Frank had never known physical conflict more violent than boyhood wrestling. His hand shook. He tried to sound defiant with: “They can’t scare me!”
His telephone, and a voice: “This Shallard? Well this is a brother preacher speaking. Name don’t matter. I just want to tip you off that you’d better not speak tonight. Some of the boys are pretty rough.”
Then Frank began to know the joy of anger.
The hall of his lecture was half filled when he looked across the ice-water pitcher on the speaker’s table. At the front were the provincial intellectuals, most of them very eager, most of them dreadfully poor: a Jewish girl librarian with hungry eyes, a crippled tailor, a spectacled doctor sympathetic to radical disturbances but too good a surgeon to be driven out of town. There was a waste of empty seats, then, and at the back a group of solid, prosperous, scowling burghers, with a leonine man who was either an actor, a congressman, or a popular clergyman.
This respectable group grumbled softly, and hissed a little as Frank nervously began.
America, he said, in its laughter at the “monkey trial” at Dayton, did not understand the veritable menace of the Fundamentalists’ crusade. (“Outrageous!” from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches. We might live to see men burned to death for refusing to attend Protestant churches.
Frank quoted the Fundamentalist who asserted that evolutionists were literally murderers, because they killed orthodox faith, and ought therefore to be lynched; William Jennings Bryan, with his proposal that any American who took a drink outside the country should be exiled for life.
“That’s how these men speak, with so little power—as yet!” Frank pleaded. “Use your imaginations! Think how they would rule this nation, and compel the more easy-going half-liberal clergy to work with them, if they had the power!”
There were constant grunts of “That’s a lie!” and “They ought to shut him up!” from the back, and now Frank saw marching into the hall a dozen tough young men. They stood ready for action, looking expectantly toward the line of prosperous Christian Citizens.
“And you have here in your own city,” Frank continued, “a minister of the gospel who enjoys bellowing that any one who disagrees with him is a Judas.”