The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

by Crouch, Tom D.

  He returned to Dayton exhausted, on May 21, 1889, to face his most bitter crisis. Susan was near death. The end came early on the morning of July 4. “About 4:00, I found Susan sinking,” he wrote in his diary, “and about five awakened the family. She revived about 7:00 somewhat, but afterwards continued to sink till 12:20 afternoon, when she expired, and thus went out the light of my home.”32

  She was buried at four o’clock on the afternoon of July 6 in a “beautiful lot” which Milton had purchased in Woodland Cemetery. Two days later he was back at work, arranging for the publication of the new Discipline adopted by his church. There were legal problems to be tackled. He was particularly anxious to begin proceedings to test the ownership of the United Brethren Printing Establishment. On August 12 he boarded a train for Union City, Pennsylvania, bound for his first local conference as the leading bishop of the reorganized church. The struggle would go on—Milton would see to that.

  chapter 6

  THE TIES THAT BIND

  Summer~Winter 1889

  Milton Wright faced an uncertain future in the late summer and early fall of 1889. For all his dedication to reforming society, he had never been able to tolerate fundamental change in his own life. Suddenly, church and family, the very cornerstones of his existence, seemed to be crumbling beneath him.

  Susan, his wife of thirty years, was gone. The eldest boys, Reuch and Lorin, were grown and living far from home. Will and Orv, at twenty-one and eighteen, might choose to strike out on their own at any time. Even Katharine, the baby of the family, was remarkably self-assured for a fifteen year old. Within a few years, Milton might find himself entirely alone.

  The prospect was yet more frightening when seen in the context of the church situation. In cutting the Gordian knot of a twenty-year-old controversy, Milton had severed his ties with the organization to which he had devoted his entire adult life. The knowledge that he was in the right did little to ease the sense of estrangement from those who had been his closest friends and colleagues for forty-two years.

  Milton was a genuine conservative, who had no intention of accepting the inevitability of change. He saw no way in which the old institutions could be improved. The best that he could hope was to lead his flock down the path blazed by the church fathers, and to somehow restructure his family to fill the gap left by the death of his wife. Only by shoring up the old foundations could the stability of church and family be restored.

  The first step in rebuilding the church was to complete the task of separating the Liberal and Radical branches into two distinct organizations. Initial stocktaking indicated that the minority group was not in such desperate straits as Milton had feared. They had taken 15,000 to 20,000 members with them, perhaps 10 percent of the total church population. This included a disproportionately large number of leaders. The Radicals had expected the older ministers to side with them, but the support of a great many young fire-eaters came as a pleasant surprise.

  Even with so many local leaders, reorganization would be daunting. Milton Wright and his colleagues must reconstruct their church from the ground up. At the local level, seceding Radical supporters had to be gathered into new congregations. While several local conferences in Indiana and Ohio had cast their lot with the Radical minority, new districts would have to be organized in the rest of the nation. Finally, the local and regional elements must be linked through an entirely new national support structure. The bishops, in their report to the first General Conference in 1893, gave a bleak assessment: “Our missionary, church-erection, Sabbath-school, publication and educational funds and property were largely in the hands of those who had gone out from us, and these funds were turned against us. All of our great connectional interests required readjustment, and some of them reconstruction.”1

  The question of property rights was foremost in their minds. The arguments began with the very name of the church. Obviously, both groups believed they had a right to call themselves the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Within a few months of the separation, the need to distinguish the two organizations led to the addition of the phrase “Old Constitution” or “New Constitution” in parentheses after the church name. It was one of many arguments that would continue for decades to come. As late as May 1901, the New Constitution bishops were still requesting that their Old Constitution counterparts adopt a new name. Bishop Wright and his colleagues replied that they were not only satisfied with their name, “but it is sacred to us as a symbol of the faith it represents.”2 They suggested that the New Constitution Brethren might feel free to change their name at any time.

  The disposition of real property belonging to the old church represented more serious problems. Who was to control the church building and grounds when a congregation was split down the middle? What was one to do with a Liberal minister presiding over a Radical flock? Could the congregation evict the pastor from the parsonage? Could the minister force his decision as to which branch represented the true faith on an unwilling congregation? The search for solutions to these and other problems was complicated by the bitterness that separated the two factions.

  The single most valuable church asset, the great printing establishment in Dayton, was the object of the first of the major lawsuits that would follow over the next five years. Bishop Wright, who served as Old Constitution publishing agent from 1889 to 1893, set the process in motion on July 26, 1889. Accompanied by two colleagues, he presented William J. Shuey, New Constitution publishing agent, with a written demand that the facility be turned over to them. Naturally, Shuey refused.

  The New Constitution board of trustees, headed by Daniel L. Rike, immediately petitioned the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas for a hearing. After considerable legal manuevering, including an unsuccessful Radical petition to the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati for a change of venue, the case came to trial on June 17, 1891.

  In addition to determining ownership of the printing plant, the decision would indicate the probable disposition of millions of dollars worth of real estate that would eventually come before the courts. Both sides hired batteries of lawyers and imported distinguished theologians to buttress the fine points of their legal and theological arguments.

  Milton and the Radicals contended that those who supported the original Constitution and Confession of Faith represented the true church and had a right to control all property. The Liberals insisted that in amending the Constitution they had operated within established procedures and produced a document with which the majority of the members agreed. After nine days of testimony, the panel of judges issued a unanimous ruling in their favor.

  The Old Constitution Brethren were unwilling to allow matters to rest there. The case made its way through the appellate court system, and was finally heard by the Supreme Court of Ohio on June 13, 1895. Once again, the high court handed down a unanimous decision in favor of the Liberals.3

  Milton was reelected bishop at the General Conference of 1893, as he would be at every conference until 1905. In addition, he was named Supervisor of Litigations, and charged with carrying forward the series of lawsuits over disputed church property. The decision to pursue a great many simultaneous suits was not an easy one; the United Brethren had long believed that good Christians should settle their differences out of court. But the bishops recognized that they had little choice if they were to “inspire faith and restore confidence in our people.” “If we should not maintain the trust confided to our care, by the pious living and sainted dead,” the council noted at the General Conference of 1893, “we could not expect future benefactions to our church.”4

  Between 1893 and 1900, suits involving local property disputes between the two branches of the church reached the supreme courts of seven states: Indiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and California. Milton and the Old Constitution Brethren lost every case but one, that brought in Michigan, where legislation favored the control of property by local bodies as opposed to national organizations such as the Gen
eral Conference. The control of church property in the Dominion of Canada was decided in a single case in which the Radicals won their suit in the lower courts, but lost to a reversed decision handed down by the court of appeal.

  The period of litigation was costly for both groups, sapping energy and funds that might have been better used. A. W. Drury reported that the New Constitution Brethren drew out a total of $35,510.06 from the coffers of the printing firm. In addition, local funds were raised to defend individual churches and parsonages. Bishop Musgrave estimated that the Old Constitution branch had raised and spent some $10,000 “in defense of its sacred rights.”5

  The process of separating the two churches was completed by 1900. Partisan bitterness was frozen into place as officials faced one another time and again in the courtrooms. There would be no reconciliation.

  It was the busiest decade of Milton Wright’s life. In addition to heading the defense team, he remained the leading churchman of the Old Constitution branch, participating in virtually every phase of the rebuilding process. He traveled incessantly, visiting congregations and organizing new conferences. By 1900, he had achieved his original goal: the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Old Constitution) was the very image of the organization into which John Morgan had baptized Milton so many years before.

  Bishop Wright attacked the problem of preserving his home with the same fierce determination he had brought to the task of rebuilding his church. In his experience, a tightly knit, unified family was the best defense against the pressures of an essentially wicked world. Dan Wright’s home had been just such a bastion of morality, besieged by the hard-drinking, pro-slavery Southern roughnecks who had dominated Rush and Fayette counties during his youth.

  Milton’s own fight against those who sought to corrupt the pure tradition of the United Brethren Church only confirmed the absolute importance of the family. But the various crises surrounding the church schism and the death of his wife had placed all of that in jeopardy at the very moment when Milton felt most need of it. He was not at all certain that he had the strength to carry on his mission alone. Consciously or unconsciously, he set to work binding his three youngest children to him for life.

  He began by promoting his daughter to her mother’s role even before Susan’s death. “Be good. Learn all you can about housework,” he wrote in October 1887, when she was thirteen. “Do not worry Mother. Be my nice pet daughter.” As Susan’s illness grew worse, Milton made clear exactly what he would expect of a “nice pet daughter.” “Take especially good care of yourself,” he instructed her in May 1889. “You have a good mind and good heart, and being my only daughter, you are my hope of love and care, if I live to be old.”6

  After Susan’s death, Milton frequently reminded his fifteen-year-old daughter that she was now the emotional center of his life. “Home seems lonesome without you,” he wrote on August 9, 1889, while Katharine was visiting family friends just a month after the funeral. “But for you we should feel like we had no home.”7

  Nor was it enough to elevate Katharine to the role of woman of the house. Milton did his best to reshape his daughter in his wife’s image. Susan had been a very shy and quiet woman, whereas even as a child Katharine had exhibited what was then generally referred to as spunk. That was fine with Milton—up to a point. He once noted in his diary that “Katharine has been a good girl, for her chance.” Whatever that may be taken to mean, there was no doubt he saw some room for improvement in his daughter.8

  “I am especially anxious that you cultivate modest feminine manners,” he counseled her. “And control your temper, for temper is a hard master.” Twenty years later he would complain to Wilbur: “If she had inherited some of her mother’s love of quiet and solitude, she might ‘Flourish like the palm tree,’ for she has a fine constitution.”9

  Milton placed many more demands on his daughter than he ever would on his sons. By the time she left for Oberlin Prep in 1893, she was her father’s unofficial partner—the voice of parental authority in his absence. Milton provided Katharine with a detailed itinerary of his travels, so that she could immediately forward all mail. If there were financial matters to be taken care of when he was gone, Katharine was responsible.

  Never a man to leave much to chance, Milton was careful to provide his daughter with detailed instructions. “I send … a draft for Lorin,” he wrote in the fall of 1892, “out of which is to be paid the office, the orders I have sent, and the money for the watch.” Katharine was to “take what is left for paint on the house, if the boys paint soon—and what is needed to live on & deposit the rest.” While she was at it, she could also deposit in the church accounts a $15,000 draft that he had received from a New York bank. That was only the beginning.

  I also send the [church] statistics of Cairo, Illinois and East Des Moines for 1892. Lay these away carefully in the left-hand pigeonholes in my desk. I also send the statistics on East Des Moines for 1891. Put these on that Statistical Chart, carefully, and then also lay in the same pigeonhole. Do not send the post office addresses of the E. Des Moines Annual Conference preachers. Put them in the same place. They are particular.10

  Seldom satisfied, Milton usually had a complaint or two to lodge with Katharine: “I want you to raise a racket if the boys do not send me the Conservator as soon as it is in print—two copies—and not wait for me to get it by the mailers. I have not seen last weeks paper yet! A week after it is in print!”11

  There was nothing extraordinary for the period in Milton’s assumption that Katharine would, as she grew older, accept the responsibility of running his household. The dutiful daughter who devoted her life to caring for a widowed father was the epitome of female virtue in the life and literature of the period. Yet it is safe to assume that few widowed fathers were as demanding as Milton Wright. As in the case of his sons, whom he also encouraged to remain at home, Bishop Wright had no intention of restricting Katharine’s intellectual growth. His egalitarian views included an insistence on the right of women to an education and entry into a profession. Katharine had always excelled at school. Graduating from Central High School in 1892, she took the school year 1892–93 off to read and study on her own before enrolling in the rigorous Oberlin Preparatory School in September 1893.

  Her two older brothers had failed to complete their studies at Hartsville, a church school that scarcely qualified as second rate. Katharine graduated from Oberlin (Class of ’98), a great university, and as much a center of the struggle for women’s rights as it had been a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment a generation before. There was never any doubt, however, that Katharine would return to her duties at home following graduation.12

  As Milton was enlisting Katharine’s help in the fall of 1889, he could take heart that at least one of his older sons had returned. Depressed, homesick, and stunned by news of his mother’s death, Lorin had ended his self-imposed exile on the Kansas prairies and rejoined the family in Dayton.13

  Lorin worked with his father and brothers for a time printing and distributing Old Constitution tracts and pamphlets, but there was little money in that. After marriage to Ivonette Stokes, his childhood sweetheart, on January 12, 1892, he found steadier work as a bookkeeper.

  Lorin and Netta, as she was known in the family, had four children over the next decade—Milton, Ivonette, Leontine, and Horace. Life was not easy for the young couple with a growing family. By the time Horace arrived, Lorin was struggling with a string of part-time second jobs, and barely making ends meet.14

  Wilbur watched his two older brothers with interest and a great deal of sympathy. Reuch and Lorin were talented men with more formal education than most of their contemporaries, yet both of them gave the impression of being constantly overwhelmed by responsibility and circumstance. They suffered from chronic poor health, and seemed to be perpetually on the brink of failure. What had gone wrong for them? It was puzzling, and more than a little frightening, for Wilbur was by no means certain he could do any better under similar circumstanc
es.

  He had emerged from the depression following his hockey accident four years earlier a self-assured and confident young man, yet still unable to reach a firm decision as to his own future. Ill health had put a college education and teaching career beyond his grasp. Life in the business world held little interest for him. Wilbur, who knew himself so well, could see no reason why he should succeed where his brothers had failed. It was a frustrating time.

  Assessing his situation in the late summer of 1889, Wilbur recognized that he was fortunate in one regard—he was not burdened with the family responsibilities that made life so difficult for Reuch and Lorin. For the moment, he was content to work out his destiny within the safety of his father’s house. If he would not be forced to explore new challenges, neither would he risk destitution and failure.

  Orville had not passed through a psychological crisis of the sort that plagued his brother, but he would face very real problems setting himself up in life. All across America young people were finding it much more difficult to strike out on their own than their parents and grandparents had. Times were hard. The long-wave depression of the 1890s led to a rise in the number of young adults who were forced to remain at home, waiting to inherit a house, farm, or business from their parents. Recent demographic studies have shown that this was especially true in Middle Western urban areas like Detroit. Presumably, Dayton was not much different. Orville was anxious to establish himself as a printer. The only way to do that, for the time being, was to continue living under his father’s roof.

  Nothing could have pleased Milton more. As Reuchlin’s experience had demonstrated, the bishop did not relish the idea of his children leaving home under the best of circumstances. He bound Katharine to him because he needed her. He seems to have regarded the boys as his hostages to fate.