Criswell Redux, His trombone and John Phillip Sousa

 This is a followup on Criswell and the Hagiography of his suck up, patronizing disciple O S Hawkins.  Come back to this as I am posting the rough draft but plan to refine and do some add ons and perspective

    I have read the bio since my first take. Got the book on Friday and pretty much devoured it over the weekend. History will record Criswell as a demagogue bastard Baptist in the big scheme of things, but Hawkins hagiography embellishes the humanity of the rascal and some of those tales are charming.

    Its like one of my Dad's Stories of My Grandmother's oldest brother Bill Helton born in the 1890s outside Pigeon Forge Tennessee where he lived all his life, the oldest of nine brother and another sister. He Told my Dad that in the thirties a visiting preacher came through the hollers for a ten day revival and stayed with a family. The wife was devout but the husband a well known moonshiner. The preacher spent one day making shine with the husband. The preacher left the steal early for the services and the shiner on the way home stopped by the open window church during mid service. He later told Uncle Bill " knowing what that rascal had been up to all day making shine with me, he was preaching in such a way, it brought tears to my eyes."

      Such was the gift of W A Criswell. I was charmed by the story last night of his mother taking him from Tex Line Texas over to Amarillo in the Panhandle because the accreditation of the public school in  TEXLINE was in Question where as Amarillo High had strong credibility.

      Criswell as incoming Junior soon was first chair in the trombone section of the High School and city wide civic band. John Phillips Sousa himself came to town circa 1915 and directed the band in Stars and Stripes forever which evoked a five minute standing ovation.

    It was just a few months before that George W. Truett, likely the greatest Baptist of the first half of the 20th Century visited the FBC of Amarillo one Sunday morning and shook hands with a sixteen year old Criswell and said God Bless You.

    I was baptized in Truett Memorial BC in Hayesville NC, birthplace of Truett where he lived his first 20 years before the family went to Texas So I have skin, at least water, in the game.

    In Baptist circles that was as big as the famous handshake of JFK and Bill Clinton when Clinton was 17

     More later 

W A Criswell and the "Nigger Nigger Nigger" strategy

I got the book today April 12. Will write a Criswell Redux soon. Hawkins does address Criswell 1956 race baiting speech and says it was one of WA top three regrets. Talks about Criswell sermon the Sunday after the JKF assassination, Nov 24 1963 where he dismissed it as result of atheistic communism. Cursory reading does not talk about Criswell and Bill Moyers. It does turn up some interesting stories about predecessor George W. Truett where the Truett legacy is diminished somewhat on the race issue.

O S Hawkins has written a biography of the mid 20th Century demagogue and influential Southern Baptist Preacher WA Criswell. An in house effort there is an exhaustive  review at Baptist News Global

    Criswell gave a scorching address at the 1956 statewide Baptist preacher's conference in Columbia SC where he said among other things "I wouldnt let my daughter within two city blocks of a big Black Buck"; and "You wouldnt call a chigger a chiggerow, now would ya." 

    He got hoots and howls on both counts and the next day at the invitation of Strom Thurmond addressed a joint session of the SC Legislature.

     My Dad's seminary proff at SEBTS at Wake Forest NC followed and said "WA Criswell doesnt speak for me."

    This episode has been thoroughly written up by Curtis Freeman of the house of Baptist studies at Duke University. You can google it up for the title Dead from the Neck Up.

     I have not read Hawkins book yet, just the review. But I will be surprised if I find reference to Criswell the race baiter in the hagiography, nor any imagination from an honest look at Wuthnow's Rough Country on how Texas Southern Baptists shaped the modern day Republican Party.

     I am convinced Robert Jones has Criswell's number in his piece of a couple years ago Shutting Down CRT Debate, Religion News. There he quotes the Lee Atwater memo where he famously said you can't say nigger nigger nigger anymore so the GOP has to come up with new issues and strategies to get in the head of the white working class vote. Abortion and Guns and Critical Race Theory put the sheen on the politics Criswell mastered at FBC Dallas and in the Southern Baptist Convention.

     There is a lesser version a twin sister of FBC Dallas and the Criswell strategy at FBC Spartanburg SC. There the Heritage foundation shows every sign of replacing the John Birch Society of Criswell's FBC Dallas and Trey Gowdy is the poster child. It is not insignificant that Billy Graham was a member of two Baptist churches: Dallas and FBC Spartanburg.

     Likely also missing from Hawkins account is reference to the book Dallas 1963 where the strong case is made Dallas Loaded the Gun, but Oswald pulled the trigger. The Sunday before the assassination Criswell preached a demagogic anti Catholic sermon. And criswell could be counted on in the shadows in all kinds of slime ball politics now championed by super Trumper Bobby Jeffress now in the Dallas pulpit.

    In the early nineties a British tv station came over to do a documentary on FBC Dallas, Criswell and Paige Patterson. I hope the bio explores that significant moment.

     What I would like to see is a biography that explores his relationship with Jesse Helms. Also widen to other leading SBC Churches beside Spartanburg to include Bellevue in Memphis and FBC Jacksonville Florida, home of the Eagle Forum Woman of the year for 2018 Tim Tebow's Momma Pam. Jerry Vines a pastor there came from West Rome Ga also infested with the Birch Society who congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is thick in the Criswell legacy.

     Hawkins makes a big do of Criswell torn between J Frank Norris and WA Criswell. Jill Lepore who's stellar recent history of America, These Truths, mentions Norris and how his fundamentalism shaped a voting block, and gives even greater attention to the sisters in the Cause, Phyliss Schlafly's Eagle Forum also entangled in Baptist Politics and the plowing of the SBC to make it fertile for MAGA land.

    So all the colorful stories aside including his challenge to young preachers to get em a good conservative woman cause the sex will be so good when they die they will have to haul em off in a wheelbarrow; the famous Wheelbarrow sermon.

     I was in the audience in San Antonio when he called preachers who didnt toe his literal interpretation of the KJV, He called em skunks. All them preachers about ten thousand of em who didnt know their ass from a Hole in the ground, they loved it.

      So Criswell could bring you tears while he dangled your soul over the bottom pits of Hell, but his preparation for Reagan and a more disastrous Donald Trump cannot be forgive. The Old Testament would define him as a Bastard for the best of the Baptist tradition, and Judge Frank Johnson and Abraham Lincoln would see him the same For America and any version of a more perfect Union.

MAGA Underbelly, guest blog

David Strain teaches college in Arkansas. He goes by the Family Dollar Fuhrer. Some of this is a little strong but written with affection and frustration with many dear to us all who got caught up in MAGA. But God Damn the venal folks who are playing them in Jesus name, like Fox at Five, Yellowhammer News in Bama, Jeffress at FBC Dallas and the staff at FBC Spartanburg who ought to know better. And their theologian in residence at NGU Tony Beam  . And the Heritage Foundation  

AT THE PIFFLE HOUR . . . .

For what it’s worth, it’s not true that I exult in the ongoing humiliation of white evangelicals at the slimy paws of one Donald J. Trump.  Most white evangelicals I know are good people—and good Christians.  For forty-five years, though, they’ve been the frog in the stove pot.  As the despicable reprobates who’ve led them have slowly raised the temperature on the burner, they’ve just kept adjusting, sensing that something is wrong but not being able to identify just what.  And since virtually all of their friends are in the same pot, they don’t have a very easy means of figuring out their dilemma.  They look on with consternation as America becomes a post-Christian nation.  And it causes them deep pain to see that, for the most part, their children—and especially their grandchildren—want nothing to do with their faith (and often aren’t even polite about it).  And they can’t begin to fathom that they’re the reason.

So why am I so deliriously happy that one Donald J. Trump celebrated Holy Week by hawking his very own GodBlesstheKlan Bible?  Because the political and religious leaders who have hitched their star to Christian nationalism are some of the vilest scum mothers in the history of the world.  Most have proved time and again they’d peddle their asses at the mall—and give a group discount.  Still, even though they’re the Anti-Christ’s evil little elves, most still possess a vestigial sense of decency—even if the impulse is faint in most.  They feel the humiliation.  Yet every time their Family Dollar Fuhrer humiliates them, I see the hand of God.  She’s doing Her very best to make them see how utterly reprehensible they’ve become, how absolutely they pollute the church, how unforgivably they impede the Beloved Community.  Sure, I enjoy watching them writhe—I’ll admit it.  (Those bastards are lower than the Yankees—and I mean by a lot!)  But I’d also like to see them saved from the wrath to come.  (There but for the grace . . . .)  Plus, I’d like to see what would happen if they started feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, taking in the stranger, loving the unloveable—instead of just hating and nursing perceived grievances.  Many are quite talented.  Until now, they’ve whored their talents for dog shit.  This poor, sad old world would be so much better if they started using them as directed (see Mount, Sermon on the).

In the Blood with the Jordans of North Alabama and the Silent Cavalry of the Civil War

   

Like a lot of the country I was not familiar with Sacred Harp singing till I saw the Oscar award winning movie Cold Mountain. Mark Morgan had read the book by Charles Frazier in which Lucas Black  of Moulton Alabama Starred. He had key scenes around the Battle of Petersburg in the Civil War  where the voices of the Ivey Family of Henegar come in strong on the soundtrack with the Idumea ( 47 on the bottom)  which boisterously raises the existential question "And Am I Born to die, to lay this body down."

     I was near perfect attendance at Pine Grove and the July 4 singing in Henegar for 15 years after. At one point as my Grandfather Jordan taught school at Pine Grove about a crow fly of a mile and a half from the house, I asked the legendary Bud Oliver if any of my grandfather or Mother's generation were singers. He said yes your Grandfather Jordan brother Roscoe, Uncle Rock , came to a lot of singings but like you, Fox, he couldn't sing worth a darn. We called him "Cake' cause he came for the food.

   My Mother's cousin Eulene Reed  of Lookout Mtn and the Sacred Harp community told me a fascinating tale about seven years ago about a near lynching and almost murder on  Lookout Mountain Mtn . You can see the place where it almost all went down from the porch of the House I lived in for thirty years on land that was in the family since the 1930s. My Grandfather was born in the vicinity in 1881 and his father John Sanders Jordan and brother and JS brother  Henry Rufus both fought for the Union during the Civil war.

   Eulene's great Grandfather didn't believe in Slavery. The Home Guard in South DeKalb County came to his house down around the curve if you take a right at the ST Reed Place top of Lookout Mtn looking for him. He got word and wandered out into a cornfield. The HG got his wife and took her to the barn and threw a rope over an eave and noosed her hangin. She told em they could hang her till she died but she wasn't gonna help em in the least.

     They did discover somehow he had ran into the cornfield and they shot it up pretty good but never saw him. I guess they ran out of ammo. Story was later he got to the brow and hollered to kin he made it alive.

   Eulene is one of his direct descendants.

    She said a retarded son was born soon after the incident. Her ggrandfather went to the neighbor in the confederate and told him if he didn't apologize for noosing up his wife and the resulting injury to his newborn he was gonna kill him if he didn't get on his knees and pray for  forgiveness.

    They both had a salvation moment in that ordeal and Eulene's Great Grandfather became a Baptist Preacher.

    This story told to Eulene by Barrett Ashley   is extra mustard for me at least  in  Augusts when I sing at Pine Grove, especially the verse of my friend  Sam Hodges Great great great Grandfather Fitzpatrick, a Rebel of Crawford County Georgia,  whose dying words from injuries in the Battle of Petersburg Va near the end of the war,  were from the  Sacred Harp hymn Jesus can make a dying bed, soft as downy pillows are.

      It wasnt until I was well into my fifties my Uncle James Jordan told me my grandfather ran as a Lincoln Republican for school superintendent of Dekalb County. He was soundly defeated cause 120 years ago that meant he had the interests of people of color in mind. Uncle James said Grandfather Jordan would pass folks on the streets of Collinsville and they would brush their lapels and say "You can smell it on him, can't you."

      That became a badge of honor for me as I always took it the family stood out in some way. And it is the same for the pulitzer prize winner Howell Raines whose family came from Winston County which seceded from the state of Alabama when Alabama seceded from the Union.

      Raines new book, Silent Cavalry,  endorsed by Paul Finebaum and the Guardian Paper of England--google their review--celebrates the 2069 soldiers on North Alabama who fought with the Union . Raines says they lit the first torches in the burning of Atlanta, something that coulda been prevented if Sherman's orders two weeks earlier at Snake Gap Creek north of Resaca Ga hadn't been lost in translation. Raines said the war coulda been ended there.

     Judge Frank Johnson is the great Republican of Winston County who came down with the decision Martin Luther King and John Lewis could march from Selma to Montgomery. About him the great Bill Moyers said had Lincoln  lived in Alabama in the 1960s he woulda been Frank Johnson and had Johnson lived during the civil War he woulda been Abraham Lincoln.

     Moyers wrote me a note in the late 80s that said people like you make a difference. It was in regard some investigations I was doing about the hardwiring of the fundamentalist leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention to the right wing of the GOP.

      So like Raines I have come to embrace the idea there is something in the genetic makeup, the archaeology, the alchemy  of some families and vicinities that make them exceptional and passes from generation to generation.

    But as the book, a must read for anybody who is serious about the Civil War and it's legacy; the book points out it is much more complicated than that.

    Raines shines with this quote I have embraced as definitive for much of the Jordan family 

       "such are the chips through which defining traits marinate across generations of families that don't quite buy into the commanding culture. It's a mysterious process, difficult to calibrate, and especially daunting when it comes to rescuing unheralded difference makers from the scrap bin of history."

   Ed Bridges, a graduate of Marshall Frady and my Furman University, was the state archivist for Thirty years in Montgomery. He wrote the Bicentennial history of the state and has thrity grand pages on the Civil War and Reconstruction in his book. He has a great summation of the claims of groups like the Sons and  Daughters of the Confederacy which were taught in the public schools of Alabama and across the nation up until just a few years ago. I think the following quote should be memorized by all honors students across the state. Bridges lists four errant claims taught by the sophomoric he says:  " Although specific historical examples could be produced to support each of these claims , taken as a whole they amounted to a rewriting of history that  distorted it fundamental ways. Ed Bridges page 159

Column for Gaffney's Cherokee Chronicle

    A Rafael Perez had a collumn in the Jan 30 Cherokee Chronicle of my hometown of Gaffney South Carolina. I do not know Mr. Perez on any family name like that but I have been away for some time.

     Perez column was an assault of the capacity of Joe Biden to succeed himself as President.

     Maybe Perez didnt see the Insurrection, nor the several legal entanglements Donald Trump is involved nor his connections to christian Nationalism. Maybe he missed the books by Adam Kinzinger and Tim Alberta and the January issue of the Atlantic magazine devoted to the case Donald Trump is a Rube and would be a disaster in a second term with his politics of Grievance, Vindictiveness and Resentment.

     The Bible, the Old Testament in Particular has a word for Trump and that word is Bastard.

      Joe Biden is not my first choice to lead the Democratic Ticket.  That Said America could easily survive a second term of Biden, even one Term of Nikki Haley though I have severe reservations about the Clemson trustee embrace of Charlie Kirk and his poisonous Turning Point USA.

     See Tim Aberta on that matter.

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer would find Trump Appalling. His likeness is in bust in Westminster Abbey with Martin Luther King and Oscar Romero as one of the three great Christian Martyrs of the 20th Century.

       The SC GOP primary will be a test of the character of South Carolina. I hope Cherokee County can pass it with a vote for Nikki Haley, to head the country slouching back in the right direction. 

     

George Singleton: The Dogs Keep Barking, but the Caravan Moves On

  I attended the authors confab at the Greenville SC Co Library Jan 20 before Henry's BBQ and the Fuman basketball game versus WCU. My friend Ron Rash was on panel with Furman alum George Singleton and a Ms Franks who is writing a novel about Copper Hill NC. She says should be out in a couple years. I'm excited about it.

      Somewhere I rubbed  Singleton the wrong way. There were two George Singleton's of the mid 80s grads of Furman, the writer and the basketball player. Singleton the baller was scouted heavily for the NBA

    The writer has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic and other lofty climes. He's not Marshall Frady FU 63, but neither am I.

      After 45 minutes of a well moderated panel conversation with a lot of jocularity--I think you can find it online as was live streamed--I got the first question in the remaining 15 minutes. I said George my Dad was a Baptist minister and I remember about ten years ago in the Furman magazine you had a quip about some kid on your hall at Furman who repeatedly tried to tell you about Jesus and save your soul. By your own testimony your are somehing of a functional alcoholic and I just wonder if on occasion you second guess yourself and thought about forsaking the notoriety and yearn to have spent your days more quietly as a Baptist Deacon in some small Upstate SC town you often ridicule.

    He called me out and said Your Stephen Fox aren't you. I asked what does it matter  , you are on the panel and I am not, but yes I am that Stephen.

     I thought he had a good answer referencing somebody who said the dogs  bark, but the caravan moves on.

      George, a Furman grad, now teaches at the Methodist school, Wofford, in Spartanburg SC, a town he shares with Trey Gowdy.

        Then I asked Rash a question about Cormac McCarthy. Wanted his take on Hal Crowther's view Cormac McCarthy coulda mined East Tennessee more before he moved South west. After the program and a visit to another room with up and coming Upstate authors, I caught Rash in the hall with his wife as they were leaving. Turns out wife Caroline is from Belton Honea Path where she mighta known Lillian Ashley but I didnt have presence of mind to ask. Told Ron the Fox Store frequented by Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God was actual store owned by the sons of my Grandfather's Fox's first cousin near the Walden's Creek UMC in Wears Valley Tennessee outside Pigeon Forge down the road from Chinkey Pen where Cousin Marshall Fox was cut behind the knee and bled to death in 1907. His grave is in the church cemetery. 

Howell Raines says North Alabama Union soldiers lit the first matches to burn Atlanta. Makes Bama Senator Katie Britt laughable with Trump endorsement.

      About 3 15 Jan 5 I was on the air with Paul Finebaum to talk about Howell Raines new book Silent Cavalry about the soldiers from North Alabama who fought with the Union in the Civil War. My Great Grandfather Jordan was among them. A Hundred Years ago his son, My Grandfather born in 1881, ran as a Lincoln Republican for School Supe in Dekalb County , Alabama and was soundly defeated .

    So I am enchanted and resonate with Raines when he writes about personal archaeology.  With some family anecdotes at end of Chapter Five Raines says:  "such are the chips through which defining traits marinate across generations of families that don't quite buy into the commanding culture. It's a mysterious process, difficult to calibrate, and especially daunting when it comes to rescuing unheralded difference makers from the scrap bin of history."

      There is a grand review of the book in the Guardian, and Raines has a long piece in the Wash Post you should be able to using facebook to navigate the firewall.

       With all Raines Bravado some historians I have already contacted say he overcooks his claim to be the only one out there to give the north alabama union story its deserved notice. Ed Bridges for long time state archivist of Alabama and a graduate of Marshall Frady and my Furman University has a grand thirty pages in his recent official Bicentennial of the state, with a superb brief paragraph on the damage of Daughters of Confederacy to the truth.

     And in the story telling style of Raines it should be noted while not directly a part of the North Alabama story, it was the voices of the Sacred Harp family of Dekalb County forty five first cousins  of the Iveys and friends on the soundtrack of the Oscar movie by Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain. . They are singing the Idumea to great effect at the battle of St. Petersburg where North Alabamian Lucas Black says we got us a turkey shoot. He was Confederate in the moment. 

     If some of his history is self serving, Raines does us all a great service with his story telling, even fast forward to current Winston County going ninety percent Trump. But there is a remnant of folks like him who are true to the best of North Alabama and Winston County, Judge Frank Johnson in particular.

     Raines before he spoke at Samford with Carl Elliott in the audience told me Frank Johnson was the second greatest man to breathe air of Alabama in the twentieth Century with ML King the first. About five years ago before he started his Sunday School class in Plains, President Carter said Johnson was the greatest American of his lifetime.

    My father was raised in Rome Ga, so Raines pages on Sherman's stay there in May 0f 1864 were of great interest as was his assertion the North Alabama soldiers coulda shut down the whole thing at Snake Gap Creek outside Resaca, Ga two weeks before they Burned Atlanta.

      Had some of Sherman's orders not been lost in Translation, Atlanta would been spared; but as it turned out according to Raines the North Bama Unionists were the first to light the matches on Atlanta.

     Raines takes great offense to Shelby Foote fame in Ken Burns nineties Civil War Documentary and he almost mocks some of the late 20th Century Confederates in Bama, one speech in particular at Auburn Montgomery in early 1990s with Frank Johnson himself in the audience.

    Even so there was not superior virtue among the rank and file soldiers of either side most of which fell in with the over powering tribe. Clearly Lincoln was superior to the cotton planters of south Alabama, but as Sam Hodges points out in his tribute to his Great great Grandfather Letters to Amanda , a confederate from below Macon Ga.; his dying thought was of the sacred harp phrase, Jesus can make a dying bed soft as downy pillows are.

     This book is fascinating. If you have any integrity to speak of and a hint of literacy and have ties to Alabama, get a copy. Call Katie Britt, the US Senator, former U Bama SGA President, whose blue blood family goes back several generations at FUMC Montgomery and invite her to the altar.

    Else the whole U Bama campaign Where Legends are Made is a bunch of Bull Sheet.