Quaker Hill / A Sociological Study

by Warren H. Wilson

NEW IDEALS OF QUAKERISM: ASSIMILATION OF STRANGERS.

Quaker Hill has always been a community with great powers of assimilation. The losses suffered by emigration have been repaired by the genius of the community for socializing. Whoever comes becomes a loyal learner of the Quaker Hill ways. I think this is a matter of imitation. Personality has here made a solemn effort to perfect itself for a century and a half; and the characters of Richard Osborn, James J. Vanderburgh, Anne Hayes, David Irish and his daughter, Phoebe Irish Wanzer, ripened into possession of at least amazing power of example. I must be sparing of illustration here, where too rich a store is at hand. I will offer only this striking fact, observed by all who know the Hill: the Irish emigrant and his American-born children, of whom there are now as many as remain of the original Quakers, have come to be as good Quakers in character—though still loyal Catholics in dogma—as if they said "thee and thou," and wore drab. They are peaceable, gentle folk, sober and inoffensive; and the transforming influence of Quaker character is seen in certain of them in a marked degree.

The same statement may be made of the pervasive example of the Quaker character upon other areas of population; servants who come from the city, summer guests, artistic people who love the Hill for its beauty and suggestiveness, ministers and other public teachers who come hither.

The area to the southeast, called "Coburn," settled to a degree by those who have worked on the Hill in times past as employees, is touched with the same manner. Its meeting house, erected over sixty years ago, even retains the Quaker way of seating the men and women apart.

The Quaker Hill Conference, now in its ninth year, is another illustration of the charm and reach of the gentle influence of the Quaker Hill ideal upon personal character.

Suggestion also explains much. In such a social whole, manners and customs are fixed. The newcomer is often fresh, ingenuous, and sometimes intrusive. Little by little he becomes socialized. Ways of action are fixed for him, and a range of performance comes to be his. In harmony with this range, suggestion is very fertile; but one learns after a time that there is a limit to its force beyond which individuals will not go. Suggestion, to be effective upon the many, must come from the sources which embody the community's religious and economic ideal.

Ideas, once broached, are usually, if they contemplate action, opposed, at least by inertness; but after a time they reappear as if native to the minds which would have none of them by reasonable approaches. This process is accelerated if the suggestion begins to travel from mind to mind. Some individuals are less slow than others; and the leaders of Quaker Hill thinking have always been able to work by the plan of academic proposal—to avoid rejection—followed by incitement of popular action in particular quarters. Quaker Hill cannot bear to be divided; and that which comes to be successful in one quarter soon comes to be universal. Things can be done by social suggestion which could never be accomplished by appeal or rational discussion.

The word that has formed the social mind of Quaker Hill has been, not "the Spirit," not "the inner light," but "orthodoxy" or "plainness." For this community, it must be remembered, had no great thinkers. It discouraged study, stiffened reason in formulas and dissolved thinking in vision. To its formulas the Hill has been exceedingly devoted. He who upheld them was accepted, and he who rejected them, as well as he who ignored them, was to the early Quaker Hill as if he did not exist.

This shibboleth has indeed always been religious. Even to-day the way of direct access to the common heart is a religious one. Catholic as well as Protestant, Quaker no more and no less than "the world's people," welcome religious approaches, respect confessions, and believe experiences. Nothing can assemble them all which does not originate in religion and clothe itself in religious sanction. History is religious history. Business prosperity is approved when the prosperity has followed religious profession.

I do not mean to say that there are not other symbols than those of religion. Prosperity has spoken its shibboleths as well as orthodoxy. "Business is business" on Quaker Hill. Not "to save money" is an unforgiven sin—and a rare one!