A Gilded-Age Ohioan educated at Kenyon’s Bexley Hall seminary, Brown cut a broad swath through life, a man of God who morphed into a man of Marx-and Darwin, too. He was the first… [Episcopal] bishop, and only one so far, to be tried for heresy.<\/p>\n
Bexley Hall, a fixture at Kenyon until 1968, holds few stories as fascinating as Brown’s. His career-part Willy Loman meets Elmer Gantry, with touches of Horatio Alger Jr. and Jay Gatsby-reflects both the meandering path of an individual life and the winds of social change that swept across the land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<\/p>\n
Above all, Brown strove to hold sway among those around him. “It’s a constant in his life, this business of wanting to be somebody,” said historian Ronald M. Carden, author of William Montgomery Brown (1855-1937): The Southern Episcopal Bishop Who Became a Communist.<\/p>\n