The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
History
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
I will briefly sketch here some of the main facts that
led to his death, not only justice to the dead, but to his
living friends who only knew him as a writer and have
been compelled to read in the newspapers the loathsome
and lying slanders sent out against him from this
city.
The origin is to be found in the visit to this city of
ex-Priest Slattery, who, for gross immorality, had been
kicked out of the fold of the Catholic church. He was
accompanied by a woman fully as bad as he, and these
two saints set up to lecture, and the substance of their
lecture was briefly this, that convents and female schools
under the charge of the sisters, were but bawdy houses
to satisfy the lust of the Catholic priesthood. Mr. Brann,
who heard, in the opera house in this city, these vile
slanders flung amid thunders of applause, mostly from a gang
of blackguards from and around Baylor University, outraged
by the wrong done the pure and stainless women
whose vows bar them from the slightest hope of reward
on earth, yet devote their lives in and out of the convent
walls to soothing the sorrows and relieving the sufferings
of humanity, attempted to reply in their defense, and for
this he was hooted and nearly mobbed by this precious
lot of curs and had to be escorted from the opera house
by the police. After the Antonio Tiexeria scandal came
out, and he saw the poor girl reduced to ruin, standing
barely on the verge of womanhood, desolate and friendless
in a foreign land, with his whole sympathetic nature
aroused in her behalf, he certainly struck some hard
blows at Baylor. In his repeated thrusts he made one at
the professors which is believed by many to have cut far
deeper than anything ever said about the Brazilian girl,
and that was his proposition to open a night school for
their benefit. In last October ICONOCLAST, in a
paragraph, he expressed the hope that Baylor would not
continue to manufacture ministers and Magdalens. For
this he was twice mobbed, and it is claimed eventually
murdered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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