Tag: WWI

Fur Coats

by Ronald R Johnson

Douglas’s “Fur Coats,” in the December 1919 issue of The Intercollegian.

The following is from an essay by Lloyd Douglas entitled, “Fur Coats,” published in the December 1919 issue of the YMCA’s monthly magazine, The Intercollegian.

“It was a good train, and we had been doing our fifty miles an hour all afternoon. But the trip was long, the book I had been reading had depressed me, and I was feeling the need of some congenial human society when the young doctor sauntered down the aisle and, upon receipt of my smile of welcome, dropped into the vacant chair.

“‘What’s the book?’ he inquired. I told him. It was Professor Cram’s brilliant little volume, Walled Towns.

“‘What’s it about?’ he persisted. I read him a few selected passages, specializing on the author’s indictment of modern society.

“‘This man thinks,’ I remarked, ‘that one of our chief errors is ‘the quantitative standard’ — the worship of bigness, the rejection of ‘the passion for perfection in favor of the numerical equivalent’ — exhibited alike by ‘the ignorant contractor, trying, by the aid of galvanized iron, to produce an effect of a tawdry, lying magnificence,’ and the exploiters of ‘foolish luxuries, and so-called amenities of life which we were far happier without.’ Pretty dismal invoice of the times, don’t you think?’ — for I hoped this young man might restore my optimism.

“‘Well,’ replied the doctor gravely, ‘I don’t believe he has overstated the case. I am blue, today, over certain matters closely related to this.’

“I told him to unpack his troubles from his old kit-bag and we’d look ’em over. He did so. He was on his way back, he said, from the annual ‘homecoming’ at his alma mater — one of the greater state universities of the middle west. There had been a thrilling football game, and a crowded program of social events.

“‘Nothing in all that to be blue about,’ I observed. ‘You must have had a mighty good time.’

“‘I am never going back!’ he said passionately. ‘Never!’

“Whereupon I handed him the inevitable ‘Why?’ — and waited for the story.

“‘Even at my own fraternity house,’ he began, with suppressed indignation, ‘I felt like a cat in a strange attic. The only values there were money values! The new outfit was cold, hard, worldly-wise, blasé, candidly snobbish! Many of the old grads were back. The youngsters coolly appraised their cars, their clothes, and accepted or rejected them on a financial basis. Some of the old fellows brought their wives out to the dance. The woman who appeared without a fur coat was extremely fortunate if she wasn’t snubbed by that selfish, silly, inordinately stupid bunch of new-rich!’

“‘A fur coat!’ I echoed, somewhat dazedly.

“‘Yes!’ snapped the doctor, angrily, ‘a fur coat! That’s the sign of the order now! The Inner Guard at the Greek portal asks the Outer Guard, ‘Who comes there?’ And the Outer Guard replies, ‘Looks like an old grad!’ Says the Inner Guard, ‘How did he get here?’ ‘Motored!’ ‘Spiffy car?’ ‘Not so very!’ ‘Come alone?’ ‘Wife with him!’ ‘Fur coat?’ ‘No!’ ‘Tell ’em we’re sorry!’

“‘But,’ I stammered, ‘what’s going to become of our justly celebrated Democracy if we have this sort of thing going on, right at the tap-root of the leadership we are training to bring us out of our social wilderness?’

“The doctor didn’t know. Presently, we discovered that we weren’t cheering each other’s mood very much, and he went back to his seat while I resumed the little book at the place where Professor Cram was saying, ‘Neither is education a universal panacea for this persistent disease of backsliding; it is not even a palliative or a prophylactic. The most intensive educational period ever known had issue in the most preposterous war in history [WWI, which had ended a year earlier], initiated by the most highly educated of all people, by them given a new content of disgrace and savagery, and issuing at last into Bolshevism and an obscene anarchy that would be ridiculous but for the omnipresent horror!’

“‘But the war!’ I reflected. ‘Surely it was guaranteed to furnish us a new outlook on life! It was to prove ‘a great regenerative agency, out of whose fiery purgation would issue forth a new spirit that would redeem the world.’

“I turned back to the little book and found the professor saying, ‘Every great war exhibits at least two phenomena following on from its end: the falling back into an abyss of meanness, materialism, and self-seeking, with the swift disappearance of the spiritual exaltation during the fight; and the emergence, sooner or later, of isolated personalities who have retained the ardor of spiritual regeneration and who struggle to bring the mass of the people back to their lost ideals.’

“Are these ‘isolated personalities’ now in preparation for their sublime task? Are they in college this winter? And what do they think of the ‘fur coat’ standard of human values?”

Demos in the Saddle

by Ronald R Johnson

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.”

Calling All Professors

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Ph.D. — Director of Philanthropists,” in the February issue of The Intercollegian.

The following is an essay entitled, “Ph.D. — Director of Philanthropy,” which Lloyd Douglas published in the February 1919 issue of The Intercollegian, the monthly magazine of the YMCA. At the beginning of this essay, Douglas talks about two black men on a ship, one of which is seasick. His bunkmate tells him “we’s a passin’ a ship!” According to Douglas, the seasick man says, “Ah doan want tuh see no ship…. Call me when we’s a passin’ a tree!”

The Great War (which we now call WWI) had just concluded two months earlier, and Douglas draws the lesson:

“This yarn fits our mood. Certain sights, sounds, and demands have palled on us. Only a change of scenery will beguile our interest. The lore of bayonets, red and sticky, and of dead men’s legs sticking up out of the mud of the trenches — it is enough! Lead us away.

“It happens, now, that ‘we’s a passin’ a tree.’ Tourists will kindly hunt a porthole and look out.

“I’m both sorry and glad that I am not a faculty man, these days — sorry because I should like to have his chance to become immortal in the lives of the young fellows who are so eager to be led into a larger life; glad because I shouldn’t want to risk foozling such an opportunity.

“College students are facing their tasks just now with deep seriousness. The old selfishness has become unpopular. They used to say, ‘I should worry!’ Now they are saying, ‘I should worry!’ They are anxious to be challenged to do something to prove their right to live in these high days.

“A tremendous amount of spiritual energy, no longer static but kinetic, has been and is being generated in the heart of the young collegian. All persons who have to do with him will be held accountable by human society for the manner in which they help to recharge the batteries of life with this new dynamic, to carry the race over the long, lean years of such material prosperity as invariably follows great crises.

“The faculty man who believes in Christianity as ‘the theory of applied altruism’ and dares to say that he believes it in his classroom; challenging men to operate their lives centifugally; calling recent events to witness the folly of attempting to live centripetally; may justly feel that the five minutes he spends in making that speech are worth a whole semester’s lectures on his particular subject.

“Inversely, the member of the college teaching force who pooh-poohs the zealous aspirations of young men and women to invest themselves in some heroic philanthropic service is useful only as a brilliant and theatrical example of an ‘undesirable citizen.’

“Every thoughtful man is now called upon to acknowledge the value of ‘the imponderables’ — the facts of life which cannot be assayed by the ton or estimated with a slide rule.

“A certain type of academic, accustomed to doing his thinking only in the pluperfect [well in the past, in other words], will still pursue the ‘laboratory method’ of dealing with everything — regardless. Whether he makes research of a poem, an acid, a dogma, or an oratorio, he straps on his rubber apron, adjusts his green eye shade, lights the gas burner under the little copper pot, and pours whatever-it-is into a test tube.

“There is developing a new type of college instructor, however, whose imagination and faith are going to work wonders in helping the present crop of serious-minded students to deepen their own convictions that the greatest energies of this age are not to be spoken of in terms of KWs or BTUs [kilowatts or British Thermal Units].

“To my mind, there is no prophetic office more potential, in our day, than that occupied by the conscientious and fearless faculty man.

“His mere aside, tossed into a lecture, touching upon the importance of conserving the spiritual energies generated by this age of heroism and sacrifice, is worth more than all the sermons of the college preachers.

“One needs hardly add that his sneer at ‘the present wave of sentimentality’ can easily chill the ardor of many a student whose interest had been turned toward the things of life that really count.

“He shall be long remembered as a loyal friend of humanity, whose Ph.D. in these days means, ‘Director of Philanthropists’ — the potential philanthropists now in training in our colleges.”

Passenger or Crew Member?

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Taking the Grade,” published in The Intercollegian’s January 1919 issue.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to post the essays Lloyd Douglas published in The Intercollegian (the monthly magazine of the YMCA) from January 1919 through June 1920. Today’s article is entitled, “Taking the Grade,” and it was published in the January 1919 issue. (Let me just say in advance: some of Douglas’s essays haven’t aged well. This one was written right after the end of WWI.)

“A thoughtful friend of mine, who is something of a maxim-wright, informs me that ‘eventful eras produce prophets.’ If this is true — and it does jingle like an honest-to-goodness proverb — we must have been passing through an uncommonly stirring period, judging by the densit of the present population on the Isle of Patmos.

“These prophets seem to constitute a new species of the genus seer, in that they are agreed on at least one premise, to wit: we are entering upon an age of unprecedented possibilities for the advancement of civilization.

“Now the unanimity of this forecast surely cannot be charged to collusion among the prophets, for the business of prophesying is strictly a one-man job. The prophets do not ‘collude.’ Never yet have they held an annual conference to elect officers and have their picture taken. Prophets are about as chummy as comets.

“Therefore, when all of them declare, with certitude, each independently of the others, that we are now en route to better things — and that, too, in face of the traditional uncheerfulness of their trade — the combined effect of their predictions is very heartening.

“We will consider this as a settled fact, then–an incontrovertable, non-sinkable, self-bailable, time-lock, sunk-hinge Fact. The world is about to ‘take the grade’ to the upper levels. After a long and uneventful journey across the prairie, civilization makes ready to climb to a clearer and cleaner atmosphere. But the prophets have not said that the world is going to toboggan up to that altitude. Coasting is only good for movement in the opposite direction.

“Whoever is interested in this proposed ascent of civilization will join the crew. Erstwhile coal-passers will ply their shovels at the furnace doors. Persons previously on the passenger list will go forward to the tender and help the stokers. Certain husky people will get out behind and push. A few daring ones may go ahead and pull — though this is dangerous business, involving the risk of being run over; it is sincerely to be hoped that nobody will try to pull who hasn’t had a lot of previous experience in pushing.

“Of course, there are to be many passengers. Special cars will be made up for various parties, such as the dirty nations, the greedy nations, the ignorant nations, the self-infatuated nations, and the sick nations.

“Certain other passengers with special reservations are such incapacitated types as the great-grandson of old Timothy Waggles, who sat on the wharf swinging his feet and shouting, ‘Fool!’ at Robert Fulton when the latter was trying to make his steamboat go; and the son of Caleb Scroggins, who hee-hawed at Langley’s attempt at an aeroplane; and Willum the Last, himself, who turned all the resources of his empire into gunpowder and then pulled the trigger.

“All these will have to be hauled up the grade; plus one more passenger. Him I heard say, not long ago, ‘What’s all this talk about ‘missions’ and ‘increased missionary effort’ and ‘a larger missionary program’? Personally, I have never seen any good in missions, and I don’t see any good in them now! I consider all this chatter to be mere piffle!’

“So, we have to haul him too, along with Waggles and Scroggins and Willum. He will probably expect an assignment to the most luxurious coach on the train. We can’t ask him to ride forward in one of the rattan tourist cars, along with the ordinary supermen and the Hunkies and the Turks and the rest of that gang who went out to spread ‘kultur’ among their benighted brethren. No; we’ll have the porter make up the drawing-room compartment for this man, and ask the steward of the diner to send him all his meals.

“I think I can see him chatting with the senile Waggles and the infirm Scroggins and the other old fellow, on the way up, saying, ‘Mighty fine bit of country through which we are passing, gentlemen! Growing more and more beautiful with every mile. Notice how pure the air smells up here! And, just to think, we’re coasting up! Remarkable, isn’t it?’

“Now, if we could find some way of coaxing this man to stroll through the train and see what all we have on board, I believe he would want to join the crew; for he is not a bad sort. He is just getting a bit elderly in his habits of thought. All his life he has been ransacking the depths of his inexperience for wise words of caution for all who ‘waste their money and strength on missions.’ His mind has been lighted up, slightly, by the general illumination that has been observed by most people not utterly blind; but his voice still quavers the old tune. His mind and his mouth seem to have become disconnected in some manner.

“Anybody with a plan to suggest for persuading this man to put on his hat and walk through the train will confer a great favor on the crew who need his assistance. If we could get him into that car where the passengers are down on all fours around a wooden thing with six legs, ten horns, two tails, and a stinger, beseeching it to give them health and harvests, I know he would say, ‘What this bunch of drooling idiots want is a God with some sense; and a corps of doctors, and some tractors, and a threshing-machine, and a million dollars’ worth of soap! Why, I didn’t know we had anything like this aboard! What kind of a train is this? Let me get out and look!’

“And if he did get out, and saw what a tremendous amount of energy it was going to require to haul this miscellaneous outfit up the grade, I know that fellow well enough to believe that he would take off his coat and help. For he’s not a fool, even if he is old and fat.”

In the Aftermath of the Great War

by Ronald R Johnson

Front cover of a promotional brochure for sermon entitled, “Walled Towns.” In LCD 1918 Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

As the 1919 Christmas season was about to begin, Lloyd C. Douglas announced an unusual sermon offering “The Way Out” of the intricate problems left over from the Great War (which we now call World War I). There was nothing Christmasy about this sermon. It was a review of the book, Walled Towns, by Ralph Adams Cram, a professor of architecture at MIT.

In a brochure announcing the upcoming sermon, Douglas wrote that Walled Towns “urges and predicts a return, in all things, to ‘the unit of human scale,’ believing ‘the Free City’ — ‘the Walled Town’ — to be the only solution of our problem which, [Cram] declares, involves the destruction of Imperialism, Materialism, and ‘the quantitative standard’ — the ‘three errors of modernism.’

“‘The life of society,’ writes Cram, ‘is conditioned by a rhythmical wave motion; curves rising and descending… the falling curve meeting at some point the rising curve of a future coming into being, the crossing points forming the nodes of history, and spacing themselves at five-century intervals either side of the birth of Christ, or the year 1, A.D.

“By the use of the drawing which appears below (special permission having been secured from Professor Cram to reproduce it here), the author calls attention to ‘the correspondence, in time, between certain periodic manifestations of spiritual force, identical in nature, though somewhat varied in fashion, and these nodal points: that is to say, the monastic idea as this showed itself in the first, sixth, eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This synchronism may be graphically explained thus, the thin line indicating the approximate curve of social development, the shaded line the monastic manifestation…

From promotional brochure for sermon entitled, “Walled Towns.” In LCD 1918 Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

“‘It would appear from this,’ continues Professor Cram, ‘that now while the next nodal point is possibly seventy-five years in the future [1994], the next manifestation of monasticism should already be showing itself. The curve of modernism is now descending as precipitously as did that of the Roman Imperialism; but already, to those who are willing to see, there are indisputable evidences of the rising of the following curve.

“‘Whether this is to emulate in lift and continuance the curves of Medievalism and of modernism, or whether it is to be but a poor copy of the sag and the low, heavy lift of the Dark Ages, is the question that man is to determine for himself during the next two generations [the 1920s and 30s].'”

In the remaining paragraphs of his announcement, Douglas calls Cram’s views “prophetic” and says, “This new conception of a ‘way out,’ surely cannot fail to be of interest to the ‘tried and tired mind’ of the present generation. For many of us it will have such an allurement that we may be tempted seriously to give ourselves to the promotion of this expedient to rescue our social order from its own blunders.

“Owing to the limited seating capacity of the church and the probable interest on the part of many people in the matter indicated above, Mr. Douglas will deliver this address on ‘Walled Towns’ at both the 10:30 AM and 7:30 PM services…”

It was unlike Douglas to create so much hype around a controversial idea of this kind. He was a modernist, and Cram was not. Cram was advocating a return to monasticism. For Douglas to jump on this bandwagon, especially at the beginning of the Christmas season, is rather alarming. But we have to remember that this was just a year after the end of the Great War, and it seemed clear that the nations were still in turmoil (a fact that would eventually lead to another World War). Douglas was obviously concerned about the future.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about “Walled Towns,” a sermon that wasn’t very important in its own right, but that laid the foundation for one of his most memorable novels.

The Grounds of Our Gratitude: Living in These Times

by Ronald R Johnson

From the title page of “The Grounds of Our Gratitude.” In Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

This is from a sermon entitled “The Grounds of Our Gratitude,” that Lloyd C. Douglas preached at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, November 23, 1919. (It can be found in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

He gives four reasons for being grateful.

The first, he says, “is that we are alive in this remarkably interesting period of the world’s life…. [W]e seem to have but one brief visit to this world in which we now live. And it is not for any of us to choose the time for that single visit. This is of considerably more importance than would appear on first thought. Even the distant friend, visiting our own little Ann Arbor for just once in his life, would deem himself fortunate to have arrived yesterday at the annual homecoming — everything a riot of color and a wealth of welcome. He would have formed quite another impression, had he visited us about the first of September, when the place had all the marks of a deserted city.

“The same thing is true of our visit to this old planet — earth. It is of great consequence that one’s single, brief stay here should occur when there is something really doing, something important afoot….

“Of certain generations in the Christian era, very little is preserved. Indeed, there are certain cloudy strips of time, about midway of civilization’s journey from Golgotha to Verdun, so innocent of any real achievement that we really know nothing about men’s thoughts, deeds, or aspirations for periods of three or four generations laid end to end.

“Now, if I am to have only one life in this world, I am glad that I didn’t have to take my turn then.

“Until very recently, a considerable portion of the earth-dweller’s time and energy was occupied with the business of keeping alive and dealing with bodily discomforts. I am not an extremely old gentleman; yet, in the course of my life I have seen common life made more enjoyable. I remember very distinctly when the streets of Ft. Wayne, Indiana (which was the nearest large town) were lighted for the first time by electricity, and what an object of curiosity it was! In the town in which I lived then — a place of 2,000 population — a man drove around in a cart every evening and lighted a few oil-burning lamps. Most of the sidewalks were wooden, and the long planks had a trick of warping and becoming disconnected at one end, to the occasional undoing of pedestrians groping their way along the dimly lighted streets — streets that would mire a wagon almost any time in spring, and from which blinding clouds of dust arose all summer.

“I was ten when I saw a telephone for the first time, and several years older before I had occasion to use one. Such surgery as we had was very crude, and employed only as a last resort — and, if my memory serves me correctly, it generally proved to be, indeed, the last resort of the patient.

“I shall not forget the tremendous excitement that was caused when the first automobile appeared in town. It had only one cylinder and was in appearance like an old-fashioned buggy. The more discerning businessmen of the place agreed that it was an interesting toy, but assured one another that it would never be made practical. My own pet ambition as a little boy was to own some day one of those bicycles with a front wheel about five feet in diameter, trailed by a very small wheel less than a foot high. Altogether, it was a deadly weapon, but quite the thing with all the young men of the period. Practically the whole business of automatic machinery has come into being in the course of my own lifetime. I am thankful, today, that I have lived to see so many drudgeries of life rendered unnecessary.

“It is good to be living in a time when one does not have to spend quite so much of one’s nervous energy in the business of just keeping alive, and trying to cope with discomforts….

“Moreover, there are certain great issues before men’s minds today which serve to make this age of peculiar interest. The whole social order — the world ’round — is in a state of change. We know not what the next little group of years will bring forth, but we know that they will produce some radical revisions of our recent processes of living.

“There have been whole centuries when men grew up from boyhood to take over their father’s farm or shop or office and live precisely the manner of life that had been lived by their predecessors. Until very recently, the average American, speaking of his foreign-born neighbor, said, ‘He came from the Old Country.’ Which old country didn’t matter. All old countries looked alike — somewhere across the sea, they were.

“Now we have achieved an international consciousness — not an international conscience, as yet, but a recognition of the existence of other peoples and a growing desire to see them rid themselves of their old-world burdens of ignorance, disease, drudgery, and despair.

“True: the new knowledge has but added to our responsibilities and increased our obligations, but it is a great thing just to be alive in this period that shall be known in history as an era of radical changes more significant than any changes which have befallen human experience since the dawn of Christendom, nearly twenty centuries ago.

“I am thankful that, having but one life to live, I am permitted to be in the world now.”

To be continued…

Rethinking the Great War

by Ronald R Johnson (www.ronaldrjohnson.com)

I mentioned last time that Douglas became so caught up in the Great War (WWI) that he began to hate everything German, including the Lutheran Church and its parochial schools. (And that was saying a lot, because Douglas used to be a Lutheran minister.)

I’ve also mentioned more than once that Douglas did his best thinking at the typewriter, and that allows us to trace the development of his thought. In this case, I can cite two prominent examples of how he talked himself down from the ledge (so to speak), and worked his way back to a gospel of love and forgiveness, even for Germans. The first is a Baccalaureate address he gave at Indiana University in June, 1918 (later circulated in booklet form), and the other was a 1918 Christmas booklet entitled, The Dilemma of Santa Claus.

The title of his speech at Indiana University was “Leased Lives,” so-called because he concluded by saying that that was the proper attitude for us all to have now: to realize that our lives have been “leased” to us, and to offer them back in service to society. The war was still being fought, and Douglas was still very much wrapped up in it. That’s why his message is so interesting: because, in spite of the fact that he was still very much a hawk, he was already thinking ahead and – more importantly – being critical of the very things he had been saying for the past year.

As I’ve mentioned before, this was one of his strengths: his ability to step back from his sermons and published articles and to criticize what he had said before – even using the very same words and phrases. We should all be so self-critical! As you read the following excerpt from “Leased Lives,” realize that it’s himself he’s quoting and paraphrasing:

In a frenzy of indignation, we have shouted that our enemy is a nation of madmen, stark staring lunatics, for organizing such an infernal institution as that with which they wage their ruthless war, forgetting that madmen do not organize, and that only yesterday we had sat at their feet to catch up the crumbs that fell from their feast of wisdom.

In our hot anger, we have spluttered out the charge that they are but a massed mob of soul-less brutes, dead to all finer feelings, oblivious to the fact that no musical program of ours has ever seemed complete without a rendition of their inspiring and uplifting harmonies, preferably interpreted by performers who had found their training in the native habitat of the masters by whom these exalted songs of the soul had been wrought.

In tearful rage, we have declared that the despicable philosophy of The Superman was responsible, which enjoins the strong to press on toward greater strength, leaving the weak to their fate; forgetful that for half a century we have considered the exponents of that cult pioneers in the science of rebuilding broken lives and had rushed with our sick, in moments of dire extremity, to the counsel of men whose training was had in Vienna or Berlin.

Perchance it was their outrageous religion that had killed their national soul, an argument rendered somewhat difficult when we remember that modern theological sholarship has recommended a knowledge of the German language to an understanding of its most important textbooks, and that recent sainthood has fed its aspirations on the mystical dreams of Euken.

Now, it is not expected of us that we shall be able coolly to reason this out, in these tempestuous days. Whoever can think calmly and dispassionately about this crisis may choose among such charges against him as cowardice, paresis, moral lassitude or overt treachery. Nothing matters just now but the winning of this war; and if we lose it, none of us cares to live for another ten minutes in such a state of society as must inevitably ensue. But to the end that there shall be no recurrence of a like disaster to the world, they who are to assume leadership of us in the coming days must give themselves to patient and painstaking analysis of the conditions which have brought all this to pass.

Lloyd C Douglas, “Leased Lives,” Baccalaureate Address, Indiana University, June 1918

This is still anti-German. The “conditions” that had caused the war, in his view, came down to this: that the entire Western world, including the United States, had been marching so steadily toward greater efficiency that those at the head of the pack (the Germans) had finally done away with human sentiment and kindness. Douglas’s remedy was to follow Christ’s teaching that, if we want to be great, we must serve. “There is no other way!” he said. This is still an anti-German sentiment; he still maintains that the Germans have become heartless; but he now sees that we’re all in it together and that the Germans have just gone farther than the rest of us in their pursuit of efficiency. He’s stepping back from his earlier inflammatory remarks and moving in the direction of a calmer, saner analysis of the situation.

His 1918 Christmas booklet, The Dilemma of Santa Claus, also recognizes our debt to German culture, even for some of our most cherished Christmas traditions. The “dilemma” is the fact that, even though the war was now over, it’s hard to forgive. It’s going to take some time. Douglas doesn’t admonish his readers to stop hating Germans. He admits that he himself isn’t ready to do it yet. But he reminds us that children don’t care what nationality Santa Claus is. And he goes one step further: he asks us to think about children living in Germany right now, in the aftermath of defeat. What will their Christmas be like this year?

On the one hand, he says he’s not ready to forgive; on the other hand, he invites us all to think about what life must be like over there… at least for the little ones.

This is how Lloyd Douglas lived his whole life. He was a man of passion who got caught up in world events and stated his positions boldly; but he was also a thinker, and he was capable of honest self-criticism after the fact. That’s one of the main reasons why I’ve spent so much of my life reading his writings. It’s good to “hang out” with someone like that, don’t you think?

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