Eddy, Sherwood

EDDY, SHERWOOD (1871-1963). The son of a businessman in Leavenworth, Kansas, elite educated at Phillips Andover Academy and Yale (in Engineering), Eddy was inspired to enroll in Union Theological Seminary in 1892. The Student Volunteer Movement and the YMCA filled his time until the death of his father gave him an independent income. He attended Princeton Theological Seminary, determined to become a missionary. Eddy served as a missionary in India and China during the final years of the waning century and first years of the new, experimenting with ideas and techniques of democracy, cooperation and local control.

Eddy’s radicalization came with World War I. Serving as a chaplain in France, he saw the brutalizing effects of combat on American troops and became disgusted with capitalism itself. Eddy began to see the war as one fought for capitalists and imperialists, at the cost of working people and moral sensibilities. Drawn to the socialist doctrines of Norman Thomas, Eddy embraced a socialist outlook, albeit with large spiritual components, in the 1920s. He argued that structural changes in local national and international institutions as well as an application of Christian values were necessary to create a new world order, as the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Unlike traditional Marxists who had focused upon class issues almost exclusively, Eddy branded racism as antithetical to Christian and American values. During the Depression, Eddy embraced a practical vision of cooperative labor, himself purchasing a two thousand acre farm in Mississippi, with thirty former tenant farmer families, black and white, as a working cooperative enterprise. His influence extended to some of the young regional organizers destined for fame all the way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s, notably Howard Kester, of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The “Delta Farm” itself lasted twenty years, despite the pressure from white supremacists who bitterly opposed the interracial experiment.

Eddy’s Christian Socialism placed him close to other notable Christian radicals, including Norman Thomas, the star of a much-reduced Socialist Party. Eddy worked side-by-side with Thomas and others, and became the leading editor, 1926-34 of The World Tomorrow, premier magazine of Christian non-violence and anti-imperialism. He viewed his own role as simultaneously local and international. He helped create the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (later renamed the Fellowship of Socialist Christians) with a special mission embodied in the “American Seminar”: small groups of fellow religious activists taken abroad to meet global luminaries like the aging George Bernard Shaw. His visit to the Soviet Union in 1923 and his subsequent work in India and the Middle East further convinced him that the Russian experiment had much to teach progressives in the U.S. in finding a middle way of their own, between the extremes practiced in the two great world powers. A prolific writer, Eddy was influential among liberal Christians for more than a generation. His Religion and Social Justice (1927) established him as a radical thinker devoted both to Christian purposes and progressive activism.

Eddy continued to serve as an itinerant speaker and fundraiser throughout his life, even when his outspoken Christian socialist views flagged him as a controversial figure within the YMCA. He died in 1963, in Jacksonville, Illinois. He had taught nearby at the Illinois College and MacMurray College.

Cook, Vaneesa. Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Cort, John. Christian Socialism. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Press, 1988

George Sherwood Eddy Papers, Yale University