Phil brought up William Jennings Bryan and Populism a little way down the page, and I thought I’d meditate on the subject today.

All most people remember about Bryan nowadays is that he was the guy they based the Brady character in “Inherit the Wind” on (here’s an interesting web page that’ll explain a lot of things you don’t know about the Scopes Trial, if all you know of it is what you saw in the movie or the play). Bryan ran for president three times, and he was a serious candidate. He was the standard-bearer for Populism (today we’d say liberalism) around the turn of the Twentieth Century.

“How can this be?” we wonder today. “How can an evangelical, Bible-believing Christian be a liberal?”

That question brings us to an aspect of American history that’s mostly forgotten today. Throughout the 19th Century, evangelicalism and liberalism in America were (by and large) the same movement.

Whence comes today’s liberal’s certainty that the changes he wants to implement cannot help but make the country a far better place, a veritable Heaven on earth? It comes, in part, because he has inherited the vision of the Abolitionists (most of them Christians, like Charles G. Finney and Henry Ward Beecher), who saw, with considerable justification, their crusade against slavery as a Biblical drama, the Exodus and the Apocalypse rolled into one. The antislavery movement, I believe, marked the birth of a brand new form of pleasure—the pleasure of being a moral crusader. The moral crusader (be his crusade wise or foolish, good or bad) enjoys the delights of living on the moral high ground. If the struggle brings success and fame, the crusader is smugly aware that he deserves it. If it brings suffering and martyrdom, he dies with the pleasure of knowing he’s the pioneer, “truth forever on the scaffold,” as the poet Lowell wrote.

After the slavery fight had been won, the evangelical community looked around for a new crusade, a new way to improve society and usher in the Kingdom. By consensus, the next great goal became Prohibition.

Prohibition involved a subtle change of focus. It wasn’t hard to believe that slavery should be ended, and that slaveholders should be forced to give up their slaves, whatever the cost to them. Prohibition moved on to target a voluntary commercial activity, in which nobody was forced to participate (the Prohibitionist argued that drunkards were, for all intents and purposes, slaves to Demon Rum, and so the case was the same). The moral crusaders had moved from rescuing people held against their will, to prohibiting free transactions based on a conviction that they knew better than other people what was good for them.

It was a long struggle, but they won at last. Booze got banned (a by-product, by the way, was Women’s Suffrage. Prohibitionists pushed Women’s Rights hard, because women were overwhelmingly anti-saloon).

But it was sometime around there that a schism occurred. The liberals of the East looked out at the great, unwashed mass of Progressive evangelicals and said, “These really aren’t our kind of people.”

The Scopes Trial is said to have been the rupture point. Intellectuals like H. L. Mencken were offended by Bryan’s opposition to Darwin. They washed their hands of him and his followers. The intellectuals moved toward Socialism, the evangelicals, gradually, toward conservatism.

It took a while. I’ve heard a story of one of the founding fathers of my church body. Back in the 1940’s he’d been elected to the Minnesota State Legislator as an independent. Being an independent, he had to decide for himself which party he would caucus with.

“I looked across the chamber,” he said, “and I asked myself, ‘Which party best represents the principles of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?’

“I did not hesitate. I went immediately and caucused with the Democrats.”

The Christy Awards winners were announced last Saturday. Editor Terry Whalin says the event was fun and gives a list of the winners, which aren’t on The Christy Awards site or in the news sources I’ve searched. FaithfulReader.com has the list and some reviews. Editor David Long has kicked up some discussion.

According the website, “the Christy Award is designed to:

1. Nurture and encourage creativity and quality in the writing and publishing of fiction written from a Christian worldview.
2. Bring a new awareness of the breadth and depth of fiction choices available, helping to broaden the readership.
3. Provide opportunity to recognize novelists whose work may not have reached bestseller status.

I found this in the Brandywine Books archives. Erin O’Connor passes on a list of reasons why God couldn’t get tenure, and reader Kris at Berkley offers up an opposite list for why He could. From the first list:

1. He’s authored only one paper
2. That paper was in Hebrew
3. His work appeared in an obscure, unimportant publication
4. He never references other authors
5. Workers in the field can’t replicate His results.

From the second list:

1. The one publication was a Citation Classic.
2. The Hebrew original was widely translated courtesy of the author.
3. Being written before journals existed, references were hard to come by.

Read on

[first posted May 29, 2004] According to Ask Oxford, from the Oxford U.P., “Most of the words which are given as ‘the longest word’ are merely inventions, and when they occur it is almost always as examples of long words, rather than as genuine examples of use” i.e. ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,’ which is supposed to be a lung disease. Of course, there are real words of extreme length. A couple good examples of these superduperlong words are ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ and ‘pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism.’ They just roll off the tongue, what?

For the trivia nerd or engineer in your family, Ask Oxford explains, “The formal names of chemical compounds are almost unlimited in length (for example, ‘aminoheptafluorocyclotetraphosphonitrile,’ 40 letters), but longer ones tend to be sprinkled with numerals, Roman and Greek letters, and other arcane symbols. Dictionary writers tend to regard such names as `verbal formulae’, rather than as English words.”

Walker wheeled his dolly through the Post Office door. A lady going out held the door for him, and he thanked her twice, embarrassed to have a door held for him by a woman.

It was a once-a-quarter chore, sending the returns back to the publisher. In order to have a variety of books to sell, the bookstore subscribed to a program by which the publisher sent them a couple cartons of overstocks, which would be displayed for three months, then returned. The bookstore paid for the invoice difference, if any. Not much this quarter. Precisely one book sold. Summer slump in a school bookstore.

He got in line and surveyed the dingy, cluttered service area. The building wasn’t very old, but the abrasion of bureaucracy had already erased any humanity the place had ever had. Walker missed the old-time Post Offices, temples of democracy with classical porticos and lots of brass. You felt like you were dealing with the majesty of the republic in those old places. You felt proud to be an American there. You scanned the wanted posters on the bulletin boards, inspired with civic zeal to ferret out wrongdoers for the good of the commonwealth.

He looked at the service windows to his left. Only two postal employees on duty, so it would be a wait. But she was on duty today. Maybe he’d luck out and be one of her customers. Maybe a Sublime Moment would happen, somehow….

Such a lovely woman. You didn’t expect to see a woman who looked like that working for the Post Office. He couldn’t guess her age. She might be in her thirties, she might be as old as fifty. Impossible to tell. With that bone structure, she’d be beautiful until the day she died. The kind of bone-deep beauty Katherine Hepburn had, though she didn’t look at all like Hepburn. A petite woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and blue eyes. A kind of aquiline face, its planes clean and perfect. If she wore makeup, it wasn’t apparent.

And no wedding ring….

Helen gave the lady her receipt and looked to the next customer, saying, “Can I help you?” That customer, a guy with a beard, seemed to be woolgathering. The guy in line behind him nudged him, and he roused himself and wheeled two cartons on a dolly up to her window.

Great. Boxes to lift. Again.

Boxes of books. She knew it was books because she recognized the customer. Some sort of bookstore employee. He came in now and then, and he always wore a tie and a hat. Even on a summer day like this. Odd bird.

Too fat, but he had interesting salt-and-pepper hair, and his face looked younger than the hair indicated. She wondered what he was like. He was always polite and well-spoken. She glanced at his hand. No ring.

“All books. Media Mail,” he said.

They went through the rigmarole. As always, he didn’t want insurance or special services. He pulled out a business check and had it filled in except for the amount by the time she had a figure for him.

“If he asked me out, would I say yes?” she asked herself. “Might be interesting to find out what a guy who dresses like this is like. Probably a weirdo, though.”

“Any stamps?” she asked.

“In a separate transaction,” he said.

“Doesn’t charge his own stamps to his company,” she thought. “Minimally honest, at least. Better than my last boyfriend.”

She lifted the plastic display page. “We have these stamps,” she said.

“I’ll take a sheet of the Reagan stamps.”

She swore to herself. A bleeping Republican.

“Thank you,” she said when he paid her.

“Thank you,” he replied, wheeling his empty dolly away.

(The story above is true, except for the lies. It’s a fair description of my trip to the Post Office today, but I made up Helen’s [not her name] thoughts [certainly wrong].

Also one of the things that make me a total dork.)

J. Mark Bertrand points out a couple podcasts he participated in during this summer’s Worldview Academy. (part 1, part 2)They are the two parts of an interesting discussion on why we should care about literature.

In the second part, I believe Mark makes a great point about the instincts of his students. Though they may question how someone can say one writer is better than another, they fully understand how someone can say one band is better than another. Personal taste does come into play a bit, but an experienced listener can make a good case that one band, even a band he doesn’t enjoy, is more skilled than another. The same with writers. There’s more to be said, but I’ll leave it there.

Here’s a fun, art-related animation which you may not have seen. It’s “Animator vs. Animation.”

On June 30, 1891, my great-great-grandfather, Ole Olsen Kvalevaag, of Avaldsnes parish, Karmøy Island, Norway, wrote the following in a letter to his son, my great-grandfather, who’d emigrated to America and changed his name to John Walker (my translation):

I myself have been sick awhile, but now, thank God, I am better again; and it’s a good thing, because I haven’t had much of anyone to help me with the farm work this year…. I myself have plowed every furrow this year….

Ja, it is certainly hard to think that we, who have brought up so many as we have, are now alone in our old age. Ja, it is sorrowful to think of, that we should have two sons in America, and [they] go and work for day wages, with nothing of their own to hold on to, and will not be at home in their own home and country. Ja, it is amazing how a person can be, ja, I often wonder about it when I think of you, that you could forsake your dear home, and live in that America….

You, Jan, are scared to come home, you say, because you have to go to Madla [for military service], you say; ja, setting aside the fact that you have to, for you aren’t too good for that place, nor is anyone else; for as surely as you are, and want to be, a Christian, there is something the Lord has commanded, that we should submit to God and king. I ask you not to refuse this, for think how the Lord can lay upon you something that might be worse for you if you avoid this; for I can tell you that there are many who have been punished by God for it.

I don’t have John’s replies, but what I see in this letter (as well as the others in the collection) is the Declaration of Independence writ small (to an extent), in one family’s history. My great-grandfather resisted a lot of pressure and well-meaning warnings (not to mention guilt) in order to strike out on a new path in a new country. He left familiar things, and things that felt right, to try it the American way.

He ended up rich by the standards of his time and place, incidentally. The later letters make it clear that his father had borrowed money from him.

I’m grateful to be an American, grateful both to God and to my risk-taking ancestors.

Happy Fourth of July.

For Independence Day, Junk Yard Blog quotes from ancient Episcopalian wisdom, which may have little to do with modern church leadership.

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favour and glad to do thy will.

Blogger SeeDubya calls the modern Episcopal church the Shasta Cola of Anglicanism.

He also points to some good parodies of the NY Times and others, including this one on Powerlineblog.com which shows the Times blowing the cover on colonial plans to announce the attack of the British.