William Moseley Brown (27 February 1894–8 January 1966), educator and fraternal organization leader, was born in Lynchburg, the son of William Nicholas Brown and Emily Carrington Moseley Brown. The family moved to Atlanta for a few years and then returned to Virginia. Brown's father, who operated a grocery in Danville, served in the House of Delegates from 1906 through 1912 and later as the city's postmaster.
Brown attended public schools and graduated from Danville High School in 1911 and from Washington and Lee University in 1914. He taught German at Washington and Lee from 1914 to 1917 and also biology in the 1915–1916 term, and in 1915 he received a master's degree from the university. In 1914 Brown helped found Omicron Delta Kappa, a service fraternity that soon spread to other colleges. In addition to choosing the organization's Greek-letter name, he served as general secretary from 1916 to 1920. During America's participation in World War I Brown entered the army and rose to the rank of second lieutenant in the production division of the air service.
After the war Brown returned to Danville, where he taught, served as assistant principal of the high school, and was secretary of the city school board until 1920. He then returned to Washington and Lee as associate professor of education and psychology. During the 1922–1923 academic year Brown was on leave. He earned a second master's degree in 1922 from Columbia University and a doctorate from the same school in 1923 with a thesis published as Character Traits as Factors in Intelligence Test Performance. On 27 June 1922 he married Gloria Graham, a native of Birmingham, England. They had two sons.
Teaching at Washington and Lee did not fill all of Brown's time. He occasionally taught in summer sessions at George Washington University and at the University of Virginia. He also served as national president of Omicron Delta Kappa from 1922 to 1925 and as executive secretary of the organization from 1925 to 1937. Brown plunged into Freemasonry, too. Between January and June 1922 he became a Master Mason, a Royal Arch Mason, and a Knight Templar, took the Scottish Rite degrees, and joined the Shrine. In 1928 Brown was first elected to statewide office in the Masonic order. That same year he served as the sixth president of the Virginia Academy of Science and as head of the Association of Virginia Colleges.
In 1928 Brown was drawn into politics. A Presbyterian elder and an ardent prohibitionist, he joined many fellow southern Democrats in supporting Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover after the Democratic Party nominated Alfred E. Smith, the Catholic governor of New York and an opponent of Prohibition. Hoover carried Virginia in the November 1928 election. Virginia's gubernatorial election of 1929 won national attention as a test of whether the desertion of the anti-Smith Democrats in 1928 was a temporary phenomenon or the beginning of effective two-party politics in the South. Virginia Democrats nominated John Garland Pollard, a Baptist layman and prohibitionist who had supported Smith in 1928. On 18 June 1929 anti-Smith Democrats chose William Moseley Brown to run against Pollard after Brown stated that he would enter the campaign if the Republicans also backed him. Eight days later the Republican state convention nominated Brown.
Brown promised a nonpartisan administration if elected governor and condemned anti-Catholicism in politics. His speeches, however, lurched between unsuccessful attempts to tie Virginia's Democrats to Smith and ineffective criticism of the popular administration of retiring governor Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966). The campaign went steadily downhill, and some Democrats circulated a leaflet that appealed for racial solidarity by predicting that a Republican victory would return the franchise to African Americans. In November Pollard and the regular Democratic Party organization defeated Brown by a margin of two to one. Brown carried only three of the state's one hundred counties and lost every congressional district.
Brown had resigned his position at Washington and Lee to run for governor. In February 1930, through the influence of state Republicans, he found work as a research associate for the president's National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. Two months later Brown announced the creation of Atlantic University in Virginia Beach, of which he was the president. The school was the brainchild of the psychic and healer Edgar Cayce. Brown had taught Cayce's son at Washington and Lee and as a psychologist had become interested in Cayce's beliefs. Unfortunately for Brown, Cayce quarreled with his financial supporters, and the school closed in 1931.
In 1932 Brown contemplated running for Congress, and he delivered a speech to the Virginia Young Republicans in 1936, but he did not again campaign for office. He served as Grand Master of Masons in Virginia in 1934, Grand Commander of the Knights Templar of Virginia the next year, and Grand High Priest of the Royal Arch Masons in Virginia in 1936. Brown became editor of the monthly Virginia Masonic Herald in August 1936. Earlier that year his Freemasonry in Virginia (1733–1936) was published, followed by Templary in the Old Dominion (1938), both of which were chronological compendiums of early Masonic documents, records of lodge charterings, and lists of officers.
At the end of 1937 Brown became director of the Vick Chemical Company's new school of applied research in New York. He resigned as executive secretary of Omicron Delta Kappa and in the spring of 1939 resigned as editor of the Masonic Herald, but he retained ties to Virginia by preparing several other volumes on Masonry in the state. During World War II Brown served in the air force and retired as lieutenant colonel in February 1954. In 1949 he became a professor of social science at Elon College in North Carolina and executive director of the Elon College Foundation. During his time at Elon, Brown published a biography of another prominent Virginia fraternal leader and independent political figure, From These Beginnings: The Life Story of Remmie LeRoy Arnold (1953). In 1960 he retired and moved to Florida. William Moseley Brown died in Saint Petersburg, Florida, on 8 January 1966 and was buried with other family members in the cemetery in Louisville, Jefferson County, Georgia. On 29 June 1966 he was reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Dr. William Moseley Brown, Independent Candidate for Governor of Virginia (1929 campaign biography, including portrait); Birth Register, Lynchburg, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Estelle Stevenson, George Cabell Moseley of Ingleside, Bedford County, Virginia [1953], 32; Virginia Masonic Herald 29 (Mar. 1934): 8–9; Commemorating the Silver Anniversary: Omicron Delta Kappa Fraternity, 1914–1939 (1939); Alvin L. Hall, "Virginia Back in the Fold: The Gubernatorial Campaign and Election of 1929," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 73 (1965): 280–302; Dr. Brown, Republican Candidate for Governor [1929]; Harmon Hartzell Bro, A Seer Out of Season: The Life of Edgar Cayce (1989), 329–336; Brown's publications also include Freemasonry in Staunton, Virginia: A Saga of Two Centuries (1949), Freemasonry in Winchester, Virginia, 1768–1948 (1949), and Blandford Lodge No. 3 A. F. & A. M. Petersburg, Virginia (1957); obituaries in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 Jan. 1966, Richmond News Leader, 10 Jan. 1966, and New York Times, 12 Jan. 1966; memorials in Virginia Masonic Herald 59 (Mar.–Apr. 1966): 10, and Virginia Journal of Science 18 (1967): 5.
Photograph in Virginia Masonic Herald, Mar. 1934.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John T. Kneebone.
How to cite this page:
John T. Kneebone, "William Moseley Brown (1894–1966)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Brown_William_Moseley, accessed [today's date]).
Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.
