Oral history interview with the Reverend William McElwee Miller, recorded in his home on January 10th, 1979, by Alan Thomson for the Presbyterian Historical Society. We were talking about your experiences at Princeton and the visit of Doctor Zwemer I believe when we broke off the interview last time.

I mentioned that a number of my friends there felt need to go to the Muslim world or to some other part of the world, so that quite a number of Princeton graduates went as missionaries. I failed to mention the name of my very dear friend, J. Christy Wilson. He was there at the time of 1919, and while we prayed for him and talked to him about becoming a missionary, he felt strongly that God had led him to remain in this country. Near the end of the year 1919, one of the secretaries of the Board of Foreign Missions, Dr. White, came to Princeton and addressed the senior class and were urging the members of the senior class to consider foreign missionary work.

Let's see.

During this session, I was heading toward the back and my friend Christy Wilson was sitting ahead of me. Christie got up on his feet, his hands behind him, rather trembling with excitement and said, I felt that God had called me to stay in America. But when my country called for volunteers for the chaplaincy, I volunteered. Then the war ended and I was not needed. Then I began to think I was willing to go overseas for my country was not willing to go overseas for my Lord. And so now I want to say that I'm ready to go as a missionary of the Board of Foreign Missions. And I was thrilled. We had prayed for Christie specially, and we knew that he would do outstanding work if he went abroad. Since it was rather late in the year and I had already been appointed to go to Iran. Christie applied to go to Iran. And when we sailed, as I would relate later, he and his wife and son were on the same ship with me. At the end to go back a year or two. At the end of my second year in Princeton seminary, I was invited by the student department of the YMCA to become the traveling secretary for the Middle Atlantic states. I considered very carefully whether it was well to interrupt my seminary course or not, and I felt Mugabe had called me to do this. And so after my middle year in the seminary, I became a secretary of the intercollegiate YMCA. My responsibility was visiting colleges in the Middle Atlantic states in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. And I spent a good part of the year in travel. It was a great privilege to go to these different campuses and meet the Christian leaders there. The YMCA played a very important part in the life of these colleges at that time. It was the one religious organization that included large numbers of the of the student bodies at that time. The YMCA was undertaken to raise money for relief of prisoners of war in Russia and Germany. And the student department undertook to raise money from students as we made the appeal in college after college. It was thrilling to see how students, some of them over there. Poverty gave very generously to alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners of war under the program that was being carried on by the YMCA in this year, I made many friends in different parts of the country. One of the colleges which I visited was Denison Baptist College in Ohio. I well remember sitting in the room with the members of the cabinet, sitting around in a circle, and a little man with a bald head was sitting in the group. He said nothing. We were discussing the matters, the work of the YMCA in the college. And afterwards I asked someone who was this gentleman who was sitting there? They said he is the advisor to the YMCA. He is Mr. LaTourette. He went as a missionary to China, but his health failed and he had to come back. And he's teaching here. How old now? I've thought since then of how this little man whose health had failed in China returned to this country to write untold numbers of books about the history of Christianity. And ever since then, Dr. Kenneth LaTourette was a friend of mine who kept in touch with me as long as he lived. During this year, I myself became unwell and in the spring had to stop the traveling work that I was doing. And for some months I was in rather poor health. I had to have several operations and it was decided by the doctor that I should go up to, uh, to Lake Placid in New York. And there regained my health and my mother went with me and we spent several months in Lake Placid. And then in the winter of 1917, there was a student volunteer conference at Northfield. And so I left north. You are left to Lake Placid and attended this conference. And then after that, my mother and I came back to Princeton and she lived in an apartment which we rented, and she took care of me. And I graduated with the class of 1918, a year later than I should have normally graduated. I applied to the Board of Foreign Missions to go as a missionary, but it was not best for me to wait another year until my health had fully recovered. And so I took another year in Princeton and made a special study of Islam. And as I mentioned, Doctors Weinberger had come to the seminary, had called upon students to volunteer for missionary work to Moslems. And I had felt that this was. God's call. I well remember that at commencement, 1918. Dr. John Dennis, an outstanding missionary of the Reform Church in Basra, was our commencement speaker. He had just been through the trials and dangers of the Second World War in Mesopotamia. He gave a very thrilling address, telling us of some of his experiences. And as we were standing on the lawn of the president's home at the commencement reception, I saw Dr. Banner standing up on the porch, and I walked up to him and said, Dr. Van Ness and I want to get your advice about a place to go in working for Muslims. What suggestion do you have? And he said, Have you considered Persia? I believe that the next great move in the Kingdom of God is going to be in Persia. I followed up his suggestion. I inquired what the Presbyterian Church was doing in Persia and I found that a new station had been opened in Mashhad in the northeast corner of the country by Dr. Lewis Esselstyn. And it seemed to me that perhaps this was the place where God wanted me to go. Mashhad was near the border of Afghanistan, also near the border of Russia and Turkistan, and those were countries on occupied fields into which someone ought to enter. And I thought perhaps if I went to Mashhad, I might be able to get into Afghanistan one day.

Mr. Miller, before you get yourself overseas, I recall having heard that during your YMCA year, you had an interesting contact with a another famous Presbyterian, namely Henry Van Dusen.

Well, yes, that is true. I first met Henry Van Dusen when I was trying to get students to attend the Eagles Smear Student Conference in 1916. I believe it was. I went to Penn Charter School here in Philadelphia and had a few moments to talk to the students about this conference, and I asked if some of them would like to go. To whom they could give their names. One of the students held up his hand and said that any who wished to go could give their names to him and he would communicate with me. After the meeting, the students had left. One of the teachers said to me, You can be sure that this will be well taken care of because this is Pitt. Van Dusen. Henry Van Dusen. He's a responsible fellow. Well, in this way, I first met Henry Van Dusen, and when I was later in Princeton, he was there in the university as a freshman. And I had contact with him while I was in the seminary. Some of the men in the seminary helped to conduct Bible classes and mission study classes in the university. And in this way, I got to know this man who later became, of course, one of the leaders in our Presbyterian church.

Perhaps something that both of you have in common is that I know that both of you have an interest in street preaching. You told me something about street preaching when you were at Princeton Seminary.

Well, I really never did very much to preach street preaching. Several of us went down to Trenton several, several times and tried to preach the gospel on the streets there until the Methodist minister saw us and had pity on us. Since no one was listening to us and invited us to come speak in his church. So after that, we had a better audience in the Methodist Church than we had on the Trenton Street.

Dr. Van Dusen became famous as president of Union Seminary, and he used to challenge the students to do street preaching in New York, and he claims he never had very much success. Would you tell us you say that you felt a call to mission to Muslims. Would you go into that? Perhaps a little more. But how did you understand the mission to Muslims and what was especially attractive to you about it?

Of course, I believe that it was Christ's command and the will of God that the Gospel be preached to people in all parts of the world. And when doctors Wayman was there giving us these lectures on Islam, he told us that the only great world religion to come into existence after Christianity was the religion of Islam. He told us that this was the one religion that attested the truth of Christianity in its time, but claimed to supersede it as being the true religion of the world and for the future. He told us that the Christian church had greatly neglected the responsibility of preaching the gospel to the people of Islam. He told us that pure converts had been made from among Muslims than from any other people, and he challenged us to give our lives to this service. And I think I mentioned that some of the men in the seminary felt this was God's call to them. I was one of them. And so we went as missionaries to Moslems.

In different countries. Well.

After my return to the seminary in the winter of 1918, 1718, the there were military units on the campus, and we were asked by the YMCA, the Army YMCA, to continue working among the students as YMCA secretaries. And so for some months I was able and studying in the seminary also to in the uniform of a YMCA army secretary to help in reaching the the students who were in the Army and Navy units on Princeton University campus. And then also I went in the summer to Camp Devins, and before the war ended, there were many troops in Camp Devins, not far from Boston, Massachusetts. And I was there working all during the summer as a Army secretary among the troops that were assembled there on their way to France.

Will you say something about the First World War and also about your your own involvement with it and also your brothers?

My involvement was justice, to which I have alluded to, raising money for prisoner of war work on the college campuses and also serving as secretary of war in Selma summer for soldiers in Camp Devins. My brother volunteered before America's entrance into the war to go to go abroad under the YMCA to work with troops in France or England. And after he had gone there, the America entered the war and he had once enlisted in France in the artillery as a private. And later he received officer's training and became a lieutenant in the artillery and served actively. He almost got killed before the war was over when a shell burst right beside him. But God spared his life and he came back from the war. And at that time he didn't know just exactly what to do. But he thought it would be an excellent thing if you could go to England and study in Oxford University. And so he and my mother went to England in September 1919. Shortly before I left for Iran. And after going there, he received a Rhodes scholarship. So he continued there in Trinity College, from which he graduated. Dr. Selby Congregational Minister Mansfield College was of tremendous spiritual help to him. He and my mother had a very helpful time in England, and after his graduation from from Trinity College in Oxford, he was asked by the Student Christian Movement of England to serve as one of their secretaries, which he did for a time. And then later he became a secretary of the World student, Christian Federation. And after that the Chairman of the World, Student Christian Federation.

And to both positions, he was the immediate successor to John Ahmad. Is that not correct?

I think that is correct, yes. Yes, he was.

Mr. Miller, according to the biographical sketch in the Book of Ministers of the Southern Church, it indicates that you were actually ordained to the ministry before your graduation from Princeton Seminary.

That is true. When I was asked to become a traveling secretary of the college YMCA, I felt that I would like to be ordained. And so I applied to my presbytery in the Southern Presbyterian Church, the Lexington Presbytery in the Senate of Virginia, in which both my grandfather, McElwee and my father, Henry Miller, had served as ministers. I applied for ordination, and on May the eighth, 1916, I had the great privilege of being ordained by the presbytery in the church in which my grandfather had served for 20 years and my father for ten years. And the members of the presbytery were somewhat suspicious of a man who had gone north to get his theological training. And they didn't realize that Princeton was thoroughly orthodox. And so they had an all day meeting of presbytery, and they spent most of the day in examining Williams to see if he could come up to the standards. My mother was present and she was very nervous that her son would say something. You could get him into trouble. But I came through with the satisfactory examination, and I was ordained at that time when the time came for me to apply to go abroad as a missionary. And I asked Dr. Robert Spear, the secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions, with whom I was acquainted, if it would be possible for me to be appointed to Persia and be assigned to the city of Mashhad, this Pioneer Station, which had been opened in 1911. Dr. Spear encouraged me to apply, but the problem was I was not a member of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, and so I didn't want to do anything irregular. I wrote to Dr. Chester and the secretary of the Committee of the Southern Presbyterian Church in Nashville and asked him if it would be all right for me to go out under the Northern Presbyterian Church. And he encouraged me to apply. He said, go ahead, God bless you. And so I applied to the board in New York and later received the appointment. And I'm so happy that the Presbyterian Church in the USA did not ask me to change my church membership, nor did the church of which I was a member objected to my serving under another church. And so all through the years and when I served as a missionary in Iran, I felt that I was in a way representing both churches. And I always hoped and prayed that the two churches would one day unite. Unfortunately, this prayer has not yet been fully answered.

I understand you still maintain your membership in the church U.S.?

Yes. Lexington Presbytery has now changed its name. It is Shannon Presbytery, of which I am a member, honorably retired. And when I can, I go down to Virginia to attend meetings of presbytery.

Would you say something about your commissioning and preparation for going overseas and your actual arrival in Iran?

As I mentioned, I spent most of my fourth year in Princeton studying Islam. I studied a little Arabic with Dr. Alice, but I read as many books as I could to learn what I could about Islam. And in the year in June 1919, there were just about 100 new missionaries who were sent out by the Presbyterian Church in the USA to different parts of the world. It was a very unusually large group of people, and because of the of the First World War for several years, not many missionaries had been sent abroad. And we spent some days in New York City receiving instructions. And the most valuable part of this experience in New York was the training that the Dr. Cummins gave us in how to Learn a language. We all spent a week in receiving instructions. He used Hindustani as the language tour in which to show us how to learn a language. And he took the fourth chapter of John, The Story of Jesus. And the woman at the Well showed us how to say in Hindustan, Your woman came from the city to draw water and how to practice on pronunciation and speed and rhythm and all the things that one has to learn in learning language. This training was a tremendous help to me. Later, when I reached Iran in learning to speak Persian, and then it was decided that a group of us would leave on the 25th of September on a ship known as the Black Hour. This ship had been used as a troopship during the World War. It had been cleaned up somewhat, but not perfectly. And there were a number in our party and Dr. Mrs. Donaldson, who had been in Iran, had served in Mashhad, where returning, and they were our guides and helpers in making this momentous journey. And Dr. and Mrs. Hartman, Liaquat, medical doctor, his wife, Reverend and Mrs. Long Steiner, uh, ordained minister and a reverend, and Mrs. J. Kristi Wilson, and their little one year old son, Jack and I constituted this party. Well, one of the first things that disturbed us on the ship was that the lady in the board of missions, uh, unaware of the fact that some of the members of this party had been recently married, divided the men and the women into compartments. The men were in one compartment and the women were in the other compartment, and the newlyweds were very unhappy about that. And then I remember there was considerable restlessness on the part of Dr. Warren, who slept right under me in this bunk. And in the morning he had red spots all around it, all over his body. And he, being a medical doctor, didn't know just how to diagnose this, but it was discovered later that these were marks left by bedbugs. And so every day we had to get the steward to try to clean up the mess in our room to get rid of the bedbugs left over from the First World War. And I remember the indignation with which Mrs. McFarland replied to the steward when he said, You brought them in here with you. And she sternly denied any such allegation. You know, it was quite a voyage. And we sailed across the Atlantic and we sailed across the Mediterranean and we sailed through the Dardanelles. We saw the hull, the the wrecks of British warships on the other side that had been destroyed by the Turks in the fighting in the Dardanelles. And we went on into the Black Sea and finally reached no risk in Russia. The ship on which we were traveling was carrying leather and rifles to help the white Russians fight the Bolsheviks. And we were landed in nowhere and we saw there something of the results of poverty that had afflicted the people during the war.

This is a Black Sea port.

A Black Sea port. No risk. Then how are we going to get on to Persia? Well, it was found that there was a British freighter there that would take us on down to Baku. Excuse me. They would take us to a bar to also a Black Sea port. And the officers and men very kindly gave their stateroom to the ladies now party. And we men slept on the floor or on the dining room tables. Then we reached the tomb, and there we were to travel by rail across the Caucasus. And we were told that the Bolsheviks had raided some of the trains a few days before. So we didn't know what might happen to us, but we got across safely to take place. And there our dear friends, Christie Wilson and his wife Fern and little Jack had to leave us because they were going down to Tabriz in West Persia. They looked quite desolate standing on the railroad platform as we pulled off on our way to Baku. The rest of us reached Baku and stayed there a couple of days, and then transportation was found on a little Russian ship that was going across from Baku to endingly the port of Iran, which is now called. Maybe this was anything but a luxury liner. When we went into the staterooms assigned to us, the walls were just creeping with living creatures and we did the best we could that night. But the sea was rough and I came nearer to being seasick that day than ever before or after in my life. I went up on the deck in the morning and before long off in the distance, I saw the mountains of Persia and it was a thrilling sight to see this country in which I hoped to live and serve Christ from a distance, and then finally to arrive there in the afternoon.

This would be have been your first trip outside the United States.

This was my first trip outside the United States.

And Persian would be the first, so to speak, modern language that you would study, if you can call it a modern language.

Yes. Well, I had not studied it. I began my Persian lessons when I arrived in Iran.

You seem to have known something about Iran before or at the time of your decision to go. You, for instance, were interested in going to the station at Mashhad and you already knew the date of its founding?

Yes, I had read the report to the Board of Foreign Missions and learned everything I could about the situation. I'd also met Mr. Donaldson, who had served in Mashhad, and he helped me to. Learn what things I would need to buy and take along with me. So I did know something about the country and the work of the Presbyterian Church there.

Before I went.

The ship was met at in the lead by a teacher in the Presbyterian School in Rashed in Mercer County, Khan, and he arranged for transportation for some of the missionaries in the party to go immediately to Rashed some distance away by carriage. And he kindly kept me overnight in the in the home of one of his relatives. And I had my first Persian lesson from him. I asked him, How do you say thank you in person? And he said to me, Mathematician Mars Yard. And that sentence was very difficult for me to memorize. And the rest of the afternoon, as we were walking around, seeing the sights, I kept saying this over until I learned how to say thank you in Persian. And this was the beginning of a long process of learning the beautiful Persian language.

Tell us something about your first impressions of Iran.

Of course, at that time, Iran had just emerged from the First World War. There was a great deal of poverty. Things were quite primitive. I went from Libya to Rashed and there I saw missionaries in action for the first time. Dr. Frame was the missionary doctor. And I went into his hospital and almost fainted when I saw what he was doing to some poor, sick person. I stayed in the home there of every night, and Wilson, who had not yet been married, and the father of our Fred Watson in the program agency today. And I found their conditions that that were shocking. Going around the streets, seeing a sick person lying in the street with no one caring for him. Things like that made a very deep impression on one who had never seen sights of that sort. And then as soon as possible, transportation was arranged for Tehran. And there was a big English army truck that had been left over there. Somebody had fixed it up and was trying to make some money out of it. And Mr. Dulles arranged that all of us, with all of our baggage, would go in this truck from Russia to Tehran. We packed in like sardines. Hardly room to breathe. And we started on our way. And then the first night, the truck broke down and we stopped in the mountains. And it was necessary to go back to Rashid and get some part that had broken. Well, we got on to a village, and there we stayed for some days before the car was repaired. And we finally went on our still painful way up the mountains.

Until we reached Tehran. It I believe it.

Took us nearly two weeks to get from Russia to Tehran, but we arrived. I arrived in Iran on the 5th of November 1919, and we arrived in Tehran on the 19th. So it was ten days that it took us to get there and.

Tell us something about your impression of this capital, of this capital city, Tehran.

Well, Tehran at that time was not very large. There was a large wall all around it. The wall consisting of a high mound of earth on the outer side of which was a moat. And there were 12 or 13 gates which were closed at night. And so the city was quite primitive. The streets none of the streets were paved in the summer. They were dusty. In the winter, they were very muddy. Almost no one had telephone or electric lights. There was no plumbing. And the living was simple. And you appreciate that Time was very different from the country it is today.

What had been the position of Persia during the First World War, and what was the political atmosphere when you arrived?

Per year had been neutral, but they are the armies of the allies and and the Turks had fought on the the. The Assyrians, very unwisely, had been persuaded to enter the war on the side of the Allies. These Assyrians living in the northwest corner of the country and while Iran says subjects of Iran were religious and when the Russians came in, they were happy because they protected them. When the Turks came in and drove the Russians out, of course these people were subject to attack by the Turks and they were attacked. And it is said that something like 100,000 of them left their old home in around Romania and fled and moved down toward Hamadan, which was occupied by the British at that time. One of our Presbyterian missionaries, Dr. Shedd William Shedd, felt that he must go along with them. He and his wife accompanied them until he contracted cholera and died along the way. And later she wrote his life and recovered his body and brought it to Tabriz for burial. I visited the grave there. Well, as a result of these struggles. There was a great deal of poverty in the country, many beggars. And Iran had suffered from the war. And though Iran as a nation had not been involved, the government of Iran was inefficient. The Shah was living out of the country most of the time, and so time.

After time was at his name.

And. So I will always remember that some intelligent Iranian said to me, Iran is a corpse with no one to bury it. The people seemed hopeless about their future and they might well feel that way.

You mentioned in connection with the events of the First World War, the evacuation of Oromia by the Assyrians. Would you say something about the significance of this for the life of the church?

Up to this time, the strongest part of the Christian effort in Iran was among the Assyrians and Armenians in Northwest Iran, And the exodus of these large numbers of Christians really wrecked the churches around the room here, or what is today called resolving. Is there a section of the country? The pastors, the members of the churches left, fled and those who were left were mostly the poorest of the people. So that after the war, when some of these people returned from Iraq, where the British army had been keeping them during the war, the condition of the churches in the roomier region was very distressing. There were no pastors. There were the people were very poor. They couldn't support their churches as they had been doing before. And so it was necessary for people like Reverend Hugo Muller and others, Dr. Cohen, to start training some men for the ministry. They took a group of largely uneducated young men and trained them and made pastors of them, and they became the pastors of the rather weak churches that remained. There was also much need for relief. The people were so desperately poor. And it always became it had become difficult for the people in that region to realize their responsibility of supporting their churches financially. Many of them felt that this was something that the missionaries ought to do, and it was not a encouraging situation for the progress of the church there in the other parts of Iran. The churches were very small and they had not suffered so much during the war, except that the number of missionaries had been greatly reduced and the help that they were able to give to the other churches was limited.

You have studied and written the history of the Church of Iran. Would you say something about now from a broader perspective, not only from your own immediate first impression, but also from that? What was the state of the church in Iran.

At the time that you arrived?

The Presbyterian work in Iran. As I said, we're strongest in this northwest region among the Assyrians and the Armenians in Tehran. There was a small church divided into two groups, Armenian speaking and Persian speaking. There were only oh, just, I don't know, perhaps 40 or 50 members in each group.

Who would these Persian speaking church members have been? What would have been their background?

Some of them were Hebrew Christians, Jews who had become Christians. There were a few Moslem converts, and there were also some Armenians there who preferred to worship in Persian speaking congregation. The Armenians, of course, were people of Armenian heritage and in language. But up to up to that time there had not been many Muslim convert. The number of converts was quite small.

But speaking in terms comparatively of the situation of the Muslim mission in the Middle East, these numbers were quite impressive. Is that not correct?

Not at that time. The number of converts throughout the country in 1919 was small. There had been in different in the different stations, the different mission stations of the Presbyterian Church. There had been individuals who professed faith and the hope was that more would come. But one of the difficulties was that the Armenians or the Assyrians, who were the elders and leaders in the churches. Did not. I did not welcome the coming of Moslem converts. They suspected any Moslem who made a profession of faith.

I think we had better stop there or the tape will stop us. Thank you very much, Dr..