- Cross’s church in Berkeley
My thinking on this post started off in one direction and then suddenly veered into another direction entirely. As you’ll see.
My original plan was simply to recount a triangular correspondence involving Laurance L. Cross, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Marty Mann that occurred in 1947.
Their letters to one another captured a telling instance of pushback against Mann’s then-fledgling alcoholism-is-a-disease campaign from a disgruntled dry.
Laurance L. Cross was pastor of the Northbrae Community Church in Berkeley, California and, from 1947 to 1955, that city’s mayor as well; he was also apparently a staunch and diehard dry sympathizer and as well (sans any hint of mutatis mutandis) chair of the local unit of Mann’s National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (NCEA).
Harry Emerson Fosdick was a nationally prominent Protestant theologian. His controversial advocacy of a modernist position on biblical interpretation landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1930. Fosdick was also a member of Mann’s organization’s advisory board and as well brother of Raymond Fosdick, chief of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s philanthropic establishment. According to Wikipedia, H.E. Fosdick’s 1939 favorable review of Alcoholics Anonymous (i.e., “The Big Book”) is still regarded in that fraternity as “significant in the development of the AA movement.”