"Deadliest Foe"

Last week, two men prepared to debate. One was Alfred Emanuel Smith. The other was John Roach Straton, Manhattan pulpiteer, parson of Calvary Baptist Church. Why had the debate been arranged?

The answer is, not vice, but the word vice, and especially the meaning of the word vice in the historically great tradition of U. S. Puritanism. Actually the word is simply a general term signifying the opposite of virtue. If habitual kindness is a virtue, then habitual unkindness is a vice. For all specific forms of vice, there are specific words: thus, profligacy, drunkenness, sadism, cannibalism, gluttony, venery, adultery, laziness, mendacity, cupidity.

But, when a U. S. preacher says "vice," all of his listeners take him to mean sexual vice, or even more specifically fornication. There is little that a U. S. President or a State Governor or legislator can do about fornication except to avoid this sin himself. Indeed the only thing he can do is to make difficult the practice of the ancient profession of prostitution, which is a commercialized and variously well or badly organized form of fornication--usually regarded as the lowest form.

A fortnight ago, Dr. Straton, in his evening sermon used the word vice. His point: "However clean, personally, the Democratic candidate may be, and however innocent he may have been of any deliberate intention to give aid and comfort to the forces of vice, lawlessness, and drunkenness, nevertheless, because he is the type of politician he happens to be and because his sympathies and the judgments of his heart are with the liquor crowd and the hangers-on of the liquor crowd, the forces of prostitution and gambling have, for the sake of truth, to be included with them, therefore it must be said that as a public man he is the deadliest foe in America today of the forces of moral progress and true political wisdom."

Gov. Smith cared nothing for Dr. Straton's opinion of his "true political wisdom." Gov. Smith was to debate prohibition throughout the campaign, had no desire to take time out on this subject with just one parson, however dry. But Gov. Smith has waited for a chance to get at and dispose of this matter of VICE. Whisperings throughout the country, and especially in the South, were trying and would try to connect him with VICE. The more the ordinary man got to life him, the more the ordinary woman might be alarmed. In some vague way, he was to be the symbol of sexual infidelity, of degrading pleasures which the virtuous woman feared more than beer. He was to be thoroughly confused with New York, and somehow all the vice (sex) of Broadway and the Bowery was to be imputed to him.

Now Dr. Straton has, especially in the South, great prestige. He is the big-city representative of small-town theology and morality. He would, of course, attack Gov. Smith. But he could not say that Gov. Smith is immoral. Detectives have for a decade, hounded Gov. Smith's present and past. Apparently Gov. Smith has never visited a brothel. Apparently Gov. Smith has never spent so much as an hour in compromising circumstances with any woman. Therefore, Dr. Straton's attack must be "However clean . . . nevertheless. . . ."

So the Brown Derby wrote:

"Dear Dr. Straton:

"The New York Times . . . quotes you as saying from the pulpit of your church that, as a public man, I am the deadliest foe in America today of the forces of moral progress and true political wisdom.

"I do not know why you should make a statement of that kind, but I do know that I will never permit it to go unchallenged. . . . I do not feel that I should charge you with making this statement for any political purpose, as it was made in a church devoted to the teachings of Christ, one of which was, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'

"I therefore ask you, in a spirit of American fair play, to invite me to your church at any time that suits your convenience during the week inclusive of and beginning Sept. 2 and I ask you to make the same statement in my presence with such proof of its truth as you may be able to advance. I further ask that you permit me to make full reply. In order that you may not be embarrassed, I will permit you, if you choose, to conduct the meeting by question and answer. . . .

"Very truly yours, "Alfred E. Smith"

After reading the letter in the newspapers, Dr. Straton promptly agreed to the debate, and made almost hourly suggestions, such as a return debate in St. Patrick's Cathedral, a continuation of the debate in a dozen southern cities, and that the largest Manhattan auditorium be selected in preference to Calvary Church. The Governor would have none of these. He desired merely to defend his reputation as a (sexually) right-thinking man before the congregation before which he believed he had been slandered by innuendo.

At Greenwood Lake, N. Y., where he was resting, Dr. Straton received Gov. Smith's letter. He motored to a nearby town in vain search of a stenographer. Returned, he promised reporters his reply at 6 o'clock, went swimming in a red bathing suit, supped, finished his lengthy reply, full of biblical quotations. Excerpts:

"Dear Governor Smith:

"... I definitely accept your challenge, and will certainly meet you, God willing, face to face. . . . The place where this is done is quite immaterial, as it is vindication before the whole nation that you need and not the opportunity to establish an alibi merely before the Calvary congregation.

"Let the meeting be held, therefore, in Madison Square Garden, or other suitable, very large hall, with a division of the sittings--say, to the number of 3,000 for our Calvary members and friends, and the same number for, say, the St. Patrick's Cathedral congregation and your friends--the other 20,000 sittings to be equally divided between Democratic and Republican headquarters for distribution. . . .

"Before closing, there are two or three other matters in your letter of which I ask the privilege of a few words of comment. . . .

"1) It is very generous of you, my dear Governor, to thus offer to 'permit' me to take that line in the meeting, but I assure you that I have not heretofore been 'embarrassed' on meeting you, and do not think that I will suffer thus when we meet face to face with this discussion, though I well know your great prowess in debate, and am also aware of my own limitations and defects. ... I venture to remind you that you are not yet President.

"2) . . . As to this, my dear Governor, I express to you the sincere hope that during our debate you will quote your own 'record,' etc., more accurately than you quote Scripture. The quotation you give, 'thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor' was not a part of 'the teachings of Christ,'* as you say, but one of the Ten Commandments revealed to us through Moses. It is in the Old Testament--recorded in Exodus, twentieth chapter, sixteenth verse. Jesus's teaching was yet higher. He taught that love is the fulfillment of the law, and therefore the true basis of fellowship. The New Testament throughout teaches that we are 'to seek the truth in love' (Eph. 4:15), and that is precisely what I did last Sunday night in speaking of yourself and your most unhappy record.

"You must remember, my dear Governor, that the fire of that 'record' under the red-hot grid you are dancing on is of your own kindling, and your quarrel is really with your own 'record' and not with those of us who, for the sake of the Republic we love, have dared to warn the people about it as an indication of the type of President we may expect if you should by any unhappy chance be sent to the White House.

"Since you have lectured me and quoted Holy Writ for the good of my soul, I reciprocate in the spirit of a sincere desire to help you by suggesting that you restudy the entire Ten Commandments, as those Heaven-given precepts have been vastly useful in the past in creating and preserving good order in civil society. I have seen with a considerable degree of satisfaction your vigorous action against the gamblers and their camp followers, the prostitutes and bootleggers, up Saratoga way since some of us began prodding into your 'record'; though I regret that some of this holy zeal and energy has not been expended in our own beautiful city and before you became a candidate for President of the United States.

"In addition to these verses you quoted for my edification, you could find other timely verses as, for example, this:

" 'The powers that be (the Constitution of the United States) are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.' (Romans, 13:1 & 2).

"And also this: 'Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity! Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest the bottle to him, and maketh him drunken also.' (Habakkuk, 11:12 & 15). . . .

"May I assure you, in closing, that I have absolutely no personal feeling of unkindness toward you, and shall discuss your record and the methods and ideals of the political school in which you were brought up entirely apart from your personality as a man, a father and a follower of Christ.

"Awaiting, therefore, your further advices, and with the best wishes possible under the circumstances, I am,

"Very sincerely yours, "John Roach Straton."

This is by no means the first time that Dr. Straton has captured the limelight by attacking VICE. When a pastor in Norfolk, Va., in 1917, he said that Norfolk was full of bawdy houses and blamed local officials. He wrote a book ($1 per copy) entitled Scarlet Sins of Norfolk, was sued for libel, was hailed before a Grand Jury where he confessed that it was all based on what "somebody" had told him. The commotion began when Dr. Straton tried in vain to get a pardon for a Baptist friend who had been convicted of boot-leggery. It ended when his Baptist flock asked the preacher to quit them.

A curious comment on it all came from New York Supreme Court Justice William Harmon Black (a trustee of Dr. Straton's church) who said:

"Dr. Straton is the ablest orator, in my opinion, in the Baptist Church and knows more about the Bible in a minute than I will ever know.

"But I believe, without conceit, that I know more about political history than he will ever know. I do know that I would not be so profoundly interested in Gov. Smith's success if I had not known him intimately 25 years, and if I did not know that he is the cleanest, most loyal man in politics today."

But only Fundamentalists agreed with Judge Black as to even Dr. Straton's religious powers. Non-Fundamentalists regretted that the Governor had given him the publicity he loves, (see RELIGION, p. 32.)

* An error. Christ said "Keep the Commandments. . . . Thou shalt not bear false witness." (Matthew, 19:17 & 18)