The Bishop's Boys (13 page)

The process of separating the two churches was completed by 1900. Partisan bitterness was frozen into place as officials faced one another time and again in the courtrooms. There would be no reconciliation.

It was the busiest decade of Milton Wright’s life. In addition to heading the defense team, he remained the leading churchman of the Old Constitution branch, participating in virtually every phase of the rebuilding process. He traveled incessantly, visiting congregations and organizing new conferences. By 1900, he had achieved his original goal: the Church of the United Brethren in Christ (Old Constitution) was the very image of the organization into which John Morgan had baptized Milton so many years before.

Bishop Wright attacked the problem of preserving his home with the same fierce determination he had brought to the task of rebuilding his church. In his experience, a tightly knit, unified family was the
best defense against the pressures of an essentially wicked world. Dan Wright’s home had been just such a bastion of morality, besieged by the hard-drinking, pro-slavery Southern roughnecks who had dominated Rush and Fayette counties during his youth.

Milton’s own fight against those who sought to corrupt the pure tradition of the United Brethren Church only confirmed the absolute importance of the family. But the various crises surrounding the church schism and the death of his wife had placed all of that in jeopardy at the very moment when Milton felt most need of it. He was not at all certain that he had the strength to carry on his mission alone. Consciously or unconsciously, he set to work binding his three youngest children to him for life.

He began by promoting his daughter to her mother’s role even before Susan’s death. “Be good. Learn all you can about housework,” he wrote in October 1887, when she was thirteen. “Do not worry Mother. Be my nice pet daughter.” As Susan’s illness grew worse, Milton made clear exactly what he would expect of a “nice pet daughter.” “Take especially good care of yourself,” he instructed her in May 1889. “You have a good mind and good heart, and being my only daughter, you are my hope of love and care, if I live to be old.”
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After Susan’s death, Milton frequently reminded his fifteen-year-old daughter that she was now the emotional center of his life. “Home seems lonesome without you,” he wrote on August 9, 1889, while Katharine was visiting family friends just a month after the funeral. “But for you we should feel like we had no home.”
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Nor was it enough to elevate Katharine to the role of woman of the house. Milton did his best to reshape his daughter in his wife’s image. Susan had been a very shy and quiet woman, whereas even as a child Katharine had exhibited what was then generally referred to as spunk. That was fine with Milton—up to a point. He once noted in his diary that “Katharine has been a good girl, for her chance.” Whatever that may be taken to mean, there was no doubt he saw some room for improvement in his daughter.
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“I am especially anxious that you cultivate modest feminine manners,” he counseled her. “And control your temper, for temper is a hard master.” Twenty years later he would complain to Wilbur: “If she had inherited some of her mother’s love of quiet and solitude, she might ‘Flourish like the palm tree,’ for she has a fine constitution.”
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Milton placed many more demands on his daughter than he ever would on his sons. By the time she left for Oberlin Prep in 1893, she
was her father’s unofficial partner—the voice of parental authority in his absence. Milton provided Katharine with a detailed itinerary of his travels, so that she could
immediately
forward all mail. If there were financial matters to be taken care of when he was gone, Katharine was responsible.

Never a man to leave much to chance, Milton was careful to provide his daughter with detailed instructions. “I send … a draft for Lorin,” he wrote in the fall of 1892, “out of which is to be paid the office, the orders I have sent, and the money for the watch.” Katharine was to “take what is left for paint on the house, if the boys paint soon—and what is needed to live on & deposit the rest.” While she was at it, she could also deposit in the church accounts a $15,000 draft that he had received from a New York bank. That was only the beginning.

Seldom satisfied, Milton usually had a complaint or two to lodge with Katharine: “I want you to raise a racket if the boys do not send me the
Conservator
as soon as it is in print—two copies—and not wait for me to get it by the mailers. I have not seen last weeks paper yet! A week after it is in print!”
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There was nothing extraordinary for the period in Milton’s assumption that Katharine would, as she grew older, accept the responsibility of running his household. The dutiful daughter who devoted her life to caring for a widowed father was the epitome of female virtue in the life and literature of the period. Yet it is safe to assume that few widowed fathers were as demanding as Milton Wright. As in the case of his sons, whom he also encouraged to remain at home, Bishop Wright had no intention of restricting Katharine’s intellectual growth. His egalitarian views included an insistence on the right of women to an education and entry into a profession. Katharine had always excelled at school. Graduating from Central High School in 1892, she took the school year 1892–93 off to read and study on her own before enrolling in the rigorous Oberlin Preparatory School in September 1893.

Her two older brothers had failed to complete their studies at
Hartsville, a church school that scarcely qualified as second rate. Katharine graduated from Oberlin (Class of ’98), a great university, and as much a center of the struggle for women’s rights as it had been a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment a generation before. There was never any doubt, however, that Katharine would return to her duties at home following graduation.
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As Milton was enlisting Katharine’s help in the fall of 1889, he could take heart that at least one of his older sons had returned. Depressed, homesick, and stunned by news of his mother’s death, Lorin had ended his self-imposed exile on the Kansas prairies and rejoined the family in Dayton.
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Lorin worked with his father and brothers for a time printing and distributing Old Constitution tracts and pamphlets, but there was little money in that. After marriage to Ivonette Stokes, his childhood sweetheart, on January 12, 1892, he found steadier work as a bookkeeper.

Lorin and Netta, as she was known in the family, had four children over the next decade—Milton, Ivonette, Leontine, and Horace. Life was not easy for the young couple with a growing family. By the time Horace arrived, Lorin was struggling with a string of part-time second jobs, and barely making ends meet.
¹⁴

Wilbur watched his two older brothers with interest and a great deal of sympathy. Reuch and Lorin were talented men with more formal education than most of their contemporaries, yet both of them gave the impression of being constantly overwhelmed by responsibility and circumstance. They suffered from chronic poor health, and seemed to be perpetually on the brink of failure. What had gone wrong for them? It was puzzling, and more than a little frightening, for Wilbur was by no means certain he could do any better under similar circumstances.

He had emerged from the depression following his hockey accident four years earlier a self-assured and confident young man, yet still unable to reach a firm decision as to his own future. Ill health had put a college education and teaching career beyond his grasp. Life in the business world held little interest for him. Wilbur, who knew himself so well, could see no reason why he should succeed where his brothers had failed. It was a frustrating time.

Assessing his situation in the late summer of 1889, Wilbur recognized that he was fortunate in one regard—he was not burdened with the family responsibilities that made life so difficult for Reuch and Lorin. For the moment, he was content to work out his destiny within
the safety of his father’s house. If he would not be forced to explore new challenges, neither would he risk destitution and failure.

Orville had not passed through a psychological crisis of the sort that plagued his brother, but he would face very real problems setting himself up in life. All across America young people were finding it much more difficult to strike out on their own than their parents and grandparents had. Times were hard. The long-wave depression of the 1890s led to a rise in the number of young adults who were forced to remain at home, waiting to inherit a house, farm, or business from their parents. Recent demographic studies have shown that this was especially true in Middle Western urban areas like Detroit. Presumably, Dayton was not much different. Orville was anxious to establish himself as a printer. The only way to do that, for the time being, was to continue living under his father’s roof.

Nothing could have pleased Milton more. As Reuchlin’s experience had demonstrated, the bishop did not relish the idea of his children leaving home under the best of circumstances. He bound Katharine to him because he needed her. He seems to have regarded the boys as his hostages to fate.

The depth of Milton’s desire to insulate and protect his sons from the harsh treatment that the world meted out to honest folk was never more apparent than in the late summer and fall of 1908, when Wilbur was making his first public flights in France. “I wish you could be in the home circle,” Milton wrote that September, at a time when his world-famous son was besieged by admiring throngs. “You are so
alone
, if not lonely.”
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Milton was certain that he knew what Wilbur must be feeling. “I have had some experience in being thousands of miles away from home, away from my family,” he reminded his son. “But I was in my own country and amid my own language. In 1859 I was a full month distant, and mails about six weeks en route. In 1885, 1886, 1887, and 1888, I was about 7 or 10 days away. I do not like to have you so far from us all, with your cares and experiments.”
¹⁶

Surrounded as he was by “those who have a lack of sympathy, and even inward hostility,” Wilbur must be suffering from the “lack of home sympathy.”
¹⁷
Milton cautioned him to mind his health and to be careful while flying, but he was far more concerned about what those “hostile strangers” might do. He warned his son to be especially alert to the danger of sabotage. “Before making a flight,” he suggested, “you should inspect your machine carefully, to be sure that no one has tampered with it.”
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If the French did not kill Wilbur, Milton feared, they would most certainly attempt to rob him. “Astute experimenters,” he advised, “will catch up with you, prevent your profit, and steal your credit, as well as [your] cash, at last.”
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Time and again he reminded Wilbur that the applause of the multitude was not to be trusted. “The ties of blood relationship,” he admonished, “are more enduring and more real.”
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But if Milton sought to protect his children from the harsh reality of the world, it is also clear that he was very much afraid of being abandoned by them. He struggled to mask those feelings. “As long looked for,” he wrote to thirty-nine-year-old Wilbur in August 1908, “you [and Orville] are both far away, probably never to be much at home after this. But I … [will] say little about it.” Still, Wilbur and Orville could scarcely avoid reading between the lines of a letter received in July 1908. “We miss you,” their father remarked, “but while your business goes forward I have to accept the inevitable.”
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Milton would grow more demanding in years to come, creating considerable tension in Katharine’s life after her graduation and return home. She and her brothers accepted this side of their father’s nature without complaint, however. Bishop Wright had faced problems with Reuchlin, but there was never the slightest sign of rebellion among his three youngest children. They revered him, never doubting that he wanted only what he thought best for them. More important, they believed he knew what was best for them.

Nor was there any question who was the head of the household. Wilbur spoke for all of them in a letter written to Milton while the printing establishment suit was being heard by the Ohio Supreme Court in December 1898.

“The Fathers knew what they were doing,” Wilbur concluded. “They had a right to do it; the Court is bound to protect that right.”
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Clearly, Wilbur regarded the church situation as a metaphor for life—“The Fathers knew what they were doing.” Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine were deeply involved in and affected by their father’s problems.
They never doubted the righteousness of his cause or the way in which he attempted to resolve the difficulties he faced. Like Milton, they came to believe in the essential depravity of mankind. The world beyond the front door of their home was filled with men and women who were not to be trusted.

Gradually, they would become as isolated as their father—and as combative. The ten-year fight in the courts for the property rights of the Old Constitution church served to draw them closer together. An honest person was well advised to expect the worst of others, and to rely on the security and support of the family.