General Washington’s Negro Body Servant

Mark Twain

Galaxy/February, 1868

The stirring part of this celebrated colored man’s life properly began with his death–that is to say, the notable features of his biography began with the first time he died. He had been little heard of up to that time, but since then we have never ceased to hear of him; we have never ceased to hear of him at stated, unfailing intervals. His was a most remarkable career, and I have thought that its history would make a valuable addition to our biographical literature. Therefore, I have carefully collated the materials for such a work, from authentic sources, and here present them to the public. I have rigidly excluded from these pages everything of a doubtful character, with the object in view of introducing my work into the schools for the instruction of the youth of my country.

The name of the famous body-servant of General Washington was George. After serving his illustrious master faithfully for half a century, and enjoying throughout his long term his high regard and confidence, it became his sorrowful duty at last to lay that beloved master to rest in his peaceful grave by the Potomac. Ten years afterward—in 1809—full of years and honors, he died himself, mourned by all who knew him. The Boston GAZETTE of that date thus refers to the event:

George, the favorite body-servant of the lamented Washington, died in Richmond, Va., last Tuesday, at the ripe age of 95 years. His intellect was unimpaired, and his memory tenacious, up to within a few minutes of his decease. He was present at the second installation of Washington as President, and also at his funeral, and distinctly remembered all the prominent incidents connected with those noted events.

From this period we hear no more of the favorite body-servant of General Washington until May, 1825, at which time he died again. A Philadelphia paper thus speaks of the sad occurrence:

At Macon, Ga., last week, a colored man named George, who was the favorite body-servant of General Washington, died at the advanced age of 95 years. Up to within a few hours of his dissolution he was in full possession of all his faculties, and could distinctly recollect the second installation of Washington, his death and burial, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battle of Trenton, the griefs and hardships of Valley Forge, etc. Deceased was followed to the grave by the entire population of Macon.

On the Fourth of July, 1830, and also of 1834 and 1836, the subject of this sketch was exhibited in great state upon the rostrum of the orator of the day, and in November of 1840 he died again. The St. Louis REPUBLICAN of the 25th of that month spoke as follows:

ANOTHER RELIC OF THE REVOLUTION GONE.

George, once the favorite body-servant of General Washington, died yesterday at the house of Mr. John Leavenworth in this city, at the venerable age of 95 years. He was in the full possession of his faculties up to the hour of his death, and distinctly recollected the first and second installations and death of President Washington, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battles of Trenton and Monmouth, the sufferings of the patriot army at Valley Forge, the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, the speech of Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Delegates, and many other old-time reminiscences of stirring interest. Few white men die lamented as was this aged negro. The funeral was very largely attended.

During the next ten or eleven years the subject of this sketch appeared at intervals at Fourth-of-July celebrations in various parts of the country, and was exhibited upon the rostrum with flattering success. But in the fall of 1855 he died again. The California papers thus speak of the event:

ANOTHER OLD HERO GONE

Died, at Dutch Flat, on the 7th of March, George (once the confidential body-servant of General Washington), at the great age of 95 years. His memory, which did not fail him till the last, was a wonderful storehouse of interesting reminiscences. He could distinctly recollect the first and second installations and death of President Washington, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battles of Trenton and Monmouth, and Bunker Hill, the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, and Braddock’s defeat. George was greatly respected in Dutch Flat, and it is estimated that there were 10,000 people present at his funeral.

The last time the subject of this sketch died was in June, 1864; and until we learn the contrary, it is just to presume that he died permanently this time. The Michigan papers thus refer to the sorrowful event:

ANOTHER CHERISHED REMNANT OF THE REVOLUTION GONE

George, a colored man, and once the favorite body-servant of George Washington, died in Detroit last week, at the patriarchal age of 95 years. To the moment of his death his intellect was unclouded, and he could distinctly remember the first and second installations and death of Washington, the surrender of Cornwallis, the battles of Trenton and Monmouth, and Bunker Hill, the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, Braddock’s defeat, the throwing over of the tea in Boston harbor, and the landing of the Pilgrims. He died greatly respected, and was followed to the grave by a vast concourse of people.

The faithful old servant is gone! We shall never see him more until he turns up again. He has closed his long and splendid career of dissolution, for the present, and sleeps peacefully, as only they sleep who have earned their rest. He was in all respects a remarkable man. He held his age better than any celebrity that has figured in history; and the longer he lived the stronger and longer his memory grew. If he lives to die again, he will distinctly recollect the discovery of America.

The above resume of his biography I believe to be substantially correct, although it is possible that he may have died once or twice in obscure places where the event failed of newspaper notoriety. One fault I find in all the notices of his death I have quoted, and this ought to be correct. In them he uniformly and impartially died at the age of 95. This could not have been. He might have done that once, or maybe twice, but he could not have continued it indefinitely. Allowing that when he first died, he died at the age of 95, he was 151 years old when he died last, in 1864. But his age did not keep pace with his recollections. When he died the last time, he distinctly remembered the landing of the Pilgrims, which took place in 1620. He must have been about twenty years old when he witnessed that event, wherefore it is safe to assert that the body-servant of General Washington was in the neighborhood of two hundred and sixty or seventy years old when he departed this life finally.

Having waited a proper length of time, to see if the subject of his sketch had gone from us reliably and irrevocably, I now publish his biography with confidence, and respectfully offer it to a mourning nation.

P.S.–I see by the papers that this infamous old fraud has just died again, in Arkansas. This makes six times that he is known to have died, and always in a new place. The death of Washington’s body-servant has ceased to be a novelty; its charm is gone; the people are tired of it; let it cease. This well-meaning but misguided negro has not put six different communities to the expense of burying him in state, and has swindled tens of thousands of people into following him to the grave under the delusion that a select and peculiar distinction was being conferred upon them. Let him stay buried for good now; and let that newspaper suffer the severest censure that shall ever, in all the future time, publish to the world that General Washington’s favorite colored body-servant has died again.

The Melodeon as a Religious Motor

Mark Twain

Harpers/March, 1878

There is no doubt that the hand organ, badly played, is a means of grace, if its discipline be properly applied. But its influence is very different from that of the cabinet organ, as the full-grown melodeon is now called. This latter is strictly a means of evangelization. It is only manufactured for moral purposes; and if any secular person thinks he can buy one for his lager-beer saloon, let him try it. These organs are sold only to persons who can bring a certificate of good moral character and of church membership.

The melodeon is good for nothing to dance by, except among the Shakers and in those strictly church sociables held in the sociable end of the church. It is not used at all for the German, except in Boston, a place where very little reverence is left. There is something in its pathetic drone that takes the life out of the waltz and dismembers the polka redowa, In the soirees dansantes of the metropolis its voice is almost never heard. There is an impression, current especially in the rural districts, that the melodeon is a hilarious, convivial instrument, calculated to make youth giddy and old age frivolous. This is not so, and the notion cannot he too promptly met. The melodeon was built on purpose to promote moral and religious tendencies in the minds of the young, and it is sold only for that use. Any other use of it is an infringement of the patent.

It is one of the wildest notions of this slanderous age (one that we presume was started in circulation by the piano judges at the Centennial) that the melodeon is a source of depravity to youth, and that if you shut a young person in a room where the melodeon is persistently played, he will become exhilarated and profane. Nothing is further from the truth. The melodeon never excites anything except devotional emotions; no other instrument so inspires them, not even the big organ or the harp. We do not go so far as to say that, let us make the melodeons of a people, and we do not care who makes their morals, but we do say that a people brought up on the melodeon will not care much for the accordion or any other sinful instrument like that.

The Private History of a Campaign That Failed

Mark Twain

Century Magazine/December, 1885

You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war, is it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started out to do something in it but didn’t? Thousands entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out again permanently. These, by their very numbers, are respectable and therefore entitled to a sort of voice, not a loud one, but a modest one, not a boastful one but an apologetic one. They ought not be allowed much space among better people, people who did something. I grant that, but they ought at least be allowed to state why they didn’t do anything and also to explain the process by which they didn’t do anything. Surely this kind of light must have some sort of value.

Out west there was a good deal of confusion in men’s minds during the first months of the great trouble, a good deal of unsettledness, of leaning first this way then that, and then the other way. It was hard for us to get our bearings. I call to mind an example of this. I was piloting on the Mississippi when the news came that South Carolina had gone out of the Union on the 20th of December, 1860. My pilot mate was a New Yorker. He was strong for the Union; so was I. But he would not listen to me with any patience, my loyalty was smirched, to his eye, because my father had owned slaves. I said in palliation of this dark fact that I had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was a great wrong and he would free the solitary Negro he then owned if he could think it right to give away the property of the family when he was so straitened in means. My mate retorted that a mere impulse was nothing, anyone could pretend to a good impulse, and went on decrying my Unionism and libelling my ancestry. A month later the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi and I became a rebel; so did he. We were together in New Orleans the 26th of January, when Louisiana went out of the Union. He did his fair share of the rebel shouting but was opposed to letting me do mine. He said I came of bad stock, of a father who had been willing to set slaves free. In the following summer he was piloting a Union gunboat and shouting for the Union again and I was in the Confederate army. I held his note for some borrowed money. He was one of the most upright men I ever knew but he repudiated that note without hesitation because I was a rebel and the son of a man who owned slaves.

In that summer of 1861 the first wash of the wave of war broke upon the shores of Missouri. Our state was invaded by the Union forces. They took possession of St. Louis, Jefferson Barracks, and some other points. The governor, Calib Jackson, issued his proclamation calling out fifty thousand militia to repel the invader.

I was visiting in the small town where my boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County. Several of us got together in a secret place by night and formed ourselves into a military company. One Tom Lyman, a young fellow of a good deal of spirit but of no military experience, was made captain; I was made second lieutenant. We had no first lieutenant, I do not know why, it was so long ago. There were fifteen of us. By the advice of an innocent connected with the organization we called ourselves the Marion Rangers. I do not remember that anyone found fault with the name. I did not, I thought it sounded quite well. The young fellow who proposed this title was perhaps a fair sample of the kind of stuff we were made of. He was young, ignorant, good natured, well meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels and singing forlorn love ditties. He had some pathetic little nickel plated aristocratic instincts and detested his name, which was Dunlap, detested it partly because it was nearly as common in that region as Smith but mainly because it had a plebian sound to his ears. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way; d’Unlap. That contented his eye but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the same old pronunciation, emphasis on the front end of it. He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined, a thing to make one shiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and affectations, he began to write his name so; d’Un’Lap. And he waited patiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at his work of art and he had his reward at last, for he lived to see that name accepted and the emphasis put where he wanted it put by people who had known him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been as familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure of victory at last is the courage that can wait. He said he had found by consulting some ancient French chronicles that the name was rightly and originally written d’Un’Lap and said that if it were translated into English it would mean Peterson, Lap, Latin or Greek, he said, for stone or rock, same as the French pierre, that is to say, Peter, d’ of or from, un, a or one, hence d’Un’Lap, of or from a stone or a Peter, that is to say, one who is the son of a stone, the son of a peter, Peterson. Our militia company were not learned and the explanation confused them, so they called him Peterson Dunlap. He proved useful to us in his way, he named our camps for us and generally struck a name that was “no slouch” as the boys said.

That is one sample of us. Another was Ed Stevens, son of the town jeweller, trim built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat, bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. There was nothing serious in life to him. As far as he was concerned, this military expedition of ours was simply a holiday. I should say about half of us looked upon it in much the same way, not consciously perhaps, but unconsciously. We did not think, we were not capable of it. As for myself, I was full of unreasoning joy to be done with turning out of bed at midnight and four in the morning, for a while grateful to have a change, new scenes, new occupations, a new interest. In my thoughts that was as far as I went. I did not go into the details, as a rule, one doesn’t at twenty four.

Another sample was Smith, the blacksmith’s apprentice. This vast donkey had some pluck, of a slow and sluggish nature, but a soft heart. At one time he would knock a horse down fro some impropriety and at another he would get homesick and cry. However, he had one ultimate credit to his account which some of us hadn’t. He stuck to the war and was killed in battle at last.

Joe Bowers, another sample, was a huge, good natured, flax headed lubber, lazy, sentimental, full of harmless brag, a grumbler by nature, an experience and industrious ambitious and often quite picturesque liar, and yet not a successful one for he had no intelligent training but was allowed to come up just anyways. This life was serious enough to him, and seldom satisfactory. But he was a good fellow anyway and the boys all liked him. He was made orderly sergeant, Stevens was made corporal.

These samples will answer and they are quite fair ones. Well, this herd of cattle started for the war. What could you expect of them? They did as well as they knew how, but really, what was justly expected of them? Nothing I should say. And that is what they did.

We waited for a dark night, for caution and secrecy were necessary, then toward midnight we stole in couples and from various directions to the Griggith place beyond town. From that place we set out together on foot. Hannibal lies at the extreme south eastern corner of Marion County, on the Mississippi river. Our objective point was the hamlet of New London, ten miles away in Ralls County.

The first hour was all fun, all idle nonsense and laughter. But that could not be kept up. The steady drudging became like work, the play had somehow oozed out of it, the stillness of the woods and the sombreness of the night began to throw a depressing influence over the spirits of the boys and presently the talking died out and each person shut himself up in his own thoughts. During the last half of the second hour nobody said a word.

Now we approached a log farmhouse where, according to reports, there was a guard of five Union soldiers. Lyman called a halt, and there, in the deep gloom of the overhanging branches, he began to whisper a plan of assault upon the house, which made the gloom more depressing than it was before. We realized with a cold suddenness that here was no jest–we were standing face to face with actual war. We were equal to the occasion. In our response there was no hesitation, no indecision. We said that if Lyman wanted to meddle with those soldiers he could go ahead and do it, but if he waited for us to follow him he would wait a long time.

Lyman urged, pleaded, tried to shame us into it, but it had no effect. Our course was plain in our minds, our minds were made up. We would flank the farmhouse, go out around. And that was what we did.

We struck into the woods and entered upon a rough time, stumbling over roots, getting tangled in vines and torn by briers. At last we reached an open place in a safe region and we sat down, blown and hot, to cool off and nurse our scratches and bruises. Lyman was annoyed but the rest of us were cheerful. We had flanked the farmhouse. We had made our first military movement and it was a success. We had nothing to fret about, we were feeling just the other way. Horse paly and laughing began again. The expedition had become a holiday frolic once more.

Then we had two more hours of dull trudging and ultimate silence and depression. Then about dawn, we straggled into New London, soiled, heel blistered, fagged with out little march, and all of us, except Stevens, in a sour and raspy humour and privately down on the war. We stacked our shabby old shotguns in Colonel Ralls’s barn and then went in a body and breakfasted with that veteran of the mexican war. Afterward he took us to a distant meadow, and there, in the shade of a tree, we listened to an old fashioned speech from him, full of gunpowder and glory, full of that adjective piling, mixed metaphor and windy declamation which was regraded as eloquence in that ancient time and region and then he swore on a bible to be faithful to the State of Missouri and drive all invaders from her soil no matter whence they may come or under what flag they might march. This mixed us considerably and we could not just make out what service we were involved in, but Colonel Ralls, the practised politician and phrase juggler, was not similarly in doubt. He knew quite clearly he had invested us in the cause of the Southern Confederacy. He closed the solemnities by belting around me the sword which his neighbour, Colonel brown, had worn at Beuna Vista and Molino del Ray and he accompanied this act with another impressive blast.

Then we formed in line of battle and marched four hours to a shady and pleasant piece of woods on the border of a far reaching expanse of a flowery prairie. It was an enchanting region for war, our kind of war.

We pierced the forest about half a mile and took up a strong position with some low and rocky hills behind us, and a purling limpid creek in front. Straightaway half the command was in swimming and the other half fishing. The ass with the french name gave the position a romantic title but it was too long so the boys shortened and simplified it to Camp Ralls.

We occupied an old maple sugar camp whose half rotted troughs were still propped against the trees. A long corn crib served fro sleeping quarters fro the battalion. On our left, half a mile away, were Mason’s farm and house, and he was a friend to the cause. Shortly after noon the farmers began to arrive from several different directions with mules and horses for our use, and these they lent us for as long as the war might last, which, they judged, might be about three months. The animals were of all sizes all colours and all breeds. They were mainly young and frisky and nobody in the command could stay on them long at a time, for we were town boys and ignorant of horsemanship. The creature that fell to my share was a very small mule, and yet so quick and active he could throw me off without difficulty and it did this whenever I got on. Then it would bray, stretching its neck out, laying its ears back and spreading its jaws till you could see down to its works. If I took it by the bridle and tried to lead it off the grounds it would sit down and brace back and no one could ever budge it. However, I was not entirely destitute of military resources and I did presently manage to spoil this game, for I had seen many a steamboat aground in my time and knew a trick or two which even a grounded mule would be obliged to respect. There was a well by the corn crib so I substituted thirty fathom of rope for the bridle and fetched him home with the windlass.

I will anticipate here sufficiently to say that we did learn to ride after some days’ practice, but never well. We could not learn to like our animals. They were not choice ones and most of them had annoying peculiarities of one kind or another. Stevens’s horse would carry him, when he was not noticing, under the huge excrescences which for on the trunks of oak trees and wipe him out of the saddle this way. Stevens got several bad hurts. Sergeant Bowers’s horse was very large and tall, slim with long legs, and looked like a railroad bridge. His size enabled him to reach all about, and as far as he wanted to go, so he was always biting Bowers’s legs. On the march, in the sun, Bowers slept a good deal and as soon as the horse recognized he was asleep he would reach around and bite him on the leg. His legs were black and blue with bites. This was the only thing that could make him swear, but this always did, whenever his horse bit him he swore, and of course, Stevens, who laughed at everything, laughed at this and would get into such convulsions over it as to lose his balance and fall off his horse, and then Bowers, already irritated by the pain of the horse bite, would resent the laughter with hard language, and there would be a quarrel so that horse made no end of trouble and bad blood in the command.

However, I will get back to where I was, our first afternoon in the sugar camp. The sugar troughs came very handy as horse troughs and we had plenty of corn to fill them with. I ordered Sergeant Bowers to feed my mule, but he said that if I reckoned he went to war to be a dry nurse to a mule it wouldn’t take me very long to find out my mistake. I believed that this was insubordination but I was full of uncertainties about everything military so I let the matter pass and went and ordered Smith, the blacksmith’s apprentice, to feed the mule, but he merely gave me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensibly seven year old horse gives you when you lift up his lip and find he is fourteen, and turned his back on me. I then went to the captain and asked if it were not right and proper and military for me to have an orderly. He said it was, but as there was only one orderly in the corps, it was but right he himself should have Bowers on his staff. Bowers said he wouldn’t serve on anyone’s staff and if anybody thought he could make him, let him try. So, of course, the matter had to be dropped, there was no other way.

Next, nobody would cook. It was considered a degradation so we had no dinner. We lazed the rest of the pleasant afternoon away, some dozing under trees, some smoking cob pipes and talking sweethearts and war, others playing games. By late supper time all hands were famished and to meet the difficulty, all hands turned to on an equal footing, and gathered wood, built fires, and cooked the evening meal. Afterward everything was smooth for a while then trouble broke out between the corporal and the sergeant, each claiming to rank the other. Nobody knew which was the higher office so Lyman had to settle the matter by making the rank of both officers equal. The commander of an ignorant crew like that has many troubles and vexations which probably do not occur in the regular army at all. However, with the song singing and yarn spinning around the campfire everything presently became serene again, and by and by we raked the corn down one level in one end of the crib and all went to bed on it, tying a horse to the door so he would neigh if anyone tried to get in. (it was always my impression that was always what the horse was there for and I know it was the impression of at least one other of the command, for we talked about it at the time and admired the military ingenuity of the device, but when I was out west three years ago, I was told by Mr. A. G. Fuqua, a member of our company, that the horse was his, that the tying him at the door was a mere matter of forgetfulness and that to attribute it to intelligent invention was to give him quite too much credit. In support of his position, he called my attention to the suggestive fact that the artifice was not employed again. I had not thought of that before.)

We had some horsemanship drill every forenoon, then, afternoons, we rode off here and there in squads a few miles and visited the farmer’s girls and had a youthful good time and got an honest dinner or supper, and then home again to camp, happy and content.

For a time, life was idly delicious. It was perfect. There was no war to mar it. Then came some farmers with an alarm one day. They said it was rumoured that the enemy were advancing in our direction from over Hyde’s prairie. The result was a sharp stir among us and general consternation. Ir was a rude awakening from out pleasant trance. The rumour was but a rumour, nothing definite about it, so in the confusion we did not know which way to retreat. Lyman was not for retreating at all in these uncertain circumstances but he found that if he tried to maintain that attitude he would fare badly, for the command were in no humour to put up with insubordination. SO he yielded the point and called a council of war, to consist of himself and three other officers, but the privates made such a fuss about being left out we had to allow them to remain, for they were already present and doing most of the talking too. The question was, which way to retreat; but all were so flurried that nobody even seemed to have even a guess to offer. Except Lyman. He explained in a few calm words, that inasmuch as the enemy were approaching from over Hyde’s prairie our course was simple. All we had to do was not retreat toward him, another direction would suit our purposes perfectly. Everybody saw in a moment how true this was and how wise, so Lyman got a great many compliments. It was now decide that we should fall back on Mason’s farm.

It was after dark by this time and as we could not know how soon the enemy might arrive, it did not seem best to try to take the horses and things with us, so we only took the guns and ammunition, and started at once. The route was very rough and hilly and rocky, and presently the night grew very black and rain began to fall, so we had a troublesome time of it, struggling and stumbling along in the dark and soon some person slipped and fell, and then the next person behind stumbled over him and fell, and so did the rest, one after the other, and then Bowers came along with the keg of powder in his arms, while the command were all mixed together, arms and legs on the muddy slope, and so he fell, of course, with the keg and this started the whole detachment down the hill in a body and they landed in a brook at the bottom in a pile and each that was undermost was pulling the hair, scratching and biting those that were on top of him and those that were being scratched and bitten scratching and biting the rest in their turn, and all saying they would die before they would ever go to war again if they ever got out of this brook this time and the invader might rot for all they cared, and the country along with him, and all such talk as that which was dismal to hear and take part in, in such smothered, low voices, and such a grisly dark place and so wet, and the enemy, maybe, coming along at any moment.

The keg of powder was lost, and the guns too; so the growling and complaining continued straight along while the brigade pawed around the pasty hill side and slopped around in the brook hunting for these things; consequently we lost considerable time at this, and then we heard a sound and held our breath and listened, and it seemed to be the enemy coming, though it could have been a cow, for it had a cough like a cow, but we did not wait but left a couple of guns behind and struck out for Mason’s again as briskly as we could scramble along in the dark. But we got lost presently in among the rugged little ravines and wasted a deal of time finding the way again so it was after nine when we reached Mason’s stile at last; and then before we could open our mouths to give the countersign several dogs came bounding over the fence with a great riot and noise, and each of them took a soldier by the slack of his trousers and began to back away with him. We could not shoot the dogs without endangering the persons they were attached to so we had to look on helpless at what was perhaps the most mortifying spectacle of the Civil War. There was light enough and to spare, for the Mason’s had now run out on the porch with candles in tier hands. The old man and his son came and undid the dogs without difficulty, all but Bowers’s; but they couldn’t undo his dog, they didn’t know his combination, he was of the bull kind and seemed to be set with a Yale time-lock, but they got him loose at last with some scalding water, of which Boweres got his share and returned thanks. Peterson Dunlap afterwards made up a fine name for this engagement and also for the night march which preceded it but both have long ago faded out of my memory.

We now went into the house and they began to ask us a world of questions, whereby it presently came out that we did not know anything concerning who or what we were running from; so the old gentleman made himself very frank and said we were a curious breed of soldiers and guessed we could be depended on to end up the war in time, because the no governor could afford the expense of the shoe leather we should cost it trying to follow us around.

“Marion Rangers! Good name, b’gosh,” said he. And wanted to why we hadn’t had a picket guard at the place where the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn’t sent out a scouting party to spy out the enemy and bring us an account of his strength, and so on, before jumping up and stampeding out of a strong position upon a mere vague rumour, and so on and so forth, till he made us all feel shabbier than the dogs had done, not so half enthusiastically welcome. So we went to bed shamed and low spirited, except Stevens. Soon Stevens began to devise a garment for Bowers which could be made to automatically display his battle scars to the grateful or conceal them from the envious, according to his occasions, but Bowers was in no humour for this, so there was a fight and when it was over Stevens had some battle scars of his own to think about.

Then we got a little sleep. But after all we had gone through, our activities were not over for the night, for about two o’clock in the morning we heard a shout of warning from down the lane, accompanied by a chorus from all the dogs, and in a moment everybody was up and flying around to find out what the alarm was about. The alarmist was a horseman who gave notice that a detachment of Union soldiers was on its way from Hannibal with orders to capture and hang any bands like our which it could find. Farmer Mason was in a flurry this time himself. He hurried us out of the house with all haste, and sent one of his negroes with us to show us where to hide ourselves and our telltale guns among the ravines half a mile away,. It was raining heavily.

We struck down the lane, then across some rocky pasture land which offered good advantages fro stumbling; consequently we were down in the mud most of the time, and every time a man went down he black guarded the war and everybody connected with it, and gave himself the master dose of all for being so foolish as to go into it. At last we reached the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there we huddled ourselves under the streaming trees and sent the negro back home. It was a dismal and heart breaking time. We were like to e drowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the booming thunder, and blinded by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. The drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the reflection that the halter might end us before we were a day older. A death of this shameful sort had not occurred to us as being among the possibilities of war. It took the romance all out of the campaign and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare. As for doubting that so barbarous an order had been given, not one of us did that.

The long night wore itself out at last, and then the Negro came to us with the news that the alarm had manifestly been a false one and that breakfast would soon be ready. Straightaway we were light-hearted again and the world was bright and full of life, as full of hope and promise as ever; for we were young then. How long ago that was! Twenty four years.

The mongrel child of philology named the night’s refuge Camp Devastation and no soul objected. The Masons gave us a Missouri country breakfast in Missourian abundance, and we needed it. Hot biscuits, hot wheat bread, prettily crossed in a lattice pattern on top, hot corn pone, fried chicken, bacon, coffee, eggs, milk, buttermilk etc. and the world may be confidently challenged to furnish the equal of such a breakfast, as it is cooked in the South.

We stayed several days at Mason’s and after all these years the memory of the stillness and dullness and lifelessness of that slumberous farmhouse still oppresses my spirit as with a sense of the presence of death and mourning. There was nothing to do. Nothing to think about. There was no interest in life. The male part of the household were away in the fields all day, the women were busy and out of our sight, There was no sound but the plaintive wailing of a spinning wheel forever moaning out from some distant room, the most lonesome sound in nature, a sound steeped and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness of life. The family went to bed about dark every night and as we were not invited to intrude any new customs we naturally followed theirs. Those nights were a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up till twelve. We lay awake and miserable till that hour ovariotomy and grew old and decrepit waiting through the still eternities for the clock strikes. This was no place for town boys. So at last it was with something very like joy that we received word that the enemy were on out track again. With a new birth of the old warrior spirit, we sprang to our places in line of battle and fell back on Camp Ralls.

Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason’s talk, and he now gave orders that our camp should be guarded from surprise by the posting of pickets. I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road in Hyde’s prairie. Night shut down black and threatening. I told Sergeant Bowers to out to that place and stay till midnight, and, just as I was expecting, he said he wouldn’t do it. I tried to get others to go but all refused. Some excused themselves on account of the weather, but the rest were frank enough to say they wouldn’t go in any kind of weather. This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but there was no surprise in it at the time. On the contrary, it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. There were scores of little camps scattered over missouri where the same thing was happening. These camps were composed of young men who had been born and reared to a sturdy independence and who did not know what it meant to be ordered around by Tom, Dick, and Harry, who they had known familiarly all their lives in the village or the farm. It is quite within the probabilities that this same thing was happening all over the South. James Redpath recognized the justice of this assumption and furnished the following instance in support of it. During a short stay in East Tennessee he was in a citizen colonel’ s tent one day talking, when a big private appeared at the door and, without salute or other circumlocution, said to the colonel;

“Say, Jim, I’m a goin’ home for a few days.”

“What for?”

“Well, I hain’t b’en there for a right smart while and I’d like to see how things is comin’ on.”

“How long are you gonna be gone?”

“Bout two weeks.”

“Well, don’t be gone longer than that and get back sooner if you can.”

That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conversation where the private had broken it off. This was in the first months of the war of course. The camps in our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General Thomas H. Harris. He was a townsman of ours, a first rate fellow and well liked, but we had all familiarly known him as the soles and modest-salaried operator in the telegraph office, where he had to send about one despatch a week in ordinary times and two when there was a rush of business. Consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day on the wing, and delivered a military command of some sort in a large military fashion, nobody was surprised at the response which he got from the assembled soldiery.

“Oh, now what’ll you take to don’t, Tom Harris?”

It was quite the natural thing. One might justly imagine that we were hopeless material for the war. And so we seemed in our ignorant state, but there were those among us who afterward learned the grim trade, learned to obey like machines, became valuable soldiers, fought all through the war, and came out at the end with excellent records. One of the very boys who refused to go out on picket duty that night and called me an ass for thinking he would expose himself to danger in such a foolhardy way, had become distinguished for intrepidity before he was a year older.

I did secure my picket that might, not by authority but by diplomacy. I got Bowers to go by agreeing to exchange ranks with him for the time being and go along and stand the watch with him as his subordinate. We stayed out there a couple of dreary hours in the pitchy darkness and the rain, with nothing to modify the dreariness but Bower’s monotonous growling at the war and the weather, then we began to nod and presently found it next to impossible to stay in the saddle, so we gave up the tedious job and went back to the camp without interruption or objection from anybody and the enemy could have done the same, for there were no sentries. Everybody was asleep, at midnight there was nobody to send out another picket so none was sent. We never tried to establish a watch at night again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept a picket out in the daytime.

In that camp the whole command slept on the corn in the big corn crib and there was usually a general row before morning, for the place was full of rats and they would scramble over the boys’ bodies and faces, annoying and irritating everybody, and now and then they would bite someone’s toe, and the person who owned the toe would start up and magnify his english and begin to throw corn in the dark. The ears were half as heavy as bricks and when they struck they hurt. The persons struck would respond and inside of five minutes everyman would be locked in a death grip with his neighbour. There was a grievous deal of blood shed in the corn crib but this was all that was spilt while I was in the war. No, that is not quite true. But for one circumstance it would have been all.

Our scares were frequent. Every few days rumours would come that the enemy were approaching. In these cases we always fell back on some other camp of ours; we never stayed where we were. But the rumours always turned out to be false, so at last we even began to grow indifferent to them. One night a negro was sent to our corn crib with the same old warning, the enemy was hovering in our neighbourhood. We all said let him hover. We resolved to stay still and be comfortable. It was a fine warlike resolution, and no doubt we all felt the stir of it in our veins–for a moment. We had been having a very jolly time, that was full of horseplay and schoolboy hilarity, but that cooled down and presently the fast waning fire of forced jokes and forced laughs died out altogether and the company became silent. Silent and nervous. And soon uneasy–worried and apprehensive. We had said we would stay and we were committed. We could have been persuaded to go but there was nobody brave enough to suggest it. An almost noiseless movement began in the dark by a general but unvoiced impulse. When the movement was completed, each man knew that he was not the only person who had crept to the front wall and had his eye at a crack between the logs. No, we were all there, all there with our hearts in our throats and staring out towards the sugar-troughs where the forest footpath came through. It was late and there was a deep woodsy stillness everywhere. There was a veiled moonlight which was only just strong enough to enable us to mark the general shapes of objects. Presently a muffled sound caught our ears and we recognized the hoof-beats of a horse or horses. And right away, a figure appeared in the forest path; it could have been made of smoke, its mass had such little sharpness of outline. It was a man on horseback, and it seemed to me that there were others behind him. I got a hold of a gun in the dark, and pushed it through a crack between the logs, hardly knowing what I was doing, I was so dazed with fright. Somebody said “Fire!” I pulled the trigger, I seemed to see a hundred flashes and a hundred reports, then I saw the man fall down out of the saddle. My first feeling was of surprised gratification; my first impulse was an apprentice-sportsman’s impulse to run and pick up his game. Somebody said, hardly audibly, “Good, we’ve got him. Wait for the rest!” But the rest did not come. There was not a sound, not the whisper of a leaf; just the perfect stillness, an uncanny kind of stillness which was all the more uncanny on account of the damp, earthy, late night smells now rising and pervading it. Then, wondering, we crept out stealthily and approached the man. When we got to him, the moon revealed him distinctly. He was laying on his back with his arms abroad, his mouth was open and his chest was heaving with long gasps, and his white shirt front was splashed with blood. The thought shot through me that I was a murderer, that I had killed a man, a man who had never done me any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow. I was down by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead, and I would have given anything then, my own life freely, to make him again what he had been five minutes before. And all the boys seemed to be feeling the same way; they hung over him, full of pitying interest, and tried all they could to help him, and said all sorts of regretful things. They had forgotten all about the enemy, they thought only of this one forlorn unit of the foe. Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of the shadow of his eyes, and it seemed to me that I could rather that he had stabbed me than he had done that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep about his wife and his child, and, I thought with a new despair, “This thing that I have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too, and they never did me any harm, any more than he.”

In a little while the man was dead. He was killed in war, killed in fair and legitimate war, killed in battles as you may say, and yet he was as sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been their brother. The boys stood there a half-hour sorrowing over him and recalling the details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be and if he was a spy, and saying if they had it to do over again, they would not hurt him unless he attacked them first. It soon turned out that mine was not the only shot fired; there were five others, a division of the guilt which was a great relief to me since it in some degree lightened and diminished the burden I was carrying. There were six shots fired at once but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.

The mans was not in uniform and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country, that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of hi got to preying on me every night, I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war, that all war must just be the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity, strangers who in other circumstances you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business, that war was intended for men and I for a child’s nurse. I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldier-ship while I could retain some remanent of my self-respect. These morbid thoughts clung to me against reason, for at the bottom I did not believe I had touched this man. The law of probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood for in all my small experiences with guns, I had not hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my best to hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseased imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.

The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have already told of it. We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another and eating up the farmers and their families. They ought to have shot us; on the contrary they were as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it. In one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an upper Mississippi pilot who afterwards became famous as a daredevil rebel spy, whose career bristled with desperate adventures. The loom and style of his comrades suggested that they had not come into the war to play and their deeds made good the conjecture later. They were fine horsemen and good revolver shots, but their favourite arm was the lasso. Each had one at his pommel, and could snatch a man out of his saddle with it ovariotomy, on a full gallop, at any reasonable distance.

In another camp, the chief was a fierce and profane old black-smith of sixty and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic, home-made bowie-knives, to be swung with two hands like the machetes of the Isthmus. It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practising their murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless old fanatic.

The last camp which we fell back on was in a hollow near the village of Florida where I was born, in Monroe County. Here we were warned one day that a Union Colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment at his heels. This looked decidedly serious. Our boys went apart and consulted; then we went back and told the other companies present that the war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband. They were getting ready themselves to fall back on some place or another, and we were only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected to arrive at any moment, so they tried to persuade us to wait a little while but the majority of us said no, we were accustomed to falling back and didn’t need any of Harris’s help, we could get along perfectly without him and save time too. So, about half of our fifteen men, including myself, mounted, and left on the instant; the others yielded to persuasion, and stayed–stayed through the war.

An hour later we met General Harris on the road, with two or three people in his company, his staff probably, but we could not tell; none of them were in uniform; uniforms had not come into vogue among us yet. Harris ordered us back, but we told him there was a Union colonel coming with a whole regiment in his wake and it looked as if there was going to be a disturbance, so we had concluded to go home. He raged a little bit, but it was of no use, our minds were made up. We had done our share, killed one man, exterminated one army, such as it was; let him go and kill the rest and that would end the war. I did not see that brisk young general again until last year; he was wearing white hair and whiskers.

In time I came to learn that the Union colonel whose coming frightened me out of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent; General Grant. I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was myself; at a time when anybody could have said, “Grant–Ulysses S Grant? I do not remember hearing the name before.” It seems difficult to realize there was once a time when such a remark could be rationally made, but there was, I was within a few miles of the place and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.

The thoughtful will not throw this war paper of mine lightly aside as being valueless. It has this value; it is not an unfair picture of what went on in may a militia camp in the first months of the rebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without the steadying and heartening influence of trained leaders, when all their circumstances were new and strange and charged with exaggerated terrors, and before the invaluable experience of actual collision in the field had turned them from rabbits into soldiers. If this side of the picture of that early day has not before been put into history, then history has been, to that degree incomplete, for it had and has its rightful place there. There was more Bull Run material scattered through the early camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run. And yet, it learned it’s trade presently and helped to fight the great battles later. I could have become a soldier myself if I had waited. I had got part of it learned, I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.

The Woes of a Holy Man

H.L. Mencken

Dothan Eagle/June 28, 1929

All the pother about Monsignor James Cannon, Jr.’s, unfortunate venture into an outhouse of Wall Street seems to be founded upon a misunderstanding of Methodist canon law. It will be admitted by everyone, I take it, that playing the board, even when a sworn ambassador of Christ is the performer, is not prohibited by the ordinary or civil law. A bishop obviously has the same civil rights as any other man, and any other man, under what remains of American freedom, is free to buy and sell stocks as he pleases. That privilege, as we all know, is one of the many thousands Americans have sought and enjoyed during the past few years, and included among them, I have no doubt, have been multitudes who now hold His Grace up to contumely, and hint broadly that he ought to be deconsecrated and unfrocked.

What lies under this demand, when simple dislike of the man is not responsible for it, is apparently a feeling that a bishop is bound by tighter bonds than other men—in other words that he must not only obey the ordinary law with great scrupulosity, but also the canon law of his church, which is assumed to be far more rigorous. The doctrine here is sound, but there is a false assumption in the application of it. That is the assumption that the canon law of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, prohibits trading in the market. It prohibits nothing of the sort. On the contrary, a fair examination of it indicates that it actually encourages such trading, provided only that the successful speculator devotes a reasonable part of his gains to the uses of the church.

Nowhere in the Book of Discipline of the Southern Methodists, the official lawbook of the denomination, is there any prohibition, either direct or indirect, of gambling. The Northern Methodists, to be sure, are forbidden to indulge in “such games of chance as are frequently associated with gambling,” but that is as far as it goes—and Northern Methodists are by no means to be confused with their Confederate brethren. The two churches are quite distinct, and their Books of Discipline differ radically. Many prohibitions in the Northern book are conspicuously missing in the Southern book. One is the prohibition of “buying or selling slaves.” Another is the prohibition of tobacco. Yet another is the prohibition of frequenting “misleading” movie shows, whatever that may mean. And a fourth is the prohibition of gambling.

The Southern Methodist discipline, in fact, is very much less harsh and rigorous than that of the Northern Wesleyans, and even on the awful subject of wine-bibbing it shows a relatively mild and civilized spirit. The Northern Methodists, for example (General Rule, 30), are forbidden to resort to “drunkenness, buying or selling spirituous liquors, or drinking them” save in cases of “extreme necessity,” whereas the Southern faithful are quite free to get drunk in cases of plain necessity, without any qualifications of extremity. Moreover, the Southern discipline lets it go at that, whereas the Northern discipline goes on to ban “all intoxicants,” whether spirituous or not, and adds “cigarettes and tobacco in all other forms” for good measure.

In the Northern church a candidate for holy orders, before he may be licensed to preach, must answer two questions satisfactorily, to wit: “Will you wholly abstain from the use of tobacco?” and “Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in the work of the ministry?” In the Southern church the first question is omitted (Ministers and Church Officers, VI, 168). As a makeweight certain others are added, for example: “Are you going on to perfection?” “Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?” and “Are you groaning after it?” Bishop Cannon, when he was ordained, said yes to all of these questions, but he did not promise to avoid the use of tobacco, and so he is perfectly free to smoke it or chew it today (as many of his brethren of the cloth do), just as he is perfectly free to buy or sell slaves, to go to “misleading” movies, to keep a jug in his house against a possible necessity, and to play the bucket shops until he either goes broke or is rich enough to have himself made an archbishop.

To deny him these diversions upon canonical grounds is absurd. He must, of course, avoid those that are forbidden by the civil law, e.g., trading in slaves, but beyond that he is free to do as he pleases. Even a bishop is yet a man, and even a Methodist may amuse himself within the law. I see no evidence that Monsignor Cannon has ever stepped so much as an inch outside it.

III

Both branches of Methodism are extremely fond of (and hence respectful to) money, and their clergy are business men quite as much as they are priests. Open any Methodist paper at random, and the chances are at least five to one that you will light upon a call for more funds: such calls, many of them couched in peremptory terms, always greatly outnumber the treatises on the saving of souls. The two churches of the church support immense staffs of collectors, and they are hard at work all the time. For a Methodist to attend divine service without being besought to cough up for this or that great cause would be so surprising that it would probably strike him as almost miraculous. He is taught frankly that getting into Heaven costs money, and that his chances run with his liberality.

This attitude of mind naturally makes the well-heeled Babbitt a powerful personage in the church. He is in many parishes the de facto if not the de jure superior of the pastor, and can turn one pastor out and bring another in as he pleases. This is true, in particular, in the South, where the generality of the faithful are poor, and the prosperity of a given church depends upon the generosity of a few rich individuals. In the cotton-mill towns of the Carolinas two-thirds of the churches are supported by the mill magnates, and the clergy are as much their employees as the slaves in their mills. What this control amounted to was shown during the recent strike down there, when the local Methodist papers, otherwise ever eager to horn into “moral” causes, were magnificently about the exploitation and ill usage of the poor morons at the hands of their pious masters. There was plenty of space for denouncing the brutes hired by the mill-owners to put down the strike.

Thus Methodism is anything but Socialistic. On the contrary, it is all for the capitalistic system, and is perhaps the only church existing today which makes a belief in that system a cardinal article of faith. (Southern Book of Discipline, Sec. III, 30; Northern, Division I, 24.) Getting money, by its code, is not only not sinful; it is positively virtuous. The one thing that is forbidden is laying it up. It must be “systematically administered for the kingdom of God,” i.e., for the high uses and occasions of the rev. clergy. Well, Dr. Cannon is himself a clergyman.

There is nothing in either Discipline, or in any other canonical text that I am aware of, which indicates that getting money by speculation is held to be less moral than getting it in any other way. If it were, then some of the most eminent Methodist laymen in the South would be lying under danger of excommunication. I avoid embarrassing the living by pointing to one now safe in Heaven: the late Asa G. Candler, inventor of Coca-Cola. The Hon. Mr. Candler, while he lived, was unquestionably the most eminent Methodist south of the Potomac. The church got millions out of him, and showed its appreciation by making his younger brother a bishop. Was his money all made by simple trading? Hardly. A good deal of it also came out of a speculative rise in the stocks he was interested in, and in the fruits of that rise many another Southern Methodist shared.

I can recall no objection to this being business. On the contrary, Dr. Candler was anointed so lavishly in all the Methodist papers that he ran goose-grease almost like the Hon. Buck Drake, of Durham, N. C., another consecrated man who was lucky in the market, and did not forget the pastors when the money rolled in. Buck made his basic millions out of cigarettes—a fact that explain the absence of a prohibition of them in the Southern Book of Discipline—but he increased his load enormously in Wall Street. When he died he left $60,000,000 to a Methodist “university” at Durham, set up to counteract Darwinian wickedness at the State University at Chapel Hill, and more millions to a fund for underpaid Methodist preachers. He is a saint in Heaven today, though while he lived was a gambler and a wine-bibber. To denounce him at any Methodist camp meeting in the South would be as gross an indecorum as to denounce St. Patrick at an oyster roast of the Knights of Columbus.

For all these reasons—and I could adduce many more—I incline to think that Monsignor Cannon is being badly used. God knows, I am not one of his partisans, but even a bishop deserves justice. To hint that his venture into high-pressure go-getting disqualifies him to bind and loose by the Wesleyan rite is as absurd as to argue that he would be disqualified if he were caught pulling the cat’s tail, lifting jam from the pantry, or telling a lie. Methodist bishops are not so easily busted. So long as they avoid necking, morphine and going to mass they are safe. Even murder is within their prerogative—that is, provided they merely applaud it, and do not undertake it personally.

Adventures in Kiwanis

H.L. Mencken

Morning Union/October 4, 1925

One day, toward the middle of August of last year, I sent 25 cents to the Kiwanis Magazine of Chicago for a copy of its current issue. My desire was to refresh myself with idealism, to bathe my soul in the spirit of service. The Kiwanis Magazine, as I knew, was the organ of Kiwanis International. It was read every day by thousands of resilient and eminent men of business—“leaders in their respective lines.” One of its principal contributors was the Hon. Roe Fulkerson, a man whose writings had been an inspiration to multitudes. I looked forward to a spiritual debauch, and expected to come out of it full of pep, and hot for service in my chosen craft.

But no Kiwanis Magazine arrived. It seemed strange. Two weeks passed, and then three weeks, and then a month. What had happened to service? I sent in a complaint. No answer. The year faded into autumn and then winter. Christmas came, and after it New Year. I began to give up hope. Finally, one day—I think it was late in January—there arrived a letter. It was from a firm of public accountants in Chicago. They said they were examining the books of the Kiwanis Magazine, and wanted to know if the item of 25 cents, there credited to my account, was correct.

I replied instantly that it was. I added that I regretted the fact immensely. What I wanted, I explained at length, was not a credit of 25 cents, but a copy of the Kiwanis Magazine. My soul ached and thirsted for its inspiration; I yearned to be uplifted; I wanted to learn how to serve. All this I conveyed to the firm of public accountants, closing with a respectful demand that the magazine be sent at once. No answer. I followed with a postcard, perhaps somewhat tart. No answer. Another. No answer.

This January passed, and after it February. March dawned with the usual meteorological phenomena. My rheumatism, by now, was bothering me, and I was in a low state mentally. I was doomed, it seemed, to draw no inspiration from the fountain head. The boons and usufructs of Kiwanis were not for me. So I turned, on the fourth of the month, to the next best source. That is to say, I went to Washington to witness the inauguration of the Hon. Mr. Coolidge as President of the United States.

The show was disappointing, and I got home with a chill. My mental depression, by now, was extreme. I was beginning to have hallucinations. The sound of a phonograph set me to trembling. But suddenly, and at one benign stroke, I was cured. On my reading table, as I rolled into bed, I found a pile of magazines, all arrived while I was in attendance upon Dr. Coolidge. The first was the Christian Herald. I threw it into the fire unopened. The second was the American Standard. I put it aside for Sunday. The third was Hot Dog. I dropped it into my waste basket. But the fourth, O, hallelujah, was the Kiwanis.

I was still reading it at 3 a.m., page after page describing the altruistic work of the Kiwanians of Red Lion, Pa. and Nashville, Tenn.; portraits of eminent Kiwanis orators, lecturers on service, prophets of New and Better Business Ethics, heralds of the millennial dawn; long juicy, exhilarating articles by Dr. Fulkerson and other wizards of the inspirational word; solemn treatises by Kiwanis philosophers on the esoteric meaning of Kiwanis, the secret work of Its votaries; sermons in tabloid form by Kiwanis ecclesiastics. I read until 3 a.m., until 3.05, until 3.10. I fell asleep at last to dreams of introducing the principles of Kiwanis into journalism, of launching myself into constructive work, of consecrating myself to the ideal of service.

In the morning, alas, I am always somewhat sour. As I rolled out of bad, my mood of exaltation was brutally dashed. I had sent 25 cents for the magazine. The price marked on the cover was 15 cents. Where was my change?

III

For months thereafter this question worried me. Could it be that the very chiefs and captains general of Kiwanis, the syndics of the Kiwanis Magazine itself, would stoop to bilk a poor literary man out of 10 cents? The thought seemed somehow obscene, and so I put it out of my mind. But it kept on recurring. Specifically, it recurred on March 5, on March 11, on March 23 und on March 29. In April it recurred five times; in May eight times; in June three times; in July six times.

Over and over again I was tempted to write to the publisher, to the editor, to the public accountants, to the chief of police of Chicago, to Dr. Fulkerson, to the Kiwanis Club in my town, to the secretariat of the League of Nations. The thought of that lost 10 cents began to ride me. It popped up a dozen times a day. But I always put it away as hideous. If Kiwanis itself was engaged in highjacking, then what would become of idealism in the world? If, in the very citadel of service, a Christian and a patriot could be mulcted of 10 cents, then our boys died in vain at Chateau Thierry and Dr. Frank Crane was a lobster.

My trust and hope, I need not say, were rewarded. On Aug. 25 I received from the Kiwanis International an elegantly engrossed statement of account. It showed that on some unnamed date in the past I had deposited 25 cents in the Kiwanis treasury. It showed that on March 4, 1926, I had received goods and service to the value or amount of 15 cents. And it showed, by simple mathematical devices, that the sum of 10 cents remained to my credit. This balance was enclosed with the statement. There were five postage stamps the United States, each bearing the portrait of the immortal Washington and each of them value of 2 cents. Five times two is ten. Kiwanis had made good, and to the last cent.

But let us go back. My order, as I have said, was sent in in August, I got my magazine on March 4, say six and a half months later. I got my change on Aug. 25, 1925, almost exactly a year later. Should I rejoice that my confidence in Kiwanis, in the long run, was justified—that its lofty principles triumphed over every weakness and temptation in the end? My reply is that I have already rejoiced, to the perhaps excessive profit of the ink and paper trusts. What haunts me is the uneasy feeling that I had to be confident far too long.

Is that feeling hypercritical? Do I yield once more to my lamentable tendency to cavil, my lust to destroy? I think not. Kiwanis is not of ordinary flesh. Kiwanis is Kiwanis. Its purpose is to improve Business Methods, to Give More Than Mere Goods, to preach the Gospel of Service. Once a week, in every town of the republic, its great minds meet to further that exalted aim. They sing songs, they blow a few spitballs, they get down their chicken croquettes and peach pie, and then they belch gently and give ear to their prophets.

The words of such prophets I enjoy immensely. That is why I sent for that copy of the Kiwanis Magazine. It delights me to follow their syllogisms. I approbate their eloquent demands for Something More. When I have my shoes shined, I like the professor to inquire about my kidney trouble. Buying a box of collars, I am exhilarated when the haberdasher throws in a bottle opener. I chose my tailor because he sings beautifully and is a prominent Elk. My barber’s charm is not in his mere shears. but in his flow of economic and sociological ideas. No manicure girl can touch me who is not comely, a swell dresser, and a lover of the films. My bootlegger gets my trade because he is supporting 10 orphans in a mission on the Yang-Tse-Kiang.

In brief, I am a natural Kiwanian. I believe that business is also a form of idealism. I love and venerate service. But is it service to take six and half months to fill a 15 cents order? And is it service to rob a poor man of the interest on 10 cents for a solid year? The answer I leave to the president of Kiwanis International, to the vice presidents and ex-presidents thereof, to the regional directors, to the club secretaries, to the Hon. Mr. Fulkerson, and to the heirs and assigns of the author of “Sweet Adeline.”

Dr. France’s Platform

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/April 27, 1931

BAPTISMAL and burial services are ingeniously (or is it ingenuously?) combined in the manifesto of Dr. Joseph I. France, candidate for the Presidency, issued to a somewhat unresponsive country on April 8. In the very same words which announce his candidacy he sets forth the reasons which will make his nomination and election impossible. Item, he calls for a revival of the Bill of Rights. Item, he calls for common honesty and common decency in high office, including especially the highest. Item, he—

But I have said enough, I think, to show that his chances of succeeding Lord Hoover are no greater—if, indeed, they are as great—as those of Al Capone. The first alone is enough to damn him beyond redemption, for it arrays every great engine of opinion in the country against him, from the Supreme Court to all save two or three of the big newspapers, and from the American Legion to the bishops of state church. The Bill of Rights, quotha? I believe in all seriousness that it would be safer for an aspirant to the Presidency to advocate communism, cannibalism, or even Darwinism. In many American States they now jail men for less.

It is, however, the second item that really cooks Dr. France’s goose. Imagine a candidate trying to reach the White House by renouncing and denouncing “colorless compromise, weak negation and dishonorable equivocation!” Can it be that the hon. gentleman is actually as innocent as all that? If so, then let him give some study to the recent history of his country. He will discover that every President since Cleveland has got into office by one route or the other—that is, either by compromise, by negation or by dishonorable equivocation. Has he so soon forgotten that Dr. Wilson promised solemnly to keep us out of the war? The last candidate to fly and flaunt his true colors was the Hon. Alton B. Parker, Jr. and he was beaten ignominiously by the master trimmer, Roosevelt. Even Al Smith, let us remember sotto voce, was quite content to run as a wet on a platform that was dry, and with a client of the Anti-Saloon League as his runningmate.

I HALF suspect that Dr. France has more humor in him than is generally believed, and is simply trying to have some fun with Dr. Hoover, in whose knees and neck there is more rubber than in all the tire-factories of Akron. To a man of his principles the dodging, skulking, groveling type of politician is naturally revolting, and hence a fair target for ribaldry. But it is one thing to mock, and quite another thing to fetch the crowd. My fear is that Dr. France, like many an idealist before him, vastly overestimates the native decency of the American people. He seems to believe (or, at all events, to hope) that they are as much disgusted by the Hooverian politics as he is. But that is probably a gross error. They are really not offended by the Great Engineer’s limber efforts to hold his job for four years more. What offends them is simply his failure to perform a miracle.

Dr. France alludes to this failure in his manifesto—at events, so I interpret his reference to “self-advertised supermen.” But it seems to me that he makes far too little of it. That Hoover is immensely unpopular must be plain to everyone; indeed, there is evidence that it is plain to Hoover himself. The crowds in the movie parlors flatly refuse to applaud him, and so do the crowds in the streets; he had to go all the way to Porto Rico to hear really hearty cheers—and God knows what it cost young Teddy Roosevelt, in toil and moil, to produce them. The plain people blame him for all their present woes. He gets a black thought every time the roof leaks or the baby cries.

All this, of course, is very unjust to him. He is no more responsible for the present economic situation than he is for the downfall of poor Alfonso XIII, and he could not remedy it if he tried. But there are many evils that he could remedy, and very easily. He could clear out the gang of political harpies which now infests Washington, with the White House as its base. He could get some common decency into our dealings with Latin America. He could throw out the stupid hacks who pollute his Cabinet, and put in honest and competent men. Above all, he could abandon his “dishonorable equivocation” about Prohibition, and deal with it in a frank, sensible and self-respecting manner. But he does none of these things, nor anything like them. His one aim is to avoid every issue that is likely to bring him trouble in 1932, and to that end he is apparently willing to sacrifice everything that men of any dignity hold dear.

III

BUT, as I say, all of this arouses little, if any, public indignation. There is no sensitiveness to such dishonors in the communal breast. The wets, I fancy, would be quite content, and even thrilled, if the hon. gentleman came to the conclusion tomorrow that the Prohibition jig was up, and so deserted his Methodist friends between days, and began howling for personal liberty. Nor would the Methodists, I suspect, be greatly surprised. No one expects a President, in this one-hundred-and-fifty-fifth year of the Republic, to be a candid man. No one expects him to make any sacrifice of his personal fortunes to the common weal. No one expects him to be jealous of his honor.

No one, that is, save a few romantics of the school of Dr. France. They still look for honest leadership in the White House, and they count upon it to restore the American passion for justice and the dignity of American public life. France himself, it some incredible act of God put him in Hoover’s place, would strive magnificently to that end. Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, he would try to resuscitate the Bill of Rights, and make it once more a living force. He would deal honestly and courageously with the problems confronting him, if not always wisely. He would heave himself with groans and hallelujahs into a herculean effort to move the immovable, resist the irresistable, purge the unspeakable, and solve the insoluble.

He will never, of course, get the chance. He is as safely vaccinated against sueceding Hoover as I am against succeeding Pius Xl. But that is no reason, it seems to me, for laughing at him. If his somewhat grandiose programme does not voice the hopes of any considerable body of his countrymen, then it at least voices hopes that are honest, and honorable, and, in the best sense—a sense now almost obsolete in the United States—patriotic. The Republic that he dreams of would be a shade priggish, perhaps, but it would be far more worthy of a self-respecting man’s allegiance than it is today. There might be plenty of reason to be discontented with it, but there would be no reason to be ashamed of it.

DR. FRANCE made a good Senator, and in difficult days. He stood against the Wilson holy war upon the Bill of Rights at a time when it took a lot of courage, and he never faltered. No Marylander of his generation has ever done more to establish and maintain the Maryland Free State scheme of things; he was battling for it pertinaciously long before most of those who now talk about it had ever heard of it. His reward was that he was thrown out of office to the tune of violent objurgations and revilings.

His concrete opponent, when he came up for reflection, was the Hon. William Cabell Bruce, another good Senator. It has always seemed to me to be a magnificently ironical fact that Dr. Bruce, who depicted him in the campaign as a kind of anarchist, was actually in full sympathy with most of his principles, and afterward maintained them with great vigor in the Senate. Some day, I hope, Dr. Bruce will review his speeches during that contest with a judicial eye, and make public amends to Dr. France. For the two men, at bottom, believe in precisely the same things: their only real difference is over ways and means of attaining them.

But this is a detail of politics, which is to say, of a science compounded of irrationalities. The important thing is that Dr. France, after eight years of retirement, has got into action again. He will not reach the White House, but there is plenty of work for him to do at home, and within the bounds of his own party. Under the leadership of that depressing nonentity, Dr. Goldsborough, it has become a mere rabble of professional jobholders, with a dismal sprinkling of prehensile Babbitts. It is years since Goldsborough last had an idea, and it will be years before he has another. If Dr. France heaves a bomb or two into that vacuum he will be doing something valuable to his party, and something also valuable to his country.

On Religious Liberty

H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/July 6, 1931

The method of choosing grand juries in Baltimore, it appears, is as follows: When the time comes ’round each of the eleven judges of the Supreme Bench nominates two freemen of the town, along with one, two or three alternates, all of them men of discreet years, chosen for their notorious wisdom and rectitude. The names are canvassed by the whole bench, and if the two nominees of a given judge turn out to be eligible they are appointed forthwith. If not, resort is had to his alternates, or to the alternates of another judge. Thus twenty-two jurors are selected, leaving one more to make the legal twenty-three. This one more, in practice, is always a colored man of high tone, and finding him is delegated to that judge or those judges who happen to be Republicans. In this way the jury is completed.

Some time ago I received a note from one of the judges, a man who has known me for twenty-five years, saying that he was putting me down as one of his nominees. This proof of judicial confidence, I confess, flattered me, and I returned thanks at once. But at the same time my conscience, always delicate, induced me to suggest that I was probably ineligible. Here Is the substance of my letter:

Unless I misunderstand Article 36 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights, a grand juror must believe in what is commonly called the moral order of the world. That is, he must believe that there exists an eternal moral law, ascertainable mainly by revelation, and that any person who violates it will be punished inevitably, either in this world or the next. Inasmuch as I have doubts about this moral law, do not believe that violations of it, if it exists, are punished inevitably on this earth, and remain, at the most, of an open mind about a future life, I think I probably fall outside the specification . . . . In fact, so long as the Declaration of Rights remains as it is I seem to be unable to take any hand in any legal process in Maryland, either as witness or as juror.

I requested that this letter be laid before the Supreme Bench. What notion was taken upon it, if any, I do not know, for the learned judges carry on their deliberations in camera, but I observed that when the list of grand jurors was published my name was not on it. Inasmuch as I am unaware of any other ground for my disqualification, I can only conclude that I was disqualified, as I had myself suggested, on a ground purely theological.

No doubt it will surprise many Marylanders to hear that a religious test still exists in the Free State, and, what is worse, that it is actually a part of the Declaration of Rights, the very charter of our freedom. Yet I see no way to view the following passage in Article 36 as anything else:

. . . nor shall any person, otherwise competent, be deemed incompetent as a witness or juror on account of his religious belief provided he believes in the existence of God, and that, under His dispensation, such person will be held morally accountable for his acts, and be rewarded or punished therefor, either in this world or the world to come.

Plainly enough, this provision sets up a double test. In the first place every witness or juror must believe in the existence of God, which bars out all atheists at once, and all agnostics with them. And in the second place, he must believe that divine justice takes precedence of divine grace and mercy, which bars out all Moslems, and great numbers of Christians. It Is not sufficient for him to believe that the wicked may be punished post mortem: he must believe unqualifiedly that they will be punished. If he finds himself unable to believe it, then he cannot sit on any jury in the State of Maryland, or give evidence in any court of law or equity.

That this view of Article 36 is sound is proved by all the pertinent Maryland decisions. In Clare vs. the Slate (39 Md., 164), Stewart J., speaking for the Court of Appeals, held that a man be put on trial for his life only on the indictment of boni et legales homines, good and lawful men, and in The State v. Mercer (101 Md. 535) Schmucker, J., also speaking for the court, held that no disbeliever in “the existence of God and His dispensation of rewards and punishments” could be such a good and lawful man. And in Arnd vs. Amling (53 Md., 192) the court held that no disbeliever could qualify as a witness.

The decisions are quite dear and exactly to the point. They meet it squarely and state the law unequivocably. They are binding upon every judge in Maryland, and have been cited lately, and with approbation, by Owens, J., in Baltimore and by one of the judges in the counties. If any man stands indicted in the State today by a grand jury which included one unbeliever, then his indictment Is null and void. If any man has been convicted by a petit jury which included one, then his conviction is without force or effect. And if there was one unbeliever among the material witnesses against him, then he is still as good as innocent.

III

It will be observed that the definition of an unbeliever set up by Article 36 is very sweeping. The two halves of the test are not joined by or but by and. It Is thus not sufficient to believe “in the existence of God”; it is also necessary to believe that he maintains a complete judicial system for the detection and punishment of sinners, and that any man who escapes it in this world is bound to be laid by the heels In the next. In brief, believing in Hell is quite as essential as believing in God. The precise nature of Hell, of course, is not defined, but there is the thing itself as plain as day. Take it away, and the whole test falls to pieces.

The late Mr. Chief Justice Taft, if he had ever come into Maryland to testify in a lawsuit, might have been challenged and disqualified, for he was a Unitarian, and thus did not believe in Hell; in fact, his disbelief was used against him, especially in the Bible Belt, in the campaigns of 1908 and 1912. Nor is the disqualification of President Hoover at all certain, for he is a Quaker, and if the Quakers believe in Hell then they have surely managed to keep the fact a secret. I refrain, in delicacy, from pointing to any of our own great officers of state. The oath of office prescribed by Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution Includes no religious test, and so they are probably safe in their jobs despite a contradiction (and apparently unconstitutional) provision in the code of 1924. But suppose some of them that I could name were summoned to court as witnesses?

What would happen to most of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins is plain enough: they would be disqualified at once. I know a large number of these learned men, some of them with considerable intimacy, but I can recall none save Dr. Howard A. Kelly who has ever expressed any active and eager belief in Hell. Many of them, it may be, believe in God, but, as I have just shown, belief in God is not enough; it is also necessary to believe that God invariably rewards virtue and as invariably punishes sin. If it be admitted for an instant that any conceivable sinner may escape, then the test becomes mere vanity and nonsense, signifying nothing.

Mr. B.H. Hartogensis, a learned member of the Baltimore bar, has been carrying on a campaign against religious tests, in Maryland and elsewhere, for many years, but his chief attention, naturally enough, has been directed to those which work a hardship on his own people, the Jews. Article 36, so far as I can make out, does not disqualify Jews—that is, if they be orthodox—for they unquestionably believe in the same God that Christians believe in, and they do not categorically deny the existence of Hell. But, it certainly works a dreadful slaughter of many other persons, including not a few of the highest eminence in these parts.

What is to be done about it I don’t know. At several times in the past skeptical legislators from the city have made efforts at Annapolis to submit Article 36 to the voters of the Stale for repeal, but always their resolutions have been killed by the pious county members. There is some question, indeed, whether a referendum would suffice to repeal the article, for it is not in the Constitution proper, but in the Declaration of Rights, and it may be that the Declaration of Rights cannot be molested save by a constitutional convention. We were to have one, but it was shelved at the last session. And even if it had been held, Article 36 might have survived.

In Alabama a somewhat similar test was lately got rid of by judicial interpretation. First the judges of the Court of Appeals decided that the dying declaration of an unbeliever could not be accepted in evidence, and then they granted a rehearing and decided exactly the other way (Haura Wright vs. the State). Perhaps, if a case under Article 36 were taken to our own Court of Appeals it might be induced to repudiate Its judgment in The State vs. Mercer. But that seems unlikely, for The State vs. Mercer was heard as recently as 1905, and Maryland Judges seldom change their minds so quickly. The only way out, I suppose, is to keep on agitating, as Mr. Hartogensis has been agitating for years. When complete religious freedom is established in Maryland at last he will deserve an equestrian statue 100 feet high.

Meanwhile, it should be pleasant for many Baltimoreans to discover that they can escape jury service without expense of becoming an honorary member of the Fifth Regiment or the nuisance of committing a felony or studying for the bar. Let those who are so inclined simply say that they do not believe in Hell, and the Judge on the bench will have to excuse them. If they ever get to Hell they will undoubtedly regret their denial sorely, but while they remain on this earth it will ease and gratify them no end.

Upton Sinclair Calls Marriage Slavery and Ceremony a Farce

Annie Laurie

Oakland Tribune/January 30, 1909

Upton Sinclair says he’s sorry he’s married.

He said it right out loud in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice.

I read about the Robins people—the couple who don’t believe in marriage and who have decided to take the world Into their confidence and proclaim that they have never been married at all, and that they never intend to marry at all—not nobody, nowhere, at no time—all because they believe that modern marriage is a hideous mockery, and a horrible sin. So I went down to Mr. Sinclair’s hotel to see what he thought about the Robins and their views of the marriage question.

Hears Amazing Thing

Mr. Slnclair was pleasant enough to invite me to a most delightful vegetarian luncheon and then I sat there and listened, with eyebrows that I did my best to keep vertical, to all kinds of amazing things—mostly about marriage.

“These Rabins must be people of great courage and fine character,” said Mr. Sinclair. “It takes grit to be a pioneer. Of course, they are doing the right thing. I have never believed in marriage. Who could, and know any married people at all? But I wasn’t brave enough to live up to my convictions.

“When my wife and I fell in love with each other, we talked the whole marriage business over very conscientiously. We both of us hated the idea of being tied together by either a religious or a legal ceremony, and we tried to make up our minds to set the right kind of example to the world.

“But we know that Mrs. Sinclair’s father and mother would go raving crazy if we did what our conscience told us was right. So to ease their minds we let some one mumble a few words over us—and made them happy.

Calls Ceremony “Farce”

“l wish now we had done as these Robins people have had the courage and the fortitude to do—lived together without the farce of a foolish and obsolete ceremony.

“The world would have been that much farther ahead on the road to progress.

“We were young and foolish then, and now we have seen the world and know a great many married people—so we are a good deal ashamed of being married ourselves.

“Why am I so prejudiced against marriage?

“Why shouldn’t I be prejudiced against it? You might as well ask me why I am so prejudiced against slavery—or against thievery—or if it comes to that, against murder either.

“Marriage in this day is nothing but legalized slavery; that’s the most polite word to call it, I fancy.

“The average married woman is bought just exactly as much as any horse or any dog is bought.

“She is absolutely dependent upon her husband for her food and clothes, and she marries him just to get the very best food and clothes that she can command in the market.

“What are all these balls and parties—but bargain sales?

“This lovely blonde for half a million, a little shop worn, going at half price.

This gorgeous brunette on the bargain counter today, $20,000 a year will buy her. That’s what it all means—this display and parade and music and feasting and flowers. Every woman with a daughter is a match-maker, and she is looking for bargains, too.

“Talk about a fire sale rush—you just watch a young man with a good income or good prospects of a good income at a party, and you’ll see what the word ‘rush’ means.

“Women will never marry for love and for love alone until they become economically independent.

Independent Women

“A woman wage-earner will not marry for a home, when it gets to be as swell to earn your own living as it is to have some man earn it for you.

“Marriage of today is worse than a farce; it is a hideous tragedy.

“How many happy married people do you know?”

“About one couple in ten thousand.

“There’s So and So, a dissipated, selfish wreck—his wife lives with him rather than to go out and earn her own living.

“I don’t like to have my wife associate with women who do such things. I consider it immoral to encourage such horrible immorality.

“There is Thus and So, a morbid egotist, absorbing his wife’s very vitality and fairly eating up her very soul.

“There is Johnson buying bis wife pretty clothes, dressing her like a doll and making love to every woman he meets.

“She knows it, and she knows that he knows that she knows he knows it—but what’s the difference. A pair of pendant earrings at the right time or a new chinchilla coat—and it’s all right.

“Marriage! Faugh!”

“Marriage—ough! It really isn’t a subject to be discussed at the table.”

“But if all these people you speak of were not married to each other, Mr. Sinclair, only just living together, without a ceremony, do you think they would be happier then?” I ventured.

“They wouldn’t live together,” said Mr. Sinclair. “When they got tired of each other they’d quit.”

“And find some one else?” I queried, timidly.

“Perhaps,” answered Mr. Sinclair, calmly.

“And then?” I breathed in diffident but determined tones.

“And then,” said Mr. Sinclair, firmly, “what then? Nothing matters so long as the human race progresses. It may come through pain and through sorrow and through humiliation and through martyrdom, the progression, but come it must, and before we can climb very high on the stairs of progress we have got to leave the old-fashioned marriage contract at the foot of the steps.”

I found my dazed and somewhat bewildered way down the hill to Market street and down Market street to the little vegetarian restaurant kept and run by the Robins, Mr.—may I call her for this once again?—Mrs. Robins.

Eyes That Dream

Mr. Robins is a pale little man with a high, broad forehead, and a pair of dark eyes that dream, and Mrs. Robins is rather an attractive woman of the Swiss type, with large blue eyes, black lashed, plenty of black hair, a sweet smile and a great deal of fresh and perfectly natural color.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Robins, showing me to a seat at a plain little table at the end of the plain little restaurant, “I am the woman you read about in the papers. We didn’t want it to get into the papers, but since it was in why, we’ll have to make the best of it.

“No, I never married Mr. Robins. Yes, I have been called his wife for five years. I do not believe In marriage.

“It is a cruel and wicked slavery. want to be free; I could not bear to tie myself by any ceremony to any man.”

To Remain Happy

Mr. Robins smiled gently across a somewhat crumpled tablecloth and said very softly, “We are not separating because we are unhappy.

“We are separating because we are happy—and we want to keep happy.”

“Yes,” nodded Mrs. Robins, her large blue eyes afire with what looked like intelligent Interest. “That’s the way to keep happy—to separate.

“We have never quarreled, and we intend to part so that we never will have quarrels.

“Too much companionship is the worst kind of slavery. I want to live my life my own way, and I want this man I have loved for five years and love now to live his life, his own way; that’s all there is to it. There is no mystery—nothing but plain common sense. I despise the average married woman. I look upon her as a poor drudge, bought and paid for by her clothes and board.

Would “Improve World”

“When there are no more such women as she in the world the world will come nearer to being fit for honest, self-respecting women to live in.

“No true woman can be a helpless parasite and keep even a pretense of self-respect. Some day the world will see this, and then there will be no more marriage and no more misery, stunted, half-developed lives.”

The Archive

Historic American Journalism

Tag Archives: bible

General Washington’s Negro Body Servant

The Melodeon as a Religious Motor

The Private History of a Campaign That Failed

The Woes of a Holy Man

Adventures in Kiwanis

Dr. France’s Platform

On Religious Liberty

Upton Sinclair Calls Marriage Slavery and Ceremony a Farce