Red-Tie Bill and the Wingless Bird: Tar Heel Baptists and the Evolution

The Daily Advance, which devoted an average of four full-page Red-Tie Bill and the Wingless Bird: columns a day to the spectacle, glowed with the glory of it all. "The Tar Heel Baptists and the evangelist's grip on the city," wrote Herbert Peele, is almost breathtaking .. The revival is the topic of conversation wherever one Evolution Controversy goes. ... The barber in h1~ chair, the salesman behind his counter, the executive at his desk,, the worker ~t ~1s bench, the laborer at his task are one and all thinking Tom Parramore and talking about religion. 0. SAUNDERS, the puckish editor of the Elizabeth City Inde• And what was the inspirational message that Pasquotank County W;pendent, ·was after the revivalists fang and claw before they could was flocking to the tabernacle twice a day, seven days a week, to hear? get their tabernacle up. He predicted that Elizabeth City was going to It was direct, simple, clear, dramatic: the world, Ham assured his have a "red-hot, rip-snorting, hell-raising, sin-busting carnival of evan• audiences, was about to come to an end. The whole temple of man's gelism" that would last for eight weeks or "as Jong as the town stands wordly achievement-all his cities, his industry, his art, his science, his for it." He declared that Evangelist Mordecai Ham's main business government-were at the brink of an utter and complete destruction there was to work on the emotions of the ignorant and then skip town from which there was no earthly or heavenly hope of being spared. with whatever loose change he could pick up. As church-goers shrank There remained a precious little time in which each of us might make in anxiety, the town wags settled down for a gorgeous display of oratori• our peace with God. But nothing could save the world. cal fireworks between press and pulpit. This fate, said Ham, was being hurried along by the work of the Not even Jess Willard against Jack Dempsey had offered the awe• living Devil, whose principal tool could be broadly described as the cult some battle of heavyweights that W. 0. Saunders and Mordecai Ham of modernism. Under this heading were included an arsenal of evil were to give Pasquotank County in the fall of 1924. Saunders was a influences, such as liberalism, Bolshevism, feminism, and so on. The brazenly outspoken journalist who felt truly at peace only in the midst specific forms taken by these influences included wicked books and of tumult. movies, woman's suffrage, jazz music, organized labor, short skirts, Only a few days before the revival, for instance, Saunders had re• sports and games, and dancing. Those most responsible for fostering ferred to President Coolidge as "that timid, awkward, cringing boob in satanic modernism included all those who participated in any of these the White House." It required a liberated imagination to guess what sins; they also included historian H. G. Wells, poets Robert Burns and awful things he might say about the revival and Mr. Ham. Lord Byron, the Jews, Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin, the president of By the middle of the first week of the revival, everything was in con• Sears, Roebuck and Company, and countless thousands of others, not a fusion. Saunders had come back from the first sermon he heard and few of whom were stationed right there in Pasquotank County. declared that Mordecai Ham was a splendid preacher. He said that Mr. W. 0. Saunders of the Independent had not followed Ham very far Ham had at his command "an outstanding array of citations and quota• through the serpentine caverns of cataclysmic international evil before tions that only a trained memory" could handle. Saunders especially he regretted profoundly his initial enthusiasm for the preacher. As admired what the evangelist had to say about young people who spent Ham waxed each night more impressively foreboding, Saunders grew their evenings in parked cars and girls who wore their skirts up to here increasingly more irritated. By early November, the two men were and their blouses down to there. It was a marvel of the age, but Saun• providing the verbal pyrotechnics many had expected from the begin• ders seemed to be the revival's first convert. Herbert Peele, a devout ning. Each man now seemed firmly dedicated to the destruction of the churchman who was editor of the rival Elizabeth City Daily Advance, other. felt by the end of the week that he could assure his own readers that the Among several burning issues between the revivalist and the editor, Lord's enemies were "in large measure converted, subdued, or at least none had more sweeping implications than Ham's unrelenting assault silenced." It was going to be the "greatest spiritual awakening," he on the doctrine of evolution as propagated by the disciples of Charles predicted, in the history of Elizabeth City. Darwin. Exchanges between the two men were all the more vitriolic The revival marched on triumphantly through its opening week and because neither one was especially well informed on the subject. gathered momentum in its second week. The tabernacle held 4,000 Saunders was aware only that people he respected were convinced people, and it was often filled to capacity. The Elizabeth City police evolutionists. Ham knew perfectly well that the Bible taught nothing of department found it necessary to stand guard against spectators who the kind. For Ham and other fundamentalists, the idea of the progres• tried to cling to the roof to hear Harn speak. By the third week, Eliza• sive development of life from lower to higher forms was directly contra• beth City had religion the way the Pasquotank River had bull frogs. dictory to the doctrine of the Fall of Man. The world, in their view, was \._..- falsely represented as advancing upward; it was, instead, plummeting "Let us have done with our questionings," he pied, "and follow where He irredeemably downward. leads. We shall be together if we follow Him. Yonder gleams His The heated claims and counterclaims between Ham and Saunders banner above the battle line. Have done with these debates in the rear. over evolution derived their peculiar virulence from almost four years Up and after Him through blood and tears, after Him to victory!" of public controversy that had preceded the epochal Elizabeth City con• As Poteat turned from the rostrum, there was a pregnant moment of frontation. North Carolinians who had never before heard the term profound and breathless silence before the audience burst into long and "evolution" had been startled to learn in the spring of 1920 that it was a frenzied applause. Richard T. Vann came forward to lead them in "All heresy and that its advocates included the president of Wake Forest H3;il the Power of Jesus' Name" and confronted a spectacle, as the College, William Louis Poteat. Dr. Poteat, former president of the Winston-Salem Journal described it, of "Tears ... streaming down Baptist State Convention, holder of a German doctorate in zoology, and their cheeks." The Journal said, "never before has a song been sung with one of the best-loved North Carolinians of his day, was shown to espouse more fervor, more joyousness .... It was a momerit of victory, of con the doctrine in the biology class he still taught at Wake Forest. quest, a reunion, a glorious benediction." Among those most deeply Poteat, known affectionately to the Wake Forest student body as moved was the group of anti-evolutionists who had stationed themselves "Red-Tie Bill," weathered easily the flurry of calls for his dismissal in menacingly on the front rows and who now pressed forward to grasp 1920, but the man seems to have acquired out of his experience a relish Poteat's hand and offer their pledges of loyalty. for controversy. When the subject of his views came up again in 1922, it The speaker's own earnest Christian convictions, his magnetic per• was Poteat himself who raised it. In March of that year he published in sonal charm, his warm relations with the ranks of the Baptist faithful the Biblical Recorder a fatuous article entitled "Was Paul an Evolu• all across the state, his record of distinguished service at Wake Forest, tionist?" It was an absurd question, not only because it could not be all had guaranteed, perhaps, that his appearance here would be a definitively answered, but because it placed the evolution controversy personal triumph. Newspapers far beyond the confines of North Caro• on a plane where anti-evolutionists could have all the better of the argu• lina hailed the blow he had struck for liberty of conscience, for aca• ment. If Darwinism was to be considered in the light of Biblical testi• demic freedom, for the integrity of scientific research. The state of mony, then fundamentalists could bury Poteat under an avalanche of North Carolina, perhaps by this one speech, had been spared the humi• contrary texts. liations through which Tennessee and other southern states were This they proceeded to do. Edenton's W. J. Berryman, moderator of destined to be dragged in the years ahead. the West Chowan Baptist Association, posed for the Biblical Recorder Amid the chorus of editorial and denominational cheers for Poteat's the inquiry: "Did Paul believe he was descended from a monkey? Of stirring address, a few dissenters, such as W. 0. Saunders of Elizabeth course he didn't ... Did Paul believe he came all the way up from a clod City, seemed strangely perverse and ungrateful. It was Saunder's com• by means of spontaneous generation? He did not." Berryman's evidence plaint that Poteat had "won a great victory by chloroforming his was thin, but no thinner than Poteat's reasons for claiming Paul as a enemies." The anti-evolutionists themselves, once the moment of glad• fellow evolutionist.

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