1937 Union Theological Summer Session Catalogue

By Default

Jesse Halsey / Radio Address c1935

The World Court protocols have again failed to pass our Senate. If the prestige of a President, who can get a blank check for four billion, could not bring the Senators into line, what can? Apparently, a “barrage of telegrams” is more effective than the influence of the Chief Executive.

Anyone who listened to Father Couglin or Senator Reynolds or Huey Long, when they were on the air, realized, as never before, the awful power of the radio in the hands of propagandists, not to say demagogues.

(I realize it is very easy to call the other fellow bad names.) If we are to change the picture, we must, in the future, not take anything for granted; but begin to organize our forces and be prepared to make vocal, in Washington, such public opinion as we can create and direct. This presupposes a consistent policy of education in the cities and at the crossroads, to proclaim the ideals of brotherhood and the international implications of the Gospel, to make “Americanism” something more than a narrow nationalism, to take the best idealistic traditions of our history and to exalt them.

Whoever is responsible for the policies of mission study deserves credit for placing the emphasis on Japan for this year. With current increase in armaments and our naval gestures in the Pacific, it is of great value for the churches to be studying and trying to understand Japan. Certainly, it is but a drop in the bucket, but, as a wise woman said, “The place for the drop is in the bucket.”

The Senators from Ohio voted on opposite sides on the World Court. The day following the vote, from Washington comes a dispatch to our morning paper, intimating that the anti-Senator has been deluged with telegrams of congratulations whereas the pro-court Senator had received no congratulatory messages. However large the “barrage” of anti telegrams may have been, eight names are mentioned in our paper. None of them happens to be known to me (and I have lived in our town for over twenty years). However, an array of fifty or sixty names of our “leading citizens” appear on the letterhead of our World Court Organization. None of us apparently have wired and, likely, few have written, either congratulating our pro-Court Senator or criticizing our anti. I imagine that is symptomatic the country over.

It is our business to sow the seed and plant the leaven, but on occasion it seems necessary that we count our sheaves or bake our loaves of bread. In other words, put pressure where it will make votes in Washington, or, quite frankly, engage in straight-forward, above-board “lobbying.” For our encouragement in this dark time when we desperately need it, let me rehearse in brief a bit of history that ought to give us hope and teach us some lessons.

President Nicholas Murray Butler [of Columbia University], after spending some time with Premier Briand, came home and, in a Sunday evening address to less than four hundred citizens at an eastern summer resort, outlined in substance what we now know as the “Pact of Paris.” A small committee of citizens selected that night went to Washington. President Coolidge and Secretary Kellogg thought the plan impossible and “unconstitutional.” Senator Borah said that he “would not oppose it”; and there it seemed to stall.

A Roman Catholic member of this citizen’s committee said to the others that the only method of approach was through the Federal Council. They saw Dr. Cadman and started the Council’s machinery and as it became evident that individuals and groups the country over were interested, the plan began to take form. Its unilateral feature became multilateral, and other minor changes were introduced, but under the pressure of public interest in high places, it became possible and constitutional and, curiously enough, in most quarters it now bears the name of the “Kellogg Pact.”

Apparently, we do have the machinery to make vocal our idealism. None of us say that the League of Nations is a synonym for the Kingdom of God nor that the World Court will bring universal peace, but we do feel ashamed and humiliated that our great country, whose statesmen designed and set up the machinery of peace, seems afraid to use it herself. The world must judge that we have things or fear things in the future, that we are afraid to adjudicate of public opinion. Nationalism is in the ascendant; preparedness races are eminent. America, at least officially, begins to line up with the unidealistic and anti-Christian forces. The next decade will be a “testing time”—a period of judgment. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. We need to teach and live, but it is perfectly legitimate and entirely necessary that we make vocal in places where it will count our determined opposition to increased armaments, to isolationist policies—to Chauvinism in all its forms.

Note Book: Dr. Francis Landey Patton

Dr. Francis Landey Patton

Note Book

November 26, 1932

Jesse Halsey

Dr. Patton died today in Bermuda, nearly ninety. It brings back old times. I remember when first I saw him; at Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as president (of Princeton, 1902). He had a cadaverous figure and face; sideburns that made him ‘look like a monkey’ (I thought to myself and have never breathed before). He had a biting wit, was keen as a brier in repartee, and could preach for an hour—and interest freshmen—by his eccentricities of manner and lapses into slang and homely and cogent illustration, and then keep the faculty going thru the sermon by his comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and unusual thought forms. He was a great preacher—and a lazy man. He delivered and sold some lectures at Lake Forest twenty odd years ago—and they have never been finished.

My admiration for him as a keen minded heresy hunter changed after I saw him in action in Princeton. Partly because my point of view changed and David Swing the heretic, whom Dr. Patton had prosecuted, became one of my heroes, and Dr. Patton’s star declined in my young mind. I had more admiration for the old colored janitor—Charles—in Miller Chapel at the Seminary and when he brought in with great ceremony the glass of water just before service and handed it to Dr. Patton, Charles and not Prexy pronounced the benediction—on me.

Dr. Patton would come to class about half the time—this was in Theism, at the Seminary; often late, and would mumble over his notes and yellow MS written thirty years before. Unless you sat in the front seat you couldn’t hear. Some of the boys used to complain, but he never would speak louder. There is a legend (true in the case of Dr. McQueen of Pittsburgh) that a

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[Ed note: The text is missing the next page! In my text, the following inexplicably appears instead.]

Five to sixteen letters every week there is a vacancy in our Presbytery. We have nearly seventy churches and ordinarily there are one to two vacant. As soon as this church is listed by Dr. Mudge’s Office—sometimes before—the letters begin to come. There are a lot of repeaters. These are briefly and courteously answered, but receive slight consideration. A letter from a friend is better than one from a candidate himself; though sometimes a man who writes a direct application without rationalization as to why he wants to move, will receive favorable consideration. This chairman then checks on a man by every available reference, and when meeting with the session of a vacant church talks over with them the qualifications of two or three of the most likely candidates.

We then decide on the preferential order and the pulpit committee undertakes to hear the prospective candidate, preferably without his knowledge, a committee visits his church and community and gets their impression, this is reported back and after conference the man may be invited to preach, preferably not unless the committee is practically unanimous as to his desirability.

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[Ed note: Thanks, however, to the generous assistance of the archivist at Princeton's Theological Seminary this summer, I now have the missing part of the story.]

Dr. Patton would come to class about half the time—this was in Theism, at the Seminary; often late, and would mumble over his notes and yellow MS written thirty years before. Unless you sat in the front seat you couldn’t hear. Some of the boys used to complain, but he never would speak louder. There is a legend (true in the case of Dr. McQueen of Pittsburgh) that a student went to him and asked him to read louder. “You wouldn’t understand it if I did,” came the answer.

But there were mornings, not a few, when, after ten minutes with the MS., he would throw them aside and sit and talk. Sometimes it was concerning the news of the day, sometimes some problem of philosophy, but most often, something about St. Paul, who was his hero. His sketches of the Pauline Epistles, given off-hand in these hours, stand out as among the most inspiring of my experience.

One day in class Dr. Patton thought he was being horsed (to use the Princeton term for roughhouse). He could deal with any situation, as one day when he heard students leaving the back seats during his lectures (he was very nearsighted) he was heard to say, (this time so all could hear), in his cracked falsetto voice, “our blessings brighten as they take their flight.” This particular morning he slammed his book, took up his coat and strode out and went home. The noise was from the hall, made by another class going to its recitation room. Sensing that he knew none of this, our class got quickly together and delegated me to take their explanation, and apology, to Prexy.

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With fear and trembling I was ushered into his study. The colored servant announced my name. Dr. Patton was storming up and down, puffing a black cheroot. “Halsey? Halsey? You belong to that class that just insulted me?” “Yes. Sir.” “Well, explain—never had such outrageous treatment from any class in the thirty years I’ve been in Princeton!” And much more. At last, when he was exhausted, I simply told the fact. His face changed. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Young man. Sit down.” He talked for thirty minutes—one of the most surprising, and in a manner, pathetic things I’ve ever heard, or read. He said, in substance, that he’d never had a friend in college days, didn’t know what it was to be hailed as an equal and fraternized with as an undergraduate. “I was an Ishmaelite—always have been.” His poor eyesight was one reason, he said.

Then he told how his reputation was made as a heresy hunter; how he came to Princeton on the reputation, and intimated that it was a bad thing to have a reputation to live up to. And, as I gathered, that many times he would have taken a more liberal slant in public utterance if he hadn’t felt charged with the responsibility of orthodoxy, and the urge toward consistency. He talked a long time, as to an equal, an overflowing of the soul.

I left, hardly knowing what had happened; went back to my class and reported that we were absolved and non one else was implicated—but never told the rest of the story. From that day I had a unique place in my memory, and sympathy, for Dr. Patton.

Some of the most brilliant discourses I ever listened to, or expect to, fell from his lips.

One item more. The day after Mr. Wilson’s inauguration was Sunday. Dr. Patton preached to a crowded chapel. I sat, as it happened, just in front of Nicholas Murray Butler. As Dr. Patton went on scoring one philosophy after another in his sermon, Dr. Butler would whisper to Mrs. Butler, “That’s Spencer; Kant, now; Spinoza.” Once I heard her ask, “Who’s that?” He answered, “I don’t make out.”

I ought now, while the iron is hot, to add that Dr. Patton was more or less forced to resign at the College. At the very meeting when he did resign, he had that influence with the trustees, that, before they had adjourned after his resignation, they had, under his influence, elected Woodrow Wilson.