Billy Sunday as a Source for Carl Sandburg's "The Four Brothers"

 

Billy Sunday as a Source for Passages in Carl Sandburg's "The Four Brothers"

           

 

                                                                                                                    

 

 

Billy Sunday as a Source for Passages in Carl Sandburg's "The Four Brothers"

            Carl Sandburg's "The Four Brothers," a poem supporting US entry into World War 1, has been faulted for its vulgarity and viewed as an attempt to stoke jingoistic sentiment in favor of war. Philip Yannella, in his book The Other Carl Sandburg, writes that the poem, with its calls for cutting Kaiser Willhelm II's throat and hacking his head, sounds like something written by "a rhetorically gifted Liberty Bond salesman" (109) and is a "sonorous orchestration of the Wilson administration's line on the Great War" (110). Furthermore, "killing, the object of the war, was as enthusiastically endorsed in the poem as it was in the best of the stories [government] bureaucracy was able to place in American newspapers."  Sister Mary Grace Ruszkowski, in her 1962 doctoral dissertation entitled Analytical Study of Carl Sandburg as Poet and Biographer, faults the poet for stooping to "crude name calling and vulgar images that are demonstrative of the depths of vulgarisms to which he is still able to descend" (28). What is generally unknown is that Sandburg appears to have drawn the inspiration for a long passage in this poem from the sermons of Billy Sunday, a former baseball player who later became the most famous evangelist of his era. Sunday was also a strong proponent of US entry into World War I. During the war, he had military recruiters stationed outside the venues in which he held his revival meetings and even led "Hang the Kaiser" rallies. Because Sandburg had a pronounced antipathy for Sunday, the use of the evangelist’s material suggests that the poet may have been signaling his disapproval of the official reason for the war—containing Germany as personified by Kaiser Wilhelm II—even though he supported the war itself because of its potential to lead to the adoption of economic policies that would benefit the working class.

            Sandburg had often written in scathing terms about Sunday. The depth of Sandburg’s disdain for him is evident in his eponymous 1915 poem in which the poet interspersed criticisms of the evangelist's theology with unflattering descriptions of his delivery:

                        You come along squirting words at us, shaking
                        your fist and calling us damn fools so fierce the
                        froth of your own spit slobbers over your lips—
                        always blabbing we're all going to hell straight
                        off and you know all about it (lines 11-15).

A few stanzas later, he ridicules the evangelist's sense of theater:

                        Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to.
                        Smash a whole wagon load of furniture at every
                        performance. Turn sixty somersaults and stand
                        on your nutty head. If it wasn't for the way
                        you scare women and kids, I'd feel sorry for
                        you and pass the hat (43-48).

In lines 58-60, he ranks Sunday below "pups born from mongrel bitches."  The poem was considered so inflammatory that when it was published in Chicago and Other Poems, the publisher insisted on changing the title to "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter"  (Yannella 50-51)

            Sandburg's criticism of Sunday was not confined to his poems but appeared in an article for the International Socialist Review as well. In a 1916 "Doings of the Month" column, written under the pseudonym Jack Phillips, Sandburg criticizes the evangelist's use of scare tactics:

                        He went after the assemblage of skirts hammer and tongs and said there wasn't                              enough of Jesus in the lives of men and women and for that reason men with                                 rotten diseases were infecting women with rotten diseases, and if they would all                            get more of Christ in their lives, everything wouldn't be so rotten as it is (9).

            After reporting that 35 women had fainted and been carried to an emergency aid station on the premises, Sandburg offers his own opinion:

                        Some day this foul-mouthed, ruthless savage whose regular game is to knock                                women silly with rotten talk will get what's coming to him.

                        We don't know what it will be. But the frothy-mouthed, violent blatherskite of this                        type always gets binged. According to physiology and psychopathy, Billy Sunday                         is scheduled to collapse in convulsions on the platform, foaming with human                                     hydrophobia (9).

Sandburg's withering and deeply personal attacks on Sunday may have their roots in a political disagreement as many socialists believed that wealthy industrialists encouraged Sunday's evangelization of workers as a foil to union organizing (Yannella 56-57).

            Because of Sandburg's disdain for the evangelist, it is not surprising that he apparently drew on Sunday's material to express his disapproval of a particular reason for war while writing a lengthy passage in "The Four Brothers":

                        Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars,

                                    Good-night to the kaiser.

                        The breakdown and the fade-away begins.

                        The shadow of the great broom, ready to sweep out the trash, is here.

 

                        One finger is raised that counts the czar,

                        The ghost who beckoned men who come no more—

                        the czar gone to the winds on God's great dustpan,

                        The czar is a pinch of nothing,

                        The last of the gibbering Romanoffs.

 

                        Out and good-night—

                        The ghosts of the summer palaces

                        And the ghosts of the winter palaces!

                        Out and out, good-night to the kings, the czars, and the kaisers.

 

                        And another finger will speak,

                        And the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million sleeping-waking ghosts,

                        The kaiser will go onto God's great dustpan—

                        The last of the gibbering Hohenzollerns.

                        Look! God pities this trash, God waits with a broom and a dustpan,

                        God knows a finger will speak and count them out (lines 68-84).

The broom and dustpan image, the reference to a story in the book of Daniel, and the counting out of European rulers can all be plausibly linked to Sunday.

            Sandburg's odd linkage of God and dustpans echoes the language Sunday used in many of his sermons. In Billy Sunday: The Man and his Message, a compilation of sermons edited by William Ellis, Sunday describes the burial of a wealthy man:

                        They put back the loamy soil, then they roll back the sod and with a whisk broom                         and dust pan, they sweep up the dirt, and you would never know that there sleeps                          the Pullman-palace-car magnate, waiting for the trumpet of Gabriel to sound, for                                 the powers of God will snap his steel, cemented sarcophagus as though it were                                     made of a shell and he will stand before God as any other man" (401).

            In another sermon appearing in the June 10, 1916, edition of  the newspaper The Eugene Register Guard (7) Sunday says, "A man may believe he can handle nitroglycerin without danger, but if he monkeys around with it, you'll have to take him up with broom and dustpan." In one story dating from early in his evangelistic career, the preacher angers a man, who then reaches for a gun. Sunday jumps between the man and the gun, saying, "Don't you move to touch that. If you do, they will take you up with a dustpan and whisk broom" (Martin 90). In these passages, Sunday uses brooms and dustpans to suggest death, which is similar to the way Sandburg uses these images in his poetry while the unusual juxtaposition of cleaning implements and the deity suggests that the poet's material was inspired by a "man of God."

Other parts of this passage may have been at least partially inspired by Sunday's interpretations of the story found in the fifth chapter of Daniel, in which the Babylonian king, Belshazzar, drinks from Temple vessels and God causes a disembodied finger to write a prediction of his doom on the palace wall. This story interested Billy Sunday enough for him to incorporate it into one of his sermons, an excerpt of which appears in Burning Truths from Billy's Bat:

            Belshazzar's feast was no common beer, pretzel and dill pickle blow-out, but the                           real goods. Nude and lewd women wormed and wriggled their way through the                             banquet hall. The bunch began to get soused and the revelry increased. Then came                        the obscene song, the drunken hiccough, the slavering lip, and the guffaw of                            idiotic laugh bursting from the lips of princes, flushed, reeling and bloodshot,                             while mingled with it all were the hurrahs for great Belshazzar.

           

            Then from the atmosphere flashed an armless hand which wrote upon the frieze in                        words that blazed like fire and glistened like gold. Terror froze Belshazzar to the                           very soul. His countenance changed, his thoughts troubled him so that the joints                                    of his loins were loose and his knees smote together. I tell you old "Bel" was                            about all in (46-7).

Later lines—"God knows a finger will speak and count them out. It is written in the stars; / It is spoken on the walls;" (79-80)—indicate that Sandburg is clearly referring to the biblical story.

            However, there is a second layer of meaning. The raised finger counting out the kaiser, king, and czar is an umpire's finger counting strikes and balls. Sandburg uses "out" exactly three times in the stanza found in lines 77-80 about bidding goodnight to “the kings, the czars, and the kaisers.” The implication is that the rulers’ turn at bat has come to an end and the workers now have a chance to change the game.

            The connection to Sunday is obvious. Not only was he a former baseball player, he often mimicked the physical actions of baseball players in his sermons. He would sometimes slide across the stage like a base runner and then, standing to his feet, pretend to be an umpire yelling "You're out, Kelly." This action was intended as a lesson on the costs and consequences of drinking alcohol, which had cost the base runner his salvation (Magill 3584).

            An additional reason for believing that Sandburg borrowed material from Billy Sunday is found in his poem "God's Children," which was published posthumously in 1993.  While the exact date of the poem is uncertain, references to the Czar suggest that it was written before the US entered the war. This poem contains the lines "I hear Billy Sunday and the Kaiser and the Czar talking about God like God was some pal of theirs . . . ./ I can't help it. I feel like God was some cheap dirty thing born from a fiddler's bitch and kicked from one back door to another" (Knoepfle). This poem ties together nearly all of the themes of the "dustpan" section of "The Four Brothers": God, the Kaiser, the Czar, and dirt. Since the two poems share four themes, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Sunday is an implicit influence on the war poem.

If Sandburg drew upon Billy Sunday's material while writing "The Four Brothers," as the evidence suggests, his choice raises questions about both the poet's intentions and the meaning of the poem. Given Sandburg's disdain for Sunday, it seems unlikely that he would use material drawn from the evangelist's sermons to support positions with which he was in full agreement. Furthermore, his choice of images undermines a pro-war argument: depicting God as using a broom and dustpan diminishes the religious sentiment that leaders often try to encourage, while the use of these stereotypically feminine implements makes war seem dirty, tedious, and unmanly.

               While Sandburg’s resignation from the Socialist Party USA and his work for the pro-war American Alliance for Labor and Democracy support the idea that Sandburg strongly favored the war, the passages in “The Four Brothers” strengthen the argument that he did not regard containing Germany as a sufficient reason for inflicting death and hardship on young members of the working class, which would bear most of the burden of the war. His disapproval of that particular reason for war would explain why the passages about the German ruler are both aesthetically awkward and often shocking in their level of violence: he is subtly criticizing the "official" reason for the war. In contrast, those parts of the poem advocating socialist revolution tend to have gentler imagery of nature, nursing mothers, and telegraph lines clicking with the news of a better world to come.  

               Readers lulled into patriotic complacency by images of a hacked, hanged Kaiser Wilhelm II swept into God's dustpan might very well have failed to notice both Sandburg's implicit criticism of the US government's wartime goals and the radicalism of a poem that equates kings and czars with Kaisers. They might also have failed to notice that a poem that calls for sweeping away a thousand-year-old system is one that expresses a larger vision than the defeat of one country or the removal of a single enemy leader. Socialists, however, would have understood the message. Furthermore, Sandburg managed to express these radical opinions without getting arrested for his views, like his fellow socialists Kate Williams O'Hara and Eugene Debbs, or lynched like Frank Little, an opponent of the war and an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. When understood in this context, "The Four Brothers," while certainly a failure as a poem, is a strong example of the way in which poetry can be used by people on the margins of society to express forbidden opinions. 

 

 

Works Cited

"For Fair Play and Smiles; Billy Sunday Says Christ Came to Bring Happiness."Eugene   Register-Guard 10 June 1916, sec. A: 7. Print.

Knoepfle, John. "New Poems and Stories from Sandburg." Illinois Issues 29 (1994). Illinois         Issues. University of Illinois. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.    

Martin, Robert F. Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American         Society, 1862-1935. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 184. Print

McGill, Frank N. The 20th Century O-Z: Dictionary of World Biography. London: Routledge,

            2013. Print.

McLoughlin, William G. Billy Sunday Was His Real Name. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

            Print.

Pallen, Joseph. Burning Truths from Billy's Bat. Philadelphia: Diamond, 1914. 103. Print.

Phillips, Jack. "Doings of the Month." International Socialist Review 1 July 1916: 5-10. Print.

Ruszkowski, Mary Grace. "Analytical Study of Carl Sandburg as Poet and Biographer." Diss.      University of Ottawa, 1962. Print.

Sandburg, Carl. "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter." Chicago and Other Poems. New York:         Holt, 1916. 25. Print.

Sandburg, Carl. "The Four Brothers." Cornhuskers. New York: Holt, 1918. 141. Print.

Scheiber, Harry N. The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties:1917-1921. Kindle ed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1960. Print.

 

 

Sunday, William Ashley, (Billy). Billy Sunday, the Man and His Message: With His Own Words Which Have Won Thousands for Christ. Ed. William Thomas Ellis. Philadelphia: John C.          Winston/Google Ebook, 1914. 451.

--Burning Truths from Billy's Bat. Philadelphia: Diamond, 1914. Print.

Yannella, Philip R. The Other Carl Sandburg. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 1996. 186. Print.