Isaac Kauffman Funk

• Isaac Funk
• Born: September 10, 1839
• Died: April 4, 1912

Temperance publisher, was born in Clifton, Ohio, the son of John Funk and Martha (Kauffman) Funk. Isaac Funk was raised a Lutheran and as a young man decided to enter the ministry. After education in local schools he enrolled in Wittenberg College, in Springfield, Ohio, and then in its Theological Seminary, from which he received his D.D. in 1861. Wittenberg awarded him an honorary LL.D. in 1896.

Funk began pastoral work in 1861 at More-shill, Indiana, continued it at Carey, Ohio, and ended it at St. Matthew’s English Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, New York (1865-72). After resigning his last position he traveled abroad in 1872. When he returned to the United States, he became associate editor of the Christian Radical, published first in Pittsburgh and later in New York.

In New York City, Funk started a publishing house that catered to the needs of clergymen. He began to publish the Metropolitan Pulpit, which after several name changes became the Homiletic Review. In 1877 he took as a partner one of his college classmates, a Kansas lawyer named Adam Willis Wagnalls. The famous Funk & Wagnalls Company publishing house was now effectively formed, although the familiar form of its name dates only from 1891. The house soon started publishing in areas not connected with the clergy. A popular weekly, the Literary Digest, was founded in 1889 and, in 1890, the company issued the first edition of its famous Standard Dictionary of the English Language.

Meanwhile, Funk had become active in temperance work. In 1884 he founded The Voice, a newspaper associated with the Prohibition party, which soon had a circulation of 130,000. It sold as many as 700,000 copies per week during the presidential campaign of 1888.

The campaign of 1888 was followed by a rapid splintering of the temperance movement. Some groups began working for a federal prohibition amendment, others tried to obtain prohibition or local-option laws in individual states, and all sense of united effort was lost. In an attempt to reach some consensus on goals and strategy, Funk began a column, in 1890, in his Homiletic Review, entitled “A Symposium—On What Line May All Enemies of the Saloon Unitedly Do Battle?” This attempt, and similar ones made by other reformers, failed, and a coordinated effort did not emerge until the end of the century, with the advent of the National Anti-Saloon League.

Funk was also disappointed in two Utopian real-estate ventures. In the 1880s he and some friends lost substantial amounts of money in land purchased for a prohibition center in Tennessee, where they hoped to establish a community free from liquor. A second attempt, in Staten Island, New York—a small residential community called Prohibition Park—was more successful.

In addition to temperance work, Funk also undertook to simplify English spelling, using The Voice and the Literary Digest as vehicles. Aside from articles written for his own publications, he produced several books. In The Widow’s Mite and Other Psychic Phenomena (1904) and The Psychic Riddle (1907) he showed a fascination with the occult that was not uncommon among the educated of his time. Quite a different aspect of the world appears in The Next Step in Evolution (1902), an attempt to reconcile Christianity with the evolutionary concepts of modern biology.

Funk married twice. In 1863 he married Eliza E Thompson of Carey, Ohio; they had a son and a daughter. In 1869, one year after her death, he married her sister, Helen G. Thompson; they had one son. Funk died in New York City at the age of seventy-two.

The most useful sketches are those in the Dictionary of American Biography (1931) and in the National Cyclopaedia American Biography, vol. 11 (1909). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The New York Tribune, April 5,1912.