Summary
Francis McLellan Wilcox was a minister, author, editor, and administrator who became one of the most influential Seventh-day Adventist leaders of the first half of the twentieth century. Through his 33 years (1911—1944) as editor of the denomination’s flagship periodical, the Review and Herald (later renamed Adventist Review), and his 35 consecutive years as president of the Review and Herald Publishing Association (RHPA), Wilcox wielded unparalleled influence over what Seventh-day Adventists read and the ideas that shaped their outlook. He crafted the denomination’s first formal statement of “Fundamental Beliefs,” published in 1931, which remained normative for nearly five decades. He also served as president of the Board of Trustees of the Ellen G. White Estate, championed the church’s noncombatant position during two world wars, and labored for close to 60 years in the Adventist cause.
Early Life
Frank Wilcox, as he is named in the earliest available records, was born on February 28, 1865, in Rossie, New York. His parents, Allen David Wilcox (1819—1887) and Julia Ann Lawton Wilcox (1825—1900), owned a farm in Theresa, a rural township in Jefferson County, northern New York state, where they raised their six children — four sons and two daughters. Frank was their fourth-born.
He attended the public school in Theresa and worked on the farm as a teenager. In 1877, twelve-year-old Frank and his older brother, Milton, became Seventh-day Adventists through the evangelistic labors of Henry H. Wilcox (1819—1911), no relation, joining a small new congregation at Rossie organized by Dudley M. Canright. Milton C. Wilcox (1853—1935) would precede his brother in entering the ministry and in serving as longtime editor of a major Adventist periodical — the California-based Signs of the Times (1891—1913).
Education and Early Ministry
Frank Wilcox was among the charter students at South Lancaster Academy (later Atlantic Union College) in Massachusetts when it opened for its first full academic year in September 1882. By 1883, his work in canvassing, evangelism, and city missions had demonstrated evidence of a ministerial calling, and the New York Conference issued him a preaching license at age 18.
Frank spent most of 1884 and 1885 in Battle Creek, Michigan, learning the printers’ trade at the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association. He was a typesetter for the Review and Herald, then edited by Uriah Smith, the only editor in the periodical’s history with greater longevity than Wilcox would later achieve. In 1886, Frank returned to the East for two more years of study at South Lancaster Academy, interspersed with evangelistic work as a licensed minister in the New York Conference.
In 1887, he married Lucretia (Louie) M. Higby (1858—1897), a canvasser and Bible worker in the New York Conference.
New York Conference Ministry
Published reports of Wilcox’s evangelistic labors suggest that he was an effective speaker. Yet the crowds were generally small and the converts few and hard won in the tent efforts that he conducted in the towns and rural villages of upstate New York. He apparently stood out, though, for his organizational skills. When the position of New York Conference secretary suddenly became vacant in January 1888, Wilcox, though still only 22 and not yet ordained, was appointed to the position. He was elected conference secretary at each of the three subsequent annual sessions, 1888 through 1890. In 1889 and again in 1890, Wilcox was elected to another leadership position in the conference — president of the Health and Temperance Association. His wife, Louie, was elected to serve with him as secretary-treasurer for both terms.
Ordination at a Historic Camp Meeting
Wilcox was ordained to gospel ministry at the annual New York Conference camp meeting, held at Rome, New York, in June 1889. Yet this particular camp meeting would be of exceptional historical significance due to the presence of Ellen G. White, Alonzo T. Jones, and Ellet J. Waggoner, who were crisscrossing the nation to uplift the message of “Christ our righteousness” stemming from the historic 1888 General Conference at Minneapolis.
Multiple witnesses attest that F. M. Wilcox’s ordination service on Sabbath afternoon, June 18, was a remarkable experience. After a “powerful discourse” delivered by Ellen White and “the laying on of the hands of the eldership present,” A. T. Jones gave the ordination charge “almost entirely in the language of the Scriptures in several passages.” The moving ceremony left “but few dry eyes” in the congregation.
Editorial and Administrative Work
From the outset of his ministry, Wilcox demonstrated a penchant for writing and began publishing brief devotional and doctrinal articles in the Review and the Youth’s Instructor in 1884, while still in his teens. At the General Conference session held in March 1891, Wilcox was called to California, where he edited the Sabbath School Worker, published at Pacific Press, and served as recording secretary for the International Sabbath School Association. In 1893, Wilcox became president of the Sabbath School Association while also engaging in evangelistic work.
The Wilcoxes became parents on April 16, 1893, with the birth of Allen Francis Gage Wilcox, “Allie” for short. Sadly, they lost him to death just seven weeks later on June 4. They had no other children.
Later that year, the couple moved back to Battle Creek where Elder Wilcox took up new responsibilities as secretary of the Foreign Mission Board and editor of the Home Missionary, the monthly periodical of the International Tract and Missionary Society. The magazine’s broad purpose was to advance all aspects of home and foreign missions, and included departments devoted to health and temperance, religious liberty, and canvassing.
Personal Tragedy and Remarriage
However, Louie’s deteriorating health due to tuberculosis became his main concern in 1895. In December he took her to the Boulder Sanitarium in Colorado for treatment. Wilcox returned to Battle Creek in late January 1896, encouraged by the improvement in his wife’s condition but nonetheless convinced that she would never be well enough to return to the East. During the year that followed, he juggled his Battle Creek responsibilities with attending to his wife in Boulder, where he envisioned moving permanently to work in connection with the sanitarium.
Louie passed away in Boulder on February 4, 1897, at age 38. After laying her to rest in Constableville, New York, Wilcox headed for Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was assigned to assist with editing the General Conference Bulletin. By May, Wilcox was back in Boulder, this time his own health being the paramount concern. The Foreign Mission Board accepted his “unconditional resignation” on July 6, 1897, while expressing “high appreciation for his earnest and efficient labors.”
On October 13, 1897, he married 18-year-old Maude M. Sawyer (1879—1962) of Niobrara, Nebraska, a graduate of the sanitarium’s first nursing class. Their daughter and only child, Ruth Naomi, was born exactly a year later, on October 13, 1898.
Colorado Sanitarium Leadership
With his health improving, Wilcox took up new responsibilities as Colorado Sanitarium chaplain and pastor of the 150-member Boulder Church. He served as business manager of the Colorado Sanitarium from 1902 to 1909 and as president of the board of trustees during his final few months there (1908—1909). Amidst the institution’s erratic growth and heavy indebtedness, Wilcox proved an effective advocate for the institution, endeavoring to keep it tethered to the reform principles and missional purposes envisioned by Ellen White for Adventist health institutions.
Wilcox became involved in a public controversy when Seventh-day Adventist students were expelled from Boulder public schools for refusing to participate in a mandatory new ritual called the “American Patriotic Salute.” More elaborate than the official Pledge of Allegiance promulgated by the federal government in 1954, Boulder’s patriotic salute required students to declare, “We give our heads,” while touching their foreheads, then, moving their hands over their hearts, say, “and our hearts,” and then, stretch out their right arm high, tilt their heads back slightly and say “to God and our country!”
Wilcox sent articles and letters to newspapers both to advocate for dissenting children and to correct misrepresentations of Adventist views. He assured Coloradans that Adventists were “law-abiding citizens” who held the principles of civil and religious liberty represented by the American flag in “the highest respect.” He pointed out, however, that true patriotism is a matter of the heart and thus that “enforcement of the flag salute begets a patriotism in form and name only, and not in fact.” This controversy foreshadowed the approach he would later take as a spokesperson for the denomination on controversial matters: repudiating extremes, avoiding inflammatory rhetoric, and explaining the church’s core principles in a forthright, clear, and insistent manner.
At the Helm of the Review and Herald
In January 1909, Francis and Maude Wilcox, along with ten-year-old Ruth, relocated to suburban Washington, D.C., where Elder Wilcox began a connection with the Review and Herald and its publisher that would continue for the remainder of his life. Starting with the February 4, 1909, issue, Wilcox became associate editor of the Review, serving initially with William W. Prescott as editor until Prescott was replaced later that year by William A. Spicer. In 1911, Wilcox became editor, a position he would hold for 33 years. Along with editorial work he also carried an important administrative role as president of the Review and Herald Publishing Association (RHPA) from 1909 to 1944.
In addition to all that she did in life partnership with her husband, Maude served as a proofreader at RHPA for several years. Daughter Ruth, a 1921 graduate of Washington Missionary College, was vice president of her class and editor of the Sligonian. She taught at an Adventist school in Baltimore until her life was cut short at age 26 on January 31, 1925, a week after she contracted pneumonia.
Wilcox’s dual role as Review editor and RHPA president for more than three decades afforded him unparalleled influence over what Seventh-day Adventists read and thus the information and ideas that shaped their outlook on the church and the wider world. The Review was formally identified on its masthead as the “General Church Paper of the Seventh-day Adventists” beginning with the January 6, 1910, issue, near the outset of the Wilcox era. Wilcox, as RHPA president, also had general oversight of other major church periodicals, including Liberty, Life and Health, and the Youth’s Instructor.
“To guard and to promote Adventist beliefs and standards was to him more than an editorial duty, it was a passion,” wrote Francis D. Nichol, for nearly two decades one of Wilcox’s associate editors.
Fundamental Beliefs (1919—1931)
Perhaps the most significant achievement of Wilcox’s career was crafting the denomination’s first formal statement of “Fundamental Beliefs.” At the adamant insistence of its pioneers, the Seventh-day Adventist Church had no creed or binding articles of faith. To meet inquiries and correct inaccurate characterizations by others, a pamphlet stating 25 generally held “Fundamental Principles” was published in 1872. However, the church published no formal summary of its teachings until 1931.
Historian Michael Campbell has shown that the historic summary thus formalized in 1931 had its origins in 1919 when Wilcox crafted a statement of “Fundamental Principles for Which Seventh-day Adventists Stand” modeled on the World Conference on Christian Fundamentals (WCCF) 1919 Doctrinal Statement. Soon thereafter, Wilcox published two further summations of Adventist belief in the Review — “A Sure Foundation” (August 21, 1919) and “The Fundamentals of Christian Faith” (April 1, 1921).
Most of the language of the 1931 statement of “Fundamental Beliefs” clearly reflects the language of one or more of the three doctrinal summaries that Wilcox introduced in 1919 and 1920, although some language and re-configuration of points suggests the input of others as well. Published as a pamphlet and printed in the Church Manual as well as the Yearbook, “Fundamental Beliefs” was widely viewed as normative for nearly five decades until a new 27-point statement was approved at the 1980 General Conference.
The doctrine of the Trinity is a striking example of Wilcox’s influence. The founders of Seventh-day Adventism had sharply rejected what James White, in 1852, called “the old trinitarian absurdity that Jesus Christ is the very and Eternal God.” The 1872 statement of principles made no mention of the trinity or threeness in the Godhead. Around the turn of the century, Ellen White became the leading voice for a major shift in Adventist thought, writing with unprecedented clarity about the “three living persons of the heavenly trio” and Christ as “equal with God” and “the pre-existent, self-existent Son of God.” Thus, Wilcox stepped further into disputed territory in his June 1919 summary by using the term “Trinity” and echoing its Nicene formulation by referring to Christ as “being of the same nature and essence as the Eternal Father.” This language was then included in the denominationally accepted statement of 1931.
Unity on the Essentials
Regarding doctrinal orthodoxy within Adventism, Wilcox was firmly conservative but not particularly hardline or militant. He did believe that wholehearted unity was essential on the 20 or so fundamental beliefs in his various listings but also affirmed the importance of ongoing “critical examination of the reasons for our faith” in the light of the Bible. Such investigation could “lead to clearer light on the fundamentals, and even to a modification of view on some of the details of fundamental truth” although not “nullify or set aside the great fundamental principles upon which this movement is based.”
A greater concern for him was what he called “pseudo-tests of orthodoxy.” Such were created when details of biblical interpretation, such as “the personnel of the 144,000, the identity of Melchizedek, the question of ‘the daily,’ or some particular date in prophecy” were disproportionately magnified in importance to the point of becoming a “shibboleth” or litmus test of orthodoxy. Against this sort of narrow dogmatism, Wilcox called for “grace to obey Christ’s command not to judge others, not to set up our own standards and conceptions of truth as a gauge of others beliefs and practice.”
Ellen G. White Estate Trustee
Wilcox served as president of the Board of Trustees of the Ellen G. White Estate from 1915 to 1922, as custodian of her writings after her death. He was steadfast in promoting Ellen White’s writings as “inspired commentaries” on Scripture. By 1934, when his book The Testimony of Jesus: A Review of the Work and Teachings of Mrs. Ellen Gould White was published, he had decisively rejected verbal inspiration in favor of “thought-person inspiration.” However, he proposed that in “general policy and instruction she was an authority,” and if her counsels lacked any binding authority, the logical outcome would be “to sweep away the whole thing.”
Seventh-day Adventists in Time of War
At the same time that he sought to conserve Adventist theology, Wilcox sought to preserve another aspect of Adventist faith and practice — the noncombatant position — one that came under test with the outbreak of World War I. At a meeting of the North American Division Conference committee in April 1917, soon after the United States entered the war, Wilcox helped draft a statement of the Adventist position with respect to the impending military draft. After declaring, “We have been noncombatants throughout our history,” the church leaders re-affirmed the 1865 General Conference statement that compelled Adventists “to decline all participation in acts of war and bloodshed.”
With the likelihood of another major outbreak of warfare becoming increasingly apparent, Wilcox compiled and edited Seventh-day Adventists in Time of War, a 407-page volume published in 1936 to guide and inspire faithfulness to noncombatant principles on the part of young people. In a concluding chapter entitled “Church Pronouncements Against War,” Wilcox opened by declaring, “The Seventh-day Adventist Church is not the only denomination which has opposed war and the bearing of arms.”
Legacy
The December 28, 1944, issue of the Review and Herald was the last in which Francis McLellan Wilcox appeared as editor. At age 79 he retired, along with his wife, Maude, to Glendale, California. He remained on the Review masthead as an associate editor, writing weekly editorials that he called “Heart-to-Heart Talks.” One of his “Heart-to-Heart Talks” appeared on the day of his death on August 30, 1951, at age 86 in Glendale, with two more still to be published. The editor was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, and Maude Sawyer Wilcox was interred beside him following her death on May 21, 1962.
Francis M. Wilcox’s 33 years is the longest tenure of consecutive years of service as editor in the periodical’s history. Wilcox skillfully used this platform of unparalleled influence in Seventh-day Adventism, writing with clarity and conviction, but also with nuance and moderation. Not only a man of letters, his 35 consecutive years of service as president of the Review and Herald Publishing is the most impressive testament to his prudence and effectiveness in administrative leadership. Altogether, Wilcox labored for close to 60 years in the Adventist cause.
F. D. Nichol credited Wilcox with a “sweet reasonableness” and a “large elasticity of soul” that “enabled him to revise, and even to reverse, his view when the weight of evidence went against it.”
Wilcox’s final editorial, published posthumously in the September 13, 1951, issue of the Review, was entitled, “Will We Triumph With the Message?” He directed it particularly to long-time Adventists, speaking to an issue that must have at times perplexed many who had served for so many years: “Have we grown weary with long waiting? . . . Have we sacrificed in time and money to give the message to others? Have we sent our loved ones overseas as heralds of the cross? And now has all this been in vain?” Then, after quoting from Scripture powerful assurances to the contrary, he concluded with this exhortation: “The nearness of Christ’s coming needs to be sounded from all our church pulpits. Nothing will so brighten the hopes and strengthen the faith as the preaching of this message.”
