13.3.05

 
Well here's how it is:
I was going back through my image files because of guilt. Not posting anything, and I knew I had something in there, so I was reviewing, and I found this image of Billy Sunday. So I needed an attribution for it, but a google search for the image number didn't run up anything. Before going back to the date-folder and looking for other images to vector on I ran a google on his name. That led to Wadsworth ( Your Publishing Partner for the Humanities and Social Sciences) - more specifically their US History Image Bank of Progressivism: 1889 - 1920.
Scanning down the page brought me to Helen Keller. That recalled an image I thought I'd seen at LoC.
So that was that, and off we go into the stacks, perusing. Two hours later, or is it? Four? Tomorrow?
We have:


Helen Keller and Annie Sullivanto(detail)


Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan, and Alexander Graham Bell

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The Bell clan gathered, Helen Keller seated, front row, second from left
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Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, right, and an unidentified man
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A formal portrait
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Helen Keller listening to a piano with her hands and with her body

Library of Congress - Prints and Photographs search
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Helen Keller was not just a metaphor of human isolation. Alexander Graham Bell did a lot more than invent the telephone.
Helen Keller was an outspoken champion of human dignity, and a foe of injustice.
More on this tomorrow, time permitting.
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Billy Sunday, unfortunately for America, was neither a champion of human dignity nor a foe of injustice.
He was the first major league ballplayer to round the bases in under 14 minutes, and he was the most famous Evangelist preacher of the Twentieth Century, before Billy Graham began his crusades.
He was pretty much responsible for the Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution in schools and led to the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial".
He was a racist supporter of the Ku Klux Klan.
He was folksy:
"If you took no more care of yourself physically than spiritually, you'd be just as dried up physically as you are spiritually.

Look into the preaching Jesus did and you will find it was aimed straight at the big sinners on the front seats.

Churches don't need new members half so much as they need the old bunch made over.

There wouldn't be so many non-church goers if there were not so many non-going churches.

There are some so-called Christian homes today with books on the shelves of the library that have no more business there than a rattler crawling about on the floor, or a poison within the child's reach.
[...]
To train a boy in the way he should go you must go that way yourself.

Don't stop with telling your boy to do right. Show him how.

Be careful, father, or while you are taking one lap around the devil's track your boy will make six."
His son committed suicide in 1933, two years before he himself died.
He left a high-paying professional baseball gig to become an underpaid preacher; a move that was eventually rewarded.
He was obsessively anti-alcohol. One of his most famous sermons, known as the "Booze Sermon", contains these adamant statements:
"The saloon is the sum of all villanies. It is worse than war or pestilence. It is the crime of crimes. It is the parent of crimes and the mother of sins. It is the appalling source of misery and crime in the land. And to license such an incarnate fiend of hell is the dirtiest, low-down, damnable business on top of this old earth. There is nothing to be compared to it.
The legislature of Illinois appropriated $6,000,000 in 1908 to take care of the insane people in the state, and the whisky business produces seventy-five per cent of the insane. That is what you go down in your pockets for to help support. Do away with the saloons and you will close these institutions."
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Christianity being ostensibly the living practice of the teachings of Jesus Christ, the lack of compassion in Sunday's message and in his heirs', and the complete absence of recognition of the miracle at Cana, when Jesus is said to have turned water into wine - presumably so it could be consumed as part of the celebration of a wedding, as a favor to the hosts who were saddened that they'd run out while the party was still going on - is more than telling.
This is Christianity as a franchise, a successful business, with its trademarks and copyrights taken right out of the public domain, because they're free - no one owns them.



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