Biography – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Prohibition Begins

The front page of the New York Tribune, Saturday, January 17, 1920, proclaims: “American Nation Permanently ‘Dry.'”

I’ve been telling you about the sermon series Lloyd Douglas preached on the subject of “Personality” at the University of Michigan in January 1920, and in my last several posts I shared his message from Sunday morning, January 18, 1920. Although I haven’t mentioned it, that weekend was on everyone’s radar at the time, and certainly must have been important to the students who filled the balcony of the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, where Douglas was pastor.

For that was the beginning of the Prohibition Era in America.

According to the Eighteenth Amendment, “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.”

“The prohibitionist cause had always been linked to anti-immigrant sentiment,” writes Lisa McGurr in her book, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). During the Great War (WWI) “the nation’s large brewing companies, overwhelmingly in the hands of men of German descent, were further stigmatized as ‘enemies’ and ‘traitors.’ The Anti-Saloon League shamelessly pandered to the hostility to all things German to win the amendment’s passage. The league identified the antiliquor crusade as the ultimate patriotic act. The time had come, wrote one pamphleteer, for a split between ‘unquestioned and undiluted American patriots and slackers and enemy sympathizers.’ The most patriotic act of any legislature or citizen was to ‘abolish the un-American, pro-German, crime-producing, food-wasting, youth-corrupting, home wrecking, treasonable liquor traffic'” (pp. 33-34).

McGurr continues: “With the war effort and wartime patriotism at full throttle, congressional majorities well in excess of the two-thirds requirement submitted the Eighteenth Amendment to the states on December 22, 1917…. On September 18, 1918, Congress introduced a plan for wartime Prohibition at the time that many states were considering ratification [of the Constitutional Amendment]. In doing so, it once again linked the war against alcohol to the war effort. By January 1919, ratification was complete…. World War I sped the process for the achievement of the Eighteenth Amendment to an extent unexpected by even its most avid supporters” (p. 35).

“The House passed a vigorous enforcement code on July 23, 1919” and “the Senate followed suit on September 5.” It was called “The National Prohibition Act, better known as the Volstead Act, after its author, Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead” (p. 36). It was to go into effect on Friday night, January 16, 1920, at midnight, making alcohol illegal in America as of Saturday, January 17.

Lloyd Douglas’s daughter Virginia tells this story in her book, The Shape of Sunday, about one of her father’s weekly meetings with his music director, Earl V. Moore:

“Always after the Rotary Club luncheon at the Michigan Union, Daddy and Earl Moore had a little conference to discuss how things had gone the previous Sunday and review their plans for the following one. One time in 1920 they met as usual and Mr. Moore handed Daddy the program of anthems, hymns, and solos which were being prepared by the choir for the next Sunday,” which happened to be January 18.

“Daddy’s eyes ran down the list and suddenly he raised a horrified hand to his head. ‘Earl! You can’t do this to me.’

“Earl Moore’s face expressed complete bewilderment.

“‘Don’t you know,’ groaned Daddy, ‘what happens at midnight this coming Saturday?’

“Mr. Moore thought and then remembered that at the stroke of twelve that night Prohibition was to go into effect in the United States. The solo he had chosen for Jimmie Hamilton to sing was ‘Ho! Everyone That Thirsteth'” (p. 106).

I can well imagine the balcony rocking with laughter as the University of Michigan students reacted to that!

One more comment before I leave this. There’s a passage in Douglas’s novel Magnificent Obsession that went over my head the first time I read it. It’s in Chapter Three, when Tom Masterson is trying to describe to Joyce Hudson the change that has come over their friend Bobby Merrick. Merrick got in a boating accident while drunk, and the aftermath made him a new man. The chapter opens with this:

‘You say he’s different,’ pursued Joyce interestedly. ‘How do you mean — different? Sober, perhaps?’

Masterson chuckled.

‘Don’t be a fool!’ she growled. ‘You know very well what I meant.’

A page or two later, Masterson tells her:

‘…I just kidded him a little, but he didn’t take it nicely…. ‘What’s the big idea?’ I said. ‘Gone over to Andy Volstead?’

‘What did he say?’ demanded Joyce as the pause lengthened.

‘He said, ‘Hell, no!’ and then mumbled down in his throat that he’d gone over to Nancy Ashford.’

Nancy Ashford is the superintendent of the hospital, and she has talked him into turning his life around and making something of himself. But it’s just like Lloyd Douglas to make a joke out of the Volstead Act — something that religious people, by and large, took very seriously.

Personality I: Are You a ‘Traveling Menagerie’?

by Ronald R Johnson

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.

The following 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.):

“Now… let us sum up what we have been considering this morning as the first phase of this vitally important subject.

“No man needs hope for success in any human endeavor unless he possesses and expresses ‘personality.’ His first step is to become conscious of his personality. His awareness of the high dignity of his own person as an individual (not merely a legal citizen and a voter) but an individual, exactly like unto whom there is not, never has been, and never will be another; a child of God, stamped with an image divine — all this makes him confident of his capacities and eager to achieve his rightful destiny. Thus he becomes conscious of his personality. Then, character-growth begins.

“As he proceeds from strength to strength in this consciousness of his high and holy station as the trustee and custodian of this particular soul — like unto which there is not another soul in the whole universe — he finds in himself a growing interest in life’s real and permanent values and an increasing distaste [for] and distrust of the sordid, the petty, the inconsequential, and the mean. He becomes fine-fibered! His horizon recedes. His eyes are lit with clearer vision. His ears are sensitized to myriad voices in nature, of whose existence he had previously been unaware. He finds strange magic in words formerly without meaning, such as the natural eye hath not seen, and the natural ear hath not heard; the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him; for He reveals them to us only by His Spirit.

“Again: with this Godward relationship established, he becomes a citizen of the world — all men his brothers; and in that fraternal attitude, he begins to express his newfound personality. This is no vague theory. This is a law of life, certified to and attested by the careers of all eminent men whose names are familiar to the pens and brushes and chisels of those who grant earthly immortality to the great.”

[Anticipating next week’s sermon:]

“As to the practical processes by which personality may most effectively be expressed, this must be reserved for further treatment in the succeeding addresses of this series.

“Those processes deal with the general principles of ‘personality-expression’ as demonstrated in the lives of useful and celebrated people. I hope you may decide to follow on through with this subject…”

But “without these primary considerations [that he has spoken about today], no man can best express his personality. He can imitate, yes. He can imitate more or less successfully the most gracious and pleasing characteristics observed in other people. He can plagiarize their personalities; ape their manners; repeat their bon mots; retail their ideas for whatever they will fetch; and feed on the crumbs that fall from their neighbors’ tables. But, until a man finds himself, he is a mere counterfeit of some other person whom he admires, or a composite of a group of personalities whose lives he envies. And, all the time, if he should set out upon a tour of self-discovery, he would find within his own life that one individual personally before whom the gates of opportunity might be flung open wide, all along the way.

“Many a man — if entirely honest — when asked who he is, would be obliged to reply:

“‘Well, sir, my name is Jones — John Jones. But I am really just a kind of human mosaic in which various and sundry fragments of other characters have been rather neatly pieced together.

“‘I have tried pretty well to affect a big, deep voice like that of my friend James Robinson. Of course, occasionally in moments of excitement I forget and pipe out a few tones in an untrained voice that probably belongs to the self I might have been, but ordinarily I speak like Robinson. I laugh like William Brown, or as nearly like that as possible. My little tricks of gesture, facial expression, posture, etc., I have just gathered up a bit at a time, from goodness-knows-where. I should hate to have to account for the original sources of them all. Aside from these scraps of what appears to be my personality, the rest of me has just been blown together by the breeze.'” [Douglas carries this even farther, having the person admit that he picked up the saying, “What do you know about that?” somewhere along the way and now says it in response to almost anything, varying it sometimes as “I’ll say it is!” or “I’ll say they do!” or “I’ll say it wasn’t!” or, if all else fails, “I’ll say!”]

Douglas concludes: “Now, you can be a traveling menagerie like that if you wish, lugging about with you little pieces of other personalities, but you need never hope to be anything but an echo…. Or you can, by resolute search, find yourself, and when you have found yourself and have learned to express yourself, you may have whatever you wish, for all things are yours.”

Personality I: A Firm Handshake is No Substitute for This

by Ronald R Johnson

“I think it can be shown that the discovery of personality is just a matter of realizing one’s proper relationships.”

[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.)]

“Who and what am I? An animal that has been trained by ages of culture and restraint to observe certain social usages imposed upon me by contemporaneous society? An animal that has learned to eat with a fork and sit on a chair — and refrain from snatching food out of others’ hands?

“Well, if I am that, I had better buy the book on ‘personality’ [see the previous post] and learn a few more tricks of pose, gesture, stride, and the proper way to ask for a raise. But once I become convinced that I am considerably more than a trained animal — nothing else or less than a child of God, stamped with an image divine — then a new field of conquest and opportunity opens which has no barriers or limits except such as I raise myself.”

Paraphrasing I John 3:2, Douglas continues: “Sons of God — and while it doth not yet appear what we shall be, we know that when He shall have become clearly manifest to us, we shall be like Him. Now, a man who believes that, with all his heart, simply cannot think of himself in terms of deprecation.

“I am conscious that you are saying, ‘Oh yes, theoretically that is all very well; but isn’t it a practical fact that some of the most attractive and effective ‘personalities’ in the world are possessed by persons who give but very little attention to their divine sonship?’ I freely admit this, if one is obliged to judge by outward seeming. Some very potent and pleasing ‘personalities’ are in the custody of certain men who, from all appearances, have no religious interests, tagged and labeled as such. But, if you will take the trouble to investigate, you will find, deeply imbedded in the early training of such characters, that which exalted the importance of a man to himself.

“Moreover, he judges of this matter superficially who refuses to predicate God-consciousness of a man merely because that man boasts no oral creed and has never subscribed to theological postulates. The point I am trying to make is: that no man can discover and develop his personality until he has first become convinced of the value and importance of his personality. He only sets out in search of it after he has determined that it is worth the quest.

“Therefore, I believe that this simple faith in God’s Divine Paternity of the human soul is the most stimulating thought that can be relied upon to motivate and energize the life of the individual.

“Now, the second step in the discovery and development of ‘personality’ is similar to the first, in that it, also, is a matter of relationships. This second step, indeed, is corollary to the first.

“So soon as a man decides that God is his Father, his relations with other men are automatically established on a basis of brotherhood. All men are his brothers. They are dissimilar as to minor points but possessed of a host of common interests and mutual ties.

“Just for example: one of the most coveted graces of character, in which ‘personality’ may be said to speak for itself strikingly, is an easy affability toward a stranger. Who does not envy the man who, in the first instant of meeting, is able to present himself with such cordiality that he at once inspires respect, confidence, and admiration?

“What is the secret of this? Well, your man greets the stranger as a brother, not with his guard up, bristling with suspicion and a ‘show-me’ air, but as if they two had a very great deal in common. And the stranger may remark to himself, ‘What a delightful personality that man possesses!’

“Why, to be sure he has. He didn’t have to consult a book on personality, either, under the chapter, ‘How to Greet a Stranger.’ For, having accepted the principle of universal brotherhood, he needed only to follow the natural inclinations of his heart in order to present himself attractively and with a cordiality that inspired respect and confidence.

“So long as he is subconsciously defending his own interests, mentally distrustful of the other, he cannot express ‘personality’ at all. And the book will not aid him while he persists in a self-centered state of mind.

“Let me cite a few cases in point. Much has been said about the hand-clasp and how it expresses ‘personality’ — and it does. A man extends you a limp, clammy, flabby, flaccid hand, and you shake it as much or as little as you think the case justifies, and put it down, saying to yourself, ‘He has no personality.’

“But suppose he really wants to achieve personality. How is he to be advised? Shall he be taught how to shake hands? Will that solve his problem? Let him be taught, then. Suppose the next time he meets you, he grips your fingers and pumps away like a congressman home on furlough. Do you say to yourself, ‘Ah, he has personality’? Not at all. Indeed, you are rather shocked at the incongruous. He is nobody in every respect except that he is able to give a fair imitation of a man of ‘personality’ when he shakes hands. He has been treated, by somebody, for a symptom. His disease rages on, unabated.

“What, after all, is his trouble? Well, he is living a centripetal life; other men are not his brothers; he is a thing apart, unrelated and unobligated. He has walled himself in, possibly not by a fixed resolution to do so, but he is walled in! He meets you. He puts out his hand for you to shake. He thinks he is conferring a favor upon you by letting you shake it. He isn’t especially interested. He knows that when you have shaken it all you care to, you will quit and then he can have it back. He notes your smile of salutation and observes that you are glad to meet him. He, too, is glad — not glad to meet you but glad that your meeting him has given you such obvious pleasure.

“Every conscious thought and subconscious inclination of his revolves around himself, describing a very little orbit because he is a very little man. Now, you can teach him how to shake hands, if you care to spend the time — just as you can teach a dog to shake hands — but you haven’t corrected his real difficulty. He has no ‘personality’; that is to say, he expresses no ‘personality’ until he discovers the relation he sustains to other people, by virtue of their all having a Father in common; or, lacking belief in a common Father, nevertheless resolves that he is closely related to all the rest of humankind.

“Take another case. Here is a man who is concerned only with his own line of work; makes wheelbarrows, we will say. Talks of nothing else. Doesn’t know anything else. Mention some other matter of human interest and the only effect it has on his imagination is to remind him of something connected with the production of wheelbarrows. Get him out of his wheelbarrow and he is helpless.

“What is to be advised in his case? Think you that it will solve this man’s problem to go to him in a spirit of undoubted candor and command him, in the name of society, to let up about his wheelbarrows? Oh, no; that will only deprive him of the power of speech.

“He is just spinning around himself, that is all. He can’t be anybody until he quits that; and the only thing that will stop his ingrowing ego is a brand-new appraisal of his fraternal relations to other men. He must become a brother or remain a clod. For him there is no middle ground.”

Personality I: Gimmicks

by Ronald R Johnson

“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.