On the morning of Friday, January 22, 1926, before Burbank's avowal of disbelief was broadcast through the press, California's gentle patriarch went about his experimental labors with the serenity of one who knows that he has harbored no evil thoughts of his fellowman and that in seventy-seven years of life he has never consciously hurt a living being.
He was the revered, kindly old gentleman of an admiring world. No voice had ever been raised against him. How could any voice be raised against a man who had done only good, who had filled the world's gardens with more beautiful flowers than they had ever known before, who in times of hunger and war had helped replenish the world's granaries by his genius, and who had given mankind meaty vegetables and gorgeous fruits such as nature, working blindly, had never before visioned?
At noon of that day the San Francisco Bulletin, shielding its sensational "beat" against the buccaneering plagiarisms of rival papers, rent wide its pages to make space for my copyright interview in which the famous horticulturist described himself fearlessly as an infidel, expressed disbelief in immortality, and of course scornfully dismissed Henry Ford's recently pledged adherence to a fantastic theory of reincarnation.
And before night Burbank, wrested violently from his calm nature-lore in the thriving little city of Santa Rosa, became the center of the most exciting philosophical and theological discussion of our era. Letters and telegrams began pouring in, first from nearby cities, but,
