William Thomas Manning, Bishop of New York from 1921 through 1946, was perhaps the best known and most controversial bishop of his era.

He was born in England in 1866, and when in his teens he moved with his parents to Nebraska, and then California. He graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, and studied at both its divinity school and at the General Theological Seminary in New York. His career after ordination was fast paced. It is said that William Reed Huntington of Manhattan's Grace Church saw him as a "comer" at the General Convention of 1901 and upon his recommendation the 35-year-old Manning went to New York, eventually to succeed to the rectorate of Trinity Parish there. In 1921, he was elected bishop, having already declined election to at least four other dioceses. If ever the hackneyed term "meteoric" was appropriate, it would apply to the career of William T. Manning.

When he became Bishop of New York, he had important credentials of solid past performance. First, his remarkable energy (which he retained throughout his long life). Then there was his ability to translate his firm orthodoxy into an optimistic conviction that Christians of all traditions might approach unity. He also proved himself to be a firm administrator. The properties and policies of land-endowed Trinity Parish were subject to widespread criticism when he became rector. In a matter of months this was changed.

The newspapers soon learned that Bishop Manning was good copy. He returned the compliment by using the press in the interests not of himself but of the church he loved. He used letters to the editor as a regular forum along with his addresses to diocesan conventions and his after-dinner speeches at the Church Club. When some moral, ecclesiastical or political issue emerged, the bishop would alter his schedule and appear at the cathedral's Sunday afternoon service and speak about the matter from the pulpit.

But this widespread publicity did not always benefit Bishop Manning, as the Judge Lindsey episode proved. Judge Lindsey, a Methodist layman, championed trial marriage as a means to decrease the rising divorce rate. The bishop opposed this mightily, and in one of his Sunday afternoon cathedral sermons denounced the idea. It happened that Judge Lindsey was present, and at the end of the sermon he jumped onto a table and asked for five minutes to answer the bishop. Security guards and ushers hustled him out of the cathedral and took him to police headquarters. It was reported that the elderly judge showed signs of having been roughed up. The publicity was distinctly unfavorable to Bishop Manning. He never regained the civic popularity he had once enjoyed.

Bishop Manning's convictions about racial justice, financial integrity and the responsibility of Christians in all aspects of a complicated culture seem now to some people to have been well in advance of what might be expected of a man trained and ordained in the 1890s. After he died, it was said, "Manning was usually right."

He managed a large diocese with minimal staff. The bishop even edited the diocesan newspaper for much of his episcopate. Until his last illness, this tiny, almost frail, man retained his remarkable forcefulness. Detractors called him haughty and arrogant. He was in fact quite humble, and unimpressed by the trappings of wealth.

He retired graciously to a little house near Washington Square in Manhattan. And while there, less than two years, he discovered another good fight to be fought. He decried the proposal to destroy the old houses in the square. He waged a campaign of letter writing and speaking against ruining Washington Square. Again he was good copy. It is probably largely because of Bishop Manning that New Yorkers can still enjoy that spacious square. He died Nov. 28, 1949. o

The Rev. James Elliott Lindsley was formerly editor of the Episcopal New Yorker, and is historiographer of the Diocese of New York. He lives in Millbrook, N.Y.