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Fred Burton Smith was an American evangelist and reformer.
Background
He was born on December 24, 1865 on the family farm near Lone Tree, Iowa, United States. He was the third son and youngest of five children of Robert Ames and Endora A. (Dinwiddie) Smith. His father was a Vermonter, his mother a native of Indiana.
Education
Smith attended district school and for a short time the academy and state university at Iowa City.
Career
He left school to share in the trials and tragic losses of a new frontier, gravitating there from farm to store clerk to farm machinery salesman and finally to the Young Men's Christian Association. His Y. M. C. A. work followed a conversion experience in 1885 that gave an unmistakable sense of direction to his immense energies and varied talents. Called to the Y. M. C. A. of Sioux Falls, Dakota Territory, in 1888, as secretary, he was transferred in 1891 to Dubuque, Iowa, and in 1896 to Chicago to do evangelistic work, then a major Y. M. C. A. emphasis.
Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War he was asked by Dwight L. Moody, by whom he was profoundly influenced, to organize the religious work among troops in southern camps; this service led to a call to head the Religious Work Department of the International Committee of the Y. M. C. A. The department's central interest was evangelism, and somewhat to his surprise Smith soon emerged as "America's greatest speaker to men. " He addressed yearly an average of forty-two Sunday afternoon audiences of one to six thousand men.
As he reached toward a sense of larger mission, Smith became dissatisfied with individualized evangelism; he read the literature of the social gospel, was deeply moved by Walter Rauschenbusch, and spent two days in conference with Washington Gladden. It remained for a subordinate in the Religious Work Department, Harry W. Arnold, to propose in 1910 a practical scheme that Smith organized into a program and carried to a climax in the nationwide campaign known as the Men and Religion Forward Movement.
Smith and Raymond Robins led a team that took the message of the Movement around the world. Some members of the International Y. M. C. A. Committee had been critical of this activity, so at its next meeting Smith presented a voluminous exhibit describing another expanded campaign involving the social emphasis. It was not approved.
Smith resigned the next spring (1914), convinced that to remain would mean becoming "a time-server. " For the next ten years he earned his livelihood as assistant to the president of the Johns-Manville Company, T. Frank Manville, whom he had met while soliciting funds for the Y. M. C. A. During almost the same period he used his prestige among business men to further one of the goals of the Men and Religion Forward Movement by heading a commission of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ which helped to organize local and state federations.
During the first World War he served in Y. M. C. A. war work. In the 1920's Smith devoted his major efforts to the prohibition cause and the peace movement. In 1925 he became chairman of the American section of the World Alliance for International Friendship through the Churches, a post in which he served with devotion to the end of his life, speaking, writing, and traveling incessantly in behalf of world peace; he crossed the Atlantic eighty-two times in all.
He was moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches in 1929-31 and for the next six years chairman of its continuing executive committee.
He died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in White Plains, New York.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Religion
Without sensationalism, he presented the "simple gospel" of "a living Christ who had the power to help men to live right"; to him it "made a real difference" whether a young man was a Christian or not.
Politics
Long a Republican, he attended that party's national convention in 1936.
Personality
He possessed of a fine voice, robust physique, and easy platform manner.
Connections
Smith married Minnie (Mary) Agnes Colvin in 1886; they had five children, Fred Gordon, Martha Lucile, Helen, Dorothy, and Richard Morse. After her death he married Lillian Eberenz in 1917.