18 April 2010, 02:03
GatogordoTelling it like it was in Texas........
This is a slightly shortened excerpt from an enjoyable book I'm reading, "Tales of Bad Men, Bad Women, and Bad Places (Four Centuries of Texas Outlawry)" by C. F. Eckhardt. I bought it while touring the XIT Ranch Museum in Dalhart.I found it to be interesting..... this is from about 1895/96 and relates to William Cowper Brann and his magazine, The Iconoclast, that he published in Waco until his enthusiastic writings lead to his untimely demise in 1898. BTW even though Brann was shot from behind "where his suspenders crossed", Brann managed to turn and put 4 shots from his Colt .45 into his attacker, neither survived.
quote:T. DeWitt Talmadge was a Baptist Minister who was both an evangelist and a newspaper columnist, syndicated in more than 3,500 newspapers. Brann's previous editorials in other papers had prompted Talmadge to devote an entire newspaper column to condemning Brann as the "Apostle of the Devil." For one reason or another, Talmadge and the publisher of the Tyler Telegram got crossways, and the Telegram blasted Talmadge in an editorial. For reasons not clear, the Telegram shortly withdrew the remarks in an apologetic editorial. This infuriated Brann, who rolled out the Iconoclast's cannons and opened fire.
"The Tyler Telegram humbly apologizes for having called that wide-lipped blatherskite, T. DeWitt Talmadge, 'a religious faker.' Next thing we know our Tyler contemporary will apologize for having inadvertently hazarded the statement that water is wet. When a daily newspaper tells the truth, even by accident, it should stick to it instead of crawling on its belly in the dust to humbly ask pardon of the Devil. The Iconoclast will pay any man $10 who will demonstrate that T. DeWitt Talmadge ever originated an idea, good, bad, or indifferent. He is simply a monstrous bag of fetid wind. The man who can find intellectual food in Talmadge's sermons could acquire a case of delirium tremens by drinking the froth out of a pop bottle."
Now that's telling it like it was in Texas....
