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The End of “The Protestant Era”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2011

Alison Collis Greene
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More than fifty years after delivering the talk “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935” to the American Society of Church History, Robert Handy is still the default authority on religion and the Great Depression. This is a tribute to his remarkable insights, but it is also an indication that the Depression merits more attention from historians of religion. A number of scholars have taken the religious history of the 1930s seriously. Yet we tend to think of the work of Joel Carpenter, Leo Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, Beth Wenger, Kenneth Heineman, and others as primarily about fundamentalist institution-building, New Deal demagogues, or Jews and Catholics in New York and Pittsburgh, and only incidentally about the Great Depression.

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Church History , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 600 - 610
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2011

More than fifty years after delivering the talk “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935” to the American Society of Church History, Robert Handy is still the default authority on religion and the Great Depression.Footnote 1 This is a tribute to his remarkable insights, but it is also an indication that the Depression merits more attention from historians of religion. A number of scholars have taken the religious history of the 1930s seriously. Yet we tend to think of the work of Joel Carpenter, Leo Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, Beth Wenger, Kenneth Heineman, and others as primarily about fundamentalist institution-building, New Deal demagogues, or Jews and Catholics in New York and Pittsburgh, and only incidentally about the Great Depression.Footnote 2

At the end of his 1959 talk, Handy declared “the Protestant Era” over, echoing Will Herberg's argument in Protestant, Catholic, Jew.Footnote 3 Handy contended that the demise of the Protestant Era resulted directly from a spiritual depression that began in 1925. He separated the religious depression from the economic Depression, arguing that the former preceded the latter. Jonathan Ebel has discussed how we can connect the two if we think differently about the starting point of Handy's periodization. This essay starts at Handy's endpoint: 1935.

Handy did not provide much rationale for declaring 1935 the end to the religious depression and the Protestant Era. Events since Handy's talk raise questions about whether the Protestant Era ended at all. But Handy was onto something. Protestantism, broadly defined, retained its influence. Yet after the 1930s, it did so on different terms. The Protestant establishment, based in major denominations and a few influential interdenominational bodies like the Federal Council of Churches, no longer claimed the kind of power it once possessed. Instead, religious leaders outside that establishment negotiated a new place for religion and the church in American life. Those outsiders are important, but their successes make sense only when measured against the destruction the Depression wrought on established religious bodies.

Handy understood 1935 as a symbolic year, rather than as an absolute end to the spiritual depression he describes, and 1935 serves well in that role. Several events that year drew attention to the changing place of Protestantism in the public arena. Roosevelt's battle with the Supreme Court and the Democrats' 1934 congressional victory brought a flood of new legislation that emphasized long-term reform. The 1935 legislation marked a breaking point for many one-time supporters on the President's right as well as his left. And as unemployment declined and the Depression seemed to abate for a time, many religious leaders intensified an ongoing debate over the relative roles of church and state in addressing social problems.

I. Roosevelt's Letter to the Clergy

In September 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt indirectly addressed the implications of the Great Depression and the New Deal for American religious institutions in a form letter sent to more than one hundred thousand rabbis, priests, and ministers. Roosevelt opened with flattery: “Your high calling brings you into intimate daily contact not only with your own parishioners, but with people generally in your community. I am sure you see the problems of your people with wise and sympathetic understanding.” “Because of the grave responsibilities of my office,” Roosevelt went on, “I am turning to representative Clergymen for counsel and advice.” Specifically, he asked for input concerning the Social Security Act and the Works Progress Administration, both established earlier that year. “I shall deem it a favor if you will write to me about conditions in your community,” the President requested. “Tell me where you feel our government can better serve our people.” He closed with an appeal to cooperation: “We can solve our many problems, but no one man or single group can do it,—we shall have to work together for the common end of better spiritual and material conditions for the American people.”Footnote 4

For all of Roosevelt's talk of cooperation, the letter was an implicit admission that the President had managed just fine for two and a half years without formal support from churches or clergy. Many of the respondents noted exactly that. “Is it possible,” asked an Arkansas minister, “that you sincerely desire the friendship of the Christian ministers whose advice was formerly counted as worth little?”Footnote 5 Others accused him of making a transparent attempt to shore up a diminishing base of support, and many doubted that the President himself would ever see their responses. Perhaps in response to the letter's skeptical reception, the administration designated Aubrey Mills to read, catalogue, and tabulate the 12,096 responses that arrived by mid-November (eventually, the number of responses would approach 30,000). After painstakingly parsing each letter and marking it as “favorable,” “favorable with criticism,” or “unfavorable,” Mills grouped nearly half the clergy in the “favorable” category. He designated a stunning 84 percent as either “favorable” or “favorable with criticism.” Perhaps Mills's categorizations were generous to his boss. Still, a sizable majority of clergy expressed approval of all or part of the New Deal even as they acknowledged that the church had taken a back seat to the state in addressing the social problems of the 1930s.Footnote 6

Some clergy who responded voiced concern about the reduced role of the church in society. Yet they often attributed the shift not to Roosevelt's policies but to the Depression—which many clergy, like Handy, characterized as both spiritual and economic. Ultimately, the clergy had begun to acknowledge that the Great Depression sapped American religious institutions' power to face social crisis and alleviate individual suffering. A few also recognized—often with relief—that the New Deal marked the transfer of that power from church to state.

II. The Protestant Establishment and the Great Depression

The Great Depression, and the resulting shift in power from church to state, played out differently across regions, and differently in the nation's cities, towns, and countryside. For rural Americans in the South and Midwest, the Depression followed a decade of economic hardship; for some upper-class residents of northeastern cities, it brought a quick end to once-flashy prosperity. The contrasts among local stories of the Depression are important, in part because they make the commonalities across region and terrain all the more striking.Footnote 7

If no city or region is typical, Memphis and the Delta regions of Arkansas and Mississippi most often earn attention because they are atypical. The “most southern place on earth,” the birthplace of the blues, a cradle of the civil rights movement, one of the many buckles of the Bible Belt—together, the Delta and its unofficial capital city might be the most nicknamed region in the country.Footnote 8 Those monikers highlight the region's reputation for religious conservatism, cultural creativity, and racial diversity, its population divided almost evenly between black and white. Such characteristics, combined with the interdependence between city and countryside and the straddling of three southern states, each with its own political and religious idiosyncrasies, make Memphis and the Delta a fascinating locale for examining the broader effects of the Great Depression and the New Deal on the Protestant establishment.

At the beginning of the 1930s, churches and religious organizations stood prominently among the limited providers of support for people in need. Protestant leaders had spent the previous half-century trying to reform American society through a combination of social activism and charitable aid. Even as many churchgoers questioned whether it was their responsibility to address the material as well as the spiritual needs of America, ecumenical religious societies and denominations established orphanages, hospitals, schools, and settlement houses. Churches also provided informal support to local families that had fallen on hard times, as well as to particularly vulnerable populations of women and children.Footnote 9

In cities and large towns, religious and civic aid organizations supplemented the work of municipal relief funds and state-based welfare programs, but in many rural areas, churches were the primary source of help for suffering community members. Although many churches in the South scorned the term “Social Gospel,” they nonetheless adopted a form of social Christianity that emphasized work beyond the church walls. Arguing that the church must care for the mind and the body as well as the soul, churches in Memphis and the Delta built most of the region's colleges, orphanages, and hospitals. It was never the churches' intent to educate, rear, or nurse everyone in need—a task most knew to be impossible. Thus, southern religious activists also campaigned for moral reforms like Prohibition and public education, which they deemed essential to the region's spiritual well-being.Footnote 10

Even in the best of times, religious reform and aid agencies were overburdened, and by the mid-1920s, many were already floundering. This period of struggle provides Handy's evidence for a religious depression that preceded the economic one, but that characterization lacks context. Hopeful that the Great War had precipitated a great new revival, church leaders spent committed funds on new social programs at the war's end only to find that church participation soon returned to prewar levels. Thus, the religious depression was in some respects simply the wearing-off of wartime enthusiasm. This slump, combined with an agricultural depression and a growing gap between rich and poor, meant that churches faced the 1930s with little in reserve.Footnote 11 Black churches across the South were particularly distressed, their membership depleted by the Great Migration and their remaining adherents displaced and impoverished by the ongoing rural crisis.Footnote 12

Financial concerns notwithstanding, members of the Protestant establishment entered the 1930s confident that their leadership was essential to addressing both individual suffering and the broader crisis. They wasted no time in declaring the Great Depression a spiritual crisis, an outgrowth of the individual immorality and collective greed of the previous decade. Citing brief depressions from 1873 to 1921 as precedent, religious and political leaders alike linked economic crisis to spiritual awakenings. Massachusetts evangelical and entrepreneur Roger Babson warned in 1930, “Business depressions are caused by dissipation, dishonesty, disobedience to God's will—a general collapse of moral character.” The cause dictated the solution. Babson concluded that depressions “are cured by moral awakening, spiritual revival, and the rehabilitation of righteousness.”Footnote 13 Echoing leaders across the nation, one Mississippi Methodist exulted, “Man's extremity is God's opportunity.”Footnote 14 The Depression, ministers like this one hoped, would send repentant sinners back to the pews as the churches took the lead in making meaning of the crisis. In the meantime, the churches would demonstrate their commitment to body and soul by caring for those who deserved help. Many religious leaders anticipated no Great Depression. Instead, they expected a Great Revival.

Nowhere was that hope dashed more quickly than in the Delta. In the summer of 1930, land that had three years earlier lain under the flooded Mississippi River now scorched beneath a blazing sun and cloudless sky. In Arkansas, the drought burned up half the cotton crop, and the price for what was left dropped by nearly half. People had no money, no food, and not much help. In August, desperate Arkansans robbed a Pine Bluff store for provisions. In November, the largest banking system in the state failed, and the few farmers who had managed to put money away lost their savings. No one could get a thing on credit. By January, Arkansans were starving. While commentators nationwide insisted that the downturn was nearly over, a group of farmers made headlines when they took up arms and marched into the town of England to demand food.Footnote 15 Refugees from the countryside flooded into Memphis, a city with virtually no municipal aid program and an interfaith Community Chest agency that quickly ran out of funds.Footnote 16

Meanwhile, many major denominations struggled to stay afloat. In 1931, Southern Baptists announced that denominational revenues had fallen 25 percent since 1928, and they feared that the worst was yet to come. The president of the convention admitted, “We are putting off the Lord's cause while we try to settle with our other creditors.”Footnote 17 In Tennessee, their African American counterparts, the National Baptists, worried that they would have to cut funds to all missions and education programs.Footnote 18 Other denominations struggled as well, encouraging their clergy to cajole donations from destitute church members. The Depression crippled churches' finances and forced them to slash services when their members needed help most. Furthermore, many churches grew increasingly preoccupied with internal disasters at a time when Americans desperately wanted an explanation for the broader crisis that left many of them hungry and homeless.

Roosevelt provided one explanation. In his first inaugural address, he attributed the Depression to “unscrupulous money changers” and declared it time to “[seek] old and precious moral values.” Echoing the revivalist language of the clergy, the President declared, “These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”Footnote 19 Religious leaders and progressive Protestant ideals influenced Roosevelt's social and economic programs. But the Protestant establishment as a whole was reeling from the Depression, and the New Deal state began to pick up where the churches had fallen short. The overlap between church and state was neither dramatic nor immediate. Early New Deal programs like the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act relied heavily on local administration and emphasized creative solutions to the problems of the displaced and the unemployed. But direct relief remained an option of last resort.Footnote 20 Nonetheless, the New Deal provided far more help than either voluntary or civic groups had managed, and those groups took note.

Although religious leaders expressed approval of many New Deal relief measures, some worried that churches had begun to “depend upon the state for relief of the burdened,” and more ominously, “for the preservation and protection of morals.”Footnote 21 By the time they responded to Roosevelt's letter, many ministers recognized that losing control of charity meant giving up the power to determine who deserved support and on what terms. Some thought that, at the very least, they might usefully instruct the administration in the proper distribution of aid. One Arkansan who tentatively supported the President's work relief programs but opposed all direct relief warned, “The individual recipient should be taught to respond by giving back to society his full value in productiveness.”Footnote 22 A few ministers suggested that Roosevelt administer his relief programs through the churches, allowing them to maintain control of aid without the burden of fundraising.Footnote 23

Many of the clergy who wrote to Roosevelt in 1935 expressed relief rather than dismay at the transfer of relief from church to state. Roosevelt's letter to the clergy stressed the importance of the Social Security Act, passed scarcely a month earlier. Social Security was one of the most popular programs of the New Deal, but its provisions for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled intruded on purportedly religious terrain in a way that no government program had done before. But the clergy overwhelmingly expressed enthusiasm for the program, with fully 75 percent expressing unconditional approval.Footnote 24 One Delta minister deemed the program nothing less than a “Divine Revelation.”Footnote 25 Others expressed their relief that the government had finally taken over work that churches were neither equipped nor willing to do. An Arkansas minister declared, “The greatest benefit of this measure will be spiritual. What people want primarily is security. When they have that there will be manifest a new sense of neighborliness and charity.”Footnote 26

Many churches had long pushed for a stronger federal role in supporting Americans in need, and the Depression made that push a widespread demand. Certainly, there were dissenters. Conservatives complained that the federal government should not be in the business of charity, while Socialists criticized Roosevelt for salvaging rather than overturning capitalism. Many southern clergy who supported New Deal social programs worried that local administrators of relief distributed aid inequitably. Others demanded, with some success, that the Roosevelt administration acquiesce to a Jim Crow system that relied on an African American underclass. But regardless of their reservations, a striking majority of the clergy who responded to Roosevelt's belated request for input recognized that the Great Depression had laid bare the inadequacy of the Protestant establishment to address Americans' needs and expressed gratitude that Roosevelt provided an alternative source of help.Footnote 27

III. “The Protestant Era” Fades

The clergy who wrote to Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 confirm Handy's identification of that year as a symbolically important one in the decline of the Protestant Era. By 1936, a prominent National Baptist took note of the Southern Baptists' failure to establish a viable social service program at a moment of great need, and he lamented “the embarrassing fact that the real work of improving unfortunate conditions is being done by sinners.”Footnote 28 Just as important as the religious orientation—or lack thereof—of the New Deal era's most energetic reformers was the fact that, for the first time, the state rather than the church led the way. Activists who once oversaw the administration of relief and pushed for reform as part of religious organizations now signed up to do the same as part of the federal government. These reformers generally retained their religious commitments. Nonetheless, their decision to work through secular rather than religious avenues meant that the churches not only lost influence over charity and reform in the aftermath of the Great Depression, but that they also lost their most visionary reformers.Footnote 29

The Great Depression and the New Deal did not affect all churches equally, however. While members of the Protestant establishment in Memphis and the Delta, and across the country, voiced relief that the New Deal had taken some of the burden of social welfare and reform from the church, churches outside the Protestant establishment benefited more from both depression and recovery. Evangelical, holiness, and pentecostal churches with less elaborate institutional apparatus responded to the crisis with greater flexibility than their larger counterparts. Some drew in new members looking for a more energetic alternative to the established churches. More importantly, the Protestant establishment's loss of power made room for the upstarts to assert some power of their own.Footnote 30 Meanwhile, Catholic churches held steady and Jewish congregations underwent a transformation of a different sort as a result of post–World War II immigration. When long-anticipated religious revivals finally swept the nation in the aftermath of World War II, the Protestant establishment flourished. But so did Catholics, Jews, pentecostals, and evangelicals. This broadening of the American religious landscape led Handy to announce that “during the depression . . . Protestantism declined and lost its sense of being the national religion.”Footnote 31

Perhaps Handy declared a premature end to the Protestant Era. But he was right that the Great Depression marked an important transition in the relative importance of the Protestant establishment and in the roles of church and state in assessing and meeting the needs of the nation's population. Religious and political leaders are still wrestling with the implications of that shift.

References

1 Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History 29, no. 1 (March 1960): 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982)Google Scholar; Ribuffo, Leo P., The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Wenger, Beth S., New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Heineman, Kenneth J., A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

3 Handy, “The American Religious Depression,” 14; Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955)Google Scholar.

4 Franklin D. Roosevelt to the nation's clergy, September 23, 1935, Box 1, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter FDR Library). Monroe Billington and Cal Clark argue that Roosevelt had little to do with the letter. They describe the likely provenance of the letter in “Clergy Reaction to the New Deal: A Comparative Study,” Historian 48, no. 4 (1986): 509–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Perry F. Webb, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Oct. 20, 1938, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, Franklin D. Roosevelt–President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.

6 Aubrey Mills, “Supplementary Report on Clergy Letters,” Folder: Report of Aubrey Mills, Box 35, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library. Mills broke down the responses by state, and then nationally. For additional evaluation of the clergy letters, see Billington, and Clark, , “Catholic Clergymen, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal,” The Catholic Historical Review 79, no. 1 (January 1993): 65–82Google Scholar; Billington, and Clark, , “Baptist Preachers and the New Deal,” Journal of Church and State 33, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 255–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flynt, Wayne, “Religion for the Blues: Evangelicalism, Poor Whites, and the Great Depression,” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 1 (February 2005): 4–38Google Scholar.

7 The body of literature on the local experiences of the Great Depression is immense. For a sampling, see Blackwelder, Julia Kirk, Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929–1939 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Egan, Timothy, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (New York: Mariner, 2006)Google Scholar; Greenberg, Cheryl, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Starr, Kevin, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

8 Cobb, James C., The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Rushing, Wanda, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The progressive nature of Protestantism from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries is well documented. See, for instance, Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

10 I follow Paul Harvey's distinction between social Christianity and the Social Gospel: “Social Christianity overlaps with but is not synonymous with the social gospel. Social Christianity involves envisioning a public role for Christians in reforming and regulating human institutions, without necessarily seeing this public role as primary.” Harvey, Paul, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the progressivism of southern churches in the first half of the twentieth century, see Butler, Anthea D., Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Harvey, Paul, Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Harvey, Redeeming the South; Link, William A, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; McDowell, John Patrick, The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886–1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

11 On churches' financial concerns in the 1920s, see Bailey, Kenneth K., Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Kincheloe, Samuel C., Research Memorandum on Religion in the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937)Google Scholar; Miller, Robert Moats, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958)Google Scholar; Carter, Paul Allen, The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920–1940 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

12 Best, Wallace D., Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Sernett, Milton, Bound For the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lemann, Nicholas, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar.

13 “Babson's View of Slumps,” New York Times, September 11, 1930, p. 27.

14 E. F. Scarborough, Holly Springs District Superintendent's Report, Official Journal of the Forty-Second Session of the Upper Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Columbus, Mississippi, December 2–6, 1931, pp. 25–27, J. B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism, Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi.

15 Hamilton, David E., “The Causes of the Banking Panic of 1930: Another View,” Journal of Southern History 51, no. 4 (November 1985): 581–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “7 Arkansas Towns Have Breadlines,” New York Times, January 9, 1931, p. 16; “The Week,” The New Republic, January 14, 1931, pp. 228–29; “Red Cross Remains in Field to Assist Drought-Hit Areas,” Washington Post, March 15, 1931, p. M15; Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth, As Rare As Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern Drought of 1930–1931 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 3–21, 56–65, 102Google Scholar; Johnson, Ben F. III, Arkansas in Modern America, 1930–1999 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 11–13Google Scholar.

16 Open Your Heart: Memphis Cares for Her Own, Memphis Community Fund, 1928, Memphis–Community Chest Clippings File, Memphis Public Library, Memphis, Tennessee (hereafter MPL); 1940 Annual Report, Memphis Community Fund, with Historical Supplement, Memphis, Tennessee, Mayor Watkins Overton Papers, MPL; Biles, Roger, Memphis in the Great Depression (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 55–57Google Scholar.

17 Alldredge, E. P., Southern Baptist Handbook, 1931 (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1931), 37Google Scholar; “Our Present Denominational Situation,” (Arkansas) Baptist Advance, August 7, 1930, p. 1, 9.

18 Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Sessions of the State B.Y.P.U. and State Sunday School Conventions, First Baptist Church, Jackson, Tennessee, July 21–24, 1931, p. 25, Box 3, Samuel A. Owen Papers, MS 151, Mississippi Valley Collection, Ned R. McWherter Library, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee (hereafter MVC); Rev. S. A. Owen and Rev. H. W. Perry to the Baptist Brotherhood of the State of Tennessee, September 18, 1933, Folder 1, Box 1, Owen Papers, MVC.

19 “Text of New President's Address at Inauguration,” Washington Post, March 5, 1933, p. 2.

20 Kennedy, David M., Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131–217Google Scholar; McElvaine, Robert, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers, 1993 [1984]), 138–69Google Scholar.

21 “Substituting Government for Religion,” Mississippi Baptist Record, October 12, 1933, p. 2.

22 J. J. Galloway, Hughes Parish M.E.C.S., Hughes, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 1, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.

23 See, for instance, R. E. Black, V.D.M., Boydsville, Arkansas, to FDR, October 7, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library; George W. Bell, Whiteville M. E. Church, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 28, 1935, Folder: Tennessee, Box 34, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.

24 Aubrey Mills, “Supplementary Report on Clergy Letters.”

25 N. B. Bynum, Brinkley, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 16, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library. Monroe Billington and Cal Clark have written several articles about the clergy letters. See Billington and Clark, “Catholic Clergymen, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the New Deal”; Billington and Clark, “Clergy Reaction to the New Deal”; Billington and Clark, “Baptist Preachers and the New Deal.” Wayne Flynt uses the letters in his essay about white southern evangelicals in the Depression: Flynt, “Religion for the Blues.”

26 Rev. Joseph Boone Hunter, Pulaski Heights Christian Church, Little Rock, Arkansas, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 8, 1935, Folder: Arkansas, Box 3, President's Personal File 21A–Church Matters, FDR Library.

27 In addition to the clergy letters, see Bailey, Kenneth, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues; Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1978])Google Scholar.

28 “Southern Baptists Table Jesus,” National Baptist Voice, June 13, 1936, p. 2. This author referred particularly to the Communists' social justice work, but his comment is more broadly applicable as well.

29 I explain this point more fully in my dissertation: Alison Collis Greene, “‘No Depression in Heaven’: Religion and Economic Crisis in Memphis and the Delta, 1929–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010), 190–247.

30 On the relative success of such churches in the 1930s, see Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ; Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again; Sarah Ruth Hammond, “‘God's Business Men’: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010); Roll, Jarod, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

31 Handy, “The American Religious Depression,” 13–14.