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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2018
Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the “marrying parson”—a minister willing to perform on-demand marriages—became a well-known American cultural figure, caricatured and depicted in daily newspapers and popular magazines. To date, however, no scholar has analyzed this cultural phenomenon. This article explains and analyzes the rise of the marrying parson to cultural prominence in the early twentieth century. It discusses, first, the legal and cultural environment that gave marrying parsons a legal product—a state-sanctioned marriage—that they could sell; and second, the Progressive Era fears over changes in sexual behavior that made marrying parsons both prominent and controversial in popular discourse. Because marrying parsons were marked as religious figures, white Protestant leaders and reformers viewed them as traitors from within, traitors who commercialized the legal privileges of their sacred office as they undermined Protestants' attempts to combat divorce, protect the sexual innocence of young women, and limit youthful sexual autonomy. Although marrying parsons are no longer prominent in popular discourse, religiously ordained individuals continue the quick-marriage activities of early twentieth-century “marrying parsons,” thus revealing the limits of attempts by Protestant leaders to police the commercial use of religious privilege.
Special thanks to Andrea Turpin, Joshua Paddison, Leigh Schmidt, Shari Rabin, Barry Hankins, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics for allowing me to present an early version of this essay at their Religion And Sexual Revolutions Conference in 2014.
1 Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, Ideals of Love and Marriage (New York, 1929), 16 Google Scholar.
2 Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, Ideals of Love and Marriage, 5, 21.
3 “Bristol's Marrying Parson,” Roanoke (Virginia) Times, Jan. 11, 1911, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.
4 There are a number of excellent books that cover, at least in part, the transitions occurring in American marriage during the early twentieth century. These include Syrett, Nicholas L., American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Eby, Clare Virginia, Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Davis, Rebecca L., More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Celello, Kristin, Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Simmons, Christina, Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Pascoe, Peggy, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Howard, Vicki, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Coontz, Stephanie, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005)Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Hartog, Hendrik, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA:: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For a brief mention of “marrying parsons,” see Syrett, American Child Bride, 179.
5 On the way that this “Protestant moral establishment” operated, see Sehat, David, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. The best historical volume on the Protestant establishment is Hutchison, William R., ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
6 I thank Laura Shaw Frank for sharing her unpublished paper, “‘Is a Jewish Priest a Minister of the Gospel?’: Rabbis as Marriage Officiants in Postbellum America.” On the way that Jewish religious leaders used their ritual authority as a way to earn wages, see Rabin, Shari, “Working Jews: Hazanim and the Labor of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 25 (Summer 2015): 178–217 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Monger, George P., Marriage Customs of the World: From Henna to Honeymoons (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC/CLIO, 2004), 128–29Google Scholar, 142–43.
8 Sullivan (Indiana) Democrat, Dec. 15, 1864, www.newspaperarchive.com.
9 For examples of this second group, see “He Holds The Record As Chicago's Marrying Parson,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 27, 1898.
10 For this point I am drawing on Cott, Public Vows, 2–3.
11 Grossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 76 Google Scholar.
12 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Marriage and Divorce 1867–1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 200–207 Google Scholar.
13 See U. S. Bureau of the Census, Marriage and Divorce 1867–1906, 208, 223, 260. Those provisions were still in effect in 1928. See Richmond, Mary E. and Hall, Fred S., Marriage and the State (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1929), 18 Google Scholar. Although religious officials were preferred as marriage officiants, secular officials increased in popularity over the first few decades of the twentieth century. In Muncie, Indiana, weddings performed by a religious official declined from 85 percent of all weddings in 1890 to 63 percent in 1923. See Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen M., Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1929), 112 Google Scholar.
14 Hartog, Man and Wife in America, 12–14.
15 Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 69–83; Syrett, American Child Bride, 77–97.
16 Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 83–102.
17 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Marriage and Divorce 1867–1906, 251; Richmond and Hall, Marriage and the State, 41.
18 Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 92–95.
19 Talmage, T. DeWitt, The Wedding Ring: A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those Contemplating Matrimony (New York: Bible House, 1886), 42–59 Google Scholar.
20 Reports, Year Ending December 31st, 1886 (Montpelier, VT: National Divorce Reform League, 1887), 8 Google Scholar; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 94.
21 There were implicitly negative mentions of “marrying parsons” in the 1890s. See, for example, “His Bride Taken From Him,” Sun (New York), December 16, 1892, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
22 “Chicago Couples Wed In Milwaukee,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 26, 1895. The article was picked up by other newspapers. See, for example, the St. Paul Daily Globe, Aug. 27, 1895, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
23 “How He Ties Knots,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 3, 1895.
24 According to a search in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database, Hunsberger was the first minister to be described as a “marrying parson” by the New York Times.
25 “Marrying Parson Strikes,” New York Times, June 18, 1897, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (hereafter PQHN).
26 “Marriage Made Easy: An Alleged American Industry in Western Waters,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), Aug. 8, 1898 Google Scholar, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.
27 “Marrying in America,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jan. 14, 1905, Readex America's Historical Newspapers (hereafter RAHN).
28 Coontz, Marriage, 159. On vernacular sexual cultures, see Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Knopf Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Cocks, Catherine, “Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (Apr. 2006): 116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Smythe, Ted Curtis, “The Diffusion of the Urban Daily, 1850–1900,” Journalism History 28 (Summer 2002): 75 Google Scholar.
30 Ullman, Sharon R., Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3 Google Scholar.
31 U. S. Bureau of the Census, Marriage and Divorce, 1867-1906, 13. The increase in divorces was proportionally about the same (roughly 2.5 times greater) when based on number of married people rather than number of people.
32 Center for Disease Control and Prevention/National Vital Statistics System, “National Marriage and Divorce Rate Trends,” http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm (accessed Nov. 23, 2015).
33 “Kissed 1500 Brides,” Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 5, 1904, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
34 D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B., Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 147 Google Scholar; Wood, Sharon, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 8–9 Google Scholar.
35 “The Milwaukee Abomination,” Green Bay Gazette, June 8, 1897, 4, www.newspapers.com.
36 “Find Lake Boat Outings White Slavery's Harvest,” The Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore, OK), Aug. 1, 1909, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.
37 Bailey, Beth L., From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 9 Google Scholar; Fass, Paula, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 57 Google Scholar; Clement, Elizabeth Alice, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 50 Google Scholar; Spurlock, John C., Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States (New York: Routledge, 2015), 12–34 Google Scholar.
38 “Marriage Laws Attacked for Scandalous Laxity,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 31, 1909, www.newspapers.com. The critic in this case was James Martin Miller, a journalist and former diplomat.
39 “The Marrying Parson,” Richmond Times, Oct. 23, 1898, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
40 For more denunciations, see, for example, “Kissed 1500 Brides,” Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 5, 1904, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Marrying in America,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jan. 14, 1905, RAHN; “Indiana Marriage Laws,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jan. 17, 1905, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
41 “Wants Corner on Wedding Business Matrimonial Drummer Gets Good ‘Trade’ for Marrying Minister,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 9, 1912, RAHN.
42 Richmond and Hall, Marriage and the State, 288.
43 “Said on the Side,” Evening World (New York), July 13, 1905, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
44 Omaha Bee, Aug. 4, 1901, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
45 “Beliefs of a Benedict,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), Feb. 9, 1908, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
46 “A Marrying Parson,” New-York Tribune, Oct. 29, 1905, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. At that time Burroughs claimed credit for about 2,600 marriages.
47 “Cupid's Capital,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, May 15, 1910.
48 Phillips, Victor N., Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia: A History, 1852–1900 (Johnson City, TN: The Overmountain Press, 1999), 95, 256–57Google Scholar.
49 The minimum age requirement applied to those who sought to get married without parental consent. With parental consent, people younger than 16 could get married.
50 “Ceremony for Four Thousand Elopers,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 19, 1906, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
51 “Married One Thousand Couples,” Anderson (South Carolina) Intelligencer, May 1, 1901, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
52 “Twenty Ministers Resolve to Stop Marrying Elopers,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jan. 3, 1911, RAHN; “Now His Brethren Are Trying To Put the ‘Marrying Parson’ Out of Business,” New-York Daily Tribune, Feb. 19, 1911, www.newspapers.com.
53 Quote comes from Roanoke (Virginia) Times, which was excerpted in “Bristol's Marrying Parson,” Mathews (Virginia) Journal, Jan. 12, 1911, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
54 “Marrying Parson Wins Another Fight,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 28, 1911, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “He Has Joined 4000 Couples in 23 Years,” Greensboro Daily News, July 21, 1912, www.newspapers.com.
55 “Find Marrying Parson Dead in His Garden,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 6, 1916, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Marrying Parson Buried,” Sun (New York), July 23, 1916, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. For songs about Burroughs, see Wade, Stephen, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (Champaign,: University of Illinois, 2012), 403 Google Scholar n20, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyZTjMPI1-I (accessed Feb. 2015).
56 For background on Savidge, see Putz, Paul, “A Church for the People and a Priest for the Common Man: Charles W. Savidge, Omaha's Eccentric Reformer,” Nebraska History 94 (Summer 2013): 54–73 Google Scholar.
57 “Rev. C.W. Savidge of Omaha Advertises Record,” Norfolk Weekly News Journal, Jan. 24, 1908, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Omaha The Matrimonial Market Town,” Omaha Bee, Oct. 27, 1909, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Wants Corner on Wedding Business Matrimonial Drummer Gets Good ‘Trade’ for Marrying Minister,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, June 9, 1912, RAHN.
58 “Preacher Opens His Matrimonial Bureau,” Omaha World Herald, Jan. 18, 1913, RAHN. On the creation of matchmaking bureaus in the Progressive Era, see Pamela Ilyse Epstein, “Selling Love: The Commercialization of Intimacy in America, 1860s–1900s” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2010).
59 Freeport (Illinois) Journal-Standard, Apr. 12, 1921, www.newspapers.com; Reno Gazette-Journal, Apr. 8, 1921, www.newspapers.com.
60 “Marriage Laws Attacked for Scandalous Laxity.”
61 “Pastors Eugenic Experts?” Omaha Daily Bee, Aug. 4, 1913, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
62 Joseph P. Watkins, “An American Gretna Green,” Weekly World (Mar. 1911): 574–75.
63 “Weds 10,000 Elopers,” Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise, Apr. 2, 1911, RAHN.
64 “One Girl at Head of Home is Worth Forty in a Factory,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, Feb. 5, 1913, http://news.google.com/newspapers.
65 Savidge, Charles W., Have Faith in God (Omaha, NE: Methodist Episcopal Church, 1914), 93 Google Scholar.
66 “Cupid's Aids Are Center of Storm at Rockville, MD,” Washington Times, Jan. 4, 1914, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
67 Savidge's logic was similar to that of home missions workers described in Pascoe's, Peggy Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 146–65Google Scholar.
68 On “moral” reform, around which both conservatives and liberal Protestants could unite, see Foster, Gaines, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar. On approaches among establishment white Protestants to debates about marriage and sexuality in the early twentieth century, see Tobin, Kathleen A., The American Religious Debate Over Birth Control, 1907–1937 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 1–71 Google Scholar; Davis, Rebecca L., “'Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry': The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” Journal of American History 94:4 (Mar. 2008): 1139–40Google Scholar. On Protestant efforts to maintain their cultural authority amidst the changes of the twentieth century, see the essays in Between the Times.
69 “Marriage Facilities in New Jersey,” New-York Tribune, Mar. 1, 1912, 6, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
70 Quote is from “Marrying Parson Will Lose Maryland Pulpit,” Washington Times, Mar. 16, 1920, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. See also “Rockville Parson Opposes Bill to Halt Elopements,” Washington Times, Mar. 14, 1912, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “A Matrimonial Uplift,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, Jan. 24, 1916, www.newspapers.com; “Ministers to Fight Marrying Parsons,” Seattle Star, Feb. 6 1917, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
71 “Mr. True A Friend of the Reporters,” Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI), May 9, 1899, www.newspapers.com; Richmond and Hall, Marriage and the State, 109–10. On the similarities between advance notice laws and an earlier Catholic and Anglican tradition of banns, see Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 93–94.
72 “Get-Wedded-Quick Scheme is Stopped by County Auditor,” Seattle Star, Sept. 20, 1909, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. On other connections between marrying parsons and interracial marriage, see “Marrying Parson Dead,” New York Times, Mar. 13, 1907, PQHN; “Married in Crematorium,” The Washington Herald, July 11, 1909, chroniclingmaerica.loc.gov.
73 Richmond and Hall, Marriage and the State, 190–98.
74 “Elkton Thrives As Gretna Green,” Wilmington (Delaware) Morning News, July 7, 1913, www.newspapers.com..
75 “Successor Decries Wedding Traffic,” Washington Times, Jan. 19, 1913, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Quit Own Churches to See Pastor Who Refuses to Resign,” Washington Times, Jan. 26, 1913, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Critic of Pastor Balks at Ousting,” Washington Times, Jan. 20, 1913, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov; “Hantzmon Goes Away,” Wilmington Morning News, Apr. 10, 1913, www.newspapers.com.
76 “Elkton Thrives As Gretna Green.”
77 Hartogensis, B. H., “Denial of Equal Rights to Religious Minorities and Non-Believers in the United States,” Yale Law Journal 39:5 (Mar. 1930): 673.Google Scholar
78 Howard, Brides, Inc., 213–14.
79 Alexander, Ruth M., The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1 Google Scholar.
80 See, for example, “She Weds On A Dare,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1922, PQHN.
81 “Parson Is Done With Weddings,” Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, Apr. 25, 1920, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
82 George Britt, “Marrying Parson Also Rates as Efficient Fire Fighter,” Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, Feb. 21, 1926, www.newspapers.com; see also Betty Van Benthuysen, “Only One Chance in Ten for Elopers!” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 26, 1922, www.newspapers.com.
83 “Jazz Wedding Rites The Latest,” The Evening Herald (Klamath Falls, OR), July 11, 1921, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
84 Davis, “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry,’” 1141.
85 Quotation from Lumley, Frederick E., “The Preacher's Right to Marry,” Journal of Social Forces 2:5 (Sept. 1924): 705 Google Scholar.
86 Lumley, “The Preacher's Right to Marry,” 703.
87 Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1921 (Philadelphia, 1921), 135–38Google Scholar. See also Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1922, Part I (Philadelphia, 1922), 226–27.
88 “Marrying Parson To Go,” Baltimore Sun, Mar. 16, 1920, www.newspapers.com; “Wants Marriage Laws Changed,” Wilmington Morning News, Jan. 16, 1922, www.newspapers.com.
89 “Want Marrying Pastor Restored,” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, Oct. 10, 1922, www.newspapers.com; “Dr. M'Elmoyle Quits Elkton,” Wilmington Evening Journal, Oct. 6, 1924, www.newspapers.com.
90 Edward Scribner Ames, “A Letter from the Devil,” Christian Century, June 15, 1922, 749.
91 Oliver McKee Jr, “Our Gretna Greens Cover the Country,” New York Times, July 19, 1931, PQHN.
92 Richmond and Hall, Marriage and the State, 88, 96.
93 Spurlock, Youth and Sexuality in the Twentieth-Century United States, 58, 63–64; Howard, Brides, Inc., 215.
94 On the emergence of the wedding industry, see Howard, Brides, Inc.
95 For example, a search in ProQuest's New York Times Historical Newspaper database for the term “marrying parson” reveals that it was used 51 times between 1900 and 1939, but only 3 times after 1940. Similarly, a search in Readex's Omaha-World Herald database shows 121 uses of the phrase between 1906 and 1939, but only 21 in the decades after 1940.
96 Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 93. For an example of support for these advance notice laws from the Protestant establishment, see Alfred W. Swan, “And So Forth,” Christian Century, Apr. 30, 1941, 600.
97 Marrying parsons also continue in popular discourse every winter when the song “Winter Wonderland” is played. The song, written in 1934, includes the line: “In the meadow we can build a snowman / And pretend that he is Parson Brown / He'll say, ‘Are you married?’ / We'll say, ‘No man! / But you can do the job when you're in town.’” The line about Parson Brown reveals the flirtatious and romantic connotations that early twentieth-century marrying parsons sought to promote.
