THE ORANG-OUTANG HUNTERS
There is a part of the United States which suffered for a century or two
under the blight of Negro slavery; in consequence, from Virginia to
Texas, the population still lives in the ideas of a hundred years ago.
Here are communities which are not content to use religious dogmas as a
shield for special privilege; they really believe the dogmas, and are
willing to fight about them and to torture one another, as in the old
days. In these states there has sprung up what is called the
“Fundamentalist” movement, made up of seventeenth century Cromwellians
in modern machine-made clothing; the only difference being that whereas
the old Pilgrims wished to “come out from among them,” the idea of these
modern fanatics is to drive out the other fellow. They are carrying on
an enormous campaign in the evangelical churches, seeking to keep out of
the pulpits people who do not believe in the literal inspiration of
Scripture—in Noah’s ark, and Jonah and the whale, and Joshua blowing
down the walls of Jericho; also in the virgin birth, and the six-day
creation of man. They are especially indignant against “evolution,”
which means to them one thing, that man is descended from the
monkey—something it does not mean to any scientist.
The leader of this new fanaticism is no less a personage than the
Honorable William Jennings Bryan, the Peerless Commoner, who, having
made several hundred thousand dollars out of lecturing, is not so keen
for the breaking of the money power, but gives his time to the
preserving of the ignorance of his forefathers. Mr. Bryan has used his
enormous prestige with the legislatures of the Southern states; he came
within one vote of putting through the Kentucky legislature a bill
providing that no public appropriations should be used for salaries of
employes who teach Evolution or Darwinism. Incredible as it may seem, he
succeeded in putting through such a measure in the states of South
Carolina and Oklahoma, and he expects to make a tour of the legislatures
this winter and try with others.
These reactionaries are busy in all the Southern colleges, plying their
brooms against the tide of modern thought. They succeeded in driving
Professor Wheeler from the University of Mississippi, and Professor Rice
from the Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas. Also they are
strong among the Baptists, and at Waco, Texas, they have got possession
of a large school called Baylor University. This place had a professor
of sociology, G. S. Dow, who devoutly believed in his Baptist faith, and
earnestly protested that he did not teach that “man came from another
species”; but he published a text-book, “Introduction to the Principles
of Sociology,” in which he used some phrases of modern science, and the
howling dervishes of Texas took it up. In Fort Worth is a Baptist
preacher, who publishes a paper called the “Searchlight,” and has grown
rich out of waging war upon modern thought; in what delicate language
his controversies are carried on you may judge from one sentence,
referring to the expulsion of Professor Rice: “While the Methodists have
put their orang-outang out, we are keeping ours in!”
I really felt sorry for Professor Dow, as I read over a mass of
clippings concerning his trouble; he is such a humble and patient
Christian gentleman! But, you see, in his book he actually made
reference to “primitive man,” and we all know there was no such beast;
says the “Searchlight”: “Those of us who read our Bibles have always
thought that he was made in the image of God.” So Professor Dow was
forced to resign, and he stayed resigned, in spite of indignant protests
of his students.
The Baptists of Texas appointed a committee, which went about in these
educational institutions, submitting to every instructor a
questionnaire, and forcing the resignation of several who were too
honest in their confessions. They held a “pastors’ and laymen’s
conference,” in which they laid down “uncompromising opposition to the
teachings of Darwinian evolution, and the substitution of social service
for regeneration.” Reading their literature is to a modern man like
having a nightmare; it takes you back three hundred years in human
history, when they burned witches at the stake, and tore men to pieces
on the rack. In Texas now they burn only Negroes; but the wretched,
half-starved, rack-rented tenant-farmers and their wives are victims of
the most degrading sort of terrors. In one issue of the “Searchlight” I
find a portrait of a maniac with a big black moustache, cavorting with
clenched fists on a platform, and advertised as “the man who preaches
sin black, hell hot, life short, death certain, eternity long, and calls
sinners to a blood-bought redemption.”
In “The Profits of Religion” I have pictured the “Bootstrap-lifters,”
with their eyes uplifted to heaven while the agents of the Wholesale
Pickpockets’ Association are robbing them on earth. Just so it is with
the “Fundamentalists”; while they were getting the professor of
evolution fired from the Southern Methodist University, the public
utility interests of Texas, camouflaged as the “Texas Public Service
Information Bureau,” have been poisoning the minds of the students. They
have contrived a course of lectures, to be given by expert public
utility pickpockets—the general manager of the telephone company, the
president of the power and light company, the general manager of the
traction company—so on through a long list.
Also these Fundamentalists are active in Tennessee, where they brought
destruction to an old friend of mine, a thoroughly trained scientist and
most humane and charming gentleman, who was director of hygiene and
physician at the state university. They were cordial to him in the first
weeks, until he began attending the Unitarian church; then a pillar of
the rich Baptist church in Knoxville refused to donate to the “Y” work
at the university “so long as they had Unitarians on the faculty.” In
the hope of forcing my friend to withdraw, the president and dean
proceeded to make him unpopular by requiring all freshmen to take a
course of two hours a week in “personal hygiene” with him—and receiving
no credit for the course! Still, the professor made a success of it, and
more students came to him for treatment than he could handle; so last
spring he was unceremoniously dropped.
At Bethany, West Virginia, is a college of the religious body who call
themselves the “Disciples of Christ,” or “Christians”—to distinguish
themselves from Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and other
kinds of heathen. This institution is described as “a literary, moral
and religious school,” and it now has some five hundred students, and
thirty or forty members of the faculty. They got a young professor by
the name of Croyle, in the “Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament,” and they
kept him less than a year, and then summarily fired him without notice.
The professor put the case in the hands of the American Association of
University Professors, which wrote to the president of the college and
proposed an investigation. The president’s name is Cramblet—again I have
to explain that I do not make these things up. President Cramblet
replied to the effect that he and his college did not want any
interference from professors’ associations. “For the present we are
quite sure that we can make our own rules and conduct our own affairs
better than some people who are not able to take care of their own
business.”
It is interesting to follow this story and watch the slow process of the
opening up of this religious hard shell. It took the Association about a
year and a half to do the job; they kept boring away—a little publicity
here and a threat of publicity there—until finally President Cramblet
popped open and wrote a long letter, explaining the crimes of Professor
Croyle, and agreeing to meet a committee of the Association and prove
his charges. It appeared that Professor Croyle had come from the Union
Theological Seminary, with his mind full of what in the West Virginia
mountains is known as “destructive criticism.” In one of his classes he
had explained that maybe the story of God’s plan to drown everybody in
the world except Noah and his family was not to be taken quite
literally; that night President Cramblet was called to the girls’
dormitory, “because a number of them were weeping and well-nigh
hysterical over this experience!”
It is interesting to note that the Professors’ Association does not
attempt to insist that church colleges shall maintain any standards of
freedom of teaching or of thinking. All it lays down is that “church
colleges should fully and unequivocally inform the public and their
professors of all restrictions that their tenets impose upon academic
freedom.” And it notes that this “Christian” college has now taken out
of its catalogue the statement that “Bethany seeks the latest and best
results of modern scholarship,” and that “the latest results of
archeology are used in an attempt to understand the vitality of the
Prophetic Activity!”
I close this chapter with the singular adventure of my friend, Harry
Laidler, who went a few years ago to lecture at Emory and Henry College,
one of the oldest institutions in Virginia. Laidler was secretary of the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and the students had asked to hear
him, and the president had consented. It chanced, however, that an
itinerant preacher was present that morning, and he strongly disapproved
of a Socialist lecture, and took occasion to save the students from the
consequences of their wayward curiosity. He took the platform, and
lifted his hands in invocation to the Almighty, imploring Him to protect
these young minds from the heresies and false doctrines to which they
were about to be exposed!