I’m reading W. Scott Poole’s Satan in America: The Devil We Know and have just finished his discussion of Billy Sunday, the celebrity evangelist of the early 20th century. Poole sends us to George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, in which he shares a warning attributed to Sunday in 1925:
Our country is filled with a Socialistic, I.W.W., Communistic, radical, lawless, anti-American, anti-church, anti-God, anti-marriage gang, and they are laying the eggs of rebellions and unrest in labor and capital and home, and we have some of them in our universities. … If this radical element could have their way, my friends, the laws of nature would be repealed … cats would bark and dogs would mew.
And now, via YouTube, we see that the very apocalyptic chaos Sunday warned us of has been brought on by the “Socialistic, I.W.W., Communistic, radical, lawless, anti-American, anti-church, anti-God, anti-marriage gang.”
So, OK, a barking cat is amusing.
But it’s not as funny as the full quote from Billy Sunday:
Our country is filled with a Socialistic, I.W.W., Communistic, radical, lawless, anti-American, anti-church, anti-God, anti-marriage gang, and they are laying the eggs of rebellions and unrest in labor and capital and home, and we have some of them in our universities. … If this radical element could have their way, my friends, the laws of nature would be repealed, or they would reverse them; oil and water would mix; the turkey dove would marry the turkey buzzard; the sun would rise in the West and set in the East; chickens would crow and the roosters would squeal; cats would bark and dogs would mew; the least would be the greatest; a part would be greater than the whole; yesterday would be after tomorrow if that crowd were in control.
Poole notes that neither Sunday nor his audience seems to have realized that Sunday’s description of the chaos to be wrought by the “radical element” includes words originally spoken by Jesus Christ as his description of the kingdom of God.
“The least would be the greatest.” That’s just the sort of thing that some long haired hippy from the “Socialistic, I.W.W., Communistic, radical, lawless, anti-American, anti-church, anti-God, anti-marriage gang” would say.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In