"You must believe in Russia:" The Military Service of Reverend Jesse Halsey, Part 1

During WWI, Reverend Jesse Halsey served abroad doing "War Work" as a chaplain, ministering to servicemen “whatever, whenever, and wherever." In my research I've found one account, published in 1940, of his war work written by another YMCA secretary, Ethan T. Colton. The book is called "Forty Years With Russians." My great-grandfather served in Russia at the direct behest of President Wilson, whose student Jesse had been while they were both at Princeton. Apparently, the two had a great affinity for one another for, as one of Jesse's students told me, "They swapped dictionaries." My great-grandfather was granted an indefinite leave of absence, with full salary and expenses, by the trustees of his church in Cincinnati in order to take up work with YMCA. He said, "My church took care of my family, kept my job all during the war—I was gone a year or more—and welcomed me home. They had loaned me to the government without expense and I have always been proud of them." 

For more than 12 months in 1917-1918, Halsey served in Moscow with the YMCA, as American Consul in Murmansk, as a Chaplain in British Navy in the Arctic Circle, and as a representative of American Red Cross. Halsey recalled that President Wilson had directed him to search for a diplomatic contact at Murmansk inside the chaos of the 1918 Russian Civil War. He also spoke frequently of the suffering of the common people in Russia, even the soldiers, saying they were "thinly fed borscht." And "They carried spoons in their boot tops." 

As Colton recounts, “Spaces are wide in European Russia. At its northern extremity, well within the Arctic Circle, Jesse Halsey began activities in Murmansk among the American, British, and Russian crews of the cruisers lying there. Charles Hedden came to reinforce him. Together they fulfilled with distinction not only their appointed mission but that of rendering unofficial government services that drew high tribute from the American consular, military, and naval representatives.” In the forward to the book, General Secretary of the YMCA War Work Council John R. Mott writes, in 1940: “You may not understand Russia, but you must believe in Russia.”

En route back to Washington to advise Wilson, my great-grandfather was briefly stationed at the Eagle Hut, a center operated by the Y.M.C.A. in London for servicemen on furlough. One night he climbed up the observation tower on the base and found a solitary soldier there. Halsey asked the soldier why he was in the watch tower rather than down carousing with the other boys? The soldier said, “My damn mother.” Halsey told him: “One of the things that’s absolutely necessary in life is to have damned mothers who help you understand what you need to be.”

"Forty Years With Russians"

“Spaces are wide in European Russia. At its northern extremity, well within the Arctic Circle, Jesse Halsey began activities in Murmansk among the American, British, and Russian crews of the cruisers lying there. Charles Hedden came to reinforce him. Together they fulfilled with distinction not only their appointed mission but that of rendering unofficial government services that drew high tribute from the American consular, military, and naval representatives.” --"Forty Years With Russians" by Ethan T. Colton

ALL SOULS Acts 27:37

This is much that I love in this 1934 sermon written by my great-grandfather, Reverend Jesse Halsey, and much which still seems so relevant 82 years later. But these lines in particular strike me as  important: "Serious thought has been forced upon us and as we revamp our plans for the future, in the Spirit of Christ, regardless of what our traditional religious prejudices have indicated, we ought to go forward with our main reliance on the Ethical Gospel of our Lord. There is salvation in no other Name; and that, in the barest terms, He said, was to love God with heart, soul, and mind--and one's neighbor as one’s self."

Jesse Halsey, Sir Grenfell, Charles Halsey, c. 1930 | Peconic Bay

ALL SOULS Acts 27:37

“And we were in all in the ship two hundred, threescore and sixteen souls."

The ship in which Paul sailed toward Rome can be taken as a cross-section of society—then or now. The capitalistic owner and galley slaves. Sailors and land lubbers. Prisoners and police. Soldiers and civilians. A minister of the gospel, a writer, a physician—all sorts and conditions of men.

The Morro Castle disaster apparently is not the first time when sailors showed the “white feather.” Under pretext of putting out an anchor, the sailors on the SS “Castor and Pollux” sought to escape in the one remaining lifeboat. Paul’s word to the Centurion, “Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved,” is a good word for each individual and group in our divided society, today. Each needs the other. It is impossible for the nation to come to its best or to go forward in any marked way, without the contribution that each group can make. There must be some common denominator.

This is equally true for all groups. The Catholic has something to add to our national life. We deeply sympathize with his insistence that religion enter into the education of children and if, by constitutional means, he can secure public funds, as good citizens and believers in democracy, I suppose, we will submit. On the other hand, we will make a vigorous fight to prevent this very thing, believing that our best contribution will be in support of a non-sectarian school system. The trouble with this situation is that most Protestants are anti-Catholic rather than pro-Protestant. For traditional and real causes they will fight Catholics, but when it comes to a positive support of their own churches, they are sadly lacking. Witness the attendance at worship in this church this morning, or in any other Protestant church in the city, unless it happens to be some anniversary or special occasion. A Protestantism that represents only animus toward other groups is entirely beside the point and unworthy.

I am ashamed to make any reference to my next point. It seems so obvious that denominational bounds within Protestantism are outgrown and “out-moded,” and yet we are farther away from any kind of coherent church unity than we were when I began my ministry, twenty-five years ago. The “world” outside, that incidentally contains many discerning people of good will, has little sympathy with our “unhealthy divisions.” They are a crying shame to heaven.

The first step toward a larger unity has been made in the Federal Council, which has had widely representative and capable leadership. No man today speaks with more spiritual authority and keen intelligence than Bishop McConnell, who speaks in our city next Sunday night. He has been one of the guiding spirits of the Federal Council.

The report on the steel situation fifteen years ago, violently opposed at the time, is now recognized as a masterly document that solved a problem in the field of labor that the government in Washington had failed to adjust. This report is an ample vindication of the Council and of future efforts in that direction from the same source, provided they be guided by the principle, which I would call Bishop McConnell’s “Principle of Prophesy,” which briefly is this: On the basis of the best information available, unprejudiced and gathered by experts from all sources, let the Church, in the name of justice and good will, indicate to economic and industrial groups the just policy, and you will have a prophetic voice speaking in no uncertain tones along lines that can be profitably followed. Put human interests ahead of property interests, with all the sanity and knowledge available! Apply the basic principles of the Gospel and the Church can still exercise its prophetic function. That endowment of power in other days came upon individuals, and that may happen again. But, more likely, it is destined in the future to speak through the combined intelligence of the Group.

Yes, we need each other. The Pacifist, in this present evil world, still needs the Militarist. Somewhere, between the two extremes, the public course must be charted. There are too many dangers for complete disarmament. On the other hand, all the enthusiasm of the sincere lovers of peace, all the good sense of statesmen, is needed to prevent the recurrence of war. It is an open question whether war ever accomplished any good commensurate with its awful cost. Nine-tenths of all our present day poverty, moral and economic alike, the world around, can be charged up to the Great War. On this I feel strongly and would defend the right of any lover of peace, no matter how extreme, to have his say. But I am enough of a realist to know that in order to make substantial progress, any program, whether it be promoted by churchmen or politicians, must give the assurance of national security to citizens of my country in order to gain their support, tacit or enthusiastic. But more of this next Sunday, which happens to be Armistice Day.

In the present county elections the ugly form of Nazism rears its head. We owe a great debt to our Jewish citizens. In this city they are among our most intelligent and generous philanthropists. This has been true for nearly a century. In the religious field, they have been given a surprising number of outstanding leaders in our city. Culturally and economically they have been a great asset. In the last decade they have proved stalwart supporters, and furnished striking leadership for, the desperate political situation of this municipality. But, I predict that the election next Tuesday will temporarily eliminate some of our most useful public servants simply because they are Jews, for an over-seas hatred, due to historical and racial reasons, finds a strong reflection in “Zinzinnati.” “My beloved brethren, these things ought not so to be” . . . . “Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.”

Now I ask you, as I ask myself, what are the forces that cohere? What are the things that bind us together? This multitude of all sorts, who travel in the same ship of state. [With us, as of old, there are prisoners, and the problems of the under-world and the gangsters are forced home upon us every day. What have we to offset this and the hundred other ills that afflict us?

This was a food ship, in which St. Paul traveled, carrying to Rome the wheat for the daily dole. Our relief situation is nothing new. Make it acute enough however, and you have the seeds of revolution sprouting fast.]

I should say that very likely in American life the thing that most nearly binds us together into anything like a common unity is the Public School, which is worthy of our support in the present or any other tax levy; not for the mere learning of the Three R’s, but enough money available for adequate equipment and a well-paid teaching staff that has had access to all the educational and cultural advantages of our time, that they may pass these on, consciously and unconsciously, to our children. Not a stereotyped, inflexible system that teaches by rote the ‘Law of the Twelve Tables’ or an interpretation of the Constitution sanctioned by the Sons of the Revolution—or the Daughters, but an intelligent, constructive educational policy that teaches the value of all that is good in the past and yet recognizes the inevitability of change. Over every public school might be written into the motto: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Organizations like the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, the present non-sectarian policies of the Y.W. and Y.M.C.A; these, and any other groups for young people or adults, that give them a cross-section of the community, that force people of all sorts and conditions to mix and to mingle—as they must have done on the little ship that sailed to Rome, these “two hundred, three score and sixteen souls,” learning to dislike each other and, in emergencies, to admire each other and depend upon each other for mutual help and support; all the things in our common life that acquaint us with each other, our strong cohesive forces.

And, the religion of Christ, by all means, ought to be one of these unifying factors. If Protestantism has been divisive, let us change its character. Paul said that Christ came to break down “a middle wall of partition” and that without this the Cross of Christ would become of no effect. Whatever the first century Christians may have done in this regard (there are the marks and wounds of strife in the Book of Acts), whatever they may have done or failed to do, our present interpretation of Christianity in Protestant circles is far from “breaking down” any walls. We have as many prejudices as have our Catholic neighbors, only theirs take a different form. Their united front and policy, of opposition to all who do not agree with them in theory, of course, is the very antithesis of the Gospel. Let it be a lesson to us.

Like these ancient mariners, we have thrown overboard much of the tackling of the ship. There is not much water between our keel and the rocks. Shipwreck may be ahead. If all abide in the ship, if there is a unified purpose of good will, all will come safe to land, though it may be on broken pieces of the ship.

No one is wise enough to predict the future. There are certain great and abiding principles that ought, however, to direct our life, individual and social. These have been defied; that is our trouble today. Old-fashioned honesty, a simple faith in action; these have been largely lacking in the setup of the last twenty years. We have become too sophisticated. There are many new helps to navigation, thanks to Lord Kelvin and a hundred others, but none of them can afford to neglect the stars. Like these ancient sailors, “we have cast our anchors out of the stern and long for the day.” Serious thought has been forced upon us and as we revamp our plans for the future, in the Spirit of Christ, regardless of what our traditional religious prejudices have indicated, we ought to go forward with our main reliance on the Ethical Gospel of our Lord. There is salvation in no other Name; and that, in the barest terms, He said, was to love God with heart, soul, and mind--and one's neighbor as one’s self.

We need a new infusion of the fear of the Lord, reverence for the Highest and Best, a new appreciation of good will and brotherhood, a baptism of the spirit of love that suffers long and is kind, that never fails and cannot fail.

In a neighboring factory, one day last week, an emery wheel “let go,” as they say, and flying off into space, worked havoc. Something in the conglomerate composition of the carborundum was not able to stand the stress, and break-up resulted. This is a picture, to many contemporary minds, of our civilization. It is flying to pieces. On the other hand, there are many whose picture is much more moderate. Forces of disintegration are undoubtedly at work, they say, and for better or for worse, changes have come and are coming; but the essential fabric is sound. The emery wheel still revolves and has cutting quality, though its spindle may be slightly eccentric.

No one but the extreme Tory believes that the machinery of our social and political life is in anything like perfect alignment. To begin with, there are no end of personal and party differences. The President last week very pointedly told the bankers that their group did not agree among themselves. There is certainly a divided counsel in the administration itself. No one can predict whether it will swing right or left. Take any church group, and it is hard to find a dozen people who absolutely agree about any one thing.

Four ministers sat at lunch last Friday. After rather vigorously criticizing the President, one of them pointed out that if they four were committed with the destiny and policy of their own denomination, they could not agree among themselves, not only in details of administration, but on some points of, what their fathers would have considered, basic theology.

Everywhere you find it:

Catholic versus Protestant

Jew versus Gentile

Democrat versus Republican

Charter versus Organization

Blacks versus Whites

Capital versus Labor

The haves versus the have-nots

Conservative versus Radical

Pacifist versus Militarists

The list could easily be doubled. It looks like a football schedule, only in this game there is generally less sportsmanship than is manifest on the intercollegiate gridiron. What is it, then, that holds our conglomerate society together? With all the causes of faction and division, what is it that makes the whole cohere? There must be something in the life of our body politics, for in spite of all the disruptive forces, in peace and in war, the nation, for over one hundred and fifty years, has held together.

It is encouraging to note, in the first place, that these divisions are nothing new. The present agitation in political circles, induced by Catholic interest in public school money, is a mere echo of the thunders of the “Know-Nothing” agitations of sixty years ago. We will always have some “Klansmen” with us. Likely, all that we can ask is that they go unmasked.

The newer and more accurate historians of our Revolutionary War indicate very clearly that sentiment in the colonies was anything but unified. John Adams says that in Massachusetts, likely the most patriotic colony, nearly forty-five percent of the people were opposed to the Revolution. (Curiously enough, the loyal people in those days were those that supported the king. In this case, as often, the revolutionist of one period becomes the patriot of another.)

“Tovashi Hadley” by Jesse Halse

Pop Hadley | Russia, 1918

Then there was “Pop” Hadley, as we called him, a New York Tribune reporter that nothing could down. [Ed note: Howard Hadley, political writer for the New York Tribune] (Pop years ago got out the first publicity on the Route now marked Federal Highway 1from Canada to Florida. It was his idea. He came from the Canadian Border.) During our practical internment while street fighting was going on in Moscow [1917], he found a Russian printer who had some Roman characters in his cases, and set up a long jargon of hog-Russian and printed it on a strip of paper a yard long—it was a “Proposk” or permit or passport as you choose. A dozen of us signed it—he illuminated it with bright seals and impressive sealing wax and gave them out occasionally, here and there, as he traveled. As the red guards couldn’t read and Proposk looked highly official, it was often the open sesame to gates otherwise closed. More than one bedraggled traveler used this paper to get him across Siberia [Ed note: see photo of JH’s bogus passport.]

Hadley on one occasion found himself in Odessa. The Bolsheviks were in full control after hard fighting with the Whites. Pop who always carried his camera, was taking pictures. The Red Guard interfered; his passport didn’t work this time and they hailed him before the Commityet at the Narody Dom (City Hall). He was accused of espionage and condemned to be shot. After sentence was passed and the firing squad drawn up outside, he casually remarked to the Commissar that this was a curious procedure hard for an American to understand. And then went on to say, very leisurely, that with the “greatest experiment in all history” under way they should publicize the thing to the world. That’s the way they do it in America.” It didn’t take long; the Bolos got the point, and within ten minutes Pop was made official photographer and chief propoganda agent for the Odessa Soviet.

Excerpt about the Bolsheviks from a story by Isaac F. Marcosson about British Lord Northcliffe in the Saturday Evening Post, June 7, 1919:


“Perhaps the following incident will help to convince carpers that the Bolshevik armies have nothing above the neck but some species of bone or ivory:

Toward the middle of December 1918, a little man answering to the name of John D. Wolls was brought to American Headquarters in Vladivostok by a military escort. An American officer in Harbin had examined his passport and his naturalization papers, and had taken violent exception to the them—first because he didn’t see how anybody could travel on a passport like the one Wolls possessed, and second because the naturalization papers had been tampered with, the date of naturalization having been erased. So the American officer had shipped him in to headquarters under military escort.

At American Headquarters Wolls ultimately reached Capt. Bayard Rives, who among other Intelligence duties had charge of passport control for all the Allies. Captain Rives demanded his papers: and while Wolls was undoing several layers of garments and fishing for them Captain Rives asked him how far he had come. Wolls replied that he had come from Petrograd. This gave Captain Rives pause; in fact, it gave him several pauses—several large, full-grown pauses—for the distance from Petrograd to Vladivostok is 5,842 miles; and Bolshevik forces between Petrograd and the Urals were as thick as are black flies in the Maine woods in June; and it was as easy for a person to pass through them as for a St. Bernard dog to pass through a mouse hole. While Captain Rives was attempting to quiet the unrest which Wolls’s statement caused him Wolls finally succeeded in digging out his passport. He handed it to Captain Rives, who examined it carefully and then excused himself and repaired to the office of Colonel James Wilson, the chief surgeon of the Siberian Expeditionary Forces to have his tongue examined and his pulse noted. And considering the document which had got Wolls through the Bolshevik lines, Captain Rives could scarcely be blamed for wondering whether his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. This is the passport that Wolls produced:

THIS PASSPORT

Entitles

John D. Wolls

To 1 week’s board at "Do Svidanya" Camp, "SI Chas" beach, Upper Chatequgay Lake-in-the-Adirondacks, United States of America, and a seat near the fireplace the while you tell what little you actually know about Russia.”

GOOD for ONE first-class coupe in the Wagon-Lits from WHERESOEVER—YOUARESKI

to

MOSCOW

provided you can get into it and hold it against all comes, “Catch-as-catch-can,” “Jiu-Jitsu,” “Collar-and-Eyebrow,” and “Russo-Roumanian” style of wresting.

GOOD for one first-class passage by any and all payola, steams, e tok dahlia, from

MOSCOW

to

LYON MOUNTAIN, N.Y.

the usual routine for travelers having first been complied with.

SPECIAL NOTICE: --In case you are wrecked, lost, arrested, or in extreme peril or dire distress of any nature on land or sea, you are hereby authorized and empowered, having uttered your regular prayers, to offer up a prayer to either Allah, Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Mohammad, Shinto, Vishnu, Zende, Vesta, Yogi or Brigham Young, or to all of them, or to any other powers that have helped struggling souls in diverse lands a-down the ages, to the end that they may, --perchance,--tip up the koovchin of salvation and let a little drizzle down upon you. Any port in a storm!

P.S. Bring your Trans-Siberian Hymnals with you. Camp song: “And WHEN I Die, Don’t Bury Me At All, “ e tok dahlia.

ODESSA, Feb. 20, 1918.

HOWARD D. HADLY

Oclin Visocoki Koezezgodent of the Ancient, International Legion of “Si Chassers.”

NOTE: --NOT GOOD unless countersigned at Moscow by Crawford Wheeler, Perwi Advocate and Exemplifier of the short-notat-hour workday: Bayard H. Christy, Chief Prophet of the Worshippers of the Rising Sun and by the Rev. Jesse Halsey, Choroski Commissar, Cook and Bottle-Washer and Supreme Head in Russia of the Sons of Labrador.

This billyet will not be honored by said Hadley aforesaid after Oct. 26, 1972.

EMERGENCY COUPON!

If all railways in Russia become blocked this coupon entitles you to hoof it across lots to either Suez, Calcutta, Singapore, Ceylon, Cape Town, Vladivostok, Port Arthur, Archangel, or Jerusalem, and authority is hereby granted to commandeer such horses, oxen, camels, elephants, ostriches and reindeer as may be required.

"But we can do a service to democracy . . ."

The Continent, Volume 49 | March 21, 1918

75th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

"May our country ever be the instrument of righteousness in the hand of the Eternal."

On the Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Rev. Jesse Halsey preached his farewell sermon to the Cincinnati congregation he had served for more than 28 years and delivered the pulpit vacant. In the evening, the new pastor Rev. Clayton Williams, a former French minister who was a Paris war refugee, was installed. The succession agreement didn’t happen in the Presbytery of Cincinnati according to standard procedure, but happened via my great-grandfather’s direct order: Jesse wanted to get Rev. Williams out of Nazi-occupied France.

Pearl Harbor occurred between the two services, upsetting everything. At the evening service, Rev. Joseph R. Sizoo, of New York City, said: "If we had confidence in Jesus, we could expect him to say at this time the same thing with which he comforted people at a similar time in the first century. He would repeat today, 'at the heart of things there is a God who is not hate but love.'"

Rev. Halsey Suggests Non-Sectarian use of the Scripture in Schools

9 December 1935 | The Cincinnati Enquirer