Joseph Pomeroy Widney

From Metapedia

Jump to: navigation, search
This article contains text from Wikipedia which has not yet been processed. It is thus likely to contain material which does not comply with the Metapedia guide lines. You can help Metapedia by editing the article and cleaning it from bias and inappropriate wordings.
Joseph P. Widney during his tenure as President of USC
Joseph P. Widney during his tenure as President of USC

Joseph Pomeroy Widney (December 26, 1841 — July 4, 1938) was a polymathic pioneer American physician, medical topographer, scholar-educator, clergyman, entrepreneur-philanthropist, proto-environmentalist, prohibitionist, philosopher of religion, Racial theorist, and prolific author. He served as the second President of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California and as the founding dean of the USC School of Medicine,[1] and was one of the co-founders and first general superintendents of the Church of the Nazarene, and the primary founder of the Los Angeles County Medical Association. One of the "most conspicuous Southern Californians of his generation",[2] Widney was a cultural leader in Los Angeles for nearly seventy years [3] and the "mystic seer in residence and prophet of Southern Californian Anglo-Saxonism".[4]

Contents

[edit] Biographical details

[edit] Ohio: Childhood and Education (1841-1861)

Joseph Pomeroy Widney was born on 26 December 1841 in a large two-story six-room log cabin owned by his grandfather in Piqua, Ohio in the forests of Miami County, Ohio in the midst of the Miami tribe, the third son of John Wilson Widney (born 4 December 1809; died 1852) and Arabella Maclay Widney (born 1811; died 15 February 1880). At the age of fifteen, Joseph became the de facto head of the family after his father died of pneumonia at the age of 42, as his two older brothers John Widney (1837-1925) and Robert Maclay Widney (1838-1929) had already migrated west to California. He had the responsibility of providing for his mother, two younger brothers: William Wilson Widney (born 25 December 1850) and Samuel Alexander Widney (born 15 November 1852), and two younger sisters: Arabella Erwin Widney (born 1843) and Elizabeth Widney (born 1848) (latter married to Joseph Leggett).[5][6]

After graduating from Piqua High School, Widney was granted advanced placement as a sophomore at the Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, even though he was qualified to enter as a junior classman. At University, Widney studied Latin, Greek, and the classics. His entire collegiate career only last five months. In 1907, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree in recognition of the scholarship as revealed in his Race Life of the Aryan Peoples. The poet-preacher David Swing was one of his instructors.

[edit] Civil War Military Service (1861-1862)

In 1861 he discontinued his studies to enlist in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War. Despite his own frail health, Widney served initially in the field as a regular infantryman, but later became a medical corpsman. He was trained to administer first aid to wounded soldiers, and served an apprenticeship in both medicine and surgery. He was transferred onto steamers on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in a medical capacity. Widney was discharged from the Union army in 1862 due to a physical and nervous collapse after a year of working with casualties.[7]

[edit] Migration to California (1862-1865)

Desiring restoration of his health, and with the encouragement of his two older brothers and his uncle, Charles Maclay, who had migrated to California previously, Widney sailed to San Francisco, California via the Isthmus of Panama, arriving in November 1862, prior to his twenty-first birthday. During the next two or three years, Widney travelled extensively throughout California on horseback. During this time he visited the missions and lived with the Spanish-speaking inhabitants, learning their culture and their language. As his health improved, one night he believed he had an encounter with God, while camped out in the redwoods. He recalled, "That night I reached out and touched God's infinite".[8]

[edit] Graduate Education (1865-1866)

He returned to university in 1865, completing a Master of Arts degree from the California Wesleyan College (later the University of the Pacific), (then located at Santa Clara, California). In January 1866, Widney moved to San Francisco and on 4 June 1866 commenced the third session of the medical course at the Toland Medical College (which later became part of the University of California, San Francisco,[9][10] graduating at the head of his class with a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree on 2 October 1866. He was awarded a gold medal in recognition of his superior scholarship.

[edit] Marriage to Ida DeGraw Tuthill (1869-1879)

Widney was married twice. His first wife was Ida DeGraw Tuthill Widney (born 17 November 1844 in Orient in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York), whom he married on 17 May 1869 in San Jose, California. Together they had three children, each of whom died in infancy: Ada, who died after convulsions at the age of fourteen months in August 1870; an unnamed son who died in 1872; and another son, Joseph T. Widney, who died after convulsions aged six months old in June 1874. They lived in a Victorian mansion at 129 S. Hill Street in the Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California area, next to his brother Judge Robert M. Widney (who lived at 127 S. Hill Street). His first wife, Ida D. Widney died in Los Angeles on 10 February 1879 and is buried in the Los Angeles City Cemetery, in the same family plot as the children who preceded her in death.[11][12][13]

[edit] Marriage to Mary Bray (1882-1903)

Widney remarried on 27 December 1882 in Santa Clara, California to Miss Mary Bray (born 26 April 1845 in Missouri),[14][15][16] the daughter of the late John G. Bray, a pioneer merchant of San Francisco, [17][18] and the first president of the San Jose Bank.[19] Mrs. Mary Widney had been a respected artist prior to her marriage. They had no children. Mary was well-regarded as "a cultured and accomplished lady".[20] On 18 February 1884 flooding of the Los Angeles River resulted in the loss of 43 homes. "Widney lost the most expensive house in the area, built fifteen months before at the foot of Sainsevain Street [now East Commercial Street] at a cost of $2000".[21] Dr. and Mrs. Widney subsequently established their new home at 150 W. Adams Boulevard (formerly S. 26th Street), nearer to the newly established University of Southern California. As the founder of the Flower Festival Society, which she started in 1885, Mary Widney was responsible for organising flower festivals that raised enormous sums to support the Woman's Home, a home for up to seventy poor working women that they had opened on 1 March 1887 on 4th Street (between Los Angeles and Main Streets); and the Woman's Exchange.[22][23][24][25] Mary Bray Widney died on 10 March 1903 at their home at 150 W. Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles. Dr Widney never remarried. Various relatives lived with him, including his younger sister Arabella Erwin Widney (born 1843).

[edit] Later Years (1929-1938)

In 1929 Widney was badly injured as a result of being struck by an automobile as it was backing out from the curb. According to Widney,
an automobile accident left me with a fractured skull, fracture of the cervical spine, several broken ribs and some injuries of the skull, leading to blindness and defective hearing with severe and continuous pain about the base of the skull which, even yet, has hardly ceased.[26]
His hearing was severely impaired. By 1937 he was blind. Widney's biographer, Dr. Carl Rand, believes that the failure of his eyesight in latter years was due to the development of senile cataracts, which Widney refused to have removed.[27] Nevertheless, Widney wrote four books in this period with the assistance of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Anna Elizabeth "Hettie" D. Jenkins Widney and her sister, Mrs. Rebecca Davis Macartney. In 1935 Widney was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity (D.D.) degree from the University of Southern California in recognition of his life of scholarly contributions.

[edit] Death

Widney died at 10:50 a.m. on 4 July 1938 in his home at 3901 Marmion Way, Highland Park, Los Angeles, California, aged 96. Dr Seletz believes that his final illness was caused by "occlusion of a posterior cerebellar artery"[28] (also known as a Posterior cerebral artery Stroke).[29] After a funeral held in his own home, he was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery at Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California on 6 July 1938 in his family plot.[30][31] A replica of his Marmion Way bedroom is on display at the General Phineas Banning Residential Museum in Wilmington, California.[32][33]

[edit] Legacy

In March 1939 the newly built Crippled Children's High School (located at 2302 S. Gramercy Place, Los Angeles) was renamed the Dr. Joseph Pomeroy Widney High School. This school is for those aged 13 to 22 with special educational needs. The historic Widney Hall Alumni House (now located at 650 Child's Way (originally W. 36th Street) at the University of Southern California)[34], Widney Hall, the university's original building, was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (No. 70) on 16 December 1970.[35][36][37] The University of Southern California honors its distinguished graduates by presenting the Widney Alumni Award. His portrait was painted by American artist Orpha Mae Klinker (born 20 November 1891; died 23 May 1964),[38][39][40][41] and a bust of Widney was sculpted by Emil Seletz (1907-1999).[42][43]

[edit] Widney and medicine

[edit] Widney as military surgeon

After his graduation from Toland Medical College (the only medical school operating at that time in California) on 2 October 1866, Widney re-enlisted in the army as a military surgeon in January 1867 for a two-year tour of duty. He was posted to Drum Barracks[44] in Wilmington, California for a month in 1867, before being appointed Acting Assistant Surgeon for the Arizona Territory during the Apache Wars. During this time he served with the 14th Infantry Regiment under General James Henry Carleton (1814-1873).[45] During this period the regiment camped for several weeks two miles south of La Paz, Arizona en route to Camp Date Creek (sometimes known as Camp Date Post), where they were based for several months where he helped reestablish that post.[46][47][48] By July 1867 he was based near Apache Pass during the re-building of Fort Bowie,[49][50] where he supervised the building of the Post Hospital.[51]

In December 1867 he requested the Medical Director grant his discharge from the military. There was little fighting during his tour of duty and very few wounds to attend.[52] Consequently, while in the military, his interest in climatology increased. He sent detailed reports regarding the region's rainfall, topography, and climate. Rand concludes that the Arizona Campaign "contributed much more to his appreciation of life in general than to his medical career".[53] During his time in the desert Widney "found God, in a way that transformed his life",[54] and so "returned from Arizona a changed man".[55]

[edit] Widney as private physician

In late 1868, Widney was discharged from the military and moved to the embryonic community of Los Angeles. Widney began private medical practice on 8 October, 1868, sharing offices with Dr John Strother Griffin (1816-1898), in the old Temple Block (corner of Temple and South Main Streets, Los Angeles). Among those he treated in the next few years was General William Tecumseh Sherman and Mexican bandido Tiburcio Vasquez,[56] as well as the indigent ill.

[edit] Los Angeles County Medical Association

Prior to the passing of a bill to regulate medical practice (known popularly as the "Anti-Quackery Law") by the California State Legislature on 3 April 1876,[57] it was possible for anyone to practice medicine in California without a license. The medical profession was not recognized legally by the State before this date and it was common for medical practitioners to advertise (and exaggerate) their medical skills in the newspapers.[58] Concerned about the "medical quackery" proliferating in California, and also at lax local health and state licensing legislation, on 31 January 1871, Dr Widney was the one most responsible for the founding of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, the longest-serving medical association in California. In fact, Widney became known as "the Father of the Association".[59][60] The desire of the founders was to establish medical schools and publications, lift the standards in the practice of medicine, as well as the income and status of doctors. "The medical school and society ... aspired to raise standards of professional practice and admission and thus to restrict entry and maintain high income and status. These institutions were badly needed antidotes to the quackery that proliferated in California due to lax local health and state licensing legislation".[61] Widney advocated dispensing aid to "the sickly poor", which he saw as a key facet of public health and civic philanthropy.[61] After 1876, medical licensing was done by the State Medical Society until 1901 when a State Board of Medical Examiners was finally created. Widney was among the very first licensed by the new board in 1876. Dr Widney was elected its president in 1877.[62] On 12 May 1937, a bust of Dr Widney sculpted by Dr Emil Seletz and commissioned by the Los Angeles County Medical Association was unveiled and placed in the lobby of their headquarters.[63]

Despite his own Christian beliefs, Widney took an active role in opposing unscientific medicine. Among those he opposed were faith healing or "mind cure" practitioners, such as Christian Science and John Alexander Dowie. As early as 1886, Widney, "then professor of the principles and practice of medicine in the college of medicine of the University of Southern California, proposed a protocol for such studies. He believed that
before mind cure can by the rules of scientific evidence claim to be established as a true science, [it] must be able to present cases of cure of organic disease, the existence of the disease and the fact of cure both being authenticated by competent observers - men who through study of disease are to be considered experts;... No such evidence has yet been furnished by the mind cure, and until it is furnished and authenticated beyond question, the verdict upon its claims as a true curative power must be - Not proven.[64]

Widney advocated the organization of both the Los Angeles and California Boards of Health, and was Los Angeles' first public health officer.[65]

[edit] Southern California Medical Society

In 1884, Widney helped re-organise the Southern California Medical Society. Dr Widney served on the Committee on Medical Topography, Meteorology, Endemics and Epidemics that reported frequently to the Medical Society of the State of California. Widney was a pioneer physician-meteorologist who was an active exponent of medical topography, a nineteenth century medical specialty influenced by Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), that studied the relationship between the environment and disease. Linda Nash explains that
medical topography sought to understand geographic locations through the diseases they produced.... To do so, physicians needed to engage not only the medical sciences but also geography, meteorology, geology, and hydrology. Practicing medical topographers endeavored to record all the environmental factors that might affect health in a particular place, and the list was often long: Temperature and altitude were the most critical variables, but also relevant were water quality, the amount and intensity of sunlight, the timing and amount of rainfall, barometric pressure, wind direction, stream discharge, electrical air currents, soil types, dew point, the timing of frosts and spring growth, the temperature of wells, the timing of fish runs, and the occurrence of "causal phenomena"—such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, hailstorms, and meteor showers. In this world, the quest for health required not merely careful attention to the human body but "patient, plodding work with the thermometer, psychrometer, wind vane [and] rain gauge....In comparison to other western regions, a "scientific" medical topography developed quickly in California. Both the strangeness and the variability of the California landscape dictated the need for prodigious amounts of local medical study. In contrast to the more homogenous landscapes of the Middle West, California struck doctors as a place of many different environments, each one with its own effect on health. "If we would make our work and our statistics of any true or permanent value", wrote Dr. Joseph Widney of Los Angeles, "climatic belt must be differentiated from, and contrasted with, climatic belt. It is only thus that our work will lead to a clear understanding of the varied pathological peculiarities of the State....A complicated geography offered not only a scientific challenge but also new possibilities of cure.[66]

[edit] Southern California Practitioner

In 1886 Widney helped establish the Southern California Practitioner, the monthly journal of that society. He served as one of the editors for the first few years. In addition to the discussion of the usual subjects found in such a publication, there was a focus on the climate of Southern California in almost every issue. According to the Illustrated History of Los Angeles County(1890), the Southern California Practitioner, which Widney helped establish and edit, there were compelling reasons for this journal to focus on the climate of southern California:
The Practitioner, while treating of all matters pertaining to the science of medicine and surgery, has mapped out for itself as a specialty one particular field, viz.: the careful investigation of the climatic peculiarities and climatic laws of Southern California, and of that great inland plateau which embraces Arizona, New Mexico, and the elevated portion of the interior of Mexico; the effect which these climatic peculiarities may have upon race types, race development, and race diseases; the local changes which through human agency—such as irrigation, drainage, cultivation, planting or clearing of timber—may be produced in climate; the question of race habits, of food, drink and manner of life; the physiological and pathological effects of the crossing of bloods; and all of these questions as affecting the Anglo-Teuton in taking up his abode in this, to him, new climate. This is a new, a broad, and a hitherto unworked field; and the Practitioner hopes to add somewhat to the stock of human knowledge in this direction, and to help toward the solution of these problems. It will also endeavor to present the salient features of various sections of this now widely-known climatic belt, so that physicians in the Eastern States and abroad, who may be recommending a change of climate to invalids or persons of delicate constitutions, may have accurate information upon which to base a selection. In carrying out the plan of work thus outlined, the Practitioner, which is the pioneer in the field, has hardly issued a number without some valuable climatic article; and it has become standard authority throughout the continent in this new line of climatic and disease study.[67]

Widney attributed the health of southern Californian residents to the climate and to the availability of fresh fruit, as it was the leading article of their diet. Widney seemed especially impressed with the therapeutic benefits of strawberries.[68] Widney believed his own long life could be attributed to living simply and keeping busy.[69] He believed that people should eat plain simple food and not eat too much or too often. His own personal health practices included eating a raw onion each morning before breakfast and eating potatoes and salt-pork for breakfast. At age 94, Widney advocated "no liquor, no tobacco, no drugs. I'm not a fanatic on liquor, but to me it is a medicine. I keep it around and take it when I need it. But there is no excuse whatever for tobacco or drugs".[70] He recommended at least eight hours sleep each night and short naps throughout the day.[71]

Despite being "the most distinguished physician in the city",[72] upon his election as the president of the University of Southern California in 1892, Widney discontinued his lucrative medical practice at age 51, only continuing to treat a few personal friends.[73]. However, when he became involved with the Los Angeles City Mission (1894) and the Church of the Nazarene (1895-1898), Widney offered free medical care for those unable to afford treatment.

[edit] Widney and the environment

While stationed at Drum Barracks and in the deserts of Arizona, Widney began a lifelong interest in climatology and conservation. Widney served as chairman of the Los Angeles Meteorological committee for several years. Widney credited white settlement with several improvements in the Southern California climate, including less variation in temperature, milder winds, and increased rainfall.[74] Widney was concerned about conserving water and was one of the first to warn about what later came to be called smog, identifying it as a concern in 1938 (some five years before it was officially recognised in Los Angeles).[75]

Additionally, Widney argued successfully for the setting aside of three great forest areas for the benefit (in a conservation of resources) of generations to come, thus giving impetus to the great work of securing the present water supply for Los Angeles.[76]

[edit] Widney and the Salton Sea

As early as January 1873, Widney advocated in print the flooding of the Colorado Desert to re-establish the Salton Sea. This marked his first appearance in print after his arrival in California. Widney believed that by diverting the Colorado River into the Salton Sink that this would increase the rainfall in the area, eliminate the deserts of southern California, and create a new Eden in what was renamed the Imperial Valley in about 1901. His creation would stretch from the Delta all the way to Palm Springs, just as the prehistoric Lake Cahuilla once had. The huge body of water would create drastic changes in the climate of Southern California, making it "similar to that of the Hawaiian or Bahamian Islands." His plan was cause for great excitement in the press. Widney's proposals strongly influenced those of Oliver Wozencraft and Arizona Territory Governor General John C. Fremont, who travelled to Washington to convince Congress of the project's potential.[77] George Wharton James' book, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, published in 1906, introduced the second volume with a whole chapter on Widney's arguments:[78]
In 1873, a Los Angeles booster named JP Widney had proposed that the city create an artificial lake in the nearby Colorado Desert in order to moisten the atmosphere and free the region from the curse of aridity. A mere two decades later, there was more fear that Los Angeles might be blighted by the curse of humidity. In the summer and fall of 1891, heavy rainfall and flooding created the inland sea in question, and with rain continuing for some time, it seemed to be having the effects that Widney had promised. John Wesley Powell took the talk about "the new lake in the desert" to be more wishful thinking by that "class of publicists . . . who are forever presenting schemes for the amelioration of hard climatic conditions", but in fact the reaction in Los Angeles was less rejoicing than dismay. Even Widney now admitted that the change would make the region "less agreeable for residence" though better for farming. If the climate were to become "more more humid than heretofore", asked a newspaper, if the nights were to become "so close, humid, and oppressive that one could easily imagine himself in New York or Indiana", asked one concerned citizen, who would move to southern California? If the new lake meant more "moist, 'sticky' heat" in the summer, declared the Los Angeles Times, "we don't want it at any price." [79]
According to Lindsay,
A proposal to once again inundate the Salton Trough, by diverting the entire flow of the Colorado River, was made in 1873 by Dr. JP Widney. His scheme was named the "Widney Sea." His proposal lead to a lively discussion in Los Angeles newspapers until Gen. George Stoneman proved the impracticality of such a proposal.[80]

[edit] Widney and Atlantis

In his 1935 book, The Three Americas, Widney argued that the fabled lost city of Atlantis once existed in the area where the Bahamas are now located. He believed that Atlantis was a large semi-tropical island ("larger than Libya and Asia - [ Asia Minor, now Anatolia ]"), stretching west of Gibraltar and east of the West Indies, inhabited by peoples from the Americas rather than from Europe. He believed that the Sargasso Sea now covers part of the now submerged Atlantis. He argued that Atlantis was built up originally from the soil washed into the ocean from Africa and South America, and that it eventually subsided because "in the course of the ages the time came when the fissure in the earth's crust could no longer sustain the weight, and Atltantis went down".[81] He also believed that there was a submerged lost continent in the South Pacific Ocean.[82]

[edit] Widney as author

In 1872, Widney helped to found the Los Angeles Library Association,[83] and served on its board of governors for the next six years.

Along with Jonathan T. Warner (1807-1895) (better known as J.J. Warner)[84] and Judge Benjamin Hayes (1815-1877),[85] Widney wrote and edited the first history of Los Angeles County,[86] the so-called Centennial History of Los Angeles, published in 1876. In 1888, he collaborated with Dr. Walter Lindley (1852-1922), the founder of the California Hospital Medical Center, in producing California of the South, one of the first tourist guides promoting the region. Both of these volumes were produced to extol the benefits of California and its climate. They were commercially available and were popular.

Also from Widney's prolific pen came many books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper articles upon various topics - industrial, racial, scientific, climatic, professional, historical, political, educational, national, international, and religious.[87] He discussed such topics as the League of Nations and its shortcomings; judicial reform (he advocated trials by judges rather than juries for criminal cases); and the future of modern civilzations. With the exception of his two-volume magnum opus, The Race Life of the Aryan People, published in 1907 by Funk and Wagnall, Widney chose to have all his other writings published at his own expense and donated to influential people, personal friends, and libraries and other public reading rooms to ensure maximum availability of his ideas.[88]

Widney revealed in his Civilizations and Their Diseases (1937),
I have never written for money. The sole object has been the carving out of broader lines for the human race. For more than fifty years of careful historical study, I have thought, and planned, and worked to this end. This ultimate purpose has run through all my publications. I have not placed upon the public market the books which I have written. I had not the time for this in an overworked life, nor have I had the means. My works have been placed, instead, in the great public reading rooms, and libraries, and colleges and universities of the world, where they might find the largest number of readers. This has drained heavily upon my private resources, so much so that I must still go on in the same old way. It is my contribution to the uplift of humanity and the making of a better world, and with this I am content-. I am near to the beginning of my ninety-seventh year. Owing to injuries received in an accident, I have had to do all my work under the heavy handicap of being crippled, and in blindness, and in pain. Every word that I have published, for many years, I have had to dictate. What this means in patience, in difficulty, in labor, only one who has gone through it can know.

[edit] Widney as real estate investor

Widney had been impressed with the potential of Los Angeles since his first visit there in January 1867 when posted to Drum Barracks. He apparently said to himself then: "There will be a harbor made here, and a great city will be built about it. I will put some money here when I come back from the front".[89] Widney was the brother of lawyer (and later Judge) Robert Maclay Widney (1838-1929), the city's first real estate agent[90] and publisher of The Real Estate Advertiser, the city's first real estate paper, who had settled in Los Angeles earlier in 1868. Widney made many lucrative investments in real estate in Los Angeles and surrounding areas (often in collaboration with Judge Widney), which were to make him financially independent, allowing him to retire from the practise of medicine at the age of 55, and allowing him to devote the following 42 years to his business, literary, and religious pursuits. By 1900, the Los Angeles Times described him as "an extensive property owner in this city".[91] At one time he owned the Widney Block on First Street (near the corner of Temple and Spring Streets), another Widney Block located at Sixth and Broadway, and a property at the corner of Ninth and Santee streets, where he erected the Nazarene Methodist Episcopal Church.[92] Additionally, he owned a building at 445-447 Aliso Street, where the first college of medicine for the University of Southern California was located from 1885 to 1896.

Widney's speculation in land started early. Between 29 April 1869 and 28 August 1871, he purchased thirty-four lots in Wilmington near the San Pedro harbor area and another sixty acres near the San Gabriel Mission (Rand 28). He once owned the parcel of land (the old Temple block at the corner of Temple and Main Streets, Los Angeles) where the Los Angeles City Hall now stands, as well as most of Mt. Washington, Los Angeles, California, on which his last home (a Victorian mansion at 3901 Marmion Way) stood. This section included a group of neighboring homes and stores, as well as a rooming apartment for girls.

[edit] Hesperia (Widneyville-by-the-Desert)

During the Los Angeles real estate boom that commenced about 1885, Dr Widney purchased Template:Convert of land (located Template:Convert northeast of Los Angeles) comprising the relatively undeveloped township of Hesperia, California. Soon after, Widney formed the Hesperia Land and Water Company for the purpose of creating a town. Hesperia was advertised as the "Denver of the West".[93][94] This was one of the more controversial real estate ventures associated with Widney. It was known pejoratively as Widneyville-by-the-Desert. Major Horace Bell, in his On the Old West Coast, a personal reflection on that period, critiqued the boomers, including the developers of Widneyville:
From 1856 on to and through the great real estate boom which began in 1885 and lasted three years, the banner of organized rascality floated over the municipal hall of Los Angeles and its rulers were banded together in a speculative conspiracy against all that was honest. The city began to increase its rate of growth about 1875, but it was still a slow movement until the boom struck in '85. This boom was one of the crimes of the age. Only a few people profited by it while hundreds of thousands were trapped into insane purchase of property and crazy speculation, and finally ruined....I will give a few instances of the wildcatting during those memorable years. All the land from Redondo-by-the-Sea to Widneyville-by-the-Desert they cut up into town lots. They built cement sidewalks for miles into the desert vastness. From the trains they herded them into wagons, tally-hos or stages and hauled them to the heart of the proposed new "city." Here a vast array of refreshment tables would be set up in serried ranks, covered with cold lunch, while barrels of beer, whiskey and wine would be tapped to the blare of the band. All free of course, and most stimulating when the hour arrived for bidding in lots. Lots selling on those feast days for thousands of dollars apiece were afterward assessed for taxation at two dollars a lot and many of them reverted to the tax collector. My goodness, the colleges they proposed and sometimes actually built! A college for at least every thousand acres. The college seemed to be a big selling point. And hotels! Magnificent structures were actually erected that never held a guest after opening day and were later dedicated to the insurance companies by the fire route. "Widneyville-by-the-Desert" was a prize exhibit of those days. The promoters referred to it as "the modern Elysium", I believe, or some such high-toned Greek brag. A tremendous excursion was organized to conduct the speculative hordes to the site of the proposed ideal city on the opening day. A natural and to the Eastern tenderfoot a rather appalling growth of cactus and yucca palms, commonly called Joshua trees, covered the desert hereabouts. These spiny, writhing Joshua trees are really a horrific sight if you are not used to them, but the promoters of Widneyville had a bright idea that saved them the expense of clearing the growth off. They did a little judicious trimming on the cactus plants and yuccas, shaping them up into a certain uniformity, then shipped out a carload of cheap wind-fall oranges and on the end of each bayonet-like spike on the yuccas and on each cactus spine they impaled an orange. Suddenly the desert fruited like the orange grove! Down the lines of the proposed streets staked out in the desert, and around the great square outlined by the surveyors, crowded innumerable orange trees loaded with their golden harvest. The Easterners stood agape at the Elysian sight, hardly listening to the salesmen as they described the college, the several churches, the great sanitarium and the magnificent hotel--temperance hotel--that would so soon surround the central plaza of Widneyville.
"Here, you see, ladies and gentlemen, is the natural home of the orange", said the conductor of the excursion as he addressed the assembled multitude. "These beautiful trees, so prolific of fruit, are a natural growth. This is the only spot west of the Rocky Mountains where the orange is indigenous. In a little while we will have irrigation canals all over the tract and when these orange trees are irrigated their fruit will grow as big as pumpkins. There'll be a fortune in every block, ladies and gentlemen." Blocks and blocks were sold from the plat of "Widneyville-by-the-Desert", at boom prices but no house was built on the actual site.[95]
Widney's subdivision crews laid out what was known as the Old Townsite. In 1887, Widney began construction of the Hesperia Hotel, a three-story brick building consisting of 48 rooms and hot and cold running water, baths, and a water closet on each floor. The hotel, which took 2½ years to build, even had communication tubes between floors, thus enabling room service.[96][97][94] An Illustrated History of Southern California (1890) described Hesperia:
Hesperia is a small town in the Hesperia valley, on the main line of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, about twenty-five miles north of the county seat, at an elevation of Template:Convert. The San Bernardino Mountains on the south and the Hesperia Mountains on the north enclose the valley, the climate is delightful and unrivaled for pulmonary, bronchial, and nasal disorders.[98]

[edit] Iron-Sulphur Springs

The Los Angeles Times of 2 June 1887 reported that Widney had purchased a hotel and several bath houses in the town of Iron-Sulphur Springs (formerly known as Fulton Wells, and known today as Santa Fe Springs), fifteen miles (24 km) east of downtown Los Angeles. This area was originally part of the Rancho Santa Gertrudes.[99] The hotel (located on the north side of Telegraph Road, two blocks east of the intersection of Telegraph Road and Norwalk Boulevard) had been constructed in 1873 by Dr J.E. Fulton, and designated as the Fulton Sulphar Springs and Health Resort.[100] In 1886 the springs were purchased by the Santa Fe Railroad, who renamed the town after itself.[101][102][103] Widney planned to build a larger hotel.

[edit] Widney as progressive

Widney was future-focused and believed in progress. He was quoted as saying, "We may look lovingly back on log cabin days, but the looking back must be done over a multi-lane highway, not along a cow track".[104] Nettie Widney, his brother Samuel's widow, indicated: "he never went back. When he made a finish of a thing, that was the last of it, and he got a new project. He lived in chapters, and closed the book".[105] Even towards the end of his life, at a time when many his age might have been comforted by reflecting retrospectively, Dr Widney was still articulating grand plans for the development of Los Angeles after the age of 95. In 1937 he wrote "A Plan for the Development of Los Angeles as a Great World Health Center." To facilitate the development of Los Angeles, Widney proposed building a series of roads and tunnels that would transverse and pierce the Sierra Madre Mountains, thus linking the city and the interior desert. According to Carl Rand, Widney postulated:
The whole future of the city lies within our own hands. Los Angeles Harbor (which ought to have been larger and deeper); the great Desert City which may be; and the Colorado River water system; these are the three factors which will settle the future of the City of Los Angeles. And the time to strike is now![106]

Widney believed his Desert City could be built at no expense to the taxpayers. He advocated the government grant the land for his proposed Desert City, with the land then sold to investors and developers. Widney proposed an automobile highway up the Arroyo Seco to link Los Angeles with the Mojave Desert, which would be funded from a tax on gasoline.[107]

[edit] Widney as booster

Widney was a prominent booster of Southern California and, most especially, of Los Angeles. Deverell and Flamming see him as among "a small group of extraordinarily powerful men working to consolidate and add to their power. Linked by family ties, cooperative business ventures, and carefully exclusive social and neighborhood networks, these men sat atop the booster food chain, and they knew it. Their booster project was about the consolidation of power and the expansion of what were for many already substantial fortunes".[108] Further, Jaher identifies Dr Widney as among those successful Los Angeles entrepreneurs who were the "most avid civic boosters...[who] made sanguine by their triumphs, they expect urban growth to bring further gains...[who] predicted that the city would become a great metropolis".[109] Widney envisioned Los Angeles "developing into the health capital of the world, a heliopolis of holistic health culture".[110]

Widney was an active member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce since its resurrection in October 1888, and served occasionally as its chairman or secretary. Widney's first two books were written to promote (or "boost") California. In California of the South (1888), described by David Fine as "one of the earliest booster tracts"[111] Widney and Walter Lindley wrote: "The health-seeker who, after suffering in both mind and body, after vainly trying the cold climate of Minnesota and the warm climate of Florida, after visiting Mentone, Cannes, and Nice, after traveling to Cuba and Algiers, and noticing that he is losing ounce upon ounce of flesh, and his cheeks have grown more sunken, his appetite more capricious, his breath more hurried, that his temperature is no longer normal,... turns with a gleam of hope toward the Occident"—by which they meant Southern California. Many people followed that gleam and found it something more than hope".[112]

[edit] Widney and public service

According to one report, Widney "was a zealous promoter, for several decades, of every public enterprise in Los Angeles".[113] "Doctors involved in entrepreneurship or government also achieved high professional status, as measured by affiliations, medical school faculty appointments, and medical society presidencies....Medical and legal elites achieved hegemony in similar fashion. An interlocking group of physicians controlled local professional societies, schools, and hospitals".[61] "Upper-class culture differed from eastern patriciates in expressing stronger democratic and instrumental impulses. Here the establishment, as in the cases of Bridge and Widney, agreed with its Chicago counterpart....The foremost figures in this dimension of urban leadership were often active in several organizations and in other aspects of community hegemony. As the institutions that they directed enlarged from specialized clientele to community audiences their control expanded over high culture. Los Angeles also resembled the other cities in that the leaders of its intellectual and esthetic agencies often derived from distinguished families. The newly risen dominated economic, political, and professional life, but culture, like charity, remained an Old Guard stronghold. Joneses, Newmarks, Hubbells, Mesmers, Widneys,...like their peers in other places, compensated for commercial and political displacement by exerting considerable influence over culture".[114] "Joseph P. Widney, like Graves a proponent of rugged individualism, argued that New Deal programs corrupted the American spirit".[115]

[edit] Widney and San Pedro Harbour

Widney did much in outlining the railroad, maritime and commercial policy of Southern California.[116] He and his brother Robert were prime examples of entrepreneurial professionals. They proved to be "effective lobbyists for the Southern Pacific [railroad] and for harbor improvements"[117] and were especially "active in transport enterprises and in the development of the San Pedro harbor".[118]

As early as 1871 Widney saw the need for Los Angeles to have its own harbour, and with Phineas Banning successfully lobbied the United States Congress for funding over many years for the establishment of the harbour at San Pedro, California (now known as the Port of Los Angeles). In 1881 Widney was described in the Los Angeles Times as the "prime mover of Wilmington Harbor".[119] He was chairman of the Los Angeles Citizens' Committee on the Wilmington Harbor. He wrote the memorials to the U.S. Congress advocating the deepening of the harbor. He also successfully opposed the attempt of the railroad interests of Collis Potter Huntington and his partners from claiming the state tidelands of the harbor for their own corporate purposes, thus ensuring these lands remained in public domain.[120]

[edit] Widney and Southern California statehood

Widney was one of the first to discuss the feasibility of dividing the state of California and establishing the commonwealth of Southern California. He wrote prolifically on the subject, and was regarded as "one of the ablest and most enthusiastic advocates of the new 'California of the South'".[121] For many years Widney advocated unsuccessfully for the division of the state of California into at least two (and later he advocated four) states, in order to maximise its representation in the U.S. Senate.[120] He indicated in 1880 that "the topography, geography, climatic and commercial laws all work for the separation of California into two distinct civil organizations".[122] In 1888, Widney contended that "two distinct peoples are growing up in the state, and the time is rapidly drawing near when the separation which the working of natural laws is making in the people must become a separation of civil laws as well".[123]

Widney's mature views on the division of the state of California were:
I issued a call for the meeting which was attended by representatives of various Southern California counties, and the records of this session of two or three days are still in my possession. A committee of distinguished attorneys was appointed, and this committee reported that the State, at the time of its admission, was already practically divided, for provision was then made that, whenever the people wished it, a division of the State into two parts could be made. Notwithstanding, however, it was so provided, that no vote need be taken upon the issue, the convention decided that our movement was premature- the time was not ripe for the step. I think that the postponement was a great mistake, and I am still in favor of such a subdivision, and into four parts, according to the harbors available: (1) Southern California, which would have Los Angeles Harbor and San Diego Harbor; (2) Point Harford at San Luis Obispo (a cut through the mountains bringing the lower San Joaquin Valley to the ocean); (3) North Central California, with San Francisco Bay, and that city as the capital; and (4) another division, centering around Eureka or on Humboldt Bay. That my views are sound was confirmed by a conversation with an eminent senator from the East, who expressed the opinion that Californians, with a coast line of more than eight hundred miles, and yet allowed only two senatorial votes (or no more than are given to little Rhode Island), are very foolish in not insisting upon a redivision, and, therefore, a new and better representation. Such a division into four parts, as I proposed in the February, 1881, issue of The Californian, would give us eight senatorial votes; and this division will surely come-only just wait![124]

[edit] Widney and American Imperialism

Widney is credited as the one who originated and made the first public movement looking toward the acquisition of the peninsula of Lower California by the United States.[116] Additionally, he proposed in an article published in 1932 that "Europe should simply be bought out of the Western Hemisphere,"[125] with the European nations ceding their territories in Central and South America and the West Indies to the United States to cancel their debts to the American people. Such an action would give the British colonies of Belize, and British Guiana (now Guyana), the French colony of French Guiana, and the Dutch colony of Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) to the USA, thus expanding her empire by Template:Convert. Further, he believed that the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea ought to be "American seas" and that "the power that controls the American interoceanic canals must be an American power, and among the American nationalities none but ourselves has the strength to do this work, and to enforce the peace."[125]

[edit] Widney and Anglo-Saxon federation

In his book The Three Americas(1935), Widney suggested that the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form an Anglo-Saxon federation with freedom of migration and a common citizenship.

[edit] Widney and Prohibition

While Widney was Republican in general politics, he was "an earnest worker in the cause of temperance".[116] In an 1886 Los Angeles Times op-ed piece Widney suggested that the liquor question - the restriction of its manufacture and sale - should not only become the subject of a Republican party platform plank but should be the issue around which the party rebuilt itself.[126] He had been greatly interested in the progress of prohibition. He served as head of the city's nonpartisan anti-saloon league, but declined to run for mayor of Los Angeles on the Prohibition ticket in 1894.[127]

[edit] Widney and education

Widney is regarded as "the outstanding early educator of Los Angeles".[128]

[edit] Widney and the University of Southern California (1880-1896)

Widney was involved in the University of Southern California from its very conception in 1879. He served as a member of the Board of Trustees of USC from 1880 to 1895. As such he was responsible (along with the other trustees), for USC's policy of implementing a non-discriminatory admissions policy. Carter reveals, "USC's first student body, the class of 1884, was made up of seven students and two of them were women. That's not a bad record, considering the fact that many other private universities such as Yale did not begin admitting women until almost 90 years later".[129] In addition to being a member of USC's governing body, Widney was also for several years Professor of English Literature at the College of Liberal Arts at USC, until, with the establishment of the College of Medicine, he was compelled by lack of time to concentrate his labors in the latter.[130]

[edit] Widney as Dean of USC College of Medicine (1885-1896)

Widney was the person most responsible for the creation of the USC College of Medicine in 1885 at the beginning of a three-year "boom" cycle in Los Angeles real estate. He was elected as its founding dean, a responsibility he accepted for the next eleven years until his resignation on 22 September 1896. According to Michael Carter, "the University Catalogue for the academic year 1884-85 declared that applicants to the medical school, as to the rest of USC, would not be denied admission because of 'race, color, religion or sex.'"

The USC College of Medicine held classes for its first ten years rent-free in a two-story brick building (originally housing the Vache Freres Winery) located at 445 Aliso Street owned by Widney. Widney donated a large sum to establish the College of Medicine, including donating the property where it was initially located, made frequent large contributions afterwards, and arranged to give a larger amount in providing new and more commodious college buildings for permanent occupancy.[131] He attracted a strong faculty to the Medical School, which he headed, and kept that arm of the university solvent by the simple expedient of paying the bills himself.[132] He was responsible for the development of the curriculum, choosing to offer a three-year (later four-year) course of study in keeping with then-recent developments at prestigious medical schools in the eastern U.S.

[edit] Widney as President of USC (1892-1896)

After the death of USC founding president the Reverend Marion McKinley Bovard on 30 December 1891, the Board of Trustees elected Widney as the next president. Widney was reluctant to accept this responsibility, but after he "recognized a call of the Lord",[133] he accepted the presidency at a difficult time in the history of the embryonic institution. At that time USC had only twenty-five undergraduate students, and its focus was on providing secondary education.[134] According to E.T.W., "Everything was in confusion; they were in the midst of the bank crash of '93, and no one knew what property the university had, or what it was worth. The professors had not been paid for months, and relief was not to be had through the banks, which withdrew credit":[133]
With finances in a precarious state and the administrative system almost completely shattered by his death, the University of Southern California faced the great crisis of its existence. It was a physician who proved to be the man of the hour to heal the university of these blows. Under the vigorous and cheerful leadership of Dr. J. P. Widney, a brother of the founder, the drooping spirits of faculty and students were revived".[135]

The College of Liberal Arts was then eighteen thousand dollars in debt. Widney's first step was to set up a separate governing board for the College of Liberal Arts, both as a means of refinancing the debt and of tying that branch of the institution more closely to the spiritual leaders of California Methodism.[136] Widney himself went out on the streets and raised $15,000, giving his own personal security to back up the loans, thus saving USC from bankruptcy. The Southern California Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church increased its support for USC in 1893. The Conference "enthusiastically adopted Widney's new financial program for the institution. Two of the church's most distinguished and trusted leaders [Widney and Phineas F. Bresee] were at the helm. By the time of the annual conference of 1894, the university had passed through its financial crisis, and Widney's principal work was done".[137] In the spring of 1895, Widney decided to resign after "four years of intensive unremunerated service to the university as its president".[138] He announced his intention to spend a year studying in the East. The board finally accepted the resignation, after their benefactor had turned aside repeated requests that he reconsider his decision.[139]

[edit] Widney's philosophy of education

Jaher indicates that
Shortly after retiring as USC President, he [Widney] articulated a philosophy of education that emphasized democracy over elitism, pragmatism over scholarship, the present over the past, the California college over the eastern and European university, and the Pacific over the Atlantic Coast. Easterners schooled in that region and Europe "lose their originality," relevance, and force. They "go out from this atmosphere of a narrow overrefinement" looking "to the past." But those they "superciliously" regard "as crude and unlettered, men possibly without the university stamp are the men the world instinctively seeks out, and who do its work." According to Widney, "the distinctively American mental life is to be found west of the Appalachians, in the memory of the log schoolhouse and the smaller colleges".[128]

[edit] Widney and the Los Angeles Board of Education

In addition to his responsibilities at USC, Widney served several years as a member and president of the Los Angeles Board of Education.[137]

In October 1894 at the dedication of the Peniel Hall, Widney announced his intention to organize a Training Institute, in which Bible and practical nursing were to be the principal studies.[140]

[edit] Widney and religion

[edit] Widney and the Methodist Episcopal Church (1841-1895)

Widney had been raised in the Greene Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Piqua, Ohio, where his father, Wilson Widney, was a steward.[141][142] His mother's brother, Robert Samuel Maclay (7 February 1824 - 18 August 19070, was the first Methodist missionary to China, as well as the pioneer Methodist missionary to Japan and Korea.[141][143][144][145]

Widney was an active lay leader in the Methodist Episcopal church in Los Angeles. He was a member of Los Angeles First Methodist Episcopal Church (originally located at the corner of Fort Street (now South Broadway) and West Third streets, and from 1899 at the corner of South Hill Street and West Sixth Street)[146], and was close friends with one-time pastor, Rev. Phineas F. Bresee. The Widneys were the mainstays of the "District Aid Committee," an organization devoted to securing better support for underpaid pastors.[147] Dr. and Mrs. Widney and his sister, Arabella, had long been active in the evangelistic endeavors which Methodists carried on among the poor and unfortunate. The two women pioneered the organization of deaconess work in southern California in 1889. Bresee and Widney were members of the first executive board. The only question Methodists ever raised against Widney came in 1892, when he employed a critical approach to the Scriptures in a series of articles aimed to rebuke an extreme doctrine of divine healing.[137]

[edit] Widney and the Peniel Mission (1894-1895)

According to noted historian Timothy L. Smith,
all records agree that Widney was an honored citizen of both the city and the church he loved. But, like Bresee, his abiding passion in recent years had been the evangelization of the poor and the extension of the ministry of scriptural holiness to classes which the church might otherwise miss. Few were surprised, therefore, when he joined the group which was sponsoring Peniel Hall. ... [T]his work soon became more important in Widney's eyes than the presidency of the infant university which he had so recently and so nobly served.[137]

Widney was instrumental in the support and enlargement of the Los Angeles City Mission (later referred to as the Peniel Mission), especially from October 1894 when the 900-seat Peniel Hall located at 227 S. Main Street in Los Angeles was dedicated. The Peniel Mission, founded in 1886 (as the Los Angeles Mission) by Theodore Pollock Ferguson and Manie Payne Ferguson (born Carlow, Ireland, 1850; died 1932),[148] was undenominational and nonsectarian. "Their entire work, like that of most of the city holiness missions, was oriented toward soul saving and the promotion of holiness".[149] Despite Widney's active involvement in the Peniel Mission, there was no thought to resigning from the Methodist church.[150] According to Frankiel, "The mission was not a church...; converts were supposed to join one of the regular denominations. It was, rather, a holiness revival station spreading the message of Christian perfection".[149]

According to Smith, "all the available evidence indicates that neither Bresee nor Widney was contemplating any change in his relationship with Peniel Mission or with the Methodist church".[139] However, by early October 1895, Widney and Bresee were "frozen out" of the Peniel Mission. According to Smith,
[t]he immediate cause for the organization of the Church of the Nazarene ... is not so much to be found in Bresee's differences with the Methodists as in those which developed between him and the proprietors of Peniel Hall. Certainly J. P. Widney must have been disillusioned when A. B. Simpson, leader of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and reportedly an extremist on divine healing, appeared as a special worker at the mission in May [1895]. Bresee on his part disagreed with Mr. and Mrs. Fergusons' insistence upon the use of young women in rescue work, and their growing interest in foreign missionary schemes.[139]

[edit] Widney and the Church of the Nazarene (1895-1898)

[edit] Formation of the Church of the Nazarene

During the summer of 1895, Widney had changed his plans to study for a year in the East and had remained in Los Angeles. With characteristic decisiveness, Bresee and Widney determined to form a new organization in which their program of a church home for the poor might be fully carried out. They announced a service for Sunday, 6 October 1895, in Red Men's Hall located at 317 S. Main Street in Los Angeles, a short distance from the Peniel Mission. A Los Angeles Times reporter gave us the only extant firsthand account of this meeting. The leaders, he wrote, "announced that although no name had been decided upon for the new denomination, its work was to be chiefly evangelistic and its government congregational".[151] Bresee declared that the only thing new in the movement was its determination to preach the gospel to the needy, and to give that class a church they could call their own.[151]

After three weeks of independent meetings in the Red Men's Hall, on 30 October 1895, Bresee and Widney formally organised the Church of the Nazarene, the west coast ancestor of the denomination that now bears that name, with 82 charter members.
While several distinguished Methodists joined, most of the membership, was made up of recent converts from the poorer sections of Los Angeles. On the day of organization Widney preached on the words of Christ, "Follow me." Widney "pointed out that the essence of Christianity was not to receive a creed or to observe church forms and rituals, but simply to accept the Christ life, to make Christ himself the Lord of one's heart. After an interesting reference to the novelist Tolstoy's recent decision to abandon his high position and go to serve the peasants of a Russian village, Widney attempted to explain why a new denomination was required. The reason, he said, was that the machinery and the methods of the older churches had proved a hindrance to the work of evangelizing the poor".[152]

[edit] Naming of the Church of the Nazarene

Widney was responsible for suggesting the name of the infant denomination. Smith explains:
The word "Nazarene" had come to him one morning at daybreak, after a whole night of prayer. It immediately seemed to him to symbolize "the toiling, lowly mission of Christ." It was the name which Jesus used of himself, Widney declared, "the name which was used in derision of Him by His enemies", the name which above all others linked Him to "the great toiling, struggling, sorrowing heart of the world. It is Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, to whom the world in its misery and despair turns, that it may have hope.[153]
At the outset Widney and Bresee saw this church as
"the first of a denomination that preached the reality of entire sanctification received through faith in Christ. They held that Christians sanctified by faith should follow Christ's example and preach the gospel to the poor. They felt called especially to this work. They believed that unnecessary elegance and adornment of houses of worship did not represent the spirit of Christ but the spirit of the world, and that their expenditures of time and money should be given to Christlike ministries for the salvation of souls and the relief of the needy. They organized the church accordingly. They adopted general rules, a statement of belief, a polity based on a limited superintendency, procedures for the consecration of deaconesses and the ordination of elders, and a ritual. These were published as a Manual beginning in 1898. They published a paper known as The Nazarene and then The Nazarene Messenger." [154]
Among the first to be ordained by the new church was Joseph P. Widney. Bresee and Widney were appointed to life tenure as pastors and superintendents in the infant denomination,[149] but their power was "more personal than legal".[155]

[edit] Resignation

In October 1898, Bresee and Widney both resigned as superintendents due to an increased consensus that life tenure was not in the best interests of the church. The delegates from the various churches voted to accept the resignation of Widney and Bresee from their lifetime tenure, and to limit the term of office for general superintendents to one year.[156] They were subsequently re-elected to an annual term.[157]

However, soon afterward (in late 1898), Widney resigned from the Church of the Nazarene.[158] Apparently, the growing frequency of services of great emotional power at the tabernacle became at last too much for him. Smith reports, "It happened that one night, after a great "outpouring of the Spirit," some of the most prominent members of the church went to the altar. Several were overcome completely, and a good deal of noise and confusion resulted. Widney, a quiet-mannered man, decided that he could not be happy any longer amidst such scenes".[159] According to Smith, "there is no evidence at all of any hard feelings between Bresee and Widney. Their parting was most friendly".[160] Additionally, according to Frankiel, there were theological differences between Widney and the Church of the Nazarene. Widney "believed in gradual spiritual growth rather than an identifiable experience of [entire] sanctification".[86]

[edit] Widney and the Methodist Episcopal Church (1899-1911)

Widney returned to the Methodist church as a minister and was appointed to the church's City Mission of Los Angeles (formally organized in 1908), where he ministered to thousands over the next several years.[158]

In 1899 the Southern California Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church accepted his credentials. He was appointed the superintendent of the city missionary work of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, and was also listed as the pastor of the Nazarene Methodist Episcopal Church, which met initially in Widney's home at 150 W. Adams Street.[156] Growth of the congregation necessitated the construction of a 500-seat building at Ninth and Santee Streets on a property owned by Widney. Widney met the entire costs of construction and ministered without compensation. The new building was dedicated on Sunday, 3 June 1900. The new facility incorporated on the ground floor a free reading room, a bath house for men to use, and two stores.[161]

In 1903 this church was renamed the Beth-El Methodist Episcopal Church due to increased confusion with the rapidly growing Church of the Nazarene led by Phineas F. Bresee. The congregation was soon to be relocated to a new property purchased by Widney at the corner of Pasadena Avenue and Avenue 39 (now 3901 Marmion Way, Highland Park), as th