Category Archives: Collection-related Publications

John Q. Public

Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

John Q. Public

Many cultures have a name for their “everyman.” In England it is Joe Bloggs or Tommy Atkins. In Poland Jan Kowalski fills the bill. In Puerto Rico you’ll likely bump into Juan Del Pueblo out on the street. In the United States the moniker is John Q. Public. This generic name is used to denote a hypothetical “common man.” This “average joe” represents the randomly selected “man on the street.”

The roots of John Q. Public, according to Hess and Northrop in Drawn & Quartered: the history of American political cartoons, seem to go back to Frederick Opper’s “Mr. Common People” who was the symbol of the average American and appeared in the Arena in 1905. Opper’s character was drawn as a bewildered bald man whose hat was a bit too small and who was subject to the whims of big business’ monopolies and greed. Twenty-five years later as the Great Depression began “John Q. Public” emerged from the pen of Vaughn Shoemaker onto the pages of the Chicago Daily News, where Shoemaker began his career in cartooning in 1922.

Shoemaker’s “everyman” influenced fellow editorial cartoonist Jim Lange’s “Mr. Voter,” a similarly-looking glasses-wearing and mustachioed man clad with a fedora. The Oklahoma State Senate eventually adopted Lange’s character as the state’s official editorial cartoon.

Shoemaker’s editorial cartoons, including those with John Q. Public can be viewed in the Archives & Special Collections.

Kennedy and Nixon

Books, Collection-related Publications, Researcher Publications, Special Collections

The Making of a Catholic PresidentKennedy’s run for the U.S. presidency brought to the fore many concerns about the role of religion in public life. Grave were the concerns of some that Kennedy, as a Catholic, would have divided allegiances and may swear more allegiance to the Pope (viewed as a foreign and religious power) than the Constitution.

Shaun Casey explores this tension in the 1960 Presidential election. Within his work he delves into the role that Evangelicals played in the religious debate. He illuminates how both Kennedy and Nixon used religion to their advantage. Casey’s readers will gain a sense of the anti-Catholic sentiments that were widely resident in American culture, making references to activities by Evangelicals to mobilize and convey the potential dangers in electing a Catholic president.

Casey served as senior adviser for Religious Affairs and Evangelical Coordinator for the Barack Obama presidential campaign. He is also Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary. Casey’s critically acclaimed work utilized resources from the records of the National Association of Evangelicals (SC-113).

Muggeridge and Eliot: literary converts

Books, Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

Literary ConvertsJoseph Pearce, in his Literary Converts, presents biographical explorations into the spiritual lives of some of the greatest writers in the English language and includes Malcolm Muggeridge and T.S. Eliot among his subjects. This book touches on some of the most important questions of the 20th century.

Malcolm Muggeridge seemed to have a ambivilent relationship with T.S. Eliot. Ian Hunter, in his biography Muggeridge: a life, indicates that Muggeridge had sent Eliot some of his short stories that Eliot praised. However, Muggeridge is also noted elsewhere that Eliot was a “death rattle in the throat of a dying civilization.” Muggeridge had been introduced to Eliot’s work while teaching in Cairo.

In The Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick, Muggeridge wrote that during “the thirties and the war years, I occasionally ran into Eliot at the Garrick Club; he was extremely amiable and polite, but, as it seemed to me, a man who was somehow blighted, dead, extinct. I wrote of him once that he was a death-rattle in the throat of a dying civilisation, for which a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement took me severely to task. Yet that was how I saw him–actually, several cadavers fitting into one another like Russian dolls. A New England one, an Old England one, a Western Values one. And so on.”

Muggeridge first heard of Eliot, particularly his Wasteland, while teaching in Egypt and attending a lecture by his department chair, Bonamy Dobree. In this lecture Dobree stated that “he would stake his literary reputation that the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ would be considered as being on a par with that of the Lyrical Ballads [by Wordsworth]. This was a statement that Muggeridge wished to refute on the spot, believing that it was unkind to let such a dramatic challenge pass unnoticed.

Patrick Walsh, in his reminicenses of Muggeridge in Modern Age, recounted a visit in 1988 where he noted that Muggeridge and Eliot had a similar spiritual journey through the wasteland of the twentieth-century and had “found peace at the ‘intersection of the timeless with time.'” He read to Muggeridge from Eliot’s Thoughts After Lambeth, which [Muggeridge] was much taken with:

“The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization and save the world from suicide.”

Walsh noted that both Muggeridge and Eliot were twentieth-century pilgrims–both re-learning Christianity for themselves. They found they could not rescue their age, but could rescue their own souls through time for eternity. “They both came to love the beauty of the world and to look beyond it for consolation.”

Millions Served…

Books, Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

George MacDonaldGeorge MacDonald (1824-1905) was one of the most prolific and original of the Victorian novelists, composing a stunning array of novels, poetry and fairy tales, all laced with his singular Christian mysticism. C.S. Lewis regarded MacDonald as his “master,” declaring, “I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.” G.K. Chesterton cites MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin as a work that had “made a difference in my whole existence.” With Lewis, Chesterton and four other British authors, MacDonald’s life and work is featured in the Wade Center on the campus of Wheaton College. But he also figures in the spiritual development of three authors whose papers are collected in Special Collections, a separate archive from the Wade but also located at Wheaton.

As a lonely child in New York City, novelist Madeleine L’Engle (SC-03) discovered the novels of MacDonald. She read them first for the story, then for the theology, responding with heartfelt sympathy to his emphasis on God’s love. In an essay titled “Nourishment for a Private World,” she declares, “Meeting George MacDonald’s writing when I was very young was a blessing to my understanding of God and creation and our own small but potentially beautiful place in it.”Oswald Chambers

Another keen admirer of the mystic Scot was Oswald Chambers (SC-122), who copied into his diary extensive passages from MacDonald’s books, not distinguishing George’s words from his own. After Chambers’s death, his widow, Biddy, prepared the notes for publication, not realizing that much of the material, so provocative and eloquent, may not have been original to Oswald.

MacDonald’s touch is also seen in a rather unexpected corner of the literary world. Visiting the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Illinois, you will see a display featuring a MacDonald poem called “Baby.” The poem meant much to the Hemingway family, and its pious sentiments surrounded the dedication of baby Ernest to a long, productive Christian life – which, sadly, did not occur. Ernest’s father, Anson (SC-209), attended Wheaton College, and was a friend of Jonathan Blanchard.

WHERE did you come from baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here.
Where did you get those eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.

What makes the light in them sparkle and spin?
Some of the starry spikes left in.
Where did you get that little tear?
I found it waiting when I got here.

What makes your forehead so smooth and high?
A soft hand stroked it as I went by.
What makes your cheek like a warm white rose?
I saw something better than any one knows.

Whence that three-cornered smile of bliss?
Three angels gave me at once a kiss.
Where did you get this pearly ear?
God spoke, and it came out to hear.

Where did you get those arms and hands?
Love made itself into bonds and bands.
Feet, whence did you come, you darling things?
From the same box as the cherub’s wings.

How did they all just come to be you?
God thought about me, and so I grew.
But how did you come to us, you dear?
God thought about you, and so I am here.

Without doubt, through direct and indirect influence, MacDonald’s writings have influenced millions hungry for a taste of God’s tender mercies.

The Chrysostom Society

Books, Collection-related Publications, Researcher Publications, Special Collections

Artists often create in solitude, so it is not uncommon for these lonely souls to seek the company of other creative minds for encouragement, comfort and inspiration. For instance, author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, portraitist Joshua Reynolds, historian Edward Gibbon, novelist Oliver Goldsmith and other 18th Century literary elite comprised “The Club,” assembling regularly for spirits and spirited conversation in London salons. Similarly in the 1930s, the “Inklings” of Oxford, England, gathered in a cozy pub where, amid swirling pipe smoke and raucous laughter, scholars such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams read their as-yet unpublished works, welcoming constructive scrutiny.

John ChrysostomThe tradition, now evangelically flavored, continues with “The Chrysostom Society,” named after the “golden-mouthed” third-century Church Father, reflecting his respect for words rightly used. Initially conceived as a Christian artists’ guild, the small collection of writers soon shifted emphasis, providing a wider arena for imaginative expression, expanding as it attracted interest. As Bible translator Eugene Peterson explains, “They felt it was really important to just get together, write together, and believe in each other as practitioners of a craft to the glory of God.”

Meeting informally at a rural retreat for four days annually, membership, though varying, caps at twenty. Organized in its early stages by Richard Foster, the Chrysostom Society’s roster includes Larry Woiwode, Calvin Miller, Eugene Peterson, Robert Siegel, Madeleine L’Engle, Stephen Lawhead, Harold Fickett, Diane Glancy, Jeanne Murray Walker, Phil Keaggy, Karen Mains and Gregory Wolfe. In addition to enjoying the refreshing pleasures of personal camaraderie, the Society occasionally collaborates on a manuscript. Their first work, Carnage at Christhaven (1989), is a comedic mystery based on a unique concept devised by the Detection Club of London, a coterie of crime novelists such as G.K. Chesteron, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and others. For the Club’s corporate novel, The Floating Admiral (1931), participants each contributed a chapter, round-robin style.

Reality and the VisionUsing this method for other publications, the Society then produced Once Upon a Christmas, a slim volume graced with colorful illustrations, assembling thoughtful seasonal memories interspersed with poems by Luci Shaw. In Reality and the Vision (1990), edited by Philip Yancey, the Society reflects on writers who influenced their own visions of the human condition: Walter Wangerin on Hans Christian Anderson; Larry Woiwode on Leo Tolstoy; John Leax on Thomas Merton, etc. The Swifty Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle (1998), edited by Luci Shaw, collects essays from members and other friends celebrating the 80th birthday of the beloved novelist. Among the Chrysostom Society, Wheaton College Special Collections possesses the papers of Luci Shaw, Madeleine L’Engle, Calvin Miller, Karen and David Mains and Robert Siegel.

Life in Bear Lake

Alumni, Books, Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

One of the richest components of the Special Collections are the 95 hours of oral history interviews with Kenneth and Margaret Landon, conducted over 13 years by their son, Kip (Kenneth). Abstracted, The Landon Chronicles, provide rich detail and insight into the lives of these two amazing individuals. It tells of the fun times and the hard.

One such story was Margaret Mortensen Landon’s time as a teacher in Bear Lake, Michigan.

Margaret Landon, 1925Adelle, Margaret’s mother, drove her up to Bear Lake, Michigan, which was good bit farther north than Stoney Lake. It was hard for Margaret to go. She stayed with a couple, Mr. and Mrs. William Richmond, whom she found very kind people–he was a rural deliveryman. Margaret’s salary as a teacher was $150 a month, which was good. She had a bedroom, and had her meals with the Richmonds. Though her accommodations were nice the house had no inside bathroom–the Richmonds were in the process of building one. Her first letter home from Bear Lake talked of her rearranging her room, but all fall she wrote about them working on that bathroom. The only toilet was outside attached to the old barn, requiring Margaret had to have a slop pail in her room to use as a toilet at nights.The outhouse was fifty feet from the house, and on a cold, snowy night in winter, it was no pleasure!

No toilet paper was provided at the Richmond’s, instead, there was just an old Sears catalog. Everybody was expected to get along with pages they ripped out of it. Margaret relates in the Chronicles, “I wasn’t used to that, you see.” So, Margaret bought paper napkins, she tells us, to use instead of toilet paper. How she longed for the completion of that new bathroom! The inside part was completed that fall, but they didn’t have a septic tank and so couldn’t connect it.

In addition to this indignity, the only way she had of taking a bath was a sponge bath. Oh how this refined young lady from Evanston must have longed for home.

Margaret’s teaching schedule included English 3; Latin 1; Assembly; Caesar; English 4 and American literature; English 1; English 2. A heavy load. In addition to this, she was expected to coach the debating team and coach the basketball team.

Just a small glimpse into the early career of this noted author with the Landon Chronicles containing so much more.

Three Flats

Books, Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

Malcolm MuggeridgeMalcolm Muggeridge’s first play was Expense of Spirit, which according to Muggeridge biographer, Ian Hunter, was “a rather tepid play.” The play was a veiled retelling of his father’s successful 1929 election as a Labour M.P. (member of Parliament). Hunter called it “a rather cruel caricature” of H. T. Muggeridge.

Muggeridge’s second play, Three Flats, was one that actually saw the stage and received some attention.

Three Flats, on the other hand, is a curious play that allows the audience to look into the lives of the occupants of three high-rise flats. On the bottom floor live two single schoolteachers quietly desperate to get married; one sublimates her yearning into her work and is miserable; the other yields to it in promiscuity and is content. Then a middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Mason, whose marriage of twenty years has become a worn husk in which the seed has shriveled; finally, on the top floor, Maeve Scott, a naive young woman of what, at one time, would have been called “liberated” views, unmarried and living with a “struggling, unsuccessful litterateur” named Dennis Rhys who, undoubtedly speaking for Muggeridge, wonders to himself: “Why does one write?–a silly trade. Why isn’t it enough to live; to feel things–why must one always be grinding them out in words? And yet it seems the only thing to do.”
What is the unity, the play asks, in these three lives? What is it that makes such people, and countless others like them living in flats everywhere, carry on from day to day? Muggeridge provides insufficient scope to answer such questions and seems content just to raise them. There is a point to it all, he seems to be saying, but not yet sure what it is.

The play was first performed at the Prince of Wales Theatre on February 15, 1931. Its frankness offended his family and some critics. His father came to opening night, but still voiced disapproval of what he considered a preoccupation with sex. Kitty’s aunt, Beatrice Webb, disliked it intensely; she said she was “shocked,” not so much for herself, but for those in the audience whose sensibilities she presumed to be less robust than her own.

Even this early and insignificant play has an odd prophetic quality about it; in one sense it is an examination of the effects of high-rise living, then comparatively rare, on individual morality. The play attracted extensive notices, most of them favorable. One critic said, “There was plenty of truth in the offing, but the bane of the contemporary theatre, Dr. Freud, would keep breaking in.”

The Narnia Code

Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

Norman Stone’s professional affiliation with C.S. Lewis began when he directed the original Shadowlands, a film about the marriage of Lewis to Joy Davidman and her subsequent death. Most may be familiar with the title but remember Anthony Hopkins in the role of Lewis rather than the BBC’s Joss Ackland from 1985. Lewis’ papers and family wardrobe are housed in Wheaton’s Marion E. Wade Center. Stone also produced a docu-drama in 2005 titled C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia, which is viewed to be more accurate than the final production of Shadowlands. After a long association with the creator of Reepicheep, Tumnus and the Pevensie children, Stone returns to Lewis with The Narnia Code. To air on BBC1 April 16th, The Narnia Code details Michael Ward’s cracking of the mysterious thread that holds the various Narnian tales together.

Norman StoneNorman Stone has had an illustrious career with his being awarded a first class honors degree in Visual Communication Leeds College before transferring to London’s Royal College of Art for a Master of Arts degree in Film and Television. He began his professional career in television as the youngest producer/director for the Religious Department of the BBC.

Moving from Everyman documentaries and a pioneering Sunday children’s show into drama, he produced the highly acclaimed film A Different Drummer about the blind and deaf Cornish poet Jack Clemo (1980). Shadowlands helped more firmly establish his career with its international success. The film won two BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards, an International Emmy and the Prague D’Or for Best Director. Other of Stone’s dramas include Martin Luther – Heretic, starring Jonathan Pryce; New World, starring James Fox; The Vision, starring Dirk Bogarde and Lee Remick, and the award-winning Burston Rebellion with Eileen Atkins and Bernard Hill. In 1988-89 he directed a three-part thriller series for BBC Scotland, The Justice Game (first series), and the television feature Pied Piper, starring Peter O’Toole and based on the novel by Nevil Shute (a Granada TV/CBS co-production).

While working on the script of The End Time with Murray Watts, Stone also collaborated with Watts on a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man (BBC 2), starring Jeremy Irons.

Norman StoneStone has won an International Emmy, Gold Awards for Best Film and Best Director at the New York Film and Television Festival, and the Monitor d’Oro for Best Drama at Umbriafiction TV ’92 for the Catherine Cookson television film The Black Velvet Gown, which he directed for World Wide International Television.

Following up on his successful direction of They Do It with Mirrors, BBC’s 1991 “Miss Marple” Christmas special, Stone has also worked on BBC’s final “Miss Marple” adventure, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side.

Other awards include a BAFTA for the Omnibus special on the life of Dudley Moore, After the Laughter, an Andrew Cross Award for best documentary of the year for The Tartan Pimpernel and a Golden Remi for his first feature film Man Dancin’, which he created and directed in his home town of Glasgow. Stone directed Florence Nightengale, a period drama, which aired in the UK in mid-2008.

John L. Smith, donor and missionary, dies at 89

Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

John L. SmithJohn L. Smith passed away Sunday, April 5, 2009 in Marlow, Oklahoma. Known to many as John L., Smith was born Monday, March 15, 1920 to Emmon and Viola Jeannetta (Gayle) Smith. In 1937 he graduated from Marlow High School and enrolled at Oklahoma Baptist University. He later attended Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma and Brigham Young University. He was awarded three honorary doctorates (Doctor of Divinity) and a Doctor of Theology from Southwestern Baptist Seminary.

On November 27, 1940 Smith married Winona Inez Muncrief in Coalgate, in south-central Oklahoma. They were married for nearly fifty-one years and together they bore and raised a son (John, Jr.) and two daughters (Winona and Bonita). Inez passed away on August 27, 1991. Smith married Pearl Gayle on June 4, 1995.

Rev. Smith’s career in ministry spanned nearly seventy years, serving for seventeen years in Utah. He pastored for fifteen years in several churches in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah. While in Utah, he began his study of of Mormonism–something he would engage in for over fifty years, leading Smith to write several books on this subject. In 1953 while in Utah, Smith and his wife, Inez, founded Utah Missions. They later moved the ministry to his hometown of Marlow, Oklahoma. Smith began to donate portions of his papers to Wheaton College in 1990. At the age of 80 he began The Ministry of John L. Smith to continue his missionary efforts.

You’ll never become a cartoonist…

Collection-related Publications, Special Collections

Vaughn ShoemakerVaughn Shoemaker, who died in 1991, was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News and his work is as relevant today as it was when he sketched it. Along with being an acknowledged cartoonist, Shoemaker was a Christian whose work often displayed his convictions.

According to David Enlow in a tract titled Meet a Pulitzer Prize Winner, in 1918 Vaughn Shoemaker enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, with a class that was overcrowded and with many waiting to get in, the instructor, after three months, took to the task of weeding out the least likely to succeed. The first one picked was Shoemaker.

“You’ll never become a cartoonist in a thousand years,” said the director.

Twenty years later he had won his first Pulitzer Prize. Also he won the National Headliners Award, two National Safety top awards, eleven Freedom Foundation gold medals, topping it off with an honorary degree from Wheaton College and his second Pulitzer Prize.

What happened to transform this young man into a distinguished American cartoonist?

In 1917 as a lifeguard on a Chicago beach, he met a beautiful girl who later became Miss Chicago and it was love at first sight. Not only was this girl beautiful, but she was also sensible. It was “no go,” she said, unless Vaugn showed more signs of making some success in life.

With this incentive, Shoemaker found himself attracted by an ad in a magazine: “Draw this cartoon and become a famous cartoonist.” The fact that he had no particular aptitude in that direction did not stop him. Soon he found himself in art school, from whence came the director’s discouraging word.

An apprenticeship in the art department of the Chicago Daily News opened up, and this laid the groundwork for his 44 years of successful cartooning.

At the age of 20, a storybook situation brought the first break of his life. The chief cartoonist for the News left to take a position in New York City. His assistant had gone to take another position in the same city, and the second assistant had to leave because of illness in his family.

“You, Shoemaker!” the boss shouted. “Draw something, anything, until I can get a cartoonist somewhere.”

As he faced his dilemma, Vaughn thought of his mother, who years earlier had taught him to pray at her knee. Right in the chief cartoonist’s studio, he fell to his knees and asked God for help. Somehow, the cartoon came off his pen. He was known at The Chicago Daily News as a “gospel cartoonist.” He once said he started each cartoon “on my knees with a prayer.” He noted that the boys at the newspaper noticed it. Some laughed. “Some kidded me,” Shoemaker said. “I laughed back. There I stood: God helping me, I could do no other.”

In addition to his professional success, Shoemaker travelled far and wide to share the Good News of the Gospel which transformed his life.

John Q. PublicShoemaker created the character John Q. Public and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Shoemaker’s most familiar character represented the beleaguered American taxpayer. The character appeared first in The Chicago Daily News, the paper on which Mr. Shoemaker began his career in 1922. In 1963 Mr. Shoemaker’s cartoons were syndicated to more than 75 newspapers. He worked at the Daily News for 27 years and then moved to the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago American and the American’s successor, Chicago Today, where he retired. By the time he retired, in 1972, he had drawn 14,000 cartoons

The Road BackHe won his first Pulitzer in 1938 for a drawing, “The Road Back,” which showed a World War I soldier marching backwards into war. The caption said, “You’re going the wrong way.” His cartoons were criticised by Herman Goering who described his work as “horrible examples of anti-Nazi propaganda.” In 1947, he won his second Pulitzer, for a cartoon titled, “Still Racing His Shadow.” In this cartoon a worker, marked “new wage demands,” tried to outrun his shadow, “cost of living.”