Every
movement to make America more fully realize its professed values has
grown out of some form of public theology, from the abolitionists to the social gospel and the early
socialist party to the civil rights
movement under Martin Luther King and the farm workers»
movement under Caesar Chavez.
Fox tells the story from beginning to end: childhood in the German - American parsonage; nine grades of school followed by three years in a denominational «college» that was not yet a college and three year's in Eden Seminary, with graduation at 21; a five - month pastorate due to his father's death; Yale Divinity School, where despite academic probation because he had no accredited degree, he earned the B.D. and M.A.; the Detroit pastorate (1915 - 1918) in which he encountered industrial America and the race problem; his
growing reputation as lecturer and writer (especially for The Christian Century); the teaching career at Union Theological Seminary (1928 - 1960); marriage and family; the landmark books Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man; the founding of the Fellowship of
Socialist Christians and its journal Radical Religion; the gradual move from
Socialist to liberal Democratic politics, and from leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation to critic of pacifism; the break with Charles Clayton Morrison's Christian Century and the inauguration of Christianity and Crisis; the founding of the Union for Democratic Action, then later of Americans for Democratic Action; participation in the ecumenical
movement, especially the Oxford Conference and the Amsterdam Assembly; increasing friendship with government officials and service with George Kennan's policy - planning group in the State Department; the first stroke in 1952 and the subsequent struggles with ill health; retirement from Union in 1960, followed by short appointments at Harvard, at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and at Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies; intense suffering from ill health; and death in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1971.
The leftist media has successfully transformed the National
Socialist Movement that
grew out of this Wandervogel Youth
Movement into a right wing
movement, but anyone with a bare minimum of knowledge and logic knows this to be not true.