BIO: Stephen Grellet, Quaker aristocrat (16 Nov 1855) BIO: STEPHEN GRELLET, QUAKER ARISTOCRAT (16 NOV 1855) This series includes biographical sketches of about ten Quakers. Most sketches are accompanied by sections on various topics related to the Quaker movement. A Table of contents, enabling the reader to find material on various Quakers and various aspects of Quakerism, can be reached by clicking . A reading list, sorted according to topic, can be reached by clicking . $$$ STEPHEN GRELLET Stephen Grellet was born in France in 1773, and was known as Etienne de Grellet du Mabillier. (French "Etienne" corresponds to English "Stephen," just as "ecole" to "school," "etudient" to "student," "etage" to "stage," and so on.) His father was a wealthy manufacturer, at one time controller of the Mint, and on close terms with King Louis XVI (see 21 January). At the outbreak of the French Revolution, his family had to flee for their lives. Stephen fought against the Republic, was captured and sentenced to death, but escaped, going to Amsterdam <52:21 N 4:54 E>, then to South America <@ 10 S 50 W>, and then to New York in 1795. By this time, he had abandoned the Roman Catholic religion of his parents for the philosophy of Voltaire. However, in New York he began to read William Penn. Late in 1795 he moved to Philadelphia <40 N 75:10 W>, and late in 1796 he formally joined the Quakers. About a year and a half later, in March of 1798, he became a Recorded Minister. In 1798 Philadelphia <40 N 75:10 W> suffered an epidemic of yellow fever. Grellet visited the sick and the dying, caught the fever, and was so sick that a public announcement was made of his death. Beginning in 1799, he made frequent preaching journeys, and between journeys engaaged in business ventures that financed the journeys. His manners combined the graciousness of a French nobleman with the simplicity of a Quaker, and made him at home in all company. "He served the lowly and stood unabashed before rulers." In the American South, he preached the love of Christ to slaves, and denounced the iniquity of slaveholding to their masters. He traveled in Quebec <@ 47 N 75 W>, where he preached in French to Roman Catholics. He visited mines, hospitals, prisons, and asylums, and everywhere sought to improve conditions. In England, he spoke of his prison experiences to Elizabeth Fry, and inspired her to undertake a movement for prison reform in that country. He traveled in the British Isles <@ 55 N 3 W>, France <@ 47 N 3 E>, Switzerland <@ 47 N 8 E>, Italy <@ 43 N 12 E>, Spain <@ 40 N 5 W>, Germany <@ 53 N 13 E>, Sweden <@ 60 N 15 E>, Finland <@ 63 N 27 E>, Russia <@ 55 N 40 E>, Greece <@ 38 N 23 E>, and the Crimea (=Krim) <@ 45 N 34 E>. He was received by the King of Bavaria (=Bayern) <@ 40 N 12 E> and the King of Prussia <@ 53 N 14 W>. He was received by the Czar, and spoke to him of the wretched conditions he had observed in Russian prisons and poorhouses. The Czar adopted a text written by Grellet and another Quaker for use in the schools. Grellet was also received by the Pope, to whom he spoke of needed social reforms in the Papal States. Altogether, he made four European tours (1807-8, 1811-4, 1818-20, 1831-34), and one tour to Haiti <@ 19 N 72 W> in 1816, with a great deal of travelling in North America in between. In his later years, he traveled less because of failing health, and retired with his wife and daughter to Burlington <40:05 N 74:51 W>, NJ, where he died 16 November 1855. $$$ QUAKERS IN EDUCATION Quakers believe in working with people on a basis of respect, and have tried to implement this in their institutions. In 1779 John Fothergill, a London doctor, founded a school for boys and girls at Ackworth in Yorkshire, committed to Quaker principles in education. In 1796 William Tuke, a York tea-merchant, founded The Retreat, a hospital for the insane, the first such in England, and one of the first in the world, to treat the insane with mildness, patience, and respect. There are ten colleges in the United States founded by the Society of Friends or branches thereof: Haverford (Haverford, PA) <40 N 75:30 W>, Earlham (Richmond, IN) <39:50 N 84:51 W>, Swarthmore (Swarthmore, PA) <39:54 N 75:21 W>, Guilford (Greensboro, NC) <36:03 N 79:50 W>, Wilmington (Wilmington, OH) <39:28 N 83:50 W>, Malone (Canton, OH) <40:48 N 81:23 W>, William Penn (Oskaloosa, IA) <41:16 N 94:20 W>, Friends University (Wichita, KA) Whittier (Whittier, CA) <33:58 N 118:02 W>, George Fox (Newberg, OR) <45:19 N 122:59 W>. Three more were founded by individual Quakers: Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) <42:26 N 76:30 W>, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) <39:18 N 76:38 W>, Bryn Mawr (Bryn Mawr, PA) <40:02 N 75:19 W>. In varying degrees, some of these schools have become secularized, as have schools of other denominations. Harvard (Unitarian), Yale (Congregational), and Princeton (Presbyterian) were all founded as religious colleges, and primarily for the education of clergy. Swarthmore has a faculty of 180, 3 of them Quakers. Bryn Mawr circulates a brochure about itself that does not contain the words "Quaker" or "Friend." I asked a Haverford alumnus whether there was a distinctively Quaker atmosphere at his school. He replied: "Yes, there is. One obvious mark of it has vanished, though. Like many traditional colleges, we used to have College Chapel, with all students expected to attend, and at Haverford it was an unprogrammed Meeting for Worship in the Quaker manner; but it ran into trouble during the Vietnam War. All the enthusiastically pro-Viet Cong students leaped on the opportunity to make speeches to a captive audience, and the meeting became indistinguishable from a political rally planned by SDS. Finally the administration discontinued it, and I don't think it has been revived. There are still Meetings for Worship, and those who wish to worship in the Quaker manner still attend them, but they are voluntary and off- campus, and the leaders feel free, when appropriate, to invite a speaker to find himself a soap-box elsewhere." $$$ QUAKERS IN SCIENCE The most famous Quaker scientist is John Dalton (1766-1844), whose work with atomic weights is the foundation of modern chemistry. Others have included: Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), geneticist and eugenist; Silvanus P Thompson (1851-1926), researcher in chemistry; Joseph Lister (1827-1912), pioneer in antiseptic surgery; Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), father of cultural anthropology; Peter Collinson (1693-1768), a leading botanist of his day; Thomas Young (1773-1829), who helped to establish the wave theory of light, and also wrote on medical subjects. Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), astrophysicist, pioneer in demonstrating empirically the truth of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and author (1923) of THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY, which Einstein called the best treatment of the subject in any language. Miss Anna Ruth Fry (QUAKER WAYS, London: Cassel & Co., 1933) lists 58 fellows of the Royal Society who were Quakers or of Quaker descent, elected between 1663 and 1915. Kathleen Lonsdale, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society), in an essay, "Science" in the book THE QUAKER APPROACH, writes: Judging by statistics covering the last 150 years, a Quaker, or a man of Quaker birth, has some twenty or thirty times the chance of election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society (the highest scientific honor bestowable in Great Britain) as his fellow countrymen in general. ...Nor is it simply a question of Quakerism being, or having become, "respectable," so that Quakers are drawn mainly from the professional or upper middle class. It applied even when they were not so respectable. See Arthur Raistrick, QUAKERS IN SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY, (NY, Philosophical Library, 1950) $$$ QUAKERS IN THE ARTS Because of a historic distrust of "frills," fewer Quakers have been prominent in the arts than in the sciences, but several examples come to mind. In literature, there is James Michener (1907- ), who first caught the public attention after World War II, with his TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, the inspiration for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical SOUTH PACIFIC. He went on to write numerous books, specializing in what may be called the "fictional documentary." Typically, he takes a region, such as Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, Colorado (CENTENNIAL made into a TV miniseries), Israel (THE SOURCE), the Chesapeake Bay area (CHESAPEAKE), the Caribbean, South Africa (THE COVENANT), Spain (IBERIA), Mexico, Poland... and writes the history of the area from past geological ages up to the present, with stories about many individuals, almost all of them fictional, but with meticulous attention to getting the physical and historical details right. The books are thus intended to convey a history lesson as well as to entertain the reader. Not all of his historical novels fit the billion- years-ago- to-the-present time frame. SPACE, deals with the space program, and THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU deals with the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (when Soviet tanks had crushed the uprising, some Hungarians, including one of my closest friends, escaped to Austria and freedom by crossing the bridge at Andau). A recent work, RECESSIONAL, deals with life in a fictional retirement home, and raises some provocative questions about options for the aging. Michener has also written straightforward non-fictional works such as KENT STATE: WHAT HAPPENED AND WHY and SPORTS IN AMERICA and THIS NOBLE LAND: MY VISION FOR AMERICA. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner and an outstanding writer and not to be missed. In the 1800's John Greenleaf Whittier was known throughout the United States as "the Quaker poet." As recently as the 1950's, no high school course in American Literature was complete without some of his poems. His best known is a long narrative poem, SNOWBOUND, describing a winter day on a New England farm after a heavy snowfall necessitates digging out. Many readers will also remember, if only with a chuckle, at least a few lines from MAUD MULLER (The saddest words of tongue or pen on earth are these: "It might have been.") or from THE BAREFOOT BOY ("Blessings on thee, little man, barefoot boy with cheek of tan, with thine upturned pantaloons, and thy merry whistled tunes"), or from BARBARA FRIETCHIE, based on an alleged actual incident when Southern troops led by Stonewall Jackson marched into Frederick, Pennsylvania, and one ninety-year-old woman continued to fly the Union flag, defying Jackson, who admired her courage and let her and her flag be. The best-known fragment of the poem is: "Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country's flag," she said. or, as generations of school children have delighted to misquote it: "Shoot, if you must, this old gray nut, but spare your country's flag, you mutt!" His poems ICHABOD, a lament for what Whittier regarded as Daniel Webster's desertion from the Abolitionist cause, and THE KANSAS EMIGRANTS, also dealing with the prelude to the Civil War, will still bear re-reading. His poem "The Eternal Goodness" is an eloquent statement of his belief that, although all salvation is dependent on the saving work of Jesus Christ, it is not limited to those who know about Him. (For a not-so-eloquent discussion of this thesis, go to web site www.aber.ac.uk/~spk/christia and click on Christia Library Essays by Author. Then scroll to "Kiefer" and under that heading to "non-Christians saved," and click on that.) Alas, only a fragment of this poem is available at the kimopress site listed below. Many of his poems (or selected stanzas from them) have been set to music as hymns, and can still be found in hymnals of many denominations. The opening lines of a few such hymns are here listed: All things are thine; no gift have we, Lord of all gifts, to offer thee. (1872) Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways. (from "The Brewing of Soma," 1872) O brother man, fold to thy heart thy brother (now sung, perhaps, as "O sibling human, shake hands with thy sibling") (from "Worship," 1848) When on my day of life the night is falling (I find no background details) Oh, sometimes gleams upon our sight, through present wrong, th' eternal right. (from "Chapel of the Hermits," 1852) Immortal Love, forever full, forever flowing free. (see next) O Lord and Master of us all, whate'er our name or sign. (these two from "Our Master," 1856) Who fathoms the eternal thought? Who talks of scheme and plan? (see next) I know not what the future hath, of marvel or surprise. (see next) I bow my forehead to the dust, I veil my eyes for shame, and urge, in trembling self-distrust, a prayer without a claim. (these three from "The Eternal Goodness," 1867) For a brief biographical sketch, and a few of his shorter poems, see the web page www.kimopress.com and click on "Whittier." Here let me recommend a personal favorite, a book of short stories by Jessamyn West, THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION (Harvest Books, $10pb, 0-15-633606-5), and the film, FRIENDLY PERSUASION, based on the book and starring Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire, and Anthony Perkins. It deals with a real Quaker family, the Birdwells, in southern Indiana during the Civil War. Jessamyn West is directly descended from that family, as is former President Richard Nixon. Jessamyn West is also the editor of THE QUAKER READER (1992, $17.50pb, Pendle Hill Pub 0-87574-916-X), an anthology of Quaker writings. Turning from literature to painting, we have Edward Hicks (1780-1849), who painted in what art historians call the Primitive style. His favorite theme was "The Peaceable Kingdom," based on Isaiah 11:6-9 ("The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid.... They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.") He painted perhaps a hundred versions of it, of which about twenty-five have survived. He shows children and carnivores and other animals peacefully mingling in a forest clearing, and often William Penn is shown conferring with the Indians and signing a treaty with them in an adjoining clearing, as a sign of Hicks's conviction that the Quaker commonwealth established by Penn was a fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah. Today Hicks is known and respected as a landmark in the history of American painting, and his works hang in the best galleries. In his own day Hicks was known chiefly as a Quaker preacher who dabbled a bit in paint. He was a supporter of his cousin, Elias Hicks, who led what came to be known as the liberal, or "Hicksite" branch of Quakerism in the United States. Another Quaker painter is Benjamin West (1738-1820), who was born in the United States, but moved to England, where he became historical painter (1772-1801) to King George III, co-founder of the Royal Academy (1768), and succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as its president (1792-1801). He painted scenes like the death of General Wolfe (who captured Quebec for the British), and caused controversy by showing the General in the uniform appropriate to his time rather than in a classical toga. One outstanding Quaker composer is Ned Rorem. Having written various settings for traditional mainstream Christian texts, he wanted to write something expressive of his Quaker convictions, but ran into a difficulty, in that Quakers (says Rorem) do not tend to say or write the sort of statements that naturally lend themselves to being set to music. He therefore took eleven texts that mean a great deal to Quakers, such as "Mary Dyer did hang like a flag," and James Nayler's "There is a spirit," and wrote an organ meditation on each, with no attempt to write anything that the words could be sung to. The eleven meditations constituted an organ suite known as "A Quaker Reader," a name adapted from the anthology by Jessamyn West. I was probably one of the first persons to hear the suite, since our parish organist knew Rorem and played the various parts of the suite as preludes to our Sunday services as they were written, "before the ink was dry," and well before their official publication. I fear that I did not appreciate my advantages, having a narrow-minded preference for Bach. But there is no doubt that among lovers of contemporary organ music, Rorem's work rates very high indeed. $$$ QUAKERS IN INDUSTRY Comfort (JUST AMONG FRIENDS, pp 145-147) devotes two pages to examples (taken from Paul H. Emden, QUAKERS IN COMMERCE) of Quakers and Quaker families that played a prominent role in the development of manufacturing and technology in the Industrial Revolution in Britain. He begins: To a singular degree the Quakers were ready for the Industrial Revolution with its new requirements for capital. Quaker thrift and intermarriage in substantial families had laid up capital which was prepared to finance new enterprises. Here the reader must be referred to the engrossing story which Paul H. Emden has told in his QUAKERS IN COMMERCE. We have now reached what Emden calls the Iron Age. New topics begin to appear in his presentation: iron-founding, brass works, coal furnaces in the hands of the Darby dynasty [The economist Kenneth Boulding says: The "iron-age" would not have been possible without the discovery by Abraham Darby of a practicable method of smelting iron with coal-coke, for up to this time the iron industry had been dependent on the swindling supplies of wood charcoal.]; Huntsman's discovery of the crucible process for the making of the steel required for his watch-springs and pendulums is part of the story of Sheffield as the steel center; the Pease family as combers, wool buyers and weavers of cloth had become enriched at Darlington and later engaged in extensive banking enterprises in Durham and Yorkshire; the ceramic arts were developed by Quakers at Plymouth early in the eighteenth century. Early in the nineteenth century the first road laid upon rails was promoted and financed at Darlington by the Pease family and their wealthy associates. Stephenson had the satisfaction of driving the engine of the Quaker Line on September 27, 1825, over the twelve miles to Stockton in three hours and seventeen minutes. George Bradshaw, first author of the famous Railway Guide (standard collection of railway timetables for Britain), was a Friend. As bankers and members of Parliament in more recent times the Pease family continues a long and honorable career. Then there were corn merchants like Joseph Sturge at Birmingham, and cotton manufacturers like John Bright at Richdale; the Gurney family of bankers in Norwich; a silk manufacturer in London, Job Allen, was the father of William Allen the Quaker scientist, drug manufacturer, philanthropist, minister and companion of Stephen Grellet. Then with Mr. Emden we must add mention of the Barclays, brewers and bankers; Christys the hatters; Bryant and .... Quakers led the way, not only in technological invention, but also in establishing principles of dealing fairly and generously with their employees. Comfort (p 148) goes on to say: T. S. Ashton, in his IRON AND STEEL IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (Manchester and London, 1924, pp 196,213), says that by the Quaker firm of iron-masters established by the Crowley family, "arbitration courts consisting of nominees of the firm and of the workers were set up to enquire into grievances; and contracts made between the master workmen and their hammermen were drawn up in these courts. Very early in the eighteenth century a system of contributory insurance against death, sickness, and old age was compulsory upon all workers; and a doctor, a clergyman, and a schoolmaster were maintained jointly by the firm and its employees.... The more important chapters in the history of the iron industry might have been written almost without passing beyond the bounds of the Society of Friends." $$$ CONCLUSION D Elton Trueblood writes: Quakerism is at its best when it is passionately loyal to the Church Universal, yet fully aware that it is not by any means identical with that grand totality. It functions best, not as another denomination, but as an ORDER in the great Church which is coming into being.... An order, though it is not the Church, exists to serve the Church. Its purpose is to produce something which might otherwise be forgotten, lost, or minimized. To such a vision Quakers are called.