Flashback 1998: 1890s newspaperman slashing prose stings today

Brann

     Baylor University is in the news, applying for — and receiving — a religious exemption to the Department of Education ban on sexual harassment, so that any young LGBTQ person who has the misfortune to find themselves on campus can feel the full lash of Southern Baptist hospitality. 

    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