George Henry Hewes and the Neighborhood Settlement in Los Angeles

Abstract

Sunday, February 6, 1898, a mass meeting was held at the Los Angeles Theater on South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, The theater was crowded to the roof ' for the meeting, which was sponsored by the Union Reform League, a newly formed umbrella organization of the city's reform movements, W.D.P. Bliss, who had founded the Union Reform League in San Francisco the previous year, had been invited to Los Angeles by the People's Club of St. Paul's Episcopal Church to lecture on the subject of Christian Socialism. Several prominent members of the reform and radical movements in Los Angeles, including Bishop Joseph Horsfall Johnson of the Episcopal Diocese, were interested in Christian Socialism, the belief that the goals of Christianity and socialism were identical. To emphasize the ecumenical nature of the Christian Socialist movement, the speakers who shared the platform with Bliss at the meeting included Rabbi Moses Solomon of Congregation B'nai B'rith, Reverend Burt Estes Howard of Westminster Presbyterian Church, the Right Reverend George Montgomery, Roman Catholic Bishop of Monterey-Los Angeles, and the Reverend John Gray, Rector of St. Paul's, the city's most socially prominent Episcopal church. Also on the program was George Henry Hewes, pastor of the Church of the Neighborhood, who was not socially prominent and probably not an ordained minister. Hewes was to speak that day, according to the Los Angeles Heralďs account of the meeting, representing the wage earners and the working class.1