In 1877, a small number of Des Moines citizens,
unhappy with the pattern of conservative evan gelism
preached in the churches in the city, decided to invite a
representative
of the Iowa Unitarian Association to come to Des Moines,
a community of some 16,000 persons, to explore the possibility
of the establishment of a Unitarian hurch in the city. After
a couple of meetings led by Reverend J. R. Effinger of Keokuk,
on August 7, 1877, nine persons signed an agreement to form
the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines. At the next meeting
two weeks later, some ten others signed the agreement, and
so the church began, holding its meetings in an upstairs
meeting hall on Locust Street in downtown Des Moines.
A church, of course, is basically the members of the congregation.
It may or may not have a chosen leader or minister, and it
may or may not have a church building. For a couple of years,
Reverend Effinger divided his time between serving as a part-time
pastor for the congregation and working for the Iowa Unitarian
Association. During this time, he lived in Des Moines with
his family and spent a considerable amount of time traveling
in Iowa, evangelizing for Unitarianism. Finally, in August
of 1880, the church hired its first full-time minister, the
Rev. Sylvan Stanley Hunting, who had been serving as minister
in Davenport, Iowa. During Rev. Stanley's six years of  service
to the Des Moines congregation, the first church building
was erected at a cost of some $9,000.
And so the Unitarians began to look like a "real church." However,
it was the congregation that was the most significant part
of the fabric of the church. For example, the Rev. Effinger's
wife quickly aligned herself with the women's suffrage group
in Des Moines, and within a few months was on the board of
the group and became the editor of a weekly newspaper the
suffragists were publishing.
Benjamin Gue
However, perhaps the most dynamic and interesting member
of the congregation was a gentleman with the improbable name
of Gue (pronounced "goo"). Benjamin Gue was raised
in New York State as a member of a Hicksite Quaker family
that was ardently anti-slavery. Upon the death of his father,
Gue and a younger brother came to Iowa and took land in Scott
County. They cleared the land and built a log home to which
Gue brought his mother and younger brothers and sisters.
Dissatisfied with the positions of both the Whig and the
Democratic parties, he along with other Quakers and abolitionists
helped form the new Republican party in Iowa. In 1857, he
was elected
to the Legislature and served in both the House and Senate
in subsequent years. During his first term of office, he
initiated and succeeded in getting passed legislation establishing
The State Agricultural College and Farm in Story county,
which would eventually become Iowa State University.
In 1865, after having been elected lieutenant governor,
he became president of the Board of Trustees of the just-about-to-open
college. He persuaded a bare majority of the board to permit
the admission of women to the college, he himself casting
the deciding vote. Thus the new student body (when enrollment
occurred) was 20 percent female.
It was Benjamin Gue who had invited Rev. Effinger to Des
Moines, which in turn led to the formation of the church.
Mr. Gue
remained an active member of the church, the Legislature,
the suffragist movement, and the community until his death.
Many years later, Gue was said to have been asked what were
the three most important things he had done in his life,
to which he replied "Marrying Elizabeth Parker, helping
women to go the college at Ames, and helping to found the
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines."
Rights of Women
The emphasis by the congregation members upon the right
of women to full membership in society resulted in an early
tradition of choosing women as ministers of the church. The
third full-time minister was the Rev. Ida C. Hulting, who
came from Algona in October 1886. Another early minister
was Mary Augusta Safford who served between 1899 and 1910,
when she resigned because of poor health. The Rev. Safford
was very active not only in church affairs, but also in the
wider community. Her leadership was particularly noted in
the suffrage movement, and in helping a women's group Unity
Circle to become an important cultural group in the city.
Unity Circle presented plays, organized lectures and musical
events, and raised funds for needed community improvements.
The public was invited to attend these events and did so.
Individual members of Unity Circle were also active in the
affairs of the city and the state. For example, the Reverend
Eleanor Gordon, who was for a time the assistant minister
under Mary Safford and who, like Safford, was active in the
suffrage movement, was attending a parlor meeting of Unity
Circle one warm summer day when she decided that something
dramatic needed to be done to stimulate public interest in
the suffrage movement. She proposed that a march be held,
and under her leadership, such a demonstration was held in
Boone, Iowa. Some of the women in Unity Circle attended but
others did not. However, at the head of the demonstration
proudly marched not-quite-5-feet-tall Unity Circle member
Mrs. Mary Jane Coggeshall, carrying the American flag. And
be it noted that this street demonstration in Boone was the
first such demonstration in the United States!
Indeed, the congregation members in the First Unitarian
Church of Des Moines were strong workers for what they envisioned
as the needs of a better world.
Building a Better World
During the late 1890s, the congregation became increasingly
less concerned with theology and "other-worldliness" and
more concerned with how they, as humans and Unitarians, could
interact with society and help bring about change for the
better. As the congregation changed, so did the viewpoints
of the ministers whom the congregation chose. Growing out
of this shift in emphasis, in 1915, the Reverend Curtis W.
Reese became the pastor of the church. Reese had started
his ministry in the Southern Baptist denomination, but soon
he found that he could no longer believe in many of the creedal
aspects of the Baptists and so he became a Unitarian minister.
With this, he began to increasingly emphasize the role of
people as instruments of change and to downplay the importance
of divine intervention in the grand scheme of things. Out
of this soon grew what became known as the American Humanist
Movement. When Reese left the Des Moines church in 1919,
he became involved in the formal creation of this organization
and served as its first president. However, he remained a
Unitarian minister and taught on the faculty of the Unitarian
seminary that he had helped move to become a part ofthe theological
faculty at the University of Chicago. Thus, in a very direct
way, the Des Moines church helped launch religious humanism
in the United States.
Another social activist and humanist minister served the
congregation for one year, 1934-1935. He was Aaron S. Gilmartin,
and he not only actively worked to support organized labor
in the area but also joined with a mild-mannered Quaker mathematics
professor at Iowa State University to help form the Iowa
Civil Liberties Union and served as its first president.
Since that time, several church members have served in a
variety of positions in the ICLU and still do so.
In 1961, the Rev. John B. Isom who followed much the same
religious path as Reese had trod became pastor and remained
as such until his retirement in 1974. While here, Isom became
involved in trying to get a program of community help started
to aid poor families in acquiring ownership of a home. A
man who had grown up in the sand hills of Alabama when the
Civil Rights movement began calling forth violence from the
white community of Selma, Isom went to Selma to try bring
peace to those troubled waters. But mostly, as a religious
humanist, the Rev. Isom sought to help members of his congregation
to become aware of the great potentials which existed in
each human to call forth the "highest and best" from
each person.
Since 1900, laypersons of the Des Moines church have been
active in trying to bring about a better world.
During the period following World War I, and again following
World War II, the ladies of Unity Circle sought to make the
lives of the victims of war easier. They collected clothing
and non-perishable food and sent it tons of it
to relief agencies in Europe.
Unity Circle was notified that Fort Des Moines had thousands
of overcoats left over
from WWI, and Unity Circle could have them. However, there
was a small problem: all the brass buttons with U.S. Army
insignia had to be removed. Unity Circle accepted the overcoats
and the challenge of replacing the banned buttons. The ladies
notified the newspaper of the problem and of the need for
buttons for the overcoats. The newspaper spread the word,
and soon the mail began to bring packages of buttons some
from as far away as Alabama. Women from all around Central
Iowa showed up to remove and replace buttons, and the job
got done.
From the Des Moines Unity Circle, almost 8,000 overcoats
were sent to the Unitarian Service Committee for distribution
in Europe.
The Civil Rights Movement
In 1948, Martin Luther King Jr. was ordained a minister.
This was seven years before Rosa Parks refused to move her
tired feet to the back of the bus in Birmingham. In this
same year, Edna Griffin, a black member of this congregation,
ordered a sandwich and a soda at a Des Moines lunch counter
where she knew she wouldn't be served because of the color
of her skin. Soon after, Griffin filed suit against the lunch
counter for violating Iowa's Civil Rights law, and the case
was heard all the way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Griffin
and her friends (many from this church) picketed the lunch
counter every Saturday for six weeks. The lunch counter was
found guilty, and in 1949, Edna and her supporters walked
into the lunch counter and were served. Because of this slight
but not at all mild woman, Iowa's public accommodations were
integrated.
From that date until age sidelined her, she continued to
fight for justice and the protection of the rights of all
kinds of persons, supporting the Tiny Tot nursery, raising
funds for bail money for young people (including First Unitarian's
Brian Peterson) who went to Alabama and Georgia to assist
in education and voter registration. You name a good cause
in Iowa and the nation, and you would have named a cause
that found an active supporter in Griffin. Iowa has been
blessed by this woman of this church who made a difference.
During the Vietnam war, there grew up a loud voice of protest.
In Des Moines, a group of middle and high school students
offered a protest by wearing black armbands
to school in memory of all the individuals who had died in
the war. Some daughters and sons of members of this congregation
participated in this. Chris Eckhart, whose mother Maggie
Eckhart was a member of the church, and some Quaker children
brought suit against the school system for depriving them
of their rights of free speech, and this case was carried
(thanks in large part to the Iowa Civil Liberties Union)
to the U.S Supreme Court, which ruled for the youngsters
with the dicta that "the right to free speech does not
stop at the schoolhouse door."
Currently, 46 Iowa organizations
concerned with problems of the environment have been joined
into an organization known as the Iowa Environmental Council,
so that the pro-environmental forces can gain a united voice
when appearing before the Legislature and the various branches
of the media. This council was formed largely through the
efforts of church member Linda Applegate. Another church
member, Susan Heathcote, is a primary researcher for the
council concerning the problems of preserving and supplying
safe water to the citizens of Iowa.
And so the story will go on into the history yet to be made.
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