Pittsburgh: The Schenley Hotel Reception

On the afternoon of the 7th of May, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá and His party arrived in Pittsburgh after the brief overnight journey from Cleveland. The party was driven directly to the Schenley Hotel in the Oakland district near the University of Pittsburgh, where the small Pittsburgh Bahá'í community had arranged a series of afternoon and evening engagements.

The afternoon reception in the hotel's main parlour was the principal occasion of the visit. The Pittsburgh friends had worked hard, in the weeks of preparation, to broaden the guest list beyond the small Bahá'í community itself. The attendees, as Mahmúd records, included a number of the city's prominent figures: two of the ministers of the established Pittsburgh churches; an editor of one of the city's daily newspapers; several of the small group of manufacturers and steel-mill operators who, even in 1912, were known by name and reputation across the entire American economy.

The Master rose to address the gathering. He chose, as His subject for this audience in Pittsburgh of all cities, the spiritual obligations of wealth — the ancient teaching, set out in every prophetic dispensation, that material abundance is a trust held by the wealthy for the benefit of the larger community.

He named the central principle plainly. The man who accumulates wealth beyond his own real need has, by that accumulation, taken into his hands a portion of what properly belongs to the community as a whole. The proper response is not the abandonment of the wealth or the revolutionary redistribution of it. The proper response is the patient generous voluntary application of the accumulated means to the genuine needs of the wider community — to the wages of the workers, to the welfare of the families of the workers, to the education of the neighbourhood children, to the construction of the hospitals and the libraries and the houses of worship that belong to the larger civic life.

The economic question will be solved when religion has trained the human heart to take only its share.

The phrase, set down by Mahmúd from the closing portion of the address, named the Master's view of the economic question that the Pittsburgh of 1912 was at the leading edge of asking. Pittsburgh was then the heart of the American steel industry. The class divisions of the city were, by the standards of any subsequent American period, extreme. The great fortunes were being made. The wages of the workers were severely insufficient. The labour disturbances of the period had begun to be serious.

The Master did not propose, in His Pittsburgh address, any particular legislative solution. He proposed instead the deeper change of heart on which any genuine economic justice would in the end depend. The wealthy who heard Him were challenged to examine, in their own personal practice, whether they had been taking only their share or had been taking more. The ministers and editors who heard Him were challenged to take the question to their own pulpits and columns.

Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for May 7, 1912; see original for full text.

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání*. George Ronald.