The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12

by William Cowper Brann

[This is the lecture that Mr. Brann delivered and was to continue on his lecture tour, which was cut short by his death.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: There are many things which I very cordially dislike; but my pet aversion is what is known as a "set" lecture—one of those stereotyped affairs that are ground out with studied inflection and practiced gesture and suggest the grinding of Old Hundred on a hurdy- gurdy; hence I shall ask permission to talk to you tonight as informally and as freely as though we were seated in friendly converse around the soda fount of a Kansas drug store; and I want you to feel as free to talk back as though we had gotten into this difficulty by accident instead of design. Ask me all the questions you want to, and if I'm unable to answer offhand I'll look the matter up later and telegraph you—at your expense. With such unbounded liberty there's really no telling whither we will drift, what subjects we may touch upon; but should I inadvertently trample upon any of your social idols or political gods, I trust that you will take no offense—will remember that we may honestly differ, that none of us are altogether infallible. Lest any of you should mistake me for an oratorical clearing-sale or elocutionary bargain- counter, expect a Demosthenic display and be disappointed, I hasten to say that I am no orator as Brutus was, but simply a plain, blunt man, like Mark Antony, who spoke right on and said what he did know, or thought he knew, which was just as satisfactory to himself. He's dead now, poor fellow! Woman in the case, of course. Shakespeare assures us that "men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love." However that may be, Antony's just as dead as though he had died for love—or become a gold-bug "Democrat." Yes, Mark Antony's gone, but we still have Mark Hanna. One threw the world away for Cleopatra's smile, the other threw Columbia's smile away for a seat in the Senate, and so it goes. Of the two Marks, I think Antony was the easiest.

. . .

But let us take a look at our text. The rainbow is a sign, I believe, that the Prohibitionists once carried the country and would have made a complete success of the cold water cure had not the Rum Demon engineered the Ark. Still it does not necessarily follow that a rainbow chaser is a fellow on the hot trail of a blind tiger. He may be one who hopes to raise the wage rate by means of a tariff wall, or expects John Bull to assist Uncle Sam in the remonetization of silver. A rainbow-chaser, in the common acceptance of the term, is a fellow who mistakes shadow for substance and wanders off the plank turnpike into bogs and briar patches. Satan appears to have been the first victim of the rainbow-chasing fad—to have bolted the Chicago convention and run for president on the reform ticket. At a very early age I began to doubt the existence of a personal devil, whereupon my parent on my father's side proceeded to argue the matter in the good old orthodox way, but failed to get more than half the hussy out of my hide. But we will not quarrel about the existence or non-existence of a party who Milton assures us slipped on a political orange peel. We know that frauds and fakes exist, that hypocrites and humbugs abound. Whether this be due to the pernicious activity of a horned monster or to evil inherent in the human heart, I will not assume to say. We may call that power the devil which is forever at war with truth, is the father of falsehood, whether it be an active personality or only a vicious principle.

. . .

Under the direction of this devil, real or abstract, the world has gone rainbow chasing and fallen deep into the Slough of Despond. Conditions have become so desperate that it were well for you and I, who are in the world and of it, to abate somewhat our partisan rancor, our sectarian bitterness, and take serious counsel together. Desperate, I say, meaning thereby not only that it becomes ever more difficult for the workman to win his modicum of bread and butter, to provide his own hemlock coffin in which to go to hades—or elsewhere; but that honor, patriotism, reverence—all things which our fathers esteemed as more precious than pure gold—have well-nigh departed, that the social heart is dead as a salt herring; that all is becoming brummagem and pinch-beck, leather and prunella; that a curse hath fallen upon the womb of the world, and it no longer produces heaven-inspired men but only some pitiful simulacra thereof, some worthless succedona for such, who strive not to do their god-given duty though the world reward them with a gibbet, but to win wages of gold and grub, to obtain idle praise by empty plausibility. They aspire to ride the topmost wave, not of a tempestuous ocean which tries the heart of oak and the hand of iron, but of some pitiful sectarian mud-puddle or political goose pond. Under the guidance of these shallow self-seekers we have abandoned the Ark of the Covenant with its Brotherhood of Man, its solemn duties and sacred responsibilities, and are striving to manage matters mundane on a basis of brute selfishness, with a conscience or a creed of following the foolish rainbow of a fatuous utilitaria and getting even deeper into the bogs.

. . .

I have frequently been called a "chronic kicker," but do not object to the epithet. There's need of good lusty kickers, those whose No. 1 tootsie-wootsies are copper- toed, for the world is lull of devilish things that deserve to die. Lest any should accuse me of the awful sin of using slang, and thereby break my heart, I hasten to say that the Bible twice employs the word "kick" in the same sense that I used it here. In fact, a goodly proportion of our so-called slang is drawn from the same high source, being vinegar to the teeth of pietistical purists, but quite good enough for God. Some complain that I should build instead of tearing down, should preserve and not destroy. The complaint is well founded if it be wrong to attack falsehood, to exterminate the industrial wolves and social rottenness, to destroy the tares sown by the devil and give dollar wheat a chance to arise and hump itself. In determining what should be preserved and what destroyed, we may honestly disagree; but I think all will concede that what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently an age of artificiality—that there is little genuine left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston propose to expel from politics for dereliction of duty. Somehow an old bachelor always reminds me of a rainbow; not because he looks like one in the least, but rather because he's so utterly useless for all practical purposes. He also reminds me of a rainbow-chaser, because what he is compelled to admire is beyond his reach. When hope deferred hath made him heart-sick he begins to growl at the girls—and for the same reason that a mastiff barks at the moon. You will notice that a mastiff seldom barks much at anything he can get hold of and bite.

. . .

We are solemnly assured that the world is steadily growing better; and I suppose that's so, for in days of old they crucified men head downwards for telling the truth, while now they only hammer them over the head with six-shooters and drag 'em around a Baptist college campus with a rope. All that a reformer now needs is a hard head and a rubber neck. The cheerful idiot, alias the optimist, is forever prating of the world's progress. Progress is a desirable thing only when we make it in the right direction. It may be sure and swift down a soaped plank into wild ocean depths; or it may be with painful steps and slow toward the eternal mountain tops where breaks the great white light of God, and there's no more of darkness and of death. Progress industrial, the productive power of labor multiplied by two, by ten; and with such improved weapons for waging war upon the grisly gorgon of want, nearly nine millions of the industrial army in India alone died upon their shields. Hosannahs mounting in costly churches here, the starving babe tugging at the empty breast of the dead mother there!— and we send to the famine-sufferers many bibles and hymn- books, little bacon and beans. Bibles and hymn-books are excellent things in their ways, but do not possess an absorbing interest for the man with an aching void concealed about his system. Starving people ask a Christian world for grub, and it gives them forty'leven different brands of saving grace—each warranted the only genuine —most of these elixirs of life ladled out by hired missionaries who serve God for the long green, and who are often so deplorably ignorant that they couldn't tell a religious thesis from an ichthyosaurian.