VOL. XVI

NO. 2

T

HE last four months have witnessed the greatest Sunday blue law campaign that has ever afflicted America. In many localities it is still raging in all its fury, and with the religious fervor that usually characterizes fanaticism. Some of the most prominent religious organizations involved in this campaign say that they have just begun the fight, and that they are going to employ the same effective and persistent efforts and use the same machinery as the Anti-Saloon League did in bringing about national prohibition. They are sure that a national Sunday law in the form of an amendment to the Federal Constitution will be adopted ultimately by Congress and the several State legislatures, the same as the Eighteenth as the Eighteenth Amendment became a part of the fundamental law of the land. They are equally sure that a drastic enforcement act with confiscatory penalties will follow the adoption of a compulsory Sunday ob; servance amendment, the same as the Volstead Enforcement Act, with teeth in it, followed the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment.

In other words, the present agitation is to continue until the clamor for a national Sunday law becomes the all

absorbing question of the hour. He who thinks this issue is going to die out and soon be forgotten, is deceiving himself. The Sunday question is destined to precipitate a greater crisis than this nation has yet seen. One of two things is inevitable,either the Constitutional guaranties of civil and religious liberty and the total separation of church and state must be maintained, and the existing Sunday blue laws be repealed, or these shackles of religious bigotry and tyranny will ultimately destroy our free republican institutions. We cannot remain free and forever retain local religious statutes enforced by the civil magistrates which override the Federal Constitution and are absolutely hostile to every guaranty of civil and religious freedom vouchsafed to the individual citizen. We cannot continuously override the Constitution without ultimately destroying all respect for its provisions enacted in defense of human rights. If the churches are not driven out of politics, they will finally control the state, and the horrors of the Inquisition will be renewed, and the streams in America will flow crimson with the blood of martyrs, as did the streams of Europe under the old régime of church and state domination; for men

who have hearts that beat true and consciences that will not flinch, will die for their convictions, but they will never surrender them. The inevitable product of a legal religion is either hypocrisy or persecution. It always has been, and it never can be otherwise.

How the Campaign Started

The desire of a few "professional reformers" and self-styled "Christian lobbyists" to Puritanize America and to bring the church back into power as a dominating factor in politics, led to a nation-wide protest of such a sweeping character that the Sunday blue law advocates were forced to seek shelter from the onslaught of public sentiment called out by their encroachments upon human rights. The first gun in the campaign for a drastic national Sunday law was fired when the Methodist Church South drafted the bluest Sunday blue law that was ever presented to Congress for enactment into law. Their bill proposed to stop every passenger train and freight car on Sunday, to stop the United States mail service, and every street car and automobile, to stop all recreation, all amusements, to close every public park and every other avenue on Sunday except the one which led to the church door, so as "to make it easier to go to church on Sunday." They also proposed to stop the printing, delivering, receiv

ing, and reading of every Sunday newspaper in the country. Every vocation and profession of a secular nature was to suspend operations on Sunday. Only works of actual necessity and charity were to be allowed, in the discretion of the courts. Corporations which should violate this drastic Sunday law would be liable to a fine of $100,000 for the first offense, and for the second offense they would lose their charter and be prohibited from doing business in the future. In other words, this Sunday law was to operate so as to confiscate the property of every persistent offender.

The Methodist Church South could find no Congressman who was willing to sponsor or even introduce this proposed Sunday bill, and it was returned to them by Senator McKellar of Tennessee and Congressman Randall of California, who gave forceful reasons why they would not foster such an un-American and unChristian measure. However, the Methodist Church South did succeed in getting State Senator Cooper (who was also chairman of the committee that framed this drastic Sunday bill) to introduce it into the legislature of Tennessee. was introduced into both the senate and the house of representatives, and was referred to the judiciary committees of both houses of the legislature. A joint hearing was arranged by both judiciary committees, and the bill was rejected by

It

both committees. But Senator Cooper, the sponsor of the bill and the spokesman of the Methodist Church South, forced the issue upon the floor of the senate for further consideration and action. The senate did quick work with this bill after a very heated debate that lasted for hours, and the bill went down in defeat by a majority vote of 25 to 2. That ended the history of the bluest Sunday bill framed in modern times by any church organization.

Professional Reformers Fired Second Gun The professional reformers of the Lord's Day Alliance and the International Reform Bureau fired the second gun in the campaign, when Rev. Harry L. Bowlby, the national secretary of the Lord's Day Alliance, and Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts, superintendent of the International Reform Bureau, gave their personal interviews to the press for publication as to the plans and aims of their organizations in reference to some drastic Sunday legislation which they were urg

ing upon Congress for the District of Columbia, and if successful, for the whole nation.

Dr. Bowlby's Proposed Legislation Dr. Bowlby gave the following interview to the New York reporter of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. As quoted in the issue of that paper of Nov. 28, 1920, Dr. Bowlby said:

"We are well financed. Our lobby at Washington will be an effective and experienced one. We shall work in every Congressional district in every State. We shall agitate and spread propaganda, and cause voters to write unceasingly to their representatives in Congress until no Congressman who cares to stay in Congress will dare refuse to vote for our measures. These were the methods used by the Anti-Saloon League, and they were effective.

"We propose to pass no blue laws. There are no such things as blue laws-never were. And we don't propose to legislate people into church. We propose, by legislation, to make it easier for people to go to church. In other words, we shall try to close the baseball parks, the golf links, the motion picture and other theaters, the concert halls, the amusement parks, the bathing beaches, and so on. We shall fight