‘Keep me a hundred years, and you shall find a use for me.” In 1885 William H. Whitsitt penned this line on the inside front cover of his secret diary. The diarist painstakingly and neatly recorded his activities and his impressions of others and the diary eventually filled 16 volumes. He kept repeating the injunction: “Keep me ….”
Fred Anderson
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As shared in my last column, Whitsitt was a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary when he began his diary; and in 1895 he became president. There quickly developed a controversy over his published findings on the origins of Baptists. The controversy was fanned by the Baptist press and by the fundamentalists of his day. It became so all consuming that it acquired a life of its own including a name, the Whitsitt Controversy. It eventually led to his resignation.
James H. Slatton’s engaging biography of Whitsitt has just been published by Mercer Press. Slatton had exclusive rights to peek inside the sealed diary. Slatton wrote: “[Whitsitt] was inspired [to keep a diary] by the examples of the British novelists Anthony Trollope and George Eliot and by the desire to keep track of his progress in writing the book he was working on. The diary served as a log of his financial activities and other significant events. It reflected his candid — and often uncomplimentary — opinions about his fellow professors — surely one of the reasons he wanted it kept from public scrutiny until long after his death — and theirs.”
Following Whitsitt’s death in 1911, the first keeper of the diary must have been Florence, who survived her husband and died in 1923. Their daughter, Mary Whitsitt Whitehead, was the faithful guardian of her father’s legacy, including the diary. She had literary gifts and ambitions of her own and she used much of her father’s letters and papers to write the story of her parents. From family memories, it seems she received enough rejection letters from publishers to wallpaper a room.
Several persons in the Southern Seminary community courted Mary Whitehead for access to her father’s materials. Over 50 years ago, she answered the request of the seminary’s librarian with the following: “If you remember, Dr. [W.O.] Carver quoted my father as having said, ‘I would rather have ten lines written on the spot than a cart-load of reminiscences.’ The diaries are history ‘written on the spot.’ ” She added: “My father was so mild and benevolent looking, with a manner so characterized by shy courtesy and consideration that, meeting him, you would have concluded he was not observant. Actually, little escaped him, and nothing was outside his field of interest. In the diaries, he wrote with frankness of his day and time as it passed within the compass of his vision, and in the front of several volumes he set down: ‘Keep me ….’ ”
Mary Whitehead possessed a strict interpretation of her father’s statement. “Keep me for a hundred years.” She observed, “Few men, I suppose, have left more complete records of themselves; but up to now there has apparently been small interest in them.” The librarian had been interested in Whitsitt’s study of Mormonism and she gleaned pertinent information from the diary and typed excerpts. But the diary itself was off limits.
“Prof” Inman Johnson tried to gain access for the seminary’s centennial in 1958. He wrote: “There is so little factual data concerning the controversy of that day that I am trying to put down a story of the controversy which we have underway here now. The things for which Dr. Whitsitt stood of course have been proven correct by this time.”
Again, Mary selected some references about seminary life in hopes of satisfying the inquirer’s thirst; but she revealed that the controversy remained too painful for discussion. “After it was over, it was rarely mentioned, certainly not in our home in the hearing of us children. His entries in his diary during his presidency are few. He was too busy and too burdened.” She described her father’s “mellowness of spirit” as he “endured the storm that swirled about him” and added: “For me, the controversy has always been out of bounds. Such distilled bitterness would be too painful, even after all these years.”
Scholars kept trying to use the diary. One wrote asking if the restriction was for 50 years or 75 years. The family maintained it was 100 years.
At the half-century mark after Whitsitt’s death, W.O. Carver, the renowned professor of missions at Southern, gave an address entitled “Seminary’s Martyr.” In his conclusion, Carver stated: “The basic and comprehensive achievement coming out of this trouble was a new and continuing recognition of the right and responsibility of Baptists for free search and research in the realm of knowledge and for the right and obligation to assert the truth without penalty of charge of disloyalty or the loss of position and standing in the fellowship of their brethren.
“That Whitsitt had actually won his contention and that his victory was secure was attested by the fact that his successor in the teaching of church history the very next session taught exactly what Whitsitt was supposed to be expelled for teaching, and without compromise or interference. Further, no teacher of history in any Baptist seminary outstanding has taught otherwise. A few days after Whitsitt was out a group of his opponents was rejoicing that ‘we got rid of Whitsitt.’ Standing among them was the venerable W.E. Powers, long the nestor and leader in the Long Run Association, who spoke up and said: ‘Yes, you got rid of Whitsitt. But you didn’t get rid of Whitsittism.’ Whitsittism became thenceforward the authoritative word in American Baptist history.”
In 1986 Etta Whitehead Nachman — Mary’s daughter and William’s granddaughter and herself a former librarian — finally surrendered guardianship over the diary. She and her children gave the diary to the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, which Whitsitt himself served as president. They kept one proviso: that James H. Slatton had first dibs. With the publication of the biography, now the great-grandchildren feel that the desires of Whitsitt have been fulfilled. The diary was (and will be) safely kept. A hundred years essentially have come and gone. It is time to open them and find if they may be useful.
W.H. Whitsitt: The Man and the Controversy, by J.H. Slatton, can be ordered from the Virginia Baptist Historical Society (804) 289-8434 or online through Religious Herald Resources at www.religiousherald.org in the left-hand column of the home page.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.