The Other Calvin Colleges

“The” Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is not the only Calvin College there has been in the United States. There were two others. One existed in a comic book universe where a superhero, Al Pratt, AKA The Atom, was a student majoring in nuclear physics. The other was in Cleveland, Ohio, in our actual universe, in the second half of the nineteenth century. There also is a Collège Calvin in Geneva, dating to the late 1550s, and a Calvin University in South Korea. This story will focus on the American schools.

Al Pratt’s Calvin College was in Calvin City, Connecticut, in a comic book series (1930s-1950s) set in the DC Comics universe. A group of Calvinists, Puritans presumably, had escaped England in 1678 and founded a town on the Housatonic River. Theological disagreement led a group to leave and found Ivy Town on the other side of the river, in 1708. (See map.) In Ivy Town they founded Ivy University. It is larger and more famous than Calvin College but does not have a superhero alumnus.

Pratt is a common American kind of character: a little guy who gets picked on by bigger guys, bulks up, and gets his revenge. Pratt grew tired of being harassed by bullies and found a boxing coach who taught him how to fight back. Then he became a crime fighter. A few years into the series, exposure to radiation gave Pratt some actual superpowers.

A common ad in comic books sold a training program created by the body builder Charles Atlas. The ads had a photo of Atlas and promised a training regimen to quickly put on muscle and turn a wimp into a hero. Cartoon images told the story of a small man at a beach getting sand kicked on him by a bully, while a woman looks on. The last image in the ad shows the “new man” beating up the bully and impressing the woman. (See below.) This narrative is Pratt’s own story, including a love interest.

Pratt’s alter ego, the Atom, was part of the Justice Society of America (JSA). DC Comics later reinvented the JSA as the Justice League of America (JLA). And still later, it has series about both, with the JSA existing on “Earth-Two” and the JLA on “Earth-One.” These were different versions of Earth in different universes in the “multiverse.” There were in the 1960s-1980s crossover stories mixing characters from the two earths/universes.

The Calvin College in Cleveland, Ohio, also was founded by Calvinists—German Reformed immigrants—and was associated with the Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS). The RCUS is a sibling church of the Dutch American denominations, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and Reformed Church in America (RCA), with some noteworthy regional and ethnic parallels.

The RCUS, like the RCA, dates to the colonial era. Its founder was John Phillip Boehm (1683–1749), a teacher, lay reader, and later an ordained pastor who started the first congregation in 1720 near Philadelphia. In the nineteenth century, waves of German immigrants transformed the RCUS, as the Dutch did with the RCA and the CRC. As in the RCA, East coast congregations of the RCUS tended to be more urbane and Americanized, while those in the Midwest were more conservative and had a strong immigrant-ethnic identity.

The RCUS had some 57,000 communicant members in 1890 and was divided into German and English language synods. There were ten congregations in Cleveland, nine of them German speaking. As with the Dutch Reformed, the German speaking members of the German Reformed churches came to America in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century.

Cleveland’s Calvin College opened its doors in 1863, more than a decade before the Theological School that became Calvin College and Seminary opened in Grand Rapids. The founder and first teacher was Rev. Dr. H. J. Ruetenik, who had founded the first RCUS congregation in Cleveland in 1860.

Ruetenik was a religious entrepreneur, a familiar kind of figure in nineteenth century America. He also founded a German Reformed Publishing House and edited several church magazines, one of them called Der Wächter. The CRC’s Dutch language magazine, which lasted into the 1960s, was similarly named De Wachter (The Guardian or The Watchman).

Ruetenik’s school began as the Calvin Institute. Its mission was to prepare students to be pastors. It quickly transitioned from Ruetenik’s pet project to a school run by three RCUS regional classes.

In 1881 Calvin College was put under the control of the new Central Synod of the RCUS. As the ad from 1883 suggests, its curriculum had expanded, though it is not clear how many of the faculty were full-time vs. part-time. Most probably were the latter.

Cleveland’s Calvin College struggled for funds and students throughout its existence. It competed for students and financial support with Mission House College (now Lakeland College) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which had been founded in 1860. The congregations in Ohio that supported Calvin tended to be poor. And the decision to provide instruction in German limited the pool of potential students.

In 1899, after two decades of trying to find more students and more raise money to support Calvin College, the RCUS reluctantly shut it down and sold the property. It had graduated seventeen divinity students, reflecting its original purpose, and seventeen more had spent part of their seminary training there. It was a small number of clergy alumni, but all thirty-four were in ministry in the RCUS.

Al Pratt retired from superhero work in 1951, along with the rest of the Justice Society of America. The JSA was under investigation by HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was hunting for communists. The Atom and the rest of the JSA superheroes refused to reveal their identities to the committee and instead left their aliases behind and disappeared into American society.

The Atom revealed himself only to Mary Jane, the woman he had pined for as mere Al Pratt, and married her. He became a professor of nuclear physics at Calvin College. In later iterations of the DC universe, the Atom came out of retirement to battle evil in the multiverse and prevent Ragnarök.

One can only imagine how many Calvin colleges and universities there are in the multiverse! For more details about the Calvin College in Ohio, check out Robert Swierenga’s article. (It provided most of the information in this blog post about Cleveland’s Calvin College.)

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William Katerberg is a professor of history and curator of Heritage Hall at Calvin University. All images courtesy of Heritage Hall.