Monday, March 16, 2015

Carl J. Rigney: The Life of a Progressive Populist

Rate: 1 Flag
By Daniel Rigney
This weekend we’ll be celebrating the life of my late father, a scientist, educator  and man about home whose cultural roots (and so some of my own) lie deep in the populist soil of  east Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. My Dad was raised a fundamentalist Protestant on the edge of the deep South, but his worldview evolved and matured when he went north to Chicago in the 1940s to pursue a doctoral degree in physics.  
Dad lived for a time in an observatory on the shore of Lake Michigan, from which he could see heavens even larger and more amazing than those he had heard about in the southeast Texas Baptist church of his youth. Dad was a religiously and politically-progressive Southern populist. He was named in honor of William Jennings Bryan, unfortunately remembered now more for his hard-shelled opposition to modern evolutionary theory than for his steadfast defense of the interests of ordinary folk.  (That would be most of us.)
Let my brother, David Rigney, tell the story of my Dad’s cultural legacy in an exerpt from a eulogy that will appear in this weekend's memorial service bulletin.
 
IN MEMORIAM - CARL JENNINGS RIGNEY (1925-2011) …
His parents named him Carl JENNINGS Rigney after a person they greatly admired, William Jennings Bryan -- champion of the common man and woman against the abuses of the wealthy, big corporations and banks; and activist for the Social Gospel as the religious wing of the progressive movement for combating injustice, suffering and poverty in society.
Carl was grateful to Port Arthur [Tx.] for providing him an excellent public education, first at DeQueen Elementary School and later at Woodrow Wilson Junior High and Thomas Jefferson High School. The Navy sponsored much of his undergraduate college education through its V-12 Navy CollegeTraining Program, leading to a bachelor degree in electrical engineering at the University of Louisville.
Under the G.I. Bill, he then obtained Master and Ph.D. degrees in physics at Northwestern University and  taught physics at Southern Illinois University and  Northern Illinois University, before becoming the chairman of the physics department at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches. In the autumn of 1956 he became chairman of the physics department at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

Dad's kind and generous progressive-populist spirit lives on in the lives of his children and grandchhildren, and even into future generations not yet born. His memorial service will recall his favorite scripture, from Matthew 25:
"I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome. I was naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me....Even as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me."
To those who may believe that traditional rural and small-town religious populism can't be alloyed with a modern progressive worldview in 21st-century American politics, I'm here to say otherwise.  I submit for your consideration  the life of Carl Jennings Rigney. 

No comments:

Post a Comment