An unknown Unitarian minister

We hear a lot about the Unitarian and Universalist ministers who stayed in ministry for decades — people like Hosea Ballou and William Ellery Channing. But what about the people who served as Unitarian or Universalist ministers for just a short while, then moved on to something else?

Here is one such person.

William E. Short Jr.

William E. Short, Jr., served as a Unitarian minister for just two years, from 1915 to 1917, primarily at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. He left the ministry for radical politics, then became a building contractor and later a realtor.

He was born on September 6, 1888, in Jackson, Miss. Short’s father was an Episcopalian minister, who moved the family to St. Louis, Mo., in 1889. William Short, Sr., died on October 27, 1905, when William, Jr., was 17 years old. After his father’s death, William, Jr., completed high school at the University School, St. Louis, Mo., and went on to attend Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., his father’s alma mater, receiving his B.A. there in 1912.

As an Episcopalian lay reader, William had charge of a few “missions,” or what we now might call church plants or emerging congregations. He received his B.D. from the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass., in 1915. Beginning in the fall of 1914, he became interested in Unitarianism, and made contact with the American Unitarian Association (A.U.A.). In the summer of 1915, he served the Unitarian church in Walpole, Mass. At the end of the summer, he was accepted into Unitarian fellowship. The A.U.A. recommended him to the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, and the congregation called him in November, 1915. It appears that the Palo Alto church never regularly ordained him, due to his feelings about ordination, though he was recognized as a minister by the congregation and denomination.

Initially, he was quite happy in Palo Alto, and wrote to the A.U.A.: “I am more pleased than ever over the fact that I left the Episcopal Church and became a Unitarian.” However, he avoided contact with the denomination, going so far as to resist meeting with other Unitarian ministers. Even though the A.U.A. paid much of his salary, Short consistently neglected to submit to them the monthly reports they required of him.

Short resigned from the Palo Alto church as of June, 1917. In March, he had told the A.U.A. that he would be resigning, saying he felt he had no serious message to give, “and my intention is to try to understand life better before I try to preach again in some other place.” He was motivated by another reason which he didn’t reveal to the A.U.A.: he was the source of major conflict within the congregation. More than a decade after Short had resigned, around 1927, Alfred S. Niles learned that “the minister at the time of World War I had been a pacifist and conscientious objector, and this had caused a split in the church from which it never recovered.” During Short’s ministry, about half the members left the church. Although he had enjoyed some initial success, Short’s ministry in Palo Alto ultimately proved a failure.

He went on to head a pacifist group, the People’s Council of San Francisco. He married radical feminist Gratia Shipman Erickson on May 12, 1918, in San Francisco; a justice of the peace officiated. Later in 1918, he was arrested for draft evasion. Army official Major Ralph H. Van Deman, and his successor Lieutenant Colonel Marlborough Churchill, had gotten a federal grand jury to investigate Short for his pacifist activities with the People’s Council. When the jury did not act quickly enough for their purposes, they decided to bring Short under the jurisdiction of the Army:

As a Unitarian minister, Short had an automatic exemption from the draft, Class 5, Division B. Yet he could hardly be a real minister, Van Deman reasoned, because he worked for the People’s Council, which the army devoutly believed to be an organization of draft dodgers connected to the IWW. Churchill summed up the case against Short: “He has been active in opposing the draft, also in connection with the defense of one Thomas Mooney…and has made himself generally obnoxious.” A visit by one of Churchill’s officers to Short’s draft board was all it took to change his status to Class 1, Division A, cannon fodder. With the unusual World War I provision that considered a draftee in the military upon receipt of the induction notice, Short had to make a decision fast. He appealed his reclassification, did not appear for induction, and was arrested by the army as a deserter. [Roy Talbert, Negative Intelligence: The Army and the American Left, 1917-1941, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1991, p. 76.]

Guido Marx, one of Short’s former parishioners at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, tried unsuccessfully to bail him out of prison.

In May, 1919, Short wrote to the A.U.A. from Santa Fe, N.M. He was then serving in the army, and wished to find another position as a minister of a Unitarian congregation. Louis Cornish replied for the A.U.A., saying there were no Unitarian churches who would accept a candidate who had opposed World War I (which was probably not true); but also pointing out that Short seemed less interested in build-ing up a local congregation than in social causes (which was probably true). While admitting that ministers who were deeply interested in social justice causes “may do more for the bringing of the kingdom of God in following their own lines of reform,” Cornish declined to place Short in another Unitarian church because “unless a man is whole-heartedly and enthusiastically a believer in the worth and definite mission of the church then the ministry is his proper field of action.” Today, we might disagree strongly with Cornish and support Short’s right to be a pacifist; at the same time, Cornish was doubtless correct in saying that Short would be unlikely to succeed as a minister in an-other congregation.

By 1920, William and Gratia were living in Pinal, Ariz. By the late 1920s, he and Gratia had moved to Palo Alto, where he worked as a builder (but he had no further connection with the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto). In 1930, he was still working as a builder in Palo Alto; Gratia’s mother, who lived a few blocks away, died in June of that year. By 1935, he had moved to San Francisco, and Gratia was in New York by 1936. William was divorced by 1940, and at that time lived in San Francisco where he sold real estate. By 1950, he was the proprietor of his own real estate business in San Francisco. He died in San Jose on March 29, 1979.

Notes

1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950 U.S. Census; “Necrology,” William Short [Sr.], The Church Eclectic: A Monthly Magazine, vol. 37 no. 3, Dec., 1905, p. 240; San Francisco, Marriage Certificates 1918, p. 328; William Short, Jr. Unitarian Universalist Association Minister files, 1825-2010, bMS 1446/202; Alfred S. Niles, “The Early Years of the Palo Alto Unitarian Society, 1947-1950,” mimeographed pamphlet, Palo Alto Unitarian Church, c. 1958; “Banner will announce each lynching to New Yorkers,” Baltimore African American, 11 June 1936, p. 18; Find-a-grave website Winifred Augusta Shipman Erickson www.findagrave.com/memorial/149448330/winifred-augusta-erickson accessed 31 Oct. 2025; Social Security Death Index. William Short is listed with the middle initial “E.” in some records of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, but not elsewhere.

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Gratia Shipman Erickson Short

The woman who married William Short is also worthy of mention. There is no evidence that she was a Unitarian. But she is of interest nonetheless because she supported woman suffrage in the 1910s, was a pacifist during World War I, and was a White supporter of the NAACP in the 1930s.

Gratia Shipman Erickson was born April 2, 1891, in Lewiston, Montana. She studied at the University of Wisconsin through at least 1917, and was engaged in radical politics as a student. As an activist for women’s suffrage, Gratia sometimes endured attacks: “Miss Gratia Erickson of Evanston, for years a suffrage speaker, was one of a number of suffrage orators who were drenched with water thrown from windows at a street meeting in Philadelphia last night.” She was active in the National Woman Suffrage Association, including serving as secretary of the Executive Council in 1914, and she was a life member of the Association.

She married William Short, Jr. on May 12, 1918, after he had left his position as minister of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, but while he still considered himself a Unitarian minister. When William was arrested for draft evasion, she wrote to the American Unitarian Association to ask for their help; the A.U.A. included her letter in Short’s minister file. She also attempted unsuccessful legal action to have William freed. In the spring of 1919, while still advocating for William, she suffered from ill health of some kind. By 1920, William was out of the army, and the two of them were living in Pinal, Arizona.

Although she and William were living in Palo Alto by the late 1920s, there is no record that they affiliated with the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. In 1930, she and William Short continued living in Palo Alto; her mother lived nearby. Her mother died on 12 June 1930. The couple apparently separated in the early 1930s; by 1936, while William was in Palo Alto, Gratia was in New York, where she supported the NAACP:

“Banner Will Announce Each Lynching to New Yorkers… The huge banner bearing the inscription ‘A Man Was Lynched Yesterday’ [will be] run up on a flag pole over the national offices [of the NAACP] in New York every time a lynching occurs, Roy Wilkins said Friday. The flag was prepared following a suggestion by Mrs. Gratia E. Short, White, who recently began volunteer work with the association in New York. Mrs. Short, who modestly admitted she was interested in any fight for justice, came east from San Francisco. During the World War she was affiliated with an organization interested in the cause of peace.” [Baltimore African American, 11 June 1936, p. 18]

In 1940, Gratia was divorced and living in Tucson, Arizona. Little could be discovered about her later life. She died in August, 1979, in San Mateo, Calif.

Notes

1900, 1930, 1940 U.S. Census; Rita Shipman Carl, The Shipman Family in America, Shipman Historical Society, 1962; University of Wisconsin Catalogue, 1916-1917; Chicago Examiner, Oct. 27, 1915; Handbook of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1914 through 1919; William Short, Jr. Unitarian Universalist Association Minister files, 1825-2010. bMS 1446/202; Find-a-grave website Winifred Shipman Erickson www.findagrave.com/memorial/149448330/winifred-augusta-erickson accessed 31 Oct. 2025; Social Security Death Index.