Miriam Vedder

“What did you come to Silver Bay for?” one girl asked another on the last night of the conference. “I came,” said the other, “to see if Christianity had a left leg to stand on.” “What have you decided?” “That it is a regular centipede!” was the reply.

– Miriam Vedder, Wellesley, 1916, in The North American Student, October, 1915

Miriam Vedder hailed from Schenectady, N.Y., served as editor of the Wellesley College News and won the first [John] Masefield Prize for verse in 1916. In 1931 and ’32, she had 29 pieces published in The New Yorker. The poem below appeared in the September 17, 1932, issue:

“Horoscopes” – By Miriam Vedder, Wellesley Class of 1916.

I’ve high esteem for horoscopes
They give one such romantic hopes.
Mine said I’d meet a very fine
Young man in 1929,
And intimated wedding rings,
And other such inspiring things,
I waited for him all the year,
But that young man did not appear
Unless he was a tax-collector,
Or, possibly, the dog-inspector.

In 1930 speculation
Was to achieve the elevation
Of my depressed financial state.
But something might have sidetracked Fate
The stocks I bought that happy spring
Today are not worth anything.

A voyager upon the sea,
A traveller in wagons-lits,
I should, before the year was done,
Have been in 1931.
And yet, despite the friendly stars,
I only rode on trolley cars.

But though my fortunes have declined,
I’m vastly gratified to find
That 1932 should be
A most propitious year for me,
With riches knocking on my doors,
And sojourning on foreign shores,
And gentlemen of many nations
Offering fervent protestations.

For even though I seem to stay
At home in quite the usual way,
And no one names me as an heir,
And suitors are extremely rare,
It’s very comforting to know
That Heaven never planned things so!

* * *

My thanks to Eni Mustafaraj for finding the poem.

J. Stitt Wilson

Jackson Stitt Wilson (1868-1942) was a speaker at the Silver Bay student conference of 1925 and most probably made his audience sit up and pay attention. He was an ardent Christian Socialist and served as the Socialist mayor of Berkeley, California, from 1911 to 1913.

After graduating from seminary at Northwestern, Wilson worked as a Methodist pastor and social worker in Chicago, and afterward said, “The injustices, misery, and wretchedness, and the unequal struggle of the workers against such frightful odds compelled me to study the underlying causes of this social agony, and I became a Socialist.”

From 1907, Wilson was a contributing editor to The Christian Socialist, a weekly newspaper which unified the Christian socialist wing of the Socialist Party of America.

In 1911, Wilson wrote, “If God is ever to wipe away the tears from the face of man, this age-long wrong [capitalism] must be overthrown. If the mission of Jesus is ever to get the upper hand in human affairs, the social revolution must come to pass… There is no deliverance for captives unless this social captivity is ended. There is no setting at liberty the people that are bruised unless this age-long bruising machinery is stopped. If we are ever to call the poor and the maimed and the halt to the banquet of creation, the program of the revolution must be inaugurated.”

* * *

On a completely irrelevant note, Wilson’s daughter Gladys, billed as Viola Barry, appeared in 29 silent films between 1911 and 1916.

The Reluctance of Jabes Pond

Today, Jabes Pond is thought of as a hikers’ destination, a quiet spot to kayak, and an early source of drinking water for the Silver Bay Association. But its past is not without some drama.

On October 16, 1932, on a chilly autumn day, Game Protector Paul DuCuennois was patrolling Jabes Pond when his canoe sprang a leak. He rose and tried to walk to the other end of the craft, perhaps to raise the leaky spot above the water, but the boat capsized and he tumbled into the pond. Although the young man was a strong swimmer, he apparently could not fight the sudden shock of the cold and the weight of his soaked clothing.

DuCuennois was just 21 years old. On the job for less than a year, he had already received threats from hunters, who found him overly conscientious, and so there were rumors of foul play. But two witnesses – Charles Foote and Wilson Putnam – came forward and said they had seen him capsize, although they were too far away to come to his aid. An autopsy would help to establish what had happened, but for that the coroner needed the body, and Jabes Pond seemed reluctant to let it go.

The day after the drowning was reported, 50 searchers and 350 spectators (it was a Sunday) hiked up the muddy, two-mile trail. Men in two rowboats attempted to locate the body using grappling hooks. Next came dynamite; the “powder man” said that a body usually rises six to ten hours after underwater blasting; that didn’t work either.

Stephen LaFort of Schnectady donned diving apparatus but found only 12 inches of mud and swirling silt on the pond’s bottom. In the days that followed, seven more rowboats were carried up the mountain, as were two outboard motors. A raft for the diver and his crew was built from lumber and oil drums, and a generator was brought up to power an underwater search light. After two weeks, everything had failed, and the work crews, who by now had built a camp to live in, tried to drain Jabes Pond. But it was not a bathtub.

The sages on the shore said the body was probably trapped under a ledge, or that the cold water had prevented the body from rising. At last, on the twenty-seventh day, Charles Foote, using a homemade contrivance of fish hooks attached to a window sash weight, felt a snag.  He had created the device to cope with the narrow gorges and crevices that make up the bottom of Jabes Pond, and indeed he had found the body in 80 feet of water.

The remains of Paul DuCuennois were brought to the surface and carried down the two-mile trail to the Swain undertaking parlors in North Creek. An autopsy was performed, and three doctors found no evidence of foul play. The young Game Protector was laid to rest at last.

The Tax Snit of 1907

In February of 1907, the Silver Bay Association moved to amend its original 1904 act of incorporation and avoid paying New York taxes, saying the association had been organized solely for charitable and religious purposes, and thus should not be subject to the state’s general corporation law.

On February 28th, the Warrensburgh News called the citizens of Hague to arms:

 “If the Silver Bay association should be relieved from taxation, it is claimed by the taxpayers of the town of Hague that they would have to submit to an increase of over ten percent above the present rate of taxation, as the amount assessed against the association for the current year is $29,588, while the total assessed valuation of the town of Hague is only $265,281… The residents of Hague are naturally greatly incensed and do not propose to assume any increased burden of taxation. A taxpayer of Hague writes as follows:

“It is hard to believe that a body of Christian workers could knowingly favor evading their fair share of taxation and ask that it should be put upon the shoulders of those for whom the Silver Bay association is doing practically nothing.”

The Silver Bay Association was granted tax exempt status in 1938.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers

In September of 1922, a concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers closed out the Industrial Human Relations Conference, an annual summer gathering of leaders from industry and organized labor.

The first Fisk Jubilee Singers had been organized 50 years earlier to tour and raise funds for Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee. They were the first group to publicly perform the songs of slaves and they shared them with the world. keeping these songs alive and illuminating the faith and emotions of the African American slave. And as the earliest choir members were children of freed slaves or freed slaves themselves, the “Jubilee” appellation – a reference to the Biblical year of jubilee when slaves were set free – was very appropriate.

In March of 1872, the group performed for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. The following year, while touring Great Britain and Europe, they performed “Steal Away to Jesus” and “Go Down, Moses” for Queen Victoria.

An autographed photo of the Fisk Jubilee Singers circa 1905

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were followed at Silver Bay by the Cotton Blossom Singers in 1931 and the Tuskegee Quintet in 1938. The first of the African-American touring college choirs, the Jubilee Singers are still an active organization at Fisk University.

* * *

An interesting note on the 1922 Industrial Conference: The newspaper said, “In order that the speakers may have the utmost freedom of utterance, they have been assured that their addresses shall not be reported and that newspaper writers are not to be admitted to the discussions.”

Silver Bay Wisdom

“We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us.”

– Francis John McConnell (1871-1953), American social reformer, bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church and faculty member at Silver Bay conferences in the 1920s.

John Mott, Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

John Mott was on the faculty of Silver Bay’s summer conferences as early as 1903 and was a frequent speaker through the 1920s.

A seemingly tireless individual, John Raleigh Mott (1865-1955) came to Cornell University from a small college in Iowa in 1885. As president of the Cornell Y.M.C.A., he increased the membership threefold and raised the money for a university Y.M.C.A. building. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1888. That autumn, he began 27 years as national secretary of the Intercollegiate Y.M.C.A. of the U.S.A. and Canada.

During this time, he led the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, presided at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, and chaired the International Missionary Council. He helped to organize the World’s Student Christian Federation in 1895 and as its general secretary went on a two-year tour, during which he organized student movements in India, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe. In 1912 and ’13, he toured the Far East, holding 21 missionary conferences in India, China, Japan, and Korea.

From 1915 to 1928, Mott was general-secretary of the International Committee of the Y.M.C.A. and from 1926 to 1937 president of the Y.M.C.A.’s World Committee. During World War I, when the Y.M.C.A. offered its services to President Wilson, Mott became general secretary of the National War Work Council. Through the Y.M.C.A., he kept up international contacts and helped to conduct relief work for prisoners of war.

Mott wrote 16 books; crossed the Atlantic more than 100 times and the Pacific 14 times. He received decorations from China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Jerusalem, Poland, Portugal, Siam, Sweden, and the USA, plus honorary degrees from Brown, Edinburgh, Princeton, Toronto, Upper Iowa, and Yale universities.

Some considered him to be the most universally trusted Christian leader of his time. In 1946, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

But much of it might not have happened. In 1912, Mott and a colleague were offered free passage on an ocean liner by a White Star Line official who was interested in their work. But they declined the offer and took a more humble liner, the SS Lapland, passing on their chance to sail on the Titanic.