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Horace H. Holley
Holley, Horace Hotchkiss (1887-1960). Author, Baha'i administrator, Hand of the Cause.
R. Jackson Armstrong-Ingram
Early Life
Horace Hotchkiss Holley was born on
April 7, 1887, in Torrington, Connecticut, United States of America. His
family was well-to-do and his forebears included congregationalist ministers
and noted educators. He graduated from the well-known Lawrenceville School in
New Jersey in 1906 and went on to attend Williams College where he studied
literature.
In 1909, he set out for Europe with the intention of spending
the summer there and returning to complete his studies. However, he met a
young artist, Bertha Herbert, on the boat. She loaned him Myron Phelps'
book about 'Abdu'l-Baha which introduced Holley to the Baha'i Faith. Herbert
and Holley were married in October 1909 and remained in Europe, first in
Italy and later in France. While they lived in Italy, their first
daughter, Hertha, was born.
In 1911, the Holley family went to
Thonon-les-Bains, France, to meet 'Abdu'l-Baha who was staying there. In
1912, they moved to Paris and again met 'Abdu'l-Baha on his visits there. In
Paris, Horace opened a modern art gallery and Bertha studied design. While
living in Paris, Holley published his first books of verse and his first work
on the Baha'i Faith, Bahaism: The Modern Social Religion.
Holley's
view of the Baha'i Faith was very much in social terms in these early years.
It was not really until later that he developed an appreciation of its
specifically religious aspects. Although, even then, he tended to emphasize a
continuity between the religious and social aspects, viewing the former as
inspiring individuals to achieve the latter rather than seeing them as
directly interconnected.
New York
After the outbreak of World
War I, the Holleys were among those who fled Paris. They went first to
London, and then to New York where they stayed initially with the Kinney
family, staunch members of the New York Baha'i community.
The Holleys
established themselves in Greenwich Village, New York, and associated with
the rather bohemian literary and artistic society there. Their second
daughter, Marcia, was born in 1916. Horace continued to write, publishing
more verse, plays, and discussion of the Baha'i Faith. However, what private
income they had did not go as far in New York as it had in Europe and any
supplement provided by Horace's literary and Bertha's artistic endeavors was
inconsequential. Horace entered the more commercially viable world of
advertising copywriting, working first with the Iron Age Publishing Company
from 1918 to 1920 and then as chief of the copy department at the Redfield
Advertising Agency from 1921 to 1925.
The Holleys' difficulties were not
only financial. Their marriage had been under strain for some time and the
circles in which they moved in Greenwich Village did not contribute to its
stability. Horace and Bertha divorced in 1919. That same year, Holley married
Doris Pascal whom he had first met in Paris.
Although divorced, Horace
and Bertha remained unamicably entangled for many years over financial
matters and because of the sad condition of their elder daughter. Hertha went
through repeated and worsening periods of mental disturbance until her death
in 1936 which were very costly for all the family both financially and
emotionally.
From his arrival in New York, Holley was active in Baha'i
circles, as well as those of Greenwich Village, and by the early 1920s he was
also well-known nationally in the Baha'i community. He was also an active
member of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in New York which had developed
an association with the Baha'i community, among others, under its rector
Dr. William Norman Guthrie in the years before World War I. Holley served
as Junior Warden of the vestry from 1928 to 1933, writing the
church's publicity materials, acting as part-time manager of its rental
apartment buildings, and spearheading its fundraising efforts. Holley left
the church in 1933, along with many Baha'is and others, as a consequence of
a disagreement between the vestry and the rector over church
finances.
In 1923, Holley was elected to the National Spiritual Assembly
of the Baha'is of the United States for the first time. He would serve on
this body until 1959. He was Secretary from 1924 to 1930 and from 1932 to
1959. It was during his first term that the position was made full-time
and Holley gave up his now well established career in advertising.
As
well as serving on the National Assembly and working with St Mark's Church,
Holley also served as editor of World Unity Magazine and worked with the
World Unity Foundation. He initiated and edited Baha'i News. And he was
involved with numerous editorial and writing activities related to Star of
the West, The Baha'i World, and editions of Baha'i
writings.
Wilmette
In the late 1930s,the NSA decided to move the
Baha'i national administrative headquarters from the East Coast to the
vicinity of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkar in Wilmette, Illinois. Holley moved to
Wilmette in 1939, and this, together with the travel restrictions later
imposed by World War II, encouraged a centralizing of national committee
activities there as well as the direct administrative functions of the
National Assembly secretariat itself.
Holley's conscientiousness and
availability did sometimes encourage a "let Horace do it" attitude that could
result in more of the burden and responsibility for national Baha'i affairs
resting on one person's shoulders than was quite fair. This conscientiousness
was greatly relied upon by Shoghi Effendi, both for dealing with matters
within the United States and internationally. Shoghi Effendi was likely the
only person concerned with Baha'i affairs to be in a position to both
appreciate the extent of Holley's labors and to legitimately ask for more as
he, himself, was even more beset.
After the move to Wilmette, Holley
continued his editorial work, despite the growth in his administrative role,
and served on national committees. He was also active in the local Wilmette
Baha'i community hosting community feasts and firesides. He participated in
the broader life of the town, as well, becoming a member of Rotary, helping
found the Wilmette Historical Commission, and even serving as an air raid
warden during the war.
In 1944, Holley suffered a heart attack and from
that year had recurring bouts of ill health, both because of his heart and
later because of a nerve condition that caused him to be in almost constant
pain. He also had problems with his eyesight. Despite everything, he
continued to serve well beyond the point where concern for his health could
have decided him to retire. Indeed, he even broadened the scope of his
activities to include an international dimension. The National Assembly did
establish the post of Assistant Secretary to help him, electing Charlotte
Linfoot to this position, and she took over much of the day to day work of
the office.
Hand of the Cause
The effort launched in the
mid-1930s to increase the extent of the Baha'i Faith in the Americas started
to bear fruit after World War II with the creation of new National
Assemblies. Holley represented the United States National Spiritual Assembly
at the election of the first National Assembly in Canada (previously under
the jurisdiction of the United States body) in 1948. Along with Dorothy
Baker, he represented the United States Assembly at the election in Panama of
the first National Assembly for Central America, in 1951.
Later in
1951, Shoghi Effendi appointed Holley a Hand of the Cause. Subsequent to this
he attended overseas events as Shoghi Effendi's representative as well as
that of the United States National Assembly. Of the international conferences
held as part of the Holy Year celebrations of 1953, Holley attended those in
Kampala, Uganda, Stockholm, Finland, and New Delhi, India, as well as the one
in Chicago.
It was also in 1953 that Holley and Shoghi Effendi met for
the first time after three decades of collaboration by correspondence when
Holley visited Haifa, Israel, in December. As Secretary of the most firmly
established national Baha'i administrative body, Holley had played a major
role in aiding Shoghi Effendi's efforts to give practical expression to
Baha'i administrative principles, even if Shoghi Effendi had to curb
Holley's tendency to want to establish procedural rules. Temperamentally,
Holley felt most comfortable with firm boundaries and it was an effort for
him to imagine an administrative structure that ap- proached
situations contextually and flexibly. To some, this made him appear rigid,
even intolerant, when it was largely a concern for a level playing field.
Those occasions never ceased to astound him when he thought he was
acting impartially in the best interests of all, but his actions were viewed
as dictatorial.
In 1957, Holley attended the convention in Lima, Peru,
at which the election for the first National Assembly for the northern
countries of South America was held, as Shoghi Effendi's personal
representative.
After the death of Shoghi Effendi in November 1957,
Holley played a prominent role in the conclaves of the Hands who were
attempting to steer the Baha'i Faith on a safe course. Subsequently, he was
asked to become one of the Hands of the Cause resident in Israel.
He
resigned from the United States National Spiritual Assembly in 1959 and he
and Doris arrived in Haifa in December of that year. His illness had
now progressed considerably and he was very weak. He died in July 1960 and
was buried at the foot of Mount Carmel in
Haifa.
Bibliography
The National Baha'i
Archives, Wilmette, Illinois, has Holley's own papers. Apart from these the
principal original sources on his career are the Records of the National
Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States. The records of most
committees of the United States National Assembly include material on Holley
as do almost all collections in the National Baha'i Archives that cover the
years of his active participation in the community.
Although there is
no available biography of Holley, any biography, memoir, or history related
to the American Baha'i Community between 1910 and 1960 is likely to have
mention of him. A valuable personal tribute to Holley which gives a good
sense of a rounded human being is the "In Memoriam" article on him by
Ruhiyyih Khanum in The Baha'i World: XIII (pp. 849-858).
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