Writing – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 3f: Leading the Way

[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:

An invitation card used by the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor for a January 1916 series. In Douglas’s 1917 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

[Douglas will continue his comments in my next post…]

Wanted: A Congregation, Part 2g: Preacher and Editor

by Ronald R Johnson

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 wants to enlarge his audience but was taught nothing at seminary about reaching the surrounding community through the local newspaper.]

“Anybody who is not more than two-thirds blind needs not be informed that most people derive their information and form their opinions from the papers. It is to be doubted if responsibility for public opinion rests so heavily upon any other man as the editor. That being true, this important individual should receive some moral support. He is entitled to the intelligent cooperation of the preacher. When he strikes exactly the right note in an editorial, registering on the side of honor, justice, and morality, he has a right to expect that his good friend the minister will call him up or drop him a line of appreciation and encouragement; not a long-winded, piously-phrased homily which may produce precisely the opposite effect than the one intended, but a mere, ‘Bully work, Jim! You are doing fine business! The people who count are with you to the limit! More power to your elbow!’

“Not only does a little recognition like this have the effect of keeping the editor buoyed up to his task, but it serves as a deterrent in moments when he is strongly tempted to trim and hedge in some situation where the nasty little virtue of Prudence is admonishing him to ‘keep in right’ with Big Tom of the Steenth Ward.

“If the minister is not too far absent in the spirit, and habitually has his ear to the ground to detect impending seismic vibrations likely to disturb The Morning Star and cause the tripod thereof to wobble, he will happen in about this time and invite the editor out to lunch. Two dollars spent in this manner will sometimes bring larger returns than invested in a volume of Thirty Thousand Thoughts for the Theologian.”

[To be continued in my next post…]

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

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 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…]

Summer 1920 and The Christian Century

by Ronald R Johnson

The cover of the August 5, 1920, issue of The Christian Century.

I’ve told you before that Douglas debuted with The Christian Century by entering an essay contest. John Spargo’s article, “The Futility of Preaching,” was the subject, and a number of ministers responded to the editor’s call for rebuttals. Douglas was one of them. Through his essay, “Preaching and the Average Preacher,” Douglas demonstrated a style all his own, and the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison invited him to submit more of his writing to the Century. In fact, he urged Douglas to do it right away, while readers still remembered his name.

Douglas did better than that: he submitted a series of articles, and he framed them as a longer, more in-depth response to Spargo’s criticisms. He called the series, “Wanted — A Congregation!” In this series, he offered advice about how one might preach in such a way that people would flock to the church (as his own parishioners had been doing for the past five years at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, adjacent to the University of Michigan). Douglas had a dynamic personality and was especially powerful in the pulpit and at the typewriter, but in this series of articles he claimed that others could learn from his successes (and failures).

It may seem astounding that Douglas could have responded to Morrison’s invitation so quickly and voluminously, but this series was based on a book he had already written more than a year earlier. In January 1919, Douglas sent a manuscript of the book The Mendicant to the Doran Company. George Doran liked the style of Douglas’s writing but wanted the book to be more religious than it actually was. Douglas didn’t take Doran’s advice, and the manuscript sat in his file cabinet, waiting for the right opportunity to try again.

Douglas recognized Morrison’s invitation as that opportunity. Although The Mendicant was written as a series of dialogues, Douglas took the information that was in his manuscript and rewrote it as a series of essays. Over the next few weeks, I will share excerpts from those essays.

Douglas’s Anonymous Limericks (Part 2)

by Ronald R Johnson

From the Michigan Daily (the student paper of the University of Michigan) sometime in October 1919.

This is Part 2 in a short series of posts about some anonymous limericks Lloyd Douglas wrote for the Michigan Daily, the student paper at the University of Michigan, in the fall of 1919. These were meant as advice to incoming freshmen. “The Newcomer” tells about himself and an “Old Timer” (an upperclassman) offers advice. This one was printed sometime in October 1919 and it was titled, “Concerning Etiquette”:

The Newcomer Says:

I love this free Democracy
Where all of us are brothers;
But where I eat on Duroc Street
They also board some others.

My Uncle! You should see this crew –
Their arms up on the table –
Our food supplies they vocalize
As loudly as they’re able.

And when the feat is quite complete
And they have mopped the platter,
They find a stick and gouge and pick
Where anything’s the matter.

Now I was taught that men of thought
Are persons of good breeding;
Please tell me why this rule’s awry
When college men are feeding.

The Old Timer Replies:

My cultured friend, you need not mend
The maxim you have quoted;
Most men of thought, as you were taught,
Are for good manners noted.

But don’t you know someday you’ll go
From out these halls of knowledge?
All sorts you’ll meet – and with them eat
(For all you’re trained in college).

We could not bear to send you there
Unused to sights revolting;
So, for your good, you take your food
Where some are skilled at bolting.

And afterwhile you’ll sometimes smile
To see their feats courageous;
Be careful, though; we’d have you know
The habit is contagious.

[I will continue sharing these limericks over the next two posts.]

Douglas’s Anonymous Limericks (Part 1)

by Ronald R Johnson

For the past few months, I have been sharing Douglas’s preaching and published articles during the 1919-1920 school year. He also wrote anonymous limericks in the Michigan Daily, the student paper at the University of Michigan. These were all meant as advice to incoming freshmen. “The Newcomer” tells about himself and an “Old Timer” (an upperclassman) offers advice. The first of these limericks was printed sometime in October 1919 and it was titled, “Concerning Confusion”:

The Newcomer Says:

I like the looks of my new books;
They cost me three weeks’ wages;
Therefore I fain would ascertain
What’s written on their pages.

But every day, where I now stay,
The racket is increasing –
A dreadful din, a mandolin –
And chatter without ceasing.

Oh how, indeed, is one to read
In such wild agitation?
I’ve lost my poise in all this noise:
Please deal with this vexation.

The Old Timer Replies:

You’ve told the truth, oh wretched youth;
The tumult here is awful!
We also used to feel abused,
Declaring it unlawful.

But every year, this earthly sphere
Grows noisier than ever:
Our peace of mind we’ve left behind,
To be recaptured never.

‘Twould be unkind to train your mind
To think in peace and quiet,
Then shout someday, ‘Get in the fray
You cloistered monk – and try it!’

So: to have noise, we’ve hired some boys
To furnish great confusion;
They think that they are here to stay
But this is mere delusion.

If you can toil in this turmoil,
And practice concentration,
You will agree someday with me
That it was your salvation.

Editor’s Note: The above verses with some others which will appear in later issues of The Daily were written by a prominent man of Ann Arbor who is very much interested in student affairs but who, in his own words, wants his ‘anonymity carefully preserved.’ They were written for the purpose of printing them in a booklet for the freshmen. As the latter plan did not materialize, he has given them to The Daily for publication.

I will share the rest of his limericks over the next few posts.

Editor’s Note at the bottom of Douglas’s anonymous limerick, “On Confusion.”

Douglas’s Advice to Students on Stowing Away Knowledge

by Ronald R Johnson

From the June 1920 issue of The Intercollegian.

The following is from “A Suggested Valedictory for Class Day at AnyCollege,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the June 1920 issue of The Intercollegian (the monthly magazine of the YMCA). Douglas had already done something similar a year earlier under the title, “A Truthful Commencement Address,” given by the college president. This time he’s pretending to be a member of the graduating class:

“Honorable Board of Directors, Members of the Faculty, Distinguished Guests, Alumni, Fond Parents, Fellow Students, Dear Classmates, Ladies and Gentlemen, and — have I forgotten anybody, I wonder?

“We are about through. One more long, trying session in these flowing robes — appropriately so-called because of their perspiration-exciting capacities — and we shall float out of them upon the sea of life.

“It is a well-known fact among us that only a few skippers of our gladsome fleet are aware of their next port of call. Most of us are concerned with the business immediately at hand — that of standing on the bridge, waving our handkerchiefs to the crowd on the wharf.

“Personally, I have an uneasy misgiving about my cargo. For some years, the stevedores have been dumping it into my hold, and I have stood by, checking the items: two B’s of this, three A’s of that, and ten C’s of something else, with an occasional D or two of something else — but making no effort to store the stuff in a manner that may permit of its being unloaded. Indeed, as I have looked into the hold now and again, of late, I have been quite worried over the problem. I find that I have been considering certain consignments as mere dunnage which really are of great value. There are huge bales of priceless wares chucked down in the bilge, probably water-soaked and half rotten by this time, that I could market for a fine price if only I had known earlier how important it was to preserve them.

“Moreover, I have my cabin piled high with boxes and cartons of merchandise which, a little while ago, seemed tremendously valuable, but now appear to be useless.

“I recall with a shudder how I laughed on the day that the big bale labeled ‘Political Economy’ broke loose from the grappling hooks and fell through to the very keel of me and smashed; and I said, ‘Oh, well; it amounts to little anyway! Let it lie!’ That same day, I was toting up to my stateroom packages of stuff which were so precious I wouldn’t let anyone else touch them — all about the movie stars, the latest crinkle in jazz, the last sartorial yip from the haberdashery.

“I would give much today if I might escape this Turkish bath for a few hours to dig about in my hold and lay hands upon some of the discarded and water-logged possessions of mine and fish them out.

“But that seems impossible. The engines are chug-chugging, and the band is um-pah-ing, and our admiring friends are bidding us ‘Bon voyage!’ We must be true to form and see the event through, according to the best traditions. Forgive us for wearing serious faces. We cannot help being reflective. Every mother’s son of us knows that he is embarking with a badly-distributed ballast.

“As for myself, I am aware that there isn’t a scrap of machinery in me capable of hoisting a single bale of my cargo up out of the hold. I hooted at the Literary Society and called the Oratorical Association funny names. I never learned how to speak in public and am considerably at a disadvantage when it comes to expressing myself clearly in private. I do not know how to write, convincingly or any other way. It is difficult for me to compose a readable letter of fifteen lines. In other words, I am full of knowledge up to my quarter deck, and I have no equipment for disgorging it.

“O ye who follow us — a word with you! Be careful how you store your cargo. Don’t emulate our folly who have debated, hours, on the respective merits of Gish and Pickford; who wrote long editorials admonishing the local play-houses against showing such an excessive amount of advertisements on the screen to the loss of our time who had come rather to see Deadeye Pete and Mexico Jake save the life of the Queen of Bronco Bill’s Dive; who had no time for concerts, lectures, art exhibits, or the paleontological museum — half ashamed, indeed, to be caught with an interest in such things — I say, don’t try to perpetuate our foolishness!

“Store your cargo so that you can get at it again. Be sure that you rig some windlasses and donkey-engines on your decks, to be used at various ports! And Heaven help you if you toss down into the bilge-water merchandise of great value. I know some of you. Already well on toward committing the same blunder that today causes us unrest. Nobody could persuade you to appear in a collar one-quarter inch too high — and you pooh-pooh the idea of trying to find out what ails Russia!

“Farewell! We are off! In many respects, we have been off all along. Farewell! Just toss that rear hawser in, will you? That’s a good fellow! Thanks!”

Under the Juniper Tree

by Ronald R Johnson

The front page of the February 1920 issue of The Intercollegian (the magazine of the YMCA).

It was early 1920, a little more than a year after the end of the First World War. Although the war was over, peace was illusive. Lloyd Douglas, watching global developments from Ann Arbor, Michigan, was concerned about the future. His essay, “Under the Juniper Tree,” published in The Intercollegian’s February 1920 issue, was prompted by a youth convention of some sort, probably involving the YMCA. I have been unable to get information about that conference, but here is Douglas’s response. The biblical reference is to the story of Elijah under the juniper tree in I Kings 19.

“An old statesman sat, fagged and gloomy, under a juniper tree. The place was a wilderness. The hour was twilight. The man was a fugitive.

“He had tried, unsuccessfully, to make something of a nation that was rotting. Too much war, too much social injustice, too much idle riches at the top and sour poverty at the bottom. All of these conditions had ‘done her in.’ Everybody was restless; the air was charged with revolution; two percent were profiteering on ninety-eight percent, and ninety-eight percent were rolling up their tattered sleeves to settle with the two percent. A mess it was — by all the rules of reckoning!

“The old statesman had given up the sacrificial struggle and wanted nothing else than to die. He tumbled into a forlorn heap under a juniper tree. Thus, the juniper tree became, forever and ever, a symbol of wretchedness. Even the berries thereof have been put under the ban.

“A Voice spoke to the despairing statesman. By no means was his cause lost. There were seven thousand still loyal to the best interests of the endangered kingdom. These seven thousand constituted the key to the desperate situation. Let them be lined up for service and the nation’s mistakes could be rectified.

“All of this happened in 920 B.C.

“At the opening of 1920 A.D., seating accommodations under the juniper tree were entirely inadequate to take care of the prophets who feared we were destined to perish of our quick and easy riches. Materialism rampant; indifference the vogue; selfishness at the crescent; almost everybody with his hand in the bag, up to the shoulder.

“A telegram from Des Moines!

“Seven thousand!’ Seven thousand who? — what? — whence?

“Seven thousand potential leaders of the nation’s future affairs forego their holidays, at no little cost to themselves, to meet in a great convention and pledge their lives to lift, help, heal, serve, redeem!

“Moreover — these seven thousand were but picked representatives of seven times seven thousand who feel precisely as they feel about the responsibilities now facing the trained leadership of the republic.

“Let the juniper tree be cut down for a celebration bonfire! We are not so badly off as we thought! This country simply cannot make enough mistakes to abrogate the influence of these indomitable young dynamos!

“When the census taker inquires about your occupation, tell him you are a wood-cutter — specializing in juniper trees!

“We are on the way up once more!”