E.A. Sutherland

E.A. Sutherland as a young man

The Michigan Backdrop to Madison

By Albert Dittes

For Edward Alexander Sutherland, thirty-nine years old, resigning as president of Emmanuel Missionary College (EMC) in Berrien Springs, Michigan, in May 1904 culminated thirteen years of Seventh-day Adventist educational reform. He had dedicated himself to following the directions given through Ellen White, and that had led to conflict, unpopularity, and productivity.

“The conservative man will never be a reformer,” he once said.

Sutherland was conservative in that he based all he did on the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy. Unfortunately, this trait often brought him into conflict with the top officers of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination.

On December 20, 1907, he wrote to Elder S. N. Haskell that he had moved to Tennessee not only because he felt God could use him in a “needy field” but also because “we knew that we were in a position at Berrien Springs where we could not be free to carry out the instruction given to us by the Spirit of Prophecy without great difficulty.”

Some of these difficulties come to light in documents on file at the Adventist Research Center at Andrews University. Many incidents led to this dramatic resignation at a high-level church council. Ellen White tried in vain to head off trouble, but emotions just boiled over, and Sutherland shocked the assembly by walking out.

Part of the problem, according to a doctoral dissertation on E. A. Sutherland by Warren Sidney Ashworth, was that he could never develop a good working relationship with Arthur G. Daniells, newly elected president of the General Conference. Following a recommendation of Ellen White, Sutherland and Magan wanted to start a sanitarium in Berrien Springs after the 1901 fire destroyed the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Daniells had apparently killed the plan, however. Sutherland and Daniells had communicated little from September 1903 until a month before the important Berrien Springs meeting set for May 1904. The tension started affecting the EMC students.

He always had spoken his convictions. His differences with SDA church leaders began in 1891 at Battle Creek College. Sutherland, then a young Bible teacher, taught from Genesis 9 that eating flesh foods shortened life, and he recommended that the cafeteria not serve meat.

“This teaching caused a furor in Battle Creek College,” he later wrote in an autobiographical sketch of himself and Percy Magan. “Twenty five of the students quit eating meat.”

The college cafeteria served meat three times a day, and that “provided practically all of the protein that they had,” he wrote. The issue divided the students and teachers, and the college administration resolved the situation by adding beans to the menu.

This incident set the course for Sutherland’s life work and ultimate resignation as president of the college. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, medical superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, agreed with him and proclaimed the benefits of a non-flesh diet to the students. George I. Butler, a past president of the General Conference, disagreed. After Sutherland later taught the change of diet given to Israel during their deliverance from Egypt, W. W. Prescott, head of the General Conference department of education, called him in and told him “there was to be no more use of the Testimonies with the Bible teaching.”

“Sutherland insisted that the Bible itself taught a non-flesh diet,” according to the autobiography.

Uriah Smith sided with Prescott, who sent Sutherland out to Walla Walla College as president for the next six years.

“That young fellow will soon come to his senses,” Sutherland quoted Prescott as saying.

Sutherland and Kellogg never resolved their differences with Prescott.

The industrial education program that Sutherland started at Walla Walla impressed the delegates to the 1897 General Conference. The new president elected that year, George A. Irwin, chose Sutherland to head Battle Creek College, ushering in a “new order.” Percy Magan later became dean.

Sutherland immediately vowed to follow the Spirit of Prophecy guidelines. “I feel that it would be worse than folly to undertake the work here unless the instruction given by the Lord is closely and faithfully followed out,” he wrote to Willie White, son of Ellen White and one of her top assistants, soon after taking office. “If I know my own heart I have no other desire than to work in harmony with the Lord on this school question.”

He started by transforming a college playing field into a garden. He also bought an eighty-acre farm and rented a second farm to alleviate the cramped quarters of Battle Creek College, built across the street from the sanitarium. He stopped granting degrees in 1899, saying they were “papal in origin and an alliance of church and state.” He wanted English as well as science and bookkeeping taught only from the Bible and Testimonies.

Sutherland opened a broom factory at Battle Creek College, as well as facilities for dress making, woodwork, carpentry, and printing. He and Magan also filed articles at the Calhoun County Courthouse for a business to train students “in the art and business of printing and publishing whereby they may become self-sustaining missionaries.”

In studying the Ellen White guidelines, Magan and Sutherland felt the need of a farm for their school and started looking for one, when time permitted, in 1899. Their friend A. T. Jones, editor of the Review and Herald, approved of their plans, but after a rainstorm sidelined them for two days in a Chicago hotel, President Irwin of the General Conference told them “there was to be no more of that.” Sutherland later wrote in his autobiographical sketch, “He [Irwin] wrote Ellen White that they [we] were naughty boys.”

Ellen White told them to let the issue rest for now. In the meantime, they devoted themselves to liquidating an $80,000 debt on the college.

During these years of 1898–1900, a prominent woman, Mrs. S. M. I. Henry, a past president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, came to the Battle Creek Sanitarium and ultimately joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The industrial program at Battle Creek College impressed her, and she arranged for Sutherland to speak to a group of like-minded educators contemplating an industrial school in Berrien Springs. While there, Sutherland discovered a farm for sale along the St. Joseph River. The industrial school plan faded, but Sutherland remembered the farm and quietly told others about it.

In April of 1899, Sutherland wrote to Willie White about the possibility of starting an industrial school for black students in Calmar, Mississippi. He and Magan admired the work of J. Edson White, older brother of Willie White, and later spent a month touring the South, visiting “industrial schools” there.

At the 1901 General Conference session, Ellen White said it was time to move Battle Creek College, and the assembly approved. The selection committee chose the Berrien Springs farm as the new site.

They moved the school to Berrien Springs later that year, but Sutherland ran afoul of the conference officers again when he offered free tuition to any SDA student willing to work. The brethren felt that cost the school money they would have to come up with.

Sutherland and Magan shocked the church and seemed to weigh in with the now controversial Dr. Kellogg when they reopened Battle Creek College as a premedical institution in 1903 to help his medical school, now deprived of students after the removal of the old college to Berrien Springs. Ellen White discouraged Adventist young people from going to Battle Creek for their education.

The collapse of Percy Magan’s wife, Ida, also aggravated the situation. Health problems had plagued the Magans during the years of working with Sutherland. A severe attack of typhoid fever with relapses and myocardial complications during the summer of 1900 cost Percy Magan most of his hair at the age of thirty-three. Nursing her husband back to health and experiencing the premature death of her brother made Ida seriously ill, and their two boys went to live with her parents in Santa Ana, California. “It seemed when I left my poor little children at Santa Ana that the last thing I had on earth was being taken from me, and coming back here to my home at Berrien Springs seemed almost like coming to the grave,” Percy Magan wrote to Ellen White.

Nobody knew who had made a false rumor out of an Ellen White statement in a private letter that some of the educational reforms were extreme. Ida Magan heard that Ellen White disapproved of her husband. This bad news hit her so hard she checked into a Kalamazoo, Michigan, mental hospital and later contracted tuberculosis.

“It was not Brother Daniells or Brother Prescott who after the Oakland Conference came with a depressing influence, saying that Sister White had changed toward Brother Magan, and would no longer sustain him in his work,” Ellen White wrote. “This is the word that was carried to Sister Magan, and it was followed by the loss of her reason. But I wish to say that those who charge this to Elder Daniells or to Elder Prescott are bearing false witness. These men are not doing that kind of work, and those who attribute it to them are doing them great injustice.”

Thus, the stage was set for confrontation at a biennial session of the Lake Union Conference set for May 18–26, 1904. Also attending would be the Auditing Committee of the General Conference as well as the Review and Herald Publishing Association and Emmanuel Missionary College boards of directors. Arthur G. Daniells then served as president of the Lake Union as well as the General Conference.

Delegates to the Lake Union Conference session arrived Tuesday, the important meetings began Wednesday, and Ida Magan died Thursday.

A. T. Jones conducted her funeral the following Sabbath afternoon.

“Sister Magan worked with her husband, struggling with him, and praying that he might be sustained,” Ellen White commented Monday. “She did not think of herself, but of him. And God did sustain them, as they walked in the light. From her small store of money, Sister Magan gave five hundred dollars to erect the Memorial Hall. She strove untiringly to maintain a perfect home government, teaching and educating her children in the fear of God. Twice she had to nurse her husband through an attack of fever while she herself was becoming diseased. She suffered for months, and the husband suffered with her. And now the poor woman has gone, leaving two motherless children. All this, because of the work done by unsanctified tongues.”

The first day of the conference, Ellen White spoke against some of the problems with The Living Temple, a Kellogg-written book some people felt contained pantheistic statements, and W. W. Prescott wanted to denounce pantheism. Ellen White initially told him to go ahead but then changed her mind and wrote him to do all he could to save Dr. Kellogg. This latter note never reached Prescott.

According to a summary of this meeting by Adventist historian E. K. Vande Vere, Prescott preached a withering denunciation of pantheism that Friday evening, with Dr. Kellogg in the audience, reading from a book looking like The Living Temple. At the close of the meeting, in a dramatic flourish, Prescott threw the book to the floor. The Kellogg followers picked it up, discovered it was not The Living Temple, and cried foul.

At the Monday early morning devotional, A. T. Jones lashed back at Prescott.

“Did you write that?” Jones would ask, listing the specific charges against Dr. Kellogg and showing that Prescott himself had written the same things in the Review & Herald.

After Prescott would admit that he had, Jones asked, “Do you believe what you wrote?”

Prescott protested that he had changed his mind.

“When did you change your mind?” Jones demanded.

This blistering attack continued for three hours, with Jones trying to prove Prescott and other ministers the sources of Dr. Kellogg’s ideas.

The session erupted into charges and countercharges, with Dr. Kellogg saying he had written nothing out of harmony with the denomination and Ellen White.

Sutherland then startled everyone by getting up and saying, “I have done my best work with the denomination. Now, Elder Daniells, you are driving me out of the organized work. Well, you hereby have my resignation. I believe the Lord is calling me to establish a school in the South.”

Percy Magan and Bessie DeGraw did the same.

“Brother Sutherland spoke words that were untimely,” Ellen White wrote two months later. “For him to present his resignation at a time when so much was a stake, at a meeting in which the ministers had assembled for prayer and confession, to seek for unity of spirit, was an unfortunate spirit, and showed that a strange power had come in to influence his mind, and lead it away from the living fountain to the brackish streams of the lowlands. He said that to which he would not have given utterance had he not been talked with and wrought upon. He spoke at a time when silence would have been eloquence.”

Ellen White had not opposed the idea of going South when Percy Magan mentioned it to her on a Sunday afternoon drive, and she publicly affirmed their decision.

“If Brethren Sutherland and Magan shall leave Berrien Springs, and I believe it is their duty to go, I beg of you, for Christ’s sake, not to follow them with criticism and faultfinding,” she told the delegates. “Several times, even before they took up the work in Berrien Springs, Brethren Magan and Sutherland expressed to me their burden for the work in the South. Their hearts are there. Do not blame them for going. Do not put any impediments in their way. Let them go. . . . God go with them, and may His blessing attend them.”

The board met the next day and asked them to reconsider. Perhaps Sutherland and Magan could start a new school in the South as part of their work at Berrien Springs.

But their decision was final. Less than a month later, they found a site for their new school in Tennessee.

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