Religion: Reform by Committee

Twelve fighting-mad Protestant ministers of Steubenville, Ohio decided that the only way to deal with their city’s sin was literally to go gunning for it. They asked for permission to turn themselves and their aides into a pistol-packing vice squad, pledged to a “dirty war” on “the indecent elements which are attacking the very citadel of city life.”

Last week, after a month-long hurly-burly of tough talk and newspaper publicity, Steubenville’s eager preachers were turned down. At the same time, 300 miles away in Louisville, Ky., the Committee on Institutions of the Louisville Council of Churches was applying its own method to the problem of local crime. To Steubenville’s rampageous reformers the committee’s methods might seem sissified. But they have one peculiar advantage: they are working.

How to Do It. The sparkplug of Louisville’s Committee on Institutions is a small, bespectacled, 58-year-old businessman named George W. Stoll. One Sunday in 1940, Methodist Stoll left church after an especially inspiring sermon. He overheard someone say: “I’ve heard a lot of sermons like that. They inspire you to do something for your fellow men, but they never tell you what to do or how to do it.” Then & there, Oilman Stoll decided that he would put Christian idealism to work in civic life.

He made the rounds of Louisville churches—sometimes as many as six on a Sunday, buttonholing members, quizzing pastors for names of those who would help in conscientious community work. Today his Committee on Institutions has some 200 lay members, divided into subcommittees in three main divisions: penal, health, child care.

The essence of the Stoll technique is cooperation rather than attack. The committee avoids public crusades or reform waves, concentrates on first getting all the facts, then making helpful suggestions. Says Chairman Stoll’s brilliant right-hand man, Lawyer Charles E. Keller: “We avoid all politics. However, we will criticize conditions, or a bad system—or public apathy, if it is to blame. . . . But we never criticize a public official except to his face.”

Rehabilitate or Electrocute. A sample committee operation was that on Louisville’s county jail. The jailer came to the first meeting with the committee sure that he was being put on the spot. But when he found that the committee’s purpose was to help with his problems rather than to seek his scalp, he cooperated enthusiastically. One weekend the committee kept a 30-hour vigil (six-hour shifts of two men each) to observe the jail’s routine. Result: 1) a program of wise reforms carried out with the help of individual committee members; 2) public credit to the jailer.

During the past five years George Stoll’s Christian laymen have worked similarly with such institutions as the Central Kentucky State Hospital for the insane, the State Reformatory at La Grange, Louisville’s Juvenile Court and detention center and the city’s General Hospital. This week, a subdivision of the committee is tackling the problems of rehabilitating probationers. Says Chairman Stoll: “Sometimes I think there are only two things to do with a man when he commits a crime—either rehabilitate him or electrocute him.”

So manifold have George Stoll’s extracurricular responsibilities become that he has hired two full-time workers to help him and Keller with committee minutes, make phone calls, get speakers. Says he, quietly: “I have always felt that congregations should do more than congregate.”