What was washington gladden known for

To improve the community, Gladden won election to the Columbus City Council. He served from to While he had hoped to instill moral values in government officials as well as local residents, Gladden was consumed with more mundane issues. He helped secure reduced streetcar fares. He also helped Columbus assume control over a local electric plant. He, however, was unable to enact temperance laws, to enforce Sunday blue laws, and to assist laborers in obtaining better working conditions.

Gladden chose not to run for reelection after his term in office. Gladden remained active in public life following his time as a councilman. He encouraged his parishioners to become active in their community and to put pressure on politicians to follow the will of the people instead of just the desires of wealthy industrialists.

He urged that the church minister to the needs of working people, the poor, and those hurt by the impersonality of urban life. Thus he was an early exponent of what was eventually called the Social Gospel. He urged support for labor unions to protect the working man, identified with the settlement house movement, and entered into politics in Columbus, Ohio, to represent those seeking reform of municipal government.

Rockefeller, Jr. He denounced the gift as "tainted money," an attack similar to those being leveled by secular "muckraking" journalists at big business and the great captains of industry. Although not an originator of new ideas and trends, Gladden nevertheless pioneered in the theological views he adopted and in the social causes he espoused. Gladden became a national speaker fighting corporate trusts, government corruption, and racial prejudice.

As the Moderator of the American Missionary Association, he endorsed the development of higher education and voting rights for African-Americans. Gladden supported the Tuskagee industrial education philosophy advocated by Booker T. Washington saw the need for schools to create employable skills and did not focus on politics and voter rights.

In time, other Black leaders began to criticize this approach. By , Gladden adopted the views of W. Du Bois chastising the disenfranchisement of blacks in the south and calling for equal rights in every facet of life.

Gladden saw all people as the children of God and as God loves us equally so should we love each other as one universal family. As a result, the Columbus board of education voted to integrate schools some 74 years prior to Brown v.

Board of Education. Yet he admonished the racial prejudice of northern trade unions that often excluded blacks from membership. Washington Gladden is best remembered by historians as one of the founding fathers of the Social Gospel Movement which has been described as the most distinctive American contribution to world Christianity.

This Christian Reform Movement arose as a response to the unprecedented and profound social problems that rapidly multiplied in Americas' fast growing, newly industrialized cities during the last decades of the 19th century.