The Remarkable Mr. May
Dr. Catherine L. Covert
(Permission to include it
was given by her estate executrix, Carolyn Stepanek Holmes)
Address Given at May Memorial
When I knew I was going to
speak here this morning, I looked around for some kind of anniversary to
celebrate in this church, and the only think that I could come up with was that
almost to the day, one hundred and twenty years ago, in
Actually, what I’d like to do
more than to stand here and look back, you know, which is what historians are
supposed to do, is to sort of feel that you and I and Sam are all here
together. Now, knowing him as well as I do, and I do feel I know him very well
after having sort of lived in this presence for the last decade or so, I am
quite sure that if he could be with us today – in fact, he may well be – he
would be quite delighted. He was just human enough to enjoy having people tell
him he had done a good job, and I think he would be quite pleased with the idea
that we were standing around and talking about him this morning.
He would have, I am sure,
approved of the readings – Amos was one of his favorites. I don’t know what his
reaction would have been to the syntax of the poetry, but if we can imagine him
with us, I’d like to go on sort of a venture with that in mind.
You can see from the way that
he looked that he would have been, now, most contemporary. I mean that his hair
kind of straggled down over the back of his collar, and he had a funny little
beard that grew at various times in different places exotically around his
chin, and usually the pictures of him show him in a frock coat and kind of
indeterminate pair of pants, and if you’d put him down with some of the kids
that are dressed from the Salvation Army today, I think he would have looked very
with it, indeed. And, as you get into his life, you’d see that was precisely
what he was, a very “with it” kind of individual.
People have accused me of
going into history as a flight from the present. Now, they don’t know anything
about history, because, particularly, when someone consorts with Samuel Joseph
May, one worries about drugs, one things about permissive sex, one thinks about
the rights of women, one thinks about urban sprawl, one thinks about civil
rights, one just doesn’t realize one isn’t living in 1972. And it’s very
interesting to go with a man like that and to spend some time in his company.
If we pretend that he is here
now, maybe we can also pretend – just for a little while – that we’re back in
He baffled people. He had
these funny mixtures in his personality. He was, as one person said, a zealot
without a zealot’s bitterness. He was a gorgeous individual in terms of being
loving and kindly, and absolutely firm about what he
thought was right or wrong. In fact, any biographer of Dr. May has a terrible
time because the man was so full of what we would call charisma that everybody
succumbed to him after awhile. Even the people who disapproved highly of all
his wild ideas would eventually end up loving him. And trying to write a
biography of an apparently perfect individual is an absolutely disgusting kind
of a thing. You just can’t find any faults in the man.
Now, if you were going to imagine the perfect
source for finding out about Samuel J. May from people who didn’t spend all
their time telling you how wonderful he was, you would imagine this. You would
imagine that in
So, this morning, if I quote
liberally from The Religious Recorder,
it’s not because I wish to introduce Presbyterianism into this sacred desk, as
Samuel J. May would have called it, but because it is the only way you are
going to get a balanced picture of the man.
He came to this village,
imagine for yourself this village – it was about 9,000 people, it was still a village;
it wasn’t a city, had a big canal, or course, going down the middle; that’s
where everybody went and was the heart of the whole village; not very many
streets paved; all of the sidewalks were planked. I mean, if you had a sidewalk
it was planked. There was, of course, a railroad running down through the
middle of it. You had young elm trees, beautiful young elm trees, just having
been planted not long ago; and then everywhere you had bustle and crowds.
You see, we were fully
Yankees, upcountry Yankees. Now, these were people who were sensitive to all
kinds of reforms, all kinds of exciting, interesting new kinds of ideas, and
they had come over and settled here, so you had a great place for reform. You
had people who were sensitive to concerns of this kind, who were rich enough
not to take off a little time and start
worrying about their immortal souls, if they happened to be that kind; or about
the conduct or their brethren, if they happened to be that kind. So, a lot of
people were doing a lot of worrying about a lot of things besides making money.
It was just a perfect place
for Sam May to come, and he found it that when he stayed here the rest of his
life. He was fairly famous when he came. He had been the principal of the very
first normal school, training young women to go into the, then, revolutionary
field of childhood education. He was well-known, and the men who called him
from there knew what they were doing. They wanted somebody who was good in
education and they got Sam. They called him over from
When he got here, however, he
discovered that this was not an ideal community. Some things you find out about
him are fun – he and Mrs. May and the four kids came over on the train in 1845.
You can imagine what moving a household like that would have been like. Did he
stay home and help with the unpacking? No! he went to
a meeting on education reform the next day, leaving Mrs. May to unpack. I get
the feeling that Mrs. May spent a lot of time that way while Sam was out to
meetings, taking care of the four children and unpacking! He was always not
there. He was out doing something laudable with somebody else’s children a
great deal of the time. The Religious
Recorder did not tell me that; I just figured that out by myself, having
had some experience in unpacking myself while my husband is off on some other
noble things.
Let’s look at the major
issues that he was confronted with. Now, sometimes we have to change the words,
as Cummings did this morning, but certainly the drug issue is one of the things
that concerned him the most. The drug that bothered people in those days was
alcohol, of course, and they saw in it the kind of abuses that some people see
in drug uses today. And you can tell very interesting things sometimes from
statistics. Let me give you this set of statistics about
This kind of thing bothered
people, very much the way reports of abuse and drugs bother people now. They
were concerned. They tried to legislate this evil out
of existence, as we have done with the marijuana laws. In 1845
So you can see that May’s
interest through organizations and privately, through education, was very much
the same as our concern. He didn’t have very much more success in his lifetime
than we have been having lately. Law was apparently no way to handle this
problem. Education, they said, was the way to handle this problem. We will
educate our young in the abuse of alcohol, and that was still not the solution.
Sam May’s life was full of unsolved problems, and as I stand up today and try
to tell you about things he accomplished, it’s a little difficult because his
whole life was spent with the unsolved. It is kind of comforting to know that
somebody like Samuel May never did manage, really, to pull off anything except
maybe the Civil War, but he was always worrying about things that were still
ahead of him and that is kind of the spirit I would like to bring him to today.
He was concerned with sexual
permissiveness, very interestingly. The thing that they were really worried
about in those days, as far as sexual permissiveness was concerned, was dancing.
This bothered him dreadfully. It is easy for us to laugh when we look back and
think how concerned they were with that, and yet it was as much sexual
permissiveness to them as the indeterminate mixes of the sexes in dormitory
rooms are to some parents today. They were very worried about social dancing,
and a prominent clergyman had preached a sermon on the evils of dancing, and
Dr. May went right to his pulpit and preached a sermon on the Christian uses of
entertainment. He was for a certain amount of sexual permissiveness, you see.
To me it is kind of interesting that this was exactly the same sort of
undertaking that we are worried about today. The Religious Recorder, naturally, as soon as Dr. May had given
this sermon, printed a number of letters from irate subscribers, and one of
them talked about the Rev. S. J. May “who sought last week to give us in The Star a sermon professedly on
dancing. The sermon, now being public property, the author cannot claim it
peculiarly his own. It was religious firebrand. May made an unnecessary and
out-of-the-way fling at a portion of the religious community who differed from
him in religious beliefs. His views should be confined to his own pulpit where
an audience is willing to be defiled by it. To spew it out over the community
is unjustifiable, disreputable, and outrageous.”
What Sam had done, was what
he did quite frequently, was be a very clever
publicist. He quite frequently took his sermon down and gave it to the papers
and they printed it, which upset the Presbyterians dreadfully. You can see, in
this way, what kind of thing was upsetting the particular people at the time.
Sam was apparently defending dancing, he was even defending the valse (note: In the 19th Century, the waltz was
often referred to as a valse), which was pretty far
out at that time. Sam was apparently defending dancing,
he was even defending the valse, which was pretty far
out at that time. There is another gorgeous thing in The Religious Recorder about a woman standing up, partially
clothed, with a partner who was allowed to put his arm around her waist and to
be about to dance, which was apparently a very disgusting kind of thing for the Presbyterians to
contemplate. This was the way they regarded dancing, so you can see that Sam
was taking a stand on behalf of social dancing, which was really a very
revolutionary kind of thing to do.
May also on occasions
attended meetings of the Female Moral Reform Society. I haven’t found any
accounts that he was particularly active in that Society, but it is interesting
to ascertain which half of the populace in the 19th Century he
thought was in need of reform.
A more serious kind of
undertaking, in light of our views, is the concern that Sam had about war. Now,
in 1846, as you well know, our country was engaged in a foreign war, an
invasion of an underdeveloped nation, an extension of American imperialism. We
were sending our boys to be slaughtered for a purpose which many people did not
approve of and, Sam, as many other people, took out ads in the local papers
protesting the Mexican War, and organized meetings opposing the Mexican war,
and, indeed, was denounced by the major papers in the community as a traitor
and a man of treason because he would refuse to support U.S. arms in such an
adventure.
The Religious Recorder was, for once, on his side. The Recorder also was opposed to the war. A great many upstate
people of religious affiliation were extremely opposed to it but they were a
whole block of people.
Most of the people who ran the village felt this was a justifiable, patriotic
undertaking, and that we should punish the Mexicans for their supposed invasion
of our territory. And you find in this village, too, very strong conflicting
groups over the issue of the Mexican War. Sam finally organized a peace
meeting, an out-and-out protest, which so enraged the pro-war people that they
came into the meeting – they broke it up – when you broke up a meeting in those
days you did it seriously. You came in with brick bats, with stones, rocks,
with rotten eggs, rotten vegetables, and you broke up the meeting, and that is
exactly what pro-war people did to Sam’s meeting.
So, Sam, being a man of
non-violent principles, called off the meeting and they met someplace else and
passed their anti-war resolution. It was, according to the best evidence that I
can find, the first anti-war meeting that was held anywhere in the country. And
Sam organized it. He was a progenitor of anti-war protest in 1846, and we feel
with him in this regard. He condemned the war from the pulpit in 1846, and some
of his critics accused him of introducing politics into the sacred desk. Sam
dismissed this complaint. “In denouncing every violation of my brothers’ rights
in politics,” he said, “then woe to every minister who
stands before his people and does not preach politics,” said Sam, at his most
graphic.
He was worried about the
increase in problems of urbanization. It is funny to think of a village of
8,000 worrying about urbanization. The things that were happening in
You have to realize that this
village was dominated by the Calvinists. The first Presbyterian Church stood
astride of this village, Presbyterian principles ruled
the village, all the leading people, almost, were Presbyterian. It was a
stifling place in many ways for the ancestors and the progenitors of the people
in this congregation. You probably know that Unitarians in 1838, 1839, and 1845
when Sam came, didn’t have any social life, except with other Unitarians. The
Calvinists simply refused to associate with them, and so the lovely Unitarian
social evenings began, which turned out to be such a crown for this particular
church.
When Sam got here no other
clergyman would call on him. He would call on other clergymen. Other clergymen loved
him – oh yes, they loved him – but it wasn’t appropriate to call on a
Unitarian, you see. It simply was not done. So, you had a village full of
schisms and you had a village that was strongly split on sectarian principles,
and it was a village in which all the Calvinists were at each other’s throats,
too, comfortingly enough.
The Presbyterians had split
over slavery and Congregational Church was formed. The Wesleyans had split over
slavery. The only thing that the Calvinists could agree on was being opposed to
Catholicism and Unitarianism. So, interestingly enough, the Unitarians and the
Catholics formed an interesting and close bond with each other, as I should
think they would, being beyond the pale, and one of Father O’Hare’s
parishioners – Father O’Hare was the Catholic clergyman here in the middle part
of the century and he and Dr. May got to be quite friendly with each other. One
of Father O’Hare’s parishioners complained of this. He said, “What’s going to
happen when Dr. May tries to get into heaven?” And Father O’Hare said,
“There’ll be a back door for Dr. May.”
But that was not really the
flavor of fear of Catholics which was in this community. They were scared to
death of the Catholics. They were papish, in the
first place, but even worse, they were poor.
They were bringing in all kinds of social problems we couldn’t solve.
Good old wasps had always managed their own problems in their own homes. If you
had somebody who was sick you took care of him in your spare bedroom. You did
not have anybody who broke the law, heaven help you. You certainly did not have
a delinquent son, and you certainly did not have a daughter who got herself
into and kind of “trouble.”
Well, the poor were coming in
and they were having these problems, and there was no way for this community manage them. Can you imagine a community with
no institutions for this kind of thing? This is the way we were in 1845. The
problems were coming in, and where were we?
And Sam was there in the
middle of all these problems trying to solve them. He helped set up a house of
refuge for the canal boys, helped with the hospital, he helped with the
reformatory. He saw people as people. He did not see them as poor; he didn’t
see them as Catholic; he didn’t see them as Black; he saw them as other
individuals. And, to me, it was the most remarkable thing about the man that he
could do this. He would look straight in someone’s eyes, and he would see him
as another person. He would not see all these other things which apparently
bothered our up-tight, wasp friends in the City of
His major work was, of
course, in abolition. You all know about the things he has done – I’m still
talking about him in the present tense – had done in abolition and civil
rights. You may not be aware of the fact that he got so concerned about the
Onondaga Indians, who were at this point a very sad remnant of a once proud
tribe and they were living south of the village, and nobody would pay any
attention to them. They would drag through the village at night drunk, and that
would be about all anyone would see of the Onondagas.
Sam had a glorious ability to
think and talk in the terms that people understood. He’d go out and he’d help
them. He finance the well for the village. He got five
year’s appropriation for their school from the state legislature. He sort of
acted like an unpaid Indian Agent. The nicest thing that I ever heard about him
was that one time he went off to talk to the Indians on the dedication of their
new school, and he said to them, “the coming of a school to the Onondaga Nation
is like the coming of spring, and the nation will put out leaves that will
blossom into the summer of full knowledge and full education,” speaking in what
I think he thought was Indian terminology that could be understood. And this
only comes in sharper contrast to what the next man said who was, I think, and
Episcopalian clergyman. He got up and said, “I think it is a great idea to have
a school, because now the Onondagas would not be dirty and disreputable like
they had been, but they would be more like Oneidas down the way.” You can
imagine how successful that was in comparison to Dr. May’s very moving ability
to put himself in somebody else’s place.
He also was very interested
in the sub-culture’s rejection of establishment values, if you want to use a
little modern jargon. He was great on commune movement. You know, we had a very
lively jumping commune at the edge of
And, so we can see that as an
anti-establishment man he took every possible opportunity to express himself.
Well, you could go on forever: Women’s rights, brutality in prisons – he was
very concerned with this – if there was a cause, May was there speaking,
writing, and talking, buttonholing people and writing letters to the
newspapers, and developing new kinds of audio-visual devices for the schools.
He was in every possible way promoting the idea that he was the next man’s
brother. He was just as concerned about his brothers as he was about himself.
His solution was what ours
usually is – education; he felt that war, poverty, intemperance, and everything
else would disappear, if we were only educated properly. The major continuing
concern of his life was to bring up the young in ways that it would enable them
to be happier and their brothers to be happier than the previous generation had
been. In 1848, you will be interested to know, he wrote the statement of
principles on which the Syracuse School System was founded. It was the first
school system in the state which was integrated, and it was one of the earliest
school systems in the state, thanks to Dr. May, in which corporal punishment,
that terrible infliction of cruelty on children, with whips and all kinds of
things, was abolished. We had an extremely liberal school system here because
Sam had set out to make it that way.
So, we see him as kind of a
culture bearer from the east, the glorious Brahmin coming here to an upstate,
almost frontier, village ready to receive him with an ardent active little
group of people who were eager to help him forward his ideas, and we see this
beautiful interaction at a time when action, when ferment, when declaring one’s
principles was a very important thing. You see out of this interaction the kind
of church that is here today.
It is very interesting to me
to stand here to see this beautiful building and those of you who are here, and
to see what has happened as a result of labors after these many years. When he
first came, he warned the Unitarians about the kind of person he was. He
preached sermons on some of his most agitating subjects and they called him
anyway, and he wrote in handwriting which is preserved, fortunately, in the
minutes of your church, and which is still there. You can go and look at it,
written in 1845: “I turn my eyes toward your little Society as one of the
service of which I believe I could spend my life still more agreeably to
myself, to more purpose, in the cause of rational, liberal Christianity of
suffering humanity.”
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