Between the Wars

The 1930s: From the Crash to the War

ANDREW DOLKART The Cathedral wasn’t finished when the Wall Street Crash happened in 1929. The whole economy was collapsing while the Cathedral continued major building work. But no one viewed the construction in a negative way. The Cathedral provided employment in New York and that was important. The Episcopalians were doing what they were supposed to do, which was to finish the church for whatever role it was going to play in New York society. And by this time, I don’t mean a role in high society, but whatever role it could play in New York culture.

WAYNE KEMPTON Bishop Manning wanted to finish the Nave and he was providing jobs during the Depression. He used employment for continued fundraising so that the Cathedral could continue to build.

MARNIE WEIR Living conditions became a huge conversation in the 1930s. Thousands of families had been living in a Hooverville just blocks away on the Great Lawn of Central Park.

BISHOP DIETSCHE Bishop Manning led a city-wide movement to eliminate the slums and tenements of New York. He dismantled an actual tenement apartment and re-erected it at the entrance door of the Cathedral. To enter the Cathedral, you had to pass through that slum and experience how the poor of New York were living. And then there is the famous story about All Souls, which is the nearest church to this Cathedral. One Easter morning the white people got to church early and locked the doors so that the Black people couldn’t come in. Manning went down there with an axe and knocked the chains off the door.

“Nothing is too great, too high, or too beautiful

to be true.” BISHOP MANNING STEPHEN FACEY When construction was finished in November 1941, there was a week of celebration. The huge front bronze doors would be opened, a curtain pulled back, and for the first time, visitors could view the full two-football-field-plus-a-foot length of the completed nave.

On Sunday, November 30, 1941, the congregation worshipped in the entire space for the first time. The next Sunday, December 7, was the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt’s “Great Day of Infamy” ended the Cathedral’s great week of celebration. Within months, building of the Cathedral ceased. Most of the workers went off to war; they just laid down their tools. Building did not resume until 38 years later, in 1979.

WAYNE KEMPTON The Midshipman's School of Coumbia University held its graduation exercises at the Cathedral. During the school's more than five years of operation, it graduated nearly 25,000 men. As of December 1945, 350 of those same men had been killed or reported missing in action.

Top left Granite carvers working on the façade, early 1930s.

Top right Scaffolding enclosing the construction of the Nave, 1930s.

Bottom The Midshipman's School of Columbia University's graduation exercises.

Changing City

America emerged from World War II as a country of profound and deepening contradictions. Black soldiers who had gone to fight for their homeland returned to Jim Crow laws and even lynchings. The Episcopal Church traditionally represented a slice of New York society: well-to-do, and most of all, white.

The Episcopal Shift

Leaving the Cathedral following the funeral service of former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Front, carrying the Bishop’s staff, is the Rev. Gerald V. Barry, rector of Christ Church, Riverdale; followed by the Rt. Rev. Charles K. Gilbert, Bishop of New York; Governor Thomas L. Dewey; and New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer, September 22, 1947. THE REV. TOM PIKE After the war, people thought The Episcopal Church was in decline in New York. There was less money, fewer people, and great social issues were falling all around. But the Church did not go into decline because of a new prayer book or the embrace of different ethnic groups. The Episcopal shift reflected a cultural shift. Again welcoming new people and again recreating our city.

WAYNE KEMPTON There was a study done in the 1950s that said the most segregated occupation in the country was Episcopal clergyman. Even Sunday Schools were segregated. There were articles in the Diocesan newspapers about how the Diocesan Convention was so nice because the two races could talk in the same room. Well, we needed more than that. The new Bishop, Horace Donegan, preached social activism. But that was the era of “Father Knows Best.” You could preach equality and still not really get anywhere. People would agree, but they wouldn’t take action.

DEAN KOWALSKI I grew up in a church that doesn’t bear much resemblance to the church today. The 1950s and 1960s were not necessarily “the good old times.” The religious institutions were moralistic, trying to control their congregants and the larger culture. Certainly, there was a shift. As the tent has gotten bigger, we’ve become more embracing. We have become more accepting. What we see today is a product of a church that was figuring out sociopolitical issues in terms of faith.

BISHOP DIETSCHE Always we have had great progressive leaders and great conservative leaders both moving us, shaping us, and ultimately moving us forward. A lot of our victories and a lot of that tolerance was hard won. Hard won with the church battling with itself, trying to move forward.

WILLIAM BRYANT LOGAN The 1947 funeral for Fiorello LaGuardia marked a new era for the Cathedral. As the great representative of progressive city government went to his grave, the nation fell into the hysteria of the Cold War. DEAN MORTON Urban unrest in American cities in the 1950s and 1960s was a problem to all established institutions: commercial, educational, and religious. The large white religious communities in particular were concerned because many of their long-established churches and synagogues were located in the racially challenged central cities.

PAMELA MORTON Traditional parishioners were leaving the inner-city congregations. The churches didn’t know how to cope, or maybe they just didn’t know how to invite the new people in.

THE REV. SANDYE WILSON My family were members of St. James Episcopal Church in Baltimore for generations. In 1953, they joined a small group of people who founded Church of the Holy Trinity down the street. A white congregation had left Holy Trinity because of the “changing neighborhood,” read: becoming more Black. The white parishioners left all of the silver, the vestments, and everything else and told the diocese that they could make it a Black church but they weren’t staying to be a part of it. So the rector of St. James came down the street with the choir and some of the members to start Holy Trinity in its new incarnation. The first babies brought into Holy Trinity were my twin brother and me.

“The tide of statistics has been running against the Diocese of New York since the late 1930s. While the communicant lists of the Diocese of New York slipped year by year, those of the dioceses in New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut grew.” CATHEDRAL ARCHIVES

BOB PENNOYER In 1800, New York had been 98 percent Protestant, but that had changed. By the 1960s, New York’s population was 50 percent Roman Catholic, 25 percent Jewish, and the other 25 percent they called Protestant, although by that time, the church going Protestant population of New York City was down to four percent.

A Church Informed by Social Justic

Top The Rt. Rev. Horace W. B. Donegan, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Very Rev. James Pike.

“Pike possessed a unique ability to commend the faith of the Church to thinking men and women. He had charisma.”

william bryant logan

Bottom The Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, then Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., marching for the District of Columbia Home Rule with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, 1968.

“My father marched with

Dr. King and the DC

Coalition of Conscience, which my father and Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy cochaired.” honor moore BISHOP PAUL MOORE JR. In almost direct proportion to the increasing importance of the city in American culture has been the withdrawal—both physical and spiritual—of the Protestant Church…. After World War II, various groups in The Episcopal Church spontaneously began to look for a positive approach to the inner-city situation. Formal Anglican religion faced Southern Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Asians, Kentucky farmers, Italians, Irish, and the other culturally different dwellers of the tenements. None of these people could feel sympathetic to the restrained orderliness of classical Anglicanism… Could the cumbersome, dignified, proper, and occasionally over respectable Episcopal Church reach the throbbing life of a city?

FRANCIS SYPHER The West Side suddenly went from being a premier neighborhood in the city, with all the glitter and glamour that was attached to it, to a neighborhood with social problems. And this changed the perspective of the institutions that found themselves here. They had to decide, “Are we going to stay and minister to the people in the neighborhood?” The Cathedral was one of the institutions that decided to face that need rather than to turn away from it.

VIVIEN HEWITT The West Side went through changes for sure. It was not the upper-middleclass white enclave envisioned by its 19th-century builders. But the period after the War also stirred a new cultural vitality in the neighborhoods of Morningside Heights, Harlem, and Sugar Hill. Not only were the new families of the Great Migration pouring in, but within blocks of the Cathedral, the luminaries of Black America were living. Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, and even a young Ruby Dee all were within walking distance of St. John’s. Many became devoted members of the Cathedral community.

TOM FEDOREK Bishop Donegan was not overtly a radical, though he was definitely a social liberal. But probably what turned things around at the Cathedral was the new Dean, James Pike. There were very few radical causes that Pike didn’t sign on to. He was a rebel within the church. He even got on the cover of TIME Magazine. Donegan and Pike worked together.

DEAN MORTON From 1952 to 1958, the Cathedral’s brilliant fifth dean, the Very Reverend James Pike, made the Cathedral’s pulpit a voice to be listened to far beyond The Episcopal Church. He was one of the first religious leaders to appear regularly on national television. He regularly invited the congregation for discussion on television after the 11 am service. Dean Pike was a prophet, a priest, and a scholar. His views on racial segregation, birth control, capital punishment, the ordination of women, and the recognition and acceptance of homosexuals and lesbians gave him a national voice and a packed Cathedral. WILLIAM BRYANT LOGAN Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dean James Pike and Bishop Horace Donegan spoke continually against Senator Joseph McCarthy, against loyalty oaths, against racism and prejudice. For the first time, the Cathedral found itself on the defensive. Sentiments which had been music to the ears of a LaGuardia or a Roosevelt—were regarded by a Nixon or McCarthy as decidedly “Pink.” That Dean Pike could fill the Cathedral for his sermons against apartheid, against the House Un-American Activities Committee, and against unethical business was a tribute to his eloquence, but also a sign of the negative turn liberalism had been forced to make.

DEAN JAMES PIKE The church has often been healthiest when it was illegal; we got our start that way.

“There is hardly anything more obvious than the fact that evil is present in the universe. It projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles into every level of human existence. We may debate over the origin of evil, but only the person victimized with a superficial optimism will debate over its reality. Evil is with us as a stark, grim, and colossal reality.”

THE REVEREND DOCTOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., PREACHING AT THE CATHEDRAL IN 1956

TOM FEDOREK The Cathedral was very much a part of the movement. When the 1960s frieze Taking a Stand was added over the Great Bronze Doors, it was defaced with swastikas.

PAMELA MORTON Social concerns had always been connected with the church, but in the 1960s there was an expanding educational movement. Urban churches began to come together and have exchanges about issues. There was definitely an urban church movement. The national Church asked Jim to train people to work in the inner cities to stop the flight to the suburbs and to identify the new sources of power.

DEAN MORTON In 1962, the new National Office of The Episcopal Church recruited me to start an Inner-City and Metropolitan Office. The leadership of the Church was largely ignorant about the changed dynamics of the cities. My job was to make the hard-up inner-city Episcopal Churches of America’s changed neighborhoods “cued-in.”

THE REV. JESSE JACKSON Jim Morton and I go back to the days when the mission of a generation was being born in the churches of America: when we prayed, preached, marched together, and put our hearts and souls on the line for civil rights and civil justice.