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Monday, July 3, 2023

With "Trial Marriages," Family Is In Danger of Destruction, Dr. Gus Dyer Tells Methodists, July 3, 1923

Declares Trial Marriages Are Already in Force. . . Tells Methodist Social Conference that American Family Is in Danger of Destruction

Lake Junaluska, July 2—Asserting that through the alarming increase in the divorce rate, the American family is in danger of destruction, Dr. Gus Dyer, professor of political economics and sociology of Vanderbilt University, stated in a lecture on the “Family, the Child and Divorce” before the social conference of the M.E. Church, South, here today that America is virtually living in a state of legalized polygamy and that trial marriage already is in force, sanctioned by law through the divorce evil.

He pleased for a return to the old fashioned home, standing to itself away from crowded centers and with its own industrial system through which every member of the family was a producer. The average man cannot produce enough to support a wife and several children under modern city conditions, he declared.

The speaker took a rap at much of the modern education and said that there had never been such a mania for going to school, and so little interest in education. He declared colleges are filled up with people who have no interest in education and said they are blocking education. He continued that the average girl graduate is all dressed up and has nowhere to go. The professor thought it took an optimist to become enthused over the results of education today.

The speaker protested against the tendency to turn all of education over to the schools, declaring that a child’s parents were primarily its best teachers. He declared it is a day of big problems and little men and will be until we return to God’s system, which had its center in the home.

Various aspects of the home, the child, and the family will be discussed further during the progress of the conference.

From the front page of The Concord Daily Tribune, July 3, 1923. The M.E. Church was the Methodist Episcopal Church.

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