Category: Academic studies

The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist

Between 1886 and 1931, Christian publishing houses in the United States offered an unprecedented biographical profile of the contemporary American evangelist as an unambiguously modern figure. Sold at tabernacle tents, Christian bookshops, and church fund-raisers, these texts simultaneously document concerns with the modern landscape as they regale readers with the styles and stories of headlining American Protestants, including Dwight Moody (1837-1899), Sam Jones (1847-1906), Reuben Archer Torrey (1856-1928), J.

Wilbur Chapman (1859-1918), Rodney “Gipsy” Smith (1860-1947), Billy Sunday (1862-1935), and Baxter “Cyclone Mac” McClendon (1879-1935). Although it is not difficult to discern distinguishing marks and regional inflections within the anecdotal particularities of these men, the overarching structure and themes of their chronologies is consistent. The purpose of this essay is to produce the beginning of a collective biography of the turn-of-the-century preacher, highlighting the persistent paradigm represented in the promotional products of these preachers. Whereas previous historians have described these men as antiquated proponents of an “old time” religion, this article argues that their narratives reveal a strikingly modern man, poised in an engaged and contradictory conflict with his contemporary moment.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Religion and American Culture

Why Women Loved Billy Sunday: Urban Revivalism and Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth-Century

Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) is well-known for an aggressively masculine platform style that was clearly aimed at attracting a male audience to his urban revival campaigns. Less recognized but equally important are Sunday’s meetings for “women only,” in which the handsome, athletic evangelist preached passionate, explicit sermons on sexual vice to an audience that had been purged of all male interlopers. Though Sunday’s ostensible purpose was to reinforce traditional Victorian morality-the sermons were originally meant to rail against birth control-the social context for his message subtly undermined its conservative aim. As is illustrated by his campaign in Boston during the winter of 1916-1917, Sunday was perceived by many of his contemporaries, both men and women, as scandalously frank to the point of sexual crudeness. Critics and supporters alike described him in the same terms they used for vaudeville and theater idols, a notion that ex-baseball player Sunday did little to dispel. Yet, evangelical Protestant women came to hear his muscular Christian message anyway. The ability of his female audiences to adapt to—and obviously enjoy— Sunday’s physical stage presence suggests that often-used terms like “feminization” and

“masculinization” are too stark to describe the transition from Victorian to modern forms of religious behavior. Women’s response to Sunday, situated at the intersection of evangelical religion and popular entertainment culture, demonstrates the durability of feminine religious tastes and suggests ways in which the blurring and confusion of formal gender categories factored into the transition from Victorian piety into the more individualized, popularized forms of religious faith in the twentieth century. Women were not passive observers in the transformation of American religion but central to the nature and direction of its survival.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Religion and American Culture

The Gospel of Efficiency: Billy Sunday’s Revival

This essay investigates the roles of Billy Sunday’s staff during his urban revivals in the 1910s, especially the committees and departments they administered. Understanding this revival organization is central to understanding Sunday’s success. A corporate organization not only allowed Sunday’s team to reach urban populations, it also put evangelicalism culturally in step with the times. This committee structure made outpourings of the Holy Spirit predictable and even guaranteed, and it helped Sunday create a revivalism for an age of mass production, one that was palatable to a cross-class and nationwide audience and reproducible in cities across the country. Most scholars of American religion are familiar with the outline of Sunday’s career, but the labors of his staff and their contributions remain virtually unexplored. Further, there is a looming historiographical problem with how scholars treat Sunday. His most important years as a revivalist were in the 1910s, before the fundamentalist movement began, but his name is virtually synonymous with fundamentalism. This article challenges scholars to interpret Progressive Era evangelicals not in terms of what they became in the 1920s, but in terms of how they shaped and were shaped by an era of urbanization and consumer capitalism.

Church History
Bureaucracy and Evangelicalism in the Progressive

TRANSFORMATION IN THE TABERNACLE: BILLY SUNDAY’S

CONVERTS AND EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Millions of Americans watched the evangelist Billy Sunday preach during the years 1905-1935, and many were profoundly affected by the experience. Using letters, published and unpublished reminiscences, and other primary source documents, this article reconstructs the emotional experience of Sunday’s converts and offers insights into the meaning of conversion and followership in Sunday’s and other similar social movements. Through their emotional responses to the evangelist, followers recast socioeconomic problems and community pressures as personal, internal crises that could be resolved through adherence to Sunday’s principles. The process of conversion was considered and volitional; it was also a long-lasting act of self-fashioning. Americans who converted in Sunday’s tabernacles thoroughly reinvented themselves as followers of Sunday and then set out to remake society according to the evangelist’s goals. Generalizing from these insights, the article argues that followership of inspirational leaders was a site of significant agency for Progressive Era Americans. It also identifies emotional experience as a way for historical figures to translate cultural trends into concrete social action. The article concludes by calling for additional research into how emotions shape and condition historical change.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2015
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The Billy and Helen Sunday Ephemera, Archives of Wheaton

What is in this collection?

Newspaper clippings, bulletins, counselor training materials, promotional pieces, correspondence, audio tapes, photographs, postcards, scrapbooks, films and other materials gathered by the Archives from varied sources, all of which relate to the Billy and/or Helen Sunday lives and evangelistic ministry. These records had no existence as a unit until they were put together by the Archives staff. Hence they are called “ephemera” as opposed to a collection of Billy and Helen Sunday materials created and maintained by the Sundays, which would be called their “papers.”

Notes: Newspaper Scrapbooks and newspaper and magazine clippings: The collection has many scrapbooks and collections of clippings for Sunday campaigns in individual cities. Usually the newspaper stories include day by day reprints of verbatim or near verbatim transcripts of Sunday’s sermons as well as stories and pictures of the campaign. Sometimes the scrapbooks contain information on more than one campaign or on other subjects than the Sunday campaign. Among the campaigns are Springfield (Illinois) in 1909 (folders 5-3, 6-7), Everett (Washington) in 1910 (folder 6-9), Omaha in 1915 (folder 6-6), Philadelphia in 1915 (folders 3-2, 4-6, 5-2, OS 36), Paterson (New Jersey) in 1915 (folder 5-2), Kansas City in 1916 (folder 5-1), Baltimore in 1916 (folder 6-2), Boston in 1916 (folders 2-10, 6-3), New York City in 1917 (folder 1-4: these articles tell how the 1917 New York City campaign was organized and details crusade finances, while other articles relate anti-Sunday sentiments from Catholics, accuse Sunday of coercion and religious bankruptcy, and mention Al Saunders, a “second Sunday.”), Cincinnati in 1921 (folder 4-1) Bluefield (West Virginia) in 1921 (folder 1-6), Columbia (South Carolina) in 1923 (folder 6-4), Memphis in 1924 (folder 6-5), Portland (Oregon) in 1925 (folder 2-8), St. Louis in 1928 (folders 1-9 through 1-26), and Iola (Kansas) in 1928 (folder 1-7). Attached to one page of clippings (folder 6-2) are four tickets to Sunday meetings in Baltimore (1916). Folder 5-3 also contains a booklet about the 1909 Springfield campaign put out immediately afterwards. It includes excerpts from Sunday’s sermons, list of his pithy sayings, biographical data on his principal helpers, endorsements from local clergy, a statement on conversions and several photos.

Microfilm reel 2 consists of a collection from the Library of Congress of materials by William L. Daley. Daley is identified by the Library as Sunday’s press agent, but if he did hold any such position, he did not hold it very long. Daley appears to have been a reporter or press agent. The microfilm contains several pages of clippings about Billy Sunday campaigns and what appear to be some notes, either of a Sunday sermon or of an article about Sunday by Daley. There are also some postcards of Billy and Helen Sunday, their associates and their evangelistic campaigns. However much, perhaps most of the material on the microfilm has no relation to Sunday, such as articles about the Teapot Dome scandal or a celebration of the anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. Most of the Sunday materials appears to date from 1915-1917. Among the Sunday campaigns for which there is some, often very fragmentary materials, are Philadelphia (1915), Syracuse (1915), Trenton (1916), Kansas City (1916), Boston (1916-1917), Buffalo (1917), and New York City (1917).

Several scrapbook pages in folder 1-5 contains information about Sunday and other evangelists, such as Rodney “Gipsy” Smith, Charles Taylor, Percy Crawford, Bob Ingersoll (cousin of the famous orator), Laurie Taylor, and Walter Kallenback. Folder 1-5 has a clipping about Annie Mac Laren, a solist during some of Sunday’s meetings. Folder 6-8 has several columns of “Sundayisms,” pithy sayings culled from Billy’s sermons which newspapers often printed daily during his meetings.

Folder 3-1 contains a collection of Sunday’s obituaries from newspapers all around the country. A booklet containing a transcript of his November 9, 1935, memorial service at Moody Church in Chicago (including the sermon by H. A. Ironside and comments by Harry Clarke and Homer Rodeheaver) is in folder 4-7.

An article by John Reed, a social activist, journalist, and the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, offered a colorful account of a Sunday crusade in Philadelphia for the Metropolitan (folder 1-3). “Ma” Sunday is portrayed as the “boss” as Reed describes her attempts to thwart an interview with Sunday. Reed also criticized the Sunday campaign as an attempt to divert the attention of the lower classes away from their problems.

Correspondence: Correspondence by or about the evangelist is found in folders 2-3 through 2-5 and 4-4. Folder 4-4 includes notes that Billy wrote to Helen, describing his preparation for the 1911 Toledo meetings. Folder 2-3 contains a letter from Sunday to a ministerial association planning a Sunday campaign which reveals some of the principles Sunday followed in his campaign planning. Folder 4-4 has xeroxes of letters from Billy Sunday to Edward Mullins on teaching evolution in schools; to Kenesaw Mountain Landis about reforming baseball; and many letters written to Sunday from well wishers in 1924 when he had to go to Mayo Clinic for treatment. The folder also contains two brief notes by Helen Sunday in the 1950s, one just a short time before her death. The other is a postcard from her to Billy Graham’s business manager, George M. Wilson. One undated letter (ca. 1921) by Helen Sunday to Mrs. Amanda H. Mann thanking her for a “basketful of flowers.” There is also in folder 4-4 a photocopy of a letter from Mrs. Sunday to Frank J. Stroner in which she talks about the death of her children and Billy Sunday’s history.Folder 2-4 contains letters from W. B. Millar and folder 2-5 has miscellaneous letters with stories and information about the evangelist written after his death. There is a manuscript by Frederick Cramer about Billy’s connections with Hood River, Oregon, and those of his brother Ed (Harold Edward) and Ed’s grandson Harry Ashley Sunday.

Miscellaneous: The collection also includes sermons (folder 3-6) written after her husband’s death by Helen Sunday, a prolific speaker and teacher in her own right. Other materials about Sunday (folder 3-3) include a ticket to a Sunday speech sponsored by a temperance society in July of 1931, a small handbill recording Sunday’s endorsement of Wheaton College, a newsprint flyer, published in New Jersey, in which Sunday promotes women’s suffrage circa 1915, a souvenir booklet describing in some detail the 1909 Spokane campaign, and picture postcards (in the photo file, see photograph location record). There is also a photocopy from a hymn book about Sunday associate Florence Kinney. Several pages of loose-leaf sheet music, Billy Sunday’s Victory March, (ca. 1913) by Herbert S. Frank are in folder 6-10.

Several folders contain publicity materials concerning Sunday and his song leader, Homer Rodeheaver. A handbill advertising the Sunday Youngstown (Ohio) campaign held in January and February, 1910, is found in folder 2-7. Promotional material for Billy Sunday: The Man and His Message by William Ellis is contained in folder 1-2. Several copies of The Y.W.C.A. Bulletin in folder 3-4 contain news of Sunday’s New York campaign and folder 1-4 includes a special promotion of the New York American at the price of $1.50 for three months featuring complete coverage of the New York meetings.

Especially interesting, in view of the common criticism that Sunday did not work with converts after they had responded to his sermon, are the tracts in folder 2-2 which outline the Sunday method of evangelism, counseling, and follow-up. There is also a copy of the brochure given to converts on how to live the Christian life. The same folder contains other forms used during campaigns. For example, shares were sold during Sunday’s campaigns to raise money to build the wooden tabernacle. After the meetings, the lumber would be sold and the money divided among the shareholders. One of these certificates for the Paterson, New Jersey, campaign is in the folder, as are the blank check forms that were used for the offering for Sunday which was traditionally taken at the last service of the campaign. There are also two items from the 1924 Charlotte campaign.

Series: Audio/Visual materials

Arrangement: Numerically by item number assigned by the Archives

Date Range: 1920-1965; n.d.

Volume: 0.34 Cubic Feet

Geographic coverage: United States

Type of documents: 2 audio tapes, 1 film, 1 phonograph record, 1 video

Notes: The individual items are described on their location records. The film Billy Sunday (F1, V1) is a documentary on his life and work; it contains newsreel footage of Sunday’s meetings and preaching and includes an appearance by Homer Rodeheaver telling anecdotes about Sunday.