William Dwight Porter Bliss
William Dwight Porter Bliss was a prominent Christian socialist and editor, born in Constantinople to Congregationalist missionaries. His early education took place in institutions like Roberts College and Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1878. Bliss was ordained as a Congregationalist minister and served churches in Colorado and Massachusetts before converting to Episcopalianism in 1885. Influenced by Anglican socialists, he advocated for the church's role in addressing social issues, particularly those affecting the working poor.
He joined the Knights of Labor and founded several organizations, including the Christian Socialist Society and the Christian Socialist Church of the Carpenter. Bliss was an active lecturer and leader in social reform movements, serving as president of the National Social Reform Union and working with the U.S. Bureau of Labor. His literary contributions included editing key works on socialism and labor history, as well as publishing his own titles. Bliss continued his ministry until his retirement due to health issues, passing away in 1926 at the age of seventy. His legacy reflects a commitment to social justice and the integration of faith with progressive ideals.
Subject Terms
William Dwight Porter Bliss
- William Bliss
- Born: August 20, 1856
- Died: October 8, 1926
Christian socialist and editor, was born in Constantinople, the son of the Congregationalist missionaries Edwin Elisha Bliss and Isabella Holmes (Porter) Bliss, who worked among the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire for fifty years. He was educated at Roberts College in Constantinople; Phillips Academy, Andover; and Amherst College, class of 1878. He took a bachelor’s degree in divinity from the Hartford Theological Seminary in 1882 and was ordained a Congregationalist minister. He was minister of Congregationalist churches in Denver, Colorado, and South Natick, Massachusetts, from 1882 to 1885. In the latter year he converted to Episcopalianism, was appointed rector of a church in Lee, Massachusetts (1885-87), then became rector of Grace Church, South Boston (1887-90).
Shortly after joining the Episcopal Church, Bliss fell under the influence of the philosophy of the Anglican socialists F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Their ideas about the church’s responsibility for furthering social progress had been gaining currency in England for half a century—Maurice’s The Kingdom of Christ was first published in 1838—but American clergymen of all denominations were always actively hostile to them.
Bliss, with his dynamism and persuasive oratorical style, attempted to force the churches to accept their social responsibilities, particularly toward the working poor. He joined the Knights of Labor in 1886, during that organization’s national expansion of membership, and the following year ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on the Labor Party ticket. He founded the Christian Socialist Society in 1889, and in 1890 the Christian Socialist Church of the Carpenter, an Episcopalian establishment in Boston of which he was rector until 1894.
In that year Bliss began a national lecture tour to promote the Christian Socialist Union, and over the four succeeding years visited every part of the United States. He became president of the National Social Reform Union in 1899, during his tenure as Episcopalian rector in San Gabriel, California (1898-1902). He returned East to parishes in Amityville, Long Island (1902-06) and West Orange, New Jersey (1910-14). He served as special investigator (1907-09) for the U.S. Bureau of Labor during its activist phase toward the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, visiting Europe to report on unemployment and on women in trade unions. During and after World War I he worked in Switzerland among interned French and Belgian soldiers. Upon his return from Europe in 1921, he became rector of St. Martha’s Church in the Bronx, a small mission he helped develop until 1925, when ill health forced his retirement. He died a year later, six weeks after his seventieth birthday.
In 1891 Bliss edited two compendia of the works of British social thinkers, The Communism of John Ruskin and Socialism, by John Stuart Mill, and an abridgement of Thorold Rogers’s landmark study of labor history, Six Centuries of Work and Wages. He also published A Handbook of Socialism (1895) and The Encyclopedia of Social Reform (1897; revised and enlarged edition, 1908). With Josiah Strong he collaborated in the American Institute of Social Service, and they published together Studies in the Gospel of the Kingdom. From 1889 to 1896 he was editor of The Dawn, the monthly magazine of the Christian Socialist Society, and in 1895-96 edited The American Fabian, a socialist journal that ceased publication in 1900.
See the obituaries of William D.P. Bliss in The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times for October 9, 1926. See also the Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 2, the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 20, and the Dictionary of Religious Biography.