Free The Bishop's Boys by Tom D. Crouch Page B

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.” 17
    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.” 18 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. 19
    Late in 1881, Milton founded a monthly newspaper, the Richmond Star , dedicated to