Chapter V: Part 5

And so she went up the hill. A little while later a man left the group, remarking that he must go home. He followed her. And a moment after that another left, and then another, until behind Hatrack was a line of men, about one to a block, who would not look at one another, and who looked sheepishly at the ground when they met anyone coming the other way. As each man accosted her in turn Hatrack inquired whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic. If he was a Protestant she took him into the Catholic cemetery; if he was a Catholic they went into the Masonic cemetery.

5

I fell a willing victim to the wiles of the Rum Demon on the night of my conversion, and thereafter, in common with other boys of the town who were aflame with revolt against the religious taboos which had so oppressed us, I drank whenever I could obtain the liquor. This was not often, because I seldom had any money and it was difficult to find a bartender who would sell a drink to a minor. The eagle eye of the W. C. T. U. was constantly upon him. But occasionally the darkies would buy for us in return for one swig at the bottle, and as often as possible we purchased by this means a pint or quart of whisky or gin. I did not drink because I liked the taste of liquor, for I didn’t, and I do not now, but I thought it was smart and manly to get drunk.

And there was another, and a deeper reason. It seemed to me that in the eyes of the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters a man could commit no more heinous sin than to get tight; it was even worse than smoking. Such being the case, I felt that it was incumbent upon me to achieve that condition, and thereby show them that I had no use for them and the things for which they stood. And that was also the reason we sang vulgar songs, and roared with gusto the parodies on hymns that we learned from time to time. It was our custom to get as drunk as possible and then group ourselves about the pump in the courthouse yard, where we bellowed ditties and parodies until the town marshal or some outraged Brother or Sister stopped us.

There were few such songs that we did not sing; it was at the pump, on a summer night, that I first heard the “Song of Jack Hall.” It was taught to us by a shoe drummer from St. Louis, who sang it with appropriate gestures, and for a long time it was our favorite song. The version that we sang was this--it should be rendered with great gusto and feeling, and the final line of each verse should be dragged from deep down in the chest:

Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, ’tis Jack Hall,
Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall, ’tis Jack Hall;
Oh, me nyme it is Jack Hall,
And I’ll tell youse one and all,
The story of me fall,
God damn your eyes.

Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, so ’tis said,
Oh, I killed a man ’tis said, so ’tis said;
Oh, I killed a man ’tis said,
And I kicked his bloody head,
And I left him lyin’ dead,
God damn his eyes.

So they chucked me here in quod, here in quod,
So they chucked me here in quod, here in quod;
So they chucked me here in quod,
With a ball and chain and rod,
They did, so help me God,
God damn their eyes.

Well, the parson he did come, he did come,
Well, the parson he did come, he did come;
Well, the parson he did come,
And he looked so God-damned glum,
As he talked of Kingdom Come,
God damn his eyes.

And the sheriff he came, too, he came, too,
And the sheriff he came, too, he came, too;
And the sheriff he came, too,
With his little boys in blue,
He said: “Jack, we’ll see you through,
God damn your eyes.”

So it’s up the rope I go, up I go,
So it’s up the rope I go, up I go;
So it’s up the rope I go,
And those devils down below,
They’ll say: “Jack, we told you so!”
God damn their eyes.

The parodies on hymns that we sang were almost innumerable, and were undoubtedly sung all over the country by other boys who, in the eyes of their elders, were only being smart-alecky, but who, like us, had a deeper reason for the eagerness with which they paraded their disrespect for the Church and for religion. It was one of the few ways we knew to flaunt our sin, and nothing pleased us more than to break up a church service, or at least interrupt it, by bellowing at the top of our voices some disreputable and unholy parody that had reached us in one way or another.

One of our most enjoyable Sunday-night escapades was to gather in a group outside a church window, and sing a parody immediately after the choir and the congregation inside had sung the hymn itself. We persisted in this until finally the pastor of the Northern Methodist church had Wint Jackson, the Night Marshal, chase us away. We went without comment or objection when Jackson ordered us to disperse, because he had just killed a desperado named Yates, and we considered him something of a hero; we thought that he went about with his finger constantly in the trigger of his revolver, and that the finger itched.

On this particular night the parody which made the Methodist minister so angry, and swept from his mind all thought of his Christian duty to turn the other cheek for us to swat, was on “Oh, that will be glory for me.” Our version went like this:

Oh, there will be no chicken for me,
No chicken for me, no chicken for me;
When all the preachers have gulped their share,
There’ll be no chicken, no chicken for me.

To give the proper swing to the tune, “gulped” must be pronounced “gulluped.”

Perhaps the most celebrated of all the parodies, at that time, was on the favorite old hymn, “At the Bar.” We sang it thus:

At the bar, at the bar,
Where I smoked my first cigar,
And the nickels and the dimes rolled away;
It was there, by chance,
That I ripped my Sunday pants,
And now I can wear them every day.

Another parodied “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” thus:

Nero, my dog, has fleas,
Nero has fleas;
Although I wash him clean,
Nero, my dog, has fleas.

And thus, to the tune of “Hallelujah, Thine the Glory”:

Hellilujah, I’m a hobo,
Hellilujah, I’m a bum;
Hellilujah, give us a handout,
Revive us again.

There was also in circulation at that time a great number of parodies on hymns in which mention was made of Beecham’s Pills, the merits of which were emblazoned on every barn and fence throughout the countryside. I have heard that these parodies were circulated by the Beecham Pill people themselves in response to a plea of English churches for hymn books, but I do not know if the story is true. One of our favorites of this collection was the parody on “Hark, the herald angels sing.” It went:

Hark, the herald Angels sing,
Beecham’s Pills are just the thing;
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
Two for man and one for child.

6

To my long list of unhallowed but frequently pleasant accomplishments I added, in my sixteenth summer, journalism and dancing; I went to work on the Farmington _Times_ and learned to waltz and two-step, and on occasion danced the Virginia Reel and the quadrille with spirit and abandon if not with elegant grace. The practice of journalism was not then, in all quarters, considered a sin of the first magnitude; nor is it so considered to-day except when various Preachers and other goody-bodies find their names mentioned infrequently and their daily denunciations ignored. It is then the fashion to denounce the newspapers, and to deplore the low plane to which the fourth estate has fallen. But in Farmington in my youth the feeling against the Sunday newspaper was so great that it was felt generally that all journalism was at least slightly tainted, and so I list it as a sin. So far as the financial rewards go, it is even now nothing less than a crime.

There was no question about the sinfulness of dancing, especially the round dances, as we used to call the waltz and two-step. In some parts of the country exception was made for the square dances, but everywhere in my section of Missouri the waltz and two-step were considered Steps toward Hell. I frequently heard Preachers and Brothers and Sisters pronounce solemn judgment against young girls who indulged in such heinous practices, and brand them before God and man as abandoned scarlet women glorying in the unsanctified embraces of wicked men. That was the way the Preachers usually talked, too. One man in our town was even criticized for waltzing with his wife.

Not only was the wicked waltz and the devilish two-step, no matter how decorously performed, a Sunday taboo in our town, but in our most religious families it was taboo at all times, and several persons were dismissed from church for participating in such orgies. We had one Preacher who informed us that both Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God because their inhabitants danced and for no other reason, and the prediction was freely made that Farmington was destined for the same dreadful end, and he intimated that we would not even reap the resultant benefits of great fame and publicity. His tirades were strikingly similar to the ones that are being made every day now by the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals against New York City and other centers of sin.

As I have said, for many years the Presbyterians, city slickers at heart, had a virtual monopoly of dancing in Farmington. It was they who introduced the waltz and the two-step, to the great horror of all of our old women, both male and female, and it is they who must be held responsible when God sends His avenging angels to blast and destroy. Occasionally a Baptist or a Methodist backslid sufficiently to trip the light fantastic toe, as I delighted to call it as a juvenile reporter on the _Times_, but not often; generally the Presbyterians alone thus flaunted their wickedness. But when God failed to perform as expected, others became bold and abandoned all caution, and when I left Farmington, dancing was general and the town was obviously headed straight for Hell. But even then there was very little dancing done on Sunday night.

We had two newspapers in Farmington, the _Times_ and the _News_, the former owned by Mr. Theodore Fisher and the latter by the Denman brothers, extraordinarily devout members of the Northern Methodist church and leaders in most of the town’s religious activities. Mr. Fisher was a Presbyterian, a liberal at heart, but for business reasons he was unable to do or say anything to stem the tide of prying Puritanism. Both papers were controlled by the churches of the town, and published everything that the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters asked them to; as I grew older, Mr. Fisher became more confidential and frequently expressed his disgust at many things that went on in Farmington, but he was powerless. If he had said a word in favor of a more liberal attitude his paper would have had an even more difficult time getting along, and Heaven knows it was hard enough as it was; Mr. Fisher frequently had to spend all of Saturday morning collecting advertising accounts so he could pay wages in the afternoon. But the _News_ was always very prosperous.

When I went into the newspaper business, or game, as it is called in the motion pictures and the schools of Journalism, I went in with the enthusiastic thoroughness with which I had abandoned myself to a life of sin. Mr. Fisher hired me at $2 a week, during the summer vacation, to be the office devil, and for that princely wage I built the fires each morning, swept the office, carried copy, set type, distributed pi, kicked the job press, cranked the gasoline engine on Thursdays, fed the big roller press, folded the papers, wrote names on them and carried them to the Post Office in sacks. And I had many other duties besides.

These multitudinous activities sufficed me for a few weeks, because in doing them, and in so being engaged in journalistic practice, I had the same feeling that so encouraged me when I danced or drank or smoked cigarettes; I was confident that I was doing something of which the righteous did not wholly approve. But later I became ambitious. I wanted to be an editor. Only God knows why, but I did. So I became an editor; indeed, I became many editors. Using the small job press and Mr. Fisher’s stock of vari-colored inks, I printed cards informing the world that I was sporting editor, society editor, fire editor, crime editor, baseball editor, football editor, financial editor, religious editor, and barber-shop editor, this last because I purposed to interview the customers in Doss’s barber shop.

Thus equipped, I felt able to handle any journalistic problem that might confront me, and I spent my spare time interviewing people and gathering items which, because of the extreme godliness of our citizens, usually consisted of nothing more exciting than announcements that so-and-so was on the sick list, or had been on the sick list and was now improving. When I asked a banker if he knew any news I gravely presented him with my financial-editor card; and when it became my proud duty to interview my youthful idol and our most famous citizen, Mr. Barney Pelty, the major-league baseball pitcher, he learned by ocular proof that I was both sporting editor and baseball editor, and as such fully competent to transmit to type and to posterity his deathless utterances. As I recall them, these were generally that he would be in town to visit his relatives or because some member of his family was on the sick list, and would then return to St. Louis to take up again the onerous duties of his profession. Once he predicted that the Browns would win the pennant, and I wrote this exclusive information with all the large and handsome words at my command, but he was mistaken.

As time went on I became almost everything that it was possible to be on the _Times_; I was printer, pressman, reporter, mechanic, editor of this and that, and what not. But I was never permitted to write editorials or chronicle the doings of our best people. The _Times_ was passionately addicted to the Democrats, and each week our editorial page trumpeted the widely known and indisputable fact that the Republicans were a lot of skunks. These blasts were written, and well written, by Mr. Fisher himself, and my own share in the good work was merely to put them into type, and occasionally correct Mr. Fisher’s phraseology when I did not think that he had expressed himself clearly. And since these corrections were made at the case after the proof had been corrected, they nearly always got printed, sometimes with dire results. Once Mr. Fisher wrote, in jovial vein, about the gaudy house in which a certain political candidate resided, and I corrected it to read “bawdy house,” holding that the latter was more definitely descriptive.

Another member of Mr. Fisher’s family, who had previously spoken to me pleasantly when she met me on the street but who regarded me as nothing but hired help after I had accepted employment, wrote about the social activities of our first families on Columbia Street and the second and third families in Doss’s Addition. I was occasionally permitted to describe the pitiful doings of the Catholics, the Lutherans and other curious humans down near the ice plant, and the weekly dances given by the abandoned young people at our chief source of civic pride, the insane asylum. But the functions of Society were obviously beyond the descriptive powers of a mere printer’s devil. It was bad enough that such a person had to set the type. Nevertheless I attended these functions, and gained great comfort by inserting my name in the list of those present, and by adding the important and vital information that dainty and delicious refreshments had been served and a good time had by all. If it was a birthday party the host was wished many happy returns of the day. It was my belief at that time that it was against the law to publish an account of a social event without so stating. It was not always true; frequently the refreshments were not delicious and no one had a good time, but in those days I did not have that high regard for the truth that I have since acquired through labors on the great metropolitan journals; indeed, a night seldom passes now that I do not ask myself: “Have I written the truth to-day?” The answer, has, so far, eluded me. But Mr. Fisher, and to an even greater extent the Brothers Denman, sole owners of the _News_, frankly tried to please the advertisers and the subscribers; there was not then that fine spirit of independence which is such an essential part of modern journalism.

I advanced rapidly on the _Times_, and eventually was receiving $7 a week and had appointed myself to so many editorships that my cards filled two pockets. I was satisfied, and probably would have remained so for some years, but the end of my allotted time in Farmington was drawing near. I went to Northeast Missouri to visit relatives, and Mr. Fisher discharged me for over-staying my leave. This was a terrific blow; it seemed to me that my journalistic career had been cut off in the flower of its youth. I went to work in a lumber yard, and kept the job until the first carload of cement came in. But after I had pulled and tugged at the ninety-eight-pound sacks for ten hours I concluded that the lumber business held out no glowing promise for a young man who wished to retain his health and have leisure for a reasonable amount of traffic with Satan.

So I resigned and went to Quincy, Ill., where after considerable negotiations I obtained a job as reporter on the Quincy _Journal_ and embarked on a career in daily journalism. So far this has kept me in the cities, where the opportunities for sin are vastly more numerous than in the small towns, but where there is less sin in proportion to the number of inhabitants. This is true despite the horde of wailing prophets and professional devil-chasers and snoopers whose principal occupation is violent and false denunciation of every city large enough to have an electric-light plant. And in a city one can, by diligent search, find a few people who will admit that a man’s religion, or his lack of religion, is his own affair.

CONCLUSIONS OF A MAN GONE TO THE DEVIL

If there is anything in religious inheritance, or in the influence of a religious environment, I should be, if not an actual Pastor of a flock, at least one of the most devout of the faithful, a snooping Brother concerned only with good works. But instead of carrying on the work of my forefathers I find myself full of contempt for the Church, and disgust for the forms of religion. To me such things are silly; I cannot understand how grown people can believe in them, or how they can repress their giggles as they listen to the ministerial platitudes and perform such mummeries as are the rule in all churches.

Never since the night of my “conversion” have I gone into a church to worship. I have frequently entered such dens of righteousness, but my visits, except for a few that I made soon after Brother McConnell’s revival meeting to please my father and mother, have been on newspaper assignment or out of curiosity. I have inquired into the doctrine of almost every sect that has adherents in America, but in none of them have I been able to find any sign of a true and beneficent God. I can see only groups of sanctimonious, self-seeking Little Jack Horners chasing about poking their fingers into someone else’s pie, and then shouting gleefully: “Look at me, God! Look what I found! Ooooh! Ain’t it nice and smutty?” They cannot practice their religion without prancing and cavorting before the public eye; they are constantly showing off. They are not so much concerned with the glory of God as with the glory of the front page. And what time they are not whirling giddily in such imbecilities, they are engaged in disgusting squabbles among themselves as to who shall have the local agency for purveying religion; they want to copyright salvation in the name of their particular sect.

On all sides we hear that religion is the greatest thing in the world and that mankind’s chief need is more of it. But it is my conviction that mankind would be infinitely better off with less of it, and probably best off with none of it. Nothing has ever caused more trouble. The whole history of religion is a record of war, murder, torture, rape, massacre, distrust, hypocrisy, anguish, persecution and continual and unseemly bickering; it is a rare church that has not been the scene of disorderly brawls. It has divided towns and nations into bitter factions; it has turned brother against sister and father against son; it has blighted romances; it is a prime cause of insanity; there is hardly anything harmful to the human race that it has not done as it pursued its meddlesome, intolerant way down the ages. Its followers proclaim loudly that their particular belief is synonymous with love, and bawl threats and epithets against anyone who denies it; but in truth religion comes more nearly to being synonymous with hatred and revenge, with each sect praying to God to grant it special privileges and to damn the others.

I have never at any time regretted my complete withdrawal from all forms of religion and churchly ceremony. During many years of my childhood, while mental and physical habits were forming, these things kept me in constant terror; I was horrified by the thought of the awful things that God was preparing to do to me; I was fearful and miserable lest I give birth to an idea that was not perfectly righteous and in keeping with His commands as laid down by His agents. The Bible, which I necessarily interpreted in the light of what I had been taught, caused me more nightmares than any other book I have ever read, and I was vastly more alarmed by the tales of the fires of Hell related to me by the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters than I was in later life by the thunder of German artillery or the crackle of machine-gun bullets.

Since I left Farmington I have been near death many times, both as a soldier in France and from the natural illnesses incident to civil life. At least three times I have been told that I had but a few hours to live. Yet even then I did not feel the need of religion, nor for a preacher or a priest to pray over me to a God that neither of us knew, and perform ceremonies founded on pagan rites. How can an intelligent God pay any attention to a last-minute deathbed repentance that it is so obviously the result of fear and nothing else? The religionist expects God to wash all his sins off the slate merely because, when he is about to die, he says he is sorry. If there be a God, cannot He look into such a shrunken little soul and see that there is nothing in it but a fear of death and a horror of the unknown?

I am not an atheist, because for all I know to the contrary there may be a God, or any number of Gods, but to me the God worshiped by my forefathers and by the religionists of to-day is a cruel, preposterous creation conceived by a people who felt the need of chastisement. He is a celestial traffic cop, hounded by whimpering weaklings who beseech Him to tell them they are on the right road, and yet keep trying to show Him which way the traffic should go. In the Christian and Jewish conceptions of the Heavenly Father I can see nothing that is fit for a civilized man to worship; indeed, the nearer a man approaches civilization and intelligence, the less need there is for him to worship anything. Conversely it is the stupid, illiterate man, knowing neither how to read nor how to think, who is most often the religious fanatic. He understands nothing and is afraid of everything; he goes through life as a small boy goes past a graveyard at night, whistling to keep up his courage. He requires religion and its twin, superstition, to give him strength to contemplate the wonders of the sunset and the falling rain.

For my part, I simply refuse to worry about God. If there is a God, I hope that I may in time find favor in His sight and obtain my share of the spiritual loot; there is nothing that I can do about it. And if there is no God, there is nothing I can do about that, either. I profess neither knowledge nor theory about the Supreme Being and the heavenly wonders; knowing nothing, I believe nothing, and believing nothing, I am prepared to believe anything, asking only reasonably correct information and authentic signs. These I fail to find in selfish prayers, constant squabbling over the wishes of the Lord and the building of magnificent temples within sight and hearing of the ramshackle tenements of the poor. I do not believe that I shall ever find them, for

“Wherefore and whence we are ye cannot know,
Nor where life springs, nor whither life doth go.”

Without religion I thoroughly enjoy the business of living. I am oppressed by no dreadful taboos, and I am without fear; I set myself no standards save those of ordinary self-respect, decent consideration of the rights and privileges of others, and the observance of the laws of the land except Prohibition. To my own satisfaction, at least, I have proved that religion and the Church are not at all necessary to a full and happy life. And if I am thus a sinner and my chance of ultimate salvation forfeit, then the fault lies at the door of those fanatics whose method of teaching religion to a child was, and is, to hammer it into his head by constant threats of terrible punishment, by drawing torturing word pictures of Hell, by describing God as a vicious, vindictive old man, by scolding and tormenting and laying down taboos until the poor child’s brain whirls in an agony of fright and misery. I know of no better way to salute them than to refer them to certain words of their own Savior, to be found in the thirty-fourth verse of the twenty-third chapter of the Book of St. Luke.

* * * * *

If I ever have a son, which now seems unlikely, his boyhood will be quite different from my own. For him Sunday shall be a day of rest and pleasure; there shall be no taboos, and no attendance upon church and Sunday school unless their performances are more interesting than other available entertainment. They now rank just below the moving pictures, and are therefore last. I shall bring my son in contact with the sacred books of the Christians, the Jews, the Buddhists and of all the other religions as rapidly as he is able to comprehend them, and he shall be permitted to choose his own religion if he decides that a religion is necessary to his happiness and peace of mind. But if he shows any signs of becoming a preacher, priest or rabbi, or even a Brother, I shall whale hell out of him. I am that intolerant.

THE END

A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET

_This book is composed on the Linotype in Bodoni, so-called after its designer, Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) a celebrated Italian scholar and printer. Bodoni planned his type especially for use on the more smoothly finished papers that came into vogue late in the eighteenth century and drew his letters with a mechanical regularity that is readily apparent on comparison with the less formal old style. Other characteristics that will be noted are the square serifs without fillet and the marked contrast between the light and heavy strokes._

SET UP, ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC.,
BINGHAMTON, N. Y. · ESPARTO
PAPER MANUFACTURED IN SCOTLAND,
AND FURNISHED BY W.
F. ETHERINGTON & CO., NEW
YORK · BOUND BY H.
WOLFF ESTATE,
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

On page 39, based upon context, “We could have no indoor games” in the
original should be “We could have no outdoor games”; this eBook
reflects this change.