At the appointed hour on a sultry, mid-July afternoon, the highly decorated, customized Model-T autovan, nicknamed “Rome’s Chariot,” arrived on the corner of Washington Street and Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton, Massachusetts. In the autovan rode Martha Moore Avery and David Goldstein, the featured lecturers for the meeting to be held that evening sponsored by the Catholic Truth Guild. The Model-T had been modified to hold evangelistic meetings from within its doors. It housed a moveable platform, complete with a stand-up rostrum known as the “perambulating pulpit,” that folded out at a forty-five degree angle from the front of the car. Its four seats could be removed or stacked on top of one another to form a table, and ample storage compartments carried large quantities of Catholic literature.
Designed as an eye-catching spectacle, the autovan generated a crowd simply by driving into town. Its decorations blended American patriotism and Roman Catholic devotion. It sported a sentence from George Washington’s Farewell Address: “Reason and experience forbid us to believe that national morality can prevail where religious principles are excluded.” A miniature star spangled banner decorated the hood to display visibly its patriotism. The Catholic nature of the enterprise shone forth in a large crucifix topped by an electric light and in the yellow and white chassis colors borrowed from the papal flag. In cardinal red letters, the refrain from the Holy Name hymn, penned by Boston’s Archbishop William O’Connell, covered the other side of the car: “Fierce is the fight for God and the right; sweet name of Jesus in Thee is our might.” The autovan’s maiden voyage took place on Independence Day, 1917, when it carried Avery and Goldstein, the co-founders and lecturers of the Catholic Truth Guild, to Boston Commons, to the inaugural meeting.
The Catholic Truth Guild provides only one illustration of the rampant institution building that women evangelists pursued during the decades of the Progressive Era, from 1890 to 1920. Three thousand miles to the west, Florence Louise Crawford brought the Pentecostal message from Azusa Street to downtown Portland and opened the Apostolic Faith Mission. In Hicks Hollow, an impoverished enclave in Kansas City, former slave, Emma Ray, turned a ramshackle, two-story wooden building into a rescue mission for African American children, while at a nondescript crossroad along the foothills of the Appalachians, Mattie Perry founded Elhanan Training School, even before the first public school opened in Marion, North Carolina. When institution building reached the craggy creek beds of western North Carolina through an ordinary woman like Perry, with no financial reserves, no church standing, and no higher education, the movement can be said to have thoroughly pervaded the entire nation.
This phenomenon differentiates women evangelists in the Progressive Era from their counterparts in previous generations. Earlier in the nineteenth century, evangelists like Harriet Livermore, Jarena Lee, Nancy Towle, and Zilpha Elaw, the so-called “strangers and pilgrims” featured in Catherine Brekus’ groundbreaking study, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845, had labored single-handedly as preacher, publicist, and pastor at the altar. What changed toward the century’s end was that women evangelists settled down to build institutions, from evangelistic organizations to religious training schools, from churches to rescue missions.
Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era focuses on the generation of women evangelists who shifted their tack from itinerancy to institution building. The salient change was this: the first generation of lone itinerant women evangelists who had once wandered the continent became, in the next generation, a phalanx of entrepreneurial institution builders. With this key strategic change, these women transformed the quintessential expression of American Christianity—evangelism—from an itinerant practice into the grand task of institution building.
Priscilla Pope-Levison (c) May 2014
Priscilla Pope-Levison is Professor of Theology, Seattle Pacific University and author of ‘Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era’.
