The Press: The Iconoclast

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"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.