Primate Perry

A curious election was held last week in Chicago. It was preceded by no oratory, either to praise, defame or nominate a candidate. There were, officially, no candidates. Nonetheless Rt. Rev. Dr. James De Wolf Perry, Bishop of Rhode Island, was elected presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S., became thereby the U. S. analog to Most Reverend Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Bishop Perry was chosen amid the whining of a great Chicago blizzard (see p. 13) so tempestuous that only 84% of the 134 bishops eligible to vote could make their way through it. On the seventh ballot, after unofficial conferring, he received 69 votes, one more than the necessary majority. No one was surprised.

Bishop Perry now finds in his hands the task of national Episcopal coordination, for which he has been strongly recommended by able services in reorganizing and simplifying the operations of the National Council. This work churchmen believe will, among other things, result in an advantageous separation of affairs financial from affairs spiritual in the church.

Bishop Perry succeeds the late Bishop Charles Palmerston Anderson who died on Jan. 30. He himself served scarcely two months, having followed Bishop John Gardner Murray who died early in October 1929.

James De Wolf Perry, 58, of Providence, R. I., was born in Germantown, Pa., son of a rector, descendant of Capt. Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. He attended Germantown Academy, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Episcopal Theological School (Cambridge, Mass.). He occupied several parishes in Massachusetts and Connecticut, married (1908) Edith Dean Weir, violin-playing and painting daughter of onetime Dean John Ferguson Weir of the School of Fine Arts, Yale University. He is president of the trustees of St. George's School, Newport, R. I. At his summer home in Princeton, Mass, he plays tennis, tends a garden, fells trees. Firm-jawed, genial, sparse of hair, he is an enlightened divine whose culture should make him particularly welcome at the four weeks' Lambeth Conference of Anglican leaders which opens in London in July.

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