“Want to read something good?”
It was an account of how a Catholic priest had been accused of intimate relations with a young girl who had come to confess to him. The man winked and gleefully expressed his indignation. His little dark eyes sparkled.
“They ought to all be wiped out root and stem,” he said vehemently. “They’re all alike, with their round faces and their fat stomachs. Every one. A bunch of hypocrites, under the rule of an Eye-talian pot-entate, taxing the people and living on the fat of the land. Why, it’s a well-known fact that every priest has a cellar full of wine and that they get drunk every night.”
He recited other “facts” and then appealed to history. He had just read in a previous issue of the same publication of the Spanish Inquisition.
“If they had the same power now they’d hold an inquisition right here,” he declared. “They’re an intolerant lot and if I had my way I’d make every one swear he wasn’t a Catholic and those who wouldn’t swear, I’d hang.”
The defender of tolerance gleefully read the card Hamilton handed him.
“Every word of that is true,” he repeated after every statement. “Yes, sir, every word. Yes, sir, we demand separation of church and state?”
For a moment the phrase “separation of church and state” struck Hamilton as an odd anachronism—it was as though he had demanded “no taxation without representation”—and then he remembered that that was one of the purposes of the Tribe as outlined on the card. States’ rights was another one of the planks with a musty flavor—it went back also to the Constitutional Convention, to gentlemen in knee breeches and wigs ardently debating how much of the power of the sovereign states was to be delegated to the Confederation itself.
But the tolerant gentleman who wished to hang all Catholics waxed enthusiastic over these demands and Hamilton encouraged him.
The other converts were clerks or secretaries, the most important of them the secretary of a commercial club of a suburb of Chicago—Parkins, a short, blond, plump man, with an engaging smile and a penchant for pep talks. He wore rimless eye-glasses suspended by a gold chain, which he frequently removed from his nose to breathe upon and wipe with a silk handkerchief. Parkins had his eye, a very pale one, on a bigger job, managing director of the Chamber of Commerce of one of the more important cities of the Mississippi Valley and systematically spoke before various civic and commercial organizations. He had both spoken and written for trade journals, house organs, etc., considerably more about the human will than Jonathan Edwards and William James combined. His lectures, called “The Will to Success” and “Selling Yourself Through Your Will” were called “classics.” They were universally accepted, emulated and followed.