HENRY
WILDER FOOTE: MINISTER, SCHOLAR, HYMNOLOGIST 1875-1964
Harvard
College Fiftieth Anniversary Report
Foote,
the son of Henry Wilder Foote, '58, and Frances Anne
Eliot, was born February 2, 1875, at Boston. He prepared
at the Roxbury Latin School and at a private school.
After receiving his Bachelor's degree with our Class,
he spent a year at the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences and was awarded an A.M. in 1900. Two years
later he was granted an S.T.B. at the Harvard Divinity
School. In 1929 a D.D. was conferred upon him by the
Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry in Berkeley,
California, and in 1941 the Meadville Theological
School bestowed on him the same honor.
Foote's
marriage to Eleanor Tyson Cope took place June 22
1903, at Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their
children are Henry Wilder, Jr., born August 30 1905;
Agnes Cope, born March 11, 1907; Arthur, born January
18, 1911; Caleb, born March 26, 1917; and Elizabeth
Stewardson, born Februrary 5, 1920. H. Wilder, Jr.,
is a member of Harvard '27; Arthur was graduated in
1933; and Caleb in 1939. There are seven grandchildren.
Foote served for six months with the American Red
Cross in Washington in World War I.
After
graduation from the Harvard Divinity School in 1902,
I was ordained to the Christian ministry in Kings
Chapel, Boston, where I had been brought up. That
fall I went to New Orleans, where I served as minister
of the First Unitarian Church from 1902 to 1906. From
1906 to 1910 I served in the Unitarian Church in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, and I returned to Cambridge in 1911
to become secretary of the Department of Education
of the American Unitarian Association.
In 1914 I was appointed assistant professor of preaching
and parish administration and secretary of the faculty
at the Harvard Divinity School, a position I held
until 1924. In the latter year I was in Europe with
my family for seven months. On my return I became
minister of the First Church in Belmont, Massachusetts,
which I served until 1940.
I then felt that the time had come for me to resign,
that my church might select a younger man. I soon
discovered that I had "retired" from a professional
career to enter active life, for I was immediately
drafted into war-time service, mostly for brief periods
with churches for which no other minister was available.
HWF,
seated, age 6 with his twin sister, Frances Eliot
Foote
In
1940 I spent two months in Berkeley, California, making
a survey of the Unitarian School for the Ministry.
The following year I spent some months as "interim
minister" of the May Memorial Church in Syracuse,
New York, and a similar period in 1942 in Vancouver,
British Columbia.
During
the winters of 1944 and 1945, I was in Charlottesville,
Virginia, organizing the newly established Unitarian
Church in that city and conducting evening services
in Lynchburg. After that I really retired and moved
from Belmont back to the house in Cambridge which
my wife and I built in 1912.
All these varied activities have brought me a rich,
full, and busy life, for which I am deeply grateful.
I still retain a reasonable degree of health and strength
and a wide variety of interests. Aside from professional
concerns, my chief hobby has been historical research
in the field of colonial portraiture, and I have on
hand plans for writing sufficient to fill all the years
that may remain to me. In religion, politics, and the
field of social reform, I am still an "unrepentant
liberal," profoundly concerned that we may leave
to our children and grandchildren a better world than
the tom and distracted one that we have known.
Family
photo, 1938
Back: Friend, Marcia, E.T.C.F., HWFIII, Arthur,
Rebecca
F: Agnes, Caleb, Baby FEF, HWFII, Grandson HWFIV,
Elizabeth
After
graduation from college, I spent a year travelling in
Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy,
Greece, and Egypt. Then I studied for one year in the
Harvard Graduate School before entering the Divinity
School. Under the eligibility rules then in effect I
was a member of the first combined Harvard-Yale Track
Team to compete against Oxford and Cambridge in London
in July, 1899, where I ran in the three-mile race. Thirty-two
years later my second son ran in the same event against
Oxford and Cambridge in London, and in 1933 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
In addition to many printed articles, sermons, and pamplets
I have written three books, The Minister and His
Parish, 1924; Robert Feke, Colonial Portrait
Painter, 1930; and Three Centuries of American
Hymnody, 1940. I collaborated with H. F. Clarke
in his life of Jeremiah Dummer. I also collaborated
in editing two hymn books, The New Hymn and Tune
Book, 1914 (as secretary of the Editorial Committee);
and Hymns of the Spirit, 1937 (as chairman of
the Editorial Committee); and with A. T. Davison in
editing the Concord Anthem Book and the Second
Concord Anthem Book.
Courtesy of Harvard University Archives
Henry Wilder Foote, Hymnologist
by
Arthur Foote II
In
1927, the Directors of the American Unitarian Association
appointed a Commission on Hymns and Services. My father
was named chairman. Asked to serve with him were Dr. Curtis
W. Reese, a leading representative of the humanist wing
of the movement; Dr. Von Ogden Vogt, author of Art
and Religion, 1921, and Modern Worship, 1927;
and Rev. Edward P. Daniels, an accomplished musician.
After the work was well under way, the Universalist General
Convention also appointed a hymnbook commission. In 1931
it was decided "that the two Commissions should cooperate
in editing jointly a book to be recommended to the two
groups of Churches.'' Hymns of the Spirit, the
result of their labors, thus became an important early
milestone on the long road to merger of these two denominations
in 1961.
Age
12
For father, editing Hymns of the Spirit became
much more than an avocation; it grew into what might be
called "a second career" that added heavily
to his duties as a parish minister at the First Church,
Belmont, Massachusetts. Night after night, the light burned
late in his third floor study; and the mornings of his
summer vacations invariably found him working in his small
study on the shore at Southwest Harbor, Maine. He was
a scholar by nature, willing to work long hours and to
take infinite pains to get things right.
If my father's interest in hymnology and the art of worship
grew naturally from his childhood exposure in the family
pew and in the parsonage of King's Chapel, so also came
his life-long interest in Colonial and early American
history. His forebears on both sides traced their ancestry
back to the first days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Father's Father was a competent historian, having completed
his two-volume Annals of King's Chapel not long
before his death. A large percentage of my father's writings
were historical in character. As soon as he returned to
Massachusetts to live, he became actively involved in
the Massachusetts Historical Society and in Salem's Essex
Institute.
1902
Naturally,
my father derived considerable satisfaction that Hymns
of the Spirit was so well received, both within and
without the denominations for which it was prepared. But
he also treasured one bitterly critical review in a Unitarian
church bulletin, in which the minister called it "an
atrocious collection, set to miserable, unsingable music,"
and ended with a plea to his congregation to "throw
it out and secure a really good hymnal, like the Methodists'"
(quoted from memory).
My father was invited to give a series of lectures on
American hymnody at the Harvard Summer School of Theology,
held in July, 1936, in connection with the Tercentenary
of Harvard University.
The finished book commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary
of the publication of The Bay Psalm Book in 1640,
"the first book printed in English-speaking North
America."
The year 1940, which saw the publication of Three Centuries
of American Hymnody, also marked his formal retirement
from the parish ministry, after sixteen years in the Belmont
pulpit. He had reached the age of sixty-five, a most fitting
age, he thought, for men to step aside to make way for
their successors. Vigorous in body and at the height of
his intellectual powers, he had no real intention of retiring
in the usual sense. He was a man of many intellectual
interests, and he had in mind a number of books he now
hoped to find time to write. America's entrance into the
war, however, postponed his plans for leisurely research
and writing. With younger men going off as chaplains into
the armed services, many churches were calling for ministerial
assistance. So for the next five years, my father continued
in the parish ministry after all, serving as interim minister
in Vancouver, British Columbia, Syracuse, New York, and
Lynchburg, Virginia—the last of these in conjunction
with helping to establish a new Unitarian society in Charlottesville,
Virginia, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church.
HW
and Arthur, Harvard cross country 3-milers, 1899
model and 1931 model
It
was during the two years, 1943-45, that my father served
as the first minister of the newly formed Jefferson Unitarian
Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, almost in sight of
Monticello, that his interest in the life, and particularly
in the religious views, of the third President was stimulated
to the point of involving him in scholarly research about
him. He noted in his reading of biographies of Jefferson
how scanty and inadequate were their treatments of his
religious philosophy. My father knew that Jefferson in
his correspondence had more than once declared himself
a Unitarian; but this whole aspect of the Virginian statesman's
life seemed to him to have been passed over much too lightly.
So, using the opportunity of being in Jefferson's home
territory, he began the study that led to the only thorough
survey of Jefferson's religion. This was published shortly
after the end of World War II, after his return to his
Cambridge home, under the title Thomas Jefferson: Champion
of Religious Freedom; Advocate of Christian Morals.
An accompanying work, Thomas Jefferson, Social Reformer,
was also published the same year, and several years later
he edited The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
extracted fromThe Gospels by Thomas Jefferson.
This remarkable pioneering venture in New Testament criticism
had long been unavailable. These three publications of
my father's represent a significant contribution to America's
understanding of one of its most brilliant founding Fathers.
About this time Father was goaded by his children into
writing an essay for them, giving his mature religious
views, a final statement of his faith. The work was begun,
as so many of his scholarly labors had been, in his summer
study, overlooking Norwood's Cove at Southwest Harbor.
In the evenings he often brought a new chapter to read
to the family aloud before the fire. It was soon apparent
that the emerging book should find a wider audience. The
result was The Religion of an Inquiring Mind, published
in his eightieth year, a book described on its fly-leaf
as
not addressed to professional theologians or philosophers,
but to that steadily enlarging group of educated people
who are aware of the widening gulf between the conception
of the universe held by science, and the traditional
forms of religious belief and dogma set forth by most
churches. . . The author is a keen inquirer who has
just turned eighty-and has never stopped asking questions.
. . . In this book he recounts the story of his own
spiritual pilgrimage. . . . It is written out of a mellow
maturity; and it reflects a mind that would be free:
a youthful and vigorous mind.
Engagement
picture, HWF with Eleanor T. Cope, 1902
A
son lacks the objectivity needed to appraise his own
father's career, even the son who has elected to follow
the same calling, and who has more than a casual interest
in the field of hymnology. It is perhaps appropriate
to voice, as a Unitarian minister, my gratitude that
this small denomination, having produced so many fine
hymn writers, also produced a man sufficiently interested
in this extraordinary phenomenon to devote much time
and patient effort to tell the story of it, with conscientious
thoroughness. From the time of my father's early paper
on "The Harvard School of Hymnody," his imagination
played upon the fact that a small religious movement,
commonly considered highbrow, should have created such
a succession of beautiful religious lyrics, ranging
from statements of a warm personal faith and gratitude
to stirring calls to social justice and the service
of mankind, over a period of approximately one hundred
and fifty years.When the first edition of the Pilgrim
Hymnal was published in 1910, he noted, it listed both
the nationality and the church membership of the authors
included, which led to the disclosure that nearly half
of the American authors were Unitarians who had contributed
considerably more than half the hymns of American authorship.
In answer to critics Dr. Washington Gladden replied
that this was due to the simple fact that the Unitarians
had written a larger number of the best hymns than had
the American writers in other denominations.
This "unique phenomenon in the history of hymnody"
has had, in my father, a patient and accurate chronicler.
Without him, this important facet in the history of
Unitarianism might never have been adequately told.
1915
If,
in closing, I may be forgiven a more personal word: the
truly remarkable thing about this man, to his son at least,
is how significant a scholarly contribution an active
parish minister can make, provided he be a man of wholehearted
scholarly commitment. Father's mind was not marked by
great originality. His mental habits were deliberate.
He was not particularly facile in extemporaneous speech.
But he compensated for these limitations by unfailing
self-discipline and hard work. Not a musician himself,
such were his musical sensibilities that fine musicians
were glad to work with him. He was not a poet, a friend
comments, nor did he ever think of himself as one, yet
he loved felicity in writing and himself wrote interestingly
and well. In a day when serious scholarship is not often
found in men engaged in the parish ministry, his life
is a testimony to how much such a man can accomplish.
His devotion to his chosen profession was full and unwavering.
He was widely loved and respected by his parishioners,
and by his colleagues. Over the years he worked steadily
for many such denominational causes as adequate pensions
for retired ministers, and care of their widows. Another
long time concern was Negro education, and for more than
half a century he served on the Board of Trustees of both
Hampton Institute, and Penn School of Frogmore, South
Carolina. Yet he managed to achieve as an historian and
a hymnologist the high level of competence I have sought
to recount in this paper.
Such people as he do maintain the fabric of the world,
and in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer.
Abridged
from "Henry Wilder Foote, Hymnologist," in
The Papers of the Hymn Society, The Hymn Society
of America, New York, NY.
