Newspapers – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2f: A Running Start

Excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted—A Congregation, Second Phase—Preacher and Newspaper,” Christian Century, August 19, 1920.

[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who received a request from the local newspaper for an abstract of his sermon from the previous Sunday.]

“Now, the introduction to that sermon had cost the preacher many hours of labor. He had toiled over it until it was flawless; not a tool-mark in sight; smooth, euphonistic, rhetorically sound in wind and limb. Not on any account could he escape the temptation to repeat this introduction in his abstract. Of course, the introduction was historical. It had dealt with the dramatic incident of Israel’s abandonment of the national ideal in the building of the golden calf. To clear the way for that theatrical event, Mr. Blue had backed up about a score of years, into the Valley of the Nile, so that he might get a long, running start at the calf story.

“Confronted, now, with the necessity of boiling the whole sermon down to a scant nine inches of eight-point, instead of jumping into the very ruck of things and hurling red-hot chunks of his appeal at the public in the first paragraph, the only method his inexperience could suggest was to begin with the calf.

“We are forever lamenting that the public knows so little about the Bible. The public knows more about the Bible than we suspect. It does not understand the causes of biblical events very well, nor does it have much sense of sequence, but the majority of the reading public can recite the more stirring stories of the Bible with considerable fidelity to detail. It knows, for instance, the story of the golden calf. It knows it so well that the mere mention of that incident acts in the nature of a narcotic.

“Well; Mr. Blue had squandered his five hundred words in riotous introduction. He had told the story of Israel’s defection, but there was nothing in it – except possibly in the last few lines, which nobody reached but the proofreader – even vaguely suggestive of a modern application. The editor had found nothing in it, so far as he had gone, to warrant an attractive caption. In fact, he had labeled it, frankly, ‘The Golden Calf – Dr. Blue Recites Well-Known Story – Idol Worship.’ Think you that anybody would read it, after such a recommendation? Verily, a silly question.

“Our friend’s pride nearly bleeds to death when he reflects upon the matter. He had been given a chance to preach to every man in Centerville on Monday morning, and this is the way he had done it – by rehearsing the moral lapses of another country and another age, as if he were afraid to approach America’s and Centerville’s lapses by less than thirty-three hundred years and seven thousand miles! To be sure, this wasn’t true of him! Anybody hearing him on Sunday would have admired his fearlessness – but he kept it very carefully concealed from the public in his report on Monday.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2e: Better Late Than Never

by Ronald R Johnson

[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He is talking about a minister who was contacted by the local newspaper and asked for an abstract of ]

“Very much in earnest over this matter, Mr. Blue proceeds to do what he ought to have done back in 1905 when he lived in Robinsonville. He subscribes for several periodicals published in the interest of writers and pores over their contents with zealous industry. He is surprised and delighted to learn that he may have easy access to a voluminous literature on the subject of composition. He is heartened to find that the rules for newspaper writing are very simple. For example: he discovers that the newspaper reporter tells his story in the first paragraph – just the bare fact that John Smith robbed William Brown’s hen-coop and was assessed a fine of $50 and thirty days in the workhouse. If the reader is consumed with curiosity to learn all the thrilling details of this event – Smith’s former record, Brown’s attitude toward his bereavement, the fate of the fowls, together with such facts and fancies as the reporter may see fit to make public – is it not written in the story, further down the page? Mr. Blue discovers that this is a hard-and-fast rule in newspaper writing, that the reporter must throw down all his salient facts in the first three or four lines.

“Judging his feeble efforts in composing ‘sermon abstracts’ for the Monday papers on rare occasions by this inviolable rule indicated above, Blue smiles wryly over the remembrance of the stuff he had submitted. If it was never read by anybody – small wonder. He can easily understand now why he is so seldom asked for reports of his sermons. He recalls the day when he had preached a really remarkable sermon on the general subject of the danger of losing a national ideal. Very few had heard it. He had announced it in the Saturday column of ‘church notices’ under the title, ‘The Golden Calf.’ Blue never had known how to compose a sermon theme, though one scarcely needs be told that. ‘The Golden Calf’ is sufficient to explain Blue’s ignorance on this subject. But it was a good sermon; and if it had been given a fair chance, it might have drawn a better audience.

“It was so strong, indeed, that a discerning auditor had called upon the editor of The Morning Star, requesting him to print an excerpt. The editor had telephoned Blue, asking for about five hundred words. Blue had consented, somewhat gingerly, to furnish the required copy.”

[But all did not go well for Blue, as Douglas will reveal in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2d: Journalism and the Seminary

by Ronald R Johnson

[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” Douglas is talking about Rev. Blue, a minister who has decided to increase his audience. Blue knows he must make use of the local newspaper as a means of communication, but he doesn’t know how.]

“Had the theological school which claimed D. Preston Blue among her alumni offered a short course in Journalism for Preachers, she might have done herself and her output more credit than she ever received for the painstaking interest with which she had explained the Apocrypha in the original. Indeed, had she given this man so little as ten hours instruction in the art of composition intended for the public press, she might have served him better than with her entire wealth of erudition anent the Minor Prophets.

“When the minister, twenty years out, compares what he studied in the seminary with the actual problems he has faced daily in his profession, he wonders how his theological alma mater could have contrived to miss the mark with such systematic completeness. Almost nowhere had his instruction even remotely touched his job. He had been loaded to the gunwales with the history of doctrines, which the public didn’t care to hear about; crammed with rules for the manufacture of sermons which, if carefully observed, were guaranteed to stultify any spontaneity likely to shine through the gloom; stuffed with dogmatics, apologetics, hermeneutics, liturgics, homiletics, catechetics, exegetics, and a host of lesser ‘ics’ – now happily forgotten. But nobody had ever considered it necessary to inform him how to prepare attractive and readable ‘copy’ for a newspaper or magazine, probably for the very excellent reason that not a man on the faculty was possessed of such information. Nobody had ever so much as hinted that there were at least two ways – a right and a wrong – of phrasing sermon topics for public announcement. Never had anyone talked about the close and helpful contacts possible and desirable between preacher and editor.

“Of course, great changes – laus Deo! – have been registered in recent years in theological schools. These matters are now receiving in some quarters just a very little bit of attention. But that doesn’t help D. Preston Blue, who acquired his B.D. in the good old days when the seminary graduate was equipped only with such information as might fit him to aspire to one of the professorial chairs of the institution that had graduated him.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2c: The Crowded Church

by Ronald R Johnson

[This is from Part 2 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted – A Congregation!” This second installment was in the August 19, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. It was entitled, “Second Phase – Preacher and Newspaper.” I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. The Reverend D. Preston Blue is excited thinking about increasing the size of his audience.]

“Moreover, Blue has learned upon inquiry that there is no room in the crowded church for such petty annoyances and puerile squabbles as customarily prey upon the frail vitals of the less prosperous. Little rackets which might do serious damage in a puny church are smothered, ignored, and forgotten in the crowd. Deacon Edgewise, peevish because his wishes have been disregarded in some minor manner, may announce to his fellow members of the Fifty-Percent-Efficient-Church that he is going to withdraw – he and his wife, man-servant and maid-servant, heirs and assigns, ox and ass, money, influence, prayers, and presence – thus creating sad havoc in Zion and necessitating the minister to undignify himself, his profession, and the cause he serves by trotting around to the Edgewise headquarters with his trusty molasses bucket. But if the Edgewises belong to a church habitually crowded, they will be somewhat cautious about ‘checking out’ in a moment of irritation, being fully aware that they will be missed about as seriously as a handful of clover blossoms plucked from a forty-acre meadow.

“All things considered, Blue believes that a crowd would mean the salvation of his church. He resolves to have one, if it is to be achieved by honest means. He lays out a definite campaign. We have seen his early efforts to line up the people who are already of his following. Now he has arrived at a decision to make his pulpit known to the general public. The most natural medium is the newspaper. He is going to avail himself of it. Only one condition holds him back. He hasn’t the faintest idea how to go about it.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 1f: Second Only to Blood

by Ronald R Johnson

From the first installment of Douglas’s series, “Wanted — A Congregation!” in the 8/5/1920 issue of The Christian Century.

[This is from Part 1 of Lloyd C. Douglas, “Wanted — A Congregation!” This first installment was in the August 5, 1920, issue of The Christian Century. I am continuing where I left off in my most recent post. He’s talking about a minister who has decided to enlarge his audience.]

“Our friend must be equally on guard now that he does not become so infatuated with the preparation of his sermon that he neglects the other important features of his campaign for a crowd. Much remains to be done. So far, he has lined up his active congregation. He has won the support of his ‘prospectives’ for this particular Sunday morning’s service. And he has a sermon under construction. This is only part of the process. The general public must be given to understand that there is an attraction in the gospel he preaches. How does one reach the public?

“Next to human blood, ink is the most redemptive chemical in the world. Let the preacher keep this in mind. More Americans form their opinions from the public press than by any other process. The minister who draws himself up haughtily, muttering his distaste of what he dubs ‘newspaper notoriety’ has boxed himself in from active contact with the people at the one place of all places where he is sure of access to them.

“The editor of the daily newspaper – (At this point, the editor of this paper is reaching for the axe. He says that no one man is permitted to monopolize all of the talk. Not if he can help it.)

“It still remains for us to discuss the further processes by which our anxious friend, the minister-without-a-congregation, is to recruit a crowd, and preach to it with a new kind of fervor, and thrill it to its fingertips, and touch it with the contagion of his faith until it wants to come back – again and again – provided he really has a message to deliver!

“No amount of campaigning, calling, writing, advertising, is going to result in a permanent gain unless he is able to deliver a message touched with the breath of the Holy Spirit.

“This is no wild dream that we are talking about. The best proof that this thing can be done is the fact that it has been done. Not always is it attended with the same degree of success: sometimes a hundred-fold, sometimes sixty, sometimes thirty. Most discouraged preachers will probably feel that is they could only multiply what they have at present by so little as thirty, it would be good business.”

[In my next post, I’ll tell you about the second installment in the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!”]

Publishing Miracle 5: Newspapers

by Ronald R Johnson

We’re still talking about the factors that made Magnificent Obsession a bestseller. Perhaps you’ve noticed that some of the factors mentioned in previous posts were picked up by the newspapers. The clergy preached about Lloyd Douglas’s book to their own flocks, but then their message was amplified by being repeated in the papers. Reading groups and women’s circles reviewed the book amongst themselves and enjoyed refreshments afterwards (one of them had hot cocoa and cake), but their influence was broadened as summaries of their meetings were printed in the local papers.

The press was an important factor in Douglas’s success all along, even in his earliest days as a pastor. I’ve mentioned again and again how he was the darling of the local journalists, mostly because he knew how to supply them with usable information about his sermons and speeches, complete with soundbites. He gave them “copy” they could easily print without much editing, but he also thought like they did and presented his ideas in a way that would be considered “newsworthy.”

In the course of my Lloyd Douglas research, I’ve read a lot of smalltown newspapers from those years (1903 to his death in 1951), and one thing that stands out is a shift in what was considered “news.” One hundred years ago, local newspapers chronicled the daily lives of the people in their towns or cities. The focus wasn’t on shocking the reader; it was on keeping townspeople informed on who was doing what. While Douglas resided in Washington, DC, for instance (from 1909 to 1911), the newspapers printed the names of women who were accepting “calls” that day – in other words, women who were available to receive visitors from others in their social class. It was useful information that also tells us a lot about who these people were and how they lived.

This feature of local newspapers (their ability to reflect their readers’ daily lives) was especially helpful in spreading the word about Douglas’s novel. As each city’s influencers reviewed the book, the newspapers recorded that fact and increased awareness to people who were not present at those events.

Many newspapers also had a Book Review section. Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession scrapbook contains a number of reviews of his book from newspapers in small towns and big cities throughout North America. And because he had made an impression on the journalists in each of the cities where he had served as pastor, the papers in those places treated the book’s publication as a newsworthy event in its own right.

Chief among these was the Times-Press of Akron, Ohio. Douglas was treated as a local celebrity during the years he served as pastor in Akron (1921-1926), and they still revered him and printed news about him for some years afterwards. When Magnificent Obsession was published in the fall of 1929, that newspaper purchased the rights to serialize the novel, beginning in December of that year. Here’s the announcement:

And, when they printed the book in serial form, they did it in style. They gave each episode a nice banner…

…and had a local artist draw illustrations: of Perry Ruggles trying to rescue Dr. Hudson from drowning…

…and of Nurse Nancy Ashford talking with Bobby Merrick in the hospital after his accident:

I’m not going to claim that the artwork was exemplary (the images of Nancy and Bobby are not quite how I would envision them), but I do think that the newspaper did its very best to present Douglas’s book to the Akron reading public in a positive light. And that was something Douglas greatly appreciated.

We’re retracing the steps that led to the success of Magnificent Obsession, and the attention of newspapers was certainly one of those steps. Another contributing factor was Douglas’s move to Montreal. I mentioned in an earlier post that he left Los Angeles at the beginning of 1929 to serve as pastor of St. James United Church of Montreal. As it turned out, that one little detail benefitted the book’s sales in a way that Douglas could not have predicted. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.