Archival Research – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 5

From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.

The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has just finished saying that the public has better taste in music than most ministers are willing to admit, and that makes it harder for them to listen to poor music at church. He continues:

“Unfortunately, too many churches have been specializing in poor music. The reasons for it are legion. Two or three of them will bear mentioning. The trouble may be, for example, with the choir leader. Not to speak too abstractly, permit me to present Sister Iontha Place. Miss Place began directing the choir at the tender age of twenty-two, just after her return from the year she spent at the Tophole Conservatory. That was in the early summer of 1901. [Twenty years earlier, in other words.] Because she has been at it so long, and also because her brother is the heavy contributor, Miss Place must be retained. By virtue of her position, she may sing solos if she wishes so to do. And she wishes so to do – almost every Sunday. Miss Place flats abominably. There is only one satisfying tone taken in the whole of her performance – the final syllable of ‘Amen.’ There are ten persons in her choir – the sort that could be expected to become and remain party to such an enterprise. Every Sunday there is a sugary little anthem about ‘Behind the Beyond is Somewhere,’ or ‘His Old Mother’s Rocking Chair.’ And other stuff like that.

“Now, Rev. R. H. Pepper, a real preacher with a real message, has become aware that he can never make anything of his church so long as this state of things persists. He wants to know what he is to do. For, as has been said, Miss Place is the esteemed sister of Deacon G. Rowling Place, and in most excellent health. Your duty is plain, Pepper. It is not a pleasant job; but – somehow – you must contrive to displace the misplaced Miss Place (begging a thousand pardons!). Nobody envies you the task; for this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. But you can’t preach against that music. You must either change matters at that point, or be resigned, or resign!

“Have another? Well; meet our good friend, Mr. Onestop, the genial organist who has been playing for nothing (a just wage for services rendered) during the past thirteen years. Whenever the suggestion has come up to the board of trustees that Brother Onestop be given a big birthday dinner in celebration of his retirement as organist, somebody has remembered that Onestop really has been doing the best he could – which even the frenzied admit – and absolutely without recompense. This latter is to be kept carefully in mind. A new organist will add another annoying item to the budget; and the board’s pet motto is, ‘Budge not the budget!’

“These well-meaning people do not realize that they would be doing Percy Onestop a kindness by shielding him from any further rough criticism and contumely behind his back. And, as to the economics involved, Onestop’s gratuitous service at the organ is the most expensive item in their whole blessed and unbudgeable budget! If there are any tears to fall, let them be shed in behalf of our brother, the preacher, who has become the ungrateful legatee of such a bequest as Onestop. What shall he do? In the midnight watches, he asks himself, ‘What shall I do?’ He must get rid of Onestop. It would be positively wrong for him to poison the fellow; but he can easily request the rendition of certain musical numbers which are quite out of Onestop’s reach. If the man has any sense at all, he will see the point. If not, it can be explained to him by the aid of a map and lucid footnotes. But Onestop must go!”

In my next post, Douglas will say more about the role of the pastor in insuring that his church offers good music.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 4

by Ronald R Johnson

The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:

“It can easily be proved that discouraged preachers have consistently underrated the public taste. They have harangued their congregations about the increasing godlessness of this generation as a reason why their churches are failing to attract, when the real reason may reside in the increasing unattractiveness of their services, due to the more exacting nature of the public taste. In no field has this development of taste proceeded with more rapidity of late than in this matter that is before the house just now. The public has recently achieved new agencies for the cultivation and satisfaction of its heart-hunger for good music. The phonograph which has become almost as common and indispensable to the American home as the wash-boiler, reproduces the music of the masters, executed by the best known of contemporaneous artists. True, the jazz record brays its abominable yawp more often than ‘Gloria a Te’ raises its majestic praise, but the family that is likely to take any interest in church at all owns a few first-class records and plays them with delight of a Sunday afternoon. More people know good music when they hear it than we suspect. It should be repeated – the preacher is always tempted to underrate the public taste! Because they don’t talk back, he thinks his puny little essay on Sunday morning was a wonder. Because nobody stayed after church to ask him where he got his figures when he said that one-third of the inmates of Sing Sing are college graduates, he thinks they believe it. Because they don’t call him up Monday morning to tell him that the music yesterday was the most awful thing they had ever heard on land or sea, he imagines the music will do. Ah, no; the public isn’t such a dull ass as some would have us believe.”

Douglas is just getting started. In my next post, he’ll tell us why he thinks church music is so bad.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 3

by Ronald R Johnson

The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. Before getting into the subject of his essay, he’s talking about some of the things that can help keep the church pews empty on Sunday mornings. He has just finished talking about various ministers’ personality problems. He continues:

“But one’s full sympathy goes out to the minister who knows that he is not making a go of it – not failing for any of the reasons indicated above… but because he has never taking into account the importance of that supreme feature of Christian worship: the music of the church.

“He may be an able preacher, but he can’t preach past bad music. He may be a tactful and beloved pastor, but he can’t win and hold people to his Sunday services with that execrable choir! He may be no end of a statesman in his deft manipulation of his multitudinous auxiliary societies, boards, cabinets, bureaus, and whatnots; but the feeble organist will see to it that the SRO sign is never put out. Sometimes he is entirely unaware that this is so.

“Not infrequently one hears a preacher saying that he knows nothing about music at all – church music or any other kind – saying it nonchalantly, as he might admit ignorance of the tapestries peculiar to the Ming dynasty, apparently oblivious to the fact that his confession is equivalent to a carpenter’s casual remark that he never could saw a board straight or drive a nail without pounding his thumb. No more rarely one hears a preacher saying that he has ‘no ear for music’ – saying it with a smile that clearly means he is too much preoccupied with serious matters to give attention to anything so trivial. We are to understand that it is just a pleasant little joke that he has on himself. By no means is it a joke! It is exactly as if a painter should confess to color-blindness! For so large a place does music rightfully hold in Christian worship that whoever accepts responsibility for the religious education and devotional inspiration of a church can never hope to teach his congregation how to sense the Divine Presence unless he is not only in love with music but fairly conversant with its history, its functions, and the proper manner of its execution. ”

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 2

by Ronald R Johnson

“Only slightly less unalluring are the sermons that reek of the vapid tosh known as Pollyannaism. The ‘just be glad’ preacher gets to be as great a public nuisance as his colleague in the next block who knows the city deserves to be blown to perdition – and now a worm has chewed up his gourd-vine. Again, the preacher’s sermons may be so profound as to be incomprehensible to all but the self-confessed intellectuals of the neighborhood, or as light as the chaff which the wind driveth away.

“It is just possible that something may be wrong with his pastoral activities. He may have acquired a trick of wearing a chip on his shoulder, precariously poised, and frequently being brushed off by careless passers-by, to his perpetual discomfort and irritation; or he may have been built, temperamentally, by the rules which obtain in plain and solid geometry, with right angles and the apexes of triangles sticking out all over him, upon which rugged corners and sharp spikes people keep bumping themselves and moving off rubbing their hurts and muttering that he is what – most unfortunately – he is. Or, again, he may have so poor a head for anything like organization or executive leadership that his board of deacons is as glum, in session, as a coroner’s inquest, and his board of trustees haggles with him over the suggested appropriation of four dollars and fifteen cents wherewith to buy the janitor some new brooms and a coal-shovel, while his Sunday School hasn’t half enough teachers, and his women’s society is up to its ears in a brawl. These are some of the reasons [why the pews are empty]. Without doubt, these brethren have a bad time of it, each in his own way.”

But this was all by way of introduction. What Douglas wants to talk about is the music of the church, and its problems. In my next post, he’ll share some candid thoughts on that subject.

Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, as published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. The photograph is taken from Douglas’s 1920-1923 Scrapbook. The green item in the upper left side of the picture is a cloth “snake” that the Bentley Library provides to help lay pages flat while being photographed.

Lloyd Douglas continued making controversial comments in The Christian Century in an article entitled, “The Music of the Church,” published in the January 13, 1921, issue. This time he took aim at church music.

He began by describing the pastor who doesn’t feel it’s his responsibility to supervise the church’s music. And that, he says, explains why “his church treasurer is always blue over a bank balance that is always red.” Douglas continues:

“Nor need this good man [the pastor] quest an ampler reason for the habitual listlessness of his congregation on the first day of the week, if it is listless, or for the diminutive size thereof, if it is small. Of course, there may be other excellent reasons, but this one will do quite nicely.”

Douglas employed a number of writing techniques that were unusual for the time and especially for Christian magazines. Here’s an example: he pretends that he’s being interrupted by one of his readers.

“Our young brother in the second balcony heckles us to state a few of these other reasons [why the pastor’s congregation might be listless or small]. We dislike to be interrupted [Douglas jokes, since he’s actually interrupting himself], but the question is fair. Well – for instance – something may be wrong with the preacher’s sermons. Their dimensions may be at fault – too long, too deep, too narrow. They may be blighted with a chronic pessimism. Weekly information to the effect that the world is going, if not already gone, to the dogs, and that the whole of nature groaneth and travaileth to the exclusion of any other lawful pursuit gets to be an old and not very attractive theme after a while. And people get tired of hearing, constantly, that they are miserable sinners – a fact too obvious to demand such frequent repetition. When they have enough, they quit. That is one reason, and a mighty good one.”

[And there are others, which Douglas will mention in my next post. But he’s actually going to talk about church music. That’s all coming! To be continued…]

Reactions to Douglas in 1920

by Ronald R Johnson

Over the past several weeks I’ve been sharing Lloyd Douglas’s articles in The Christian Century during the summer and fall of 1920. He had made his debut in the July 1st issue, and the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, had urged him to send another submission while his name was fresh in the memory of the Century’s readers. Douglas did even better: he sent a five-part series called “Wanted – A Congregation!”

After the first two installments, Morrison printed the following response:

From the Letters to the Editor in the Christian Century, 8/26/1920.

In November, Douglas fired off an article criticizing the politician William Jennings Bryan for speaking against science in general and evolution in particular at the University of Michigan, where Douglas was the resident Congregationalist minister. That article prompted a couple of letters from readers:

From the Letters to the Editor at the Christian Century, 12/23/1920.

Because Morrison was eager to publish controversial material that would increase readership, he was happy to print Douglas’s articles and especially liked his spicy way of arguing his points. In the coming months, Douglas would continue to accommodate the editor’s desire for hard-hitting essays. I’ll tell you about more of them in my next posts.

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 6

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century, 11/25/1920.

[The following is the conclusion of Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“A few days ago this eminent lecturer spoke to a large audience of laymen in Chicago. The chance was his to make a notable contribution to that convention. What does it get from him? Why – the monkey jokes, of course! And the red cow! It is to be presumed that hundreds of laymen, going home from that convention under the impression that they had heard a great scientist speak his mind about evolution, will be on the alert now to detect the slightest deflection from orthodoxy on the part of their pastors. Let the good brother phrase his remarks in the language of modern scholarship, insisting upon a faith that may be held without damage to one’s intellectual self-respect, and he takes a chance of hearing unfavorably from the deacon who has just returned from the convention where ‘Darwinism’ – and all things scientific – had been weighed and found wanting.

“I write this partly to relieve my feelings, but mostly because there is no doubt in my own mind that we ministers, who have thought our way through these problems at no little cost of time and effort, should refuse any longer to tolerate such presentations of religion as that indicated above, if we may by any possibility put a stop to it! For Mr. Bryan to speak in any presence concerning the relation of religion and science is a piece of presumption! King David prayed, ‘Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins!’ David apparently considered this a serious offense – presumption. And David, being something of an expert on sinning, surely ought to be an authority.

“One is not forgetting that Mr. Bryan is a great and good man who means well and is loved devotedly by great masses of people. He has it in him to make a large contribution to religion. But however rich and active may be the wine of his faith and his enthusiasm, he really ought to stop trying to vend it in the old bottles. Oh – oh – but how fearfully old are the bottles!”

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 5

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is a continuation of Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“Every year, in most of our great universities, the student is asked to state his religious convictions at the time of his registration. He is requested to name the denomination to which he belongs, or the denomination he prefers, if not a member. After the cards had been handed to me, this year, which belonged to my denomination, it occurred to me that some interest might attach to a comparison of these registration cards with those of last year. I would see how many students who registered last year as of the faith of which I am an adherent were registered this year as ‘without religious convictions.’ The investigation showed no case of the kind. To the contrary, there were sixty-nine students who stated last year that they were without religious convictions who announced, this fall, that they were adherents of our faith. It is not true that the freshman inevitably comes to the university to surrender his faith. But it is true that many a chap is obliged to come into a university community to find his faith!

“Mr. Bryan does not know this. Nobody ever told him. He never inquired. He would not believe it if he were told. He doesn’t want to believe it. It would dampen his enthusiasm about the awful effects of modern science upon Christian faith. Then he would lose heart for the monkey jokes. And the monkey jokes must be told. And the red cow – the same old red cow – must she not still eat green grass and give white milk to yield yellow butter?”

[Douglas will conclude his essay in my next post…]

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 4

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on 11/25/1920.

[The following is a continuation from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“The total result of the Bryan address to his university audience was disgust on the part of religious people – both faculty and students – disgust over the speaker’s intellectual immorality, to say nothing of the crass impudence displayed by such an exhibition of ignorance before an audience of that character. But the really serious fact about the performance resided in the effect produced upon the students who never go to church, manifest no interest in religion, and who think of Christian faith with as little knowledge of its present-day claims as Mr. Bryan has of biology – which is next to nothing. This type of student understands that Mr. Bryan is a widely known and generally recognized religious leader in the country – frequent spokesman before ecclesiastical conclaves, and a general defender of the faith. The student is informed, from this respected quarter, that, to be a Christian, he must repudiate that which his own eyes have seen in the laboratory and believe certain ancient dogmas which he cannot hold without the sacrifice of his intellectual self-regard. It is extremely doubtful if Mr. Bryan will ever be invited to speak before this group again. But the damage is done!

“While we are on the subject – how much truth is there, after all, about the deplorable loss of religious faith which Mr. Bryan notices in academic circles? Let us see. Many people who do not know the facts are persuaded to believe that the typical freshman comes to the university firm in the faith of his fathers, fresh from Sunday School, convinced that the Bible is to be accepted as a textbook on geology, anthropology, astronomy, and all the rest of the natural sciences. After he has been here for a year or two, he loses his faith, becomes a cynic and a scoffer, flaunts his atheism or his infidelity, and repudiates religion as of no further use to him. What are the facts about this matter?”

[Douglas, having spent the past decade on major Midwestern college campuses, will give his answer in my next post.]

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 3

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas’s article, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” in the November 25, 1920 issue of The Christian Century.

[The following is from Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“A few days ago, Mr. Bryan lectured, on a Saturday night, in the auditorium of a great Midwestern university [probably the University of Michigan, where Douglas was the Congregational minister]. No monkeys appeared in the lecture. Indeed, it was a good address – old, commonplace, but acceptable. There was a large crowd. The students were enthusiastic. The Students’ Christian Association pressed the speaker to stay over and talk, in the same place, on Sunday noon. He consented. The word was quickly passed about the campus. There were five thousand persons present, next day. Fully three-fourths of them were students. The faculties were largely represented. It was understood that Mr. Bryan was to speak about the claims of religion upon the life of youth. It was a brilliant opportunity for a really great contribution to be made to the lives of many hundreds of young men and women. As I look back over many similar opportunities afforded celebrated speakers to set the cause of religion squarely before the face of the college man, I do not remember ever having seen such a crowd, in such a receptive mood! One envied this rare spirit his chance to do valiant service for Christianity that day. What came of it? The monkey talk!

“How this good man could ever have gained the consent of his own mind to commit the almost incredible impertinence of reading the old misquotations, spinning the old yarns, and assailing ‘Darwinism’ in the presence of hundreds of youngsters who understood enough about evolution to know that the speaker knew nothing about it whatsoever – yes; and in the presence of scientists who had made a life job of research in this field – how he could have done it, I do not understand; but he did it. He went further. He deplored the subversive effects of science on Christian faith; explained to the students that science was the enemy of faith; excoriated scientific men, advanced scholarship, modern learning, and generally anathematized higher education. All this was by way of preface to a statement of his belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Adam was the first man. He was made of the dust of the ground. The Bible said so. Apparently nobody has ever gone to the bother of asking Mr. Bryan how he accounts for the fact that wherever explorers have gone they have found men boasting an ancestry easily traceable to remote periods whole millenniums before navigation was discovered or effected.

“A considerable volume of water has passed under the bridge, in the realm of science, since Mr. Bryan first came out as a biologist. Practically the whole theory of evolution has been rephrased during that time. Perhaps the genial ex-secretary of state is unaware of that fact. Surely he must be unaware of it, for his lectures still carry opportunities for the introduction of the same old stories, the same old misquotations, and the same old attacks against ‘Darwinism.’ His references to evolution have not grown an inch or gained a pound for twenty years. Meanwhile, let it be repeated, science has been busy. Mr. Bryan may have wished to inform himself upon this subject, or he may not; but science has been assiduously devoting itself to a sincere and honest investigation of the known facts.

“One of the interesting features of modern scholarship in this field – which may come as a shock to Mr. Bryan, should he ever have this matter brought to his attention – is the fact that the present-day scientist has long since left off talking of evolution in terms of ‘Darwinism.’ Mr. Bryan rarely speaks of evolution: his designation for it is ‘Darwinism.’ Ah – how he does put Darwin on the grille! Cannot some friend inform him, for his own sake, that Charles Robert Darwin is related to evolution, in the thought of the scholar, exactly as Robert Fulton is related to steam navigation, and as Langley is related to aeronautics, and as Dr. Harvey is related to present-day surgery? Of course, it used to make very little difference to the typical lecture audience whether Mr. Bryan was sure of his facts or not. But increasingly the American people have had opportunities to inform themselves about matters of a scientific nature, and the good man seriously underrates the intelligence of his audiences.”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]