The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Personality I: Gimmicks

A page from the sermon, “Personality (First Phase),” preached by Lloyd C Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on 1/18/1920. In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

“Even the average man pricks up his ears when you hint that you can hand him some patent for improving his personality. He thinks it may make him a better salesman; a more successful politician; a more adept and resourceful pleader of whatever causes are uppermost in his mind.”

This is from the first of a three-part series on “Personality,” by Lloyd C. Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, on January 18, 1920. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

“The word [personality] is in very common use. It ricochets from lip to lip, and almost any child of twelve will attempt to define it for you. Full-page advertisements in the magazines are frequently tooled around the finger of a determined man, pointing his finger directly in your face and shouting, ‘I will teach you how to have personality!’

“And, desirous of a personality, you may send for his book, which can be had for a dollar and a half, and the book tells you how to begin, as follows, to wit:

“‘Stand up straight! Don’t sprawl like a jellyfish!

“‘Look ’em in the eye!

“‘Brace your neck firmly against the back of your collar — and be sure that your collar is clean. Take your hands out of your pockets!

“‘Now then, if you are ready, say: I can! I will!

“‘Say it a little louder this time: I WILL. I WILL. I WILL!'”

[Douglas continues…]

“Now, all of this is very good exercise, and doubtless has the merit of correcting some slouchy habits, which fully justifies the price of the book; and it possibly stimulates circulation, though not nearly so much as dumbbells, of a cold winter morning, by an open window. But personality? No! You don’t invent a personality, or earn a personality by hard labor, or manufacture one over a pattern furnished by somebody else. You discover a Personality; and when you discover it, you discover that it is yours and that there is not another like it in the whole world! There may be better ones, but not another like it. And the process of achieving it, therefore, is not by a system of calisthenics or self-hypnosis, but by a quiet, serious, patient self-search.

“A man may howl, ‘I must! I can! I will!’ until he is hoarse and hysterical, but the only effect it produces is to put him through his usual motions with a little more than his usual impetuosity (an added quality not invariably valuable; it depends).

“‘Walk right into your employer’s office,’ says the book, on page 162. ‘Look him squarely in the eye and tell him you’re worth more money!’ Well, maybe you are, but not because you did that!

“No; all these patent tricks for developing ‘personality’ merely offer a temporary prescription for self-delusion. One can galvanize the leg of a dead frog and make him kick a few times in a manner exceedingly lifelike, but the frog will never develop into a swimmer. What he requires is power on the inside. The battery will not help him very much, or for very long.

“A man may decide: ‘Henceforward I propose to be successful — to possess a forceful personality — to surmount my difficulties and laugh at obstacles!’ But he soon finds that his little dose of strychnine loses its stimulating effect. He has begun at the wrong end of the proposition. He is just trying to act as he might act if he really had personality.

“What he needs to do is to go deeply into the problem of his own life and discover what tenable reasons he may hold for a belief that his is a distinctive character.”

I’ll continue this in my next post.

Personality I: Worms Need Not Apply

by Ronald R Johnson

Title page of the sermon, “Personality (First Phase),” preached by Lloyd C Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on 1/18/1920. In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

“In its broadest connotation, Religion designates the feelings and acts of men who quest The Infinite to determine their mutual relationship.” [This is from a sermon by Lloyd C. Douglas, preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on January 18, 1920. It was the first of a three-part series on the subject of “Personality.”]

“Whatever else Religion is must be considered casual, incidental, or accessory. Religion is the human search for God.

“Now, this very first premise, if it has any weight at all in man’s consciousness and experience, inevitably exalts human personality. I do not mean that it merely inflates the ego and magnifies the first personal pronoun by a few thousand diameters; for, if the God-seeker is honest, he is bound to be humble. And surely it is highly commendable, when one addresses oneself Godward, to approach Him in some such mood as that of the ancient desert sheik who, stretching his bronzed arms toward the gloriously star-strewn sky, exclaimed in wonderment: ‘When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou has ordained — what is man that Thou art mindful of him?’

“But, though his sense of awe and bewilderment never leaves him, the seeker either becomes personally exalted by his quest or he abandons it, baffled, and thereafter refers to God as ‘X.'”

“So the adventurer sets forth upon his tour of discovery, crying from the depths of his humility, ‘I am but clay, and Thou the omnipotent artist!’ But, erelong, he is demanding, with high faith and a confidence that has nothing of effrontery in it: ‘Mold me — from clay to statue — from statue to flesh — from flesh to manhood — to manhood triumphant — celestial — until I awake in Thy likeness!’

“Any system of religious inquiry that begins with the premise that man is but a crawling worm, unworthy the consideration of his Maker, is merely impudent when it talks of aspiring to a conscious bond of spiritual contact between the human and the Divine. But in that moment when a man begins to think of God as his Father and of himself as God’s child, he rises to the dignity of a new creature, from whom old things, like petty fears and vain imaginings, have passed away, and for whom all things are become new; a creature of vast capacities, whose exalted social station as a ‘child of God’ invites him — nay, compels him — to ‘leave his low-vaulted past’ and ‘build more stately mansions for his soul.’

“In other words, so long as a man maintains that he is ‘on his own,’ mumbling vague nothings about himself as a mere chemical compound, somehow produced by a series of fortuitous accidents in the laboratory of Mother Nature; washed up out of the primeval ooze to shed his fins and learn to walk on his hind feet; or, with no more logic (or less insolence), prattling of his self-containment in such orotund phrases as Henley’s ‘I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul,’ as if he were running around loose in the universe like an uncharted chunk of sizzling triolite, expatriate from some volcanic star — he cannot be expected to think very much of himself, and he would be a fool if he did. He and the soft-shell crab and the exiled meteorite are equally dignified, and all of the same order as to destiny. He admits it himself, and one has too much courtesy to dispute him.

“But, once one rises to greet the Spirit of God with the confident attitude of one who walks, unafraid, into his father’s presence, he must recognize the extent of his obligation to talk and act as becometh the high-born! No longer does he grovel, or whine, or fear. Life has no bounds for him; circumstance no chains; adversity no bars! Even Eternity loses its unnamed terrors; Death its sting; the grave its victory! He is built of that which is imperishable, and he knows it! He is a son of God.

“‘Dust thou art — to dust returnest’ was not spoken of his soul!”

But the objective, Douglas says, isn’t for this questing soul to remain where he is in his development. The objective is to grow into a relation with God. That’s why it’s sad that so many “personality” experts rely on gimmicks. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

How Douglas Got People’s Attention

by Ronald R Johnson

Unidentified clipping, n.d. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

“WANTED — An unsuccessful and discouraged man to hear a sermon-lecture on ‘Personality’ at the Congregational church (corner of State and William streets), Sunday morning at 10:30. Costs you nothing but your time.”

“WANTED — Student who never attends church services anywhere but is interested in the development of his ‘personality,’ to come to the Congregational church next Sunday morning at ten-thirty.”

These are the kinds of random ideas Lloyd Douglas came up with, and he wasn’t bashful about following up on them. In January 1920 he was about to launch a series of sermons on “Personality” at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, and although the church was already filled on Sunday mornings, he thought they could reach even more people. Douglas was especially interested in reaching the kind of people who didn’t enjoy going to church, because he didn’t like it very much himself — or at least he didn’t like the way most churches conducted their services. He did things differently at the First Congregational Church, and he wanted to extend the church’s reach.

So he composed some notices for the types of people he wanted his sermon-series to reach, and he placed them in the local paper as Want-Ads. The newspaper even ran a story about it.

Clipping from Ann Arbor Times-News, n.d. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

He also followed up with more conventional advertisements:

Unidentified clipping, n.d. [but apparently 1/11/1920]. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

It was this sort of thing that made Douglas “the talk of the town,” no matter what town he happened to be working in at the moment. It also made his church the place to be on Sunday morning — if for no other reason than to satisfy people’s curiosity about what he would say. I’ll tell you what he did say in my next post.

Finding Contentment in a Busy World

by Ronald R Johnson

From the text of an untitled sermon preached by Lloyd C Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on 1/4/1920. In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

Seeking contentment isn’t a private affair, according to Lloyd Douglas. “The influence of just one fault-finding, captious, crabbed soul in a household will sour the whole institution. The radiant personality of one well-poised apostle of contentment will pervade and inspire a whole social group.”

This is from a sermon by Lloyd Douglas on January 4, 1920, at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.) Douglas says:

“Here is a family where life runs at sixes and sevens every day. The members of the household are very much on edge all the time. Everybody ragging and badgering everybody else. Not often does a remark of commendation get by for anybody, anywhere, without someone’s qualification. You can depend upon it that some one member of that institution is responsible or was responsible. Maybe it has gone so far nothing could stop it short of a miracle of grace. The children of the household go out, at length, to set up establishments of their own, where they are more than likely to conform to the traditions bequeathed to them; and so the bad work goes on.

“Here is another home where harmony and happiness are more to be desired than anything else. Slow to anger; plenteous in mercy; in honor, preferring one another; generous, even to a fault. You can depend on it — there is a soul in that establishment who has learned the secret of successful living, maybe in the old home, possibly through contact with a splendid friend, maybe through a consistent study of that Life that towers majestically above all other lives.

“It is no new philosophy that makes thought responsible for all action. It was not new when the Lord stated that thoughts and actions had so very much in common that an unlawful wish was equivalent to an unlawful act. It is a simple psychological law that any type of thought, if entertained for a sufficient length of time, will, by and by, reach the motor tracks of the brain and finally burst forth into action.

“Moreover, we build our philosophy of life — by which life becomes increasingly beautiful or ugly for ourselves and everybody related to us — by the attitude we take toward the more or less inconsequential events which belong in our everyday experience. For it is not in the great and heroic tests of life that we stand trial so much as in the attitude we take toward the minor events, where we develop the strength that may be drawn upon at a moment of sudden stress, or where we neglect to store the energy whose lack, in a critical moment, spells our disaster and defeat.

“Waiting patiently, graciously, smilingly, for the belated train means considerably more than just that. It means a very distinct gain to the permanent character, by which life is charged with a certain static energy which may be drawn upon in an hour when there is much more desperate waiting on hand than for a tardy train.”

[This next part refers to Douglas’s earlier reference to a scene from Christopher Morley’s Haunted Bookshop, in which a Mr. Mifflin talks about turning the drudgery of dishwashing into a moment of meditation.]

“And when the dishpan begins to take on what Mr. Mifflin calls ‘a philosophic halo’ and the warm, soapy water becomes a sovereign medicine to retract the hot blood from the head, there is decided gain in mental poise that means very much more than the transfiguring of an ignoble task. It means the storing of a peculiar kind of spiritual energy that may be taxed someday for larger uses than dishwashing.

“I fancy that if our generation needs any one remedy, more than another, for its ills, that remedy can be found in a patient, consistent effort to achieve contentment in the particular phases of life that have seemed most trying. A little less rush and a little more thought. A little less scramble and a little more simple-hearted enjoyment of and contentment in the homely, the commonplace acts and tasks which are as gall and wormwood until we transfigure them by our changed attitude toward them.”

Such a Busy World!

by Ronald R Johnson

This is from a sermon by Lloyd Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on January 4, 1920, on the subject of contentment. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

He has just finished saying that people seem to value being (or at least appearing to be) busy, but he expects to see the pendulum swing back to a desire for contentment.

“Assuming, then, that contentment of mind is, after all, a virtue — a laudable pursuit of normal life — how better may one seek it than in attempting to transfigure as many of the common drudgeries of life as possible into desirable avocations.

“The merchant’s inventory may be a great trial, or it may be good fun, I suppose, depending altogether on the merchant and the state of mind with which he approaches his task. The professor’s bushel of blue books [examination booklets that must be graded, in other words], collected at no little effort on the part of a good many people [students, that is], can make his soul sick, or afford much entertainment and satisfaction, according as he regards them.

“Once I heard a woman say of the daily labor of her house: ‘I hate greasy pots and skillets; and I thank goodness I do.’

“Of course, it would be rather unfortunate to arrive at the point of preferring dirty things to clean ones, and I daresay there is comparatively little danger of that, in the average case; but surely, if clean things are so greatly to be desired above dirty things, there ought to be some joy to be had in the business of making dirty things clean.

“So much of our time is spent in preparing to be happy, and anticipating contentment, which happiness and contentment we hope to experience after this particularly hateful business that we happen to be at, is done. By a subtle process of investing the hateful task with some such mental attitude as that of the dishwashing bookseller [in Christopher Morley’s book, The Haunted Bookshop, which Douglas mentioned earlier in the sermon], we need not make so much of our life merely a stretch of arid desert to be crossed that we may reach the promised land.

“In very many respects, we are becoming a much better disciplined people than were our forefathers. In the matter of being purged of the worst of our fears, for example, we are much indebted to the light thrown upon our pathway by science. Not a great while ago, people were afraid of the dark. Hobgoblins inhabited the unknown. Ghosts were common. Nobody could be found who had seen one, but almost anybody knew somebody who, if he had not seen a ghost himself, was acquainted with another who had.

“It hasn’t been so very long since the great forces of Nature were thought to be humanity’s enemies. Altars of propitiation to unknown terrors made life hideous with bloody sacrifices, not so very long ago, even among people who were reputed for wisdom. The earthly life was crammed, from birth to death, with terrors; and almost everybody was mortally afraid of the life that was to follow, as if The Ruler of the Universe was endowed with all the malevolence one could possibly imagine of a super-fiend. All that is changed now. There are very few dark corners where ogres lurk to reach out and clutch at passersby. The old fears have been banished.

Again, we are undeniably a better generation physically than any previous. We have discovered that a great many diseases, formerly charged up to the mysterious ways of Providence, are to be accounted for on grounds much less divine — such as bad sewerage, polluted water supply, and plain dirt.

“We have reduced the heavy manual labor of life to a fraction of its former burden and have thereby given mankind a better chance to live, while it lives, with fewer aches and pains. Modern surgery has achieved wonders in refashioning the bodies of hundreds of thousands who, otherwise, would have gone out of this life much sooner than necessary.

“Again, we have achieved better processes for conserving our time than ever were known before. Time means a great deal to people who really wish to accomplish many things and are aware that only a few years are given them in which to do their work. Instantaneous communication and modern means of transportation have added years to the working life of the average man. Indeed, we are rather better fixed to live than were any of our predecessors, in this earthly existence.

“But when one takes stock of the manner in which we spend our lives — rushing from here to there, and there to yonder, and from yonder to thence and back again, panting — one doubts whether, with all our modern improvements, we are getting as much out of life as our forebears who, while they lacked our conveniences, apparently contrived to enjoy the few things they had much more fully than we have the capacity for enjoying the many. In the simplicity of their lives, they did not fret much about drudgeries. I suppose they had so many of them that if they had begun to hate their drudgeries, they would have come very nearly hating life as a whole.

“We, for whom life has become so complex, will do well to dignify and transfigure the few irksome duties that are left, and which must be performed, persuading ourselves that these activities aren’t so bad after all.”

Douglas went on to give many practical applications, which I’ll share in my next post.

Are You Too Busy?

by Ronald R Johnson

The front cover of Christopher Morley, Two Classic Novels in One Volume: Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop (Dover Publications, 2018). (From amazon.com)

In a sermon on January 4, 1920, at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, Lloyd Douglas shared with his congregation a passage from Christopher Morley’s 1919 book, The Haunted Bookshop. (In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, Douglas had trouble coming up with a title for this sermon because the passage he quoted was about washing dishes. In the book, Morley’s character Mifflin talks about how he used to hate washing dishes until he realized that it slowed him down and gave him a chance to relax from his daily labors. As Mifflin says,

“Do not laugh when I tell you that I have evolved a whole kitchen philosophy of my own. I find the kitchen the shrine of our civilization, the focus of all that is comely in life. The ruddy shine of the stove is as beautiful as any sunset. A well-polished jug or spoon is as fair, as complete and beautiful, as any sonnet. The dishmop, properly rinsed and wrung and hung outside the back door to dry, is a whole sermon in itself. The stars never look so bright as they do from the kitchen door after the icebox pan is emptied, and the whole place is ‘redd up,’ as the Scotch say.”

Douglas comments on this passage:

“Now, all of this has set me thinking on the subject of our drudgeries, and to wondering if the search for contentment in life is not, after all, mostly a transfiguration of these petty drudgeries into desirable employments. I am fully aware that my original premise is not extremely popular. That one should seek contentment nowadays is almost equivalent to a confession of selfishness and moral lassitude. The way to behave, modernly, is to strive.

“Be busy. Be doing things. Be perpetually going through a multitude of motions. Don’t sit down. People might think you lazy. Don’t slow down. People might think you were losing your punch. It is best to lope about, watch in hand, with an expression of fatigue and anxiety on your face; then people will recognize you as a person of consequence. You really can’t be a man of affairs unless you are out of breath.

“It is also wise to talk a great deal about the pressure that is put on you from every direction. This is the easiest part of the performance, of course; and once you get going, it will come quite natural to you to speak of your congested program — almost to the exclusion of any other topic.

“This is the way we have been living in recent years, until the quest of contentment has come to be considered a very unworthy ambition.

“Now, I cannot believe that this sort of panicky living makes for permanent gains in the development of modern civilization. I don’t see how work that is done under such obvious pressure, and necessarily in such a great hurry, can contribute much to the lasting values of our time. There’s too much DO and not nearly enough BE in it.

“We have been chattering volubly about dynamics (one of the words that ought to collect double wages of this generation, for overtime). This, we say, is a dynamic age; and we are living in a dynamic country; and we are a dynamic people. If you want to say something pleasant about some active man, don’t forget to mention that he is dynamic.

“Now, strictly speaking, a dynamic is like the lights on a popular, democratic motorcar. So long as the car is in motion, the lights are on. When the car stops, the lights go out. A dynamic is under obligation to some other agency for its energy; and when that other agency takes a day off, so does the dynamic.

“I think it were about time we began speaking of the desirability of a static power — owing its energy to sources external to itself, to be sure; but not quite so slavishly dependent upon them. They can shut down for repairs if they wish, but the reservoir in which the static power has been stored is good for such period as it has provided for in the hours of its receipt of energy.

“To the storing of this static power in our lives, we need to give considerably more attention than we have been giving it, to a fine, well-balanced spiritual content.

“Whenever I get to the point, in high dynamics, that I must confess I have hardly time to eat my meals; am a stranger to my own household; haven’t read a book, other than that appertaining to my craft, for weeks, months, maybe; I may also seriously ask myself whether, in my abnormal life, lived under conditions artificial, unhealthy, and distinctly antisocial, my contribution to my age is likely to have very much in it of permanent value to mankind.

“I confidently expect to see, long before I die, a decided swing of sentiment away from this popular stampede toward a program of life embracing a little of dignified leisure for thought and a renewal of the well-nigh lost art of contentment.”

The rest of his sermon was about practical ways to find contentment. I’ll tell more about that in my next post.

Ships Passing…

by Ronald R Johnson

Front Cover of The Complete Works Collection of Christopher Morley, published February 2020, Kindle Edition. From goodreads.com.

I’m still working my way through the sermons Lloyd Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor during the University of Michigan’s 1919-1920 school year. Today I’m looking at an untitled sermon he preached on January 4, 1920. It was based on a passage from Christopher Morley’s 1919 novel, The Haunted Bookshop.

This was the kind of thing Douglas read for enjoyment. He subscribed to (and contributed anonymously to) the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of essays for thinking people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (hence the name). Christopher Morley wrote anonymously for them, too, as well as for other magazines that gave him a by-line. In 1917, Doubleday Doran published Morley’s short book called Parnassus on Wheels, about a secondhand bookseller whose shop was mobile: a bookstore in a horse-drawn carriage. Although it was a story, it gave Morley many opportunities to talk about everyday life in America in the early twentieth century, as well as to make interesting comments on literature. In 1919, he published a sequel called The Haunted Bookshop, and it was a passage from this book on which Douglas’s sermon (on January 4, 1920) was based.

I’ll tell you about the sermon in my next post, but today I want to call your attention to a coincidence that no one could have noticed at the time. Although Douglas was well-known in religious circles and in some of the communities where he had served as a minister, he was not yet famous, nor did anyone know that he would become famous later on. So here is Douglas building a sermon around a text from Morley, an up-and-coming author whom he admired, little realizing that his own name would one day be better known that Morley’s and that, in a couple of decades, Morley would review Douglas’s novel, White Banners, in The Saturday Review of Books, arguably the most prestigious book review in the country at that time.

Douglas’s case is unusual, of course. Most people don’t live the majority of their lives in obscurity, then suddenly get “discovered.” It was Douglas’s fame that motivated the University of Michigan to keep his private papers, then motivated me to read them. Looking back on his life, I’m able to see this ironic “passing” of two “ships in the night.”

But Douglas believed that things like this happen to people like you and me, too. He thought there were connections between us that we might never find out about. Have you ever been far from home and conversed with a stranger, only to discover that you had a mutual acquaintance? “Small world,” we say. Or have you ever visited a social media platform like Facebook and discovered that a friend of yours is somehow connected to another friend of yours, and you didn’t know it? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It has come up again and again in my Lloyd Douglas research:

*Posing for a picture at the ceremony unveiling the statue of Lew Wallace in Washington, DC, little realizing that his novel, The Robe, would later be compared to Wallace’s novel, Ben Hur.

*Arguing in the press with filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille about his film The Godless Girl in 1918, not knowing that, twenty years later, he would be DeMille’s guest on his weekly broadcast, The Lux Radio Theater.

I could give other examples from his life, but you get the idea.

Maybe this kind of thing happened so much to Douglas because he was a busy man with many interesting projects involving lots of people and therefore was connected to so many folks informally. Or maybe it’s just more obvious in cases like his. Douglas thought so. He believed that we’ve all rubbed shoulders with people who are connected to us in ways we don’t know: not celebrities — just regular people who share our interests and concerns and would have been our friends if we had ever actually met them.

They could be the motorist we snarled at on the freeway earlier. Or they may be the person we envy way ahead of us in the long, boring line at the checkout counter. Perhaps they posted a comment on social media that annoyed us, but if we had met them under any other circumstances we would have hit it off with them.

How many other ships do we pass in the night? Douglas thought that those connections would often come to light – and coincidences would happen more frequently – for those who made Christ’s teachings their life-habit. And it seems to have been true for him, at least.

A Sermon in Search of a Title

by Ronald R Johnson

Title page of “Sermon,” preached by Lloyd C Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on 1/4/1920. In Sermons [5], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

One of the vexing problems in a busy pastor’s life is the necessity of giving the church secretary the title of a sermon long before it has actually been written. If the people are to be given a “bulletin” or “program” for the church service, it has to be printed, and the printer has to fit it into his schedule. Sometimes it’s done in-house, but not always; and even when it’s an inside job, the printer usually isn’t available at the last minute, late on Saturday night. And when the sermon is advertised in the local newspapers or on the announcement board outside, the title may be needed a week or more in advance.

That’s the problem Lloyd Douglas faced as the new year, 1920, began. His sermon on January 4 was titled, “Sermon.”

As he explained to his congregation, “I spent considerable time last week trying to find a name for this sermon. Once I thought of announcing that I would preach this morning to ‘Women Without Maids’; which idea was promptly rejected when I reflected that the discourse was of no less interest to me. I then half-decided to call it ‘The Proper Way to Wash Dishes,’ which sounded clap-trap. And while I debated the question, the bulletin went to press without an announcement of the topic — no very serious matter, I suppose, and hardly worth mentioning except that it furnishes me an introduction for what I am going to be saying today.”

This is just a brief word of encouragement to all you busy people out there: it happens to the best of us, at least occasionally. And when it does, the best thing to do is to admit it, perhaps with a touch of humor, and just keep going.

Pioneering the Air Waves: New Years 1920

by Ronald R Johnson

In my last post I told you about the University of Michigan’s participation in a nationwide experiment with wireless technology on the night of December 31, 1919. The school’s radio station would send out two messages: the first, at 8:30 PM, would be “telegraphic,” and the second, at 8:45, would be “telephonic.” The technology was so new that they still hadn’t settled on the lingo with which we would later become familiar. What they meant was that the first message would be in a coded signal (probably Morse code) and the second would be conveyed via human voice. Both messages would be written by Lloyd Douglas, and it was his voice that would be heard in the “telephonic” segment.

His “telegraphic” message was 60 words long:

“Saluting twentieth year of twentieth century our world’s depleted batteries of happiness and hope must be recharged. The century’s newly discovered physical forces have been taught to do evil. They must henceforth be taught to serve, lift, help, heal, else we are better without them. High time to radiate happiness, goodwill, friendly service, human welfare. We wish you happy New Year.” Then it was signed by the national organization that sponsored the event: “COMMUNITY SERVICE.”

This rather austere message was written in the shadow of the Great War (which we now call World War One). When Douglas says the “newly discovered physical forces have been taught to do evil,” he’s referring to all the technological advances that had made the war so horrific. And since his message was being conveyed over an even newer technology — wireless radio — he hoped it would be put to good uses, not bad ones.

He elaborated on this theme in his “telephonic” message, which you and I would consider his actual “radio” speech. He said:

“It is a great pleasure and privilege to speak to you — my unseen friends — in this peculiar way. It is so strange, it is almost uncanny, to feel that my words are going out to you, through the darkness, by means of contact entirely invisible and mysterious.

“I am informed that, so long as I hear no objections from you, I am to conclude that you approve of my sentiments; and if any one of you cannot stay through my entire address, please retire very quietly so that the others in the audience may not be disturbed.” [He was joking. It’s interesting to see him trying to wrap his head around the idea that radio waves could send messages without wires.]

“It appears that the secrets of nature, like long-imprisoned birds, are being released one by one as mankind develops sufficient ingenuity to accept and utilize them.

“The fact that we are now in possession of this new process of communication only means that we are considered wise enough and good enough to be made custodians of this secret.” [He was assuming a bit much here, as he himself would later acknowledge.]

“We are about to enter upon a new year. May I express the wish that it may be a very happy one for you — and if it is to be happy for you, it must be full of activity, for you are not the kind of people who could be contented otherwise.” [He was talking about the people who were forward-looking and industrious enough to be amateur radio operators.]

“We are entering upon a year of great prosperity as a people; probably the greatest prosperity ever registered in the history of any nation in human history. Therefore, we will face many grave temptations; for it is in his prosperity rather than in his adversity that a human being faces his greatest dangers, undefended.

“Let us not boast ourselves overmuch because of our nation’s brave show of wealth and success in material things; for such evidences have always been on display by every nation riding for a fall, and never more gaudily exhibited as on the morning of the last day.

“If we are to make our nation great, it must be great of soul, revealing a magnitude of mind and sensitiveness of conscience that bespeak the possession of certain spiritual qualities which are as far above the natural as the capacity of the ether, through which I speak to you, is above the limitations of wires spanned on poles.

“And if this ennobling of our nation’s soul is to be achieved, it must come to pass in the hearts of the people who compose this republic.

“Many wise men are saying that our social order has come to an hour of great significance, and that our course today, whether it be toward finer and larger progress in the things that really matter or toward an increasing emphasis upon things that have no permanent value to society…” [This sentence cuts off abruptly, which leads me to think that we’re getting this transcript from the receiving end, not from Douglas himself. Maybe it was too long for listeners to write it all down?]

“You and I can only determine that course for ourselves, and in our own hearts. We will have done our part if we decide that question wisely.

“Therefore, as we pass into the new year of 1920, let us go buoyantly, eagerly, expectantly, as travelers who rise to greet the dawn, resolved that, whatever others may do, we will try to make our own lives worthwhile and justify our right to live in this strategic age.”

Another clipping in Douglas’s scrapbook, which does not name the newspaper or give the date (but was probably only a day or two after the experiment), reports that amateur radio operators as far away as Cincinnati (a distance of roughly 250 miles) received one or the other of Douglas’s messages.

It wouldn’t be Douglas’s last experience with radio broadcasting. In the years to come, he would be quite comfortable speaking into a microphone to “unseen” audiences, “through the darkness.” But he was also among the first to do it, well before the average American citizen owned a radio.

When Radio Was a New Concept

by Ronald R Johnson

They called it “wireless” in those days. Only a few enthusiasts throughout the country bought the kits, assembled them, then listened eagerly for messages from other enthusiasts. They could originate from anywhere. That was part of the fascination of it: trying to determine exactly where a message was being broadcast from, and how far it had traveled.

In Lloyd Douglas’s scrapbook, there are two newspaper clippings about an upcoming wireless experiment on New Years Eve, 1919. Neither one tells us the name of the newspaper, but one, entitled “Will Wireless Greetings on New Years Eve” (see above), is either from the University of Michigan or from an Ann Arbor paper; the other (see below) is apparently from the Detroit Free Press and is entitled, “U of M to Radio 1920 Greetings.”

Unidentified clipping (probably from The Detroit Free Press) dated 12/29/1919. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

According to the first of these: “On the evening of December 31, [1919,] just before the new year is ushered in, radio operators at the university radio station will send out greetings for the year to all parts of the country. Community Service, Inc., under whose direction the movement is being carried on in all sections of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is starting what will probably be an annual event in a great publicity campaign.”

Wireless radio was such a new thing that they had to perform stunts like this to make people aware of its potential. The article continues:

“Every radio station in the United States will send out New Years greetings during the evening, and all amateur operators are urged to ‘sit in’ and copy each message received.”

A paragraph later, the article says that the university “will use both the radio telephone and the radio telegraph.” That’s how new this technology was: what we now call “radio,” they called “the radio telephone” to distinguish it from “the radio telegraph,” which was, apparently, a wireless transmission in Morse code.

From the Detroit Free Press: “The telegraphic message will be sent out at 8:30 the evening of December 31, and the wireless telephone will follow 15 minutes later. The message, which is not to be made public before it is sent, was written by Rev. Lloyd Douglas, Congregational pastor of this city [Ann Arbor], and is 60 words in length.” [They were referring to the “telegraphic” message. His “radio telephone” message would be longer.]

The event would be under the direction of Lieutenant-Colonel John Lucas, head of the signal corps work at the university ROTC, and Professor J. C. Evans of the university faculty. There was an official aura around this technology, with the ROTC providing a kind of military authority to it. Things would be very different later, when radio would become a commercial enterprise.

As both articles said, “A rotary spark transmitter will be used by the university station, and for receiving the telegraph message, receiving tuning sets should be set at 600 meters wavelength. For receiving the radio telephone message, tuning coils should be set at 660 meter wavelength.” The organizers hoped that amateur operators all over the country would write down whatever messages they received, then mail them back to the university with detailed information about their location.

It was an exciting experiment, and it was just the kind of thing that Lloyd Douglas would be involved in, not just because of his interest in science but also because of his eagerness to pursue new ways of expanding his audience. I’ll tell you about his messages in my next post.