Benjamin Orange Flower

• Benjamin Orange Flower
• Born: October 19, 1858
• Died: December 24, 1918

Editor, author, crusader, and mystic, was a social reformer to the manner born. His great-grandfather and the latter’s elder brother (after whom he was named) had been nonconformist reformers in their native England a century before. Great-granduncle Benjamin (1755-1829) was a liberal who wrote in defense of the French Revolution (National Sins Considered, 1796), was sentenced to six months in jail for an alleged political libel, and in 1808 won a celebrated lawsuit for defamation. Great-grandfather Richard (1761-1829) was a successful brewer. Failing to achieve repeal of what he considered iniquitous taxes, with such pamphlets as Observations on Beer and Brewers, in Which the Inequality, Injustice, and Impolicy of the Malt Tax Are Demonstrated (1802), he sold his business and switched to agriculture, only to inveigh in vain against the tithes exacted from husbandmen. In 1819, despairing of ameliorating conditions in England, he emigrated to the United States with his family and his friend and fellow crusader Morris Birkbeck. Richard Flower was important enough to be invited to Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, and Birkbeck eventually became secretary of state of Illinois.

Richard Flower’s eldest son, George (Benjamin’s grandfather), at the behest of his father and Birkbeck, laid out the village of Albion, Illinois, where Benjamin was born. George’s eldest son, Richard, was killed by a proslavery thug during the family’s struggle against the introduction of slavery into Illinois. His murderer was acquitted by a biased frontier jury and locally feted as a hero, causing George to cross into Indiana and settle at the Owenite colony of New Harmony. Two of his surviving sons, George Edward and Alfred, became ministers of the Disciples of Christ. Alfred married Elizabeth Orange, and to them Benjamin was born in 1858.

He was educated in Evansville, Indiana, to which his family had moved in the 1860s, and later at the University of Kentucky. Originally planning to follow his father’s calling, Benjamin, however, underwent a change of theological views and became a Unitarian. He then felt that journalism would afford him better contact with masses of people than the church.

He made a youthful debut as editor of a social and literary weekly published at Albion, The American Sentinel, which lasted until 1880, when he moved to Philadelphia to act as secretary to his brother, Dr. Richard C. Flower, for the next six years. This experience, exposing him to the inequities of urban life, rekindled the reform tendencies he had inherited.

Having married Hattie Cloud, of Evansville, on September 10, 1885, he soon left Philadelphia for Boston, then the cultural center of America. His life thereafter was to be devoted to working as both editor and activist on behalf of the improvement of human relations in a variety of fields. The better to communicate his concern for the poor, his passion for justice, and his belief in the possibility of achieving an ideal fraternal society as he conceived it, he founded The American Spectator in 1886. In 1889 he incorporated it into his new magazine, The Arena, one of the most liberal in a field of progressive and social-reform publications in what was to become known as the Golden Age of the American magazine.

Notwithstanding the combativeness of its title, The Arena was a dignified publication of the highest literary and scientific caliber. It counted among its contributors some of the leading savants of the day, including the French astronomer Camille Flammarion and the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed the theory of evolution with Darwin; esteemed writers such as Hamlin Garland, Joaquin Miller, Leo Tolstoy, Julian Hawthorne, and Dion Boucicault; and American reformers such as the Populist congressman Thomas E. Watson, woman-suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and temperance advocate Frances E. Willard.

Flower edited The Arena through December 1896. Half a year later, he was in Chicago, co-editing with Frederick U. Adams another magazine devoted to social progress, New Time, earlier known as New Occasions. From there he went on to The Coming Age, which he coedited with Anna C. E. Reifsnider in St. Louis and Boston. This publication in 1900 was merged with his old Arena, returning him to its editorial staff, of which he once again became editor in chief in 1904.

In 1909 he founded The Twentieth Century Magazine in Boston, editing it from October of that year through November 1911. Here he carried forward his crusades in print for the reforms now dearest to his heart: direct lawmaking through the initiative, referendum, and recall; government ownership of public utilities; universal suffrage; and compulsory arbitration of labor disputes.

Besides these social aims, he was also devoted to several other causes, not all equally progressive, which would become more dominant in his later years. He was an advocate of Christian Science, and as such a crusader against orthodox medical science; an upholder of the validity of psychic phenomena; and a firm believer in the ultimate scientific proof of life after death. He presided for a time over the National League for Medical Freedom, for which he wrote several controversial pamphlets, and the Free Press Defense League, essentially an anti-Catholic group.

A prolific writer, Flower contributed articles to many publications other than his own as well as writing numerous books, among them Lessons Learned from Other Lives (1891); Civilization’s Inferno, or Studies in the Social Cellar (1893); Persons, Places, and Ideas: Miscellaneous Essays (1896); Christian Science, as a Religious Belief and a Therapeutic Agent (1909); and Progressive Men, Women, and Movements of the Past Twenty-five Years (1914).

In the last years of his life, he became increasingly obsessed by the notion that the Roman Catholic hierarchy was waging “a mighty conflict... for the purpose of substituting the papal theory of government for the free democracy of our republic.” In his assumed mission to defend America from this perceived “menace” (at a time when Catholics by his own calculation represented only fifteen percent of the population), he became publisher of the anti-Catholic magazine The Menace, a small publication issued in Aurora, Missouri. It was his final venture in journalism. He died in a Boston hospital it the age of sixty.

Although Benjamin Flower lapsed into bigotry toward the close of his life, his earlier work exhibited a genuine concern for human betterment. The populism of the 1880s and early 1890s inspired him as a publisher; his best legacy from this period is The Arena, a magazine with a strong appeal to American intellectuals.

Flower’s published works include Life of Charles Darwin (1892); The New Time (1894); Gerald Massey: Poet, Prophet, and Mystic (1895); The Century of Sir Thomas More (1896); Whittier: Prophet, Seer, and Man (1896); How England Averted a Revolution of Force: A Survey of the First Ten Years of Queen Victoria’s Reign (1903); The Menace of a National Health Bureau (1911); The Compulsory Medical Inspection of School Children (1911); The Patriot’s Manual (1915); Righting the People’s Wrongs (1917). A full bound collection of The Arena is to be found in the New York Public Library. Biographical material includes R. Herndon and E. M. Bacon, Men of Progress in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1896) and H. Garland, “Roadside Meetings of a Literary Nomad,” The Bookman, January 1930. For family background, see sketch on great-granduncle Benjamin Flower in the British Dictionary of National Biography (1908-09) and G. Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (1882). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1931). An obituary notice appeared in The New York Herald, December 25, 1918.