Church wrestles with modern saints’ troubled legacy

NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Traditional stained glass can be problematic in churches where Unitarian Universalists gather, averse as they are to creeds and dogmas, even the superficial trappings of traditional religion. But for the nearly 100 members of First Unitarian Universalist church, a restored window honors two of their most famous members: Kate and Jean Gordon, […]

NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Traditional stained glass can be problematic in churches where Unitarian Universalists gather, averse as they are to creeds and dogmas, even the superficial trappings of traditional religion.

But for the nearly 100 members of First Unitarian Universalist church, a restored window honors two of their most famous members: Kate and Jean Gordon, sisters and social welfare reformers, friends to the sick, and advocates for endangered children and powerless women in early 20th century New Orleans.


Between 1900 and 1930, the pair functioned as the conscience of New Orleans, lauded by the city’s establishment as champions of the first of the seven defining values of Unitarian Universalism, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

History, however, is complicated.

“I won’t say, `They were racists!”‘ said the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger, waving her arms in mock alarm. “But I won’t lie about that in my teaching about them.

“I will admit they were flawed; that they were not consistent. But even with their faults, they did good.”

Jean Gordon, in particular, was an advocate for selective breeding. She devoted the last years of her life campaigning for the forced sterilization of criminals and the “feeble-minded.” Older sister Kate’s lifelong dedication to women’s suffrage extended only to voting rights for white women.

“It’s really kind of interesting — that on the one hand they would do so much good for the improvement of the city and for poor people, but on the other hand were racially challenged,” said Morel-Ensminger. “But their racial attitudes are of their time and of their culture.”

Among most congregation members, the darker part of the Gordons’ agenda “is known, and we’re not exactly hiding it,” she said. “But it’s not part of their legacy that we wish to be lifted up and celebrated. Because we don’t celebrate that.”

Whether, and how, to apportion praise to giants of the past whose lives and principles were both exemplary and odious is an unending challenge. Thomas Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime; Abraham Lincoln explored the idea of resettling freed slaves in Africa. Yet they remain American icons.


Ed Larson, a historian at Pepperdine University who has written about the work of the Gordon sisters, believes that historical judgment means “you have to put people in the context of their times.”

According to Morel-Ensminger, First Unitarian has always cherished the memory of the Gordon sisters as two of their own.

Individually or together, the Gordon sisters campaigned to open Tulane University Medical School to women, helped establish a local juvenile court system and campaigned for birth control. They helped found the Traveler’s Aid Society and the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

`It’s really kind of interesting — that on the one hand they would do so much good for the improvement of the city and for poor people, but on the other hand were racially challenged,’ says the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger.

Kate devoted herself campaigning for the containment of tuberculosis and in support of women’s suffrage. Meanwhile, Jean, the younger sister, specialized in child welfare, campaigning against child labor and secured passage of a landmark child protection law in 1906.

As daughters of privilege in early 20th century New Orleans, they both could be fairly characterized as white supremacists, as Larson reports in his 1995 book, “Sex, Race and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South.”


Kate wrote that enfranchising white women “will eliminate the question of the negro vote in politics,” according to Larson. Jean once refused to attend a conference at Theodore Roosevelt’s White House because Booker T. Washington was also on the guest list, he found.

Jean frequently said it was her interest in child welfare that led her to become an advocate for eugenics, a public policy of mandatory sterilization for certain classes of “social undesirables.”

In its heyday, the idea was backed by major Northeastern foundations like the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, endorsed by establishment public health officials and much of the press, including the local Times-Picayune newspaper.

“They were trying to help the poor and disabled live,” Larson said. “They thought, `We’re giving them life; we can let them have sex. We’re just taking away their ability to breed.’ “

Larson said the movement crested just after the sisters’ death in 1931 and 1932. In Germany, Hitler soon demonstrated the horrors of eugenics. “By the 1950s it was bankrupt as a public health measure,” Larson said.

“But you look around you at what people are saying, what science is telling you, what your religion is telling you. You ask yourself, would I have been any different?”


(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

If, over time, the congregation’s pride in the Gordon sisters has become more nuanced, it nonetheless remains, she said.

In fact, when the congregation discovered the window honoring the sisters — disassembled, crated and forgotten in storage for half a century — there was little doubt that they sisters’ legacy would be returned to the church.

Indeed, said Morel-Ensminger, the sisters’ flaws constitute a lesson in themselves.

“There’s no such thing as purity. Striving for purity — perfection — is bound to failure from the get-go. A person must always strive to just be the very, very best they can, knowing you will always fall short of some imagined ideal.”

(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.)

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