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II

A Call to Action

A DOZEN IOWA REFORMERS ANSWERED ERNEST B. Gaston’s call to come to his Des Moines office on January 4, 1894, to hear a paper he had written and to listen to a proposal he wished to make. It was the winter of a great depression and reports of human suffering and economic calamity came from all parts of the nation. Gaston’s twelve friends, well known to each other and to their young host, were seasoned critics of their country, Jeremiahs gifted at condemning the plundering spirit of the age in which they lived. They surely nodded in agreement that day when Gaston spoke of the “enormous waste of human energy and natural resources” and the “hideous injustice and cruelty” which he saw woven more tightly each day into the fabric of American life. Opportunities for honest men were vanishing, he told them, “as one industry after another goes into the hands of trusts and the broad acres of our common heritage pass under the control of speculators.” In the fiercely individualistic, competitive world that America was becoming, he believed, material success was possible only for those who would sacrifice their sense of justice and anesthetize their concern for their fellow human beings.¹⁶

Gaston and his friends were political warriors in a common crusade. For three years they had been hopeful workers in the cause of the new Populist Party—grandly called “The People’s Party”—drawn to it out of many reform activities and organizations in which they had trained. Their gathering place, where they met regularly to talk over ideas and strategies, was the office of the Farmer’s Tribune, a long-time journal of dissent and now the voice of Iowa Populism. Their animated conversations around the stove became angry broadsides in their newspaper. “Thousands of people are starving and freezing,” it announced just a few weeks after Gaston’s meeting with his comrades. One outrage after another was recorded: “soup houses and police hall corridors . . . are everywhere thronged by thousands of the victims of the most damnable financial policy that ever disgraced a civilized nation,” all in a country “filled with grain, fruit and all of labor’s products,” yet where “the laborers go into paupers’ and felons’ graves.” ¹⁷ Presiding over many of these conversations was General James B. Weaver, the paper’s editor and the Party’s 1892 presidential candidate. Gaston joined the editorial staff in 1891; the next year, as managing editor, he freed Weaver to travel the country campaigning for the presidency.

The deepening depression and spreading misery were not the only sources of the despair felt by the once optimistic reformers. Inspired by the vision and caught up in the enthusiasm of the Populist revolt they were saddened by the country’s rejection of the humane alternative they believed they had offered it. The Populist Party campaign of 1892 produced memorable rhetoric and enduring inspiration, but the electoral impact was slight. In Iowa, where Weaver won less than 5 percent of the vote, the outcome was especially discouraging. After the 1893 state and local elections, which likewise provided no encouragement, Gaston decided he had had enough of electoral politics. He reached the “disagreeable conclusion,” as he was to put it later, “that the road to the achievement of the reforms necessary to establish justice in the country at large, was a long and tedious one, the end of which might not be reached in time to do him individually any good.” Some other way must be found; some other outlet for reformist vision and energy must be hit upon.¹⁸

It was at this point that Gaston called on his twelve friends to listen to him read the paper he had been struggling to perfect for the past several months. He entitled it “True Co-operative Individualism,” and at its conclusion he asked his comrades to “consider plans for the organization of a cooperative Colony or Community.” His question for them was a challenging one: would they join him in building, somewhere on American virgin land, an alternative society in which they might plant and nurture the ingredients of a model social order? By creating their own community, he argued, they could offer to the country a visible example of a better way of life and perhaps in this way find the base and the leverage for reform that the political process seemed to deny them. At the same time they could provide almost immediately a satisfying environment for themselves, free from the corrupting moral and material imperatives of the larger society.

The young crusader was apparently persuasive. Acting as secretary of the meeting he had called, Gaston recorded, in the minute book in which he wrote for the first time that day, that the group voted “to prepare a draft constitution and bye laws and articles of incorporation and suggest plans for putting the ideas into practical operation at once.” ¹⁹

The man who inspired such enthusiasm among his friends had just passed his thirty-second birthday. Born in Henderson, Knox County, Illinois, on November 21,1861, Ernest Berry Gaston probably thought little about his lineage, but enterprising genealogists can trace it back at least to a rebellious noble ancestor named Jean Gaston de Foix, a French Huguenot born in 1600. Presumably guaranteed religious toleration by the Edict of Nantes, French Protestants like Jean Gaston found the reality sadly different. Long before Louis XIV formally revoked the edict in 1685, perhaps in the 1640s, Jean appears to have been banished and to have fled to Scotland in search of a more congenial religious climate. His sons, discomfited in turn by religious discrimination in Scotland, migrated in the 1660s to County Antrim, Ireland. From Ireland a number of Gastons eventually made their way to the American colonies, some to South Carolina, some to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and some to New England. One of these was a Hugh Gaston, born in Ireland in 1687. He sailed for the colonies early in the eighteenth century and his son, William, was the first of Hugh’s American-born sons. William’s son, John, helped to win independence for the colonies, serving as a major in the Northampton County militia of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Gastons were a prolific clan. John and his wife Charity Cheeseman had eight children. One of those, James, married Mary Estep and they had nine children, the eighth of whom was E. B. Gaston’s father, James Estep Gaston, born in 1809.²⁰

James Estep Gaston, father of E.B. Gaston.

By the time he married Sarah Kirk in 1838, James Estep Gaston had left the Baptist Church of his youth to follow Alexander Campbell into the newly revived Church of Christ where he became a zealous minister. Tutored by the famous Campbell and later joining him on tours through the midwest he was described by his mentor as “one of our best preachers,” a man “distinguished for good sense, good talent and unfeigned piety.” He had virtually no formal schooling, but he was admired as a student of Latin and Greek and hailed as both a good writer and compelling orator. He also carried on in the prolific 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