Brann |
This of course brought to mind my hero, William Cowper Brann. I plan to channel him in the newspaper, eventually. Until then, here's a column about him, published 25 years ago.
He wielded a pen like a razor, and gleefully slashed at his many, many enemies, one of whom stepped out of a dusty street in Waco, Texas, and shot him in the back, "where the suspenders crossed," 100 years ago this past Wednesday.
His name was William Cowper Brann. He is utterly forgotten today — his name appeared just once in this newspaper, 41 years ago — so I thought I would take advantage of the anniversary to introduce you to this son of Illinois, whose acidic personality got him tossed out of newspaper jobs from Matteson southward until he ended up in Waco, where he ran his paper, the Iconoclast, for three years before he was murdered.
In that short span of time, the Iconoclast went from a tiny local monthly (he ran off 50 copies of the first edition, sold those, then rushed the money back to the printer to pay for more issues) to a famed journal of international reputation with 100,000 subscribers, a testament to the eternal public hunger for a mean guy with high standards who doesn't pull his punches.
In the first issue, February, 1895, he went after a hugely popular columnist, T. DeWitt Talmadge, who had called Brann "the Apostle of the Devil" (a nickname that even Brann devotees came to use). Brann dismissed him as a "wide-lipped blatherskite" and "a religious faker."
"The Iconoclast will pay any man $10 who will demonstrate that T. DeWitt Talmadge ever originated an idea, good, bad or indifferent," Brann wrote. "He is simply a monstrous bag of fetid wind."
That was mild for Brann; he suggested another group of opponents "should have been hanged with their own umbilicular cords at birth."
Brann unspooled James Whitcomb Riley's nauseating verse ("So I stand in the dawn of her beautiful eyes.") until he couldn't take it anymore.
"Ah, God! A little ice water and a fan, please," Brann wrote, conjuring up the image of the Hoosier poet swooning from his own muse. "He revives, he totters to his feet, he smites his breast, he gropes hither and yon in his delirious ecstasy. . . . Perhaps he can persuade his star-eyed charmer to wear green goggles or only squint at him through a piece of smoked glass."
Is it fair that Riley's name endures, sort of, and Brann's is forgotten?
On the celebrity wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough, Brann noted that "the fiance of Miss Vanderbilt is descended . . . through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty." And the bride? "A long, gaunt, skinny young female whose face would frighten any animal but a pauper duke out for the dough."
One can only pine for what he would have done with the current Windsors.
The man certainly had his faults — particularly a jarring, bottomless racism (though reading his views on the subject is a sobering reminder of what racism is, now that the term is tossed about as lightly as a beach ball in summer).
Brann's subjects have a way of reverberating a century later. The "Slick Willie" in the White House now is only an encore of "Slippery Bill" McKinley, whose rise Brann mourned as if it were the coming of doom.
"In 30 years we have passed, by regular gradation, from the wisdom of Lincoln to the stupidity of (President) Cleveland, and it may be the will of God that we should drain the cup of humiliation to the very dregs . . . (and elect) a political nonentity astride a vacuum."
Brann battled the rabid anti-Catholicism that was so popular in the 1890s, primarily by attacking Baylor University, the preeminent local Baptist establishment. After a Brazilian Catholic girl, brought to Baylor to be trained as a Baptist missionary, instead got pregnant, Brann used the incident to heap an endless river of abuse on the school. A high point was his starting a fund drive to raise a marble monument on campus to the infant, who had died.
"It seems to me that the great Baptist seminary has been strangely derelict in its duty — has failed to properly advertise itself as a place where souls are made as well as saved," he wrote. "Baylor is far too modest. It received an ignorant little Catholic as raw material, and sent forth two Baptists as the finished products."
The college, needless to say, writhed under Brann's lash. A mob of Baylor students kidnapped Brann at gunpoint, beat him, and might have lynched him had professors not interceded.
On April 1, 1898, the father of one Baylor girl stepped out of the twilight and shot Brann in the back. Never one to treat a foe lightly, Brann whirled around and emptied his gun into his attacker. Both men died, Brann lingering until the early morning of April 2 — a day he was to begin a speaking tour that would have led him northward, perhaps as far as Chicago.
I think he'd be pleased by the idea that, a century after his cowardly murder, his words are finally echoing here:
"People frequently say to me, 'Brann, your attacks are too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less pizen.' Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter. . . . Never attempt to move an ox-team with moral suasion, or to drown the cohorts of the devil in the milk of human kindness. It won't work."
—originally published in the Sun-Times, April 5, 1998
He wielded a pen like a razor, and gleefully slashed at his many, many enemies, one of whom stepped out of a dusty street in Waco, Texas, and shot him in the back, "where the suspenders crossed," 100 years ago this past Wednesday.
His name was William Cowper Brann. He is utterly forgotten today — his name appeared just once in this newspaper, 41 years ago — so I thought I would take advantage of the anniversary to introduce you to this son of Illinois, whose acidic personality got him tossed out of newspaper jobs from Matteson southward until he ended up in Waco, where he ran his paper, the Iconoclast, for three years before he was murdered.
In that short span of time, the Iconoclast went from a tiny local monthly (he ran off 50 copies of the first edition, sold those, then rushed the money back to the printer to pay for more issues) to a famed journal of international reputation with 100,000 subscribers, a testament to the eternal public hunger for a mean guy with high standards who doesn't pull his punches.
In the first issue, February, 1895, he went after a hugely popular columnist, T. DeWitt Talmadge, who had called Brann "the Apostle of the Devil" (a nickname that even Brann devotees came to use). Brann dismissed him as a "wide-lipped blatherskite" and "a religious faker."
"The Iconoclast will pay any man $10 who will demonstrate that T. DeWitt Talmadge ever originated an idea, good, bad or indifferent," Brann wrote. "He is simply a monstrous bag of fetid wind."
That was mild for Brann; he suggested another group of opponents "should have been hanged with their own umbilicular cords at birth."
Brann unspooled James Whitcomb Riley's nauseating verse ("So I stand in the dawn of her beautiful eyes.") until he couldn't take it anymore.
"Ah, God! A little ice water and a fan, please," Brann wrote, conjuring up the image of the Hoosier poet swooning from his own muse. "He revives, he totters to his feet, he smites his breast, he gropes hither and yon in his delirious ecstasy. . . . Perhaps he can persuade his star-eyed charmer to wear green goggles or only squint at him through a piece of smoked glass."
Is it fair that Riley's name endures, sort of, and Brann's is forgotten?
On the celebrity wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough, Brann noted that "the fiance of Miss Vanderbilt is descended . . . through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty." And the bride? "A long, gaunt, skinny young female whose face would frighten any animal but a pauper duke out for the dough."
One can only pine for what he would have done with the current Windsors.
The man certainly had his faults — particularly a jarring, bottomless racism (though reading his views on the subject is a sobering reminder of what racism is, now that the term is tossed about as lightly as a beach ball in summer).
Brann's subjects have a way of reverberating a century later. The "Slick Willie" in the White House now is only an encore of "Slippery Bill" McKinley, whose rise Brann mourned as if it were the coming of doom.
"In 30 years we have passed, by regular gradation, from the wisdom of Lincoln to the stupidity of (President) Cleveland, and it may be the will of God that we should drain the cup of humiliation to the very dregs . . . (and elect) a political nonentity astride a vacuum."
Brann battled the rabid anti-Catholicism that was so popular in the 1890s, primarily by attacking Baylor University, the preeminent local Baptist establishment. After a Brazilian Catholic girl, brought to Baylor to be trained as a Baptist missionary, instead got pregnant, Brann used the incident to heap an endless river of abuse on the school. A high point was his starting a fund drive to raise a marble monument on campus to the infant, who had died.
"It seems to me that the great Baptist seminary has been strangely derelict in its duty — has failed to properly advertise itself as a place where souls are made as well as saved," he wrote. "Baylor is far too modest. It received an ignorant little Catholic as raw material, and sent forth two Baptists as the finished products."
The college, needless to say, writhed under Brann's lash. A mob of Baylor students kidnapped Brann at gunpoint, beat him, and might have lynched him had professors not interceded.
On April 1, 1898, the father of one Baylor girl stepped out of the twilight and shot Brann in the back. Never one to treat a foe lightly, Brann whirled around and emptied his gun into his attacker. Both men died, Brann lingering until the early morning of April 2 — a day he was to begin a speaking tour that would have led him northward, perhaps as far as Chicago.
I think he'd be pleased by the idea that, a century after his cowardly murder, his words are finally echoing here:
"People frequently say to me, 'Brann, your attacks are too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less pizen.' Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter. . . . Never attempt to move an ox-team with moral suasion, or to drown the cohorts of the devil in the milk of human kindness. It won't work."
—originally published in the Sun-Times, April 5, 1998
Wow. So much truth, especially in the last few sentences. Thank you for the education, sir!
ReplyDeleteSounds like a truly fun read.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet if he ever had a dinner with Ambrose Bierce, just listening would've been a real treat!
It recalls to me, the truly wonderful pillow Alice Roosevelt Longworth had on her couch, which had embroidered on it: "If you haven’t anything nice to say about anyone, come sit by me."
Have you read "Newspaper Days" by Theodore Dreiser? It's his autobiographical account of living in 1890s Chicago and breaking into the newspaper business. It's full of remarkable detail and a real snapshot of life back then.
ReplyDeleteI hate to say it, but the only present day figure who vaguely resembles Brann (like the flash of a lightning bug resembles a bolt of lightning) is our infamous ex President.
ReplyDeletejohn
Well the bigotry is the same, and the acid tongue is the same. But I think you're overlooking Brann's passion for justice, a quality no clear-eyed man could ever assign to the former guy.
DeleteFor the Orange Guy...it's a passion for "just us."
DeleteAs far as I know, the last person who wrote with such an acid tongue was the reviled, at least among the theater folk, NY theater critic John Simon.
DeleteSimon certainly wasn’t reviled by me. The theater and movie industry folk hated him because he held them to exacting standards, and they frequently failed to attain those standards (especially the movie business), and he was a master at piercing the balloons of pretense. He was also a great linguistic prescriptivist, and lamented the demise and debasement of language, particularly in his adopted country, the USA. His early 80s book “Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline” should be required reading in all high schools.
DeleteThe only reason I have a passing knowledge of James Whitcomb Riley is due to some books in my childhood basement. I believe they were published in the forties, part of a children’s series of biographies of prominent Americans, with such titles as Clara Barton, Girl Nurse and Eli Whitney, Boy Inventor. I believe Riley’s was titled Hoosier Boy.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was! One of the Childhood of Famous Americans Series! I read many of them in the Fifties. They have been reissued a number of times, and new titles have been added over the years. There are now 220 titles in the series.
DeleteI read the older editions, the ones with the silhouettes instead of illustrations. They had blue covers and the titles were in red, and some of them were unforgettable. Babe Ruth: Baseball Boy. Ernie Pyle: Boy From Back Home. Jane Addams: Little Lame Girl. Lou Gehrig: Boy of the Sandlots. Tom Edison: Boy Inventor.
I don't know how historically accurate they were, but I loved reading them as a grammar school kid. Because they were wonderful stories, easily understood, without preaching, without condescension, and just about children. Not biographies, but stories about a childhood. And they are probably as good for today's kids as they were for the kids of 65 or 75 years ago.
If I ever run across any of the titles I read, I wouldn't hesitate to acquire them for my collection of kiddie lit from my boyhood. More eventual fodder for the landfill.
Our copies also had the silhouetted illustrations, but the covers were orange.
DeleteWhere & how did you find Brann’s books?
ReplyDeleteMe? I spin around in my chair and they're enshrined in a place of honor on my roll top desk. Sorry, all long out of print. The set will put you back a few hundred dollars, I imagine. The short answer is, you can't. I plan to write his biography after I retire, but you'll have to be patient for that.
DeleteCouldn't you start it now and publish in installments 19th Century style?
Deletejohn
Not and do a good job of it, no. There is research involved. I want you to be there, in Waco, with him, 130 years ago. You don't just snap your fingers and conjure that up.
DeleteBrann The Iconoclast is available for download at the Internet Archive, but I'm not sure if it's every volume or just Volume 1.
ReplyDeletehttps://archive.org/details/completeworksofb01branuoft
Gee, am I the only one who read the colorful quotes from Mr. Brann and heard the voice of NS echoing throughout? The comments about Baylor were both cutting and funny at the same time. I can see where NS may have gotten some of his inspiration when roasting modern-day characters (or institutions) that richly deserve it.
ReplyDeleteThe contemporary writer that Mr. Brann’s style seems most reminiscent of to me is Christopher Hitchens. I admired Hitchens, and found his venom infused erudition to be hilarious, but after a while I came to view his mean streak as more of a character flaw than an asset.
ReplyDeleteThis post is my first exposure to Brann, but I feel a kinship. Not that I am his equal in turning a phrase but his claim to " have nothing against Baptists, he just believed they weren't held under long enough", is similar to my reaction to any sect of dunkers. Hitchens passing has left us without a powerful voice in this dark time. He may have crossed the line occasionally, but who among us is perfect? I miss his unapologetic voice, but thanks to Youtube I can still get a fix.
ReplyDelete