Man and Mission. Paul M. Gaston
tradition of his forebears. Sarah gave birth to six children before she died in 1853. The next year James married Catherine Estep Atkinson, a widowed cousin with two daughters of her own. James and Catherine had four additional children over the next seven years. The last of these was Ernest Berry Gaston. The family lived on a farm while the father ministered to his town congregation in Henderson. Despite his many siblings and half-siblings, Ernest grew up in a small household. Four of his brothers and sisters died before he was born, two died while he was a child, and four of the five who lived to his maturity set up on their own early in his life. Only his half-sister Clara was an enduringly important figure to him.21
James Gaston’s preaching had taken him to pastorates in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa. Early in 1864 he received a call to the newly-formed Central Church of Des Moines, the first Christian church established in the city. He had a successful ministry for three years until ill health forced his early retirement. Improved health later allowed him to take up pastorates for brief periods in other Iowa cities as well as in Kansas, but a lingering illness, apparently punctuated by bouts of depression, brought him back to Des Moines, where he lived in retirement until his death in 1888.22
Ernest Gaston grew up in the midwestern villages and towns where his father’s preaching took the family. Settled in Des Moines before he was very far along in school, he came to maturity there. Scraps of evidence suggest that he was a restless youth whose behavior was less than exemplary, especially for a minister’s son. “I readily acquired and easily held the reputation of being one of the worst boys in school,” he recalled in an 1887 speech, “and achieved the high honor of being suspended three times in a little more than a month, to say nothing of the minor punishments which were almost of daily occurrence.” Accompanying his rebellious spirit was a wide-ranging curiosity along with energy and intellect to pursue it. “I longed for a change,” he confessed in the 1887 speech, apparently referring to his personal situation but perhaps seeing that linked to some larger social cause. In any case, he had not found what he wished for; he was “still longing for change.” He wrote fondly of his adventure as a tenderfoot on a Texas cattle buying trip, but the life of a cowboy held no real appeal. At twenty-one, he entered Drake University, in the Des Moines suburb of University Place. His student career was interrupted by periods of employment in Minnesota and Kansas, the student magazine describing him once as “a business man of Minneapolis.” 23 He graduated from the commerce department at the top of his class in 1886, at the age of twenty-four.24
College years were fruitful for Gaston. He worked hard, learned to write effectively, and became a popular orator. A speaker with a commanding presence, he was also a gifted singer, with a rich bass voice. His singing performances, usually as part of a quartet, became familiar campus entertainment. Some time in the winter of 1885-86 he met Clara Mershon. A recent arrival from Jones County, Iowa, Clara was a music student, and she and Ernest were members of the same student literary and musical society. They were married on November 24,1887, just after Ernest had turned twenty-six and a month before her twenty-fifth birthday. Her family had recently moved to Des Moines from Jones County, and by the time of the marriage her father and brothers were gaining prominence with their merchandising store.25
At twenty-six, E. B. Gaston was well known around University Place for his zest and his imaginative enterprises. As a student he had won praise for his one-horse snow plow that kept the sidewalks free of snow. In the fall of 1886 he was elected justice of the peace. Not long after his election the student magazine reported that “Squire Gaston” was “making a vigorous warfare against the violation of the prohibition law in the city.” Elected to a second term as justice of the peace, Gaston honed his political skills by holding other public offices. Between 1886-1890 he served as town recorder, City Council member, and fire chief of University Place.26 In the business world, he acquired and operated a livery stable. The stable was soon abandoned when he put his business and building skills to work as a real estate developer. He bought several lots in University Place, built homes on them, and confidently looked forward to making a profit—not only from his labor and capital investment but also from the rise in land values anticipated in that growing section of Des Moines.
In the fall of 1889 Gaston marked his twenty-eighth birthday and he and Clara celebrated the second anniversary of their marriage. Unusual energy, ambition, and imagination had brought the young Gaston a measure of financial security and the respect of his fellow citizens in University Place as well. He had excelled as a student, held a variety of public offices, shown shrewd judgment as an enterprising businessman, and now was doing well in real estate. He was popular with the university set, in frequent demand as toastmaster, singer, and orator. Notices of “ice cream socials” usually featured a performance of one sort or another by him. He had a passion for horse races and seems to have enjoyed life. From all accounts his marriage to Clara was a happy one. The arrival of their first child in January, 1889, was both satisfying and a mark of their well being. Now, in the fall of 1889, a second was on the way. One might have envisioned for the future Gaston and his wife fitting comfortably into the life of their community, rearing a large family and expanding their circle of friends while Ernest enlarged his business activities and assumed the many tasks of civic leadership that seemed to await him.27
Instead, the restless spirit that was a family trademark took a new turn in him. Perhaps the death of his father the previous year was a catalyst. In any case, just as he was on the verge of entering a stable and conventional pattern of life he veered in new directions. He began by abruptly abandoning the one occupation that seemed sure to give him material security, denouncing real estate development as “speculative building,” and proclaiming: “I want no more of it.” At twenty-eight his developing social conscience made him find something immoral in a quintessentially American way of earning a living and sent him searching for ways to release the reformist drive that increasingly seemed to be giving direction to his life.28
THE AMERICA OF GASTON’S YOUNG MANHOOD WAS changing rapidly, and not in ways that made him proud of his country. Even the most casual inquiries turned up gruesome tales of deepening poverty, wrenching class conflict, with violent confrontations between industrial workers and factory owners. Many young intellectuals, the historian Dorothy Ross writes, believed they were living in an age of “profound historical crisis,” in which cherished republican values were being threatened by the new industrial capitalism. “Unadulterated capitalism,” according to another authority, seemed to many to be on the verge of destroying the social order. Richard T. Ely, one of the young scholars of that era, believed that the workings of the new system of competitive individualism were “as cruel as laws of nature.” He declared that “our food, our clothing, our shelter, all our wealth, is covered with stains and clots of blood.” As Ross observes, many of the intellectuals who etched these searing indictments were “nurtured in evangelical piety, Whiggish moral politics, and the Christian ethicism of the American colleges,” a trio of influences that had been working on Gaston; and, like the better-known critics whom Ross describes, Gaston was increasingly drawn to the “organic and idealistic thrust of socialism” in his search for answers to the social riddle. “Capital is allowed to control all opportunity,” he wrote about this time, “and give the laborers only enough of their product to keep their souls and bodies together.” 29
Passionate and eager to find answers, Gaston embarked on an extraordinary five-year intellectual and moral odyssey that culminated in the founding of the model community he would call Fairhope.
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