PROFESSOR BILLY SUNDAY
No study of the University of Pennsylvania would be complete which
failed to mention that it was founded by Benjamin Franklin, and gave an
honorary degree to Thomas Paine. Franklin’s doctrines, political and
religious, could not be taught in any university in America today, while
as for Paine, he could not keep out of jail in any state of the Union.
Theodore Roosevelt described Paine as “a filthy little atheist,” which
makes one think of Agassiz’s student, who defined a lobster as “a red
fish that swims backwards.” There were only three things wrong with the
definition, said Agassiz; a lobster is not red, it is not a fish, and it
does not swim backwards. Thomas Paine was not filthy, he was not little,
and he wrote: “I believe in one God and no more.” Paine first proposed
the Declaration of Independence, he saved the American Revolution by his
eloquence, and he will come into his own when Americans are free men.
Meantime, the great university which honored him would not dare to
mention his name, and his place in the academic sunshine is taken by the
Rev. William A. Sunday, D.D.
For the benefit of posterity, I explain that Sunday was an incredibly
vulgar and blatant religious revivalist, who abused the labor movement
and extolled the rich, and was used by the interlocking directorate to
keep the eyes of the masses fixed on heaven. They carried him from one
city to another all over the United States, and in Philadelphia they
financed for him a four weeks’ campaign. Sunday had already received the
degree of doctor of divinity from one American college; he was now
welcomed with open arms by the University of Pennsylvania, which had
barred Samuel Gompers from speaking, and more recently has barred James
Maurer, president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor.
About the reception of the Rev. Billy, you may read in his biography, a
chapter headed “A Wonderful Day in a Great University.” “The greatest
day of his crowded life,” the biographer comments, and quotes a few
samples of the eloquence whereby the great evangelist promoted the cause
of culture and scholarship. “Oh, Jesus, isn’t this a fine bunch?” he
began his closing prayer. “Hot Cakes Off the Griddle” was the title of
his address, and he portrayed the wife of Pilate—“one of those
miserable, pliable, plastic, two-faced, two-by-four, lick-spittle,
toot-my-own-horn sort of women”; and then Pilate himself—“one of those
rathole, pin-headed, pliable, stand-pat, free-lunch, pie-counter
politicians.” Speaking in the largest auditorium of the university,
before the assembled students and instructors, Billy Sunday declared
that “Jesus Christ is either the son of God or the natural offspring of
a Jewish harlot.”
You will appreciate this even more when you learn that one of the
underground charges laid against Scott Nearing was that he, when asked
privately by a student for his opinion of the Episcopal Academy, had
said that he would rather send a son of his to hell than to the academy.
This shocked a trustee, Mr. Bell, Republican machine politician and
ex-attorney general, who had never heard such language used in political
life. But Mr. Bell did not object to the Rev. Sunday stating that
ex-President Eliot of Harvard University was a man “so low-down he would
need an aeroplane to get into hell.” Poor President Eliot, it should be
explained, is a Unitarian—that is the reason he gets cussed![G]
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Footnote G:
Ordinarily a man’s domestic misfortunes are not proper basis for
attack upon his ideas; but when a man sets himself up as a teacher of
the young, when he claims that he has the one true and valid moral
system, and pours out virulent abuse upon all who differ with his
ideas—then it seems reasonable to call attention to the fact that the
son of the evangelist, William A. Sunday, Jr., has been arrested in
the city of Los Angeles twice within the past fortnight. The first
time he was fined two hundred dollars for reckless driving of an
automobile; the second time his home was raided, and he and seven of
his guests were arrested upon complaint of the neighborhood that they
have been conducting drunken debauches for many weeks.
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Mr. Bell is not the only pious politician on this pious board. Senator
George Wharton Pepper is a devout Episcopalian, leader of the church of
J. P. Morgan and Company in the City of Brotherly Love. Mr. Pepper is so
pious that he does not believe in education, he believes only in
religion. In his book, “A Voice From the Crowd,” he says: “Subtract God
and you get—not secular education, but no education at all.” Again he
says: “The teacher who interprets all of life in terms of brotherhood is
responsible for leading the students to forget God.” So, needless to
say, Mr. Pepper was annoyed when Scott Nearing caused to be published in
the Philadelphia “North American” a letter addressed to Billy Sunday,
advocating the godless idea of brotherhood. Read Nearing’s evil words:
You have declared your interest in the salvation of Philadelphia.
Look around you and ask yourself what salvation means here.
The city is filled with unemployment and poverty; multitudes are
literally starving; thousands of little children toil in the city’s
factories and stores; its workers, a third of a million strong, have
no workmen’s compensation law for their protection. Meanwhile the
railroad interests which control the hard coal fields are reaping
exorbitant profits; the traction company exacts the highest fares paid
by the people of any American city; the manufacturers, intrenched at
Harrisburg, are fighting tooth and claw to prevent the passage of
up-to-date labor laws, and the vested interests are placing property
rights above men’s souls.
These monstrous offenses against humanity—this defiance of the spirit
of Christ’s gospel—exist today in the city which hears your message.
And further: the well-fed people, whose ease and luxury are built upon
this poverty, child labor and exploitation, sit in your congregation,
contribute to your campaign funds, entertain you socially, and invite
you to hold prayer meetings in their homes.
These are they that bind grievous burdens on men’s shoulders, that
make clean the outside of the cup and the platter—the devourers of
widows’ houses, against whom Christ hurled His curses.
Here is Dives; yonder is Lazarus. And it is Dives who has made your
campaign financially possible.
Make no mistake! The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees of
Philadelphia will never crucify you while you deal in theological
pleasantries. Has it occurred to you that their kindness is a return
for your services in helping them to divert attention from real,
pressing worldly injustice to heavenly bliss? Turn your oratorical
brilliancy for a moment against low wages, over-work, unemployment,
monopoly and special privilege.
Before you leave Philadelphia will you speak these truths?
We pray “Thy Kingdom come on earth.” While men are underpaid, while
women are overworked, while children grow up in squalor, while
exploitation and social injustice remain, the Kingdom of God never can
come on earth and never will.
It was after the publication of this blasphemy that our interlocking
trustees decided that Scott Nearing must go. They knew that the young
professor’s colleagues were solidly behind him, and they also knew that
there had been no room in Logan Hall big enough to hold the crowds of
students who thronged to his lectures. So they must be cunning, and wait
until both instructors and students had scattered to the country, and
there was no longer a chance of organized action. On June 14 they voted
not to reappoint Nearing, and the provost wrote him a brief note
advising him of this action; at the same time the trustees voted
privately that they would make no statement on the subject—regular
gum-shoe work, such as they were accustomed to use when they put a bill
through their city council, stealing the socks off the feet of William
Penn’s statue!
But some of the alumni got together and formed a committee, and wrote
letters to all the trustees, and also wrote letters to the press, and
before long the newspaper reporters were dogging the trustees, trying to
“smoke them out.” “Why should we make an explanation of what we choose
to do as trustees?” demanded Mr. J. Levering Jones, trust company and
street railway company and insurance company director and Republican
machine politician. “The University of Pennsylvania is not a public
institution.” And then the reporters got after the pious Senator Pepper,
who also denied that the university was a public institution. The people
of the state were putting up a million dollars a year for it—they are
now putting up a million and a half; but they have no say as to how this
million dollars is spent! The professors of the university were in the
same position as Senator Pepper’s secretary, so this pious man declared;
he had the same right to discharge them, and they had no more right to
demand an explanation. Nor were the trustees obliged to pay attention to
the provisions of the Wharton trust deed—in spite of the indignant
protests of Mr. Morris, one of the trustees of the Wharton estate.
The agitation continued, and little by little these trustees were smoked
out and forced to reveal themselves. Terrible rumors were spread as to
what Scott Nearing had done. He had questioned a student, the son of a
Philadelphia judge, and not liking the student’s answers, had sneered:
“That is the kind of ignorance you would expect to find in judicial
circles.” The above statement being widely quoted by the trustees,
Nearing’s colleagues produced a signed statement from the student, that
he had never met Professor Nearing or spoken to him; he had sat in
Nearing’s classes, but had never been asked any oral questions by him.
The real reason behind the whole proceeding was revealed by a legislator
up in Harrisburg, who got drunk at the Majestic Hotel and told how “Joe”
Grundy, woolen manufacturer of Bristol, and president of the State
Manufacturers’ Association, had fixed it up with Senator Buckman, his
political boss, that the university should not get its annual
appropriation until Nearing was fired. So Nearing was fired, and stayed
fired, and that was the end of it. Several of his colleagues quit the
university; the rest of them raised a fund to pay Nearing a year’s
salary, as tribute of their admiration; but they themselves stayed on
and behaved themselves, and there has been no more disturbance at the
Wharton School. The University of Pennsylvania professors no longer go
out and lecture against child labor, they no longer serve on public
commissions—or if they do, their findings are what the interlocking
directorate wishes found. There are no longer graft exposures in
Philadelphia; as one professor remarked to me: “It’s all inside the
heads of people who don’t tell!” And this same professor reported an
exclamation which came from the lips of his dean: “Oh, how I hate
reformers!”