The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

My attention has been several times called by the citizens of Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb, Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds, but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print, defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I was in the federal army and know something about the South. I learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making, blatherskites ought to have their d——d tongues cut out." Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios, contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit, but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.

Now for Christ's sake don't judge Iowa people by this peripatetic Ananias. Where he was born I don't know; neither do I care a d—n; but I suspect that he was begotten in some back yard during the dark of the moon, spawned in a dry goods box and raised on bones." So Bailey is "Tank-Kee." If I mistake not there was a Tank-kee trotting around Texas some years ago beating school-children of the small towns out of their pennies by dressing like a Chinese joss with a double-barrelled jag and exhibiting a lot of old junk. It is my impression that he's a half-breed of some kind, but whether half Chinese or coon I cannot with certainty say. If he is hacking around from town to town in Mississippi he is doubtless working a fake of some kind-swindling the people while defaming them. If the Mississippians can locate G. W. Bailey they had best hold him and wire me for copies of his articles in my possession. One thing is cock-sure—"Tank-kee" had best keep out of Texas.

. . .

The suspicion is growing that Dr. Gutieras, the government expert, has a pint of yellow fever baccilli in his cerebrum. He carries the plague with him, just as a man suffering with mania a potu carries his cargo of monkeys. Had he been called to see Simon's wife's mother, he would have declared that she had a case of Yellow Jack and spread a panic through all Judea. Should he find a man suffering with katzenjammer he would pronounce him a "suspect." As Barney Gibbs says, all the yellow fever patients Gutieras discovered during his tour of South Texas were up "hunting either a drink or a job" ere this peripatetic expert was well out of town. I'll gamble four dollars that there is not in the United States to-day a genuine case of Yellow Jack. There's every indication that the cases at Mobile, New Orleans and Biloxi are identical with the disease discovered by Gutieras at Galveston—nothing under heaven but the dengue. Who the devil ever heard of the mortality in a yellow fever epidemic averaging only about 6 per cent.? Why la grippe will beat that as an angel-maker and beat it blind. When good old- fashioned yellow fever reaches for people they begin to sing "Heaven is my home," I'd rather have the "plague" now rioting in New Orleans than to contract the buck ague or the itch. These "experts" make my soul aweary. An insanity expert thinks everybody crazy but himself, while a yellow fever expert would isolate a case o' cucumber colic. What the South needs to do is to quarantine against these special doctors.

A few American newspapers and magazines of the genus mugwump, enemies of Cuban liberty and apologists for the Weylerian butcheries and brutalities, are now busily engaged in belittling those who enabled Senorita Cisneros to escape from her captors, are heaping their feculence upon Mesdames Jefferson Davis, Jno. A. Logan and the other "old women" who had the temerity to appeal to the Spanish Queen Regent in behalf of the young heroine—are even repeating the stale lies of Weyler's understrappers reflecting upon her chastity. What brave American journalists! How proud of such sons Columbia should be! It is quite possible the New York Journal undertook the young lady's rescue for advertising purposes only; but just the same, she is on American soil, and she can well afford to ignore the petty malice of emasculated mugwump editors, knowing as she must, that the chivalry of this country is with her to the last man. I do not believe the statement of the Spanish official whom Senorita Cisneros accused of insulting her, and who retorted that she had thrown herself at his head. A gentleman could not make such an assertion even though it were true, for a woman's illicit favors set upon the lips of the recipient the seal of eternal silence. The defamer of Senorita Cisneros is but another Don Matthias de Silvae of Le Sage. . . .

The coon seems to be forging rapidly to the front in some portions of this country. On October 2, Mrs. W. E. D. Stokes, a wealthy white woman and owner of one of the largest stock farms in Kentucky, gave a ball and banquet near Lexington to 300 colored people and filled 'em full of beer. Whether Mrs. Stokes danced with the bucks the dispatches do not state. . . .

My attention has been several times called to one W. D. McKinstry of Watertown, N. Y., by people of that place. They plead with me that he is really spoiling for a "roast." McKinstry is publishing a little paper which somewhat resembles an over-ripe dish-rag, or an unlaundered sheet from the bed of a colored baby; but I have no idea why he is so unpopular. It may be because he possesses the physique of a bull elephant and the brains of a doodle-bug. It may be that the appearance of such an animal outside a dime museum, or a pig sty, angers the people. I can see nothing in his editorials at which to take offense. Reading them were like drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle or filling one's belly with the east wind. McKinstry is trying to settle the "negro problem" for the South; but that has so long been a favorite occupation of Smart Alec editors who never saw a cotton patch that no one minds it any more. Waco has the coon and Watertown has McKinstry, hence it is in order for the two towns to mingle their tears instead of animadverting each upon the other's misfortune. If I might advise the mighty McKinstry I would suggest that he change his occupation. As an editor he is a dismal failure, but he would be a dazzling success as ballast for a canal boat. . . .

A correspondent notes that the New York World devotes two illustrated pages to the Vanderbilt-Marlborough brat, and wants to know what I think about it? Why, I think that old Josef Phewlitzer has succeeded in elongating the Vanderbilt leg. No editor ever publishes such tommyrot unless paid therefor, because he knows that no sane person will read it. It was an advertisement, ordered and paid for by somebody, probably Consuelo's rather gay mother, who, albeit divorced from her first husband for cause, has the distinguished honor to be gran'dam to an incipient duke, who will probably grow up to be as utterly worthless as his daddy. . . .

Jno. H. Holmes, editor of the Boston Herald, writing on the "New Journalism." says: "Huge circulation is extremely profitable. It produced revenue from the sale of the paper, and a still greater revenue from the volume of advertising." In other words, the average "great daily" is simply a mercenary advertising graft. It may "produce revenue," but seldom profit from circulation, for the price to agents is frequently below the cost of white paper and expressage. The subscription price is usually placed below the profit line, and extra inducements offered in the way of "premiums." Somehow, a circulation, bona fide or fake, must be worked up as an excuse for elongating the business man's leg. And he is a "dead easy mark." The yap who purchases checks of strangers and bets on monte is no more gullible than the average victim of the advertising grafter. A sucker is said to be born every minute; and strange to say, most of them are produced in the cities. The business man who makes an advertising contract without investigating the circulation claims of the publisher, would invest in confederate bonds or buy gold bricks. If he suffered the loss it would not much matter—would be simply another case of the fool and his money soon parted; but it is shifted to the consumer. The people must pay the merchant's advertising bills, just as they pay his rent and insurance; and the amount of which they are annually fleeced to pay for what has no actual existence, would meet all expenses of government and leave a tremendous surplus in the treasury. This nation wastes annually for worthless fake advertising more than it pays for education. . . .

A Galveston traveling man writes me as follows: