and small craftsmen. Despite the efforts of Haskell and others to evangelize the cities, the white Seventhday Adventist Church membership in North America has still not learned how to reach or even survive in an urban culture. In addition, the church has mostly lost its struggle to maintain its presence even in rural areas; and now primarily exists in the suburbs and Adventist institutional centers such as Loma Linda, California; Berrien Springs, Michigan; and Collegedale, Tennessee. Continuing National Threats Haskell and other Adventists had seen for decades the threat to religious liberty from Sunday laws, and that threat would continue. The pages of the Review during the 1920s expressed a constant concern about such legislation. Seldom did an issue of the church’s magazine not mention the latest attempt to get blue laws introduced, passed, or enforced. But new forms of danger also began to emerge. And while Haskell did not refer to the new threats as he had Sunday laws in the past, their potential for harm was just as real. Not only had domestic surveillance become widespread during America’s involvement in World War I, but many sought to continue it after military hostilities ceased. The government had censored the mail during the war, and US Postmaster General Albert Burleson wanted the practice to continue. Believing that radicals such as the Bolsheviks were working to overthrow the government, he called on Congress and “all Americans” to expand the already extensive system of internal

surveillance.5 The United States was now caught up in the midst of a major Red Scare, seeing communists, then known as Bolsheviks, everywhere. Bombs set off in the business district of New York City intensified the fear.6 Whether it was widespread labor strikes or a physical disaster, such as the collapse of a huge molasses storage tank in Boston,7 Bolsheviks received the blame. They became a topic of Adventist evangelistic sermons and periodical articles. Such threats were just as frightening to twentieth-century Adventists as the Sunday law agitation and other religious movements had been to Haskell and his fellow believers during the 1880s. North Carolina senator Lee. S. Overman chaired a congressional committee that “investigated” the influence of Bolshevism in America. Its twelve-hundred-page report saw dangerous radical elements everywhere that were inciting labor unions and foreign immigrants toward revolution. These elements were a handy scapegoat that allowed society to avoid dealing with fundamental economic, racial, social, and other changes. Labor went out on strike or blacks protested the terrible state of race relations in America, such reasoning went, only because outside agitators were stirring them up. Get rid of the Bolsheviks, and there would be no conflict; ignore the danger of the Bolsheviks, and the United States would face destruction. “And how could America protect itself against imminent revolution?” historian Ann Hagedorn writes. “Stronger, more restrictive laws to curb the actions of aliens and radicals. Laws to ease the work of a vast and reliable domestic surveillance network, essential for identifying suspicious radicals and immigrants. Laws to expand the postmaster general’s power of censorship—for example, requiring foreign-language publications to apply for licenses to use the postal system. And a powerful replacement for the Espionage Act [of 1917].”8 Frederick Lewis Allen, in his classic work on the years after World War I, described the immediate postwar period as “an era of lawless and

disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror.”9 During each of these periods, certain elements in the government would resort to constitutionally questionable laws that restricted freedom of speech and would often set up or encourage secretive systems of domestic surveillance. Some laws passed during such crises still remain on the books. For example, the Espionage Act of 1917, which forced the Review and Herald Publishing Association to revise the book Bible Readings, has yet to be repealed.10 As life returned to normal after each crisis, people would forget what had happened—until the next emergency. Then the cycle would start over again, a fact that historians have been well aware of. In his biography of Harry S. Truman, Robert Dallek noted that the president recognized “a recurring national affinity for hysteria about an apocalyptic danger like the Red Scare of 1919–1920. Frightened by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which was promising to topple established authority around the world, and by the presence of anarchists in the United States, some of whom exploded a bomb on Wall Street, American business and political leaders suggested the suspension of civil liberties and the expulsion of resident aliens from the country. Similar fears surfaced in the late 1940s and 1950s.”11 According to Dallek, “a conviction that political gains can be made by exaggerated attacks on an opponent’s real or alleged enemies has become an ugly mainstay of America’s perpetual political campaigns.”12 Besides the danger of external threats, racial strife continued to worsen. Some politicians and leaders used the focus on problems with anarchists, Bolsheviks, and other aliens to distract public attention from what the white majority had been doing to blacks throughout the nation, and not just in the South. The Ku Klux Klan revived strongly during the 1920s, and racial conflict tore at the often frayed American social fabric. At times it took on almost the dimensions of military conflict, threatening a new civil

war, not between geographical sections of the United States but between races.13 The September 26, 1922, issue of Signs of the Times, in an article on racial and other forms of intolerance, could quote President Warren Harding as declaring, “In the experience of a year in the Presidency there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens.”14 With the president’s Adventist family background, the editors felt that he would understand the church’s perspective. The social strains would continue unabated. Few today realize how often the nation has come to tearing itself apart for this and many other reasons. But, because of their eschatology, Seventh-day Adventists often sensed that real possibility and frequently predicted it. The new generation in the church would have to struggle on without Haskell’s help, though he was an encouraging voice from the past. He did unwittingly leave one legacy that dovetailed with one new major trend that would affect the church—that of fundamentalism. The Rise of Fundamentalism In the religious world, evangelical Fundamentalism was becoming a major force on the American scene. Many religious Americans saw in the influence of liberal Protestantism a significant threat to their concept of the nation, one just as dangerous as any political ideology. They feared that the new understandings of how the Bible might have come to be written and should be interpreted would destroy its authority and, ultimately, even belief in God. Rejecting what they regarded as dangers lurking in such forms of Protestantism, Adventists mistakenly identified with Fundamentalism, especially on the issue of the nature of Inspiration. Haskell’s crusade against the new view of the “daily” and other developing theological concepts had made many church members sensitive to anything that, from their perspective, might be a potential threat to the church’s core teachings. For them, as we saw in a previous chapter, the

issue of Inspiration touched not only upon the role of Ellen G. White but also on the church’s identity as a special last-day movement. In the minds of many, that identity became blended with the issue of verbal inspiration. A few weeks before the 1919 Bible and History Teachers’ Conference, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald editor Francis McLellan Wilcox attended an interdenominational conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Christian fundamental beliefs. Wilcox quoted the convention’s statement of general doctrinal beliefs that began: “We believe in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as verbally inspired of God, and inerrant in the original writings, and that they are of supreme and final authority in faith and life.”15 After expressing many points of agreement with the delegates, Wilcox offered a series of Adventist doctrinal beliefs. The first one, paralleling the conference statement on the authority of the Bible, states: “1. That the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by the inspiration of God, and contain a full revelation of his will to men, and are the only infallible rule of faith and practice. 2 Tim. 3:15–17.”16 While Wilcox did not use the terms verbally inspired and inerrant, many of his readers would have assumed that he meant exactly that. As George R. Knight has observed, “Adventism found itself caught in the midst of the crisis over inspiration, and in the process, unfortunately, lost its balanced position. Events sidelined Daniells, Prescott, W. C. White, and other moderates on the topic of inspiration during the 1920s, as the church, in a fearful and reactionary mood, even went so far as to publish a General Conference–sponsored textbook for Adventist colleges that explicitly denied Ellen White’s moderate position on thought inspiration and argued for inerrancy and the verbal inspiration of every word.”17 The influence of such Fundamentalism still lingers in the church, creating a wide range of problems. Contemporary church members continue to wrestle with different versions of the same issues that disturbed Stephen Haskell and many other church members during the

early twentieth century. The controversy about the “daily” would be a major element of Adventism’s own “fundamentalist” movement for many years. And even though the “daily” issue is itself now largely forgotten, the theological approach that Stephen used to fight it has continued to dominate in certain elements of the church. The fundamentalist reaction took its toll on many leaders. Arthur G. Daniells would lose the presidency of the General Conference, and Herbert C. Lacey refused to teach any longer in Adventist colleges (though in later years he did lecture on biblical languages at the College of Medical Evangelists). Instead, Lacey pastored in New York City and then in Southern California. W. W. Prescott would find himself under attack the rest of his life. Adventist Heritage As already noted, Haskell no longer had to deal directly with the new and increasingly complicated issues that the denomination faced. That was for a new generation of church administrators. Instead, in his final years, he could focus on being a spiritual elder in the Adventist community— sustaining the faith of the believers, teaching them how to witness, and encouraging them to cling to God and their heritage. Stephen attended camp meetings and other gatherings, preaching and teaching his Bible studies. His favorite time for his Bible studies was still five thirty or six in the morning. For years Haskell had been a prolific writer of all kinds of articles but especially news notes in the Review. Now, though, his byline began to fade away. His last two feature articles for the Review appeared in 1919.18 One was part of a special issue celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the magazine, the other a brief article on the entrance of the Seventh-day Adventist Church into Australia, which he had written for another special issue.19 Both pieces were on the subject of Adventist history. After all, he was a living source of denominational history, a breathing link to the past.

The closing paragraph of his final article is especially poignant. Stephen had waited for the Second Coming for seven decades. What was delaying it? Reflecting on the hesitation the church had shown in entering Australia initially, he wrote, “Many a time, like Israel of old, we have come to the borders of Canaan, but because of lack of faith we have turned again to wander in the wilderness. But we are reaching the time when those who are faithful will pass over Jordan. It is consecrated activity in the cause of God that will insure us an entrance to the Land of Promise.”20 Except for a letter quoted by the general manager of Southern Publishing Association on the Ingathering program and materials,21 Haskell’s final Review news notes under his byline also ran in 1919. Both dealt with particular interests of his. The first reported meetings involving missions and publishing;22 the second discussed the self-supporting programs he had worked on in the American South.23 The writing again displayed his longtime love of statistics. During the spring of 1920, Haskell visited fellow pioneer John Norton Loughborough, who had been living for a number of years at St. Helena Sanitarium. The two elderly men dressed up in their black suits and coats and, holding Bibles in hand, solemnly posed for photographs. People wanted pictures of anyone belonging to that almost extinct generation. Both still wore beards, even though the habit had long dropped out of fashion. Haskell would visit Loughborough again the following summer. Although Stephen was the younger of the two men, Loughborough outlived him, becoming the last Seventh-day Adventist pioneer. The church still valued Haskell’s ministry. The 1922 Home Missionary Calendar included him in a photo gallery with biographical sketches of fourteen honored Adventist pioneers.24 Because he was a living link with the church’s founding, the 1922 General Conference Session in San Francisco, which he attended as a delegate at large, also honored him as one of the denomination’s pioneers. Haskell appeared in a photo in the

Review along with four other pioneers.25 But the recognition of Stephen and other aging leaders was, sadly, only a minor event of the church’s important assembly. The session was divided over who should be the church’s president. As Stephen basked quietly in the honor that delegates showered on him, some of those same delegates fought among themselves over issues that he had stirred up years before. And General Conference president Arthur G. Daniells had become the focus of those differences. The Review and Herald Publishing Association general manager reported in the Review a smooth transition between Daniells and W. A. Spicer, the newly elected GC president. He said it was like “one picture dissolving into the other as harmoniously as one great picture from a dissolving lens fades into the one following.”26 But the trauma in the session’s nominating committee had been something quite different. In many ways, the suspicions that opponents harbored about Daniells, and about certain other leaders, echoed those currently stirring American society as a whole. Haskell’s campaign many years earlier against the new view of the “daily” teaching had intensified the differences within the denomination itself. Death of a Pioneer Soon after the 1922 General Conference Session, Haskell’s declining strength forced him to enter the Paradise Valley Sanitarium near San Diego, California. If he could not remain active, he thought that he would fade away. And he did. Haskell died in National City, California, on October 9, 1922, in his ninetieth year.27 The initial news note in the Review reported that he had been in “serious condition since General Conference.”28 In the rhetorical style of a now-lost world, the editors wrote, “At last his strength failed and the shadows lengthened. He sweetly fell asleep like a tired child on its mother’s breast.”29 Friends requested that his funeral take place in San Diego. Eugene W.

Farnsworth conducted the service. When someone had once asked Haskell whether he wanted to be buried next to his first wife Mary in California, or by Hetty in the east, he answered, “Just place me beside the one I am nearest to when I die.”30 He now rests next to Mary in Tulocay Cemetery in Napa, California. Arthur G. Daniells officiated at the graveside service. The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald prepared special material on Haskell for the December 14, 1922, issue and put his portrait on the cover. General Conference president William A. Spicer eulogized him. “Day after day at the recent General Conference, Elder S. N. Haskell sat with the group of pioneer workers on the platform,” Spicer began. “We felt that this veteran of many a General Conference session and of many a journey in pioneering service, was being sustained in his regular attendance more by his unabated spiritual vigor and the habit of a lifetime of devotion than by his physical forces. And now, nearing his ninetieth milestone, Elder Haskell’s life of service is ended, and he awaits the sure triumph of the message and the movement that he loved.”31 After summarizing some of the contributions Haskell had made to the denomination, Spicer concluded, “It seems inadequate to try to sum up nearly seventy years of service in a short article. But what a sowing of the good seed in five continents, and how many the lives brought into the light by that blessed ministry just closed! He was one of the pioneers of the advent message, faithful and unswerving through the years. . . . The last tribute of his brethren will not be paid to the memory of Elder Haskell until the work is finished. . . . His message of faith and trust in God and in the triumph of the work of God will live with us to the end.”32 Review editor F. M. Wilcox was especially impressed with the sheer magnitude of what Haskell had accomplished. His life ought to prove an inspiration to every man, especially to young men of limited advantages, for he was a self-made man in the truest sense of that word. Born of poor parentage, with limited school

advantages, he heard in early manhood the call of God to a great work —the work of the gospel ministry. He responded to this call with all his heart, and he set himself in faithful diligence to prepare himself for his life-work. Especially did he give himself to the study of the Word. His knowledge of the Bible was extensive and unique. His preaching abounded with practical illustrations and precious principles drawn from its sacred pages. He was mightily used of God through the years in the up-building of His work in the earth, rising step by step through perseverance and application until he occupied some of the most responsible positions in the work of the denomination.33

1. The census defined “urban” as any incorporated place as having a population of at least 2,500. Pietrusza, 1920, 156, 157. Even by this most generous definition of urban, ninety years later Haskell’s home town of Oakham, Massachusetts, still would not qualify. 2. Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915–1945, 6. 3. Ibid., 7. 4. Ibid., 18, 19. 5. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, 147. Hagedorn’s book is an excellent survey of some of the major trends and events in politics, international affairs, race relations, and science and technology for the year 1919. Pietrusza, 1920, does the same for the following year. It is fascinating to see how many of the issues, concerns, and fears of the post–World War I era echo those of twenty-first-century America. 6. Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 7. The Purity Distilling Company used the molasses to make rum. The structure of the holding tank failed, sending a wave of fermented liquid twenty-five feet high and 160 feet wide and moving thirty-five miles per hour through industrial northern Boston, flattening the area, killing twenty-one, and sending 150 to the hospital. Corporate lawyers argued that the tank’s collapse did not result from shoddy construction or inadequate maintenance but was “beyond question” the result of sabotage. After all, anarchists had plastered the tank with their posters. 8. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, 149. 9. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s (New York: Perennial

Classics, 1931), 40. 10. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, 433. 11. Robert Dallek, Harry S. Truman (New York: Times Books, 2008), 103. 12. Ibid., 104. 13. For an example of one such outbreak, see Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation (New York: Henry Holt, 2008). 14. The hostility toward anyone or anything different could take many forms. During the last few months of Haskell’s life, the church was fighting legislative proposals in Oregon and Oklahoma to outlaw parochial schools, a danger to the Adventist educational system. The entire September 26, 1922, issue of Signs of the Times focused on the threat. See Carlos A. Schwantes, “When Oregon Outlawed Church Schools: Adventists Interpret a National Event,” Adventist Heritage, Spring 1983, 30–39. 15. F. M. Wilcox, “A Conference on Christian Fundamentals,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 19, 1919, 5. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. George R. Knight, A Brief History of Seventh-day Adventists (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald®, 1999), 130. 18. S. N. Haskell, “Then and Now,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 31, 1919, 15, 16. 19. S. N. Haskell, “How the Message First Went to Australia,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 10, 1921, 3, 4. The article echoes material that he presented or wrote elsewhere, such as S. N. Haskell, “Preparation for Reception of the Holy Spirit,” General Conference Bulletin, May 21, 1909, 93, 93. Perhaps the Review editors drew the copy from previous sources. 20. Ibid., 4. 21. R. L. Pierce, “From a Pioneer,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 23, 1920, 24. 22. S. N. Haskell, “Foreign-Language Worker’s Conventions,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, July 3, 1919, 28. 23. S. N. Haskell, “A Visit to the Madison (Tenn.) School,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 6, 1919, 24, 25. 24. See advertisement in the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 17, 1921, 23. 25. Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 12, 1922, 2. 26. E. R. Palmer, “Intimate Glimpses of the Conference,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, June 12, 1922, 32. 27.Since there had been some ambiguity about exactly when Haskell was born, it is interesting that the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald gives his lifespan as eighty-nine years, five months, and seventeen days (“Elder Stephen N. Haskell,” December 14, 1922, 17). Still, there was no question that Stephen had demonstrated another New England characteristic: longevity. New Englanders

from the beginning had gained a reputation as having long lives. Of those who survived the first few winters at Plymouth Colony, nearly a third lived into their eighties. Edwin Valentine Mitchell gives some interesting anecdotes about early long-lived New Englanders. See Mitchell, It’s an Old New England Custom, 110–131. 28. “Death of Elder S. N. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, October 19, 1922, 24. 29. “Elder Stephen N. Haskell,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 14, 1922, 17. 30. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 255. 31. William A. Spicer, “A Long Life Spent for God,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 14, 1922. 32. Ibid. 33. F. M. Wilcox, “An Inspiring Life,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, December 14, 1922, 7.

Chapter XXXII

New England Flint With a Heart of Gold

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rthur W. Spalding, who knew Haskell in the his later years, wrote

that “he was a typical Yankee; I know not how lean and looming in his early years, but in my time massive, slow-moving, deliberate.”1 Stephen’s bulk seemed to impress people, but his weight and size could sometimes cause problems for him. Another time he was wanting to visit the South African town of Lady Grey, and he rented a horse. The animal seemed lazy, and Haskell had a hard time getting the animal to go despite the liberal use of switches and a cane. The horse jostled Stephen to the point that he lost his eye glasses. It took him nine hours to travel thirty-five miles. Sending the creature back, he then rented a horse that was supposed to be gentle and easier to ride. When Stephen let the animal out to graze, it wandered away through an open gate. After he found it, Haskell prepared to mount. The horse eyed the large missionary, pulled back on the reins, and then rolled on the ground, breaking the bridle and saddle girth. Stephen gave up on the beast, waited until a postal cart (a two-wheeled vehicle) came through, and rode it to where he could catch a train back to Cape Town.2 Fortunately, not all his experiences with horses were so traumatic, particularly when he was driving them instead of riding them. While he and Hetty were doing evangelism in New York, they would slip away every now and then to the home they owned in South Lancaster,

Massachusetts, where Stephen kept one of his favorite horses. “You know how fond Elder Haskell is of a horse,” Hetty told Ellen White, “and he has secured one that he thinks is a jewel, and it is a very pretty horse, a dark bay, not quite to my liking because she scares at trains some, and likes to dance a little bit; but you know he would never enjoy riding behind a horse that doesn’t dance once in a while.”3 Although she had some concerns about the horse, she considered it very intelligent, kind and gentle, and we only had it a day or two until it would whinny every time the barn door rattled. Elder Haskell had made a pet of it so quickly that it knew his step before the first week was out. He takes great delight in driving past the electric cars4 with the horse to show how much more gentle it is becoming, and I think that in time it will not scare very much, not that I am afraid of it at all now, only if I did not make a little fuss about his driving scary horses, he would be breaking colts half the time, and I think he is too old for that kind of work.5 He does love a horse that has a good deal of fire to it.6 Stephen may have been ponderous and slow, unlike the horses he enjoyed training, but he was irresistible in speech, with those New England provincial quirks such as “thutty” for thirty and “Lenkster” for Lancaster. A leonine head he had, topped by a luxuriant mane the original color of which I never knew, but gray and then white in my time, a large shovel-tipped nose, and a flowing beard. A fatherly man, he had earned the affection of his thousands of spiritual children (he had no children of his own), to whom he gave the most solicitous care, a patriarch indeed. He grew with the years: preacher, organizer, executive, author, publisher, world traveler, but above all a leader of the lay forces of the church, in literature, correspondence, and personal missionary work.7

Haskell may have had no children of his own, but he had a lot of spiritual ones. He was especially proud of those young people he had mentored to serve the church. During his final term as California Conference president, he had made it possible for younger men to participate in conference activities. While young people had founded the denomination, by the time most of them had passed off the scene, many of the leaders who succeeded them were middle-aged before they gained positions of authority. It was hard for them to accept younger people into roles that they had only recently gained themselves. But Stephen tried to bridge this generational lag. Commenting on what had been accomplished, he said that it was highly important to him “that nearly all of this work has been done by the young people. Certain men that were not permitted to labor when I came in [as president]; young men full of zeal. To be sure some of them did make some wonderful mistakes; but we tried to encourage them, telling them of their mistakes, and guarding them against the future. These young men have entered fields apparently very much harder than those entered by older men and they have had great success.”8 He added, “In all my labors for nearly fifty years in conference work we have never wanted for young men to develop. They have flocked around us, even now in my old age, desiring to work with me.”9 As for the flowing beard that Arthur Spalding mentioned, although early photographs show Stephen with a bushy one, he trimmed it more neatly in later years. But he kept it to the end of his life. One wonders if he shared the belief of his fellow pioneer, J. N. Loughborough, who took the position on the beard that “nature requires its growth” and told young men to “keep the razor off your face.”10 Haskell was generally a serious man, devoted to his mission, but he could exhibit that dry humor characteristic of New Englanders. For example, in a May 1910 letter, he described himself as a “connoisseur of unfermented wines.”11 Apparently he had encountered many examples

during his travels, especially while on the camp meeting circuit. A Generous Man We have seen how Haskell was a frugal individual driven to accomplish as much as possible. At first glance, he might seem to echo John Sedgwick’s caustic comment, “All Yankees are known for their frugality, I suppose, but well-to-do Yankees most perfectly embody the idea. In no other part of the country are the rich so cheap.”12 But Stephen was neither rich nor cheap. On the one hand, he could advocate the sternest self-denial, a trait Ellen White had to labor with him about. But he could be wonderfully generous to those in any kind of need. Ella Robinson cites an incident related to her by H. M. S. Richards. He said, “At a camp meeting held in Waterloo, Quebec, in the year 1921, I mentioned that I needed more songbooks for an evangelistic effort I was conducting. S. N. Haskell, almost ninety years old, was present. He met me outside the tent, pulled out his pocketbook, and emptied it, pouring its entire contents into my hands. It amounted to more than seven dollars [a good fraction of a week’s salary at the time] and paid for several copies of Christ in Song.”13 After his final term as California Conference president, Haskell told Ellen White that he and Hetty had “not knowingly let one person cry for help. Twice [during that term] I have loaned, or virtually given, fifty dollars out of my own pocket because I knew it would meet with opposition, if brought before the [conference] committee [for approval].”14 From his earliest days as an Adventist, Haskell had shared freely of his financial resources. It was a fundamental part of his life. In a letter to W. C. White in 1911, Stephen estimated that he had given $12,000 to $15,000 “to help the cause during the past four years,” much of it from the sale of his books and the Bible Training School periodical. That amount included $1,000 to build an orphanage in Huntsville, Alabama; $1,000 to the school at Loma Linda (plus $600 from sales of Bible Training School);

$1,000 worth of books at retail price for the new college at Angwin, California; $1,000 worth of books to the sanitarium at Melrose, Massachusetts; as well as donations for the construction of school buildings in the Garhwal District of the Himalayas; and $5,000 elsewhere to India.15 Haskell’s salary at the time was little more than $500 a year, and he had to obtain the rest from his book sales and other publishing projects. Stephen was willing to make any sacrifice to aid his beloved church. He and Mary Haskell had worked for twenty years to own a home. Finally, they had the mortgage paid off on their house in South Lancaster. Then he heard that the church headquarters in Battle Creek was experiencing a severe financial problem and needed $3,000 immediately. The couple remortgaged their house and sent the borrowed funds to Battle Creek.16 While Stephen could give much to the Lord, he sometimes forgot that others could not always do the same. For example, he suggested that ministers should sell books and tracts without any commission so that as much as possible could go to support the denominational publishing houses. Ellen White protested the idea. For ministers to do that would place another burden on individuals already struggling to live on their low salaries. Because of the poor pay, she said, “we are losing our ministers and our young men have no encouragement to become ministers.”17 Struggle Against Depression Haskell threw everything he had in his dedication to his God and his church. But a cloud sometimes overshadowed his life. Ellen White referred to it as his tendency toward despondency. Today we might diagnose it as physiological in nature, but he saw it as demonic in origin. In one letter where he shared his struggle, he declared to Mrs. White, God alone, unless He has opened it up to you, knows the struggles and conflicts I have at times with the powers of darkness. Even at times when I am laboring for others in despair and affliction, I have

felt there was a still fiercer struggle going on in my own soul, which I could not and dared not open to any earthly friend. I have awakened some nights saying, “Give me victory or give me death.” Then victory would come for a time. Then after days and nights of conflict with temptations of Satan, I would awaken uttering these words, “In the name of Jesus Christ I will place my will on the side of the will of Christ.” This has brought a victory and a freedom from those particular temptations for weeks and even months. Then at other times I would awaken at night with the powers of darkness pressing upon me so I did not have a ray of hope. After wrestling with God, . . . light would come into my soul. Now, Sister White, is there no abiding freedom from these dark conflicts? And seasons? Is it because Satan has such a hold on me he will one day have me anyhow? My soul is full this morning as I write these lines.18 His depression had especially surfaced after the death of his first wife, Mary. In three different letters he tells Ellen White that he would like to go off by himself and “to be alone with God.” She replied to him that his “desire to be alone is not healthy, not sound.” A few months later she rebuked him for his despondency and distrust of his fellow church leaders19 (the two may have been related, the depression making him more critical of others). Ellen White constantly prayed for Stephen in his spiritual and emotional struggle. “Nearly every night we supplicate the Lord in your behalf, calling you by name in our family devotions, and I have felt assurance that He who pleads in the courts of heaven in your behalf calls you by name in His work as your Advocate.” She encouraged him to shift his gaze from himself to Christ. Elder Haskell, will you look away from your own merits? Will you

trust the merits and righteousness of Christ? Will you look to Him and trust in Him as a loving and mighty Saviour? Will you believe just now? Will you fall all broken upon Jesus and say, “He saveth me; I am wholly without reserve the Lord’s”? O,! look and live! The Lord has blessings for you. He will help you. . . . My heart yearns to see you stand in the strength of the Mighty One. Will you, oh, will you take God at His word? Will you believe He means just what He says? Will you believe that your whole spirit and soul and body may be sanctified. Lie low at His feet, at the foot of the cross, subdued, broken, but taking hold of His strength, that is all you need. I tell you, we must work in greater faith, we must fight the good fight of faith, we must break the force of Satan’s suggestions, by living, actual faith. God has said it, and it will be done, His word is pledged, that He will be to you a present help in every time of need. Be strong in the Lord, yea, be strong.20 Perhaps his New England streak of self-control made it hard for him to accept what Ellen White urged. Haskell continued to struggle with doubts about himself. Four years later, she wrote to him, Jesus lives; He has risen, He has risen, He is alive forevermore. Do not feel that you carry the load. It is true you wear the yoke, but whom are you yoked up with? No less a personage than your Redeemer. Satan will cast his hellish shadow athwart the pathway of Christ. Now all you have to do, is to look beyond the shadow to the brightness of Christ. . . . Do not look at the discouragements; think of how precious is Jesus. Your memory will be renewed by the Holy Spirit. Can you forget what Jesus has done for you . . . ? You were taken away from yourself; your deepest, sweetest thoughts were upon your precious Savior, His care, His assurance, His love. How your desires went out

to Him! All your hopes rested upon Him, all your expectations were associated with Him. Well, He loves you still; He has the balm that can heal every wound and you can repose in Him. . . . The Comforter will be to you all that you desire. You will be weighted with the Spirit of God, and the importance of the message and the work. I know that the Lord is willing to reveal to you wondrous things out of His law. O, let all take knowledge of you, that you have been with Jesus.21 Another four years later, she told him, Jesus says, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He walked once a man on earth, His divinity clothed with humanity, a suffering, tempted man, beset with Satan’s devices. . . . Now he is at the right hand of God. . . . He is thinking of those who are subject to temptations in this world. He thinks of us individually, and knows our every necessity. . . . We grieve the heart of Christ when we go mourning over ourselves as though we were our own savior. No, we must commit the keeping of our souls to God as unto a faithful Creator. He ever lives to make intercession for the tried, tempted ones.22 In answer to a question about a particular aspect of his struggle with his depression, she wrote, You ask me why it is you awake in the night and feel enclosed in darkness? I often feel the same way myself, but these desponding feelings are no evidence that God has forsaken you or me. . . . Gloomy feelings are no evidence that the promises of God are of no effect. You look at your feelings, and because your outlook is not all brightness, you begin to draw more closely the garment of heaviness

about your soul. You look within yourself, and think that God has forsaken you. You are to look to Christ. . . . Entering into communion with the Savior, we enter the region of peace. . . . We must put faith into constant exercise, and trust in God whatever our feelings may be. . . . We are to be of good cheer, knowing that Christ has overcome the world. We will have tribulations in the world, but peace in Jesus Christ. My brother, turn your eyes from within, and look to Jesus who is your only helper.23 Ellen White would continue through the years to encourage him. In 1901, for example, she wrote Stephen, “I am instructed to tell you that God loves you, and He would have you express your love to Him. . . . When you get so weary that you feel full of care and worry and self pity, just go apart and rest awhile. Do not worry yourself out of the arms of Jesus.”24 A few days later, she wrote to him and Hetty, Be careful . . . to get quietness as much as possible. Do not require the mind to be kept on the strain constantly, but have some periods for rest. Your head must not be allowed to become overtaxed. . . . The light given me from God is, that . . . if you would serve the work, you must not disqualify yourselves physically or morally by overdoing. Keep fresh, that you may educate others how to work, and do not get discouraged because you cannot carry the whole load. The Lord does not place upon you burdens so heavy that you cannot carry them without sacrificing your mental, moral, and spiritual capabilities.25 Although Haskell informed Ellen White that he felt that he had overcome his despondency and depression,26 it apparently remained a threat, and she continued to encourage and counsel him to avoid anything that might bring it back. Although he might at times struggle with discouragement, it did not destroy his New England heritage of dry wit. T. E. Bowen had sent him a

draft of an article the man had written for the Youth’s Instructor. “Upon our return from an eight weeks tour attending workers meetings in the south we found your article for the ‘Instructor’. Now I think the general tenor is good. Perhaps in some points if it were more carefully stated you might avoid some criticism. You know that Seventh-day Adventists are critics. Sometimes it grows out of a misunderstanding, and sometimes from a lack of knowledge, and sometimes because they love to criticize.”27 Despite his flaws, Haskell could be particularly sensitive to the voice and leading of God’s Spirit. Ernest Lloyd, who as a young man first met him in 1901, related an experience that Stephen had during a speaking itinerary in the American South. As Haskell and his secretary rode along in their train, he began feeling a distinct impression that he should get off at a small Georgia station down the line. After telling his assistant to prepare to detrain, he approached the conductor to have the train pause at the station even though it was not a regular stop. When the two men left the train, not a person was in sight. But before too long a car pulled up. Seeing the elderly Haskell, the driver asked if he could help him. “Do you know of any Seventh-day Adventists living in the area?” Stephen inquired. The man said he knew of an Adventist family about six miles away. He explained that they operated a school and that he would be willing to take the men there. Once they arrived, Haskell decided he would go up to the house by himself. At first no one answered his knock, but when he persisted, he finally heard the faint voice of a woman. She invited him in. Once inside, he realized that she and the two daughters with her were very sick, and the mother quite discouraged. Picking up a Bible, Stephen began to reading comforting passages from it. The family, he learned, conducted a small self-supporting school. As he read, the children began arriving at the little school and started playing around it as if waiting for their teacher. Sizing up the situation, Haskell suggested that she should let him send the children home and tell them not

to return for two weeks while she and her daughters recovered. Years later, the woman related the incident to Lloyd. She said that the old minister’s visit encouraged them to continue their efforts to reach the people of rural Georgia.28 Ellen White might at times have had to confront Stephen about his dictatorial tendencies, for he sought to drive others as hard as he drove himself, but he could also be sensitively pastoral in his dealings with people. Sometime during 1906, a young man came to see Haskell, explaining that he had recently been appointed a chaplain in a private lodge organization. Unfortunately, he did not know how to pray. Would Stephen write out for him two prayers, he asked, one appropriate for funerals and the other for regular use? He told Haskell that when he was a boy, his father had been a Seventh-day Adventist. Now he would like some Adventist prayers. Stephen told the young man to return that afternoon and he would have something ready for him. Later, as the man read the prayers, he choked up, and tears filled his eyes. When he tried to pay Haskell, Stephen declined and offered him a copy of his book, The Seer of Patmos. Happy to pay for the book, the man said that he and his wife would attend the meetings that Haskell was holding at the time.29 Ever Busy While solicitous of the health of others, as in the incident in Georgia, Haskell constantly drove himself too hard, often damaging or ignoring his own health. Ellen White frequently urged him to take more rest.30 But, being a good New Englander, he had to be always busy. Unfortunately, his body often paid the price. His letters record numerous struggles with illness. Stephen seems to have been particularly susceptible to infections. For example, in March of 1900, he became so sick that he was the subject of a session of prayer and anointing. Several days later an “angry-looking” purple carbuncle developed on his left groin. When Dr. John Harvey

Kellogg arrived from Battle Creek, he lanced it and drained more than a pint of pus from it.31 Not only did he clean and dress the carbuncle himself, but Kellogg personally tended Haskell during a period of several days.32 Kellogg diagnosed Stephen’s condition as blood poisoning and, during the anointing, feared that Haskell would be dead within two days.33 It would not be the last such infection. A few years later, he had an uncomfortable train trip from the South to Redlands, California, while suffering from boils.34 Haskell seemed vulnerable also to pneumonia, a concern to both him and his wife when he had to spend a winter in Maine or elsewhere in the North. One time the Haskells visited Mr. and Mrs. Druillard—their missionary friends from Africa days—in Boulder, Colorado, for what was supposed to be a month’s rest. But Stephen could not relax. True to his New England heritage, he kept busy by writing his book The Story of Daniel the Prophet and preaching on Sabbaths and Sundays. During the couple’s stay, Dr. Kellogg passed through town and gave Stephen more treatments, doing so “like a father” to him.35 That fall Haskell continued to struggle with his health. He checked himself into the Battle Creek Sanitarium and took treatments (most likely hydrotherapy) twice a day. Still weak, he tried to preach in the Dime Tabernacle but had to sit down after fifteen minutes. Kellogg took him aside and gave him a “Dutch uncle” talk about the need to get more rest.36 Of course, that was easier said than done. Stephen could not stop pushing himself. By the summer of 1902, his health had broken again. That year, Ellen White expressed her concern about how Haskell had worked himself into exhaustion. “While you are anxious to do all that you possibly can,” she wrote him, remember, Elder Haskell, that it is only by the great mercy and grace of God that you have been spared these many years to bear your

testimony. Do not take upon yourself loads that others who are younger can carry. It is your duty to be careful in your habits of life. You are to be wise in the use of your physical, mental, and spiritual strength. We who have passed through so many and such varied experiences are to do all that is possible for us to do to preserve our powers, that we may labor for the Lord as long as He permits us to stand in our lot to help advance His work. The cause needs the help of the old hands, the aged workers, who have had many year’s experience in the cause of God. . . . May the Lord help the brethren who have borne their testimony in the early days of the message, to be wise in regard to the preservation of their physical, mental, and spiritual powers. I have been instructed by the Lord to say that He has endowed you with the power of reason, and He desires you to understand the laws that affect the health of the being, and to resolve to obey them. These laws are God’s laws. He desires every pioneer worker to stand in his lot and place, that he may do his part in saving the people from being swept downward to destruction by the might current of evil—of physical, mental, and spiritual declension. . . . He desires you to keep your armor on to the very close of the conflict. Do not be imprudent; do not overwork. Take periods of rest.37 Besides the constant threat of infection, Stephen also struggled with hot weather. Having grown up in cold New England,38 he found it hard, especially in his later years, to cope with heat. Hetty would express concern to the General Conference president about her husband’s difficulties with hot weather.39 She, by contrast, seemed to enjoy warm temperatures. In at least one case, a serious health threat did not materialize. A Dr. Tindall diagnosed Haskell as having cancer. It was a disease so feared that

many people would not even say its name. The obituaries of cancer victims would euphemistically refer to death by a “wasting disease.” Fortunately, Tindall was mistaken about Stephen’s condition.40 “Merry Christmas” Many early Seventh-day Adventists tried to avoid anything with pagan connotations or associations. For example, the early issues of the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald did not use the common terms for the days of the week, because they had come from the names of pagan gods. Instead, for a time, the periodical would follow the Quaker custom of dating its publication “First day,” “Second day,” etc. At least one practice did not bother Haskell the way it did other Adventists in his time. He began his December 25, 1908, letter to Ellen White with, “Well Christmas is here and I wish you a merry Christmas.” He had adopted the growing American acceptance of the holiday and abandoned the practice of his New England Puritan ancestors, who had studiously ignored anything connected with Christmas. Interestingly, his wife added a postscript to Stephen’s Christmas letter. He had wanted to go out and solicit money for some cause, but with “much argument” she managed to keep him home during Christmas week. Hetty declared, “Christmas is a poor time to raise money as people are usually busy with a house full of company and he needed to take a week’s rest some time before conference so we persuaded him to take Christmas week.”41 A Talent for Soliciting Support and Aid Haskell knew how to solicit favors and persuade people to help with his projects. His influence could go beyond the Adventist Church, as we see in an event that took place during the summer of 1876. As the camp meeting season approached, the administrators of the New England Conference realized that they did not have the staffing they needed to conduct such meetings. Not only were ministers in short supply,

but James White informed the New England leadership that he and Ellen —the greatest draw at such convocations—would not be able to come. Camp meetings were a primary way of developing Adventist community as well as a major opportunity to do large-scale evangelism among the crowds of nonmembers attracted to such events. When the women of the Vigilant Missionary Society learned about the situation, they decided that the conference must have a camp meeting. A group of them met to pray about the matter. Learning what the women were doing, Haskell decided that the conference would indeed have a camp meeting. The leadership chose as a campground a grove of oak and pine trees bordering a branch line of the Boston and Maine Railroad at Groveland, Massachusetts, about forty miles northeast of South Lancaster. The railroad was vital, being the easiest way for people to reach the site. Roads were few and generally in poor condition. Stephen decided to approach the railroad directors and ask for a number of favors he wanted for the session. The two-page list he handed to Ferber, the president of the company, included the free shipment of two boxcarloads of freight from South Lancaster to the campground and back; free railroad passes for New England Conference and committee officials; halffare tickets for campers arriving from a distance; trains to run on Sundays as well as during the week (including extra sections); a passenger platform beside the campground; and water piped to the site. Haskell was able to get everything he wanted except that the passenger platform was not quite as long as he had desired. In addition to the railroad, steam-powered yachts brought people up the nearby Merrimac River from Haverhill, Massachusetts, twice each weekday and every hour on Sundays. Besides the arrangements to transport people and material to the campground, Haskell did other things to make the camp meeting a success. When notified about the kind of publicity Adventists had been getting in other areas through the use of

newspapers, Stephen contacted daily papers in Boston, Lawrence, Haverhill, Newburysport, and other nearby towns to share daily reports written by Mary L. Clough.42 Newspapers in the United States had exploded in numbers and readership during the middle of the nineteenth century. They were the equivalent of modern social media for anyone who could then read. Political parties (a large number of newspapers were actually party organs) and all kinds of reform movements published or employed them. Haskell was one of many Adventist pioneers who used the secular press to gain publicity for the church. The daily reports caught the interest of many non-Adventists. An account that Uriah Smith quoted from the August 29, 1876, Haverhill Publisher shows the impact such notices had on the local population (it also reflects the flowery language used in much nineteenth-century newspaper reporting): Sunday was the great day at the meeting in the woods at Bradford, by the Seventh-day Adventists, bringing together the largest assembly of people ever convened in this region for a similar purpose, and it appears to have been much enjoyed, not only by the Adventists proper, but by a very large number of people who always enjoy themselves by getting out for a free and easy day of roaming about, and communing with nature in one way or another. The railroads were taxed beyond the utmost capacity of all their preparation for the occasion, and large numbers were prevented from attendance by not finding means of conveyance at the time the train started, or by not finding the trains moving when their effervescent inclinations were just active enough to stimulate them to visit the scene. We understand there were thousands at the station in Lawrence who could not be accommodated by conveyance, all the cars at command being literally packed to overflowing. It was the same at this station [Haverhill], and in the afternoon we noticed a train of

sixteen heavy-laden cars slowly pulling out for the camp. In addition, two steam yachts were very busy; and omnibuses [a type of horsedrawn carriage] and barges were constantly running, while private carriages without number thronged in the way thereto. Had the cars run every half hour, they would have been full, and a much larger number of people would have passed over the [rail]road. As it was, it is thought fully twenty thousand visited the grounds during the day. But this was only an experimental occasion; another year an improvement can be made in the facilities for travel.43 The reporter was also impressed with the logistics for food service at the camp meeting. Eld. Haskell, who was the superintendent of the camp, found his time completely occupied in providing for the various wants of the great crowd, which far exceeded all expectations and provisions made therefor. The supply tent, or sulter’s quarters, was eaten out at an early hour, and a messenger dispatched to this city, who completely cleaned out the Winter street bakery, and even that reinforcement did not meet the wants in satisfying the hungry cravings of the great crowd. Eld. Haskell exerted himself to the utmost, but, not having the power of miracle working, found it hard to feed four thousand with the few “loaves and fishes” at his command.44 James and Ellen White were able to attend the camp meeting after all. He spoke on Adventist belief, and she on her favorite topic, “Christian temperance.” The next day Mrs. White received an invitation from the local Reform Club to speak at the Haverhill City Hall. Its eleven-hundredperson capacity was filled. She would increasingly speak to non-Adventist audiences through the succeeding years and become a prominent example of the growing role of women in American reform movements. Later, in New York City, Haskell again displayed his talent for finding

useful things during his evangelistic meetings. After Stephen had a conversation about the Bible with the wealthy owner of a funeral home, the man offered Haskell the free use of his hundred-person chapel for Wednesday-night Bible studies. Other businessmen lent him lumber for building a platform in the Metropolitan Lyceum building on 59th Street; an organ; and five hundred chairs to equip the auditorium. A widowed Adventist church member provided Stephen with a small hand-operated printing press to prepare handbills that not only announced the meetings but included sermon outlines. A Proto-Technophile? Haskell was remembered for devising a labor-saving device that church members called the “haskell.” As were so many of his fellow Americans, he was intrigued by and adopted new developments in technology and procedure. One example is his use of the typewriter. First marketed in 1874, the device was one that almost failed. Clumsy, undependable, and expensive (about $125 for the first models), they caught on only slowly. Many Americans considered it too impersonal for a business to type its correspondence.45 Farmers especially disliked “machine-made” letters.46 Many saw no use for a typewriter in the business world. As late as the 1940s, some companies such as Sears still handwrote the bills that they sent to conservative rural regions. Writers, editors, and clergy were the first to take up typewriter use.47 Ellen White adopted the machine for sending out and duplicating her writings. Women especially picked up typewriting skill, allowing them to enter new areas of the workforce. Haskell had early begun doing his extensive correspondence on the typewriter. His letters are hardly masterpieces of neat typing. As much as he loved his typewriter, Haskell could not always control its behavior. Besides the typical cross-outs, corrections, and additions, the words might start straggling down the page as the paper slipped. (Hetty would often

handwrite her own portion to the recipients in the blank spaces at the end of her husband’s letters.) Despite the difficulties, he would take the device with him on trips. While riding the Southern Pacific railroad to a speaking appointment at a Kansas camp meeting, he commented that the “motion of the cars makes it rather troublesome to type.”48 Today we have little idea of the risks that Haskell and other Adventist pioneers faced as they traveled from one appointment to another. Railroad travel was dangerous, especially in its early days. The wooden cars rattled along often poorly constructed track and roadbed. Construction crews were more interested in getting the work done than done well. At least by the latter part of the century, riding in trains was not quite as life-threatening as when James and Ellen White first began using them.49 Still, mistakes in scheduling could send trains rushing toward each other on the same track. Flimsy bridges continued to collapse. Brakes could fail. All such wrecks would reduce the wooden coaches to kindling that could be ignited by the overturned stoves used for heat in the days before the development of a practical way to employ steam piped in from the locomotives.50 The fact that Haskell and other leaders and church members crisscrossed the country as safely as they did speaks to providential protection. Railroad travel in America reached its peak in 1919, during Haskell’s lifetime. Stephen, however, had early contact with the mode of transportation that would replace it, the automobile. In one of his frequent letters, which kept Ellen White informed about seemingly everything that was happening in Adventism, he told her that her longtime friend Henry Webster Kellogg had helped another Adventist, William O. Worth, to patent some automobile technology.51 Henry Kellogg had come to Battle Creek at James White’s request and had served for many years as general manager of the Review and Herald Publishing Association (1873 to 1882).52 Worth had long been interested in steam engine technology and had obtained patents on various devices for it. Later his focus switched to gasoline engines. He founded at least two automobile companies,

partnering with Henry Kellogg and another Adventist, William R. Donaldson.53 In 1899, the three partners investigated the possibility of joining with an Allegan, Michigan, carriage company to produce gasoline-powered vehicles. Henry Kellogg had Haskell write Mrs. White to ask about the propriety of Adventists forming such a company. Kellogg promised to devote its potentially large profits “to the work of the truth.” (Adventists also shared the widespread American dream of striking it rich.) Although the deal fell through, William O. Worth did later manufacture a vehicle he called the “Worth” (in the tradition of Henry Ford, Ransom Eli Olds, Louis Chevrolet, and other automobile pioneers who had their products named after them). It was more like what we would call a van than the regular passenger car of the time, perhaps the ancestor of the minivan. Ellen White would have her first automobile ride in a Worth product. In November 1901 she traveled from California to visit Stephen Haskell and E. E. Franke in order to see if they could resolve the tensions that had developed between them in New York City. Afterward she went to Nashville to see her son Edson and tour various Adventist institutions. Finally, she headed to Chicago, where she wanted to inspect the branch sanitarium that John Harvey Kellogg had established some years earlier. Not feeling well, she was happy to be picked up by one of the Worth cars to make the drive. Later she wrote to Henry Kellogg about “one of your automobiles waiting to take us to the Sanitarium. It was a covered carriage, shaped like a street-car, and I lay down on one of the seats running along each side. It was a great relief to me to be able to lie down.”54 Unfortunately, as was the case with most of the early automobile companies, Worth’s did not survive.55

1. Spalding, Footprints of the Pioneers, 13. 2. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 3, 1895.

3. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, August 5, 1902. 4. Probably she means trolley or streetcars, although electric-powered automobiles were popular at the time. 5. He was sixty-nine years old at the time. 6. Ibid. 7. Spalding, Footprints of the Pioneers, 13. 8. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 24, 1911. 9. Ibid. 10. John Norton Loughborough, Hand Book of Health: or, a Brief Treatise on Physiology and Hygiene, Comprising Practical Instruction on the Structure and Function of the Human System, and Rules for the Preservation of the Health (Battle Creek, MI: Steam Press of the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1868), 141. 11. S. N. Haskell Letter, May, date, 1910. 12. New England in a Nutshell, 51. 13. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 8. 14. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, February 24, 1911. 15. S. N. Haskell to W. C. White, January 16, 1911. 16. Robinson, S. N. Haskell, 151. 17. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, October 29, 1880. 18. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, April 24, 1893. 19. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, October 10, 1895. 20. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell and Brother and Sister Ings, February 13, 1888. 21. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, September 6, 1892. 22. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, May 4, 1896. 23. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, October 11, 1895. 24. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell and H. H. Haskell, December 29, 1901. 25. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell and H. H. Haskell, January 1, 1902. 26. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, June 4, 1896. 27. S. N. Haskell to T. E. Bowen, April 2, 1917. 28. Ernest Lloyd, “Memories of Elder S. N. Haskell,” Review and Herald, December 6, 1962, 6, 7. 29. Letter Nov. 14, 1906. 30. For example, Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, January 27, 1879, in which she urged him to spend some time in Colorado before setting out for camp meetings in California and Oregon.

Colorado was one of James White’s favorite places to relax and recuperate. He had a cabin there and recommended the state’s climate to others. See also Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell, August 26, 1880, in which she said for him to “take things now lazily.” She had seen what overwork did to her husband. 31. By now Haskell was in his sixties. His body must have had great stamina to fight such an infection during a time before antibiotics. 32. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, March 14, 1900. 33. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, July 15, 1900. 34. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White. December 7, 1905. 35. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, March 25, 1900. 36. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, October 11, 1900. 37. Ellen G. White to S. N. Haskell and H. H. Haskell, February 5, 1902. 38. People tend to be most comfortable with the climate they spent the first three years of their lives in. 39. H. H. Haskell to A. G. Daniells, July 10, 1904. 40. Document listed in holdings of the General Conference Archives, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. 41. H. H. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 25, 1908. 42. James White, “The Camp-Meetings,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 7, 1876, 84. Mary Clough was the niece of Ellen G. White, the daughter of her sister Caroline. Having attracted attention for her skillful reporting of activities at the 1876 Michigan camp meeting, she would work sometimes as a literary assistant to Ellen White. Mrs. White hoped to reach her sister Caroline through Mary in spiritual matters. 43. Quoted in Uriah Smith, “Grand Rally in New England,” Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 7, 1876, 84. 44. Ibid. 45. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876, 205, 206. 46. Boorstin, The Americans, 126. 47. Ibid., 399. 48. S. N. Haskell Letter, September 5, 1899. 49. See Wheeler, James White, 48, 49. For a couple of contemporary accounts of railroad accidents during the 1840s, see Boorstin, The Americans, 103, 104. 50. For historical examples of the threats faced by nineteenth-century railroad passengers, see Oliver Jensen, The American Heritage History of Railroads in America (New York: American Heritage, 1975), 178, 179; William L. Withuhn, ed., Rails Across America: A History of Railroads

in North America (New York: Smithmark, 1993), 64–71, 89; Patrick Allitt, “How the Railroads Defeated Winter,” Invention & Technology, Winter 1998, 55–67. The first year that authorities began keeping reliable statistics (1888), accidents killed 315 passengers and injured more than two thousand. See Richard Reinhardt, Workin’ on the Railroad: Reminiscences From the Age of Steam (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma, 2003), 273. 51. S. N. Haskell to Ellen G. White, December 12, 1899. 52. Jud Lake, “Kellogg, Henry Webster,” in Fortin and Moon, The Ellen G. White Encyclopedia, 434. 53. On William O. Worth, see George S. May, “William O. Worth: Adventist Auto Pioneer,” Adventist Heritage, July 1974, 43–53. 54. Ellen G. White to H. W. Kellogg, January 28, 1902. 55. Adventist tradition says that Uriah Smith tried to get into the automobile industry in a small way. Early cars frightened horses, and people assumed that it was the vehicle’s appearance that disturbed them. Smith designed a horse’s head to mount on the front of the vehicle frame, supposedly making an animal think it was just another horse-drawn carriage. Because the noise of the gasoline engine startled the creature, and not its shape, the device did not work.

S. N. Haskell’s World

S. N. Haskell with his second wife, Hetty Hurd Haskell, whom Ellen G. White had suggested he marry. (Courtesy of E. G. White Estate)

Formal portrait of Haskell’s first wife, Mary Howe Haskell. (Courtesy of the Center for Adventist Research, Andrews University)

S. N. Haskell (seated left on sidewalk) with John Norton Loughborough (seated right of Haskell) along with other Adventist missionaries in front of Ravenwood, the house rented as headquarters for the British mission. (Courtesy of GC Archives)

Attendees at the first Adventist European camp meeting, held at Moss, Norway, in 1887. (AdventistDigitalLibrary.org)

Enjoying a moment of humor instead of the usual sober pose so common at the time, Haskell and George I. Butler are caught by the camera in front of Haskell’s South Lancaster, Massachusetts, home. (Courtesy GC Archives)

Among the last few living pioneer Adventist leaders, Haskell and John Norton Loughborough pose with their Bibles for visitors at St. Helena Sanitarium. Loughborough would die the year after Haskell. (AdventistDigitalLibrary.org)

S. N. Haskell preached the sermon in the Dime Tabernacle at Ellen G. White’s Battle Creek, Michigan, funeral. (AdventistDigitalLibrary.org)

Epilogue askell had overcome much and accomplished much. He had become, in the best sense of the word, a classic example of the “self-made” or “self-improved” individual. Stephen had used every means

H

at his disposal to be all that he could be. Unlike many other self-made Americans, he had not done it for financial or political power. Instead, he had totally devoted himself to his God and to the church that would do His mission on earth. Like so many Americans of his time and culture, Stephen Nelson Haskell was a doer. Ella M. Robinson clearly grasped this when she titled her biography, S. N. Haskell: Man of Action. This was his strength as well as his weakness. He was a practical person who accomplished much and who was sure that he could make others succeed as well if they would do all that he commanded. As with so many of his contemporaries, he had great confidence in his own ability and little theoretical bent. As mentioned earlier, for many years people remembered Stephen for a little device that they believed he had invented and so named it after him. The “haskell” was a lever on wheels used to pull tent stakes out of the ground. If he did come up with the idea of the contraption, he probably considered the theory behind the device just long enough to decide whether it would work or not—and no more. A practical man, he could make something work but might not understand why. Its usefulness was the important thing, as we saw in H. C. Lacey’s story of Haskell’s appreciation of his astronomy illustration of Scripture (see chapter “Proposing to a Prophet”). Haskell was a handyman in both a literal and spiritual sense. He was pragmatic. At times, as we have seen in his

approach to the subject of Inspiration, such characteristics could create problems. Stephen loved his church and its teachings and was always ready to defend them—but sometimes not wisely, as in the case of the “daily” controversy. It cast a shadow over his lifework. Early in this biography, we compared Haskell with another fellow selfmade man: Andrew Johnson. Perhaps we can find still another parallel with the seventeenth American president. One of Johnson’s biographers, the historian Hans L. Trefousse, observed that the thing that damaged his presidency and led to his impeachment was not so much his lack of education or rough-edged personality as his failure to recognize that America had changed from a world of small farmers, artisans, and subservient slaves to one increasingly of workers in cities and factories and an altering attitude toward racial relations. Steeped in the political philosophies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson—perspectives that had emerged in a simpler nation—Andrew Johnson’s “limited world outlook, so typical of early nineteenth-century America, was no longer adequate.” He interpreted the American Constitution through that earlier mind-set, and it would compound the tragedy of his political career. But Americans were seeing the Constitution in new ways in order to meet new conditions. As for Johnson, Trefousse concludes that he “was a child of his time, but failed to grow with it.”1 Haskell was also a child of his time, including his understanding of Inspiration and biblical interpretation. He seems to have approached all Inspiration—whether that of the Bible or the prophetic role of Ellen White —on a pragmatic, question-and-answer level. But, as much as we might wish otherwise, Inspiration is not that simple. As already noted, it is an issue that Seventh-day Adventists continue to struggle with. Adventist scholars and theologians have gained greater insights into the nature of Scripture, but they have not always communicated them clearly to others —especially to ordinary church members as well as leaders such as Haskell.

Reality was often—if not always—much more complex than Haskell wanted to recognize. But surely he will be among the first to sit in on those classes that God will conduct throughout eternity as He opens up to the redeemed the deep mysteries of His ways—ways more intricate than a practical New Englander would have ever chosen or even imagined in this life. Even though Stephen Haskell resisted or refused to change on some things, we still have to admire that he could cope with most things in a rapidly changing world. He was born in an environment that was closer in many ways to that of Bible times than that of today. People either walked, rode in wind-driven vessels, or used horse-pulled vehicles to travel. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had inaugurated America’s first passenger train service just three years before Haskell’s birth. He died at the peak of passenger rail service, and that “Internet” of the nineteenth century would soon begin to decline. Aircraft were making their first tentative steps toward long-distance travel. The first experimental commercial flights took place in 1914.2 British pilot John Alcock and American navigator Arthur Brown had made the first nonstop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Ireland in June 1919.3 That same year, small airlines in Europe, using converted bombers, began offering passenger service. The previous year the US Post Office had started airmail service. Would Haskell have set records for frequent-flier points if aviation had been as extensive in his day as it is now? Surely his globe-trotting would have been even greater than it was during the days of steamships. Although Adventist automobile pioneer William O. Worth had failed in his bid to build and sell personal engine-powered vehicles, the private car was beginning to assume its dominant role in American life and changing the landscape and culture. The number of autos had expanded from half a million in 1910 to 2.5 million in 1915 and nine million in 1920. One out of every three families owned a car in 1920,4 though it would take the development of new financing techniques to make them available to most

people.5 And, like other Americans, Adventists were beginning to appreciate cars. Haskell’s fellow patriarch John Norton Loughborough enjoyed speeding around town in a friend’s car.6 In September of 1919, the US Army completed a 3,251-mile journey from Washington, DC, to San Francisco that tested its ability to move across country during an emergency. One of its participants, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, would never forget the experience. When he became president, he pushed for the establishment of the Interstate Highway System. The new cars and roads would transform how Americans lived and behaved. For Adventists, it would touch such areas as church attendance patterns and allow literature evangelists to expand their territories (and end the comfortable isolation of denominational boarding schools). But on the downside, the installment payment programs created for cars and other major items would intensify the lure of materialism and its resulting indebtedness to church members. Adventists could no longer be physically isolated from the attractions and temptations of this world through poor or limited transportation. Still other trends were appearing. The United States was beginning the transition from an agricultural and manufacturing economy to one more service oriented. As Haskell traveled on the Santa Fe Railroad to camp meetings and his endless other meetings, he would have encountered the restaurant, hotel, and newsstand/bookstore chains pioneered by British immigrant Fred Harvey.7 When Stephen changed trains at Kansas City Union Station, he might have explored the twenty-four-hour bookstore and other shops managed by the Harvey Company there. In many ways the station complex was the first complete shopping mall, built a decade before the Country Club Plaza constructed in suburban Kansas City (and often regarded as the first modern shopping mall).8 What Haskell would have encountered was a foretaste of the world that Adventists would live in during the second half of the twentieth century. One wonders how he, with his New England tinkerer ways, would have adapted to a world that

increasingly works with information instead of growing or manufacturing things—one in which few Adventists farm or run their own small businesses any longer, but, instead, work primarily for others. During his long life, Haskell had experienced much. His environment had been one of constant change, from rural New England to world travel, from the early 1800s to the beginning of the Roaring Twenties. But he was willing to adopt much of what he encountered if it would advance the cause that he lived for above everything else. At Haskell’s birth, the Seventh-day Adventist Church did not yet exist. (William Miller had been teaching his views of the Second Coming for only a few years.) When Stephen died, the current American president had family ties to Seventh-day Adventists.9 Haskell had played a major role in the spread of Adventism around the world.10 The church had grown from a few hundred believers to an official membership of approximately 187,000 at the time of his death.11 Although much more has changed since Haskell’s times, we can still learn from him. He grew up in a world that had been transformed from one of daily, monthly, seasonal, and other cycles that merely repeated what had always been done to one that saw history as heading somewhere, progressing spiritually, materially, intellectually, and socially. Haskell sided with one form of the spiritual advancement (the breaking of God’s kingdom into human history through the Second Coming) while using the increasing advantages of the other types of progress, all in order to make the journey to the establishment of God’s kingdom more successful. Ironically, although many of the cycles of the preindustrial world had faded, a more ominous cycle had emerged to establish itself in American history, and it is one that continually threatens both the nation and especially the Adventist Church. As we noted earlier, the United States has regarded itself as periodically threatened by hostile forces from outside that seek to destroy it. Hence, both national leaders and the general public have been willing to curtail constitutional freedoms to deal with the threat.

Eventually some of the restrictions would then be relaxed or ignored until the next cycle began—but not all of them. And they hang over American society, always waiting to reassert themselves. While the Seventh-day Adventist Church, in the fulfillment of its divine mission, has penetrated all kinds of cultures and must respond and adapt to their needs and demands as it seeks to communicate the gospel, at the same time it must not lose certain vital principles first nurtured by the New England culture of Haskell, James and Ellen White, Joseph Bates, and others of the earliest pioneers. God chose to begin the church in a specific cultural world for a reason. New England culture especially prized such attributes as education; personal freedom (especially in religious matters); community and marriage as covenant; hard work; and order. But perhaps the most important feature from the perspective of the Seventh-day Adventist Church was its focus on the primacy of the Word and the responsibility of every believer to wrestle with Scripture.12 Alan Taylor summarized the Puritan core as an emphasis on literacy and lay participation in religious affairs. He declares that “Puritans cherished direct access to holy and printed texts as fundamental to their identity. . . . They insisted that every individual should read the Bible, rather than rely exclusively upon a priesthood for sacred knowledge.”13 Without that vital touchstone, the Adventist Church could evolve into something other than what God intended. Truth is not determined by a small group of elites or professionally trained experts—though the latter do have an important role to play. Instead, God seems to choose to reveal His Word through a community of involved people who respond to that Word and continually seek to bring out its meaning and implications. God planted the Seventh-day Adventist Church in a culture which did exactly that. As Haskell sought to make sure throughout his life, Adventism must never forget that—as with his Puritan ancestors—the Word of God is central to its mission14 and God’s kingdom is its goal. It is a touchstone

that must be worn smooth through constant use. If Haskell were alive today, that would still be the theme of everything he would do. And it must continue to be the focus of the church that he pioneered and loved.

1. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson, 378, 379. 2. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance With Aviation, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10. 3. Hagedorn, Savage Peace, 234–246. 4. Pietrusza, 1920, 155. 5. Boorstin, The Americans, 422–425. Henry Ford thought people should save up the entire price and pay in cash, but the public as well as car salespeople did not like it, and the installment purchase plan developed instead and spread from automobiles to all consumer goods, putting many Americans at risk for indebtedness. 6. Strayer, J. N. Loughborough, 439. 7. Stephen Fried, Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West (New York: Bantam Books, 2009). 8. Ibid., 230–232. 9. Bill Knott, “The Nearly Adventist President,” Adventist Review, January 26, 2006, 8–13. Harding’s personal life may have been a mess (Pietrusza, 1920, 74–83, 87–89, 303, 317–320), but that did not mean his political effectiveness was a total failure. For a recent reevaluation of Harding in his role as president, see John W. Dean, Warren G. Harding (New York: Times Books, 2004). Pietrusza (1920, 424, 425) regards him as more independent and active than most have assumed. 10. Jerry Moon feels that “very few exceeded Haskell in quantity, variety, and significance of accomplishment among pioneering Adventists.” Moon, “S. N. Haskell,” 5, 6. After comparing Stephen to such early Adventists as the Whites, Joseph Bates, J. N. Loughborough, J. N. Andrews, Uriah Smith, and A. G. Daniells, he concludes that “it seems clear that none but those listed above can claim to have surpassed Haskell, and he was arguably the equal of some of them” (ibid., footnote 1). 11. Yearbook of the Seventh-day Adventist Denomination: The Official Directories, 1923 (Washington, DC: Review and Herald®, 1923), 5. 12. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 55–205. 13. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 179. 14. A point Ellen G. White tried to get across to those involved in the “daily” controversy. Denis Kaiser notes, “For some time Ellen White tried to bring the two parties together for a meeting of

prayer and Bible study because, in her opinion, it was through a prayerful and solemn investigation of the Word, with the Bible as the final arbiter of truth, that the exegetical and theological questions were to be mutually solved.” Kaiser, “The Word, the Spirit of Prophecy, and Mutual Love,” 3.

Index Abiding Spirit, The, 200 Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, social-media role of, 81, 82 Adventist Book Centers, 9 Acts of the Apostles, The, 271 Adams, John, 320 Africa, 141–145, 168–175, 177, 181, 182, 225, 300, 344; beginning of evangelism of blacks, 169–172; first converts from white settlers, 168, 169 Air travel, 371 Alcoholism, endemic in early America, 29, 30 Albertsworth, E. F., 326 Alcock, John, 371 Alien and Sedition laws, 320 American Medical Association, 312, 314 American Medical Missionary College, 199 American Printing House for the Blind, 271 American Sunday School Union, 48 American Temperance Society, 48 Andrews, J. N., 76, 103, 108, 109, 310, 374 Andrews University, 98, 127 Arkansas Conference, 219 Armageddon, battle of, 312, 323, 324 Arnold, William, 116, 117, 122, 123 Atlantic Union College, see New England School Atlantic Union Conference, 274, 282, 294

Audubon, James, 83 Automobiles, impact on Adventists, 304, 60, 361, 371, 372 Avondale School, 11, 93, 145, 149, 181, 182, 184, 190, 192–198 Australia, 9, 115–123, 145, 148, 149, 157, 158, 178, 179, 225, 226, 228, 294, 311, 339; E. G. White, vision of, 116, 117, 178, 179; federalism, rise of, 226; Haskell pioneered in, 9; Haskell’s first visit to, 115–123 Australian Conference, 192 Baker, William Lemuel Henry, 189, 198 Ballenger, A. F., 210 Banner of Light, 164 Basutoland, 169–172 Bates, Joseph, 23, 38, 54, 55, 57, 71, 81, 310, 373, 374 Bathing, fear of, 17, 18, 20 Battle Creek College, 93–99, 111, 149, 157, 181, 192, 196, 208; academic program controversy, 95–97; ministerial institutes, 102; move to rural area, 227, 228; problems with location, 94, 95; religion courses at, 96, 97; school homes, 104 Battle Creek Sanitarium, 87, 93, 95, 117, 187, 199, 261, 275, 277, 306, 321, 354 “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 27 Beecher, Eunice Bullard, 16, 17 Beecher, Henry Ward, 16, 196 Belden, Frank, 229, 289 Bell, Goodloe Harper, 93, 96–99, 111 Bible, Haskell’s view of, 155–157, 252 Bible and History Teacher’s conferences (1919), 254, 325, 326, 337 Bible Echo, The, 117, 123 Bible Handbook, 271, 272 Bible-Reading Gazette, The, 114, 115 Bible Readings for the Home Circle, 115, 229, 318, 319, 330, 335

Bible Readings method, 113–115, 243 Bible Training School, 243, 245, 271, 274, 285, 304, 328; masthead, 248, 249, 268, 347 Big business, rise of, 131–133 Birds of America, 83 Black codes, 217 Blacks, exodus from South, 242 Blaine, James G., 183, 304 Blair, Henry William, 53, 129 Bland, William Thomas, 276 Bollman, Calvin P., 174, 278 Bolsheviks, 334, 335 Book salesmen, itinerant, 82, 83 Bourdeau, Daniel T., 91, 109 Bowen, T. E., 315, 321–323, 351 Boyd, C. L., 172 Braille, books in, 271 Breed, Almon Jacob, 205, 209, 210 British South Africa Company, 172–174 Brown, Arthur, 371 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 16 Browning, Robert, 16 Brownsberger, Sidney, 95, 96 Bryan, William Jennings, 44, 45, 305 Bureaucracies, centralized, 224, 25 Burgess, Georgia Anna Burras, 273, 274 Burgess, Luther J., 273, 274 Burleson, Albert, 334 Butler, George I., 87, 93, 97, 98, 116, 134, 187, 258, 274, 283, 294, 314 California, Adventist center rivaling Battle Creek, 92, 98; settled by

New Englanders, 42, 45, 91 California Conference, 87, 91, 113, 148, 152, 166, 189, 244, 274, 285– 297, 345–347; divided into additional conferences, 292–295; ministerial problems created by climate, 291, 292 Campbell, Alexander, 196 Canright, D. M, 103 Cape Coloured, 169 Carnegie Hall, 240 Catholicism, militant, 135 Cavalier American culture, 46, 60 Ceylon, 146 Cherokees, 320 Chevrolet, Louis, 360, 361 Chicago Bible School, 113 Chicago Medical Mission, 234 Children, colonial, sent out to work in other families, 15; economic asset, 15 China, 146–148, 150 Chinnock, Mary, 88 Christian Connexion, 81 Christmas, 355, 356 Christ’s Object Lessons, 227 City missions (evangelistic centers), 113 Civil War, 59, 72–75, 118, 131, 163, 164, 215–218, 318; effects on South, 215–218; “Yankee conquest of North America,” 217 Claremont Union College, see Helderberg College Classical education program, 95, 96, 192, 196 Clay, Henry, 30 “Cleansing Message,” see Holy Flesh Movement Clinton Theological Seminary, 234 Clough, Caroline, 362

Clough, Mary L., 357, 362 Colcord, Willard Allan, 173 Collins, Gilbert, 197 Cold Water Army, 29, 300 Colfax Massacre, 217 College of Medical Evangelists, 261, 286, 312–317, 329 Colleges, prestige of establishing, 93, 94 Comings, C. W., 99 Confederate States, 59 Conflicts of interest, 224, 230 Congregational Church, 34, 46–48, 61, 118, 233, 234 Conradi, L. R., 107, 250, 262, 265, 322 Cornell, Merritt E., 76, 77 Constitution, American, 370 Consumerism, 13 Corliss, J. O., 115–117, 123, 289 Corruption, political, 132 Cottrell, Hampton Watson, 282, 290 Council on Medical Education, 314, 317 Covenant, signing, to start church, Puritan custom, 75 Crafts, Wilbur, 289, 298, 303 Cranmer, Gilbert, 59, 209 Crisler, Clarence C., 255, 268 Cross and Its Shadow, The, 268, 270, 271 Culture, educate young in own, 144, 145 Curtis, Spencer, 268 Czechowski, Michael Belina, 109 “Daily” controversy, 159, 187, 250–263, 326, 337, 338, 340, 375 Daniells, Arthur G., 35, 148, 150, 190, 192, 195, 196, 226, 238, 239, 254, 255, 257, 275–277, 283, 291, 293, 294, 297, 306, 307, 310, 311, 325, 328, 329, 337, 338, 340, 374

Davis, Marian, 260 Davis, S. S., 209, 210 Debating, 195, 196 Decker, H. W., 314 DeGraw, M. Bessie, 283 Deism, 72 Desire of Ages, The, 193, 254 Democratic Party, 44, 45, 48 Disciples of Christ, 196 Donalson, William R., 360 Donnell, R. S., 209, 210 Druillard, Alma, 141, 142, 172, 354 Druillard, Nellie Rankin, 141, 142, 169, 278, 283, 300, 354 Durland, Grace, 200 Durland, J. H., 126, 157 Early Writings, 191, 251, 263 Eastman, William Walter, 259, 260 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 371 Electricity, effects on society, 222, 223, 230; on Adventist Church, 223 Elihu, The Sabbath, 54, 55, 62, 81 Emancipation of slaves, 216 Emmanuel Missionary College, 279, 283 Endicott, John, 52 Epidemics, 324 Erie Canal, 23 Espionage Act (1917), 335 European Council of Seventh-day Adventists, 109 Evans, I. H., 315 Evans, Newton, 315 Faith healing, 204 Fanaticism, 201–213

Farnsworth, Eugene William, 190, 294, 340 Fay, Anna C., 43, 150, 244 Field, Stephen J., 131, 132 Financial recessions, 131 First Great Awakening, 48, 61 Fitzhugh, George, 217 Fletcher Academy, 284 Ford, Henry, 304, 360, 374 Fox, Catherine, 163, 164 Fox, Margaret 163, 164 Franke, E. E., 238–242, 361 Freeman, J. M., 170 French Revolution, 108 Fundamentalism, 336–338 Gardner, J. W., 107–109 Garfield, James, 164 General Orders No. 11, 74, 75 General Tract and Missionary Society, 87, 88; tracts sent on ships, 88, 107 General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath, 129 “Good death,” 166 Gordon, A. J., 210 Gospel Herald Publishing Company, 277 Gospel Primer, The, 271 Gotzian, Josephine, 313, 329 Gray, Emma, 313 Gray, William, 177, 178 Gray family, 177, 178 Graysville, Academy, 218, 275, 277 Grant, Ulysses S., 74, 220

Great Britain, 106, 107, 109 Great Controversy, The, 108, 229, 259, 260; chronology and historical dates in, 260, 261 Great Second Advent Movement, 245 Greater New York Conference, 240, 241, 282 “Greater Yankeedom,” see New York, “burned over” district Griggs, Frederick, 207 Growth, massive, universal social problem, 223 Hale, Thomas, 55, 57 Hall, Sara J., 111 Hancock, Samuel Cooley, 59, 209 Hankins, I. J., 168 Hansen, Louis A., 274, 275, 278 Harding, Warren G., 336, 372, 374 Hardy, William J., 72 Hare, Edward, 123, 124 Hare, Joseph, 124 Hare, Robert, 124 Hare family, 123, 124, 128 Harrison, Benjamin, 304 Harvey, Fred, 372 Haskell, George Washington, 32, 72 Haskell, Hetty Hurd, 126, 177, 178, 189–191, 197–200, 208, 209, 218, 219, 232, 236–238, 242, 243, 255, 269, 270, 273–277, 279, 281, 286, 291, 293, 296 297, 301–304, 312–315, 321–323, 326–328, 344, 345, 347, 351, 355, 359; Bible instructor, 177, 178, 197, 199, 236; conversion of, 177, 178; death of, 326–328; highly protective of Haskell, 190; honeymoon in Mrs. White’s tent, 190; marriage to Haskell, 189; ministerial license, 190; played more dynamic role in marriage than Mary had, 190; salary, 236, 273; Scholz, Louise, 321–323; White Memorial Hospital, involvement with,

286, 312–315; WTCU, contacts president of, 301 Haskell, Mariah Louisa, 32 Haskell, Mary Howe, 14–20, 31, 36 47, 55, 57, 58, 65–67, 75, 84, 85, 124, 152–154, 340, 347; active with Stephen in SDA movement, 18; ages of at marriage and death, 14, 19; asceticism, 17; bathing, fear of, 17, 18; death of, 161, 162; declining health, 152–154, 161; dormitory, living in, 124; healing of, 16, 17; invalid, 14–19; personality of, 16; physical activity, fear of, 18; received inheritance, 14, 18; spelling of her maiden name, 19; Stephen marries, 14, 15, 47; Stephen buried beside, 340; Stephen’s absences from, 63; taught Stephen, 31; testimonies from E. G. White, 16–18; Vigilant Missionary Society, 84; wants to go to California, 152, 153 Haskell, Nelson, 29 Haskell, Philena Pepper, 29 Haskell, Ruth Elizabeth, 32 Haskell, Sara Philena, 32 Haskell, Stephen Nelson, A. T. Jones, confronts, 289, 290; accent, New England, 345; adapted new marketing techniques, 9; Adventist Review, begins to write for, 57; Africa, first visit to, 141–145; Africa, second visit to, 168–75; aid and help, talent for soliciting, 355–359; algebra, studied, 36, 37; as author, 57, 146, 148, 267–271, 338, 339; as educator, 192–195; as young preacher, 50, 51; asceticism, 17, 65–67, 346; Asia, visits, 145– 148; Australia, first visit to, 115–123; Australia, second visit, 182, 186–198; baptisms, first conducted, 54; Battle Creek, moved to, 88; Battle Creek College, 93, 95; beard, flowing, 354, 346; Bible, read through 76 times, 38; Bible, teaching from, 193–195; Bible Handbook, 271, 272; Bible Training School, 243–245; Bible translations, read and collected, 34, 35, 37, 38; Bible, view of, 155–157, 252; big-bodied, 109, 344; birth, date of, 19, 26, 47;

“bishop of New England,” 76; born in Oakham, Mass., 21, 22; Braille, books in, 271; buried beside Mary, 340; California Conference, divides by climatic and economic zones, 292, 293; Canada, visits, 50, 51, 53, 54; character flaws, 65–69, 187; childhood, 29, 30; children, had none, 15, 345; Christmas, wishes Mrs. White a Merry, 355; confronts theological aberrations, 204– 212; Congregation Church, member of, 34, 47; Cross and Its Shadow, 268, 270; cultures, open-minded to other, 146, 147; “Daily” controversy, 160, 187, 250–263, 337, 338, 340, 370, 375; death of Haskell, 340, 341; death of Mary, 161, 162; defends urban training hospital, 315–317, 329; depression, struggle with, 166, 348–352; develops Bible readings approach, 113–115; dry humor, 346, 351, 352; eyes and ears, Mrs. White’s, in America, 198, 205–207, 259; educational limitations, 31; educational philosophy, 143–145; England, tried to start school in, 125, 126; Europe, first trip to, 106–110; Europe, second trip to, 124–126; Europe, third visit to, 140, 141; Europe, fourth trip to, 180, 181; evangelistic approach, 239, 240; extended absences from Mary, 63, 124; extolls Stephen and Hetty, 197; fanaticism, deals with, 205–212; fatherly man, 345; French Revolution, impact on Stephen, 108; frustrations over resistance to self-supporting institutions, 281–283; funeral sermon, Mrs. White’s, preaches, 306–309; GC committee, appointed to, 87, 91; generosity, 346– 348; God’s leading, sensitive to, 252, 353; grammar, problems with, 37; Hawaii, visits, 117, 118; heat, inability to tolerate, 198, 277; Hetty Hurd, Mrs. White suggests, as marriage partner for Haskell, 189; historical heritage, shifts to focus on, 333, 338, 339; honeymoon in Mrs. White’s tent, 190; horses, love of, 344, 345; illness, frequent, 117, 140, 303, 325, 331, 353–355; inspiration, view of, 254, 255; lay leader, 58, 59, 159; Kalaka, David, hires as guide, 170, 171; kept church leaders informed by letters, 305;

Lacey, H. C., tensions with, 196; library, extensive, 37, 38, 153; Madison institutions, 278, 279, 281–284; Magan, travels with, 139–149; marries Mary Howe, 14, 15, 19, 47; marries Hetty Hurd, 189; Methodists, joins, 34; military service, avoids, 72; Moko, Richard, hires as guide, 169, 170; New England School, establishes, 99, 100; New York, evangelized, 232, 235–242, 358, 359; New Zealand, visits, 123, 124; newspapers, employed, 240, 357; occupations, early, 33, 35, 36; ordained, voted to be, 76; organizational change, at first resisted, 225; pastoral in dealings with others, 353; pays father to compensate loss of family income, 15, 35; personal ministries, 9, 90; Portland, Maine, evangelism in, 303, 304; pragmatic, 369; prepared converts to sustain spiritual lives after he left. 237, 238; president of California Conference, Mrs. White encourages him to be, 288; Prescott, tensions with, 197, 225, 256; program to educate elementary school children, 100, 101; promises, dedication to his, 14, 15, 30; proposes to Ellen G. White, 186–188, 200; publishing committee, member of, 91; race war, Haskell feared, 222; reader, voracious, 37, 38; researched new cultures and lands, 120, 141; report blank, creates, 75, 76;rest, Mrs. White urged him to, 353, 354, 362; retires from California Conference, 294–297; returns to America, 198; Rice, Anna, C., incident, 157–159; Sabbath, accepts, 53–57, 62, 63; salary, 273, 274, 347; self-made man, 30, 31, 369; self-supporting movement, felt called to, 281; soap maker, 33, 36; Solusi Mission controversy, 172–175; South, American, Haskell in, 218, 219; South Lancaster, moves to, 75; spirit, encounter with, 162, 163; statistics, loved, 89, 119; Story of Daniel the Prophet, 267–269; The Story of the Seer of Patmos, 267; suspicion of church leadership, 65–69; struggle to get paid by church, 276, 277; Sunday law crisis in California, 288, 289; tensions with E. E. Franke, 240–242; Trinitarian language, 191; typewriter, love of,

117, 141, 359; unclean meats, 55, 64, 65; undermining Mrs. White’s role, 260, 261; urban evangelism, 9; urged to take Mary to California, 152; Uriah Smith, travels with, 180, 181; Vigilant Missionary Society, 84; wanted to evangelize Asian immigrants in California, 148; White, Ellen G., perhaps closest associate of, 9, 188, 189; White, Ellen G., read from her writings as much as from Bible, 156; White thought he had obsession on Australia, 178, 179; White wanted Haskell to hold her writings with her sons as “perpetual trust,” 189; world tour, 139–149; young ministers, encouraged, 345, 346; young students, did not always understand, 111, 112 “Haskell” device, 35, 43, 359, 369 Haskell Hall, AUC, 101 Haskell Memorial Home, 168, 175 Hawaii, 117, 118, 127, 146, 147, 183 Hayes, Rutherford B., 132 Haying season, 77, 79 Healdsburg College, 93, 96, 100, 149, 192, 196, 273, 290, 291 Helderberg College, 168 Henry, Serepta Myrenda Irish, 199, 200 Herald of Gospel Liberty, 81 Herald Publishing Company, 277 Himes, Joshua V., 81 History, cyclical, 22, 31, 373; linear, 22, 23, 373 Holiness movement, 204, 210 Holmes, Claude E., 325, 326 Holy flesh movement, 138, 204–212 Hong Kong, 147, 148, 150 Honor, Southern, 219, 220 Howe, Calvin, 14 Howe, Calvin Guild, 14, 19

Howe, Mary (mother of Mary Haskell), 14, 19 Huguenot Seminary, 143, 144 Hughes, Cassius Boone, 192 Hughes, John, archbishop of New York, 135 Hunt, William, 168 Huntley, Maria, 84, 87, 100 Hurd, Hetty, see Haskell, Hetty Hurd Hutchinson Theological Seminary, 234 Hydrotherapy treatments, 139, 140, 153, 275, 277 Immigrants, 233, 234, 246 Independent ministries, see Self-supporting ministries India, 141, 145–147, 273, 274, 321 Indiana Conference, 209, 210 Industrialization, 48 Influenza pandemic, 324, 325, 329 Ings, William, 107, 178 Insects, teaching that mustn’t kill, 205 Inspiration, 250–263, 326, 337, 338, 369, 370 International corporations, 11 International Date Line, 118, 119, 128 International Tract and Missionary Society, 88, 118, 119, 228 Invalidism, as protective mechanism, 16, 17 Irwin, Charles Walter, 291 Irwin, George A., 198, 207, 208, 218, 238, 294 Irwin, Mrs. G. A., 200, 315, 329 Israel, M. C., 117 Italy, 109 Jackson, Andrew, 61, 320, 370 Jameson, Leander Starr, 172 Japan, 146, 148, 150, 151 Jefferson, Thomas, 73, 108, 370

Jews, expulsion from Kentucky, 74, 75 Johnson, Andrew, 31, 37, 370 Johnson, Eliza, 31 Johnson, O. A., 185 Johnston Sunday bill, 288 Jones, A. T., 103–105, 134, 149, 157–159, 172–175, 184, 204, 206, 209, 224, 255, 289, 290, 303 Jones, Orrin B., 92 Kalaka, David, 170–172 Kansas City Union Station, 372 Keller, Florence Armstrong, 313, 329 Kellogg, Henry Webster, 360, 361 Kellogg, John Harvey, 87, 173, 187, 199, 224, 234, 255, 261, 262, 321, 353, 354, 361 Khama, African chief, 300 Kilgore, T. A., 180 King, R. M., 134 King of the North 312, 324 Ku Klux Klan, 336 Knox, Walter T., 288, 291, 329 Korea, 146 Labor unions, 304 Labor-management conflicts, 130, 131, 136, 137 Lacey, Herbert Camden, 149, 186, 192–197, 254, 326, 338, 369 Lacey, Lillian Yarnal, 149 La Rue, Abram, 118, 127, 147 Legree, Simon, 215 Lerotholi, African chief, 170 Lesotho, see Basutoland Lessons From the Life of Nehemiah, 176 Libraries, getting Adventist books into, 84, 85, 119, 121

Life and Health, 324 Lincoln, Abraham, 73, 74 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 164, 167 Lincoln, Willie, 164 Lindsay, Harmon, 93 Lisbon Earthquake, 141, 150 Literature evangelism, 9, 89, 90, 113, 117, 122, 123, 125, 143, 196, 236 Littlejohn, W. H., 114 Los Angeles, California, 286, 312, 313, 315–317, 324 Loughborouh, John Norton, 91, 92, 107, 126, 157, 178, 243, 245, 255, 314, 328, 339, 346, 371, 374 Lloyd, Ernest, 352 Mace, F. W., 99 McEnterfer, Sara, 210 McKinnon, Helen, 126 McLearn, Alexander, 96–99 Madison Academy, 278 Madison College, see Madison institutions Madison institutions, 93, 273, 278, 279 Magan, Percy T., 139–149, 261, 262, 278, 283, 314, 315, 317 324, 329; first church employee to make round-the-world tour for Adventist church, 149 Mahan, Alfred T., 183 Maine Conference, 87, 113, 285, 301–304; prohibition struggle in, 301–303, 311 Martin, Mary, 85 Matabele Mission, see Solusi Mission Mather, Cotton, 52 Mathewson, S. G., 55–57 Matteson, John Gottlieb, 107, 109

May 1918 Sedition Act, 318 Methodism, 47, 50, 71, 74, 209 Metropolitan Hall, New York City, 240 Michigan, malaria in, 41, 44; settled by New Englanders, 39–41 Miles, Elder, 269 Millennium, anticipation of progress on earth, 24, 27 Miller, W. H. B., 123 Miller, William, 121, 135, 372 Millerite Movement, 10, 13, 81, 217, 220, 250 Ministerial institutes, 101, 102 Ministry of Healing, 244, 272, 303 Minneapolis General Conference of 1888, 97, 134 Missions, 142–145, 147, 169–175 Moko, Richard, 169, 175 Molasses storage tank in Boston, collapse of, 334, 342 Morning Star, 219 Moshoeshoe, African chief, 169 Mother, role of, 199, 200 Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, 143, 144 Nashville, Tennessee, 219, 222, 232, 273–281, 285, 297, 311 Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute, see Madison College National Reform Association, 73, 74, 130 Ndebele (African people), 172 Nehemiah, received gifts from Persian Empire, 174, 175 New England, arguments, love of, 196, 202; culture, 33–36, 118, 373, 374; desire to replicate, 38; industrialization of, 48; intellectual life, 34; longevity of people, 343; manufacturing hub of nation, 24; many from, went South to help freed slaves, 215; settlers wore out land, 44; radical worship style in, 209; reforestation, 21, 22, 44; spawning new religious sects, 34; Sunday observance, 51, 52; supernatural, fascination with, 163, 166

New England Conference, 76, 77, 85–87, 91, 103, 113, 356; cap meeting of 1876, 356–358 New England Book and Tract Society, see Tract and Missionary Societies New England Sanitarium, 326, 327, 347 New England School, 15, 93, 99–101, 106, 110–112, 134; program to train teachers for summer sessions for Adventist children, 100, 101 New England Tract Society, 48 New Englanders, diaspora of, 35, 38–42, 47, 215; jack-of-all-trades, 33 New South Wales Conference, 189 New York, “burned-over” district, 34 New York City, first black Adventist church, 242; impact on American religious liberty, 235; New Amsterdam culture of, 234, 235, 247 New York Tract Society, 86 New Zealand, 9, 119, 123, 124, 148, 189, 196, 294, 311, 313, 329 Newspapers, Haskell employed, 240, 357 Norway, 109, 125, 140 Oak Hill Cemetery, 309 Oakham, Massachusetts, 21–23, 26, 60, 342 Oakwood Industrial School, 218, 219, 221, 285 Olds, Ransom Eli, 360 Olsen, O. A., 134, 140, 152, 158, 172, 174 Oleson, man Haskell baptized, 150 One hundred and forty-four thousand, speculations on, 201, 205–207, 213 Orphanages, Adventist, 168 Ottoman Empire, 312 Overman, Lee S., 335 Owen, Jennie, 126 Pacific Press Publishing Association, 92, 97, 98, 161, 231, 286, 291;

rivalry with Review and Herald, 92, 97, 98 Pacific Union College, 100, 290 Pacific Union Conference, 290, 294 Panic of 1893, 182, 183, 199, 216, 218, 228 Palmer. E. R., 270 Paradise Valley Sanitarium, 340 Parmalee, Brother, 116 Pasteur, Louis, 29 Pentecostalism, 287, 288 Persian Empire, gifts to God’s people, 174, 175 Personal ministries, 9, 91, 228 Physical deformities, teaching that saved cannot have, 205, 206, 208, 213 Pierce, Jane, 164 Piper, J. F., 301 Pork, see Unclean meats Portland, Maine, 300, 301, 303, 304; evangelism in, 303, 304, 310–312 Portland, Tennessee, 219 Postcards, depicting SDA pioneers, 314, 315 Postmillennialism, 49, 62 Postal system, and publishing, 82, 89 Prescott, W. W., 157–159, 184, 192, 193, 197, 225, 250, 254–256, 258, 262, 264, 265, 337, 338 Present Truth (British), 107, 126 Priest, Lewis, Jr., 85 Princeton University, 104 Progress, an American obsession, 24 Progressive Era, 199, 203 Prohibition laws, 300–305 Prophecy, fulfillment of, 132–135 Prophets, new Adventist, 157–159

Publishing, Adventist, 40, 41, 81–89, 92, 97, 98, 107–109, 114, 115, 117, 122, 123, 125, 126, 228, 244, 268–270, 293, 319, 324, 339, 347; American, 80, 82, 83 Publishing houses, E. G. White confronts administrators, 11 Puritan culture, education emphasis, 31; fled Netherlands, 247; influence on American culture, 22, 31; religious emphasis, 46, 47; see also New England Puritanism, pervasive in writings of E. G. White, 38 Quabbin Reservoir, 21 Quaker culture, 46, 60 Racial war, 336 Railroads, aided Seventh-day Adventist Church, 24, 356–358, 360; dangers of, 360, 363; effect on American society, 23, 24 Rasmussen, Anna, 153, 154, 201 Reconstruction, post-Civil War era, 131, 132, 218 “Red Scare,” 1919–1920, 336 “Reeds,” Mr. and Mrs., 36 Reiswig, Philipp, 107 Religious liberty, 173 Republican Party, 304 Restorationist movement, 10 Review and Herald Publishing Association, 92, 97, 98, 228–231, 268, 270, 271, 278, 289, 302, 307, 318, 319, 335, 340, 360; followed big business practices of late nineteen century, 228, 229; rivalry with Pacific Press, 92, 97, 98 Rhett, Edmund, 217 Rhodes, Cecil, 172 Rice, Ann C., 157–159 Rice, Roxie, 84 Richards, H.M.S., 346, 347 “Richardsons,” Mr. and Mrs., 36

Righteousness by faith, 97, 130, 134, 157, 172, 184, 212, 258 Rise and Progress of Seventh-day Adventism, The, 245 Robinson, A. T., 162, 168, 169, 177 Robinson, Dores A., 99, 100, 111, 125, 126, 255 Roddan, John T., 135, 136 Rodman, C. P., 77 Rodgers, J. H., 314 Rodriguez, Angel Manuel, 262 Roosevelt, Theodore, 183 Roper, Mr., 36 Ross, Alexander, 78 Royalties, book, 228–230 Ruble, W. A., 326 Russia, 125 Sabbath, 51–57, 122 Samoa, 119 San Francisco, earthquake, 285–287, 298; New Englanders settled, 42, 45, 91 St. Helena Sanitarium, 153, 291, 306, 339 Sanctuary doctrine, 251 Saxby, William, 53, 54 School homes, 104 Scott, Henry L., 117 Scott, L. A. 118 Scott, Lida, 315 Scottish-Border County culture, 46, 60 Seal of God, 205, 206, 213 Seasonal cycle, 24, 373 Second Coming, 22–24, 50, 51, 130, 133–135, 141, 183, 205, 210, 220, 339, 372 Second Great Awakening, 48, 49, 61; opens preaching to lay

participation, 49, 50 Sedition Act of 1918, 318 Segregation laws, 222, 330 Self-supporting institutions and missionaries, 218, 219, 279–284; see also Madison institutions Self-made man concept, 30–32 Selective Service Act, 318 Service economy, 333, 334, 372 Seventh-day Adventist Church, administrative structure, duplications in, 224; blacks and whites, perception, mix, 275; educational system, development of, 93–103; developing financial structure, 103; did not exist in isolation, 10, 23; growth of, 372; has faded in New England, 43; in Europe, spread by immigrants to America, 107; leaders, first generation dying off, 245; New England culture followed spread of, 41, 42; organization of, 11, 59, 60; Populism, supporters of William Jennings Bryan’s, 44, 45, 305; reflects American political practices, 60; reorganization of, 224–227; slavery, attitude toward, 71, 72; westward expansion in America, 23, 39–41; women’s roles in early, 90, 175, 200, 247; World War I, effects on, 317–324 Sholes, Christopher Latham, 117 ”Shoutin’ Methodists,” 209 “Shut door,” 89 Signs of the Times, 92, 107, 120–123, 178, 336; perceived as rival to Adventist Review, 92, 97 Simpson, A. B., 210 Simpson, William Ward, 241 Sisley, Maud, 107 Skyscrapers, 235 Slavery, 71, 72, 215–217 Smith, Harriet, 184

Smith, Leon, 256 Smith, Uriah, 96–98, 102, 103, 105, 114, 159, 180, 181, 183–185, 229, 246, 256, 257, 260, 264, 267, 310, 357, 363, 374 Smith, Wilton, 180, 181, 184 Social reforms, 48, 49, 61, 199, 305 Social work, 234 Solusi Mission, 172–175, 259 Soluswe (African chief), 172 South, American, 59, 71, 74, 75, 118, 131–133, 215–219, 273–279, 285; exodus of blacks from, 242; “Lost Cause,” myth of, 215; resistance to anything from the North, 216, 217, 219, 220, 274 South African Conference, 168 South Lancaster Academy, see New England School Southern Missionary Society, 277 Southern Publishing Association, 269, 271, 277, 278, 339 Southern Union Conference, 274, 283 Southern Watchman, 174 Spalding, Arthur W., 344, 346 Spanish Empire, 118 Spicer, W. A., 287, 293, 323, 327, 328, 340, 341 Spiritualism, 163–165 Starr, George B., 256, 302 Statistics, Americans loved, 89 Steele, church member who attacked E. G. White, 289 Steps to Christ, 147, 171, 191 Stevens, Lillian M. N., 301 Story of Daniel the Prophet, The, 267–269, 324 Story of the Seer of Patmos, The, 267, 353 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 39, 80, 215 Strikes, labor, see Labor-management conflict Studies in Christian Principles, 200

Studies in Home and Child Life, 200 “Subscription” publishing, 83 Sunday observance, 51–53; longest national debate of nineteenth century, 52, 53 Sunday laws, 10, 49, 51–53, 62, 129, 130, 133–135, 203, 278, 288, 289, 291, 301, 303, 304, 334, 335 Sunday Schools, 48 Sunderland, Byron, 74 Surveilance, domestic, 334 Sutherland, Edward A., 283 Sweden, 109, 140 Switzerland, 108, 109 Systematic Benevolence Fund, 75, 103 Tammany Hall, 175 Taylor, Mae, 273 Teacher qualifications, nineteenth-century, 105 Telegraph, aided Seventh-day Adventist Church, 25, 223; influence on society, 24–26 Temperance Movement, 29, 30, 48, 300–304, 358 Thayer, Jennie, 87 Thoughts on Daniel, 260 Thoughts on Daniel and Revelation, 267 Thoughts on Revelation, 260 Tindall, Dr., 355 Tract and Missionary Societies, 84–89, E. G. White said too complicated, 88, 89 Translating faith, see Holy flesh movement Trinity 197, 202 True Educator, The, 111 True Missionary, The, 87, 88 Truman, Harry S., 335, 336

Trust-busting movement, 11 Truth, present, 251, 263 Tucker, J. C., 99 Tufts, G. L., 289 Turkey, 312, 323, 324 Typewriter, 117, 141, 359 Twain, Mark, 83 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 80, 89 Unclean meats, 55, 64, 65, 69, 70 Unitarianism, 73 United States of America, American empire, 183; as two-horned beast, 183, 185; attempt to establish, as Christian nation, 72, 74; consists of many distinct cultures, 60; constant desire for parts to succeed from, 59, 71; cycles of threat and turmoil, 131–133, 318, 320, 334–336, 373; expansion of federal authority, 319; increasingly religious during nineteenth century, 72, 74; May 1918 Sedition Act, 318 Urban evangelism, 9, 232–243, 311, 312, 334 Urbanization in America, 23, 24, 26, 232, 233, 333, 334, 342 Vigilant Missionary Society, 84, 85 Victoria, Queen, 300 Waggoner, E. J., 134, 157, 204, 206, 224 Waggoner, J. H., 76 Waldensians, 109 Warren, Luther, 204, 240 Washburn, J. S., 326 Washington, George, 73 Waukon, Iowa, Adventist colony, 40 Water, danger of drinking public sources of, 29, 30 Wessels, Pieter, 172 Wessels family, 168, 172, 183

Whig Party, 49, 61 White, Ellen G., 9–13, 16–18, 23, 33, 38, 40, 41, 49, 58, 64–73, 75, 81, 85, 87–89, 93–96, 102, 105, 108, 110–114, 116, 117, 125, 130, 133, 134, 137, 139, 152–154, 156–159, 161, 162, 172, 174, 174, 178–184, 186–198, 200, 204–212, 224–232, 234, 236–241, 245, 267–269, 277–284, 286, 288, 289, 291, 292, 295–297, 301–303, 306–317, 326, 338, 345–355, 358–362, 373–375; Australia, years in, 178, 179, 181, 182, 186–198; Australia, vision of, 116, 117, 147; automobile, first ride in, 361; Battle Creek College, 93–96; Bible, teaching from, 193, 202; calls for reorganization, 224, 225; cities, urged evangelization of, 232; comments about consumerism, 13; confronts publishing house administrators, 11; consumerism, 13; “daily controversy,” 251–263, 337, 338, 375; “daily controversy” great distraction, 259; death of, 306; debating, dislike of, 195, 196; Daniel and Revelation, wanted simple book, 267, 268; declining health, 284; Daniells, urged to do urban evangelism, 312; denominational pioneers, high regard for, 257, 258; depression, Haskell’s struggle with, 348–352; E. E. Franke, her opinions of, 238, 240, 241; encourages Haskell to be California Conference president, 288; funerals of, 231, 306–310; Haskell proposes to, 186–188, 200; Haskell undermining Mrs. White’s role, 260, 261; heaven all smiles and gladness, 111, 112, 192; indebtedness, 191, 192, 228–230; initially resisted Haskell’s position on unclean meats, 64, 65; Lacey, H. C., concern about, 195–197; letters to Haskell channel to wider church, 191, 198; Madison College only institution she served on its board, 280; Madison institutions, 278, 279; marriage proposal, reasons for rejecting Haskell’s, 186–188; ministers, heavy burdens on, 347, 348; 1901 reorganization, supported, 226, 227; permission to Haskell to retire from California Conference, 295; photograph of Haskell at Elmshaven, 191; politics, discourages entering, 137;

Portland, Maine, asks Haskell to go to, 301; presents educational model, 96; rest, urged Haskell to, 353, 354, 362; Rice, Anna C. incident, 157–159; reluctant to go to Australia, 179; sends Haskell to confront theological aberrations, 204–212; Solusi Mission controversy, 172–175; temperance, favorite speaking topic, 358; testimonies to Stephen and Mary Haskell, 16–18, 65–69; theological challenges, Haskell needed to meet, 204; tract societies, said too complicated, 88; urges Haskell to take wife to California, 152; verbal inspiration, did not claim, 260, 261, 264, 265; warns Haskell against being too severe with students, 111, 112; writings, Haskell and her sons to hold, as perpetual trust, 189; wrote more letters to Haskell than anyone else outside family, 190 White, James, 23, 24, 38, 40, 41, 58, 62, 64, 75, 76, 81, 82, 85–87, 92– 95, 102, 103, 105, 116, 117, 186–189, 202, 229, 253, 260, 309, 310, 356, 358, 360, 373, 374 White, James Edson, 92, 188, 189, 271, 277, 278, 281, 297, 361 White, Mary Lacey, 149, 193 White, William C., 92, 97, 98, 100, 113, 125, 134, 149, 174, 179, 186– 188, 191, 193, 211, 213, 226, 243, 253, 255, 257, 259–261, 264, 265, 281–284, 291, 296, 297, 303, 326, 337, 347 White (E. G.) Estate, 256, 257 White Memorial Hospital, 286, 312–317, 324 Wilcox, Francis M., 174, 207, 327, 337, 341 Wilder, Mr. and Mrs., 36 Wilson, Woodrow, 104, 318, 329 Women, increasing role in nineteenth-century society, 18, 234, 358, 359 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 199, 289, 300, 301 Women’s Committee on the Los Angeles Hospital, 313–315 Women’s Gospel Work, 200

Woods, J. H., 123 Workweek, six day, 121, 122 World War I, 311, 312, 317, 334 Worth, William O., 360, 361, 371 Worth automobile, 360, 361 Yankee ingenuity, 26 Yankee peddlers, bad reputation of, 36 “Yankee West,” see “Yankeeland” “Yankeeland,” 40 Year of 1877, 131 Youth’s Instructor, 140, 301, 302, 351