In 1899, a German Reformed minister named Augustus E. Schade self-published a book called The Philosophy of History.[1] The book was pure sophistry, some four hundred densely-filled pages of esoteric nonsense masquerading as scholarship. It is a window into the mind and career of a huckster. Not just an intellectual fraud, Schade’s entire career as a pastor, publisher, and teacher was marked by one scheme after another. He eventually also seems to have become delusional, before ending his life alone in a dingy hotel room. 

Few people knew the real Augustus Schade, and indeed it would have been difficult to know him, since he seldom stayed in one place for long. A church historian in the 1950s had a difficult time gathering facts about him. Schade, he wrote, “seems to have been a sort of ‘mystery man’ so far as information about his life and activities are concerned. He was ignored by the biographers, passed over by [German Reformed magazines such as] the Messenger, and as for the Almanac – he simply did not exist.”[2]

Although historians today might not be able to see as deep into an era as the people who lived it, they can often see wider and discover connections that no one at the time could have observed. With the advent of digital search engines like archive.org and newspapers.com we can learn more about Schade than any of his contemporaries knew of him. We can also discover a wider pattern of controversy and fraud that followed him wherever he went.

In his forty-year career serving congregations in the Reformed Church of the United States from Baltimore to Seattle, Schade was accused of everything from arson, insurance fraud, adultery (on more than one occasion), filing bogus lawsuits, and abandonment of his wife. The failure of his biggest and final fraud led to his own suicide. In the last years of his life, Schade raised money intending to establish a  German colony in Panama. Some news stories depicted it as a utopian eugenics scheme, an effort to use racial science to breed a race of “supermen” by limiting entry to those who passed examinations for physical and mental health. The science of eugenics was prominent at the time, and many took such ideas seriously. Schade’s scheme in Panama may have been a mix of fraud and delusion, but in context elements of it were common in both Europe and North America. Schade visited Panama on at least two occasions, and in the U.S., he carried rocks and pressed leaves from his sojourns in the tropics. But his stories of having acquired land in Panama appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, he convinced dozens, perhaps hundreds, of German American churchgoers to invest in a colony that never existed.

 In 1913, Schade was found dead in a Cincinnati hotel room. A 31-page autobiography, copies of his book, and some letters from his love interest were found next to his body. No less than a dozen newspapers from Maryland to Minnesota reported it as a mystery, but the city coroner soon determined that Schade’s death had come from cyanide poisoning, and he declared it a suicide.

Schade was born in Coburg-Saxe-Gotha, studied at the University of Halle, and migrated to the United States in the 1860s. He rarely spoke about his life in Germany or any family that he might have left behind and no letters of attestation. He appeared in America as a man who had no past.

There were concerns with his character in the earliest American records that include his name, however. In 1869, the Iowa classis warned the Synod of the German Reformed Church about “ungentlemanly conduct and insinuations in the person of Aug. Schade and Gustav Ziph…in case they apply for licensure.”[3] But the synod examined these and other applicants and accepted them all.

In the 1870s, Schade  reputedly was a “brilliant German pulpit orator” as he led two churches in Ohio, Salem Reformed and Mt. Union Reformed.[4] Then, from 1883 to 1887, he was the minister of Cleveland’s Sixth Reformed Church. This had been a Lutheran church and Schade’s arrival caused the congregation to split. New immigrants from Germany increased the size of his congregation. It appears that Schade took the pulpit without pay, or at least at a reduced salary, while also working as an editor of the Reformirte Kirchenzeitung and Die Abendlust, two German periodicals published by Cleveland’s German Reformed Publishing House. In 1885, Schade appeared in the Cleveland city directory as the principal of Calvin College, a short-lived Ohio institute (1866-1899) not to be confused with the Calvin College in Michigan.[5] He likely came into this position through the efforts of J.H. Ruetenik, the founder the college, who was also the head at the German Reformed Publishing House. But this was a short-lived appointment.

In 1888, Schade left Cleveland and was installed as pastor of the St. John’s German Reformed Church in Baltimore, where he remained until 1891.[6] It is only from later reports that we learn about Schade’s troubles in Baltimore. Marcus Bachman, president of the Maryland classis of the German Reformed Church believed Schade was pious church reformer, but his ways led to “constant battle” in the church and he was “chased from the congregation like a dog.”[7] When Schade left Baltimore, there were also reports that he left his wife behind and was “accompanied by a young woman of the congregation.”[8]

In the summer of 1891, Schade moved to Seattle. He quickly purchased a minor newspaper called the Seattle Tribune and consolidated it with a local German sheet, the Staats-Zeitung. Schade then ingratiated himself with congregation of the local German Reformed Church and replaced their minister, again offering his services at a reduced rate, as he hoped to earn the rest of his salary through his newspaper work.

Just after 2 a.m. on December 12^, 1891, a fire started at the Seattle Tribune building. Schade suspected foul play. Others, however, suspected Schade himself, suggesting that he had hired a man to burn the place down so he could collect on the insurance. Suspicions spread. In six months in Seattle, Schade seldom paid a bill. “Claims against the vanished clerical editor seem to be numerous” the city’s main newspaper reported.[9]  Schade never paid his lawyer nor his employees at the Tribune. He did not pay his newspaper editors nor the printers. On January 7, 1892, a warrant was issued for his arrest for larceny.[10]

The next day, Schade’s possessions were forcefully removed from the parsonage of his German Reformed Church. Schade skipped town, without collecting any insurance money. But he was not clear of trouble just yet. The Northern Pacific railroad had once given Schade a free travel pass, since they believed that he was working to promote the growth of the Northwest. When Schade fled Seattle, he only made it as far as Spokane before the railroad, having heard rumors of his misdeeds, revoked the pass. Schade had no choice but to pay for the rest of his fare to St. Paul, Minnesota. The “Notorious Clerical Editor” never returned to Seattle.[11]

A week later, however, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a letter from Mr. A. Butz Sr. of Fremont (a Seattle neighborhood), Butz offer a qualified defense of Schade. He claimed to have known Schade for ten years in Ohio and thought he was an honest man. According to Butz, a Seattle church minister named Gottfried Graedel had been looking to be replaced in his position and move elsewhere. Butz had informed Schade about this opportunity, and Schade came to Seattle to see about the job. The two ministers “did not agree well one with the other,” however. Graedel eventually resigned from his position but spread rumors against the reputation of Schade. Butz was sure that Schade, if given an “opportunity to answer changes brought against him,” would “be able to justify himself.”[12]

Two days later, Graedel responded to Butz in the press. He and Schade had indeed spoken of an “exchange of pulpits,” Graedel noted. “[At] that time, however, I did not know that he was in trouble in Baltimore.”[13]

(This article will be published in full in a forthcoming issue of Origins, the historical magazine of Calvin College. The 2nd and 3rd parts of the article will be posted here soon).

(continues in part 2)

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[1] A.E. Schade, The Philosophy of History (Cleveland: A. Schade Publisher, 1899). The title page notes that Schade’s work is “based upon the works of Dr. R. Rocholl.

[2] The researcher was Guy P. Bready. Information provided by Alison Mallin, archives assistant at the Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society.

[3] Acts and Proceedings of the Synod of the German Reformed Church of Ohio and Adjacent States  (Cincinnati, T.P. Bucher, 1869),  2, 26.

[4] Theodore P. Bolliger, History of the First Reformed Church of Canton, Ohio  (Cleveland, OH: Central Publishing House, 1917), 125.

[5] Robert Swierenga, “Ohio’s Calvin College,” Swierenga website, http://swierenga.com/OhioCalvinCollege_art.html (accessed 27 July 2023).

[6] De Deutsche correspondent, 19 January 1891; Baltimore Sun, 19 November 1888.

[7] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 8 January 1892.

[8] The Democratic Advocate, 11 July 1891; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 29 January 1892.

[9] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5 August 1892.

[10] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12 December 1891; 7 January 1892; 28 January 1892; 1 April 1892; 4 December 1892; The Morning Call, 8 January 1892.

[11] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9 January 1892; 13 January 1892; 29 January 1892.

[12] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 15 January 1892.

[13] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 17 January 1892. I could find no evidence that an “A. Butz Sr.” ever lived in Fremont, Washington, or in any other Fremont for that matter. It would not have been out of character for Schade to have invented the man and written letters pretending to be him.