Volume 148

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N nearly every city in the land, as the most casual reading of its newspapers will demonstrate, there is at least one clergyman who is a hustler and a publicist in addition to being the shepherd of his flock. He is well known to the local reporters, sends advance copies of his sermons to the city editors, and makes himself heard on the questions of the day. He belongs to important civic committees, attends the luncheons of the principal service club, and assists the Chamber of Commerce in welcoming distinguished guests.

January 11, 1928

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LMOST every one has heard of Dr. Cadman. He is a public man as well as a clergyman, and has made his impress far beyond church circles. In this article, Mr. Pringle, Governor Smith's able biographer, has drawn the portrait of Dr. Cadman as he sees him, as a phenomenon of modern America. Dr. Cadman does not believe that the radio can take the place of church-going, but he is an outstanding example of the minister who utilizes worldly inventions to spread the message of the Church. His great distinction, perhaps, is his amazing ability to appease the insatiable appetite for information, manifest in so many ways since the

war.

In days that have passed, when the pace of life was more gentle, the clergyman was a man who had drawn apart from earthly things. He visited the poor and comforted the sick and the dying. He grew a little vague when confronted with such problems as a new mortgage or a new roof for the vestry, and turned these matters over to his deacons. The that birth control is sinful, that prohibichurch was a house of refuge, a place for tion is a great moral experiment certain contemplation, the sheltered abode of to succeed if given half a chance, that the spiritual. In time, however, it be- children should be spanked. But in came apparent that a new age demanded spreading his gospel he uses media born new things. In the smaller villages reof modernism. He addresses countless ligion remained static, but in the cities millions each Sunday by radio, and each the clergy reached out for more up-to-day writes a syndicated newspaper artidate ways of spreading their versions of the word of God. They built magnificle similar in form, although not always cent new churches, sometimes with hoin content, to the Dorothy Dix forums on love. His correspondence is comtels or office buildings above them, and parable to that of a mail-order house executive; and every morning, in his study, he dictates for hours to his secretaries. He answers almost any question, whether on religion, politics, business, military affairs, literature, or domestic

raised funds by the go-getter methods of Liberty Loan drives. They turned to the press and the radio, because their audiences were dwindling. They became authorities on petting parties, crime, and divorce. They consulted the public entanglements. When bigger audiences

relations counsel.

are available through additional miracles of science, Dr. Cadman will address them. When more questions are asked, Dr. Cadman will answer them. His name is known, from coast to coast, in every household that reads newspapers or twirls the knobs of a radio set. In many of them it is synonymous with omniscience.

The catholicity of Dr. Cadman's

that motherhood is her only true calling, knowledge is equaled only by the size of

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his audiences. For the past two years he has been presiding over a column published in the New York "Herald Tribune" and syndicated to eighty other newspapers throughout the country with a total circulation of more than 10,000,000 readers a day. Among the questions he has answered without hesitation are: What is the soul? How can I keep my wife from bobbing her hair? What are the evidences of high civilization? What is your conception of hell? Who was the foremost military genius in the British armies in the World War? What is success?

Dr. Cadman rarely qualifies his answers, although he frequently resorts to generalities; nor does he shrink from prophecy and mystic interpretation.

"Is there any chance," asked one thirsty newspaper reader, "that the Eighteenth Amendment will be repealed?"

"Not the slightest," was the brisk and brief retort.

"Russia will remain a liability for another century at least," he ruled on another occasion.

"Why," asked a troubled baseball fan, "did Walter Johnson lose the last game of the World Series?"

"It is not part of God's plan," said Dr. Cadman, "that one champion shall win all the time."

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"No cohabitation is a sacrilege," he

replied, "as long as it is sanctioned by Church and State and by the right behavior of the parties cohabiting."

Once in a while, of course, he has to resort to nimble foot work in answering questions that are highly debatable. A reader once wanted to know whether Dr. Cadman would "sit down to a course dinner with Negroes." Instead of turning to his Bible, he recalled the luncheon given by a President of the United States to Booker T. Washington.

"I would. Theodore Roosevelt did. What is good enough for him is good enough for you."

DR.

R. CADMAN demonstrates his mental agility most vividly on Sunday afternoons, when he addresses his "radio audience." For years prior to the invention of broadcasting he had lectured to the Men's Conference of the Bedford Avenue Branch of the Young Men's Christian Association in Brooklyn. He had assisted thousands of young men to solve their spiritual, temporal, and even business problems. Four years ago radio was called to the aid of religion, and now a network of broadcasting stations carries Dr. Cadman's pleasantly sonorous voice to at least half the Nation's population. Radio enthusiasts as far west as Iowa, in most of the cities of eastern Canada, along the greater portion of the Atlantic seaboard, and as far in the inland South as Kentucky can hear him if they choose. It has been estimated that from 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 actually tune in each Sunday. This figure is, of course, merely

guesswork; there is no way of knowing how many of those who own radio sets decline to worship at the feet of this twentieth-century oracle. That the invisible congregation is very large is demonstrated, though, by the letters that Dr. Cadman and the Y. M. C. A. receive. Sometimes there are as many as 2,000 in a single week. They come from villages and cities, and even from sailors who have listened in while at sea. Most of them are from comparatively poor people, for it is well known that the upper classes play golf on Sunday. The late Judge Elbert H. Gary, of the United States Steel Corporation, was, however, an enthusiastic Cadman fan, I am told.

Any one who has listened to the broadcasting of Dr. Cadman's Y. M. C. A. forum is necessarily somewhat awed by the celerity with which he answers the questions put to him at the end of his half-hour sermon. It seems

obvious that they must have been shown to him in advance, and that he has been able to scurry to an encyclopædia and a Biblical concordance. Although he attempts to limit his Sunday questions, these days, to spiritual matters, it is not always considered wise for him to do so. Consequently, the range is very wide and within recent months has included: What will be the nature of the resurrected body? What should an alien do when he arrives in this country? Why is America so unpopular abroad? Who is more thrifty, the Hebrew or the Scotchman?

The truth is, inquiry develops, that the chief attraction of Dr. Cadman's performance is his ability to answer questions with, as the Y. M. C. A. program puts it, "Gatling-gun rapidity." Only when it is a matter of policy does he see the puzzlers ahead of time. A committee goes over the hundreds received and, after picking out those that are too silly or that have been answered before, places several in front of him.

"How," asked one astonished worshiper after a service, "are you able to answer all these questions so swiftly and so surely?"

"Habit, I suppose," replied Dr. Cad

man.

His friends have pointed out that he has rare ability "to think on his feet" and that he has unusual confidence in himself. He does not, in other words, face the microphone with any apprehension that he will be given a question beyond his range of knowledge.

PLUMP, elderly, with gray hair and

with eyes that look out with complacency from behind his glasses, the Rev. Dr. Cadman might serve as a pattern for the well-fed, prosperous, authoritative, and successful city clergyman. Here is a man very certain of salvation, very certain of his creeds, very sure of his scholarship, very confident that he speaks with official sanction. It is wholly fantastic, as he stands on the platform of the Y. M. C. A. auditorium, that his voice is being wafted on ether waves to millions and that other millions turn daily to their newspapers for his counsel. For Dr. Cadman is no Aimee Semple McPherson, and certainly no Billy Sunday. A believer in personal evangelism, he is not a go-getting evangelist. Nor is he a really great pulpit orator. Like all ministers, he is, naturally, something of an actor. He knows the value of phrasing, of climax, of emotional appeal. He

permits his voice to rise and fall and t crash in crescendo, but he is alway dignified and always a little restrained and only rarely does an "Amen" brea from the lips of that fraction of his con gregation which attends his services i person, and not through vacuum tube and B batteries.

Dr. Cadman looks back on life an finds it excellent. Few, no doubt, hav better right, for he rose from poverty t an eminence where he is certainly the most widely heard, and probably th best paid, Congregational minister o earth. He was born in Shropshire, Eng land, in 1864, the son of a Methodis minister. As a boy he sometimes worke in a neighborhood coal mine, an learned thereby the worth of hones toil. He was early destined to the min istry, and in 1889 was graduated from London University. In 1890 he came t America, the opportunities for religiou advancement in this new land bein comparable to those in commercial lines and he was, almost from the day tha he landed, marked by his Methodis bishop as a coming man. His first floc was in Millbrook, New York, and afte that he was, for a brief time, detailed t Yonkers, New York. But the Churc does not permit its particularly talente to waste themselves on rural folk, so i 1895 he was told to reorganize a numbe of dwindling parishes in downtown Man hattan. Within six years he had adde 1,600 members to their congregations.

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N 1901 Dr. Cadman was called to the Central Congregational Church i Brooklyn, and accepted the summons although a Methodist. During the year that have passed he has rejected man offers, among them the presidency o that stronghold of Methodism, Wesleya University. A few years ago a Londo church asked for his services, also with out result. His friends pointed out tha he had become a citizen of the Unite States as soon as the law had made i possible, and that he would not return except as a friendly visitor, to the lan of his nativity. Now, along with th late Henry Ward Beecher and the Rev Newell Dwight Hillis, he ranks as one o the really inspired preachers which Brooklyn seems to produce more easily than any other part of New York City His flock showed its appreciation i 1923 by raising his pay to $12,000 year, and in 1926 by giving him a purs of $25,000-$1,000 for every year o service.

During the first years of his caree

the

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Dr. Cadman won a reputation for advanced thought, and even in 1901, when he went to Brooklyn, had been widely quoted as a believer in the abolition of creeds. In a hundred years, he has said, "there'll be no denominations and there'll be more Christianity." As a young minister, too, there were traces of pacifism in his make-up; in 1896 he said that to make war with Spain over Cuba would be criminal. In 1908 he criticised Theodore Roosevelt for wanting a large Army and Navy. But with the outbreak of hostilities in Europe he began, together with most of his brothers of the cloth, to see that God was on the side of the Allies and to change his views regarding militarism. To learn what war was actually like he became chaplain of the Twenty-third Regiment of the New York National Guard, and lost fifteen pounds serving on the Mexican border. Regarding war, he said, at

about that time:

It is not the worst of evils. The gilded youth of Broadway is typical of a much greater evil. This war is purging the nations. They will be

better for it. It is sweeping away the trivial and frivolous and revealing the deep and serious.

Returning from Texas, Chaplain Cadman remarked that universal military training was "splendid." At one of his Y. M. C. A. conferences he was asked what should be done pending possible war with the Kaiser, whose acts he had already described as those of "a devil incarnate."

"Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!" he boomed.

So great was his fervor that he even forgot his friendliness toward other creeds and his dreams of a universal Church. The Lutheran Church in Germany, he explained, was not "the Bride of Christ," but "the paramour of Kaiserism." After America had entered the struggle he blessed its cause as "that of Christ." Then he added:

If religion means to us what it did to Christ, that is, a cross of blood, then the soldiers and sailors are the most religious men we have among us. Shed blood has always brought man nearest to God. "Greater love has no

man than this, that he lay down his life for his country."

A millionaire friend, Dr. Cadman went on, had expressed doubt about the wisdom of the war. Asked what he would do if he found a "burglar attack

ing his wife," this pacifist had replied that he "would try to stop him without hurting him."

"What," demanded the pastor, "can you do with a God-forsaken ass like that?"

'HE doctor recovered his balance in

THE

time. By 1926 he was opposing military service in the schools, and was in that year barred from the Commencement exercises of the New York Military Academy at Cornwall after he had been asked to make an address. So angry did the die-hard militarists become at their former brother-in-arms that one Sunday afternoon they stormed his Y. M. C. A. forum and hissed until the police reserves ejected them. Dr. Cadman's shifting views on militarism have, in fact, constituted one of the few inconsistencies in his career as a publicist. He belongs to that ever-increasing group of clergymen, in New York and elsewhere, who know the sweet uses of publicity, who never say "No" to a reporter, who are always willing to be quoted on the question of the day. Dr. Cadman has, at one time or another, been interviewed on the League of Nations, the greatness of President Coolidge, the potentially equal greatness of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the adoption of Mary Spas by the once prominent Edward W. Browning, and the experimental murder of Leopold and Loeb. He was among the patriots who rushed to the defense of George Washington when Rupert Hughes published the first of his volumes on the Father of his Country. In this case Dr. Cadman evolved a somewhat novel method of literary criticism, saying:

Above all, Washington was sane, sober, and self-controlled. One look at his face and then at that of Mr. Hughes should convince any one that the pup looked at the King-and not like him.

Within recent months Dr. Cadman has been given another opportunity for service. He has become Chairman of the "Religious Book of the Month Club." Dr. Cadman prides himself on his standing as a "liberal-conservative," but there are some things that he cannot ac(Continued on page 71)

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HE sea wind riffled the water and broke up the white-gold patches of reflected light into shimmering streaks. The scattered fleet seemed to lie in a restless moonlit sky, the anchor chains barnacled with stars.

All but one vessel.

The Falcon, long and low, stood out as whitely against the liquid darkness as a mediæval painting of the Holy Grail. Batteries of strong lights scoured the decks on which two hundred men were working late and hard, and the illumination ran off to spread in a glowing film over the waters around the ship.

At the stern two hose-lines trailed off into the burnished water, and a diver, whiter in his rubber suit than a naked man, stood clumsy and hideous on a platform slung out over the rail by a crane. He was going below, seventeen fathoms under that bright surface, where lay the gashed and flooded carcass of the Submarine S-4.

The two hose-lines led down to her. One had been made fast two hours earlier, at one o'clock, and was now pumping sweet, living air into the fetid forward torpedo compartment. It was this diver's purpose to attach the second air hose.

One would have thought that men were being saved from death, that these measures were parts of a rescue operation.

Indeed, they might have been but for one fact:

The six men who had survived the submarine's quick plunge to sea-bottom happened to be dead, and not all the air covering the earth nor all the divers in all the navies could bring them back to life.

This was midnight of Wednesday, December 21, and they had been dead for hours if not for days.

T had been the preceding Saturday afternoon that the rum-chasing Coast Guard destroyer Paulding, seeing nothing of the submarine tender Wandank or its flag warning that a submarine was running on the test course outside Provincetown Harbor, had slashed into the ascending S-4, cut her half-way through amidship and sent her to the

By COURTENAY TERRETT

MR

R. TERRETT was one of the correspondents who went to Provincetown to see the Navy rescue six living men trapped in the torpedo-room of the sunken submarine S-4. The effort quickly degenerated into a plain job of salvage. The story Mr. Terrett tells of the actual consideration given to salvaging the ship as opposed to saving the lives of its survivors is not pleasant reading. It may be, as he says, that suitable explanations can be made to Naval Boards of Inquiry and Congressional committees; but his facts are hard facts, and one or two are capable of a sinister interpretation.

dragging the ocean floor for hours from small boats, and a buoy was put down to mark the spot.

Already the destroyer Sturtevant and the mine-sweeper Lark were at the scene. The Lark had diving equipment aboard but it was not used that night. Morn ing found the Bushnell, fitted for divers the Falcon, bearing the fullest of diving equipment, and the mine-sweeper Mal lard at the scene, and displayed a sea far calmer than that of the night before. Yet it was well past noon on Sunday before the first diver went down; for, though ships were watching all through the night, the marking buoy had broken free and the S-4's position was lost.

Again the small boats swept and dragged the sea-bed. Hours passed, and no man knew whether forty men lived below. At length the Coast Guardsmen found the S-4 again. Another buoy was put over to mark the spot. Divers on the Falcon climbed into their awkward dress and slowly de scended through the 102 feet of sea.

They found, down in the darkness of seventeen fathoms, the ship resting on an even keel. A deep wound half severed her, slashing through the controlroom below the conning tower, and her deck was a tangle of wires and rails and twisted plates.

The divers plodded around through the mud, exploring the wreck. Thomas Eadie, one of the best of them, tapped a bar against the plates of the forward torpedo compartment and got a muffled answer. He went aloft, slowly, and into the decompression chamber, and came out to announce that men still lived down below.

Other divers went down. They con firmed Eadie. Finally, late, an air-line was run over the Falcon's stern and a diver attached it to the wreck.

It was not run to the compartment where men were known to be alive. It was attached to another part of the ship. Secretary Wilbur says that it was attached to the general air-distributing system. But the men at the scene that night announced that it had been attached to the forward ballast tanks, and explained that its purpose was to push some of the water out of the S-4 and lighten her for raising.