The Press: The Iconoclast

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.