The Roman Catholic Hierarchy: The Deadliest Menace to American Liberties and Christian Civilization (Classic Reprint)
(One of the pupils of the Italian patriot, Settembrini, sa...)
One of the pupils of the Italian patriot, Settembrini, said that the tomb of his Maestro ought to bear this inscription Here lies the enemy of the Bourbons the Jesuits and the I nasrrmches. By the latter term, were meant those authors who write affectedly; by the Bourbons, were meant those rulers who rob and oppress the people; by the Jesuits were meant those wolves in sheeps clothing, who don the livery of God to serve the Devil. The same epitaph that was suggested for Settembrini, would suit me equally well. For neariy thirty years, I have wagied war upon Bourbons, Jesuits and I nasmuches. I have the scars to show for it. As the soldier is proud of his, I am proud of mine, In this book, is a culmination of my efforts against Jesuits and Jesuitism for the Roman Catholic Hierarchy is today Jesuitized. It was but yesterday, that the Eoman peril was only a small cloud, no larger than a mans hand, upon the distant horizon. Now, it is the storm-cloud which darkens the whole land. It was but yesterday, that the Roman Catholic, priest avoided the public eye, and passed you on the street with an humble, deprecatory smile which seemed to mutely plead for permission to exist. Today, the Eoman priest is the most insolent and arrogant man in A merica. The laws will not touch him. The politicians do his bidding. The press is afraid of hun. Protestant pulpits no longer dare to fuhninate against him. His powerful hand contr Jls Congress and the President. He is forcing his church into a union with the State. His greedy paws are raking public funds out of municipal, state and national treasuries for the use of his church. Our juvenile courts are furnishing slaves to his Houses of the Good Shepherd. Make America Catholic is the slogan now publicly proclaimed at monster Romanist
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The Roman Catholic Hierarchy: The Deadliest Menace To American Liberties And Christian Civilization; Volume 1
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Thomas Edward "Tom" Watson was an American politician, attorney, newspaper editor and writer from Georgia.
Background
Thomas Edward "Tom" Watson, the son of John Smith and Ann Eliza (Maddox) Watson, was born in Columbia County near Thomson, Ga. He was named Edward Thomas, but changed the order in his youth. English Quaker ancestors of his had settled in Georgia by 1768. His grandfather, Thomas M. Watson, a planter, "tall, venerable, imposing" in the eyes of an idolatrous boy, owned forty-five slaves and an estate valued on the tax records at $55, 000. With the Civil War, which was associated in the boy's mind with the death of his grandfather and uncle, began the decline of his twice-wounded father to a wretched state of fortune and self-esteem.
Education
He studied law privately, he began his dramatic rise as a criminal lawyer.
Career
He spent two years at Mercer University, a small Baptist college, and two as an impoverished country schoolteacher. After eleven years he could estimate his "assets, " consisting largely of land, at $30, 585. Finding his family in "a miserable shanty skirted by a long marsh, " he triumphantly restored them to their old home and administered a public thrashing to the landlord who had mistreated his brother. Brought early under the personal influence of Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens, he carried over into later movements many of the ideas and something of the spirit of the Confederate agrarians. At twenty-three he directed his first political effort against the state Democratic machine, dominated by capitalist-industrialists, and in his single term (1882) in the state Assembly he maintained this insurgency. As the New South tightened its alliance with the industrial North, and farmers declined in wealth and prestige, Watson's mistrust of Henry W. Grady's message crystallized: such leaders would "betray the South with a Judas kiss. " Insisting that the natural ally of the South was the agrarian West, he easily won his race for Congress in 1890 on the Farmers' Alliance platform. Then choosing between fidelity to reform pledges and loyalty to the Democratic party, he boldly announced himself a Populist. As the new party's candidate for speaker and its leader in the House, Watson introduced many Alliance reform bills and supported advanced labor legislation. He also introduced the first resolution ever passed providing for free delivery of rural mail. In 1891 he founded the People's Party Paper and the following year published The People's Party Campaign Book (1892), with the subtitle, Not a Revolt; It is a Revolution. Meanwhile, his district had been gerrymandered, and in the bloody and fraudulent election of 1892 his Democratic opponent was declared victor. Undaunted by persecution, he swayed thousands with redoubled denunciations of trusts, capitalist finance, and Democratic policies. The next election, in which he met another defeat, was unquestionably fraudulent and even more bloody, but his fight won praise from radical Populists everywhere. In 1896 he was nominated for the vice-presidency by the national Populist convention before Bryan was chosen to head the ticket. Known as an enemy of fusion with either party, Watson nevertheless accepted the nomination, being assured that only thus could all factions be harmonized, and that the Democrats would withdraw Arthur Sewall from their ticket. He campaigned in the West for Bryan, but, contemptuously treated by the Democrats and deserted by Populist fusionists, he admitted that his position was "most humiliating. " His small vote was a measure of the demoralization of the Populists that was wrought by fusion. Embittered by three defeats and what he felt was a betrayal, he retired from public life for eight years and turned to writing. The Story of France (1899), a popular history in two large volumes, is a Populist interpretation infused with the author's social philosophy, yet a work of some merit, as is also his Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life (1902). His other biographies, The Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson (1903) and The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson (1912), begun in 1907, are partisan and rambling. Bethany (1904) is a sentimental and unorganized novel. Later he published Life and Speeches of Thos. E. Watson (1908), Political and Economic Handbook (1908), and Prose Miscellanies (1912). As the Populist candidate for president in 1904, Watson polled only 117, 183 votes, but gained considerable attention from prominent reformers. In 1905 he founded in New York Tom Watson's Magazine (changed to Watson's Magazine in 1906), featuring mainly his reform editorials, but also publishing contributions from such authors as Masters, Dreiser, and Gorky. After quarreling with the publishers, he established in Georgia his Weekly Jeffersonian and Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine. His race for president in 1908 was only a gesture. New issues now overshadowed the industrialist-agrarian conflict, and Watson, counting forty-four tenants on his broad plantations and estimating his wealth at $258, 000, had changed. Old traits of irascibility and vindictiveness gained the upper hand. His politics changed with his character. Shifting his followers from one Democratic faction to the other, he virtually dictated state politics. As bewildered Populists quit his ranks, their places were filled with recruits attracted by his sensational crusades against Catholicism, Socialism, foreign missions, the Negro, and Leo M. Frank. Frank, whom Watson had attacked bitterly as an individual and a Jew, was lynched in 1915, after his death sentence for the murder of a girl had been commuted. Then with sudden resurgence of his old spirit Watson arose to denounce American intervention in the World War as "ravenous commercialism, " and war-time regimentation as "universal goose-stepping. " Until his publications were excluded from the mails and he was temporarily crazed by the death of his two children, he conducted a courageous fight against conscription. Losing his race for Congress in 1918 and the state presidential primary in 1920 by narrow margins, he was overwhelmingly elected to the Senate the latter year on the same platform, the restoration of civil liberties and the defeat of the League of Nations. In the Senate he expressed sympathy for Soviet Russia, organized labor, and oppressed minorities, but his brief senatorial career, ended by his death, while fiery and sensational, was without significant accomplishment. Some of the pathos and irony of his life may be caught in the "Thomas E. Watson Song, " a ballad of "a man of mighty power, " who "fought and struggled" and failed. It is still heard in backwoods Georgia.
Achievements
In the 1890s Watson championed poor farmers as a leader of the Populist Party, articulating an agrarian political viewpoint while attacking business, bankers, railroads, Democratic President Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party. He was the nominee for vice president with Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 on the Populist ticket.
Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1890, Watson pushed through legislation mandating Rural Free Delivery, called the "biggest and most expensive endeavor" ever instituted by the U. S. postal service. Politically he was a leader on the left in the 1890s, calling on poor whites and poor blacks to unite against the elites. After 1900, however, he shifted to nativist attacks on blacks and Catholics (and after 1914 on Jews). Two years before his death, he was elected to the United States Senate.
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Personality
Romantic and sensitive, yet assertive and ambitious, Thomas confessed much to his diaries and journals, kept a record of his reading, and wrote quantities of verse.
In political as in private life Watson assumed the role of agrarian avenger. A rebel and fighter by temperament, he was made by circumstance hostile to the new order and nostalgic for the old. His utter fearlessness, his earnestness, and the appealing combination of poet, prophet, and rustic humorist in his nature won a following that was fanatical in its loyalty. Redheaded, scrawny, yet inspiring, Tom Watson became almost the incarnation of the new agrarian revolt in the South.
Connections
On October 9, 1878, he married Georgia Durham of Thomson, where he now made his home.
