Fundamentalist Fatalities
I.Fundamentalist Fatalities A.The year 1926 opened with
1. a disaster at Pasadena’s New Year’s Day Tournament of Roses: a grandstand collapsed, killing several and wounding hundreds.
2. On an individual level, it was also the year Jack Dempsey lost his championship boxing title to Gene Tunney.
3. Baptist Fundamentalists saw similar catastrophes and setbacks in the course of their 1926 battles, and it is not surprising that discouragement was setting in.
4. In the wake of the 1925 defections and of the national mood arising from the Scopes Trial and subsequent death of William Jennings Bryan, the Fundamentalist Fellowship did not even hold a preconvention conference in 1926.
B. The 1926 NBC Meeting (Washington, DC)
1. The 1926 NBC meeting in the nation’s Capitol elected the soft conservative J. Whitcomb Brougher to the denomination’s presidency.
2. Brougher delivered the convention’s keynote address on "Our Common Denominator." With Brougher, J. C. Massee, M. P. Boynton, and Herbert W. Virgin speaking in behalf of peace and evangelism, the convention approved a proposal from Massee to declare a six-month truce in all theological disputes and to begin "a great evangelistic campaign."
3. "Soul-winning and missions" served as an effective smoke screen to divert attention from doctrinal deviation.
4. When W. B. Riley moved to make immersion a prerequisite to Northern Baptist church membership, the convention defeated his proposal two to one.
5. This was Riley’s last-ditch effort to oust Harry Emerson Fosdick and Park Avenue Baptist Church in New York City from the NBC, for John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had persuaded Fosdick to drop immersion as a requirement for church membership.
C. Many Fundamentalists were just now beginning to voice what they had probably felt for a long time: as insiders they had lost virtually every one of the great Baptist battles over the Bible and an exodus seemed inevitable.
D. The first event was a tragedy involving Baptist Bible Union leader J. Frank Norris.
1.Norris and the Shots Heard Around the World a)Fundamentalists lashed out in 1926 against the Roman Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, who had his sights on the presidency. b)The evils of alcohol were also plaguing the nation. Bootlegging had become widespread in many sections.
2. During the spring and summer of that year, Fundamentalist J. Frank Norris (1877-1952), the "Texas Tornado," had been using his First Baptist pulpit in Fort Worth and his paper, The Searchlight, to attack "Rum and Romanism," which were allegedly aligned to elect a Catholic to the White House and to subvert the Constitution.
3. The local object of attack was Fort Worth’s Roman Catholic mayor, H. C. Meacham, whom Norris charged with misdirecting municipal funds into Roman Catholic concerns. "He isn’t fit to be manager of a hog pen," declared Norris.
4. Swiftly responding, Meacham discharged from his own local department store six employees who were members of Norris’s church.
5. The pastor then published a blazing expose’ of the whole affair, along with the former employees’ testimonies, in the Friday, July 16 issue of The Searchlight and distributed copies all over Fort Worth, even in front of Meacham’s store. The paper announced Norris’s plans to continue the message from his pulpit on Sunday.
6. Saturday afternoon, July 17, found Norris busy in his second-floor study preparing for his sermon, when he received a threatening telephone call from Dexter E. Chipps, a wealthy lumber dealer and friend of Meacham.
7. A little while later, Chipps entered the church and came into Norris’s study. The two men exchanged some sharp words, and Chipps reportedly threatened Norris’s life again.
8.Norris was no doubt under some emotional strain. a)There had been threats on his life, and, during an evening service, someone had shot at him from outside the church. b)Chipps, turning to leave Norris’s office, reportedly paused at the door, whirled, and appeared to be reaching into his back pocket. Robert G. Delnay observes that "in Texas such a gesture could have only one meaning, and it would be readily understood. c)Norris, sitting at the desk facing the door, may already have had his hand on the... revolver." The sounds of three or four shots reverberated through the huge downtown church building, and Chipps’s body lay motionless on the floor. d)As one biographer expressed it, "The life of one man was gone, the life of the other was never to be the same." e)Indicted by a grand jury for the murder of an unarmed man, Norris stood trial in Austin, Texas, in January 1927. Refusing his resignation, Norris’s Fort Worth church raised sixteen thousand dollars for his defense, through contributions gathered in a galvanized washtub placed on the platform in the auditorium. f)The Searchlight claimed that "every Roman Catholic church in the city raised money for his prosecution." g)Reporters caricatured Norris as "the pistol-packin’ preacher," "Trigger Norris," and "the shoot’n salvationist."
(1) Actually, there is no evidence that Norris ever carried a gun.
(2)At the time of the shooting, Norris-believing that his life was in danger-had taken the night watchman’s gun from the drawer of the desk. h)In the course of the trial, Norris introduced a silver-plated weapon, which he claimed Chipps had been carrying at the time of the shooting. i)Norris explained that he had discovered the gun on Chipps after the incident and had hidden it for future evidence, persuaded as he was that if it should fall into the prosecutors’ hands, they would never present it to the court. j)The only witness to the incident was L. H. Nutt, a local bank auditor who was a friend of Norris; he concurred that the pastor’s story was indeed the truth. k)Following the emotional hearing, then a closed, forty-minute deliberation, the jury on the first ballot found J. Frank Norris "not guilty." In the jury’s opinion it had been justifiable homicide.
9. A throng of eight thousand greeted Norris in Fort Worth to welcome the pastor home. He received comforting telegrams from leaders all over the world, including W. B. Riley and Billy Sunday. Nothing, though, could really erase the permanent scars from a man who had gone through such an ordeal.
10. In spite of the fact that Norris would force retractions from at least five newspapers, most of the preacher’s former friends deserted him. J. Frank Norris would walk a lonely road now.
11. Wisely, he dissociated himself from the struggling Baptist Bible Union, which was on the verge of another worldwide embarrassment the following year.