Brann’s is a tale of satire and gunfire
At a time when journalists in this country are under fire, it’s interesting to recall what happened in Texas in the latter years of the 19th century when a fiery journalist’s pen and Southern Baptist brimstone met with fatal results. This column ran originally on Jan. 15, 2015.
WACO — Satire. That’s what you call it. But answer me this: When does satire bleed into calumny of the cruelest, most vicious sort? You can talk all you want about First Amendment rights and freedom of the press, but wait until you and yours are the targets. Wait until institutions deserving of our deepest devotion and respect feel the rapier prick of the satirist’s vile pen. Then we’ll see how high-minded you are.
Maybe those words approximate the thoughts of Waco businessman and Baylor alumnus Thomas E. Davis on a sunny spring day in 1898 when he lunged out of a downtown real estate office, and shot the foremost satirist of his time. A bullet from Davis’ gun burrowed deep into the back of the man he hated, right where the suspenders crossed.
Then again, maybe not. William Cowper Brann — “the classic hell-raiser of his generation,” former Houston Chronicle executive editor Tony Pederson calls him — had a way of driving people
to furious distraction, enraging them beyond words or rational thought, particularly if they were Baylorites, Baptists, Brits, women, Episcopalians, African-Americans or upstanding Wacoans. As Pederson reminded me by phone this week, “He was one of the first journalists to be killed because of what he wrote.” Tragically, he wouldn’t be the last, as we’ve been reminded by recent attacks.
Born in 1855, Brann was the son of an Illinois preacher; his mother died when he was 2. A vagabond journalist of sorts, he started The Iconoclast in Austin. When he couldn’t make a go of it, he sold his printing press and Iconoclast name for $250 to a young Austin bank teller named William Sydney Porter (O Henry). He moved to Waco to write editorials for the Waco Daily News and in 1895 revived The Iconoclast after O Henry let it die. Soon the weekly paper boasted a circulation of more than 100,000, the largest of any magazine in America, Brann claimed. Its motto: “It Strikes to Kill.”
‘Master of invective’
Brann’s raw humor and corrosive satire, directed primarily at Victorian hypocrisy and “organized virtue,” attracted readers from Hawaii to England, from Canada to Australia. News boys hawking The Iconoclast on trains inevitably ran out before they reached the last car. H.L. Mencken, no slouch as a satirist himself, called Brann “a past master of invective.”
A tall, handsome man, well-read and well-spoken, arrogant and hottempered, Brann was, in the words of Texas writer Roy Bedichek, “among the first publicists of his generation to identify and challenge the hypocrisies, the sickly sentimentalisms, the religiosity — especially the glaring gaps between religious pretense and religious performance — and the excessive affectations general in the life, art and literature of an already moribund Victorianism.”
“People frequently say to me, ‘Brann, your attacks are too harsh,’’’ the fiery editor once wrote. “Perhaps so, but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter.”
Brann may have had readers and admirers throughout the Englishspeaking world, but since Baptists were his frequent target, he was not greatly appreciated in his adopted city, particularly after he launched a weekly crusade against the Rev. Rufus C. Burleson, Baylor’s elderly president and the man who baptized Sam Houston. A 13-year-old Brazilian girl named Antonia Texeira, brought to the U.S. by missionaries, was living with the Burleson family and working as a servant. When she turned up pregnant and in court named a young relative of the Burlesons as the father, the story almost wrote itself for the man the Baptists branded an apostle of the Devil. “This young girl, still in short skirts, came to Baylor,” he wrote, “and her diploma weighed eight pounds two ounces.”
He called Baylor “an intellectual eye-sore.” Its students, he wrote, “are chiefly fork-of-the-creek yaps who curry horses or run errands for their board and wear the same undershirt year round. They take but two baths during their lifetime — one when they are born, the other when they are baptized.”
Some of those fork-of-the-creek yaps kidnapped Brann, intending to tar and feather him. The youthful mob misplaced the tar, so its leaders decided to lynch him. A professor strolling by after a prayer service at the nearby home of a judge advised against it. He suggested instead that they horsewhip him. Brann survived that ordeal and others and continued stoking the fire.
Pederson, a Baylor alumnus who now chairs the journalism department at SMU, is, like me, a native Wacoan. (Actually, we’re both from Bellmead, the blue-collar suburb east of town.) A dapper fellow, no fork-of-the-creek yap, to be sure, he discovered Brann in a journalism class taught by the legendary David McHam, recently retired from the University of Houston. When he found the complete works of Brann in a Waco used-book store, he forked over the $125 and has treasured the 12-volume set ever since.
“His ability as a stylist, the narrative quality of it, his descriptions — it’s beautiful writing,” Pederson said.
Not a hero
There’s also this about the man admired by so many journalists: However brilliant he was, however fearless, he also was a rabid racist. “The black is here, and I see but one way to get rid of him. …” (You don’t want to read the rest of it.)
“It’s there. There’s no question about it,” Pederson said. “It is awful. You would like to think that for a journalistic hero of his time he would be way ahead of his time, but he wasn’t.”
On the afternoon before Brann and his wife, Carrie — he called her Midget — were to leave on a lecture tour that would take them to San Antonio, Houston, Galveston, New Orleans and Chicago, the businessman Davis stepped into the busy street and shot him in the back, foot and groin. The buffalo hunter turned real estate agent apparently was enraged at Brann’s Baylor jibes.
The wounded editor drew the double-action revolver he carried for protection — one of the first of its kind in Waco — whirled around and shot his assailant, the bullets from Brann’s pistol rolling Davis over and over on the sidewalk. Brann was hauled off to jail. The police didn’t know he’d been shot until they noticed blood sloshing from his shoes. Both men died the next day.
Brann, 43 at the time of his death, rests beneath a live oak in Waco’s historic Oakwood Cemetery, not far from the Baylor campus. On one side of the small granite obelisk that marks his grave is a bas-relief profile of Brann carved in marble; years ago, a bullet gouged out a portion of the temple. A lamp of truth originally atop the obelisk was stolen in 2009. Baylor fraternities were among the suspects.