Woodrow Wilson’s last surviving grandchild died earlier this
month, having served for 27 years as the liberal Dean of the
National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Following, or leading, the
trajectory of the Episcopal Church towards left-wing activism,
Francis Sayre Jr. turned the Gothic and still uncompleted edifice
into a rallying point for anti-war activists during the turbulent
1960s and 1970s. In 1973, he hosted a Counter-Inauguration with
Leonard Bernstein to protest the start of Richard Nixon’s second
term.
Born in 1915 in the White House (the last baby born there!), and
dying at his home on Martha’s Vineyard, Sayre represented both
the public spiritedness and faulty judgment of America’s WASP
elite in the 20th century. His father was a Harvard law professor
and Assistant Secretary of State under FDR. His wife was the
daughter of a Connecticut U.S. senator who was also a retired
U.S. Navy admiral. Papa Sayre’s young assistant was Alger Hiss,
whose theft of classified documents from Sayre’s office on behalf
of the Communist Party would later be exposed famously by
Whitaker Chambers. Francis Sayre’s uncle was William McAdoo, who
as Treasury Secretary to Woodrow Wilson perhaps saved the
American economy by shutting the stock market for four months at
the start of World War I to prevent the Allied powers from
divesting of American assets. Less commendably, McAdoo, as a
California U.S. senator, was the Klan-supported presidential
candidate in 1924.
A
photo from 1915 shows President Wilson affectionately
glancing over the shoulder of son-in-law Francis Sayre Sr. and
down at the Baby Francis Jr. Wilson was himself a progressive
Presbyterian, and a minister’s son, who shared in the grand
optimism of the Protestant Social Gospel in the early 20th
century. As an Episcopal priest and prominent cathedral dean,
Sayre carried that Social Gospel to laudable — but just as often
radical — extremes, helping to dethrone the Episcopal Church
from its cultural heights.
Ironically, even as the Episcopal Church was falling from
predominance, Dean Sayre was busily completing the massive
cathedral that was to serve as the church of state for the
nation’s capital. By 1978, when Sayre retired, the cathedral was
90 percent completed, though the final touches would not occur
until 1990, after 83 years of construction. It is the world’s
sixth largest. Appropriately, Sayre presided over the entombment
of his grandfather in the cathedral, the only president to accept
the honor. FDR had shunned Sayre’s predecessor after he had
pressed him for the cathedral’s rights to his corpse.
SAYRE WOULD PRESIDE over the installation of classical statuary
and stunning stained glass that illustrated the Bible’s dramas,
even as his theology cast doubt on their historical veracity, and
his ministry partly replaced their significance with intense
political activism of the left. The National Cathedral’s physical
rise was concurrent with the Episcopal Church’s transformation
from upscale Christian worship to tasteful museums where liberal
WASPS organize. Sayre reputedly said: “Whoever is appointed the
dean of a cathedral has in his hand a marvelous instrument, and
he’s a coward if he doesn’t use it.” He was no coward. And his
brush strokes were broad and bold.
Among his many controversies, Sayre hosted Leonard Bernstein and
the National Symphony Orchestra to perform Haydn’s Mass in Time
of War, as a counter-event to President Nixon’s inaugural concert
in January 1973. He later observed: “I have felt that the
Cathedral was an instrument in some sense beyond the confines of
the church as an institution — an instrument that could be
effective (in the nation’s capital) in the political center — in
the arena of politics and public discussion and welfare.”
Sayre served as a navy chaplain on the U.S.S. San Francisco
during World War II, and he always professed to be a patriot.
“She had quite a war record,” he boasted of his ship to the
Martha’s Vineyard newspaper in his later years. “Two and a half
years through battle, hell and damnation.” A fierce critic of
McCarthyism, he denounced anti-Communist witch hunters as
“pretended patriots.” In a typically political sermon, Sayre
preached in 1954: “There is a devilish indecision about any
society that will permit an impostor like McCarthy to caper out
front while the main army stands idly by.”
President Eisenhower, over whose funeral he would preside at the
cathedral in 1969, with President Nixon as eulogist, appointed
Sayre as U.S. liaison to the United Nations World Refugee Year.
An early advocate of civil rights with marched in Selma, Sayre
was appointed by President Kennedy to the first Equal Opportunity
Committee. But Sayre would denounce the Johnson Administration,
largely because of the Vietnam War, as “termite ridden.” At
Sayre’s invitation, Martin Luther King preached at the cathedral
on the Sunday before his assassination. The cathedral dean’s
rhetoric got more radical with time. In 1972, Sayre fulsomely
denounced Israel’s “oppressing” Palestinians. He later claimed
that his career would be “truncated” by this denunciation, though
he would not retire for another six years.
IN HIS POLITICAL, Sayre professed to follow the ancient Jewish
prophets, citing Elijah’s challenge to Israel: “How long go ye
limping between the two sides?” The cathedral dean added: “That
question, chilling in its candor, probes rather painfully; and
I’m afraid we’ve been doing a good bit of limping ourselves, and
the testing may not be far off.” Speaking in the late 1950s, he
was specifically referring to the Civil Rights revolution. But
Sayre typically saw all of his political activism as God’s
Kingdom at work.
“Theology is not an exact science,” Sasyre told the Martha’s
Vineyard newspaper. “It’s a thing that comes to each person who
has any of it but they adapt it to their own lives, to their own
needs, thoughts and meaning. That’s all right. This is part of a
person’s freedom and that freedom ought to be central to our
faith.” In the 1930s he had decided to enter the ministry because
of “the deplorable absence of moral codes in society and the
present day lack of positive faith in whether God exists.”
Predictably, Sayre criticized the rise of post-WWII evangelicals,
specifically Billy Graham. “The salvation of the world doesn’t
come about by arithmetic,” the cathedral dean pronounced, not
approving of Graham’s mass revivals in stadiums. “There is a
dimension to sin that goes beyond the individual.” The Episcopal
Church, largely sharing this view, began its 45-year membership
plunge during Sayre’s second decade at National Cathedral.
With a grandiosity similar to his presidential grandfather, Sayre
supposed prioritized the completion of the National Cathedral’s
high tower over its nave, so that the Gothic tower could more
quickly dominate the skyline of the nation’s capital. In his
retirement, he served as chaplain at the hospital on Martha’s
Vineyard, serving God sincerely, if in the stiff and high
collared style of his WASP ancestors.
As the National Cathedral rose and was refined with ever more
intricate iconography, Sayre would enthusiastically escort
reluctant visitors onto the precarious scaffolding against the
soaring walls for a closer look. The dean, whose long face and
high forehead resembled his grandfather’s, was himself an icon of
the old Mainline Protestant cultural hegemony of the early and
mid-20th century, with all its virtues and blindnesses. And like
his Grandpa Woodrow Wilson’s, Sayre’s dramatic life was both
tragic and magnificent.
