A page from Lloyd C. Douglas’s article, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” in the November 25, 1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[This is a continuation of the essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. Douglas mentions that three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan had long ago started making fun of Darwin’s theory of evolution in his public addresses. Douglas continues:]
“So fully guaranteed to excite merriment in any crowd was this playfulness that the lecturer apparently could not resist the temptation of presenting it despite its irrelevancy to the subject under discussion. How weary he must have become reciting over and over, day after day, year by year, the same old monkey jokes! But the public would have them. How it must have rasped his sensibilities to repeat, again and again, the jaded pleasantry to the effect that if others wished to claim a chimpanzee for their grandfather, it was none of his affair – but as for him, etc., etc. And the cow – do you not remember? – the red cow that ate green grass and gave white milk from which they churned yellow butter? All of which disproved Darwinism.
“Now, Mr. Bryan is not a clown. At heart, he is serious, earnest, and self-respecting, as is sufficiently proved by the fact that he has consistently championed the things that make for better and nobler living. He really couldn’t go on telling and retelling these jokes about evolution indefinitely and retain his own self-esteem. So, he grew serious about the matter. But nobody can speak seriously on this profound subject without study. Only a skillfully trained biologist could trust himself to talk about evolution before an intellectual audience. Mr. Bryan, however, not having gone into this subject quite far enough to discover just how extensive was this field of science, and not being required to check his data because of the unexacting nature of the typical audience, talked of this theory with a degree of self-assurance utterly inexplicable on any other ground than that nobody had ever done him the kindness to take him aside and whisper a friendly admonition in his ear. He was to be forgiven, for it was a clear case that he knew not what he did.”
[I will continue Douglas’s essay in my next post…]
The title page of Lloyd C. Douglas’s article, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” in the November 25, 1920 issue of The Christian Century.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been sharing Lloyd Douglas’s series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” as it appeared over five installments in The Christian Century during the summer of 1920. Now that he had made a name for himself at the Century, he continued to be a frequent contributor throughout the first half of that decade. His next article, which appeared in the November 25, 1920, issue, was about three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. It was entitled, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade.”
It was prompted by Bryan’s recent public appearance at the University of Michigan, where he (apparently) ridiculed the theory of evolution. It made Douglas so mad, he wrote the following essay.
“Monkeys are funny animals. A joke about a monkey is good for a hearty laugh anywhere. The very word ‘monkey’ will provide a smile, even if nothing should be predicated of the subject. Vaudeville actors understand that when all other tricks fail to provide suitable entertainment, is there not the time-tried monkey joke? Certain popular lecturers have always known that no Chautauqua crowd on a hot afternoon in July is too dull, stupid, or sleepy to react promptly under a few carefully chosen words relative to this little animal which seems to symbolize humor – though so inexpressibly sad of countenance.
“Elderly readers will recall that a long time ago, the Hon. William J. Bryan began employing this interesting this interesting and amusing device to entertain his vast audiences from the lecture platform. His own use of the monkey was made in connection with satire and ridicule hurled at the Darwinian theory of evolution. Anybody who had seriously read Charles Robert Darwin’s theory of ‘the descent of man’ was in a position to know that Mr. Bryan was taking great liberties with this celebrated scientist’s hypothesis but saw no reason why the lovable and good-natured lecturer shouldn’t be permitted license to distort, misquote, and otherwise incorrectly present the Darwin belief, if it was understood that he was doing it only in play and for the sole purpose of raising a laugh.”
Does it sound like Douglas approved of that? Just wait. His essay will continue in my next post.
From the title page of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation; Fifth Phase – Making Worship Worshipful,” in the 9/9/1920 issue of The Christian Century.
[During the summer of 1920, Lloyd Douglas published a series of articles in the Christian Century under the heading, “Wanted – A Congregation.” The following is from the last installment of this series, which was published on September 9, 1920.]
“One of our recently rich was touring what remains of France with his overdressed family, two maids, a Pekinese pup, and a valet whom he addressed as ‘Jim’ and by whom he was fond of being addressed as ‘Bill.’ This man understood that it was the proper thing to visit historic shrines, to view celebrated paintings, and to make appreciative noises before notable sculptured figures of the great; and all this he did because it was the proper thing. Lacking a background of historical information and the lore of the arts, however, he was experiencing considerable disappointment. Unable to look through a stone figure and quite on past it for a distance of five hundred years to the causes and conditions which had had more to do with its production than the genius of the artist, to his untutored mind it was merely a huge chunk of rock which somebody with an unfamiliar and unpronounceable name had once hacked at with a chisel.
“One day he pulled loose from his party and went alone into one of the most widely known of the picture galleries. He did not provide himself with a catalog, nor did he seek the advice of attendants relative to the masterpieces on view. He rushed about the place like a stranger hunting for the proper ticket window in a metropolitan railroad station, pausing occasionally, for an instant, to lean over a railing and dart a hurried, hummingbird glance at some priceless work of art before scurrying away to peck at another. Within twenty minutes, he had his fill of the place and was quite ready to take leave of it. On his way out, he spied the elderly verger sitting by a window, reading. Prompted by that raw insolence which sudden wealth seems usually to bestow upon the proletarian mind, it occurred to this man that he might ease his annoyance somewhat by baiting the old gentleman; so he approached him, and assuming a posture as nearly simulating hauteur as an ex-blacksmith’s imagination could devise, he snarled, ‘I’ve been hearing all my life about these famous masterpieces. Masterpieces – bah! Daubs, I call ’em! Old trash! May have pleased, once upon a time – but not today! I want you to know that I have been disappointed!’ Whereupon the verger put down his book, polished his glasses, and, having regarded the noisy tourist for some moments in silence, replied quietly, ‘Sir, these pictures are not on trial; the spectators are!‘”
[The following is an excerpt from the third installment of Lloyd Douglas’s series about the fictitious minister, Rev. D. Preston Blue in the Christian Century during summer/fall 1920. The series was called, “Wanted – A Congregation!” The third installment, dated 8/26/1920, was titled, “The Sermon Sample.”]
“We have seen the minister’s process of enlisting his congregation’s interest in his new aspiration to develop an inspiring crowd. He has sworn them in to the task of doing their utmost to get their friends out to church on the particular date he has announced. But, as he recalls their pitifully ineffective efforts to perform such service in the past, he decides that they should be shown the way. He resolves to suggest a process to them.
“He goes to his printer with a card in mind – a card 6 x 3-1/4 – to be placed in their hands for distribution. Wait a minute! One knows exactly what you are going to say – that Blue is wasting his money – that the people will make no use of these cards at all. Just hold up a minute, please! Blue has some ideas that may be new.
“The reason that most of the ‘envelope stuff’ that the minister usually issues for advertising purposes is a mere waste of time, money, and effort may be accounted for on the ground that the printing is cheap – looks cheap – and the text dull and trite. One cannot afford to be economical in this business. Oh, what stupid cards many preachers circulate among their people – cards composed with no care whatsoever – mostly in the nature of a sad note beginning, ‘Dearly Beloved’ and closing with ‘Faithfully yours.’ No – that is a waste of good money. All the people who will read a card beginning ‘Dearly Beloved’ will get to church without any assistance.
“Blue is going to preach on ‘Shipwrecks.’ Isn’t it the most simple thing in the world for him to inquire of the printer whether he owns a ‘cut’ of a ship? Well – the printer doesn’t happen to have one; but he does own a big catalog of a type foundry; perhaps if Mr. Blue will look through that book, he may happen upon the very thing he has in mind.
“This book is a great revelation to the Rev. D. Preston Blue. He had never known there was such a thing. Here he has access to all manner of little cuts – ships, dynamos, dredges, fire apparatus, trees – of all kinds and sizes – flowers, birds, patriotic eagles, doves of peace, bluebirds ‘for happiness.’ Why – just to sit and study that book for an hour is good for enough material to stock a dozen sermons. Blue tells the printer to order him enough of the tiny cuts to make a border (36 pt.) all around the card, and two cuts of ships (inch) for marginal decoration. He leaves copy for the card, as follows:
SHIPWRECKS
A SERIES OF OCTOBER SUNDAY MORNING SERMONS
At the Broad Street Church
By Rev. D. Preston Blue
October third – ‘THE TITANIC’
October tenth – ‘THE EASTLAND’
October seventeenth – ‘THE IBERNIA’
A cordial invitation is extended to you by ______.
“There are one hundred active families in Broad Street church. That is – if one is not too punctilious about fine shadings of such words as ‘active.’ Blue has decided that he will make up enough of these cards to supply every family with five, except about twenty homes which may be trusted to make good use of so many as ten each. He proposes to mail one hundred cards himself to ‘prospectives’ and out-of-town friends who are on his mailing list – former members of the church removed to other places, occasional benefactors to the work of Broad Street church. All told, Blue needs 700 cards. He orders them printed in two colors – an orange border, with blue for the composition and marginal cuts. Cuts never cost very much, if ordered out of the regular stock.”
Douglas wasn’t making this up. Here is the card he used for a series of sermons he preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan, in January 1916:
From the October 1919 issue of The Intercollegian.
The following is an essay by Lloyd Douglas entitled, “Demos in the Saddle,” which was published in the YMCA’s monthly magazine, The Intercollegian, in October 1919. By “Demos,” he is referring to the Greek word Dēmos, which means “the people” or “the common people.” The word “democracy” is derived from it. And when he speaks of “the submerged tenth,” he’s talking about those living in poverty, at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Hopefully these references will help you in understanding this essay. It seems to me that, on this occasion, he is trying to hint at his point rather than coming right out with it.
Here’s the essay:
“We have a very widely known porkitect, up our way, who, in obedience to the public clamor for fancy cuts of meat, determined to build a hog registering 99.76% pork; no waste, scrap, scrapple, or souse, but chops.
“So, after much patience and many studious hours spent over his blueprints, he constructed an oblong hog with a tiny, highly artistic foot at each corner thereof.
“The evolution was watched with respectful interest by all of the skilled porkitects in this and many other lands. They said in one voice, ‘When fully completed this will be some hog!’
“Yet, when the logical conclusion had been achieved, the perfected pork-chop hog was unable to locomote upon his fragile foundation. His defect was obvious. He needed legs to stand on. The porkitects of the world turned away, saying, ‘What we want is a hog with stronger legs.’
“Now they will try to outdo one another building better legs.
“You can carry any good thing too far. So soon as the general public realizes the good thing has been carried too far it rushes off in the opposite direction for a remedy — but doesn’t know when it has found the remedy. Once started in that direction, it keeps going until everybody on earth knows it has carried the good thing too far again. Trying to find a general specific that will cure all the ills of the social order now and forevermore is much like the search for the city of Detour. One sees the pointing hand indicating the way to Detour — but nobody seems to report having arrived there.
“Take aristocracy, for example. If you had asked anybody, a couple of parasangs ago, who were the aristocrats, he would have replied, ‘The Pedigreed.’ A little later the same query would have been answered, ‘The Rich.’ Of late we have fallen into the pleasant habit of saying, ‘The Intellectuals.’
“It’s quite too long of a story to account for these changes in the definition of ‘aristocrat.’ Perhaps you know the tale. It is bound in many volumes. And the books are all red. When it was required that one be pedigreed to be worth notice, that was undoubtedly a good thing — at the start — else it wouldn’t have started. But they carried this good thing too far. There was a reaction. Then the despised merchant (which might mean trader or highwayman — just as in these present days of profiteering) came into his own. The Rich told the Pedigreed where to get off. The supremacy of the Rich was succeeded — in our country, at least — by the supremacy of the Intellectuals. You and I know that the best people are the college-trained, and that we have an inalienable right to dictate to our current social order. But we seem to have carried this idea too far.
“Just now young Demos is in the saddle, galloping a mad Tam-o’-Shanter to goodness-knows-whither. The dinner-pail is not only dictating to the limousine but hooting at the laboratory.
“College opens again. Thousands of students take up their old task, or their new one, assured that the present ‘trend’ is to be ephemeral. In a few days the ‘restlessness’ will be quieted. The ‘submerged tenth,’ having come up for air, will close the hatches and duck again, presently.
“Don’t be too sure about that.
“What’s to be done, then? Obviously, we ‘college-trained’ must mind our step in the precarious travel of the hour. We had carried a good thing too far. We had bred a college type with too much chest and crust, and not quite enough friendly grip in the fingers of the right hand. Moreover, we had pooh-poohed some of the older instincts of mankind, on the ground that they were vestigial race-fears, etc. Many of us had swapped God for bunch of formulae deduced in the chemical and physical laboratories. We were trying to rid ourselves of untenable superstitions. Then we made war upon our own racial instincts. We went too far.
“A newly-rich man was strolling through The Louvre. He had not troubled to provide himself with a catalog. He made a brief inspection of a few of the paintings, leaning across the rail in an effort to get as close to them as possible. Presently, in a voice of fretfulness and annoyance, he said to the old verger, ‘I’ve been hearing, all my life, about these masterpieces. I’ve just looked at them. I’m frankly disappointed. I don’t see anything in them at all. They’re very ordinary, I should say.’
“‘Sir,’ replied the verger, ‘these pictures are not on trial, but the spectators are!’
“Not many college students will have the discernment to appraise the present crisis or sense the present need. The few who do so may have much to say of future interest. These few will be men of spiritual vision, to whom God is a tremendous Reality.
“Our world is very ill of a disease that indicates a prompt infusion of Vital Faith. If you have it, you can help.”
“The sign and token of this day is a device featuring a hatchet and the ragged stump of a young cherry tree. Many people know that George Washington once cut down a cherry tree and truthfully confessed his sin, who probably remember little else about this man except, possibly, that he was the first president of the United States.
“Now, instead of merely taking it for granted, as a peculiar and interesting fact that so great a man as Washington must be made concrete for us by the sign of a hatchet with which, as a lad, he was said to have hewn down a cherry tree, it is worth our while to attempt to fathom the reason for this. Surely there must be a reason.
“It may be hastily concluded that this hatchet symbol means that Washington’s outstanding attribute was his unswerving adherence to the absolute truth. In the interest of that same kind of truth, it must be admitted that this story about Washington probably hasn’t a leg to stand on. It pains me to reflect that this yarn about the hatchet and the cherry tree was said to have been invented by a man of my own profession — one Reverence Mason Weems.
“This good man wrote a biography of Washington in 1800 which caught the popular fancy and had a circulation quite out of proportion to its actual merits. When, six years later, he came to the point of preparing a second edition of it — flushed with pride over his success — he introduced many anecdotes of Washington’s youth which that worthy, then silent in his tomb at Mt. Vernon, was unable to deny. Among these delightful reminiscences of the great man which the Reverend Mr. Weems evolved from his exceedingly versatile imagination, occurred the story of the cherry tree. And she is a very unprofitable schoolteacher who fails to point the salutary moral for her disciples that Washington was so infatuated with the truth that it began to show up in him when he was a little boy; therefore, go and do likewise.
“A slightly deeper inquiry into the peculiar processes of the public mind, however, in catching at this fanciful story of the hatchet and the cherry tree reveals a fact that must not be overlooked in our estimate of Washington. That he was a truth-lover and a lie-hater is undoubtedly correct. But the real reason that the hatchet-story has become symbolic of this man is probably due to his simplicity of heart.
“There are a few equestrian statues of Washington, but they are not notable statues, and not many people know exactly where they are, who carved them, or the occasions of their establishment. When you try to visualize Washington, you do not think of him on a horse, though that is the way he spent most of his time out of doors. Neither do you conjure a picture of him brandishing a sword and shouting to a tattered and disorganized army to get into the game and try to put some pep into it before it is too late.
“You would have John Paul Jones that way, and Phil Sheridan, and the redoubtable [Teddy] Roosevelt (all of whom were truly great men, if I have any notion of the meaning of that adjective), but Washington seems always to be placid, poised, unexcited.
“Most people like that picture of him in the open boat, crossing the Delaware — by no means posed as a big dictator, frowning upon the slaves of his galley, impatient to be done with them and on his way — but rather as a member, in good and regular standing, of a party of patriots, all equally concerned with a common cause — he not moving any faster than they, all of them in the same boat, he conscious of the value and importance of their oar-strokes to the successful course of this little transport.
“One of the marks of Washington’s greatness was his democratic simplicity. Of old, our Master said to his disciples, apropos of human greatness: ‘You are aware that among the gentiles, their leaders exercise lordship and their greatest men lord it over them; it must not be so among you. Whoever would be greatest must be servant of all.’
“Now, we do not stray far afield when we make this the first test of a genuinely great man. Of course, it is to be admitted that there are many notable historic characters of whom but little could be predicated, were one to judge them by this Galilean standard of greatness. But such conspicuous characters were mostly of the type that shot up, like a red rocket, to flare, dazzlingly, for an hour, in some crucial exigency when, but for their audacity and courage, a great cause might have been lost. And we are quite willing that these meteors should have as much praise as the fixed stars — even if their highest service was rendered at the moment of their extinction.
“But as one turns the pages which certify to the long careers of eminent leaders, one discovers that the great names — the really and truly great, who were so great that little children must be taught to speak pieces about them and the banks close on their birthdays, seven scores of years after their deaths — such great were invariably of the servant type in their attitude toward the state as an institution, and their countrymen as fellow pilgrims.”
[Douglas went on to talk about this attitude of service. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post.]
“Whenever any of his historical characters in a play happened to get caught in a tight squeeze, or a peculiar predicament demanding instant resourcefulness, William Shakespeare always hurried to the rescue with a fine phrase that exactly suited the emergency.
“A typical occasion arose when that interesting ex-hero, Julius Caesar, lay weltering in his own gore at the foot of Pompey’s statue, having gone the way of things autocratic. It seemed incumbent upon somebody to make a few remarks. Antony volunteered to perform this solemn service. And as he cast about for some reliable rhetorical whitewash wherewith to anoint the nineteen (or was it twenty-six?) carmine-stained dirk-rents in the toga of him whose first personal pronoun singular had become too huge any longer to be contained in his corporeal body, Shakespeare rushes to Antony’s relief with this wholesale indictment of humanity: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’
“As much as to say, ‘Of course, an unfriendly world — meaning you — will reflect only upon this man’s mistakes; it will not, however, be decent enough to remember the good things about him, many of which I could tell you if I had the time and you were fit to hear them.’
“In passing, it might be added that Mark Antony was not the sole beneficiary of this fetching phrase — as many a hard-pressed funeral orator of a less remote period would willingly testify. Whenever you happen in upon the obsequies of a public character and hear the preacher quote this text of Shakespeare’s, you may put it down that they are getting ready to bury all that is mortal of a great rake. It is never used except as a sweet-smelling spice to embalm somebody of whom the less said, the better.
“For ordinary working purposes, it is untrue. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, ‘the evil that men do’ is speedily forgotten, provided they had contrived to achieve enough of good to warrant their being remembered at all. And for every Nero, Caligula, Attila, or Judas Iscariot, of whose lives nothing is preserved but the decidedly unpleasant, and whose names are symbolic of all that is reprehensible, there abide, securely fixed in the chronicles of every nation, hundreds of heroes whom history reveres to the extent of adulation — entirely willing to forget their lapses and indiscretions.
“History is just the subconscious mind of the human race and can be depended upon to tuck deeply away from sight whatsoever of her memories she would willingly part with. Doubtless one of the most beneficent provisions of our All Wise Creator is His endowment of us with this strange capacity for battering down the unpleasant, the humiliating, the belittling, and the besmirching experiences of our past, until the memory of them rarely obtrudes upon our active consciousness. One of the most cruel forms of insanity is that of the disordered mind which is no longer able to keep its bitter doses down.
“And, by the same token, he is most richly invested of all men who, ‘forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth to those things which are before,’ can press toward the mark, unimpeded by the torturing memories of his weaker hours. In like manner is that nation to be considered most fortunate which can, with good conscience, transpose Antony’s requiem over Caesar into a major key and shout that the good that men do lives after them while their evil is mostly buried in their graves.
“We Americans, said to be rather generous by nature, have been singularly blessed with this ability to celebrate the very best that is to be remembered of the lives of our heroes. We are prompt to idealize them and make the most of their merits. No sooner does a strong man die than we put his fineness out, at compound interest, and, in a space, are able to strum the lute and chant epic songs about our great, in which the canonical and apocryphal are so delightfully and inextricably entangled that our minstrelsy might well excite the envy of Homer and bring confusion upon the head of the imaginative Vergil.
“One of the fascinating cases in point is that of the truly great man whose birthday we celebrate on this twenty-second day of February — he who has become known as the Father of our Country.”
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 