Interview: Henry D. Jonesi Industrial Missioner

Detroit Contact: Rev. Dr. Joseph A. Vance (1864-1961), minister of the First Presbyterian Church,Detroit, arranged for Jones to come to the DodgeCommunity Center in 1932. Photo: PHS, Phila.

the building, so we had the building goingtwenty-four hours a day. One of our taskswas to see that everybody became an Ameri-can citizen. In our community, everybodybecame an American citizen through ourcitizenship classes.

The United Automobile Workers was

started at this time.B There was a questionwhether the building should be used by thelabor union people in our community. Down-town First Presbyterian Church was run bypeople who were General Motors execu-tives. So it was important that we clear thematter of the use of the building with Dr.

Vance. I told him: "These are our people.They corne frorn our community. Can theymeet at our place?" We were given theclearance. If they were the people from ourcommunity, then they should rneet there.

We had an interesting time holding thelabor union meetings at the Dodge House.One of the organizers of the Polish group in

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the automobile workers, Stanley Novak,

became a state senator in Michigan duringthat time. He and I became close friends. Hemarried a girl who had been an active churchmember. But she gave it up because she saidthe church was not interested in the kind ofwork we were doing. We helped bringStanley into the Protestant church move-ment. He became involved in her churchand she became an active member of herchurch again. Through our work at DodgeHouse we had many relationships with thelabor movement.

Organizing the Auto Workers

lR.l.: Did the actual organizing meetingsof the automobile workers take place at

Dodge House?

H.l.: Oh yes! The Plymouth local on thenight sh ift wou Id meet at our place after theygot off at midnight. They'd have their meet-ings from 12:30 to three or four o'clock inthe morning. They met downstairs right un-der our bedroom. Sometimes the meetingswould get noisy.

R.l.: The United Automobile Workers¡UAWJ was just being organized in the rnid-thirties. They were being fought by manage-ment as well as from within by factionaldisputes. Was this the time that struggle wasgoing on?

H.j.: That's right. At that time we had alot of students come to Dodge House. Thestudent summer program, which expandedinto an active program, was started over theopposition of the people in New York. I hadasked them if we could get their support forbringing college students during the sum-mer to the Dodge Community House. Theytold us: "No, you can't have students." Butwe insisted that it was important for collegestudents to know what was going on inDetroit. So the students came and helped uswith surnmer activities for the children onthe playground, in the gym, in handicraftclasses, in story hours.

The young people came to us from allover the country. They matured throughtheir summer experiences. Some of thembecame important in the life of our church.

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Chuck Leber¡ Jr., was one of them. He hadbeen thrown out of Princeton Seminary.14

He came to us. He married an AI ma Collegegirl while he was in Detroit. He came toDetroit convinced of what needed to bedone in the inner cities of America. He wentback to Princeton, became an A student,graduated, and then wentto the "iron-bound¡district of Newark, New Jersey. We hadmany people like Chuck Leber. I can countseven present presbytery executives whowere part of summer groups at the DodgeHouse.

The point is, we were trying to do cre-ative things in training young people toexperience what needed to be done in soci-ety. We had them meet all kinds of people,from left, right, and center. They met withGerald L. K. Smith, and Father Coughlin.15

We had them meet with people who wereleading the country in various directions.The students needed to understand whatthese voices were saying and the directionsthey wanted to lead the country, and thenwhat the church had to say. Those were

some interesting summers-those nine toten summers.

Dodge Community House became asym-

bol for doing the kind of things that neededto be done during depressed times. UnderDr. Shriver's office¡ there were nationalmeetings of neighborhood houses workersfrom across the country. We were active inthe Neighborhood House National Confer-ence. During our time the national confer-ence was held in Detroit. I served as presi-dent of the DetroitSettlement House Workersfor several years and representative on theNational Board of the Federation of Settle-ments.

R.l.: Would you say your connectionswith organized labor began in your work atDodge House?

H.j.: Yes, we were involved in the firstsit-down strike in the automobile industry.Not only the workers, but the young peoplefrom Dodge House. These were the youngpeople from our church and the settlementhouse who were involved. They were ¡'sit-ting in" at the Midland Steel plant. I went to

~Journal of Presbyterian History

Early Trainee: Rev. Charles T. Leber, Jr. (b. 1924)worked with Jones in Detroit in the 1940s,returned to seminary, and became executivedirector of Dodge House in 1953. Photo: PHS.

all ofthe meetings ofthe union which met inthe Slovak HalL. I was at the meetings ofthose who were on the outside of the plant.I heard the reports of the negotiator who wasthe go-between for those on the inside andthose from the company. The negotiatorcame to report to the people on the outsideevery afternoon. '

The negotiator had something of a Scotsbrogue, but more than that, he made veryincisive reports as to where things stood. Iremember him saying: "We have nowreached 95% of the goals which we haveasked. We have not reached them alL. Thecompany is now shipping out some of thework to other places. I recommend that wecall off the strike./I

I admired his approach. I determined

that after the strike was over and after he hada week to catch up on sleep I called him upand said I'd liketo have lunch with him. Wehad lunch at the YMCA cafeteria. We sat

Interview: Henry D. Jonesi Industrial Missioner

down to lunch and I said, /lJohn, you'reScots, you must be Presbyterian./I He said, /iiwas a Presbyterian. I left the church. Thechurch was always with us until we got to acrucial point. Then it backed down becausethe owners were part of the church, in Scot-land and everywhere else. So Ileftthe church.I am a Communist now./I His name was JohnAnderson.16 We kept in touch with John

Anderson through the years. He became achurch member again. He was very much apart of the UAW. People accused the auto-mobile workers of being Communist be-cause John Anderson proclaimed loudly thathe was Communist.

R.P.: This was a crucial period in the lifeof the UAW. The Reuther brothers weretrying to squeeze out a lot of these people.Anderson was one of those. So was R. J.Thomas. I believe he may also have been aCommunistY

H.l.: Yes, and hewas also a Presbyterian.R.P.: R. J. Thomas was too?H.j.: Sure. I was close to him. He always

claimed that I was his pastor.R.P.: You know who else was part of that

group-Jim Wishart, the son of "Prexy"Wishart, the president of the College of

Wooster.18 Remember "Prexy/l Wishart ranagainst William Jennings Bryan in that fa-mous fight for the moderatorship of thePresbyterian Church in 1923.19 It was attheheight of the fundamentalist-modernist con-troversy in the church. His son Jim Wishartwas considered the "black sheep/l in thefamily. I'm not sure how much of a "blacksheep/l he was, considering his father. JimWishart ended up as the research director ofthe Amalgamated Butcher Workmen ofAmerica in Chicago. I invited him to speak ata Conference on the Church and Wage-Earners at McCormick Seminary in the sev-enties.

H.j.: He was research director of theUAW before that.

R.l.: When the R. l. Thomas and theAnderson people were finally squeezed outof the UAW, Jim went to the Farm Imple-ment Workers. You know, perhaps R. J.Thomas met Jim Wishart at Wooster. Tho-

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mas was from Ohio and spent two years atthe College of Wooster.

H.l.: You see then that it was importantthat a Presbyterian guy like myself wou Id bearound. I was a member of the DetroitPresbytery, although I wasn't preaching in achurch. I was invited to many churches topreach and I moderated the session of theFirst Presbyterian Church when Dr. Vancewas away. I was elected moderator of theDetroit Presbytery in 1935.

R.P.: All this time a lot of these folks

organizing the automobile workers were ofPresbyterian background. Did you feel thattheir faith had something to do with theirconcern for working people?

H.j.: Their faith had put them in touchwith the issues. They had a real leaning

toward justice. Butthey didn'tfeel the churchwas with them. That's why it was importantto have someone like myself there at thattime.

When the war ended, the PresbyterianChurch had to consider its work in thePacific area agai n. The foreign mission boardsof the U.S. denominations sent delegationsto meet with church people in China and inJapan. Our mission secretaries asked: "Whatwould you like us to do? What kind ofpeople do you want?/I Those in China werespecific: ':We want this person and thisperson because they understand us and whatwe are doing. But you never send us any-body to reach the industrial workers ofChina./I The Foreign Board secretaries said:/lBut China is an agricultural nation. China

isn't an industrial country./I The Chineserepl ied: "You don't know our situation. Manyindustrial changes are happening. We haverailroads, ships, and factories. We have justtaken over many of the factories which theJapanese built on the east coast. The indus-trial workers in these places are being orga-nized./I

A Call to lirdustrial Mission in China

lR.l.: This was the beginning of thechurch's industrial consciousness in Asia?

H.j.: Yes, the Foreign Board secretarieswere from the Congregationalists, Method-

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ists, Presbyterians, and some Baptists. TheChinese church leadership asked the Meth-odists for industrial missioners but they saidthey had nobody for the work. The Baptistssaid they didn't have anybody available.One of the Presbyterians present, a mannamed Lloyd Ruland,2° responded: "We'lltake the assignment. I think I know someonewho might work in this field. When wewanted missionaries trained for the revolu-tionary changes happening in India, we sentthem to work on the summer staff of this manin Detroit. They got introduced to the revo-lution taking place in our automobile indus-try. I think this man might be willing to leavehis work in Detroit and come."

Lloyd Ruland came back from China.The General Assemblywas meeting in GrandRapids, Michigan. The year was 1947. I hadjust been elected moderator of the DetroitPresbytery so I was supposed to attend theGeneral Assembly. Lloyd Ruland met methere and asked, "Will you go to China?"

R.l.: Your missionary call had been post-poned a long time.

H.j.: I told Ruland I would have to gohome to talk to Maurine. I went back toDetroit. This was May 1947. Maurine wasready. We packed up. We had to sell mosteverything we owned. We left in JUlY on aship out of New York. The trip took thirtydays-first a stop in Cuba, then through thePanama CanaL. We went up to California toget refueled and then across the Pacific.

We landed in Shanghai. We were put inan apartment in a compound of the Presby-terians. Next door was Frank Price, a South-ern Presbyterian, who later became a mod-erator of the church.21 One of my first jobswas to help the loading of a ship by countingthe stevedores as they went by and countingthe pieces as they were loaded. I was ac-countable for moving a whole hospital'sequipment up to Seou i, Korea. The army hadbrought it there to China and had sold it tothe church. .

My next job I was asked to do was fortheNationalist Chinese government. They wereconcerned about the people in the millswhich they had taken over from the Japa-

Journal of Presbyterian History

nese. What were the working conditions?What were the rights of the workers? Theyhad gathered a team of Chinese professors.Somebody had suggested to them that theyadd me to the team. They told them i was alabor expert. So I joined this team of Chineseprofessors, not having a word of Chinese, tosurvey the working conditions in these fac-tories. We visited one factory after another,spending a day in each one. The factorymanagement would do their best to make abig impression on the study commission.

They would set out a large round table witha great feast. I had never used chopsticksbefore, but llearned fast, or else I wouldn'teat. So 1 hel ped write the report of the studycommission.

This was a great introduction to China.The National Christian Council had no workrelated to the industrial worker. They had noway to reach workers. I began to study all thehistory I could, everything I could get hold ofin English. There were people who had aninterest in industrial workers. There was ayoung lawyer in Shanghai who had writtenabout labor law, largely based on Britishlabor law. There were others who had aninterest in other phases of the industrialproblem. The Baptists had set up settlementhouses. I began to draw up a list of all thepeople who might be interested in servingon a committee on industrial work undertheNational Christian CounciL.

I invited them to an organizing meeting.The committee was Chinese, both men andwomen. We met every month to design aprogram to reach out to industrial workers.We created a variety of material, posters,printed material for use with workers, hymnsfor workers, worship helps to celebrate La-bor Sunday. We channeled our work throughthe Methodist Church, the Baptist Church,

the Episcopal Church. In many places itwent into areas controlled by the Commu-nists. The Communists were much closer atthat time.

The chairman of our committee was anEpiscopal layman, a journalist and editor ofthe China Review. The China Review had its

beginning with a journalist who was impris-

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interview: Henry D. Jonesi industrial Missioner 231

Model for imhistrial Missions: Rev. Marshal Scott (í 909-1990), director¡ leads a class for ministers atthe Presbyterian Institute of Industrial Relations in the library of the Labor Temple, New York City,1948. Photo: Presbyterian Life 1 (October 30, 1948): 5.

oned by the Japanese. He died in prison, buth is son came back after the war and took upthe paper again. He had been in the SecretService group of the army and had workedwith Ho Chi Minh.22 He urged the U.S.government to work with Ho Chi Minh. Hesaw him as a revolutionary who wanted tofree the Vietnamese from colonial domina-tion. But, of course, that is not where wecame out.

i married this man and his wife. Recentlythey were on T.V.'s "60 Minutes." They nowlive in San Francisco. He wrote me: "We stillremember so well the wedding ceremony inyour apartment in Shanghai. We still havethe wedding ceremonywe wrote under yourdirection. That means a great deal to us."

What I'm saying is that under the Na-tional Christian Council of China we had agood committee. There was on the staff ofthe council an Englishman who told thehead of the commission: "This fellow Jonesdoesn't have any missionaries on his com-mittee." i was called in and bawled out fornot having missionaries on the committee. Itold the director: "Missionaries are not goingto be around much longer. I can see the

handwriting on the walL. What we need todo is to convince the Chinese churches thatthis is what they should be doing. It is theChinese working people that should be partof this sharing."

We organized all kinds of Chinese work-ers' groups and gave them the informationwhich helped them teach others what theChristian faith meantto them. We organizedgroups in the post offices, in the factories,and in the banks. Wherever there were anyChristian workers we organized groupsaround them.

Miinistry iin a Commullist Chiiia

lR.l.: If this was 1949 then the Commu-nists were soon to take over Shanghai.

H.l.: That's right. The time came whenthey closed the American school and theembassy advised all "nonessential" peopleto return home. I will never forget the word"nonessentiaL." Wives¡ children, and manystaff people had to leave. We decided thatmy function was to continue-to stay withthe church and see that it got turned over tothe Chinese. The Chinese could carryon thiswork we were doing. It was a tough time-

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to see my wife and my children go. It was the

last day of 1949. I stayed until the middle of1951.

I was in China a year and a half more. Itwas an important period in many senses. Inthefirst place, many Chinese friends cametome and said: /JOur home is your home.Anytime you want to come. Our home isopen." Number two: the Russians came andhelped "communize /J the country. In 1950I invited many of my friends to have aCh ristmas tu rkey di n ner with me. There wereamong them factory workers, factory own-ers, textile mill operators. After dinner Iasked them: "What do you think abouttheseRussians? What's been happening at yourplace?" They were bitter. /JWhat does aRussian know about making silk? Have theyever made any silk? Have they done anyweaving? Do they know how to do this finework? They are taking over. They're takingeverything out of our places they can take."There was real bitterness.

The Baptists had a settlement house inthe south end industrial area ofthe city. Oneof the consequences of the Communist vic-tory was that many small Bible schools,which were allover North China, were

closed. The students from the Bible schoolscame down to Shanghai and we took on thetask of getting them jobs in the factories./JMind you/' wetold them, ¡'you're not goinginto these factories to preach. You're goingin to be a Christian, and to live it-not to

preach. We are all going to live together atthe Baptist settlement house. We're going tomeet together for supper and talk about ourexperiences in the factories. What did youlearn? How did you share your faith by yourlife?" You can imagine those sessions. Wehad students in industry, rightthere in Shang-hai, in 1950.

R.P.: Amazing. 1950 was the year Mar-shal Scott, as dean of the Presbyterian Insti-tute of Industrial Relations, was doing thesame thing in Pittsburgh.23 There were eigh-teen of us seminarians, who were membersof that first /JMinisters-in-lndustry" in the

summer of 1950, working in steel.H.l.: In 1950, of course, the Communists

Journal of Presbyterian History

were in charge of the city. If they had knownwhat I was doing, I would have been introuble. But I lived at home and traveledacross the city on the streetcars. I think thisexperience of Bible school students workingin the factories did more in making thechurch live than any single thing. They real-ized that witnessing to the Christian faithwhere you are in these little groups-that'sthe thing that made the church live. That'salso the thing that has come through now(19821. Have you seen the book by K. H.Ting, How to Study the Bible?24 This is theBible being recovered in China. Bible studyis being continued from this early period.This is a New Testament printed in Shanghaiwhich the government has given the paperon which to print. But it's on the old platesof the Bible Society of China. When wereturned in 1979, I met the head of theformer National Christian Council of China.He was the same one who bawled me outforhaving only Chinese on my industrial com-mittee in 1949. He now writes me regularly.He is now under K. H. Ting, the organizer ofthe new Christian Council of China. He's partof the Three-Self Movement which got thePeople's Republic government to allocate pa-per in order to print the New Testament.

Reh.lll to the United States

R.P.: Atthe pointatwhich you left China,did you come right back to the U.S. or didyou stop off in japan?

H.j.: I had an awful time getting permis-sion to leave China. I had to go from Shang-hai up to Peking, then to Tientsin where I gotthe boat. I sailed on the British-China Sea

Line which had guards allover it, because ofpirates. We took the ship to Hong Kongwhere I stayed a few days. I got a telegram inHong Kong from New York saying: "Stop offin japan to survey the situation. Determinewhether we should start industria! work injapan./J I spent ten days traveling up anddown japan before I went to the airport.

I had been booked to speak about whatwas happening in China. I was talking at acenter the U.S. Army had taken over. Thecongregation for U.S. Army personnel was

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