The following article excerpt was carried in several newspapers in mid August 1910.
MIDDLE WEST HAS A RELIGIOUS FERMENT
In Chicago Itself Other World Matters Have the Floor.
“The rest of the country can hardly realize the breadth and the depth and the fervor of the spiritual tumult which is stirring the Middle West with Chicago as its center. Chicago newspapers regularly carry columns of sermons in their paid advertising columns. In Chicago street cars are displayed glaring placards advertising the “Book of Mormon,” and 48,000 copies have been sold in the city during the past two or three years. Billboards are covered with big four-sheet posters in colors, calling upon the public to attend great free mass meetings in the Coliseum, with a gospel choir of 2000 voices as the special attraction. Every Sunday morning the Auditorium—the largest theater in the city—is packed with the congregation of Central Church, and every Sunday evening Orchestra Hall is filled with people attending the religious services, which are supported by a voluntary club of Chicago business men. And during the clement season of each recent year scores of Middle West towns, with populations of ten and twenty thousand people, have practically dropped all their ordinary occupations and given themselves over for weeks at a time to a strange, fanatical religious ecstasy, under the acrobatic ministrations of “Billy” Sunday, baseball evangelist. And these are only the more normal the more nearly orthodox manifestations of the spiritual unrest.”—Henry M. Hyde in Collier’s.
The Buffalo News. Tue, Aug 16, 1910 ·Page 5
Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) 