Infinite Horizons

Infinite Horizons The Life and Times of Horace Holley

Kathryn Jewett Hogenson

GEORGE RONALD OXFORD

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George Ronald, Publisher Oxford www.grbooks.com

© Kathryn Jewett Hogenson 2022 All Rights Reserved

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-85398-651-5

Cover design Steiner Graphics

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Prologue

xi

1 The Book

1

2 Words, Words, Words, and an Encounter

9

3 Paris

37

4 Turmoil

62

5 The Poet Returns

77

6 The Early Years of the Bahá’í Faith in New York

99

7 The Covenant

125

8 New York City Paves the Way

160

9 The Birth Pangs of the New Ordering of the World

190

10 Building the World Anew Is a Messy Business

221

11 Understanding the Quest for World Peace. The Continuing Education of Horace Holley

252

12 Spiritual Conquest in the Midst of War

282

13 Institution of the Learned

322

14 The Promised Land

352

Bibliography Notes and References Index About the Author

385 397 469 489

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1

The Book I pray Thee, Lord, for some great work to do, Full worth the years I wait beneath the sky

Horace Holley1

Important events, world-shaking events are seldom announced with the beating of drums, blasts of trumpets or exploding fireworks. More likely, they are quiet, trivial, everyday happenings that go unnoticed even by the participants until their true worth is revealed days, years, or centuries later.

One such incident took place over the North Atlantic in May 1909 as the SS Merion, an American Line passenger ship, made a routine crossing from Liverpool, England to her home port of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No one recorded where it happened. Did it occur in the upper-class dining room? In a lounge with tufted seating? While strolling on a deck? Why bother noting for posterity such a minor detail of an insignificant transaction? Over time, however, the event would prove not only life-changing but world-altering. It was the loan of a book.

The owner of the book was an American beauty, Bertha Herbert – an extraordinarily accomplished woman of the world. The recipient was a twenty-two-year-old college student from Connecticut, eight years her junior, Horace Holley. Horace was not looking for such a book. In fact, he was not originally scheduled to be on that ship, but the Wheel of Fate, the unseen forces of the universe, had decreed otherwise.

In the retelling of the loan, one detail is usually missing; Horace was not travelling alone. He and his favourite brother, Irving Holley, three years older than Horace, were returning home to Torrington, Connecticut, following a two-month vacation in their ancestral homeland, the British Isles. Horace had never travelled beyond the borders 1

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infinite horizons, the life and times of horace holley

of the United States, or even far from the region of New England. The brothers enjoyed their adventure immensely. They explored the Isle of Britannia from London to the West Country, from Scotland and Wales to Oxford and Windsor, taking in as much as time and funds allowed: bookshops, museums, cathedrals, sessions of Parliament, the theatre, hiking and restaurants.2 The money for their excursion was supposed to be spent on school tuition; nevertheless, as frivolous as the trip may have seemed to frugal relatives, it was critically needed therapy, for the brothers were both mourning the recent loss of the mother whom they adored. They were adrift, rudderless.

When the Holleys first booked their passages, they also scheduled their return voyage to the United States; however, an unexpected message from Williams College reached Horace in London, causing the brothers to change their plans and return home earlier. The cable informed him that, despite his semester-long absence from school, he had been named editor-in-chief of Williams’ literary journal for the following academic year. This was a high honour, especially for such a prestigious school with its reputation for excellence. Horace was eager to dive into that work, so they modified their plans and booked tickets on the SS Merion, sailing from the port of Liverpool on 19 May.3 Aboard ship, how could Horace and Irving fail to notice Bertha?

Her name appeared just above ‘Holley’ on the upper-class passenger list. She stood out in any crowded room. Tall, slender, with dark hair, a fair complexion, and deep brown shining eyes, her neighbours in her hometown, Bayfield, Wisconsin, considered her a striking beauty.4 Not only lovely to gaze upon, Bertha was also a trained portrait artist, the head of the interior design department for the Wanamaker’s Department Store,5 and a connoisseur of fashion and colour. This beauty was anything but dull. With exotic, far-ranging interests,6 she was an efflorescent butterfly.

Horace was tall like his relatives, with blue eyes, brown hair, a fair complexion, and angular features. He was so thin that his high school classmates called him ‘Pole’. No one, other than perhaps his mother, ever considered him handsome. He made up for his lack of a beguiling appearance with humour, for he was often the ‘life of the party’.7 His quick mind enhanced his strong wit. Horace was an above average student, excelling in the subjects that interested him the most: history, literature, and social sciences.8 By far his greatest natural gift was 2

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prologue

a talent for words, both written and spoken. Poetry easily flowed from his pen. If an occasion required a poem, he was the one asked to write it, even though a reviewer for the Williams College newspaper said that, while Horace’s poems were excellent, there was a sameness of tone because of his ‘leaning toward the philosophical and religious’.9 His abilities as a writer as well as his conscientiousness and organized mind had earned him the journal editorship. Friendly, but quiet, Horace had no difficulty getting along with classmates and teachers. ***** The book loaned to him was about the life of the leader of a new religion, not a usual theme to offer a young bachelor. Both of the Holley brothers were innately religious; thus, one unanswered element of the historic loan is the question: which traveller first brought up the topic of religion that led to it? An incident which happened two years earlier might provide a plausible answer. Bertha attended a reception in Paris hosted by another native of Wisconsin.10 Among the guests were a well-to-do English matron, Sara, Lady Blomfield,11 and her daughter, Mary, minor members of the British aristocracy. Mother and daughter were sitting together on a couch when Bertha, without the preliminary introduction required by proper etiquette, approached them and sat down between the two. The brash American neglected to engage in customary small talk, but at once jumped into what may well have been a practised spiel.

‘If I look happy, it is because I am happy. I have found the desire of my heart! I should like to tell you why I am so happy. May I?’ The captive audience could hardly say ‘no’ to so surprising an opening. Lady Blomfield remembered that at that moment Bertha’s face ‘glowed’.

‘It is true! True!’

Did the startled women begin to feel slightly uncomfortable as this awkward social situation unfolded? Imagine their amazement at what Bertha said next.

‘We have been taught to believe that a great Messenger would again be sent to the world. He would set forth to gather together all the peoples of good will in every race, nation, and religion on earth. Now is the appointed time! He has come! He has come!’

3

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If only the facial expressions of Bertha’s two listeners had been captured at that moment! As sincere practising Christians, they surely believed in the Second Coming of the Christ, but it may never have occurred to them that the Second Coming would touch their own lives.

Lady Blomfield later said of that instant, ‘These amazing words struck a chord to which my inner consciousness instantly responded.’

Deep within her being, she knew Bertha spoke the truth. ‘Great awe and intense exaltation’ took hold of her ‘with an overwhelming force’.12 This brief encounter with Bertha set the Blomfields’ lives on a different path. It would have been appropriate if, at that moment, fireworks had exploded over London to mark the encounter, because, with little fanfare, Lady Blomfield would alter the future of Great Britain through her tireless work there to establish the Bahá’í community upon a firm foundation.13 It seems from the only account of the occasion that Bertha failed to mention the name of the newest Messenger of God, Bahá’u’lláh.

She did, however, tell her two listeners about His Son, ‘Abbás Effendi, better known by the title He chose for Himself, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá – Servant of Bahá – who was at that moment a prisoner of conscience of the Ottoman Empire held in the prison-city ‘Akká in Palestine. She quoted His own words to them, ‘For the Cause of God, I am a prisoner.’

With such a forthright introduction, the Blomfields wanted to learn more. Bertha did not offer them any literature, only the address of a British artist who had just returned to Paris from a visit to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

Her mission completed, Bertha rose to leave. While heading to the door, she turned around and returned to the Blomfields still seated on the sofa. Bertha had forgotten to exchange addresses in order to arrange an appointment. That accomplished, Bertha walked out of their lives.

Lady Blomfield never mentions seeing Bertha again, despite the incalculable debt owed to her for the message she imparted to them.14 Did Bertha use a variation of this approach to introduce Horace and Irving to the Bahá’í Faith? It was Horace, not his more conventionally religious brother, who accepted the loan of the book. ***** As a first effort to write a biography of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in English, the book was lengthy. Flipping through it, Horace would have noted that it 4

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the book

contained a foreword by the distinguished Cambridge University Orientalist, Edward Granville Browne, at the time the only Western scholar to have investigated the Bahá’í Faith. The author, Myron Phelps, was a New York lawyer who had made an extended visit to the ancient city of ‘Akká in Palestine to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The thick volume sympathetically focused upon the obscure religious sage from Iran, attracting Western readers as another exotic tale straight out of the Arabian Nights folktales. In the Muslim world, however, the book was deemed dangerous contraband by religious and government authorities, for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was a prisoner of conscience. To illustrate, a few years earlier government officials in Beirut, Lebanon, (then part of the Ottoman Empire) had confiscated the copy of Phelps’s book owned by William Jennings Bryan, an important American politician, Democratic Party Presidential Nominee, and future Secretary of State, while he was travelling through the Levant. Bryan had visited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at His home shortly before his copy was seized. He asked the U.S. Consulate officials to intervene with Ottoman authorities to get it back, protesting all the while against Turkish censorship of religious literature.15 The book had a cumbersome twenty-nine-word title: Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi: A Study of the Religion of the Babis, or Beha’is Founded by the Persian Bab and by His Successors, Beha Ullah and Abbas Effendi;16 despite this, it sold well enough to have a second edition. Even though it focused upon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá rather than upon His Father, Bahá’u’lláh, the Faith’s founder, it provided English readers with an adequate, but not entirely accurate, summary of the Bahá’í Faith.

As Horace moved from Browne’s intriguing introduction with its first-hand account of meeting with early believers, including Bahá’u’lláh Himself, and on to the main body of the book, he encountered an arresting prediction at the opening of Phelps’s introduction: that the Bahá’í Faith would be important to the world in the near future.

To the student of the development of human thought, there is probably not in the world to-day another place so interesting as the small city of Akka in northern Palestine; for there may be investigated, still in its youth and under the fostering care of one of its founders, a religious Faith which gives promise of becoming, at no very distant time, one of the recognized great religions of the world.17 5

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End of this sample.

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