The Bishop's Boys (9 page)

Many years later, in 1907, Reuchlin’s nineteen-year-old daughter Helen “declared independence” in a similar fashion and took a job in town. In describing the situation to Wilbur and Orville, Bishop Wright remarked that Reuch was having “about the same experience with her [Helen] that I had with him when he was about the same age, only I managed not to let him break away. After a year or two he became and remains most dutiful.”
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Reuchlin’s “rebellion” almost certainly involved the natural desire of a young man to achieve some measure of detachment from the family. Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine’s experience would prove that Milton, on the other hand, was a possessive father reluctant to allow his children to leave home and explore life on their own. Reuch did return home, although time would show that the reconciliation was by no means as happy or complete as Milton suggested.

By the spring of 1881, Milton Wright was weighed down by the burdens of his office. Ironically, he had lost a great deal of political ground while serving as one of the five highest officers of his church. He had relinquished control of the all-important weekly church newspaper, isolated himself from the center of church activity in Ohio and Indiana, and spent four difficult and exhausting years serving the needs of small, scattered congregations in the Far West.

Milton was not adept at the skills required to win friends and influence people. As an administrator he had “personally offended” a number of presiding elders. His limitations as a politician were apparent. Reconciliation, negotiation, and compromise, the tools of the effective vote-getter, were foreign to him. Moreover, he would never trust men who possesed those skills. His written descriptions of various Dayton political contests over the years are studded with words like “scheming,” “malicious,” and “treacherous.” There were no moral gray areas in his world. Right was right. Wrong was wrong. No amount of under the table negotiating would ever change that.

… his brother Wilbur was twelve …

and sister Katharine was four.

But if Milton refused to make back room deals, others would. “In one conference,” a church historian reported, “an evil man had the ascendancy and used all his arts, not only to hold his friends, but to injure the bishop’s influence, when he found it could not be made to implicitly serve his purposes.”
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As a result, Milton Wright was in a very weak position when the eighteenth General Conference of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ met at Lisbon, Iowa, in 1881. “Of course he could not expect much support from the Liberals,” a fellow churchman remarked. “Then, he had alienated some persons on the Radical side, because in certain cases he was not compliant to their wishes.”
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He was neither reelected a bishop nor reinstated to his old editorial post.

Without strong leadership at the conference, the Radicals could no longer hold off the Liberal drive for pro-rata representation. While the major issues—membership in secret societies and lay representation at the General Conference—remained in abeyance, that victory virtually guaranteed that the forces of change would ultimately triumph within the church. It was only a matter of time.

Milton returned to the Whitewater District as a presiding elder, riding the circuit as he had done at the outset of his career. The family relocated once again, this time to a farm in Henry County, near Richmond, Indiana, not far from Wilbur’s birthplace.

The return to Indiana represented a political defeat for Milton, but he was not entirely unhappy with the situation. After four years of almost constant travel and the pressure of high church office, he was anxious to spend more time with his family. Susan’s health was failing—by 1883 she was exhibiting the unmistakable early symptoms of tuberculosis. She welcomed the move back to Richmond, where she would be close to her widowed mother and childhood friends.

Milton had by no means given up the Radical cause, however. Free of the administrative burdens he had shouldered during his years as editor and bishop, he could concentrate on attempts to generate fresh support for the conservatives.

In addition to his normal clerical duties, Milton set himself up as a writer, editor, and publisher in defense of church Radicalism. In October 1881, he issued the first in a series of
Reform Leaflets
, small pamphlets “intended to be laid between the leaves of some oft-used book for preservation and future reference.” The first issue listed fifty reasons for opposing secret societies; subsequent numbers continued to hammer away at the Liberal arguments for modernization of the church.
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Late in 1881, Milton founded a monthly newspaper, the Richmond
Star
, dedicated to building support for the conservative cause. In spite of the fact that “every effort was made by some officials to suppress it,” the
Star
became self-supporting after its first year.
While never a moneymaking proposition, the paper served as a rallying point for Radical sentiment in the church, and enabled Milton to mend a few fences within his dwindling ranks.
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In spite of Milton’s reduced salary and the expenses related to his publications, the family budget was large enough to enable the two eldest sons to continue their education. Reuchlin, having returned to the family circle, entered Hartsville College, his parents’ alma mater, as a sophomore in the fall of 1881. Lorin enrolled as a freshman.

The boys spent two academic years rooming together. Perhaps significantly, it was Lorin who remained in closest touch with their mother by mail. “I and Reuchlin are clean out of money again,” he wrote to Susan on October 31, 1882.

Lorin assured his mother that they were trying “to get along cheaper.” They roomed with the college president, and boarded with a Mrs. Case, who was “nearly starving before we had her cook for us.”
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The Brethren schools were a far cry from the best American higher education could offer. Hartsville had an enrollment of some fifty-two students during the year 1882–83. Lorin’s shaky grammar, his requirement to purchase a speller, and the fact that he made some extra money teaching Spencerian penmanship to fellow students, does not speak highly of the entrance standards.

Still, Lorin at least seems to have thrived at Hartsville. During his freshman year he served as secretary of the Philomatheon Literary Society, and delivered an address entitled “Building for the Ages” at the anniversary exercises on June 14, 1882.
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A little education was apparently enough for both boys. Instead of returning to school in the fall of 1883, they moved back to Dayton and took rooms in a boardinghouse at the corner of Third and Euclid. Lorin found work as an assistant bookkeeper at the Van Arsdall & Garmen Carpet Store, while Reuchlin took a job clerking in a lumberyard.

Wilbur began his senior year at Richmond High School in September
1883. His schedule of classes would daunt a modern honors student: Greek, Latin, geometry, natural philosophy, geology, and composition, with general scholastic averages of 94, 96, and 95 for the first three terms.
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He was an athlete as well, excelling at gymnastics and particularly, his father would recall, “as an expert on the turning pole.” He enjoyed riding the high-wheel bicycle he had purchased with his own money, and may even have developed an interest in a young woman classmate. Milton and Susan talked of sending him on to Yale.
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Orville seemed destined for commerce. As a six year old back in Dayton he had gone from house to house with his wagon collecting bones for sale to the local fertilizer plant. In Richmond, he pressed Katharine into service helping him collect scrap wood and metal for delivery to a junkyard. He also built and sold kites to his playmates, and organized a local amateur circus performance.

Wilbur made his pocket money assisting his father on the Richmond
Star
. Family tradition has it that he constructed a special machine to fold the papers for mailing. He also helped his brother build a six-foot treadle-powered wood lathe. Orville would later recall that this was their first joint venture in technology.

The few idyllic years in Indiana came to an end in June 1884, when Milton decided to move the family back to Dayton. Certainly, it cannot have been an easy decision—their twelfth move in a quarter of a century of married life. Henry County was home, close to the place where Milton had been born and both of them had grown up. Their farm was at the center of the preaching circuits for which Milton was responsible, and near Richmond, Indiana, where his Radical newspaper was published. Susan, now fifty-three and already in poor health, not only had Milton home more often but was close to her aging mother, her sister, and childhood friends.

Wilbur was about to graduate from the high school in Richmond. The move was so quick and abrupt that he would not be able to attend the commencement exercises with his classmates, or officially complete the courses required for graduation. They would not even be able to return to their own home. The lease held by the family renting 7 Hawthorn Street still had sixteen months to run.

Yet the reason for the move was clear to everyone: Milton, rested and refreshed, was ready to return to the fray. The General Conference of 1885 was only a year away, and he would find it easier to marshal his forces in Dayton, the city that remained the unofficial headquarters of the church and the home of its publishing house.

On June 14, 1884, Milton and his youngest sons, Wilbur and Orville, carefully loaded their worldly goods onto the Dayton train. The boys, assisted by Lorin and Reuch, who were already living and working in Dayton, would supervise the move into a rented house at 114 N. Summit Street. Susan and Katharine would follow on June 17.

Milton remained behind in Indiana for a few more weeks on business. On June 20 he received a letter from his wife. The new house, she informed her absent husband, was “in miserable order.”
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F
ew outside the family circle knew or understood Milton Wright better than his fellow clergyman, A. W. Drury. “By his strain of Puritan blood, by primal instincts, and by association,” Drury pointed out,

By the time he came back to Dayton in the spring of 1884, it was apparent that church opinion was running heavily against Milton and the other members of the dwindling Radical party. Moreover, there was a personal price to be paid for continuing the fight against Liberal elements within the church. Milton had failed to win reelection as a bishop in 1881. Now the presiding elders of the quarterly White River Conference voted to cut his already reduced salary by one quarter because he was no longer living in his district.

The system of proportional representation approved in 1881 would
give the Liberals control of the majority of votes at the upcoming General Conference of 1885.
The Religious Telescope
, once a bastion of conservative strength, now supported a more lenient attitude toward secret societies: “We are living in another age,” wrote Bishop Weaver, a one-time Wright supporter. “Our ecclesiastical machinery must be adjusted to meet these days, and not the days of our fathers.”
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