BRANN VS. BAYLOR.
REVOLVERS, ROPES AND RELIGION.
I HAVE just been enjoying the first holiday I have had in
fifteen years. Owing to circumstances entirely beyond my
control, I devoted the major part of the past month to
digesting a couple of installments of Saving Grace
presented by my Baptist brethren, and carefully rubbed in
with revolvers and ropes, loaded canes and miscellaneous
cudgels—with almost any old thing calculated to make a
sinner reflect upon the status of his soul. That explains
the short-comings of the present issue of the ICONOCLAST.
One cannot write philosophic essays while dallying with
the Baptist faith. It were too much like mixing Websterian
dignity with a cataleptoid convulsion, or sitting on
a red ant hill and trying to look unconcerned. Here in
Waco our religious zeal registers 600 in the shade, and
when we hold a love-feast you can hear the unctuous
echoes of our hosannahs from Tadmor in the Wilderness
to the Pillars of Hercules. We believe with St. Paul that
faith without works is dead; hence we gird up our loins
with the sweet cestus of love, grab our guns and go
whooping forth to "capture the world for Christ." When we
find a contumacious sinner we waste no time in theological
controversy or moral suasion, but promptly round him
up with a rope and bump his head, and we bump it hard.
Why consume our energies "agonizing with an emissary
of Satan," explaining his error and striving by honeyed
phrases to lead him into the light, when it is so much
easier to seize him by the pompadour and pantelettes and
drag him bodily from the abyss? Some may complain
that our Christian charity carries a razor edge, that we
skim the cream off our milk of human kindness then put
the can under an alkali pump before serving it to our
customers as a prime article; but bless God! they can
scarce expect to
". . . be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
Whilst others fight to win the prize
And sail through bloody seas."
My Baptist brethren desired to send me as a missionary
to foreign lands, and their invitation was so urgent,
their expressions of regard so fervent that I am now
wearing my head in a sling and trying to write with my
left hand. Although they declared that I had an imperative
"call" to go, and would tempt Providence by loitering
longer than one short day, I concluded to remain in Waco
and preach them a few more of my popular sermons from
that favorite text, "If ye forgive not men their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." It is
quite possible that a few heathen will go to hell whom I
might enable to find the river route to heaven, but I
believe in doing the duty that lies next my hand—in first
saving the heathen right here at home.
But enough of persiflage; now for cold facts. In all
candor, I would cheerfully ignore the recent disgraceful
occurrences in this city could I do so in justice to the
South in general and to Texas in particular. I have no
revenge to gratify, no more feeling in the matter than
though the assaults had been made upon an utter stranger.
It is quite true that for a time I was eager to call my
assailants out one by one and settle the affair after the
manner of our fathers; but being creditably informed that
instead of honoring a cartel, they would make it the basis
of a legal complaint and send me to the penitentiary, and
having no desire to enact the role of the street assassin, I
became once more a law-abiding citizen. Truth to tell,
there's not one of the whole cowardly tribe who's worth
a charge of buckshot, who deserves so much honor as being
sent to hell by a white man's hand. If Socrates was
poisoned and Christ was crucified for telling unpalatable
truths to the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of their time,
it would ill become me to complain of a milder martyrdom
for a like offense. It may be urged that having been
twice accused of the heinous crime of slandering young
ladies, and twice beset on that pretext by armed thugs, I
owe it to myself to make some explanation satisfactory
to the public. Not at all; from my youth up noble
womanhood has been the very god of my idolatry; and
now that I have reached the noon of life, if the reputation
which I have honestly earned as a faithful defender of
the vestal fires can be blown adown the wind by the rank
breath of lying rascals, I would not put forth a hand to
check its flight. If old scars received while defending
woman's name and fame in paths of peril which my
traducers dare not tread, fail to speak for me, then to hell
with the world, and let its harlot tongue wag howsoever
it will. Never but once did I stoop to refute a cowardly
falsehood circulated about myself. I was younger then—
had not learned that public opinion is a notorious bawd,
that "nailing a lie" but accentuates its circulation.
Unfortunately, the recent assaults upon me are not altogether
my private concern. They were armed protests against
a fundamental principle of this Republic—freedom of the
press. They are being citied by ill advised or malicious
persons as evidence of "Southern Savagery." They are
calculated, if suffered to go unexplained, to cast reproach
upon revealed religion. They were futile but brutal
attempts in the last decade of the Nineteenth century to
suppress truth by terror, to conceal the iniquities of a
sectarian college by beating to death the only journalist who
dared to raise his voice in protest. They were appeals to
Judge Lynch to strangle exposure, hence it is imperative
that the blame be placed where it properly belongs; not
upon the South, which unqualifiedly condemns it; not upon
the Baptist church, which indignantly repudiates it; but
upon a little coterie of white-livered black-hearted
hypocrites, any of whom could look thro' a keyhole with both
eyes at once, a majority of whom are either avowed
sympathizers with or active members of that unamerican
organization known to infamy as the A.P.A. The same
old God-forsaken gang of moral perverts and intellectual
misfits who more than two years ago brought a Canadian
courtesan and an unfrocked priest to Waco to lecture on
A.P.A'ism, and who threatened at one of these buzzard-feasts to mob me for calling the latter a cowardly liar,
were responsible for my being dragged with a rope by
several hundreds hoodlums up and down a Baptist college
campus in this city Oct. 2, and for the brutal assault upon
me five days later by a pack of would-be assassins who
had waited until my back was unsuspectingly turned before
they had the nerve to get out their guns. I can overlook
the assault made by the college students, although
most of them were grown men, because they were encouraged
thereto by their elders. I have positively refused to
prosecute them; but the last assault was led by a shyster
lawyer of middle-age, a so-called "judge," a member of
the board of managers of Baylor. I am seeking no
trouble with any of them—they are perfectly safe in so
far as I am concerned; still if the latter gang are not
satisfied with their cowardly crime, if they regret that
they were beaten off ere they quite succeeded in sending
me to Kingdom Come, they have only to notify me where
and when they can be found alone, and I'll give the whole
accursed mob a show for their money. I'm too slight for
a slugger—cannot lick a herd of steers with one pair o'
hands; but I can make a shot-gun sing Come to Christ. I
am credibly informed that "at least half a dozen" of
my meek and lowly Baptist brethren are but awaiting an
opportunity to assassinate me, and that if successful they
will plead in extenuation that I "have slandered Southern
women." I walk the streets of Waco day by day, and I
walk them alone. Let these cur-ristians shoot me in the
back if they dare, then plead that damning lie as excuse
for their craven cowardice. If the decent people of this
community fail to chase them to their holes and feed
their viscera to the dogs, then 'd rather be dead and in
hades forever than alive in Waco a single day.
The claim set up by my assailants that I had slandered
the female students of Baylor University is a malicious
calumny, that was but made a lying pretext for the
attacks. That my article in the October ICONOCLAST did
not impeach the character of the Baylor girls is amply
evidenced by the fact that my offer to leave the matter
to the decision of a committee of reputable business men,
to abjectly apologize and donate $500 to any charity these
gentlemen might name in case the decision was against me,
was flatly refused. "The honor of young ladies is not a
proper subject for arbitration," I was told. Quite true;
but the proper construction of an article which is made a
pretext for mob violence, is a proper matter for cool-headed and disinterested parties to pass upon. The
Baylorians insisted upon being judge, jury and executioner—
proof positive that they well knew the article would not
stand the arbitrary construction they had placed upon it.
After the first outbreak the Baylor bullies of the lost
manhood stripe and their milk-sick apologists held a windy
powwow in a Baptist church, and there bipedal brutes with
beards, creatures who have thus far succeeded in dodging
the insane asylum, whom an inscrutable Providence has
kept out of the penitentiary to ornament the amen-corner
—many of whom do not pretend to pay their bills—some
of whom owe me for the very meat upon the bones of their
scorbutic brats—branded me as a falsifier while solemnly
protesting that they had never read a line of my paper.
They proclaimed in stentor tones and pigeon-English that
would have broken the heart of Lindley Murray, that I
was a defamer of womanhood—while confessing that they
didn't know whether I had ever mentioned a female. They
howled that they "were willing to sign Brann's death-warrant"—on mere hearsay. These intellectual eunuchs,
who couldn't father an idea if cast bodily into the womb
of the goddess of wisdom, declared positively that I would
be permitted to print nothing more about their beloved
Baylor—and that without knowing whether I had advertised
it over two continents as an oasis in a moral Sahara
or a snakehole in the Dismal Swamp. It was a beautiful, a
refreshing sight, this practical approval of mob violence
by unfledged ministers on the campus of a Baptist college,
this raucous tommyrot about death-warrants and ropes,
this sawing of the air and chewing of the rag by people so
d——d ignorant that they couldn't find either end of
themselves in the dark, this chortling over the fact that
one desk-emaciated welter-weight had been caught unawares
and trampled upon by a sanctified mob—a refreshing
sight, I say, in a temple consecrated to that Christ
who forgave even his enemies from the cross. But every
man at that meeting who said he never read the ICONOCLAST
deliberately lied. The Baptists all read it. Some
subscribe and pay for it like gentlemen, some buy it,
some borrow it, and the rest steal it from the newsstands.
The greatest trouble I have is to prevent, Baptist
preachers spoiling my local sale by telling everybody in
town what the ICONOCLAST contains before the revised
proof-sheets are read. It is but fair to say, however,
that the Baptists were not alone to blame. Much of the
noise was made by a lot of tickey-tailed little politicians
who have no more religion than a rabbit, but who were
trying to open a popular jack-pot with a jimmy. Some
of the brawlers were self-seeking business men, willing to
coin blood into boodle, ready to slander Deity for a
plugged dime, anxious to avert a Baptist boycott by
emitting a deal of stinking breath. These bloated financial
ducks in a provincial mud-puddle have had entirely too
much to say. When the present lecture season is over;
when I get the Baptist mob thoroughly cowed; when I
can walk the streets without expecting every moment to
get shot from a stairway or double-banked by the meek
and lowly followers of the Messiah; when I have time to
amuse myself with trifles, I'll sue this brace of Smart Alecs
for $20,000 each for deliberate defamation of character,
and if I recover the money I'll use it to make a partial
payment on the grocery bills of the rest of the gang.
Intellectual pigmies who accumulate much cash by trading
in cash or tripe in a country town are quite apt to
become too big for their britches and require to be taken
down a peg or two, to be taught their place. They sometimes
have the nickel-plated nerve to play Rhadamanthus
to the purveyors of brains—swell up like unclean toads
and conceive themselves to be in "select society." Some
of them actually imagine themselves of more importance
to this community than Judge Gerald and Waller Baker;
yet you could scrape enough intellect from under Gerald's
toe-nails to build the crew, while Baker forgets more
every fifteen minutes than they have learned since they
were born. The meeting held at the Baptist church to
ratify the outrage was composed of a lot of self-seekers
and whining hypocrites, half of whom would sell their
souls for a copper cent and throw in their risen Lord as
lagniappe. It was a mob that writhed and wriggled in
its own putridity like so many maggots, while the local
press cowered before its impotent wrath like young skye-terriers before a skunk. If I couldn't beget better men
with the help of a digger Indian harem I'd take to the
woods and never again look upon the face of woman. It
was a glorious sight to see these "pore mizzuble wurrums
of the dust" spraining their yarn galluses trying to hurl
the writhen bolts of Olympian Jove—and now bellyaching
because hit in the umbilicus with their own boomerang.
The second assault, more brutal and cowardly than the
first, followed as the logical sequence of that powwow of
pietists, peddlers and politicians. The utterances of that
congregation of unclean adders, the resolutions adopted
by that sanctified body of dead-beats in the sanctum
sanctorum of the Baptists, was a bid for blood-injected the
idea into the warty heads of a trio of thugs that by way-laying and beating me to death they would pass into
history as heroes. Then the real manhood of Waco rose
en masse and laid down the law in no uncertain language
to the hungry hypocrites and their Baylorian hoodlums.
They declared that religious intolerance would no longer
be permitted to terrorize this town. Fearing just retribution
at the hands of the citizens, Baylor called out its
three military companies and mounted guard with rifles
furnished by the government, while the very girls in whose
name they had dragged me around the college campus with
a rope, laughed them to scorn and sent me flowers—and
the password of the bold sojer boys. One young lady
writes: "The password for the night is `Napoleon.'
Our bold soldiers halted a milk wagon at daylight this
morning. Probably they thought Brann was concealed
in one of the cans with his bowie-knife." Half a dozen men
armed with cannon-crackers could have chased the brave
mellish into the Brazos and danced with the Baylor girls
till daybreak—and I suspect that the latter would have
enjoyed the lark. For a third of a century the bigotry
of a lot of water moccasins had been the supreme law of
this land. To obtain an office the politician had to
crawl to it on his marrow bones and slavishly obey its
behests. To obtain trade the merchant had to sneeze
whenever it took snuff. To obtain patronage the local
publisher had to make it the absolute dictator of his
policy. Like Jehushran, it "waxed fat and kicked"—
until it got its legs tide in a double bow knot about its
own neck. Its tyranny became insupportable, murderous,
there was a new declaration of American independence,
and now this J. Caesar that erstwhile did bestride Central
Texas like a colossus, is more humble than Uriah Heep.
And what were the A.P.Apes of Waco doing while
honest men were raising the standard of revolt and chasing
the Baptist hierarchy into its hole? Were they in
the front rank shouting their war-cry of "no union of
church and state"—the "little red school-house" rampant
on their orange-colored rag? Not exactly. They
had sneaked off to some bat cave to plot against the
whites, to protest against the proceedings of their fellow
citizens. Had a Baptist editor been mobbed on the campus
of a Catholic college they would have howled a lung
out about Popish tyrannys stood on their heads and
fanned themselves with their own shirt-tails.
The faculty of Baylor protest that they did all in their
power to prevent the brutal outbreak. They confess,
however, that it had been brewing all day, yet they neglected
to notify either myself or the sheriff. Before me
is a Lake Charles, La. paper, in which a letter from one
of the scabs who participated in the first attack is
published. He says: "The faculty did not say do it, or
not do it." And that's about the size of it. That the
students were encouraged by one or more members of
the board of trustees can be demonstrated beyond the
peradventure of a doubt. All the stale bath water in all
the Baptist tanks this side Perdition cannot wash the
conviction from the public mind that the Baylor management
was behind that howling mob. The second assault
was led by a trustee, a member of the board of managers;
and this after I had stated positively in the local press
that I meant no disparagement of the young ladies—that
it was the administration of the University I was after.
In the October ICONOCLAST I expressed the fervent hope
that no more young ladies would be debauched at Baylor.
That constituted the ostensible
casus belli.. Do the
trustees of Baylor dare deny that such things
have
occurred at that "storm center of misinformation" and
ministerial manufactory? If so, they are a precious long
time putting me to the proof in the courts of this country.
Texas has an iron-clad criminal libel law, and I suspect
that I could pay a judgment for damages in any reasonable
sum without spraining my credit or bankrupting the
ICONOCLAST. If they have not the chilled-steel hardihood
to deny that girls have been debauched at Baylor—if by
their resounding silence anent this matter they mean to
give assent—what then? Do they hope that more girls
will be ruined there? They may take either horn of the
dilemma they like, but I beg to state that the issue here
raised cannot be obscured by dragging me around with
a rope. When Jonah was caught in a scheme of vindictive
rascality he thought he "did well to be angry." The
best thing the Baylorites can do is to 'fess up and reform
—it's too late in the century to suppress truth with six-shooters. I have heard of no "deplorable accidents" at
Add-Ran, the Christian college, consequently it has no
complaints to file against the ICONOCLAST. The Convent
of the Sacred Heart gets along somehow without "mishaps,"
and even Paul Quinn, the colored college, is graduating
no "missionaries" for Hungry Hill. Because
some girls go wrong at an institution for the promotion of
ignorance, it by no means follows that all, or any
considerable number thereof are deficient in morality. I doubt
not that a vast number of the female students of Baylor,
past and present, are pure as the flowers that bloom above
the green glacier; but some have fallen, and the conclusion
is inevitable that they were not properly protected
from the wiles of the world. I care not how noble-minded,
how pure of heart a girl may be, if she is committed when
young and inexperienced to a college where both sexes
are received, it becomes the imperative duty of the
management to render one false step impossible. When the
president of a pretentious sectarian institute must plead
with the public that he had "wept and prayed over" a
14-year old girl, but was powerless to prevent her rushing
headlong to ruin; when at a grand rally of the faithful to
condemn a well-meant criticism and encourage mob violence,
an old he-goat who couldn't get trusted at the
corner grocery for a pound of soap, confesses to more
than the ICONOCLAST had charged, by saying that some
accidents had occurred at the college, it were well for
mothers to look carefully to its management and note its
discipline before entrusting it with their young daughters.
"Accidents," indeed! Criminal negligence would be a more
appropriate name. A university consecrated to the
Baptist Christ, whose trustees lead cowardly assaults upon
law-abiding citizens and beat them with bludgeons after
they are insensible; whose faculty know that mob violence
is contemplated yet fail to report it to the police; whose
students enter the home of a man for the purpose of
dragging him by force and with drawn pistols from the
presence of his family (the Baylor thugs had the impudence
to invade my home in search of me before finding me
in the city)—such an institution, I say, is not a proper
guardian for any youth whose father doesn't desire to see
him land in the Baptist pulpit or the penitenitary. I
have been publicly warned on pain of death, and heaven
alone knows what hereafter, not to speak "disrespectful"
of Baylor; but I feel in duty bound to caution parents
against committing their children to such a pestiferous
plague-spot, such a running sore upon the body social.
...
Not only has Baylor demonstrated its unworthiness to
be the custodian of young people of either sex, but such
unworthiness has been proclaimed in the public prints by
Dr. Rufus C. Burleson, who served as its president for
almost half a century. I insisted that the salaries paid
the faculty at Baylor were insufficient to command the
services of first class educators, and that those entrusted
with the duty of selecting teachers were incapable of correctly
estimating the educational qualifications of others
Dr. Burleson goes far beyond that, expressly declaring in
the Dallas News that a majority of the present board of
managers are not college educated, that for them to properly
administer discipline and make wise selection of
teachers "is simply impossible." What, in God's name,
can be expected of an institution containing several hundred
young people of both sexes, if it be deficient in discipline?
Of what earthly use is a University if it be not
provided with a wisely selected faculty? It now remains
to be seen whether the Baptist brethren will mob Dr.
Burleson—or sneak up behind him with an assortment of
clubs and six-shooters! But that is not the worst that
Dr. Burleson says. In a published letter of his now
before me he denounces Dr. B. H. Carroll, chairman of
the board of trustees and present high muck-a-muck of
Baylor, as an ingrate, a self-seeker, a mischief maker and
an irremediable liar! Now if Burleson is telling the truth
—and I am not prepared to dispute his statements—what
can we expect of a University managed by such a man? I
am frank to confess that I did not suspect Bro. Carroll to
be quite so bad. I knew that he was an intellectual dugout
spreading the canvas of a seventy-four, that there was
precious little to him but gab and gall; but I did not
suppose that he was an habitual falsifier and guilty of
base ingratitude. I really hope that Dr. Burleson may be
mistaken—that the new boss of Baylor has not contracted
such a habit of lying that it is utterly impossible for him
to tell the truth. I should dislike to believe all that is said
about each other by the two factions of my Baptist brethren
now struggling for the control of Baylor. According
to Carroll, Dr. Burleson, president emeritus, ought to
be in the penitentiary; according to Burleson, Carroll is
not a fit associate for a brindle cow. "Speak disrespectfully
of Baylor and die!" Good Lord! were I to repeat
one-half the Baylor factions are saying about each other
I'd wreck the state. Time was when the faculty of
Baylor was the pride of the South. Those were the days
when many of the noblest men and women of Texas were
educated within its walls. They love their
alma mater,
not for what she is, but for what she was. The old
professors are gone, have been supplanted in great part by a
lot of priorient little preachers, selected by a board of
trustees, half of whom couldn't tell a Greek root from a
rutabaga,
pons asinorum from Balaam's ass. Dr. Burleson
seems to be of the opinion that a majority of the
Baylorian managers were educated in a mule-pen and
dismissed without a diploma—couldn't tell whether a man
were construing Catullus into Sanskrit or pronouncing
in Piute a panegeric on a baked pup. Were I not
persona
non grata I would like to witness the classroom
performances of these young professors—chosen with owlish
gravity by men who cannot write
deer sur without the
expenditure of enough nervo-muscular energy to raise a
cotton crop, chewing off the tips of their tongues and
blotting the paper with their proboscides. Yet for
offering to open a night school for the benefit of the Baylorian
faculty I was mobbed; for intimating that the hoard of
managers had not socked with old Socrates and ripped
with old Euripides I was assaulted by one of their number
and his brave body guard and beaten with six-shooters
and bludgeons until I was insensible.
...
It is not my present purpose to drag forth all the grisly
skeletons of Baylor and make them dance for the amusement
of the multitude. I have yielded to the urgent appeals
of my friends to let the institution down easy, to
cast a little kerosene on the troubled waters, to hold out
the olive branch to Baylor. Besides, I already have more
holes in my head than nature intended, and am not
particularly anxious to increase the assortment. Let what
is hidden from public ken so remain until that great
incubator of Christian charity, that ganglion of brotherly
love, attempts to redeem its long-standing promise to
land me in the penitentiary for criminal libel. It could
serve no good purpose at present to trace out here the
history of those "accidents" so feelingly referred to at
the ratification of the Brann round-up—would but cause
cheeks to flame and hearts to break. I would not destroy
Baylor; I would make it better. I would deprive the
ignorant and vicious of control. I would expel all the
hoodlums whose brutality and cowardice have disgraced
it. I would place at its head a thorough educator and
strict disciplinarian, a man of broad views and who sets a
good example by paying his bills. I would make its
diplomas badges of honor as in the old days, instead of
certificates of illiteracy at which public school children
laugh. No, I do not want the presidency—there are
enough perspiring Christians for revenue only quarreling
and lying about each other because of that beggarly plum
already. For months past it has given every Baptist
journal in the state a hot-box, has filled every little
preacher's head with all the petty intrigues of peanut
politics. If one-half that the leaders of the factions, now
warring over this $5 per diem bone, say about each other
be true—and I have no evidence to the contrary—they
would disgrace a boozing ken on Boiler avenue. I do not
mean to say that all Texas Baptists are bad; at least 50
per cent. of them are broad-gauge, tolerant, intelligent;
the remainder are small-bore bigots upon whom nature
put heads, as Dean Swift would say, "Solely for the sake
of conformity."
...
Baylor and the Baptists complain that the ICONOCLAST
has "persecuted them until it has become unbearable."
Bless God! who began this thing? Before the ICONOCLAST
was three days old it was boycotted by the hydrocephalous
sect. As it grew fat on that kind of fodder, ex-Priest
Slattery and his ex-nun wife were brought hither to lecture
on A.P.Aism, and incidentally make the town too caloric
for my comfort. The Baptists took their wives and
daughters to listen to Slattery's foul lies about the
convents and the confessional, the Pope and "his Waco
Apostle," and his most infamous utterances were
applauded to the echo. They sent their wives and daughters
to hear the Slattery female defame women who had given
up the pleasures of the world and were devoting their lives
to the reclamation of such unclean creatures as herself.
Slattery's last harangue was delivered to men only and
the house was packed with Baptists and Baylorites at
half-a-dollar a head. The so-called lecture was the foulest
thing that ever fell from the lips of mortal man, yet his
audience gloated over it and rolled his putrid falsehoods
as sweet morsels under its tongue.
[1] Unable to restrain
my indignation, I arose and denounced his every utterance
as a malicious lie. Immediately the audience yelled,
"Throw him out! Down with him! Smash him!" I
chanced to have my back near the side-wall, and that's
why I wasn't mobbed—the cowardly crew couldn't get
behind me. They suspected that I'd make an angel of
the first sanctified galoot who attempted to place his paws
upon me, and none cared to draw on his celestial bank
account. That's the identical gang which has the immaculate
gall to accuse me of defaming virtuous women—the
same gang which applauded Slattery for calling convents
priestly harems wants me killed for expressing the hope
that no more young girls will be debauched at Baylor.
...
Scarce had Baylor's applause of Slattery and his
woman died away, scarce had it ceased to gloat over the
"iniquities" of convent schools and priestly harems,
scarce had it ceased chuckling over the crimes of "the
Scarlet Woman," ere the police discovered that the duly
ordained "ward of the Baptist church," who was being
educated at Baylor University for missionary work among
the heathen Catholics of Brazil, was in a dreadfully
"delicate condition." She was brought from Brazil at the
tender age of 11 years by a returning missionary, she was
formally adopted by the Baptist church, she was consecrated
to the salvation of souls and placed at Baylor to
be educated. She was under the special supervision of
the president and was a member of his household—yet
at 14 years of age she became enciente. Did Baylor pity
and protect her? Did it strive to secure the punishment
of her seducer? Not exactly. It fired her out and made
no complaint to the police. When the latter discovered
her and she was required by the court to account for her
condition, she stated that she had been forcibly despoiled
by a young man about town on the premises of Baylor's
president. It chanced that this young man was brother
to the president's son-in-law, and the whole influence of
Baylor was brought to bear to clear the accused! The
son-in-law, who is a Baptist preacher and editor (as well
as other things not necessary to mention) strove to make
her confess that her guilty paramour was a pickaninny
—wanted the world to believe that orphan girls committed
to the care of that great Baptist college might become
enciente by coons! Yet the Baylor students didn't mob
him—none of its trustees laid in wait for him and slammed
him over the head with a six-shooter. The girl soon put
a white babe in evidence—a pretty little 2-pound Baylorian
diploma. The doctors declared that she had been
raped and the case looked ugly for the accused. The child
died. The ignorant little mother wanted money to go to
Memphis—and first thing we knew she had signed a
"retraction" and had a ticket to Mike Conolly's town. Who
bought it—and why! Damfino. The defendant was
acquitted of the charge of rape—the age of consent in
Texas being 12 years at that time; but whether she was
raped or seduced, the infamy occurred at Baylor University.
That's
one of the "deplorable accidents"; but it
is not the only one you will please not forget to remember.
Reads like a fairy story, doesn't it? But the law doesn't
permit Texas editors to tell fairy tales of that type. No
doubt the man who has the audacity to breathe a hope that
no more girls will be debauched at Baylor deserves to die.
Dr. Burleson, in the fullness of his Baptist charity,
branded the unfortunate girl as a natural bawd. I don't
know about that; but I do know that after she got beyond
Baylorian influences she married and began leading a
respectable life.
...
Defamer of womanhood? Get the sawlogs out of your
own eyes, brethren, before howling over the micrococci in
the optics of others. For three years past Baptist
preachers all over the land of Christ have been telling their
congregations that the ICONOCLAST is read only by depraved
people,—chiefly criminals and courtesans—and
that despite the fact that the names of thousands of the
noblest men and women of America are on its subscription
books. During the past three years the ICONOCLAST
has had upon its books the names of more than a thousand
ministers, representing every denomination. Are these
men criminals and their wives courtesans? Has any busy
little Baptist parson been rounded up with a rope for
proclaiming them as such from the pulpit? When a
deserted babe was found in the street and carried by the
Sisters into the convent, was Jehovah Boanerges Cranfill
—organ-grinder for the Baylor bosses—mobbed by the
Catholics for saying that it probably came out of the
convent? Now, you people keep down the narrative of
your nether garment and apply a hot mush poultice to
your impudence. The ICONOCLAST is only tickling you
with snipe-shot now; but don't forget for one moment that
it has buck a-plenty in its belt.
...
A word to the lady students of Baylor: Young ladies,
this controversy does not in the least concern you. The
ICONOCLAST has never questioned your good character.
You are young, however, and mischievous people have led
some of you to believe that it has done so. If you so
believe, I am as much in duty bound to apologize as though
I had really and intentionally wronged you. A gentleman
should ever hasten to apologize to ladies who feel
aggrieved; hence I sincerely crave your pardon for having
printed the article which gave you offense. Upon learning
that you read into it a meaning which I did not intend,
I stopped the presses and curtailed the circulation of the
October number as much as possible, proving my sincerity
by a pecuniary sacrifice. I would not for the wealth of
this world either do you a wilful injustice, or have you
believe me capable of such a crime. May you prosper in
your studies, graduate with honor and bestow your hands
upon men worthy of noble women.
...
P.S. In looking over the foregoing since it was put in
type, I suspect that I have been a trifle too hard on some
of those who met to ratify the action of the first mob and
publicly brand me as a defamer of women. I would not
do my deadliest enemy an injustice. Two wrongs do
not make a right; hence I concede that perhaps half of
those present pay their debts and make a reasonable effort
to be decent. If God neglected to bless them with brains
that is their misfortune instead of their fault. Let it go
at that. They have had their say, I've had mine, and
right here I drop the subject until another attempt is
made to run me out of town. I make this concession, not
that Baylor deserves it, but at the earnest request of the
law-abiding element of this city.
[1]
Brann's reply to Slattery appears in Vol. XII.