Back in the Texas of the 1890s, when the pen was not always mightier than the six-shooter, Editor William Cowper Brann grew so bitter about sham and injustice that he longed for “a language whose words are coals of juniper-wood, whose sentences are woven with a warp of aspics’ fangs and woof of fire.” The language came so naturally that in three years of publishing in Waco, then a town of 25,000, he built a phenomenal worldwide circulation of 120,000 for his one-man monthly Iconoclast. It also tore Waco into feuding factions, got Brann himself kidnaped, beaten and almost lynched, caned and horsewhipped at pistol point, and finally shot to death.
Last week Editor Brann was very much alive. His words smoked and crackled in the pages of Brann and the Iconoclast (University of Texas; $3.95), by Charles Carver—and burned again in Waco. The book sold briskly and set such old arguments raging as the one between Texas Naturalist Roy Bedichek, 79, and his wife. Fifty years ago, a bitter dispute over Brann’s views almost broke their engagement. Shortly before the book came out, when Mrs. Bedichek learned that her husband had written its introduction, she almost broke up a dinner party with her angry objections. Brann’s international drawing power came back to life too. As it went into its second printing in Texas, a London publisher prepared a British edition of Author Carver’s skillful memoir of the pamphleteer whom curmudgeonly H. L. Mencken once saluted as “a past master of invective.”
Wind & Froth. “Tall in body and mind,” a handsome, brown-eyed man with a deep voice, Brann first hit Waco at the age of 39 after an odyssey that began in rural Illinois. He went to work as a bellhop when he was 13. By 21, he had been a painter, freight-train fireman, brakeman, baseball pitcher and manager of an opera company. Then, educating himself as he went along, he worked on newspapers in St. Louis, Galveston, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. In Austin, his first attempt to run his own paper foundered.
But in Waco, subscriptions soon deluged him in the currency of a dozen lands. The 16-page Iconoclast was a potpourri of flamboyant comment on all things, laced with spleen, belly laughs, erudition, ribaldry and scorpion satire. Often intemperate, rarely constructive, Brann could be—and was—accused of doing more harm than good. But it was hard to fault his eloquence. On the approaching marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, he mocked: “The fiancé of Miss Vanderbilt is descended…through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty, bartering to parvenus for bread an empty dukedom bought with a female relative’s dishonor.” Brann scoffed at James Whitcomb Riley, “the poetical ass with the three-story name,” railed at a clergyman-critic as a “monstrous bag of fetid wind,” adding: “The man who can find intellectual food in [his] sermons could acquire a case of delirium tremens by drinking the froth out of a pop bottle.” The son of a Presbyterian minister, he rang some of his angriest cadences against anti-Catholic bigots, called them “equal to any crime requiring no physical courage.”
Épée & Saber. He could use the épée as well as the saber.
“An heretic, my dear sir,” he wrote, “is a fellow who disagrees with you regarding something neither of you knows anything about.” Or: “Marriage is, perhaps, the only game of chance ever invented at which it is possible for both players to lose.” Against religiosity, he thrust: “Too many people presume that they are full of the grace of God when they’re only bilious.” When readers complained that he was too harsh, he had a ready riposte: “I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter.”
Brann kept his sharpest sting for “the blatant jackasserie” of Waco’s entrenched Baptists and their “storm center of misinformation,” Baylor University. He needled the local Baptist press for “ladling out saving grace with one hand while raking in the shekels with the other for flaming advertisements of syphilitic nostrums.” He riddled one proposal that Baptists do business only with Baptists. He ridiculed Waco’s Sunday blue laws, mocked how the town fretted about liquor sales while it licensed prostitutes. He seized avidly on the scandal of a 14-year-old Brazilian girl who, studying at Baylor and living in the home of its president, became pregnant and charged that she was raped by the brother of the president’s Baptist minister son-in-law.
Hypocrites & Deadbeats. When friends of Baylor denied the girl’s charge and pictured her as a wanton, Brann let go with everything in his arsenal. He sneered that Baylor had “received an ignorant little Catholic as raw material and sent forth two Baptists as the finished product.” He flayed it as “a manufactory of ministers and Magdalenes” and “worse than a harem.” A mob battered Brann, almost strung him to a tree on the Baylor campus. Two men died in a gunfight over his charges. But he kept returning to the attack against “splenetic-hearted hypocrites and pietistical deadbeats,” lashed the Baptist elders as “bipedal brutes…whom an inscrutable Providence has kept out of the penitentiary to ornament the amen-corner,” scorned the Baylor faculty as “men who cannot write deer sur without the expenditure of enough nervomuscular energy to raise a cotton crop.”
The town’s mood grew uglier, and Brann began carrying a pistol. Late one April afternoon, as he walked down the street, a man named Tom Davis, who had a daughter at Baylor, whipped out a pistol and shot Brann in the back “right where the suspenders crossed.” The editor whirled and fired again and again while Davis pumped two more bullets into him. Within hours, though he took his killer with him, Brann was dead.
Waco never quite forgot its prairie Voltaire. The grass had hardly begun to cover his grave when a figure stole into Oakwood Cemetery and fired a gun point-blank at Brann’s bas-relief profile on the stone. Like his contemporaries, those who followed could never agree whether he was saint or devil’s apostle, infidel or genius. But, as Waco was reminded last week after almost 60 years, the words outdistanced the bullets.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- See Photos of Devastating Palisades Fire in California
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com