| Original Full Text | ROUSE, ANDERSON R., Ph.D. Keeping Up with the Joneses: Progressive Era Revivalism in the South and the Rise of the Christian Right. (2024) Directed by Dr. Charles C. Bolton. 397 pp. This dissertation examines the development of the Christian Right (also known as the New Christian Right) in the late twentieth century by focusing on its roots in Progressive Era revivalism and, in particular, the careers and beliefs of Samuel Porter Jones (1847-1906), better known as Sam P. Jones, and Robert Reynolds Jones, Sr. (1883-1968), or Bob Jones. While Sam Jones is largely forgotten today, and Bob Jones is most remembered for the bastion of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism that bears his name (Bob Jones University), both evangelists became household names during their respective careers. As their campaigns crisscrossed Progressive Era America, these men attracted audiences of thousands and filled the pages of newspapers from Honolulu to Hoboken with reprints of and excerpts from their dramatic and quotable sermons. Sam Jones and Bob Jones also became inextricably connected with Progressive reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both evangelists were leading proponents for local and, ultimately, national Prohibition. Additionally, both Sam Jones and Bob Jones campaigned for gubernatorial candidates and involved themselves in municipal politics, and Sam Jones was even (briefly) a candidate in the 1898 Georgia gubernatorial election. For the Joneses, the sawdust trails of tent revivals and the campaign trails of their political allies all led to the same destination – a Christian America. Sam Jones and Bob Jones shared remarkably similar visions for what that America should look like. First, and most importantly, these evangelists viewed the Evangelical home as the foundation of a righteous society. For this idealized home to persist, men, women, and children each had their own vital obligations. The Joneses believed that fathers should be sober, hardworking, and devout, mothers should be submissive, domesticated, and pure, and children should be obedient. Christian manhood and womanhood were major concerns of these religious leaders. No threat to this vision of domestic life could be tolerated, and both men viewed their political activism as crusades to protect the home. Second, the Joneses were committed to racial separation and white supremacy. They believed that God had established racial differences and that attempts to force integration or social equality would end in disaster. Finally, Sam Jones and Bob Jones advanced the idea that Christians had a divine mandate to reform society not only through religious conversion but also through political action. A Christian America would be created both by salvation and legislation. These beliefs aligned closely with the ideology of the Progressive Movement. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 1910s and 1920s led many Evangelicals, like Bob Jones, to focus on building distinctly Evangelical institutions (including colleges). Still, these beliefs persisted into the post-World War II period and were reborn in the 1970s and 1980s as the Christian Right, which, like the Progressives of the Gilded Age, sought to reform society and rescue American homes from the threats of modern life. Ultimately, Christian Nationalists of the twenty-first century, the Christian Right of the 1970s and 1980s, and Progressive revivalists like Sam Jones and Bob Jones are united by a common purpose – to create (or preserve) a Christian nation through both the transformative power of religious conversion and the coercive power of the state.KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES: PROGRESSIVE-ERA REVIVALISM IN THE SOUTH AND THE RISE OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT by Anderson R. Rouse A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2024 Approved by Dr. Charles C. Bolton Committee Chair ii © 2024 Anderson R. Rouse iii DEDICATION When I began this dissertation in earnest in the summer of 2017, I could not have been aware of all the changes and challenges that the next seven years would hold. This dissertation’s existence is thanks to the love and support of my friends, colleagues, and family. At UNCG, I benefited from the insight, camaraderie, and wisdom of my fellow graduate students, especially Arlen Hanson, Travis Byrd, Mike Rubin, Timothy Reagin, and Shawn Reagin. My three years as an officer in UNCG’s Graduate Student Association helped me grow as a leader and communicator. The academic and personal upheavals caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, however, often made me question if I would ever finish my studies at UNC Greensboro. I found a new academic community among the faculty of Millennium Charter Academy in Mount Airy, where – teaching 8th grade for two years and high school for a third – I discovered a passion for teaching even as I put this dissertation on the backburner. Truthfully, other demands on my attention had higher priority than my degree. I earned a graduate certificate in teaching at UNC Charlotte and resolved to be an excellent high school teacher. Among my colleagues at MCA, I found academics who continued to challenge me and helped me to grow professionally and academically. In particular, Eric Cook, a fellow humanities teacher at MCA, became a good friend and provided valuable insights into religious history. My friends and loved ones refused to let me neglect this dissertation. Dr. Vernon Burton, my master’s thesis advisor at Clemson University, helped to provide a role model of what it means to be a historian who was not content to let the past be neglected and abused. Through his influence, I have constantly been reminded that history can and should be transformative. He has helped to shape me into the historian that I am today. My parents, Amy and Andrew Rouse, stubbornly ignored my attempts to change the subject when they asked me how the dissertation iv was coming. From them, I have learned that persistence – perhaps a better word is faithfulness – is the foundation of a well-lived life. Their commitment to their family (including me) and their community is a constant encouragement to me to stay committed to those things that I care about the most. My siblings – Stacy, Ambrose, and Alexander – along with my brothers- and sisters-in-law (Daniel Headrick, Briseydi Rouse, and Hailey, Michaela, and Madison Rutledge) and my mother- and father-in-law, Karen and Mike Rutledge, were constantly encouraging and uplifting, even when I doubted myself. More than any other person, however, this dissertation’s completion is thanks to my wife. Throughout this process, she has encouraged me to keep on keeping on. Even when I resolved to let this dissertation join the piles of unfinished dissertations, she refused to let me finish before completing my degree. Her small business, which she founded by herself during the pandemic, allowed me to refocus on completing my dissertation. She has been endlessly encouraging and supportive. She has been cheerleader, my muse, my guide, my sounding board, my north star. We fell in love as the first pages of this dissertation were being written, and this June will mark our sixth year of marriage. “Doctor of Philosophy” will always be a much less impressive title to me than “husband.” This dissertation, then, is dedicated to my beloved, my orange half, Lauren Rouse. v APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Anderson R. Rouse has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair Dr. Charles Bolton Committee Members Dr. Greg O’Brien Dr. Jill Bender Dr. Thomas Jackson February 26, 2024 Date of Acceptance by Committee March 11, 2024 Date of Final Oral Examination vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ........................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER I: THE SAWDUST TRAIL FROM PROGRESSIVISM TO CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM ............................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER II: “I PLEAD FOR HOME”: SAM P. JONES AND GENDER ............................... 18 CHAPTER III: “A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY”: SAM P. JONES AND THE RACIAL ORTHODOXY OF THE NEW SOUTH ...................................................................................... 66 CHAPTER IV: THE SAWDUST TRAIL AND THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL: SAM P. JONES AND NEW SOUTH POLITICS ...................................................................... 135 CHAPTER V: DEFENDING “PROTESTANT CIVILIZATION”: BOB JONES AND THE REBIRTH OF PROGRESSIVISM .................................................... 188 CHAPTER VI: “GOD WAS THE FIRST SEGREGATIONIST”: BOB JONES AND THE FUNDAMENTALIST DEFENSE OF SEGREGATION ........................................ 248 CHAPTER VII: DEFENDING “THE BATTLEMENTS OF THE HOUSE”: BOB JONES CAMPAIGNS TO PRESERVE THE HOME ...................................................... 297 CHAPTER VIII: “A DIVINE MANDATE”: THE BIRTH OF THE NEW CHRISTIAN RIGHT ............................................................................................... 333 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 366 vii Illustration 1. David Macrae (Atlanta Constitution, February 24, 1899) ...................................... 67 Illustration 2. Caricature of Sam P. Jones (St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, March 25, 1895) .................................................................... 89 Illustration 3.“‘Bob’ Jones at the West Scranton Revival,” The Tribune (Scranton, PA), January 10, 1913 .......................................................................... 193 Illustration 4. Williams Adams Gunter ....................................................................................... 214 Illustration 5.“Postponed,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 7, 1922 ............................................................................................................................ 222 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1 On a humid Sunday evening in August 1912, seven thousand audience members crowded under the eaves of the “Sam Jones Tabernacle,” a massive wooden structure built in Cartersville, Georgia, in 1886 to house annual revival meetings led by Cartersville’s favorite son, evangelist Sam P. Jones. After he died in October 1906, the tabernacle that bore his name largely sat empty, and no one had preached there at all since 1908 after his son-in-law, evangelist Walt Holcomb, had scandalized a woman who had dared to attend a Sunday School meeting that was for “men only.”1 The crowd had assembled to hear the closing sermon of a twelve-day-long revival campaign led by a twenty-eight-year-old evangelist from Montgomery, Alabama, named Robert Reynolds Jones, or “Bob” Jones, who had gained a reputation in his teenage years as the “Boy Preacher.”2 In early June 1912, Bob Jones had been invited by forty citizens of Cartersville (and, notably, not the leading ministers of the town) to hold a meeting from July 31 to August 11 with the hope of reopening the Sam Jones Tabernacle and reviving the annual evangelistic meetings. The meetings were only begrudgingly supported by the pastors of the Cartersville Methodist Church (which, since 1907, had met in the newly-constructed Sam Jones Memorial Methodist Church), the Cartersville First Baptist Church, and the First Presbyterian Church of Cartersville, in part because it conflicted with a scheduled revival at Cartersville First Baptist, but also because the ministers were not included in the decision to hold a revival at the 1 The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 11, 1912; “Tabernacle Meetings To Be Held At Cartersville,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), July 20, 1912; “Rev. Walt Holcomb Guilty, Knoxville Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), October 27, 1908. 2 “Bob Jones Is Successor to Late Sam Jones,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), August 13, 1912. CHAPTER I: THE SAWDUST TRAIL FROM PROGRESSIVISM TO CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM 2 Tabernacle. Still, the revival was praised as ending “religious factionalism” between the Protestant denominations in Cartersville and the Tabernacle was “rebaptized to evangelism.”3 As Bob Jones concluded what was described as an “impressive sermon,” the Sam Jones Tabernacle Committee, at the urging of Mrs. Laura McElwain Jones (the late evangelist’s wife), called on the audience to choose Bob Jones to succeed her husband and conduct annual revivals in Cartersville. The audience obliged, unanimously selecting Bob Jones to be Sam Jones’s successor. Sam Jones’s son, Paul Jones, declared after the meeting that “Bob Jones much resembles my father in his manner of preaching” and described him as “the best living evangelist in the south.”4 Bob Jones would return to the Sam Jones Tabernacle in August 1913, managing a campaign led by evangelist Rodney “Gipsey” Smith. Jones himself turned down pleas from the audience to preach, since the pastor of Cartersville’s Sam Jones Memorial Methodist Church, W.T. Hunnicutt, had not given his approval for Jones, a Methodist evangelist, to preach.5 Unavoidably, Bob Jones, an evangelist licensed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South who was born and raised in the Deep South, was compared to Sam Jones, an evangelist licensed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who was born and raised in the Deep South. Many contemporaries even assumed that the two Joneses were related.6 Furthermore, both 3 “Pastors Explain Tabernacle Row,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 20, 1912; The Ozark Tribune (Ozark, AL), June 1, 1912; “Cartersville Awakened By A Powerful Revival,” The Knoxville Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), August 12, 1912; “Jones Tabernacle Row Gets Warmer,” The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), August 19, 1912. 4 “Big Meeting Closed Last Sunday Night,” The Cartersville News (Cartersville, GA), August 15, 1912; “Bob Jones Is Successor to Late Sam Jones,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), August 13, 1912; “Rev. Bob Jones Selected As Sam Jones’ Successor,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 12, 1912. 5 “Bob Jones and Gypsy Smith Open Cartersville Revival,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 4, 1913. 6 “Bob Jones, Evangelist, Coming to Macon,” The Macon Times-Democrat (Macon, MO), July 31, 1913; “Consigns Non-Prayers to Bottomless Future,” The Pittsburgh Daily Post (Pittsburgh, PA), September 9, 1907. This misunderstanding was understandable, especially since Sam Jones’s son, Robert Wilkerson Jones (occasionally known as “Bob” Jones) converted during one of his father’s meetings and decided to become an evangelist; however, Robert Jones died of pneumonia when he was thirty years old, in January 1907. See “Quits His Meanness 3 Joneses were renowned for “pinning the most loathsome and terrible curse on the ungodly and the hypocrite.”7 They were both also famous for pithy aphorisms, and “Sam Jones-isms” and “Bob Jones-ism” filled the pages of papers across the country.8 Sam Jones implored his listeners to “quit your meanness,” while Bob Jones instructed audiences to “do right,” even “if the stars fall.”9 Despite these similarities, Sam Jones and Bob Jones were markedly different in their pulpit rhetoric. Sam Jones, a former lawyer who turned to the ministry after recovering from alcoholism, deliberately courted controversy, leading journalists to describe the “George Cracker” (as he was slandered by a columnist for the New York Sun) as “blasphemous” and “of the nature of buffoonery.”10 The Georgia evangelist himself admitted that he had “mixed humor and sarcasm” and “played along the lines of the comedian” in order to communicate his message.11 In contrast, Bob Jones, who had been preaching since he was a boy, conscientiously tried to “cut out all emotional effort” and condemned those who were “sensational for the sake of being sensational.”12 His supporters praised him for avoiding sensationalism and frivolity (in contrast to Sam Jones), even if some of his detractors accused him of depending on emotionalism and Goes to Preaching,” The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), November 3, 1906; “Robert Jones, Son of Late Rev. Sam P. Jones, Is Dead,” The Knoxville Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), January 26, 1907.7 “Bob Jones, Famed Evangelist Coming,” The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY), February 8, 1920. 8 “Bob Jones-Isms,” The Miami News (Miami, FL), April 18, 1922; “Sam Jonesisms,” The Reidsville Times (Reidsville, NC), November 23, 1888. 9 “Christians May Chew,” The Saint Paul Globe (St. Paul, MN), June 27, 1886; “Shells from Bob’s Battery,” The Times Recorder (Zanesville, OH), March 7, 1917. 10 “Sam Jones’ Sermon,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, WA), October 26, 1891; 11 “Sam Jones’s Eloquence,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 20, 1895. 12 “Without Church Hell Would Come to You,” The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 15, 1917; “Bob Jones’ Last Sermon,” The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 26, 1917. 4 instead of theology, or, as one critic memorably complained, “covering over good, wholesome food with tobasco [sic] sauce.”13 Regardless of their differences, it is impossible to deny the influence that Sam Jones had on Bob Jones’s career. Perhaps the most significant way that Sam Jones shaped Bob Jones’s career was through his own protégés, his evangelist assistants George Stuart and Sam Small. Stuart, who, like both Sam Jones and Bob Jones, was a noted proponent of Prohibition as well as a frequent Chautauqua lecturer, was praised by Bob Jones for being “a man of uncompromising convictions.” Stuart would go on to introduce Jones to Sam Small, who, in 1926 or 1927 wrote the Bob Jones College creed.14 Small became a booster for the new college and lectured under the auspices of its extension department.15 From his last name and associates to his message and methods, Robert Reynolds Jones was a successor to Samuel Porter Jones. This point is not mere trivia or a kind of Evangelical “six degrees of separation”; tracing the connections between Evangelical leaders like Sam Jones and Bob Jones is essential for understanding the evolution of Protestant Evangelicalism in the twentieth century. The historiography of the rise of the Christian Right has had a tendency to overemphasize the disjuncture between the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversies of the early twentieth century (which includes the 1925 Scopes trial) and the post-World War II politicized Evangelicalism that culminated in the over-sized influence of Christian Right organizations, like Jerry Falwell, Sr.’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition (and extends into the twenty-first century). Histories of the Christian Right either describe the movement as a strictly post-World 13J.S. Park, “Rev. Bob Jones’ Work,” The Decatur Weekly News (Decatur, AL), September 21, 1907; Frederick A. Bisbee, “Front Porch Studies,” The Miami News (Miami, FL), May 12, 1922. 14 “Tribute Paid Sam Small By Noted Evangelist,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 6, 1933. 15 “Sam Small, Famous Evangelist, Comments on Bob Jones College,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 21, 1927. 5 War II development, or as a kind of political “comeback kid,” returned to political prominence after decades of obscurity caused by the failure of the anti-evolution and anti-Modernist campaigns of the 1920s. Sociologist and political scientist Ruth Murray Brown, for example, begins her 2002 study of the Christian Right in 1972 with the crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment and the formation of a “pro-family movement” led by southern fundamentalist women.16 Daniel K. Williams’s influential study of the Christian Right, God’s Own Party, is more aware of politically active Evangelicalism’s historical roots. Williams notes that “Conservative Christians had been politically active since the early twentieth century.”17 In this regard, Williams joins the majority of scholars who, while mindful of the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversies of the early twentieth century, neglect the origins of that political activism in favor of focusing on the Christian Right of the late twentieth century. The birthplace of the Christian Right was not the Scopes Trial – instead, it began in the reforms of the Progressive Movement. A dense network of personal connections helped to tie evangelists of the Progressive Era to the Fundamentalist clergy-turned-lobbyists of the Christian Right. The Christian Right is a continuation of nineteenth-century Progressivism. This statement would seem to be, on its face, oxymoronic: How can a movement that is so closely linked to modern Conservatism be an offspring of Progressivism, since, as political commentator Win McCormack writes, “Progressive and liberal are precisely synonyms in American political life”?18 When examining Progressivism as a historical movement, however, it becomes clear that politicized Evangelicalism is an offshoot of the anxiety and aims of the Progressive Movement. 16Ruth Murray Brown, For a “Christian America”: A History of the Religious Right (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 15-21. 17 Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2. 18 Win McCormack, “Are You Progressive?” The New Republic, May 1, 2018, 72. 6 Historian Walter T.K. Nugent defines Progressivism as “a many-sided reform movement that emerged in the final years of the nineteenth century” that “reflected a growing . . . consensus among Americans that major changes in the late nineteenth century had produced unwelcome, un-American imbalances in their society.” He observes that “Progressives . . . favored using some form and degree of government . . . to regulate economic problems, ameliorate social ills, and reconcile change with tradition” and achieve “the ‘public interest’ or ‘common good.’”19 Richard Hofstadter highlights similar strains of Progressivism in his definition of the movement when he writes that the “general theme” of Progressivism was “the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy” and to “bring back a kind of morality and civic purity.”20 Evangelical religious leaders – from the focuses of this dissertation, Sam Jones and “Bob” Jones, to latter-day Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson – were convinced that both individuals and governments had a responsibility to regulate morality and promote righteousness. From the campaigns for Prohibition of the late nineteenth century to the Pro-Life Movement of the late twentieth century, Evangelicals have lobbied politicians to join their crusade against the evils of “modern” America. At this point, it may be useful to define a few key terms. First, it is essential to understand what (or who) an Evangelical is. David W. Bebbington’s “quadrilateral” of Evangelicalism – “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross” – has been widely accepted by Evangelicals themselves 19 Walter T.K. Nugent, Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1-3. 20 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 5. 7 as an accurate summary of their beliefs.21 Historian Thomas Kidd takes a similarly theology-centric approach to defining Evangelicalism, observing that “Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.”22 Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in Jesus and John Wayne, challenges definitions that focus on doctrine alone. Professor Du Mez contends that “what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith” and suggests that “modern American evangelicalism” is inextricably linked with whiteness and Republican politics.23 Kidd and Du Mez highlight how slippery – or, as NPR correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben remarked in 2015, “squishy” – the term “Evangelical” is.24 In large part, its “squishiness” is caused by the fact that the term is used both prescriptively and descriptively – as shorthand for a creed and as a synonym for a subculture. In the case of Sam Jones and Bob Jones, this terminological elasticity is useful. These evangelists can be described both by Bebbington’s “quadrilateral” (or Kidd’s triangle) and by Du Mez’s more socio-cultural definition. In this dissertation, the term “Evangelical” is used to describe the cluster of shared religious beliefs and cultural convictions held by Sam Jones and Bob Jones. These beliefs hew closely to Bebbington’s “quadrilateral” but also foreshadow the ultra-masculine, nationalistic Evangelicalism of post-World War II America described by Du Mez. 21 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2-3; “What Is An Evangelical,” The National Association of Evangelicals, https://www.nae.net/what-is-an-evangelical/ (accessed January 13, 2021). 22 Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 4. 23 Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020), 5-9. 24 Danielle Kurtzleben, “Are You An Evangelical? Are You Sure?,” NPR, December 19, 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/12/19/458058251/are-you-an-evangelical-are-you-sure (accessed January 21, 2021). 8 Doctrinally, Sam Jones and Bob Jones reflect Bebbington’s Evangelical “quadrilateral.” Admittedly, these men were not theologians who built their careers on subtle doctrinal distinctions (in fact, they both were somewhat critical of “ivory tower” theologians), but their sermons provide a generally complete description of their theological beliefs. Speaking in Atchison, Kansas, in 1917, Bob Jones laid out his own “quadrilateral” – to the evangelist from Alabama, “four things make a Christian: Conviction, repentance, conversion, and being born again.”25 Both evangelists believed that it was essential to be “born again” – the conversion experience was the lynchpin of their theology. This is not surprising; after all, their primary goal as evangelists was to produce conversions. Sam Jones explained that an individual was “born again” when “a great big sinner . . . walked up to Jesus Christ and renounced all his allegiance to the devil and gave it to Christ.”26 Bob Jones, more concisely, stated that to be “born again” was to “take Christ for our Saviour.”27 Both Sam Jones and Bob Jones also believed that the Bible was literally true and without mistakes, or inerrant. Sam Jones argued the Bible “outweighs the universe.”28 Bob Jones insisted that “Jesus is God [and] the Bible is His word.”29 The two Joneses also emphasized the crucifixion of Christ. Speaking to an audience in Chicago in 1886, Sam Jones declared that his “one desire” was to “preach Christ and him crucified” and promised that he would “preach nothing but that.”30 Bob Jones shared his predecessor’s crucicentrism, 25 “What Is a Christian,” The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 2, 1917. 26 “As He Said It,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), May 17, 1891. 27 “Boys in Blue and White March to the Front to Join Christ’s Big Army,” The Watchman and Southron (Sumter, South Carolina), May 15, 1915. 28 “The Man of the Hour,” The Daily American (Nashville, TN), October 10, 1888. 29 “4,000 Hear Bob Jones Open Drive on Devil and Sin,” The El Paso Times (El Paso, TX), September 4, 1922. 30 “What Wait I For,” The Champaign Daily Gazette (Champaign, IL), March 24, 1886. 9 emphasizing in a chapel message delivered at Bob Jones College that “all you need is Jesus” who had been crucified and still bore “scars on His brow and scars in his hands.”31 Finally, both evangelists believed that salvation was a reflection of human activity – repentance and sanctification were as much a result of human volition as divine intervention. Indeed, Sam Jones encapsulated this conviction in a catchphrase – “quit your meanness.” Preaching in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1886, he commanded his audience to stop “snubbing and crying . . . around an altar” and “quit your meanness” by attending church and living according to God’s laws. Jones explained that men and women needed to use the gift of faith, granted to all humans, to live righteously, or, as he put it, “sight is the gift of God, but seeing is Sam Jones’ job.”32 Bob Jones, while insisting that “salvation is not by works,” maintained that “your rewards [depend] on your work.”33 The younger Jones exhorted his audiences to “live a pure life” and to “decide to do right.”34 Sam Jones and Bob Jones believed in the possibility – and necessity – of human action to effect spiritual change. As men who made their living on the “sawdust trail,” these evangelists depended on the human role in salvation and the Christian life. Sam Jones and Bob Jones, however, did not become ecclesiastical celebrities because of their profound doctrinal teachings – instead, both Joneses gained audiences by reflecting, shaping, and at times challenging popular Evangelical culture in the post-Civil War South. The evangelists – and their colleagues who crisscrossed the nation with them – blurred the lines between the marketplace, the political stump, and the pulpit. In terms of their religious teachings, 31 Bob Jones, Sr., Things I Have Learned: Chapel Talks at Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1986), 222-223. Emphasis in original. 32 “Christians May Chew,” The St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, MN), June 27, 1886. 33 “Visit the Outcast, Urged Bob Jones,” The Times Recorder (Zanesville, OH), March 7, 1917. 34 “Sowing and Reaping is Subject of Men’s Sermon,” The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), January 23, 1911; “Prayer Meets Big Asset of Revival Here,” The Evening Review (East Liverpool, OH), October 1, 1920. 10 Sam Jones and Bob Jones were largely unremarkable, and doctrinally they mostly hewed close to mainline Evangelical Protestant doctrines. They never made headlines for insisting on the truthfulness of the Bible or the efficaciousness of the crucifixion, since, after all, in most cities and towns across the United States anyone could choose a church at random on any given Sunday and hear very similar sermons. The Joneses became celebrities by linking Evangelical Protestantism with a defense of allegedly traditional or “old time” beliefs and values, and then supercharging their rhetoric with techniques that advertisers still use today. They sweated and screamed, they cajoled and begged and bullied, they jumped and gestured, they offended public sensibilities by talking about all kinds of sins, and they demolished any assumption that these evangelists were like the staid, restrained, seminary-educated ministers who, in the minds of often-unchurched audiences, spent their time lulling parishioners to sleep and growing fat off Sunday dinners prepared by doting housewives. Perhaps Warren Akin Candler, a bishop of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South starting in 1898, summed up the difference between these evangelists and other ministers when he shared the words of a Black audience member who (allegedly) said that “when [Sam Jones] cuts loose from Scripters and jist lets ‘er sail, den he’s de doggondest preacher dat ever pounded a pulpit.”35 This dissertation examines the careers of the Joneses through the interpretive lenses of race, gender, and politics. Of course, these broad lenses overlap and blur together, but narrowing focus on these topics serve to highlight the ways that these evangelists used their platforms to advance a form of Evangelicalism that was as concerned with reforming society as saving souls 35 “Sam Jones’ Strong Points,” The Scranton Tribune (Scranton, PA), November 20, 1900, originally printed in the Pittsburg Post. Candler had a rocky relationship with Sam Jones. In 1898, Jones raised the bishop’s ire when he interrupted a meeting of the M.E., South’s general conference to encourage the assembled Methodist leaders to hang any ministers accused of sexual impropriety. See “Brother Jones’ Heroic Remedy,” The Herald and Mail (Columbia, TN), June 3, 1898. 11 – or, more accurately, that viewed a reformed society as a consequence of saving souls. As BobJones explained in 1917, a revival would put saloon keepers out of business and “make men want to vote clean.”36 These evangelists were not content to keep their focus on heavenly vistas – instead, like Sam Jones quipped, they talked about the “nasty now and now” and tried to bring heaven to earth.37 Political activism went hand-in-hand with their evangelistic efforts; to evangelists like the Joneses, refusing to wade into the political fray was a dereliction of a clergyman’s duty. Speaking in 1887 in Chattanooga, Sam Jones condemned “mincing, effeminate, perfumed preachers,” who were afraid to condemn society’s evils, as “monstrosities.”38 The society that these men wished to create was defined by hierarchies and ruled by God himself. Those who dared to challenge this divinely decreed order were targets of “hot shot” from their pulpits. God’s kingdom on earth was to be governed by White, middle-class men. The first half of this dissertation focuses on the career of Sam Jones. Chapter 1 explores Sam Jones’s defense of the idealized Evangelical home. The household, as the foundational unit of Jones’s reformed society, was a common concern in the increasingly market-oriented Gilded Age. Jones was not a “voice crying in the wilderness”; instead, he reflected the concerns of many Americans in the late nineteenth century. Sam Jones’s political activism – in particular, his fervent support of Prohibition – was closely connected with his desire to protect the home, and his directives to men and women to eschew sins of modern life (like dancing, cardplaying, and novel-reading) were grounded in the idea that these diversions threatened the American home. 36 “Three Large Sunday Congregations,” The Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), January 1, 1917. 37 “Sam Jones’ New Sermon,” The Pioche Weekly Record (Pioche, NV), March 24, 1898; “Honesty and Justice,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), March 3, 1886. 38 “Sam Speaks,” The Chattanooga Commercial (Chattanooga, TN), June 2, 1887. 12 This home was decidedly middle-class. Jones believed that a woman’s “place” was at home (an impossibility for many working-class women); men were to be industrious, godly providers; and children were to be obedient and pious. Chapter 2 examines Sam Jones’s complicated attitudes towards race. Jones was emphatically a product of the Jim Crow South. As one journalist remarked, he was “a Southerner, and accustomed to the social institutions of the South.”39 Sam Jones’s career, which began in the mid-1870s and continued until his death in 1906, overlaps with the decades when the system of segregation, discrimination, and racial difference was being constructed in the South. Jones’s attitudes towards African Americans reflected the attitudes of many White Southerners (and many White Americans) at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, as a leading religious figure, the evangelist helped to legitimize Jim Crow. Nowhere is this more clearly on display than in Jones’s public comments on lynching. He believed that “a negro who will attack white women” should be killed like a rabid dog.40 As an apologist for horrific acts of racial violence, Jones justified lynching and challenged those, like Ida B. Wells, who dared to condemn “Judge Lynch.” In 1899, the year that Jones wrote that “rape means rope,” the evangelist held major meetings in Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Toledo, Ohio; Hartford, Kentucky; Gloster, Mississippi; Cartersville, Georgia; and Madisonville, Kentucky. These campaigns would typically last ten days and attract tens of thousands of audience members. Hundreds of thousands more read Jones’s syndicated column. As a religious celebrity, Jones sanctified and popularized the South’s racial order for a national audience. 39 “Sam Jones, Revivalist,” The Summit County Beacon (Akron OH), July 22, 1885. 40 “Sam Jones on the Negro Problem,” Carbondale Free Press (Carbondale, IL), August 5, 1903. 13 Chapter 3 wraps up the first half of the dissertation by analyzing Sam Jones’s role in politics. Ironically, the evangelist condemned the “little fellows who dabble in politics” who had lost the trust of their congregations and their influence over their communities.41 Of course, Jones did not mean that clergymen should stand completely above the political fray, and he certainly involved himself in the political debates of his day (and even briefly campaigned to be Georgia’s governor). Instead, he believed that clergymen, as an extension of their religious ministry, were obligated to advocate for reform. In this way, Jones became a Progressive. He believed that the preacher and the politician could become allies in redeeming society. Sam Jones was a fierce Prohibitionist and his campaigns for Prohibition became his longest-lasting legacy. Nearly fifty years after his death in 1906, Memphis, Tennessee’s Commercial Appeal asserted that he was “the one man most influential in stirring up sentiment for outlawing the liquor traffic” in the South.42 While Prohibition was Jones’s defining political position, he also engaged in a wide array of other debates. From the pulpit and in his weekly syndicated columns, Jones engaged in political punditry, voicing his opinions on contemporary political issues ranging from United States policy in the Philippines to regulating monopolies. Sam Jones helped to establish what, in time, would become a defining trait of American Fundamentalism – the idea that clergymen not only had the right to participate in politics, but that they also had an obligation to be a voice for moral causes. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the career of Robert Reynolds Jones, better known as Bob Jones, which began in the early 1900s and continued until his death in 1968. 41‘Sassy Sam Jones,” The Courier (Waterloo, IA), July 11, 1899; “The Sam Jones Meetings,” The Austin Daily Statesman (Austin, TX), May 5, 1896. 42 Sterling Tracy, “Folks Hung From the Rafters to Hear Plain Sam Jones Rip Into Evildoers 50 Years Ago,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), January 29, 1950. 14 Chapter 4 analyzes Jones’s attitudes on gender. In many ways, Bob Jones continued where Sam Jones left off. Like his predecessor, Bob Jones emphasized the Evangelical home as the cornerstone of a Christian America. Throughout the first three decades of his career, Jones would frequently deliver a sermon on “Home Problems,” where he declared that “we need a puritanism to save the American home.”43 He believed that the home needed to be the center of Christian life, where sober, industrious men led daily devotions and pious, serious women obeyed their husbands and raised clean, respectful, obedient children. Bob Jones’s teachings on manhood and womanhood, unlike those of Sam Jones, drew the ire and ridicule of many critics, especially women, who bristled at the evangelist’s condemnation of “modern fashion” and his insistence that a women’s place was in the home – after all, Jones’s most active years as an evangelist were in the 1910s and 1920s, and what may have drawn little comment during the years of Sam Jones’s career seemed small-minded and bigoted to audiences in the Roaring Twenties. Bob Jones, who lived until 1968 (coincidentally, the same year as demonstrations against the Miss America pageant), waged a losing battle against what he considered to be the decline of manhood and womanhood in America. Chapter 5 discusses Bob Jones’s attitudes towards race. Since Jones’s career continues into the decades of the modern Civil Rights Movement, examining his career provides a chance to explore the evolution of Fundamentalist Evangelical beliefs regarding segregation and race relations. Jones became an ally of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to further his campaigns for civic righteousness, and in the last years of his life he became an outspoken critic of integration. He believed that God had separated the nations, and that integrationists’ designs to “do what is 43 “Jones Says America Needs a Revival of the Home Altar,” The El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 8, 1922. 15 contrary to the purpose of God” would create problems for America.44 Like Sam Jones a generation earlier, Bob Jones attempted to legitimize racial hierarchies in American society. He struggled to preserve the Jim Crow South. Unlike Sam Jones, however, Bob Jones’s beliefs and teachings about race – especially towards the end of his life – did not reflect mainstream American opinion. His growing isolation from cultural and political authority heightened Jones’s commitment to his racial beliefs, and segregation was enshrined as doctrine at Bob Jones University (BJU), the college founded by Jones in 1927. Segregation in some form continued at BJU until 2000, when a ban prohibiting interracial relationships was finally repealed. The final chapter of this dissertation, Chapter 6, explores Bob Jones’s complicated political career. Following in Sam Jones’s footsteps, Bob Jones became a leading proponent of Prohibition and led a successful campaign for statewide Prohibition in Alabama in 1907. In the 1920s, Jones condemned social evils – like gambling and Sabbath-breaking – from Texas to Georgia, and in 1928 he joined the “Hoovercrats” who broke ranks with the Democratic Party because of their nomination of New York governor Al Smith. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jones became attached to the postwar far Right. In the early 1960s, he joined the speakers at Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusades, joining such far Right luminaries as Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, Robert Welch (the founder of the John Birch Society), and former United States Army General Edwin Walker, who had resigned his commission in 1961 before being arrested in 1962 for inciting riots at the University of Mississippi in reaction to the university’s integration. Jones’s political career represents an early example of what political scientists have described as white Christian nationalism, a political movement that links Evangelical Christianity with chauvinistic nationalism. While Bob Jones perhaps represented an atavistic strain in American 44 “Jones Says Integration’s ‘Against God,’” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), April 18, 1960. 16 politics in his attitudes towards gender and race, he was an innovator in his wholehearted embrace of a kind of Evangelical identity that viewed America as a Christian nation threatened by an “internationalist conspiracy,” Communism, the United Nations, the “liberal, collectivist press,” integration, and weak-willed, “egghead” intellectuals in the State Department.45 Sam Jones – largely forgotten today – and Bob Jones – primarily remembered for the university that bears his name – demonstrate the continuity of the Progressive Movement and its ongoing influence on the Christian Right. Progressivism fractured, branched, and transformed in the 1920s. Bob Jones’s commitment to Prohibition and civic reform highlight the lingering influence of Progressive ideals. These evangelists’ careers also reveal the origins of the ideology of Christian nationalism in the twentieth century. As political scientists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry observe, “Christian nationalism is a cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.”46 Sam Jones and Bob Jones were both emphatic that America was – or should become – a “Christian nation” governed by Christian (that is, white Evangelical Protestant) morality. Sam Jones lamented the fact that “the most Christian nation on the globe” allowed “the liquor traffic” to continue.47 Bob Jones argued that “the United States isn’t a Christian nation,” even if it was “nearer to being Christian than any other nation.”48 In a 1949 column, Bob Jones expressed his hope that America would “rest upon 45 “Right-Wing Convention Takes on Carnival-Like Atmosphere,” The Stillwater News-Press (Stillwater, OK), August 5, 1962. 46 Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 15. 47 “Sam Gets Very Warm,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 17, 1897. 48 “What Is a Christian,” The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 2, 1917. 17 the Lord Jesus Christ,” who would “redeem this world by power.”49 Both evangelists aspired to make the United States a Christian nation whose laws and morality aligned with their interpretations of Christianity even as they expectantly hoped for the end of the world. Sam Jones and Bob Jones are a “missing link” in American religious and political life, connecting the utopian dreams of Progressivism with the apocalypticism of Christian Nationalism. 49 Bob Jones, “Comments on Here and Hereafter,” The Union-Banner (Clanton, AL), November 10, 1949. 18 1 The Holt County Sentinel (Oregon, MO), October 22, 1886; Laura Jones, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones (Atlanta, GA: the Franklin-Turner Company, 1907),241; Sam P. Jones, Sam Jones and Sam Small in Toronto (Toronto: Rose Publishing Company, 1886), 20. 2 Hiram Mattison, Popular Amusements: An Appeal to Methodists in Regard to the Evils of Card-Playing, Billiard, Dancing, Theatre-Going, Etc. (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1867), 3. 3 Henry Brown, The Impending Peril, or Methodism and Amusements (Cincinnati, OH: Jennings and Pye, 1904), 7. CHAPTER II: “I PLEAD FOR HOME”: SAM P. JONES AND GENDER During a three-week long campaign in Toronto in October 1886, the first sermon Sam Jones preached was titled the “The Consecration of the Home.” Before an audience of four thousand men and women at the Mutual Street Rink, the evangelist offered his explanation for the problems of the Gilded Age - rather than “lying and stealing and drunkenness,” a “tide of worldliness sweeping over our homes” that was “crystalizing our children in worldliness and making them impervious to the truth” was the true danger to families and communities. The only solution, in Jones’s mind, was to “make your home a sacred place.”1 Evangelicals generally and Methodists specifically had becoming increasingly concerned about “worldliness” in the late nineeteenth century. Hiram Mattison, a Methodist minister who led a congregation in Jersey City, New Jersey, explained in 1867 that “it is commonly reported . . . that some of you Methodists who were once poor and unknown . . . have left the narrow way . . . and are now indulging in many of the fashionable amusements of the day.”2 Dancing, card-playing, theater attendence, and a host of other “worldly amusements” appeared to threaten not just Methodism, but all of American Christianity. As Henry Brown, a presiding elder in the Spokane District of the Columbia River Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church warned, “our common Christianity is in jeopardy from . . . the popular amusements of the day.”3 The Evangelical home, more than any other arena of life, became the primary theater in which the war against “worldliness” was fought. To Jones, homes were the most fundamental building block of society, and all forms of social disorder 19 were rooted in dysfunctional homes. As he argued, “all life centers in the home life, and . . . all forces radiate from the home life.”4 George R. Stuart, Jones’ assistant during many of his campaigns in the 1880s and 1890s, summed up his colleague’s emphasis on the home during a joint campaign with Jones in St. Louis in 1895 asserting that “if the home life is pure, all is pure,” since “the home is the center of everything.” Stuart made the link between homes and society explicit, arguing that “homes . . . are so many streams pouring themselves into the great current of moral, social, and political life.”5 Preserving the home became the foremost goal of Jones’s career, as he imagined himself as a defender of American homes and families. An idealized conception of the home was prevalent in the late-nineteenth century. As literary scholar Leland Krauth has observed, “there was no more generally accepted value in 19th-century America than the value of home and family.”6 The home linked disparate issues and competing interests and served as one of the most powerful ideas of the late-nineteenth century. The home sat squarely at the center of debates on manhood and womanhood, moral reform, and race relations. Historian Richard White argues that the home, “a concept so pervasive that it is easy to dismiss it as a cliche,” became “the frame in which ordinary nineteenth-century Americans understood their own lives.” The home was essential to Gilded Age Americans, he notes, because it “ordered society.” 7 John B. Robins, a Methodist leader in Georgia writing in 1896, argued that “the home is the foundation upon which all else rests.” Robins believed that homes were essential for a Christian civilization and used the supposed 4 Sam P. Jones, Thunderbolts (Nashville, TN: Jones and Haynes, 1890), 508 5 George R. Stuart, Sermons (Philadelphia, PA: Pepper Publishing Company, 1904), 50, 6 Leland Krauth, “Mark Twain: At Home in the Gilded Age,” The Georgia Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 1974), 109. 7 Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 136-137, 139. 20 absence of “marriage and homes” as an explanation for “the power of the Anglo-Saxon” over “the Indians of America, the negroes of Africa, [and] the aborigines of Australia.” The home, for Robins, and for other Americans in the Gilded Age, was essential for upholding white, Christan civilization.8 Jones, believing that Christian homes were necessary for a Christian society, emphasized the importance of the home in his sermons, and his campaigns against vices - from temperance to divorce - were linked to his attempts to defend families from influences, as he asserted, that would destroy homes and, ultimately, society. He summed up his primary goal simply, explaining that “I plead for home,” and declaring that he was “a man that wants to see every Southern home a home in the right sense of the word.”9 Jones informed audiences in Indianapolis in 1886 that “the consciousness that I have made homes happy is worth all the world to me,” and the evangelists’ sermons suggest that this was indeed one of his foremost aspirations.10 As a father to seven children, one of whom died in infancy, Jones was keenly concerned with his own children’s upbringing, stating, in Boston in 1887, that “the great concern of my soul and all my efforts and endeavors are concentrated wholly in the immortality of my children and I will put aside all consideration of temporal luxury and temporal excellence . . . to give them true knowledge and bring them to the true light of all the world, Jesus Christ.” 11Hoping to see his family reunited in heaven, Jones believed that his first priority was to have his 8 John B. Robins, The Family: A Necessity of Civilization (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1896), 13. In addition to other posts within the M.E. Church, South, Robins was pastor of the First Methodist Church, Atlanta from 1892-1895 (Pioneer Citizens’ Society of Atlanta, Pioneer Citizens’ History of Atlanta, 1833-1902 (Atlanta, GA: Byrd Printing Company, 1902), 141). 9 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896. 10 “The Jones Sermons,” Indianapolis News (Indianapolis, IN), June 19, 1886. 11 “Our Little Ones,” Boston Daily Globe (Boston, MA), February 2, 1887. 21 “children be right.” Towards that end, he announced that he “want[ed] to consecrate home for [his] children.”12 Jones encouraged his audiences to share his emphasis on the home, calling on them to “make home the brightest, happiest, and cleanest place in the world.”13The evangelist believed that the world was full of influences that threatened to corrupt and destroy children and families. Jones observed that “every ball room, every theater, every card room, every bar room, every gambling hell in this city are so many agencies of the devil at work on . . . your children” leading him to lament “the fact that there are manifold evils that can assail and ruin and distract and distress and perhaps damn my children.”14 In Jones’ mind, all other concerns were subordinated to his overriding focus on protecting homes, insisting that, if “God save[s] my family from cards and profanity, and whisky and dances . . . let the world call me what it will.”15 Jones encouraged parents to work to create loving, Christian homes, warning that “when anything but love rules a home you have got a bad home.” 16 He emphasized that evangelical Christianity was essential to “make our homes happy.”17 The evangelical home, as imagined by Jones, depended on mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons fulfilling their responsibilities within the household. Daughters were encouraged to be “pure, precious, loving, gentle, and obedient,” 12 Sam P. Jones, Sam Jones’ Anecdotes and Illustrations, Related by Him in His Revival Works (Chicago: Rhodes and McClure Publishing, 1888), 261. 13 “Sermon to Women,” Richmond Democrat (Richmond, MO), February 9, 1888. 14 “A Sam Jones Sermon,” The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, NE), November 6, 1887 (sermon given in St Louis);“Our Little Ones,” Boston Daily Globe (Boston, MA), February 2, 1887. 15 “Sam Jones on Dancing,” The Democratic Northwest (Napoleon, OH), January 26, 1888. 16 “The Jones Sermons,” Indianapolis News (Indianapolis, IN), June 19, 1886; See also “Sam Jones’ Meetings,” Daily Record-Union (Sacramento, CA), February 22, 1889. 17 Sam P. Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book: A Series of Sermons Collected and Edited Under the Author’s Own Supervision (Cincinnati, OH), Cranston and Stowe, 1887), 419. 22 and their most important responsibility was to listen to their mothers, since, Jones warned, “nine-tenths of the trouble at home . . . grows out of the fact of taking somebody else’s advice instead of mother’s.” 18 A “model son,” he argued, was obedient, devoted to his father and his mother, unselfish, hardworking, grateful, honest, intelligent and studious, a “teetotaler,” and, above all else, a Christian.19 Jones believed that the evangelical home was especially crucial for sons, contending that “the boys are subjected to a thousand temptations and what they need are the charms of home life.”20 Safeguarding sons’ souls was essential, argued the evangelist, since “there’s two million boys that are driftin’ to degradation and destruction.” 21 Jones stressed the need for fathers who would protect their children and provide them with an example of pious masculinity.22 He urged fathers to “pray and talk with your children” and “train your children to meet God in peace.”23 Mothers, the guardians of the family, were to “guard . . . the sanctity and modesty of your home.”24 Jones explained parents’ responsibilities to their children, preaching that “God puts that little child in your lap as impressionable as warm wax,” and warning that, since “every child born is an immortal child,” parenting was a weighty responsibility. He taught that if parents were to “neglect” their child, he or she “will forever roam through the corridors of hell and damnation.” Ultimately, the responsibility for rescuing their children from damnation belonged to the mother; as Jones contended “the mother has more influence over the child than 18 “Woe to Him that Shouts,” The Boston Daily Globe (Boston, MA), February 5, 1887. 19 Jones, Thunderbolts, 521-524. 20 “Now for the Girls,” Richmond Democrat (Richmond, MO), February 9, 1888. 21 “Birds of a Feather,” Des Moines Leader (Des Moines, IA), June 9, 1897. 22 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 490. 23 Jones, Sam Jones’ Late Sermons (Chicago, IL: Rhodes & McClure Publishing Company, 1898), 686. 24 “Women Only, and 8,000 of Them,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 11, 1896. 23 all the preachers and churches and Bibles.” 25 He argued that “the greatest purifying force . . . in the world is mother’s love.” 26 Since “mothers leave a character impressed upon the innocent children of our homes,” Jones believed that “the home is in the hand of the mother.” 27 For the evangelist from Cartersville, the evangelical home, the cornerstone of a Christian society, depended on mothers. As he declared, “be it ever so humble, there is no place like home and there’s nothing at home like mother.”28Jones emphasized parents’ responsibility for their children’s religious education. Even though he praised Sunday schools, Jones warned that they could become “a purely technical scriptural instruction.” He argued that “the Sabbath school is . . . [t]he place where the children ought to be instructed in the things that appertain to Christ and where Christ ought to be shown them in His relations to the life of today instead of His relations to the life of 1800 years ago.”Jones believed that parents were ultimately responsible for their children’s religious upbringing, explaining that he was uncomfortable with the “idea of delegating to anybody in the world, without supervision” and reasoning no one would “take more interest in the immortal souls of your children than you.”29 For Jones, the “model home” was one where “a model father” would lead his family in Bible reading and family prayers, arguing that “the best lick you ever struck in your life for your wife and children was when you held family prayers.”30 The evangelist 25 “Sermon to Women,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), February 6, 1894. 26 “At the Assembly,” Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, KS), June 23, 1898. 27 “Sam Jones Meetings,” Daily Record-Union (Sacramento, CA), February 20, 1889. 28 Wayne County Herald (Honesdale, PA), June 3, 1886. 29 “Our Little Ones,” Boston Daily Globe (Boston, MA), February 2, 1887. 30 Jones, Thunderbolts, 525; Sam P. Jones, Good News: A Collection of Sermons by Sam Jones and Sam Small (New York, NY: J.S. Ogilvie and Company, 1886), 81. 24 emphasized the importance of family prayers, declaring that if a man was a Christian, he would “pray in his family,” and urging men and women to pledge to hold family prayers in their homes.31 Family prayers, in Jones’ mind, provided an opportunity for men to assert their leadership over the home, arguing that “every mother and wife should have family prayers and the husband should lead,” since “a man should always head the procession.” 32 Family prayers, then, not only served to protect children from the influences of society and guard homes from damnation – they also helped to reaffirm male authority and the evangelical gender hierarchy. Jones also stressed that corporal punishment, in conjunction with prayer, was essential, explaining that “prayer and hickory were the good lightning rods for a family and the best tonic a man ever knew,” and recommending that parents “give plenty to their children.” 33 He encouraged fathers and mothers to pledge to “train [their] children to meet God in peace,” and admonished parents to “keep track of their children at night and guard them from the dangers that threaten them on every side.” 34 Furthermore, Jones threatened eternal punishments for parents who were a bad influence on their children, declaring that he “would rather be Judas Iscariot in hell tonight than to be a father or mother leading my children to death and hell.” 35 Jones also tirelessly campaigned against vices and individuals who he believed threatened families. As a fervent supporter of temperance, the evangelist argued that liquor was a danger to the home, explaining that if “you sow whisky . . . you’ll reap drunkards,” and inviting 31 “Christians May Chew,” The St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, MN), June 27, 1886. 32 “A Talk to Women,” Nashville American (Nashville, TN), February 6, 1894. 33 “Slangy Sam Jones,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, NY), January 26, 1893. 34 Jones, Sam Jones’ Late Sermons, 686; “A Talk to Women,” Nashville American (Nashville, TN), February 6, 1894. 35 “Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), August 22, 1892. These comments were delivered in Urbana, IL. 25 those who doubted his dire prediction to “go into the hovel home of one of those starving, miserable families; look at that sallow, weazen-faced woman in the corner, hovering over her freezing babes,” explaining that if you were to “ask that mother and those babes what is the cause of their misery and degradation . . . in chorus they’ll say, ‘The arch demon, rum!’”36 Jones asserted that “these saloons are hurting our children, hurting our fathers, debauching our homes.”37Jones also believed that divorce, as a threat to marriages, was unconscionable, declaring that “one of the worst things to contend with is the divorce court.” 38 He blamed divorces on upper-class society, arguing that “society is the cause of nine-tenths of the divorce cases in the courts of this land.”39 Jones also warned about the influence of domestic staff and educators, insisting that “you can’t be too careful . . . about the character of the people that you introduce into your household,” since “servants get a hold on the confidence of the children frequently that is insidious.” He also believed that teachers taught children to be atheists, exclaimed that he did not “want a man . . . teaching my children science and telling them that science proves that that there is no God; and educating them to be infidels and scoffers against Jesus Christ.” Jones blamed this on schools being “turned over . . . to be run by politicians,” arguing that “education mixed up with politics is an unmixed evil.” 40 Because of these threats, and because of the supposed failure of parents to safeguard their children, Jones believed that “the children of this country are growing up Godless.” 41 36 Jones, Sam Jones’ Anecdotes and Illustrations, 224-225. 37 “Tabernacle Service,” Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), October 3, 1890. 38 “Rev. Stuart Leaves,” Paducah Sun (Paducah, KY), October 14, 1902. 39 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896. 40 “Our Little Ones,” Boston Daily Globe (Boston, MA), February 2, 1887. 41 “Birds of a Feather,” Des Moines Leader (Des Moines, IA), June 9, 1897. 26 As an evangelist, a popular lecturer, and a Prohibitionist, Jones both reflected and challenged the ideology of Gilded Age Evangelicalism. As historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, from Anthony Rotundo and Gail Bederman to Kristin Hoganson and Matthew Frye Jacobson, have shown, the redefinition of gender - in the face of war (both at home and abroad), industrialization, and urbanization - was one of the chief concerns of Americans in the late 19th century. Evangelicals, like other Americans, struggled to construct ideologies of manhood and womanhood that reflected traditional, religious-based understandings of the roles of men and women while responding to the challenges of modernity.42 Jones too attempted to create a sort of theology of gender, that reconciled his “old-time religion” with his sympathies for Progressive reform movements. In Jones’ sermons, the gendered evangelical home became the standard for true manhood and womanhood. The evangelist exhorted men to be devout fathers and loving husbands, and commanded women to be pious mothers and devoted wives. The home defined what it meant to be a man or a woman in Jones’ ideology. He reserved his most fiery condemnations for those who he perceived threatened the home – men and women who abandoned the home or influenced their children to transgress evangelical Protestant ideas of piety, men who threatened the bonds of family by threatening the innocence of daughters and sons or alienating the affections of wives, and women who used their position in society to promote pastimes that Jones deemed immoral. Furthermore, the litmus test for true manhood and womanhood was willingness to stand up for moral reform and social piety, and, by doing so, save their homes and American society. The home, then, defined and inspired Jones’ messages to men and women in the Gilded Age. 42 See Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 27 Jones advocated what historians have described as “muscular Christianity” as an answer to Gilded Age anxieties about masculinity.43 As historian Chad Gregory observes, Jones also “deflected the charge of ministerial and saintly effeminacy by commandeering the key elements of masculine discourse.”44 Jones encouraged a version of evangelical manhood that emphasized moral conviction, or “backbone,” piety, honesty, and idealized family relationships. Laura McElwain Jones, in her biography of her husband, summed up Jones’ beliefs, listing the qualities of “essential manhood”: “the power to choose between right and wrong,” moral conviction (“an indomitable purpose to do the right”), courage (both physical and moral), honesty, and tenderness with wives and children.45 Jones argued that “the dearth of manhood in this century” was due to men’s decision to surrender the moral “grit” or dedication to duty that made a man a man.46 Above all other traits, the Georgian evangelist valued “backbone,” declaring that “if [he] was going to make a man [he] would make him 95 per cent backbone and put a little flesh and skin on him.”47 Jones emphasized that the most important characteristic for men to possess, the “spirit of manhood,” was courage, the “moral manhood that says: No I cannot afford to do wrong, and, yes, I can afford to do right.” 48 One way for men to “assert [their] manhood” and 43 See Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, 1994); Clifford Wal- lace Putney, “Muscular Christianity: The Strenuous Mood in American Protestantism, 1880-1920,” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1995), and Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge, 1985). 44 Chad Gregory, “Sam Jones: Masculine Prophet of God,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 238. 45 Jones, Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 316-318 46 Jones, Thunderbolts, 268. 47 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 48 “Sam Jones! His Eloquent and Popular Lecture Given in Full,” Assembly Herald (Winfield, KS), June 24, 1891. 28 exercise their moral manhood was to vote for prohibition and “against the red nose devil.”49 Jones and his associates argued that voting against the “whisky traffic” was a way for men, both black and white, to demonstrate their masculinity. Speaking to an African-American audience in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1890, George Stuart, Jones’ assistant, argued that African-American men could “be . . . great,” if only they would have “pride in [themselves], pride in [their] family and pride in [their] nation” and “assert [their] manhood,” reject liquor, and “cultivate [their] heart[s] and mind[s].”50 Jones believed in a form of self-reliant masculinity that emphasized moral striving and self-reformation. For the evangelist, manhood was a product of human effort, not divine intervention. Jones argued that “genuine manhood” could only be achieved when a man determined to “conquer the difficulties in [his] pathway . . . resist temptation . . . [and] succeed.”51 Jones insisted that “manhood in its highest development and in its grandest results” was the result of cooperation between God and man. 52 Along with “moral manhood,” Jones emphasized that “genuine manhood” was characterized by honesty, as well as through loving relationships with mothers, wives, and children. He argued that St. Paul, “the grandest man that God ever created,” was defined by his “downright earnestness and honesty,” explaining that “an honest man is the noblest work of God.” Jones defined “an honest man” as “a man who has convictions and will live up to them and die by them.”53 For the evangelist, then, honesty was closely linked to “backbone” or “moral 49 “Sam Jones’ Closing,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), November 18, 1895. 50 “To the Colored People,” The Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890. 51 Jones, Thunderbolts, 476. 52 “Sam Jones! His Eloquent and Popular Lecture Given in Full,” Assembly Herald (Winfield, KS), June 24, 1891. 53 “Sam Jones Here,” Owensboro Daily Messenger (Owensboro, KY), May 5, 1893; “Sam Jones’s Sermons,” Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 24, 1886; “Counting Converts,” Owensboro Weekly Messenger (Owensboro, KY), May 11, 1893. 29 manhood” – essentially, to be a “genuine man,” one had to know and do what was right, regardless of the consequences. Jones contended that “honesty is the quintessence of manhood,” since it would make “your character . . . like the warship Texas, that missiles from all other war vessels will not affect it, but that other vessels must forever move when she opens fire on them.”54 He also argued that honesty was following the “golden rule” of reciprocity, stating that “honesty means I’ll do towards that man as I would he would do to me.” Honesty, then, also meant fairness in business dealings, marriages, and in communities.55 Jones also insisted that manhood was defined by tenderness towards and love for women – particularly wives and mothers – and children. He explained that nothing “better proves thenobility of a man than that in his home circle he is kind, patient and gentle with his wife and kind and good and gentle with his children.” 56 Furthermore, he argued that “the highest type of perfect manhood” was displayed by “a boy of 21 who can look back to the cradle and thank God that he has never put his foot on the tender heart of his mother” and “a man who can look back to his marital altar and thank God that from the day he stood there he has never done an act that would bring his foot down on the heart of his wife.”57 Jones encouraged men to “care . . . for our women-folks,” and bemoaned the fact that “we don’t care enough for wife, and we don’t care enough for the children.”58 In keeping with his admonition that men follow the golden rule, he 54 “Sam Jones at San Marcos,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), July 22, 1892. 55 “Sam Jones’s Sermons,” Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 24, 1886. 56 “Sam Jones! His Eloquent and Popular Lecture Given in Full,” Assembly Herald (Winfield, KS), June 24, 1891. 57 “Birds of a Feather,” Des Moines Leader, June 9, 1897. 58 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 139-140. 30 argued that “the first principles of manhood say: ‘I’ll never do to another man’s daughter or sister what I would not have him do to mine.’”59 Jones believed that piety was essential for manhood. He argued that “the highest type of manhood” could be found in “a genuine Christian.”60 For Jones, in order to become a “great man,” one must first be a Christian, contending that, since “Christianity is the science of manhood . . . Christianity furnishes the only soil out of which ever grew up a great man in this world’s history.”61 He believed that “Christianity . . . teaches us how to be men.” Evangelicalism, in Jones’ opinion, did not mean emasculation; rather, Christianity – particularly Evangelicalism – elevated men, and it was the only way for men to achieve true manhood. As he insisted, “the grandest thing . . . is a pure, noble, honest man.” 62 The evangelist called for a revival of manhood in the pulpit, in politics, and in “mercantile life.”63 He blamed the scarcity of men and the overabundance of “gentlemen” on two causes – greed, and upper-class society. He attacked America’s commercial culture, explaining that “the reason we have no more men” was because “we have put gold above God, and chattels above character, and Mammon above manhood.” 64 Jones criticized those who would, by distilling and selling whisky, “debauch homes, break hearts, damn souls because there’s money in it.” He contrasted himself with saloon-keepers and distillers, who he believed were not genuine men, declaring “I hold God above gold, character above chattels, and manhood above 59 “Jones Talks to Men,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), April 15, 1895. 60 Jones, Thunderbolts, 429 61 “Jones Talks to Men,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), April 15, 1895 62 “Jones to Drummers,” The Waco Evening News (Waco, TX), April 18, 1894. 63 “Jones Talks to Men,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), April 15, 1895 64 “Sam Jones! His Eloquent and Popular Lecture Given in Full,” Assembly Herald (Winfield, KS), June 24, 1891. 31 money,” and boasting that he was “unpurchasable and unbulldozable.”65 Furthermore, Jones also condemned upper-class society for emasculating men, arguing that “society . . . is the fruitful mother of a dwarf, unreasonable, unsatisfactory race of people . . . humanity gone to seed.” 66 Jones’ meetings for exclusively male audiences became a key part of his revival campaigns. In cities across the South, from Atlanta, Georgia (in 1886 and 1896) to Waco, Texas (in 1894), and throughout the eastern United States, from Boston, Massachusetts (in 1887 and 1897) to Pensacola, Florida (in 1891), men and boys flocked to hear Jones attack the sins of men – in Atlanta in 1896, for example, over seven thousand men heard Jones speak in the MoodyTabernacle. 67 Addresses “for men only” were a common feature of lecture circuits, even though some critics viewed them as a gimmick to attract audiences.68 Indeed, for many of the men who attended Jones’ services “for men only,” the chief draw of these meetings was not the chance of redemption or moral enlightenment, but simply entertainment. The Vicksburg Evening Post observed in 1889 that men attended these meetings hoping to hear “something ‘rich, rare, and racy,’” since, after all (as one waggish journalist in Buffalo, New York, quipped) “his ‘sermons’ draw better than a circus.”69 Despite his sensationalist denunciations of men’s misdeeds, Jones’ sermons to men provide valuable insight into his beliefs about manhood and masculinity. In his sermons to men, Jones typically focused on four sins that he believed uniquely troubled men – profanity, gambling, licentiousness (particularly adultery and pre-marital sex), 65 “Counting Converts,” Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY), May 11, 1893. 66 “Sam Jones! His Eloquent and Popular Lecture Given in Full,” Assembly Herald (Winfield, KS), June 24, 1891. 67 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 68 The Sunday Gazette (Denison, TX), February 8, 1891. 69 “Rev. Sam Jones,” Vicksburg Evening Post (Vicksburg, MS), November 18, 1889. In Vicksburg, at least, those hopes were disappointed; Buffalo Enquirer (Buffalo, NY), November 21, 1894. 32 and intemperance. Sabbath breaking also frequently came under fire. All of these evils, the evangelist believed, threatened first the home, and, by extension, society as a whole. Jones attacked profanity, believing it to be one step on a slippery slope that would lead men into a life of crime. Men who would curse would become criminals, since, he reasoned, if a man would “persistently swear and pollute the name of God,” he “won’t stop at cussing,” and progress to stealing and other crimes. 70 Jones cautioned listeners that “if you see a man a profane swearer, that isn’t all he is.”71 He asserted that men who would speak profanely and blaspheme, had, by committing a sin against God himself, had revealed their true nature, and, having started down the path to damnation, would not hesitate to commit crimes against society. Therefore, since these men were dangerous, Jones exclaimed that profane men should be “butted to death by a billy goat.”72 In addition to being a danger to society, profane men, Jones argued, threatened homes by “[stealing] the peace of mind and happiness” from their wives and mothers, explaining that when he swore he “stole the peace from [his] home and the roses from the cheeks of [his] wife.” 73 He condemned men who would swear in front of their children and “debauch” them, since “there’s not a brute that would thus debauch its young.” Jones warned that if you “sow profanity,” you will “reap profanity,” and since, as he asserted “there’s damnation in profanity,” men risked damning their children.74 Jones explained that “every little profane boy that blights 70 “For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889; “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 71 “For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889. 72 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 73“For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889; Sam P. Jones, Sam Jones’ Gospel Sermons (Chicago: Rhodes and McClure Publishing Company, 1898), 341. 74 Sam P. Jones, Rifle Shots at the King’s Enemies, Being Rev. Sam P. Jones’ Sermons Delivered in Toronto (Toronto: William Briggs, 1886), 53-54. 33 the morals of this town is a living witness that if you sow profanity you reap profanity,” explaining that a man who swore “had sown his little boy’s heart full of this seed of damnation and reaped a harvest for hell before his child was four years old.”75 “Pity the man who will deliberately demoralize the pure children of his home.”76 Swearing also threatened the innocence of young women, since “the man who will swear will do all the other things if you just take the bridle off him.”77 Furthermore, Jones argued that men who would swear would not make good employees, encouraging employers not to hire salesmen who would curse, and warning that a man who would “be unfaithful to God,” would not “be faithful to you.”78 Jones argued that profanity, the “most excuseless” sin, disqualified men from calling themselves “gentlemen.” 79 As suggested earlier in this chapter, manhood, for the Georgia evangelist, was defined by piety, which extended to men’s speech. Indeed, Jones explicitly linked eschewing profanity with manhood, exhorting an all-male audience in Toronto in 1886 to “stand up in your manhood and say, I’ve sworn my last oath.”80 Profanity, because it was bad for business, threatened society, and, most importantly, endangered the home, disqualified men from meeting the evangelist’s standard for manhood. Another target of Jones’ preaching to men was gambling, which he decried as “hellish.” Jones condemned gambling because he believed that gambling, particularly card-playing, 75 Jones, Late Sermons, 524-525. 76 Ibid. 77 Jones, Sam Jones’ Gospel Sermons, 339, 341. 78 Jones, Rifle Shots at the King’s Enemies, 53. 79 “Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), August 22, 1892; Jones, Rifle Shots at the King’s Enemies, 53; “Birds of a Feather,” Des Moines Leader (Des Moines, IA), June 9, 1897. 80 Jones, Rifle Shots at the King’s Enemies, 53 34 threatened the home. He believed that a man who would play cards would “debauch his whole family by playing cards before the children” and lead his children, particularly his sons, to become gamblers.81 The evangelist reiterated this point, warning fathers that their sons would “follow your track when they become men.” Jones called upon men to reform their lives so that they would “be indeed a father to [their] children.”82 Jones believed that parents – primarily fathers – who played cards with their children would “turn out on the streets of this city three more gamblers from your so-called Christian home,” asserting that ninety percent of gamblers “were raised in Christian – so-called Christian – homes.”83 Gambling, according to Sam Jones, threatened to lead men and boys into indebtedness and crime, extramarital or nonmarital sex (“licentiousness”), and intemperance. 84 Jones was particularly critical of the Louisiana State Lottery, the so-called “Lottery Octopus,” which stretched its “tentacles” throughout the country through the postal service. He declared that “[o]f all the gambling the Louisiana State Lottery is the worst this side of hell,” because “it was ruined more young men in this country than all the other hell-traps combined.” 85 Jones believed that that gambling was a form of theft, that it produced dishonest men, that it hindered the economy, and that it was a sign of intellectual deficiency. 81 Jones, Rifle Shots at the King’s Enemies, 56. 82 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 327. 83 Sam P. Jones, Quit Your Meanness (Cincinnati, OH: Cranston and Stowe, 1886), 59 84“For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889. 85“The Lottery Octopus,” The Evening Journal (Wilmington, DE), July 30, 1890; “The Lottery Monster,” The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu, HI). September 2, 1892; Wayne E. Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 192-221; “For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889. Jones was not alone in his condemnation; President Benjamin Harrison himself called for the elimination of the Louisiana State Lottery in 1890. 35 Jones’s assault on gambling was an attempt to defend a version of masculinity that was defined by hard work, arguing that “gambling is a sin against every man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow.” 86 Jones ridiculed the idea that “sow[ing] cards” would “reap. . . honest, industrious citizens.”87 Furthermore, Jones argued that gamblers were inherently dishonest.88 Speculation, too, was gambling, according to the evangelist, who criticized the hypocrisy of Atlanta society, decrying men who won their fortunes in “cotton futures” and became “colonels and majors.” 89 In Toronto, Jones even went as far as to say that “a blackleg gambler is a gentleman and a Christian beside a church member who speculates in stocks and futures.”90 Jones lashed out at both upper-class and lower-class gaming, insisting that upper-class players of “progressive euchre,” were “just as much of a black legged gambler as any faro den in Chicago can be.” 91 In the 1880s and 1890s, progressive euchre, a variation on euchre that involved changing, or progressing, through different tables and partners throughout an evening of card-playing, became an upper-class fad.92 Jones objected to the card game, arguing that, because “somebody wins and somebody else loses,” progressive euchre, which was played by “deacons,” 86“For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889. 87 Jones, Rifle Shots, 55. 88“For Men Only,” The Durham Daily Globe (Durham, NC), October 15, 1889. 89 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 90 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 504. 91 “Tabernacle Service,” Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), October 3, 1890. 92 For the rules of progressive euchre, see John W. Keller, The Game of Euchre (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1887), 57-63; For indications of the game’s popularity among the upper-class, see “The Popular Game,” Daily Press and Dakotaian (Yankton, Dakota Territory [SD]), March 14, 1885, and “At Home,” The Globe (Saint Paul, MN), March 7, 1886; Progressive euchre was seen as a pastime of upper-class urban socialites, as revealed by a letter to the editor of The Iola Register in March 1889, by the inquiry of a self-proclaimed “country boy,” who was “limit[ed]” to the Iola Register, school books, and Sunday School in his “opportunities to know the world and the people in it,” who wanted to learn the rules of the game (“Progressive Euchre,” The Iola Register (Iola, KS), March 15, 1889). 36 helped to make gambling respectable.93 Furthermore, Jones argued that, since “you can’t play progressive euchre without the ‘Booby prize,’ and you can’t play for a Booby prize without putting up the stakes,” a progressive euchre player was “a gambler in the sight of God.”94 In Jones’ mind, the upper-class pastime was simply “progressive damnation.”95 Jones pleaded for “one whole man” who would not “[try] to go to church with part of the body and deal progressive euchre with the other part.”96 Jones believed that card-playing was especially a danger to children.97 Since, as he insisted, “cards have damned people,” he declared that it was foolishness to play cards, arguing that “people that play cards are moral and intellectual starvelings.” 98 Believing that card-playing and gambling threatened the home and challenged middle-class manhood, Jones declared that he would rather open a brothel than “run . . . a gambling house.”99 Jones’ attacks on gambling even led to a physical altercation in February 1891, when the evangelist was assaulted by John J. Word, the mayor of Palestine, Texas. In November 1890, Jones led a series of meetings in Palestine, during which he “[gave] the mayor . . . an excoriation . . . for immoral conduct as a public officer and private citizen,” declaring that he was “in 93 The Rural New Yorker: A Journal for the Suburban and Country Home (New York City, NY), vol. 1, no. 2171 (September 5, 1891), 643. 94 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 81. 95 Jones quoted in George F. Hall, Sexology; or Startling Sins of the Sterner Sex (Chicago, IL: L.W. Walter Company, 1892), 139, and in Alma White, Looking Back from Beulah (Bound Brook, NJ: Pentecostal Union, 1910), 58-59.96 “Sulphur for Sinners,” St. Joseph Gazette Herald (St. Joseph, MO), July 23, 1885. 97 Jones, Rifle Shots, 56. 98 “No Dancing Christians,” Daily Globe (Boston, MA), January 31, 1897. Jones also quipped that “nothing will amuse an idiot like cards” (Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), August 22, 1892). 99 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1896. 37 collusion with violators of the law and directly or indirectly receiving pay from them for overlooking these offences.” Furthermore, Jones “took it upon himself to refer in most insulting language to [Word’s] life and habits” in front of an audience that included Word’s wife and young children. Jones justified his smear campaign against Word by claiming that the mayor allowed “gambling dens” to say open, asserting that even women attending church could hear “the keno call.” Jones, believing that he must “plead for women and children,” attacked the mayor. Word, who, as the Weekly Union Times explained, was “a Texan, and hot-blooded,” was understandably angered by Jones’s accusations.100 After Jones gave a lecture in Palestine’s opera house on February 2, 1891, Word confronted Jones at the train depot the following morning, and, after asking “Is this Sam Jones?,” announced “My name is Word,” and hit the evangelist two or three times with “a light cane,” cutting Jones’ cheek and bloodying his face. Jones, in a reflection of his “Georgia grit,” then grabbed Ward’s cane and “literally wore him out” (according to Jones), causing him to bleed from his left ear. According to Jones and his supporter, Word attempted to draw his pistol on him, though Jones was “glad he could not get it out, for [Jones] would have taken it away from him and might have had to kill him.” Word, however, denied that he had attempted to draw a revolver on the pugilistic preacher. Bystanders separated Word and Jones, and the evangelist – now battered, bruised, and bleeding – boarded a train for LaGrange, escaping arrest for his part in the tussle, though not before disparaging Word as a “coward.” As for Word, he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and for carrying a pistol. Word was thankful that “no further harm resulted to either of us,” recalling that Jones “was a much larger man than I and of 100 “Sam Jones’s Fight,” Atlanta Constitution, February 9, 1891; “Sam Jones As a Fighter,” The Sunday Gazette (Denison, TX), February 8, 1891; “The Rev. Sam P. Jones Thrashes a Texas Mayor,” The Weekly Union Times (Union, SC), February 12, 1891. 38 undaunted courage and strength.” Jones feared that, because of Word’s attack, “some smart Aleck will want to whip me again,” and that he would not “have peace until I kill some one.”101 Jones used Word’s attack to promote his image of “muscular Christianity.” Jones, in a telegram, informed his supporters that “the one-gallus mayor of Palestine tried to cane your Uncle Jones,” but he “wrenched the cane from him and wore him out,” and, though he was a “little disfigured” he was “still in the ring.” Jones explained that he “criticised [Word’s] official career,” because “it needed criticising.”102 At a mass meeting held the evening after the scuffle, five hundred citizens of Palestine issued resolutions condemning Word for his actions and demanded that the mayor resign, to the adulation of Jones and his supporters. The editor of the Denison, Texas Gazette, criticized the resolutions, arguing that if anyone other than Sam Jones had “made a public attack upon [Word] in the presence of his wife and children,” the people of Palestine would “have honored” the mayor for attacking his slanderer, and concluding that “an evangelist should be held just as responsible for his language as the most obscure citizen.”103 Nevertheless, Jones, who “passes as a follower of the lamb” even though “he lammed his adversary with a cane,” was widely praised for his aggressive evangelistic style.104 The fight between Jones and Word helped to cement Jones’ reputation as pugnacious critic of wickedness. The Temple Weekly (Temple, Texas) compared Jones to the apostles, one of whom “smote the high priest’s servant and cut off his ear,” and joked that “mayors of crooked towns” should 101 “The Sam Jones Scrapping Match: Mayor Word Gives His Version of the Affair,” The Sunday Gazette (Denison, TX), February 8, 1891; “Sam Jones As a Fighter,” The Sunday Gazette (Denison, TX), February 8, 1891; “The Rev. Sam P. Jones Thrashes a Texas Mayor,” The Weekly Union Times (Union, SC), February 12, 1891; “Sam Jones’s Fight,” Atlanta Constitution, February 9, 1891. 102 “The Rev. Sam P. Jones Thrashes a Texas Mayor,” The Weekly Union Times (Union, SC), February 12, 1891; 103 ‘Citizens Ask Word to Resign,” The Sunday Gazette (Denison, TX), February 8, 1891. 104 Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), February 10, 1891. 39 beware Jones’ “sledgehammer argument.”105 Newspapers across the country reported on the scuffle, declaring that Jones provided a “good illustration of the church militant,” comparing the evangelist to John L. Sullivan, the famous boxer, and praising him for “elevating the manly art.” The Boston Herald too compared Jones to a boxer, declaring that he “seems to be preaching the gospel according to Queensberry.” The Petersburg Index-Journal quipped that Jones had likely converted Word to “the belief in muscular Christianity,” and the Milwaukee Journal, tellingly, argued that Jones, in contradiction to the aphorism that “there are three sexes – men, women and preachers,” was “essentially masculine.”106 Jones, and the press, used the confrontation to emphasize Jones’ image as a manly crusader for righteousness, even if, as one paper claimed, Word was just “a decrepit old man.”107 In the fight for public support, Jones thrashed Word, and the mayor received “all the adverse criticism.”108 Indeed, in the aftermath of this incident, Word decided not to run for re-election for mayor.109 Jones’ most pointed attacks on the sins of men were against intemperance, arguing that drinking liquor made men go “from bad to worse” and made their homes a place where “desolation reigned.” 110 As with profanity, gambling, and illicit sexual activity, Jones condemned intemperance because he believed it threatened homes and families, and because, he asserted, it was a step down the path to damnation. Jones believed that a “whisky guzzler . . . 105 The Weekly Times (Temple, TX), February 13, 1891. 106 Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), February 14, 1891. 107 Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), February 16, 1891. 108 “State News,” Brenham Weekly Banner (Brenham, TX), February 12, 1891. 109 “Mayor Word Will Not Be In It,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), March 13, 1891. 110 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 40 bleeds his wife’s heart, ruins his home, pauperizes his children, and debauches his own body.”111 As a recovering alcoholic himself, Jones believed that he “deserve[d] to be heard.”112 He campaigned for temperance because he had seen how alcoholism had negatively impacted his own family. Jones lamented that “during . . . three short years of dissipation” he caused his wife’s “cheeks with the glow of health grow pale.” 113 He mourned that his home “was blighted,” as he “drank on until I saw the light fade out of [his] home,” even as he and wife lost a daughter in infancy. Only his father’s dying wish that Jones would “meet him in heaven” motivated him to pursue sobriety, and after three years the evangelist “conquered the appetite.” Still, Jones related, he struggled to stay sober, and emphasized that alcoholism was “a disease.”114 For the Georgia evangelist, the fight for prohibition reflected his personal struggles with alcoholism. Jones summed up his argument for temperance simply, stating that “the reason I hate whisky . . . is because it blights the home life and makes mothers so unhappy and crushes the . . . joy out of the wife’s heart.”115 He declared that he had “the same objection [to saloon-keepers] that [he had] to a louse – they make their living off the heads of families,” and he insisted that “every saloon sign is an insult to the wives and mothers of this country.” Jones characterized himself as a champion of women, declaring that “if there’s only one man in this country who will stand up for the wives and mothers, by the grace of God, I’ll be that man.” The evangelist preached that alcoholic beverages contributed to “the breaking down of the home life,” which 111 Jones, Sam Jones’ Late Sermons, 464. 112 Jones, Thunderbolts, 141. 113 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1896. 114 “Local Option Column: Sayings of Sam Jones,” The Butler Weekly Times (Butler, MO), January 18, 1888. 115 Jones, Thunderbolts, 143. 41 “debauches society.”116 Jones called on men to support prohibition, asserting every saloon was responsible for “a dozen broken-hearted wives and mothers.”117 He argued that alcohol would “ruin” families, and blamed bar-keepers for making husbands and sons alcoholics.118 Jones pleaded with his audiences to vote for prohibition, so that God would “help us to quit killing our children.”119 He argued that he could not tolerate the “whisky business” because it “drags down women and children.”120 The evangelist accused distillers and saloon-owners of attacking homes and society. He explained that distillers were responsible of “carrying ruin to thousands of hearts and homes, and damning the souls of thousands of otherwise noble men.” Jones reasoned that the liquor industry would “debauch homes, break hearts, damn souls because there’s money in it.” The evangelist’s umbrage was not, however, reserved solely for saloon-keepers and distillers. He declared that “the infernalest old dog I know is the man who goes home to his wife with a jug,” calling them “little old narrow-eyed, ‘possum-eared, knock-kneed, jimber-j’inted old devils.”121 Jones campaigned for Prohibition, reasoning that “amid all the creatures that shall ever creep into the dark hell, one of the meanest is the soul of a wholesale liquor dealer who has fattened his life’s blood on men and women,” and declaring saloon keepers to be worse than a train robber, since, unlike a train robber, the saloon keeper “wreck[ed] homes,” caused women - 116“Enormous Crowds Hear Rev. Sam Jones,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), April 28, 1890; “Sam Jones in Charlotte,” Charlotte Democrat (Charlotte, NC), May 2, 1890. 117 Jones, Sermons and Sayings, 153. 118 Jones, Sam Jones’ Late Sermons, 465; Jones, Sermons and Sayings, 153. 119 Jones, Sermons and Sayings, 156. 120 “Local Option Column: Sayings of Sam Jones,” The Butler Weekly Times (Butler, MO), January 18, 1888. 121 “Counting Converts,” Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY), May 11, 1893. 42 specifically mothers and wives – to grieve, and “incapacitate[d]” his victim from pursuing honest work.122 In addition to arguing that intemperance threatened families, Jones also preached that liquor was a danger to society as a whole. The evangelist blamed alcohol for crime, asserting, in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1902, that “twenty-five men and women were sent from here to the penitentiary in one week, and twenty-three were traceable to saloons.” 123 He argued that “the damnable liquor traffic is at the bottom of all crime,” and claimed that “all disorder is hatched and ripened” in distilleries and breweries. Jones argued that “the grog-shop is the head centre of wickedness for . . . men.”124 He also contended that intemperance would result in communism and anarchy. In St. Louis, in 1887, Jones declared that anarchy and communism will triumph “because you have gone on and piled up wealth and let the devil run the city, and the world take its own course.” He reasoned that municipalities’ reticence to enforce liquor laws resulted in the introduction of communism and anarchy, arguing that “when you’ve got a law you can’t enforce, you’ve got anarchy set up,” and “[w]hen you’ve got a law you won’t enforce, you’ve got communism in the community.” 125 Jones also contended that wives, who had to support families, “working her life away, making garments at $1 per dozen,” because their husbands were drunk, created an atmosphere where communism could flourish, declaring that “there is enough burning communism in shirts at 60 cents a dozen to burn this country up some day.” 126 122 “Pointed Truths for Men Only,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1896. 123 “Hot Shots from Sam,” Paducah Sun (Paducah, KY), October 15, 1902 124 “Rev. Sam Jones to Men Only,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), June 25, 1890. 125 “A Sam Jones Sermon,” The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, NE), November 6, 1887 (sermon given in St Louis). 126 “Field Day for Rev. Sam Jones,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 23, 1896; “Local Option Column: Sayings of Sam Jones,” The Butler Weekly Times (Butler, MO), January 18, 1888. 43 Jones believed that the spread of anarchy and communism could only be halted through prohibition. He called for Americans to “overcome saloons with coffee houses and with meat and bread,” believing that “as long as men guzzle beer their children will cry for bread.”127 Because Jones believed that “all the breweries and distilleries and saloons and demijohns in this country are sending . . . 150,000 a year into a drunkard’s grave and a drunkard’s hell,” the evangelist was relentless in his attacks on distillers, saloon-keepers and their clients, and politicians who supported licensing saloons and distilleries. 128 Crucially, he argued that true manhood was defined by a willingness to fight the liquor interests, and that men who made, sold, or bought alcohol beverages were not truly men and, therefore, not worthy of society’s respect. During the 1902 Paducah campaign, Jones lambasted the town for embracing a whisky salesman-turned-distiller, declaring that, since “the biggest man in your town is a . . . low, damnable distiller,” the citizens of Paducah had “no manhood,” and quipping that he would “call you all dogs, only you’re not big enough, you’re just puppies.” Jones exclaimed that he would “sooner tip [his] hat to a dirty, chain-gang negro than to a damnable devil of a whiskey man.” 129 Jones was so adamantly opposed to liquor, and convinced of its negative effects, that he stated that he would “as soon run or patronize a [whore] house as a saloon.” 130 Believing that American was “cursed and damned by whisky,” Jones called on men to have “backbone” and support prohibition.131 127 “A Sam Jones Sermon,” The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, NE), November 6, 1887 (sermon given in St Louis); “Bread and Beer,” The National Temperance Mirror, Volume IX (1889), 284. 128 “Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), August 22, 1892. 129 “Rev. Stuart Leaves,” Paducah Sun (Paducah, KY), October 14, 1902. 130 “Character Building,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), April 22, 1895. 131 “Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), August 22, 1892. In Urban, IL. 44 As an example of masculinity gone amok, Jones repeatedly criticized “dudes,” or fashionable, upper-class young men. “Dudes,” which one nineteenth-century guide to “Americanisms” defined as “a dandy, an exquisite,” were the embodiment of Americans’ fears about the supposed decline of manhood in the Gilded Age.132 Like the “mollycoddles” condemned by President Theodore Roosevelt in a 1907 address at the Harvard Union, “dudes,” unlike the “vigorous men” lauded by Roosevelt, did not subscribe to what essayist G. Lowes Dickinson described as “the gospel of ‘strenuousness.’”133 These men were broadly lampooned in the popular press in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Criticized as proof of “Darwin’s theory of evolution,” unpatriotic (for copying European fashions), entitled, lazy, “useless,” a “creation of his tailor,” effeminate, and stupid, the “dude” was an easy target for social critics uncomfortable with the pastimes and fashion choices of upper-class youth. As the satirical “Judkins’ Boy” column in Life observed, “everybody is allus a-givin’ it to Dudes.”134 Descriptions of “dudes” focused on their physical appearance; theirdecision to adopt British fashion and mannerisms, particularly those of Oscar Wilde, drew elicited disdain from contemporaries.135 The chief criticism of “dudes” was that they transgressed Gilded Age ideals for manhood; as C.A. Bateman, a lecturer for the Independent Order of Good Templars, a fraternal order dedicated to temperance, explained, a “dude” was “a 132 Miles L. Haney, ed., Dialect Notes, vol. VI, part III (New Haven, CT: American Dialect Society, 1931), 122. 133 Theodore Roosevelt, “The College Man: An Address Delivered at the Harvard Union,” transcribed in Donald Wilhelm, Theodore Roosevelt as an Undergraduate (Boston: John W. Luce and Company, 1910), 79; G. Lowes Dickinson, Appearances: Notes of Travel, East and West (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1914), 180. 134 “Judkins’ Boy,” Life, vol. I, no. 22 (May 31, 1883), 257. 135 “K.B., “Capricious Washington,” Table Talk, VIII, no. 7 (July 1893), 237; C.A. Bateman, The Rescuer: Popular Lectures by Major C. A. Bateman (St. Louis, M.O: A.R. Fleming and Company, 1893), 159-160. 45 burlesque on man.” 136The “dude” was viewed as the exact opposite of nineteenth-century ideal manhood, a fact emphasized by John R. Glascock, a member of the House of Representatives from California, who called on his colleagues, who were reticent to impose more stringent regulations on railroads, to have “a little less of the dude and more of the man.”137 “Dudes” were also a threat to Christian manhood, as Americans wondered if “dudes” could even be Christians, and religious publications warned of “dudes in the church.”138 War, such as the Spanish-American War, could redeem “dudes” and transform them into “heroes,” but many critics quipped that death was the only suitable fate for a “dude.”139 Jones believed that “dudes” were a sign of society’s decline, explaining, that as a pimple showed “that the blood is out of order,” dudes were “a bump on the face of the body politic and shows that the blood of society is in a bad condition.”140 He attacked these men because he believed that they were lazy, weak, unintelligent and effeminate, totally unlike the kind of middle-class masculinity Jones endorsed. He characterized them as an outcome of the faults of upper-class Americans - in his words, they were “‘sawciety’ gone to seed.”141 The evangelist lamented that “the tendency of the nineteenth century is to dudeism.” He was especially critical 136 Bateman, The Rescuer,159-160. 137 Interstate Commerce: Debate in Forty-Eighth Congress, Second Session, on the Bill (H.R. 5461) to Establish a Board of Commissioners of Interstate Commerce, and to Regulate Such Commerce, &c., &c. ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884), 229. 138 J.W. Bencough, “The Dude,” Motley Verses Grave and Gay (Toronto: William Briggs, 1895), 171; Mosely H. Williams, “Illustrations and Applications,” in The Sunday-School World, vol. XXXVIII, no. 9 (September 1898), 323. 139 Mosely H. Williams, “Illustrations and Applications,” in The Sunday-School World, vol. XXXVIII, no. 9 (September 1898), 323; George W. Hughes, Faults and Follies (Clinton, IL: Self-Published, 1908), 158. 140 “Now for the Girls,” Richmond Democrat (Richmond, MO), February 9, 1888; see also Altoona Tribune (Altoona, PA), November 1, 1898; “Slangy Sam Jones,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 26, 1893. 141 “‘Sassy’ Sam Jones,” The Courier (Waterloo, IA), July 11, 1899. 46 of the attention that “dudes” were given by young women, explaining that when “you dress a young buck, part his hair in the middle, put on an eyeglass, give him pants which looks as though his legs had been melted and poured into ‘em, put on toothpick shoes . . . every girl in the town admires him.” Jones believed that “dudes” were a threat to women, exclaiming that he would “rather see [his] daughter dead to-night than sitting in a parlor talking to a dude.”142 Jones’ disdain for “dudes” was rooted in his assumption that these men would seduce young women and violate their sexual purity. Jones’ chief reason for decrying “dudes” was his belief that they endangered homes by alienating the affections of wives and leading daughters into nonmarital sexual relationships. The only proper reaction to this kind of violation of the home, the evangelist asserted, was violence, declaring that “these perfumed, peripatetic, diamond-studded bucks . . . who invade a home for lecherous purposes should be made to feel the vengeance of an outraged husband or parent.”143 “Dudes,” however, were not just a threat to homes - they were also a result of bad parenting. Jones warned that “many a woman has whipped everything out of her little boy she admires in her husband,” and, as a result, those boys grew up to become “a great big dude, a first-class dunce.” He admonished mothers to “regulate” their sons, rather than “whip[ping] out of your children all the strength and manhood in them.”144 As both a danger to proper relationships between husbands and wives and parents and daughters, as well as a consequence of women’s failure to properly mother their sons, “dudes,” in Jones’ thinking, were both a cause and an effect of social decay. To put it bluntly, to Jones, “dudes” were a crime 142 “Sam Jones on Dancing,” The Democratic Northwest (Napoleon, OH), January 26, 1888. 143 “Rev. Sam Jones in Danville,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), April 5, 1893; Sam Jones, “Shams and Genuine,” The Twin City Chautauqua Journal, vol 2, no. 6 (September 1900), 13. 144 Jones, Sam Jones’ Anecdotes and Illustrations, 257. 47 against nature; as he argued, “the dude has stolen a march on creation, for I don’t believe God ever thought of the dude when he made Adam or thought the race would ever come to that.”145 On the opposite side of the social spectrum, Jones attacked “the tramp,” who, “like the dude, is a man of leisure and an idler by choice.” While the “dude” displayed the shortcomings of upper-class masculinity, the “tramp” was an example of lower-class masculinity. The “tramp,” the “corn on [society’s] toes,” and the “dude,” the “wart on the nose of society,” were both given to laziness, gambling, intoxication, and Sabbath-breaking. While Jones argued that “honest sweat” would “cure society of the social excrescences called the dude,” he believed that workhouses and laws against vagrancy and begging should be implemented to eliminate the “tramp” from society. The evangelist insisted on “the honorableness of honest toil and the utter disgrace of idleness.”146 In contrast with “dudes” and “tramps,” Jones praised men who were thrifty, industrious, ambitious, and humble. Jones commended the young man who “works for $20 a month” and “wears jeans clothes and a wool hat,” and finds financial success because of his thrift, industry, and ambition, and encouraged women to marry those kinds of men, criticizing “girls” who “wouldn’t look at an honest working boy.” 147 Jones contended that “after the dudes had died out the brown jeans boys will be running this country.”148 His commendation of “brown jeans boys” highlights that Jones’ criticism of dudes was based on his beliefs about gender and class. “Dudes” were not only contrary to ideal manhood; they were also a symbol of the failings of the 145 “A Sam Jones Sermon,” The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, NE), November 6, 1887 (sermon given in St Louis). 146 Jones, Thunderbolts, 507. 147 “Now for the Girls,” Richmond Democrat (Richmond, MO), February 9, 1888; “Sam Jones’s Sermons,” Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 24, 1886. 148 “Sam Jones’s Sermons,” Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 24, 1886. 48 upper class. Over-refined, over-educated (but unintelligent), fashionable to fault, extravagant, lazy, unpatriotic, and lecherous (as Jones claimed), “dudes” embodied the excesses and sins of “sawciety,” which corrupted both manhood and womanhood. “Dudes” provided Jones with the perfect argument for evangelical, middle-class manhood. Jones also condemned “dudes” to assert his own manhood. Claiming that upper-class young men had threatened him with physical harm, the evangelist used this (possibly fabricated) danger to highlight his fearlessness and courage, a marker of the manhood. He explained that he had been warned that “if you don’t let up on these saw-ciety dudes . . they will kill you.” Jones retorted that “if I don’t die until I’m killed by them, Methuselah will be a babe beside me.”149 The evangelist asserted that he was unconcerned by “dudes,” explained that he was “not afraid to drop down into a hundred acres of dudes and not a thing to fight with and all of them armed with six-shooters.”150 Jones even boasted that he could drown “dudes” by spitting on them.151 Because, he reasoned, “young bucks . . . ain’t got no honor,” the evangelist saw no need to tread carefully. 152Jones targeted “dudes,” not only because he believed that they violated a supposedly divine ideal for manhood, threatened the home, and embodied all the faults of the upper class, but also because his attacks on upper-class young men allowed him to display, or perform, his own masculinity. Performing masculinity, as illustrated both by Jones’ dismissive attitude towards “dudes’” threats, as well as by his reaction to Mayor Word’s assault in Palestine, Texas, was a key aspect of the evangelist’s public self-portrayal. Jones’ reaffirmation of his own “manly virtues” was essential to his popularity as both a reformer and as an evangelist, not only because 149 “Rev. Sam Jones in Danville,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), April 5, 1893 150 “Sam Jones on Dancing,” The Democratic Northwest (Napoleon, OH), January 26, 1888. 151 “Slangy Sam Jones,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, NY), January 26, 1893. 152 Sam Jones, “Shams and Genuine,” The Twin City Chautauqua Journal, vol 2, no. 6 (September 1900), 13. 49 of the long-standing assertion that clergymen were a kind of “third sex,” but also because, as a member of the Progressive coalition, the evangelist struggled against popular perceptions that social reform was primarily the responsibility of women. As historian Kevin Murphy argues in Political Manhood, “male urban reformers borrowed from the style and practices associated with working-class men, constructing more aggressive forms of political manhood that legitimized reform as an appropriately masculine endeavor.” This sort of “cross-class appropriation” was necessary for reformers who hoped to ward off accusations of “mugwumpism” and for clergymen struggling against the notion that ministers could not be “manly.”153 As with men, Jones grounded his teachings on women on the foundation of the home. Jones believed that “the best creature in God’s world is woman, and the meanest creature in the universe is woman,” teaching that women were responsible for both saving society and damning it, and for cleaning house and cleaning society.154 One of Jones’ central beliefs about the role of women in society was the idea that women had a unique position of moral authority, which could be used to influence society. He argued that “the best creature in God’s world is woman” and that “there is a great influence from an honest, sterling, sincere woman.” 155 Jones believed that the moral integrity of society depended on women’s piety. Speaking to an audience of women in Atlanta, the Georgia evangelist declared that “every woman in this house ought to have religion.”156 Jones believed that “the Creator has made women religious by nature,” and “planted 153 Kevin M. Murphy, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1-3. 154 Sam P. Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!,” or, Sermons and Lectures Delivered by Rev. Sam Jones During His Second Visit to Toronto (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1887), 77 155 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 77, 80 156 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896. 50 in her heart a true hatred of the devil.”157 Because he was convinced of the inherent piety of women, Jones taught that women had a special responsibility to “fight the devil . . . the worst enemy of her husband and children.” 158 He held that women’s moral responsibility was exercised primarily in the arena of the home, emphasizing the roles of mother, daughter, and wife. Jones believed that “there is no relation in this world that requires more piety, more goodness than that of a mother,” and he asserted that “there’s no great man who didn’t have first a good mother and then a good wife.”159 He even went as far as to blame the early death of his mother for his “wickedness” before his conversion. 160 Jones was also insistent that daughters had a moral duty to reform their lives, declaring that “the destiny of this country depends on how the girls are living, and whom they are obeying.” 161 Jones contrasted his ideal of womanhood, a “good consecrated wife,” who meets her husband with a smile, “attend[s] to all the features of home,” keeps the house clean, works hard to please her husband, and is a paragon of modesty and sobriety, with so-called “society women.”162 Jones enjoined men to “go with girls who read good books and wear good dresses.”163 The evangelist paid special attention to his beliefs about wives’ responsibilities. Jones believed that wives should have a pleasant disposition, complaining that when husbands “come home, worn out with business cares,” and are “met there by a cross, ill-natured wife,” 157 “Sermon to Women,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), February 6, 1894; Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 74 158 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 74 159 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896. 160 “Sam Jones Meetings,” Daily Record-Union (Sacramento, CA), February 20, 1889. 161 “Woe to Him that Shouts,” The Boston Daily Globe (Boston, MA), February 5, 1887. 162 “Sermon to Women,” Richmond Democrat, February 9, 1888. 163 “Sam Jones’s Sermons,” Baltimore Sun, May 24, 1886. 51 they wish they “[were] dead.” 164 Jones also commanded wives to focus on pleasing their husbands, rather than winning the praise of socialites. He argued that “if some women would try as hard to please their husbands as they have certain members of society, your husband would be as happy now as a pig in the sunshine” 165 Jones’ instructions for women extended to housekeeping; he warned that some men had been “made drunkards” because their wives’ “hard biscuits and greasy gravy” was inedible. Furthermore, he argued that untidy houses, a reflection of wives’ failure to “live right,” were a barrier to their husbands’ sanctification.166 Upper-class women, in Jones’ view, represented all that was wrong with America. Jones declared that he would “rather shake the tail of a dead fish than the hand of the average ‘sawciety’ woman.” In part, his condemnation of the “sawciety woman” was because he believed she was neglecting her responsibilities as a mother and a wife. In 1906, the Tampa Tribune reported that Jones “didn’t believe in the ilk that ‘fondle poodle dogs and neglect children.’”167 Jones also condemned society women for their decision to (allegedly) shirk their moral responsibilities. He exclaimed that he “would rather be the poorest old negro woman down South . . . than to be one of you fine-dressed, diamond decked society women, with an unholy and worldly influence.”168 To Jones, an impious woman was a perversion; he asserted that “the greatest monstrosity of the nineteenth century is a godless woman.” 169 164 “The Jones Sermons,” Indianapolis News, June 19, 1886. 165 “Sermon to Women,” The Evening Tribune (Lawrence, KS), January 30, 1888. 166 “Sermon to Women,” Richmond Democrat (Richmond, MO), February 9, 1888. 167 “Had His Hammer,” Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), February 24, 1906. 168 George R. Stuart, ed., Famous Stories of Sam P. Jones (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1908), 223-224. 169 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896; “Sermon to Women,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), February 6, 1894. 52 Jones also objected to the fashion of upper-class women. Even though he believed that “women ought to be the leaders of the modesty of this country,” Jones observed, with alarm, that “the women of this country are fast becoming the leaders of immodesty . . . with the girls cutting down their corsages for the ballroom and cutting up their dresses for their bicycles.” Jones blamed socialites’ fashion choices on their lack of sense, declaring that “even if his head was hollow, he would have more sense than some women.”170 Reasoning that “if God Almighty intended women to go naked all on her shoulders he would have covered her with hair or feathers,” Jones derided “the society women who button their collars around their waists,” explaining that he preferred a “high collar, close around your necks, because it was “modest and comely.”171 Understandably, Jones’ remarks drew criticism from upper-class women, declaring him vulgar and uncouth. He was quick to refute their criticism, observing that “some of you society women object to my plain speech; and yet you will go to the theatre and witness vulgar costumes, indecent insinuations, and vile plots until nearly midnight, and come home greatly rested and refreshed.”172 If this retort failed to convince his detractors, the evangelist resorted to name-calling, explaining that “if you see a woman who says she don’t like Sam Jones . . . it’s just a sign she’s a fool.”173 Jones justified his criticism of high society by asserting that he was merely defending the honor of women and children. He declared that “if a man . . . is on the side of pure women and 170 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896.; “Sam Jones on ‘Sawciety,’” Statesman Journal (Salem, OR), June 1, 1899. 171 “Sawciety,” Weekly Town Talk (Alexandria, LA), June 17, 1893; “Sam Jones,” Richwood Gazette (Richwood, OH), July 9, 1900. 172 Stuart, ed., Famous Stories of Sam P. Jones, 197. 173 “Twin Evils,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), May 2, 1899. 53 innocent children he is on the right side.”174 Defending himself against accusations that he was “vulgar and ill-bred,” Jones argued that “no man in America will stand to the death any more readily to defend the purity of the women of these country than the man now speaking to you,” and declared that he “would build . . .a wall a mile high around the virtue a every girl this country has to-day.”175 Jones believed that “‘sawciety’ . . . was a monster that would eat the heart out of a woman, just as quickly as whisky would eat a man’s blood up.” 176 He condemned dances and modern fashion, because he believed that they threatened women’s virtue. Jones exclaimed that “a round dance is an ante-room to damnation.” Jones condemned dances because he “never want[ed] to see the arm of a lecherous man around [his] wife or daughter.”177 Furthermore, he believed that dancing was the pastime of less-than intelligent people, explaining that “I never knew an intelligent person in my life that was passionately fond of dancing,” and declaring that “if I couldn’t educate my daughter’s head, I would educate her feet and marry her off to a little ball-room dude, and hide them away on a little farm about forty miles from town, and tell them never to come see me, because I might have company at my house.” 178 Additionally, he warned women that ball-room fashions drew the gaze of “vulgar men . . . upon their bare skin,” going as far as to say that he “wouldn’t put such on my [his] pointer dog.” Jones emphasize that if women knew “the vile thoughts men have of you when they gaze upon your decollette gowns . . . you’d fly home to your mammies screaming.”179 The evangelist’s criticism 174 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 148. 175 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 357. 176 “Slangy Sam Jones,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, NY), January 26, 1893. 177 “Sam Jones on Dancing,” The Democratic Northwest (Napoleon, OH), January 26, 1888. 178 “No Dancing Christians,” Daily Globe (Boston, MA), January 31, 1897. 179 “Sermon to Women,” Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), March 26, 1896. 54 of popular pastimes was not confined to dances; Jones warned that “a saloon’ll get your boy if he goes into it; an’ yellow-backed literature’ll get your daughter if you let her read it. The saloon ain’t any worse than the yellow literature.” 180 Railway novels, often called “yellow-backs,” in reference to their binding, “were the most inspired publishing invention of the era,” appealing to “every taste but the crudest and most cultivated.” These yellow-backs, often budget reprints of bestsellers, appealed to train passengers and other travelers.181 Yellow-backed novels, such as George du Maurier’s Trilby, were often criticized by Evangelicals for their depiction of sexuality and romantic relationships. Jones believed himself to be a defender of the sexual purity of women, and his favorite sins to target reflect that belief. Like other religious leaders in the late nineteenth century, Jones became involved in the debate over women’s role in the church. Early in his career, Jones argued that women should not publicly participate in church meetings, declaring that he did not “take much stock in their takin’ too much place in public affairs,” adding that he believed that even though “a woman can work in the prayer meeting and talk,” he “wouldn’t like to see my wife pitchin’ and rarin’ and prancin’ in the pulpit.”182 The evangelist, furthermore, was dismissive of women’s work in churches, asserting that “the women of the church, instead of being wide awake to save souls, are forever getting up some little church fair.” This criticism of women’s work was condemned by the Brookfield Argus, which contended that “the great working force of the Christian field is . . . the good mothers, the good wives, and the good sisters,” and asserted that “there are thousands upon thousands of good, pious women in this land, every one of whom has done more effective work 180 “Birds of a Feather,” Des Moines Leader (Des Moines, IA), June 9, 1897. 181 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1957), 299-300. 182 Jones, Sam Jones’ Anecdotes and Illustrations, 46. 55 for the cause of their Master than a hundred pulpit buffoons have or ever will accomplish,” before concluding that “Sam Jones’ religion . . . is beginning to smell badly.”183 Jones’s opinion on women’s role in the churches evolved in the 1890s, as the evangelist encountered women, like Frances Willard, who were leaders in the Progressive movement. Kathleen Minnix, in her biography of Jones, argues that Willard’s influence “convinced [Jones] that God called women to the ministry.”184 Though Jones seems to have endorsed an expanded role for women in the church before he explicitly connected his “conversion” to Willard’s influence – in 1892, Jones stated that he believed that “women can preach if they want to,” while the evangelist did not begin to credit Willard with changing his views until 1896 – certainly his association with leaders of women’s reform organizations shaped his beliefs.185 Jones came to believe that women should be allowed to speak in church serves and revival meetings, reasoning that if God gave women the power to talk, he would not tell her to “keep her mouth shut,” and, by 1896, the evangelist (somewhat disingenuously) asserted that he had “never uttered a word against woman’s working in any line of Christian effort, whether preaching, praying or speaking in public .186 Jones challenged critics of women’s involvement in churches who justified their opposition by appealing to St. Paul’s instruction, in First Corinthians, to “let your women keep silence in the churches.” The evangelist refuted these nay-sayers’ interpretation, declaring that he advocated "the religion that makes women talk out in meeting. Women say that St. Paul said that 183 “Bad-Smelling Piety,” Brookville Transcript (Brookville, KS), July 15, 1887. 184 Kathleen Minnix, Laughter in the Amen Corner: The Life of Evangelist Sam Jones (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 105. 185 “Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), August 22, 1892. In Urban, IL. 186 “The Church and Woman,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1897; “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 56 they shouldn’t talk in meeting. But he didn’t. He was simply reporting the custom of that day. He said women oughtn’t to cut off their hair, but about two-thirds whack off bunches of it in the front, anyhow. When they quote St. Paul, they are simply hunting for excuses.”187 The evangelist argued that women who said that “Paul says it is a shame for women to speak in public” still continued to cut their hair and “whack off bunches of it in the front, anyhow,” even though Paul said that “women oughtn’t to cut off their hair.”188 Jones argued that these women are “Pauline when you want to be and un-Pauline where you want to be.”189 Despite the evangelist’s endorsement of women’s public involvement in churches, Jones insisted that women’s behavior in churches ought to comply with evangelical expectations for women’s comportment, explaining that even though he “like[d] to see a woman talk . . . she ought not to make too many jestures [sic] and jump up.” 190 Furthermore, Jones did not believe that all women had a duty to preach or speak in religious meetings, declaring that “if you cannot talk, as is the case with the majority of women, you need not say anything.” 191 Jones insisted that women’s participation in Christian work – both within the church and the community – was essential. He believed that women “had their work to do,” and it was “always done, except when some man stepped in and objected.”192 Jones contended that “it is the privilege of women to work, and to work efficiently, and work persistently, in the cause of 187 “Twin Evils,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), May 2, 1899. 188 Sam P. Jones, Sermons By Rev. Sam P. Jones (Philadelphia: Scammell & Company, 1887), 99; “Twin Evils,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), May 2, 1899. 189Jones, Sermons By Rev. Sam P. Jones, 99. 190 “The Church and Woman,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1897. 191 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 80. 192 “The Church and Woman,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1897. 57 God.”193 He compared “the old ship of Zion” to a side-wheel paddle steamer, and warned that “she would turn about in the river if one of the wheels was locked.” He argued that if “both wheels turned . . . we will all take a bee line for the millennium shore.”194 Jones emphasized that “you must have both the male and the female wheel to run the boat,” since “we men have been running this world about 6,000 years and we got it ‘most to hell.” He argued that “what we want to do now is to let the women run it for God.”195 Jones returned to the metaphor of society as side-wheel paddle steamer throughout his career repeatedly to explain his view of women’s moral responsibility. In Toronto, Jones observed that he had seen “the old ship of morals and religion floating over the ocean of time with only one of her great wheels at work,” and exhorted women, the “other half of the machinery,” to be as active and as earnest in piety and good works as men were expected to be.”196 Jones supported women’s work, insisting that he was “always glad to put [himself] in line and in sympathy with Christian women in their work anywhere and everywhere.”197 Women, Jones argued, “should stand by your church work.” 198 He emphasized women’s unique role in evangelization, explaining that “there is a work in this town to be done that none but women can do . . . the work of saving the poor lost women.”199 Jones endorsed women’s charity and domestic missions organizations, and celebrated “the great good women could do for 193 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 74. 194 “The Church and Woman,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 9, 1897. 195 “More Intense: Sam Jones Draws Tears to Many Eyes,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), January 16, 1897. 196Sam P. Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 73-74. 197 Sam P. Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 73 198 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 199 Sam P. Jones, “Sermon XXXIV: One Heart and One Way,” Sam Jones’ Own Book: A Series of Sermons (Cincinnati, OH: Cranston and Stowe, 1887), 469. 58 Christianity and humanity by banding themselves together.” 200 Jones praised the work of The Door of Hope homes, missions started by Emma M. Whittemore in New York City in 1890 under the auspices of the Christian and Missionary Alliance as refuge for prostitutes and unwed mothers.201 Jones declared that “of all the blighted characters none are more literally drowned in sin than the lost women of this city.” Jones encouraged audiences in Nashville, during a campaign in 1895, to attend a lecture by Whittemore titled “A Walk in the Slums.” Jones also urged men and women to give to the Door of Hope home in Nashville.202 In addition to supporting the work of The Door of Hope missions, Jones, during his 1896 Atlanta campaign, urged the women of Atlanta to join the Salvation Army’s women’s auxiliary and praised “the ‘red-shirted fellows’ who were laboring earnestly and aggressively for the cause of Christ.” Jones insisted that “if [his] wife didn’t belong to the auxiliary of the Salvation Army,” he would ask her if she had “backslid” or “grown cold.” After Jones appeal, fifty women joined the organization.203 Jones’ closest connection to evangelical women’s social work was through Emma Tucker, who, with her sister, Tina Tucker, was employed as a city missionary in Nashville, where she helped to found a Door of Hope mission, before being transferred to Atlanta in 1895 to work under the auspices of the city’s Wesley House Mission (and supported by the Methodist 200 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 201 Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865-1920 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1977), 82; “Door of Hope,” New York Charities Directory (New York: Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, 1898), 214; R.M. Offord, ed., Jerry McAuley: An Apostle to the Lost (New York: American Tract Society, 1907), 242. 202 “Character Building,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), April 22, 1895. 203 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 59 churches of Atlanta) to minister to “the poor” and the “the fallen”204 Jones praised Tucker, who had opened a Door of Hope mission for her work among “fallen women,” and argued that there “ought to be a thousand women consecrated to this same work.” 205 He also encouraged “everybody” to read a guide for evangelism written by Tucker and her sister titled Search Lights for Soul Winners.206 During his 1896 campaign in Atlanta, Jones shared the platform with Emma Tucker at a mass meeting focused on “rescue work,” and Tucker was scheduled to replace Jones on the program if the evangelist was unable to attend.207 Tucker became an evangelist in her own right, leading “Bible readings,” presentations of passages from the Bible, organized according to themes such as “Man Honored in Service,” “God a Refuge,” and “Woman in the Spiritual Realm.”208 Jones commended Tucker, who led revival meetings in Cartersville in 1904, as a “consecrated, earnest, efficient worker,” observing that “she is fartherest removed from the long-haired man, and shorthaired woman type,” as she was “ladylike in all her methods and movements” while still having “great force, and faith.” He praised Tucker, observing that “no man can sit and listen to the Bible reading by Miss Tucker unmoved and unbenefited.” Jones declared that “I wish every candidate now in the field could spend a week here listening to Miss Tucker’s Bible Readings,” because “they would soon want religion worse than they want 204 Sara Estelle Haskin, Women and Missions in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (Nashville, TN: Publishing House of the M.E. Church, South, 1920), 200; Noreen Dunn Tatum, A Crown of Hope: A Study of Woman’s Work in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, From 1870-1940 (Nashville, TN: Parthenon Press,1960), 248, 265; “Zealous Leaguers Meet at Sunrise, Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Night,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 24, 1897; “Work of Women in Grace Church,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 17, 1897. 205 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 206 “Sam Jones Hits Hard,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 11, 1897. 207 “Mass Meeting at Trinity,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), November 14, 1896; “Religion: In the Pulpit and Around the Fireside,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), November 15, 1896. 208 Emma Tucker and Tina Tucker, X-Rays from God’s Word: Bible Readings (Atlanta, GA: Foote and Davies Company, 1903), vii. 60 office.”209 Jones’ endorsement of Tucker’s public ministry was in no small part linked to the ways that her work and behavior conformed to Gilded Age evangelical expectations for women. Rather than exhorting mixed audiences and interpreting the Bible, Tucker’s “sermons” emphasized letting the Bible “speak for itself” – in this way, Tucker appeared to avoid usurping men’s allegedly natural leadership in the church and society. Furthermore, Tucker was careful to appear to be “ladylike.” Jones was not alone in emphasizing Tucker’s feminine qualities. Tucker assisted William F. Quillian, a Methodist minister in the North Georgia Conference and Jones’ friend and pastor in Cartersville, during a revival held in LaGrange, Georgia, in 1895. In their coverage of the meetings, the LaGrange Reporter detailed Tucker’s characteristics, highlighting her “illuminated face, her earnest appeals, [and] her perfect womanliness.”210 For Jones, and other Evangelical men in the late nineteenth century, women’s public participation in civic and religious life was circumscribed by a gender ideology that believed that women must be demure, restrained, and submissive to men’s authority. Like his views on women’s public involvement in church work, Jones’ position on women’s suffrage evolved throughout his career. In 1886, during a series of meetings in Chicago, he declared that he was “not in favor of woman suffrage,” because he would “never want to see [his] wife trudging around the polls.” Nevertheless, the evangelist seemed to be in favor of women be given the right to vote specifically and solely for Prohibition, declaring that he hoped to “see the day when the women of America can cast their votes for prohibition and drive whisky out of this country forever.”211 Jones eventually came to support women’s suffrage, 209 “More Intense: Sam Jones Draws Tears to Many Eyes,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), January 16, 1897. 210 Garnett W. Quillian, ed., Rev. William F. Quillian, M.D. (Atlanta, GA: Foote and Davies Co., 1907), 244, 301. 211 “Brother Jones to Wives,” Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), March 19, 1886 61 primarily because he believed women would support prohibition. Believing that saloons were “set against woman’s peace, prosperity and happiness,” and that “every saloon sign is an insult to every good woman,” Jones presumed that women would be natural enemies of John Barleycorn.212 During a meeting in Topeka, Kansas, in 1887, Jones argued that “if women had the ballot in their hands they would settle this question as to how the liquor traffic should be regulated,” declaring that “woman’s rights should be as high as her wrongs are deep, her privileges as broad as her responsibilities are great.”213 The Georgian evangelist later emphasized his commitment to women’s suffrage during an 1892 meeting in Urbana, Illinois, declaring “I believe in women’s rights. I believe in women’s suffrage, too,” before explaining that he supported the enfranchisement of women because he believed that women would “vote the damnable stuff” – that is, whisky and other alcoholic beverages – “out of the country.” He declared that he thought that women could “be anything except the father of a family of children.” 214 The evangelist returned to this seemingly egalitarian statement again in 1893, insisting that “a woman has the right to do what her husband does,” and endorsing “woman’s rights – the right to do and be everything, except the father of a family of children."215 Jones’ support of women’s suffrage was closely linked to his belief in women’s moral authority, an idea espoused by many other Gilded Age Progressives. In an interview in 1895, Jones explained that, since “woman’s mighty near always on the moral side of every subject,” he “believe[d] in lettin’ the women have a han’” in running the world. He emphasized that if women “had her way we 212 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 213 “Another Great Day,” The Weekly Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), June 23, 1887. 214 “Sam Jones Sermon,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), August 22, 1892. In Urban, IL. 215 “Rev. Sam Jones in Danville,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), April 5, 1893 62 wouldn’t have any whisky.”216 By the end of his life, Jones again seems to have soured on women’s suffrage; when addressing an Epworth League meeting, an organization for Methodist young adult, in Missouri in 1906, he declared that he “used to think that woman’s suffrage would cure the liquor problem,” but, he observed, despite women’s enfranchisement in Colorado, the state had “more whisky to the square mile than any other place in the world.” Jones concluded that “women’s suffrage won’t help temperance, since “women go to the polls and vote the way their husbands do . . . and that is the end of it.”217 Jones’ support of women’s suffrage was closely linked to his participation in temperance campaigns and his relationship with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement and its leaders. Jones was a committed supporter of the WCTU, declaring that “none but God can tell what that organization has done for America,” which he described as a “drunkard-making country.”218 During a campaign in Galveston, Texas, in 1895, Jones “spoke of the work of the Women’s temperance union and commended it very highly,” and “called upon the women to come forward in it and he said that God had said more to woman than to man . . . He said good work in that direction was patriotism and the right kind. Drive out the saloons. Stand by the women and children – that is patriotism.” 219 In Austin, in 1896, Jones “lauded the Woman’s Christian Temperance union,” stating that “the Woman’s Christian Temperance union has my heartiest support and prayers, and it should have yours,” explaining that he supported “women doing any good work and being anything, except the father of a family” before attacking “‘little 216 “Thro’ Georgia Specs,” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, KS), June 17, 1895. 217 “Too Many Stingy Colfax Farmers,” Des Moines Register (Des Moines, IA), August 7, 1906. 218 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 219 “Sam Jones’ Closing,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), November 18, 1895. 63 red-nosed politicians’ who oppose the Woman’s Christian Temperance union.”220 Jones recruited women to join the local unions of the WCTU in Atlanta, where he encouraged women to join that organization rather than the Capital City Club of Atlanta, “where whisky flows like water over a mill dam.” 221 The evangelist argued that Atlanta “ought to have 5,000 women at work for temperance,” and commended the women of Monroe, Louisiana, for organizing a successful temperance campaign. He exhorted the women of Atlanta to “come together . . . and see to it that liquor shall go out of this city,” reasoning that “the council of Atlanta can be affected by the influence and the prayers of Christian women.” After his remarks, he promoted a meeting of the Atlanta Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. 222 After holding meetings in Little Rock, Arkansas, the local WCTU chapter thanked Jones “for his words of encouragement, and kindly assistance, in their great hour of need.”223 In December 1886, Jones held a meeting in Toronto under the auspices of the WCTU.224 Jones praised both the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” asserting that “no two organizations can do more to meet heathenism in the dark places of the world and to aid the progress in our own country of sobriety and good and right.”225 Jones rallied support for the WCTU, insisting that “every Christian woman in this city . . . should do anything for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and should show her good feeling by her presence and her influence and her 220 “Sam Jones at Austin,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 13, 1896. 221 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 222 “Story of Rescue From Many Lips,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 26, 1896. 223 “A Card of Thanks,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), May 11, 1895. 224 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 73 225 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 75 64 power.”226 Jones encouraged the women of Toronto to organize to “carry this point for sobriety and right,” and he condemned women who opposed the work of the WCTU. The evangelist concluded his sermon by recruiting women to join the Toronto affiliate of the WCTU.227 Jones, as a celebrity, a popular evangelist, and as a leader in the Prohibition campaign, lent crucial support to the organization, as reflected by the fact that at least one WCTU chapter, in Roanoke, Virginia, named their organization the “Sam Jones Union.”228 By recruiting members for the WCTU and launching temperance campaigns in cities where he held meetings, Jones became a key ally for the organization. Jones was also an outspoken supporter of Frances Willard, who was president of the WCTU from 1879 to 1898. In Austin, in 1896, Jones described Willard as “the grandest woman in the world, and she is the finest speaker I ever heard,” and argued that “she can beat any little old preacher in Texas” – including himself.229 Jones credited Willard for changing his attitude towards women’s role in the church and society as a while, explaining in a column published in the Atlanta Journal in 1904 that he “was once very much opposed to women talking in meetings, or preaching,” because he was “narrow in my views, conceited of my sex, and misunderstanding the great Apostle.” He related that that he had his “conceit knocked into splinters” after hearing Willard speak. Jones “felt like I was not fit to say grace and a table . . . in comparison to such winsome words, pure logic, splendid reasoning, and hearty sympathy.”230 He 226 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 79 227 Jones, “I’ll Say Another Thing!”, 83. 228 Roanoke Times (Roanoke, VA), March 23, 1893. 229 “Sam Jones at Austin,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 13, 1896. 230 “Sam Jones’ Letter,” The Courier (Asheboro, NC), April 21, 1904. 65 declared that he would rather hear Willard speak than “any man that wears breeches.” 231 Jones’ admiration for Willard was not one sided; in her autobiography, she included Jones as one of the “exceptionally gifted Southerners” that she considered her friends, describing him as the “out-yankee-ing Yankee of the South.”232 In conclusion, Jones, reflecting the concerns of Gilded Age Americans, in both the North and the South, emphasized the importance of the home to social order and advocated manhood and womanhood that, while not radically departing from nineteenth-century gender ideals, expanded and redefined the proper place of men and women in society. Preserving the home, as the most foundational unit of society, was the driving goal of Jones’ arguments about manhood and womanhood. Anything, or any person, that threatened the evangelist’s ideal of the gendered evangelical home, was a target for his criticism. The home, more than any issue, motivated Jones’s attacks on society women, dudes, saloon-keepers and distillers, gambling, profanity, Sabbath-breaking, and a host of other social issues. 231 “More Intense: Sam Jones Draws Tears to Many Eyes,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), January 16, 1897. 232Frances E. Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: An Autobiography of An American Woman (Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1889), 568. 66 In 1899, more than thirty years after his tour of the war-torn South (1867-1868), David Macrae, a Presbyterian minister and author from Glasgow, Scotland, returned to visit the United States. Loved by southerners for his sympathetic attitudes towards the South displayed in his 1870 travelogue, The Americans at Home, Macrae was warmly received by the elite of the New South. Macrae, who was described as “a Friend to the South and the Southerners,” praised the South’s industrialization and urbanization, planting a seal of approval on the New South’s economic aims. The primary purpose of Macrae’s return to the South was his interest in “the social and race problems of the south, including the effect of . . . thirty odd years of free labor.”1 While visiting Atlanta in February 1899, Macrae interviewed Jones (perhaps in one of the sitting rooms of the palatial Peachtree Street home of his host, Atlanta businessman Frank Ellis), and their conversation, recorded by stenographer and recorded in the Atlanta Constitution, provides one of the clearest insights into Jones’s views on race.2 In this wide-ranging conversation, Jones derided African Americans as being prone to “intemperance, dishonesty, and licentiousness or lasciviousness,” easily manipulated, and ultimately uneducable. Since one of Macrae’s primary goals for his 1899 tour of the South was to examine the relationship between white and black southerners he queried the evangelist about his views of “the race problem.” Jones asserted that “the negro is . . . not pious, but religious,” 1 “The Scotchman,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), February 2, 1899; “Distinguished Visitor,” The Semi-Weekly Messenger (Wilmington, NC), February 14, 1899. 2 “Rev. David Macrae Talks of the South,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 24, 1899. CHAPTER III: “A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY”: SAM P. JONES AND THE RACIAL ORTHODOXY OF THE NEW SOUTH 67 clarifying that he meant that “the most religious negroes are the ones who pay the least attention to the commandments.” He believed that, to African Americans, “whisky is God and there is no other,” and he argued that “the greatest curse in the south is the influence of liquor upon the negros.” When Macrae challenged him on his low estimation of black southerners’ character, Jones conceded that “the morals of the laboring negro have improved,” but he rejected the Scottish divine’s suggestion that education would help to “alleviate” African Americans’ supposedly depraved moral condition. Instead, he argued that education made black southerners fit only for teaching, preaching, or “the chaingang,” and insisting that “the good, old-fashioned country negro” was preferable to educated African Americans. Jones asserted that white supremacy made the upward mobility of African Americans intolerable; as he declared, “the Anglo-Saxon race has been the dominant race . . . and the Anglo-Saxon race in this country will always be the dominant race,” and, therefore, “there is nothing more intolerable to a southern Illustration 1:David Macrae (Atlanta Constitution, February 24, 1899) 68 man than for you to put a negro above him.” Jones believed that this meant that “the avenues of higher endeavor are closed to the negro,” since when a black man “becomes educated the only kind of work he will accept is a first-class job or none.” Because there were “more first-class, educated fellows in the south than we have jobs for,” he asserted that educated black men turned to “forgery, larceny, and all manner of crimes.” Espousing an educational philosophy similar to that espoused by Booker T. Washington, Jones argued that “every white man and negro should know the three R’s,” but warned that “when you educate him to where he considers himself a gentleman . . . he must have a gentleman’s occupation.” When Macrae demanded to know if Jones believed that African Americans were “not worthy of education to a higher position,” Jones laughed off his question, explaining that he could “see no future for the negro in the south beyond manual labor.” 3 Macrae, in general, would have agreed with Jones’s opinion on the nature of education for African Americans: as he stated in an 1899 interview in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, he believed that “what the negro needs . . . is the sort of education that will make him a good artisan, a first class craftsman, who can make things the white people want.”4 Macrae also questioned Jones on “the political status of the negro in the south.” Jones flatly denied the political influence of African Americans, except when they were “tied out as a reserve force by the devil, and is run in on us on election day and carry cities and towns overwhelmingly wet against the majority of the white people,” resulting in “the better whites . . . losing patience and sympathy with him.” Jones insisted that, even if African Americans “should equip themselves to exercise the right of suffrage” through education, “the negro will be controlled . . . just as he has been for the last twenty years,” explaining that “the democrats of the 3 “Dr. David Macrae and Rev. Sam Jones Discuss Questions of the Day,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 26, 1899. 4 “As Others See Us,” The Times-Democrat (New Orleans, LA), March 18, 1899. 69 south are running the south politically.” Jones again warned that white supremacy made African American political advancement dangerous, since if you were to “put a negro in ahead of [Democrats],” then “the devil himself could go to school to them and learn some new tricks.”5 Seemingly frustrated by Jones’s continued refusal to even consider the possibility of African American suffrage and office-holding, Macrae posed a hypothetical to Jones, and asked the evangelist if African Americans would be denied the right to hold political office even if they “became so well educated, of such good character and ability, that, had they been white, they would have taken ruling positions.” Jones dismissed this supposition out of hand, declaring that even though some African Americans were well-educated and possessed “good character and ability,” like Booker T. Washington, who “is respected all over the country,” African Americans could never challenge white supremacy, since “the Anglo-Saxon race has a history . . . that the negro can never achieve,” insisting that “the white race will take care of its history, its poetry, its science, its art,” and dismissing black intellectual achievement, explaining that “our brother in black is not much when it comes to inventive genius.” Even though Jones acknowledged that “men like Booker Washington, Douglas, and Granderson are men of ability,” he still argued that “it will take them a thousand years . . . to reach the position which the whites have achieved.”6 Macrae persisted with this line of questioning, demanding to know whether “a man like Booker Washington should be excluded . . . from a high office to which he might be elected.” Jones contended that “white is better than black in America, and ever will be,” asserting that “it is the better color; it stands for more, and America gives the right of way to the white man.” An 5 “Dr. David Macrae and Rev. Sam Jones Discuss Questions of the Day,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 26, 1899. 6 “Dr. David Macrae and Rev. Sam Jones Discuss Questions of the Day,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 26, 1899. 70 unnamed “gentleman” in the room interjected and defended “race feeling” in the South, arguing that, after all, the British, in “their colony districts” of South Africa and India, practiced “white domination,” and that the British had “refused even the right of franchise to the negro.” Jones, encouraged by his ally in the room, justified slavery, explaining that “when the negro was a slave . . . America did more toward the uplifting of his condition than will be done the first hundred years of his freedom,” and arguing that “immediately upon emancipation the majority of the rascals went and hired out to the devil.” The evangelist argued that since he, as a southerner, knew “the negro instincts and . . . ‘outstinks,’” he believed that “the best negroes in the south today are the ones who were once in slavery.” He argued that “slavery taught [African Americans] to read and write . . .and introduced him to our religion,” and lamented that “immediately upon emancipation . . . many of them degenerated into vagabonds.”7 While the Scottish minister had generally tolerated Jones’s arguments for supposed black depravity and white supremacy, he vociferously rejected Jones’s defense of slavery. Macrae declared that “with regard to lasciviousness and immorality, the negro received a very poor lesson in that as the history of the mixed race shows.” Macrae suggested that white southerners’ “bad example” was responsible for black southerners’ alleged “present condition.” Jones was not content to end the discussion on that note, however, and as a parting shot, Jones quoted a “famous negro congressman from Mississippi” who allegedly said that “God himself could never educated the negro until the negro thought more of his women and less of whisky.”8 7 “Dr. David Macrae and Rev. Sam Jones Discuss Questions of the Day,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 26, 1899. 8 “Dr. David Macrae and Rev. Sam Jones Discuss Questions of the Day,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 26, 1899. 71 As perhaps suggested by Jones’s conversation with Macrae, the evangelist from Georgia, for the most part, reflected the racial views of the New South’s elite. The racial creed of the New South was founded on an unshakeable belief in white supremacy and black inferiority, and all other facets of this worldview stemmed from this foundational idea, that, as Henry Grady declared to a cheering crowd of forty thousand white southerners at the Texas State Fair in October 27, 1888, was “to be worn unsullied and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended” – that “the white race must dominate forever in the south, because it is the white race, and superior to that race with which its supremacy is threatened [that is, African Americans].”9 Southern writer and lawyer Thomas Nelson Page, another leading promoter of the idea of the New South, also emphasized the centrality of white supremacy to race relations in the post-Civil War South, writing in 1904 that he was convinced of the “absolute and unchangeable superiority of the white race . . . an inherent of essential superiority, based on superior intellect, virtue, and constancy.”10 One of the most straightforward statements of this creed was provided by Thomas P. Bailey. An educator and sociologist who taught at the University of California, the University of Chicago, and the University of Mississippi, as well as serving as the Superintendent of Schools in Memphis, Bailey was also a firm believer in racial segregation and white supremacy, a belief that he justified as a necessary evil needed to preserve social order and domestic tranquility. In a 1913 article on “Race Orthodoxy in the South,” Bailey formulated the racial creed of the South using the following fifteen points: “1. ‘Blood will tell.’ 2. The white race must dominate.9 “Grady in Dallas,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), October 28, 1888. 10 Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 293. 72 3. The Teutonic peoples stand for race purity.4. The negro is inferior and will remain so.5. ‘This is a white man’s country.’6. No social equality.7. No political equality.8. In matters of civil rights and legal adjustments give the white man, as opposed to thecolored man, the benefit of the doubt; and under no circumstances interfere with theprestige of the white race.9. In educational policy let the negro have the crumbs that fall from the white man’stable.10. Let there be such industrial education of the negro as will best fit him to serve thewhite man.11. Only Southerners understand the negro question.12. Let the South settle the negro question.13. The status of peasantry is all the negro may hope for, if the races are to live togetherin peace.14. Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.15. The above statements indicate the leadings of Providence.”11Bailey’s summary of the “race orthodoxy” of the New South mirrors Sam Jones’s beliefs about and attitudes towards African Americans. Jones spelled out his racial views and explicitly endorsed white supremacy and the New South’s “race orthodoxy” in his columns for the Atlanta Journal. The evangelist began writing a weekly column for the Journal in 1892, and he continued to write for the newspaper until his death in October 1906.12 Jones often used his columns to focus on current topics of interest, including the “negro question.” In a column that was printed in the Journal in 1894, he specifically focused on black southerners. The evangelist claimed that since, as a southerner, he was “born, bred, and buttered among the colored brethren,” he was uniquely qualified to speak about African Americans in the South. Jones asserted that African Americans were superstitious and religious, but not pious. Their supposed superstitiousness, he argued, made African 11 Thomas Pearce Bailey, “Race Orthodoxy in the South,” Neale’s Monthly II, no. 5 (November 1913):583-593. 12 Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), August 18, 1892; “Sam Jones’ Last Letter,” The Cameron Herald (Cameron, TX), November 1, 1906. 73 Americans “easy prey to deception in religious circles.” Furthermore, he insisted that African Americans did not have pangs of conscience when they committed some transgression but “it lashes and pains” them when they were “caught in wrong doing.” Jones praised black southerners’ “folksy” wisdom. He explained that “the darkey is a philosopher in giving consolation to the disconsolate,” and “a philosopher in the management of the mule,” since “the negro and the mule work together better than any force I know.” Jones also asserted that “the negro is a weather prophet.” He concluded this stereotype-ridden description of black southerners by declaring that “in all, the negro is a good citizen, a kindly neighbor, a forbearing, forgiving fellow.” Jones insisted that African Americans were not any more inclined to steal than whites, and blamed poor pay and the fact that “white folks” owned all of the property for theft committed by black men and women. Additionally, he observed that there was no difference between the “instincts” of white and black Americans, and that “the negro differs from the white man more in his outstinks . . . than in any other way.” Jones declared that “the negro is growing in intelligence, frugality and good citizenship,” and that he wished them well.13 As illustrated by this column from 1894, Jones repeated stereotypical assumptions about the character of black southerners, but he rejected the idea that African Americans were inherently different from white southerners – instead, circumstances and upbringing separated white and black southerners, and, perhaps, it was possible for African Americans to improve their status in the South. Two years later, again in the Journal, Jones discussed his views of “the brother in black.” He began by explaining why the “negro problem” had to be addressed. Jones noted that “through the ‘black belts’ . . . the negroes swarm like locusts in Egypt,” and, therefore, “as they multiply in number . . . so the problem grows in importance and intricacy.” As in his earlier column, Jones 13 Sam P. Jones, “Sam Jones on the Negro,” Herald and Tribune (Jonesboro, TN), May 16, 1894. 74 took care to describe the supposed racial characteristics of black southerners. He declared that “no two races are as little alike as the Anglo-Saxon and the African races.” Jones asserted that “ambition, self-respect, and acquisitiveness” were “dwarfed or almost totally lacking” in African Americans, and that “something to eat, somewhere to sleep, something to wear is the height of the ambition of a large proportion of brothers in black.” The Georgia evangelist blamed this alleged lack of ambition, coupled with a lack of character, for the status of black southerners in the post-Civil War South. He complained that black southerners “call themselves the poor, down-trodden race, not knowing that they have their own foot upon their own neck.” Indeed, he argued that the end of slavery had led to more unemployment, vagrancy, alcoholism, and crime.14 Again, Jones insisted on white supremacy. Significantly, though, he argued that racial difference was a result of history, not predestination, contending that “the Anglo-Saxon race owes its position to its history.” Jones called on African Americans to use their divinely-given gifts to improve their condition. He argued that “the negro will never rise until by courage and industry, and intellectual growth and moral character he shall furnish for himself a foundation on which the superstructure will stand.” Jones then listed what he believed were the unique gifts of African Americans. He asserted that “God has peculiarly endowed the colored race. They are natural born orators.” Jones also noted that “God has endowed him with a good disposition . . . and with intellectual ability.” At the same time, he believed that African Americans were 14 “The Brother in Black: Sam Jones Writes of the Colored Man of the South,” The Ledger (Gaffney, SC), November 12, 1896 75 handicapped by a lack of ambition, since “they work for what they get, instead of aiming at proficiency and excellence and higher service and higher pay.”15 Jones stubbornly refuted claims of racial discrimination in the South. He asserted that “we have in the South as a rule laws which bear equally upon the colored and the white race,” but acknowledged that “arson and rape draw the dead line in the South.” Furthermore, he insisted that “our courts and juries will do justice by the colored man.” Still, he argued that disenfranchisement should be pursued, since “it would be much better for the negro if he were not a factor in the politics of the South,” and “it would be much better for the politics of the South if the negro were eliminated.” Even though he recognized that “there are many sterling, honest, intelligent negroes in the South who are not for sale on election day,” Jones lamented that “the politicians and ward-heelers and saloon-keepers have used the negro at the polls to elect their candidates and to carry out their schemes of infamy.” The evangelist seems to have viewed disenfranchisement as a way of eliminating corruption in southern politics. Broadening his focus to all voters, he declared that “a man who will buy a vote or sell a vote ought to be disenfranchised,” and explicitly pointed out that this would have to include white voters as well, as he suggested that “the negroes are not the only people who sell their votes.” Making this connection between disenfranchisement and the Progressive agenda of purifying the ballot box, he followed this discussion of disenfranchisement by noting that “every Southern State especially ought to have Australian ballot.” Still, Jones believed that black voters were particularly prone to being bought. He concluded his discussion of disenfranchisement by insisting that “as long as there are unscrupulous politicians and as long as the greed of office 15 “The Brother in Black: Sam Jones Writes of the Colored Man of the South,” The Ledger (Gaffney, SC), November 12, 1896 76 overlaps everything else the negro will be a menace to the purity of the ballot-box of the South.” The evangelist wrapped up his letter by noting that he had “always been an abiding friend to the colored race,” and declaring that “they are the best servants we have ever had,” and, moreover, “many of them make good citizens.” He encouraged his readers to embark on a campaign of racial uplift. Jones admonished white Americans to “go at the brother in black, not only with a spelling book in one hand and Bible in the other . . . in loving mercy, doing justly and treating him kindly.” As an example of this mission of racial uplift, Jones observed that “many times have I preached to tens of thousands of colored people,” who “make attentive, respectful audiences” since “they love the truth.”16 Despite his belief that African Americans and whites shared the same “instincts” and were only separated by history and upbringing, Jones was still a fervent proponent of white supremacy and the political disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. Jones seems to have come to this position gradually. During an interview he gave to a reporter in Brooklyn in 1892, Jones explained that southerners were “perfectly willing for the negro to vote and perfectly willing to allow a free ballot and a free count up to the point where negro domination does not carry.” He reasoned that the South had “as free ballot and as fair count” as the North, but “down there we use lead, in Indiana they use silver,” since “we can kill them cheaper than we can buy them,” and “we are both running on the most economical lines.”17 Ten years later, speaking at the Bloomington, Illinois Chautauqua in 1903, Jones boasted that African Americans “know their place and they keep it,” now that the South had “gotten rid of Yankee skalawags [sic].” 16 “The Brother in Black: Sam Jones Writes of the Colored Man of the South,” The Ledger (Gaffney, SC), November 12, 1896; “Sam Jones Talks of the Negro Race,” The Concord Times (Concord, NC), November 26, 1896; “The Brother in Black: Sam Jones Writes of the Colored Men of the South,” The Goldsboro Headlight (Goldsboro, NC), February 4, 1897. 17 “Sam Jones a Cavalier,” The Brooklyn Times (Brooklyn, NY), October 5, 1892. 77 Jones blamed “the enfranchisement of the negro” for disrupting social order in the South, and praised the white primary, which, since “a nomination is equivalent to an election,” ensured that “the black vote does not interfere.” In the same lecture, Jones took the opportunity to praise Booker T. Washington for “dignifying labor and teaching [black southerners] to work.”18 Earlier in his career, in San Francisco, Jones told an audience of Californians that “the domination of an inferior race” was “a fearful menace to the civilization” in the South. He argued that Christianity did not require that “the white race should meet the negro on terms of social equality,” and insisted that equality would “only come about when they meet before the throne of God.” Jones believed that the “Solid South” would never break, since “the fear of negro supremacy would forever unite those States.” 19 Clearly, Jones believed in white supremacy, and, like other white southerners, feared the idea of “social equality.” Even though Jones defended white supremacy, he believed that the end of slavery, on the whole, had benefited the South. In an 1895 sermon in St. Louis Jones praised abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as an example of principled, courageous living. The evangelist argued that Garrison’s efforts had benefited white southerners more than black southerners, since, before the Civil War, the South “was raising up a crop of aristocracy down there that wasn’t good for the country,” but now “we are raising a brawny, laborious, noble set of boys down there . . . and the brother in black is doing first rate.” Jones again displayed a mixture of paternalistic pride and racist condescension, explaining that black southerners were “improving all the time,” before joking that “they don’t have to work much,” since “they can work three months a year and that puts them to black berries, and the blackberries puts ‘em to watermelons, and melons fetches ‘em 18 “Sam Jones’ Hot Shot,” Crittenden Press (Marion, KY), August 13, 1903. 19 “Sam Jones on Himself,” The Daily Examiner (San Francisco, CA), March 24, 1889; “An Address to Children,” The Daily Examiner (San Francisco, CA), March 24, 1889. 78 up on persimmons, and persimmons brings ‘em to ‘possums, and ‘possums lasts ‘em all winter.” This comment, predictably, was met with gales of laughter from the nearly 12,000 audience members, most of whom were white.20 As suggested by this example, Jones often made black southerners the butt of his jokes. Like his early assistant Sam W. Small, who, before he was converted by Sam Jones, became famous for his “Old Si” dialect sketches published in the Atlanta Constitution (which provided the template for Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus Stories”), Jones frequently relied on minstrel humor, told in the “negro dialect,” to entertain his white audiences.21 On one occasion, Jones repeated an often-retold joke about an African American man who, mistaking axle grease for cheese, declared the grease to be the “mos’ saftest and de ransomest cheese I ever tackled.”22 The evangelist also used a form of minstrel humor to support his qualification as an expert on the “negro problem.” On many occasions, Jones repeated a story about “an old colored woman” – which, in some versions of the story, he described as being “a large, fat old soul” who weighed “300 pounds dress” – who approached him after a service to relay her appreciation for the evangelist’s message. According to Jones, the woman said: “God bress you, brudder Jones, you is everybody’s preacher; everybody loves to hear you preach.” This woman (who possibly may 20 “Sam Jones’s Last Day Here,” St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, MO), March 25, 1895. 21 “From Editor to Preacher,” The Lawrence Daily Journal (Lawrence, KS), October 26, 1885; “Rev. Sam Small Famous Orator Lectures Today,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 8, 1925; “Uncle Remus,” The New York Times (New York City, NY), July 11, 1908 22 “Sam Jones, A Sketch by Joe Johnson, Jr,” The Houston Post (Houston, TX), December 17, 1893. Versions of this joke were widely printed beginning in the 1880s. See “Ransom Cheese,” Detroit Free Press (Detroit, MI), September 6, 1885; Texas Bar Association, Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Session (Austin, TX: Austin Printing Company, 1911), 237. 79 have never even existed) then declared that even though “brudder Jones” had “white skin,” he had a “black heart.”23 Jones was a firm supporter of the disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 1899, he was asked to respond to comments made Allen D. Candler, the governor of Georgia, on the “race problem.” Candler, reacting to a series of lynchings near Bainbridge, Georgia, in July 1899, argued that only “intelligent” black men should be allowed to vote, that African Americans should be taught morality, and an end to the “perpetual intermeddling with the relations of the races in the South by fanatics and fools” would settle racial conflict in the South.24 Echoing Candler’s sentiments, Jones declared that the South would “run our little institutions without aid or advice from Yankee Doodle.” He went on to contend that “the average negro in the South fares as well as the average Chinaman in San Francisco.” Jones noted that he agreed with Candler’s call to restrict suffrage in order to eliminate “ignorance and vice from the ballot box,” since “a characterless, moneyless, ignorant negro or white man has no more business on election day than a mule or a billygoat.”25 In an essay on politics he wrote for the Atlanta Journal, Jones contended that, since “our brother in black” was “a weaker race,” the “survival of the fittest will settle that question sooner or later.” He went on to assert that “it was a mistake to put the ballot in the hands of the Southern colored man when he wasn’t equal to the duties of citizenship nor intelligent enough to vote.” Jones insisted that “law and order, the protection of life and property, can only be maintained in the South by the supremacy of the white man and his domination over the inferior race.” He hoped for the time when “no man can vote . . . in any election, who is not 23 “Noted Sam Jones,” The Galena Times (Galena, TX), July 2, 1897; “National Life,” The Courier (Waterloo, IA), July 25, 1894; “The Sam Jones Meeting,” The Austin Daily Statesman (Austin, TX), May 10, 1896. 24 “The Race Problem,” The Houston Daily Post (Houston, TX), July 29, 1899; “Bloody Scenes in the Southland,” The Richmond Planet (Richmond, VA), July 29, 1899. 25 “Guns With Our Gospel,” The Bamberg Herald (Bamberg, SC), August 10, 1899. 80 versed in National and State affairs, or who can at least intelligently read and understand our National and State constitution and statutory law.”26 As a campaign for prohibition (and a member of the Prohibition Party), no argument for disenfranchisement was more compelling to Jones than the claim that as long as black voters could still vote, prohibition would never pass. Jones argued that “the negro, both in his constitution and by laws, is closely allied with the whisky question.” He lamented that African Americans were “corralled and marched and voted for whiskey in local option fights,” and that the “very gang who drove them to the polls is the very gang that debauches them and frequently the gang that lynches them.” Jones contended that “this country will never be what God and good men want it to be until the negro is politically regulated and whiskey is permanently abolished.”27 In January 1899, Jones, in an interview with a journalist from the Baltimore Sun, argued that threats of “negro domination” (which, as A.M.E. Zion bishop C.R. Harris observed in October 1899, “means simply equal rights to the negro”) were a pretext used by southern Democrats to justify their continued control of southern politics. He explained that “there is no such thing” as “negro domination,” and contended that “if there were no emoluments connected with the offices the white men would give them all to the negro and feel no degradation.” Even as he minimized the risk of “negro domination,” Jones excused political violence against African Americans. The Georgia evangelist observed, euphemistically, that “when the number of negroes in office gets too high everybody has a picnic and a few funerals occur, then things roll on before,” but insisted that “no more than twenty-five negroes [are] killed by white men a year in the South.” He derided northern criticism of southern race relations. Jones then addressed the 26 “Sam Jones on Politics,” Houston Daily Post (Houston, TX), March 4, 1894. 27 “The Negro and Whiskey Questions,” The Courier (Asheboro, NC), April 16, 1903 81 Wilmington insurrection of 1898. He argued that the explosion of violence against black citizens in the port city centered on office-holding, comparing it to “a lot of calves who get mad when the pigs get into the stall and start to sucking the cow.” Jones still maintained, however, that “everything is smooth as before,” and “nobody thinks of it now.”28 Jones’s comments were widely reprinted in both Democratic and Republican-leaning newspapers. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, which was generally sympathetic to the Democratic Party and its candidates, reprinted Jones’ full interview with the Baltimore Sun without comment.29 The Los Angeles Times, which at the time was owned by Republican Harrison Gray “Hungry Growl” Otis, chose to reprint only Jones’ comments on “negro domination” in the Sunday, January 29 edition of the paper.30 The Appeal, a national African-American newspaper based in St. Paul, Minnesota, also included Jones’ statements about black suffrage, declaring that “Rev. Sam Jones can’t help but tell the truth sometimes.”31 The Georgia evangelist’s insistence that “negro domination” was a canard to justify white Democrat rule continued to be reprinted by newspapers into the twentieth century. In 1904, the Huntington, Indiana Herald, managed by long-time editor and avid Republican, Thaddeus Butler, excerpted Jones’ remarks to refute “the incessant declaration of 28 “Bishop Harris’ Address,” The Asheville Citizen (Asheville, NC), October 6, 1899; “Rev. Sam Jones’ Ideas,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), January 11, 1899. 29 “Rev. Sam Jones’ Ideas,” The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), January 15, 1899. See “The Norfolk Pilot Sold,” The Press-Visitor (Raleigh, NC), November 13, 1896 for information about the editorial bias of the Virginian-Pilot and its antecedent newspaper, the Norfolk Daily Pilot. 30 “Sam Jones Sizes Up Negro Domination,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), January 29, 1899. In addition to being a staunch Republican, Otis led a campaign against labor unions which culminated in the bombing of the Los Angeles Times offices in 1910 (See “‘Corporal’ Bests ‘General,’” The Carpenter XXVIII, 7 (July 1908), 19; Howard Blum, American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century (New York: Crown Publishing, 2015), 20-25). 31 The Appeal (St. Paul, MN), March 18, 1899. 82 southern bull-dozers . . .that the south is in danger of ‘negro domination.’”32 In the same year, The Yellow Jacket, a strongly Republican-oriented newspaper based in Moravian Falls, North Carolina and edited by R. Don Laws, also reported Jones’ 1899 comments on “negro domination.” 33 Regardless of his views on “negro domination,” Jones supported the racial orthodoxy of the New South. Unsurprisingly, then, Jones condemned Theodore Roosevelt’s approach towards race relations. Even though Roosevelt, for the most part, reflected the racial presuppositions of northern Progressives, and, influenced by his mother, who was raised in Georgia, accepted disenfranchisement, and, on the whole, was thoroughly convinced of white supremacy – as he wrote in a letter to South Carolina politician James Adger Smyth, he believed that African Americans were “altogether inferior to the whites.” Nevertheless, he believed that African-American advancement was possible, even if equality could only be gradually and difficultly obtained. Roosevelt’s racial views produced contradictory results, at least as far as policy-making was concerned. Even though he occasionally acted to uphold the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South (most notably, in the 1906 Brownsville affair), Roosevelt, in 1903, made a series of decisions that brought praise from African American leaders and led white southerners to unleash a storm of outrage on the president and his administration. In the fall of 1902, Roosevelt had appointed William D. Crum, a black Republican, as the Collector of Charleston, 32 The Huntington Herald (Huntington, IN), July 9, 1904; For information on Butler, see “What His Brethren Think: Comments of Northern Indiana Editors Concerning Thad Butler,” The Huntington Herald (Huntington, IN), November 18, 1905; Frank Sumner Bash, ed., History of Huntington County, Indiana: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1914), 268; 33 “Sam Jones Sizes Up Negro Domination,” The Yellow Jacket (Moravian Falls, NC), June 9, 1904; Jule Hubbard, “Laws, Romulus Don,” in Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, vol. 4, L-O, William Stevens Powell, ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 199), 32; James Larkin Pearson, “A History of Newspapers in Wilkes County,” in The Land of Wilkes, Johnson L. Hayes, ed. (Wilkesboro, NC: Wilkes County Historical Society, 1962), 282. 83 South Carolina. He followed this appointment by supporting Minnie Cox, a federally appointed black postmistress in Indianola, Mississippi, who, enriched by her government position and strategic investment in local business, became viewed as “uppity” by the white population of Indianola, and was forced out of town by the town mayor. Roosevelt went as far as to suspend deliveries to the Indianola post office – forcing residents to pick up their mail in Greenville, Mississippi (more than thirty miles away) – while continuing to pay Cox her salary. Finally, in mid-January, news broke that Roosevelt planned to name a black Republican as Boston’s Assistant District Attorney. White southern reactionaries lashed out at the president, describing him as a “blunderbustering nigger-lover,” an “accident,” and a “fourteen karat jackass.”34 Never one to avoid controversy, Sam Jones soon joined the fray. In a letter to the Atlanta Journal in January 1903, the evangelist announced his hope that Roosevelt would “be wiser when he is older.” Jones suggested that Roosevelt should follow advice of William Jennings Bryan and appoint an African-American postmaster in the North, since, while “it takes noting but spite to put a colored person off on us in the south,” he believed “it would take grit to put one off on some northern town or city.”35 In a second letter to the Journal published at the end of January, Jones returned to the Indianola affair. He declared that “the people of Indianola do not want a colored postmistress and I candidly doubt if the colored postmistress wants the job.” 34 Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 52-53, 198-201; Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to James Adger Smyth. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o266191. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 101-102; Seth M. Scheiner, “President Theodore Roosevelt and the Negro, 1901-1908,” The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 3 (July 1962): 169-182; “Mr. Edmunds Disagrees,” The Richmond Planet (Richmond, VA), March 21, 1903; The Twice-A-Week Messenger (Owensboro, KY), January 20, 1903;“Niggers,” The Vicksburg American (Vicksburg, MS), August 26, 1903. Notably, Vardaman’s attacks on Roosevelt were credit as one of the secrets of Vardaman’s victory (“Governor Jas. K. Vardaman,” The Vicksburg American (Vicksburg, MS), August 28, 1903). 35 “Sam Jones’ Letter,” The Concord Times (Concord, NC), January 29, 1903; The Meridian Press (Meridian, MS), January 13, 1903. 84 Jones acknowledged that “the Brother in Black is entitled to a pull at the public pay,” and quipped that southerners would “furnish them tickets . . . to any point where the president will furnish the office.” He explained that the controversy was the result of “a growing conviction and a determination on the part of the Anglo-Saxon race south of the Mason and Dixon line that the top rail belongs on top” and “that there is enough insincerity in the makeup of President Roosevelt to give him a considerable tincture and color of a hypocrite.” In Jones’s estimation, Roosevelt was either “a very weak man,” or “a politician of the cheapest variety.” The evangelist argued that while he was “a friend to the brother in black,” he also believed that “God made him black, and God wants him to stay black . . . and whenever you mix white and black in the marital world, you damage both races,” and that “the best negroes and the best white people” – including Booker Washington – “don’t want social equality.” Jones declared that Roosevelt had “a devilish stubbornness that disgusts his friends and cools the ardor of his admirers,” and threatened that if Roosevelt were to come down South, he “would sit down in a dish of red hot stuff.”36 Throughout 1903, Jones continued his criticism of Roosevelt. Referring to the president, he observed that “most every man is some kind of fool, but the man who is all kinds of a fool ought to be locked up.”37 Speaking in Houston, Texas in February 1903, Jones argued that Roosevelt’s decision to appoint African-American officeholders (and, in the case of Minnie Cox, to prevent black government appointees from being forced out of office) violated the “sentiment underlying the very future of the South that there is a top rail that is going to stay on top and a bottom rail that is going to stay at the bottom.” He characterized Roosevelt as a kind of “race traitor,” and insisted that “any white man that should object to white supremacy and defends 36 “Sam Jones Letter,” The Enterprise (Albemarle, NC), January 29, 1903. 37 The Caucasian (Shreveport, LA), March 8, 1903. 85 miscegenation and social equality between the two races in the South is to be more despised and damned than the blackest negro.” Jones professed that he had no objection to Roosevelt hosting Booker T. Washington for a meal at the White House (Jones compared Roosevelt dining with Washington to a woman kissing a cow - that is, he believed it was merely “a matter of taste”38) but observed that while “it is none of the business of the people of the South if Roosevelt wants a negro to eat with him in the White House,” Roosevelt’s attempt to appoint “negro postmistresses” and “impose them upon our people” was an entirely different matter, since “a government place is not a position for the president to put in who he pleases.” Jones went on to declare, to great applause, that “the South has said, and the South will stick to it, that this is white man’s country.”39 Despite Jones’s condemnation of Roosevelt’s reaction to the affair in Indianola and his decision to appoint Walter Crum as the Collector of Charleston, the evangelist insisted that even black officeholders were preferable to officeholders who sold liquor – an indication of the intensity of Jones’s commitment to the cause of prohibition. In the fall of 1903, Jones attacked Walter Akerman, the postmaster of Cartersville, his hometown, who was selling homemade wine, and declared that he would “rather that Roosevelt would come the Indianola, Miss., on us and give us a decent, sober negro postmaster than a white man dishing out dope in the shape of home-made wine,” a comment that ultimately led to blows between Jones and Akerman.40 By 1905, Jones seems to have reconciled with Roosevelt. Speaking at the Seven Hills Chautauqua near Owensboro, Kentucky, in August 1905, he declared Roosevelt to be “one of the best 38 “Sam Jones Discusses Some Recent Events,” The Enterprise (Albemarle, NC), August 20, 1903. 39 “Throngs to Hear Sam Jones,” The Houston Post (Houston, TX), February 2, 1903. 40 “Sam Jones in Fight,” The Danielsville Monitor (Danielsville, GA), September 18, 1903; “Preacher Goes Free,” The North Georgia Citizen (Dalton, GA), September 24, 1903 86 presidents this country has ever had.”41 Roosevelt returned the compliment in Atlanta in October 1905. At the Georgia State Fair, held in Piedmont Park, Roosevelt, who was being honored as part of “Roosevelt Day” at the fair (October 21), called Jones up to the platform at, “in the presence of fifty thousand people,” and invited the evangelist to be his guest the next time he visited Washington, D.C. “Mr. Jones,” President Roosevelt declared, “you, in your own way, are doing for this country and the people what I am trying to accomplish in mine. I heartily endorse your good work and hope that success will continue to crown your efforts.”42 Ultimately, Jones’s and Roosevelt’s shared commitment to Progressivism bridged the gap between their views on race, which, after all, was not as wide as Jones’s newspaper columns and pulpit remarks would suggest. While Jones disagreed with Roosevelt on the issue of black officeholders, the evangelist seems to have shared the president’s views on Booker T. Washington. Jones condemned southerners who criticized Roosevelt’s decision – as he put it, who would “kick at the guest sitting at another man’s table” – to host Washington for dinner on October 16, 1901. He declared that “Roosevelt dined the greatest negro on earth, and a negro who leads his race and leads the right.” Jones, however, was quick to insist that he was not “for social equality.”43 On October 4, 1902, Jones lectured to the students of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. His speech, for the most part, was not specifically targeted at black southerners (even though, of course, most of the audience was African American) – the one exception was Jones’s claim that “the negroes of the south had drunk enough whisky since the war to buy each head of a negro 41 “Auspicious Opening of the Chautauqua,” The Twice-a-Week Messenger (Ownesboro, KY), August 4, 1905. 42 “The State Fair in Atlanta,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), February 10, 1905; “Mutual Admiration Society,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), October 24, 1905. 43 “Rev. Sam Jones,” The Times-Mercury (Hickory, NC), November 6, 1901. 87 family a nice little house.” After his visit, the evangelist took the chance to commend Washington. Jones described the black educator as “the leading colored man of the world.” He was effusive in his praise, declaring that “Booker Washington is a General” and a “King,” who “rules with absolute authority the thousands who attend his school.” Jones commended “the great work [Washington is doing for his race.” He emphasized that Washington “knows his place, and in his place he is king.” Jones believed that, like Moses, “Booker Washington, by the providence of God, has been raced up as the great leader of his race.”44 A year later, in 1903, Jones again praised Washington, and noted that “Booker T. Washington is doing the most for [blacks]. He is dignifying labor and teaching them to work.”45 The evangelist had a friendly relationship with Booker T. Washington. Jones lectured to students of the Tuskegee Institute at least twice in his career – in 1902, as noted above, and again on April 20, 1905 – and he also shared the Chautauqua platform with Washington many times, including in Pontiac, Illinois, in 1898, Ottumwa, Iowa in 1905 and in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1906.46 Washington’s congenial relationship with the evangelist, however, was criticized by both white and black critics of the educator. During a debate in the Alabama House of Representatives on September 29, 1903, over a bill to appropriate additional funds for a school for African Americans in Montgomery, J.R. Wood, a representative for Macon County, Alabama, where the Tuskegee Institute was located, attacked Jones for repeating Washington’s assertion that “not 44 “Sam Jones,” The Tuskegee News (Tuskegee, AL), October 9, 1902; “Jones on Booker Washington,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN) October 27, 1902; “Booker T. Washington,” Hopkinsville Kentuckian (Hopkinsville, KY), November 25, 1902. 45 “Lynching is Approved,” The Jamestown Weekly Alert (Jamestown, ND), August 6, 1903. 46The Tuskegee News (Tuskegee, AL), April 27, 1905; “Summer Assemblies for 1898,” The Chautauquan, October 1898, 109; “Noted Lecturers,” The Ottumwa Courier (Ottumwa, IA), February 23, 1905; “Arrange for Two Special Trains,” The Muscatine News-Tribune (Muscatine, IA), July 6, 1906 88 one of his students has been in the penitentiary,” which Wood claimed was a lie.47 Only two weeks later, the Illinois-based Afro-American Equal Rights League criticized Washington for giving ammunition to men like “[Benjamin] Tillman, John T. Morgan, and Rev. Sam Jones in their attacks on the colored race.”48 Jones, then, seems to have taken a moderate position, at least as far as Washington was concerned; unable to satisfy neither radical, reactionary white supremacists nor proponents of black equality, the evangelist, like other Progressives, hewed a middle course that avoided the violent racial demagoguery of men like South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman, who threatened that Roosevelt’s decision to dine Washington would “necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”49 47 “Wood of Macon Proposes Withdrawal of State Support from Negro Schools,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 2, 1903; “Tuskegee’s Critics,” Our Southern Home (Livingston, AL), September 30, 1903 48 “Booker T. Washington Criticized,” The Oshkosh Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI), October 13, 1903. 49 The Keowee Courier (Pickens, SC), November 20, 1901; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 259. 89 Illustration 2. Caricature of Sam P. Jones (St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, March 25, 1895) Jones embraced the white-supremacist ideas and practices of the Jim Crow South, and his acceptance of Jim Crow-style segregation is reflected in his campaigns. Nevertheless, even as segregated seating and separate, special meetings for African American audiences emphasized the evangelist’s commitment to – or at least acceptance of – white supremacy and racial discrimination, Jones’ paternalist and Progressive leanings also shaped his attitudes towards black worshippers. The Georgia evangelist’s meetings were both noticeably biracial, yet strictly segregated, simultaneously challenging and affirming the Jim Crow racial order. The reporting of a correspondent for The Summit County Beacon of Akron, Ohio, who attended Jones’ 1885 meetings in Nashville, illustrates the contradictions within Jones’ racial views. The journalist, “Inez,” paid special attention to the ways that Jones both challenged and upheld segregation in his meetings. “Inez” observed that while “Moody and other great evangelists have always 90 declined to labor much below Mason and Dixon’s line, for the reason that they could not adapt themselves to the Southern view of race,” Jones, as a southerner, was “accustomed to the social institutions of the South.” Though Jones, according to “Inez,” was “rather free from the extreme caste spirit,” his meetings were strictly segregated, as a rope was put up “as a line of demarcation” [sic] to separate black and white audience members. Jones attempted to characterize segregation as a positive light, declaring that he “hoped the negroes would see there was a place set apart for them”; he did, however, insist that black attendees “keep there.” 50 Even though, as a column in The Journal and Courier of New Haven, Connecticut observed in July 1885, “Mr. Jones antagonized almost everybody in some way or another,” he “naturally deferred to the popular sentiment on the race question” by “setting apart a separate portion of the tent for colored people.”51 During a series of meetings held in Cincinnati in February 1886, Jones took time to explain why his meetings in the South were segregated. After seeing African Americans in his audience, the evangelist remarked that he had “noticed the presence of colored people at these meetings with a good deal of pleasure.” He boasted that he frequently preached to African American audiences, and that “some of [his] best friends” in the South were black people. Jones then sought to justify segregated meetings in the South, in response to critics who condemned Jones for acting as though he was “friends of the colored folks” north of the Mason-Dixon even though “down South” African Americans who attended his meetings were given “a separate place,” and were not allowed to “go anywhere but this place.” Jones offered three excuses for segregating his services to this northern audience. First, he argued that white audience members 50 “Sam Jones, Revivalist,” The Summit County Beacon (Summit County, Akron, OH), July 22, 1885. 51 “In the South,” Journal and Courier (New Haven, CT), July 29, 1885. 91 were forced into segregated seating when he held special meetings for African Americans (a “colored people’s meeting”). Jones explained that he would “cut off a little corner for the white folks and . . . make them sit there.” Second, Jones blamed “social usages down South,” or southern racial prejudice, for forcing him to have segregated seating at his meetings. Finally, Jones insisted that he had “no choice about where the people sit,” since it was “[his] business to preach, and it’s the ushers’ business to seat the people.” 52 There was probably some truth to the evangelist’s final justification for segregated meetings. Indeed, local arrangement committees for Jones’ meetings, and ushers provided by those committees, probably bear much of the responsibility for enforcing separate accommodations at services. For example, in Columbus, Mississippi, the Committee of Arrangements for the meetings organized an open-air service at the courthouse specifically for African Americans, which was attended by a mixed audience of nearly four thousand African Americans and a handful of white onlookers, who listened from a stand erected in front of the courthouse. Jones, however, at this meeting as well as during other campaigns, would have had final approval for arrangements.53 Even though Jones approved – either explicitly or tacitly – of segregated seating, the evangelist also challenged Jim Crow by refusing to segregate some of the most meaningful aspects of his meetings. Despite enforcing segregated seating, Jones did not mandate segregation in the “inquirers’ seats” or the anxious bench for audience members seeking to be “born again.” A columnist for the New Haven Journal Courier, “Emile,” reported on this fact, observing that Jones had invited inquirers forward by remarking that “you’ve got to mingle promiscuously some day in one future world or the other; and you might as well begin here and 52 “Salvation! O Salvation!,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1886. 53 “Rev. Sam Jones in Columbus, Miss.,” Weekly Commercial Herald (Vicksburg, MS), April 23, 1886; “Sam Jones at Columbus,” Vicksburg Evening Post (Vicksburg, MS), April 28, 1886. 92 now.” This ambiguity was picked up by the Summit County Beacon’s correspondent, “Inez,” who followed up an observation that “at the general meetings the color line seemed to be considerably broken down,” as black and white audience members stood side by side in the aisles, by reiterating that “no blacks occupied seats among the whites.” Even though Jim Crow was maintained in the pews, religious expression was shared by both white and black audience members alike at Jones’ meetings. “Inez” observed that there was “a good deal of demonstration” at Jones’ meetings, ecstatic religious experiences that ranged from shouting and laughing to weeping. African Americans took part in this common ecstasy; as “Inez” remarked, “oftenest the colored people would start the shouting,” echoing nineteenth-century stereotypes that ridiculed African Americans’ supposedly “excessive enthusiasm” and inherent religiosity while unintentionally revealing that both black and white attendees participated in shouting and other forms of ecstatic religious expression. 54 In this way, Jones’s meetings had an ambiguous relationship with the Jim Crow order – while audiences were segregated while they sat in staid silence in the pews, altar calls were sites of emotion-laden integration. As Jones crisscrossed the South and West between 1884 and 1906, a regular feature of the evangelist’s campaigns were meetings specifically targeted to black audiences. As his wife, Laura Jones, observed in her biography of her husband, “it was the custom of Mr. Jones to preach to the colored people nearly everywhere he went.”55 While early in his career (in 1889), Jones was lauded for his decision to “seek congregations of [his] color,”56 nevertheless, the evangelist preached to black audiences at African American churches and camp meetings. For 54 “Sam Jones, Revivalist,” The Summit County Beacon (Summit County, Akron, OH), July 22, 1885; “In the South,” Journal and Courier (New Haven, CT), July 29, 1885 55 Laure McElwain Jones and Walt Holcolmb, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones: A Minister of the Gospel (Atlanta, GA: The Franklin-Turner Company, 1907), 294. 56 “Camden County Correspondent,” The Falcon (Elizabeth City, NC), October 18, 1889. 93 example, in August 1895, Jones preached at an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E) camp meeting in Fairchance, Pennsylvania, as a fundraiser to complete an A.M.E church building in Morgantown, West Virginia. 57 More frequently, though, Jones would designate one day or one meeting of his campaign as being especially for black audiences. These meetings often attracted huge audiences. In Charlotte, in May 1890, Jones’s meeting for African Americans was attended by at least eight thousand audience members – an impressive showing in a city that in 1890 boasted fewer than 12,000 citizens.58 One representative example of these services was held in Fort Worth, Texas, in March 1890. At this meeting, Jones and his assistant at the time, George Stuart, addressed a predominately (though not exclusively) African American audience. Often, a “negro meeting” was attended by both white and black listeners, which meant that Jones performed not only for his targeted audience, but also for white spectators. This tension between appealing to black audiences while appeasing white onlookers imparted a unique character to these meetings. In Austin, for example, in 1896, between three thousand to four thousand African Americans attended a meeting, and the remainder of the seven-thousand seat auditorium 57 “Jones’ Pot Pourri,” Fort Smith Times (Fort Smith, AR), June 25, 1905; Emily F. Robbins, ed., Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment (Battle Creek, MI: Race Betterment Foundation, 1914), 146; “Sam Jones to Preach,” The Freeman (Indianapolis, IN), August 24, 1895. Accounts of Jones’ sermons at African-American churches are often only anecdotal, and possibly apocryphal. The Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment (cited above) recounts a story in which Jones, who was leading a service at a black church in Georgia, was prayed over by an African-American deacon who asked that he would be anointed with “the kerosene oil of salvation.” The story of the black deacon praying over a white minister was not originally about Jones, however, and some of the earliest versions of the anecdote state that the white preacher was from New Jersey. Most likely, this is simply a version of minstrel humor. See “Varieties,” Ocean Grove Record (Ocean Grove, NJ), November 27, 1886; “The Savorless Salt,” The Bethel Courier (Bethel, VT), June 29, 1893; The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 23, 1897. 58 “Sam Jones Among the Negroes,” The Newberry Herald and News (Newberry, SC), May 8, 1890; “Charlotte’s Population,” The Charlotte News, July 1, 1890. According to the News, Charlotte’s population was 11,739. This number differs slightly from the official United States Census tabulation of 11,557 (see LeGette Blythe and Charles Raven Brockmann, Hornets’ Nest: The Story of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (New York: McNally, 1961), 449). 94 was occupied by whites.59 In Savannah, during series of meetings held in the city’s Park Tabernacle in 1901, the service for African Americans had around five thousand black attendees and between two thousand to three thousand white onlookers.60 This was not always the case; notably, in Charlotte in May 1890, white audience members were forced out of the tabernacle on Tryon Street to make room for 7,000 African Americans, even though, as the Charlotte Chronicle noted, “a few lonesome white folks were scattered around.”61 In some ways, these services subverted the prevailing racial order. In Savannah, in 1901, Jones held a “tremendous” meeting for African Americans of the city. When he announced the meeting, Jones explained that “the pews will be for the colored people,” and that he “[didn’t] want a single white person to sit down as long as there is a colored person standing up.”62 These meetings, like other services held during Jones’ campaigns, prominently featured congregational singing, as well as performances by choirs and soloists. Before Jones spoke in Fort Worth, his soloist, E.O. Excell, sang a minstrel song written by a white southerner from Kentucky, William S. Hays, titled “Keep in de Middle ob de Road.” As an example of what ethnomusicologist Sandra Jean Graham describes as a “commercial spiritual,” which parody traditional folk spirituals using minstrel humor and stereotypes, Excell’s decision to sing this song (which may have been a choice made by Jones) is curious, at best a tone-deaf attempt to 59 “The Negro Meeting,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 10, 1896; “The Sam Jones Meetings,” The Austin Daily Statesman (Austin, TX), May 10, 1896. Having both white and black audience members at meetings “devoted exclusively to the colored people” seemed to be a common occurrence; See “Eloquent Sermon by Sam Jones,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 31, 1891. 60 Sam P. Jones, Lightning Flashes and Thunderbolt, comp. J.S. Shingler (Louisville, KY: Pentecostal Publishing Company, 1912), 176, 61 “Most Wonderful of All,” The Charlotte Chronicle (Charlotte, NC), May 2, 1890; “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890 62 Jones, Lightning Flashes and Thunderbolts, 160-161. 95 pander to black audiences, and at worst a mockery of African-American religious worship.63 E.O. Excell performed minstrel songs – and genuine negro spirituals – for the amusement of white audiences. In sang 1889, the soloist sang “Keep in the Middle of the Road” to a meeting for young people organized by Bands of Hope in Oakland, California. Excell succeeded in “imitating the negro dialect and musical tone to perfection, much to the amusement of all present.”64 The meeting in Fort Worth seems to have been typical of Jones’ meetings for African Americans. In Austin in 1896, after the congregation sang three or four hymns, Jones’ song leader for those meetings, Charlie Tillman, asked the mostly black audience to “sing one of your own songs,” and the audience, led by John T. Gibbons, the pastor of Wesley Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, obliged. The Austin Daily Statesman reported that “the song was rendered in precisely the same style that the old plantation darkeys used to sing ‘fo the wah,’ and old southern men in that vast congregation were carried back into the long ago as its melody flowed out in a mighty stream.”65 Newspaper reports from Jones’ meetings often emphasized the supposedly inherent musicality of African Americans, insisting that black audiences sang “with a sweetness, a sympathy, a depth of conviction and religious enthusiasm that only a negro congregation . . . could.”66 This performance was as much for the white audience’s reassurance as it was for the edification of the African-American worshippers, who linked music – 63 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890; Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 145, 178;“Keep in de Middle of de Road,” Heywood and Son’s Up-to-date Collection of Nigger Songs and Recitations (Manchester, UK: Abel Heywood and Sons, 1895), 22; William Shakespeare Hays, Keep in De Middle Ob De Road (Cincinnati: Newhall & Co., Geo. D., 1878), Notated Music. https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1878.11057/ (accessed May 1, 2019); William Shakespeare Hays, “408. Keep in de Middle ob de Road,” in E.O. Excell, ed., Triumphant Songs, Nos 1& 2 Combined (Chicago: Clark and Adams, 1890), 410-411. 64 “Sam Jones on Himself,” The Daily Examiner (San Francisco, CA), March 24, 1889; “An Address to Children,” The Daily Examiner (San Francisco, CA), March 24, 1889. 65 “The Sam Jones Meetings,” The Austin Daily Statesman, May 10, 1896. 66 Jones, Lighting Flashes and Thunderbolts, 177. 96 particularly music that reminded them of an idealized (and imaginary) Old South – with the comforting assumption that black southerners were happy and docile, content to be consigned to a subordinate role in southern society.67 The meaning of black musical performances to white southerners was made explicit during a meeting in Meridian, Mississippi. In Meridian, E.O. Excell requested that the black audience members sing the chorus of “I’ll meet you the city of the New Jerusalem” by themselves. They obliged, and “the white folk were delighted with it.” To the Meridian News, this incident, which was repeated at Jones’ meetings across the South, had great significance, since it promised “a phase of the race question.” The News declared that “every time” the song was sung again that it would “bring back to memory . . . the kindness of the white people of Meridian,” and argued that “this incident . . . has done more . . . to restore the right feeling among the races than all the Winchesters or legislation in this state.”68 Clearly, the News believed that black voices joined in singing gospel favorites was a sign that “proper” relationships could be restored by black and white southerners. Again in Charlotte and Wilmington (in May and October 1890, respectively) and Little Rock (in 1891 and again in 1895), newspapers reported that (in the words of the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette) “the negroes sang a number of their favorite hymns,” followed by a solo by E.O Excell, who favored “When the General Roll is Called” – an African-American spiritualpopularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (and reportedly Jones’ favorite song) – or “The Road to Heaven,” written by the song leader himself.69 Excell would also enlist black audience members 67 Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 1-2. Thompson points out that white southerners were aggravated at freed peoples’ – and, later, the twentieth-century “New Negroes” – apparent refusal to engage in song and dance. 68 “Negro Melody,” The Clarke County Democrat (Grove Hill, AL), December 12, 1889. 69 “Blistering the Boys,” The Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891; “Tabernacle Meetings,” The Morning Star (Wilmington, NC), October 5, 1890; “Notes,” The Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), May 11, 1895; 97 to assist him in singing gospel songs in services predominately attended by whites, and, on occasion, students from black colleges sang at Jones’ services.70 Jones’s meetings for African Americans were not only an example of evangelistic outreach – they also acted to reaffirm the racial assumptions of the New South elite. The Charlotte Chronicle’s reporting on an afternoon service on May 1, 1890 for African Americans illustrates this point. The Chronicle remarked that “there was every style of nigger in creation there,” from “the tony, aristocratic nigger in the stylish last year’s dress of the lady she cooked for” to “the country darkey.” It observed that “there were darkeys that looked like they had applied glycerine [sic] soap before coming out,” while others “had rubbed on the last piece of that bar of soap from yesterday’s clothes washing,” and “the ruling majority . . . bore no evidence of soap at all.”71 White audiences viewed Jones’ meetings for African Americans as a kind of spectacle. The chance to hear African Americans sing, suggested the Daily News of Galveston, “was perhaps the feature that attracted so many . . . whites” to Jones’ meetings for black audiences.72 Daily newspapers’ extensive coverage of Jones’ meetings often emphasized African Americans’ ecstatic worship – in Charlotte, as a result of the gospel singing, “a number of the brethren and sister [sic] got happy, and were bound to shout.”73 The chance to hear Alden W. Quimby, “Borrioboola Gha,” The New York Observer 81, 3 (March 26, 1903): 392; Theodore F. Seward and George L. White, eds., Jubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers, Part 1 (New York: Biglow and Main, 1881), 53; “When the General Roll is Called,” in Frederick J. Work, ed., Folk Songs of the American Negro, No. 1 (Nashville, TN: Work Brothers & Hart, 1907), 32; E.O. Excell, “The Road to Heaven,” in Triumphant Songs No. 4: A Collection of Gospel Songs for Sunday-Schools, Revivals, Hymns of Prayer, and Praise for Devotional Meetings (Toronto: William Briggs, [1894?], 207. 70 “Notes,” The Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), May 11, 1895; “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 71 “Most Wonderful of All,” The Charlotte Chronicle (Charlotte, NC), May 2, 1890. 72 “Eloquent Sermon by Sam Jones,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 31, 1891. 73 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 98 African Americans sing “in the good old style” was an inducement for white audience members to attend Jones’ services for African Americans.74 These meetings served as evidence for the racial assumptions of the New South. Jones’ sermons to black audiences would often be preceded by comments from his assisting evangelist. At the meeting in Fort Worth, Jones was supported by George R. Stuart, a long-time colleague of Jones who held a Doctor of Divinity degree from Emory and Henry College in southwest Virginia. Stuart, who, with only a brief interruption, was with Jones’ evangelistic team from 1889 to 1906, provided a counterpoint to the Georgia evangelist’s folksy, down-to-earth manner. As Stuart’s biographer observed, while Jones was “colloquial, droll, familiar, and . . . as close as allowable to what his critics called coarseness,” Stuart was “polished, classic, and mindful of conventional standards.”75 Taking the platform at Fort Worth, Stuart methodically outlined his beliefs about what was necessary for African Americans to “begin to improve.” Stuart began his address by quoting a verse from the Bible, Psalm 33:12: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” His message focused on racial uplift, explaining that African Americans could “go on and make of themselves a grand and glorious people,” if only they could achieve true manhood and womanhood by being sober, chaste, industrious, and by building Christian homes – after all, as Stuart argued, “some of the noblest men have come from your nation.” He argued that African Americans constituted a “distinct nation,” and he emphasized the importance of segregation, arguing that “the best of your people stick to the color line strongest” since “God gave you your color and He gave us ours.” He blamed “whisky and 74 Jones, Lightning Flashes and Thunderbolts, 161. 75 Thomas N. Ivey, The Southern Methodist Handbook, 1916 (Nashville, TN: Smith & Lamar, 1916), 141; W.W. Pinson, George R. Stuart: Life and Work (Nashville, TN: Cokesbury Press, 1927), 75-78; The Tuskaloosa Gazette (Tuscaloosa, AL), May 23, 1889; “Sam Jones’ Meetings,” The Daily Commercial Herald (Vicksburg, MS), June 8, 1889; “The Tabernacle Meeting,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), September 15, 1889. 99 the great lack of moral character in the women” for “eating the heart out of the negro race,” and he admonished his black audience to “quit wasting money, to be men and make something of themselves,” and to create homes, save money, and “educate their children.” While Stuart asserted a kind of spiritual egalitarianism by declaring that “the same Heaven that is for me is for you” and that “God does not care for color,” he nonetheless depended on racial stereotypes that assumed that black Americans were inherently susceptible to alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and extravagant spending.76 Stuart’s views reflected the mindset of a group of reform-minded men and women, described by historian George M. Frederickson as “new accommodationists,” who, influenced by the ideals of the social gospel “confronted an ascendant Negrophobia” in the early twentieth century. This form of “accommodationist racism” was accepted by men like the Alabama Episcopal clergyman, Edgar Gardner Murphy, and Willis D. Weatherford, a social reformer and educator active in the YMCA in Tennessee and North Carolina and defined southern liberalism’s approach to African Americans for a generation. Emphasizing the supposed child-like nature of African Americans, these “new accommodationists” embraced a kind of “romantic racialism” that taught that black men and women were docile, kindhearted, and simple, and not inherently criminal, violent, or bestial.77 Even if, as Willis Weatherford wrote, they believed that African Americans were “lacking in self-mastery” and “industry and thrift,” the “new accommodationists” rejected claims that African Americans were “brutes.” While these Progressives believed that “the Negro, as a race, has not so far developed what the psychologists call the power of inhibition,” the “catalogue of race traits” that were supposedly essential traits of 76 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890 77 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 283-289. 100 African Americans – religiosity, a sense of humor, musicality, a lack of vengefulness, generosity, “kindliness,” gratefulness, and loyalty – were “enough to make any race happy; virtuous, useful, and even great.”78 In town after town – from Galveston, Texas to Charlotte, North Carolina – Stuart repeated the same message of racial uplift to black audiences, recycling his sermon and preaching from Psalm 33:12. 79 In Austin, Texas he added a defense of slavery, arguing that “it was God’s providence that had put the negro race into slavery.” He contended that “if there is a down-trodden colored man in this country it is so because his own big foot on his neck has put him down,” a comment which, the Austin Daily Statesman was glad to report, was praised by an audience member who shouted “Dat’s so; bless the Lord.” Egged on, Stuart argued that “law has done . . . all it can do,” and insisted that African Americans needed “character, true manhood and womanhood, to raise you up.” Stuart praised the benefits of “sobriety and industry,” and admonished his audience “to be true to their race” – that is, to oppose miscegenation. The Austin Daily Statesman, further confirming Stuart’s neopaternalist racial views, also noted that “he showed them how God had blessed them and richly endowed them as a race with peculiar oratorical and musical gifts.” 80 Stuart argued that African Americans were “a religious people.”81 Speaking in Little Rock in 1891, Stuart argued that he “had a right to talk to the colored people,” since “he had been born and was raised among them and learned to love them,” 78W.D. Weatherford, Present Forces in Negro Progress (New York and London: Association Press, 1912), 25-31 79 “The Negro Meeting,” The Galveston Daily News, May 10, 1896; “Eloquent Sermon by Sam Jones,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 31, 1891; “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 80 “The Sam Jones Meetings,” The Austin Daily Statesman, May 10, 1896; See also “Glance at the Man Who Sways the Multitude,” The Houston Post (Houston, TX), May 10, 1896. 81 Jones, Lightning Flashes and Thunderbolts, 176. 101 his father had owned slaves, and he “was nursed by an old colored granny whose sweet lullably [sic] had often put him to sleep.” He insisted that “every race . . . is separate and distinct,” but that “there was nothing in color.” Stuart insisted that in their churches, “colored people . . . shouted too much, and thought too little.” As in Austin, he argued that “slavery has been a blessing to the colored people,” and emancipation had only caused there to be “more drunkards and idlers among the colored people.”82 In Fort Worth, after Stuart had concluded his remarks, Jones took the platform, beginning his sermon by declaring that, as “a Southern man,” he had “done more for you” than a northerner like Excell. Jones believed, as Thomas Bailey asserted, that “Only Southerners understand the negro question,” and that he, as a southerner, was uniquely qualified to speak on the issue. The Georgia evangelist’s remarks reflected similar racial views to the ones held by Stuart. In his sermons to African Americans, Jones instructed his audiences to be honest, industrious, sober, and “moral” (that is, not sexually promiscuous), to keep out of politics, and to eschew “social equality,” or any mixing with whites. In Fort Worth, Jones promised his black listeners that “if you have honesty, purity, religion, industry you will be there,” since “a colored man can be as honest a man as God ever made.” The evangelist exhorted African Americans to be honest. Jones, in line with his accommodationist views, rejected the idea that African Americans were inherently given to dishonesty and theft, explaining that “white folks stole more from you than you ever did from them,” and arguing that “if you had white folks in slavery they would steal more than you ever did.” In Charlotte in 1890, Jones similarly emphasized the importance of honesty. He declared that African Americans “must be honest,” and that it was “a lie” that every black person would steal, since “some of them are as honest as anybody.” Jones even went as far 82 “Blistering the Boys,” The Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891. 102 as to question if “the white folks [took] more from the negroes” He insisted that African Americans could be honest, even if they were poor.83 In Little Rock, in 1891, Jones suggested that if “we white people worked for you and you didn’t pay us any better wages than we pay you we would steal everything you had.”84 The evangelist also encouraged African Americans to be industrious, since he insisted that “to be honest you must be industrious.” Jones believed that “the greatest trouble” with black southerners was that they “don’t work enough.” He was convinced that idleness led to crime, asserting that when you saw an African-American man “loitering around, doing nothing” you could be assured that “that fellow goes through the chain gang on his way to hell.”85 Speaking in Fort Worth, Jones repeated this claim, contending that “nine-tenths of the niggers are getting into the chain-gang from idleness” since “an idle brain is the devil’s workshop.” He blamed unemployment on over-education. Jones reasoned that “whenever a colored fellow gets stuck up and won’t work the next thing is he is in the chain gain,” and insisted that “when a colored man gets a little education he does one of three things – he goes preaching, teaching, or to the chain gang.” Jones explained that that African Americans “have to work,” since “a Christian colored man” was the same thing as “an industrious colored man.” As a model of appropriate behavior, he praised “the old colored woman in the linsey dress and bandana handkerchief, bending over a washtub, making her own honest living,” while deriding black men who “prance around the streets in their silks.” 86 During a sermon to African Americans in Hopkinsville in 1893, Jones commanded black listeners to “get you a home” and 83 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890 84 “Blistering the Boys,” The Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891; Jones frequently took pains to refute the idea that African Americans were all kleptomaniacs. See “The Serpent’s Trail,” The Owensboro Weekly Messenger (Owensboro, KY), May 11, 1893. 85 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 86 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890 103 “live industriously.” He argued that when African Americans’ “credit [was] worth nothing,” it “isn’t because of color, but character.” Expounding further on the topic, Jones stated that “you get money and pay your whisky bills and let the grocery bills go, and that’s the reason your credit goes.”87 As suggested by the evangelist’s comment above, Jones was convinced that many of the problems facing African Americans in the New South could be credited to their allegedly inherent tendency towards alcoholism. He believed, as he stated to an audience in Charlotte in 1890, that “all the negroes love whisky.”88 Jones argued that African Americans could be honest as long as they would “stop getting drunk.” 89 In Staunton, Virginia, he declared that “a whiskey-drinking negro is a liar and a rogue.”90 He insisted that, since “whisky makes honest men steal, and makes brave men cowards” who were unable to provide for their families, the economic ramifications of alcoholism were dire for African-American families. Jones asserted that “more than 1,000 of you have spent enough money for whisky to build you a home.” He also argued that African Americans’ supposed fondness for whisky reduced their political clout, since “when there is an election on prohibition you can be tolled around like sheep, with a flask of whisky.” 91 Jones’s sermons to African Americans focused on the evils of whisky, and suggested that liquor was the blame for black southerners’ economic and social problems, but it should come as no 87 “Straight from the Shoulder: Sam Jones Preaches to the Negroes of Hopkinsville,” Crittenden Press (Marion, KY), January 19, 1983. 88 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 89 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890 90 “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 8, 1891. 91 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 104 surprise that the evangelist, who was renowned for his campaigns for prohibition, would target liquor. Along with alcoholism, Jones also targeted sexual promiscuity. He believed that African Americans failed to appropriately value their own “virtue,” and that of their children, particularly their daughters. Jones told an audience in Stainton that “the very lowest down are those negro women who have sold their characters for silks.”92 Believing that parents had a special responsibility to safeguard the sexual purity of their children, he reserved special condemnation for a black woman who would trade “the virtue of her daughter” in exchange for “a few yards of ribbon,” describing that woman as “worse than a dog.” 93 The evangelist urged black southerners to protect their daughters, insisting that “you mothers cannot be too careful about your girls.”94 Unusually, Jones even encouraged black men “shoot . . . down” a “low down mean white man” who would attempt to “steal the honor of your family,” since “the dearest thing you have is the purity and virtue of your homes.” Jones insisted that “a colored man has a right to protect his family.”95 In Roanoke, Virginia, in 1892, the evangelist even asserted that “whenever you shoot down a white scoundrel fooling around your house at night you do the country an absolute favor.” He told a predominately black audience that “if you have got a virtuous wife and a virtuous daughter, I say to the colored men protect your home in its innocence and virtue with all the fidelity with which a white man protects his.”96 Believing that no black woman could be well-dressed and honestly employed, Jones insinuated that African-American women who failed 92 “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 8, 1891. 93 “Blistering the Boys,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891. 94 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 95 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890. 96 “Rev. Sam Jones,” The Roanoke Times (Roanoke, VA), May 11, 1892. 105 to live up to his ideal for black womanhood (“the old colored woman in the linsey dress and bandana handkerchief, bending over a washtub, making her own honest living” – essentially, the “mammy” stereotype personified) were prostitutes. He noted that “whenever you see a colored woman dressed up and walking the streets, you can put it down that she does not make her living by working.”97 Even though Jones, in some ways, reflected the accommodationist racism of Gilded Age America, he was still powerfully influenced by the “mammy” and “Jezebel” archetypes – either black women were hardworking, docile, and chaste models of black domesticity, or they were lazy, “uppity,” and sexually promiscuous. The evangelist also warned black audience members away from political participation and interracial relationships, or “miscegenation.” He encouraged black southerners to “stay out of politics,” since “all these politicians want of you is your votes.” 98 Jones believed that politics would be African Americans’ “ruin,” and, speaking in Charlotte in May 1890, ridiculed black southerners’ support of the Republican Party, since the Republicans never gave them “anything to eat or wear.” 99 Again in Staunton in March 1891, Jones repeated this claim and declared that African Americans “have not benefited by voting for the Republican party.” 100 He alleged that “the Republicans are sorry you have the right to vote,” and they only curried black support when “they can ride to power on you.”101 In particular, Jones warned African Americans against voting against Prohibition, explaining that “it is a fearful thing to vote against God.” Ultimately, Jones believed that black southerners should be content to allow white southerners to control 97 “Blistering the Boys,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891. 98 “Blistering the Boys,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891. 99 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 100 “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 8, 1891. 101 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890 106 southerner politics. He explained that, since “the whites are superior to the blacks because they have a history and a literature . . . they deserve to rule” and, therefore, “the colored man should have little to do with politics.”102 In Jones’s opinion, friendship between white and black southerners and Christian virtue were the only solution to racial tension, since “the race problem will never be settled by votes.”103 Jones argued that “the way . . . to settle the negro question is for white men to go to them with the Bible in one hand and a spelling-book in the other.”104 He insisted that “the best thing . . . to do, is to look to God and your neighbors for help.”105 Because he believed this, Jones disdained “the colored political preachers” who encouraged their congregants to become politically active.106 Jones reassured black audiences that “your best friends are your white neighbors,” and that white southerners would protect the interests of African Americans.107 The Georgia evangelist, at the same time, also fiercely condemned interracial relationships, declaring that they should “put the mothers and fathers of all the mulatto babies in the Penitentiary.”108 He told black audiences not to “associate or mix with the white race,” and observed that when whites and blacks did mix, “they mix at the bottom.”109 Jones blamed whites for some of black southerners’ vices. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Jones 102 “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 8, 1891. 103 “Sam Jones,” Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), June 16, 1890; “News from the States,” The North Carolina Intelligencer (Raleigh, NC), June 25, 1890. 104 “Rev. Sam P. Jones’ Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 1, 1891 105 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 106 “The Sam Jones Meetings,” The Austin Daily Statesman (Austin, TX), May 10, 1896. 107 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 108 “Blistering the Boys,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891. 109 “Eloquent Sermon by Sam Jones,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), May 31, 1891; “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. Jones repeated this claim again in Staunton in March 1891 (“Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator, July 8, 1891). 107 attacked “black devils” who “want to take after the white people” by going to saloons and “‘hobnobbin’ with the devil.” He concluded that these men and women “need the Ku Klux gang after you.”110 Jones firmly rejected “social equality,” since he believed that whites and blacks would “mix at the bottom.”111 Jones’s sermons to African Americans demonstrate his commitment to white supremacy, and his support for a version of black womanhood and manhood that reflected the New South dream of a docile, hardworking black underclass, that emulated the habits and desires of the white middle class but remained subordinate to southern whites. The evangelist admonished black southerners to pay their debts, “get religion, get manhood, womanhood,” and “live sober, honest, industrious, [and] virtuous.” In this respect, Jones’s sermons to black and white audiences sound remarkably similar. In fact, the evangelist highlighted a vision of a sort of moral egalitarianism when he insisted that “God does not care . . . for the color of the hide so much as what is in the hide.”112 Jones praised simple living, domesticity, and piety, and instructed blacks in Staunton, Virginia, to “get a good wife, a house, and a cow, and let your homes be homes of purity and religion.” 113 In Charlotte, in 1890, the evangelist even promised that if black southerners would “quit your stealing, whisky drinking, gambling, and lying, and do right, and after awhile you’ll get home to heaven; and your old black skins will peel off, and your hair will straighten right” – remarkably, Jones seemed to equate whiteness (white skin, straight hair) with spiritual transformation, and asserted that black southerners would be white in heaven.114 The 110 “My Heart is Fixed,” The Western Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), September 26, 1895. 111 “Rev. Sam P. Jones’ Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 1, 1891 112 “To the Colored People,” The Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 30, 1890 113 “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator, July 8, 1891. 114 “Jones to the Negroes,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), May 4, 1890. 108 evangelist, however, was nevertheless committed to white supremacy, and defended Jim Crow and racial injustice. Jones told his audience in Stainton that “the white folks don’t treat [African Americans] right . . . because you don’t do right,” and complained that “In the North they work their white girls to death on a mere pittance of wages, and complain of the way the Southern people treat the negroes, when the negroes are kindly treated and better paid, and are doing well when they behaves themselves,” describing northern criticism of race relations in the South as unjust.115 The Georgia evangelist seemed to genuinely believe that he was a friend to black southerners. During his fiftieth birthday party, Jones related the comments of an African American man in Cartersville, who allegedly told Jones that “the negroes loved [Jones] just as the white people did,” and observed that when he was traveling “no one ever molested my family,” in part because “the good colored people had hidden all night . . .secretly guarding my wife and children.”116 He boasted that he had “always been the friend of the colored people” and that “some of [his] best friends are colored people.” 117 Jones declared that he “wish[ed] the colored people well, and in word and deed I am kind to them.” 118 Surprisingly, Jones’s sermons to black audiences brought condemnation from white supremacists. The Bee of Earlington, Kentucky, observed that “numerous negro-haters . . . who are too narrow-minded to give any one justice, and despise all those who have the courage of their conviction” attacked the evangelist 115 “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 8, 1891. 116 Gordon N. Hurtel, “Sam Jones at His 50th Milepost,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), October 17, 1897. 117 “Blistering the Boys,” Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, AR), June 7, 1891. 118 “Salvation! O Salvation!,” Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), February 15, 1886. 109 because he refuted their assertion that “the negro has no ability and has never done anything creditable.”119 White reactions to Jones’s sermons to black audiences, as suggested previously in this chapter, ranged widely, from praise and slack-jawed awe at the sheer spectacle of Jones’s meetings for African Americans, to condemnation for his temerity in suggesting that African Americans had praiseworthy qualities. Black attitudes towards Jones’s sermons also seem to have been diverse. In March 1902 Jones lectured to a segregated crowd of both black and white listeners at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta as part of the regular lecture series hosted by Morris Brown College. Taking as his subject “A Medley of Philosophy, Facts and Fun,” the evangelist focused on the “problems that now confront the negro.” Jones reprised comments made at other addresses to predominately black audiences and argued that “the greatest need of the negroes was a better home life,” and insisted that “the race would never be what it should be until its men thought less of whisky and more of women.” Despite the evangelist’s less than positive comments towards African Americans, the Colored American of Washington, D.C. praised his participation in the lecture series, arguing that it heralded “the drift of Southern sentiment toward the Negro,” since Jones was among “the best exponents of Southern thought on the public rostrum.”120 Even though the Colored American may have seen Jones’s lecture to a black audience as a sign of progress, it is less clear that African Americans in general shared its optimism. The Washington Bee, an African-American newspaper published in 119 The Bee (Earlington, KY), January 12, 1893. 120 “Sam Jones Will Lecture,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 13, 1902; “Sam Jones at Big Bethel,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 21, 1902; The Colored American (Washington, DC), May 17, 1902. 110 Washington, D.C., observed that after Jones’ 1886 meetings in Baltimore, no African-American converts were reported, even though there were “a great number [of whites] saved.”121 One of the most scathing assessments of Jones’ racial views came from J.A. Jones, writing in The Freeman, a prominent national African American newspaper published in Indianapolis. J.A. Jones, in an article on racial prejudice, attacked the “white minister of the gospel in the South,” who were, he argued, “controlled by public sentiment,” and become “the willing tool in the hands of the most hypocritical maudlins on the face of the earth,” since, rather than being “molders of public sentiment,” were instead “molded by public sentiment.” Sam Jones, he contended, was likewise controlled by the “arrangement committee’s’ arrangements, which exclude God’s dark-skinned children from worshipping on an equality with his pale-faced sons and daughters in his tent-meetings.” J.A. Jones excoriated the evangelist, who, despite his influence and his attacks on white society, was unable, or unwilling, to challenge racial prejudice. The journalist argued that “if Sam Jones should get up . . . and say, ‘Brethren, God has created us all equal. Please let those colored people take seats wherever they can find them,’” he “would be run out of town on the next train daubed all over with decayed hen fruit.” J.A. Jones argued that the evangelist was “either a great coward” or a hypocrite, concluding that not only Jones, but the whole South, “the heart of Dixie,” was “not right.”122 The columnist wrote in again to The Freeman a month later, resuming his discussion of “Southern Sentimentalism.” Jones continued his attack on segregated churches, arguing that, “with a white Christ and a black Christ in the South, the Lord’s Prayer is a farce,” and specifically targeting the Methodist Episcopal Church, South for “erecting in the South separate houses of worship for the white and colored 121 The Washington Bee (Washington, DC), June 5, 1886. 122 J.A. Jones, “Southern Sentimentalism,” The Freeman (Indianapolis, IN), September 17, 1898. 111 members.” He reasoned that “if they were all the same, why not worship together in the same church?” Borrowing the rhetoric of the temperance movement, Jones contended that “prejudice is the drug which has stupefied” the South, and that “intemperance in its worst form is not near so detrimental to the country’s progress, as Southern prejudice.” He ended his essay by asserting that “nothing but the grace of God” would ever “awaken” the South from prejudice, and arguing that though “Sam Jones . . . may preach on and blaze . . . in the ecclesiastical skies of this century,” until “the white pulpit begins to preach a living Christ and a whole gospel” racial prejudice would “continue to curse this land.”123 J.A. Jones was not the only African American to criticize Jones’s racial views. During a campaign in Austin Texas, in 1896, Jones responded to a letter from an African American man, Sam Paul Jones, from the rostrum. Sam Paul Jones described the evangelist’s “comparisons and illustrations about the negro” as “pretty low down,” and admonished him to “help them along,” rather than mocking them. The evangelist defended his statements by saying that that he recognized two different kinds of African Americans. He explained that “when I say ‘nigger’ I mean a black rascal,” but “when I say ‘colored man’ I mean a good negro.” Jones went on insist that he was “for the negro every pop,” and declaring that “I have the utmost confidence in many of them.” Jones contended that “the final bar of God will show that the whites have stolen more from the negroes than the negroes ever stole from the whites.” Jones repeated his claim that he had “always been a friend of the colored race,” and explained that he believed that white Americans should “be kind to them.” Jones argued that African Americans’ “souls are like those of the white people,” as they would “go to heaven if they are good and to hell if they are bad.”124 123 J.A. Jones, “Southern Sentimentalism,” The Freeman, (Indianapolis, IN), October 22, 1898. 124 “It was a Roaster,” The Galveston Daily News, May 7, 1896. 112 Jones, like other clergymen in the New South, struggled to find a response to lynching that both condemned lawlessness and reaffirmed men’s supposed right (or obligation) to violently punish other men who threatened to violate their wives’ and daughters’ “innocence.” As historian Joe Coker observes, “southern evangelicals . . . simultaneously censured lynching and were sympathetic to and often forgiving of the emotions and societal forces that led to such lawless acts.”125 Jones’ career coincided with the apogee of racial violence in the South. Between 1889 and 1922, more than three thousand black southerners were lynched - lynching was unavoidable and undeniable, despite the protestations of some white leaders.126 As Leon Litwack notes, “in the 1890s, lynchings claimed some 139 lives each year, 75 percent of them black,” highlighting the “cheapness of black life” in the late nineteenth-century South.127 Despite this, one of Jones’ most common responses to criticism of lynching (particularly in the South) was to deny their prevalence. Writing in 1903, he insisted that while he was fifty-five years old, “born bread and buttered in the South,” he had never “[seen] a mob assembled nor the victim of a mob.” 128 Jones argued that lynchings were uncommon, and that, like him, few southerners had ever seen a lynching, let alone taken part in one.129 Even though he questioned the frequency of racial violence, the Georgia evangelist resolutely condemned mob rule and vigilante justice. Jones argued that “a mob is the most 125 Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 151. 126NAACP, “For the Good of America” broadside, ca. 1926. (Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC06197); Philip Dray, At The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York, NY: Modern Library, 2002), 17. 127 Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 284. 128 “Sam Jones Discusses Some Recent Events,” The Stanley Enterprise (Albemarle, NC), August 20, 1903. 129 “Guns With Our Gospel,” The Bamberg Herald (Bamberg, SC), August 10, 1899. 113 infernal thing in this world, because it is so cowardly.” He believed that vigilante justice against African Americans and poor whites was unnecessary, since “this is the very class that the law and the courts would execute speedily,” unlike men with “friends and money.”130 Jones praised Peter Turney, the governor of Tennessee, for his response to a mass lynching in Millington, Tennessee in 1894. Six African-American men from the small town thirty miles north of Memphis, who were accused of arson, were attacked by a mob of fifty men who fired “volley after volley” into the shackled victims.131 Turney, reacting to public outcry against the lynchings, declared that “an example must be made of the savages who composed the mob,” and announced a campaign against “crimes of civilization” that resulted in the indictment of (but not the conviction of) thirteen white men who were complicit in the lynching.132 Jones argued that, in the Millington, Tennessee lynching, “there was scarcely a shadow of proof of guilt” against the “defenseless” victims, and warned that “will . . . sacrifice much prosperity . . . [and] human life” if mobs and “lynch law” were unchecked. Jones encouraged his audience to “let the courts execute the law.”133 Jones also commended a white jury and Charles C. Janes, a Superior Court judge of the Tallapoosa Circuit, in Cedartown, in northeast Georgia, which found an African American man, Grant Bell, innocent of assaulting a sixty-five-year-old white woman, Susan Lumpkin. He argued that “that jury in Judge Jayne’s [sic] court . . . acquitted themselves magnificently when 130 “Sam Jones Talks,” Semi-Weekly Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville, TN), September 14, 1894. 131 ‘Six Negroes Lynched,” The Los Angeles Herald (Los Angeles, CA), September 2, 1894. 132 “Governor Turney Outspoken,” The Troy Messenger (Troy, AL), September 12, 1894; Mia Bey, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 202. 133 “Sam Jones Talks,” Semi-Weekly Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville, TN), September 14, 1894. 114 they cleared this negro for want of sufficient testimony.”134 In his comments on the verdict in Cedartown Jones argued that it was wrong to “lynch an innocent man,” and he argued that mobs should “wait until . . . [the criminal’s] guilt is proven, and then lynch him if you will.”135 The evangelist insisted that mobs should not be judge, jury, and executioner and advised southerners to reform the legal system, rather than turning to extralegal violence. He argued that if “the mobs must hang anyone” they should “hang the judge and jury.”136 In an 1897 letter to the Atlanta Journal, Jones commended Chief Justice Logan Edwin Bleckley of the Georgia Supreme Court, who wrote that “there is no provocation for or palliation of the crime of lynching,” since “no kind or degree of provocation will justify or even mitigate it.” The evangelist argued that “a mob is the most infernal and most cowardly thing this side of perdition,” declaring that he “would as soon be a member of any chainganger as a participant in a mob.” Jones blamed clergymen for creating pro-lynching “sentiment,” and asserted that he “would as soon tackle a Missouri cyclone as to tackle the sentiment of a community.” He contended that “the pulpit can create sentiment, and is responsible largely for the right sentiment obtaining in any community,” which could only be attained by attacking “ring politicians, dirty politics, saloons, beer guzzlers, and rascality” as well as women who “are cutting off the top. . . and the bottom of their dresses.” Jones even accused mobs of committing rape, since “the word rape means force, and the mob that burns a negro for rape commits rape itself.” He boasted that 134 Thomas W. Loyless, ed., Georgia’s Public Men, 1902-1904 (Atlanta, GA: Byrd Printing Company, 1904), 232; W.S. Coleman, “Mrs. Lumpkin Recites Story of the Assault to the Jury,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 7, 1899; “Grant Bell is Vindicated,” The South Alabamian (Jackson, AL), June 17, 1899; “On Lynching and Liquor,” The Gastonia Gazette (Gastonia, NC), July 20, 1899. 135 “Sam Jones on Lynching and Whiskey Selling,” The Warren Record (Warrenton, NC), July 14, 1899. 136 Yorkville Enquirer (York, SC), September 19, 1894; “Right End Foremost,” The St. Louis Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), September 13, 1894. 115 he was not afraid of being lynched himself, since “no mob was ever known to lynch a man who had friends or money.” 137 Jones was not alone in his condemnation of mob violence. Like other southern leaders, he argued that lynchings and vigilante justice were unavoidable evils, wavering between disavowing and excusing – and, at times, even encouraging – lynching. Former Georgia governor W. J. Northen argued that lynchings were “horrible,” and Charles B. Aycock, of North Carolina, in his inaugural address in 1901, described “mob law” as a “curse.”138 Governor James K. Vardaman’s paper, Vardaman’s Weekly, boasted that while “mob law was largely prevalent inMississippi” before Vardaman’s governorship, during his administration “there was not an instance where a prisoner . . . was lynched.”139 For all of the New South elites’ pronouncements against “mob law,” white southerners argued that lynching in defense of white womanhood was justified and even laudable. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage observes, “whites clung to the notion that lynchings were the predictable consequence of black crime.”140 The Atlanta newspaper editor John Temple Graves, speaking at Chautauqua, New York, in 1903, demonstrated this belief when he argued that while lynching “is deplorable,” mob violence was “here to stay,” since “lynching will never . . . be discontinued . . . until the crime which provokes it is destroyed.”141 The Western Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, summed up this position in an August 137 Sam P. Jones, “Infernal and Cowardly – Sam Jones on Lynching,” Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), August 5, 1897; Donald G. Matthews, At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 81 138 “Ex-Governor Northen on Lynchings,” The Warren Record (Warrenton, NC), June 2, 1899; “Governor Aycock’s Inaugural Address,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), January 16, 1901. 139 “The Vardaman Administration,” Vardaman’s Weekly (Jackson, MS), October 7, 1910. 140 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 53. 141 “Critics of the President’s Letter on Lynching,” The Literary Digest XXVII, no. 8 (August 22, 1903), 213-214. 116 1887 editorial when it observed that while “the execution of mob law is demoralizing and . . . tends to promote the defiance of law and is generally deplored by all law abiding citizens,” lynchings would continue “so long as black scoundrels attempt hellish crimes upon white women, and so long as the law is tardy in administering justice.”142 Despite Jones’ condemnation of “mob rule,” the evangelist firmly believed that extra-legal violence was a natural – and appropriate – response to rape. Even though relatively few lynchings resulted from allegations of rape – between 1889 and 1922, fewer than 17 percent of lynching victims were accused of committing rape – white southerners frequently appealed to the specter of a bestial, rapacious “black brute” to excuse lynchings. As the Memphis Daily Commercial argued in an 1892 editorial titled “More Rapes, More Lynchings,” only the “most prompt, speedy, and extreme punishment” could restrain “the brute passions of the negro.” The editor continued, explaining that since “there is nothing which so fills the soul with horror, loathing and fury as the outraging of a white woman.” He contended that this was “the race question in its ugliest, vilest, most dangerous question,” since “neither laws nor lynching” could prevent sexual assault against white women. The editor concluded by arguing that only in the case of rape was lynching justified. Southerners, he explained, would “bear with the law’s delay and uncertainty when every law of God and man is violated – except one.”143 Jones advanced a similar argument when insisted that “Southerners . . . denounce lawless hangings, except for the one crime of rape,” since “rape means rope.”144 The canard of black rapaciousness was 142 “A Good Example,” The Western Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), August 5, 1897. 143 NAACP, “For the Good of America” broadside, ca. 1926. (Gilder Lehrman Collection, GLC06197); See also Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 62-72, for an analysis of the connection between alleged sexual assault and mob violence in Georgia and Virginia; “More Rapes, More Lynchings,” The Daily Commercial (Memphis, TN), May 17, 1892. 144 “Guns With Our Gospel,” The Bamberg Herald (Bamberg, SC), August 10, 1899. 117 convincing to many white southerners and offered a compelling justification (and excuse) for horrific displays of racial violence. As Brundage points out, “by raising the cry of protecting ‘the honor and sanctity of white womanhood,’ lynchers offered the most potent defense for their actions possible.”145 Jones, in 1889, argued that “the South, with all her faults and shortcomings, HONORS AND PROTECTS the chastity of her women” (emphasis in original). In order to protect women from being “debauched,” the evangelist explained that “we down South get our shotguns and go a-hunting, and we find our game” to ensure that “our women shall be protected.”146 Speaking in Aberdeen, Mississippi a year later, Jones reportedly “suggested the efficacy of the Mississippi shotgun policy in cases where the sanctity of the household has been violated.” The Nashville American explained that “this ‘Mississippi plan’ consists of a strong rope with the criminal at one end and a mob at the other.”147 Jones’ views of lynching echo the infamous declaration of fellow Cartersville resident (and Jones’s teacher at the Felton Academy), Rebecca Latimer Felton, who argued that “if it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts – then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.”148 Jones also encouraged black men to violently protect their homes, enjoining them to “shoot . . . low down mean white men” who would attempt to “steal the honor of your family,” 145 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 58. 146 “Rev. Sam Jones,” The Times Democrat (New Orleans, LA), June 10, 1889; Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), July 11, 1889. 147 “Sam Jones is Right,” The Tallahatchie Messenger (Charleston, MS), April 25, 1890; “The Mississippi Plan,” The American (Nashville, TN), April 22, 1890. 148 “Mrs. W.H. Felton’s Reply to Dr. Hawthorne’s Attack,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), December 22, 1898; Jones and Holcolmbe, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 49. 118 since “the dearest thing you have is the purity and virtue of your homes.” Jones insisted that “a colored man” – like white men – “has a right to protect his family.”149 The evangelist explicitly linked lynching with the need for segregation in his weekly column in the Atlanta Journal in July 1903. Commenting on racial violence in Evansville, Indiana, Jones argued that “Anglo-Saxon blood is the same everywhere, and the only way to stop lynchings and riots between the races is for the colored race to stay from over the dead-line.”150 Jones’ solution to lynching and mob violence was segregation. This was a typical answer to racial violence and was shared by other southern leaders. Lamar Jeffers, in 1922, explained white southern attitudes towards lynching. During debates on the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, the Alabama congressman insisted that while he did not condone lynching, he understood that because of “the terrible despair that must be felt in the heart of the man upon whose loved one has fallen the brutal rapist,” an African American who “oversteps the white man’s dead-line” was taking his own life into his hands.151 In 1930, defending comments he had made on an interracial marriage in New York, Alabama’s J. Thomas Heflin explained to the United States Senate that “whenever a negro crosses this dead line . . . and lays his black hand on a white woman he deserves to die.”152 Edwin Gladmon, a physician from Southern Pines, North Carolina, summed up the southern solution to lynching in a 1903 letter to the Henderson, North Carolina Gold Leaf, arguing there should be “a dead-line . . . in every relation of life” – simply 149 “Sam’s Eloquence,” Fort Worth Daily Gazette (Fort Worth, TX), March 20, 1890. 150 “Sam Jones’ Letter,” The Weekly News (Lenoir, NC), July 24, 1903. 151 “Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill Unjust and Not Needed, Says Jeffers,” The Anniston Star (Anniston, AL), January 19, 1922. 152 Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the Second Session of the Seventy-First Congress of the United States, LXXII-Part 3 (January 24, 1930-February 10, 1930) (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1930), 3239. 119 put, according to the New South elite, segregation (rather than legislation or policing, or even moral reform) was the only way to stop racial violence.153 In addition to using lynchings to justify segregation, Jones also connected “lynch law” with his campaign for prohibition. He asserted that lynch mobs were “tanked up at the saloon (which the negro voted to license).” The evangelist believed that intoxication, made possible by black support of “wet” factions, was responsible for racial violence.154 Sam Jones illustrates what Wilbur Cash famously identified as the southern “rape complex.”155 Jones argued lynchings were unavoidable as long as assaults against white women by black men continued. He contended that “the matter . . . will remain status quo, for all time to come,” since “rape means rope, fiends and fire.” The evangelist was quick to explain that he was “not an advocate for lynching,” but despite his personal opposition the laws of “cause and effect” remained the same, and “mob law” persisted.156 Jones wavered between describing lynchings as a regrettable, but natural, consequence of rape, and encouraging vigilante justice as an appropriate response to sexual violence.157 Jones’ advocacy of lynch law seems to have nearly resulted in the lynching of Frank Weems in Chattanooga in May and June of 1892. As the Eufaula, Alabama Daily Times warned, since “Rev. Sam Jones has been preaching that ‘rapists must be the anchor of hempen ropes,’” Weems could have been lynched “before sunset” on May 153 “Whites to Blame,” Gold Leaf (Henderson, NC), September 10, 1903 154 “Sam P. Jones: The Negro Losing Ground,” The Atlanta Journal (Atlanta, GA), June 1, 1900, clipping in Jones Papers, Emory University, Box 2, Folder 3. 155 Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1941), 115-117 156 “Sam Jones Discusses Some Recent Events,” The Stanley Enterprise (Albemarle, NC), August 20, 1903 (originally in Atlanta Journal). 157 “General News,” The St. Joseph Herald (St. Joseph, MO), May 26, 1892. 120 25. 158 While speaking at the Bloomington Chautauqua in August 1903, Jones was asked whatwas responsible for outbreaks of racial violence in July in Danville, Illinois and Evansville, Indiana in July, which were notable, in part, because in Danville African Americans used force to resist the lynching of a jailed African-American man.159 The evangelist explained that the only responsible response to a “negro who will attack white women” would be to kill him, like a “mad dog or a wild beast.” Jones also claimed that “the respectable blacks” in the South helped white southerners lynch accused rapists.160 Some of Jones’ clearest statements on lynching were made during a sermon to men only in St. Louis on March 25, 1895. Speaking to an all-male audience, the evangelist declared that “seduction is a crime unpardonable, and rape means rope in every State in the Union.” Jones then went on to clarify that he did not mean that “it means mob.” He stated that he had “no respect for a mob,” since “a mob is the most infernal, cowardly thing in this world.” Jones believed that mobs were cowardly “scoundrels,” since they “never mobbed anybody except some poor negro or some defenseless white man that didn’t have a friend in the world.” The evangelist insisted that since he was not “a base, infamous coward,” he would never join a mob. He even went as far as to argue that mobs were “as great scoundrels as the scoundrel that they execute vengeance upon,” and suggested that “whenever law can’t be executed” citizens should “go and mob the judge and sheriff and the jury.” Despite his condemnations of mobs, Jones next argued that “to step over the boundary line of a pure home in the South and crush the virtue of a noble girl” meant certain death; as the evangelist declared, “we know . . . that the price of virtue is the life of 158 “After Weems Yet,” The Eufaula Daily Times (Eufaula, AL), May 27, 1892. 159 Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 61. 160 “Mob Violence, North and South,” The Independent LV, 2852 (July 30, 1903), 1769; “Sam Jones’ Hot Shot,” Crittenden Press (Marion, KY), August 13, 1903. 121 the scoundrel that robbed the girl of it,” and, like “a mad dog that comes leaping and lunging down the street,” men who would threaten the virtue of wives and mothers and daughters should be destroyed.161 Jones’ attitudes towards lynching are most clearly illustrated in his reaction to the lynching of Samuel Wilkes, better known as Sam Hose, in Coweta County, Georgia, on Sunday, April 23, 1899.This gruesome example of mob violence captured national attention as Hose – a black farmhand accused of murdering a white farmer, Alfred Cranford, and raping his wife, Mattie, near Palmetto, Georgia – was lynched by a mob of as many as two thousand white Georgians, primarily from the towns of Newnan and Griffin, who castrated and mutilated him before dousing him with kerosene, tying him to a tree, and burning him alive. Hose’s ears, fingers, and genitals were taken as souvenirs by the crowd and in the frenzy and hysteria surrounding the lynching mobs killed Elijah Strickland, a black preacher who Hose, while being tortured, had implicated as the instigator of his alleged crimes.162 Hose’s lynching became the focal point of national discussion on the “negro problem” that involved black leaders like W.E.B DuBois, who refused to meet with Joel Chandler Harris after hearing that he would have to pass by a shop displaying Hose’s charred knuckles, and Booker T. Washington, as well as white politicians, journalists, pundits, and clergymen. 163 The sensational accusations against Hose, and the spectacle and gore of Hose’s horrific death, filled newspaper pages and provoked both condemnation and praise from contemporaries. 161 “Sam Jones’ Closing Day,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), March 25, 1895; Jones, Thunderbolts, 139-140.162 Edwin T. Arnold, What Virtue There is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 122-123. 163 Arnold, What Virtue There is in Fire; Phillip Dray, At The Hands of Persons Unknown, 3-16; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 280-283, 404-407. 122 Philip Dray likens new accounts of this incident and those like it to “bodice rippers” that “constituted a form of ‘folk pornography’ that made for welcome, titillating reading.”164 As Darren Grem observes, “a vigorous debate about the practice of lynching . . . filled the pages of Atlanta newspapers.”165 The ever-acerbic Charles Henry Smith of Cartersville, writing under the pseudonym Bill Arp, summed up many white Georgians’ view of the affair when he observed that “the press and the preachers have expressed their horror or their approval and the world moves on.” Arp remarked that he “rejoiced when the brute was caught and burned,” since he believed that “the white people have been . . . overkind to the negro,” and only disenfranchisement and “the whipping post” would produce “peace between the races.”166 Len G. Broughton, the controversial pastor of the predominately white Tabernacle Baptist Church indowntown Atlanta, in contrast with Arp’s opinion, took the pulpit at his church the evening after the lynching to condemn “lawlessness.” He argued that “every man in that mob . . . stands tonight before the bar of God’s justice with a heart streaked in human blood, to answer the charge of murder.” Broughton was particularly incensed by Atlanta’s seeming hypocrisy, since the city, which had just a week earlier banned street preaching, was now condoning mob violence. The pastor called on the citizens of Atlanta to “put down this infernal spirit of mob and murder.”167 In a series of letters published in the Atlanta Journal (and widely reprinted in local newspapers throughout the South), Jones weighed in on the public debate over Hose’s lynching. 164 Dray, At The Hands of Persons Unknown, 4. 165 Darren Grem, “Sam Jones, Sam Hose, and the Theology of Racial Violence,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 90, 1 (Spring 2006): 43. 166 Bill Arp, “Bill Arp Grows Caustic About the Critics of Lynching,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 30, 1899. 167 “He Rebuked the Lynchers,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 24, 1899. 123 The evangelist’s commentary on this particular example of racial mass violence reflects his views on lynching in general – that lynching is an inexcusable example of lawlessness that was only justified as a response to rape. In a letter printed in the Journal . . . Jones condemned both the lynch mob and Sam Hose. The evangelist argued that Hose’s “diabolical crimes” were “more execrable than the mind can conceive of,” and, therefore, “his punishment is just, be that what it may.” He described Hose as “an inhuman brute.” Jones also repeated his frequent claim that “rape means rope,” and added that “diabolical crimes means mobs.” He insisted that “mobs and lynchings will never cease till the crimes which call them forth”- in particular, sexual assault – “shall cease.” Even as Jones excused lynching, he lambasted the mob for lynching Hose on Sunday, “the day we have been taught to reverence,” which necessitated extra trains being run to carry spectators to the scene of the lynching, and extra papers to be printed to satisfy the voyeurism of white southerners. The evangelist condemned the lynching as a “a diabolical, lawless deed” perpetrated by “two thousand good citizens.” Jones declared that he would not “apologize for or extenuate the conduct of the inhuman mob,” and he would never join a mob, since he could not be sheriff, judge, jury, and executioner and “lawlessness never inaugurated or perpetuated lawfulness.” Nevertheless, he concluded his letter by observing that “the only way the mob can be checked is for the victim of the mob to stop doing the things that . . . egg them on to fury.”168 A week later, Jones again commented on the lynching. He expressed sympathy for Broughton, the pastor of the Baptist Tabernacle who “denounced the mob as murders” and received threatening letters, had his church vandalized as a result, and was targeted by placards posted near his church that encouraged citizens “to whip Broughton, the negro lover,” but 168 Reprinted in “Sam Jones on the Burning of Sam Hose,” The Concord Times (Concord, NC), May 11, 1899. 124 refused police protection. Jones straddled the fence, however, and acknowledged that “Bill Arp” was “right in some respects.” Jones criticized the mob for taking souvenirs and remarked that “if the good people are obliged to lynch victims, don’t divide up the cooked bones and flesh of the culprit,” since “a lynching out to be a decent affair.” The evangelist questioned how “humane men” could have “divided up the charred remains of a victim.” Jones encouraged Georgia to enact laws that would require quick trials and executions. He also condemned mobs for only targeting “a poor culprit of negro or some defenseless white man who has no money or friends.” Jones again insisted that he would “never join a mob,” since “we are two different breeds of dogs.”169 Later that summer, in July, Jones revisited Hose’s lynching. He argued that “a mob can play the sheriff and execute a fellow but it cannot justly play a judge and jury and try him.” Jones remarked that “it was a shame to have hung that poor negro preacher [Lige Strickland], his guilt only indicated by the statement of Sam Hose.” He argued that “if the crowd is obliged to mob or lynch a criminal,” it should “wait until his guilt is proven, and then lynch him if you will.”170 The evangelist forcefully reiterated this idea in his weekly column in the Atlanta Journal. Jones demanded to know if Governor Candler had “stopped lynchings in Georgia,” since, even though five women were (reportedly) “outraged” in Georgia, there was “not a lynching in Georgia that week,” and asked “have the boys run short on rope?” Even though he was insistent that “the man, white or black, who commits an outrage on a virtuous woman deserves death,” and that “Sam Hose deserved to be burnt,” he still persisted in arguing that law officers should be 169 “Mob Sympathy in Atlanta,” The Washington Weekly Post (Washington, DC), May 2, 1899; The Atlanta Journal, reprinted as “Rev. Sam Jones Writes of Kentucky Whisky and Horse Racing,” The Warren Record (Warrenton, NC), May 19, 1899. 170 Atlanta Journal, reprinted as “Sam Jones on Lynching and Whisky Selling,” The Concord Times (Concord, NC), July 13, 1899. 125 responsible for “executing the criminal, except in cases like Sam Hose, then anybody, anything, anyway to get rid of such a brute.” Jones concluded his diatribe by repeating his famous aphorism: “rape means rope in the United States – in Massachusetts as well as in Georgia.” 171 Historians have emphasized the ambiguity of Jones’s views on the lynching of Sam Hose (and his statements on lynching in general). In her biography on Jones, Kathleen Minnix contends that “Sam Jones . . . equivocated on lynching,” citing his reaction to 1899 lynching of Hose as an example of the evangelist’s shifting views on lynching.172 Darren Grem, confounded by what he describes as a “shocking turn in Jones’s views,” struggled to explain this apparent swing from condemning to encouraging lynching. He posits three possibilities: one, that Jones simply “decided to move on to other topics”; two, that Jones “may have concluded that defending his position on Hose would have somehow compromised his appeal as a revivalist in the South”; and three, that Jones, threatened with violence, decided to change his position.173 Donald Matthews accepts Grem’s and Minnix’s conclusion that “about seven weeks after the lynching . . . Jones began to waver in his adamant, world-defying, and manly stand.” He argues that “the pressure Jones felt from his disappointed fans,” combined with his belief in “the obligation to punish,” led the evangelist to concluded that he “had to be the man who told men to man-up for Christ” and mete out fearsome retribution on those dared to threaten the sanctity of the home and of white womanhood.174 Matthews’ (and Grem’s and Minnix’s) characterization of 171 “Jottings by Sam Jones on His Western Tour,” The Chronicle (Wilkesboro, NC), August 30, 1899, p. 3. 172 Minnix, Laughter in the Amen Corner, 200-201. 173 Grem, “Sam Jones, Sam Hose, and the Theology of Racial Violence,” 58-59. 174 Matthews, At the Altar of Lynching, 227-228 126 Jones’ “equivocation” is also repeated by Edwin Arnold in his monograph on the lynching of Sam Hose.175 While these scholars’ interpretations of Jones’ view of lynching have much to offer, they oversimplify his complex attitudes towards mob violence. While it may seem contradictory for Jones to condemn lynch law while advance the idea that “rape means rope,” for the evangelist those ideas existed comfortably within his worldview. As a southern Progressive, Jones was committed to the use of state authority to enforce the law. As discussed above, he deplored mobs for their refusal to recognize and submit to legal authority, and Jones’ primary complaint about lynching was not that it was violent or inhumane, but that it bypassed due process and denied the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. The evangelist also steadfastly supported both black and white men’s right to defend their homes (particularly their wives and children), explaining his repeated insistence on the dictum of “rape means rope.” While Jones was convinced of the necessity of government-enforced law and order, he believed that the defense of homes and women could (and, at times, should) supersede due process. As contradictory as this may seem, Jones’s (and many other nineteenth-century southerners’) hierarchical view of society allowed this kind of contradiction. For Jones, the family and the home, outside and above governments, was sacrosanct and inviolable. While the government could (and should) step in to protect the home from divorce, drunkenness, rapists, and a host of other dangers, ultimately the responsibility for defending the home rested in the hands of husbands and fathers. Jones certainly did not see the act of lynching, when in response to rape, as a violation of the law. He may have even shared the view expressed by a writer in the Memphis Commercial, who argued that “rape means rope – that is the law . . . a law which the 175 Arnold, What Virtue There is in Fire, 135. 127 people have made, which they approve, and which they execute.”176 Therefore, as early as 1892, and then throughout his career, Jones argued that “rape means rope,” even as he insisted that he deplored the “lawlessness” of lynching. Even though Jones did not express each side of his attitude towards lynching in every letter in the spring and summer of 1899, the evangelist’s statements on lynchings over his twenty years of evangelistic work show that he did not equivocate – rather, he merely expressed different facets of his “philosophy” at different times. Jones’ position on lynching – particularly his statements on the lynching of Sam Hose in April 1899 – reflected the broad consensus among white clergymen in Atlanta. The evening after the lynching, Warren W. Landrum, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, delivered a sermon in response to the lynching titled “The White Man’s Burden.” The clergyman argued that African Americans “had been a source of trouble to the whites” since the beginning. Landrum went on to declare that “this broad land of ours . . . is now, ever has been, and ever will be a white man’s country.” The pastor characterized African Americans as a burden to white southerners, in part because “all his crimes are diabolic” and “our ‘brother in black’ is too often a fiend incarnate.” Landrum declared that “all hearts have kindled into red hot indignation” in response to Hose’s alleged crimes.177In the late spring and early summer of 1899, the Evangelical Ministers’ Association of Atlanta, the leading ecumenical organization of the city, focused on lynching during their regular meetings. On May 1, the body considered resolutions authored by Joel T. Daves, the president of the Association and the pastor of Park Street Methodist Church, which echoed Jones’ sentiments on lynching, declaring that “the crime of Hose was inexcusable, and that no punishment could outweigh it,” and condemning lynching. 176 The Memphis Commercial, reprinted as “Lynching Indorsed,” The Mt. Sterling Advocate (Mt. Sterling, KY), August 22, 1893. 177 “Dr. Landrum Speaks on Negro Problem,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 24, 1899. 128 Another competing set of resolutions took a similar position, but refused to take a position on lynching one way or the other. After discussing the resolutions “until they were all excited and sorely wrought up,” the Association decided to table both.178 At the Association’s monthly meeting on June 5, Len Broughton, reflecting his earlier attacks on lynching, introduced a set of resolutions condemning mob violence that were quickly tabled. The Baptist minister encouraged the organization to call for speedy trials, civil and military intervention to prevent and punish mobs, and “better religious and educational training” for African Americans “touching crime and . . . the proper relations between the races.” Broughton’s fellow ministers objected to Broughton’s resolutions since they believed they gave the impression that “there was a reign of mob law in the country,” and that military authorities should interfere, and they instead encouraged the association to pass resolutions commending a speech delivered by former Georgia Governor Northen.179 By August 7, the body had reached an agreement, adopting a resolution that declared that “we sincerely and sternly condemn and oppose all lynch law,” and encouraged ministers to promote law and order. The resolution also called on legislators to define rape and other crimes as “infamous crimes,” subject to expedited trials and sentencing, to amend the law to “protect the delicacy of unfortunate female witnesses,” and to increase penalties for rape and other crimes. At the same time, they argued that rape and attempted rape were “nearly always committed by negroes on white women and children,” and appealed to “all good and influential colored people” to “make [African Americans] see the awful wrong of their crimes.”180 During the 178 “Ministers Elect New Officers,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), January 3, 1899; “Ministers Discuss Lynching,” The Washington Weekly Post (Washington, DC), May 2, 1899. 179 “Ministers Held a Warm Meeting,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 6, 1899. 180 “Ministers Call for Quick Law,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 8, 1899 129 debate on the resolutions, J. L. D. Hillyer, pastor of Kirkwood Baptist Church (and a relative of Atlanta mayor George Hillyer) addressed the organization, and blamed the “lame administration of justice in our country” for lynching. Significantly, Hillyer also asserted that since “the preachers’ first consideration is . . . of the sin against God” ministers were more concerned with “speedy trials and prompt executions” than “human laws” that “defeat the ends of justice.”181 Because he believed that divine law prioritized “justice” over the concept of due process, Hillyer excused lynchings. Jones’ views on lynching drew both condemnation and praise from contemporaries. A northern paper, the Dispatch, of Moline, Illinois, agreed with Jones’s explanation for lynchings, arguing that “the fact is that the law does not provide sufficient punishment for crimes of this kind.”182 In an open letter to John Temple Graves first published in 1906, Kelly Miller, the so-called “Bard of the Potomac” and a leading African-American intellectual, contended that the “sententious” Jones’ demand that “rape means rope” was approved by “the moral sense of mankind,” but that “this rope” should not be used “by the bloodthirsty mob to appease ignoble race hatred.”183 Wilbur Crafts, the superintendent of the International Reform Bureau, deplored the “recent epidemic of mobocracy, the worst feature of which is the defense of it in some pulpits and papers.” He criticized Jones’s statement that “rape means rope, and fiend means fire” and wondered why, “if the mob is the best court of justice,” all other courts were not abolished. Crafts blamed Christians’ refusal to honor the Sabbath for increased anarchy, since they had 181 “Says the Law is at Fault,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 10, 1899. 182 “Jones’ Theory of Lynching,” The Dispatch (Moline, IL), August 10, 1903. 183 Kelly Miller, Race Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1908), 66-67. 130 turned the day into “a school of lawlessness.”184 An African-American clergyman, C. S. Smith, lamented Jones’ position on lynching, and declared that “that ‘rape means rope’ is . . . a favorite expression of the Rev. Sam Jones . . . is to be deeply regretted, since he is in a position to influence thousands.” Smith argued that “mob law is a menace to good government and is destructive and revolutionary in its tendencies.”185 Smith was not the only critic to condemn the influence of evangelists like Jones and their role in encouraging lynching. Walter White, who led the NAACP from 1931 to 1955 after serving as an investigator for the civil rights organization, argued in Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch that “the orgies of emotion” encouraged by revival meetings unleashed “dangerous passions . . . which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynching.”186 In addition to justifying lynching in response to alleged sexual violence, Jones joined other white southerners in condemning anti-lynching campaigner Ida Barnett Wells. Historian Philip Dray argues that “Wells was one of the first people in America to perceive that the talk of chivalry and beastlike blacks ravishing white girls was largely fallacious, and that such ideas were being used to help maintain a permanent hysteria to legitimize lynching.”187 The Georgia evangelist, like other white Americans, was outraged by the London Anti-Lynching Committee’s visit to the United States in September 1894. The organization, which included in its membership Sir J.E. Gorst, members of Parliament, and the Duke of Argyll, Sir John Gorst, was founded in 184 Wilbur F. Crafts, “Summer News and Notes,” Herald of Gospel Liberty XCV (Dayton, OH), September 17, 1903. 185 C.S. Smith, “Race Question is Revived,” The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), January 29, 1899. 186 Walter Francis White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), 43. Other scholars have also noted the religious dimension of lynching, including Donald G. Matthews in “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching in the American South,” Mississippi Quarterly 62, 1 (Winter2008/Spring2009): 27-70.187 Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 64. 131 the summer of 1894 in reaction to Wells’s 1894 speaking tour in Great Britain. Jones castigated Wells and declared that he “[had] contempt for Ida Wells and her fool followers.” His insisted that “Tennessee . . . don’t need any investigating” from Wells or the London Anti-Lynching Committee, since “Tennessee is no worse than New York or Indiana.”188 The evangelist lashed out against the reformer, describing Wells as “a negro wench . . . airing her views of the barbarism of the south.”189 Jones shared Tennessee Governor Peter Turney’s views of the Committee, who argued that the British “had better purify their own morals before coming amongst a better people.”190 Jones’ criticism of Wells – and his attempts to excuse lynching – drew wide condemnation from African-American newspaper editors. In an interview with a reporter from the Topeka State Journal, printed on June 17, 1895, Jones was asked to share his views on Ida B. Wells’ allegation that “negroes were lynched in the south for crimes in which the white women are equally guilty.” The evangelist – whose comments were recorded in eye dialect – declared that, if Wells had indeed said that, “she lied, that’s all,” since “if a white woman would be guilty of that sort of thing down south not one white man would raise his hand to defend her.” The reporter from the Journal also asked Jones about “lynch law in the South. He declared the even though “Ah don’t believe in it myself . . . things happen down there occasionally that’s mighty provokin’.” Jones argued that if “a dear sweet sister o’ yours” had been assaulted like “some of our girls have been by big black devils,” he believed that anyone would “be in for a lynchin’ 188 “Sam Jones Talks,” Semi-Weekly Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville, TN), September 14, 1894; See also Sarah L. Silkey, “Southern Politicians, British Reformers, and Ida B. Wells’s 1893-1894 Transatlantic AntilynchingCampaign,” in The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg, eds. (Lexington , KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 145-164.189 “Sam Jones On Parties,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), July 9, 1894; “Ebony or Ivory – Which?,” Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), February 13, 1896. 190 “Gov. Turney and Sam Jones,” Algona Courier (Algona, IA), September 21, 1894. 132 without stoppin’ to think.” Jones denied that mob violence in the South was “more numerous though it is anywhere else accordin’ to the nigger population.” He also maintained that lynchings that had occurred were justified, insisted that “Ah don’t believe many niggers have been lynched in the south that hadn’t ought to be.” Even though he railed against Wells and defended lynching, he asserted that he would never join a mob, and referred to his earlier condemnation of the mass lynching in Millington in September 1894.191 Jones’ interview drew almost immediate censure from African American periodicals. Albion Tourgee’s The Basis derided Jones as a “saintly black-guard” and concluding that “the bar-room graduate never loses the flavor of his preparatory school.”192 The American Citizen argued that Jones’ attacks on Wells and his defense of lynching demonstrated that was unchivalrous and that he had a “black heart,” since “no southern gentleman,” and only someone who had a “black heart would “call a lady a ‘liar’ or advocate the lynching of defenseless persons.” The paper excoriated Jones’s supporters, who “honor and endorse his sentiments,” since Jones “sustains ballot box stuffing and fraud in order to maintain white supremacy at the south” and “approves the hanging, flaying and burning of colored men at the south when accused of crime and he does not care who knows it.” The American Citizen also blamed Jones for the persistence of racial violence in the South, since, if Jones, “a reputed leading minister of the gospel,” would argue that “there are no more ‘nigger lynched in the south than there ought to be’ . . . [i]s there any wonder that southern lynchings do not cease?” The Omaha Progress called Jones a “monster scalawag,” and declared that Jones “is going to land [in hell] when his career 191 “Thro’ Georgia Specs,” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, KS), June 17, 1895. 192 The Basis, reprinted in the Sterling Standard (Sterling, IL), August 8, 1895. 133 on earth is ended.”193 The Cleveland, Ohio Gazette argued that “as a minister, Jones knows when he perverts the truth; he knows when he appeals to blind passion.” The Gazette observed that “Sam Jones, proud and ambitious, threw himself in the breach to stay the swelling tide of . . . sentiment in favor of the poor and much-persecuted Afro-American,” and “lashed himself into a fury of madness” Jones indulged in bitter, vile, and loathesome language” and “denounced Miss Wells with the tongue of a scorpion and thereby became the advocate of lynch law and mob violence.” Furthermore, the paper alleged that Jones “renounced the spirit and teachings of the Savior and betrayed his great reputation to prejudice, passion, and ambition.”194 The Freeman, of New York, suggested that Jones’ “crown in the next world would be a royal diadem” if he “would turn his battering ram” on lynch mobs rather than “anathematizing Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett.”195 Sam Jones’s life reveals the contradictions of the racial creed of the New South. The evangelist would seem to defy Joel Williamson’s categorization of white views of race in the nineteenth century in his seminal work, The Crucible of Race. While, like Williamson’s “liberals,” Jones believed that black progress was possible, he, like the “conservatives,” was convinced that African Americans were, at least for the present, inferior to white Americans (and perhaps would always be). As a Progressive – and as a Gilded Age evangelical who embraced the tenets of the Social Gospel – Jones seemed to be uneasy with racial views that insisted that African Americans were inherently wicked, and he supported a program of “racial uplift.” The evangelist demonstrated a paternalistic noblesse oblige and tried to maintain friendly – if 193 American Citizen (Topeka, KS), June 28, 1895; The Omaha Progress, reprinted in The Parsons Weekly Blade (Parsons, KS), July 20, 1895; 194 “Sam Jones vs. Ida Wells,” The Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, OH), May 30, 1896. 195 “A Georgia Mob,” The Freeman (Indianapolis, IN), June 6, 1896. 134 somewhat patronizing – relationships with black Americans. This even extended to supporting institutions supporting the advancement of black southerners.196 At the same time, Jones was undeniably part of the New South elite, and, in some ways, acted as the “high priest” of the New South. He was fervently committed to white supremacy and believed that African Americans should submit to white rule. Moreover, Jones was a careful student of public opinion, and often adjusted his views to reflect those of the ticket- and newspaper-buying (and donation-giving) populace. He was an evangelist, which meant he was an entertainer as much as a minister, and all good entertainers know how to read their audiences. At the same time, Jones was quick to show his contempt for black southerners who, unlike Booker T. Washington, failed to learn their “place” and violated his view of the ideal black man – docile, hardworking, sober, humble, and non-political. As the African American newspaper, the Southwest Christian Advocate, observed, “no man in this country rolls, like a sweet morsel in his pulpit, the word “nigger” so insultingly as does Sam Jones, the Southern evangelist.”197 Jones’s malice towards “uppity” black southerners was real, and he could be a snide humorist or a snarling, rabid polemicist as the moment demanded. At the same time, his theology, his social circles, and his political beliefs all inclined Jones to believe in black progress. In short, Jones believed in the racial orthodoxy of the New South, mediated through the ideologies of Progressivism and the Social Gospel.196 Laura Jones recalled that her husband “helped the struggling colored people in his own town and in many places where he gave them special services” (see Jones and Holcomb, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 333). This seems to have been true – for example, during a during a meeting in Staunton, Virginia, in July 1891, Jones took up a collection for the short-lived Valley Training School for African Americans (see “Rev. Sam. Jones’s Meetings,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), July 8, 1891), and in Austin in 1896 he encouraged audience members to support “a home for the infirm ex-slaves” (see The Sam Jones Meeting,” The Austin Daily Statesman (Austin, TX), May 10, 1896). 197 Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans, LA), July 11, 1889. 135 On February 19, 1898, Sam Jones sent a brief telegram to the Atlanta Journal, announcing his candidacy in the upcoming gubernatorial election, declaring that he would not be the “‘hind dog’ [or underdog] in the race.”1 The evangelist entered into a crowded field of candidates that included Robert L. Berner, Louis F. Gerrard, Allen D. Candler, and Spencer R. Atkinson, a former Georgia Supreme Court judge.2 Initially, Jones declined to announce his platform, leading the Journal to speculate, based on “his well-known opposition to public schools,” that his platform would be founded on his “enmity to public instruction.” After all, Jones had argued that public schools allowed parents to foist off their responsibility to educate their children on the state, and he believed that “if a man wishes to educate his family he should adopt some other method than that of depending on the public pocket.” The evangelist thought that state monies could be instead invested into the “suppression of the liquor traffic instead.” According to the Baltimore Sun, the other candidates were relieved to hear that Jones would not turn the election into “a prohibition crusade,” though the newspaper anticipated that “his remarkable form of stump oratory will cause the campaign to assume a pyrotechnic nature.” 3 Jones soon followed his announcement by releasing his platform. He styled his campaign as “a crusade against corrupt politicians,” and declared that he himself stood for a platform of “simple, unadulterated, unpurchasable, unbulldozable manhood.” Jones hinted that his 1 “Sam Jones for Governor of Georgia,” The Knoxville Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), February 19, 1898. 2 Lucian Lamar Knight, A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians, volume II (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1917), 1011-1012. 3 “Sam Jones a Candidate,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 21, 1898. CHAPTER IV: THE SAWDUST TRAIL AND THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL: SAM P. JONES AND NEW SOUTH POLITICS 136 announcement stemmed from his bewilderment at the number of politicians opposing Allen D. Candler, who he argued “had been called for by the popular voice and desire of the state.” Because of the popular support for Candler, he remarked that he was surprised to find that, upon returning to the state after traveling for two weeks, “the band wagon had struck a telegraph post as the runway team turned a corner, and the politicians were scattered from Dade to Chatham.” Jones declared himself to be a “Candler man,” since he was part of the “common people of Georgia,” unlike the “ring-streaked politicians and pap-suckers.” Getting down to particulars, he stated that his principles were “equal rights to all men” and “down with extortion.” Part of Jones’s motivation for declaring his candidacy was his suspicion of Georgia Governor William Atkinson, who he believed had stolen the Democratic nomination from Clement Evans for the 1894 gubernatorial election. He declared that he was “tired of that gang” who had “robbed Gen. Evans of the governorship and defeated the will of the people.” Jones argued that “the reign of the demagogue hurts,” and, for that reason, he declared his candidacy.4 Furthermore, Jones remarked that he was “sick and tired” of the debate between the silverites and the gold bugs, which he thought was a debate used by an inept politician as “a blindfold to hide . . . his own inefficiency for the office he proposes to fill, or raise an enthusiasm on a question about which he himself has views that he could not sell for 10 cents a dozen in any intellectual market.” Jones summed up his platform by calling for the citizens of George to “pen up the jackasses for a while.”5 Describing his position, the Owensboro, Kentucky Messenger suggested that “Mr. Jones is an advocate of the gold standard and opposed the election of Bryan,” and (like the Baltimore 4 “Mr. Jones’ Platform,” The Columbia Herald (Columbia, TN), February 25, 1898. 5 “Sam Jones’ Platform,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 22, 1898. 137 Sun) predicted that he still “would probably make prohibition the leading issue of his fight,” regardless of his platform.6 Newspapermen practically salivated at the thought of “Candidate Sam Jones.” The Baltimore Sun noted that, after his announcement, Sam Jones was “now the most-talked-about man in Georgia,” even though most of the Georgia newspapers believed his announcement was “a joke.” The Sun observed that many thought that Jones was “really interested in the nomination of his friend, Hon. Allen D. Cander.”7 The Owensboro, Kentucky Messenger remarked that “the Atlanta Constitution treats the announcement as a practical joke.”8 The Constitution was probably correct in its assessment; after all, Jones had declared that “the field for fun in the political arena of Georgia to-day to me is almost irresistible.”9 The Herald of St. Joseph, Missouri, observed that if Jones were to adapt his “regular pulpit methods” to the campaign trail, the campaign would be “more entertaining than losing one’s self in a ripe Georgia watermelon.”10 The Atlanta Journal, however, doubted if Jones “really intends to be a candidate for governor,” and it observed that perhaps “he himself does not yet know.” The Journal, however, did suggest that he would not be running as a Democrat, since “he has often asserted his independence of that organization.”11 6 The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY), February 22, 1898. 7 “Mr. Jones’ Candidacy,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 25, 1898. 8 The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY), February 22, 1898. 9 “A Sam Jones Campaign,” The Tazewell Republican (Tazewell, VA), March 3, 1898. 10 St. Joseph Herald (St. Joseph, MO), February 25, 1898. 11 The Atlanta Journal, reprinted in “Sam Jones a Candidate,” The St. Joseph Herald (St. Joseph, MO), February 25, 1898. 138 Even though the Journal doubted Jones’s sincerity, they condemned the evangelist’s deprecation of Atkinson and his “gang,” as well as the other candidates. In an interview published in the Atlanta Constitution, Jones argued that he had not done anything more than say that “Judge Atkinson . . . must be doing a good deal of thinking,” and challenged the Journal’s description of his views on public education. He stated that he was not opposed to education, merely that he was “opposed to free anything-free everything.” Jones also questioned if a man who “can’t educate his own kids” should even have children. After responding to the Journal, Jones then got to the heart of the issue – he insisted that his real goal was “the fair thing from start to finish.” Jones argued that his only goal was that nothing would be done that would “take away from any man in the State who has the right to cast a vote the opportunity to do so.” When asked if he would be actively campaigning, Jones said that he would “take the stump for Allen D. Candler,” unless he campaigned for himself. He concluded declaring that he was a Democrat,even though he had not declared himself to be a Democrat “because politics isn’t my profession.” Despite his silence on his party allegiance, he insisted that he was “a Methodist – and next to that . . . a democrat.”12 Jones’s time as a candidate was short-lived. On Thursday, February 24 – less than a week after he made his initial announcement – the evangelist, in a letter in the Atlanta Journal, withdrew from the race for governor. Jones explained that his candidacy was something of a joke (or a publicity stunt), since “this has been an off week . . . and I generally spend my off weeks not in doing nothing”; essentially, he was bored, and he “never was a candidate up till last Saturday.” Jones explained that he had “too much to do to monkey with politics long at a time, and then it is such a terrible dirty business.” He also declared – somewhat tongue in cheek – that 12 “Mr. Jones’ Candidacy,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 25, 1898. 139 since the three remaining candidates were “first-class gentlemen,” he did not want to “antagonize that class of human beings.”13 Moreover, after receiving a letter from the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jones responded by declaring that he had “never had any purpose of running before the people of this State for the office of Governor,” but that, because “it has become very popular in Georgia for the last few days for candidates to announce themselves,” he had “the right to announce [himself] as a candidate.” Still, he insisted, he “would not accept the office if it was tendered . . . on a silver waiter.”14 Despite the excitement of his candidacy, Jones, by the Democratic primary in June 1898, was a fervent spokesman for Allen Candler. He declared the candidate to be “a man of integrity and good common sense,” and defended him against claims that he was the “whisky candidate” from Rebecca Latimer Felton and her younger sister, Mary Latimer McLendon. Jones joked that one of the reasons he had decided not to run was because he was afraid of women like Felton and McLendon. He quipped that “if you put a sharp man behind a sister and let him tell her what to say, and you have got a Georgia cyclone after you.”15 Jones’s reputation suffered from his short-lived candidacy. The Knoxville Sentinel explained that he “caused an infinite amount of amusement and some hard feelings by his meteoric descent into the gubernatorial arena in Georgia and as sudden withdrawal therefrom.” The paper argued that “the whole procedure was one of Sam’s jokes and in order to give him some needed advertisement,” since his “habitual Jonesisms” had become “trite.”16 13 “Rev. Sam Jones Quits the Race,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 28, 1898. 14 “Sam Jones Not a Candidate,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), February 25, 1898. 15 “Sam Jones Says Candler Will Sweep the State,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 5, 1898. 16 Knoxville Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), March 1, 1898. 140 At first glance, Jones’s brief candidacy in Georgia’s 1898 gubernatorial election seems to be only be a brief distraction from the contested race, which ended with Candler, the so-called “One-Eyed Ploughboy of Pigeon Roost,” handily defeating the Populist candidate J.R. Hogan, winning 118,028 votes to Hogan’s 51,191.17 While Jones himself would have probably admitted that, more than anything else, his campaign was a media stunt, designed to attract attention (and entertain himself), Jones’s descriptions of his platform, as well as journalists’ responses to his announcement, reveal much about the evangelist’s political views, and the ways that others viewed his political agenda. As demonstrated through this brief episode, Jones’s political concerns closely aligned with the values of the Progressive movement. While he himself should not be considered to be “progressive” – certainly not in contemporary parlance, and not even for the late nineteenth century – Jones did reflect the ideas of Progressivism. “Candidate Jones” illustrated his affiliation with, or sympathy for, Progressivism in two key ways. First, as suggested by both the Owensboro Messenger and the Baltimore Sun Jones was a fervent supporter of prohibition, a core concern of southern Progressivism, and he and his protégés, Sam Small and George Stuart, became some of the foremost prohibitionists of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. 18 Indeed, as John Temple Graves observed in 1908, Jones was “the very Lion of the Tribe of prohibition in all the Southern and Western States.”19 17 “The One-Eyed Ploughboy,” The Sun (New York, NY), January 28, 1898; Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia’s Populist Party (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 195. The Populists had fought an uphill battle, as Tom Watson’s opposition to the Spanish-American War and dire warnings of “Negro rule” (which, in 1898, were fueled by limited fusion between the Populists and Republicans in parts of Georgia) cost the Populist Party supporters, and the official organ of the Populist Party in Georgia, the People’s Party Paper, folded and deprived the Populists of one of their most powerful tools. 18 As Ann-Marie Syzmanski notes, “most scholars place prohibition squarely at the center of southern Progressivism” (Syzmanski, “Beyond Parochialism: Southern Progressivism, Prohibition, and State-Building,” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 1 (Feb., 2003): 109); “Sam Jones a Candidate,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), February 21, 1898; The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, KY), February 22, 1898. 19 John Temple Graves, “The Fight Against Alcohol,” Cosmopolitan Magazine XLV, no. 1 (June 1908), 83. 141 Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, Jones’s “platform” illustrates his support of Progressive calls for government reform. Progressives, for a number of reasons, sought to “purify” municipal, state, and national governments from the supposedly corrupting influence of private and business concerns, political machines, and ignorant, easily-manipulated voters.20 During the election of 1894, the pages of the Atlanta Constitution were filled with tales of “Atkinson manipulators” who attempted to subvert the will of the “honest yeomanry” of Georgia and steal the Democratic nomination from Clement Evans. Dubbed “the men who control” and the “Atkinson ring,” the Constitution – and Evans’s supporters – portrayed the election as a struggle of “the politicians against the people.”21 When Candler announced his candidacy during the 1898 election he emphasized that he would be the “candidate of no ring, clique, faction, or combination.” Furthermore, Candler declared that “a venal vote is the destruction of the republic,” and, therefore, “the use of money to control elections must stop.”22 Similarly, Jones condemned government corruption and the “gang” that he believed had stolen the Democratic nomination from Evans in 1894, and characterized his own candidacy as a critique of the corruption that he believed was present in the Georgia gubernatorial election of 1894.23 Jones’s “Progressivism,” however, was blunted by his firm belief in the moral accountability of individuals (in particular, men). As revealed by the Baltimore Sun’s suggestion that Jones’s platform would revolve around his opposition to public education, the evangelist 20 See Richard L. McCormick’s seminal 1981 essay, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” The American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (April, 1981): 247-274. 21 “Mr. Atkinson and the ‘Ring,’” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 15, 1894; 21 “A Wail from the Wiregrass,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), May 15, 1894; “Four Out of Five,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 1, 1894. 22 “Allen D. Candler Will be a Candidate for Governor,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), January 22, 1898. 23 “Mr. Jones’ Platform,” The Columbia Herald (Columbia, TN), February 25, 1898. 142 often opposed reforms favored by Progressives, particularly those which would expand the powers of government.24 This does not mean, however, that Jones should not be considered to be part of the Progressive movement. Progressivism, as an ideology, provided a smorgasbord of causes that allowed middle-class Americans to pick and choose from a number of options in order to suit their own beliefs and priorities. Progressivism, as a movement, was, almost by definition, paradoxical and pluripotent, and the “big tent” of Progressivism included reformers and activists with radically different views. Furthermore, Progressivism as an ideology was, in many ways, the professional class’s answer to and cooption of the complaints and concerns of working-class radicalism. Progressivism was (as historian Gabriel Kolko and others have observed) fundamentally conservative in its unwavering commitment to capitalism, traditional – that is, nuclear and patriarchal – families, and nationalism. Modern conservatism (and, in particular, the Christian Right) is an inheritor of Progressivism. This chapter explores Jones’s political views and his political activism, in order to highlight the evangelist’s sympathies with and allegiance to Progressivism and Progressive causes. Jones’s political activism was unsurprising, as he preferred “manology” to “theology.” since, he explained, “I always find [theology] so muddy that I can’t see through it.”25 The evangelist’s support of moral reform was shared by hosts of evangelicals, including Robert Reynolds Jones, or “Bob” Jones, the Alabama evangelist discussed in the second half of this dissertation. Sam Jones’s political views, which embraced Progressive moral reform (and the use of government power to accomplish that reform) while simultaneously rejecting an expansive view of government power when he believed that they threatened to undermine Americans’ 24 Minnix, Laughter in the Amen Corner, 130-132. 25 “The Georgia Revivalist,” The Southern Herald (Liberty, MS), April 24, 1886. 143 personal responsibility (and were certainly not unique to Jones), would go on to define the political ideology of evangelicals – especially in the South – into the twentieth century. Jones was a firm believer in the need to reform, and in clergymen’s responsibility to be reformers. He argued that “we have got to begin at the top and work down to reform.” This meant that preachers had to be willing to “jump on a few old rummies,” but also condemn “a president or governor,” which would take “grit.”26 Jones implored preachers to talk about “the nasty now and now,” since he believed that “if we preachers would quit preaching so much about the ‘sweet by-and-by’ and have more to say about the dirty ‘now-and-now,’ we would see things getting in better shape in Georgia and Alabama and all over this country.”27 In his call for preachers to campaign for reform, Jones weighed in on one of the most debated questions among American Christians of the Progressive Era – what was to be the role of preachers in politics? The question of “the preacher in politics” was hotly debated by Americans in the late nineteenth century, to the extent that by 1888 one journalist complained that the subject had become “just a little threadbare.”28 Opinions on the subject generally fell into two camps: those who believed that “the preacher or priest . . has certainly degenerated . . . when he engages in politics,” and those who argued that preachers should “thunder against the wrong” – that is, did clergymen’s participation corrupt or debase the pulpit, or were ministers morally obligated to speak out against evil?29 Many Americans feared that religion’s influence in politics would pervert the gospel and debauch society. As one enemy of “preachers in politics” wrote in 1901, 26 “Sam Jones’ Prediction,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 19, 1888. 27 The Brown County World (Hiawatha, KS), October 22, 1897; The Standard (Marion, AL), July 3, 1894. 28 The Salina Republican (Salina KS), October 19, 1888. 29 The Manhattan Mercury (Manhattan, KS), July 24, 1901; J. G. Evans, The Pulpit and Politics, or Christianity and the State (Chicago, IL: Noble M. Eberhart, 1891), 13 144 “the preacher in politics” was “a pirate in society,” a “noser into the acts of officials in another country,” and “a prostitute in the spiritual kingdom of Jesus Christ.” The preacher, he argued, who becomes “a detective, a policeman, a spotter and informer” in turn “prostitutes his high and holy office to carnal affairs . . . [and] encourages the powers of darkness.”30 Other critics took a more moderate position. Charles B. Wellborn, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Logansport, Indiana, told his congregation that “politics, as it relates to a party or parties, has no place in the pulpit of the gospel ministry,” but insisted that pastors, like “a watchman on the towers of Zion,” were obligated to “cry out against the enemy from whatever direction he may approach.”31 Many Americans believed that clergymen, while avoiding the polluting influence of partisan politics, should be like the fiery prophets of the Old Testament, fearless and undaunted in their condemnation of evil. J.G. Evans, a leading Methodist and the president of Hedding College of Abingdon, Illinois, argued that “every minister of the Gospel is a bearer of messages from God to man,” and therefore it was “his duty to proclaim unpleasant truths to those who wear crowns.” Evans warned that the silence of religious leaders could have disastrous consequences – indeed, he asserted, the Civil War was a consequence of America’s churches’ failure to fulfill their moral duties.32 Mark Collis, an elder of Broadway Christian Church, a large urban Church of Christ congregation (numbering more than a thousand members) in Lexington, Kentucky, echoed Jones’s call to focus on the “nasty now and now,” declaring that “we have in the pulpit today too many glittering generalities and too little direct preaching; too much about 30 The Manhattan Mercury (Manhattan, KS), July 24, 1901 31 “Pulpit Politics,” The Logansport Reporter (Logansport, IN), October 5, 1896. 32 Evans, The Pulpit and Politics, 8, 12. 145 the stars and flowers, and too little about specific sins and the remedy for them.” Collis insisted that though pastors “must remember . . .there is a difference between the pulpit and the stump . . . when men enter into league with the powers of evil, when fraud is practiced, no preacher can be true to himself or to his calling who does not cry out against it.”33 While Jones himself (as referenced above) explained his view on the role of preachers in politics throughout his career, perhaps his clearest statement on the issue comes from one of his weekly columns in the Atlanta Journal that was published in November 1894. The evangelist began his essay by defining the preacher as “a voice and a conscience; a sentinel upon the watch tower.” He argued that “a preacher must be a patriot,” and, therefore, “he should champion every clean method and every right aim which results in good government, and must denounce . . . every influence that would hurt civil liberty or mar the character of the people.” Furthermore, he noted that a preacher is also “a citizen . . . with a conscience and a supreme desire for the maintenance of all that is good, and the destruction of all that is evil.” Jones also characterized preachers as teachers, responsible for instructing their congregants in the difference between right and wrong. While Jones believed that preachers were guardians of civil and moral purity, patriots, citizens, and teachers, he also thought that they should not be partisans. Jones declared that he had “no respect for a preacher who champions the democractic party, or the republican party, or the populist party,” since he believed that when a preacher “champions” a particular political party, he would decrease his ability to “influence men for good.” Instead of supporting one political party, Jones insisted that preachers should denounce “candidates who are unclean in life and character . . . no matter what party they represent.” He argued that “a preacher has 33 “The Right,” The Daily Leader (Lexington, KY), October 2, 1899. Information on Collis and the Broadway Christian Church comes from John T. Brown, Churches of Christ: A Historical, Biographical, and Pictorial History of Churches of Christ in the United States, Australasia, England, and Canada (Louisville, KY: John P. Morton and Company, 1904), 362-364. 146 sworn eternal enmity to the devil and to wrong, and it is his duty to live up to his oath and fight the devil in political parties and denounce rottenness and uncleanness wherever he sees it, smells it or feels it.” Jones praised “the true now-and-now preacher who is handling with gloves off the corruption in politics and the corruption in society.” He concluded his essay on the preacher in politics by declaring that while he believed in “the grand doctrine of regeneration for the soul of man” he also held fast to “the grand doctrine of reformation for the race of man,” especially when it came to the liquor traffic, which he believed “every preacher in America” should “turn his guns on.”34 Jones believed that “unless the ministry of this country of all denominations, shall read and think and preach along the lines of political economy, governmental principals, purity of politics and fairness of elections, that our country will go down and our institutions forever ruined.” Jones explained the opposition to the “preacher in politics” by stating that only politicians, brewers, distillers and “strictly party editors and politicians” want “preachers to . . . preach the gospel, attend to their own business and let the world go on to hell.” The evangelist failed to see “how ministers of religion can wink at the crimes of the parties of their community and fall in line and run and vote with them, and yet keep in harmony with God and a conscience void of offense.”35 Unsurprisingly, Jones became known as much as a reformer of society as a preacher of the gospel. Early in the evangelist’s national career, Bill Arp (who, like Jones, lived in Cartersville, Georgia) observed that “reform is the watchword now” and that Jones “is a reformer.” The columnist described Jones as courageous reformer, a host unto himself: he was “eccentric, electric, and sometimes erratic” but “never retreating from the enemy,” and as a result 34 Sam P. Jones, “Sam Jones’ Letter,” The Knoxville Tribune (Knoxville, TN), November 18, 1894. 35 “Sam Jones On Parties,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), July 9, 1894 147 he “has made more havoc single handed than any soldier of the church militant during the last half century.”36 Jones’s contemporaries clearly viewed the evangelist as a reformer. In a speech delivered at Jones’s fiftieth birthday celebration in 1897, W.B. Palmore, the editor of the St. Louis Christian Advocate, declaring that “God has raised Sam Jones to be a reformer,” praised God that Jones’s “voice can always be heard above the roar of politics and ballot boxes.”37 Three years later, W.W. Landrum, the pastor of Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, denigrated Jones’s evangelistic campaigns by asserting that he did not believe that “Rev. Sam Jones preaches the gospel.” The minister, however, did insist that the evangelist, when “fairly judged by his friends,” would “stand forth pre-eminently as a reformer.”38 Jones was viewed by many, first and foremost, as a reformer. As one of the dailies of Chattanooga proclaimed (somewhat grandiosely), “the universal effect of one of his revivals upon the moral atmosphere is that of a severe thunderstorm” since Sam Jones “is a reformer.”39 More than any other Progressive cause or reform movement, Jones was most closely associated with the campaign for Prohibition. Indeed, Jones declared himself to be a “straight-out prohibitionist,” since “liquor curses every one within the reach of the man that uses it.”40 His prohibitionist fervor shaped his views on a host of other issues, from labor to race relations. No issue was more important to the Georgia evangelist – since, as he explained “if you would dry up every still in Georgia I wouldn’t care if the devil was President,” because, he reasoned “he couldn’t do much real harm without red 36 “Arp’s Letter: Chunks of Wisdom from the Genial Philosopher,” The Yazoo Herald (Yazoo, MS), October 1, 1886. 37 ‘Sam Jones at His 50th Milepost,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), October 17, 1897 38 “Landrum on Sam Jones,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 27, 1900. 39 The Chattanooga Daily Commercial (Chattanooga, TN), April 20, 1885. 40 “Sam Jones on Himself,” The Daily Examiner (San Francisco, CA), March 24, 1889. 148 liquor.”41 Jones’s almost myopic focus on prohibition as the cure for America’s problems was understandable, since he himself had struggled with alcoholism as a young adult. In a biographical sketch written shortly after her husband’s death, Laura McElwain Jones recorded that, shortly after entering high school in Euharlee (perhaps the Euharlee Male and Female School, founded in 1867), Sam Jones “became a slave to liquor.” According to Mrs. Jones, her husband struggled with “the worst form of nervous dyspepsia” (a catch-all term for any unexplainable upper and gastrointestinal tract symptoms, that was often viewed as a symptom of moral or psychological weakness) so he had turned to liquor, “believing it would save his life” – or, as the evangelist himself described, he “began to seek relief in the intoxicating cup.” According to Mrs. Jones, Sam Jones was not “an habitual and constant drunkard,” and that “his dissipation . . . was of but five or six years duration.”42 Nevertheless, Jones, who had passed the Georgia bar exam, was forced to abandon his legal practice and become a day laborer driving a public dray. In November 1869, Jones married Laura McElwain, and in August 1872 Jones’s father, John J. Jones, fell ill. On his deathbed, Jones’s father told him that he had “broken the heart of your sweet wife and brought me down in sorrow to my grave,” and made him promise 41 Mississippian (Jackson, MS), July 18, 1888. 42 Jones and Holcomb, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 46-48; Sam P. Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 13. For a fuller explanation of “nervous dyspepsia,” see Nicholas J. Talley and Rok Seon Choung, “Whither Dyspepsia? A Historical Perspective of Functional Dyspepsia and Concepts of Pathogenesis and Therapy in 2009,” The Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology 24, 3 October 2009):S20-S28 and Henry M. Lyman, “Nervous Dyspepsia,” The Journal of the American Medical Association XXVIII, 21 (May 22, 1897): 959-962. It is not entirely clear from Jones’s biographies which school Jones attended in Euharlee, GA. The only detail included in Laura Jones’s biography, for example, is that he studied in Euharlee, with “Professor Ronald Johnson.” Ronald Johnston, who taught in Cartersville for twenty-five years, was a well-known educator in the state, and in 1867 he was one of the first principals of the Euharlee Male and Female School, so it is most likely that Jones attended the Euharlee Male and Female School (“Sam Jones in Private Life,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), January 17, 1897; Lucy Josephine Cunyus, The History of Bartow County (Cartersville, GA: Tribune Publishing Company, 1933), 149; “Cartersville Male High School,” The Cartersville Weekly Express (Cartersville, GA), June 23, 1870; “West End Academy,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), August 15, 1883; “Mrs. Johnston, Lawrenceville,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 21, 1916) 149 that he would “meet him in heaven.” Sam Jones, overcome by emotion, promised to reform. Jones soon converted, became a Methodist, and began preaching.43 This conversion story was a central part of the mythos that developed around the evangelist. In an autobiographical sketch in Sam Jones’ Own Book (1887), Jones related that he was “wretched and ruined” by liquor, but “after days of seeking” he found “peace and pardon.”44 In an interview with a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner in 1889, Jones explained that “at the request of my father on his deathbed . . . I promised to break off the fearful habit, reform and become a Christian.”45 Newspapers emphasized the “waywardness and dissipation” of his youth, and described him as a “confirmed drunkard” (despite Mrs. Jones’s claims otherwise) who was swept into “whisky-drinking, profanity, and their kindred evils,” a “vortex of dissipation,” while, at the same time, highlighting his dramatic conversion.46 Perhaps because of his own struggles with alcoholism, Jones reserved most of his opprobrium for those who made and marketed liquor, rather than those who suffered from its effects. Instead, the evangelist argued that “no human being that walks the earth . . . deserves more sympathy, encouragement and help than the young man who is making a manly fight against hereditary drunkenness.” He declared that he could not pass by “a wrecked, bloated drunkard” without thinking about “the battles he has fought, the tears he has shed and the horrible defeat he has suffered.” Jones insisted that “drunkenness is a disease,” explaining that 43 “Cartersville Mourns Loss,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), October 16, 1906; “Sam Jones as a Drayman,” The Pittsburgh Daily Post (Pittsburgh, PA), September 29, 1891; Jones and Holcomb, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 50; “The Great Revivalist,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), September 26, 1890 44 Jones, Sam Jones’ Own Book, 15 45 “Sam Jones on Himself,” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA), March 24, 1889. 46 “The Late ‘Sam’ Jones,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), October 16, 1906; “The Great Evangelist,” The St. Joseph Gazette-Herald (St. Joseph, MO), September 27, 1885. 150 “drunkards are made by heredity, physicians, and social customs.” He argued that “from parent to child every weakness of body or mind and every passion or appetite has been transmitted.” Jones raised the specter of “millions of natural born drunkards,” provided with “saloons at the doors of every such unfortunate child,” and questioned the idea of depending on “reform schools, penitentiaries and Keeley institutes” to answer the social crisis when the American government endorsed an “infernal and diabolical system of making drunkards.” For Jones the solution was for “all forms of social drinking” to “be driven from our American homes.” 47 Jones warned of an epidemic of alcoholism when he declared that “we have already in America a million young men between the ages of 16 and 25, who are surely headed toward the maelstrom of debauchery.” He explained that “very few men who begin early to drink ever escape the doom of a drunkard’s life,” and, once a young man had found “the habit of drink,” his family and business relationships would be destroyed and, ultimately, his physical and mental health would be destroyed. Jones believed that alcoholism had dramatic social consequences, and he explained that there were “two sides to a drunkard’s life,” as the young man “suffers pangs of conscience and remorse of soul,” and his “loving mother looks upon the wreck of her boy with bleeding heart and tear bedimmed eyes.” As explained in chapter one of this dissertation, Jones believed that the primary victim of liquor was the home and the family. He argued that “this boy wrecked the happiness of his home,” and, even worse, “by his influence . . . other boys are caught into this maelstrom of ruin.” Jones suggested that pious mothers were the only thing standing between drunken sons and destruction, and sons who continued to drink despite their mother’s influence was “as cruel as a snake and as heartless as a hyena.” Therefore, 47 “The Drunkard’s Disease,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), June 2, 1895. The Keeley Institute, founded in Dwight, Illinois in 1879 by Leslie Keeley, operated over two hundred alcoholics rehabilitation centers nationwide in the late 1890s and early 1900s. See Sarah W. Tracy, Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 114–118. 151 he believed that women, especially, “ought to shun and spurn everything that broke a mother’s heart or doomed an immortal soul,” and condemned a woman who would “extend the wine glass to the young man,” since “the wine supper, the champagne dinners . . . the club life” were “but anti-chambers of the gilded saloons.”48 Jones asserted that “a drunken husband and father . . . brings into the home the croaking raven, the howling wolf and the screaming jackal.” He painted a horrifying picture of the impacts of alcoholism on families, describing how “the wife’s blessings have been turned into curses, her joys into sadness, her hopes into despair,” and the only solution left to her is to “take to morphine” and, with her husband, to “stagger on to destruction before the eyes of the helpless children.” He declared that the “loathsomeness” of “debauchery” was seen most fully in the “staggering steps, bleared eyes, and ruined life of a wife or mother.” Jones observed that “experience and observation . . . have taught [him]” that his beliefs were “true.” 49 Despite Jones’s condemnation of drunken husbands, he believed that, ultimately, it was the state’s responsibility to rehabilitate these men as long as it endorsed the sale of liquor. Jones suggested that “as long as this country is in copartnership with whisky, both nationally and locally, it is but mete and right that . . . any husband who is known to have been intoxicated . . . should be consigned to a place of refuge and guarded and protected for at least five years,” and only be released if he promised to never drink again.” Jones argued that “if we would quit making drunkards and take care of the ones we have got, it would not take long to have drunkenness a thing of the past in this country.”50 Jones argued that “whisky has proven such a 48 “His Favorite Topic,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), June 9, 1895. 49 “Sam Jones Tells the Story of the Ruthless Home Destroyer,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), June 16, 1895. 50 “Sam Jones Tells the Story of the Ruthless Home Destroyer,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), June 16, 1895. 152 diabolical enemy to the human race” that “the only two friends . . . the whisky traffic can boast of are the devil and the politicians.” He asserted that “the politician rides into office on the shoulders of whisky.” Jones believed that “the protection of the liquor traffic by the government of the United States” was “a gross violation of the very spirit of our constitution,” as well as “the greatest financial folly our government ever went into” since, he insisted, “it costs this government in dollars and cents more money to take care of the ravages of the whisky traffic than it gets out of the whisky traffic.”51 Even though Jones believed that politicians were in the pockets of the whisky traffic, he had hope that Americans as a whole would support Prohibition. He insisted that that “every business interest of the country is at heart an enemy of the traffic,” since no employer “wants as an employe [sic] a drunken man” and “every profession in its best manhood has a secret enmity against the saloon.” Along with “every business man and every professional man,” Jones alleged that “every thoughtful woman in America” supported prohibition. While Jones believed that “the whisky traffic has more power over legislation today than any day in the history of this great country,” he also insisted that “the fires of enmity to this traffic are being kindled in every quarter.” Jones hoped that soon “the good people of America, representing every class and every question,” would “rise up . . . and consign the old red-nosed politicians to the back streets of life and bury the infernal whisky traffic.” Jones declared that now that “the minds of the common people are being awakened to our government affairs . . .the politicians may look out to hear it thunder.” He prophesied that “when the American people set into spring cleaning . . . the ants and cockroaches and chinches [bedbugs] will have to hide.” Jones claimed that the power of breweries and distilleries was a clear example of government corruption. He asserted that “the 51 “Sam Jones Tells the Story of the Ruthless Home Destroyer,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), June 16, 1895. 153 infernal whisky traffic walks up to every legislature in this country, shows its gold bag and shakes its fist” and “it walks up to the capital of the United States, and puts the whole thing in its pocket and walks off with it.” Jones argued that “the average politician belongs to the breweries and distillers of this country,” just as a slave “belonged to his master in the days of slavery.” He lambasted the “drunkenness and debauchery” of Congress, and condemned the Democratic Party, which had “sold out to liquor from snout to tail,” and the Republican Party, which would “never lose a chance to gain a vote by concessions to breweries and distilleries.” Jones pleaded for America to live up to its democratic ideals and argued that, “if this government is run by the people, and for the people, and for the people, then let’s make it so, and let the people run the country instead of politicians, brewers and distillers.”52 Jones was a well-known crusader for Prohibition, and his campaigns (both evangelistic and political) were credited with causing several municipalities to “go dry.” Sometime in the late 1870s or early 1880s, Jones’s crusade in Eatonton, in Putnam County, Georgia, led the citizens of Putnam County to petition the county commissioners to raise the licensing fee for saloons to three-thousand dollars. The commissioners obliged, and soon all but one saloon closed, and the last remaining saloon was forced to close after the license fee was raised to five-thousand dollars.53 Jones was also instrumental in bringing prohibition to Barnesville (in Lamar County) as well as Monticello and all of Jasper County.54 His political activism extended to his own hometown of Cartersville, Georgia, where he played an important role in the passage of Prohibition. In September 1884, the evangelist held services in Cartersville, and “made terrific 52 “The Nation’s Enemy,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), June 23, 1895. 53 Jones and Holcomb, Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 82. 54 Jones and Holcomb, 85, 88-89 154 assaults upon the [liquor] traffic.” That following December, the prohibitionists carried the town by a slim majority of two votes.55 Even in his early career, Jones seems to have been a decisive voice for temperance. In 1885, during a campaign in Nashville, it was reported that the proprietor of one the largest grocery stores in town had torn down his bar and surrendered his stores of alcohol. Furthermore, all the advertising for his stock of beer and wine was taken down.56 Apparently, Jones’s attacks on liquor in Nashville were so effective that, according to the Atlanta Constitution, “the people have almost to a man quit drinking.”57 The following year, Jones was blamed for inciting violence between prohibitionists and their opponents when, after the evangelist made a prohibition speech in Milledgeville, Georgia in the weeks leading up to a prohibition vote in Baldwin County, an anti-prohibitionist shot and killed a deputy marshal who was a Prohibitionist on February 27, 1886.58 During an evangelistic campaign in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1890, Laura McElwain Jones records that her husband’s “arraignment of the evils of the liquor traffic . . . created a mighty sentiment against the liquor business.”59 Jones was often sought after by local organizers as a way to tip the scales in favor of Prohibition. In 1891, Jones was brought in by Prohibitionists in Staunton, Virginia, to rally support for prohibition in a local option election held on August 22.60 The evangelist led a campaign against prohibition from the “Temperance Tabernacle.” He declared that he stood on 55 Jones and Holcomb, Life and Sayings, 307 56 “Sam Jones, Revivalist,” The Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, OH), July 22, 1885. 57 The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), May 30, 1885. 58 “Prohibition and Bloodshed in Georgia,” The Record-Union (Sacramento, CA), March 1, 1886. 59 Jones and Holcomb, Life and Sayings, 279 60 “‘Wets’ and ‘Drys,’” The Wilmington Morning News (Wilmington, NC), August 19, 1891 155 “the side the angels would take, or the mothers, or the pious wives, or the innocent children, or the dead,” and warned that those who voted against prohibition would become “a co-partner with the saloon-keeper.” Jones insisted that the prohibition question was “a question of blood and death and hell,” and declared that “a man who has any manhood will protect innocent womanhood.” Jones argued that Prohibition would have positive economic impacts, since “every dollar put in [saloons] is so much taken from the merchants and mechanics and others.” He warned that those who supported Prohibition would “vote for all the consequences resulting from it.” Jones believed that instead of treating the consequences and rescuing individuals who suffered from alcoholism, it would be better to “dry up the stream at the fountain head” by outlawing the sale of liquor. Jones urged Prohibitionists to organize to defeat “John Barleycorn,” complaining that since “the liquor forces were so well organized that they can send any amount of money to any place . . . to influence an election,” the Prohibitionists too “should have [an] organization to defeat organization, and money to meet money” – essentially encouraging the creation of a political party or special interest group. 61 In 1893, Jones returned to Staunton during a campaign for Prohibition in Augusta County, Virginia, and his involvement reportedly turned the campaign “red hot.”62 Jones and Sam Small canvassed the county, visiting Staunton (the county seat), Parnassus, and Churchville. Because of these “big guns,” Prohibitionists in Augusta County believed that “never in the history of the Prohibition party has it had better prospects.” 63 61 “Rev. Sam Jones at the Temperance Tabernacle,” The Staunton Spectator (Staunton, VA), August 19, 1891. 62 “News of the Week Condensed,” The Washington Gazette (Washington, NC), November 2, 1893. 63 “The Prohibition Campaign,” Yost’s Weekly (Staunton, VA), October 19, 1893. 156 Of course, Jones’s intervention did not always result in a lasting victory for Prohibition. In 1893, after a Sam Jones crusade, Bowling Green, Kentucky “went dry while the people were in a sort of pious paroxysm.” Jones was hired to “rescue [Bowling Green] from its sin,” and after preaching for ten days more than 2,500 people made professions of religion, and 300 of those converts joined local churches. The evangelist also “inaugurated a great moral movement against the liquor traffic” and, as a result, the City Council refused to reissue licenses to saloons and, consequently, closed forty-three saloons. This moral fervor seemed to have been short-lived, since by July 1896 prohibition had been “chased out with a sharp stick.”64 Nevertheless, time and again, Jones shifted public opinion in favor of Prohibition. He was credited with influencing Somerset, Kentucky, to go dry in 1898.65 In Texarkana in 1894, Jones held a meeting on the Texas side of town (where, unlike the Arkansas side of town, liquor remained legal), much to consternation of distillers and saloon-owners who feared that Jones’ meetings would “precipitate the war on whiskey.”66 Eventually, his wife noted, “as a result of his work in Texas, the great ‘Lone Star State’ was swept from one side to the other with the tidal wave of conviction to salvation and municipal reform.”67 Jones’s influence for Prohibition was not confined to the South – in Sacramento, after Jones’s meetings in 1889 “the laws regarding the Sunday saloons were enforced.”68 64 “Swept By Religious Wave,” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, MO), April 19, 1893; “Converts at $1 Per Head,” The Indianapolis Journal (Indianapolis, IN), April 19, 1893; The Semi-Weekly Interior Journal (Stanford, KY), July 14, 1896. 65 The Semi-Weekly Interior Journal (Stanford, KY), December 9, 1898. 66 “A Whiskey War,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 31, 1894. 67 Jones and Holcomb, Life and Sayings, 294. 68 Jones and Holcomb, Life and Sayings, 274. 157 Jones also participated in Prohibition campaigns in Atlanta. In 1885, the Atlanta Constitution announced that “the two Sams . . . are coming to Atlanta . . . to help whip the fight for the prohibitionists.” A “GRAND PROHIBITION MEETING,” the paper proclaimed, would be held in Jones’s massive 20,000 square foot tent (which could seat about five thousand people), pitched behind the Markham House, across from the Union Station (the main railway station in Atlanta) and along Decatur Street. Atlanta prohibitionists believed that Jones’s tent would be an essential part of their campaign since Jones had earlier packed out the nearby opera house. One prohibitionist interviewed by the paper crowed that “Sam Jones, Sam Small, and that gospel tent seals the doom of the anti-prohibitionists in Fulton County.”69 On November 15, Jones led a massive prohibition rally. More than 5,000 people attended, including “a great many ladies” and students and faculty from Atlanta University (a college for African Americans founded in 1867 under the auspices of the American Missionary Association). Jones insisted that prohibition was necessary in Atlanta, because if Atlanta “went dry,” Macon, August, Savannah, Columbus, and eventually all of Georgia would “go dry.” Jones exclaimed to his audience in Atlanta that “people all over Georgia are watching you with deepest anxiety.” Before concluding, Jones asked all men who were willing to campaign for prohibition to stand, and nearly 2,000 men rose.70 In 1891, Jones also assisted Sam Small and Azmon A. Murphey, the president of the “1890 Prohibition Club,” during a prohibition campaign in Atlanta.71 Jones’s 69 “Jones’s Gospel Tent,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), November 9, 1885. For the seating capacity of Jones’s tent, see “Sam Jones’ Tent,” The Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, SC), September 24, 1885. 70 “A Great Gathering,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), November 16, 1885. For more on Atlanta University (which merged with Clark College in 1988 to form Clark Atlanta University) see Willard Range, The Rise and Progress of Negro Colleges in Georgia, 1865-1949 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1951), 21-22 71 “Sam Jones in Atlanta,” The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), November 26, 1891; Small and Murphey both participated in street brawls during this campaign in 1891. See “Seems to Be Warming Up,” The Macon Telegraph (Macon, GA), November 14, 1891. 158 campaigns for Prohibition in Georgia were not limited to Cartersville and Atlanta - In Macon, Georgia, on November 13, 1898, Jones held a service in the “prohibition tent,” during which he described himself as “running the mouth-end of this here prohibition campaign” in the town and raised funds for the prohibition campaign.72 In June 1887, Jones and Small crisscrossed Tennessee, barnstorming the state for Prohibition. In one week, Jones visited Chattanooga, Shelbyville, Tullahoma, Murfreesboro, Nashville, Springfield, Columbia, and Pulaski.73 In Nashville, on June 3, 3,500 people packed into the Broad Street Amusement Hall to hear Jones. He called upon “every voter to take a stand.” Jones told his audience that “every anti-prohibition sentiment can be traced either to the man’s mind, heart, or the pocketbook.” He declared that he “believe[d] in law and order,” and called for his listeners to pass the prohibition amendment, “and have its violators ground to powder beneath the iron heel of the law.” Jones also portrayed anti-prohibition as unpatriotic and un-American. He argued, “your big red-faced Dutchman and your flannel-mouth Irishman who bring to this country their peculiar views and customs and are un-American, we don’t want them,” since, “thank God, this is a white man’s country, and we haven’t surrendered it yet.” Jones declared that it would be a waste of “hundreds of gallons of pure, noble blood poured out from Lexington to Yorktown” if “anarchy and Communism” were allowed to flourish by ignoring the law. Even though he voiced nativist arguments for prohibition, Jones also declared that since “we are brothers and sisters,” Americans should not “make drunkards of our brothers and break the hearts of our sisters” in order to profit from liquor. Jones argued that he, as a prohibitionist, had “mother and good women and God” on his side, while those who opposed 72 “Red Hot Sermon By Sam Jones,” The Enterprise (Albemarle, NC), December 8, 1898. 73 “The Two Sams,” The Chattanooga Daily Commercial (Chattanooga, TN), May 29, 1887. 159 prohibition were on the side of the devil and convicts. After finishing his address, Jones collected $905 for the prohibition cause. In Columbia, six thousand citizens turned out to hear Jones, and at Pulaski the evangelist addressed four thousand people. During this campaign in Tennessee, Jones raised five thousand dollars for state- and county-wide prohibition campaign.74 In Nashville, because of Jones’s influence, river steamers gave up their bars, and saloon keepers closed their businesses and surrendered their stocks to committees of ministers.75 Laura Jones recalled that “the cause of temperance in Tennessee was always very close to [Sam Jones’s] heart, and . . . he preached and pleaded for the close of the saloons and general prohibition, until the State now . . . has local option.” She hoped that, “if the day comes . . . when the State is entirely free from Saloons, at the judgment bar of God Mr. Jones will receive much of the reward for the faithful and earnest work which closed the saloons.”76 In 1903 and 1904, Jones waded into the fight for Prohibition in North Carolina. In 1903, Jones was hired by the Anti-Saloon League of Salisbury, North Carolina, to hold a ten-day long crusade (from September 15 to September 25) to “aid in its fight for prohibition.”77 Jones was often hired to rally support for prohibition in southern towns. On July 2, 1903, the Anti-Saloon League of Goldsboro, North Carolina, announced its desire to secure Jones’s services as it was launching “an active campaign . . . in the interest of some form of temperance legislation in Goldsboro.” 78 Though it is unclear if Jones was able to fit a lecture at Goldsboro into his 74 “The Prohibition Campaign,” The Knoxville Journal (Knoxville, TN), June 7, 1887. 75 The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), May 23, 1885. 76 Jones and Holcomb, The Life and Sayings of Sam P. Jones, 298. 77 The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), August 30, 1903. 78 “Anti-Saloon League,” The Goldsboro Weekly Argus (Goldsboro, NC), July 9, 1903; “Goldsboro Gleanings,” The Semi-Weekly Messenger (Wilmington, NC), July 7, 1903. 160 schedule, on October 13, 1903 voters in Goldsboro voted for prohibition, and, as the Goldsboro Argus reported, it helped to make Goldsboro “the best town in the State” as it encouraged “physical development as well as . . . trade growth.”79 Jones had become so associated with the prohibition campaign in North Carolina that the Greensboro Record quipped in April 1904 that the aggressiveness of Greensboro’s board of alderman and liquor merchants would “bring prohibition without the aid of Sam Jones.”80 Jones and his assistant George Stuart did, however, hold revival services the following month, and the Greensboro Patriot observed that “a strong temperance sentiment . . . developed during the closing days of the meetings,” and “crystallized into a demand for prohibition in Greensboro,” and, by October, Greensboro had voted for prohibition.81 Jones’s contemporaries and friends described the evangelist as one of the leading voices for Prohibition in the South. Writing two years after Jones’s death, John Temple Graves described Jones as a “radical and redoubtable prohibitionist” who tirelessly – “in season and out of season, on platforms, political and evangelical, in the pulpit, on the lecture platform, and from the hustlings [sic].” He recalled that Jones “supported every candidate of the Prohibition party, and thundered the curse of the saloons into the listening ears of thousands.” Graves declared that “so long as Sam Jones lived the prohibition cause was never asleep in Georgia or the South.”82 Writing in December 1917, Sam Small, one of Jones’s evangelistic assistants who was himself a 79 “Anti-Saloon Elections,” The Farmer and Mechanic (Raleigh, NC), October 13, 1903; “What Prohibition Does.” The Farmer and Mechanic (Raleigh, NC), May 10, 1904 (originally published in The Goldsboro Argus). 80 The Semi-Weekly Messenger (Wilmington, NC), April 15, 1904 (originally published in The Greensboro Record). 81 “Jones and Stuart Depart,” The Greensboro Patriot (Greensboro, NC), May 18, 1904; “The Watts Act and the Towns and Cities,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), October 2, 1904. 82 John Temple Graves, “Georgia Pioneers the Prohibition Crusade,” The Kansas Democrat, (Hiawatha, KS), July 1, 1908. 161 leading voice for Prohibition, argued that the proposed Eighteenth Amendment was “a signal vindication of the vision and valor of Sam Jones, our great Georgia evangelist,” and that, because of the proposed amendment to the Constitution, Jones’s “victorious spirit must rejoice!” Small asserted “that it was Sam Jones who gave the prohibition cause the inspiration and impetus that put the solid south nearly ‘all white’ [that is, “dry”] before any other section of the nation.” Small insisted that “all through the long struggle of a generation the figure and the fiery preachments of Sam Jones stood above all other influences to nerve men to battle and to rally legions of men and women into the ranks [of prohibitionists].” His protégé recalled that “the greater conspicuousness of Sam Jones’s evangelism was his implacable enmity to the liquor traffic,” and of his sermons, lectures, and even casual conversations were “punctuated somewhere with a timely jolt for John Barleycorn.” Small claimed that, because of Jones’s attacks on liquor, “legislators took his words back home and consulted their constituents, and then returned to their capitols to put more strips on the traffic, and forge more fetters for saloonists, and put more balls and chains on bootleggers,” before, realizing “that liquor . . . cannot be bound with fetters and chains,” they “began to build state-wide guillotines and behead the beasts.” Small noted that he had “been told by hundreds of prohibition leaders that they got their inspiration and enthusiasm to fight against booze by hearing Sam Jones.” Because of his mentor’s contributions to the temperance struggle, Small believed that Jones should be commemorated in a monument to prohibition in the nation’s capital.83 83 Sam W. Small, “Sam Small Says Sam Jones Was First National Apostle of National Prohibition Cause,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), December 26, 1917. Small envisioned a monument to national Prohibition that would be erected between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, that would be composed on forty-eight white stones, representing each state, with a statue of Frances Willard, the “Mother of America,” on its capital. A red cross, symbolizing the “great red cross of our salvation” would serve as the base of the monument, and on each arm there would be a statue of “the four great evangelists of this supreme emancipation” – Neal Dow facing north, Howard Russell, facing east, John P. St. John, facing west, and Sam Jones, facing south. See Sam W. Small, “States’ Rights and Prohibition,” in Louis Albert Banks, ed. Ammunition for the Final Drive on Booze: An Up-To-Date Arsenal for Prohibition Speakers (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1917), 184-185. 162 The intimidation, threats, and violence that Jones’s faced because of his support of temperance is another testament to Jones’s impact as a Prohibitionist. In his own hometown of Cartersville in 1885, liquor vendors, angered by Jones’s condemnation of “blind tigers” in the already-dry town, dynamited Jones’s barn, destroying a carriage and a buggy. The following morning, Jones received a postcard that threatened that if Jones did not “shut [his] mouth,” they would bomb his home as well.84 In Kansas City in 1888, visitors to the tabernacle on the morning of January 26 found a janitor tied to a bench, the piano and organ destroyed, the song books burned, “and every thing [sic] soaked with kerosene,” supposedly in retribution for Jones’ preaching.85 On July 29, 1891, Jones was lecturing at Hutchin’s Park Pavilion in Houston, Texas, when the lights for the pavilion were turned off, and “a gang of toughs” egged Jones and his audience (many of whom, newspapers reported with indignation, were “ladies”). Apparently, this harassment was an attempt to punish Jones’s aggressive campaign for civic righteousness. Earlier in 1891 he had held a revival in Houston and, as a result of his work, gambling houses were closed, Sunday laws were enforced, and a “league of citizens formed to see that the laws were enforced.” Ultimately, two saloon keepers, Gus Sauter and John Roesalar, were arrested in connection with this attack.86 Even though Jones was one of most well-known members of the Prohibition movement in the South, he declined to officially join the national Prohibition Party (despite Sam Small’s prominence in the organization) and instead remained a Democrat. Small, in an interview after the 1888 meeting of the Georgia Temperance Association (at which both he and Jones were 84 Jones and Holcomb, Life and Sayings of Sam Jones, 308-309 85 The Canton Press (Canton, MS), January 27, 1888. 86 “Hired for the Purpose,” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), July 30, 1891; “O Tempora! O Mores!,” The Austin Weekly Statesman (Austin, TX), August 6, 1891; “Sam Jones Rotten Egged,” The Messenger and Intelligencer (Wadesboro, NC), August 30, 1891. 163 honored guests), when asked if Jones would join him supporting the third party movement replied that Jones would be with him “as a matter of conviction,” even though “he believes . . . that Cleveland will be elected, and that we won’t be able to do much this year, but he has been preaching and believing in the third party idea for a long time.”87 While Jones clearly supported the Prohibition Party, it is unclear if he formally joined the new political party. In July 1888, while speaking in Chautauqua, New York, Jones declared that he was neither a Democrat nor a Republican or a member of a third party. Instead, he described himself as a “‘one in hill’ kind of fellow,” focused only on one issue – Prohibition.88 Still, despite his disavowal of political parties, in October 1888 Jones insisted to an audience in Durham, North Carolina that he was not “working in the interest of the Republican party and that he was “just as good a Democrat as ever flooped [sic] wings” (emphasis in original).89 Ultimately, Jones’s party affiliation was secondary to his support for Prohibition, even if he remained a Democrat. The evangelist was what some political scientists may describe as a “single-issue voter,” and that issue was Prohibition. Jones made this point explicit during his 1890 revival in Wilmington, NC. He declared that he was not concerned with who was president, governor, or mayor as long as “Jesus Christ is King,” and, therefore, he would “rather have the devil for President and no whiskey in this country than any man you can run and have whiskey in it.” Even though Jones believed that “there are some things connected with the Democratic party as sacred to the Southern people as the honor of their wives and children,” he criticized the “demijohnicrats” who could “carry old 87 “Sam Small Talks,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), May 9, 1888. 88 “Sam Jones’s Prediction,” The Daily-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 19, 1888. “One in a hill” is a term Jones seems to have borrowed from agriculture – some crops, especially some varieties of corn, thrive best when planted in small mounds. 89 “Sam Jones a Democrat,” The Durham Recorder (Durham, NC), October 31, 1888. 164 Wilmington for whiskey and the Democrats,” but balked when asked to “carry it for God,” since they claimed that African Americans would be opposed to Prohibition.90 Despite Jones’s initial hesitancy to align himself with a third party – and his protestations to the contrary, many journalists assumed that that Jones had left the Democratic Party and threatened to splinter the Solid South. In April 1888, the Chicago Tribune, in an article headlined “Democrats No Longer,” announced that Sam Small and Sam Jones had started a third party in Georgia. It reported that “the Democrats are badly scared,” as Sam Small, the “‘National organizer of the Prohibition party for Georgia’ has begun a red-hot fight.” The Tribune observed that, while Georgia was “full of Prohibitionists,” the state’s “bitter race prejudices which have kept the whites in the Democratic party had dominated all other feelings.” The paper reported that this campaign for Prohibition was “opened up by Sam Small, Sam Jones, and their colleagues . . . [m]en whose Democracy has never been questioned.” An unnamed Democratic politician interviewed in the article asserted that “the whole thing is being run in the interest of the Republican party,” part of a “shrewd scheme . . . to split the white vote” and ensure that “the negro vote will be polled and will be continued.” The Tribune predicted that Jones and Small were “likely to be heard as frequently in the political arena in the future as they have been heretofore in the churches.” The platform of the Prohibition Party, according to the Tribune, would include a prohibition of the liquor traffic and other measures designed to limit the sale and consumption of alcohol, but it also incorporated Progressive goals, like “substantial National aid to public education and public improvement” and the end of convict labor. The Tribune recorded that “Sam Jones is in hearty accord with his Brother Small in the new departure.” At a meeting in Atlanta on April 17, 1888, Jones declared that he was “a Christian mugwump,” who, “if you 90 “Be Thou Strong,” The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC), October 4, 1890. 165 would dry up every still in Georgia [he] wouldn’t care if the Devil was President,” since “he couldn’t do much harm without red liquor.” He believed that if “you don’t divide the Democratic party pretty soon the Devil will get the whole lump.” Jones announced that he was “for prohibition all the way through,” since he would support “anything for the benefit of my mother, wife, and children, and sobriety.”91 Even when Jones was not stumping for the Prohibition Party, he still, as the North Carolina Prohibitionist observed, “made converts to the Prohibition party daily, by the simple preaching of . . . ‘Quit your meanness.’”92 By 1892, Jones proudly declared that he was no longer a Democrat, but a Prohibitionist. At the Tennessee Prohibition Party Convention of 1892, Jones, a keynote speaker, declared that he was a Prohibition because he was a Christian, and he “ceased to be Democrat because [he was] a Christian.” He asserted that someone could not be a “good Democrat and a good Christian,” only a “sorter Democrat and a sorter Christian.”93 Jones’s views on Prohibition shaped his views on race, leading him to dismiss the idea of “negro domination.” In Nashville in 1892, Jones declared that “there are a heap worse things” than Black voters and that “the best thing the white people in the South can do is to fix it so that they will keep their brother in black sober.” 94 At the same time, many southerners - Jones included – feared that black voters would make Prohibition impossible. The assumption, among many white southerners, was that the failure of prohibition was because of the influence of black suffrage. In 1888, Reverend S.A. Burney, of Morgan, Georgia, explained that “there is a majority of 1,000 negroes for liquor in our county. Even the negro preachers are for whisky. Up to this 91 “Democrats No Longer,” The Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), April 21, 1888. 92 The North Carolina Prohibitionist (Greensboro, NC), November 2, 1888. 93 “Judge Edward H. East,” The Nashville Banner (Nashville, TN), June 3, 1892. 94 “Judge Edward H. East,” The Nashville Banner (Nashville, TN), June 3, 1892. 166 time we have been unable to overthrow this black denomination [sic].” Jones also claimed that liquor was the cause of the “black brute” feared by white southerners. In 1906, he asserted that “whisky . . . was behind” the Atlanta Riot. Jones argued that “liquor was behind all those atrocious deeds committed by the blacks in and around Atlanta, and if you fellows . . . accomplish the destruction of the liquor traffic I will personally account for every rape committed thereafter.” 95 This idea that African American criminality was linked to liquor was promulgated by Jones throughout his career.96 Along with his support of Prohibition, Jones took up a range of other Progressive policies. As noted earlier, the evangelist was an advocate for “clean” politics. Jones believed that “politics and politicians brought all this unrest upon the country”97 In 1896, Jones, in an open letter to Alexander S. Clay, the chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, called on the Democratic Party to ensure “a free ballot and a fair county” in the 1896 election, and criticized elections across the South as being unfair. The evangelist went as far as to threaten that he would “stump himself in behalf of honest elections.”98 Jones attacked “pot politicians” who were “stuffing the ballot boxes” after having “learned how to stuff them against the Republicans.”99 He believed that electoral reform was necessary, and he viewed disenfranchisement as a powerful tool for eliminating electoral corruption. Jones, in 1899, noted that he agreed with Georgia governor Allen Candler’s call to restrict suffrage in order to eliminate “ignorance and vice from the ballot box,” since “a characterless, moneyless, ignorant negro or white man has no 95 “Sam Jones on Atlanta Riot,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), September 24, 1906. 96 “Rev. Sam Jones Makes a Choice,” The Valley Virginian (Staunton, VA), August 6, 1885. 97 “Sam Jones,” The Weekly Democrat (Natchez, MS), July 31, 1895 98 “Sam Jones Wants Fair Elections,” The Indianapolis Journal (Indianapolis, IN), September 10, 1896. 99 The Choctaw Alliance (Butler, AL), November 22, 1893. 167 more business on election day than a mule or a billygoat.”100 He also declared (in 1903) that “a corrupted ballot . . . means a corrupted citizenship and debauched community.” Jones emphasized that while “a free ballot and a fair county may mean negro domination . . . a corrupted ballot, and stuffed ballot boxes and perjury and fraud mean the domination of the devil and the eternal ruin of our people.” 101 In order to prevent electoral fraud, Jones encouraged violence and disfranchisement. He declared that “our ballot is as free and fair in Georgia as it is in Indiana,” the only difference being that “in Georgia we use lead, and in Indiana you can use silver [that is, a poll tax].” Jones attributed this difference to pragmatism, since “both Georgia and Indiana are running on the most economical plan to defeat a clean ballot and fair count.” Jones praised the Mississippi Plan, declaring that “Mississippi has the best election laws in the south.” He explained that Mississippi “tried the shot gun regime, and the stuffed ballot box for a good while” and then “they called a constitutional convention, and made it a law that no man could vote in Mississippi unless he could read any paragraph in the constitution of the state, or understand if it read to him,” and “therefore . . . Mississippi goes democratic overwhelmingly.” 102 As discussed in chapter 2, Jones’s calls to purify the ballot mostly focused on black southerners. In 1894, he claimed that “it was a mistake to put the ballot in the hands of the Southern colored man,” since he believed “he wasn’t equal to the duties of citizenship nor intelligent enough to vote.” Jones, however, also believed that all uneducated voters should be denied the right to vote. He hoped for the time when “no man can vote . . . in any election, who is not versed in National and State affairs, or 100 “Guns With Our Gospel,” The Bamberg Herald (Bamberg, SC), August 10, 1899. 101 “Sam Jones at Troy,” The People’s Advocate (Columbiana, AL), July 5, 1894. 102 “Sam Jones at Troy,” The People’s Advocate (Columbiana, AL), July 5, 1894. 168 who can at least intelligently read and understand our National and State constitution and statutory law.”103 In addition to attacking electoral fraud, Jones also railed against corruption, exclaiming that “our politicians are corrupt beyond any class of our fellow citizens.” Jones feared that “with the tide of vagabond immigration into this country” and “with loose theorist talk by these hair-brained politicians with the indifference on the part of the good people of the country, our institutions are in danger and must go down in the ruin unless there is a revolution of sentiment and action along the lines of purity in politics and purity in officials.” 104 The most tangible result of Jones’s calls for “purity in politics and purity in officials” was his success in persuading men to join the National Law and Order League. The National Law and Order League was begun in Chicago as the Citizen’s League of Chicago in 1877, in response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The National Law and Order League was organized in 1883, and soon attracted citizens across the country who were concerned with civil unrest and political corruption.”105 Jones was an important part of this movement and personally inspired the creation of local Law and Order Leagues in Rome, Georgia; Houston, Texas; and Memphis and Chattanooga, Tennessee.106 He also began a “‘law and order’ campaign” in Kansas City in 1888.107 After a campaign in Rome in September 1891, admirers of the Georgia evangelist formed a “law and 103 “Sam Jones on Politics,” Houston Daily Post (Houston, TX), March 4, 1894. 104 “Sam Jones at Troy,” The People’s Advocate (Columbiana, AL), July 5, 1894. 105 Andrew J. Jutkins, Hand-book of Prohibition (Chicago: R. R. McCabe and Company, 1883), 104. 106 “Prove the Charges,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), September 29, 1891; “Law and Order League,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), August 8, 1891; “Miles of Saloons,” The Memphis Commercial (Memphis, TN), February 9, 1893; “Law and Order,” Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), August 25, 1891. 107 “Sam Jones,” The Saturday Evening Kansas Commoner (Wichita, KS), March 2, 1888. 169 order club” in order to “wipe out the sinful character of the city.” Predictably, Rome’s elected officials took offense at this challenge to their political authority. Judge John W. Maddox, a judge of the superior court, Rome circuit, during a grand jury that deliberated on accusations that the Law and Order League had resorted to vigilante violence, declared that “so long as this court exists there is no need of such a club,” since “you gentlemen of the grand jury are the only law and order club necessary.”108 Jones believed that officials’ failure to enforce the laws furnished the soil for anarchy and communism, and he encouraged city officials to clean up their municipalities – both figuratively and literally. In 1902, he ridiculed Paducah, Kentucky, describing it as “the dirtiest town” he had ever visited, apart from the notoriously filthy New Orleans. Jones criticized the city’s municipal leaders and declared that “these present officials are not going to clean anything up.”109 While Jones clearly was part of a broad Progressive coalition – as signified by his support of Prohibition and his advocacy for anti-corruption measures and “purifying” the ballot – the Georgia evangelist, as always, defies attempts at categorization. Jones was particularly critical of social reform measures like free schools – he condemned “free schools, free silver and everything else that was free” since “nothing that was given free was of any value to any one.”110 He believed that free schools should only be provided to parents who “take the pauper’s oath,” and even then the children should be instructed in the “three R’s . . . and nothing more.”111 Jones feared that “free schools, free turnpikes, free pensions” and “free anything else” would lead to 108 “Sam Jones Worsted,” Pittsburg Dispatch (Pittsburgh, PA), October 12, 1891 109 “Sam Jones,” The Saturday Evening Kansas Commoner (Wichita, KS), March 2, 1888; “Sam Jones Last Evening,” The Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, KS), June 23, 1898. 110 “Sam Jones Opposed to the War,” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, MO), April 29, 1898. 111 “Rev. Sam Jones and Free Schools,” The Salisbury Weekly Sun (Salisbury, NC), November 25, 1897. 170 “government paternalism,” though he, as an agent of the Methodist Orphanage in Decatur, did support “institutions for indigent children of widows.” The evangelist justified his viewpoint by arguing that on the one occasion that God gave “anything free” – when “he rained manna down for the Israelites” – it resulted in an “anarchistic and disjointed crowd” that could only be remedied by “a rain of free snakes.”112 Jones insisted that “free schools” were “a menace to manhood,” and therefore, “people can quit using whisky and tobacco and pay for the education of their children,” and support Prohibition and those who did not should “provide asbestos burial clothing for their burial robes” – that is, he believed that “wets” were doomed to perdition.113 Furthermore, far from following the lead of the “trust-busting” Roosevelt and other Progressives who bemoaned the power of conglomeration, Jones announced that he was in favor of trusts. The evangelist seems to have been among those described by William Jennings Bryan in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech, who “believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous that their prosperity will leak through on those below.”114 In a column in The Manufacturer’ Record of Baltimore, Jones outlined his version of trickle-down economics. He explained that trusts, like Standard Oil, could save consumers money, since “there is no doubt about the aggregation of wealth, with brains controlling it . . . can manufacture any article cheaper.” Jones also argued that “the great railroad combinations” made rail travel faster, more comfortable, safer, and more reliable. He insisted that public opinion would act as “boundary lines” on trusts, which, he argued “have their weathercocks out on every prominent cupola watching how the wind blows.” Jones declared that he was “a thousand times more afraid of 112 “Sam Jones on Free Snaps,” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, KS), January 31, 1898. 113 “Sam Jones Last Evening,” The Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, KS), June 23, 1898. 114 Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Chicago, Illinois, July 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1896, (Logansport, Indiana, 1896), 233. 171 demagogues and politicians than I am afraid of trusts and combines.” Repeating claims made by British journalist William T. Stead in If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), Jones argued that trusts were honest and righteous, even if “the successful man or combination means the downfall of other men and other combinations.” The Georgia evangelist argued that this was simply the rule of “the survival of the fittest” which God had ordained in creation. Jones argued that trusts were like “whales,” in that, “in the ocean’s waters . . when the whales come along the little fish have to hide out.” He insisted that he had “yet to know of a single instance where combines and trusts hurt the masses.” Even though Jones acknowledged that “these great combinations affect legislation,” he believed that, since “they have one eye on public sentiment all the time,” trusts would be limited in their ability to hurt Americans. Jones went on and declared himself to be “an expansionist,” believing that “when the highways over the seas shall be laden with our products into foreign countries . . . then we shall flourish perennially.” Since “only aggregations of wealth can build ships and open markets in foreign lands,” Jones supported trusts and combinations. 115 Jones’ hymn to trusts was widely printed in newspapers across the country, which provides a window into the way Jones’s views were circulated around the country. His essay’s wide circulation was thanks to a public relations campaign led by the Philadelphia-based advertising agency N.W. Ayer and Son. The agency, which was “working . . . with a number of large corporations endeavoring to help interest them” in advertising in newspapers, believed that favorable coverage would help convince “large corporations” to use their services and advertise in newspapers. N.W. Ayer and Son sent letters to newspaper editors across the country – particularly those in rural areas – requesting that they publish Jones’ article, arguing that printing 115 See The Reaper (Sheffield, AL), July 14, 1900; The American (Nashville, TN), July 15, 1900; “General Business Topics,” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), July 10, 1900. 172 the essay would be “helpful in our effort to secure newspaper advertising from this class of corporations.” While many newspapers complied, other editors, particularly of Democratic or Populist sympathies, took umbrage at this ploy. H.H. Peyton, the editor of the New Albany X-Ray of New Albany, Kansas, printed the request from N.W. Ayer and Son, and explained that, since the New Albany X-Ray was not “willing to be thus bought,” he would not print Jones’s article.116 Newspapers in Arkansas, including the Bentonville Sun and the Arkadelphia Southern Standard, also received letters from N.W. Ayer and Son. The editorial staff Southern Standard supposed that the mailings were “paid for by Mark Hanna [a senator from Ohio and one of McKinley’s top advisors] and are sent to every paper in the south.” They advised Jones to “let politics alone and have nothing to do with Mark Hanna and that crowd if he wants to have any influence in the South as a minister of the Gospel,” and informed their readers that “the article was thrown in the waste basket.”117 An article in the Ironton County Register, of Ironton, Missouri, attacked both Jones and N.W. Ayer and Son, condemning the “insidious arts the trust employ to accomplish their purpose.” The author of the essay criticized Jones for writing the “long article” for “so much per line,” and contended that the advertising firm had sent out the article to “supposedly unsuspecting country newspapers.” He continued to heap scorn on N.W. Ayers and Son, declaring that “no democratic paper whose editor has enough intelligence to fold papers will publish the Jones article or be caught by the soft words of those gay deceivers, N.W. Ayers & Son.” The Ironton County Register also reprinted a column from the Jackson, Missouri Cash-Book, which alleged that N.W. Ayer and Son were “in ‘cahoots’ with the Hanna-McKinley trust 116 New Albany X-Ray (New Albany, KS), July 13, 1900; See also Wilson County Sun (Neodesha, KS), July 13, 1900. 117 The Southern Standard (Arkadelphia, AR), August 2, 1900. 173 and goldbug crowd that are sucking the lifeblood of the masses.” The Cash-Book characterized Jones as a “hypocrite of the cloth,” and accused him of being paid by “the Republican machine” to write the article. It asserted that while Jones had portrayed himself to be “a disciple of Christ . . . the greatest commoner and best friend of the poor the world ever saw,” the evangelist, “this fraud and burlesquer of the religion of Christ,” had become “like his prototype, Judas” and betrayed his supporters.118 The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot also rejected Jones’ article, arguing that “it is scarcely fair” that “Mr. Jones was paid, doubtless twice, for writing the article” and that the Manufacturers’ Record profited from Jones’ article, while local newspapers were asked to print the essay for free. The Virginian-Pilot argued that “the scheme is very stupid,” and that “the trusts must take the newspaper fraternity for great fools to thus attempt to beat their advertising,” before declaring the “the panegyric of Rev. Sam Jones will line many a waste basket in this broad land.”119 The Presbyterian Standard of Charlotte, North Carolina described the campaign as “bribery and corruption,” and explained that it was bringing the letter to light to show “how much public opinion is manufactured at so much a yard.” The author of the column in the Presbyterian Standard called for “the money and the brains” to be “ruled by conscience,” and expressed hope that, at the final reckoning, “the wrong shall perish and the right prevail.”120 The evangelist’s forthright advocacy of trusts was condemned by some readers. Jones “does not preach except under contract by which he is assured $100 a day and up. he creates a great sensation from the pulpit . . . gets the money and goes on his way rejoicing, whether souls are saved or not. He preaches for the money, and so does the many who takes stock in combinations 118 Ironton County Register (Ironton, MO), August 2, 1900. 119 “The Trusts Attempt to Do a Little Business,” Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), July 22, 1900 120 “Bribery and Corruption,” Fayetteville Weekly Observer (Fayetteville, NC), September 20, 1900. 174 of capital to manufacture goods or establish department stores.” The Chariton Courier argued that “the article written by Sam and furnished the Baltimore Manufacturers’ Record for publication was like his sermons, a source of revenue to him.”121 The Republican of Emporia, Kansas, argued that Jones’ argument in the article was as “deep as the ink on the paper.”122 N.W. Ayer and Son had apparently attempted to sway public opinion by sending out news items for newspaper editors to reprint at least once before. In the winter of 1899, an article titled “Danger in Calcium Carbide” from the New York Sun was widely reprinted in newspapers nationwide and (at least according to the Kennett, Missouri Democrat) this was because of the machinations of the advertising agency, which was working on behalf those industries that hoped to discredit acetylene gas as a light source. 123 W. R. Lindsay, a leader among the Populists of North Carolina, attacked Jones for his views, and described him as “an enemy of the common rights of the common people.” Lindsay accused Jones of saying that “these men who going among the people telling them the laws are discriminating and taxes are unequal are engaged in wickedness and are creating discontent and unhappiness.” The Populist leader insisted that though the “stronger elements of society” were favored, Jones declared it was “a grand lie.” Lindsay believed that Jones was a victim of greed, suggesting that “when plutocracy lays its lightning touch upon a logical brain, it paralyzes it into 121 “The Trusts and the People,” The Yellow-Jacket (Moravian Falls, NC), August 9, 1900; “Sam Jones and Trusts,” Chariton Courier (Keytesville, MO), July 20, 1900 122 Emporia Republican (Emporia, KS), July 19, 1900. 123 Reprinted in Ironton County Register (Ironton, MO), August 2, 1900. For an example of the attack on acetylene gas, see “Danger in Calcium Carbide,” Columbus Courier (Columbus, KS), February 2, 1899. For more information about the tactics of N.W. Ayers and Son, see “The Result of Advertising,” Lawrence Daily World (Lawrence, KS), August 18, 1899; “Do You Know Uneeda Biscuit?”, New York Tribune (New York, NY), September 14, 1899; Ralph Merle Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N.W. Ayer & Sons at Work, 1869-1949, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). 175 the weakness of a child’s,” and begged the evangelist not to “fan [the people] to sleep with cooling wings that the vampires may suck their life’s blood ere they awake.”124 Jones’s belief that a rising tide would lift all and his suspicion of attempts to restrict the pursuit of riches or redistribute wealth put the evangelist at odds with the People’s Party along with “silverites.” Speaking at a meeting during a revival campaign in Troy, Alabama (just south of Montgomery), Jones declared that he thought Reuben F. Kolb was “a fool for running again,” reasoning that, if he “had beat the race as much as [Kolb] did the last time, and could not get in, [he] would quit.”125 The Troy Messenger challenged the Montgomery Journal’s version of Jones’ remarks (first printed June 25). The Messenger argued that “it has a number of gross misrepresentations” and alleged that the synopsis “was . . . written by some populate sympathiser, whose partisan prejudice is stronger than his respect for truth.” Jones, the paper contended, did not say that he thought that Kolb was “a fool for running again.” Instead, according to the Messenger, “Kolb’s name was mentioned but once, when the preacher warned the populites that their crazy devotion to politics to the neglect of their religious duties was likely to land them in perdition.” Rather than supporting Populism, the Messenger argued that Jones condemned Populists, describing them as “act[ing] the fool,” and mocking their claim that “the laws of the country are all made in the interest of the rich and against the poor,” and their attempts at financial reform, since advocates of free silver were “never able to get from one station to another without taking up a collection.” According to the Messenger, Jones did condemn political corruption, and declared his support for the Democratic Party, since “they are 124 “The Priesthood to the Rescue,” The Progressive Farmer (Winston-Salem, NC), July 17, 1894. 125 “Sam Jones Lets Go at Alabama Politics,” The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 26, 1894; “Sam Jones at Troy,” The People’s Advocate (Columbiana, AL), July 5, 1894. Reprinted from the Montgomery Journal 176 as dear to me as the honor of my family.”126 In response to Jones’ remarks at Troy, newspapers in Alabama reprinted excerpts of one of Jones’ columns in the Atlanta Journal, where he wrote that “the third party . . . may get to Heaven, but they’ll never get to Washington,” and described “the third party man” as “fool.”127 In a letter to the editor, one citizen of Montgomery, “B,” argued that Jones’ comments were “an editorial production,” and lamented “the perversion of religious services for political purposes.” “B” argued that the author of the piece had to have been inebriated, since he had missed Jones’ ridicule of the Populists. He asserted that Jones had questioned why men like Stanford, Carnegie, and Edison had been able to amass wealth, when “all the laws are made in favor of the rich.” He also insisted that Jones had insulted Populists, calling them empty-headed and “bleary-eyed.” “B” questioned if the Montgomery Journal was actually a Democratic paper and declared that “garbled extract” to be “a manifestation of perfidy.” The Huntsville Mercury wondered how much Jones was paid for his sermon.128 The Troy Messenger questioned the Montgomery Journal’s claim that “the report furnished in the Journal was furnished for publication by one of the most accurate and painstaking shorthandwriters in the State,” whose work had “never been brought into question.” The Messenger rejected the Journal’s claim to accuracy, since “the writer hereof sat within ten feet of Mr. Jones when the sermon was preached in which the language quoted by the Journal’s correspondent was alleged to have been used.” The Messenger argued that a thousand witnesses would agree with the paper that “it is not a truthful report, but a garbled and fabricated thing, concocted as a campaign document to help bolster up a desperate and declining cause,” and 126 The Troy Messenger (Troy, AL), July 4, 1894, 2. 127 “Sam Jones on Populists,” The Coosa River News (Centre, AL), July 6, 1894; The Eufuala Daily Times (Eufaula, AL), July 4, 1894. 128 “B,” “Profession and Practice Don’t Agree,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 30, 1894; “How Much Did It Cost,” Ibid. 177 questioned why the Journal was supporting the “Kolb-Hoar combine.”129 The Atlanta Constitution also condemned Jones’ (alleged) remarks, arguing that “at a time when the northern papers are sympathizing with the crusade against the south started by Ida B. Wells, in England, we should present the bright side of the situation and let the facts be our vindication.”130 The Choctaw Herald reported that the citizens of Troy were “indignant over the misrepresentations of Sam Jones’ sermons.”131 Jones’ comments became ammunition in a political battle in Alabama between the People’s Party and the Democratic Party. This political disagreement even divided newspapers within towns, as illustrated by the Choctaw Alliance and the Choctaw Herald. The Alliance, which advertised itself as “the People’s Paper” and endorsed Populist candidates, supported the Montgomery Journal’s version of Jones’ remarks. The Alliance asked its readers to decided “who is right, the Herald lady or THE ALLIANCE man,” and reprinted excerpts from the Montgomery Journal claiming that Jones acknowledged their version of events in the Atlanta Journal. The Alliance also requested that the Herald admit that a comments on third parties made by Jones and reprinted in the newspaper “was written by a Democrat sympathizer.” 132 Regardless, Sam Jones was a constant thorn in the side of the Populist Party and those who called for the free coinage of silver. He declared that he was “not for free and unlimited coinage of silver at 16 to 1 by the United States, and that the gold bugs had not bought him,” but still, he insisted, he was “a gentleman and an honest man, and he wanted good sound money.” Jones also denounced those who believed, like Kansas Farmers’ Alliance lecturer Mary 129 “But Sam Jones Didn’t Say It,” The Troy Messenger (Troy, AL), July 4, 1894. 130 “Elections North and South,” Ironton County Register (Ironton, KS), July 5, 1894. 131 “Sam Jones’ at Troy,” The Choctaw Herald (Butler, AL), July 12, 1894. 132 “Our Fairness,” The Choctaw Alliance (Butler, AL), July 18, 1894. 178 Elizabeth Lease, that “the common people are robbed to enrich their masters,” and criticized the “calamity howler who said that the poor man had no chance,” since, after all, men like Alexander Turney Stewart, Andrew Carnegie, and Abraham Lincoln proved that America was still a place of opportunity.133 In Jones’s opinion, Populists were in cahoots with “socialism, communism, and greenbackism,” and threatened to make the United States a “wrecked and ruined state,” as it had made “Kansas the home of growlers and the citadel of discontent.”134 Jones was particularly critical of William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner” and the hero of “silverites.” He heaped opprobrium on ‘tje Silver Knight of the West,” claiming that Bryan’s lectures were “not worth 10 cents a dozen,” falsely accusing him of only paying eight dollars in taxes (and, therefore, “was not a man to be trusted with the nation’s finances,” and asserting that Bryan “leaned . . . towards communism” and that he was a “compound of populism, socialism, and communism,” and, in his most inflammatory (and perhaps apocryphal) charge, declared that Bryan was “the most dangerous demagogue and agitator this or any other country had ever produced.”135 Needless to say, Jones and Bryan were not on speaking terms.136 In July 1895, Jones was an invited lecturer at the Mississippi Chautauqua Assembly in Crystal Springs, which began on July 18 and concluded on July 28. Jones was given two days of the assembly (July 23-24) to himself.137 Over the course of those two days, the evangelist 133 “Her Strange Power,” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, KS), March 31, 1891; “Louisiana Chautauqua,” The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 27, 1895. 134 “Sam Jones on Grover Cleveland,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), January 6, 1901. 135 The Waterloo Press (Waterloo, IA), January 1897; “Sam Jones Cornered,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), January 31, 1899; “At the Assembly,” The Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, KS), June 23, 1898; “Rev. Sam Jones on Grover Cleveland,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), January 6, 1901; “Bryan, the Agitator,” The Tazewell Republican (Tazewell, VA), August 13, 1908. 136 “Bryan and Sam Jones Don’t Speak,” The Concord Times (Concord, NC), July 13, 1899. 137 “At Crystal Springs; First Day of the Mississippi Chautauqua,” The Times-Democrat (New Orleans, LA), July 19, 1895; “Chautauqua Mississippi,” The Canton Times (Canton, MS), July 12, 1895. 179 repeatedly ridiculed Populists and proponents of “sound money.” Summarizing Jones’s time on the Chautauqua stage, the Vicksburg Evening Post stated that “Rev. Sam P. Jones has during his lectures . . . advanced unanswerable arguments against the free silver heresy.”138 Jones declared that supporters of “free silver” were ignorant, and that “their brains . . . must certainly not be connected with their tongues.” Furthermore, he argued that “they lend no ear to reasonable and sound ideas,” but “they pass in one ear and out the other, for the very good reason that there is nothing inside to stop the words.” Jones quipped that “he could have his head split open, filled with sawdust and sewed up and then make a better showing and advance more sane arguments than the independent, unlimited free silver heretic.” He contended that “the brainless silverite . . . don’t care for enlightenment or knowledge,” and, beyond being ignorant, was “prejudiced as well.” Even though he believed that silverites would reach heaven, since “God has made special provision for fools and children,” he joked that “if Gabriel blows a golden trumpet they will just sit still and say, ‘No, I am not going to move.” Jones concluded that “God’s sun never shone upon such a country as America today; a kind Providence never furnished such a section for the poor man as is the south.” 139 During a lecture titled “Sham and Genuine” on July 24, he asserted that “there is not a dirtier cesspool on the American continent today than the free silver camp.” He argued that “the Democratic party is the father and the Republican party is the mother of the heretic Populites.” Jones believed that the People’s Party was a party of “deluded farmers” and “plain, simple fools, without bangs or frizzles.” Jones, in an attempt to refute the claims of the Populists, argued that while the Populists “howl that the rich are getting richer and the poor 138 “Sam Jones’ Last Broadside,” The Vicksburg Evening Post (Vicksburg, MS), July 27, 1895). 139 “Sam P. Jones on the Silverites,” The Pine Belt News (Brewton, AL), July 30, 1895. 180 poorer, the reverse is true” – in fact, he claimed, “statistics show that the millionaires are becoming poorer every day.”140 Jones’s attacks on the People’s Party outraged the Populists and their supporters and led to the evangelist being raked over the coals by silverites. In 1895, Giles Ligon, the so-called “Sage of Wilson” and a lecturer for the Territorial Alliance and Industrial Union in Indian Territory (a branch of the Farmers’ Alliance in what is now Oklahoma), attacked Jones in an editorial that appeared in the pages of the Ardmore Alliance Courier, the official organ of the Alliance in Indian Territory.141 The “Sage of Wilson” declared that Jones, “who poses as a preacher,” was a “hard, downright liar.” He argued that those who knew free silver leaders like Richard P. Bland (co-author of the Bland-Alison Act), Joseph Weldon Bailey, and James “Cyclone” Davis “must admit that Sam stated a falsehood when he said they were fools.” Ligon argued that “the love of money” had “forced Sam out of the gospel of Christ,” and now, instead, “he is declaring the everlasting gospel of the devil.” Ligon asserted that “such men as Sam Jones have done more to enslave and damn the world than any other class of men.” He criticized Jones for growing wealthy “from the people,” and condemned him for complaining about “the sub-treasury craze, the free silver craze, etc.” even while he neglects “to tell the people about the bonded warehouse that is established by the government to keep the whiskey in that is made by the money kings.” He declared Jones to be “another Benedict Arnold in camp.” He attacked Jones for “serving the gold standard” while “class legislation and the corrupt systems under which we live . . . drive thousands to ruin and untimely graves.” He criticized preachers (and 140 “Mississippi Chautauqua,” The Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 25, 1895; “Sam Jones,” The Weekly Democrat (Natchez, MS), July 31, 1895 141 “Territorial Alliance,” The Alliance Courier (Ardmore, OK), August 30, 1895; “The News at Home,” The Alliance Courier (Ardmore, OK), September 6, 1895; N.W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer and Son, 1894), 967. 181 insinuated that Jones was among their ranks) who told voters to “go to the ballot box and cast your vote for . . . the p-a-r-t-y,” which was only causing more debt and “caring for the whisky interest.” He declared that if Jones was so concerned with “sound money,” then he should, when taking up collections, “notify the people that [he] did not want money that was not sound.”142 Even though Jones endorsed trusts and antagonized Populists, he still lamented America’s focus on commerce, and shared many of the concerns of agrarian rebels. He asserted that while “Greece centralized her whole life in literature, [and] Rome focused her life on law, America centralizes her whole life in the dollar.”143 Jones believed that “money spoils the world.”144 He also feared that “trusts and combines, rings and cliques are running this country from snout to tail.” 145 He argued that the myopic focus on commerce would lead to anarchy and communism “because you have gone on and piled up wealth and let . . . the world take its own course.”146 Jones believed that “avarice is eating the heart out of the people,” especially in cities like Nashville, where “the banks” held “millions of capital and millions of deposits and government bonds and railroad stock and Sheffield notes and West End Script.”147 Despite Jones’s criticism of the Populists, and his championing of trusts, he still lamented the influence of wealth, and insisted that “everything depends now on the workingman.”148 Jones also expressed sympathy with organized labor. In 1888, he argued that “the curse of the country is 142 “Sound Money,” The Alliance Courier (Ardmore, OK), September 20, 1895. 143 “Sam Jones’ Last Broadside,” The Vicksburg Evening Post (Vicksburg, MS), July 27, 1895). 144 “Slangy Sam Jones,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 26, 1893. 145 “Sam Jones On Parties,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), July 9, 1894 146 “A Sam Jones Sermon,” The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, NE), November 6, 1887. 147 “Some of Sam Jones’ View,” The Mississippian (Jackson, MS), December 5, 1888. 148 “The Meeting is Over,” The Paducah Sun (Paducah, KY), October 17, 1902. 182 that we are not paying the working man for his work,” and remarked that he believed in “the Knights of Labor and in strikes,” though he did condemn attempts to prevent strikebreakers from working.149 Jones also criticized employers who “blackballed” striking workers.150 Even though he defended trusts, Jones warned that “monopolists who were paying 60 cents a dozen to poor over-worked seamstresses” risked driving the United States into communism.151 Jones was a political gadfly, irritating and, at times, infuriating Americans across the political spectrum. The evangelist was no respecter of persons. Jones expressed his desire to disrupt the political status quo, declaring that if he had “time to go around for about six months to these political meetings, I would just like to pick up this little spread-eagle politicians . . . and let them drop and hit the ground running.”152 He argued that “office seekers were like suckling calves, and our nation is fast becoming a nation of suckers.”153 Jones asserted that “the three R’s” – “rings, rascality, and rum” – “have debauched our politics and well nigh degraded ourmanhood,” and “office-seekers, brewers, distillers, saloon keepers, gamblers, are the leading factors in American politics today.” 154 Jones “took no stock in the democratic and republican parties,” since “they have been saving the country for years, and if what has been accomplished is salvation, then the time has come for damnation.”155 In an interview in the Kansas City World in June 1900, Jones described his political allegiances as “in a tree watching the crowd go by,” 149 “Sam Jones on Labor,” The Concordia Daylight (Concordia, KS), February 21, 1888. 150 “Rev. Sam Jones on Strikes,” The Journal and Tribune (Nashville, TN), July 24, 1901. 151 “Thousands At Camp,” The Saint Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, MN), June 25, 1888. 152 “Sam Jones’ Last Broadside,” The Vicksburg Evening Post (Vicksburg, MS), July 27, 1895). 153 “Sam Jones Last Evening,” The Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, KS), June 23, 1898. 154 “Sam Jones On Parties,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), July 9, 1894 155 “Rev. Sam Jones’ Similes,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), August 3, 1896. 183 since, he explained, he was not “mean enough to be a Democrat or a Republican and not fool enough to swallow the Populist doctrines.”156 Early in his career, Jones attracted attention for his criticism of the Georgia legislature after he declared during a sermon in Atlanta that “no matter what my wife may charge me with, she can never charge me with having belonged to the last Georgia legislature.”157 Jones also addressed the Mississippi House of Representatives in November 1888.158 In 1894, Jones lashed out at the United States Congress, exclaiming that “of all, the box-ankled, bandy-shanked, flea-bitten, bob-tail, lop-eared, mangy, courageless, brainless jackasses ever assembled since God made the world . . . the present gang in Congress, headed by Hill in the Senate, and tailed by ‘no-quorum’ in the House, beats them all.”159 Disgusted with the “slavery” of party politics, Jones encouraged Americans simply to “vote for good men.”160 Jones readily shared his views on politics, and, despite his criticism of politicians as a class, even endorsed certain politicians. Jones praised “Clevelandism” in a column published in the Atlanta Journal in January 1901. He was fulsome in his praise for Grover Cleveland, declaring him to be “right in every utterance he made.”161 Jones’ essay was widely published, in the hopes that it would “help along the ‘reorganization’ plan” and increase the “Stuffed Prophet’s” – that is, Cleveland’s – “political power.” The Caucasian of Shreveport, Louisiana, argued that “Rev Sam should stick to saving souls,” since “the Democratic party needs no 156 “Sam Jones on Politics,” The Wichita Star (Wichita, KS), July 6, 1900; “He Banks on Hanna,” The Topeka Daily Capital (Topeka, KS), June 30, 1900. 157 “Southern States,” The Statesman (Austin, TX), November 23, 1881. 158 ‘Sam Jones Coming,” The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), May 30, 1889 159 The Choctaw Alliance (Butler, AL), March 21, 1894. 160 “Hot Shots from Sam,” The Paducah Sun (Paducah, KY), October 15, 1902. 161 “Rev. Sam Jones on Grover Cleveland,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), January 6, 1901. 184 salvation at his and Cleveland’s hands.” 162 The evangelist had praised Cleveland before – in 1891, Jones declared that Cleveland “has got a backbone as big as Harrison’s hat,” and in 1894, he explained that he admired Cleveland “because he’s got a backbone as big as a circus pole, and when he takes a position . . . all the powers of the earth can’t move him.”163 Jones believed that Cleveland was “an honest and patriotic president and did the best he could with the congress he had.”164 Jones enjoyed being a political prognosticator and predicted that McKinley and the Republican Party would win in the election of 1900, since “when Uncle Mark Hanna rolls out his barrel . . . and yells ‘McKinley and prosperity; Roosevelt and the Rough Riders,’ it will all be over” for the Democratic Party, and they would “be no more in it than a pig pen in a Kansas cyclone.” Jones encouraged Democrats to “drop some of their crazy ideas like free silver and government ownership.” The Georgia evangelist seemed to admire Hanna, McKinley’s campaign manager, and contended that he was a “man who knows how to win,” and “the political general who knows how to do the work.” Jones derided Senator James K. Jones (the chairman of the Democratic National Committee), arguing that the “difference between Mark Hanna and Senator Jones is the difference between a race horse and a cow.” He described the Democratic Party chairman as “slow,” and quipped that in 1896 “it took Jones two weeks to find out Bryan was defeated.” 165 162 “Cleveland and Sam Jones,” The Cauucasian (Shreveport, LA), January 16, 1901; For explanation of “Stuffed Prophet” moniker for Cleveland, see Benjamin Rush Davenport, The Crime of Caste in Our Country (Chicago, IL: National Publishing, 1893), 373. 163 “Only a Question of Backbone,” Knoxville Weekly Journal (Knoxville, TN), December 2, 1891; “Rev. Sam Jones on Backbone,” The Greenville Advocate (Greenville, AL), November 28, 1894. 164 “Thro’ Georgia Specs,” The Topeka State Journal (Topeka, KS), June 17, 1895. 165 “Sam Jones on Politics,” The Wichita Star (Wichita, KS), July 6, 1900; “He Banks on Hanna,” The Topeka Daily Capital (Topeka, KS), June 30, 1900. 185 Jones, like many Progressive leaders, was opposed to imperialism – and, in particular, to the United States’ occupation of the Philippines. The evangelist – despite his otherwise pugilistic inclinations – opposed the war against Spain. At first, Jones seemed to have doubted that war would break out with Spain. In April 1898, he declared that he was “not taking much stock” in the talk about war, but he did note that he thought that Spaniards were “not worth the powder and lead that it would take to kill ‘em.” Jones also objected to the cost of the war. He bemoaned that it would “cost so much to clean them [the Spanish] up and pay the pensions of the great American army that will be left intact.”166 Despite his object to the United States’ imperialistic ambitions, he held up war heroes like Admiral George Dewey, Commodore (later Admiral) Winfield Scott Schley (“the hero of Santiago”), and the “noble” Admiral Richmond P. Hobson as examples of bravery and loyalty. Jones pleaded for “such loyalty and courage among the Christian people,” since, he believed,” if Christians possessed those traits “Satan would be driven from every stronghold.”167 Understandably, by January 1899 (a month after the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1898, which ended the Spanish-American War), he described American expansion as a fait accompli – he declared that “the question of expansion is already settled,” since, after all, “we have already expanded. We have certainly taken in . . . all Spain had.” Jones’s main focus, then, was the question of “what shall we do with the Philippines.” He speculated that the United States would end up giving the Philippines back to Spain.168 During an interview following services at a 166 “Sam Jones Talks of War,” The Kansas City Journal (Kansas City, MO), April 2, 1898; “Sam Jones Opposed to the War,” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, MO), April 29, 1898. 167 “All Georgia Joins Atlanta in Her Welcome to Admiral Schley, and Thousands Aid in Ovation,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), November 5, 1899; “Sam Jones on the War,” The Prattville Progress (Prattville, AL), October 7, 1898. 168 “Sam Jones on Expansion,” The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), January 22, 1899 186 brush arbor near Purcellville, Virginia, he declared that he “was not an expansionist.” Jones argued that the United States had too many wards already, and quipped that he thought that “we have more crops that we can care for.” Jones criticized the idea of “using the gun and the Bible as our implements of conversion and civilization,” and sarcastically remarked that “it is kind of us to give [a Filipino] a Bible after we kill him.” He based his criticism of American imperialism on his views of the federal government’s policies towards African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities, arguing that since the nation could not “take care of its own inferior races,” it “need not bid for any more contracts until it has shown that it knows how to fulfill them.”169 Sam P. Jones was a southern Progressive, with all the inconsistencies and contradictions bound up in that label. He was committed to reform, and his call for sinners to “quit your meanness” was extended to society as a whole. To say that Jones was a Progressive, however, is not to characterize him as being necessarily left-leaning or (counterintuitively) “progressive.” From the tabernacle platform, the political stump, and the Chautauqua stage, Jones declared a gospel that encouraged (and even demanded) social reform. Nevertheless, and in keeping with his belief in the important of human effort, Jones’s political views emphasized the need for individual responsibility and accountability. Furthermore, Jones (like many Progressives) believed that social, racial, and gender hierarchies were the result of natural, unavoidable differences. Women could not be men, black Americans could not be white Americans, immigrants could not be natural-born citizens, and wealthy men could not be laborers. These divisions, in Jones’s mind, were fixed and unchangeable, like the sun in the heavens, and any 169 “The Race Problem,” The Houston Daily Post (Houston, TX), July 29, 1899; “Bloody Scenes in the Southland,” The Richmond Planet (Richmond, VA), July 29, 1899. 187 attempts to distort these natural or God-ordained hierarchies would surely result in the destruction of society.188 On January 17, 1968, the New York Times published an obituary for “Bob” Jones, who had died the day before. The article emphasized his “dramatic, homespun delivery of the old-time gospel” as well as his legacy as an educator, who “ran his school with an iron hand, making no compromise with what he called modernists.” The obituary also emphasized his political career and observed that “Dr. Jones . . . moved into politics to get his ideas across.”1 While the New York Times was content to describe Jones as politically atavistic and bigoted, Jones’s politics were more complex than they would appear at first glance. The evangelist-turned-educator was described as a “reformer” in his early career, and like his predecessor Sam Jones, supported reforms that were part of the Progressive Movement’s agenda, like Prohibition, civic and municipal reform, and Sabbatarianism.2 Progressivism, especially in the South, was no friend to radicalism, however, and Jones was a staunch opponent of political radicalism and theological modernism. From the beginning of his career in the early 1900s to his death in 1968, Jones lived by this motto: “Do right if the stars fall out of their silver sockets.”3 He believed that “the only men in this world who are playing a winning game are the men who are doing right,” and he was uncompromisingly committed to “do right or do nothing.” 4 Jones brought Southern 1 “Dr. Bob Jones, Evangelist, Dies; Founder of University Was 84,” The New York Times (New York, NY), January 17, 1968. 2 “Reformer in Scranton,” The Wilkes-Barrie Semi-Weekly Record (Wilkes-Barre, PA), January 14, 1913. 3 “Shells From Bob’s Battery,” The Times Recorder (Zanesville, OH), March 7, 1917. 4 “Religion is Reliance,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), August 18, 1925; “Materialists Hit At Summit Camp,” The Wilmington Morning News (Wilmington, DE), August 6, 1941. CHAPTER V: DEFENDING “PROTESTANT CIVILIZATION”: BOB JONES AND THE REBIRTH OF PROGRESSIVISM 189 Progressivism into the twentieth century and ensured that its goals and aspirations would shape a new – or perhaps reborn – movement for reform in the post-World War II United States. Like his predecessor Sam Jones, Bob Jones was an advocate for civic and municipal reform. Despite the fact that the success of his career depended on cities and towns, Bob Jones was a strident critic of urban life. As a native of rural southeastern Alabama, Jones lamented a perceived loss of so-called “country” morals. In The Search for Order, historian Robert Wiebe contends that as the “society of island communities” was replaced by new forms of community in the late nineteenth century, many Americans in towns and cities “fought . . . to preserve the society that had given their lives meaning.”5 A key component of the reaction to the “community crisis,” he argues, was “a preoccupation with purity.”6 Jones’s attacks on urban living illustrate this concern with public morality. He argued that the growing connections between city and country, a result of “picture shows, automobiles, paved roads, and modern travel,” resulted in the moral decline of rural communities. Jones believed that because of the close ties between urban and rural communities, there were no longer “any more country folks in America.” Cities’ role in shaping the nation was especially troubling to Jones, since, he argued, “there isn’t really a Christian city in America.” Jones lamented that “the elements which dominate our cities” – according to Jones, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and opponents of Prohibition -- “are not the Christian elements.” Hoping to reverse the decline of cities and the nation into “decay and ruin” because of immorality, the evangelist crusaded against the sins of the city. 7 5 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 45. 6 Wiebe, The Search for Order, 56. 7 “Bob Jones Raps Wicked City Life and Candidacy of Gov. Al Smith,” Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, Washington), November 1927. 190 Like other critics of urban life, Jones recognized that cities provided an escape from the social and cultural norms of rural America. Historian William Cronon, observing this “long-standing rural anxiety about the dangers and corruptions of urban life,” contends that “what really worried” rural and small-town Americans “was their perception that the city acted as a magnet for sin.”8 Cities, by providing easy access to theaters, dancing halls, drinking establishments, and other forms of entertainment, created a new moral landscape that threatened to unravel the nation’s moral fiber. Jones castigated city-dwellers for their embrace of dancing and theaters and for their seeming disregard for Prohibition. Dance halls, which Jones asserted were places “where whites and negroes commingle,” were also associated with fears of racial mixing.9 Because of New Yorkers’ fondness for drinking and dancing, Jones believed that “the only difference between Manhattan and hell is that Manhattan is surrounded by water.”10 Jones also believed that cities had been taken over by immigrants. In his sermons, he painted a picture of an America swamped by polluting waves of foreigners; he raged that “New York City is no longer an American city but is in the grip of foreign elements” and that “only 20% of Chicago’s population is native born.” Because of Chicago’s immigrant population, Jones believed that “Chicago is sunk in sin beyond the power to imagine.”11 Immigrants, who failed to obey Prohibition and respect the Protestant Sunday, were responsible, according to Jones, for the decline of America and its cities. Ultimately, however, Jones laid much of the blame for the 8 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 357. 9 “Smith Overcoming Alabama Enemies,” The New York Times, October 7, 1928. 10 “Evangelist Finds Dance Luring New York to Hell,” The Washington Times (Washington, DC), July 24, 1914; “New York Dancing on Brink of Hell,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), July 24, 1914; “Says New York is Dancing on the Brink of Hell,” The Day Book (Chicago, IL), July 24, 1914; “Prefers Hades to New York,” The Eagle (Bryan, TX), August 4, 1914 11 “Bob Jones Raps Wicked City Life and Candidacy of Gov. Al Smith,” Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, WA), November 1927. 191 supposedly vice-ridden cities at the feet of politicians. In his mind, heaven would be a place “where you don’t have to beg a mayor or a city commission to do what God wants done.” 12 In 1913, Jones joined a “clean-up crusade” in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “to suppress violations of the law” and led a four-week-long campaign in January.13 One editorial in the Scranton Times compared Jones to Jesus Christ, “the most radical religious reformer the world every knew.” The paper (with a somewhat mixed metaphor) forecast that Jones, like “Hercules and the river Alpheus” of Greek mythology would help to cleanse “the modern Sodom and Gomorrah.”14 In the first days of his campaign, Jones declared that he found affairs to be “pretty rotten” in the Electric City, as “saloons and cabaret shows stay open until 3 o’clock in the morning,” in violation of a county ordinance that required such establishments to close at midnight.15 On the evening of January 10, Jones went on a tour of Scranton’s underbelly, participating in a common ritual of Progressive reformers - the “slumming tour.” Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the “slumming tour” (also known as a “muckraking trip”), defined by the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1891 as “going through the parts of a large city where the wretched, the sinful and the destitute live,” became something of a fad among reformers and socialites.16 Jones first visited the New Westminster Hotel, which boasted 12 “Bob Jones Revival Closes with Sermon Sunday Night,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 20, 1921. 13 “‘Bob’ Jones Joins Clean-Up Crusade,” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 10, 1913. 14 “Kicking ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Scranton Times (Scranton, PA), January 13, 1913. 15 “Reformer in Scranton,” The Wilkes-Barre Record (Wilkes-Barre, PA), January 10, 1913. 16 Ruth Ashmore, “What You Want to Know,” Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1891, 16; “Clash at Board Trial,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), March 21, 1911; “People of the Day,” The Logansport Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, IN), May 11, 1896; “Mrs. Nation in Cincy,” The Princeton Clarion-Ledger (Princeton, IN), March 28, 1901. 192 a cabaret show in the evenings, and described it to be “the first station on the road to hell,” before touring a smattering of mostly empty hotels, dive bars, and gambling houses. Even though, as one ne’er-do-well remarked, “the town [was] pretty tight because of the crusade,” Jones was still appalled by the vice of the city. After the conclusion of his sight-seeing, Jones declared Scranton to be “the rottenest city I ever saw.”17 Jones took another “slumming tour” later that same week. He found that “some places in Scranton are miniature hells,” especially those cabarets and dance halls “where girls from fourteen years up are allowed and even invited to attend dances, given all the whiskey they want and become so incited and morally hardened that they sit anywhere, even in men’s laps, between dances.”18 Indeed, Jones believed that Scranton’s “dancing places are hotbeds of sin.”19 In advance of a service for men alone, Jones warned that he would share “unknown facts concerning prominent men and places in Scranton.” Robert Wilson, a local detective, was also scheduled to speak. Jones specifically invited the mayor of Scranton to this service, noting that “much of the blame of the immoral conditions in this city is laid at your door.”20 At the meeting, held on January 19, Jones told of a hotel owner who defrauded customers, trafficked opium, and contributed to girls being “ruined.” He then launched into a sermon titled “The Sins of Men,” in which he condemned dancing, gambling, and drinking.21 Detective Wilson declared Scranton to 17 “‘Bob’ Jones Sees Some Sights and Says It’s ‘Rotten,’” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 11, 1913; The Cahn-Leighton Official Theatrical Guide, volume XVII (New York: Julius Cahn and R. Victor Leighton, 1912), 583. 18“‘Bob’ Jones on Another Trip,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 15, 1913; “‘Bob’ Jones on ‘Paths to Hell,’” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 16, 1913. 19 “Clergymen Talk to Interested Audiences,” The Scranton Times (Scranton, PA0, January 15, 1913. 20 “Something Warm, Says ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 18, 1913; “Invites Mayor to Big Meeting,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 17, 1913. 21 “Thousands Hear ‘Bob’ Jones on the Sins of Men,” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 20, 1913. 193 “be badly in need of reform,” and the eight thousand men in attendance pledged to make Scranton “the cleanest city in the world.”22 Illustration 3.“‘Bob’ Jones at the West Scranton Revival,” The Tribune (Scranton, PA), January 10, 1913 Jones’s crusade against vice was ostensibly effective. Jones shocked audiences on January 16 by declaring that there had been an attempt to bribe him to “quiet down his attacks on vice in this city.” Of course, Jones turned down the “wad of cash.”23 On January 20, the evangelist received an anonymous death threat, which warned Jones to leave town or suffer the consequences. Jones met this threat with bravado, claiming that it was probably a hoax, but that he was “too old a cat to be played with by a kitten.”24 When Jones closed his campaign on January 29, which boasted more than twenty-four hundred conversions (nine hundred of which 22 “Eight Thousand Men Respond to Appeal for a Cleaner City,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 20, 1913. 23 “Solemn Service by ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 17, 1913. 24 “Threat Letter Received by Evangelist ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Citizen (Honesdale, PA), January 24, 1913; “Regards Letter as a Poor Joke,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 21, 1913. 194 joined local churches), he explained that while his “main work” was “to get people saved,” he was glad to aid “the reform of social conditions.”25 The Scranton Truth credited his success to “his unmerciful flaying of commercialized vice.”26 As a consequence of Jones’s campaign, Scranton was declared to be “undergoing a reform wave,” as more than twenty proprietors and customers of “gambling dens” were brought before a grand jury to testify about their activities.27 While Jones was a relentless enemy of urban vice, he became most well-known for his support of Prohibition, particularly in his home state of Alabama. The surprisingly rapid success of Prohibition through local option in Alabama was attributed to the efforts of “church people throughout the rural districts and in the smaller towns.”28 “Dry” counties quickly multiplied. In July 1907, twenty-one of the sixty-seven counties of Alabama were dry. By November, forty-five counties had voted for Prohibition.29 Protestant preachers, ministers, lay people, and evangelists were influential in the success of Prohibition in Alabama. Local option provided opportunities for churches and temperance organizations to use religious fervor among rural communities and small towns to accomplish reform. Bob Jones, as an evangelist, was uniquely situated to spread the gospel according to Prohibition.30 In July 1907, the Montgomery Advertiser observed that “in the past few weeks Mr. Jones has been instrumental in the closing of dispensaries in one or two places in East 25 “‘Bob’ Jones Closes Campaign Tonight,” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 29, 1913; “‘Bob’ Jones Talks to Great Throng,” The Tribune-Republican (Scranton, PA), January 28, 1913. 26 “Jones Reviews His Work Here,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 29, 1913. 27 “Undergoing Reform Wave,” The Wilkes-Barre Record (Wilkes-Barre, PA), January 11, 1913. 28 “Temperance Sentiment,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), March 17, 1907 29 James Benson Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 1702 to 1943 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 114. 30 “Bob Jones Starts Movement to Bar Whiskey from City,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 7, 1907. 195 Alabama.”31 After Jones held a “most successful revival” in Camden, in Wilcox County, “four fifths of an immense audience of men” at a men-only meeting conducted by Jones on July 8, 1907, petitioned the mayor and the town council to close the dispensary.32 Camden abolished its dispensary, and Wilcox County went dry in October 1907. In Dothan in Houston County, Jones persuaded city officials to close the town’s dispensary. Jones argued that the city officials responsible for the continued operation of the dispensary were “responsible for . . . many of these drunkards around town who go home and beat their good wives and innocent children.” City officials voted unanimously to close the dispensary.33 The citizens of Dothan then called a mass meeting to discuss petitioning the probate judge to hold a referendum “to put whiskey out the county” altogether.34 After Jones led a revival campaign in Fort Deposit, in Lowndes County, voters in the county held a referendum to determine whether the county would be wet or dry. 35 Jones had also campaigned for Prohibition in Haynesville, the county seat, on September 25, 1907.36 Apparently, the loss of revenue from the dispensary was a major challenge to Prohibition in the town. Jones persuaded the city council of Fort Deposit to close the dispensary by demonstrating how the city could liquidate its indebtedness without the dispensary.37 Voters in Lowndes 31“Mr. Jones in Dallas,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 16, 1907. 32 “To Abolish Dispensary,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 9, 1907 33 “Remarkable Story of Bob Jones’ Life,” Tribune (Denver, IN), January 29, 1914; R.K. Johnson, Builder of Bridges (Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord Publishing, 1969), 47. 34 “Rev. Bob Jones Works Big Wonders Among the Townfolk of Dothan, Ala.,” The Pensacola Journal (Pensacola, FL), June 27, 1907. 35 “Mr. Jones Leaves Elba,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 25, 1907. 36 “Prohibition in Lowndes,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 24, 1907. 37 “Bob Jones Speaks,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 26, 1907 196 County next petitioned the probate judge to hold a referendum on Prohibition. Some citizens voiced a concern that the county had a debt of several thousand dollars on the liquor in stock at the dispensary. A local farmer offered to pay off the debt, insisting that he would not “let a few thousand dollars damn the children of this county.”38 With this problem resolved, the county voted to become dry on October 10, 1907.39 Bob Jones arrived in Montgomery on September 29, 1907, to begin a two-week long revival campaign. When Jones began his revival, it was anticipated that he would provoke a movement for Prohibition in Montgomery. The Montgomery Advertiser observed that Jones had “started a strong Prohibition sentiment wherever he has preached,” that Dothan and Camden had abolished their dispensaries as a result of Jones’ meetings, and that he had “crippled the saloons and dispensaries in other towns to such an extent that elections for their abolishment have been called or are about to be called.”40 Jones’s revival was expected to spark a movement towards Prohibition in Montgomery.41 On Wednesday, October 2, 1907, the fourth day of the revival, Jones preached one of his most frequently used sermons, “The Prodigal Son.” In this sermon, Jones challenged the citizens of Montgomery to look at their town. He argued that “some men can’t even see their own towns.”42 Jones warned that Prohibition was a “crisis that will soon come to this city,” and if Montgomery refused to join the rest of Alabama in voting for Prohibition, “all the riff-raff and 38 Bob Jones, Jr., Cornbread and Caviar: Reminiscences and Reflections (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1985), 9. 39 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 119. 40 “Bob Jones Here,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 29, 1907. 41 “Jones Is Not Sensational,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 30, 1907. 42 Bob Jones, Sr., “The Prodigal Son,” Bob Jones’ Sermons (Montgomery, AL: Paragon Press, 1907), 97. 197 undesirable citizens of the surrounding towns and States will flock to Montgomery to carry on their business.”43 As the second week of the revival begin, Jones began to campaign for Prohibition in earnest. At an afternoon meeting on Sunday, October 6, he advocated for Prohibition. The meeting, which “resembled in many respects a political rally rather than a religious meeting,” was for men only. Jones discussed “four striking sins of men”: profanity, gambling, drinking liquor, and adultery. Jones particularly emphasized “the evils of drink.” He condemned the saloons, where “the minds of men are corrupted,” where “one finds pictures he dare not take to his home,” and where “one finds the man who uses vile language and tells vulgar stories.” In the consumption of liquor and the social customs that surrounded drinking, Jones found an intersection of the dangers facing Montgomery. Saloons were places where men could gamble, use language deemed inappropriate by the Victorian South, entertain (and perhaps fulfill) sexual fantasies repressed by society, and imbibe alcohol.44 As Ted Ownby suggests in Subduing Satan, the campaign for Prohibition was “an attempt to reform male culture itself,” a criticism of one form of masculinity in favor of a masculinity constructed by the ideals of evangelicalism.45 Jones not only attacked liquor as a threat to Victorian values, but, like Sam Jones before him, he also co-opted white men’s fear of African Americans to demonstrate the need for Prohibition. Racial radicals created a nightmarish distortion of African Americans, which emphasized the alleged bestiality of black men who, freed from the confines of slavery and 43 “Rev. Bob Jones Scores Men and Women of City,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 3, 1907. 44 Eric Burns, The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), 150. 45 Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan; Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 170. 198 embolden by liquor, regressed to atavistic, animalistic savages.46 Alcohol became associated with the idea of the “black beast.” B.F. Riley, a Baptist from Alabama, summarized white fears about African Americans and alcohol, warning that “inflamed by cheap liquor . . .the Negro is more easily manipulated against the white race.”47 Racial fears were a valuable tool for supporters of Prohibition. W.B. Crumpton of the Anti-Saloon League of Alabama, recognized the usefulness of a racialized argument for Prohibition, observing that it “hit the liquorites like a cyclone.”48 Jones himself argued that liquor served as “food for [black southerners’] depravity.” He appealed to white men’s concern for the safety and sexual purity of white women by suggesting that until the saloons were closed, the South could not “feel a reasonable safety in leaving its women in unprotected positions.”49 By the end of the meeting on the afternoon of October 6, Jones had begun a movement for Prohibition in Montgomery, as he led thirteen hundred men in signing a pledge to “do all in my power to put whisky out of Montgomery.” At the following meeting, on the evening of October 6, Jones announced that the campaign for Prohibition was on in Montgomery County. The choir celebrated his declaration with refrains of “Montgomery’s going dry. Montgomery’s going dry.”50 On Monday, October 7, 1907, clergymen and laymen formed a temporary organization to conduct the campaign for Prohibition and agreed to hold a rally on the following 46 Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 79. 47B. F. Riley, The White Man’s Burden. A Discussion of the Interracial Question with Special Reference to the Responsibility of the White Race to the Negro Problem (Birmingham, AL: B.F. Riley [c. 1910]), 19 48 Riley, The White Man’s Burden, 19. 49 “Bob Jones Starts Movement to Bar Whiskey from City,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 7, 1907. 50 “Bob Jones Starts Movement to Bar Whiskey from City,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 7, 1907. 199 Thursday. On Tuesday, petitions began to be circulated asking Probate Judge J.B. Gaston to call an election in Montgomery County on the question of Prohibition.51 On Thursday, October 10, Jones, joined by Brooks Lawrence of the Anti-Saloon League and G.G. Miles, chairman of the Prohibition Campaign Committee, led a Prohibition rally. The evangelist portrayed the fight for Prohibition as a struggle between the “whisky element” - brewers, saloonkeepers, and prostitutes - and every “true” Christian. Jones concluded his remarks by condemning the political influenceexerted by the “whiskey element.” Over fifteen hundred men attended the rally, and a collection of $1,660.50 was taken up. 52 At the end of 1907, most counties in Alabama had approved Prohibition measures. By November 12, W.B. Crumpton was able to claim in a flyer passed out to legislators that only three counties – Winston, Mobile, and Baldwin – remained wet.53 Supporters of Prohibition saw statewide Prohibition as the next step in the fight against liquor. At the end of September, letters were sent to all legislators asking them if they would “vote for a State Prohibition law if one is presented at the extra session of the Legislature.”54 When Comer called an extra session on October 9, Prohibitionists saw in the extra session an opportunity to make Alabama dry.55 Statewide Prohibition was especially appealing to those from majority-wet counties. While Prohibition was difficult to achieve there if it was to be determined by local option, public sentiment in general throughout Alabama seemed to be in favor of Prohibition. These attitudes 51 “Petitions for An Election,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 9, 1907. 52 “Fund for Prohibition Fight Raised at Last Night’s Rally,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 11, 1907. 53 W.B. Crumpton, “Prohibition in Alabama After Jan. 1, 1908.” November 12, 1907, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, AL. https://cdm17217.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/voices/id/2007. 54 “Statewide Prohibition,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 25, 1907. 55 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 119. 200 motivated Prohibitionists in Mobile to petition Governor Comer to include a Prohibition bill in his agenda for the extra session.56 The Alabama Anti-Saloon League adopted resolutions in favor of constitutional Prohibition on October 4 and decided to lobby the Legislature to put the amendment to a popular vote.57 Governor Comer resisted the consideration of a state Prohibition law, since some counties had “not yet had the opportunity of calling a local option election.”58 Ignoring Comer’s position on Prohibition, Representative Eugene Ballard from Autauga County, the chairman of the House Temperance Committee, announced his intent to introduce a statewide Prohibition bill with the support of the influential Alabama Anti-Saloon League.59 Prohibition was the foremost concern of legislators who arrived early to the extra session. On the first day of the session, Speaker A.H. Carmichael from Tuscumbia introduced a Prohibition bill. The House committee on temperance reported the bill favorably, and on November 13, the House passed the Carmichael Statutory Prohibition Bill by a vote of sixty-six to twenty-five. The Senate passed the Carmichael bill on November 19, after amending the bill so that it would take effect on December 31, 1908.60 Bob Jones, recovered from a bout of tuberculosis that had forced him to take a temporary hiatus from the campaign for Prohibition, took an active role in the extra session.61 Jones gave the opening prayer for the Senate on November 19, the same day that body passed the Carmichael Statutory Prohibition bill. The bill’s passage was surrounded with Prohibitionist 56 “Prohibitionists in Mobile.” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 29, 1907. 57 “May Exclude Liquor,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 5, 1907. 58 “Will Not Aid Prohibition,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 1, 1907. 59 “First Bill Prohibition,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 30, 1907. 60 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 120-121. 61 “Personal and General Notes,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 16, 1907. 201 pageantry. A “great crowd of Prohibitionists” filled the Alabama Senate chamber, composed mainly of women, children, and ministers. Visitors to the Senate cheered and waved handkerchiefs, and supporters of Prohibition wore white badges printed with the words “Statutory Prohibition for ALL Alabama.” After the bill passed, women at the capitol sang the doxology and a Prohibitionist hymn, “Alabama’s Going Dry” (set to the tune of “Bringing in the Sheaves”). Supporters of Prohibition gave flowers and words of praise to senators who had supported the bill.62 By leading the Senate in prayer, Jones provided symbolic leadership for a movement that had been defined by and associated with popular religious and moral beliefs. The success of statewide Prohibition in Alabama was short-lived. Encouraged by their success at lobbying for the passage of the Lovelady bill, the Moody bill, and the Carmichael bill, in 1908 the Anti-Saloon League began to campaign for the passage of a prohibition amendment to the Alabama constitution.63 The Prohibition amendment was overwhelmingly defeated in 1909. As the Progressive coalition led by Comer began to break down as the goals of individual interest groups were achieved, “the advent of alcohol as an issue simply dissolved Progressivism.”64 Those opposed to the Prohibition movement were able to mount a successful campaign to defeat the amendment. “Home protection” – a favorite argument of Prohibitionists – was co-opted by anti-Prohibitionists to persuade voters. If the amendment was passed, anti-Prohibitionists warned, constables would be able to enter homes of private citizens to search for liquor.65 62 “No Whiskey to Be Sold in Alabama After Jan. 1, 1908,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 20, 1907. 63 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 128. 64 Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 316. 65 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 144; “Alabama Voters Rebuke Comer and His Scheme,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 30, 1909 202 A letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser helps to explain the about-face in public opinion of Prohibition. The writer of the letter, using the pseudonym “Old Citizen,” observed that “Prohibition in a city was an evil” and remarked that “the wisest and best men clung to the idea that local option was the only proper solution.” He explained that statutory Prohibition had only succeeded because of “organized agitation,” which went as far as to “pet lovely woman . . . to stand around the polls, button-hole men, and invade legislative halls.” The writer concluded that “state-wide Prohibition was thus forced upon the state in a movement of hysteria.”66 Opponents of constitutional Prohibition argued that statutory Prohibition was ineffective, and that the public had been manipulated into supporting statutory Prohibition by proponents of Prohibition.67 Governor Comer and his allies were personally attacked for their support of the Prohibition amendment. In a debate held in Autaugaville in 1909, Leon McCord, the organizer and secretary of the Safe and Sane League, one of the major organizations opposing constitutional Prohibition, viciously attacked Comer. He charged that the governor was “overbearing, that he has bankrupted the State, and he is dead politically, and that his constitutional Prohibition policy is breaking up the Democratic party of Alabama.”68 Those opposed to the constitutional amendment were successful in persuading Alabama voters “that the amendment was conceived in politics and brought forth in trades.”69 In the campaign for 66 “Old Citizen,” “Constitutional Prohibition,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 1, 1909. 67 “Opposes Comer’s Plan,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 28, 1909; “Opposed the Amendment,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 16, 1909. 68 “Autaugaville Hears Debate,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 27, 1909. 69 “Early Fight is Surprise,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 6, 1909. 203 constitutional Prohibition, opponents of constitutional Prohibition were able to portray the amendment as being wholly political. Churches and ministers, the agents of grassroots change in earlier campaigns for Prohibition, were criticized for being overtly political. Hilary A. Herbert, a former Congressman from Alabama and Secretary of the Navy under Grover Cleveland, condemned churches and ministers for attempting to “bring to bear the power of the church as an organization to control the action of individual members.” Herbert warned churches that “free-born Americans will revolt against any church that denies them their rights.”70 Former Congressman Milford W. Howard, a Populist, echoed Herbert, stating “I love preachers, but a number of them have descended from the pulpit to the dirty mire of politics.”71 Opponents of the Prohibition amendment were able to lessen the influence of churches and ministers by questioning the legitimacy of the churches’ political activism. The people of Alabama rejected the Prohibition amendment and Comer’s reform coalition. In November 1910 voters elected Emmet O’Neal, a “wet” who was supported by some parts of Comer’s confederation.72 In his inaugural address, O’Neal attacked the rejected Prohibition amendment, describing it as “offspring of that fatal union of intolerance and bigotry.” The newly elected governor called for “an eternal divorce between the liquor interests and politics” and advocated for a general local option law.73 Representative W.L. Parks of Covington County introduced a local option bill on February 2, which was approved by the 70 “Monstrous, Declares Col. Hilary Herbert,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 17, 1909. 71 The Alabama Christian Advocate, October 21, 1909 72 Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, 316. 73 “Governor Emmet O’Neal Delivers Inaugural Address,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), January 17, 1911. 204 House and Senate. A bill to regulate liquor traffic was introduced by Representative Smith of Montgomery County on February, and this legislation became law on April 6.74 Bob Jones, unsatisfied with a return to local option, was frustrated at this turn of events. He lamented that “the political situation in Alabama couldn’t be worse.” “The church people and Prohibitionists,” Jones observed, “are even more dissatisfied . . . than had been dreamed of.” The evangelist expressed hope that the Prohibitionists would “rally to throw off the burden.”75 Proving the adage that a prophet has honor everywhere but his hometown, even as statewide Prohibition in Alabama failed, Jones became a leading voice for Prohibition in America. By summer 1911, the evangelist had developed a national reputation as an influential figure in the Prohibition movement, as illustrated by the fact that he was invited to go to Montana to participate in the state’s Prohibition campaign. Jones had to decline the invitation, since he was engaged in a revival campaign in Georgia.76 That Jones, an evangelist whose career was mostly confined to the South, would be invited to participate in a Prohibition campaign in Montana certainly speaks to his influence. In Georgia, Jones castigated Governor Joseph Brown for his veto of the Tippins bill, “one of the most drastic Prohibition measures in the history of the state.”77 Jones declared Brown a “liquor governor” and condemned legislators “who did not have manhood enough to stick to the bill.”78 The evangelist attacked saloons, saloonkeepers, and the “whiskey trust” in cities and towns across the United States. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, in January 1913, as a result of the 74 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 163-166. 75 “Declares Political Situation in Alabama Bad,” Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), November 17, 1911 76 “Atlanta News,” Weekly Banner (Athens, GA), May 12, 1911. 77 “Prohibition Bill Most Drastic Yet,” Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC), July 11, 1911. 78 “Rev. ‘Bob’ Jones Scores Governor” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA) August 5, 1912 205 revival led by Jones discussed earlier in the chapter, the men of the city inaugurated a movement to clean up the city, and, as a result, it became “very ‘dry’ in Scranton.”79 Later that year, Macon, Missouri, voted to go dry after Bob Jones held a revival in the town. During this revival campaign, Jones dramatically “stalked into ‘Bob’ Thomas’s saloon, on whisky row, and from the center of the sawdust floor, preached hell and damnation for whiskey sellers. ‘Bob,’ the preacher and ‘Bob,’ the saloon keeper, glared at each other across the bar and a great crowd watched.” This theatricality helped to convince Macon voters to support Prohibition.80 Town after town went “dry” because of Bob Jones’s efforts. Hartford City, Indiana, voters decided to go dry on May 4, 1915, after Jones “made attacks on the saloon” and “forced the church people to call an election.” The Alexandria Time-Tribute attributed the success of Prohibition in Hartford City to Jones’s revival, explaining that “a revival made Hartford City a saloon-less city.”81 In December 1915, Jones held a revival in Martin’s Ferry in eastern Ohio. Prohibitionists in the Buckeye State saw Jones’s revival as “the opening gun of the campaign to make Ohio dry next November.”82 His campaigns for Prohibition were successful in many cases. Jones’s career demonstrates the importance of evangelists – like Sam Jones and Bob Jones – to the success of Prohibition, and the role they played as champions of Progressive reform.By the 1920s, then, Bob Jones had developed a reputation as a religious muckraker, uncovering the sins of municipalities across the United States. In 1921 and 1922, Jones 79 “Midnight Bell is Widely Heard,” Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 13, 1913 80 Closing in on John Barleycorn,” Kansas City Star (Kansas City, MO) December 7, 1913. 81 “‘Wet’ Town Puts Ban on Saloons After 73 Years,” Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, IN), May 5, 1915; “Revival to keep Hartford Dry,” Alexandria Times-Tribune (Elwood, IN), August 21, 1915; “‘Wet’ Town Puts a Ban on the Saloons After 73 Long Years,” The Northern Indianian (Warsaw, IN), May 6, 1915. The vote in favor of Prohibition was 1,629 to 1,528. 82 “Dry Campaign in Ohio,” The Evening Review (East Liverpool, Ohio), November 16, 1916. A similar campaign in Martins Ferry in 1914 was ultimately defeated. The “wet” majority in that election was 146. See “Three Ohio Cities Carried by ‘Wets,’” The Washington Reporter (Washington, DC), December 21, 1914 206 embroiled his own hometown, Montgomery, Alabama, in a political maelstrom involving “blue laws.” Sabbatarianism, while often overlooked, was an important Progressive reform movement. Campaigns for Sunday closing laws are easy to dismiss as puritanical paroxysms caused by, as the always-acerbic H.L. Mencken famously quipped, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.” Mencken, in a column condemning the work of the Lord’s Day Alliance (a Sabbatarian reform group) in Maryland, argued that the crusade for Sunday closing laws was the fruit of an “obscurantist and hateful theology.”83 While this characterization may not be wholly untrue, the reality of the situation was more complex than the pundit’s pen could capture. Sabbatarianism sat squarely at the intersection of a cluster of anxieties that troubled middle-class, white evangelical Protestants in the Progressive Era. Sunday, as historian Wayne E. Fuller observes, “was not just a day of worship” but “also a day of rest, spiritual renewal, andstudy.”84 Sunday, in short, was sacred. Added on top of the already weighty religious significance of Sunday, Sabbath desecration was viewed as a symptom of an array of social ills, including the influx of non-Protestant (and perhaps un-American) immigrants and the connected threat of political radicalism, the crushing impact of industrial capitalism on workers, and generally, the wave of vice that seemed to be sweeping the nation. Bob Jones himself gives testament to the nativist dimension of Sabbatarianism. The evangelist often warned of a conspiracy led by the “motion picture trust,” which, he claimed, was “headed by five Jews,” to “destroy our Sabbath.” Jones admitted that he was afraid of Jewish Americans and, appealing to racist stereotypes of immigrants, declared that “if these foreigners do not like our Sabbath, let 83 H.L. Mencken, “The Struggle to Make Us Holy,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), March 7, 1932. 84 Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America, 27. 207 them pack their boot black and bannana stands and go back home.” He explained that he did not want a “blue Sunday” or a “red [or radical] Sunday” but a “red, white and blue Sunday.” Jones linked Sabbatarianism to nativism and patriotism, exclaiming that “no man is a friend of America who is opposed to the Sabbath.”85 P.Y. Schelley, the Field Secretary of the Lord’s Day Alliance of Pennsylvania, blamed the “lack of Sunday observance” for the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and “German culture” (and the outbreak of the Great War) and insisted that “foreigners” had come “with the purpose of overthrowing our government.”86 Martin D. Kneeland, the General Secretary of the Lord’s Day League of New England, made this connection between Sabbath desecration and political radicalism even more explicit when he argued that “a failure to enforce the law” and punish Sabbath-breaking breeds “Bolshevism and demoralization” and “hoodlumism and lawlessness.”87 Beyond the nativist fears of reformers like Jones, concerns about the influence of unrestrained capitalist greed and its impact on workers fueled campaigns for a “blue Sunday.” Therefore, organized labor was, at times, an ally to Sunday closing laws. The Labor Champion of Topeka, Kansas, declared in 1904 that “organized labor believes in Sunday closing.”88 In Knoxville, in 1901, the Central Labor Union called on “each and everybody of organized labor, and all true friends of organized labor,” to boycott barbershops that stayed open on Sundays, and in Chicago in the 1890s, labor and Protestant Sabbatarians formed an alliance to advocate for 85 “Bob Jones Flays American Sabbath Breaking and Booze Buying Church Members,” The Owensboro Inquirer (Owensboro, KY), March 10, 1926; “Bob Jones Delivers Two Great Sermons,” The Marshall Morning News (Marshall, TX), March 19, 1924. 86 “Blue Law Friends Point to Russia,” The Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia, PA), March 22, 1921. 87 Martin D. Kneeland, “Unfair Newspaper Criticisms,” The Defender XXIV, nos. 4-5 (July-August-September 1919): 13. 88 “The Unions and the Sunday Closing Laws,” The Labor Champion (Topeka, KS), June 3, 1904. 208 Sunday to be a day of rest.89 Even though Sabbatarians targeted amusements on Sunday, or, as Daniel T. Rodgers notes, “the workingman’s one weekly holiday,” and, in that light, may be considered to be part of a middle-class effort to restrain working-class Americans, Sabbatarians and organized labor could agree that the concerns of commercialized and industrialized America threatened a shared desire to have a Sunday of rest and re-creation.90 Lord’s Day reformers argued that “those who want to make money out of the ‘working class,’” rather than the working-class Americans themselves, were the ones who demanded that movie theaters be allowed to stay open and characterized that the “open-on-Sunday Commercialized Moving Picture House” was an example of commercialism gone amuck, as “commercialism runs all through this evil.”91 Failing to “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” could also have grave social consequences. This argument was starkly made by the Reverend John Quincy Adams Henry, an evangelist and temperance reformer, who, in his eulogy, was described as “a field marshal of reform.”92 Henry warned that “without a right recognition of this day [Sunday] and of the God who is its author . . .there will be engendered no real respect of man for man.” Children who learned to disobey the Fourth Commandment (to remember the Sabbath day) from parents would forget the Fifth Commandment and disobey their parents, and since “society is an aggregation of 89 “Barber Shops,” The Knoxville Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), February 8, 1901; William A. Mirola, “Shorter Hours and the Protestant Sabbath: Religious Framing and Movement Alliances in Late-Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Social Science History 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 395-433. 90 Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 107. See also Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 91 “Is the Sabbath Doomed?,” The Defender XXIV, no. 3 (May-June-July 1919):25; “EXTRACT From Report of Committee on Moral and Social Welfare, at Massachusetts Congregational State Conference,” The Defender XXIV, nos. 4-5 (July-August-September, 1919): 13 92 “Eulogy for Rev. J.Q.A. Henry,” 1920. The Bill Henry Collection, The Occidental College Library, Los Angeles, CA. https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/c8513x7v/?brand=oac4. 209 families,” failing to preserve the “American Sabbath” would result in the “subversion of social order.”93 As historian William A. Link summarized this argument, “Social disintegration followed nonobservance.”94 Even though the zenith of the Sabbath crusade was in the decades before the Great War, Evangelical Protestants – particularly those of a more fundamentalist bent – continued to protest what they believed were violations of the Sabbath. Immigration (especially from majority-Catholic European nations), urbanization, the evolving nature of work in America, the development of new technology (particularly motion pictures), and the growth of the middle class all challenged traditional Protestant Sabbath observance and caused a backlash from Evangelical leaders and their followers. After an aggressive campaign targeting “Sunday amusements” was launched by the International Reform Bureau and the Lord’s Day Alliance, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI) and the Motion Picture Owners of the United States (representing the film industry on the East Coast as a whole) mobilized in December 1920 at a meeting in New York to respond to this threat to their industry; representatives from more than a dozen industry associations based in California would follow suit four months later at a meeting in Los Angeles in March 1921. This response from the film industry alarmed “blue law” crusaders, especially after the outspoken president of the NAMPI, William A. Brady, declared that “if these slanderers, Jew baiters, and Catholic haters are not silenced we proposed to fight to a finish with no quarter.”95 He followed up these comments by 93 “The Holy Sabbath,” The Maryville Times (Maryville, TN), May 14, 1890. 94 William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 54. 95 Karl E. Johnson, “From Sabbath to Weekend: Recreation, Sabbatarianism, and the Emergence of the Weekend,” (Ph.D. Diss., Cornell University, January 2011); Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 99-100; “Movie Men to Raise Big Sum for Children,” The Salt Lake Telegram (Salt Lake City, UT), December 14, 1920; “Film Firms to Fight the ‘Blue Laws,’” The El Paso Herald (El 210 deriding the crusade as “bigoted fanaticism run riot.”96 To many Americans, the campaign by the film industry evoked earlier resistance to Prohibition led by members of the so-called “liquor trust,” like the United States Brewers’ Association. Newspaper editor and future Nebraska governor Edgar Howard declared that “in their mad rush for quick money . . . the movie trust is going beyond the limit of patience on part of American fathers and mothers, just as the liquor trust before its fall.” He warned that if the “movie trust” did not mend its ways, “a righteous public sentiment” would demand that Congress censor films.97 In the spring of 1921 Bob Jones weighed in on this national controversy over the ways that Americans used Sunday. From a temporary tabernacle constructed on Capitol Hill opposite the Alabama state capitol, he launched a campaign against “Sabbath desecration” that would shape Montgomery’s politics for the next decade. Even before his campaign in May and June of 1921, Jones had been calling for a “drive to restore respect for Sunday” in Montgomery. In August of 1920, he condemned Montgomery’s refusal to close swimming pools and movie theaters on Sundays. Jones warned of “a frivolous and irresponsible generation of young people” that would plague Montgomery unless the citizenry “respected God’s day.”98 Jones’s calls for stricter Sunday laws coincided with Conrad W. Austin’s appointment as the chief of the Law Enforcement Department of Alabama byProgressive governor Thomas E. Kilby. Austin, commonly known as “Connie,” was a chief of police for Birmingham, a deputy sheriff of Jefferson County, and a state fire marshal before he Paso, TX), March 4, 1921; “To War on Censorship,” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), March 1, 1921; “Film Promoters Fight Blue Laws,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), March 22, 1921; “Dr. Carter Scores ‘Blue Law’ Outcry,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, NY), December 15, 1920. 96 “Films to War on Blue Laws,” The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, CA), January 15, 1921. 97 Edgar Howard, “Beyond the Limit,” The Columbus Telegram (Columbus, NE), June 20, 1919. 98 “‘A Fool There Was,’ Subject of Sermon,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 2, 1920. 211 was appointed to head up the state Law Enforcement Department in November 1919.99 The Monday after his appointment, Austin announced that he was going to “clean up” Montgomery.100 The new chief law enforcement officer carried out his new duties with aplomb – in the first week in his new position, Austin raided an illegal saloon, seized seventy-five gallons of whiskey, and busted up a “gambling den” in Troy, ransacked a bar in Montgomery, and by Friday, was himself arrested for firing into an automobile.101 Austin and his “purity squad” conducted raids across Alabama in the winter of 1919 and throughout 1920 and 1921.102 Meanwhile, in Montgomery itself, violators of Sunday closing laws faced small fines, but the municipal government declined to implement stricter enforcement.103 On the afternoon of June 12, 1921, Jones preached a sermon titled “You Can’t Get Away With It.” Before his sermon, he called on his audience to “take a stand on the Sunday law question.” Jones distributed cards to the voters, which would place them on record as “petitioning the city commission to abolish Sunday moving pictures, and close swimming pools, on Sunday.” The evangelist called on “Christian men to get some guts” and improve the moral conditions of the city.104 Following Jones’s sermon, “Connie” Austin mounted the platform to 99 “Austin Made Chief of Law Enforcement Body on Saturday,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 16, 1919; “Kilby Empowers Austin to Probe County’s Affairs,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), February 25, 1919. 100 “Liquor Case in Supreme Court,” The Chattanooga News (Chattanooga, TN), November 17, 1919. 101 “Chief Austin Raids 2 Establishments,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 18, 1919; “C.W. Austin Now Under Bond on Assault Charge,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), November 22, 1919. 102 “Austin’s Officers Raid Five Stills,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), February 19, 1920; “Purity Squad Makes Haul Near Columbus,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 11, 1921. 103 “Violators of Sunday ‘Blue Laws’ Pay Small Fines,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), February 28, 1921. 104 “Jones Calls for Stand on Sunday Laws,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 13, 1921. 212 deliver a scathing attack on local officials. In an address that lasted for more than fifty minutes (rather than the allotted fifteen), Austin declared that he wanted to “run the devil out of Montgomery.” He announced that “two-thirds of the hotels in your city are nothing more or less than houses of prostitution and blind tigers.” Austin argued that “the responsibility for the present deplorable condition of the morals of Montgomery lies with your courts, your city commission, and the sheriff of your county.” He alleged that his attempts to clean up Montgomery was “obstructed by [Montgomery’s] local officers in every conceivable way.” Austin had, in effect, declared war on the “rotten” political ring that controlled Montgomery.105 Austin’s incendiary charges were all anyone in Montgomery could talk about on Monday, June 13. The Selma Times-Journal reported that business across the city closed, as people gathered in small groups to discuss Austin’s accusations, and the ministers’ union of Montgomery held a special meeting to declare that “the time had come when the officials should enforce the laws or resign.”106 One of the judges who was accused by Austin of failing to enforce the law dismissed the lawman’s allegations, quipping that “dogs snap at the best of men.”107 On Thursday, June 16, Jones announced that thirty-five hundred voters of Montgomery had signed cards petitioning the city commission to close all public swimming pools and movie theaters on Sundays. Jones believed that this outpouring of popular support would be enough to compel the city commissioners and the mayor to call for stricter enforcement of Sunday laws.108 105 “Officials Blamed for Lawlessness in Capital City,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 13, 1921; “Is Montgomery Rotten?” The Union Springs Herald (Union Springs, AL), June 16, 1921. 106 “Mont’gy Scared By Charges of Chief Austin,” The Selma Times-Journal (Selma, AL), June 14, 1921. 107 George Dickson Teate, “Blue Law Fight is Now On To Finish,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), June 22, 1921 108 “To Request Sunday Closing Without Call of Election,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 17, 1921. 213 Montgomery was “a city divided against itself.” After Jones and three hundred Montgomery citizens delivered the petition requesting that movie theaters and swimming pools be closed on Sundays, Mayor William A. Gunter rebuffed the petition for stricter enforcement of “blue laws,” arguing that it should be left up to the voters, rather than decided by executive fiat. He stated that since he had been elected on a ticket that had opposed stricter “blue laws,” he believed that he would “not be doing his duty” if he acted on the petition. Alarmed by Gunter’s obstructionism, Bob Jones and a dozen of Montgomery’s citizens went over the mayor’s head and lobbied Governor Thomas Kilby to intercede. As a result, Kilby ordered Conrad Austin to close down such scourges of polite, Christian society as “soda fountains, ice cream parlors, bottled drink stands, filling stations, shoeshine parlors” and “delicatessens” that dared to open on Sunday.109 109 George Dickson Teate, “Blue Law Fight is Now On To Finish,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), June 22, 1921; “Clean-Up Drive is Plan for Capital,” The Lafayette Sun (Lafayette, AL), June 22, 1921. 214 Illustration 4. Williams Adams Gunter Mayor Gunter was outraged by this turn of events. He stated that he would “under no circumstances cooperate with State Law Enforcement Officer Conrad W. Austin” and declared that the municipal leaders of Montgomery “bitterly resent Mr. Austin’s unfair statements.” Kilby announced, somewhat noncommittally, that he supported the “enforcement of all laws.” Austin, of course, was jubilant. He remarked that he would close down “garages, filling stations, stores, fruit stands, delicatessens, auto repair shops, auto accessory and equipment shops, soft drink stands, shine stands, cigar stands, and markets” on Sundays and “wage a vigorous campaign in Montgomery against violation of the law in all its forms.”110 110 “Statements of Gunter, Kilby, and Austin Giving Position on Sunday Law Enforcement,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 19, 1921. 215 At the close of his evangelistic crusade, Bob Jones specifically addressed the mayor, William A. Gunter, Jr., the city commissioner, James H. Hardaway, and Chief of Police W.H. Taylor to encourage them to enforce city ordinances regarding “moving picture shows,” which stipulated that if a film was show it must be religious in both its content and music. Jones accused city officials of “allowing the city ordinances to be trampled upon.” He promised that since “Alabama is a Christian state and a Protestant state,” it “will not stand for . . . Sabbath desecration.” Jones threatened Montgomery’s officials with removal from office since “no man can line up with immoral forces and keep a job.” He implored his audience to boycott the movie theaters until they stopped playing movies on Sunday, and almost the entire audience pledged to do so. 111 As the Demopolis Times noted, “The Bob Jones meeting in Montgomery” began “a movement . . . to close up those places that have been in the habit of systematically violating the Sabbath.”112 A week after Jones concluded his campaign in Montgomery, more than three hundred representatives of local churches formed the Protestant Christian Council (PCC) of Montgomery, in order to enforce Sunday laws and outlaw other amusements on Sunday, like baseball, tennis, and golf. Among the assembled divines was future Alabama governor Bibb Graves, who was named the chairman of the law enforcement committee. 113 Emboldened by an outpouring of local support, Austin engaged in an aggressive campaign against “Sabbath desecration.” The chief law enforcement officer overrode the city commissioners and took a swing at Sunday golf and baseball, threatening that those who indulged in baseball or golf on Sunday would be arrested, beginning Sunday, July 10, after the 111 “Bob Jones Revival Closes with Sermon Sunday Night,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 20, 1921. 112 “Sunday Closing in Montgomery,” The Demopolis Times (Demopolis, AL), June 23, 1921. 113 “Organization is Formed to Enforce Sunday Laws,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 27, 1921. 216 Protestant Christian Council’s law enforcement committee gave the Montgomery Country Club and the Woodley Country Club the option to either voluntary end Sunday golf or to “have it stopped.” The Montgomery Country Club, however, maintained that they were within their rights to host Sunday golf, prompting Austin’s threat to arrest golfers. 114 Austin then consulted with Alabama Attorney General Harwell G. Davis who, presumably, rejected his argument, since no golfers were arrested and the issue was dropped.115 As Montgomery was left to deal with the fallout from Austin’s accusations, the law enforcement officer – perhaps because his efforts to outlaw Sunday golf in Montgomery were stymied – moved on to stamp out vice in Mobile by hunting down “wildcat” stills. Austin also invited Bob Jones to come to Mobile to lead a “clean up” movement in the city.116 Austin’s overzealous enforcement of Prohibition in Mobile led to the eventual downfall of his moral crusade. After deputies under Austin’s supervision raided homes without warrants, assaulted the proprietor of a “gambling place,” and, subsequently, were charged with trespass and assault, the chief law enforcement officer of Alabama was dismissed by Governor Kilby on July 26, 1921. The lawman characterized his dismissal as a result of his department’s “disturb[ing] the rich and prominent.”117 114 “Austin Will Not Molest Local Merchants Today,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 3, 1921; “Sunday Baseball in Montgomery Is On Austin’s List,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 9, 1921. 115 “Right of Amusement to Be Investigated,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 7, 1921. 116 “Mobile Leaguers,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 15, 1921; “Mobile Appeals for Bob Jones Revival,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), July 15, 1921. 117“Mobile Grand Jury Indicts Three of Austin’s Deputies,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 9, 1921; “Governor Kilby Fires Law Enforcement Chief,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), July 29, 1921. 217 Even though Austin was discredited, and despite opposition from city officials, Jones and the Protestant Christian Council continued their assault on “Sabbath desecration.” 118 On Sunday, July 31, Jones held a mass meeting at Oak Park in Montgomery to rally support for stricter Sunday closing laws. The evangelist characterized the campaign in Montgomery as the start of a nationwide campaign to stop “any motion picture being shown . . . on Sunday.” Since the efforts to appeal to Montgomery’s city officials had been frustrated, Jones explained that “our only hope for relief lies in the legislature” in order to fix the currently “obsolete and vague” Sunday law. The evangelist emphasized that he and his allies were not in favor of a “blue Sunday” and denied that the Protestant Christian Council was a political organization. He explained the purpose of the PCC by stating that “we are devoted to the enforcement of the laws, and we intend to keep up our fight until the stars fall out of their silver sockets.”119 After his statements on the PCC and its mission, Jones preached a sermon on heaven, “God’s ideal city,” that provides some key insights into the evangelist’s agenda for civic reform. In heaven, the evangelist preached, there would be no “housing shortage.” Water would be abundant, clean, and free flowing. Lighting would be freely available, and the streets would be paved. Here, Jones took a moment to praise the people of Forest Avenue in Montgomery for having their street paved. The evangelist also praised state health officials for their work in 118 As an example of the opposition from city officials, the Protestant Christian Council and Bob Jones were condemned by Walter Burgywn Jones, a circuit court judge for Montgomery County. Walter B. Jones condemned “the fashion . . . to arraign and try men for the alleged serious offenses on the hustings, at mass meeting, in the newspaper and sometimes at ‘semi-religious meetings.’” The judge argued that Austin’s address during Bob Jones’s revival was given at meeting that was “advertised as a religious meeting” but, in actuality, was “largely political.” Walter B. Jones condemned the allegations made by Austin, Bob Jones, and the PCC as “miserable slander.” The PCC responded to the judge’s comments by issuing a statement that it was “deplorable that a learned and upright judge” would “use his sacred office to palliate lawlessness and lawbreakers and unfaithful officials.” See“Judge Walter B. Jones Makes Strong Charge to Grand Jury; Refers to Attacks on City,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 19, 1921; “Concerted Action By Montgomery Ministers in Reply to W.B. Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 25, 1921) 119 “Rev. Bob Jones Addresses Great Crowd at Oak Park Sunday; Urges His Followers to ‘Stand Hitched,’” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 1, 1921. 218 “fighting disease and death.” Finally, in heaven “there will be no officials who do not enforce the laws.” In order to achieve this “ideal city,” Jones urged the people of Montgomery to “lead a life as such as he would expect to live in heaven.”120 Agitation for a “Blue Sunday” was one of the issues that led Governor Kilby to convene the legislature of Alabama for a special session on October 4 to “revise laws relating the observance of Sunday and to regulate the exhibition of motion pictures,” along with more than a dozen other propositions.121 This decision by Kilby was described by Crawford H. Ellis, the president of the Anti-Blue Law League of America, as “the first absolute evidence of the campaign of reformers to bring about state and nation-wide blue Sunday laws.”122 With the special legislative session underway, Montgomery’s Protestant Christian Council’s agitation for stricter Sunday closing laws reached a fever pitch. On October 9, the PCC held a rally at First Baptist Church in Montgomery, which was attended by more than a thousand concerned citizens. The audience listened to James W. Kight, the secretary of the PCC, read Romans 12, which admonishes readers to “be not conformed to this world,” but instead, to “be ye transformed,” and heard a sermon from H.S. Spragins, the pastor of the Court Street Methodist Church. 123 After Spragin’s sermon, A.G. Patterson, the president of the Alabama Public Service Commission, addressed the assembled supporters of the PCC, declaring that “it is not proposed to legislate morals . . . but to demand that all our Christian institutions . . .be respected and 120 “Rev. Bob Jones Addresses Great Crowd at Oak Park Sunday; Urges His Followers to ‘Stand Hitched,’” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 1, 1921. 121 “A Statement from Dr. Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), December 24, 1921; “Kilby Calls for Extra Session of Legislature Oct. 4,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), September 25, 1921. 122 “Says the South Leads in Effort to Pass Blue Laws,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), September 27, 1921. 123 “Strict Sunday Observance Law Demanded by Christian Council,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 10, 1921. James W. Kight was also the secretary of the Montgomery YMCA. See “Y.M.C.A in Montgomery on October 20, 21, 22,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 13, 1922. 219 observed.” The bureaucrat credited Jones’s campaign in Montgomery, as well as a campaign in Albany-Decatur (Patterson’s hometown) from September 4 – September 25, 1921, as having “done much to awaken the public conscience on many moral questions.” After Jones’s campaigns, Patterson noted, both the PCC of Montgomery and a PCC in Albany-Decatur had continued the work begun by the evangelist, and “if necessary, similar organizations will be formed in every city and town in the state.” 124 Representatives from the Montgomery Ministers’ Union and the Federated Men’s Bible Classes of Montgomery pledged their support for the movement, and it was announced that George R. Stuart, Sam Jones’s former evangelistic assistant who, since 1916, had been pastoring the First Baptist Church of Birmingham, would be addressing the Alabama senate in support of the legislation.125 The following Tuesday, representatives from the Montgomery Protestant Christian Council addressed the senate committee on revision of laws. Eugene Ballard, an officer in the Montgomery PCC (who, as an Alabama state representative, had introduced the 1907 bill for statewide Prohibition discussed earlier in the chapter), insisted that he was not advocating for “blue laws,” but he warned the politicians that the “movie trust” was as dangerous as the “liquor trust” had been. Ministers who were part of the delegation pleaded “pleaded for the preservation” of Sunday and warned that there would be dire consequences for the state that “goes against the will of God.” Opponents of the stricter Sunday closing law also addressed the committee, 124 Strict Sunday Observance Law Demanded by Christian Council,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 10, 1921; “A.G. Patterson’s Platform for Congress,” The Decatur Daily (Decatur, AL), June 2, 1930. The Jones campaign in Albany-Decatur resulted in 295 new church memberships (and netted Bob Jones $3362.14). See “Revival Campaign Comes to a Close,” The Albany-Decatur Daily (Albany, AL), September 26, 1921; “Final Report on Jones Meeting is Made Public,” The Albany-Decatur Daily (Albany, AL), October 23, 1921. 125 “Strict Sunday Observance Law Demanded by Christian Council,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 10, 1921; “Kilby Forces and Bloc Faction to Clash in House,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), October 10, 1921; “Dr. Stuart Dies Suddenly,” The Richmond Times Dispatch (Richmond, VA), May 12, 1926. Before his death in 1926, Stuart had been the key force behind Sunday closing laws in Birmingham (“The Sunday Movie Question in Birmingham,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), February 20, 1928). 220 including state senator John Rogers of Sumter, who, after being hissed by the audience, quipped that “geese are the only animals that hiss.” 126 Despite lobbying from supporters of more stringent Sunday law regulations, the Alabama senate voted fourteen to twelve to “indefinitely postpone” discussion of the Sunday closing law.127 Perhaps Alabama’s senators declined to take a clear stance on the position because they recognized that it was a political hot potato. As the Birmingham News suggested, “The fight for and against a closed Sunday will be one of the hottest not only of the forthcoming session, but of a number of such sessions before,” and therefore, would draw the attention of voters.128 Legislators were afraid of a “blue Sunday” and of the political fallout from either supporting or opposing the piece of legislation. 129 Outraged by the legislature’s failure to act, the Montgomery Protestant Christian Council and Bob Jones began to organize “a vigorous political campaign for the election of men to the next legislature who believe in the ‘American Sabbath.’” Jones believed that the Sunday closing bill was sidelined by other legislation, and that its failure was just a temporary setback. He encouraged the Montgomery Protestant Christian Council to help organize the state to protect the 126 “Favorable Report on Ross Beverage Bill Given House,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), October 11, 1921. Ballard, who had lived in nearby Prattville in Autuga County, Alabama, before moving to Montgomery in 1919, was a leading attorney and a prominent Prohibitionist. Additionally, he was the Sunday School superintendent for Montgomery’s First Baptist Church. See “Moves to Montgomery,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), September 26, 1919; “Former Trojan May Be Candidate,” The Troy Messenger (Troy, AL), February 25, 1914; “First Baptist Church Plans for Great Stay-To-Church-Day,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), April 3, 1921. 127 “Sunday Closing Law Lost In Senate Sunday Afternoon,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 25, 1921; “Many Bills Are Expected to Die In Adjournment,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), October 28, 1921. 128 “Sunday Fight in Legislature to Be Most Spirited,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), October 2, 1921. 129 “Sunday Observance Law Not Drastic,” The Selma Times-Journal (Selma, AL), October 17, 1921; The Demopolis Times (Demopolis, AL), November 3, 1921; The Chattahoochee Valley Times (Lanett, AL), November 2, 1921. 221 Sabbath. 130 Support for Jones’s crusade seems to have been wavering, however, as the evangelist and the Protestant Christian Council had to respond to questions about how long the movie theater boycott would continue and requests to release the faithful from their to boycott movie theaters. While the executive committee of the PCC decided in November 1921 to release persons from their pledges, Jones snapped that if individuals wanted to “see Mary Pickford,” that was between them and God, since “you promised God.”131 In 1922, the Protestant Christian Council and other Protestant groups in Montgomery began to mobilize to influence the 1922 Democratic primaries. In January 1922, the PCC elected new officers, including a new president, Walter D. Shepherd, and six women who served as vice presidents of the Council.132 Furthermore, the Montgomery Protestant Ministers’ Association issued a resolution calling on “Christian men and women . . . who are interested in the moral welfare of our community to pay their poll tax and register” to prepare for the upcoming elections.133 The Protestant Ministers’ Association followed up this resolution with a more pointed call to action, which declared that since “certain flagrant evils and vices, which are gross violations of the law, are common in the city and county of Montgomery,” voters should “demand from the candidates . . . a pledge that . . . they will do all in their power to see that the laws are enforced.”134 The Protestant Christian Council also adopted this resolution from the 130 “Campaign on For Selection of Legislature,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), December 5, 1921; “Dr. Bob Jones Makes Appeal for Sun. Closing,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), December 5, 1921. 131“Anti-Movie Pledge Cause of New Debate,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 28, 1921; “Campaign on For Selection of Legislature,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), December 5, 1921; “Dr. Bob Jones Makes Appeal for Sun. Closing,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), December 5, 1921. 132 ‘W.P. Shepherd Heads Christian Council,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), January 23, 1922. 133 “Ministers Urge That All Pay Poll Tax,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), January 24, 1922. 134 “Resolutions Passed Today By Ministers,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), March 27, 1922. 222 Protestant Ministers’ Association but added to it a declaration that “the officers of the law should be . . . required to enforce the laws.” The PCC also announced its intention to lobby for “an intelligible, fair and equitable Sunday law” in order to “prevent the commercialization of the Lord’s day.” The PCC also explicitly encouraged its membership to support those candidates most likely to accomplish its reform agenda and reminded its members – particularly women – to register to vote and to pay their poll taxes.135 Illustration 5.“Postponed,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 7, 1922 As election day approached, the election eclipsed all other concerns, and Jones began to take a more active role in the Protestant Christian Council’s political activities. On May 28, 1922, Jones addressed a meeting of the PCC. The evangelist bashed the Gunter ring and urged 135 “Protestant Christian Council to Seek ‘Equitable’ Sunday Law,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), April 24, 1922. 223 his audience to “find out which candidate the ring is for, and vote for the other man.” He derided “the foreigner who comes over here with a pack on his back, stays a few years, rides around in automobiles, and elects the mayors of our cities.” This statement “was loudly applauded.” Jones expressed his hope that “church people” would purify politics in Montgomery.136 Even though the PCC refused to endorse any candidates, Jones was decidedly less nonpartisan.137 Mayor Gunter and the leaders of the Montgomery Democrat political machine specifically targeted Jones. In a speech to striking railway shop men (who were participating in a national strike of railroad workers), Gunter argued that “Bob Jones is in a business,” and he preached “for pay.” Gunter characterized the evangelist as “the self appointed apostle to clean up an already clean county” and accused him of not only attacking present officeholders but also besmirching the reputations of deceased public officials with “ghoulish glee.” The mayor then recounted a conversation that he had with Jones during his campaign in May and June 1921. According to him, Jones had told Gunter that he was a “big man.” Jones then reportedly alleged that Gunter had “never had the support of the protestant ministers” and offered to bring the ministers into his camp if the mayor would simply agree to close down the movie theaters and swimming pools on Sunday and stop Sunday baseball. Gunter turned down his offer. The politician suggested that Jones had attempted to “buy” him. The mayor argued that Jones’s crusade was personal, motivated by a desire for revenge against “the man who stood in his way of profiteering off of the fair name of our people.”138 136 “Find Out Who Ring Is For, Vote for Other Man, Says Bob Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 29, 1922. 137 “Christians Urged to Examine Characters,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 24, 1922. 138 “Mayor Gunter Vigorous in Assailing Doctor Bob Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 9, 1922. 224 Two weeks before the election on August 8, Jones held a rally at Montgomery’s city auditorium. Before an audience of twelve thousand citizens, he delivered an address on “Good Citizenship.” Jones declared that Montgomery County was controlled by a “ring,” and he again admonished his listeners to exercise their right to vote and use it to “vote out the ‘ring.’” Jones encouraged voters to only select candidates whose “moral lives are beyond reproach.”139 The evangelist intensified his crusade in the days leading up to the election, speaking on the Saturday before the election to an audience at a local high school auditorium and twice on the day before the election.140 On the evening before the election, Jones delivered an address at the Montgomery City Hall in direct competition with Leon McCord, the Judge of the Circuit Court for the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit of Alabama – and an (unopposed) candidate in the upcoming election – who intended to respond to the “vicious and unfounded assaults of Bob Jones” in a speech in the Grand Theatre.141 McCord began his speech by declaring that he intended to “answer the Reverend Doctor Bob Jones, who has slandered the living and the dead of Montgomery.” Before an audience of twenty-three hundred, the judge, despite having just had surgery for appendicitis, announced that he had come to “raise his voice to let this Goliath [Jones] know that he cannot go stalking over the county murdering the characters of living and slandering the memory of the dead.” According to McCord, even though Montgomery had raised $100,000 to “advertise our good community to the world,” Jones “has sent the world word that this is a community of corruption, government by men under the dominion of bootleggers, immoral women, and gamblers.” He 139 “Political Rally Held At City Auditorium,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 26, 1922. 140 “Dr. Bob Jones To Speak Here Twice Monday,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), August 7, 1922. 141 “Judge M’Cord to Answer Doctor Bob Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 7, 1922. 225 defended Montgomery by appealing to the decades of public service provided by men who Jones had claimed were part of the “ring” and his own political record. McCord lambasted Jones and the Protestant Christian Council for allegedly distributing an anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic pamphlet that he believed was intended to be circulated in the county but had been sent out into the city by mistake. Like his ally Gunter, McCord accused Jones of being a venal evangelist. The judge claimed that Jones “owns an apartment house and rides in a limousine.” McCord alleged that Jones made $100,000 “preaching the gospel,” and that he was “drunk on power.”142 Even as McCord railed against Jones, the evangelist spoke to a crowd of about twenty-five hundred men and women. Jones began by addressing the “Anti-Catholic and Anti-Jewish circulars” that had been distributed in Montgomery on Saturday. He denounced the flyers, saying that “any man who says that I or my friends had anything to do with that business is a low-down, degenerate liar.” Jones insisted that he believed that “good feelings should exist between Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic.” The evangelist then went on the offensive, attacking McCord for using his influence in “upholding a political ring,” before arguing that the disagreements between himself and McCord and Mayor Gunter were distractions from “the real issue in Montgomery.” Jones insisted that “the issue . . . is between ring rule and the people of Montgomery who wish good clean government in this city.”143 As election returns began to trickle in on Wednesday morning, it became clear that the “Bob Jones ticket” had not been able to unseat the “Old Guard or ring candidates.”144 Colonel Bibb Graves, a close friend of Jones and the chair of the law enforcement committee of the 142 “McCord and Jones Address Big Crowds Monday Night,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 8, 1922. 143 “McCord and Jones Address Big Crowds Monday Night,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 8, 1922. 144 “Brandon and M’Dowell Are Sweeping State,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 9, 1922. 226 Protestant Christian Council, was defeated soundly by W.W. Brandon in the primary for the Democratic candidate for governor.145 Journalist J. Fred Thornton, who covered the revival for the Montgomery Advertiser in 1922, suggested that if Jones’s revival campaign had been held closer to the election, “the reformers would have done better.”146 Frustrated by the election results, the Protestant Christian Council turned to new allies to accomplish their reform agenda. On December 31, 1923, Jones addressed the organization at their regular meeting at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church. As he began his lecture, the evangelist pulled out a letter from the Montgomery Klan No. 3 Realm of Alabama, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which praised the work being done by the Council. The letter, which included a fifty-dollar donation to the Council, emphasized the Klansmen’s “great interest and strong approval of the work of the Protestant Christian Council.” Jones then read his response, in which he thanked the Klan for supporting “the moral side in every political battle in this country.”147 In September 1923, the Protestant Christian Council reorganized and formed the Protestant Christian League, which permitted all citizens who belonged to Protestant churches in Montgomery to join its ranks.148 The Council took this action after hearing an address from Bob Jones on “Protestantism - Her Perils and Her Duties.”149 The evangelist warned the audience that “Protestantism is losing her power as the great dominant religious force in America” and was “no longer the mighty dominant power she was a few years ago.” Jones painted a grim picture 145 “Vote Counting in Montgomery Is Long Task,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 10, 1922; “Hughes Wins By A Narrow Margin,” Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), August 9, 1922. 146 “Crusading Fervor: Ring Vs. Reformers,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 7, 1958. 147 “Montgomery Klan Gives Council $50,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), January 1, 1923. 148 “New Protestant Combine Formed,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 3, 1923. 149 “To Deliver Address,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 2, 1923. 227 of a conspiracy planned by “the religious which are antagonistic to Protestantism” – namely, Catholics and Jews – “and the foreigners and the underworld” to undermine Protestantism’s political authority. He asserted that cities threatened to overwhelm the influence of Protestantism in rural American. He then held up the struggle for stricter Sunday closing laws in Alabama as an example – in Jones’s opinion, Montgomery and Mobile were responsible for the defeat of the “very reasonable” Sunday law in 1921. He contended that since cities were the future of America “every one hundred percent American ought to line up to save the cities,” starting with “a fight for a genuine Protestant Sabbath.” Jones called on his audience to “wage a new war for the truths of Protestantism” fought through “a battle of education” and “a battle of ballots.” He argued that “Protestantism . . . must emphasize anew an authoritative Bible” and fight against the teaching of evolution. Jones explained that he believed in Protestantism “because Protestantism believes in the public schools of America,” “because Protestantism is the torch bearer of the liberties of men” and “because Protestantism is the fairest and most tolerant religion in the world.”150 Jones’s call for a campaign to save Protestantism was the immediate impetus for the creation of the Protestant Christian League. The editor of the Missouri Valley Independent, the official organ of the Ku Klux Klan of St. Joseph, Missouri, described the new organization as being “made up of real Protestants” and “a sort of half sister to the Klan” – which, as discussed in chapter 5, was also supported by Jones. 151 Jones’s Sabbatarian crusade in Montgomery provided a template for further activism. The evangelist founded Protestant Christian Councils in four states between 1921 and 1922. As 150 “Bob Jones Rallies Protestantism Which He Says Is Losing In Power,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 3, 1923. 151 The Missouri Valley Independent (St. Joseph, MO), September 20, 1923. The Catholic Tribune, on October 21, 1922, referred to the Missouri Valley Independent as the “official organ” of the Ku Klux Klan in St. Joseph. See The Catholic Tribune (St. Joseph, MO), October 21, 1922. 228 mentioned previously, besides the PCC of Montgomery, Jones also founded a Protestant Christian Council in Albany-Decatur, Alabama and directly supported its efforts by dispatching Bibb Graves, his close friend and a leader in the Montgomery PCC, to help refine their strategy.152 In the fall of 1921 in Springfield, Missouri, Jones organized a Protestant Christian Council formed of the leadership of forty area churches, which successfully petitioned the city council to hold a special election on December 27, 1921, at which the citizens of Springfield voted to close movie theaters on Sunday.153 A broadside printed in the Springfield Leader and paid for by “The Picture Shows of Springfield” outlining Jones’s modus operandi, described the evangelist’s strategy – applied in Springfield much as it had in Montgomery - as “the Jones idea.”154 In October 1922, Jones also formed a Protestant Christian Council in El Paso, Texas, which, along with other “patriotic” organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, sought to close the bridge from El Paso to Juarez after midnight.155 In November 1922, after a campaign in St. Petersburg, Florida, Jones established a Protestant Christian Council, which chose as one of its first target Sunday airplane flights in response to a local aviator flying around the revival tabernacle.156 152 “Col. Bibb Graves to Come Here to Aid Organization Church’s Council,” The Albany-Decatur Daily (Albany, AL), September 27, 1921. 153 “Local Churches Did Great Work in City During Past Year,” The Springfield Leader (Springfield, MO), December 31, 1921; “Ruling Made by White in Theater Case,” The Springfield Leader (Springfield, MO), December 16, 1926. 154 The Picture Shows of Springfield, “Blue Sunday – An Appeal to Thoughtful People,” The Springfield Leader (Springfield, MO),December 11, 1921. 155 “Council Won’t Endorse Plan For Early Closing of the Bridge, Protestant Committee is Told,” The El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 27, 1922; “Jones to Talk to Patriotic Societies Tonight,” The El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 2, 1922. The Klan also supported the work of the Protestant Christian Council of Montgomery – in 1923, the Montgomery Klan donated fifty dollars to the organization. See The LaFayette Sun (LaFayette, Alabama), January 4, 1923. 156 “St. Petersburg Raises $5,224 for Bob Jones As Revival Is Closed,” The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), November 21, 1922 229 Jones’s crusade for Sunday closing laws in Montgomery marked the beginning of a long-running conflict between the evangelist and Alabama’s Democratic machine. Jones clashed with Gunter and his allies in the presidential election of 1924, the gubernatorial election of 1926, the Montgomery mayor election of 1927, and the presidential election of 1928. In 1924, Jones sided with Lycurgus Breckenridge Musgrove, the chairman of the executive committee of the national Anti-Saloon League from Jasper, Alabama, against the former United States senator from Alabama, Oscar Underwood, in the Democratic primary in 1924.157 Musgrove, a “life-long Prohibitionist,” entered the race as a “dry” candidate, backed most notably by William Jennings Bryan. The Prohibitionist leader was the national campaign manager for the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, and therefore, received much of the credit for national Prohibition. The Daily Mountain Eagle of Jasper, Alabama, described Musgrove as a “progressive Democrat,” unlike his “wet” opponent, Senator Underwood.158 Jones canvassed the state for Musgrove, employing nativist and anti-Catholic arguments to rally support for the Prohibitionist candidate. In a letter from the evangelist that was widely circulated in Alabama, Jones wrote that “the Roman Catholics and the lawless foreigners” supported Underwood just as they backed “that whiskey Catholic governor” Al Smith. He alleged that Underwood was part of a conspiracy planned by Smith and the “wet forces” to steal Alabama’s electoral votes.159 Despite Jones’s support, Musgrove won a mere 33,966 votes to Underwood’s 58,392. Musgrove, for his part, 157 “Convention Bulletins,” The Albany-Decatur Daily (Albany, AL), June 23, 1924; “Walkerites At The Convention,” The Daily Mountain Eagle (Jasper, Alabama), July 2, 1924. 158 “Musgrove a Candidate,” The Mountain Eagle (Jasper, AL), January 9, 1924. 159 “M’Neill Censures Dry Organization for Its Politics,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), January 28, 1924; “Dr. McNeill Replies to Bob Jones,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), February 7, 1924. Reverend H. H. McNeill of Dothan, Alabama, who was himself a vice-president in the Alabama Anti-Saloon League, condemned Jones for his “religious intolerance, disloyalty to the constitution . . . and ignorance of political history.” McNeill called on Jones to withdraw his letter and insisted Prohibition was “not an issue in this campaign” (“Dr. McNeill Replies to Bob Jones,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), February 7, 1924). 230 accused Underwood’s followers of electoral fraud, since he believed that he had carried the “white counties.”160 Jones spent most of 1926 organizing Bob Jones College in Lynn Haven, Florida, in the Florida Panhandle. The evangelist raised more than five million dollars for what was described as an “interdenominational, orthodox Christian College.”161 Jones also recruited the Board of Trustees for the new college, including his friend, Bibb Graves.162 In August 1926, Graves won the Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama with a plurality of around thirteen thousand votes.163 The governor-designate promised to “clean house” and expand the state’s road building program.164 Even though his focus was primarily on his new school, Jones had supported Graves’s candidacy before the primary. Speaking in Andalusia in August 1925, the evangelist prophesied that “Bibb Graves will be the next governor of Alabama.”165 As part of a sustained campaign against Montgomery’s political machine, Jones attacked the “political ring” and declared that Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed because they were run by a ring. He proclaimed that he was “against any political ring that works against descency [sic].”166 After the election, Jones praised Graves, describing him as “a devout, Godly, consecrated Christian 160 “Sen. Underwood Has A Majority About 25,000,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), March 12, 1924. 161 “Big Student Fund for Bob Jones College,” The Wiregrass Farmer (Headland, AL), April 15, 1926. 162 “Trustee Board For Bob Jones School Formed,” The Pickens County Herald and West Alabamian (Carrollton, AL), May 13, 1926. 163 “Graves Winner In Alabama Vote By About 15,000,” The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), August 13, 1926. 164 “Col. Graves Will First Clean House, Then Build Roads,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), September 14, 1926. 165 “Rev. Bob Jones a Prophet,” Our Southern Home (Livingston, AL), September 29, 1926. 166 “Bob Jones Praises Revivalist Smith,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), October 12, 1925. 231 man.”167 Graves reciprocated Jones’s support, taking an active role in the establishment of Bob Jones College. Two weeks after winning the primary, Graves visited Florida to inspect the grounds of the new college, declaring that he was “very favorably impressed” with Bob Jones College.168 On December 1, after winning the gubernatorial election, Graves was the keynote speaker at the groundbreaking ceremony for Bob Jones College.169 The Alabama Ku Klux Klan was instrumental in Graves’s victory, despite predictions that the Klan’s support of the candidate would ensure his defeat.170 James Esdale, the grand dragon of the state Ku Klux Klan, claimed that the Klan was responsible for Graves’s nomination and declared that “we licked ‘em clean in the election.” 171 The Klan – and not Graves himself – characterized the primary election as a referendum on the presumed candidacy of Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election. In a newspaper published by the Alabama Klan, the secret society urged “every Klansman to go to the polls and vote,” since a vote for Graves was a vote against Al Smith.172 George Lewis Bailes, Graves’s campaign manager, naturally discounted the Klan’s involvement and predicted that Graves would win because the candidate, being the only veteran in the race, had the support of Alabama’s veterans, as well as the backing of labor unions and the women of Alabama.173 The Committee of Ex-Service Men, a veterans’ 167 “What Rev. Bob Jones Says About Governor Graves,” The Progressive Age (Scottsboro, AL), September 16, 1926, Reprinted from the Alabama Christian Advocate. 168 “Col. Bibb Graves Visiting Bob Jones,” The Evergreen Courant (Evergreen, AL), August 25, 1926. 169 “Jones College Is Pledged to Orthodoxy,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), December 1, 1926. 170 “Getting Desperate,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), July 24, 1926 171 “Alabama Klan to Bolt Democrats If Smith Chosen,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), August 14, 1926. 172 “Alabama Klan Rallies to Aid of Bibb Graves,” The Miami News (Miami, FL), August 8, 1926. 173 “Alabama Klan Rallies to Aid of Bibb Graves,” The Miami News (Miami, FL), August 8, 1926. 232 organization in Alabama, also rejected the idea that the Klan was responsible for Graves’s victory and argued that he “could not have been nominated by such a large vote . . . without the veterans of the World War and the ex-service men backing him through thick and thin.”174 Even though his success in the Democratic primary was a reflection of his ability to successfully muster support from a diverse coalition of voters, Graves did have deep ties to the “Invisible Empire.” At least as recently as 1923, Graves had served as a Kleagle within the Montgomery Klan, responsible for recruitment and instructing members on the proper practice of “Klanishness.”175 Three weeks after Graves’s victory in the Democratic primary, the Klan held a rally in Birmingham where three thousand hooded and robed Klansmen marched around downtown Birmingham, from Woodrow Wilson Park (now Charles Linn Park) to the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium on Eighth Avenue.176 This rally, the Fourth Klorero of the Klansmen of the Realm of Alabama, was described as “the dread Invisible Empire at the zenith of its power and glory.” Graves, by now the Exalted Cyclops of the Montgomery Klan, along with future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, were feted by the Klan and given golden Grand Passports, which conferred life membership on the two Klansmen. Both Black and Graves pledged fealty to the Klan, with Graves promising to be “a living exemplar of a white man’s Protestant Christian Americanism.”177 Unsurprisingly, then, the Klan became a key issue in the 1927 mayoral election in Montgomery. Mayor Gunter’s opposition argued that “Montgomery is a city controlled by the 174 “Graves, The Soldier Candidate,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), August 19, 1926. 175 Ray Sprigle, “Black’s Loyalty To Klan Shown in Fervid Pledge,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA), September 15, 1937. 176 “3,000 March in Parade of Klan,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), September 3, 1926. 177 Ray Sprigle, “Black’s Klansman Oath Renewed While He Stood On Threshold of Senate,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA), September 14, 1927. 233 underworld,” while his supporters insisted that “Montgomery is a city composed of respectable law abiding people and it must not come under the domination of the Ku Klux Klan,” according to Atticus Mullin, a columnist for the Montgomery Advertiser. Mullin argued that the campaign truly began when Gunter had refused to allow the Klan to march in Graves’s inauguration campaign. After attempting to convince a number of Montgomery’s businessmen and politicians to run for mayor, Graves succeeded in persuading J. Johnston Moore, the proprietor of a drug store in Montgomery, to become a candidate. The governor then marched Moore down to the offices of the Montgomery Journal and Times to ensure that his candidacy was announced in the afternoon newspaper. Graves also intervened by assigning auditors to investigate Montgomery’s finances.178 Bob Jones also injected himself into the election in favor of Moore – or, perhaps more accurately, in opposition to Gunter. The evangelist was one of the featured speakers at the rally to open Moore’s campaign. Jones argued that “if Johnston Moore is elected mayor, gamblers, prostitutes, and bootleggers will go,” and, “if you want them to stay, elect Bill Gunter.” Yet again he was forced to defend his 1921 revival campaign in Montgomery and insisted that he was not “paid a penny” for the revival.179 Like in his earlier campaigns against vice in Montgomery, Jones accused the “underworld” of controlling Montgomery’s municipal government and, with McCarthy-like flair, claimed to have a list of names of those who 178 “Red Hot Election Campaign To End At Polls Monday,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 11, 1927. 179 “City Auditorium Crowded to Hear Johnston Moore Open Campaign,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), April 29, 1927. 234 conspired to corrupt Montgomery. For his part, Moore asserted that “Montgomery is a city controlled by 200 powerful members of the underworld.”180 Graves’s and Jones’s support of Moore seems to have been a political miscalculation, as it unleashed a storm of criticism against the governor and the evangelist. Indeed, Gunter and his allies mostly ignored Moore and instead focused their assault on Jones and Graves. At a rally on May 6, the mayor savaged Graves and Jones, accusing them both of being Klansmen and “doing the bidding of a secret power.” Gunter proclaimed that “the Governor has prostituted his office to achieve his purpose” and accused Jones of having a personal vendetta against him. At the same rally, Leon McCord, irreverently introduced as the “Father of the Underworld,” condemned Jones for being “an evangelist entirely surrounded by the collection plate.”181 On the eve of the election, the Gunter ring continued to characterize the campaign as a clash “between the forces of intolerance and the forces defending the principles of free government.” At a rally held on May 14, 1927, William Wallace Hill, a Montgomery attorney and state legislator, specifically targeted Jones. He argued that if J. Johnston Moore was elected mayor, “Rev. Bob Jones will be the power . . . because he has said Moore is his candidate.” Gunter spoke following Hill’s address and again attacked Jones’s involvement. He argued that the minister “comes in the garb of sheep, but he is a ravenous wolf.” The mayor also condemned Graves, who he described as “the accident of 1926,” for involving himself in “a conspiracy to besmirch the good name of his home town.” After he finished his remarks, McCord concluded the rally by again lambasting Jones as a “character assassin,” the “foul-mouthed traducer of Montgomery,” and a coward 180 Atticus Mullin, “Capital Sizzles As Mayor’s Race Draws to Climax,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), May 11, 1927. 181 “Four Thousand Montgomerians Hear Gunter Rap Graves At Opening Rally,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 7, 1927. 235 “backing like a scuttlefish” (i.e, a cuttlefish, a relative of squids and octopuses that, like squids, can rapidly propel themselves backwards by expelling water); He also attacked the newly-founded Bob Jones College, characterizing it as “a college on the sand dunes of Florida” established to “teach klanism.” 182 The governor and the mayor were forced to defend their involvement in the election and their accusations of municipal corruption.183 Montgomery Solicitor W.T. Seibels, at the urging of Leon McCord, issued a subpoena on May 16 (the Monday before? the election) summoning Jones to appear before a Montgomery County grand jury, to compel him to prove his charges that “immoral conditions exist in Montgomery.”184 Jones did appear before the grand jury on Wednesday, May 18, but after testifying for thirty-seven minutes and submitting “a batch of papers about two inches thick,” the grand jury investigation resulted in no indictments.185 The evangelist struggled mightily to refute the accusations of Gunter’s faction and to prove his own allegations. Jones attacked Gunter and his supporters for choosing to “prosecute me,” rather than to “argue the merits of the case.” He claimed that, unlike Gunter, McCord, and their “ring,” he was “fighting on the side of the great majority of the ministers of the Gospel and the rank and file of the Christian forces of the state.” Jones pleaded with the citizens of Montgomery not to be distracted by “mud-slinging” but to focus on the real issue – “that commercialized vice goes unmolested in this city.” Like Sam Jones before him, Bob Jones argued that he was an advocate 182 “Over 2,000 Applaud Gunter, Hill and M’Cord at Grand,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 15, 1927. 183 “Governor Graves Defends Entrance in Campaign and Denies Mayor’s Charges,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 15, 1927. 184 “Rev. Bob Jones Is Summoned For Grand Jury Questioning,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 15, 1927. 185 “Bob Jones Quizzed on Vice Conditions in Capital City,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 19, 1927; “The Grand Jury Speaks,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 22, 1927. 236 for women – mothers, “whose sons have been ruined by ‘commercialized vice,’” and wives, who had seen their husbands “wrecked” by gambling and alcohol.186 On May 15, Jones paid to have a lengthy letter placed in the Montgomery Advertiser to respond to the charges of Leon McCord and Bill Gunter. The evangelist condemned Gunter for “descending to such venomous depths as would bring applause from not only a few bootleggers . . . but from the ‘negro voters.’” Furthermore, he accused McCord of being under the influence of the “saloon crowd.” Jones argued that “the reputation of Montgomery in the entire state of Alabama is injured because Bill Gunter is mayor.” He contended that the introduction of the Ku Klux Klan as an issue in the election was a desperate strategy implemented by Gunter to “make ‘em hate each other.” Jones insisted that he did not “hold any religious prejudice in the world,” and that he had never said anything to “stir up religious hatred or which was unfair to either Jew or Catholic.” He asserted that Gunter had raised the Klan issue “because he thinks he can make you Jews and you Catholics hate the Klan so much that you will vote to keep him in office.” Jones also praised the “courageous, clean, fair, manly, Christian Johnston Moore,” who “fought a good fight.”187 Despite their best efforts, Moore’s supporters saw their candidate demolished in the election. Gunter was re-elected, winning 4,278 votes to Moore’s 2,338. During Gunter’s victory parade, McCord argued that they had “dealt a staggering blow to hatred, spite, and bitterness” and “driven the dragon to his lair.”188 Added to this defeat, a Montgomery grand jury found that “there has been no lax enforcement of the laws . . . and the people of Montgomery have neither 186 “A Letter from Rev. Bob Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 13, 1927. 187 “Dr. Jones Answers Charges of Judge M’Cord and Gunter,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 15, 1927. 188 “Governor Graves Given Rebuke by Montgomery Vote,” The Florence Herald (Florence, AL), May 20, 1927. 237 directly nor indirectly countenanced law violation.”189 The evangelist protested that there was abundant evidence of prostitution and Prohibition violation, but Montgomery was “more interested in her good name than in goodness.”190 Jones suffered another setback in August 1927, as he saw yet another Sunday closing law defeated in the Alabama Senate.191 Even as the evangelist struggled to stem the tide of “wickedness” in Montgomery, he was making plans for the future. First, and most important, Bob Jones College opened on September 14, 1927, as an “orthodox, co-educational, inter-denominational Christian” college, receiving the endorsement of many Evangelical leaders, including Sam Small.192 Second, Jones prepared for an expected Al Smith candidacy in 1928 presidential election. He promised that “the fearless Christian leadership of Alabama will be ready,” and, indeed, it was – as discussed in the next chapter, the same alliance of Klansmen, Prohibitionists, reformers, and Evangelicals that struggled to defeat Gunter would rally to prevent the election of Al Smith and, ultimately, would fracture the Solid South in defense of an imagined white, Protestant America.193 Even as Jones warred against lawlessness and vice, the evangelist warned Americans about what he viewed as a connected threat – communism. Jones’s anti-communism was an outgrowth of his condemnation of theological modernism, atheism, and lawlessness. To the evangelist, political radicalism in general, and communism more specifically, was the final product of Darwinism, theological modernism, and atheism. He alleged that “the same false 189 “The Grand Jury Speaks,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 22, 1927. 190 “A Letter From Dr. Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 23, 1927. 191 “Omnibus Measure Beaten in Senate by Vote of 18-10,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), August 18, 1927. 192 The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 20, 1927; “Sam Small, Famous Evangelist, Comments on Bob Jones College,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 21, 1927. 193 “A Letter From Dr. Jones,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), May 23, 1927. 238 teachings which in Germany were instilled into the minds of the country’s youth for years now . . . permeate virtually every layer of ‘higher education’” and warned that the consequence would be “another cataclysmic upheaval such as the world war.”194 Jones believed that “America is a nation of law breakers” largely because of “a false educational philosophy” that “grew out of the self-expression, behavioristic idea of education.”195 In his mind, “education with God left out is a curse.”196 Jones insisted that departing from the “old time religion” and the authority of the Bible would destroy society, and, in his mind, World War I provided evidence of the consequences of modernism and atheism. As he declared in 1926, “I regard evolution as the rankest kind of heresy. It was responsible largely for the late World War.”197 Bob Jones College, founded in 1927, was designed to remedy this problem, to be an “armament against the invasion of modernistic doctrines.”198 Jones was convinced that if something was not done to ward off “Modernistic leaders,” a revolution – akin to what had taken place in Russia at the end of the First World War – would topple the American republic.199 Jones believed that a “revival” was needed to stop “the storm of radicalism and revolution that has 194 “Bob Jones, Noted Evangelist, Bitterly Assails All College Heads in America In Sermon,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), February 3, 1926. 195 Bob Jones, Sr., The Perils of America or Where Are We Headed? (Cleveland, TN: Bob Jones College, 1934), 12-13. 196 Jones, Sr., The Perils of America or Where Are We Headed?, 19. 197 Dolly Dalrymple, “‘Flapper Mothers’ and Evolution Draw Fire From Evangelist Jones,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), May 7, 1926. Jones was certainly not alone in his belief that evolution was behind WWI. See “Novel Viewpoint on Evolution Row,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), July 6, 1925; Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 35. 198 “Interdenominational College to Be Erected By Rev. R. R. Jones,” The Tensas Gazette (Saint Joseph, LA), March 12, 1926; “Noted Evangelist and Educator To Be Speaker Here,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), March 30, 1935. 199 Jones, Sr., The Perils of America or Where Are We Headed?, 29. 239 been hanging over this country.”200 Higher education was a particular threat to “Protestant civilization,” since Jones believed that colleges were breeding grounds for atheism and radicalism. One of the evangelist’s favorite examples of the dangers of higher education was a student club at the University of Rochester called “the Society of Damned Souls.” Backed by the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, the Society of Damned Souls was alternately held up as an example of the insouciance of “high-spirited young people” and as proof of the decline of modern society.201 Jones’s attitude was closer to the latter; he was horrified these students would hold meetings where “birth control, race suicide, trial marriages, etc.” would be discussed.202 To raise support for Bob Jones College, Jones frequently delivered a sermon on “Three College Shipwrecks,” in which he recounted anecdotes about three Christian young people who were sent away to college only to have their “faith shattered” by their professors and their peers. These anecdotes provided evidence, of a sort, of the destructive nature of higher education. In his sermon, one student “took a gun, and blew out her brains,” and another, diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease and impoverished by gambling, resolved to “buy a gun and blow out [his] brains.” The third student, after being made “an atheist” by an atheist in the Science Department at his university, became “a drunken, atheistic bum.”203 200 “Young People Are Turning to Religion for Something They Need, Says Noted Evangelist,” The Ocala Evening Star (Ocala, FL), April 9, 1932; Irving Belman, “Minister Holds Revival Series,” The Birmingham Post (Birmingham, AL), March 12, 1932. 201 “Irrepressible Youth,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 5, 1926; Eric Leigh Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their? Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 254-255. Jones and the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, or the 4A, occasionally clashed. In 1932, Jones was described as an “orthodox fanatic” by an annual report of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. When asked for comment, Jones remarked that he would rather be called a “fanatic” than to be praised by atheists like “modernists.” See “Bob Jones Hits at His Critics,” The Tallahassee Democrat (Tallahassee, FL), June 23, 1932. 202 Jones, The Perils of America or Where Are We Headed?, 33. 203 Bob Jones, Sr., pamphlet, “Three College Shipwrecks,” [no date], Bob Jones University Archives; George T. B. Davis, “Atheism’s Advance Among Students,” The Baptist and Reflector (Nashville, TN), June 11, 1931. 240 A voyage to eastern Europe in 1934 provided Jones with even more ammunition for his campaign against atheism and communism. Beginning on October 3, 1934, Bob Jones, along with his wife, Mary Gaston Stollenwerck Jones, and personal secretary, Marjorie Parker, led a team of three young evangelists on a tour of Europe. After spending some time in Britain and France, Jones and his party held evangelistic services in Poland and Belarus before concluding their tour with a revival campaign in Ireland.204 Almost as soon as he returned to the United States in late December 1934, he began reporting on “world conditions” and warning of the threat of communism.205 Jones warned that the United States “sleeps upon an atheistic and communistic volcano” since “the seeds of communism are being sown” in colleges and universities across America. Since he had “seen the results of communism and atheism” in Poland and Belarus, he wanted to “turn on the light and give the facts” about the consequences of “modernistic or atheistic leanings.” Jones implored Americans to “get back to old-time American decencies and the old-time religion.”206 Throughout the late 1930s, Bob Jones continued to rail against communism in his sermons. During a sermon preached at the First Baptist Church in El Paso, Texas, in 1936 titled “Where Are We Headed – or the Communistic Conspiracy,” Jones alleged that “colleges and universities . . . make first an atheist and then a Communist of American youth.” He argued that American colleges were preparing the country for communism. He contended that “the guess of 204Bob Jones, Sr., Comments on Here and Hereafter (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1942), 20-29; “Bob Jones To Tour Europe,” The Coffeeville Courier (Coffeeville, MS), October 5, 1934; “Dr. Bob Jones On An Evangelistic Tour,” Pickens County Herald and West Alabamian (Carrollton, AL), October 18, 1934; “Bob Jones Spreads Gospel in Poland,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), November 25, 1934. 205 “Dr. Bob Jones Preaching at Gospel Center Tonight,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), December 26, 1934; “Bob Jones Back From Europe,” The Union-Banner (Clanton, AL), December 27, 1934. 206 “Communism Danger Told By Rev. Jones,” The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL), February 10, 1935; “Church Audience Hear Dr. Jones,” The Miami Herald (Miami, FL), February 26, 1935; “Says Education Tends to Redism,” The Knoxville Journal (Knoxville, TN), March 18, 1935. 241 Darwin had been substituted for fact by the American college professors,” and as a consequence, “there is more atheism in this nation today than was ever before on this earth,” since “the colleges have made atheism fashionable.” Jones ended his sermon with a plea for donations to Bob Jones College, since it was “a battlement against the introduction of Communistic and atheistic ideas.”207 Even as World War II loomed on the horizon, Jones remained fixated on the threat of communism. He warned that “there is a great deal of secret communism in the colleges of this land,” since “there are many secret atheists, and atheism means communism.” Jones lamented the fact that, as he alleged, “college professors seek to undermine the faith of young people.”208 The evangelist warned that “Communism is reaching for a stranglehold upon America.”209 Jones argued that “the only thing that stands between America and communism is the World Word? of God.” In his mind, Communism was a violation of the “individual property right” guaranteed in the Ten Commandments. He insisted that “if human nature unrestrained and unregenerated expresses itself” then “we shall have a bloody, communistic revolution in America.”210 Jones believed that a future cataclysm could be averted only if Christian ideals reigned supreme.211 Even though he was aware of the threat posed by the Axis powers, he believed the “Communists 207 “Bob Jones Hits at Communism,” The El Paso times (El Paso, TX), October 31, 1939. 208 “Evangelist Says Colleges Filled With Communists,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), April 27, 1936. 209 “Pastors See Communism As Danger to America,” The Knoxville Journal (Knoxville, TN), January 31, 1937. 210 “Bob Jones,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), May 14, 1936. 211 Ruth Taunton, “Christianity, Not Warships, Can save Civilization,” The San Diego Union (San Diego, CA), March 21, 1939. 242 . . . constitute a real danger to the United States,” as he declared in an interview that appeared in the Mobile Press Register on the morning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.212 After World War II, Jones became sort of a “elder statesman” among evangelical anti-communists. While he remained a leading opponent of communism, Jones, who was sixty-two when World War II ended, had a more important role behind the scenes as a mentor and organizer for men like Billy Graham, Carl McIntire, and Billy James Hargis. Jones played a particularly important part in shaping the beliefs and early career of Billy Graham. As an eighteen-year-old college freshman, Graham enrolled at Bob Jones College (which, by now, had moved to Cleveland, Tennessee) in September 1936, where he stayed for one semester before “a spell of influenza” forced him to return home. Graham finished his education at the Florida Bible Institute in Temple Terrace, Florida, and Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.213 Even though his time at Bob Jones College was cut short, Graham continued to have close ties with Bob Jones, Sr., Bob Jones, Jr., and Bob Jones College, turning to Bob Jones College students, staff, and faculty for financial support and manpower and to Bob Jones, Sr. for advice.214 Graham, like Jones, was a staunch anti-communist during his early career, proclaiming to a group of four thousand students at M.I.T. in 1950 that “Communism . . . is a fanatical religion that has declared war against God, Christ, the Bible, and America.”215 Besides Graham, Bob Jones, Sr., and his 212 “Famous Evangelist Says Communism Creates Real Danger for Uncle Sam,” The Mobile Press Register (Mobile, AL), December 7, 1941. 213 “Billy Graham Converted At 16, Devoted Self to Study of Bible,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), February 25, 1951. 214 Nate Wegodsky, “World’s Most Unusual University Turns Out Evangelists,” The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), September 14, 1952. 215 “Utopia Lies in Belief in God, Graham Tells 4000 at Tech,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), April 22, 1950; Marshall Frady, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1979), 197-201; Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 16. 243 son, Bob Jones, Jr., were allies of Carl McIntire, the founder of the Bible Presbyterian, a popular radio commentator, and a leading anti-communist among Fundamentalists – McIntire addressed Bob Jones University students more than once, and in 1953, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate.216 Bob Jones, Sr. also was a close friend of Billy James Hargis, who founded the anti-communist evangelical organization, Christian Crusade, in 1950. He often participated in Christian Crusade’s radio marathons, and Jones, described by Christian Crusade as one of the “foremost conservative authorities on the dangers of Communism in America,” was a frequent speaker at the organization’s annual conventions.217 Bob Jones University awarded Hargis an honorary doctorate in May 1961, which he described as having “greater significance than any honor I have ever received.”218 The university also hosted two days of meetings for the Christian Crusade in October 1959, which included addresses by Hargis, Glee Lockwood (the director of Christian Crusade’s Campaigns), Bob Jones, Jr., and John Noble, an author described in an advertisement for the event as a “former Russian Slave.”219 Bob Jones, Sr. and his university provided support for anti-communist crusaders, and the aging Evangelist helped to confer legitimacy on younger leaders (like Graham and Hargis). 216 “Dr. Carl McIntire To Visit Greenville,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), January 28, 1965; “Four Get Honorary Degrees at Bob Jones,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), May 30, 1953. See also Markku Ruotsila, Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); John Fea, "Carl McIntire: From Fundamentalist Presbyterian to Presbyterian Fundamentalist," American Presbyterian 72, 4 (Winter 1994): 253-68; Heather Hendershot, What's Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 217 The Canton Record (Canton, OH), April 24, 1958; “Robert Welch, Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., Tom Anderson, Dr. G. Archer Weniger to Address Third Annual National Convention – August 4-5-6,” Christian Crusade, June 1961, 3; “Crusade Books Ministers,” The Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK), July 28, 1963. 218 “735 Received BJU Degrees,” The Index-Journal (Greenwood, SC), June 1, 1961; “Quotes from Speech by Billy James Hargis,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, LA), November 16, 1961; 219 The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), October 15, 1959. 244 In 1951 and 1962, Bob Jones University hosted conferences on “Americanism” where anti-communist ideas were espoused. The first Americanism Conference, in 1951, featured United States Senator Clyde R. Hoey, a Democrat from North Carolina; Representative Joseph R. Bryson, a Democrat from South Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District; and TennesseeGovernor Gordon Browning. Glen S. Snow (a former president of the National Education Association), Edward T. McCormick (president of the New York Curb Exchange), Morse Salisbury (director of the division of information of the Atomic Energy Commission), Abraham Vereide (executive director of International Christian Leadership and founder of the National Prayer Breakfast), Ralph Robey (chief economist of the National Association of Manufacturers), Freda Utley (a former British communist who had become an author and fierce anti-communist), and John Temple Graves II (a syndicated newspaper columnist for the Birmingham Post) also spoke at the conference. While the 1951 Americanism Conference was less politically polarized than the 1962 conference, speakers at the conference still attacked the international spread of communism and criticized what they perceived as the spread of communism in the United States.220 At the Americanism Conference in 1962, Bob Jones University hosted Billy James Hargis, Arkansas Congressman Dale Alford (who had defeated the incumbent Brooks Hays after he supported integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957), C. Stanley Lowell (the editor of the Church-State Review), Dan Smoot (a former FBI investigator turned author and broadcaster), Harry T. Everingham (editor of the anti-communist Free Enterprise), South Carolina Congressman L. Mendel Rivers, and Milton Lory (the president of the American 220 “Hoey, Bryson Open Series,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), December 12, 1951; “Reports of Shortages in Consumer Items Hit,” The St. Joseph Gazette (St. Joseph, MO), December 14, 1951; “Praises Sacrifice,” The Knoxville Journal (Knoxville, TN), December 14, 1951; “Gov. Browning Calls Russia World Foe,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), December 14, 1951; ‘Anti-Communism Talk,” The Gastonia Gazette (Gastonia, NC), December 15, 1951. 245 Coalition of Patriotic Societies). These self-described “conservatives” or “right-wingers” argued in favor of interposition and strict constructionism and condemned liberalism, socialism, communism, public education, the United Nations, and television (described by Lory as the “one-eyed monster” and “the devil’s jukebox”).221 The speakers at the Americanism Conference of 1962 painted a grim picture of an America threatened by the conspiracies of a communistic cabal, a sort of “deep state” determined to undermine capitalism, nationalism, and democracy. Dale Alford argued that the United States should withdraw from the United Nations (UN), since “the time had come to rid ourselves of internationalism and to return to nationalism.” L. Mendel Rivers agreed with Alford, describing the UN as the “modern tower of Babel.” Milton Lory colorfully described the United Nations as “an international brothel” and a “conference of witch-doctors . . . spawned to draw the United States into a web of international intrigue.” Alford also singled out the Council on Foreign Relations, which he described as an “invisible government” (borrowing the phrase from Smoot, who had published a book with the same title in 1962), which had infiltrated the State Department in order to further communism. Bob Jones himself, of course, agreed with these views - he believed that the United Nations ignored God and had refused to recognize Christ.222 The speakers also condemned what Lory described as a “great army of bureaucrats who run our government,” who operate under the radar with the exception of “pinks, punks, or perverts” who “occasionally hit the headlines.” Everingham alleged that communists had infiltrated every bureau and branch of the federal government. Along with the United Nations and bureaucrats, Rivers made a special target of the media, which he believed was under control 221 Fred Sheheen, “7 Right Wingers Emphasize ‘Americanism,’” The Charlotte Observer (February 16, 1962). 222 Fred Sheheen, “7 Right Wingers Emphasize ‘Americanism’,” The Charlotte Observer (February 16, 1962); “Says U.N. Ignores God,” The News-Journal (Mansfield, OH), November 22, 1950. 246 of “leftists.” He condemned the New York Times, LIFE, and Time for backing Castro, “that bloody butcher,” and telling “a slanted story of the racial problems of the South.” He also attacked the National Council of Churches, declaring the ecumenical organization to be “loaded with fellow travelers.”223 Even as Bob Jones and his university strengthened their ties to conservatism, the aging evangelist weighed in on presidential politics. 224 Jones, who remained a supporter of the Democratic Party into the last years of his life, attacked John F. Kennedy in the election of 1960 and split with the Democratic Party, just as he had more than thirty years earlier during the 1928 presidential election. During a mandatory chapel service at Bob Jones University, he declared that even though he was “the son of a confederate [sic] soldier and a lifelong Democrat,” he would not support Kennedy. Jones alleged that Kennedy “would take orders from the Catholic Church in the White House.”225 On October 30, 1960 ( “Reformation Sunday” and, coincidentally, Jones’s seventy-seventh birthday), he told the student body of Bob Jones University that “good Protestants don’t want any man in the White House who is obligated to anyone except the American people.” 226 Jones also condemned Billy Graham in 1960 after he refused to endorse Richard Nixon (against Kennedy) in the 1960 presidential race.227 Despite 223 Fred Sheheen, “7 Right Wingers Emphasize ‘Americanism’,” The Charlotte Observer (February 16, 1962); “Alford: Patriotism is Desperate Need,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), February 6, 1962; “Liberals Causing Our Woes—Hargis,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), February 7, 1962. 224 As an example of the evangelist’s political punditry, in 1953, Jones excoriated Reid Memorial Baptist Church, in Augusta, Georgia, for changing its schedule of services to allow Dwight Eisenhower to attend church on Sunday morning and play a round of golf on Sunday afternoon. See “Bob Jones Assails Church for Change in Hours for President’s Golf Game,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), March 6, 1953; “Surely, Dr. Bob Jones Wasn’t Being Serious,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 6, 1953; “Dr. Bob Jones Explains Statement on Ike, Calls for More ‘Wesleys,’” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), March 12, 1953. 225 “Bob Jones Sr. Anti-Kennedy,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), August 15, 1960. 226 “Reformation Sunday Observed,” The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), October 31, 1960. 227 “Graham Criticized For Keeping Quiet During Election,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), November 24, 1960. 247 Jones’s obvious suspicion of Kennedy, his son, Bob Jones, Jr., was careful to maintain a façade of objectivity. Bob Jones, Jr., who, beginning in 1947, was the university’s president, called for the Monday and Tuesday of election week in November 1960 to be days of prayer, since “there never was a time . . .when our liberties were so much at stake.” Bob Jones Jr. emphasized that the university was “not as an institution Democratic or Republican.”228 Bob Jones’s career connects evangelicals’ support of Progressive reforms (like Prohibition, municipal reform, and Sabbatarianism) with the anti-communist crusades that would animate evangelical political activism into the 1960s and 1970s. Jones aspired to preserve (or perhaps more accurately, create) a Protestant republic, secure from the influences of foreigners, radicals, and lawbreakers. While it may be tempting to suggest a break between Jones the Progressive reformer and Jones the anti-communist (and, as discussed in the following chapter, segregationist), this characterization would be a mistake. Continuity, rather than change, exemplifies Jones’s political views. Jones was an opponent of communism primarily because he believed it threatened an evangelical Protestant America – the same reason he opposed Sunday entertainment and the sins of cities and supported Prohibition. In this sense, Jones, as a crusader for a Protestant republic, remained a Progressive until his death in 1968. Furthermore, Jones’s political goals helped to inform the New Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s, ensuring that the new political movement was a kind of reborn Progressivism.228 “Dr. Bob Jones Jr. Calls for Prayer Monday, Tuesday,” The Times and Democrat (Orangeburg, SC), November 4, 1960. 248 On Monday, March 4, 1956, Bob Jones, Sr. broadcast a regularly scheduled sermon from the studios of WMUU, Bob Jones University’s FM radio station (whose call letters were an acronym for one of the school’s nicknames, the “World’s Most Unusual University”). As reported by the Associated Press, the evangelist “lashed out at the injection of Christianity into the racial issue.” He argued that “the intermingling of races is not God’s plan” and criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, since he believed that the Court “had no right to invade the social customs in the South.” He insisted that God was “the Author of segregation” and railed against “people calling this a Christian issue when Christianity is not involved.”1 Jones’s comments were made at a pivotal time in the struggle for civil rights in America. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which, from the beginning, had been led by ministers and church members, entered its fourth month in March 1956. As Jay Jenkins, a journalist with the Miami Herald, commented, the boycott had “become virtually a spiritual crusade”; this observation is backed up by Rev. R.W. Wilson, a participant in the boycott who declared that the boycott “has become a spiritual movement for us.”2 On February 22, 1956 (less than two weeks before Jones’s sermon on March 4), Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy declared that February 24 would be “Prayer-Pilgrimage Day” and called African Americans in Montgomery to gather “to sing 1 “Jones Denies Segregation Is Christian Issue,” The Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), March 5, 1956; “Another Southern Voice on Segregation,” The Alabama Journal (Montgomery, AL), March 22, 1956; “Christianity Not Involved,” The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), March 5, 1956; James W. Crocker, “Segregationists Lacking in Faith, Elder Charges,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), March 5, 1956; 2 Jay Jenkins, “My Feet Are Tired But My Soul is Resting,” The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida), March 4, 1956; “Indicted Ministers Vow Protests To Continue; Call for Spiritual Move,” The Alabama Citizen (Tuscaloosa, AL), March 3, 1956. CHAPTER VI: “GOD WAS THE FIRST SEGREGATIONIST”: BOB JONES AND THE FUNDAMENTALIST DEFENSE OF SEGREGATION 249 and pray” at a mass meeting at the First Negro Baptist Church on the evening of February 23.3 The following Sunday (February 26) Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. told his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that “segregation can’t survive because God is against it.”4 Even as those who campaigned for equal rights in Montgomery reiterated the religious nature of their crusade, Jones, as a counterpoint, insisted that segregation was divinely inspired. As a voice for preserving Jim Crow, the evangelist would soon be joined by the signers of the so-called “Southern Manifesto,” read into the Congressional Record on Monday, March 11. Among the signatories were both of South Carolina’s senators, including Strom Thurmond, a firm supporter of Bob Jones University as well as one of the key authors of the document. 5 Like Sam P. Jones before him, Bob Jones was a staunch defender of racial segregation in the South, believing it to be part of a divinely ordained plan for humanity. The Alabama-born evangelist, by resorting to racial demagoguery during the 1928 presidential campaign, connected fundamentalism with racial intolerance. By stubbornly refusing to fully integrate Bob Jones University, Jones (and his son, Bob Jones, Jr.) helped to spark the rise of the Christian Right. His racial attitudes, therefore, shaped both fundamentalist belief and evangelical political activism. Bob Jones, who was born in 1883, incorporated the racism of the Jim Crow South into 3 Joe Abzell, “75 Nabbed By Deputies On Boycott Indictments,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), February 23, 1956; “Rev. King And 88 Others Booked On Boycott Writs,” The Alabama Journal (Montgomery, AL), February 23, 1956. 4 “Indicted Ministers Vow Protests To Continue; Call for Spiritual Move,” The Alabama Citizen (Tuscaloosa, AL), March 3, 1956. 5 “Southern Manifesto To Be Read Into Congress Record On Monday,” The Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS), March 11, 1956; “The Southern Manifesto,” The Union-Banner (Clanton, AL), March 29, 1956; Congressional Record, 84th Congress, Second Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956), 4459-4460; John Kyle Day, The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 63-65; Dale Perry, “Thurmond Blasts Disturbances,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), April 29, 1969. 250 his ideology, and by doing so, made racial separation a virtual doctrine of southern fundamentalism. Bob Jones, like many other southern Protestants, did not challenge race relations in the South. While he sought to reach African Americans in their own churches and as part of revival campaigns, he resisted integration and racial equality. Furthermore, Jones did not hesitate to resort to demagoguery and race-baiting when it suited his agenda. He became an ally of the Klan when Prohibition in Alabama and the nation was threatened, and he became a rabid supporter of segregation when challenged by Billy Graham and other integrationist ministers. By refusing to challenge racism, Jones sacrificed an opportunity to recognize the essential humanity of African Americans in order to accomplish his own political and ecclesiastical goals. White supremacy, theological conservativism, and Progressivism (at least the kind of Progressivism espoused by evangelists like Bob Jones and Sam Jones) were mutually reinforcing. Religion was used to legitimize racial inequality. Apologists for Jim Crow believed that “racial inequality is the work and the will of God” and insisted that African Americans’ subordinate role in American society was a result of God’s will.6 While Protestantism may have encouraged southerners to be more benevolent towards African Americans, it supported the established racial order by conferring divine sanction on segregation. Historian Paul Harvey describes this practice as “theological racism,” which he defines as “the conscious use of religious doctrine and practice to create and enforce social practices that privileged southerners of European descent.” Harvey argues that “this Christian mythic grounding” for racism was “unstable,” which, by the 1960s, led supporters of Jim Crow to abandon theological arguments – though, as discussed in this chapter, Jones and his allies provide a notable exception to this 6 L.A. Newby, Jim Crow’s Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 83-84, 89-90. 251 trend.7 Bob Jones, Sr., Bob Jones, Jr., and Bob Jones University continued to defend segregation on theological grounds into the 1980s. Even though Bob Jones was a proponent of racial segregation, he (like Sam Jones before him) attempted to evangelize African American audiences and often preached in African American churches. In July 1909 he preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, while its pastor, R.C. Judkins, was absent. The Pensacola Journal suggested that Jones’s decision to preach at the Baptist church was a demonstration of “rapid restoration of a cordial feeling among the whites and blacks of the south.”8 On another occasion, he spoke at special meeting at another African American church, Day Street Baptist Church, in Montgomery. The Advertiser reported that the church members had prepared a “special program of music” and reserved a section of the church auditorium “for white people.”9 Jones’s relationship with African American churches extended beyond addressing their congregations. During a campaign in Charlotte, an African American minister read one of Bob Jones’s sermons to his congregation, and “many of the people present shouted at the conclusion of the reading of the sermon.”10 As was typical for white evangelists in the South, Jones also held segregated meetings solely for African Americans during his campaigns, though these were not always a 7 Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 2. 8 “Cordial Feeling Restored,” The Pensacola Journal, July 13, 1909; “Rev. Bob Jones at Negro Church Today,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), July 18, 1909. It is interesting to note that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would assume the pastorate in this church in the 1950s. 9 “Rev. ‘Bob’ Jones in City,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), August 15, 1917. 10 Mamie Bays, “Services Today to End Series,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), October 5, 1919. 252 feature of his campaigns. In Owensboro in 1926, Jones rejected a plea to hold special services for black residents of the city, stating that he was “not physically able and does not have the time.” 11 While Jones preached at African American churches and held special meetings for African Americans, he, like Sam Jones (and other southern evangelists) before him, most often set up segregated sections in his revival meetings for African Americans instead. Mary Gaston Stollenwerck Jones, Bob Jones’s second wife, recalled that “Dr. Bob always loved the Negro.” As proof of this affection, she noted that “he had a special section reserved for them in all his big campaigns, and he never failed to acknowledge their presence.”12 Jones’s meetings did often have sections reserved for African Americans; for example, at a campaign held in Sumter, South Carolina, in 1915, a “small section of the tabernacle” was reserved during each revival meeting “for the negro pastors of the city.”13 Black Christians did not always appreciate the evangelist’s “hospitality.” In Miami in 1922, after African Americans there did not “accept the invitation to hear Evangelist Bob Jones,” J.W. Drake, the president of the Colored Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, explained why black Miamians failed to attend the meetings. While being careful to maintain that they were not “prejudiced against our white brothers,” Drake’s explanation critiqued Jim Crow laws that were, by 1922, more stringently enforced in Miami than they had ever been in the late nineteenth century. Drake observed that since white Miamians complained about sitting in seats that African Americans had sat in, he felt that “some of the white people would be offended” if black Christians had attended the meeting. Drake also noted that “white men have beaten and even threatened to put to death negroes.” Because of the racial 11 “Bob Jones Starts Sumter Campaign,” The State (Columbia, SC), April 28, 1915; “Today Is Go To Church And Sunday School Day in Jones Union Religious Campaign,” The Owensboro Inquirer (Owensboro, KY), March 21, 1926. 12 Johnson, Builder of Bridges, 162. 13 “Bob Jones Starts Sumter Campaign,” The State (Columbia, SC), April 28, 1915. 253 discrimination and violence, Drake declared that black Miamians did not attend lest they “throw a dampness” on Jones’s “splendid revival.”14 When black audience members did attend his meetings, Bob Jones – like Sam P. Jones – often had them perform spirituals for the enjoyment of the predominately white audience members. Twice during his campaign in Montgomery in 1921, he pressed “the negro portion of the congregation” into singing hymns for the rest of the congregation. Loren Jones, Bob Jones’s long-time song leader, called on black audience members seated in the segregated portion of the tabernacle to sing “a number of their own songs which were thoroughly enjoyed by the whites.”15 On another occasion, during a campaign in Andalusia, Alabama, in 1925, Jones asked African Americans to perform, and they obliged, earning them “hearty applause.”16 Mrs. Jones recalled that her husband frequently requested African American audience members to “sing some of their Spirituals, as only they can.”17 Even though Bob Jones welcomed African Americans into his tabernacles, he did not do so out of any sense of racial egalitarianism – black audiences were involved in Jones’s services on terms that promoted the Jim Crow order and preserved white supremacy. Jones encouraged a form of paternalism that asserted African American inferiority while emphasizing the importance of white southerners’ protection of African Americans; indeed, Bob Jones rejected “social equality,” even as he insisted that the souls of African Americans needed 14 “Invitation to Bob Jones,” The Miami Herald (Miami, FL), May 7, 1922. See also Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1997), 73-78. 15 “Several Hundred Hit Trail at Bob Jones Tabernacle,” Montgomery Advertiser, May 31, 1921; “‘American Home’ Rev. Bob Jones’ Sermon Subject,” The Montgomery Times (Montgomery, AL), May 26, 1921. 16 “Sermon At Tabernacle Wed. Nite Built Around Great Story of Zacheus,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), August 13, 1925. 17 R.K. Johnson, Builder of Bridges, 163. 254 rescuing. He condemned “white people” who were “neglecting the negroes.” Jones believed that “every soul, white or black was valuable to God,” and he “admonished the people to discuss Christianity with their servants in an endeavor to convert them.”18 He maintained that “the South is the best place for the negro” and rejected the idea that a political solution could be found for “the race problem.” Jones believed what had made African Americans “loyal, devoted, and good” in the antebellum South (unlike the “New Negro” of the twentieth century) was “the religion of their day.” This idea led the evangelist to the conclusion that “Jesus . . . is the only solution of the race problem,” and that “Christian religion will solve your race problem” – an ironic statement in hindsight, given his later claims that the fight against segregation was not a Christian issue.19 Jones’s attitudes towards African Americans are also demonstrated in his relationship to his domestic staff. Bob Jones retained various African American cooks and maids throughout his career. After the birth of Bob Jones’s son, Bob Jones, Jr., in 1911, the family hired a black woman named Emma Hunt, who Bob Jones, Jr., described as “a large black woman” who was “housekeeper, cook, nursemaid, laundry woman – a kind of general factotum in the household.”20 Emma, characterized by one local newspaper as a “negro mammy,” travelled with the Jones family between at least 1911 and 1917, primarily serving as a nanny for the Joneses’ young son.21 During a campaign in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1917, the local newspaper, The 18 “Bob Jones Sways Big Audience,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 5, 1922. 19 “Recent War Not Last One Declares Evangelist Bob Jones,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 12, 1919; “Jones Stresses Need of Prayer,” The Daily Leaf-Chronicle (Clarkesville, TN), September 9, 1924; “Significant Sayings of Bob Jones,” The Escambia Record (Atmore, AL), July 9, 1925. 20 Jones, Jr., Cornbread and Caviar, 17, 27. 21 “Big Delegation Will Greet Bob Jones Tomorrow,” The Daily Courier (Connellsville, PA), February 18, 1916; “Interest Grows As Week Advances,” The Mansfield News (Mansfield, OH), September 15, 1915. 255 Pantagraph, reported that “Emma, the colored maid with the Bob Jones family” who “had never . . . into Yankee land” was able to see the first snow of the winter in St. Louis. Emma, according to the newspaper, “became quite gleeful over it,” remarking that “you white folks can take yo’ Florida and Alabama and yo’ sweet magnolia and wintah roses, but jes’ give me snow.”22 When the Jones family would travel by train the Jones family would travel in the drawing room with Hunt instead rather than in the segregated sleeping cars.23 Bob Jones reportedly even spoke at Hunt’s funeral. His wife recalled that “We loved Emma. She was a wonderful asset to the family.”24 Bob Jones held up Emma as an example of the ideal black American. After her death in 1920, the evangelist described her as “faithful” and discussed her conversion and death, “when she passed into eternity with a prayer on her lips.”25 Jones believed that African Americans should be pious, loyal, and submissive. Even though he was likely sincerely concerned for their spiritual condition, he did not believe in racial equality. Even though Jones’s racial views were generally paternalistic, he could turn to outright racial demagoguery in pursuit of his political goals. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Bob Jones and his agenda were endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and he became a political ally of the Invisible Empire. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a revitalization in the early twentieth century. Founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons, a defrocked, alcoholic, Methodist minister who had become enamored of the ritualism and comradery of fraternal orders, the New Era Klan was inspired by D. W. Griffith’s Reconstruction-era drama, The Birth of a Nation (based on The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, the brother of Fundamentalist leader Amzi Clarence Dixon), and 22 “Bob Jones Says We’ve All Got Ego-Mania,” The Pantagraph, January 5, 1917. 23 Bob Jones Jr., Cornbread and Caviar, 27. 24 Johnson, Builder of Bridges, 161. 25“Jones Stresses Need Of Prayer,” The Daily Leaf-Chronicle (Clarksville, TN), September 9, 1924. 256 the Knights of Mary Phagan, a lynch mob formed in Marietta, Georgia, in August 1915 in response to the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a fourteen-year-old factory worker. Leo Frank, a Jewish man from New York, was falsely convicted and sentenced to death, but after civil liberties groups denounced Frank’s death sentence, the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. On August 16, the Knights of Mary Phagan abducted Franks from a prison farm and hanged him. Two months later the group burned a giant cross on Stone Mountain, a granite monolith eighteen miles east of Atlanta.26 Simmons and thirty-four members of fraternal orders that included members of the Knights of Mary Phagan and the Reconstruction Klan, chartered the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on October 26, 1915. On Thanksgiving 1915, Simmons and fifteen Klansmen trudged up Stone Mountain. Once the group reached the summit, Simmons lit a sixteen-foot-tall wooden cross and administered the Klan’s oath to the members. Even at the birth of the order, Simmons made appeals to Protestantism. He had his members construct an altar on Stone Mountain, and Simmons used a Bible as a relic of the Klan. From the altar to the Bible to the fiery cross itself, Simmons solidified the Klan’s relationship to religion.27 The 1920’s Klan co-opted the symbols and rhetoric of Protestantism to define their organization and to appeal to Protestants. As Klansmen literally wrapped themselves in white robes, so the Klan metaphorically shrouded itself in Protestantism. The kleagles, recruiters for the Ku Klux Klan, specifically targeted Protestant ministers for support. After W.J. Simmons hired the Southern Publicity Association in 1920, the Klan co-opted evangelical Protestant 26 Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 140-144; Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 7. 27 Wade, The Fiery Cross, 144. 257 churches to serve as recruiting centers for new members. Edward Young Clarke, a marketing agent with the Southern Publicity Association, offered Protestant ministers free membership, and according to the Klan itself, by 1924 thirty thousand ministers were members.28 The Ku Klux Klan appealed to Protestants by adopting religious terminology, by co-opting ministers and churches to serve as their spokesmen and recruiting stations, and by supporting causes which many Protestants embraced, such as Prohibition. Klansmen were not religious radicals. As religious scholar Kelly Baker argues in Gospel According to the Klan, “Klansmen and Klanswomen were part of the religious mainstream.” The Klan united behind a shared Protestant identity.29 Baker’s assertion that the Klan appealed to mainline Protestants generally contradicts Nancy MacLean’s claim that the Klan was primarily a fundamentalist organization.30 Examining Bob Jones’s involvement with the Klan does little to resolve this contradiction. Even though Jones is certainly a fundamentalist, the distinction between conservative Protestants and fundamentalist Protestants is difficult to define in the early twentieth century, especially in the South. While the Klan was less receptive to “modernist” Protestants, the Christianity embraced by Invisible Empire alienated few orthodox Protestants in the 1920s. Bob Jones’s own relationship with the Klan seems to support a populist or civic interpretation of the Klan proposed by scholars like historian Leonard Joseph Moore. In his study of the Klan in 1920’s Indiana, Citizen Klansmen, Moore argues that the Klan “is best understood 28 Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 8 29 Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 11, 65. 30 Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 91. MacLean, reasonably, associates with rise of the Klan with the development of Fundamentalism, especially since both movements saw their most dramatic success in the 1920s. 258 . . . as a populist organization.” Rather than being “marginal men” – as suggested by sociologist John M. Mecklin, who in 1924 characterized the Klan as “a refuge for mediocre men” - Moore asserts that Klan members “represented a wide cross section of white Protestant society.”31 Jones’s own comments attest to this interpretation, as he noted that he believed that the Klan was composed of “respectable” white Christian males. While the Klan is most associated with perpetrating racial violence and intimidation, the Klan of the 1920s was primarily concerned with policing community moral standards and defending their conception of an idealized white Protestant America. This agenda aligned closely with Jones’s own campaigns for Prohibition and Sabbatarianism, and Jones focused more on the organization’s support of Prohibition and Americanism. Like Jones’s idealized white Protestant republic, the “Klansmen’s idyll,” as Nancy MacLean contends, was threatened by social change in the 1920s. Youth culture challenged Victorian social norms; African Americans resisted the regime of Jim Crow; and Catholics, Jewish Americans, and “native-born allies” frustrated white Protestants’ attempts to ensure their worldview’s dominance.32 Jones gladly received the Klan’s generosity, which was either “a mark of the favor which the particular minister enjoys with the Klan, or of the favor which the Klan seeks” from the evangelist.33 The Klan’s donations to Jones were certainly a sign of the Klan’s approval, but the evangelist also often used the occasion of a Klan donation to defend the Invisible Empire. At a 31 Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 11; John Moffatt Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1924),109. Kenneth Jackson, in The Ku Klux Klan in the City, also refutes the idea that the Klan was a movement of ignorant country bumpkins, proposing that the Klan “was not alien to American society or un-American” See Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), xv. See also Robert Alan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 175, 179-181; and Pegram, One Hundred Percent America, 6, 49, 69. 32 MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 63-64. 33 “The Ku Klux Klan and the Church,” The Literary Digest, April 8, 1922, 38. 259 rally in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1922, seven representatives of the Klan interrupted the meeting’s “song service” and handed Loren Jones, Bob Jones’s choir leader, an envelope. While some in the choir and the audience initially applauded the Klansmen, members of the audience called for them to remove their masks. “Take those masks off: you will be ashamed to look God in the face,” yelled one audience member. Some in the audience even attempted to remove the Klansmen’s masks themselves. Jones soon silenced the audience, allowing the Klansmen to leave “without being molested.” When he opened the envelope, he found fifty dollars and a brief note, which commended Jones for his “untiring efforts to raise the standard of morality” and “to encourage a greater love for our country and respect for its constitution and laws.”34 After thanking the Klan for its donation, Jones defended the Klan. He explained that despite W.J. Simmons’s attempt to personally recruit him when Simmons organized the Ku Klux Klan, he insisted that he had “never been a member of the organization.” Jones declared that he knew “Colonel” Simmons, who, according to Jones, “was very brilliant” and “honest and trustworthy in every particular.” Simmons explained to Jones that the Ku Klux Klan supported “the teachings of Christianity . . . white supremacy and . . . pure, unadulterated Americanism.” Jones reported that after he asked Simmons if the Klan “was intended to oppress the colored people,” the former Imperial Wizard assuaged Jones’s concerns by assuring him that “the organization would be a sympathetic friend to the colored race . . . to protect the colored man from every form of oppression and at all times befriend him.” Simmons justified the order’s support of white supremacy by explaining that “when two races live side by side, one of them has to be dominant.” 35 34 “Ku Klux Klan Sends Money to Bob Jones,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 10, 1922. 35 “Ku Klux Klan Sends Money to Bob Jones,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 10, 1922. 260 Jones informed his audience that, according to Simmons, the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism was not based on religious intolerance. Instead, the organization opposed Catholic attempts to “get control of our government to help the pope in his temporal ambitions,” and the Klan refused to admit Jews because the organization “stands for the teachings of the Christian religion.” When Jones asked Simmons about the alleged vigilantism of the Klan, he replied that the organization had never taken the law into its own hands, and that “we propose to work through constituted authority.” Since one of the major concerns of anti-Klan groups was that Klansmen wore masks, Jones repeated Simmons’s explanation for the order’s hoods. According to Simmons, the masks were intended to protect Klansmen from criticism and to ensure their anonymity as they searched for “disloyalty to the government.” Jones declared that he had found that the Ku Klux Klan had “never been convicted in any community of taking the law into their own hands.” He praised Klansmen, many of whom were “outstanding Christian men of the community, the men that go to prayer meeting.”36 Jones concluded his remarks on the Klan by stating that “if the K.K.K. is what my old friend, Mr. Simmons, says . . . if what hundreds of outstanding Christian men are members of the organization have told me is true, if what many of the gospel who belong to the organization is true,” namely, that the Klan “is a patriotic organization, 100 percent American,” then “I am for it.”37 He declared that “if the organization stands for what Simmons says it does, I wish it well.” Jones finished by thanking the Klan for its donation and explaining that he “talked about the Klan to quiet your feelings.” He then had the audience sing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”38 36 “Ku Klux Klan Sends Money to Bob Jones,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 10, 1922. 37 “Ku Klux Klan Appears Here in Tabernacle,” The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), November 10, 1922. 38 “Ku Klux Klan Sends Money to Bob Jones,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 10, 1922. 261 The St. Petersburg Klan was not the only klavern to back Bob Jones. In 1923, in Greenville, Alabama, the Greenville Klan gave “an offering of $25 to the Alabama Sunday School Association.” Jones read the letter included with the Klan’s donation, which said “that the organization stood for the things he had been preaching.” He took the opportunity to defend the Klan and announced that, rather than “a bunch of cut throats,” the Klan “stood for right living and was against lawlessness.” Jones contradicted early critics of the Klan, who found in the Invisible Empire an American cousin to fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. Journalists compared the Klan to the secret police of imperial Russia, dictators, and Italian fascists.39 To defend his belief that Klansmen were law-abiding citizens, he insisted that the Klan was innocent of the murders of two men in Mer Rouge, a settlement in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, in 1922.40 Mer Rouge, as historian Thomas Pegram explains, was “the locus of anti-Klan sentiment in the region.” Klansmen from Morehouse Parish abducted five prominent citizens from Mer Rouge. Three of the kidnapped men were later found, alive but brutally beaten. The bodies of the other two men, Watt Daniels and Thomas Richards, were found in Lake Lafourche. Forensic pathologists testified that the men were “subjected to torture in what was believed to have been a viselike contrivance which broke their bones at equal distant intervals.”41 Dr. Charles W. Duval, a professor of pathology at Tulane University, remarked that “the evident torture of these men 39 The Albany-Decatur Daily (Albany, AL), March 6, 1923; “Evangelist Jones Has Good Word for Ku Klux Klan,” Daily Herald (Biloxi, Mississippi), March 3, 1923; William G. Shepherd, “Ku Klux Koin,” Colliers, July 21, 1928, 8-9; Ben B. Lindsey, “My Fight with the Ku Klux Klan,” The Survey, June 1, 1925, 271-274, 319-321; “For Bible,12-Hour Day, and Fascism,” Roanoke Rapids Herald (Roanoke Rapids, NC), June 1, 1923; MacLean, Behind theMask of Chivalry, 174-184.40 “Evangelist Jones Has Good Word for Ku Klux Klan,” Daily Herald (Biloxi, Mississippi), March 3, 1923. 41 “Victims at Mer Rouge Put to Death on Rack,” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), January 7, 1923. 262 was beyond believing.”42 Later reports found that the bodies had in fact been crushed by heavy machinery.43 After the bodies were discovered in Lake Lafourche, the exalted cyclops of Morehouse County, J.K. Skipwith, brazenly declared that “it was the wish of the entire membership of the Morehouse Klan that no stone be left unturned in ferreting out and bringing to justice the guilty parties.”44 Skipwith, Dr. B.M. McKoin – a former mayor of Mer Rouge and a leading Klansman - and other Klansmen were accused of the murders. Public hearings in January 1923 garnered national interest in the case, but the state government was ultimately unable to make a conclusive case.45 Bob Jones “hooted Coco,” the state attorney general prosecuting the Mer Rouge case. In contrast to his criticism of A.V. Coco, Jones “was loud in his praise for Captain Skipwith.” He said that Skipwith “was a friend of his and a high toned Christian gentleman.”46 Jones’s support for Skipwith is puzzling. Skipwith was notorious for his reign of terror in Morehead Parish. He used flogging, deportation, and other brutal tactics to enforce morality, even going as far to interrupt telephone service between Bastrop and Mer Rouge.47 Jones’s support of Skipwith, and his disdain of Coco, suggests that he either naively accepted the assurances of Klan leaders that the Invisible Empire did not embrace vigilantism, that he remained willfully ignorant of the atrocities perpetrated by the Klan, or less charitably, that he tacitly supported Klan violence in order to uphold public morality and suppress “vice.” 42 “Brutal Death Said ‘Beyond Believing,’” The Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), January 8, 1923 43 Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 173; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 194. 44 “Says Positive Evidence is Lacking in Identity,” Corsicana Daily Sun (Corsicana, TX), December 27, 1922. 45 Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 173. 46 “Evangelist Jones Has Good Word for Ku Klux Klan,” Daily Herald (Biloxi, Mississippi), March 3, 1923 47 Pegram, One Hundred Percent American, 173 263 Throughout the 1920s, Jones gladly received the Klan’s generosity. On the last night of a campaign in El Paso in 1922, the Klan donated five hundred dollars to Jones.48 In 1924, Klansmen in Clarkesville, Tennessee, gave what was described as “the largest lump donation in the freewill offering” – notably, even as Jones welcomed this gift from the Klan, during this same campaign he also insisted that the only solution for the “race problem” was Christianity.49 During a campaign in Andalusia, Alabama, in 1925, the Klan bestowed on Jones a gift of $1,568.50 Even during the national Klan’s decline after 1925, local klaverns continued to support Jones financially. At the conclusion of a campaign in Bellingham, Washington, in 1927, he was “presented with a bag of money representing the offering of the K.K.K.” Jones publicly thanked the Klan, noting that even though the Klan had not been invited to be special guests during the campaign, the organization had given generously. Jones remarked that the Klan was usually on “the right side” of any issue.51 During a campaign in El Paso, Texas, in 1922, Jones extended an invitation to all Klansmen, who would be his special guests.52 Before making this invitation, the evangelist had been specifically courted by the Klan, and, supposedly without his knowledge, had been taken to a Klan meeting to preach to its members.53 Later, at the revival meeting, Jones defended the 48 “Pagina Del Redactor,” Atalaya Bautista: Semanario Evangelico Bautista, October 19, 1922. 49 “Klansmen Give to Evangelist,” The Daily Leaf-Chronicle (Clarkesville, TN), September 29, 1924; Jones Stresses Need of Prayer,” The Daily Leaf-Chronicle (Clarkesville, TN), September 9, 1924. 50 “Local Ku Klux Klan No. 29 Gives Bob Jones $1568,” The Andalusia Daily Star (Andalusia, AL), August 31, 1925; Wade, The Fiery Cross, 177; “Boosting Bob Jones,” The Guntersville Democrat (Guntersville, AL), September 9, 1925. 51 “Dangers of Backsliding Stressed by Evangelist Bob Jones in Closing His Four Weeks’ Revival Campaign,” Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, WA), December 5, 1927. 52 “Jones to Talk to Patriotic Societies Tonight,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 2, 1922. 53 “Ku Klux Klan Stand for Jesus Christ and the Christian Sabbath,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), August 22, 1925. 264 Klan, reiterating that he supported the Klan if it stood for the things “my old friend, Col. Simmons, of Atlanta, Ga., said it stands for.” Jones repeated that even though Simmons had asked him to join the Klan, he had been “prevented from accepting by his own work.” He informed the audience in El Paso that “the purposes of the organization were three-fold: for the teachings of Christianity; for white supremacy, and for pure, unadulterated Americanism.” Jones explained his beliefs about white supremacy, stating that “the colored man hasn’t a better friend than Bob Jones, but I believe in white supremacy.” He concluded his remarks on the Klan by noting that “the Klan . . . is here to stay,” since “it is composed of enough outstanding, God fearing men to keep it steady.”54 Jones listed his reasons for presenting his statement on the Klan, explaining that he thought it “was just that a clear statement be given to El Paso in fairness to the Klan,” and that he believed that “the best way to cure religious intolerance is for all religious groups and factions to state their position and issues.”55 After Jones was criticized by the El Paso Times for being a pawn of the Klan, he responded by insisting that the Invisible Empire had not made him its “goat.” The evangelist noted that even though he had consulted “five men, two or three of whom may have been Klan members,” he had written his statement about the Klan independently of the order.56 Jones was generously rewarded by the Klan for his support. As noted above, on the last night of the campaign, the Ku Klux Klan gave him five hundred dollars, and, in a letter, praised Jones for “the stand he has taken for Christianity, law enforcement by constituted authorities, Americanism, and his efforts to make El Paso a better place in which to live.”57 54 “Tabernacle’s Biggest Crowd Hears Klan Issues,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 3, 1922. 55 “Bob Jones Pleads for Religious Tolerance,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 5, 1922. 56 “All Border Ports May Close Early, Says Bob Jones,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 6 -7, 1922. 57 “Jones takes Final Whack at Juarez; Gets $5900,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 9, 1922. 265 During a campaign in Galveston, Texas, in 1923, Bob Jones held a special meeting for Klansmen. He invited members of the Ku Klux Klan to “be his guests at the tabernacle . . . and hear a sermon especially prepared for them.” A “Ku Klux Klan night” during Jones’s campaign in Galveston in 1922 had been the “biggest event of the revival.”58 The Galveston Daily News recorded that “a fiery cross ten feet high and scores of American flags and banners adorned the tabernacle.” The evangelist denied that he had ever been a member of the Klan, but he declared he agreed with the “principles of the organization.”59 On the last night of the campaign, the Galveston branch of the Ku Klux Klan donated $250 to Bob Jones. Included with the donation was a letter, which stated that Klansmen had donated to Jones’s campaign throughout the week.60 As in El Paso in 1922 and Galveston in 1923, Jones invited the Klan to be his special guests at a meeting in Andalusia, Alabama, in 1925. Seeking to dispel what Jones viewed as lies spread by “the Jew and Catholic controlled press,” before he began his sermon he launched into a lengthy defense of the Invisible Empire. The evangelist claimed that the Klan was “built upon the foundation of the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ.” He argued that “every boot-legger . . . every member of the underworld . . . every unpatriotic foreigner . . . [and] every dirty peanut politician is opposed to the Klan.” Jones argued that, like him, the Klan was “for the protestant religion,” that they “believe in the Christian Sabbath,” and “stand for the open Bible in the public schools of the country.” He viewed the Klan as his ally in his campaign to stop the influence of “the Jews and the Catholics” and declared that the Klan “stand[s] for the things that I stand for 58 “To Preach Sermon to K.K.K. Tonight,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), December 3, 1923. 59 “Preacher Stress Christ’s Divinity,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), December 4, 1923. 60 “Bob Jones Revival Comes to a Close,” Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), December 17, 1923. 266 and . . . I am for you.”61 Jones supported the Klan because his beliefs aligned with their agenda, even if he occasionally disagreed with their methodology. Ku Klux Klan chapters across the country presented Jones with signs of their approval. At a meeting in Covington, Ohio, Ku Klux Klan members from the Covington Klan gave the evangelist a silk American flag.62 During a later campaign meeting in Covington, Jones discussed the Klan. He repeated his frequent claim that he was not a member of the KKK, but he informed the audience that he knew “many Protestant members who are active members and some of them are my personal friends.” According to Jones, the Klansmen he knew were “a splendid type of Christian men.” He enumerated what he believed to be the principles of the Klan: “the Christian religion . . . the separation of church and state . . . free public schools . . . the protection of pure womanhood . . . a closer relation between capital and labor . . . and the prevention of unwarranted strikes by foreign agitators.” Jones concluded his remarks by predicting that the Klan would, “inside of five years,” have twenty-five million members. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that “each of the clergymen’s statements was answered by roars of applause.”63 Klansmen also distributed literature at Bob Jones’s revival campaigns. During a revival in Dallas in 1924, Klansmen, described by the American Mercury as “Nordic Blond evangelists,” distributed a circular which described the Klan as “a Searchlight on a high tower,” “the Recording Angel’s Proxy,” and “the foe of Vice, the friend of Innocence, the rod and staff of 61 “Ku Klux Klan Stand for Jesus Christ and the Christian Sabbath,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), August 22, 1925. 62 “American Home Discussed,” Cincinnati Inquirer (Cincinnati, OH), October 10, 1923 63 “Growth of Ku Klux Klan is Assured,” Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, OH), October 27, 1923 267 Law.”64 At the end of a special meeting for Ku Klux Klan members in El Paso in 1922, Klansmen circulated a flyer which listed the oath of the KKK and the oath of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization. The oath of the Knights of Columbus printed in the pamphlet, however, was not actually the oath of the Knights of Columbus, but a falsified oath designed to incite popular sentiment against the organization.65 The “oath” of the Knights of Columbus was popular with Klansmen and their supporters, with some “country preachers” even distributing printed copies of the “oath” from their pulpit.66 Even when Bob Jones did not directly address the Klan, members of the Invisible Empire were able to spread their message. Since Jones’s beliefs aligned with the Klan’s agenda, it is unsurprising that Bob Jones and Klansmen became political allies. As discussed in the preceding chapter, in 1924 Jones supported L.B. Musgrove against Oscar W. Underwood in Alabama’s Democratic Party presidential primary. Musgrove, a Klansman, a Prohibitionist, and a millionaire owner of coal mines, banks, and newspapers, was supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Bibb Graves, a Klansmen and an American Legionnaire, managed his campaign. His opponent, Underwood, opposed progressive reforms and Prohibition. Musgrove, in contrast to Underwood, was a former chairman of the national Anti-Saloon League and a supporter of women’s suffrage and the right of workers to organize. Musgrove’s identification with Progressive causes encouraged William Jennings Bryan to support his candidacy by campaigning for Musgrove throughout Alabama. Musgrove was able to form a temporary coalition of newly-enfranchised women, white Evangelicals, organized labor, farmers, and the Klan, but he was ultimately unable to defeat 64 “Americana,” The American Mercury, April 1924, 432. 65 “Bob Jones Pleads for Religious Tolerance,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), October 5, 1922 66 “Smith Overcoming Alabama Enemies,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 7, 1928. 268 Underwood. Jones condemned Underwood’s supporters, describing them as “the whiskey people, the Roman Catholics, and the lawless foreigners.”67 In the 1927 mayoral election in Montgomery, Alabama, Bob Jones, along with the Klan and Governor Bibb Graves, supported J. Johnston Moore, a local druggist and a Klan Cyclops. The Klan attempted to unseat W.A. Gunter, a twelve-year incumbent. Jones accused Gunter of corruption.68 Despite Jones’s allegations, Gunter defeated Moore 4,278 to 2,338.69 In the 1920 presidential primary and in the 1927 Montgomery mayoral race, Jones became a political ally of the Klan. It is unclear how closely linked Jones’s support of Musgrove and Moore was to their endorsement by the Klan. Both Underwood and Gunter were part of an oligarchy that represented the “planter/industrialist clique” – or, as described in the previous chapter, the “Gunter ring” – which opposed Prohibition and Sunday closing laws.70 Jones, who campaigned for Prohibition throughout his career, and was part of the broader Progressive movement, would not have been out of place in the de facto alliances that developed in opposition to the Black Belt-Big Mule Coalition, regardless of Klan involvement. Furthermore, Jones’s personal falling out with Mayor Gunter, caused in part by the mayor’s resistance to more stringent Sunday closing laws, certainly motivated the evangelist to campaign against those whom Gunter supported. Jones’s political alliances with the Klan emphasize the complexity of the Klan’s position in the South in the 1920s. While Jones doubtlessly identified with the Klan’s support of 67 Wayne Flynt, Alabama in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 45; Glenn Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1945 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 64-66; Winfred G. Sandline, “Lycurgus Breckenridge Musgrove,” The Alabama Review, 20, no. 3 (July 1967): 213-214. 68 “US is Drifting Towards Atheism, Says Rev. Bob Jones,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), December 31, 1929. 69 “Klan Candidate for Montgomery Mayor Beaten Two to One,” The Columbus Enquirer-Sun (Columbus, GA), May 17, 1927. 70Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1919-1945, 64. 269 white supremacy, his association with the Klan was related to positions more salient to Jones’s identity. The Ku Klux Klan’s patriotism, populism, and support of public morality and Prohibition would have made the Klan an attractive ally for Jones. His association with the Klan highlights the fact that southern Progressivism often made for strange bedfellows. In 1924, Bob Jones was a spectator at the turbulent 1924 Democratic convention in New York City. His reasons for attending the convention are unclear. The convention, which lasted from June 24 to July 9, was characterized by controversy. Divisions between rural and urban delegates, regional conflict, religious disagreements, the debate over Prohibition, and a host other issues fractured the Democratic Party. Additionally, while William Gibbs McAdoo, a lawyer from California, and Al Smith, the governor of New York, emerged as front-runners, because of confusion in the party nearly every state backed their own favorite sons as nominees. In “the snarling and homicidal roughhouse known as the Madison Square Garden Convention,” competing candidates and politically dangerous issues contributed to destroy any unity in the Party.71 Chief among the issues contributing to the fragmentation of the party was the Ku Klux Klan. McAdoo was supported by the Klan, and, because his support largely was in the South, declined formally to renounce the Klan. McAdoo was also endorsed by Prohibitionists. Smith was supported by anti-Klan delegates, and, as a notable “wet,” was opposed by Prohibitionists. The Committee on Platform and Resolutions did not include any condemnation of the Klan in its 71 Robert K. Murray, The 103rd Ballot: Democrats and the Disaster in Madison Square Garden (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), x, 71-72, 90. 270 proposed platform. A minority report, which recommended the inclusion of a plank specifically denouncing the Klan, provoked a lengthy debate.72 The last delegate to speak on the minority plank was the “Great Commoner,” William Jennings Bryan. Serving as an at-large delegate from Florida, he supported the majority plank. Bryan criticized anti-Klan Democrats for being willing to divide the party because of the Klan issue, declaring that endorsers of the minority plank considered the inclusion of “Ku Klux Klan” more important than “the welfare of a party in a great campaign.” Bryan believed that the Catholic Church, “with its legacy of martyred blood,” and the Jews, with “Elisha, who was able to draw back the curtain and show upon the mountains an invisible host,” did not need the protection of the Democratic Party. He declared that “the Ku Klux Klan does not deserve the advertisement” of censure in the Democratic Party platform. Bryan’s speech was met by hisses, boos, and jeers.73 He was forced to pause twice because of the uproar.74 Bob Jones's son, Bob Jones, Jr., recalled that he and his father had sat in the gallery in Madison Square Garden to hear William Jennings Bryan address the convention. He remembered that “the Tammany Hall rabble booed him and tried to laugh him off the platform,” stating that “it was . . . apparent that those who set themselves against him were ruffians beneath contempt.”75 The New York Times credited Bryan with defeating the censure of the Klan in the 1924 Democratic Party platform, 72 Murray, The 103rd Ballot, 86-88; Arnold S. Rice, “The Southern Wing of the Ku Klux Klan In American Politics, 1915-1928,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1959), 149-150. 73 “Text of the Klan Debate: Arguments For and Against Censuring the Order by Name,” The New York Times, June 29, 1924. 74 Murray, The 103rd Ballot, 158. 75 Jones, Jr., Cornbread and Caviar, 38. 271 stating that “it was to the Commoner that credit went for keeping denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan by name out of the party’s platform.”76 The Ku Klux Klan’s political power was fully on display at the convention. After McAdoo conceded, the Klan opposed Oscar Underwood from Alabama and Al Smith, leading to the nomination of compromise candidate John Davis from West Virginia.77 On July 4, twenty thousand Klan members gathered at nearby Long Branch, New Jersey, for a Tri-State Klorero. Klansmen, women, and children “pounded to a battered pulp an effigy of Governor Smith.” After an airplane, carrying a photographer, landed near the crowd, a riot nearly broke out, since the Klansmen assumed that the photographer, “Bobby” Keough, was a Smith supporter. Later, Judge C. J. Orbison of Indianapolis assured the gathered Klan members that only a Protestant could be president or vice-president. He dubbed the convention the “Democratic Klonvention” in “Jew York,” emphasizing the influence of the Klan in the 1924 Democratic Convention.78 During the convention, Bob Jones campaigned against Al Smith. At a meeting held at the West Side YMCA, he joined Wayne B. Wheeler, general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League, Governor William Sweet of Colorado, and Wayne J. Williams, Colorado attorney general, in denouncing Smith. Jones asserted that “the reason Americans are against Al Smith is that the bootleggers are for him.” He threatened that if the Democratic Convention nominated Al Smith it would “split the Solid South,” adding that “if you want the Solid South with you, you will nominate a dry man.” The evangelist concluded his remarks by stating that “Al Smith is the 76 “How Bryan Defeated Move to Denounce the Ku Klux Klan by Name in the Convention,” The New York Times (New York, NY), July 27, 1925. 77 Wade, The Fiery Cross, 198-199. 78 “Klan Rally Vents Anti-Smith Feeling,” The New York Times (New York, NY), July 5, 1924. 272 worst hated man in America.”79 The following day, J.F. Essary, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, interviewed Jones at the Hotel Vanderbilt, allegedly a “stronghold of McAdoo.” The evangelist told the journalist that the Klan “included some of the finest men in their communities” and shared a rumor that the entire Mississippi delegation was composed of Klansmen. Jones insisted that “the political party that put an anti-Klan plank in its platform was a dead political party.”80 Jones’s condemnation of Smith, and his association with the Klan and its supporters, provided a glimpse of his future reaction to Smith’s nomination in 1928. Bob Jones became most closely allied with the Klan during the 1928 presidential election. In 1928 the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama succeeded in dividing the Democratic Party and splitting the “Solid South.” The Alabama Klan proved its continuing relevance by sparking a civil war in the Democratic Party between the so-called Black Belt/Big Mule coalition and a loose confederacy of “Hoovercrats.” Alabama Klansmen, allied with the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, succeeded in electing most of the Klan-backed candidates in the May primaries as delegates to the Democratic Convention. Before the Democratic Convention, Jones campaigned against Smith, making “klan speeches over the state.”81 Before the Democratic National Convention, Emperor and Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evan outlined the Klan’s plan to fight Smith. He declared that the Klan would resist Smith because “he is a Roman Catholic,” because he opposed Prohibition, “because he is a product of the ‘boss system,’” and because he was supported by immigrants.82 The Klan’s 79 “Smith Out of Step, Says Dry Leader,” The New York Times (New York, NY), June 23, 1924. 80 J.F. Essary, “Hotels Hide 1,000,000 Sheets, Fearing Klan Nomination,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 24, 1924. 81 “Religion Brings Wild Applause in Bolters’ Meet,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), August 14, 1928. 82 “Klan Head Reveals Plan to Fight Smith,” The New York Times (New York, NY), December 23, 1927. 273 arguments, in addition to race, which was introduced later in the campaign, would serve as the basis for many southerners’ opposition to Smith. After Al Smith was nominated at the Democratic Convention in Houston, the Alabama Klan “responded . . . as if its very life were imperiled.” In what was referred to as the 1928 “bolt,” many lifelong Democrats from Alabama broke party rank and supported Hoover, without becoming Republicans.83 Bob Jones was among those who bolted and became a Hoovercrat. On August 13, 1928, a group of anti-Smith Democrats met at the Tutwiler Hotel in Birmingham to organize the Alabama Anti-Smith Democrats. Jones was among those who spoke at the rally. He addressed the “bolters” and appealed to the “religious issue.” Jones declared that he would “rather see a saloon on every corner in every city in the United States than see Al Smith, the candidate of the foreigners, president.”84 Jones blamed immigrants for what he perceived to be impiety among Americans. In El Paso in 1922, he argued that “it is the foreigners coming to America who are destroying our Sabbath.”85 Jones attacked Smith, comparing him with Chicago’s mayor, Bill Thompson, and the devil and condemned the New York governor “on political, moral and religious grounds.” He declared that “New York with its preponderance of foreign population is everything bad, and Chicago worse.”86 During the meeting in Birmingham, Jones said that “he would rather vote for a negro than for Al Smith.” He continued, alleging that Smith was Mussolini’s candidate. Jones warned his audience that Al Smith would allow “hordes 83 Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949, 168. 84 “Religion Brings Wild Applause in Bolters’ Meet,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), August 14, 1928. 85 “Bob Jones Sways Big Audience,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 5, 1922. 86 “Al Smith Censured,” Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, WA), November 10, 1927. 274 of foreigners” to enter the United States if he was elected. He also attacked Smith for allegedly having “a drink every day.”87 Bob Jones campaigned against Smith across Alabama. He justified his political activism by explaining that America was endangered by “a conspiracy to deliver this government to the Pope at Rome.” Jones told an audience in Dothan that Smith, who he believed to be “the nominee of Tammany Hall, the Catholic machine,” was “the usurper of the nomination,” bluntly stating, “He stole it. Took it.” He declared that he believed that the pope “sits on a throne with his eyes on the nations of the world, seeking temporal power . . . dreaming of the day when he will control every country on the face of the earth.”88 Both loyal Democrats and Hoovercrats who bolted turned to race-baiting. Race surpassed Prohibition, nativism, and anti-Catholicism as the main issue of the campaign.89 At a rally at the Headland High School in Headland, Alabama, Jones howled that Smith was “the greatest ‘nigger’ lover and ‘nigger’ boot licker of the country” and that “he was a believer of the inter-marriage of the white and black races.”90 The evangelist was parroting similar race-baiting used by Hugh A. Locke, state chairman of Anti-Smith Democrats, who denounced Smith as a “negro lover” and a “negro boot licker.”91 The Wiregrass Farmer of Headland, Alabama, recognized that racial demagoguery was being used by Jones to discredit the Democratic Party. Its editor observed that Jones was resorting to the “every-present 87 “Religion Brings Wild Applause in Bolters’ Meet,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), August 14, 1928. 88 “Crowd Gathers in Auditorium to Hear Jones,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), August 25, 1928. 89 Feldman, Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1945, 161. 90 “Headland Preacher Won’t Indulge in Politics After Decrease in Crowd,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), October 9, 1928. 91 “Smith Overcoming Alabama Enemies,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 7, 1928. 275 black ghost” to “fight the Democratic party.”92 Bob Jones threatened that Smith would “Tammanyize and Romanize the South within four years or less.”93 Jones’s campaign against Al Smith attracted national attention. The Greensboro Daily News noted the importance of Jones’s attacks against Smith, explaining that in Alabama “religion is about the only subject that is receiving attention.” The newspaper stated that the campaign was “being paramount by the klan, the Republican leadership ” and “by Bob Jones, evangelist.”94 The Washington, D.C. Evening Star also observed that the Anti-Smith Democrats in Alabama had no qualms about the “religious issue.” According to the newspaper, “Those who oppose the election of a Catholic to the presidency do not whisper here; their campaign is a shouting campaign.” The article stated that “for months now Rev. ‘Bob’ Jones, an Evangelist, has been pleading with the voters in public speeches not to put a Catholic into the White House.”95 The New York Times also took note of the importance of religion in the 1928 presidential election. In describing the inflammatory rhetoric used by “Klan politicians and preachers in Methodist and Baptist pulpits,” the newspaper observed that “Dr. Bob Jones . . . is making 100 speeches for Hoover in Alabama.” He attempted to terrify audiences with threats that “Catholics regard the children of non-Catholic parents as illegitimate,” and that “a Protestant-married couple would have to be remarried by a Catholic priest.” Jones, the Times reported, “has repeated[ly] said ‘I’d rather see a saloon on every corner than a Catholic in the White House.” The evangelist was also “fond of saying that he’d ‘rather see a nigger’ President” 92 “The Questions At Issue,” The Wiregrass Farmer (Headland, AL), July 26, 1928. 93 “Headland Preacher Won’t Indulge in Politics After Decrease in Crowd,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), October 9, 1928. 94 “The Smoke Screen,” Greensboro Daily News (Greensboro, NC), October 16, 1928. 95Byron Rice, “Anti-Smith Fight Arouses Alabama,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), October 19, 1928. 276 than Smith. Jones warned his listeners that “in Italy the watch-word of the priests is ‘If you can’t convert ‘em, kill ‘em.’”96 Bob Jones’s rabid anti-Catholicism is somewhat incongruent with his relationship with Catholics during his early career. During a campaign in Waverly, Pennsylvania, in 1915, Jones condemned strife between Protestants and Catholics, contending “it would grieve the Master to come back here and find us quarrelling among ourselves.” He declared that “God loves the Roman Catholics just as much as He does the Methodists.”97 The Methodist evangelist even cooperated with a Catholic priest, Father Michael Weldon, in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1917 to campaign for the close of the red light district there. Jones proudly listed Father Weldon, the leading Catholic priest of the city, among his allies in the anti-vice campaign.98 These early examples of ecumenism provide a stark contrast to his vitriol-laden attacks against Smith’s Catholicism in 1928. This shift suggests that Jones’s anti-Catholicism was shaped by politics and not decreed by doctrine. Jones’s decision to campaign against Al Smith resulted in a loss of credibility for the evangelist. He was described by the Dothan Eagle as a “political evangelist.”99 Jones was frequently accused of being mercenary. Circuit Court judge Leon McCord, an Al Smith supporter, taunted Jones, calling him “the only minister who ever grew wealthy” – an accusation that Jones responded to by writing a letter to McCord demanding that he prove his accusations or 96 “Smith Overcoming Alabama Enemies,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 7, 1928. 97 John F. Noll, For Our Non-Catholic Friends: The Fairest Argument (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1917), 41. 98 “Sermon on the Death of Jesus,” The Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), February 9, 1917. 99 “Headland Preacher Won’t Indulge in Politics After Decrease in Crowd,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), October 9, 1928. 277 retire from the court. 100 The Montgomery Advertiser attacked Jones, naming him the “plutocratic evangelist.” The newspaper criticized Jones, stating that it always cost “a wad of money to hear Bob speak no matter whether he was saving one’s soul or one’s country.”101 After Jones was not allowed to use the Methodist Church or the public park in Headland to make a political speech, the Dothan Eagle mockingly gave a “Free Ad for Brother Bob.” The newspaper warned attendees at Jones’s political rally to “go prepared to dig into your pocket when Brother Bob passed the hat,” noting that “the money isn’t for his use, to be sure, but for his college at Lynn Haven, Fla.” The Eagle concluded its attack against Jones, stating that Jones “maybe, after Gov. Smith is elected, Brother Bob will find time to go back to the duller if less remunerative business of saving our souls.”102 Bob Jones fired back, dubbing the Advertiser a “polecat” and calling the Dothan Eagle the “Dothan Buzzard.”103 He also claimed that “the Montgomery Advertiser is in the conspiracy with the Pope of Rome” and described the newspaper as “that dirty sheet.”104 The Dothan Eagle and the Montgomery Advertiser were not the only newspapers to condemn Jones – the Wiregrass Farmer of Headland, Alabama, declared that it had “lost every vestige of whatever respect it had for Jones.”105 Jones’s support of Hoover even provoked criticism from his relatives. His wife’s family, upper-class planters from the Black Belt, insulted Jones, since, 100 “Judge M’Cord Launches Fight in Wiregrass,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), September 8, 1928; “Dr. Jones to Judge McCord,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), September 9, 1928. 101 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 1702 to 1943, 207. 102 “Free Ad for Brother Bob,” The Dothan Eagle, August 22, 1928. 103 Sellers, The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 1702 to 1943, 207. 104 “Crowd Gathers in Auditorium to Hear Jones,” The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, AL), August 25, 1928. 105 “That Long Deferred Bob Jones Speech,” The Wiregrass Farmer (Headland, AL), October 4, 1928. 278 according to Bob Jones, Jr., “They were embarrassed to have an in-law campaign for Herbert Hoover.”106 After the election of 1928, Jones’s attention was increasingly focused on Bob Jones College, which he believed could help stall the atheistic “educational drift” in America.107 He also maintained a regular schedule of evangelistic preaching, both over the radio and from the tabernacle platform.108 In 1933, Bob Jones College moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, and in 1947 the school, renamed Bob Jones University, moved to Greenville, South Carolina.109 Bob Jones College touted itself as “a modern college,” with “a modern plant” and “modern educational standards” and without any “compromise with so-called modernism.”110 When Bob Jones University moved to Greenville, South Carolina in 1947, it constructed a physical plant with facilities costing more than three million dollars, paid for in cash.111 By the mid-1950s, the school had begun a two million dollar expansion program and boasted Unusual Films, described as “the most complete film studio between New York and California,” and which, in 1958, represented American colleges and universities at the International Film Festival in Cannes. The university also had a one-thousand watt radio station and the Bob Jones University Museum and Art Gallery, which housed “the most outstanding collection of sacred art in the Southeast.” In the 106 Jones, Jr., Cornbread and Caviar: Reminiscences and Reflections, 18 107 “Atheism on Increase, Evangelist Declares,” The Tennessean (Nashville, TN), January 1, 1930; Bob Jones, “An Article,” The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL), April 22, 1928. 108 “Dr. Bob Jones Holds Revival in Pittsburgh,” The Pensacola News Journal (Pensacola, FL), April 4, 1931; “Bob Jones Will Speak At Tent Saturday,” The Elba Clipper (Elba, AL), October 8, 1931; “Dr. Bob Jones Is Heard By Packed House,” The Pensacola News Journal (Pensacola, FL), November 19, 1933. 109 “Jones College Opens Session in Cleveland,” Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), September 8, 1933; “Letter from Dr. Bob Jones, President Bob Jones College, Cleveland, Tenn.,” The Chattanooga News (Chattanooga, TN), August 28, 1933. 110 The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), June 25, 1939. 111 “Bob Jones Plans $3,030,000 Plant,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), April 26, 1946. 279 1950s, the university had approximately three thousand students, from all forty-eight states and more than twenty-five countries, compared with the eight students who were enrolled in 1927.112 The university sought to attract international students from its earliest years and bought advertisements in denominational organs (like The Southern Presbyterian Journal) to entice students from Latin America and other parts of the world. While students from Asia and Latin America did attend the school, no black students were admitted.113 As outlined in the beginning of this chapter, Jones was a staunch opponent of integration and remained so until his death in 1968. In 1955, the educator and evangelist outlined his opposition to integration. He argued that “integration might tend to weaken the spiritual heritage of the Southern Negro,” who had “preserved the old-time simple Christian faith.” Jones explicitly linked integration to his ongoing campaign to create an institution (Bob Jones University) where (white) evangelical Protestants could send their children and be assured that they would graduate without having their beliefs disturbed. He distinguished between the “rights we have under the Constitution” and “what’s best for . . . our children spiritually,” suggesting that integration, like “atheism,” may be constitutionally protected, but “not spiritually right.”114 Jones followed up these comments in 1956 (as mentioned earlier) by insisting that integration 112 “The ‘Unusual’ Is Not New For Bob Jones University,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), April 10, 1951; “At Bob Jones University, New Buildings Under Way,” The Charlotte News (Charlotte, NC), January 31, 1956; “Bob Jones University Plans Big Expansion,” The Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), March 22, 1956; “Bob Jones Film to Represent U.S. Colleges At Cannes Fete,” The Index-Journal (Greenwood, SC), May 1, 1958. The university’s claim for the number of countries represented in their student body seems to have been somewhat inflated. In the 1956 edition of the Vintage, Bob Jones University’s yearbook, only eighteen countries are represented (China, Canada, Guatemala, Jordan, Singapore, Cyprus, Haiti, Formosa (Taiwan), Germany, the Philippines, Lebanon, Mexico, Cuba, Thailand, Syria, Korea, Israel, and the Bahamas). See The Vintage (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University, 1956). 113 The Southern Presbyterian Journal, May 15, 1947. 114 “Dr. Jones Speaks On Integration,” The Rocky Mount Telegram (Rocky Mount, NC), September 8, 1955. 280 was not a “Christian issue.” 115 In July 1957, Jones, during a visit to Birmingham, told a reporter for the Birmingham News that “God is the author of the segregation of the races.” The evangelist equated integration with theological modernism. He contended that “desegregation is propagated by the extreme religious liberals who have repudiated the old-time religion.” Jones claimed that “Christian colored people . . . feel the same about it as I do.”116 In the spring of 1958, the American Council of Christian Churches was held in Greenville, South Carolina, and some sessions met at Bob Jones University.117 The organization, led by Carl McIntire and backed by Bob Jones, declared that “segregation within the church on racial, linguistic, and national lines is not un-Christian nor contrary to the specific demands of the Bible.”118 Later that year, in October, Jones attacked Norman Vincent Peale, who, during a speech at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. on October 4, argued that anyone who used the Bible to defend segregation was “a man misrepresenting the scriptures.” His diatribe, originally delivered to faculty and students at Bob Jones University, was rebroadcast by the Dallas County (Alabama) Citizens Council since they believed that “anyone who has confused ideas about segregation for religious reasons should hear the talk.” Jones contended that Peale was “misrepresenting the Scriptures,” since “God was the first segregationist.”119 By 1960, the aging evangelist had become a leading evangelical defender of segregation. 115 “Jones Denies Segregation Is Christian Issue,” The Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), March 5, 1956. 116 Claude Keathley, “Neither Race Wants Mixing, Says Pastor,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), July 8, 1957. 117 G.H. Rowland, “American Council Christian Churches Plan Meet In Greenville In Spring,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), January 15, 1958; “ACCC Meeting,” Christianity Today, May 26, 1958, 32. 118 “Integration In Churches To Be Opposed In Area,” The Gaffney Ledger (Gaffney, SC), May 6, 1958. 119 “Segregation Talk To Be Re-Broadcast,” The Selma Times-Journal (Selma, AL), October 26, 1958; “Racial Discussion Over Radio Sunday,” The Selma Times-Journal (Selma, AL), October 26, 1958. 281 Bob Jones’s clearest statement of his beliefs about race is presented in a sermon delivered on Easter Sunday 1960 titled “Is Segregation Scriptural?” He prefaced his remarks by alerting his audience that the sermon would be “one of the most important and most timely messages I have every brought.”120 Jones’s defense of segregation was based on biblical inerrancy, the belief that “whatever the Bible says is so.”121 He turned to Acts 17:26, which states, “And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” He interpreted this verse to be a divine endorsement of segregation. Jones believed that God had established a racial order. He argued that each race had a special purpose and qualities given by God.122 Jones declared that “the Bible is perfectly clear on races.” He believed that God had “fixed the bounds of their habitation,” restricting racial and ethnic groups to specific geographic locations.123 He challenged the idea that the United States should be a “melting pot,” contending that “God never meant for America . . . to rub out the line between the nations.”124 Jones believed that “God is the author of segregation,” and it was part of “God’s established order.”125 Since Jones believed that segregation was divinely decreed, he also believed that attempts to challenge segregation were satanically inspired. He saw the Civil Rights Movement as part of “a subtle, Satanic effort to undermine people’s faith in the Bible.” He argued that “race turmoil” was “contrary to 120 Bob Jones, Sr., “Is Segregation Scriptural?” (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University, 1960), 1. 121 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 2. 122 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 28, 18. 123 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 4, 8. 124 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 15. 125 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 32. 282 Scripture.”126 Jones contended that the Civil Rights Movement was “an effort . . . to disturb the established order.”127 He believed that “racial disturbance” was “not of God.” He condemned the belief that “God is the Father of everybody” as a “Satanic lie.” Jones believed that God is only the father of those who are “born again.” He characterized the Civil Rights Movement as “outside agitation.” Jones attacked the “false piety” of civil rights activists.128 He thought that the Civil Rights Movement was “a Satanic agitation striking back at God’s established order.”129 Jones associated the Civil Rights Movement with “religious liberals,” who he believed to be “the worst infidels in many ways in the country.”130 He declared that “a lot of this agitation comes from evangelists of a certain type who have never gone into this situation” and who preached “a sentimental, soap-bubble, anemic kind of a religion.”131 Jones argued that the Civil Rights Movement was an “outside, Communistic, Hellish influence,” which threatened to “set this country back . . . for twenty-five to fifty years.”132 Bob Jones characterized the movement for integration in apocalyptic terms. He warned his audience that “we are facing serious dangers today – more serious than we can ever imagine.” Jones declared that “when you run into conflict with God’s established order racially, you have trouble.” He believed that “we are facing dangers from abroad and dangers at home” because “we have got away from the Bible of our forefathers.” He cautioned his listeners against 126 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 3. 127 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 10. 128 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 11. 129 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 15. 130 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 17. 131 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 29. 132Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 21. 283 allowing “religious liberals,” who were “blowing bubbles of nothing over your head,” to “get you upset and disturbed.” Jones insisted that “enemies are being made now that are dividing this country as it has never been divided in its history.” He threatened his audience that “the darkest day the world has ever known will be when we have one world like they are talking about now. The line will be rubbed out, and the Antichrist will take over.” For Jones, integration presaged the apocalypse.133 Ironically, Bob Jones called for African Americans and white southerners to resist the “outside agitation” together. He believed that “there is no trouble between a born-again white man and a born-again colored man.”134 Jones declared that African Americans and white southerners had “gotten along together harmoniously and peacefully, and everything has come along fine.”135 He emphasized white support of African Americans, noting that “the white people have helped the colored people build their churches.”136 Jones explained that “there has never been a time . . . when the white people in the South were so eager to help the colored people build their schools.” He informed his audience that he had planned to found a school for African Americans, but that “this agitation” had made it impossible.137 Jones believed that “the good white folks have always stood by their good colored friends.”138 He asserted that “good, Christian colored people in the South . . . are trying to fight back the subtle, Satanic disturbance 133Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 31. 134Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 4. 135 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 9-10. 136 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 10. 137 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 17, 24. 138 Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,”. 10. 284 we have in this country.”139 Jones depicted a paternalistic relationship between whites and African Americans, and he turned to African Americans to resist integration. Bob Jones’s commitment to segregation was, at least in part, a reaction to other Evangelical Protestant leaders’ support of integration. His personal dislike of Billy Graham, who advocated for integration, influenced his defense of segregation. Graham, at his mother’s urging, attended Bob Jones College, located in Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1936. His “expansive nature” was ill-suited to the school’s regimen of rigorous discipline. Graham, who “never liked to be told what to do,” chafed against the institution’s strict rules.140 Bob Jones College, Graham recalled, was “so rigidly regimented that it shocked me.” Despite his dislike of the College’s regulations, Graham remembered that “we also loved Dr. Bob . . . we could not help but sense that he had our best interests at heart in all the policies he imposed.” Graham also “didn’t like the weather,” and he “didn’t like it because the school had no baseball team.”141 After enduring one semester at the school, Graham informed Bob Jones that he would be transferring from Bob Jones College to the Florida Bible Institute in Tampa, Florida. Jones lambasted Graham’s decision, remarking that if Graham was “a misfit at Bob Jones College,” he would “be a misfit anywhere.” He threatened Graham that if he left Bob Jones College, he would only “amount to . . . a poor country preacher somewhere out in the sticks.”142 Graham left Jones’s office “disillusioned and dejected.”143 139Jones, “Is Segregation Scriptural?,” 17. 140 Marshall Frady, Billy Graham, 97. 141 Louis Hofferbert, “The Spotlight: The Billy Graham Story,” Schenectady Gazette (Schenectady, NY), September 7, 1954. 142 Frady, Billy Graham, 100. 143 Billy Graham, Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 41. 285 Despite Graham’s decision to leave Bob Jones College after one semester, and Jones’s angry response to Graham’s defection, Jones and Graham maintained an amicable relationship. Graduates of Bob Jones College (and later, Bob Jones University) served in key positions on Graham’s evangelistic teams. Cliff Barrows, Graham’s music and program director, and his wife, Grady Wilson, a vice-president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), and T.W. Wilson, an associate evangelist with the BGEA had all attended Bob Jones College.144 Willis Haymaker, a long-time member of Jones’s evangelistic team, became Graham’s campaign manager. Herb Hoover, a soloist and song leader who appeared on Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision television program, earned a master’s degree in sacred music from Bob Jones University and was the director of the school of music.145 Musical groups from Bob Jones University performed at services led by members of the BGEA, and the Bob Jones University Choir appeared multiple times on Graham’s Hour of Decision program.146 Bob Jones University’s movie and television studio, “Unusual Pictures,” produced television shorts for Billy Graham.147 The University conferred an honorary doctorate on Graham in 1948.148 Jones and Graham maintained regular correspondence, and Bob Jones recalled that during Graham’s 1949 campaign in Los Angeles, the young evangelist remarked that “all I know about evangelism, I learned there [at Bob Jones College],” and Graham 144 “Wives,” Lubbock Evening Journal (Lubbock, TX), July 2, 1953; “Famed Evangelist to Open Limerick Sessions Sunday,” Pottstown Mercury (Pottstown, PA), May 25, 1951; Johnson, Builder of Bridges, 275. 145 “Bible Baptists to Have Series of Meetings,” The Kokomo Tribune (Kokomo, IN), June 13, 1956. 146 Graham Aide to Speak at N. Syracuse Services,” The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), July 25, 1953; BGEA: Walter F. Bennett & Company, Collection 54, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College. 147 Nate Wegodsky, “Bob Jones College is Unusual in Many Respects,” Kingsport Times (Kingsport, TN), September 6, 1952. 148 Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1997), 168. 286 requested that Jones call Graham “one of your boys.”149 During his early career, Graham was compared to Jones; he was described as a “‘sawdust’ evangelist preaching the prevalence of sin and damnation in the tradition of . . . Bob Jones.”150 In 1950, at the invitation of Bob Jones, Jr., Graham held a rally on the campus of Bob Jones University, and the Joneses entertained Graham, as well as members of Graham’s evangelistic team and Strom Thurmond, in their home.151 Billy Graham’s relationship with Bob Jones soon soured. As early as 1951, Jones questioned the legitimacy of Graham’s revivals, remarking that “people are flocking to his meetings because they want something to which to tie.”152 Theodore Mercer, a former registrar of Bob Jones University who was fired in June 1953 for disobeying school policies, claimed that Bob Jones Jr. described Graham as “shallow and superficial, and not having real revival.”153 The Joneses’ disagreement with Graham is difficult to explain. Historian Mark Taylor Dalhouse suggests that perhaps the Joneses’ resented Graham’s “meteoric rise,” or that Graham’s continued involvement in the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and his support of “neo-evangelicalism” conflicted with the Joneses’ condemnation of the NAE.154 R.K. Johnson, Bob Jones’s biographer, rejected that Jones clashed with Graham because of personality. Instead, Johnson argued “the Billy Graham issue is a spiritual issue. It deals with the compromise 149 Johnson, Builder of Bridges, 274. 150 Dick Connolly, “Vigorous Evangelist Strong as an Athlete,” The Portsmouth Herald (Portsmouth, NH), April 3, 1950. 151 Mark Taylor Dalhouse, Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism, and the Separatist Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 81. 152 “Evangelism Moving On, Says Dr. Jones Here,” The Miami News (Miami, FL), March 10, 1951. 153 Dalhouse, Island in the Lake of Fire, 81. 154 Dalhouse, Island in the Lake of Fire, 82. 287 evangelism in which God’s Bible-believing people are being led to join hands with God’s enemies.”155 Bob Jones’s disagreements with Graham became most pronounced during the months leading up to Graham’s 1957 campaign in New York City. The campaign was sponsored by the Protestant Council of New York, an ecumenical association affiliated with the National Council of the Churches of Christ.156 Graham announced that he was “coming to get the people to dedicate themselves to God and then to send them to their own church – Catholic, Protestant or Jewish.”157 Bob Jones Jr., in a 1956 letter to Ralph W. Mitchell, a member of the BGEA, criticized Graham for his decision to partner with the Protestant Council and threatened that “seeking the sponsorship of modernists and liberals” would “leave orthodox churches, if they cooperate, spineless and emasculated.”158 Mitchell was convinced that the Joneses were intractable and encouraged Graham not to “concern yourself unduly about such critics.”159 The Joneses, John R. Rice, and other prominent fundamentalists opposed Graham’s campaign in New York. Bob Jones condemned Graham’s ecumenism. He believed that the younger evangelist was “prostituting his role by turning his wards to the wrong churches.” He declared that “Billy is sacrificing the permanent on the altar of the immediate.” Jones denounced Graham for “giving 155 Johnson, Builder of Bridges, 273. 156 ‘Evangelist Billy Graham Hopes to ‘Light Flame’ in Revival,” Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (Lubbock, TX) , May 5, 1957. 157 “Graham Crusade Planned for ’57 in New York,” The Kingston Daily Freeman (Kingston, NY), September 18, 1956. 158 Bob Jones Jr. to Ralph W. Mitchell, November 7, 1956, Bob Jones University Archives, Greenville, SC. 159 Graham, Just As I Am, 303. 288 the tools for capturing souls to the liberals, even the radicals.” He prophesied that “when their houses come tumbling down, his will collapse, too.”160 Fundamentalists’ attacks against Graham’s ecumenism were “painful” to the evangelist. Graham recalled that the criticism of Jones, Rice, and other leaders, who Graham “admired . . . and respected,” “hurt immensely.” He remembered that “their harshness and lack of love saddened me.” Graham, however, believed that he was right in being “willing to work with all who were willing to work with us.”161 He “won the gamble that he could appeal to a larger audience” without the fundamentalists. He adopted a more expansive view of Christianity. Graham, addressing the 1957 NAE convention, stated that he believed that “born-again Christians” did not have to use “our shibboleths” or “know our particular evangelical language.”162 Graham explained that his earlier fundamentalism was based on “ignorance,” noting that he “had not had the opportunity to fellowship with people in other communities before.”163 Graham’s decision to cooperate with mainline Protestants, Catholics, and people of other faiths seems to echo Jones’s willingness to promote inter-denominational cooperation during his early career. Both Jones and Graham were willing to defy denominational boundaries during evangelistic campaigns. Despite this similarity, Jones attacked Graham for his ecumenism, even going as far to accuse him of “playing into the hands of the Communists.”164 The disagreement between Jones and Graham became the defining feature of early disagreements between Fundamentalism and New Evangelicalism. The Greensboro Record, in 160 “Billy Graham Wrong, Former Teacher Says,” San Antonio Express (San Antonio, TX), November 16, 1957. 161 Graham, Just As I Am, 302-303. 162 Billy Graham, “The Lost Chord of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, April 1, 1957, 26-27. 163 “Billy Graham’s Long Walk Home,” Times-News (Hendersonville, NC), September 15, 1991. 164 “Billy Graham Aiding Reds, Bob Jones Says,” Spartanburg Herald (Spartanburg, SC), April 16, 1958. 289 October 1958, reported that Graham and Jones “have been feuding for years.” The newspaper was unclear about the exact causes of the feud, suggesting that it was “something about theological concepts.” The column informed readers that a Graham source in Charlotte testified that seven Bob Jones students were expelled after “Dr. Jones caught them eating Graham crackers.”165 This tongue-in-cheek report illustrates both how deeply Jones and Graham disagreed and how incomprehensible the disagreement was to most observers. Billy Graham’s support of integration strengthened Bob Jones’s resolve to defend segregation. Jones, who had remained silent about segregation, began to attack Graham for his integrationist beliefs after 1957. In the early 1950s, Graham, sandwiched between culture and conviction, slowly came to believe that segregation was morally wrong. After 1954, the BGEA abandoned segregated services.166 The integration of Graham’s revival services coincided with his move towards new evangelicalism. As he rejected the rigid beliefs of fundamentalism, so Graham challenged the restrictions of segregation. Billy Graham, in an article in the October 1, 1956, edition of LIFE magazine, asserted that “the vast majority of the ministers of the South . . . feel that segregation should be ended now on buses, in railroad and bus stations, hotels and in restaurants.” He believed that “where men are standing at the foot of the Cross, there are no racial barriers.” Graham appealed to his readers to treat all men with “neighbor-love,” declaring that “we must dare to obey the commandment of love.” He refuted the arguments used by “segregation extremists” and cautioned supporters of segregation of the “mistake of pleading the Bible to defend it.” He called on churches to “lead in confession” for the “transgression of 165 “Feud Victims,” The Greensboro Record (Greensboro, NC), October 17, 1958. 166 Stephen P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 30. 290 neighbor-love.”167 In April 1958, Bob Jones attacked Graham for his position on integration. He argued that racial unrest was “being used by the Communists . . . to break down an established Southern order.” He contended that “when Billy Graham insists that he will not hold a meeting anywhere unless the races are desegregated he is playing into the hands of the Communists.”168 After a two and a half month visit to Africa in 1960, Graham reported that segregation “was an increasing embarrassment to Americans in Africa.”169 His trip to Africa “strengthened his conviction that Christianity must free itself of racial restrictions.”170 On Good Friday, April 15, 1960, Graham, in an article written for UPI, formally condemned segregation. In what one writer described as his “Easter message about race relations,” Graham argued that “the white race cannot possibly claim to be the chosen race nor can the white race take for themselves promises that were applied to ancient Israel.” He announced that “‘Jim Crow’ must go.” Graham professed that he was “concerned about some clergymen . . . that have made the ‘race issue’ their gospel.” He explained that “the gospel is the good news that on that first Good Friday Christ died for our sins and that He rose from the dead on the first Easter morning – and that God is willing to forgive our sins.” Graham called on readers to “go out of our way to extend courtesy and friendship on a personal basis to those of another race.”171 Jones, who had already criticized Graham for his support of integration, responded to Graham’s denouncement of segregation and 167 Billy Graham, “Billy Graham Makes Plea for An End to Intolerance,” Life, October 1, 1956, 138-151. 168 “Billy Graham Aiding Reds, Bob Jones Says,” Spartanburg Herald (Spartanburg, SC), April 16, 1958. Jones’s assertion is somewhat ironic, considering that Communists frequently used racial discrimination to discredit the United States in Africa. See Ralph McGill, “Communists Never Halt Anti-American Campaign Overseas,” The San Bernadino County Sun (San Bernadino, CA), April 10, 1960. 169 “Graham Denounces Apartheid,” New York Times (New York, NY), March 30, 1960. 170 George W. Cornell, “Billy Graham Says: Church Segregation is Shock to Africans,” The Anniston Star (Anniston, AL), April 7, 1960. 171 Billy Graham, “Billy Graham Gives Integration Views,” The Terre Haute Tribute (Terra Haute, IN), April 16, 1960. 291 his call for ministers to not make race relations their gospel by preaching a sermon supporting segregation on Easter Sunday. Jones’s argument about the need to preserve a supposedly God-ordained order reflects the importance of separation to the Fundamentalist worldview. A sermon preached by Jones’s son, Bob Jones, Jr., in 1958 illustrates how the Joneses’ emphasis on separation extended to areas other than race. Jones, using the same text that his father would use two years later to defend segregation, contended that “God has set up certain boundaries for people,” and that “men’s rebellious ambition” sought to “break down God’s barriers.” Jones rejected the United Nations and similar internationalist endeavors, arguing that “the effort toward ‘One World’” was a “monument to man’s rebellion against God.”172 For Fundamentalists, like Bob Jones, Sr., and Bob Jones, Jr., separation was a central doctrine. Divisions between races and nations were divinely decreed, and separation between saved and unsaved and orthodox and heterodox was essential for safeguarding the souls of the faithful and ensuring the ideological purity of the movement. Bob Jones, Sr. and Bob Jones, Jr., publicly supported racial segregation and prohibited black students from enrolling at their school.173 In 1966, reflecting Bob Jones’s rejection of integration, Bob Jones University refused to submit a required statement of compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, arguing that the compliance statement was “merely an attempt to intimidate this private institution that is not subject to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”174 Bob Jones, Jr. clarified the university’s decision to resist 172 Bob Jones, Jr., “They Talked Themselves Out of It,” The American Mercury, December 1958, 119-121. 173 “Negroes and The Christian Campus,” Christianity Today, November 20, 1964, 47. 174 “School Aid Not Sought,” Spartanburg Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC), December 10, 1966; “Bob Jones Won’t Sign,” The Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, SC), December 12, 1966. 292 integration at a revival in Charlotte in April 1966, arguing that integration was “against the stated policy of the founder,” Bob Jones, Sr., and stating that “God ordained the divisions of society . . . for man’s spiritual good.” He warned that integration would result in intermarriage and “the eventual mongrelization of the races and thus the end to diversity.”175 Bob Jones, Jr., also claimed that complying with the Civil Rights Act would mean they would not be able to “preserve our standards.”176 Bob Jones, Jr.’s explanation for the universities non-compliance contrasts with his son’s (Bob Jones III) explanation, who, in 1975, stated that the institution refused to sign the statement of compliance because Bob Jones, Jr. “had . . . foresight to understand that no institution signing that document could be free of government controls.”177 Regardless, because of the school’s non-compliance, Bob Jones University became the first institution of higher learning to be investigated by the U.S. Education Office for non-compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the U.S. Office of Education terminated federal aid to the institution in November of 1966.178 In a statement to alumni and other supporters of the university, Bob Jones, Jr., explained the university’s refusal to integrate, arguing that even though the university was not “against the Negro race,” the school could not admit African-American students because of the threat of “breaking down . . . racial barriers which God has set up.”179 He claimed that African-American 175 “Jones Says Graham Trying to Socialize Christianity,” Spartanburg Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC), April 24, 1966. 176 “Race Policies Cut Student Aid,” Christianity Today, May 13, 1966, 52. 177 “A Special Word from the President,” Faith for the Family, March/April 1975. 178 “HEW Rights Probe Hits Dixie University,” The Afro-American, December 3, 1966; “Bob Jones University Loses Aid,” Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, SC), November 26, 1966. 179 William L. Banks, The Good Hand of the Lord: The Autobiography and Writings of a Black Fundamentalist (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2002), 75. 293 students, unlike “Oriental students,” would want to “date Orientals and Caucasians.” Jones, raising the specter of the black rapist, contended that if the university were forced to “expel a black student . . . for . . . stealing, attempted rape, or something of that sort,” that student “could cry that he was being persecuted because he was black.”180 In 1971, the IRS declared that private schools that practiced racial discrimination were not eligible for tax-exempt status. In response to the threat of losing its tax exemption, Bob Jones University admitted married black students in 1971 and unmarried African-American students in 1975.181 Nevertheless, the university continued to deny admission to applicants “engaged in an interracial marriage or known to advocate interracial marriage or dating.”182 In a letter to supporters announcing that the school was losing its tax-exempt status, Bob Jones, Jr., attacked the decision as “unfair and unAmerican” and complained that “institutions that are training militant Blacks, revolutionaries, Communists, and arsonists” were still allowed tax exemption, while a “Christian institution that is peaceful” and “patriotic” was being attacked. 183 In 1976, the IRS officially revoked the university’s tax-exempt status. Bob Jones III, then-president of the University, outlined the ramifications of the decision, declaring that “a new era of religious freedom in America has been embarked upon because of this decision. The Supreme Court has further closed the door on religious freedom in America; and I believe because of this . . . America . . . has been shoved that much nearer to Soviet Russia.”184 Jones explained that the “IRS . . . is taking our exemption away . . . because of our internal policy . . . 180 Banks, The Good Hand of the Lord, 76. 181 “‘Most Unusual’: No Time For a Change,” Christianity Today, December 17, 1971, 34. 182 “Bob Jones Says University is Being Treated Unfairly,” Nevada Daily Mail (Nevada, MO), March 4, 1982. 183 Banks, The Good Hand of the Lord, 77. 184 Bob Jones III, “A Special Word from the President,” Faith for the Family, Summer 1974, 23-25. 294 which precludes interracial dating and marriage.” He asserted that “we have Bible convictions against that” and reasoned that the IRS’s refusal to respect those convictions meant that “tyranny rules the land.”185 Bob Jones University challenged the IRS’s action, but in 1983, the Supreme Court in the case Bob Jones University v. United States upheld the ruling of the Circuit Court, declaring that “the fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education . . . substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners’ exercise of their religious belief.”186 Despite the loss of its tax-exempt status, Bob Jones University refused to end its racially discriminatory policy. After presidential candidate George W. Bush visited the university’s campus on February 2, 2000, he was fiercely criticized for failing to denounce the ban on interracial dating, and U.S. House and Senate Democrats introduced a resolution on February 29 condemning Bob Jones University for intolerance.187 On March 3, the president of the University, Bob Jones III, announced that the University had dropped the rule against interracial dating in order to dispel the belief that Bob Jones University was a “racist school.”188 In November 2008, the University issued a “Statement About Race at BJU,” which apologized for upholding racially discriminatory policies, including the interracial dating ban. In the statement, the University expressed regret for its policies, stating that “we 185 “Bulletin: Tax Cast Update,” Faith for the Family, March/April 1976, 25. 186 Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983) 187 James Dao, “The 2000 Campaign: The Challenger; Bradley Blasts Bush for Talk At Bob Jones U.,” The New York Times (New York, New York), February 4, 2000; Lizette Alvarez, “The 2000 Campaign: The Religious Issue; Democrats in Congress Introduce Resolution Attaching Bob Jones U.,” The New York Times (New York, NY), February 29, 2000. 188 “Dr. Bob Jones III Discusses the Controversy Swirling Around Bob Jones University,” Larry King Live, March 3, 2000; Gustav Niebuhr, “Bob Jones U. Drops Its Ban on Interracial Student Dates,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 4, 2000. 295 conformed to the culture rather than providing a clear Christian counterpoint to it.”189 As part of its attempt to repudiate its reputation for racial intolerance, in 2011 Bob Jones University also renamed a residence hall, which was named for Bibb Graves, an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, a governor of Alabama, and a founding board member of Bob Jones College.190 Bob Jones was a racial conservative. Place and order were the most important issues for Jones. African Americans, to Jones and other racial conservatives, had their place in society. He harbored no antagonisms against African Americans as long as they stayed in their proper place – in their own churches and in segregated sections at revival meetings. This concern for placeextended not only to African Americans but also to white men and women. His defense of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s helps to demonstrate his belief that God had established a racial order. Bob Jones’s racial conservativism was enshrined into doctrine at Bob Jones University. As late as 1986, the official position of Bob Jones University on race was Jones’s position.191 In this respect, as in others, Jones “bridged the gap between old-time fundamentalism and the post-war evangelical resurgence.”192 Bob Jones’s racial views were, essentially, those of the white South in the nineteenth century, brought into the twentieth. Moreover, the Joneses’ (and by extension, Bob Jones University’s) fight against integration helped birth the New Christian Right. Conservative political activist Paul Weyrich, an ally of Jerry Falwell, Sr., recalled in a 1980 article in Conservative Digest that when “the Internal Revenue Service tried to deny tax exemption to private schools,” it “brought the fundamentalists and evangelicals into the 189 “Statement About Race at BJU,” Bob Jones University, November 2008. < http://www.bju.edu/about/what-we-believe/race-statement.php> (accessed March 14, 2020). 190 Nathaniel Cary, “Clemson Not Alone in Debate Over Renaming Tillman Hall,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), March 10, 2015. 191 Marshall Neal, “Race Relations,” (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1986), 3. 192 “Bob Jones: He Bridged a Great Gap,” Christianity Today, February 2, 1968, 50. 296 political process.”193 While believers in the old-time religion (like Sam Jones and Bob Jones) had been politically active for more than a century before the rise of the Christian Right and organizations like Falwell’s Moral Majority, this blow to private schools - the last stronghold of an idealized (or imaginary) white Protestant republic, free of vice, theological modernism (and its alleged cousin, atheism), and Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant influence, and ruled over by white Protestant men – mobilized evangelicals in a way that few other issues could. While the rise of the Christian Right is linked to other issues discussed in this dissertation (most notably, the purification,or evangelicalization, of society and the protection of the family), Bob Jones’s fight to preserve segregation at Bob Jones University, (and to a lesser extent the struggle to maintain segregation at the Goldsboro Christian Schools in Goldsboro, North Carolina), helped to crystallize conservative evangelicals’ political activism. 193 Paul Weyrich, “The Pro-Family Movement,” Conservative Digest, May/June 1980, 14. 297 Beginning in 1927, Bob Jones, alarmed by what he perceived as the spread of lawlessness, atheism, and political radicalism in the United States, began to canvas the country under the auspices of the extension department of Bob Jones College, delivering a sermon titled “The Perils of America.” The sermon – or lecture – had been preached in forty states by 1928 and had been described by local papers as “famous.” Jones would reuse this lecture time and again from 1927 to as late as 1961.1 The evangelist warned of a wide array of “perils” - the influence of cities, thoughtlessness, wealth inequality, social unrest, “uncertainty,” lawlessness, Sabbath-breaking, “sensuality,” interfering in Mexican politics, “placing incompetent officers in charge of state affairs,” immigrants, “immodest dress and vulgar dancing,” the use of tobacco by women, and the spread of atheism.2 All of these dangers, however, all stemmed from one source – the fact that, as Jones alleged, America is “fast getting away from the old time home and thefamily altar.”3 The home, and, by extension, traditional? gender roles, were viewed as an essential part of ensuring that America continued to be “the greatest country in the world.”4 Much of Jones’s anxiety about the future of America was connected to the “home peril,” since he 1 “Bob Jones Declares Nomination Of Al Smith Would Be Calamity,” The Huntsville Times (Huntsville, AL), April 13, 1928; “Bob Jones Will Lecture Here,” The Cleburne News (Heflin, AL), March 15, 1928; “‘Perils of America’ Voice At Church Freedom Rally,” The Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), November 4, 1960. 2 “‘The Perils of America’ Dr. Bob Jones New Lecture Heard Here Wednesday Night,” The Andalusia Star (Andalusia, AL), February 25, 1927; “Bob Jones To Bolt Party If Al Smith Gets Nomination,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), April 13, 1927; “Dr. Bob Jones Says America Faces Crisis,” The Atmore Advance (Atmore, AL), August 29, 1929. 3 “Evangelist Thrills Audience,” Morristown Gazette and Mail (Morristown, TN), July 15, 1931. 4 “Extracts From The Lecture By Bob Jones,” The Centreville Press (Centreville, AL), March 1, 1928. CHAPTER VII: DEFENDING “THE BATTLEMENTS OF THE HOUSE”: BOB JONES CAMPAIGNS TO PRESERVE THE HOME 298 believed that “when the home goes, it is good-bye God, good-bye decency, and good-bye America.”5 In this respect, Bob Jones mirrored Sam Jones’s concern with the home. Unlike the Georgia evangelist, however, Bob Jones charged women, rather than men, with the primary responsibility of preserving the home from the temptations of twentieth-century America. Bob Jones believed that America’s survival depended on the continued “purity” of women. He declared that “all the forces of evil can never destroy America if our women remain pure.”6 As gender roles, particularly in the South, evolved in the early twentieth century, Jones campaigned against anything he perceived to be a threat to women’s role as preservers of society. Jones also pleaded with males to embrace a manhood characterized by piety, industry, and sobriety. His admonitions to men, however, lacked the urgency of those to women. Jones’sfight for the “purity” of women was, in a sense, existential; he believed the fate of the nation, if not the world, depended on women’s adherence to traditional mores. Bob Jones’s focus on manhood and womanhood reflected popular concerns about changing gender roles in the early decades of the twentieth century. Social, political, and economic changes forced men and women to re-evaluate gender roles. At the turn of the century, historian Gail Bederman observes, “middle-class men were unusually obsessed with manhood.”7 Social change threatened male dominance, and men hurried to respond to these challenges. Gender, a “historical, ideological process,” placed men and women within culturally defined roles, which were in turn challenged and reconstructed by men and women. The contested nature of gender roles at the turn of the century gave added urgency to the social construction of 5 Bob Jones, Sr., The Perils of America, or Where Are We Headed, 25-26. 6 Bob Jones, Sr., The Modern Woman: A Sermon To Women (Chicago: Good News Publishing, 1923), 1. 7 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11. 299 gender.8 As S.J. Kleinberg writes, “the shrill public emphasis on the emphasis of the home and women’s place within it” was a response to “steadily falling fertility and rising employment levels” among American women.9 Even as American households changed – as mass production (and mass consumption) displaced the home as a the center of production, as married women sought employment outside of the household, and as work, clubs, public amusements, and a host of other diversions displaced the family home as the center of American life – women still bore much of the responsibility of preserving the sanctity of the home and protecting their families’ safety (physically, morally, and spiritually).10 Author Lillian W. Betts, writing in 1895, credited the creation of a “new woman” to the success of industrialization, as “every year the giants of science and invention have been taking out of [women’s] control the industries that had been . . . the subjects of her control.” Betts contended that “the new woman,” unlike the “caricature drawn by the . . . the unthinking man” who described the “new woman” as “smoking, drinking, and demanding . . . the right to live without restraint,” was in fact “the flower of the marvelous century.”11 While some contemporaries, like Betts, viewed these changes to gender norms in the early twentieth century as a natural evolution of women’s roles in their communities, others, like Bob Jones, were convinced that the “new woman” of the twentieth century heralded doom for American society. In Gilded Age America, it was generally accepted that women were responsible for molding the moral standards of society. S.S. Dix, the editor of the Sterling Kansas Bulletin, 8 Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 7. 9 S.J Kleinberg, Votes for Women: Women in the United States, 1830-1945 (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1999), 234. 10 Kleinberg, Votes for Women, 233-239; See also Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The lronies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, Basic Books, 1983). 11 Lillian W. Betts, “The New Woman,” The Outlook 52, no. 15 (October 12, 1895), 587. 300 argued in 1905 that “the standard of womanhood . . . determines the standard of the people” and warned of the dire consequences for the country if women were not good. Writing in the Baltimore Sun in defense of the “modern woman,” novelist Rosalie Neish acknowledged that “it is undeniably woman who sets the standard of the society in which she moves.” 12 Thomas B. Gregory, the pastor of a Universalist society in Chicago, the Church of the Redeemer, insisted that “women are the ‘salt of the earth,’ the cement of society, the conservators and saviors of humanity.”13 Jones’s belief that the survival of the American Republic depended on the goodness of women reflected commonly-held ideas in Victorian-Era America. Indeed, Jones perceived a lowering of standards among women as a social crisis. He lamented that “the woman who sins is not looked upon with scorn but tolerated and even flattered.” According to Jones, society failed to define morality, resulting in a blurring of “black” and “white,” “pure” and “impure,” which created “shadow women,” who were “impure” but yet aspired to and often achieved social respectability.14 The evangelist argued that by accepting “the woman who acts as she pleases,” women were lowering “the standard of womanhood.”15 He condemned the “sexualization” of American culture. Jones believed that the “sex emphasis” could be found “in women’s costumes, in modern dances, in shop windows, at the theatre,” and 12 “Peek-A-Boo,” The Sterling Kansas Bulletin (Sterling, KS), September 29, 1905; “Peek-A-Boo Is Dead,” The Sterling Kansas Bulletin (Sterling, KS), September 10, 1909; Rosalie Neish, “The Modern Woman,” The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), 1906. 13 Thomas B. Gregory, “A Young Woman With Lofty Ideas,” The Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), January 8, 1906. 14Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Woman Has Stepped Off Her Pedestal, Declares Bob Jones, the Young Evangelist,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 21, 1914; “Evangelist ‘Pans’ Our Modern Dancing,” El Paso World (El Paso, TX), September 25-26, 1920 (Week-End Edition). 15 “Bob Jones to Women,” The Atchinson Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 3, 1917. 301 “between the covers of novels.”16 He alleged that American women had lost their innocence. Jones suggested that a “16-year-old girl” knew more about sexuality than “her grandmother” and condemned the “loud, and immodest” girls who are “old before they are grown.”17 In all of these changes, he found evidence to suggest that “the percentage of good women in America is on the decrease.”18 This “modern woman” who was, according to Jones, “a lover of pleasure,” was “not a real woman,” and therefore unable to provide the foundation for a godly America.19 In his services for women, Bob Jones, like Sam Jones, attacked card playing, dancing, and theatre attendance. Evangelists’ positions on these activities were so well-known that it was expected that they would warrant Jones’s condemnation.20 Even though Jones believed that ability as an actor “was God-given,” he dismissed theaters, since “the Devil has a mortgage on the theatre.”21 The evangelist’s attacks on theaters seems to have been successful - after Jones held a campaign in Springfield, Illinois, in 1921, the town voted to adopt an ordinance banning Sunday shows.22 Card playing was also subject to Jones’s disapprobation. During a campaign in El Paso in 1922, Jones “scored” church women who played cards for money.23 After a sermon “to ladies” in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1909, two hundred women in attendance signed an 16 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Woman Has Stepped Off Her Pedestal, Declares Bob Jones, the Young Evangelist,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 21, 1914. 17 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922; Jones, Sr., The Modern Woman, 9. 18 “Fewer Good Women Now, Says Evangelist Jones,” The Crawfordsville Review (Crawfordsville, IN), July 3, 1917. 19 “Bob Jones on Modern Woman and Real Man,” The Selma Journal (Selma, AL), January 19, 1912. 20 “Bob Jones to Women,” The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 3, 1917. 21 Jones, Sr., The Modern Woman, 23. 22 James S. Baumin, The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful”: Remembering Springfield's Theatre History, 1926-2006 (Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 75. 23 “Jones Sounds His Warning Against Sin,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 26, 1922. 302 agreement pledging to combat “the dance, social cards, and theatres.”24 Pledges were a common tool Jones used to combat vice. Women’s appropriate behavior was linked to place in El Paso, where the evangelist declared that “girls can’t dance and drink in Juarez in those hell holes and be good girls.”25 Like other fundamentalists, Jones condemned popular dances for their “lewdness and excessive sensuality.”26 On one occasion, the evangelist banished from the choir any members who would not renounce dancing. Jones compared the danger posed by dancing to that of open saloons.27 He warned that the “twinkling feet” of dancers would “carry their owners over into the abyss.”28 Jones argued that “something has to be done to save our women from the damnable, voluptuous modern dance.”29 He alleged that there was no “excuse for modern dancing.” The popular dance was connected to sexual impropriety, and ultimately spiritual destruction. Jones associated popular dances with threats to women’s sexual purity, the maintenance of American homes, and even the lives of young women. He warned women that dancing caused many women to become promiscuous. Jones claimed that half of the “three-quarters of a million fallen women” in America had “fallen” because of dances and that 70 percent of prostitutes in 24 “Against Card Playing: Rev. ‘Bob’ Jones Preached Sermon to Ladies,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, TX), February 25, 1909. 25 “Jones Sounds His Warning Against Sin,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 26, 1922. 26 Betty A. DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), 104. 27 “Orders All Out of Choir Who Refuse to Dance,” The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), November 7, 1922. 28 “Says New York Is Dancing on the Brink of Hell,” The Chicago Day Book (Chicago, IL)¸ July 24, 1914. 29 “Jones Tells of Sins of Mansfield,” The Mansfield News (Mansfield, OH), September 17, 1915. 303 Mansfield, Ohio, had turned to prostitution because of “the modern dance.”30 Jones believed that dancing led women to reject traditional sexual mores and ultimately embrace the nadir of female sexuality, prostitution. The evangelist blamed “modern dances” for endangering the home, since popular dances, according to Jones, caused divorces.31 He argued that dancing disrupted normal family relationships and professed his confusion at “how a little music in the room gives me the right to hug your wife or your sister.”32 Popular dances also threatened the home by breaking up marriages and allowing strangers to invade – or alienate – the intimacy of familial relationships. He even warned audiences that popular dances could lead to women’s deaths. He cautioned against going to a dance and then taking an automobile, since, as Jones ominously intoned, “you can go to hell mighty fast in an automobile.”33 Popular dancing, argued Jones, could lead to the sexual debasement of women, the destruction of homes, and women’s deaths. Dance halls, “where whites and negroes commingle,” were also associated with fears of racial mixing.34 Dancing was a threat not only to white women’s sexual purity, but also to white society’s racial purity. To Jones, dance halls were the epicenter of a nation-destroying wave of sin and social disorder. Naturally, then, when he founded Bob Jones College, Jones and the Board of Trustees banned dancing on campus.35 This ban on “modern dance” has continued into the twenty-first 30 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “New York Women on Road to Ruin Lure Men to Tread it With Them, Says Rev. Jones,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 5, 1916; “Jones Tells of Sins of Mansfield,” The Mansfield News-Herald (Mansfield, OH), September 17, 1915. 31 “Says New York Is Dancing on the Brink of Hell,” The Chicago Day Book (Chicago, IL)¸ July 24, 1914. 32 “Jones Tells of Sins of Mansfield,” The Mansfield News (Mansfield, OH), September 17, 1915. 33 “Evangelist ‘Pans’ Our Modern Dancing,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 25-26, 1920 (Week-End Edition). 34 “Smith Overcoming Alabama Enemies,” The New York Times (New York, NY), October 7, 1928. 35 Nate Wegodsky, “Strait-Laced School,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), September 4, 1952. 304 century – as of the 2020-2021 academic year, students at Bob Jones University were prohibited from participating in “forms of modern dance” that “violate biblical principles.”36 Like popular dances, women’s fashion provided ample fodder for Jones’s social criticism. In the years immediately preceding the First World War and the decade afterwards, changes to women’s fashion, including lower-cut necklines - such as the “v-neck” - and shorter skirts, alarmed many Americans (as well as Europeans).37 In 1913, Representative Louis H. Cappelle, a Republican from Cincinnati, introduced a bill in the Ohio state legislature which would have limited “décolleté dresses” and prohibited women from wearing a skirt “which does not reach to that part of the foot known as the in-step.”38 Religious leaders savaged innovations in women’s fashion. The same year as Cappelle’s modesty bill, Rev. G.L. Morrill of the People’s Church of Minneapolis condemned the semi-translucent “diaphanous gown” and slit skirts. Morrill argued that “Mother Eve . . . was modestly dressed compared with her diaphanous-skirted daughters” and warned that “the slit skirt shows a cracked brain and empty heart.” Spokesmen from an array of professions – doctors, criminologists, and lawyers – also condemned changes to women’s fashions.39 Even Pope Pius XI warned that “immodest dress” was an “infamous vanity which threatened to contaminate the morality of the world.”40 Women’s organizations also condemned “immodest dress” – in 1920, the International Council of Women 36 Bob Jones University, “2020-2021 Student Handbook,” bju.edu, August 2020, https://www.bju.edu/life-faith/student-handbook.pdf> (accessed December 21, 2020). 37 James Laver, The Concise History of Costume and Fashion (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969), 223-232. 38 “Tight Skirts, Waists Peek-A-Boo May Be Banished By Ohio,” The Allen County Republican (Lima, OH), March 18, 1913. 39 “Anatomy Gowns, Newest Modes in Dress Degeneracy, Call Down Wrath of Church and State,” The All-American Magazine (St. Louis, MO), August 24, 1913. 40 “Pop Denounces Immodest Dress at Niece’s Wedding,” The Tampa Tribune (Tampa, FL), October 31, 1926. 305 urged women to “give up immodest dress.”41 While not all social critics participated in the general panic over women’s dress – in particular, one journalist for the Newspaper Feature Service, Clive Marshall, argued that “there is no standard of modesty” – the widespread condemnation of “modern” women’s fashion was reflected in the preaching of Bob Jones.42 Jones mocked what he perceived as the absurdity of modern fashion, declaring “it’s the funniest thing to me to see a woman at a dance with nothing on where she should be covered.” He complained that “if God had meant women to dress as they do, he surely would have covered their backs with hair.” Jones believed that sexual impurity was associated with women’s fashions. During a campaign in New York City in 1914, he railed against “the New York girl’s attire,” which he alleged served “the one single concentrated purpose of sex appeal.”43 He believed that “bare arms and legs at the sea shore, undraped bosom and gossamer apparel in the ballroom . . . lead to marriages which are not built on respect and wholesome love.”44 Jones protested “the vile, voluptuous styles being dumped upon our American women by the hands of France, damning and ruining the best of our womanhood.”45 The evangelist also criticized the use of cosmetics. “Instead of the flower for the blush of youth,” Jones exclaimed, “you now use paint.”46 He condemned “flapperism,” criticizing “the painting face, frizzy haired, devilish, cigarette-smoking girl of today.”47 The evangelist contrasted modern women with his mother’s 41 “Simple Life for Girls Only Happy World, Claim,” The Washington Times (Washington, DC), October 13, 1920. 42 “The Geography of Modesty,” The Birmingham News (Birmingham, AL), July 24, 1921. 43 “Says New York Is Dancing on the Brink of Hell,” The Chicago Day Book (Chicago, IL)¸ July 24, 1914; “Rev. Bob Jones Scores Present Women’s Styles,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), December 12, 1913. 44 “Bathing Suit and Ball Gown Blamed for Divorces,” The Chicago Day Book (Chicago, IL), July 25, 1914. 45 Jones, Sr., The Modern Woman, 9. 46 “Evangelist ‘Pans’ Our Modern Dancing,” El Paso World (El Paso, TX), September 25-26, 1920. 47 “Business Men Hear ‘Excuses’,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 9, 1922. 306 example, who he esteemed to be “a happier woman than the painted, bejeweled, childless New York wife of to-day.”48 Jones pleaded for respite from “the loud-mouthed, half-dressed woman” and begged for “the old-fashioned American woman.”49 Bob Jones’s critique of “elaborate, costly, immodest dress” was based on three main arguments. First, he suggested that men would be led to think “impure” thoughts. Second, Jones was concerned that poor women would be tempted to copy current styles, even when they lacked the financial wherewithal to do so. Finally, he asserted that husbands had “broken down under the strain” of providing a stylish wardrobe for their wives.50 The evangelist reasoned that men would be forced to work until life meant nothing in order to provide their wives with “extravagances.”51 Bob Jones argued that a woman had no right to be offended when subjected to sexist remarks on the streets, if she was “clothed like an immoral woman.” He contended that since woman had “deliberately stepped off her pedestal,” she should not be surprised when she lost the respect of men, and Jones blamed women for “a wave of immorality among men.” As evidence of the supposedly prurient nature of “modern” women’s dress, Jones quoted a man who, after seeing a young woman wearing “a most immodest dress,” sneered that “yet they hang men in this country for rape.”52 Jones argued that men could not be expected to be pure “until women 48 “Evangelist ‘Pans’ Our Modern Dancing,” El Paso World (El Paso, TX), September 25-26, 1920 (Week-End Edition). 49 “Business Men Hear ‘Excuses’,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 9, 1922. It is worth noting Jones’s association of “old-fashioned” women with patriotism – to Jones, the “modern woman” was not only morally repugnant, but unpatriotic. 50 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Woman Has Stepped Off Her Pedestal, Declares Bob Jones, the Young Evangelist,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 21, 1914. 51 “Bob Jones to Women,” The Atchison Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 3, 1917. 52 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “New York Women on Road to Ruin Lure Men to Tread it With Them, Says Rev. Jones,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 5, 1916. 307 dress decently” and suggested that the way to prevent the unwanted advances of men was for “the women to dress decent.” He claimed that women who adopted modern fashions would be “hugged and slobbered over by every lizard in town.”53 The implication of his rhetoric was clear: women were responsible for restraining men’s sexual urges, and when men were unable to control themselves, it was surely the result of the failure of women to comply with Jones’s requirements for women’s fashion. Ironically, Jones argued that women’s fashions resulted in the objectification of women. He believed that women, who had “been demanding that men pay attention to her head, that they admit it to be as good a head as their own,” undermined their efforts by drawing focused attention to their feet by wearing expensive shoes and short skirts, “so that the general public shall have every opportunity to see her ankles.”54 Jones insisted that women were slaves to the decrees of “Dame Fashion.”55 Rosemary Daniell in Fatal Flowers explained the evangelical obsession with “decent dress” by suggesting that “the female body, imperfect, was made to be covered, and how it was covered mattered.” Jones’s arguments for “decent dress,” though, were associated not with female imperfection, but rather with concerns about men’s inability to control their sexual urges. Bob Jones’s prescriptions for women’s clothing were not unique among Evangelical Protestants. Richard Baxter, a seventeenth-century Puritan minister, cautioned Christians to be careful in their dress, since they “must walk among sinful persons, as you would do with a 53 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922. 54 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “New York Women on Road to Ruin Lure Men to Tread it With Them, Says Rev. Jones,” The Evening World (New York, NY), July 5, 1916. 55 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922. 308 candle among straw or gunpowder.”56 The concept that women are in some way responsible for restraining men’s sexual desire continues to shape Evangelicals’ positions on women’s fashion. C.J. Mahaney, the president of Sovereign Grace Ministries, based in Gaithersberg, Maryland(until April 2013), and a leading figure in Evangelicalism, urged women to dress “modestly,” since men are “grateful for women who serve them by helping them fight the temptation to lust.”57 Evangelical pastor and author Jeff Pollard, after claiming that “men are far more visually oriented than women,” writes in his 2003 book, provocatively titled Christian Modesty and the Public Undressing of America, that “women . . . are not to dress in sensual, luxurious, or expensive fashions lest they provoke others to sin.”58 Admittedly, Jones’s and other Evangelicals’ tendency to blame women for men’s inability to exercise self-control has been criticized by some within the evangelical movement. In December 2014, Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), an organization founded by Boz Tchividjian, the grandson of Billy Graham and law professor at Liberty University, issued a report, commissioned by Bob Jones University, condemning Bob Jones University’s teachings on sexual abuse. This report specifically quoted one of Bob Jones’ssermons, demonstrating the continuing impact of Jones’s teachings on fundamentalists’ and, more broadly, evangelicals’ beliefs about gender and sexuality.59 Evangelical women have also criticized a “Modest Is Hottest” approach and argued that the evangelical theology of the 56 Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter (London: George Virtue, 1838), 392. 57 C.J. Mahaney, “God, My Heart, and Clothes,” in Wordliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, C.J. Mahaney, ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 128. 58 Jeff Pollard, Christian Modesty and the Public Undressing of America (San Antonio, TX: The Vision Forum, Inc., 2003), 20. 59 “Final Report for the Investigatory Review of Sexual Abuse Disclosures and Institutional Responses at Bob Jones University,” Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, December 11, 2014, http://netgrace.org/wp-content/uploads/Final-Report.pdf., 45. 309 human body objectifies women, since, as Sharon Hodde Miller, an author and speaker, observes, “it treats women’s bodies . . . as sources of temptation that must be hidden.”60 Even though conservative Evangelicalism continues to evolve, Jones and those who have been influenced by his teachings, espoused an understanding of gender grounded in the norms of Gilded Age culture. Bob Jones also condemned women’s card-playing. He emphasized that even though card playing was associated with “high society,” it was still gambling. Jones asserted that “the jeweled fingers of a high-bred society woman can’t make a deck of cards decent.” The evangelist warned that women card players could entice their sons to become poker players and gamblers. Jones saw ruin in a deck of cards. He saw the clubs as reminders of broken heads, the hearts as reminders of “hearts that are crushed,” and the spades “as a reminder of the graves that they dig in every cemetery in the world.”61 Jones blamed “society women” who played cards for creating gamblers. He harshly condemned women who played cards, declaring that mothers who played cards would “send their boys to hell” and “damn them.” Jones accused card playing women for “this country going to hell.”62 Jones rebuked women who read novels. He asserted that the primary emphasis of popular novels – particularly romance novels – was sex. Jones claimed that “a young girl who falls in love [with?] the immoral rake who is the hero of a novel cannot herself be pure at heart.”63 During a sermon delivered in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1915, the evangelist specifically criticized 60 Sharon Hodde Miller, “How ‘Modest Is Hottest’ Is Hurting Christian Women,” Christianity Today, December 15, 2011. 61 “Jones Tells of Sins of Mansfield,” The Mansfield News (Mansfield, OH), September 17, 1915. 62 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922. 63 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “New York Women on Road to Ruin Lure Men to Tread it With Them, Says Rev. Jones,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 5, 1916. 310 Three Weeks, a romance novel written in 1907 by Elinor Glyn. To Gilded Age Americans, Three Weeks was salacious, inappropriate, and immoral – a novel that no one admitted to reading, yet everyone had read. Eventually, Three Weeks sold more than five million copies and earned Glyn a slew of new nicknames, including the “Narrator of Naughtinesses” and the “high priestess of love.”64 Novels like Three Weeks produced both defenders and detractors. In 1908, one of the United States Post Office’s assistant attorneys general, Russell P. Goodwin, declared Three Weeks to be “decidedly obscene” and refused to allow it to be sent through the U.S. Postal Service.65 In contrast, British author W.L. George defended “the modern novel,” even though he acknowledged that romance novels, like “the modern girl” and “modern dancing,” seemed to be “universally disliked.” Renowned playwright George Bernard Shaw also challenged critics’ attitudes towards so-called “sex novels.” Shaw insisted that “a legitimate sex novel” was different from a “pornographic novel,” and that modern romance novels were only titillating when compared with the “sexless” Victorian novels.66 On the whole, however, the “modern novel” was “denounced as pernicious from the pulpit,” described as “crammed full of poisonous errors,” and condemned for “making vice attractive” and “transforming us into a nation of cocktail-drinkers, adulterers, and racketeers.”67 Jones was not a “voice crying in the wilderness” 64 Daisy Fitzhugh Ayres, “‘Three Weeks’ at the National Capitol,” Nashville Banner (Nashville, TN), January 18, 1908; The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), November 15, 1931; “Glynn Invented IT,” The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL), July 17, 1955. 65 “Postmasters Can Pass On Merits of Glyn Story,” The Washington Times (Washington, DC), January 7, 1908. 66 W.L. George, “Have Sex Novels a Bad Influence? Moderns and Their Books Defended,” The Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), December 7, 1924; The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA), December 5, 1926. 67 “The Modern Novel,” The Weekly Pioneer-Times (Deadwood, SD), June 6, 1895; “What the Modern Novel Is,” The Reno Evening Gazette (Reno, NV), January 9, 1890; “Women’s Clubs Department Votes Modern Book Immoral by 158-98,” The Record (Hackensack, NJ), January 30, 1932. 311 when he attacked the “modern novel” – rather, he reflected the moral outrage and tastes of Progressive-era Americans. Like many Americans, Jones believed that reading popular novels would corrupt women. Speaking in Mansfield, Ohio in 1915, the evangelist warned that “the women of this country . . . cannot revel in these books and keep themselves pure.” He asserted that readers who came to “love a crooked hero or heroine in a novel” were themselves “crooked in your heart.” Novel-reading, however, was not the cause of wickedness among women, but rather a symptom of a broader malaise – the “modern woman” who was “unfit for marriage.” 68 He described the “modern woman” as someone who was a “sex-novel reader.”69 Jones said that “all she reads is the society page of the newspaper and novels.” He argued that “novels are written for women,” and that “many of our modern novels are nothing but filth.”70 Jones’ critique of novels is consistent with the trivialization of novels as mere romances or even pornography. Scholar Catherine Kerrison, however, believes that “they gave women opportunities to image a world different from they knew.” Novels, then, provided women with an escape from domestic drudgery.71 Regardless, Jones’s criticism of novels only helps to cement the evangelist’s place in the mainstream of Victorian-era culture. Bob Jones argued that women’s primary obligation should be becoming pious mothers and wives.72 He, like other fundamentalists, believed that “women’s new career was marriage.”73 68 “Women Arraigned for Their Sins,” The Mansfield News (Mansfield, OH), September 25, 1915. 69 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922. 70 Jones, The Modern Woman, 15. 71 Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 111. 72 “Bob Jones to Women,” The Atchinson Daily Globe (Atchison, KS), November 3, 1917. 312 Jones objected to those women who supported suffrage, who he believed were “merely restless and impatient of restraint.” He argued that “the normal woman should marry early and have a child every two years . . . that is the existence which is best and happiest for her.” While Jones declared his “sympathy” for women who were required to work in “offices and shops,” he also insisted that these women were not “normal.” Jones contended that “wives and mothers ought to be forced neither into politics nor into business.”74 He bemoaned the fact that, as he claimed, “bossy” women were becoming more common. During a campaign in Atchison, Kansas, he described “the woman who begins by bossing her home, and progresses until she attempts to boss the government.” Jones criticized suffragists who, in “demanding your rights,” denied men “that blessed privilege . . . of giving a woman her rights.” In 1923, he declared that he “never was for woman suffrage,” contradicting his earlier claim that he “did not mind their having the ballot.”75 Jones seemed to have adopted a more moderate position on women’s suffrage than other southern men, who “equated ballots for females with a terrifying threat to society.” He believed that “now it is in the interest of good government for every good woman to vote” to “counteract” the influence of “bad women.”76 Jones and other fundamentalists, however, criticized “bossy” women, instead emphasizing the leadership of husbands within the home and men in general outside the home.77 73 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, 96. 74 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Woman Has Stepped Off Her Pedestal, Declares Bob Jones, the Young Evangelist,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 21, 1914. 75 “Passing Throng,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 30, 1916. 76 Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 – 1936 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 15; Jones, Sr., The Modern Woman, 12. 77 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, 103. 313 Dancing, “immodest” dress, card-playing, novel-reading, and bossiness all paled in comparison to Jones’s primary target - sexual impropriety. He argued that “the great American sin is the one symbolized by the scarlet letter.” Jones believed that the responsibility for society rested solely on women’s sexual purity, for “nations have become great through the purity of their women who became wives and mothers.”78 Women could be the embodiment of virtue; the evangelist once proclaimed that “the best thing outside of heaven is a good woman.” He, however, also announced that “the meanest thing outside of hell is a mean woman.”79 Jones, like other Victorians, both “deified and degraded women.” Middle-class men had “transcendently powerful” yet ambivalent feelings about women.80 Victorian perspectives on women emphasized the dichotomy between “women who were chaste and all good or seductive and all bad.”81 Sigmund Freud, writing in the early twentieth century, provides an example of the ubiquity of this dualistic thinking about women in his formulation of the “Madonna/Whore complex,” a kind of psychological impotence (psychische impotenz).82 It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Jones’s beliefs about women to a mere psychological complex. Instead of confirming the stereotype of Victorian repressiveness, Jones frankly discussed sexuality, often earning him the disapprobation of critics.83 Jones did not hesitate to prescribe proper sexual activity for women. 78 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Woman Has Stepped Off Her Pedestal, Declares Bob Jones, the Young Evangelist,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 21, 1914. 79 “Bob Jones Stirs Up Women at Centenary,” The Sandusky Star-Journal (Sandusky, OH), July 3, 1919. 80 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 104. 81 Samuel Slipp, The Freudian Mystique: Freud, Women, and Feminism (New York: New York University, 1995), 45. 82 Sigmund Freud, “Über die allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens,” Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, vol 4 (1912), 40. 83 Jones, The Modern Woman, 23. 314 Sexual intimacy was not unlawful or illicit; rather, Jones condoned and promoted sexual activity, for both men and women, within the confines of marriage. The “purity” promoted by Jones was not celibacy. Jones, despite his suspicion of women’s participation in politics, enlisted women in campaigns to reform society. In Bloomington, Illinois, in 1917, he appealed to women to eliminate the “red light district.” Women volunteers pledged to distribute two thousand petition cards for “signatures in two days.”84 Jones formed broad coalitions in his campaigns against vice. In the campaign in Bloomington, the “Protestant clergy of Bloomington, the leading Catholic priest of the city, the Woman’s Club, the D.A.R., and thousands of others” signed card petitions.85 In Charlotte, North Carolina, women expressed their opposition to dance halls by standing at Jones’s invitation.86 Jones’s wife, Mary Gaston Stollenwerck Jones, mobilized women to support social reforms. In 1919, Mrs. Jones, writing on behalf on the Women’s Missionary Society of the Court Street Methodist Church, pled with Alabama legislators to support Alabama Senate Bill 414, which would mandate “the reading of the Holy Bible in the public schools.” Mary Gaston’s political activism was based on her adherence to traditional gender norms. She appealed to legislators in “the name of the motherhood of Alabama” to support the legislation.87 Bob Jones’s appeal to women to become politically active was not 84 “Preaches on the Crucifixion,” The Bloomington Pantagraph (Bloomington, IN), February 5, 1917. 85 ‘Sermon on the Death of Jesus,” The Bloomington Pantagraph (Bloomington, IN), February 9, 1917. 86 Mamie Bays,“Women Opposed to Dance Halls, Express Themselves at Invitation,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 20, 1919. 87 Mary Gaston Stollenwerck Jones Letter, September 5, 1919, Alabama Textual Materials Collection, SPR 244, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voices/id/2875/rec/4. 315 inconsistent with the fundamentalist position on women. Most fundamentalists allowed women to serve in supportive roles.88 Jones’s condemnation of the “modern woman” provoked outrage from some. A columnist for the New York Evening World, Marguerite Mooers Marshall, compiled the complaints of readers who were “intensely interested in the woman of to-day” and were “by no means ready to agree with the indictment.” One reader, “Mrs. M. W.,” responding to Jones’s allegation that “immorality among men is caused by the suggestive dress of women,” urged men to “learn a little self-control,” explaining that men would gaze at any woman whose “face is pleasant to look upon.” She applied Jones’s beliefs about modesty to men’s dress and explained that “women do not gaze at men simply because they have on white trousers turned up to show ten or twelve inches of fancy sox and a pair of new shoes.” Another reader, “A. de F,” defended women’s rights to drink, smoke, and dance, arguing that “drinking moderately is no sin,” that “there is nothing wrong” in smoking, and that “dancing . . . is most graceful and conducive to beauty, health, and happiness.” She also cheered short skirts, claiming that “the exposure” would clear the brains of men of “foolish fumes.” Still another reader, “M.A.R,” responding to Jones’sindictment, challenged the hypocrisy of men, who had “been a great preacher in what woman should be and do, and has demanded of her virtue, purity, and superior moral virtue” and yet needed women to buttress “his tottering moral temple.”89 In a separate column where she interviewed Jones, Marguerite Mooers Marshall concluded by suggesting that “some of us no more agree with Mr. Jones’s idea of normality than with his biology or his theology.”90 88 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, 57. 89 “Angry Modern Eves Deny They Corrupt Men by Their Dress, as Rev. Bob Jones Alleges,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 14, 1916. 90 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “Woman Has Stepped Off Her Pedestal, Declares Bob Jones, the Young Evangelist,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 21, 1914. 316 Northern urban women apparently had no hesitation in responding to Jones’s criticism. In contrast, women in the New South metropolis of Atlanta seem to have relied on men to answer the evangelist’s indictment of women. After Jones addressed a meeting for women, H.R. Bernard, auditor of the board of missions of the Georgia Baptist Convention, responded to his remarks by describing them as “somewhat philippical.” Bernard especially took offense at Jones’s assertion that “any woman who has been shadowed should never be received again into society.” Instead, he insisted that a “shadowed woman” should be forgiven, since, Bernard argued, Jesus said “I love you, shadowed as you are.”91 Jones replied to Bernard’s criticism, explaining that he “said nothing of the woman who is truly repentant.” The evangelist contended that even though he had “worked among fallen women” and had “preached in the red light district,” he thought that “we owe most of all to the pure and the good, and should do all in our power . . . to keep our young daughters, wives, and sisters” in such a state.? In this exchange, Jones seemed to prioritize preservation over redemption. The contrast between the criticism of the readers of the Evening Herald and H.R. Bernard’s reply to Jones’s sermon is significant. The readers of the Evening Herald who objected to Jones’s indictment of women were women themselves. They responded to Jones’s rhetoric by “shaming” men for their supposedly unrestrainable lust and arguing for the benefits of the activities and habits condemned by Jones. H.R. Bernard, however, attempted to rebut Jones’s argument by relying on theological proofs. Bernard’s criticism warranted a response from Jones, who first provided his credentials as someone who had worked with so-called “shadowed women” before appealing to middle-class fears of social and moral disgrace as a result of associating with “shadowed women.” The fact that Jones responded to Bernard suggested that Jones viewed Bernard, who held a position in a 91 “Dr. H.R. Bernard Replies to Sermon of Rev. ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 4, 1912. 317 religious organization, as an equal. Jones apparently did not respond to the criticism from readers of the Evening Herald. Significantly, when E. Dean Ellenwood, pastor of the First Universalist Church in Atlanta and the self-described “self-respecting son of an average woman,” defended Atlanta women, Jones did not respond. His silence can be explained in two ways. First, Jones would have been reluctant to legitimize Ellenwood’s contribution to the discussion. Since Ellenwood was a Universalist, Jones may have viewed Ellenwood as an apostate and therefore unable to contribute to a religious discussion. Second, Ellenwood’s comments reflect not only a religiously based rejection of Jones’s attack on women, but also a class-based criticism of Jones’s career as an evangelist. Ellenwood suggested that “the average audience which ‘falls’ for the clever advertising scheme of a ‘women only’ or ‘men only’ preacher” deserved to be slandered. He then assaulted Jones’s background, remarking that he could not “help wondering where the man has been raised, and what sort of folks he has been accustomed to associate with.” Ellenwood contrasted the women of Jones’s background with “the average woman of Atlanta,” who “is not the sort of person so pessimistically pictured” by Jones. As a final jab, Ellenwood proposed that “it may be well to seriously consider . . . whether the religious forces . . . actually use good business judgment in importing men, who . . . so often depress, discourage, and disgust their hearers.”92 Jones may have failed to respond to Ellenwood because he lacked the time or the interest to continue the debate in the pages of the Constitution. Nevertheless, Jones’s response to Bernard, an official in the Baptist church, and his failure to respond to the women readers of the Evening Herald and to Ellenwood does suggest that Jones believed that neither women nor “apostates” deserved an answer. 92 “Pastor Defends Atlanta Women,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), June 6, 1912. 318 Bob Jones believed that manhood was defined by adherence to evangelical mores. He defined the “good man” in a variety of ways. “Good men,” contended Jones, “keep good company.” Speaking in El Paso, Texas, the evangelist insisted that “you can’t . . . take part in debaucheries in Juarez and be a good man.” Men, no less than women, were cautioned against venturing to communities deemed inappropriate by Jones and white middle-class Americans. The “good man would rather be at church than in the company of a crowd of bad men” argued Jones, and the “good man would rather be in a prayer meeting than to be at a card meeting.”93 He believed that being “as pure as a woman” was “a man’s job”; he masculinized sexual purity.94 Historians Elizabeth and Joseph Pleck observe that calls for men to emulate the supposed “purity” of women were common between the Civil War and Word War I. They note that “the stated goal of much sexual doctrine was to raise men to women’s standard.”95 In contrast to women, Jones defined the “sins of men” to be “social sin,” “impurity of thought and word,” “whiskey drinking,” “gambling,” and “Sabbath breaking.”96 He also criticized “the sin of profanity” and telling “dirty” jokes. Jones condemned men who would “tell smutty jokes that . . . drag pure womanhood into his filthy words.”97 Bob Jones cautioned men against sexual impropriety. Frequently, his admonitions to men were not based, however, on the perceived immorality of actions, but on their physical consequences. Elizabeth and Joseph Pleck suggest that while “ministers had frightened men 93 “Scorner Worst of All Bad Men,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 25, 1919. 94 Bob Jones, Sr., Sowing and Reaping: A Sermon to Men (Montgomery, AL: Paragon Press, 1914), 18. 95 Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, eds., The American Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980), 21. 96 “Bob Jones Unlimbers Big Guns and Tells Men Powerful Truths,” Columbus Daily Enquirer (Columbus, OH), June 17, 1918. 97 Bob Jones, Sowing and Reaping, 19. 319 with visions of hell,” in the early twentieth century “doctors predicted blindness and impotence” for men who violated Victorian sexual mores.98 The threat of immediate physical consequences apparently was more effective than the distant menace of eternal damnation. Jones warned audiences of the danger of venereal disease “as a result of our sin of adultery.” He told horror stories of children who were born blind, women who were rendered infertile, women who had “female trouble,” and women who had died, all because of gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. Jones begged doctors to warn men of the dangers of venereal disease.99 Men’s sexual purity was crucial because sexual impropriety could destroy homes. Jones located himself within culturally defined boundaries of manhood. He professed that he liked “baseball, swimming, and a little boxing.” Jones even taught his son, Bob Jones Jr., to box, to ensure that no one would “run over him.”100 The pugilistic evangelist relied on his self-proclaimed prowess to respond to threats made against his campaign. During a campaign in Honesdale in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, after Jones received a note warning him to leave the town “or we will get you,” he shrugged off the threat, explaining that he was “too old a cat to be played with by a kitten.” The evangelist did offer to take the author of the missive “behind the church and do my best to convince him that letter writing is not his natural forte.”101 Jones argued that religious conversion did not mean renouncing manhood. He declared that “confessing God never made me a sissy . . . it need not make anyone effeminate.” In fact, Jones claimed that religious conversion had confirmed his manhood by giving him “poise and some 98 Pleck and Pleck, eds., The American Man, 21. 99 Bob Jones, Sowing and Reaping, 36-38. 100 “Jones Sounds His Warning Against Sin,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 26, 1922. 101 “Threat Letter Received by Evangelist ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Citizen (Honesdale, PA), January 24, 1913. Jones’s claim that he was “too old a cat” is interesting, since he was not yet thirty. 320 sense.”102 Resembling other fundamentalist leaders, Jones exhibited an “exaggerated masculine demeanor.”103 Journalists frequently commented on Jones’s physique. One columnist noted that Jones “possesses a pair of football shoulders.”104 Another commented that he was “six feet tall, weighs 198 pounds and expends every ounce of his energy in his sermon delivery.”105 The Bloomington, Illinois, Pantagraph described Jones’s appearance at length, observing that “he is strictly ‘a man’s man,’ for he is masculine strength and brawn and muscle in all his six feet two inches of height and his more than two hundred pounds of weight.” The Pantagraph also noted that Jones had “a broad square jaw and broad shoulders and big strong hands and a reach like a prize fighter.”106 The emphasis on Jones’s masculinity was in part a response to the perception that ministers were neither male nor female.107 Jones physically embodied the idea that American manhood and piety were complementary values. Jones and other fundamentalists also advocated a martial Christianity. In a campaign in Bloomington, Illinois, he recalled an anecdote regarding a son who volunteered to serve in the Union Army and subsequently died on the battlefield. Jones insisted that Christians, like Christ, should be willing to sacrifice their lives and be willing to have their loved ones sacrifice their lives.108 Jones welcomed soldiers and veterans to his revival meetings.109 In 1917 in Grand 102 “Jones Sounds His Warning Against Sin,” El Paso World (El Paso, TX), September 26, 1922. 103 DeBerg, Ungodly Women, 88. 104 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922. 105 [Untitled], The Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), November 16, 1914. 106 “Three Large Sunday Congregations,” The Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), January 1, 1917. 107 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 65. 108 “Sermon on the Death of Jesus,” The Bloomington Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), February 9, 1917. 109 “Scorner Worst of All Bad Men,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 25, 1919. 321 Rapids, Michigan, he held a special meeting for soldiers, where he urged men to “enlist for God and country,” encouraging “every manly Christian to line up in battle with the other fellows.” To the evangelist, service in “Christ’s army” and the military were complementary.110 Jones suggested that “it is a noble thing to be wounded in the battle in which the Christian engaged.”111 The martial Christianity Jones promoted is demonstrated in The New Make Christ King, a song book compiled by E.O. Excell, W.E. Biederwolf, and other prominent fundamentalists. Jones and his song leader, Loren Jones, were assistant editors. Many songs in the collection applied military metaphors to the Christian experience. The song book encouraged Christians to “be enlisted as a volunteer,” to “enlist, for the Lord wants you,” and “with sword and armor bright, strike out bravely for the right.”112 Jones’s call for “Christian soldiers” is certainly not unique in the Christian tradition. His adoption of military metaphors is consistent with Paul’s injunction to “take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day” (Ephesians 6:12). Jones encouraged a martial Christianity, which appealed to men. The martial spirit encouraged by fundamentalists also served to reinforce a “cult of comradeship,” which supported the Victorian ideal of separate spheres. The “cult of comradeship” was demonstrated in body building, athletics, and paramilitary organizations for boys.113 Jones appealed to the “cult of comradeship” by holding special meetings for men. He 110 “Jones Sounds War Slogan In Fight On Sin,” Grand Rapids Press (Grand Rapids, MI), April 19, 1917. 111 “Plaudits of World Do Not Always Go to Best Man,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), November 22, 1911. 112 E.O Excell et al., eds., The New Make Christ King (Chicago: The Glad Tidings Publishing Company, 1917), No. 18., “As a Volunteer,” No. 49., “Hark! There’s a Call to the Brave,” and No. 60., “Be a Hero.” 113 Pleck and Pleck, eds., The American Man, 28. 322 designated certain nights of a campaign as “churchmen’s night.”114 He also invited fathers and sons to special revival meetings.115 Jones endorsed male friendships among Christians who sought to live a strenuous life by resisting worldly temptations. Bob Jones addressed Kiwanis clubs, Rotary clubs, and other fraternal orders and social clubs. Evangelical revivals had traditionally focused on the business culture of cities, and some of revivalism’s earliest successes were among businessmen.116 Jones often invited businessmen to be guests at revival meetings. During a campaign in St. Petersburg in 1922, he held a “Business Men’s Night” attended by “more than 500 business men from all walks of business.”117 In November 1925, he was the principal speaker at the “High Noon” club, a Masonic club in Pittsburgh. Jones, who The Pittsburgh Press described as “a prominent southern Mason,” was to address “Masonic activities in the south.”118 He frequently welcomed members of fraternal orders to his revival meetings.119 When Jones addressed businessmen, he usually discussed topics relevant to his audience, such as “The Secret of Success.”120 Jones’s embrace of 114 “Sermon on ‘Prayer’ and One on ‘Home Problems’ at Tabernacle Thursday,” The Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC), May 5, 1915. 115 “Moral Weakness Condemned by Evangelist Bob Jones,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 15, 1921. 116 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, 20. 117 “Business Men Hear ‘Excuses’,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL), November 9, 1922. 118 “High Noon Club to Hear ‘Bob’ Jones,” The Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), November 29, 1925. The High Noon club was founded in the spring of 1923 by 4,000 district Masons. (“Masonic Club Opens Its Winter Season,” The Pittsburgh Press, November 10, 1923.) 119 “Scorner Worst of All Bad Men,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 25, 1919; Jones invited members from Woodmen of the World and Women’s Auxiliary circle, Odd Fellows, Junior Order United American Mechanics and Daughters of America, Improved Order of Red Men, Knights of Pythias and Royal Arcanum, Masonic Orders and Eastern Star auxiliaries, Modern Woodmen of the World, Elks and Moose, U.C.T’s and T.P.A., and Patriotic Order Sons of America to assigned nights during a campaign in Charlotte in 1919 (“Evangelist Bob Jones Extends Invitation to All Fraternal Men and Women,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 14, 1919). 120 “‘Bob’ Jones to Address Kiwanis and Rotary,” El Paso Herald (El Paso, TX), September 5, 1922. 323 fraternal orders and secret societies challenges Margaret Bendroth’s claim that fundamentalists viewed these organizations as rivals for the male attention.121 Fraternal orders played an important role in Victorian America by “providing solace from the psychic pressures of . . . new social and institutional relationships.” Fraternal orders allowed middle-class men to escape their changing environment and, as a refuge from the pressures of the bourgeoning capitalist economies, served a similar function as churches. 122 While the message of fraternal orders and churches supported middle-class values, they helped to insulate middle-class men from changing class and gender roles by promoting egalitarianism among men and male supremacy over women. Fraternal orders played an important part in the Victorian campaign to revitalize masculinity, and Jones’s participation in these organizations demonstrates the compatibility of his message with the goals of fraternal orders.123 Jones advocated for a Christianity that was unquestionably, unequivocally, “manly.” The evangelist contended that as he supposed Peter the Apostle must have sweated in fighting for Jesus, so preachers should sweat and in turn make their audiences sweat.124 As with women, Jones insisted that “modern dances” were evil. For men, however, the danger of dancing was not in their susceptibility to be corrupted, but in the possibility that men may be unable to control their urges. When men danced with women, Jones argued that their “passions caught the fire of hell.” He contended that “the man who says he dances these modern dances and never has an evil 121 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 25. 122 Mark C. Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual,” in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 51. 123 Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 16. 124 “Sermon on the Death of Jesus,” The Bloomington Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL), February 9, 1917. 324 thought is one of these things: He is more than a man, less than man, or a liar.”125 Men were inherently susceptible to “impure thoughts,” and in order to resist these urges, a man would have to be divine or superhuman, or he would have to be effeminate (and thus not interested in women, presumably), since “normal” men were subject to irresistible sexual urges. Jones embraced the Victorian perspective on male sexuality, which contended that “men . . . were beset by powerful gusts of sinful sexual desires.”126 He believed that “a man has to fight harder than a woman to be good.”127 This paradigm firmly established women as the keepers of men’s virtue, which in turn requires that men must ensure that women must be protected from pollution. Preserving the purity of women, “keeping our women pure,” was reshaped as an existential struggle, not only for souls of women, but also for the souls of men themselves. Jones blamed an “excess of leisure among young men” for contributing to social problems, decrying what he perceived as the scarcity of manhood. 128 He even associated laziness and unproductiveness with certain fashion choices. During a campaign in New York City, Jones mocked offices where “crowds of young men in pink silk hose” and “crowds of young women in low-cut transparent blouses” worked and the only competition was “between the office mirror and the office clock.”129 He argued that “it takes real manhood to be a Christian, 125 “Would Convert 3,000,000,” The Macon Beacon (Macon, MS), July 31, 1914. 126 Quote from Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 48; also see Rotundo, American Manhood, 227. Rotundo suggests that in the nineteenth century there was a growing tendency to see men as animals or savages. 127 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “New York Women on Road to Ruin Lure Men to Tread it With Them, Says Rev. Jones,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 5, 1916. 128 “Sees No Hope for New York,” The Greenwood Daily Journal (Greenwood, MS), July 25, 1914. 129 [No Headline], State Times Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), October 29, 1914. This quip was widely reported across the country, even as far away as Arizona. See “Good Jokes,” The Tombstone Epitaph (Tombstone, AZ), January 17, 1915). 325 and that is why there are not more of them.”130 At the same time, Jones was concerned about an overabundance of manliness. He blamed “the war, as well as women” for “the outcropping of the bestial” in men. He cited prize fights and cock fights as evidences of the increasingly bestial nature of men.131 Jones and other southerners contrasted the “ideal type of the Christian Gentleman” with both W.J. Cash’s archetypal “hell of a fellow” and the effeminate white-collar office dweller. Jones believed that men who were masculine were characterized by their striving to live a virtuous life, which required strenuous labor and sacrifice. Jones believed that masculinity and piety were not incompatible. He related that during World War I an army officer had told him that “a soldier was a better fighter when he did not have too much religion and was a cusser.” Jones challenged that assertion, arguing that Alvin York, “a red-headed mountain boy from Tennessee” who was “a religious fanatic” was the “greatest hero and the best fighter of the whole army.”132 Evangelicalism encouraged southern men to live “lives of temperance, moderation, hard work, and fear for their immortal souls.”133 Social historian Charles Rosenberg observes that “the Christian Gentleman” was “one way of legitimating the lives which so many Americans had necessarily to lead: lives of economic virtue, sexual prudence, of a chronic need to evaluate and reassert appropriate lifestyles.”134 Jones endorsed a type of manhood well-suited to the needs of the New South that was defined by strenuous labor and virtuous living. 130 “Take Gangsters Off the Street,” The Scranton Truth (Scranton, PA), January 8, 1913. 131 Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “New York Women on Road to Ruin Lure Men to Tread it With Them, Says Rev. Jones,” The New York Evening World (New York, NY), July 5, 1916. 132 “Jones Denounces Sinners in a Hot-Shot Discourse,” The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), October 19, 1922. 133 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 64. 134 Charles E. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class, and Role in 19th-Century America,” in Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, eds., The American Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980), 234. 326 Jones based his criticism of other denominations on his construction of appropriate “manhood” and “womanhood.” In the case of Russellism, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Science, Jones suggested that the founders of these denominations had abandoned what he believed to be their proper gender roles. He attacked Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Russellism, who, despite being “one of the most wonderful advertisers in the country,” had been divorced by his wife. Jones explained that he did not know “whether he was guilty or not of the things of which she accused him,” before noting that “Mrs. Russell was a fine women.” Jones contrasted Russell, who he accused of being a deceitful huckster, with his reputable wife. To Jones, Russell was discredited because his own wife divorced him.135 Jones’s criticism of the First Church of Christ, Scientist was also based on his belief that Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, had abandoned her “proper” roles as a wife and a mother. He condemned Eddy for divorcing her husband, and he suggested that Eddy “was not even a mother to her own son,” even though “all over this country thousands of men and women call Mrs. Eddy ‘Mother.’”136 Bob Jones was not unique among fundamentalists in his condemnation of female religious leadership. As historian Betty DeBerg notes, fundamentalists, who believed that allowing women to assume leadership roles in the church violated the Bible, associated women with apostasy.137 Jones also alleged that a “Christian Scientist must smile under all circumstances.” He argued that this “requirement” led to women being unable to fulfill their 135 Bob Jones, Sr., False Religions (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1970), 12. This sermon was originally preached during and after World War I. In 1917, Jones also delivered this sermon in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 136 Jones, Sr., False Religions, 22. 137 DeBerg, Ungodly Women, 85. 327 responsibilities to mourn for their dead husbands.138 Jones used contemporary beliefs about appropriate roles to attack Christian denominations. Religion was used to define “manhood” and “womanhood,” and adherence to gender roles separated orthodoxy from heterodoxy. Despite his insistence that a woman’s place was in the home, Jones’s evangelistic team held special meetings for working women.139 In Montgomery, Alabama, in January 1920, Jones spoke to the Association of Business and Professional Women on the subject of “The Secret of Success.”140 His revival team also held talks for women employed in factories and as nurses.141 Even though he argued that women should be wives and mothers instead of businesswomen, Jones seemingly endorsed businesswomen and other professionals and their pursuit of professional success. His advocacy of Victorian gender roles seemingly conflicted with the pragmatic need to evangelize career-minded women. At the center of Jones’s rhetoric concerning manhood and womanhood were his beliefs about the home. Jones insisted that the home should be a sacred refuge. In a sermon preached at the Winona Lake Bible Conference in Winona Lake, Indiana, in 1920, Jones explained that homes should be a place of service, rest, shelter, recreation, and prayer.142 Family prayer was central to his idea of the home as a sanctuary. Family prayers served to symbolically consecrate the home, creating a sacred space that complemented the church, and, in some cases, even 138 Jones, False Religions, 19. 139 “Sermon on the Death of Jesus,” The Bloomington Pantagraph (Bloomington, IN), February 9, 1917. 140 “Evangelist Talks at Club Meeting,” The Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), January 28, 1920. 141 “Calls Church Folks Too Apathetic,” The Bloomington Pantagraph (Bloomington, IN), February 7, 1917; “Declares Human Depravity Real,” Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), September 17, 1919. 142 Bob Jones, Sr., “The Battlements of the House,” in Winona Echoes: Notable Addresses Delivered at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Bible Conference (Winona Lake, IN: Winona Publishing Company, 1919), 258-261. 328 replaced the church as the center of religious activity.143 Jones instructed his audience to erect “battlements,” or protections for the home against “the world.” These “battlements” included reverence for the Bible, “consistent Christian living,” a family altar (a place and time for a prayer and Bible reading), and family discipline.144 In late nineteenth-- and early twentieth-century America, men, faced with an increasingly complex and confusing society, turned to the home to provide order and security.145 Jones emphasized the importance of the home as a refuge by suggesting that even the heroes of the New South depended on the sanctuary of the home. He related an anecdote about Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who would (according to Jones) return to his old family home in North Georgia in search of refuge from the business of Atlanta. His elderly mother would serve him supper, consisting of “old-time southern biscuits,” country ham, and “old-time gravy,” before sending him off to bed, where she would read to him from the Bible, and Grady would say his prayers before drifting off to sleep.146 Jones’s story of Grady’s recuperative trip to his boyhood home seems to suggest that Jones considered the home to be a place where busy men could return to childlike insouciance, where their spiritual and physical needs would be cared for by women. Jones’s insistence on the ideal of the home as a refuge meant that men would have no share in the troubles or concerns of their wives; he instructed women to “try to smile” instead of complaining about “a headache” or a sick child, since the 143 DeBerg, Ungodly Women, 62. 144 Jones, Sr., “The Battlements of the House,” 261-262. 145 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 46. 146 Jones, Sr., “The Battlements of the House,” 293-265. 329 home should be a shelter from the cares of the world.147 Jones and other fundamentalists believed that the home was a fortress, maintained by a “godly mother.”148 The “destruction of home life” was a cause of social problems.149 Jones argued that “lawlessness in America is started at the fireside of the American home.” He complained that “children are not taught obedience anymore.”150 Like other fundamentalists, he believed that the home must be protected, as Betty DeBerg notes, “not only because it was holy but because society and nations depended on the home for strength and stability.”151 The home, as the most fundamental order of society, demanded the most vigorous defense of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists’ opposition to women’s suffrage and early feminism was based on a belief, shared by Southern antisuffragists, that “the world was an integrated whole.” A threat to the family and traditional gender relations would destabilize the whole edifice of society, challenging accepted beliefs about gender as well as race and class. Changes in home life were viewed as an existential threat to traditional society, leading opponents of suffrage and supporters of Victorian gender roles to describe changes to the American home in apocalyptic terms.152 Naturally, then, Jones condemned divorces. At a campaign in Bloomington, he berated an audience for their “low moral sense” because of what he judged to be a large number of 147 Jones, “The Battlements of the House,” 259. 148 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 100. Bendroth quotes evangelist Robert G. Lee, who argued that the home was a man’s “fortress in the warring world.” 149 “Sees No Hope for New York,” The Greenwood Daily Journal (Greenwood, MS), July 25, 1914. 150 Jones, “The Battlements of the House,” 263; “Sermons on Sins of America Delivered in Tabernacle,” The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, FL), October 19, 1922. 151 DeBerg, Ungodly Women, 66. 152 Elna Green, “‘Ideals of Government, of Home, and of Women,’: The Ideology of Southern White Antisuffragism,” in Virginia Bernard, et al, eds. Hidden Histories of Women in the New South (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 101-103. 330 divorces in the county.153 Jones suggested that “fast” women and divorced women should be humiliated and ostracized.154 He believed that “the Lord recognizes only one ground for divorce, unfaithfulness.”155 The home, the sanctuary of middle-class men and the basis for middle-class society, was foundational to Jones’s beliefs about gender. Jones’s campaign against “vices” was a bourgeois attack on the habits of the upper class, which he believed threatened the middle-class family. After members of the upper class in Hartford City, Indiana, criticized his revival meetings, he lashed out at “women in this town who think they are society women.” These women, according to Jones, accused him of being provincial and coarse. The evangelist replied that even though “they think they . . . are so nice, and so refined and so elegant,” the women played cards and “gamble all right enough.” Jones, however, was an uncertain populist. The high-class status of his wife, Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, a belle from an upper-class family in the black belt of Alabama, provided Jones with a claim to elite status. In response to his critics in Hartford City, Jones replied that those “who turn up their noses at Bob Jones ought to come and get a look at the woman I married.”156 He warned of “the man who belongs to a swell club, wears nice clothes, holds up his head, shines in society” and drinks alcohol, since that man would “drag to the drunkard’s ditch the young manhood” of a town.157Social class to Jones, however, was ultimately based on spiritual experience. He declared in one of his famous aphorisms that “nobody is high born who is not 153 “Bob Jones Says We’ve All Got Ego-Mania,” The Pantagraph (Bloomington, IN), January 5, 1917. 154 “Need Old-Fashioned Grandmother Today, Bob Jones Declares,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 22, 1922. 155 “Bob Jones Attacks the Modern Dance,” Miami Herald (Miami, FL), April 13, 1922. 156 “Evangelist Takes Raps at Knockers,” The Mansfield Shield (Mansfield, OH), February 27, 1915. 157 Bob Jones, Sr., Sowing and Reaping, 7. 331 born from on high.”158 Social status was immaterial without a conversion experience. Jones believed that manhood and womanhood was threatened by sin.159 Fundamentalism primarily developed as a response to social, cultural, political, and religious changes. Modernism and theological liberalism challenged traditional Protestant beliefs, threatening to deny believers the solace provided by a literal interpretation of the Bible.160 Evolving gender roles upended the “world of timeless and unambiguous social categories rooted in absolute physiological laws” and endangered an ordered society founded on the traditional ideas of the family and the home.161 Jones’s criticism of changing gender norms does not mean that the evangelist was an atavistic, anti-modern crank – rather, Jones was, in this regard as in others, a Progressive. Progressivism was anti-individualistic; communities, particularly families, were the core of democratic societies, and unrestrained individualism threatened civilization. Franklin Henry Giddings, one of the leading sociologists of the Progressive Era, argued that societies could not “begin with liberty” and ignore the values of “fraternity and equality” without risking the rise of “the widest inequality and burning hatreds.” Washington Gladden, one of the founders of the Social Gospel movement and a leader of American Progressivism, sounded a similar warning when he claimed in 1905 that “the idea of the liberty of the individual is not a sound basis for a democratic government.” Generally, Progressives were less concerned with protecting individual liberty or rights, and more focused 158 “Bob Jones-isms,” The Miami News (Miami, FL), April 10, 1922. 159 “Moral Weakness Condemned by Evangelist Bob Jones,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, AL), June 15, 1921. 160 Norman F. Furniss, The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 35. 161 Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Disorderly Gender: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 261. 332 on remedying social problems through government reform or organized social outreach. 162 Jones’s views on gender and the family reflect Progressive ideas about society – to the evangelist, women must be chaste and men must be sober, pious, and hardworking or else society would be doomed. 162 Franklin Henry Giddings, Democracy and Empire (London: Macmillan and Co., 1901), 63; Washington Gladden, The New Idolatry and Other Discussions (New York: McLure, Phillips & Co., 1905), 171; James W. Ely, Jr., “The Progressive Era Assault on Individualism and Property Rights,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29, no. 2 (2012): 255-258. 333 On a warm Sunday morning in June 2021, thousands of eager congregants gathered at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas to celebrate “Freedom Sunday.” The service opened with a rousing orchestral medley of patriotic songs, from “This Land is Your Land” to “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” which was followed by a choral arrangement of “America the Beautiful.” Waving American flags, the assembled audience joined in singing the final stanza of the patriotic hymn. Next, the audience, choir, and soloists sang the National Anthem, which was accompanied by the orchestra and flashes of pyrotechnics. Almost as an afterthought, the church’s Minister of Music and Worship, Tyler Brinson, led the congregation in singing a popular contemporary worship song, “How Great Is Our God.” After welcoming visitors and inviting them to visit the church’s visitor center, Brinson announced that they were about to begin “a very special time in our worship service” – a “salute to the Armed Forces.” As the choir and orchestra performed the songs of the United States Army, the United States Navy, the United States Air Force, and the United States Marine Corp, former and current members of each branch stood to be recognized. This portion of the service also concluded with pyrotechnics. After an a cappella group from Lee University, the Voices of Lee, performed and an offering was collected – accompanied by a choir performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” – Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor, took time to defend the church from those who claimed that his congregation was “worshipping America.” Instead, Jeffress insisted, they were “worshipping the God who has blessed America.” He argued that “America was founded as a Christian nation,” and then declared that the “the Left . . . wants to erase our history.” Next, Jeffress introduced David Barton, the founder of the WallBuilders and a well-known “Christian historian.” For more than thirty minutes, Barton CHAPTER VIII: “A DIVINE MANDATE”: THE BIRTH OF THE NEW CHRISTIAN RIGHT 334 explained that the Founding Fathers had established the United States as a Christian nation, warned of a conspiracy in American public schools to remove “real” history from the curriculum, and exhorted his listeners to become “born again” like America’s founders. After the conclusion of Barton’s sermon, Jeffress invited the audience to purchase copies of Barton’s book The American Story, and Brinson led the congregation since “God Bless America,” which ended as confetti cannons launched confetti streamers into the air.1 While some Evangelicals have criticized Jeffress’s “Freedom Sunday” celebrations – for example, the satirical Evangelical website “The Babylon Bee” lampooned the patriot services with an article headlined “Dozens Accept America As Lord And Savior At First Baptist Dallas Service” – “Freedom Sunday” provides a compelling example of the influence of Christian Nationalism in American Evangelicalism.2 To understand how Evangelicals became the torch bearers of this particular vision of American identity, it is key to grasp the ties that connect reform-minded Evangelicals of the nineteenth century and the militant activists of the Christian Right to the so-called “court evangelicals” of the Trump era. Rather than being a dramatic departure from “true” Evangelicalism, an “Ichabod” that heralds the end of a righteous age, Christian Nationalism in the twenty-first century is merely the latest iteration of an Evangelical urge to reform and recreate society. The careers of Sam Jones and Bob Jones serve to connect twenty-first century Evangelicalism with Gilded Age Christianity. 1 First Baptist Dallas, “‘America's Godly Heritage’ | Freedom Sunday | June 27, 2021,” YouTube, June 27, 2021, video, 2:00 - 1:21:53. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7rXa9A78UY. Barton may be somewhat unfamiliar to some readers. He made the list of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America” created by TIME in 2005, and his influence has grown since then. Barton is a critic of the idea of the separation of church and state. He argues that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that the Founding Fathers were Evangelical Christians (“The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,” TIME, February 7, 2005, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1993235_1993243_1993261,00.html). 2 “Dozens Accept America As Lord And Savior At First Baptist Dallas Service,” The BabylonBee.com, July 4, 2017. 335 In 1968 – the year that Bob Jones died – white conservative Evangelicals were not kingmakers or the subjects of Newsweek cover stories (as they would be less than ten years later). Rather, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the “top religious news story” (according to Church World News, a production of the Lutheran Church in America and the National Council of Churches of Christ), and while some Americans fretted over the role of clergymen in politics, much of the concern focused on ministers’ support of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, rather than their identification with right-wing causes.3 R. Franklin Terry, a professor at a small college in Iowa, observed in an October 1968 editorial that “pastors and priests, rabbis and nuns have flocked to ‘action meetings’ in various parts of the country to stake out their position against the war in Vietnam” and noted the “literally thousands of American clergymen” who “abandoned their office and parish routines to form a mass contingent of migratory civil rights marchers.”4 New York Times religion reporter Edward B. Fiske suggested that “the Protestant minister” was “experiencing a crisis of identity,” as they sought to “apply religious beliefs to social problems.”5 The Civil Rights Movement, the “War on Poverty,” and the Vietnam War motivated religious leaders of all denominations to take a more active role in politics. Robert Frears, the director of the Michigan Council of Churches, explained that “there are more moral issues in the public forum today,” which encouraged political involvement from clergymen.6 Newly awakened to the idea that, as Pierre Berton asserted in his best-selling 1965 3 “King Slaying Top Religious Story of ’68,” The News-Journal (Mansfield, OH), December 28, 1968; “The Clergymen Politicians,” The Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, IN), February 18, 1968. 4 R. Franklin Terry, “Religion in Politics: Old as Moses,” The Des Moines Register (Des Moines, IA), October 27,1968. 5 Edward B. Fisk, “Young Clergymen Face new Crisis,” Cumberland Evening Times (Cumberland, MD), April 30, 1968. 6 Ron Roat, “Putting Public Punch in Pulpit,” The Lansing State Journal (Lansing, MI), August 3, 1968. 336 book, The Comfortable Pew, “Christianity began as a revolutionary religion,” a “New Breed” of ministers began to take a more activist role in politics by joining the Freedom Rides, participating in the 1963 March on Washington, and speaking out against social injustice.7 As clergymen became advocates of social reform, champions of social and political conservativism condemned politics in the pulpit. Diplomat George F. Kennan (the author of the so-called “Long Telegram”) discouraged religious leaders from intervening in politics. He argued that “the workings of government are morally ambivalent” and warned the church not to “forget its true function.”8 In a widely read article in Reader’s Digest, J. Howard Pew – the president of Sun Oil Company, the co-founder of The Pew Charitable Trusts, and a supporter of both Evangelicalism and various Conservative causes – decried “efforts to shift the Church’s main thrust from the spiritual to the secular.” Pew condemned the “new-type evangelists” would were “leaping headlong into such fundamentally secular concerns as federal aid to education, civil rights, urban renewal, and the nation’s foreign policy.”9 Six years earlier, Pew had struck a similar note in an address to The National Council of United Presbyterian Men in the U.S.A. He cautioned his listeners that the Presbyterian Church was “a church divided against itself” by debates about whether “the corporate church should . . . speak outside its ecclesiastical sphere.”10 Ironically, Jerry Falwell, the young pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church who was just beginning to gain a national reputation, attacked clergymen’s political activism in a popular sermon titled “Ministers and Marches” in March 1965 (during the Selma to Montgomery 7 Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965), 80; Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), 12-13. 8 “Avoid Politics, Clergymen Told,” The Record (Hackensack, NJ), November 18, 1968. 9 J. Howard Pew, “Should the Church ‘Meddle’ in Civil Affairs,” Reader’s Digest, vol. LXXXVIII (May 1966), 49-54. 10 J. Howard Pew, “The Church in Secular Affairs,” Christianity Today, vol. IV, No. 14 (April 11, 1960), 11.337 Marches). He argued that the church was not “commissioned to reform the externals,” to “wage wars against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any existing evil as such.”11 Instead, Falwell recommended, “the church needs to become dedicated once again to the task of preaching Christ.”12 For the Fundamentalists and Evangelicals of the 1960s, political activism was a sign of theological liberalism. At the same time, Fundamentalist leaders remained active in political affairs, especially in regard to the civil rights movement, as attested by their opposition to the Brown v. Board decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.13 Two shifts in American culture and politics combined to rouse Evangelicals from their political torpor in the 1960s and 1970s. First, Evangelicals increasingly came to see the Republican Party as the champion of “traditional” morality in America. Alarmed by what they perceived as signs of growing degeneracy, Evangelical leaders formed an alliance with Republican politicians to redeem America. Few politicians championed the cause of social order with as much zeal as future president Richard Nixon. In a widely read 1967 article in the Reader’s Digest, Nixon warned that instead of “being a great society, ours is becoming a lawless society.” He condemned the “permissiveness towards violation of the law and public order” and the “indulgence of crime” that had led to “the shocking crime and disorder in American life today.”14 Nixon’s warnings about “permissiveness” in American life resonated with both 11 Jerry Falwell. Ministers and Marches. Documents. Jerry Falwell, 1965. https://jstor.org/stable/community.32094835. 12 Ibid., 16. 13 L. Nelson Bell, “Christian Race Relations Must Be Natural – Not Forced,” Southern Presbyterian Journal,August 17, 1955; Carl McIntire to Lyndon Baines Johnson, March 26, 1964, Carl McIntire Papers, Princeton Theological Seminary. 14 Richard Nixon, “What Has Happened to America?,” The Reader’s Digest, October 1967, reprinted in Richard Nixon, Speeches, Writings, Documents, Rick Perlstein, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 117-120.338 Fundamentalists and members of broader Evangelicalism. Two months before Nixon’s article in the Reader’s Digest, Billy Graham had called for “tough laws against the subversive elements that are openly seeking the overthrow of American government” on his weekly “Hour of Decision” radio broadcast. He warned that “the rioting, looting, and crime in America this summer has reached the point of anarchy,” and even though he believed that “commitment to Christ” could help to stymie the tide of lawlessness in America Graham emphasized the necessity of political action.15 Calls for “law and order” reached a fever pitch in 1968, both among Americans generally and specifically among Protestant leaders. For Fundamentalists like Bob Jones, Sr. (and his son, Bob Jones, Jr.) the campaign for “law and order” in 1968 was as much Sisyphean as it was salvific – after all, as explored in this dissertation, the Joneses (especially Bob Jones, Sr.) had been fighting against America’s vices since before the First World War. Still, Bob Jones, Jr. continued his father’s reactionary legacy. During the opening exercises for the 1968-1969 academic year at Bob Jones University, Bob Jones, Jr., who was then the president of the institution, announced that “Bob Jones University stands in support of the forces of law and order in this country, in opposition to revolution, socialism, communism, and political chicanery and dishonesty.” 16 Still, it was not the Fundamentalists, strictly speaking, who would become the standard-bearers of the new Christian Right; the more politically and socially expansive Evangelicals, such as Billy Graham and his more conservative progeny (Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, among others) found in “law and order” a seemingly nonpartisan way to enter the political area. The 1960s had proved – more or less conclusively – that Evangelicalism, even in the South, was at best an uneasy partner of segregationist politics. In 15 “Graham: Violence Not a Result of Poverty,” The Minneapolis Star (Minneapolis, MN), August 1, 1967. 16 “BJU Supports Law and Order, Faculty, Students Are Told,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), September 5, 1968. 339 contrast, politicians who decried crime, rioting, political corruption, alcoholism, drug abuse, and “free love” were simply taking up the same banner that Evangelical clergymen had been waving since the days of Whitfield and the Wesleys. This cluster of political and social concerns – to use a term coined by historian Steven P. Miller, “the politics of decency” – were shared not only by Republican politicians and Evangelical clergymen, but also by Nixon’s “silent majority.” Rather than Bible-thumping holy-rollers, Evangelicals who condemned the (as they believed) immorality of American society were more like John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness, whose main fault was being too prescient. Brought in from the wilderness, conservative evangelicals and ministers claimed to speak for what Nixon described in his nomination acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention as “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators” and helped to lead what Graham described as a “quiet revolution.”17 Second, besides politicians’ decision to make “law and order'' an election issue, two perceived threats to the Evangelical home helped to spur conservative Protestants into political action in the late 1960s and early 1970s: abortion and school prayer. As is clear from the careers of Sam Jones and Bob Jones, Sr., the family – and any alleged threat to families – animated much of Evangelical social and political activism. From the temperance movement to campaigns against dancing, cardplaying, and theatergoing, the defense of the family motivated conservative Protestants to act. As it was in the 1870s, so it was in the 1970s. Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 Supreme Court decision which ruled that mandatory school prayer violated the First Amendment’s Establishment clause, School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963) 17 Richard Nixon, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida,” Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, ed., The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/256650; Billy Graham, “A Quiet Revolution is Going on in America,” The Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), December 31, 1967. 340 (consolidated with a similar case, Murry v. Curlett (1963)), which prohibited school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools, and Stein v. Oshinsky (1965), which was decided by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on July 7, 1965, then denied certiorari by the Supreme Court on December 13 of that year.18 Billy Graham lamented that the Engel decision was “enough to make the framers of the Constitution turn over in their graves.”19 Even though the Stein decision is often overlooked in scholarship on the battle over school prayer, it seems to have created more alarm among Evangelicals than the earlier Engel decision. In part, this was likely because the Stein case made for better theater. Parents of twenty-one kindergarten students at a public elementary school in Queens, New York City, New York challenged principal Elihu Oshinsky’s decision to prohibit students from voluntarily saying a short prayer before eating their cookies and milk (“God is Great, God is Good, and We Thank Him for Our Food, Amen!”). While parents contended that Oshinsky’s attempt to comply with Engel v. Vitale interfered with “the parent’s right to have the child feel that God is with him the whole day long as well as . . . to have the child develop religious beliefs and religious expression,” the lower courts insisted that voluntary prayer at schools could never be truly voluntary. The idea of a petty, tyrannical principal frantically stopping small children from folding their hands and saying grace over milk and cookies incensed Evangelical leaders and provided fodder for further activism.20 Bob Jones, Jr., Carl McIntire, Paul R. Jackson (a representative of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches), and James T. Shaw (the executive secretary of the International Christian 18 Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962); School Dist. of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Murray v. Curlett, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Stein v. Oshinsky, 348 F.2d 999 (2d Cir. 1965). 19 “Graham: Decision ‘Dangerous Trend,’” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), June 26, 1962. 20 Jerry T. Baulch, “Court Upholds Principal’s Public School Prayer Ban,” The Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), December 14, 1965; “The School Prayer Cases,” The Catholic Lawyer 1, vol. 12 (Winter 1966, no. 1), 83. 341 Relief) formed a committee, the “Protestant Ministers for School Prayers and Bible Reading,” to gather signatures in support of voluntary school prayer and Bible reading. Within five months of the group’s founding, Gary G. Cohen, a member of the committee who taught at the Faith Theological Seminary, claimed in testimony before the Senate’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments that the committee had been joined by nearly 4,000 ministers who signed their name to the petition.21 Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen shared the committee’s outrage over the Stein ruling. A devout Christian, the Republican senator from Illinois sounded his battle cry in opposition to prohibitions against school prayers, declaring that he would not “let nine men tell 190 million Americans . . . where and when they can worship.”22 While Dirksen’s school prayer amendment was ultimately killed over a technicality, prayer in schools continued to be an issue that energized Evangelical political activism and recruited more students to newly-founded Christian schools.23 For example, a 1975 brochure for Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian Academy – founded in 1967, just two years after the Stein ruling – touted that “Bible reading and prayer are legal at Lynchburg Christian Academy” (while drugs and “hippies” were strictly prohibited), and the “Christian school movement” as a whole was defined by an emphasis 21 Lucille B. Green, “Protestant Ministers Push School Prayers,” The Greenville News (Greenville, SC), March 18, 1966; “Statement of Gary G. Cohen, Representing Protestant Ministers for School Prayers and Bible Reading,” School Prayer Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-Ninth Congress, Second Session on Senate Joint Resolution 148, August 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1966 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1966), 274-277. 22 “Illinois Warrior Ready to Fight Supreme Court,” The Lebanon Daily News (Lebanon, PA), January 20, 1966. 23 Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle Over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 184. 342 on prayer and Bible reading.24 Christian schools also offered a refuge from other concerning trends in public education, including sex education and the teaching of evolution. Many Evangelical parents saw the Court’s decision in Engel as a clarion call to leave the public schools. This was no surprise to contemporaries - as predicted by an AP report on school prayer published in 1963, “clergymen predict a major development of Protestant parochial schools if the Court rules out public school prayer in any form.”25 Christian schools were an attractive alternative to public education for many Evangelicals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the 1960s, the number of Protestant religious schools had a reported increase of 47% (and possibly more, since many private Protestant schools did not report statistics to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare).26 Between 1971 and 1977, the number of Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christian schools increased by 118%.27 While many contemporaries assumed that these new Christian schools were segregation academies whose raison d'être was providing an all-white education - for example, journalist Harry Golden claimed in 1969 that “Christian Academies” were formed in North Carolina by “die–hard segregationists” - the Christian School Movement defies a simplistic explanation.28 Virginia Davis Nordin and Willian Lloyd Turner, two researchers at the University of Wisconsin who 24 “Five Things We Think You Will Like About Lynchburg Christian Academy,” Lynchburg Christian Academy folder, Liberty University Archives; Reginald Stuart, “Christian School Movement Growing,” The Bennington Banner (Bennington, VT), December 4, 1976. 25 “School Prayers Still Lively Issue,” Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, OH), January 12, 1963. 26 Diane B. Gertler, Statistics of Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1970-1971 (Washington, DC: US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, National Center for Educational Statistics, US Government Printing Office, 1973), 3. 27 Virginia Davis Nordin and William Lloyd Turner, “More Than Segregation Academies: The Growing Protestant Fundamentalist Schools,” The Phi Delta Kappan, Feb., 1980, vol. 61, no. 6: 391. 28 The Nation, December 22, 1969, 697. 343 studied fundamentalist schools in Kentucky and Wisconsin in the late 1970s, found that “‘Christian’ education is a national, not a regional, phenomenon,” and that Fundamentalist schools that developed in the 1970s were largely not “segregation academies.” Instead, a more apt description of this new wave of Christian (i.e., Fundamentalist) schools were largely “church schools” that drew students from the sponsoring church or churches rather than a broad cross section of the community.29 While some parents who sent their children to Fundamentalist or Evangelical Christian schools were undoubtedly seeking to avoid sending their children to integrated public schools, by and large this was not the primary motivation. For example, Nordin and Turner found that in Louisville, Kentucky, only one out of the 68 families surveyed in Fundamentalist schools had sent their children to a Christian school to avoid busing. Instead, their research revealed that in both Louisville and Madison, Wisconsin, parents placed their children in Fundamentalist schools because they believed that public schools were not academically rigorous, that public schools did not sufficiently discipline their students, and that students would be indoctrinated in “the philosophy of secular humanism” at public schools.”30 Indeed, most Christian schools (that is, Protestant and, for the most part, Evangelical and Fundamentalist) nationwide were more focused on academic and religious freedom than racial separation. O.M. Fillman, the pastor of a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Tallahassee, Florida, argued that “the three main advantages of a Christian school are: The Bible can be taught and prayer is permitted; children may be taught Christian character, and the general environment of the school can be controlled.”31 Landmark Christian Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio, advertised 30 Nordin and Turner, “More than Segregation Academies,” 392. 31 Arline Haufler, “Enrollment Booms in Church-Operated Schools,” The Tallahassee Democrat (Tallahassee, FL), August 13, 1966. 344 “quality education” and required daily Bible study at their school. 32 A 1973 advertisement for Heritage Christian School in Fort Collins, Colorado, provides further evidence to demonstrate that Christian schools of the late 1960s and early 1970s were not necessarily “segregation academies.” To answer the question “Why send children to Heritage Christian School?” the advertisement listed reasons provided by parents for enrolling their children, including “I’ve heard that Heritage students progress faster,” “We want our children to have Bible and prayer in school,” “We have heard that Heritage emphasizes patriotism,” and “We want our children in a school where there is no drug problem.”33 Community Christian School of Stockton, California, advertised its “Bible-centered curriculum” and “respect for God, country, and authority,” along with other academic strengths of the school.34 These themes appear time and again in advertising materials for Christian schools across the United States. A half-page advertisement purchased by a local businessman, Thomas H. Ross, in the Sunbury, Pennsylvania Daily Item explained that “the surging Christian school movement” reflected “a wave of parental concern for the preservation of children.” Ross stated that “Christian schools teach their children morality and decency, obedience to law and order, respect and courtesy for others, love of country and obedience to God,” praised the Christian schools’ focus on patriotism, the family, and discipline (including dress codes) and derided what he saw as public schools’ “rampant misbehavior, robbery, drug abuse and classroom disruption” and “the continued emphasis on the teaching of the theory of evolution.”35 32 The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, OH), August 10, 1974. 33 ‘Christian Education? Have You Considered Heritage . . .,” Fort Collins Coloradoan (Fort Collins, CO), July 29, 1973. 34 Stockton Evening and Sunday Record (Stockton, CA), August 16, 1969. 35 Thomas H. Ross, “Why! Christian Schools?” The Daily Item (Sunbury, PA), August 9, 1975. 345 While some Christian schools in the South emphasized segregation - such as a planned Christian school in Pike County, Mississippi, which would, according to its organizers, “definitely . . . be an all-white, segregated school” - many explicitly rejected segregation. For example, a church-sponsored school in Miami refused to admit some applicants who stated that they wanted their children to “escape” integrated public schools, and another church-sponsored school in Greensboro, North Carolina (Vandalia Christian School) was founded in 1971 as an integrated school. 36 Parents who chose to send their children to all-white Christian schools defended their choice by arguing that their decision was motivated by a desire to give their children a quality education. One parent, writing to the editors of the Delta Democrat-Times of Greenville, Mississippi, insisted that they enrolled their children in a Christian school “not because it is all-white, but because I want my children to . . . get a decent education” and because the school had “strict discipline,” unlike public schools.37 Clearly, labeling the hundreds of Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christian schools that were established in the 1960s and 1970s as “segregation academies” grossly oversimplifies why these schools were founded, even if integration did boost enrollment. Certainly, integration - particularly using busing as a tool for integration - did help the burgeoning Christian School Movement gain traction. In Jefferson County, Kentucky, this certainly seems to have been the case, where the presidents of two anti-busing organizations, Citizens Against Busing and Concerned Parents, Inc., chose to enroll their children in Christian 36 ‘Private School Planned in Pike,” The Enterprise-Journal (McComb, MS), July 9, 1965; William R. Amlong, “Alll-White School Draws Students From Mays Area,” The Miami Herald (Miami, FL), September 5, 1969; “Christian School to Open,” The Greensboro Record (Greensboro, NC), 1971. 37 “Christian Has Spirit,” The Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS), August 29, 1971. 346 schools.38 In Louisville, Good Shepherd Elementary School opened a year ahead of schedule due to the start of court-ordered busing, and Farmdale Christian School, in Okolona (a suburb of Louisville) only started after court-ordered busing made the $740 annual tuition easier to stomach for members of the Farmdale Church of the Nazarene congregation.39 In cities across the South, court-ordered busing led to tremendous growth in the number of private schools. For example, in Memphis the number of private schools increased from 40 schools (with about 13,000 students) to 115 schools (with about 37,000 students) after a January 1973 busing order, and 12 new private schools were established in and around Charlotte, North Carolina after court-ordered integration-by-busing began, leading to a 160 percent increase in private school enrollment.40 Integration-by-busing also encouraged the growth of Christian schools outside the South.41 Even if the organizers of Christian schools and the parents who sent their children to those schools did not explicitly intend for their schools to be “havens” from school integration, many of the anxieties that led white parents to send their children to Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christian schools were closely linked to their fears about integrated schools. David Nevin, a journalist and researcher employed by the L.Q.C. Lamar Society, argued in a 1976 study of private schools that those who chose to send their children to Christian schools “believe schools are full of drugs, sexual license, and fighting; that white teachers are intimidated by 38 “Christian Schools Increase,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), March 8, 1976. 39 “A Profile of Five New Private Schools,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), September 15, 1975. 40 David Creed, “Study Traces Growth of Private Schools in South,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), September 15, 1975; “The Private School Boom,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), August 20, 1972; “Private Education,” The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), April 14, 1985. 41 Mark Fisher, “Desegregation Plan: No Private Bonanza,” The Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), September 9, 1986 347 black students, and black teachers can’t handle students of either race; that classrooms are chaotic, discipline has vanished and learning has stopped.”42 Furthermore, some Fundamentalists viewed court-ordered integration to be yet another attack on local oversight and parental control of education. As Elmer L. Towns, a co-founder of Lynchburg Baptist College (now Liberty University) argued in a polemical expose on public schools, “the courts have overthrown the historic precedent of local educational control” through school district consolidation, integration, and restrictions on prayer in schools.43 Christian schools were fiercely protective of their independence, resulting in a string of litigation (including Green v. Connally (1971) and Bob Jones University v. United States (1983)) over attempts by the Internal Revenue Service to force private schools to end discriminatory policies by withholding tax exempt status. It would, however, be a mistake to argue that the Christian School movement was solely a backlash against segregation. Rather, churches and parents sought to, as journalist Paul Harvey observed, “escape the danger and nuisance of busing and to provide a school atmosphere where Christian principles control the curriculum, where classroom prayer is permitted and where behavioral discipline is obligatory and enforced.”44 Major national Christian school organizations opposed segregation in Christian schools, including the National Association of Evangelicals-affiliated National Association of Christian Schools, whose president, John F. Blanchard, Jr., declared that “we will not accept a school whose literature says it is for white 42 David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976). 21. 43 Elmer L. Towns, Have the Public Schools “Had It”? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1974), 29. 44 Paul Harvey, “Where You Go When You Can’t Do Better?,” The Park City Daily News (Bowling Green, KY), July 28, 1975. 348 children only.” Blanchard insisted that parents who sent their children to his organization’s three-hundred-member schools were “upset over sex-education courses in public schools and are also alarmed about the general secular tone there.” The National Union of Christian Schools also officially opposed school segregation.45 While the Christian School Movement certainly benefited from the backlash against integration, and many Christian schools adopted discriminatory policies, blindly applying the title “segregation academy” to all of these schools or crediting their existence to racial integration would be a gross oversimplification. Perhaps no other issue defined the Christian Right as a political movement more than abortion. Evangelicals – and Protestants as a whole – were divided in their initial responses to the legalization of abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision.46 In 1968, a “Protestant Symposium on the Control of Human Reproduction” (co-sponsored by Christianity Today and the Christian Medical Society) released a statement declaring the consensus of the twenty-five Evangelical scholars who attended the proceedings. In this statement, the attendees announced that “whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”47 In contrast to this seeming ambiguity, the conservative Missouri Synod, the second largest Lutheran denomination in the United States, was strongly opposed to abortion, declaring in a 1971 convention resolution that “no person has the right to extinguish human life by decision of his own.” The Missouri Synod’s statement was echoed by the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which insisted that “abortion is killing” and issued a 1978 resolution urging their congregations to “confess publicly that the 45 “Creed and Color in the School Crisis,” Christianity Today, March 27, 1970, 32. 46 “Abortion Decision: A Death Blow?,” Christianity Today, February 16, 1973, 48. 47 “A Protestant Affirmation on the Control of Human Reproduction,” Christianity Today, November 8, 1968, 18. 349 unborn child is a living person whose right to life must be protected.”48 Breaking with their fellow Lutherans, the American Lutheran Church, which in 1988 merged with the Lutheran Church of America and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, took a more moderate approach to the issue of abortion and supported medically necessary, or therapeutic, abortions, while opposing non-therapeutic abortions.49 Baptists were similarly divided. The American Baptist Convention adopted a statement at their 1968 Annual Meeting that declared the denomination’s belief that “abortion should be a matter of responsible personal decision” and their support of abortion as an elective procedure (that is, without any underlying medical rationale) in the first trimester of pregnancy.50 The more conservative Southern Baptist Convention rejected the American Baptist Convention’s support of elective abortions while, in 1971, encouraging their members to “work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”51 The United Methodist Church took a very cautious approach to abortion, and rather than initially taking a clear position on abortion exhorted Methodists in 1972 to engage in “searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that may warrant abortion,” though by 1976 the UMC supported the “legal option of abortion” (while still strongly 48 “Missouri Synod Blasts Abortion,” The Capital Times (Madison, WI), July 17, 1971; “Was This Ruling Supreme,” The Northwestern Lutheran, February 25, 1973, 53; “Evangelical Lutheran Synod Current Issues Discussed,” The Camarillo Star (Ventura, CA), June 30, 1978. 49 The American Lutheran Church, Office of Research and Analysis, Abortion: A Series of Statements of the American Lutheran Church 1974, 1976, and 1989 (Augsburg Publishing House, 1980), 9. 50American Baptist Convention, “Abortion,” Yearbook of the American Baptist Convention, 1967-1968, Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1968. 51 “Southern Baptists Convention Resolution on Abortion (June 1971),” reprinted in Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (Yale Law School, 2012), 71-72. 350 condemning abortion as a form of birth control or as a “means of gender selection.” 52 The National Association of Evangelicals was strongly critical of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which “made it legal to terminate a pregnancy for no better reason than personalconvenience or sociological considerations,” while they were still unwilling to condemn therapeutic or medically necessary abortions.53 Unlike broader Protestantism, Fundamentalists were unambiguously opposed to all abortions. Bob Jones (Sr.) had opposed abortion as early as the 1930s, and Fundamentalists were quick to condemn the Roe v. Wade decision. By the end of 1973, Bob Jones III had been named to the national board of Americans Against Abortion, an arm of Billy James Hargis’s Christian Echoes National Ministry, Inc., which in 1963 had its tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS for its involvement in political activities. Jones released a statement declaring that “abortion is murder” and condemning “money-hungry doctors” whose “hands . . . drip with the blood of the innocent.” Carl McIntire, editor of the Fundamentalist newspaper The Christian Beacon and the pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church, of Collingswood, New Jersey, took a similarly strident tone. In an article in The Christian Beacon published the week of the Court’s decision, McIntire called the decision “a mammoth sin against God and the people.”54 John R. Rice, a Texas-based Baptist evangelist and editor of the Fundamentalist newspaper The Sword of the Lord, insisted 52 “United Methodist Church Statement of Social Principles (1972),” reprinted in Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (Yale Law School, 2012), 70-71; The Book of Resolutions of the United Methodist Church, 1988 (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1988), 20. 53 ‘Abortion, 1973,” The National Association of Evangelicals, October 1, 1973. https://www.nae.org/abortion-1973/. 54 “Editor’s Page,” Bob Jones Magazine, vol. 2, no. 4, January 1930, 2; “Dr. Jones, III Named,” Bob Jones University Voice of the Alumni, December 1973, 4; “Churches Not United on Question of Abortions,” Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL), February 12, 1973. 351 that “abortion is a sin, that it is equivalent to murder of an unborn infant.” Rather than abortion, Rice encouraged women to pursue adoption. 55 Fundamentalists were resolutely opposed to abortion, and as the example of Bob Jones III and Billy James Hargis’s Americans Against Abortions illustrates, the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade motivated some conservative Evangelicals to organize against abortion mere months after the Court announced its ruling. By January 1974, Americans Against Abortion had sent out millions of leaflets with graphic descriptions of abortion techniques and gained the support of Republican senator Jesse Helms.56 Evangelical participation in the right-to-life movement was hindered by strong Catholic opposition to abortion and Evangelical (and Fundamentalist) opposition to ecumenicalism. In May 1974, a group of pastors and laymen met in Washington, D.C. to specifically discuss the movement’s “Catholic label.” Bob Holbrook, the Fundamentalistpastor of the First Baptist Church of Hallettsville, Texas, and an organizer of Baptists for Life, argued that even though Fundamentalist Protestants did not support abortion they were not active in the national anti-abortion movement because they believed it was controlled by Catholics, and, as he put it, “they’re pretty wary about Catholics . . . they don’t trust turned-around collars.” Calvin Eichhorst, an American Lutheran Church clergyman from Minnesota, lamented that because of Protestants’ lukewarm response to the abortion issue, “it might appear that Protestants favor utilitarian killing.”57 Early Evangelical pro-life organizers were keenly aware of the impact of anti-Catholic sentiment on the antiabortion movement. Holbrook even suggested that there was “a massive propaganda effort to . . . employ religious prejudice” and prevent Protestants 55 John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here are More Questions . . . (Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1973), 460-479.56 Paul Clancy, “Pro-Lifers Seek Abortion Ban,” The Philadelphia Enquirer (Philadelphia, PA), January 10, 1974. 57 Carol R. Richards, “Protestants Plant Seeds of ‘Right to Life’ Lobby,” The Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, WA), May 29, 1974. 352 from speaking out against abortion, even though, he claimed, there was no more “zealous and committed group of Christians espousing the ProLife philosophy than the millions of Baptists in the independent churches” who were not being fairly represented by their denominational leaders.58 Protestant pro-lifers were particularly dismayed by a hearing of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments held in March 1974 to discuss two joint resolutions that proposed constitutional amendments to ban abortion and euthanasia. On the first two days of the hearings (March 6-7), testimony was first heard from politicians and then from four Catholic clergymen (Cardinal John Joseph Krol, archbishop of Philadelphia; Cardinal Timothy Manning, archbishop of Los Angeles; Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, archbishop of Boston; and Cardinal John Cody, archbishop of Chicago). While the subcommittee did hear testimony from representatives of Protestant denominations, including the United Methodist Church, the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, and the United Presbyterian Church; Jewish religious leaders; and Bob Holbrook of Baptists for Life, Protestant anti-abortion organizers viewed the subcommittee hearing as a “tactical disaster” because of the prominence of Catholic clergymen. Jean Garton, a laywoman who testified before the subcommittee as a representative of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, complained that “trotting out the American Catholic Church’s brass before cameras and reporters is not the best way to prove to the public that abortion is not a . . . Roman Catholic issue.” Marjory Mecklenburg, the chairman of the National Right to Life Committee (and a United Methodist), and Judy Fink, the secretary for the organization, both worried that ecumenical cooperation would not extend to the right to life movement – notably, Fink was concerned that the US Catholic Conference’s formation of a National Committee for a Human Life Amendment 58 “Others Against Abortion, Too,” The Daily Capital News (Jefferson City, MO), September 28, 1974. 353 displayed a “separatist attitude” that would “only serve the purpose of abortion groups who want to prove once and for all that abortion is truly a Catholic issue.”59 Evangelical anti-Catholic attitudes certainly played a role in suppressing their involvement in the national pro-life movement, as emphasized by Judy Fink’s 1973 observation that “they [Protestants] tend to see the public battle as Roman Catholic originated and Roman Catholic dominated.”60 Evangelicals’ reticence towards ecumenism generally and suspicion towards Catholics generally delayed efforts to organize Protestants against abortion. Both Protestant and Catholic anti-abortion organizations recognized that the myth that abortion was “a Catholic issue” was one of the primary barriers to Protestant involvement in the early pro-life movement.61 While Evangelical organization in opposition to abortion may have happened slowly and haltingly, by the mid-1970s Evangelical Christians were convinced that America, if not the whole planet, was teetering on the edge of Armageddon. Evangelicals were not alone in this belief – indeed, many Americans feared that due to overpopulation, pollution, famine, and nuclear war the human race would soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. Influential books, such as Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, warned that “mankind will breed itself into oblivion” without population control measures.62 In December 1970, National Geographic 59 United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. Abortion:hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, second session [-Ninety-fourth Congress, first session].... 1974-1976. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008515842. (Accessed October 15, 2023.); Marjorie Hyer, ‘Ecumenical Relations Strained By Controversy Over Abortions,” The La Cross Tribune (La Crosse, WI), April 12, 1974. 60 Judy Fink, Alliance from NRLC Inc., with Protestant Judiciaries, 1973, Box 4, Folder 6, ACCL Records. Quoted in Allison Vander Broek, “Rallying the Right-to-Lifers” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston College, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107943. 61 “Peace Unit Hits Abortion Ruling,” The Catholic Transcript, July 5, 1974; “Is Abortion a Catholic Issue?” Christianity Today, January 16, 1976. See also Jean Garton, Who Broke the Baby? (Bethany House Publishers: Minneapolis, MN, 1979), 59. 62 Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books: New York, 1968), xi. 354 presented photographs of polluted water and air, crowded streets, and piles of trash to warn its readers of “Our Ecological Crisis” and the risk of “abusing our vital life-support systems.” As Gordon Young and James P. Blair wrote in an article in the same issue, titled “Pollution, Threat to Man’s Only Home,” the “penalty” of failing to “maintain” these “life-support systems” would be “death.”63 Protestant leaders soon joined the chorus calling for population control measures, environmental regulations, and international food price stabilization. Phil Strickland, the associated director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, insisted that “population must be curbed in every country” and condemned the “appetites of the rich” and the “fertility of the poor.”64 American Evangelicals were caught up in the wave of apocalypticism. Films like If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do (1971) depicted in gory detail the consequences if America failed to renounce wickedness and turn to God. In the film, which was shown in churches and Christian summer camps throughout the 1970s, Baptist minister Estus Pirkle warned that “the dominion over our homes, children, and churches” was at stake and that Communist forces would come to dominate the United States (Pirkle’s narration was punctuated by images of piled-up corpses and scenes of children pursued by “Communists” and graphic torture more suitable for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).65 Books on prophecy and the Second Coming of Christ became popular best-sellers. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sold around 10 million copies by the end of the decade and earned a 1977 film adaptation (that was narrated by Orson Welles). Lindsey, a former evangelist for Campus Crusade for Christ, capitalized on Americans’ growing Doomsday anxieties. He fit Israel, the 63 Gordon Young and James P. Blair, “Pollution, Threat to Man’s Only Home,” National Geographic, vol. 138, no. 6 (December 1970): 738. 64 Roy A. Jones II, “Birth Rate ‘Must Be Curbed,’” The Abilene Reporter-News (Abilene, TX), December 5, 1975. 65 If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, directed by Ron Ormond (The Ormond Organization, 1971). 355 Soviet Union, the Peoples’ Republic of China, and the European Common Market into a sweeping narrative that claimed to predict the near future.66 Other less-well-known millenarians also published best-selling works that attempted to provide a roadmap for the coming apocalypse (such as Salem Kirban’s 666 and 20 Reasons Why This Present Eart May Not Last Another 20 Years). As observed by one liberal Protestant minister quoted in the Cincinnati Post, “the Second Coming has found its ways into the cold parlors of Presbyterianism, the warmed-up hearts of Methodists, the stiff blacks of Episcopalians – even robust, beer-drinking Lutherans.”67 This frenzy for Armageddon helped to give shape to a new Evangelical political movement that, with the apocalypse on the horizon, became fervently nationalistic. Among the Evangelical ministers who rallied to rescue America from the coming apocalypse was Jerry Falwell. In 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, Falwell and the Liberty Baptist College Singers and Orchestra brought Christian Nationalism into dozens of churches across the United States with the “I Love America” program. The patriotic program, which was not only performed in churches but also auditoriums, such as the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, featured patriotic songs (including “I Love America,” “My Home America,” and “Jesus is Calling America”) alongside recitations of speeches delivered by Patrick Henry and George Washington and re-enactments of Washington praying at Valley Forge, Marines raising the American flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima, and astronauts planting the flag on the moon. These pageants of patriotism married the sacred and the patriotic; as Falwell stated, “the purpose of the ‘I Love America’ program is to awaken Americans to a deeper love for our country and to 66 Erin A. Smith, “The Late Great Planet Earth Made the Apocalypse a Popular Concern,” Humanities, Winter 2017, vol 38, no. 1; Hal Lindsey with C.C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970). 67 George R. Plagenz, “The Fuel Crisis Prelude to Second Coming of Christ,” The Cincinnati Post (Cincinnati, OH), February 22, 1975. 356 rekindle the love for God’s precious Word in the hearts of every citizen.” 68 Falwell’s “I Love America” programs provided a platform for the newly resurgent Fundamentalists to channel their religious zeal into political change. The “I Love America” program led to the creation of the “I Love America Club,” which Falwell described as a way to slow the “moral and religious decay” of America that he saw in the Roe v. Wade decision, the prevalence of pornography and violence and sex on television, “situation ethics,” homosexuality, and his claim that “our high schools and universities are being saturated with humanism, socialism, and even communism.” Falwell believed that he was called to “bring this nation back to basics and back to God.”69 Falwell clearly feared that America was on the brink of destruction. During an April 1976 airing of Falwell’s radio show, The Old-Time Gospel Hour, he declared that America was “a tired country . . . in danger of extinction.” Falwell explained that America was tired because it was “surrounded by internally and externally with enemies,” namely “moral collapse” and “communists.”70 Falwell’s “I Love America” campaign culminated in a 1979 rally on the steps of the United States Capitol Building on April 27. Falwell and the “I Love America” team were joined by senators Harry Byrd, John W. Warner (both from Virginia), Jesse Helms (from North Carolina), Godon Humphrey (from New Hampshire), and Paul Laxalt (from Nevada). Chrisian schools and students from Liberty Bible College provided the bulk of the fifteen-thousand-member audience. The televised political rally gave Falwell an unprecedented platform to state the message of the “I Love America” campaign and to inaugurate a new “Clean Up America” 68 The Era-Leader (Franklinton, LA), March 4, 1976; Jerry Falwell. I Love America Packet. Documents, n.d. https://jstor.org/stable/community.32207689; “Patriotic Program Set,” The Daily Press (Newport News, VA), April 25, 1976. 69 Jerry Falwell, “How the 'I Love America Club' was Born,” Old Time Gospel Hour, 1979. Jerry Falwell Library, https://cdm17184.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17184coll1/id/1312/rec/17. 70 Jerry Falwell, “OTGH 183: Be Not Weary in Well Doing,” Old time Gospel Hour, April 4, 1967. Jerry Falwell Library, https://cdm17184.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p17184coll9/id/1702/rec/1. 357 campaign. He announced that he sought to make sure that America was “the greatest.” In a wide-ranging address, Falwell condemned treaties with the Soviet Union, attacked IRS attempts “to intimidate” Christian schools by stripping them of their tax-exempt status, and declared that the organization is “pro-life, pro-family, and pro-Bible morality.”71 Like Falwell, Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ International, was convinced that, as he put it, “our nation is in grave trouble,” and feared that the United States would “reach the point of no return” unless the nation was reformed and experienced religious revival. Bright formed a national organization, “Here’s Life, America,” to educate pastors and laypeople in more effective ways to evangelize their fellow Americans. He also called for “men and women of God” to become “aggressively involved in politics,” even though he declined to organize Evangelicals to accomplish political goals.72 Even as Falwell and the students of the Liberty Baptist College held rallies across the United States, Bright and his allies worked to mobilize Evangelical voters. Despite Bright’s ostensible unease with forming a voting bloc of “born-again” Christians, his alliance with Republican Congressman John Conan, of Arizona, and Rus Walton, of Third Century Publishing (the publishing arm of Bright’s movement) created shockwaves in American political life during the election of 1976. Walton, who sat on the advisory board of the California Christian Campaign Committee, highlighted the political potential of Evangelical Christians in a 1976 interview with Newsweek when he excitedly declared that “the evangelical Christian community is a sleeping giant,” adding that “there are between 40 and 50 million evangelical fundamentalists in the US. If even one-tenth of them 71 “Clean Up America Given National Support,” The Journal Champion (Liberty Baptist Bible College), May 18, 1979; “Crusade for Decency,” Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), April 28, 1979. 72 “Yoking Politics and Proclamation-Can It Be Done? An Interview with Bill Bright,” Christianity Today, September 24, 1976. 358 become active in politics – wow!” Bright and Conlan, using the Christian Freedom Foundation (CFF), along with Walton’s Third Century Publishing, helped to mobilize Evangelical voters during the 1976 elections. The CFF dispatched field representatives to all fifty states, which Third Century Publishing equipped with their “Good Government Kit” and the “Index,” which rated politicians based on their fidelity to Walton’s interpretation of Christian values. Another organization associated with Bright and Conlan’s movement, Intercessors for America, coordinated outreach to Evangelical pastors. The tangible symbol of this movement and the center of its operations was Bright’s “Christian Embassy” in Washington, DC. The CFF, in particular, had deep pockets – in 1975, IRS records included J. Howard Pew, Joseph Coors (the president of Coors Brewing Company), Nelson Bunker Hunt (an oil tycoon), and Richard DeVos (the co-founder of Amway Corporation), along with the Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Bright also had close ties with Harold Ockenga, one of the founders of the National Association of Evangelicals and a leading voice in the reform movement known as Neo-Evangelicalism, and Billy Graham. In many ways, Bright was well-positioned to lead an Evangelical political revolution in 1976.73 Ultimately, however, the movement spearheaded by Bright was a flash in the pan. Three key factors diminished the impact of Bright’s and Conlan’s activities after 1976. First, and perhaps most importantly, Conlan proved to be a poor standard-bearer for politically active Evangelicalism. During the 1976 election, Conlan lost a messy primary race for Paul Fannin’s seat in the United States Senate. His opponent, Sam Steiger, was a colorful figure in the Arizona Republican Party who had on one occasion shot two burros who had wandered onto his property. Conlan, as observed by the Tucson, Arizona Daily Star, ran his race as if it were “a religious 73 Kenneth Woodward, “Politics from the Pulpit,” Newsweek, September 6, 1976; Roy Larson, “Evangelical Far Right is in Politics,” The Independent Record (Helena, Montana), Friday April 30, 1976. 359 crusade.” He emphasized the need to mobilize Christian voters and campaigned in churches across Arizona. Conlan also emphasized that the same efforts used by Evangelicals to grow their churches could be used to win on election day. Perhaps unavoidably, his opponent’s religious beliefs also became a focus of some voters. Steiger, who was Jewish, faced anti-Semitic threats against himself and his campaign. On one occasion, Steiger’s Tucson headquarters received a threat warning his campaign staff to “quit working for that Jew,” and his campaign manager, Harry Rosenzweig, claimed that Conlan was anti-Semitic. Senator Barry Goldwater, alarmed by “the injection of religion” and “anti-Semitism” into the campaign, broke his promise to remain neutral and endorsed Steiger. Even though clergymen rushed to defend Conlan, and even though Steiger himself denied that his opponent had made anti-Semitic comments, Conlan was defeated in the primary (and Steiger would go on to lose the general election).74 Conlan’s defeat was a critical setback for the nascent New Christian Right. Conlan was able to articulate a theology of political activism for Evangelical audiences that united Christian belief with right-wing politics. In a June 1976 article in The Presbyterian Journal, Conlan argued that “the economic, domestic, social, and political disorders now rampant in American have developed primarily through neglect and rejection of Biblical principles.” Welfare programs, according to Conlan, violated biblical teachings espoused by St. Paul that “those who will not work shall not eat.” Rising crime rates were a result of “humanistic . . . concepts of compassion and justice” and educators had become “social engineers . . . who turn children against traditional Judeo-Christian values.” Integration accomplished by forced busing, too, was an attempt to 74 Diane Johnson, “Conlan Stressing Religion in Campaign With Steiger,” The Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, AZ), May 27, 1976; Don Harris, “Steiger Wins Goldwater Endorsement; Conlan is Charged with Anti-Semitism,” The Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ), August 25, 1976; “Conlan Reacts to Barry’s Backing Steiger,” The Tucson Daily Citizen (Tucson, AZ), August 25, 1976; “What Warnings, Barry?,” The Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ), August 27, 1976; “5 Clerics Dispute Charges that Conlan is Anti-Jewish,” The Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ), August 31, 1976; “Steiger Refuses to Accuse Conlan of Anti-Semitism,” The Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ), September 5, 1976; Garry Wills, “Barry Blocks an Ideologue,” The Record (Hackensack, NJ), September 17, 1976. 360 redistribute wealth and “steal” from hardworking Americans.75 Conlan’s rhetoric, however, alienated many voters in Arizona, in part because some viewed him as a “born-again opportunist” who sought to profit from the growth of Fundamentalism in the 1970s, though many believed that, while his faith was genuine, Conlan was dangerous extremist. As one voter in Arizona observed, “ultras . . . pose a serious threat to the tranquility of a nation.”76 Fundamentalist politics was something to be feared, even for conservative Evangelicals. Nevertheless, Conlan helped to introduce a broader audience to the platform of a nascent Christian Right and began to forge the networks that become so important in its rise. Second, many Evangelical leaders viewed Bright’s and Conlan’s activities as a threat to American Christianity. Bill Bright had a well-publicized falling out with Billy Graham, who was arguably the most well-known and most influential Evangelical of the second half of the twentieth century. Graham stubbornly refused to support Bright’s “Christian Embassy,” despite their formerly close relationship. He declared that he was “opposed to organizing Christians into a political bloc,” in part because he had wrongly supported Nixon during the early days of the Watergate scandal. Graham knew from personal experience the potential embarrassment that awaited religious leaders who waded into the political arena and feared that “Bright has been using me and my name” to spread his political agenda.77 Mark Hatfield, a Republican senator from Oregon, a political progressive, and an Evangelical, lamented that “to be an evangelical Christian in the world one had to be identified as a political conservative” and reportedly attended a meeting with Bill Bright that had been brokered by Chuck Colson to avoid further 75 John B. Conlan, “From the Pew to the Polls,” The Presbyterian Journal, June 30, 1976; Diane Johnson, “Conlan Stressing Religion in Campaign With Steiger,” The Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, AZ), May 27, 1976. 76 Bernie Wynn, “One Man’s Opinion,” The Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ), September 5, 1976. 77 Kenneth Woodward, “Politics from the Pulpit,” Newsweek, September 6, 1976. 361 divisions between Evangelicals in the GOP. Hatfield was particularly alarmed by the suggestion that Conlan would create a sort of loyalty tests for “real Christians” through Third Century’s “Christian Index.”78 Furthermore, the progressive Evangelical Sojourners magazine (a more liberal answer to Christianity Today) published an expose on Bright’s efforts that raised the specter of a Fundamentalist conspiracy to seize the reins of power and further cemented in the mind of many Evangelicals (and Americans) that Bright and his supporters were simply too radical to be elected.79 Finally, the Carter administration proved to Evangelicals that faith alone could not ensure that a politician would support a conservative political agenda. Even before his election, some Evangelicals feared that Carter’s beliefs did not wholly align with their own interpretation of Christianity and their political convictions. In particular, Carter’s November 1976 interview with Playboy aroused the ire of Bob Jones III (the grandson of Bob Jones, Sr.) even before it was officially published. Jones especially took offense at Carter’s admission that had “looked on a lot of women with lust,” as well as his use of the terms “shack up” to refer to couples living together outside of marriage and “screw” as a euphemism for extramarital affairs. He lashed out at the Democratic nominee, declaring that “a man who uses barnyard language has a barnyard heart, and he’s going to turn wherever he goes into a barnyard” and questioned if Carter was truly a born-again Christian.80 W.A. Criswell, the pastor of the twenty-thousand-member strong First Baptist Church of Dallas, declared that he was “highly offended” by Carter’s interview and threw his support behind President Ford, who had denied that he would have given an interview 78 Garry Wills, “Good Ol’ Barry Rides to the Rescue,” The Miami Herald (Miami, FL), September 16, 1976. 79 Jim Wallis and Wes Michaelson, “The Plan to Save America,” Sojourners, April 1976; “Journal Fears Religion’s Tie With Politics,” The Billings Gazette (Billings, MT), May 1, 1976. 80“Bob Jones: Carter is Like “Barnyard,” The Daily Item (Sumter, SC), September 1976; Robert Scheer and Barry Golson, “Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter,” Playboy, November 1, 1976. 362 with Playboy (Ford’s campaign, naturally, turned Criswell’s comments into an attack ad).81 Falwell also attacked Carter on The Old Time Gospel Hour on two broadcasts that aired on October 17 and October 24 on more than 260 television stations nationwide. Falwell had also appeared on NBC’s Today Show. Falwell questioned if Carter “really believes the Bible.”82 Carter, of course, was not the only Evangelical candidate in 1976 – in races across the country, more than a hundred Evangelicals were on ballots.83 Furthermore, despite the condemnations of conservative Evangelical leaders, many Evangelicals found Carter’s humanitarian, compassionate approach to politics appealing and celebrated the elevation of one of their own to the White House – as Newsweek had declared, it was “The Year of the Evangelicals.”84 As the decade drew to a close, however, many Evangelicals believed that Carter had betrayed their values. In a 1980 article in the Moral Majority Report, Tim LaHaye questioned if President Carter was “a Christian who is naïve about humanism and respects humanists more fully than he does Christians” or “a humanist who masqueraded as a Christian to get elected and then showed his contempt for the 60 million ‘born agains’ by excluding them from his government?” Carter’s support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), sympathy towards the gay rights movement, ongoing IRS action against Christian schools (most prominently, Bob Jones University), and his 81 “An Influential Preacher ‘Thanks God’ for Ford,” Newsday (Hempstead, NY), October 13, 1976; “Criswell,” President Ford Committee, 1976, Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012. www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/criswell (accessed October 24, 2023). 82 Repps B. Hudson, “Baptist, Carter Spar on Air Time,” The Kansas City Times (Kansas City, MO), October 9, 1976, 83 Tom Tiede, “Evangelical Candidates: A New Wave?,” The Delaware County Daily Times (Chester, PA), October 28, 1976. 84 “Playboy Interview Could Prove Costly,” The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, MO), October 24, 1976; “Born Again,” Newsweek, October 25, 1976. 363 support of SALT II, which conservatives viewed begin too conciliatory towards the “godless” Soviets, had solidified many Evangelicals’ opposition to Carter.85 The post-World War II period was both the best of times and the worst of times for Evangelicals, and by the late 1970s many conservative Evangelicals (especially Fundamentalists) felt backed into a corner. Falwell painted an apocalyptic picture of moral dissolution and national decay in an August 1979 press release for the newly formed Moral Majority, writing that: “It doesn’t take much to see the moral decay invading America everywhere. Look at the pornography readily available all around and you can understand why families are disintegrating at such a fast rate. And you don’t have to go to New York or San Francisco to find the garbage and the dirt – it’s right there, in every city, in every community . . . in your community.”86 Falwell’s message was clear – isolationism would not be enough to save Evangelicals. Their institutions – schools, churches, and radio stations – would not be enough to protect their families from destruction. Evangelical politicians would not be enough to ensure that their values were safeguarded. The only course of action left to Evangelicals, then, was direct political action. Falwell said as much in a 1980 interview, declaring that “the moralists in America have had enough.” Pat Roberston, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, insisted that Evangelicals “have enough votes to run the country. And when people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we are going to take over.”87 The New Christian Right was convinced that politics was a “take no prisoners” affair – nothing less than survival was at stake – and in the process reshaped American politics in its own image. 85 Tim LaHaye, “The Questions?,” Moral Majority Report, June 6, 1980, 10. See also Robert Freedman, “The Religious Right and the Carter Administration,” The Historical Journal, vol. 48, no. 1 (March 2005), 231-260. 86 Jerry Falwell, “Why the Moral Majority?,” Moral Majority Capitol Report, August 1979. 87 Clayton Fritchey, “Election May End Moralist Siege,” The State (Columbia, SC), October 1980. 364 No one factor caused the New Christian Right to become a political force that defined the last two decades of the twentieth century (and the first two decades of the twenty-first). Abortion alone was not enough – as conservative activist Grover Norquist stated in a 2009 interview, “the religious right did not get started in 1962 with prayer in school. And it didn’t get started in ’73 with Roe v. Wade. It started in ’77 or ’78 with the Carter administration’s attack on Christian schools and Christian radio stations.”88 It also was not, as Randall Balmer has claimed in his 2021 book, Bad Faith (and elsewhere), that the New Christian Right was a racist, cynical (and, as the title of his book suggests, a bad faith) attempt to use Evangelicalism to protect school segregation.89 Instead, the New Christian Right formed because they believed their world – and the Earth as a whole – faced destruction unless drastic changes were made. Like Sam Jones in the late nineteenth century and Bob Jones (Sr.) in the early twentieth century, the Evangelicals of the New Christian Right advanced the belief that to save society Christians needed to be directly involved in politics. The Progressive politics of the earliest Fundamentalists was reborn in the right-wing arguments for social control advanced by the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the dozens of other organizations that made up the New Christian Right. The network of connections that linked the leaders of the New Christian Right with leaders like Sam Jones and Bob Jones sustained the movement until its rebirth in the late 1970s – as noted by Evangelical journalist Jim Wallis, “there is an old boy network among 88 Dan Gilgoff, “Exclusive: Grover Norquist Gives Religious Conservatives Tough Love.” God & Country: On Faith, Politics, and Culture (blog), U.S. News & World Report, June 11, 2009. https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/god-and-country/2009/06/11/exclusive-grover-norquist-gives-religious-conservatives-tough-love. 89 Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI, 2021), 49. 365 evangelicals” based on personal friendship.90 The New Christian Right was linked to the Evangelists and Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century and shared the same conviction that protecting their faith meant reforming society. 90 Charles W. 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Gazette (Tuscaloosa, AL) Tuskegee News (Tuskegee, AL) Twice-a-Week Messenger (Owensboro, KY) Twin City Chautauqua Journal Union Banner (Clanton, AL) Union Springs Herald (Union Springs, AL) The Valley Virginian (Staunton, VA) Vardaman’s Weekly (Jackson, MS) Vicksburg America (Vicksburg, MS) Vicksburg Evening Post (Vicksburg, MS) 387 Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA) Waco Evening News (Waco, TX) Warren Record (Warrenton, NC) Washington Bee (Washington, DC) Washington Gazette (Washington, NC) Washington Reporter (Washington, DC) Washington Times (Washington, DC) Washington Weekly Post (Washington, DC) The Watchman and Southron (Sumter, SC) Wayne County Herald (Honesdale, PA) Waterloo Press (Waterloo, IA) Western Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC) Weekly Banner (Athens, GA) Weekly Commercial Herald (Vicksburg, MS) Weekly Commonwealth (Topeka, KS) Weekly Democrat (Natchez, MS) Weekly News (Lenoir, NC) Weekly Pioneer-Times (Deadwood, SD) Weekly Times (Temple, TX) Weekly Town Talk (Alexandria, LA) Weekly Union Times (Union, SC) Wichita Star (Wichita, KS) Wilkes-Barrie Semi-Weekly Record (Wilkes-Barre, PA) Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, NC) Wilmington Morning News (Wilmington, DE) Wilson County Sun (Neodesha, KS) The Wiregrass Farmer (Headland, AL) The Yellow Jacket (Moravian Falls, NC) 388 Yazoo Herald (Yazoo, MS) Yorkville Enquirer (Yorkville, SC) Yost’s Weekly (Staunton, VA) Online Sources: “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,” TIME, February 7, 2005, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1993235_1993243_1993261,00.html. 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