Flannery O'Connor's Favorite Protestant Theologian

I did a double take when I saw this passage:

"She never missed Dr. Frank Crane, an advice columnist....Appearing on the same page as the comics in the Atlanta Constitution, he was a prophet of positive thinking, regularly reporting success stories of people who smile and compliment others. O'connor jokingly called him her 'favorite Protestant theologian.'"

The passage comes from Jonathan Rogers's 2012 book, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor (Thomas Nelson). It probably didn't startle others the same way it startled me. But as a wannabe historian, this passage had the potential to make my research relevant. Here was Flannery O'Connor, a darling of the thoughtful Christian crowd, apparently an avid reader of Frank Crane, the subject of my new Nebraska History article. 

Almost everything seemed to fit. Frank Crane was indeed an apostle of positive thinking and also a syndicated newspaper columnist. Norman Thomas, writing in The Nation in 1924, aptly described Crane's style as something "a Pollyanna might have written after a short course in William James's pragmatism and a shorter and somewhat critical course in Tolstoi's non-violent ethics."

Frank Crane in American Magazine (1922)

There was just one problem: Crane died in 1928. And O'connor was reading "Dr. Frank Crane" in the 1950s. It was at least possible that Frank Crane's columns were being reprinted decades after his death, but it seemed unlikely. So I decided to investigate. I went to the sources cited by Rogers, all of which came from The Habit of Being, an edited collection of O'connor's letters. As the letters showed, O'connor definitely peppered her letters with references to Crane. "Ashley was telling me that you are an admirer of Dr. Frank Crane, my favorite Protestant theologian (salvation by the compliment club)," she wrote to Robie Macauley in 1955. "He is really a combination minister and masseur, don't you think? I like to hear him tell Alma A. that she can keep her husband by losing 75 pounds and just the other day he told a girl who was terrified of toads how not to let this ruin her life -- know the truth & the truth shall make you free."

In another letter to Macauley, she cracked more jokes about Crane: "I'll write Dr. Crane and ask him what is the significance of the short story. He tackles any subject." Elsewhere, she described Crane as an "odd mixture of fundamentalism (against the grape), psychology, business administration and Dale Carnegie. The originator of the Compliment Club."

Summer Book List: The Rise of the National Basketball Association

If you're looking for a book on the history of the NBA that features tables with titles like "Fixed-Effects Regression Equation for NBA Gate Receipts, 1950– 51," then this is your book and David George Surdam (a professor of economics at the University of Northern Iowa) is your author.

To be fair, Surdam's tables, all thirty-three of them, are placed in Appendix B. The main text of the book follows the typical chronological pattern of most descriptive histories. Within that text, though, Surdam offers a unique angle to the NBA's early history that (like the charts on fixed-effects regression equations) could only come from an economics professor. Forget Bill Russell, the owners are the heroes in The Rise of the National Basketball Association. Men like Walter Brown, Fred Zollner, Les Harrison, Eddie Gottlieb, Ned Irish, Ben Kerner, and Maurice Podoloff, should "justly feel proud of their efforts," Surdam writes, because they held the NBA together with "determination" and "a willingness to absorb losses."

To get at the owners' perspective and to explain the choices they made -- from integration, to television contracts, to gate receipt sharing, to league rules, to expansion and franchise relocation -- Surdam relies on a mix of secondary literature, New York Times and other national print media, archival research at the Naismith Hall of Fame, and a 1957 Congressional antitrust hearing on "Organized Professional Team Sports." Numerous NBA owners testified at that hearing, providing documentation on league finances and operating procedures that help Surdam analyze the economic underbelly of the league in a new way.