WE HAVE REACHED THE END of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s sixth month in North America. Let’s look back at some of the highlights of the past thirty days.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá left Chicago on September 18, 1912, for the first leg of a nearly two thousand mile trek to California. Joining his entourage was a university student, Saichiro Fujita, whom we met five days earlier when the young man dangled from a lamp post. The group began its arduous journey across the nation, passing through Minneapolis and Omaha, before paying a visit to the home of the “Great Commoner” — William Jennings Bryan — in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Having reached Denver, Colorado, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke at Nona Lovell Brooks’s Divine Science Church, a center of the New Thought movement, which we discussed in A Deceptively Simple Metaphor. He also spent an hour with journalist Alice Rohe in Drinking Tea With “The Girl From Kansas”. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá continued on to Salt Lake City, the interracial marriage of Louise Mathew and Louis Gregory took place in New York — a marriage he had helped set in motion.
On Day 171, in ‘Abdul’-Bahá Crosses The Continental Divide, we traced his seventeen-hour train voyage from Denver to Glenwood Springs, where he visited the hot springs and took in the fresh mountain air. On September 29, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá reached the capital of Utah during The Biggest Week In The History Of Salt Lake City. He witnessed a bold display of American industriousness, and on the train ride to San Francisco two days later was inspired to write a letter to Agnes Parsons in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Argues The Importance Of The Rural Economy.
Arriving in San Francisco on October 3, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked a reporter to take a message to the American people. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Assesses America’s Unique Geopolitical Position covered the resulting article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
October 8, 1912, was A Most Extraordinary Day — ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke to an audience of two thousand in Palo Alto in the morning, and the day had just begun. We covered this talk in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Landmark Address At Stanford University.
During the month we also published three editorial pieces: What’s Love Got To Do With It?, 150 Years Of The Emancipation Proclamation, and Reflections On Poverty And The Example Of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.