India. Further, he thought that through a lecture bureau he could effectively broadcast
his ideas all over the American continent and thus remove from people's minds
erroneous notions regarding Hindu religion and society. Soon he was engaged in a
whirlwind tour covering the larger cities of the East and the Middle West. People
called him the 'cyclonic Hindu'. He visited, among other places, Iowa City, Des
Moines, Memphis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Detroit, Buffalo, Hartford, Boston,
Cambridge, New York, Baltimore, and Washington. Cherishing a deep affection for
the members of the Hale family, he made his headquarters with George W. Hale in
Chicago.
But his path was not always strewn with rose petals. Vivekananda was an outspoken
man. Whenever he found in American society signs of brutality, inhumanity, pettiness,
arrogance, and ignorance concerning cultures other than its own, he mercilessly
criticized them. Often small-minded people asked him irritating questions about India,
based upon malicious and erroneous reports, and the Swami fell upon them like a
thunderbolt. 'But woe to the man,' wrote the Iowa State Register, 'who undertook to
combat the monk on his own ground, and that was where they all tried it who tried it at
all. His replies came like flashes of lightning and the venturesome questioner was sure
to be impaled on the Indian's shining intellectual lance....Vivekananda and his cause
found a place in the hearts of all true Christians.' Many Christian ministers became his
warm friends and invited him to speak in their churches.
Swami Vivekananda was especially bitter about false Christianity and the religious
hypocrisy of many Christian leaders. In a lecture given in Detroit he came out in one of
his angriest moods, and declared in the course of his speech:
You train and educate and clothe and pay men to do what? — to come over to my
country and curse and abuse all my forefathers, my religion, my everything. They walk
near a temple and say, 'You idolaters, you will go to hell.' But the Hindu is mild; he
smiles and passes on, saying, 'Let the fools talk.' And then you who train men to abuse
and criticize, if I just touch you with the least bit of criticism, but with the kindest
purpose, you shrink and cry: 'Do not touch us! We are Americans; we criticize, curse,
and abuse all the heathens of the world, but do not touch us, we are sensitive plants.'
And whenever you missionaries criticize us, let them remember this: If all India stands
up and takes all the mud that lies at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up
against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of what you are
doing to us.
Continuing, the Swami said that the military conquests of the Western nations and the
activities of the Christian missionaries, strangely enough, often proceeded side by side.
Most people were converted for worldly reasons. But the Swami warned:
Such things tumble down; they are built upon sand; they cannot remain long.
Everything that has selfishness for its basis, competition for its right hand, and