Chicago's S. E. C.

Chicago's Loop contains fewer churches (two) than the downtown districts of most other big U. S. cities. But every Sunday night from October to June some 2,000 Chicagoans and out-of-town visitors take their spiritual sustenance at the famed Chicago Sunday Evening Club in Orchestra Hall. There the ablest ministers of all sects preach to salesmen, students, merchants, homebodies, who dare laugh or beat their palms in applause as they would not in church. Last Sunday evening the S. E. C. gave its audience a novelty when onto the stage filed 300 young men in khaki from nearby Camp Skokie Valley of the CCC, 40 Negro singers from the CCC camp at Durand, Ill., 20 CCC chaplains, Army Chaplain Roland R. Bach of the Sixth Area, and the U. S. Chief of Chaplains, Colonel Alva Jennings Brasted.

Everyone sang America and two hymns, the Negroes sang spirituals, and Chaplain Bach warned the boys: "Don't play with sin!" To the audience, it was a demonstration of just how religion is brought to the CCC.

Conductor of the highly informal service was a white-thatched, rosy-cheeked man of 72--Clifford Webster Barnes, the S. E. C.'s founder. Altruist, capitalist, non-practicing parson, Clifford Barnes is quietly, almost secretly, one of Chicago's most useful citizens. Nearly 50 years ago he was a rich Yaleman (1889) who helped William Rainey Harper and Amos Alonzo Stagg establish the University of Chicago, joined its faculty to teach social science. Clifford Barnes worked in Jane Addams' Hull House, devoted his full time during the Depression of 1893 to helping Chicago's indigent. He established a settlement of his own, organized a Citizens' Welfare Committee to clean up political dirt, elect a Republican mayor. He went back to Yale for a divinity degree, directed the Student Christian Movement in Paris, became president for five years of Illinois College (1900-05). In 1907 Clifford Barnes got around to filling what he saw was Chicago's chief religious lack. In the swank Chicago Club he conferred with a group including John Shedd of Marshall Field, Banker David Forgan, Hardware Storeman Adolphus Clay Bartlett, got them to promise $20,000 for the first year's expenses of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club.

S. E. C. speakers now are paid $100 plus expenses, usually spend the week end at Mr. Barnes's Lake Forest home. The S. E. C. audience gives $100 or $200 in collections each Sunday, radio listeners send in contributions, but the Club costs $30,000 a year above the income from its $300,000 endowment--given mostly by Clifford Barnes. That the Club may not die with him, Founder Barnes hopes to raise the endowment to $500,000. Says he: "I make bold to say that the Sunday Evening Club is the most effective religious organization in America."

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