by James Tobin
Yet after the Civil War, even among the Brethren, the fervor of the antisecrecy, antimasonic movement began to lose its edge. The lodges had spruced up their images and were growing enormously, with millions of members, including many respectable churchgoers in every city and town. To some younger leaders of the United Brethren Church, the issue seemed tired. They disapproved of “lodgery,” too, but not so vehemently as their elders, and they feared the issue was hurting the church’s efforts to recruit and hold members. In 1869, these young reformers—known within the church as the “Liberals”—proposed a softening of the Church’s antisecrecy stand. An antisecrecy majority of conservative “Radicals” prevailed. They wanted no part of a “creed on wheels,” rolling with the whims of change, and they feared the Liberals as a rising force that might one day dismantle not just their antisecrecy clause but all the traditional tenets of the church. To help hold them in check, the Radical majority installed their stalwart young spokesman, Milton Wright, as editor of the Brethren newspaper, The Religious Telescope. Its offices were in Dayton, Ohio, where Wright moved with his young family in 1869.
His five children—Reuchlin, born in 1861; Lorin, in 1862; Wilbur, in 1867; Orville, in 1871; and Katharine, in 1874—grew up in the shadow of their father’s struggle within the church. It went on for nearly forty years.
IN THE EARLY 1890s, Wilbur Wright, then in his early twenties, gave a little talk to a neighborhood gathering. He spoke well, and occasionally entertained friends this way. His younger brother Orville’s best friend, Eddie Sines, missed the talk. So the next day Eddie asked Will to tell him the gist of it. It was the time when phonograph recordings were the new craze, and Will replied: “I can let you hear it on the phonograph.”
He disappeared into the next room. As Eddie and Orville listened, the sound of a fuzzy phonograph recording began, complete with scratches, hisses, cheers, laughter, applause, and Will’s speech, every word of it just short of intelligible. But there was no phonograph. Will faked all the sounds himself.
He was that kind of kid, and that kind of young man—clever, quirky, a little odd, and more likely to think up his own amusements than to follow the crowd. His bow to convention was to be a fine athlete. Among other sports he excelled in gymnastic events, including the horizontal bar. He was an excellent figure skater. And he was a good student.
He went to high school in Richmond, Indiana, where his father was based for several years. In 1884, just short of graduating, he moved back to Dayton with his family. There, for a time, he ran with his older brothers and their crowd in a club called Ten Dayton Boys. When Reuchlin and Lorin left home for college, then jobs and marriage, Will was left as the lone big brother to Orville, who was four years younger, and Katharine, called Katie or Kate, who was seven years younger.
Reuchlin and Lorin went to Hartsville College, the same Brethren school their parents had attended. But Milton and Susan had larger ambitions for Wilbur: They made plans for him to enroll at Yale. In Dayton, he took extra classes in trigonometry and Greek, apparently to enhance his skills for college. His parents hoped he would enter the ministry.
But an accident intruded. In winter, Will often played a game called shinny, a version of ice hockey, on a frozen pond at the Soldiers’ Home, a veterans’ retreat on the western outskirts of Dayton. During a game in 1886, when Will was nearly nineteen, another player let his stick fly out of his hands. It struck Will in the face hard enough to knock out several teeth. Some weeks later, he became ill with a condition his father described as “nervous palpitations of the heart”—an imprecise term that leaves the facts unclear. He may have suffered from digestive problems, too. Perhaps the deterioration of his health was related to the facial injury, or perhaps there was some other cause.
Something in that series of events drew a line across Will’s life. He stopped playing sports. He enrolled in no more college preparatory classes. His father, in a New Year’s Eve diary entry at the end of 1886, the year of the injury, recorded that “Wilbur’s health was restored.” But that seems not to have been true, for Will abandoned his college plans and for several years suffered from some chronic health problem whose nature never was made clear. It apparently made him fear that he would not live for long. Several years later, he reconsidered college, but concluded that any time and money spent on it “might be time and money wasted.” If those words mean what they seem to mean, Will spent most of his twenties, the age when most people find their place in life, not at all sure he would live to see his thirties.
WILL BECAME THE SECOND invalid in the Wright home. Three years before his injury, Susan Wright had contracted tuberculosis. She was what her husband called “a declining, not a suffering invalid.” Soon she could barely walk across her sitting room without having to pause to catch her breath. Milton’s work took him away for much of the year. Reuchlin and Lorin were grown and gone. Orville and Kate were still kids in school. That left Will. So for several years he was his mother’s principal caregiver, carrying her up and down the stairs and doing most of the household work. His features resembled hers, and though not much is known about her, it appears that he was like her in personality, too. She was very bright. She had gone to college, a rarity for women of her generation. She was good at math. Her imagination and her hands worked well together; she had a talent for “adapting household tools or utensils to unexpected uses.” Her few surviving letters suggest a chilly sense of humor and an evangelical Christian’s wary view of the world beyond her front gate.
Milton said later that Will cared for his mother “with a faithfulness and tenderness that cannot but shed happiness on him in life, and comfort him in his last moments. Such devotion of a son has been rarely equaled. And the mother and son were fully able to appreciate each other. Her life was probably lengthened, at least two years, by his skill and assiduity.”
To brother Lorin in Kansas, who heard about the family only through occasional letters, it seemed as if the athletic, ambitious Will had dwindled into a housebound idler. “What does Will do?” he asked Kate. “He ought to be doing something. Is he still cook and chambermaid?”
In fact, despite his vague infirmity, Will was busy. Besides caring for his mother, he helped his father with church business. He also embarked on a remarkable project of self-education. Without leaving 7 Hawthorn, he could choose from bookshelves crammed with the classics of ancient Rome and Greece, modern novels, histories of England and France, treatises on mathematics and biology, and sets of Chambers’ Cyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. A favorite was Plutarch’s Lives. He likely read Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His reading “perhaps nearly equaled the advantages of a classical education,” his father wrote later. “His knowledge of ancient and modern history, of current events and literature, of ethics and science was only limited by the capacity of his mind and his extraordinary memory.”
Traveling in Europe twenty years later, Will might see the name of a village, then recount precise details of a battle fought there in Napoleon’s time, solely on the basis of a book he had read in his youth. Many associates later said they were “impressed not only by the range of his reading, but by the fact that no knowledge he had once acquired ever seemed to grow dim.” Clearly, a remarkable intelligence was nourished during Will’s years of retreat. But he was less like a student in the free-for-all of the seminar room than some solitary young man preparing to take religious orders. He honed his intellect in argument, but only within the cloisters of home and church, and largely, it appears, with his younger brother.
No one can draw a psychological profile on such slim evidence as we have from Wilbur Wright’s youth, especially at a distance of more than a century and through the lens of a different time. Still, a few strokes on a sketch pad are possible. He was close to both his parents. Yet with Milton often away and Susan in need of daily care, it is clear that he formed an especially intimate bond with his mother. Indeed, just at the transition from bo
yhood to manhood, circumstances conspired to make him nurse to his mother, manager of his household, and overseer of his younger brother and sister. All these tasks were identified, of course, with the role of the Victorian mother—that is, with the position of responsibility for the day-to-day welfare of one’s family. With his father, too, he was called upon to be more the helper than the one who is helped. Both parents relied on him—Susan for care, Milton for counsel and aid. Given these demanding roles, it is at least not surprising that this boy had more than the usual difficulty in pulling away from his family and launching himself. His own physical frailty, whatever the cause, would have compounded the tendency to stay stalled at home. And a stall of several years, while less able friends ventured out and began to find success, may only have compounded his ambition to do something remarkable. Even if one can only guess at his motives, it is at least certain that the circumstances of this period of his life—his injury and subsequent retreat from a conventional education and career; his mother’s illness; his bachelorhood; his self-education—formed a context for the single-minded pursuit of an extraordinary goal.
AFTER EIGHT YEARS as editor of the Religious Telescope, Milton Wright had been elected one of five bishops of the United Brethren Church. Four years later, with his enemies, the Liberals, in the ascendency, he lost his bid for reelection and resumed his old life as an itinerant preacher in eastern Indiana, though he continued to lead the Radicals with a stream of pamphlets and editorials aimed at the Liberals. Yet at the churchwide General Conference in 1885, the Liberals won the stunning victory that Wright and his allies had feared. They named a Church Commission that would rewrite the Brethren’s “Old Constitution” of 1842 and the even older creed of 1815.
The Liberals’ political master stroke was to reelect their chief adversary, Milton Wright, as bishop—but to appoint him as overseer of the Church’s West Coast district, where he would be safely out of their business for the better part of each year.
Schism loomed. Wright and his Radicals argued that the Church Commission was an illegal body, that only the General Conference could rewrite the Church’s foundational documents. To Milton it was right against rascality. The righteous held to immutable principles and assumed that anyone holding otherwise was a scoundrel and self-seeker. The commission rewrote the documents anyway. Put to a vote of the general membership, now numbering more than two hundred thousand, the revisions were approved by a two-thirds majority. But three-quarters of the Church’s members chose to boycott the vote, apparently in tacit approval of Milton Wright. Nonetheless, most delegates to the General Conference of 1889, even most of the Radicals, were by now desperate to make peace and voted to accept the changes.
One bishop dissented—Milton Wright. He and his allies walked out and reorganized as the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Old Constitution). Ten thousand to fifteen thousand Brethren joined them. Wright and three others were chosen as bishops.
Six weeks later, Susan Wright died at the age of 58.
AT TWENTY-TWO, Wilbur Wright—without an advanced education or job experience—became Milton’s chief lieutenant as the older man went about the arduous job of building a new sect from the remnant of the old. While Samuel Langley pondered the results of his toy experiments and whirling-table data, Wilbur helped to manage his father’s business affairs and became a key strategist in the Brethren Radicals’ court battles over disputed Church property and real estate, especially the largest asset, the publishing operation in Dayton. Will’s performance as an advocate was striking. He argued with a mastery of facts, logic, and wit that veteran lawyers would later envy. His writing had the edge of a razor. And he loved to fight, as his notes to the family show. “They try to smile,” he gloated after one especially good thrust at the Liberals, “but it evidently hurts.”
Will came of age in the Brethren’s internal war. The battle against the secret societies and the Liberals strengthened his tendency, well-learned at 7 Hawthorn, to detect wrongdoing at the drop of a hat, and to keep a wary eye on privileged sharpsters operating behind closed doors. As he moved into realms far beyond sectarian politics, the habits of thought he learned under his father remained strong.
But father and son were different, too. Milton was naturally combative, but to him, the struggle with the Liberals was at bottom a matter of faith. To Will it seems to have been chiefly a matter of family duty and even of sport. The bishop’s diaries and letters are full of references to Scripture. Affairs of the spirit were at the center of his life. Will’s surviving letters contain no such references—none. For him it was right versus wrong, but also and essentially “us” versus “them.” If he had ever looked toward a life in the ministry—his parents’ hope for him—he now turned away. It’s not clear that he even attended services regularly in his twenties, and in his thirties it’s clear he did not do so. The bitterness of church politics had shadowed his entire childhood. That may be why he could not find a home among the Brethren or in any other church. He fought in the Brethren’s battles with heart and mind. For fifteen years after the schism, he would leap back into the fray whenever Milton needed him. But this was his father’s life work, not his.
WHEN HE WAS SEVENTEEN, Orville Wright built a printing press out of a pile of scrap parts that included a folding buggy top, a discarded tombstone, and a pile of firewood. In a few weeks he had it printing a thousand sheets an hour. A pressman from a big Chicago printing house heard about the machine and dropped in to see it. He looked at it from the top and the sides, then crawled underneath. Finally he said: “Well, it works, but I certainly don’t see how.”
Nothing could have pleased Orville more. He had fallen in love with the complex technology of printing some years earlier, when his father, as chief of the Brethren’s publishing arm, brought his sons to work. It was a big operation, filling a four-story building in downtown Dayton, where the Brethren published four newspapers plus hymnals, books, tracts, and stationery, all in a hubbub of fast-handed typesetters and clattering presses. The Wright boys had spent a good deal of time around their maternal grandfather, a carriage-maker who apparently acquainted them with tools and the fundamentals of wood-working. In the publishing house they learned about machines. Orville spent two summers as a printing apprentice, then dropped out of high school before his senior year to launch his own printing business. Soon he started a small weekly newspaper, The West Side News, and inveigled his brother Wilbur to serve as editor. A few months later they shut down the News and replaced it with a more ambitious daily product, The Evening Item. Up against a dozen daily competitors in the Dayton market, the Item folded in less than four months. The brothers fell back on printing jobs for merchants in the neighborhood, which gave them a modest but steady livelihood.
Orville had chosen this work. Wilbur had not chosen anything else.
FOUNDED IN 1805 as a center of trade where three creeks joined the Miami River, Dayton had become a city that made things, a “city of a thousand factories,” its streets teeming with carriage-makers and wood-benders, machinists and carpenters, engravers and glass-makers, artisans and engineers. They made harrows, stoves, and steam pumps; varnish and motors and medicine; and especially cash registers, the city’s leading export. Talk in the shops and the streets led to new ideas: By 1900 Dayton had filed more patents per capita than any other city in the United States. Its sixty thousand people knew machines. They were perhaps especially susceptible to the charms of the bicycle.
The big-wheeled “ordinary” had been around for only a dozen years when it was swept aside by the multiple innovations that composed the “safety”: wheels of identical size, close to the ground; a sturdy diamond frame; an endless chain running over pedal-driven sprockets; the pneumatic tire, which ended the machine’s deserved reputation as a “boneshaker”; and the reliable coaster brake. That basic design has persisted ever since, but for the addition of handbrakes and the modification of gearing after World War II. For several years after its introduction in 1888,
the “safety” cost too much for most Americans. But keen competition brought prices down, and by 1895, hundreds of thousands were being sold each year, despite the onset of a depression.
The automobile followed so closely, and so far surpassed the bicycle in importance, that the bicycle’s own heyday has been all but forgotten. But it was a great craze, with millions of people buying, riding, and extolling the virtues of bicycles. The easy pleasure of the two-wheeled cruise—so different from riding a horse, not to mention so much cleaner—was like a narcotic. Bicycle academies flourished. “Wheeleries” were established to rent bicycles to those who couldn’t afford to buy. Bicycle accessories became as big a business as bicycles themselves. Hundreds of exhibitors crowded the halls of cycle shows in the biggest cities, and manufacturers sent racing teams around the country to stir the excitement. “It would not be at all strange,” the Detroit Tribune remarked, “if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident in the nineteenth century.”
In the Wright family, Orville was infected first, in the summer of 1892, when he bought a fine new Columbia for $160, a very substantial sum at a time when relatively few workers earned more than $500 per year. He soon entered races and did well. Will bought his own model—used, for $80—several weeks later. Still careful of his health, Will chose not to race, but he did take long rides around town and into the countryside. That fall, without giving up the printing business, the two brothers began to sell and repair bicycles. The business did well enough for them to hand off most of the printing to Orville’s friend, Ed Sines, and their brother Lorin, who had returned to Dayton, married his childhood sweetheart, and begun a family. They rented a small storefront in West Dayton, the first of a series they occupied, and worked at their newfound trade.