Background
Dodd was born on September 8, 1878 in Brazil, Tennessee, the son of William Henry and Lucy Ann Williams Dodd, the owners of a small farm.
Dodd was born on September 8, 1878 in Brazil, Tennessee, the son of William Henry and Lucy Ann Williams Dodd, the owners of a small farm.
In 1904, Dodd received both his Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Divinity degrees from Union University, a Baptist-affiliated institution in Jackson, Tennessee, the seat of Madison County. From the same university, he received a doctor of divinity degree in 1909 and, fulfilling his first childhood inclination, an LL. D. degree in 1930. He obtained a second doctor of divinity degree from Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in 1918. He also did correspondence work through the University of Chicago and the Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, near Chester.
In 1898 Dodd enlisted in the army. Discharged after a ten-month stint, he returned to Trenton - a small town about ten miles from Brazil, where his father then operated a small lumber mill - and completed his secondary work at Peabody High School. After serving in pastorates at Fulton, Paducah, and Louisville, Kentucky (1904-1912), Dodd settled permanently - except for a six-month pastorate that he held in 1927 at the Temple Baptist Church of Los Angeles, California - at the First Baptist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana. A dynamic preacher and industrious pastor, Dodd increased the size of the congregation nearly tenfold, attaining 5, 097 members by 1942.
From 1920 to 1922 he led the Shreveport Baptists in an ambitious building program, erecting a huge church with such innovative features as a tearoom, roof garden, radio station, and a ten-story tower with bell chimes, which, according to one Baptist publication, was "unknown to modern church life anywhere in America. " Dodd also performed many professional activities outside of Shreveport. In 1918 he served for six months as a chaplain to the troops stationed at Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, Louisiana, and then for another six months with the American Expeditionary Force in France. But most of all Dodd devoted himself to denominational work. As early as 1912 he was elected to the executive board of the Louisiana Baptist Convention and consciously set "himself to the task of making Louisiana a great Baptist state. "
Dodd held the presidency of that convention for two terms (1926-1927). He almost single-handedly founded Dodd College, a denominational institution chartered in 1926 and designed to "war for the Safety and Purity of womanhood, " and acted as its president until 1935. Dodd also rose to prominence in the Southern Baptist Convention. From 1919 to 1924 he actively supported its Seventy-Five Million Campaign, a fund-raising program for Southern Baptist missionaries, by periodically speaking before congregations throughout the South. In 1933 he attained the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention; reelected in 1934, he became the first president to visit all of the denomination's mission fields - in Girdling the Globe for God (1935) he described that tour. He also participated in the Baptist World Alliance, serving on its executive committee from 1934 to 1950.
Dodd retired from his Shreveport church in 1950. Although in ill health, he continued to preach as a supply pastor whenever possible. He was holding such a post at the First Baptist Church of Glendale, California, at the time of his death, which occurred on August 6, 1952.
Dodd's mother was active in the Primitive Baptist faith and provided a home atmosphere with prayers and Bible readings. While attending school in Brazil, Tennessee, Dodd was converted to Christianity and joined the Poplar Grove Baptist Church, having been baptized on August 12, 1892.
Despite his extensive denominational involvement, Dodd's ministry was still pulpit-centered. And, as an avowed fundamentalist, he vehemently opposed theological liberalism throughout his long career by proclaiming the infallibility of the Bible, substitutionary atonement, the virgin birth, bodily resurrection, and the eventual second coming of Christ. Naturally, Dodd rejected evolution, insisting absolutely on a literal interpretation of Genesis. He also preached Landmarkism, denying that Baptists were in the Protestant tradition and claiming that the first Baptist church appeared "on Saturday, June 4, A. D. 32. " Baptists and Roman Catholics, Dodd and other Landmarkers argued, were the originators of all Christian doctrines, but they stood "poles apart upon every principle. " Although he withstood ecumenicalism, Dodd believed that the movement would eventually reduce the biblical religions to four - the Jews, the Roman Catholics, the Protestants, and the Baptists.
Dodd's social and political views were equally conservative. Long a foe of the social gospel of Harry Emerson Fosdick and others, Dodd as late as 1944 warned the students at Baptist Bible Institute in New Orleans: "It is not the business of one called of High Heaven and trained for divine service to socialize or sentimentalize or sensationalize. It is his business to mobilize the soldiers of the cross, to organize them, to vitalize them and to go forth leading them to evangelism. "Yet, Dodd often spoke out on social issues. In a tract entitled "Repeal the Eighteenth Amendment?" (1933), he praised prohibition as the greatest achievement in social engineering since Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself. " He strongly disapproved of free immigration, asserting in 1930 that for "the most part the bootleggers and criminals of each community come from these foreigners. They are Sunday desecraters, they are the church haters, they are the God haters, they are the flag despisers. The Bolsheviks and anarchists are bred and born and nurtured from this stock. " Dodd blamed the Jews, as well, for sowing the "seed of Bolshevism, Communism, and anarchy" and, returning from his worldwide tour in 1934, dismissed the Nazi persecutions of Jews as a matter of "economic necessity and political expedience. " By 1941, however, after hearing about Hitler's anti-Jewish campaign in Holland, he declared, "The civilized world stands horrified at these persistent persecutions of the Jews. " Dodd also feared, as early as 1930, the "rising tide of color" and exhorted Americans to preserve their "racial purity. " But occasionally he defended the downtrodden regardless of race, as in his 1928 castigation of slum landlords: "Cramped living quarters by tenement house owners and renters of property that crowd even Negroes down like chickens in a chicken coop in the summertime, squeezing the life out of them for $3. 50 per week for two rooms making their returns 50 percent - that's murder. "
During his senior year, Dodd courted Emma Savage, the daughter of Southwestern's president and an art instructor at the university. They were married on October 10, 1904, and had five children.
