Word: brann
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...