| Series | Box 1-8 Folder 1-345 |
General Correspondence The General Correspondence series comprises chiefly originals or carbon copies of personal and business letters to and from Bishop Perry, ranging in date from 1904 to 1947 but concentrated in the years 1919 to 1941. It also includes a small number of letters to Edith Weir Perry, and a few letters between other parties. Though what is here seems usually to be complete, in the sense that most inquiries have their answers and most protracted exchanges of correspondence are represented fully, yet the collection appears to contain only a small part of the Bishop's total correspondence (for example, in the file of the Rev. Arthur Wood, there is a comprehensive collection of letters dating from Wood's student days, 1921-1926, and one letter from 1946, while it is clear that Wood and the Bishop had been in just as close touch during the intervening twenty years). The correspondence is arranged alphabetically by the surname of the Bishop's correspondent, whether writer or addressee, and chronologically within the surname. Important persons and those represented by more than six or seven letters are in individual folders, in order following the alphabetical sequence of each initial letter; all bishops of the Church of England or the Protestant Episcopal Church of America are likewise organized. Form and circular letters and unidentified correspondents are grouped separately at the end of the series. The General Correspondence series covers a large number of kinds of material. There is a fair lot of merely social business--compliments of the season, thanks for inspiration, and the paying of respects among friends. There is also a good deal of the routine transaction of church affairs: arrangements for meetings and conventions; requests for ordination from young men and from the clergy of other denominations; fundraising for both particular and general causes; attention to the details of staffing and finances of missions and church headquarters on the national level and of Rhode Island parishes and buildings on the level of the diocese. One particular form of material which will prove difficult to utilize in the absence of a name index for the series is the very many letters of recommendation and character reference for proposed rectors, which had to be filed under the names of the correspondents rather than the subjects of the letters. There is also a great deal of material concerning the Bishop's oversight of his clergy within the diocese. Some of it has merely to do with routine business, like calls to new rectors, appointments for confirmations, or the building up of shaky missions into self-supporting parishes. Much of it, however, also deals with the rectors' conflicts, over faith, morals, or practice, with their vestrymen and congregations, as for example in the cases of Rev. Gilbertson and of Rev. Hamlin vs. H. F. Webster. Some of it has to do with the Bishop's attempts to straighten out personal scandals in the clergymen's lives, as in the cases of Byron, Evans, and Scovil. There are also extensive remains of the Bishop's care of his protégés among the students aiming for the ministry, as for example Wood, Meader, Pfaffko, Carson, and Byron. All of the material in the Correspondence series should be used in close conjunction with the Subject File, because there is a great deal of overlapping information on many matters, and because the Subject File also contains a considerable amount of correspondence which supplements or even supplies gaps in the exchanges here. Among the subjects upon which this series contains materials dispersed throughout the correspondence are the churchmanship controversies between the Romish and Evangelical factions, the causes of Anglo-Catholicism vs. the pan-Protestant movement, and the role of Presiding Bishop as head of the church. There is a good deal of information about St. George's School in Middletown and St. Andrew's Industrial School in West Barrington, as well as much material about the state of the mission churches in the Philippines (see especially letters of Bishop Mosher and Cheswick Todd), the conditions in China (see Lee), and the joint Anglican-American mission to the Assyrians. There is much material (especially under Admiral Baird and Bishop Rhinelander) concerning Bishop Perry's part in the successful defense of Chaplain Samuel Neal Kent of Newport against charges of homosexual solicitation and the church's subsequent Naval Court of Inquiry attacks upon Secretaries Josephus Daniels and Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Navy's corrupt methods of investigation (1919-1920), upon which head also there is much fuller information in the Subject series and Clippings series. The Correspondence series also contains many rather full presentations of Bishop Perry's views on matters of dogma and opinion, as for example on evolution (see the letter to S. C. G. Watkins), the sacrament (to Mrs. Hamilton Webster), and the repeal of the Volstead Law during Prohibition (to George Zabriskie), among many others. Also noteworthy is a folder of correspondence with Daniel Berkeley Updike, owner of the Merrymount Press |
1904-1947 |