Bouck White - Socialist Activities

Socialist Activities

While at Holy Trinity, White worked on several books. The Book of Daniel Drew (1910) was "A Study in the Psychology of Wall Street. A fascinating story of the mental evasions and feats of ethical juggling of one hopelessly caught in the system." The 1937 movie, "The Toast of New York" starring Cary Grant, Edward Arnold, and Frances Farmer was based on this book and is currently available on DVD. The Call of the Carpenter (1911), which portrayed Jesus of Nazareth as a workingman, agitator, and social revolutionist, went too far and caused his dismissal from Holy Trinity. White formed his own church, "The Church of the Social Revolution," and Eugene V. Debs observed that White was "the only Christian minister" in New York. In The Carpenter and the Rich Man (1914) "Bouck White shows in vivid and absorbing fashion Jesus as the leader of the great proletarian surge of his time. The immorality of being rich when other people are poor, is the keynote of this book, and the author bases it on the message of the Carpenter as found in the parables."

A member of the Socialist Party of America until he was removed because of his religious beliefs, White appeared (May 10, 1914) at a service of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, to which the Rockefeller family belonged, in order to discuss the question, "Did Jesus teach the immorality of being rich?". He was arrested on the charge of disorderly conduct and three days later he was sentenced to six months on Blackwells Island. Because of his success at converting the workhouse prisoners there to Socialism, he was transferred to the more isolated Queens County Jail. Upton Sinclair had a letter published in The New York Times urging White's followers to work for his release, and referred to "Bouck White as 'Jesus,' to the Magistrate who convicted him as 'Pilate,' to the Calvary Baptist Church as 'the temple,'....