Tangled Moralist

DRY MESSIAH (353 pp.)--Virginius Dabney--Knopf ($4).

Like most Methodist ministers at the turn of the century, Virginia's young (36) James Cannon Jr. was dedicated to the defeat of the Demon Rum. Gaunt and black-bearded, humorless and generally disliked, he licked alcohol by legislation in his native state (1914), did as much as any man to bring prohibition to the U.S. Like many of his contemporaries who believed that morality could be legislated, he periodically struck out at lesser demons. Dancing, tobacco, Coca-Cola and even football ("neither manly nor Christian") felt his indignant lash. But in 1930, this paragon of virtue, by then long a bishop and according to H. L. Mencken "the most powerful ecclesiastic ever heard of in America," was accused by the elders of his own church of immorality, bucketshop gambling, flour-hoarding (during World War I), adultery, lying and "gross moral turpitude and disregard for the first principles of Christian ethics."

Wall Street & Walkouts. Dry Messiah is Richmond Newspaper Editor Virginius Dabney's careful and stolid look at a puritan's progress from circuit-riding man-of-God to arrogant director of a nation's morals. It does little to explain the man or the moral climate in which he was bred, but it is a useful and embarrassing reminder that for over a decade Cannon's narrow vision and flinty prohibitionist zeal were among the most persuasive forces in U.S. politics.

The secret of Cannon's success was the unsparing use of his apparently boundless nervous energy. At one time, besides his duties as head of a Methodist girls' school, he edited a newspaper, ran the Anti-Saloon League, speculated heavily on Wall Street and was one of the most active lobbyists for legal morality in Washington. His handling of political contributions became a national scandal, but he successfully defied congressional committees that sought to bring him to heel. Once he walked out of a public hearing after refusing to testify. Brought before both civil and ecclesiastical courts he always got off scot free, though only his plea for Christian forgiveness saved him from the wrath of fellow churchmen.

I'll See You in Court. On the evidence given in Dry Messiah alone, most readers will probably conclude that he was guilty as charged by church and state. But thousands of prohibitionists were ready to accept the denials of the man who had done so much to whip the saloon. Cannon's favorite tactic was to sue his detractors for huge amounts in libel suits that he tried to settle for small amounts out of court. In his day he sued a Congressman for $500,000 and William Randolph Hearst for a total of $7,500,000. He lost the one, settled the Hearst suits out of court, also lost his suits against TIME, which had called him "reactionary," and LIFE, which had said he was "bigoted."

Cannon died a poor man in 1944, all but forgotten by a new generation which was facing fiercer foes of the moral order than Demon Rum. But only 15 years before, Maryland's Senator William Cabell Bruce had risen on the Senate floor to speak the indignation that many another angry church member must have felt: 'God forbid that any clergyman of this kind should ever come near me for the purpose of exercising any office that appertains to his profession. If he were to sprinkle baptismal water upon the head of a child, I should expect its scalp to be scalded rather than hallowed ... If he were to preach a funeral sermon over my corpse, I believe that like Lazarus, I would throw aside the cerements of the grave and come back to life in indignant resurrection."

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