Category: Campaign

The Brighton editors and the rubber gloves, c. 1907

Three different ways Billy Sunday handled the journalists who came after him — and the prayer that became the most quotable single passage in the entire archive.

There was a small patent-inside newspaper in Brighton, Iowa — a town about fifteen miles southeast of Fairfield. Sometime in late April or early May of 1907, while Billy Sunday was preaching his Fairfield revival, the Brighton editors took it on themselves to publish a piece calling him a “grafter.”

“Grafter” in 1907 was a heavy word. It meant a fraud, a fake, a man who lined his pockets in religion’s name. The American press had spent the previous decade leveling the charge against figures like John Alexander Dowie, the Zion City prophet whose Illinois utopia had collapsed in 1906 under accusations of financial impropriety. To call a working evangelist a grafter in 1907 was to put him in Dowie’s category. It was a serious attack.

Lindsay Denison, the New York reporter writing his American Magazine piece from the Fairfield press table, watched Sunday hold the attack inside himself for three days. Denison noted that Sunday is “slow to discuss these criticisms of his comfortable income; he knows that he is likely to lose his temper.” For three days, Sunday said nothing publicly about the Brighton editors.

On the fourth day, he prayed about them. The prayer is worth reading in full:

Oh, dear Lord Jesus, save Fairfield! Bless Mount Pleasant, Stockport and Birmingham and Batavia and—er—bless— [the evangelist opened his eyes, turned around and in an ordinary conversational tone questioned his secretary]: What was that town we went to the other day, over there on the railroad, Honeywell? Oh, yes, Eldon. [Again closing his eyes and presuming the higher pitched tone of addressing the Almighty]—Bless Eldon, dear Lord, and Packwood and Richland and Pleasant Plain. And O dear Lord, if you think its any use, you might tackle those Brighton editors. But, dear Lord, be careful—take along a bottle of disinfectant. I don’t know as you can do much with them, Jesus, but if you think its worth while, try it, Lord, try it! And if you try it, here’s a pointer, Lord, wear rubber gloves.

Denison watched the Fairfield congregation react. “From the bowed heads,” he wrote, “there rolled up a queer smothered clucking sound, followed by a cheerful roar of amens mingled with fervent assurances: ‘Yes, Lord, that’s right.'” After the benediction, Denison mingled with the audience. Not one person complained about the wording of the prayer. Several came up to him to congratulate one another that “those ‘limbs of Satan had been set out like they deserved.'”

It was, in three sentences of public prayer, a complete demolition of the Brighton editors as community figures. Sunday had not named them. He had not described what they had written. He had not defended himself against the accusation. He had simply asked the Lord to consider taking them on, while warning Him to bring disinfectant and wear gloves.

Three ways to handle a press attack

The Brighton prayer is the middle entry in what was, by 1907, a small but distinguishable catalog of Sunday techniques for dealing with newspaper editors who came after him. Three different attacks, three different responses, all preserved in the contemporary record between July 1905 and August 1907.

Sterling, 1905: counterattack from the platform

In July of 1905, Sunday spoke at the Sterling, Illinois Chautauqua to fifteen thousand people — the largest audience of his platform career to that point. The previous year, an East Coast literary celebrity named Elbert Hubbard, editor of a magazine called The Philistine, had taken a public swipe at Sunday. The Hubbard piece had called him, among other things, a grafter.

Sunday spent half of his two-hour Sterling talk on Hubbard. The Quad-City Times of July 17 carried the demolition in detail. Sunday, “coatless, vestless and with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows,” called Hubbard “good for nothing, indecent, pusillanimous, and a blot on humanity.” He called The Philistine “the result of the workers of the devil and a carbuncle on the neck of humanity.” Almost every sentence was applauded.

The Sterling response was Sunday’s first option. Direct counterattack. Loud, sustained, in front of the largest audience he could find, with the magazine and its editor named explicitly. The technique works when the attacker is famous enough that the audience knows who he is. Hubbard, at the height of his celebrity in 1905, qualified. The Sterling Chautauqua audience knew exactly what Sunday was demolishing, and they cheered it.

Brighton, 1907: weaponize the prayer

The Brighton editors were not Elbert Hubbard. They were small-town Iowa newspapermen running a patent-inside paper — the kind of publication that bought its inside pages pre-printed from a central syndicator and filled the front and back with local news. Their reach was a few hundred subscribers. The audience at the Fairfield tabernacle had probably mostly never heard of them.

A Sterling-style counterattack would have been wasted on opponents that obscure. Sunday’s second option was different: bring the attackers into the room without describing them, and let the audience’s communal sense of grievance do the work. The rubber-gloves prayer named no names and described no charges. It simply asked God to consider tackling “those Brighton editors” with appropriate sanitary precautions. The Fairfield audience knew, by the time Sunday said the word “Brighton,” exactly who he was praying about and why. They roared their assent.

The technique works when the attacker is too obscure to be worth a direct response but too local to be ignored. The prayer turns a personal grievance into a communal score-settling, with God as the agent. Sunday’s grievance becomes the audience’s grievance. The Brighton editors become a town joke. And the joke travels — first by word of mouth around southeast Iowa, and then, two months later, by national magazine. The American Magazine reached several hundred thousand readers in September 1907. Most of them had never heard of Brighton, Iowa. After September 1907, all of them had.

Charles City, 1907: ignore entirely

In mid-August of 1907, while Sunday was working the heaviest stretch of his Chautauqua summer schedule, the Charles City Herald published a long editorial attack on him. The Herald called his sermons “vile and sloppy” and his platform antics “what might be expected from a Comanche Indian.” It called him “a sideshow to the chautauqua.”

Sunday said nothing. The Charles City piece survives in the regional newspaper archive because other papers printed excerpts and the curated Sunday Master Speaking List preserves the citation. But Sunday himself, as far as the record shows, never publicly responded. No Sterling-style counterattack. No Brighton-style weaponized prayer. Just silence.

The third option works when the attacker is hostile enough that direct engagement would only amplify the attack. The Charles City editor wanted a fight. Sunday declined to give him one. The piece traveled only as far as a few regional papers and a few archived editorial columns. It was, in practical terms, a forgotten attack within months. By choosing not to respond, Sunday denied the editor the oxygen the editor was clearly looking for.

The pattern

By the summer of 1907 Sunday had worked out a usable approach to press attacks. Famous attackers got the Sterling treatment — counterattack from the largest platform available. Obscure local attackers got the Brighton treatment — communal score-settling through public prayer. Hostile but minor attackers got the Charles City treatment — silence and indifference. Each technique fit the situation, and Sunday applied them with a judgment that suggests he had thought about it more than he ever publicly admitted.

The Brighton prayer is the most readable of the three. It is also, in some ways, the most ruthless. The Sterling roast at least gave Elbert Hubbard the dignity of being named — and named at length, in front of a vast audience, with his magazine and his work specifically denounced. The Charles City silence at least gave the Herald editor the absence of a fight he was looking for. The Brighton editors got something different. They got Sunday’s wry humor turned on them in a community ceremony, with the entire Fairfield audience laughing along, with their professional integrity reduced to a recommended bottle of disinfectant and a pair of rubber gloves. They had wanted to call Billy Sunday a grafter. He had let them sit with the consequence of having said so.

The prayer also illustrates the side of Billy Sunday that biographers have always found hardest to capture. Sunday was a man who could be wounded by a small-town newspaper attack and who would hold the wound for three days before speaking. He was also a man who could turn that wound into a public prayer that the entire town would still be quoting weeks later. The Brighton editors had no idea, when they sat down to write their piece, that they were about to become a national-magazine joke in The American Magazine of September 1907. Sunday probably did not know either when he composed the prayer. But the prayer worked. It traveled. And the rubber gloves, more than a century later, are still doing their work.

Sources: Lindsay Denison, “The Rev. Billy Sunday and His War on the Devil,” The American Magazine, Vol. LXIV, No. 5, September 1907; Quad-City Times (Davenport, IA), July 17, 1905, p. 2; Charles City (IA) Herald, August 1907.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Brighton Editors and the Rubber Gloves, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 25, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/25/the-brighton-editors-and-the-rubber-gloves-c-1907/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Brighton Editors and the Rubber Gloves, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 25 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/25/the-brighton-editors-and-the-rubber-gloves-c-1907/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 25). The Brighton editors and the rubber gloves, c. 1907. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/25/the-brighton-editors-and-the-rubber-gloves-c-1907/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Brighton Editors and the Rubber Gloves, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 25, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/25/the-brighton-editors-and-the-rubber-gloves-c-1907/.

The Gibson City decision, c. 1907

In the summer of 1907, Billy Sunday’s son was born on the opening day of a revival. A few weeks later, in the middle of the same revival, his brother died. Sunday did not go to the funeral.

Gibson City, Illinois was a small Ford County town of about twenty-five hundred people. In the summer of 1907 the local committee invited Billy Sunday to hold a revival, and the campaign opened on Thursday, June 13. The town had built a temporary tabernacle. The choir had been organized. The cottage prayer meetings had been running for weeks. By the time Sunday left Gibson City a month later in mid-July, more than eleven hundred people would have come forward as converts and Sunday’s purse would come in at thirty-six hundred dollars — entirely standard numbers for a Sunday revival by 1907.

What was not standard was what happened to the Sunday family during those four weeks.

A son and a brother

On the opening day of the Gibson City campaign — June 13, 1907 — Helen Sunday gave birth to a son. They named him Paul. Helen and the baby were in Chicago. Billy was in central Illinois, standing on the platform of a tabernacle a hundred and fifty miles south of his wife and his newborn, preaching his opening sermon to a Gibson City audience that had been waiting for him for weeks.

A few weeks later, sometime in early July, a telegram reached him in Gibson City. His brother had died in Iowa. The funeral was being arranged.

There is no surviving record of which brother it was, or what he died of, or how old he was. The Sunday family records of this period are not detailed enough to recover those facts. What the contemporary newspaper record does confirm is that Sunday received the news in the middle of the Gibson City campaign, and that he made the decision not to leave for the funeral.

He stayed. He preached.

What he gave up

The Gibson City campaign also cost Sunday something else that summer. He had declined several Chautauqua bookings to do the revival. In 1907 the Chautauqua circuit was where Sunday was earning the bulk of his summer income — he would deliver eighty-six lectures that season for about forty-three thousand dollars in total, the equivalent of more than a million and a half dollars today. By choosing a four-week revival in a town of twenty-five hundred people in the middle of his peak earning season, he was knowingly giving up a substantial piece of his year.

Gibson City, ILL. Presbyterian Church. C. 1910

The Gibson City committee had asked for him. He had said yes. By the time the campaign opened on June 13 he had committed to staying. His son’s birth on that opening day did not change the commitment. His brother’s death a few weeks later did not change it either. The Iowa Lyceum Bureau had sued him for breach of contract back in late June for missing a single Chautauqua date he had walked away from in order to extend a different revival. Sunday’s defense in that lawsuit had been straightforward: his evangelistic work, he said, ought to have preference over Chautauqua dates.

Gibson City was the same principle applied. Sunday had given a town his word. He kept it. The town got him for four weeks. His family did not.

What he preached

Two sermons from the Gibson City campaign were transcribed in regional newspapers in August and so survive into the record. One was based on a verse from the Gospel of John, chapter seven, verse seventeen — “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” It was a sermon about willingness, about the believer’s choice to step forward. The other, transcribed a week later, was a sermon titled simply “Hell.”

Neither sermon mentioned the brother. Neither sermon mentioned the baby. Neither sermon mentioned the funeral Sunday had not attended. Whatever the inner cost of those four weeks was, Sunday did not preach it from the Gibson City platform. He preached, as he always did, on the standard themes — the willingness of the human heart, the reality of God’s judgment, the inescapability of the choice he was demanding his audience to make.

The Gibson City crowd would not have known. The newspaper editors who later transcribed and reprinted his sermons would not have known. The Champion Daily News of July 15, when it reported the close of the campaign with its eleven hundred converts and Sunday’s purse and the standard summary statistics, did not mention the brother or the baby. The only people who knew, that summer, were Sunday and Helen and a few members of the team.

The cost of saying yes

A few weeks after Gibson City closed, Sunday traveled to Joliet, Illinois to open the brand-new Chautauqua assembly at Dellwood Park. The auditorium was a new four-thousand-seat steel structure — the most expensive Chautauqua building in the country. Sunday spoke on the opening night, August 30, on a sermon titled “Grounders Hot Off the Bat.” A reporter for the Joliet Daily News watched him closely and wrote a piece the next day called “Billy Sunday As He Is, Spoke.” The piece is preserved in full and is hard to read in light of what had just happened to him a few weeks earlier:

He still looks more like a baseball player than a preacher, talks more in the manner of a heavy hitter than a gentleman of the cloth, and, judging from his frenzied utterances, thinks more like one as well. He works as hard on the stage as he ever did on the diamond, and his voice is worn nearly to shreds by long-continued gospel shouting.

The voice worn nearly to shreds. The hay fever that had been getting worse all summer. The dropped handkerchief in front of four thousand people. And then, at the end of his Joliet appearance, the announcement that Sunday made to the press: he was going to cut back on Chautauqua speaking after the season. The constant travel was eating into the rest he needed for his evangelistic work.

It is, in retrospect, the closest thing in the record to Billy Sunday saying out loud what Gibson City had cost him. The constant travel. The schedule. The yes-after-yes-after-yes to revival committees and Chautauqua bureaus and ministerial associations. The decision, made each time, to honor the commitment over the family. He did not, in fact, cut back in 1908. The summer Chautauqua schedule for the next year was already being booked. The big-city revivals were already being negotiated. The arc of his life had committed itself.

What we do not know

The historical record does not tell us what Helen said to Billy when she got to him after the Gibson City campaign closed. It does not tell us whether Billy made it to Iowa to see his brother’s grave that fall, or whether he ever did. It does not tell us how Paul’s first weeks of life unfolded in Chicago while his father was preaching a hundred and fifty miles away. It does not tell us what Sunday thought about, alone in his hotel rooms during the campaign, after the choir went home and Fred Fischer locked up the tabernacle and the Gibson City town fell quiet for the night.

What the record does tell us is that Sunday’s three other children — George, William Jr., and Helen, all of whom had been born in earlier years — would later grow up with a father who was almost never home. Paul, born on the opening day of the Gibson City revival, would grow up the same way. He would die young, in his twenties, in 1930 — twenty-three years after the campaign that opened on the day he was born.

All four Sunday children would, in different ways, struggle with the absence of their father during their childhoods. Three would predecease their parents. Helen and Billy outlived almost everyone they raised.

The Gibson City decision is in the record as just one moment among hundreds. The brother’s name does not survive. The funeral details are gone. The eleven hundred and fifty conversions and the thirty-six hundred dollar purse and the cottage prayer meetings are all preserved in the local Champion Daily News and the regional papers. The four weeks of Sunday preaching to the Gibson City audience while his newborn was in Chicago and his brother was being buried in Iowa are not preserved anywhere except in the gap between the dates.

He had said yes to the Gibson City committee. He kept his word. The committee got what they had been promised. He preached the campaign. He filled the tabernacle. He saw the conversions to the end. He drew his purse. He moved on to the next town.

It was a cost he chose to pay. It is also one of the quietest pieces of the Billy Sunday story, and one of the hardest to look at squarely. He paid it more than once.

Sources: Bloomington Weekly Pantagraph, June 14, 1907; The Davenport Daily Times, July 4 and July 17, 1907; The Joliet Herald News, July 9, 1907; Gibson City Courier, July 12, 1907; The Champion Daily News, July 15, 1907; The Joliet Daily News, August 31, 1907.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Gibson City Decision, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 23, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/23/the-gibson-city-decision-c-1907/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Gibson City Decision, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 23 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/23/the-gibson-city-decision-c-1907/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 23). The Gibson City decision, c. 1907. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/23/the-gibson-city-decision-c-1907/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Gibson City Decision, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 23, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/23/the-gibson-city-decision-c-1907/.

Lindsay Denison goes to Fairfield. c. 1907

The summer a New York reporter boarded a train for southeast Iowa to find out what Billy Sunday actually did — and came back having seen something he had never seen at a Yale-Harvard boat race.

Sometime in April of 1907, a man named Lindsay Denison stepped off a train at the depot in Fairfield, Iowa. He had come from New York. He was a writer for The American Magazine, a glossy monthly with several hundred thousand readers — one of the major national magazines of the period. He had been sent to a southeast Iowa town of about five thousand people to write about a former major-league baseball player turned evangelist named William A. Sunday. The piece he eventually filed, titled “The Rev. Billy Sunday and His War on the Devil,” ran in the September 1907 issue as the magazine’s lead article. It is the longest and most carefully observed contemporary account of Billy Sunday’s revival method that survives from his pre-1910 ministry.

It is also one of the strangest things to read in 2026. Denison had walked into Fairfield as a sophisticated New York journalist expecting to write a polite ethnographic piece about Midwestern revivalism. He walked out having seen Sunday smash a chair on a platform to demonstrate a drunkard murdering his child, watched 1,118 people in a town of five thousand walk down an aisle to confess Christ, heard Sunday pray for newspaper editors who had called him a grafter — asking the Lord to “take along a bottle of disinfectant” and “wear rubber gloves” — and seen a closing-night service that he could only compare to the celebration after a Yale-Harvard boat race.

I have seen many a university foot-ball victory celebration; I have seen several riots of joy after a Yale-Harvard boat race; I was in the headquarters of District Attorney Jerome of New York when the word came, on election night, that he had beaten independently the candidates of all the regular parties. But I have never seen any crowd more beside itself than was the congregation of the tabernacle when that meeting was over.

It is one of the most extraordinary single sentences ever written about an American religious event. A national-magazine reporter putting a small-town Iowa revival closing service alongside the most famous celebrations of the early twentieth century — Yale-Harvard, an election-night district-attorney upset, the rolling crowds of Ivy League football season — and ranking it first.

A town and a reporter

Fairfield was not an obvious revival town. Denison described it carefully — and with the slight condescension that New York writers in 1907 reserved for Midwestern county seats — as “a little more conventional and a little less given to emotion in its enthusiasms than most towns of the great middle west.” It was prosperous, well-painted, and full of New England transplants who said “shawn’t” and “cawn’t” to one another at the curb. It was a prohibition town. It had Judson College. It had what Denison called “a sense of righteousness rather exceeding that of most New England villages.” Sunday himself had approached it with misgivings. He told the local committee that Fairfield was “likely to be a tough proposition” because it was already a town of church members.

Denison was no friend of revivalism going in. The Brooklyn-born reporter had been writing for The American Magazine since its 1906 founding and was part of the broader muckraker movement that included Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker. The magazine was edited by men with very little patience for old-time religion. Denison arrived expecting to write a piece that would tell his New York readers what was actually happening in the small towns of the Mississippi Valley. He had no particular reason, before he arrived, to be impressed.

What he found in the tabernacle

The first sermon Denison heard, Sunday ripped off his coat, his waistcoat, his tie, and his collar. By the time it was over, the drops of sweat were flying from his brow and ears. The pulpit was being beaten on. The Devil was being execrated. Six weeks later, when the campaign closed, Denison had filled a notebook with what may be the most carefully transcribed Sunday sermon excerpts that survive from this period.

He watched Sunday do the long sermon on temptation, with Sunday playing the role of the Devil himself in the wilderness — “Are you the man that’s been going up and down the country passing as the Son of God?” — while pointing across the audience at a man who had spent sixty dollars on tobacco in two years while telling his wife he could not afford a new dress for her. He watched Sunday point at a different man and accuse him of buying alcohol “back of the drug store prescription counter” under the pretext of “buying medicine for the baby.” He watched a row of teenage boys slide down on their benches in modest panic when Sunday turned and called them out about “that girl over at Ottumwa.” He watched the seven Fairfield ministers — Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians and the rest — first wince at the methods, then huddle to discuss whether to allow the revival to continue, and then, by the end, leap to their feet at Sunday’s call for the audience to “give Christ the Chautauqua salute.”

Most strikingly, Denison watched Sunday physically act out a Pentecost-era sermon about a Chicago workingman named George who came home drunk on a Saturday night, beat his wife unconscious on the bedroom floor while the little curly-haired baby cried “Papa, don’t hurt Mamma!” — and then, in Denison’s transcription, Sunday seized a chair from the platform, swung it over his head, smashed it down onto the floor to demonstrate the killing blow, and let the legs splinter as he gasped through the rest of the story. The same Sunday who would, on the closing day, be cheered for half an hour by three thousand people standing on their tables.

Rev. Pearse Pinch breaks first

The first Fairfield minister to fully convert to Sunday’s methods, as Denison documented him, was the Rev. Pearse Pinch of the local Congregationalist Church. At the close of one of the meetings he gave Denison a quote that is perhaps the cleanest single articulation in the entire archive of how a traditional Midwestern Protestant minister came to terms with Billy Sunday:

Why, my dear sir, the man has trampled all over me and my theology. He has kicked my teachings up and down that platform like a football. He has outraged every ideal I have had regarding my sacred profession. But what does that count, as against the results he has accomplished? My congregation will be increased by hundreds. I didn’t do it. Sunday did it. It is for me to humble myself and thank God for his help. He is doing God’s work. That I do know!

Pinch’s words capture the central tension of Sunday’s career better than perhaps any other contemporary statement. The man’s methods were impossible. His theology was, by most professional standards, embarrassing. He talked to people about God the way other people talked across a counter or a dinner table. And yet the results talked. The congregations grew. The deathbed conversions held. The drunkards stopped drinking. The new church members joined and stayed. By 1906 the published stickiness studies were showing 75 to 80 percent of converts still in the faith years later. Pearse Pinch could either keep his theology and watch his church empty, or trample on his theology and watch his church fill. He chose the second.

The Brighton editors prayer

The most quotable single passage Denison preserved from the Fairfield campaign was Sunday’s prayer about the editors of a small patent-inside newspaper in nearby Brighton, who had called him a “grafter” in print. The prayer is worth reading in full:

Oh, dear Lord Jesus, save Fairfield! Bless Mount Pleasant, Stockport and Birmingham and Batavia and—er—bless— [the evangelist opened his eyes, turned around and in an ordinary conversational tone questioned his secretary]: What was that town we went to the other day, over there on the railroad, Honeywell? Oh, yes, Eldon. [Again closing his eyes and presuming the higher pitched tone of addressing the Almighty]—Bless Eldon, dear Lord, and Packwood and Richland and Pleasant Plain. And O dear Lord, if you think its any use, you might tackle those Brighton editors. But, dear Lord, be careful—take along a bottle of disinfectant. I don’t know as you can do much with them, Jesus, but if you think its worth while, try it, Lord, try it! And if you try it, here’s a pointer, Lord, wear rubber gloves.

Denison watched the audience react to the prayer. “From the bowed heads there rolled up a queer smothered clucking sound, followed by a cheerful roar of amens mingled with fervent assurances: ‘Yes, Lord, that’s right.'” Mingling with the crowd after the benediction, he heard not one congregant complain about the wording. Several came up to him and congratulated each other “that those ‘limbs of Satan had been set out like they deserved.'”

It is the kind of prayer that should not work and yet, when you read it carefully in Denison’s transcription, exposes exactly how Sunday actually worked. The pause to consult his secretary on the name of a small town. The shift from conversational tone back into formal prayer cadence. The wry humor in the middle. The genuine pastoral concern for actual towns Sunday had visited and would visit again. And the closing flourish — the rubber gloves — that turned the whole prayer from polite Christian charity into the kind of communal score-settling that the Fairfield audience went home talking about. Sunday’s prayers, like his sermons, were never quite what the traditional pastors expected them to be. They worked anyway. They worked because they worked.

The closing service

The Fairfield campaign closed on a Sunday in May with three services: a morning meeting open to all, an afternoon meeting for men only (Sunday’s “Booze” sermon, drawing the entire local company of state militia in full uniform along with the workmen of the Iowa Malleable Iron Works), and a final night meeting. Denison sat through all three. The afternoon meeting produced eighty conversions, and Sunday’s preaching had been so effective that the next morning the two express companies in Fairfield had to report that three barrels of beer consigned to local citizens had been repudiated on delivery. The agents had written in the official remarks column of the delivery records: “Cause.—Influence of sermons of Rev. W. Sunday.”

The night meeting was something different. By six o’clock — a half hour before the doors opened — long streams of disappointed people were already trudging back to town in the rain because they could not get inside. The tabernacle was packed by people who had skipped supper. By the time Sunday closed the night with his sermon on “To-morrow” — the same sermon that, two years later, he would use to invent his signature closing call at Spokane — the audience was in a state that Denison described as “tense fervor” that made “the very air tingle.”

The conversions came from every direction. “Girls and old women; gray-bearded veterans and school boys in their first trousers; rich men and poor.” Denison watched Fred Seibert, the former cowpuncher who handled the Sunday operation’s logistics, drag a shy weak-faced boy down the aisle by his collar. He watched a shabbily dressed red-haired girl with her hat knocked askew run to the third bench and throw her arms around the boy’s neck, weeping. He watched Frederic Fischer, Sunday’s music director, organize the postservice singing into a kind of structured euphoria — first hymns, then whistled choruses, then the same melodies hummed.

When the final count came in — 1,118 souls won for Christ in the Fairfield campaign — Denison wrote down the comparison that has made his article unforgettable: he had never seen any American crowd more beside itself, not at Yale-Harvard, not at an election-night party headquarters, not at a college football victory.

“Bless our friend Denison”

The last public mention Sunday made of Lindsay Denison from the Fairfield pulpit came in the closing prayer at the final night meeting. Sunday had a habit of working through the towns and people he wanted to bless by name. The closing Fairfield prayer ran past the city marshals, the county officers, the doctors and lawyers, the grocers and dry goods merchants, the bankers, the livery men, the barbers, the blacksmiths, the newspaper men, the hotels, the schoolteachers, the restaurant keepers — and then:

Bless our friend Denison, who has come all the way from New York for THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE.

It is one of the more touching small moments in the entire Sunday archive. The evangelist taking a moment in the closing prayer of a six-week revival to ask God’s blessing on the New York reporter who had just spent a month sitting at the press table, watching Sunday do everything Sunday did, and writing it down for several hundred thousand American Magazine readers. Denison had come prepared to be a skeptic. Sunday treated him as a brother. And Denison, when he sat down to write his eight-thousand-word piece six weeks later, gave Sunday what may still be the fairest, most observant, and most affectionate full-length portrait of his preaching method that exists from his entire career.

What it meant

The Denison piece changed what Billy Sunday was. Until September of 1907, Sunday was a regional phenomenon — known across the upper Midwest, written up in the small county-seat papers and the regional dailies, occasionally noted in Chicago or St. Louis. After the American Magazine piece, he was a national figure. The magazine’s circulation reached hundreds of thousands of subscribers in every part of the country. Sunday’s name, his methods, his theology, his sermon excerpts, his prayer about the Brighton editors, his physical chair-smashing, his closing-night Yale-Harvard-grade audience euphoria — all of it now circulated in places that Sunday himself had never visited and would not visit for years.

The piece did not invent Billy Sunday. It documented him at exactly the moment when his career was about to scale beyond the small-town circuit and into the cities. The 1908 Sharon revival in Pennsylvania, the 1909 Spokane breakthrough, the great urban tabernacle campaigns of the 1910s — all of them were already coming, with or without the American Magazine. But the Denison piece is the closest thing we have to a definitive contemporary portrait of Sunday at the exact moment when his small-town method had been fully refined and was about to be deployed against the major American cities.

Lindsay Denison watched the whole thing for six weeks and went back to New York to write it up. He saw what he saw and he reported what he reported. The piece he filed is, more than a century later, one of the half-dozen most useful primary sources we have for understanding what Billy Sunday actually did in front of an audience. The chair-smashing. The rubber gloves prayer. The three barrels of beer returned to sender. The Yale-Harvard comparison. The Rev. Pearse Pinch acknowledging that his theology had been kicked around like a football and that he was going to thank God for it anyway.

Bless our friend Denison.

Source: Lindsay Denison, “The Rev. Billy Sunday and His War on the Devil,” The American Magazine, Vol. LXIV, No. 5, September 1907, illustrated with photographs by Masters of Princeton, Ill. and others. All direct quotations are from Denison’s article.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “Lindsay Denison Goes to Fairfield, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 21, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/21/lindsay-denison-goes-to-fairfield-c-1907/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “Lindsay Denison Goes to Fairfield, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 21 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/21/lindsay-denison-goes-to-fairfield-c-1907/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 21). Lindsay Denison goes to Fairfield, c. 1907. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/21/lindsay-denison-goes-to-fairfield-c-1907/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “Lindsay Denison Goes to Fairfield, c. 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 21, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/21/lindsay-denison-goes-to-fairfield-c-1907/.

The year the city took Billy Sunday: 1909

A horsewhipping at the pulpit, a governor’s conversion, a record offering at Patterson Springs, and a chance meeting on a Kansas Chautauqua platform that would change the rest of his life.

On Christmas Day of 1908, Billy Sunday and his family stepped off a train at Spokane, Washington. They had been expected five days earlier. The Spokane campaign committee had built an eight-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle for the occasion at a cost of more than four thousand dollars, and the city had been waiting since December 20.

Sunday was about to preach the first revival of his career in an American city of more than one hundred thousand people. Up to that point, every revival he had ever conducted had been in a town of under fifty thousand — usually under twenty thousand, and often under five thousand. Spokane was a real city: railroad terminus, regional commercial center, a population of well over a hundred thousand spread across several rapidly growing residential districts. The question that the Spokane campaign was going to answer was whether the revival method Sunday had built in Iowa river towns and Illinois county seats would actually scale.

By the time he left Spokane in mid-February of 1909, he had his answer. Over five thousand six hundred people had come forward as converts. His purse came in at ten thousand dollars. The local saloons were reporting almost no business. Newspapers across the country were running headlines like “Beer Sales Fall. Bibles in Demand.” Roger Bruns, who would later write the standard scholarly biography of Sunday, summarized the moment this way: Spokane was where “the focus was now on where Billy could reach the masses.”

The Sunday method scaled. The big city wanted what the small town had been getting. 1909 became, almost overnight, the year that turned a Midwestern revivalist into an American institution.

A first city, a first “Tomorrow”

The Spokane campaign produced a number of firsts. The first big-city tabernacle. The first major lobbying operation built around a Sunday revival — one hundred and ten “representative men” sent on a special train to Olympia to lobby the Washington state legislature for a county-unit option bill while Sunday gave his “Booze” sermon back home, twice. The first organized homeless-relief effort attached to a Sunday campaign, during a cold wave that hit Spokane mid-campaign. Sunday personally helped feed and shelter hundreds of homeless men through the local churches.

Spokjane, Washing Sunday campaign

And, on the final day of the campaign, the first use of “Tomorrow” as a closing sermon. The sermon that would, more than any other Sunday delivered in his entire career, become his signature emotional closing. The text was simple: do not put off until tomorrow what you must decide today. The delivery, by every contemporary description, was relentless. The Spokane Spokesman-Review of February 11 carried the headline that captured what had just happened in their city: “Beer Sales Fall. Bibles in Demand.”

The detailed church-by-church convert tally from Spokane is the kind of thing that makes the modern researcher pause. Emmanuel Baptist took in 45 new members. First Methodist Episcopal, 360. First Methodist, 270. Westminster Congregational, 30. Central Christian, about 60. First Baptist, over 80. Plymouth Congregational, about 50. All Saints Episcopal, 12. Holy Trinity Episcopal and Our Lady of Lourdes, none. The Sunday method had divided Spokane’s churches into those that could metabolize the revival’s converts and those that could not.

Springfield: a governor and an assault

The Spokane campaign closed February 10. Sunday opened his next revival in Springfield, Illinois on February 26 — sixteen days later. The Springfield campaign would run six weeks, draw over six hundred thousand cumulative attendees, and produce forty-seven hundred conversions, including a remarkable seven hundred and seventy-four conversions on the final day. Sunday’s purse came in at ten thousand seven hundred and thirty-four dollars. The total offering for the campaign reached over twenty thousand.

Two moments from Springfield stand out among everything that happened in 1909. The first occurred during the very opening of the campaign. Eight thousand people were in the tabernacle for the first night. As Sunday stood at the pulpit beginning his opening sermon, a man named Sherman Potts — a religious fanatic from near Lexington, Illinois, who had previously been committed to the Jacksonville insane asylum — walked up the center aisle, climbed onto the platform, and began horsewhipping Billy Sunday.

Sunday did what a man who had spent his twenties as a major-league outfielder might be expected to do. He leaped from the platform, knocked Potts to the ground, and held him there. The choir, on the platform behind, kept singing. The tabernacle did not empty. The Britt News of Iowa carried the story on March 4. The Spokane Chronicle, when it picked the piece up months later, ran a lengthy article on Potts himself. The assault did not interrupt the revival. The papers, in fact, treated it as a story about Sunday’s coolness under attack.

The second moment occurred on the final day, April 11. Governor Charles Deneen of Illinois and his family were among the seven hundred and seventy-four conversions that day. Governor Deneen joined First Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield. A sitting state governor being converted at a Billy Sunday revival was a story that traveled — and a quiet political proof of how thoroughly Sunday had now entered the country’s mainstream civic life.

Sunday himself was unsatisfied with the Springfield numbers. His private take, later reported in the press, was that “personal work was not begun early enough.” Forty-seven hundred conversions, six hundred thousand cumulative attendance, twenty thousand dollars in offerings, the governor of Illinois joining the church on the final day — and Sunday thought he had not done enough. He was, by this point, his own hardest critic.

Marshalltown comes home

After Springfield, Sunday returned to Marshalltown, Iowa — a town of just over thirteen thousand people where he had briefly lived in the early 1890s. It was, in every sense, a homecoming campaign. The five-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle stood at the corner of Third and Main. The campaign ran six weeks, from late April through June 6. Over a hundred and ninety-eight thousand people attended. Two thousand and twenty-six conversions. Five hundred and twenty-eight cottage prayer meetings — small house gatherings, scattered through the town’s neighborhoods, that did much of the slow personal-work that the public revival services could not. Sunday’s purse: a little over six thousand dollars.

The campaign closed, as the Marshalltown Times-Republican put it, in a “blaze of glory” — thirteen thousand two hundred people present on the final day. Sunday had come back to the town where he had once been a young husband trying to make ends meet, and now drew an attendance figure equal to the entire population of the town.

The Marshalltown campaign also produced a recurring data anomaly that would surface in nearly every contemporary press report. The final conversion count appeared as 2,026 in one paper, 1,987 in a decorative stats card that circulated regionally, and 2,000 as a round-number summary in others. The Marshalltown press wars over which number was correct went on for weeks. The truth was probably in the neighborhood of two thousand. The truth was also that nobody really knew, because the Sunday operation by 1909 was generating numbers faster than even friendly reporters could verify them.

Winfield, Kansas: the man at the piano

The summer Chautauqua circuit took Sunday across Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Illinois. He delivered his now-fully-rotated four sermons — “Booze,” “Forces That Win,” “Nuts for Skeptics to Crack,” and the various baseball variants — to crowds of two thousand to ten thousand at a stretch, two or three towns a week.

On July 15, 1909, Sunday spoke at the Winfield, Kansas Chautauqua. His sermon was “Forces That Win.” Season tickets to the Chautauqua cost two dollars. Sunday’s appearance fee came in at five hundred dollars.

Two hours after Sunday finished his afternoon sermon, a Pennsylvania-born musician took the platform. His name was Homer Rodeheaver. He was thirty-three years old, a trombonist and gospel singer, traveling the Chautauqua circuit as a paid performer with his own small musical troupe. He performed for the Winfield crowd at four o’clock that Wednesday afternoon. Sunday was almost certainly in the audience. Roger Bruns, who has reconstructed this moment carefully, treats it as the first documented encounter between the two men.

Within months, Sunday had hired Rodeheaver to lead revival singing and choirs effective the following year. The partnership that began at Winfield, Kansas in July 1909 would last more than two decades. Rodeheaver would become the most recognizable musical figure in American revival ministry — the man whose trombone, choir-leading style, and gospel-song repertoire would carry Sunday’s tabernacle services for the rest of Billy’s preaching life. Without Rodeheaver, there is no big-city Sunday revival of the 1910s. Without Rodeheaver, there is no “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” or “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked” reaching the audiences they reached.

And it all started on a Wednesday afternoon in a Kansas Chautauqua tent.

Patterson Springs and a record check

Three weeks later, on August 10, 1909, Sunday spoke at the Patterson Springs Chautauqua in central Illinois. He had also spoken there two days earlier on August 8. On the second appearance, the ticket receipts from the Sunday afternoon lecture alone came in at three thousand six hundred dollars.

It was, as a regional newspaper would note a year later, the largest single Chautauqua-lecture take in American history. Williams Jennings Bryan’s previous record had been twenty-four hundred dollars at Carthage, Missouri the year before. Sunday had broken it by a thousand and two hundred dollars. The Patterson Springs receipts traveled. The Hastings (Nebraska) Daily Tribune would still be writing about the record a year later.

Whatever the cumulative arithmetic of Sunday’s Chautauqua career had been — and the 1907 totals of $43,500 across eighty-six lectures were already known — the Patterson Springs receipts crystallized a particular kind of public fact: Billy Sunday, on any given afternoon, was the most commercially valuable single speaker on the American lecture platform.

Boulder and the team budget

In early September, Sunday opened a five-week revival in Boulder, Colorado. Four-thousand-seat tabernacle. About fifteen hundred conversions. Sunday’s purse came in at thirty-five hundred dollars.

The Boulder revival is most useful, in retrospect, for what it reveals about the Sunday operation’s internal financial structure by 1909. A Spokane Chronicle item from September 3 published the team-pay schedule for the Boulder campaign in full. Fisher, the singer, was being paid thirty-five dollars a week. Ackley, the musical director, thirty dollars a week. Mrs. Miller, the pianist, one hundred dollars a month. Siebert, the tabernacle caretaker, three dollars a day. The Sunday operation now had ten people on the payroll. Mr. Gill was directing the tabernacle construction itself. The offerings on the last day of the campaign — by long-established Sunday practice — went to him personally.

Most evangelists working in 1909 were essentially solo operators, working with a song leader and maybe a piano player they paid from their own purse. The Sunday operation was, by Boulder, a small business. Ten salaried positions. A tabernacle-construction supervisor. A musical director. A separate musical director’s deputy. Mrs. Miller on piano. Siebert handling the daily logistics. By 1909 standards, this was a substantial organization, and it was beginning to look much more like the operations of the mature 1910s big-city revivals than like the small-town Iowa tent campaigns of a decade earlier.

Cedar Rapids, a Gazette appreciation, and Sunday’s stamina

The fall return brought Sunday to Cedar Rapids, Iowa for six weeks from October 10 through November 21. The campaign drew 320,000 cumulative attendees, 2,906 conversions, and a purse of $7,080. Ninety-eight general meetings plus eighty special meetings designed for particular groups. Sixteen hundred cottage prayer meetings — three times the number Marshalltown had produced earlier in the year.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette on November 20 ran an editorial titled “Billy Sunday and His Work — An Appreciation” that captured better than almost any other contemporary piece what newspapers had now come to feel about him:

There are many of us who are never going to fully reconcile ourselves to some of Mr. Sunday’s methods, to his dramatic stunts, to his use of slang… After all, why should we greatly concern ourselves about his methods? He gets results… Billy Sunday is a man among men — and men admire him. Thousands of men do not sit spellbound at the feet of a religious sissy.

The line “Thousands of men do not sit spellbound at the feet of a religious sissy” was the line that traveled. Sunday’s audiences across the entire decade had been disproportionately male, and his appeal to men — the baseball stories, the slang, the muscular delivery, the dropped jackets and rolled sleeves — was central to what made him work. The Cedar Rapids editorial put the case for Sunday in language that even his critics could mostly accept. He gets results.

Joplin closes the year

From late November through the first days of 1910, Sunday held a five-week revival at Joplin, Missouri. Six-thousand-seat wooden tabernacle. Two hundred and seventy-three thousand cumulative attendees. Almost three thousand conversions, with 278 in the final service alone. About six thousand people attended each evening meeting; another five hundred attended each afternoon. Thousands were turned away nightly from a tabernacle that was simply not large enough.

The arithmetic of Joplin, like the arithmetic of Marshalltown and Spokane and Springfield and Cedar Rapids and Patterson Springs, was the arithmetic of an American revival operation that had completely outgrown the small-town format it was built on. The tabernacle was full nightly. The town was overwhelmed. Sunday and his ten-person operation closed out 1909 the way they had opened it — with more people wanting in than the building could hold.

What changed in 1909

If 1907 was the year that broke Billy Sunday and 1908 was the year he went east, 1909 is the year he became the public figure he would be for the rest of his life. Five things consolidated.

The big-city tabernacle. Spokane proved the revival method scaled. The format that had made him in Iowa river towns worked just as well in a Pacific Northwest railroad metropolis. Within five years, Sunday would be filling the same kind of purpose-built wooden tabernacles in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York.

Homer Rodeheaver. The Winfield meeting was the most consequential personnel decision Sunday ever made. Rodeheaver’s trombone, baritone, and choir-leading style would carry the musical side of Sunday’s revivals for the next twenty years.

“Tomorrow” enters the repertoire. The Spokane closing sermon premiered the sermon that would become the most-preached closing call of Sunday’s career. The dramatic emotional close that defined every big-city revival of the 1910s started here.

The Sunday operation became a business. Ten salaried team members. Specialized roles. Detailed payroll. Tabernacle construction supervisors. By Boulder, the Sunday camp had the kind of organizational chart that would be perfectly recognizable to anyone managing a touring company today.

The political register completed. The Spokane local-option lobbying. The Springfield Governor-Deneen conversion. The Marshalltown cottage prayer meetings as community organizing. Sunday was, by 1909, simultaneously a religious figure, a temperance crusader, a civic mobilizer, and a public-policy advocate. The categories had merged.

When Sunday closed his Joplin campaign on January 2, 1910, the architecture of the rest of his career was now in place. The big-city tabernacles. Rodeheaver at the music stand. Helen running her own parallel ministry. The “Tomorrow” closing call. The ten-person organization. The political-religious fusion. The Patterson Springs commercial record. The press appreciation. The cottage prayer meetings. The hundreds of thousands in cumulative attendance.

The Billy Sunday of American memory — the one who would fill twenty-thousand-seat tabernacles in Pittsburgh, who would dine with Theodore Roosevelt, who would campaign for prohibition across the country — that Billy Sunday was now fully assembled. The 1910s would scale him. But everything he scaled was put in place in 1909.

He was forty-six years old. He had been an evangelist for thirteen years. He had four hundred sermons in his head and the country in front of him.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year the City Took Billy Sunday: 1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 19, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year the City Took Billy Sunday: 1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 19 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 19). The year the city took Billy Sunday: 1909. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year the City Took Billy Sunday: 1909.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 19, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/19/the-year-the-city-took-billy-sunday-1909/.

The year Billy Sunday went east: 1908

A Pennsylvania steel-valley revival, a lawsuit over his own sermons, a deaf interpreter, and the summer Billy stopped being just a Midwesterner.

A Pennsylvania steel-valley revival, a lawsuit over his own sermons, a deaf interpreter, and the summer Billy stopped being just a Midwesterner.

On a Friday in May of 1908, Billy Sunday stepped off a train in Sharon, Pennsylvania — a steel-mill town in the Shenango Valley along the Ohio border, eighty miles north of Pittsburgh. He had never preached this far east before. Every revival of his career up to that point had been in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, or one of the closer western states. The Sharon campaign was something new: a seven-week revival in a Pennsylvania industrial valley, and the first real test of whether the Sunday revival method would translate beyond the small Midwestern county-seat towns where he had built it.

By the time he left Sharon in late June, nearly five thousand people had come forward as converts. The campaign had drawn more than fourteen thousand dollars in offerings. A new mission was pledged for the city. And Sunday had given up the Chautauqua circuit for half the summer to make it work. The New Castle Herald, on the second day of the campaign, had already named the thing that mattered:

He has stirred up enthusiasm that has never before been evidenced in this town.

It was a quiet observation, written by a small-paper reporter who had no way of knowing that Sharon was the first piece of a much larger pivot. But the eastern industrial cities were where Sunday’s mature career would unfold. Sharon was the rehearsal.

Bloomington opens the year

The year began at Bloomington, Illinois — a town of about twenty thousand people in central Illinois. The campaign had been organized so thoroughly that the local committee opened the tabernacle on December 26, 1907, three days before Sunday himself arrived. When he stepped onto the platform on Sunday morning the twenty-ninth, three thousand people were already waiting, and they greeted him with what the Muscatine Journal called “the Chautauqua salute” — a waving of white handkerchiefs across the auditorium. It was the first time the gesture had been used to welcome him at a revival, but it would not be the last.

Colorized version of a 1908 Bloomington image. Billy Sunday in action.

Eleven thousand people attended his three services that opening Sunday. Forty-five hundred came to the morning meeting alone. A five-hundred-voice choir carried the music. By the time the campaign closed five and a half weeks later, more than four thousand of those who had come had walked down the aisle as converts. Sunday’s purse came in at $7,773.19 — by some margin the largest revival purse of his career to date. And Helen, by now a fixture on the road with him, was preaching her own Sunday afternoon meetings to fourteen hundred women at the Second Presbyterian Church.

The closing sermon was titled “Always Be Ready to Give an Answer,” taken from First Peter chapter three. It would, in the months to come, become one of the most-printed sermons of Sunday’s career.

Decatur and the printed sermons

Sunday moved directly from Bloomington to Decatur, Illinois — another central Illinois town, this one with a population of about thirty-one thousand. The campaign ran for five and a half weeks, from early February into mid-March, probably in a temporary tabernacle erected inside Decatur’s Fairview Park. By the end of it, more than six thousand people had come forward as converts. Sunday’s purse came in at over eleven thousand dollars — surpassing the Bloomington record set just weeks earlier.

But the Decatur revival had a wrinkle that the contemporary papers found themselves writing about for months afterward. The Decatur Herald — a local newspaper — had been running Sunday’s sermons in print throughout the campaign. After Sunday left town, a Decatur printing concern collected those newspaper transcriptions and published them as a book. The book sold. Sunday had not authorized it.

He spent the next several months trying to stop the publication and, when he could not, decided to buy the copyright outright. The story finally surfaced publicly in September. According to the Freeport Daily Bulletin of September 5, Sunday paid the Decatur printing concern thirty-five hundred dollars for full possession of the copyright to his own sermons.

It was the kind of transaction that did not exist in the world of itinerant revivalism before 1908. Most evangelists were happy to have their sermons reprinted anywhere they could be reprinted. Sunday had decided, by the middle of his Pennsylvania campaign, that his sermons were worth more controlled than free. By later that year his own publishing operation was issuing sermon manuscripts under titles like “What Shall the End Be,” “The Three Groups,” and “The Moral Leper” — small printed pamphlets carrying the formal byline “William Ashley Sunday.” Sunday had become, alongside everything else, a publishing concern.

A March ticket for the Booze sermon

On Wednesday, March 18, 1908, Sunday made the short trip from Decatur to Clinton, Iowa for a single evening engagement at the local Presbyterian Church. The occasion was a local-option meeting — a temperance vote that DeWitt County voters would soon be asked to weigh in on. Sunday’s contribution was a single sermon, his now-famous “Booze.” The local committee printed numbered tickets in cream paper.

The phrasing made the political stakes plain. The sermon was a campaign event. The audience was specifically registered DeWitt County voters. The doors closed at 7:15 sharp. Sunday’s “Booze” sermon — already by 1908 a fixture of his Chautauqua repertoire — was being deployed as direct political advocacy on the eve of a temperance referendum. The line between revival preacher and political organizer, never very thick in Sunday’s career, had just become almost invisible.

Charleston and the deaf interpreter

After Clinton, Sunday spent the rest of March and most of April at Charleston, Illinois — another central Illinois revival, five weeks in a four-thousand-seat tabernacle that drew twenty-five hundred conversions and around two hundred and twenty thousand cumulative attendees. His purse came in at fifty-five hundred dollars. The Decatur Herald and Review called it “the greatest religious awakening that Charleston has ever known and one of the greatest revivals that has ever taken place in Illinois.” On the final night, the crowd refused to leave the tabernacle even after Sunday had gone home — the Herald reporter watched them stand around the platform “trying to shake the great minister’s hand for the last time.”

The Charleston campaign also produced one of the most quietly moving details in the entire 1908 record, though it would not make it into print until the next year’s Springfield souvenir booklet. A Charleston-based teacher at the State School for the Deaf, Professor Frank Reed Jr., had begun attending Sunday’s services with a delegation of deaf students. Reed stood up in the audience and signed Sunday’s sermons to the deaf attendees in real time. The visual rhythms of Reed’s interpretation became, for the hearing audience around him, almost a parallel performance.

Prof. Reed stood up and repeated to the mutes just what Mr. Sunday said, and it was a very unique and interesting sight to watch the movements and gestures of the interpreter. He would enter into the spirit of Mr. Sunday’s discourse… The expression on the faces of the mutes would brighten up as he said something amusing.

Between thirty and forty deaf attendees converted across that campaign and the Springfield campaign that followed in 1909. At the offering, when the deaf delegation contributed ten dollars, Sunday paused his sermon to address it from the platform: “If men who could not hear a word of what I say were contributing to this extent, what ought some of you fellows down there do who hear it all?”

Sharon, Pennsylvania

The eastward turn began on May 1, 1908. Sunday opened a seven-week revival in Sharon, Pennsylvania — a steel-mill town in the Shenango Valley along the Ohio border. The decision to take the Sharon engagement cost him most of his usual Chautauqua summer income, and the Sunday camp itself flagged this in a margin note: “this revival eliminated Billy’s opportunity to supplement his income from chautauquas; a significant diversion for several years.”

Sunday was forty-five years old. The Chautauqua circuit had been paying him more than forty thousand dollars in summers by now. He had announced the previous August that he was going to cut back on the platform work. And now he was choosing, for the first time, to forgo a major piece of the summer revenue in order to preach a long campaign in a place he had never been. The Sharon decision was the first time Sunday’s revival ambitions clearly outweighed his Chautauqua income. It would not be the last.

The Sharon campaign drew nearly five thousand converts. The freewill offering for Sunday came in at $6,448.45, with total collected offerings reaching over fourteen thousand dollars. A new local mission was pledged. The local New Castle Herald, in its earliest coverage, captured what Sharon was seeing for the first time:

His eccentric methods of delivering the gospel and his homely statements have hit their mark and today everybody in Sharon is talking of Billy Sunday, the old-time baseball player.

Sunday had stepped outside his Midwestern comfort zone and found a Pennsylvania industrial city that responded to him the same way Iowa farm towns did. The early evidence said the Sunday method traveled. The full proof would come in the urban tabernacle campaigns of the 1910s. But the test case was Sharon.

A compressed Chautauqua summer

Sunday returned to the platform circuit at the end of June for a sharply truncated summer. He had less than two months. He still managed to deliver Chautauqua talks at more than twenty different sites across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. The four-sermon rotation that had crystallized the previous year carried him: “Get on the Water Wagon,” “Forces That Win,” “The Devil’s Boomerang,” and “Nuts for Skeptics to Crack.”

A few stops stood out. On August 9 at Patterson Springs, Illinois — declared “Billy Sunday Day” by the local committee — ten thousand people came to hear his “Booze” sermon. Helen was with him. Sunday was in real physical pain from what he described to reporters as a “carbuncle,” and he and Helen left town on the 7:30 a.m. train the next morning, exhausted. At Coshocton, Ohio on July 31, he was paid two hundred and fifty dollars for a two-hour talk and fifteen hundred people came to hear it. At Clarinda, Iowa on August 6, he spoke at a brand-new ten-thousand-dollar steel auditorium that held over four thousand. He stayed long enough afterward to umpire a baseball game.

Lincoln Chautauqua in Macon County, Illinois on August 15 produced one of the strangest preserved artifacts of Sunday’s middle period: a newspaper advertisement showing him in a head-and-shoulders portrait with his arms crossed, captioned “Meet Me At Lincoln Chautauqua: Saturday Afternoon, Billy Sunday.” It is, as much as anything in the 1908 archive, the moment when the Sunday brand became a commercial graphic asset that booking committees were placing in regional papers to sell admission.

Jacksonville and the G.A.R. veterans

Sunday’s fall return brought him to Jacksonville, Illinois for a six-week revival running from late September through early November. The campaign drew over twenty-five hundred converts and a freewill offering for Sunday of $7,279. By mid-October, more than 131,000 people had already attended services. The campaign was strong enough that multiple regional papers covered the closing service, repeating the same figures back and forth across the state.

From the Jacksonville pulpit Sunday delivered one of the tribute lines that the Freeport Daily Journal would reprint in November and that would become characteristic of his entire later career — a deliberate appeal to Civil War veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic:

If there are any public favors to be shown, are any offices to be filled, I want you young fellows to stand back and make room for the gray-haired veterans of the sixties. I want you to understand that there is but one piece of jewelry to which Billy Sunday takes off his hat, and that is the bronze button worn by the Grand Army of the Republic.

In 1908 the Civil War was still living memory for half the people in Sunday’s audiences. The Civil War veterans were now in their late sixties and early seventies — Sunday himself was forty-five — and were still organized in active local G.A.R. chapters in nearly every Northern town. Sunday’s tribute to them was both deeply felt and shrewdly calculated. The line traveled. The Freeport paper printed it. Other papers picked it up. And it remained one of the signature Sunday quotes for the rest of his life.

Ottumwa and the skin-flint complaint

The year ended at Ottumwa, Iowa. Six weeks in the local opera house, from early November through mid-December. Thirty-five hundred conversions. Sunday’s purse came in at seven thousand dollars.

The Ottumwa campaign also produced a moment of public criticism that the Minnesota New Ulm Review later reprinted, and that captures the kind of opposition Sunday now drew everywhere he went. The complaint, attributed to an unnamed correspondent in Ottumwa before Sunday’s arrival, ran like this:

Sunday’s skin-flint brand of religion is a money-getter to the sorrow of many a town. Let’s make Ottumwa the exception. Sunday uses his religion as his method of hypnotizing people, for he knows that in the heat of religious fervor people will give up money when you can’t get it from them in any other way. So, he uses religion.

It was the kind of complaint that had been following Sunday since the Charles City Herald editorial of 1907 had called him “a sideshow to the Chautauqua.” By 1908 it was a familiar pattern: regional papers running detailed positive coverage of his revivals; other regional papers running pointed editorial criticism that questioned his methods, his motives, and especially his money. Sunday rarely responded publicly to either. He just kept moving.

What 1908 changed

If the easy story of Billy Sunday’s career runs “small-town revivalist becomes big-city evangelist in the 1910s,” 1908 is the year where the move starts. Four things changed.

The eastern pivot. Sharon was the first sustained revival east of Ohio. He gave up half a summer of Chautauqua money to make it work. The Sunday method, transplanted to a Pennsylvania steel valley, performed exactly the way it had performed in the Iowa river towns. The proof of concept was now in hand.

The published sermon library. By the end of 1908, Sunday was operating a small publishing concern that issued sermon manuscripts under his own byline. The Decatur lawsuit had been the catalyst. The lesson was that his sermons had become an intellectual-property asset worth defending, and one that could carry his voice into towns where he himself would never preach.

The Helen Sunday women’s ministry. Helen’s Bloomington women’s meetings — fourteen hundred women, gathered at Second Presbyterian, on Sunday afternoons during the main revival — were now a documented and reportable part of the Sunday operation. She was no longer just on the road with Billy. She had her own platform alongside his.

The political-religious fusion. The Clinton temperance ticket, the G.A.R. veterans tribute, the local-option organizing folded into revival sermons, the integrated approach of revival-as-civic-mobilization — these were all visible in earlier years, but in 1908 they consolidated. Sunday was now a political force in every town he visited, in addition to being a religious one. His sermons sold pamphlets, mobilized voters, and built G.A.R. constituencies all at once.

By the time Sunday left Ottumwa just before Christmas to prepare for the Spokane, Washington campaign opening on December 25 — his first revival in a city of more than a hundred thousand people — the architecture of his mature ministry was effectively in place. Eastern cities. Published sermons. Helen running her own meetings. The platform-and-pulpit double income engine. The four-sermon Chautauqua rotation. The deaf interpreter. The G.A.R. tribute. The political mobilization. The carbuncle.

Spokane was the test of whether the whole thing would scale to a real American city. The answer would arrive within six weeks. But the architecture that would carry that test had been built in 1908.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Went East: 1908.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 17, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Went East: 1908.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 17 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 17). The year Billy Sunday went east: 1908. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Went East: 1908.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 17, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/17/the-year-billy-sunday-went-east-1908/.

What 1907 Tells Us About the Rise of Billy Sunday

Last in a series drawn from Lindsay Denison’s profile of Billy Sunday in The American Magazine, September 1907.

Over the past seven posts, we’ve followed Lindsay Denison’s 1907 profile through a single revival in a single Iowa town — the conversion on a Chicago curb, the footrace that tested it, the plain-English preaching, the carnival-bright music, the money and the “grafter” charge, and the overwhelming final day in Fairfield. It remains to ask what the whole thing meant, and where it sat in the larger story of the man.

Denison asked the same question, and his answer is the most quietly important passage in the article.

“Merely a repetition”

The Fairfield revival, for all its drama, was not unique. It was, Denison wrote, merely a repetition of scenes that had already played out in a score of towns across Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado — and that scores more towns in those states would yet know. Sunday’s calendar was booked solid three years ahead, and organizations both religious and secular kept coming to beg a place on his “future list.”

In other words, what a New York reporter had traveled west to witness as a marvel was, by 1907, already Billy Sunday’s settled routine. He had a circuit, a method, a company, a system — and a waiting list.

A small part of something larger

Then Denison widened the lens in a way that reframes everything. Sunday, he insisted, was really only a small part of a much broader spiritual ferment moving through the middle of the country. From Pittsburgh to Denver, from Duluth to New Orleans, the impulse to read the Bible, to pray, and to enlist one’s neighbors in the Christian army was spreading and growing more intense.

Sunday was not the whole movement. He was its most spectacular general. And what the movement would ultimately come to, Denison declined to predict — it was, he said, no part of his business to guess.

But, he added, it was worth watching.

Caught at the threshold

That line is the reason this 1907 article rewards a closer look. Read it carefully and you realize Denison was describing a man on the cusp.

Consider the geography of the situation. Sunday’s actual labors were confined to small towns in the rural Midwest — Fairfield had about five thousand people; he moved on from it to Knoxville, another small Iowa town, after only four days’ rest. Yet here was a national magazine, based a thousand miles east, sending a reporter “all the way from New York,” as Sunday noted in his own closing prayer, to explain this Midwestern phenomenon to readers who had likely never heard of him.

That gap — between where Sunday worked and who had now come to write about him — is the signature of a regional figure crossing into national awareness. The article is not documentation of a man already at the summit. It is an early national notice of a man about to climb one, arriving just before the ascent steepened. The largest and most famous campaigns of his career, the ones in major cities that would make him a household name, still lay ahead. In 1907 he was an extraordinarily successful small-town evangelist whom the wider country was just beginning to discover.

In that sense, Denison’s “worth watching” was better advice than perhaps even he knew.

The defense of plain language

Denison closed his profile not with a prediction but with a defense — and it is a fitting note to end this series on, too.

To most readers, he acknowledged, the methods seemed impossible to take seriously as religion: the circus-freak ushers and concert-hall tunes, the shirt-sleeve oratory and melodramatic impersonation, the Scripture rendered into a traveling salesman’s slang. These were not the means by which most people imagined the souls of the world would be won.

And yet, Denison reminded his readers, there had once been those who looked down on the plain speech of the Apostle Paul. The Saviour himself had rebuked the people who clung to their own traditions while rejecting the commandment of God. Denison let the apostle have nearly the last word, citing Paul’s declaration that God had chosen the foolish and the weak and the despised things of the world to confound the wise and the mighty.

It is the deepest defense of Billy Sunday in the whole article, and it goes well beyond results. The argument is not merely that the crude methods worked. It is that crudeness, plainness, even foolishness in the eyes of the refined had always been one of the ways the gospel reached people — and that the genteel critics wincing in the front rows of the tabernacle were standing, whether they knew it or not, in a very old tradition of standing in the way.

A snapshot worth keeping

That is what makes this 1907 article such a valuable document. It catches Billy Sunday whole, at a hinge moment — the ballplayer fully transformed into the preacher, the method fully formed, the national spotlight just beginning to swing his way.

A century and more later, we know what Denison could only sense: that the man on that platform in Fairfield was at the beginning of one of the most remarkable rises in American religious history. He told us it was worth watching.

He was right.

This concludes the series on Lindsay Denison’s 1907 American Magazine profile of Billy Sunday. Thank you for following along.

The year that broke Billy Sunday: 1907

A brother’s funeral he could not attend. A newborn son. A lawsuit. A carriage wreck. A converted entire police force. And the summer he finally said enough.

On a day in early July of 1907, somewhere in the Gibson City, Illinois tabernacle, Billy Sunday was handed a telegram. His brother had died. The funeral was being arranged in Iowa. The Gibson City revival was three weeks deep and at the height of its drawing power. The local committee had paid for the tabernacle, organized the choir, raised the expenses, and was counting on him to finish.

Sunday did not go to the funeral. He stayed and preached.

Within a few weeks of that decision, his wife Helen would give birth to their son Paul. The baby was born on the opening day of the Gibson City campaign. Sunday had been there for neither the birth of his son nor the death of his brother. He had been on a platform.

By the end of August he would, for the first time in his career, announce that he intended to cut back on the work that had taken him from those two events. He would announce it from a 4,000-seat steel auditorium in Joliet, Illinois at the close of a Chautauqua season that had seen him deliver eighty-six lectures in roughly thirty different towns and earn the equivalent, in 2026 dollars, of about a million and a half dollars. He was forty-four years old. He had been running this schedule for eleven years. He was, by the contemporary newspaper record, the highest-paid evangelist in America. And he was exhausted.

Kankakee in winter

The year began at Kankakee, Illinois — a town of about fifteen thousand people in the Illinois prairie, an hour south of Chicago. The campaign ran from mid-January through the middle of February in a four-thousand-seat tabernacle with a three-hundred-and-fifty-voice choir.

The Streator Times of January 26 published an extended excerpt from one of his sermons under the heading “Rev. Billy Sunday Defines What He Terms Society of the Present Day.” It was an extraordinary piece of Sunday writing, full of the period’s sense that something was slipping in American life. He drew a contrast between the brilliant drawing rooms of society women playing progressive euchre and the back rooms of “stale beer joints” where four “blear-eyed, vermin-covered old soaks” played penny ante. Then he delivered the line that the Times made sure to print:

I fear that cursed gang of society more than I do all the town loafers in that beer joint.

It was a long way from the cheerful baseball-evangelist anecdotes that had filled the Chautauqua dates the summer before. Sunday at Kankakee was in his serious mode — a working revivalist preaching for six weeks straight to crowds of three and four thousand in subzero Illinois cold, naming evils he could see in the towns he was visiting.

Spring in southern Illinois and Iowa

From late February through May, Sunday worked his way through southern Illinois and Iowa. Murphysboro for six weeks. Fairfield, Iowa for five. Knoxville, Iowa for five. Each campaign followed the same pattern: a temporary tabernacle, a choir of two or three hundred voices, a six-week timetable, and a thousand or more conversions by the closing service.

Fairfield produced what may be the most detailed single-day sermon record in Sunday’s pre-1910 career. On Sunday, April 28, he preached three separate sermons in a single day — morning, afternoon, and evening — each anchored on a different text. Earlier that month he had opened the Fairfield campaign with a sermon called “Revive Us Again.” It was the kind of Sunday-disciplined preaching that the Chautauqua circuit never quite asked of him. Four sermons in a row from four different texts. He could still do it.

The Knoxville campaign produced sixty sermons in five weeks and a thousand cards signed. It also produced a small but telling detail in the local paper: someone who had been converted during the campaign was sent to an asylum shortly after. The Sunday revival method, for all its successes, had limits that the campaign committees did not always discuss publicly. The Iowa newspaper noted the case and moved on.

Gibson City

From mid-June through mid-July, Sunday preached at Gibson City, Illinois — a small Ford County town of about twenty-five hundred people. The revival drew over a thousand conversions. Sunday’s purse came in at thirty-six hundred dollars. The economic terms by 1907 were no longer remarkable for him; they were standard.

What made Gibson City unforgettable in the Sunday family record was that it bracketed both ends of life. Paul Sunday was born on the first day of the campaign. Sunday’s brother died near its midpoint. Sunday declined several Chautauqua offers in order to finish the campaign — a sign that the revivals still had first claim on his schedule even as the Chautauqua money grew larger. But his brother’s funeral was the cost of finishing.

There is no surviving record of what Sunday said about it publicly. Two sermons from the Gibson City campaign — one on John 7:17 and one titled simply “Hell” — were transcribed in the regional press over the next month. The papers ran them as significant sermons, the kind worth preserving. Neither sermon mentioned the brother, the baby, or the funeral Sunday had missed. Whatever he was carrying that summer, he was carrying it on the platform.

The lawsuit

On June 28, Sunday was supposed to be in Des Moines, Iowa, opening a slot at the Midland Chautauqua. He did not show. The Iowa Lyceum Bureau, which had booked him, sued him for five thousand dollars for breach of contract. Newspapers picked the story up immediately. Quad-City Times, Des Moines Register, Richmond Item.

Sunday’s defense, when he gave it, was straightforward. His evangelistic work, he said, ought to have preference over Chautauqua dates. If a revival ran long, or a town needed him for an extra week, he was going to honor that. The Chautauqua bureau could sue him if it wanted to.

The case never went anywhere notable in the public record. But the spectacle of it was something new. Sunday was no longer just an itinerant preacher who could be expected to keep his commitments because his name and reputation depended on it. He was now a commercially booked entertainer with contracts that could be litigated. The Iowa Lyceum Bureau had not bought a sermon. It had bought a calendar slot. And when Sunday treated the slot as flexible, the Bureau treated the contract as enforceable.

The lawsuit told you something else about where Sunday’s life had gone. He had become the kind of person who could be sued.

The 86-lecture summer

Once the Gibson City revival ended in mid-July, Sunday’s Chautauqua summer began. By the time it ended at Joliet at the end of August, he had spoken at roughly thirty different towns across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Missouri. The eighty-six lectures total was reported later, in a July 1910 retrospective, and the figure is so large that it strains belief — until you do the arithmetic. About six weeks of summer Chautauqua. Two or three talks at most stops. A few sites where Sunday spoke five or six times across a week. The number works out.

The bookings paid roughly forty-three thousand dollars in 1907 dollars. In current dollars, perhaps a million and a half. After bureau commissions and travel expenses, perhaps a million two. Most of this came in checks of two hundred to three hundred dollars per lecture, occasionally rising to five hundred or six hundred when the local committee had organized a special gate. By Bryan’s standards as a Chautauqua speaker, the rate was modestly higher. By any other measure, the figure was staggering.

Two of the eighty-six lectures took place on August 14 in Oskaloosa, Iowa. On the way back to his hotel that evening, the carriage Sunday was riding in was in a bad wreck. Sunday was bruised but unhurt. The story went out over the wires anyway, and by the next morning newspapers in five states were running headlines about how Billy Sunday had been “badly injured” in an “overturned carriage.” Sunday kept his schedule. The next morning he was at Aurora, Illinois — where a different paper had announced he had canceled because of hay fever. The two stories crossed in the wires. Either Sunday had been hurt or he had hay fever or both or neither. He was, by his own account, just tired.

A steel auditorium and an announcement

The summer ended at Dellwood Park, just outside Joliet, Illinois, where a brand-new Chautauqua assembly opened on August 30. The venue was something the Chautauqua circuit had never seen: a steel auditorium with four thousand seats and what the builders called “perfect acoustic properties.” Sunday spoke at the opening at 8:15 in the evening. The opening sermon was called “Grounders Hot Off the Bat” — a baseball talk, with a baseball title for the first and only time in the curated record.

The next day the Joliet Daily News published a piece called “Billy Sunday as He Is, Spoke.” The headline was a deliberate pun. The reporter had watched Sunday at close range and was unsparing:

Billy Sunday is like his discourse: unpolished in appearance. He still looks more like a baseball player than a preacher, talks more in the manner of a heavy hitter than a gentleman of the cloth, and, judging from his frenzied utterances, thinks more like one as well. He works as hard on the stage as he ever did on the diamond, and his voice is worn nearly to shreds by long-continued gospel shouting.

The auditorium, the reporter noted, was not packed. Joliet seemed to have been “frightened off by Sunday’s reputation for vigorous execution.” Sunday had hay fever. When a sympathetic listener tossed him a handkerchief during his sermon, he muffed the catch. The retired ballplayer dropped a fly ball in front of four thousand people.

It was during this Joliet engagement that Sunday made his announcement. He was going to cut back on Chautauqua speaking after this season. The constant travel was depriving him of the rest he needed for his evangelistic work. The newspaper of August 30 carried the news as a routine item. Whether Sunday himself believed it at the time is harder to know. The next summer, in 1908, he would deliver Chautauqua lectures again. By 1909 he would be back at full schedule. He would not actually retreat from the platform. But he had said the words. He had reached his limit.

Galesburg and Muscatine

Sunday took a few weeks off after the summer ended. Then in late September he opened a five-week revival at Galesburg, Illinois — eighteen thousand people, a five-thousand-seat tabernacle, two thousand five hundred and eighty conversions, a closing-night crowd of eight thousand plus standing room outside. His purse came in at six thousand three hundred and forty dollars, sixteen hundred of which he turned around and gave back to the local YMCA.

The Galesburg campaign drew attendees from seventy different towns. After it ended, the local newspapers wrote about the “Bible famine” that followed — the Presbyterian church alone took in sixty new members, and the Baptists and Methodists between them took in another two hundred. A Gibson City paper, looking back at the campaign a week after it closed, said one-tenth of Galesburg had professed conversion during Sunday’s stay.

November and the first half of December went to Muscatine, Iowa — five weeks in a purpose-built tabernacle, thirty-six hundred conversions, six thousand seven hundred and eighty-five dollars in Sunday’s pocket, seventy-four sermons preached. The campaign averaged out to a remarkable two dollars and sixty-three cents per soul converted, a number the local paper printed with what seems to be genuine satisfaction. The Muscatine News-Tribune of December 15 used the phrase “the largest revival in our history.” The Muscatine Journal the next day went further — it called it “the greatest revival in the nation’s history.” Both papers were, almost certainly, wrong about the second claim. But they meant what they said, and the readers seemed to agree.

Carrying it al

The 1907 year is the one in which the cumulative weight of Sunday’s choices becomes hard to look away from. The brother’s funeral he could not attend. The newborn son. The lawsuit. The carriage wreck and the false injury rumors. The eighty-six Chautauqua lectures. The five revival campaigns. The pulled voice and the hay fever and the dropped handkerchief in front of four thousand people. The announcement at Joliet that he would cut back, and the everyone-knew-it-wouldn’t-take quality of the announcement when he made it.

He was making more money than any evangelist in American history had ever made. He was preaching to more people in a single summer than most pastors preached to in a lifetime. He was the subject of newspaper feature stories from Idaho to Indiana. The same newspaper that ran his Joliet headline ran his Galesburg revival report a few weeks later. The same press that ran the lawsuit story ran the Muscatine “greatest revival” story. He was everywhere.

And he was, somewhere underneath all of it, a forty-four-year-old man who had not been in Iowa to bury his brother and had not been in Chicago to see his son born. The next two years would bring some of the biggest revivals of his career — Spokane, Springfield, Cedar Rapids, the early relationship with Homer Rodeheaver. They would also bring more of the same exhaustion that the Joliet announcement had named out loud. Whatever broke in Billy Sunday in 1907 did not get put back together. It got worked around.

The Muscatine paper called it the greatest revival in the nation’s history. It was the greatest revival of Sunday’s hardest year.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year That Broke Billy Sunday: 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 15, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year That Broke Billy Sunday: 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 15 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 15). The year that broke Billy Sunday: 1907. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year That Broke Billy Sunday: 1907.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 15, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/15/the-year-that-broke-billy-sunday-1907/.

The year Helen Sunday packed her bags: 1906

A first professional photograph, a tent under snow, and the wife of a baseball evangelist boarding the train for good.

In late March of 1906, a brief notice appeared in the Bureau County Tribune. Mrs. William A. Sunday, the wife of the well-known evangelist, had announced she would henceforth be joining her husband on the campaign trail. The notice carried her own words:

Hereafter I shall accompany my husband. I can be a great help to him, taking charge of women Bible classes, organizing girl Bible classes and giving personal care to converted persons.

It is one of the most consequential single sentences in the entire Billy Sunday archive. Helen Sunday — known to friends as “Ma” Sunday in the years to come — was, until that announcement, a Chicago-area pastor’s wife who had spent most of her married life keeping her household running while Billy traveled. From that moment on, she would be on the road with him. She would be his organizational lieutenant, his front office, his backstage manager, and ultimately the steadiest center of his entire ministry.

Without Helen, there is no Billy Sunday of American memory. The campaigns get smaller. The big-city tabernacles never happen. The Rodeheaver era never quite assembles. The household engine that powered the next thirty years of Sunday’s career was not in place yet on the morning of March 28, 1906. It was in place on the morning of March 30. The change in his career happened in the space of those two days.

A photograph in Freeport

A few weeks earlier, on February 13, 1906, the Freeport Journal-Standard had published a photograph. It showed a clean-shaven man in his early forties wearing a dark suit, looking just past the camera with the slightly unfocused expression that early-twentieth-century professional portraits always required. It was the first professional photograph of Billy Sunday to appear in a newspaper.

A photograph in print, in 1906, meant something different than it does now. Printing technology was just becoming able to reproduce photographs in regional newspapers at workable cost. To have your photograph carried — not a sketch, not an engraving, but an actual halftone reproduction — meant your name had reached a tier where readers would recognize the face and where the paper thought running the picture would help sell copies. Sunday had reached that tier.

The photograph appeared while he was in the middle of a four-week revival at Princeton, Illinois — a small town in Bureau County where he was preaching in a temporary tabernacle that held thirty-six hundred. By the time the Princeton campaign closed in mid-March, over two thousand people had come forward as converts. The local U.B. pastor, a visiting minister from Freeport, told the papers the town was “aflame with the revival spirit.” Another eyewitness called Sunday “a storm, a whirlwind, a cyclone, hurricane, a tornado, a — well, everything indicative of power.”

The highest paid evangelist in America

By the end of March, the Princeton campaign had produced something else: a headline. On March 30, 1906, the Bureau County Tribune ran a piece under the title “Billy Sunday the Highest Paid Evangelist in America.” It was the first time that phrase had appeared in print about Sunday. It would not be the last.

The article tried to make the math human. Since October of 1905, the paper said, Sunday had earned an average of two dollars and sixteen cents per convert. The number sounded almost comical when laid out that way — pennies and dimes per soul saved — but the implication was clear. Sunday was running an evangelistic ministry that produced consistent measurable output for predictable cost. The towns where he held his campaigns understood it. The papers understood it. And, increasingly, the bookings reflected it.

Sometime in the early months of 1906, a Chicago-area booking manager named H.M. Holbrook formalized what had been an informal summer schedule the year before. Holbrook announced he had “exclusive rights to Billy Sunday” and would place him as the headline attraction at seven Chautauquas that summer: Belvidere, Sterling, Freeport, Sycamore, Janesville, Sandwich, and Valparaiso, Indiana. The Chautauqua decade was officially organized.

Prophetstown

In June Sunday took his summer revival to Prophetstown, Illinois — a small town of about twelve hundred people served by exactly three churches. The campaign ran four weeks and produced over seven hundred conversions. By any honest accounting, more than half the town walked down an aisle.

The numbers are the kind that defy plausibility until you remember what a small-town revival in 1906 actually looked like. Sunday preached against evolution under the title “Evolution a Sham” — the formal naming of a sermon he had been delivering in less polished form since at least Rockford in 1904. He preached against dance, against card playing, against the local saloons. People came in from twenty miles in every direction. The Sterling Standard carried sermon-by-sermon coverage. The numbers grew from a few hundred conversions in the first week to over seven hundred by the end of June.

Sunday’s purse at Prophetstown was about twenty-three hundred dollars. The town’s three churches reorganized to absorb the new members. The local saloons reported almost no business during the revival weeks. The pattern was now mature, repeating, and exportable.

The Chautauqua summer

The 1906 summer Chautauqua run took Sunday across the upper Midwest at a pace that would have broken most preachers. Belvidere on June 22 to a crowd of eight thousand. Globe Park in Freeport on July 8, where Sunday spoke twice in a single day and the local paper said his afternoon sermon was the best he had ever preached there. Jacksonville on July 15, where his single talk raised five thousand dollars for the local YMCA that had recently closed its doors. Janesville on July 29 to four thousand listeners. A handful of other Iowa and Illinois Chautauquas in early August. Sycamore on August 26, where he spoke twice and the local paper made sure to note that Sunday had posed for an imprinted postcard now in circulation as a souvenir.

The pattern that had only been a hypothesis a year earlier — that Sunday could sustain crowds across a multi-week Chautauqua circuit using a small rotation of well-tested sermons — was now an established fact. The Baseball sermon anchored most of the dates. “Nuts for Skeptics” made its first documented appearance at Muscatine in early August. The two-sermon Chautauqua rotation that would carry Sunday through 1907 was beginning to take shape.

Salida in the snow

In September Sunday went west again. The Salida, Colorado revival ran through October — five weeks in a mountain town at altitude. The campaign drew six hundred converts. It also drew weather. The tabernacle tent collapsed under early snow. The October 3 and 4 services moved indoors to a local church. The closing night service had to be moved a second time, to a four-hundred-seat opera house far too small for the crowd that wanted to attend.

Sunday’s closing services at Salida included an unusual range of subjects. He preached a eulogy of Abraham Lincoln. He delivered a tribute to President Theodore Roosevelt. And he closed with one of the moral admonitions he liked best: “Read good books and keep good company. Every gambler and drunkard became so by imitating the gang he went with.”

Kewanee, twice

The fall return brought Sunday to Kewanee, Illinois for a six-week revival in a new local armory — a venue large enough to handle the crowds that an earlier tent could not. Twenty-seven hundred and sixty-eight converts. Four hundred and five of those came forward on the closing night. Sunday’s purse came in at five thousand dollars — by far his largest revival purse to date.

Four days after the revival ended, Sunday returned to Kewanee for a single Chautauqua talk. The offering for that single talk was five thousand, three hundred dollars — more than he had been paid for the entire six-week revival. The Richmond-Item carried the figure on December 6. It was the kind of number that did not exist in the Sunday archive a year earlier and that would, from this point on, become routine.

The story of the two Kewanee engagements told you everything you needed to know about where Sunday’s career was going. The revival was the old model — multi-week, slow-building, institution-deepening, expensive in time and emotional capital. The Chautauqua was the new model — one talk, one offering, the same money or better. Sunday could no longer pretend he was not paying attention to the difference.

Worthington in the cold

December brought Sunday to Worthington, Minnesota for what would be his last revival of 1906 and his first of 1907. The Advance-Herald summed up the man and his methods with a single arresting metaphor: “His sermons are a bombardment having the rapidity of the gatling gun and the force of the big 12-inch rifle.”

More than a thousand converts came forward across the five weeks. The temporary tabernacle, ninety feet by a hundred and fifty, accommodated thousands. Sunday’s musical director Fred Fischer ran the music. A tabernacle caretaker named Siebert kept the building in shape. The Sunday operation was small — still just a handful of people moving from town to town — but it was now durable enough that the team had names that appeared in newspaper accounts of the campaign.

What changed

Most years in Billy Sunday’s pre-1910 career can be understood as gradual shifts. 1906 is the exception. By the time the year was over, four things had changed permanently.

Helen Sunday was on the road. The single most consequential change of the year, and arguably of his entire career. The ministry was no longer just Billy.

The first professional photograph existed. Sunday now had a public face. Postcards bearing his image were beginning to circulate as souvenirs. He was no longer a name in a newspaper. He was a recognizable person.

The Chautauqua circuit was formally organized. Holbrook’s seven-site bookings turned what had been a flexible summer experiment into a contracted commercial operation. The booking bureau model would shape the next four years of Sunday’s life.

The Chautauqua money had become a serious rival to the revival money. The Kewanee comparison — one Chautauqua talk that paid more than a six-week revival — was the moment Sunday could no longer ignore. The economics were starting to point at a different shape of ministry. By the summer of 1907, he would deliver more than eighty Chautauqua lectures in a single season, and the gravitational center of his career would shift away from the tabernacle and toward the platform.

In some ways 1906 was Sunday’s last year of the old life. The revivals were still the dominant form. The campaigns still ran four to six weeks. The team was still small enough to fit in a single railway car. By the summer of 1907 the picture would already be different. By 1909 the picture would be barely recognizable from this one.

But in 1906 Helen got on the train. And once she was on the train, everything else was a matter of time.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Helen Sunday Packed Her Bags: 1906.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 13, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/13/the-year-helen-sunday-packed-her-bags-1906/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Helen Sunday Packed Her Bags: 1906.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 13 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/13/the-year-helen-sunday-packed-her-bags-1906/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 13). The year Helen Sunday packed her bags: 1906. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/13/the-year-helen-sunday-packed-her-bags-1906/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Helen Sunday Packed Her Bags: 1906.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 13, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/13/the-year-helen-sunday-packed-her-bags-1906/.

The summer Billy Sunday filled the platform: 1905

Twenty-below-zero weather, a half-hour roast of a New York editor, a tent collapse in Colorado, and the summer Sunday decided he was a Chautauqua man.

In late January of 1905, somewhere inside a tabernacle built of rough boards and tar paper at Mason City, Iowa, six furnaces were going full blast. The temperature outside had dropped to twenty below zero. Inside, a women-only Saturday afternoon meeting drew a thousand women, while Billy Sunday — across town in the larger tabernacle — was preaching to two thousand men on a sermon he called “Chickens Come Home to Roost.”

Canton, Illinois. c. 1910.

Fifty of those men were converted that single afternoon. Eight hundred dollars was raised before the campaign ended for the poor of the city, a line item Sunday quietly added to his revival economics that year and never abandoned. By the time he left Mason City in February, he had spent five weeks doing the kind of work that newspapers in 1905 still didn’t quite have a name for. He was a revivalist. He was a temperance crusader. He was, increasingly, a regional celebrity. And he was about to become, in a way he had not been before, a national platform attraction.

A different kind of revival economy

The first thing to notice about 1905 is that Sunday was now thinking about his revivals as more than just spiritual events. They were starting to behave like community investments.

The Mason City campaign collected money for the poor. The Aledo, Illinois campaign in October produced a careful public breakdown of where every dollar went — expenses paid first, then Sunday’s compensation. The line he liked to use, and that local papers loved to print, was that he “takes nothing until all expenses are paid.” His associate evangelist Ira E. Honeywell — a man who would serve quietly on Sunday’s team for the next twelve years — was running the women’s parallel meetings.

A theme was emerging. Sunday’s revivals had stopped being a one-man traveling show and started being a small organization arriving in town with a sustainable economic model behind it. The towns paid for their own tabernacles. They underwrote their own expenses. They saw the books. And by the end of a campaign, they had not just new church members but a small but real institutional legacy — money raised for the poor, donations to local YMCAs, building plans being discussed.

Canon City and the State Penitentiary

In late March Sunday left the Midwestern winter behind and went to Colorado. The Canon City campaign ran from late March through late April under canvas — a hundred feet by a hundred fifty, with three thousand seats. He preached to coal miners and ranch hands and the families of penitentiary employees.

On a Sunday in mid-April, Sunday entered the Colorado State Penitentiary and preached four times in a single day to the inmates. Nearly 250 of them came forward as converts. The afternoon Sunday service in the tabernacle that same day drew nine thousand people. Even allowing for the inevitable exaggeration in revival-attendance figures of the era, that kind of crowd was extraordinary for a town the size of Canon City.

Around this same period, a small Iowa town called Fort Dodge took an entirely different posture toward Sunday. The local committee voted down an invitation for him to hold meetings, saying he was “not the type to appeal to the average person.” The vote made the papers across several states. Sunday, characteristically, made no public response. He had work in Colorado.

Macomb and the system

Sunday’s late-spring campaign at Macomb, Illinois drew the closest contemporary description we have of how his revival method worked, end to end. The Muscatine Journal of May 20, 1905 laid the whole thing out.

A united local ministry would invite Sunday, and the various churches would form a stock company to raise money for a temporary tabernacle. The structure would be sized to the town — anywhere from twenty-five hundred to four thousand seats. Before Sunday’s arrival there would be cottage prayer meetings, extra prayer meetings, and union services. A chorus choir would be organized. Sunday’s musical director would arrive with his preferred hymn book, the one he used exclusively.

Then Sunday would begin. He worked the church members first. He raised the money for expenses. He went after the sinners. And, in the Journal’s deadpan phrasing, “he handles sin and all its connection without gloves.” For his compensation, he asked for the last Sunday’s collection — which, after a month of meetings, generally came to twenty-five hundred or three thousand dollars.

The article also offered a real criticism, the kind that Sunday’s supporters tended to dismiss but that the longer record bears out at least partially: “after he is gone comes the reaction and the pendulum swings back even to conditions worse than they were before he visits the town.” Whether that was generally true is a question that would take a few more years to answer. But by 1906, when newspapers started doing convert-stickiness analyses on Sunday’s earlier campaigns, the answer would turn out to be: usually not.

The Macomb campaign itself was Sunday’s largest revival to that point. Sixty-two sermons in thirty days. A final day of three hundred and four conversions. The previous campaign-best had been a hundred and seventy-seven.

The Hubbard roast at Sterling

On July 16, 1905, at the Sterling Chautauqua, Billy Sunday stood on a wooden platform in front of fifteen thousand people. It was the largest audience of his platform career to that point — larger than any tabernacle he had yet preached in, larger than any revival service he had yet conducted, larger by some margin than anything that had come before.

He talked for two hours. About half of that time he spent on a sermon. The other half he spent on Elbert Hubbard.

Hubbard was the editor of an East Coast literary magazine called The Philistine. He was a celebrity of a particular Edwardian kind — an aesthete, an essayist, a self-appointed sophisticate who liked to take public swipes at preachers and politicians. He had recently called Sunday a “grafter.” Sunday had read it. And now he was on the largest platform of his life with a coat off, a vest off, and his sleeves rolled up.

He called Hubbard good for nothing. He called him indecent and pusillanimous. He called him a blot on humanity. He called The Philistine the work of the devil and a carbuncle on the neck of humanity. The crowd cheered nearly every sentence. The Quad-City Times of July 17 carried the whole thing.

The Hubbard roast was not really a sermon. It was theater. It was Sunday discovering — in front of fifteen thousand people — that his own personality, his combative instincts, his unfiltered Midwestern bluntness, could carry an outdoor platform as effectively as any sermon he had ever written. He had been preaching for nearly a decade. This was the day he became a public performer.

The summer decision

By late August Sunday had made up his mind. The Rockford Register Star of August 29 carried the announcement: Sunday was “so pleased with the results of his work among the Chautauquas during the summer that he has decided to devote a portion of all summers in the future to Chautauqua work.”

It was, in retrospect, the most consequential career decision he ever made before the great urban campaigns of the next decade. He had run the experiment. Sterling had given him his answer. Joliet, Cedar Lake, Pontiac, Springfield, Racine — every Chautauqua he had touched that summer had confirmed it. He could fill the platform.

A booking bureau started organizing his dates. The summer schedule for 1906 was already being negotiated. The next four years of Sunday’s life were beginning to take shape on a stationery letterhead somewhere in Chicago.

Salida and the snow

In the fall Sunday traveled back to Colorado for a five-week revival at Salida. It was a small mountain town. The campaign drew six hundred converts across its run. But the weather had its own ideas. The tent collapsed under early snow. The October 3 and 4 services had to be moved into a local church. The closing night on October 21 had to be relocated again — this time to a four-hundred-seat opera house. Sunday preached his closing service to a fraction of the people who wanted to hear him.

It was the kind of unglamorous logistical disaster that revival memoirs usually omit and contemporary newspapers usually emphasize. The Daily Sentinel out of Grand Junction covered every weather setback. Salida 1905 stayed in the regional memory as the campaign where the tent fell down and Sunday kept preaching anyway.

Burlington and the closing prayer

The Burlington, Iowa campaign closed out 1905 from early November through mid-December. The tabernacle held four thousand. Average daily attendance came to about six thousand. On the closing night, seven thousand people were inside and five thousand more stood outside.

Dr. G. Walter Barr — a Keokuk physician and journalist who had heard Sunday preach more than a hundred and seventy-five times and who would go on to publish a long, sympathetic study of Sunday’s methods in 1906 — wrote that the Burlington revival “exceeded anything in the history of revivalism in America and equaled the top of the wave in Wales, England and Australia.” Whether or not he was right about the comparison, the claim made the papers across the country.

On the closing night Sunday prayed a prayer that the Cedar Rapids Gazette printed in full the next morning. It is, for a man not generally remembered for the literary quality of his prayers, a striking piece of public speech:

O, Lord, save old Burlington; save old Burlington; save her Lord; let salvation sweep over her like a tidal wave. Let Thy love and mercy roll down through her streets like great rivers; let hundreds come to see their duty, and to take the right stand.

What 1905 was

The 1902 essay framed that year as the moment Sunday’s style locked in. The 1903 essay framed that year as the quiet pivot. The 1904 essay framed that year as the year he started taking positions on the modern world.

1905 was the year Sunday filled the platform. Fifteen thousand at Sterling. The largest audience of his life so far, and not a tabernacle audience that had taken weeks of cottage prayer meetings and ministerial visits to build, but an outdoor Chautauqua audience that just came. Came because they had read about him. Came because the bureau had advertised. Came because, by the summer of 1905, Billy Sunday was the kind of person a Midwestern audience now drove fifty miles to hear.

It was also the year he found out that he did not need a sermon to hold a crowd. The Hubbard roast had been pure personality — Sunday’s combative instincts loose on an outdoor platform with fifteen thousand people cheering. The implication was enormous. It meant that the constraints of the revival-tent format — the careful build-up, the cottage prayer meetings, the four-week emotional arc — were not the only way for Sunday to do what he did. There was another mode available: the platform mode, the personality mode, the single-afternoon mode. And the bureau organizing his 1906 schedule already knew it.

Sunday closed out the year preaching to twelve thousand people in a Burlington tabernacle. He opened 1906 in Rochester, Minnesota. The Chautauqua circuit was beginning to organize itself around him. The first professional photograph of him would appear in a Freeport newspaper in February. His wife Helen would announce at the end of March that she was joining him on the road full-time. The career-defining decade was opening.

1905 was the year that made all of it possible.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Summer Billy Sunday Filled the Platform: 1905.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 11, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/11/the-summer-billy-sunday-filled-the-platform-1905/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Summer Billy Sunday Filled the Platform: 1905.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 11 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/11/the-summer-billy-sunday-filled-the-platform-1905/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 11). The summer Billy Sunday filled the platform: 1905. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/11/the-summer-billy-sunday-filled-the-platform-1905/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Summer Billy Sunday Filled the Platform: 1905.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 11, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/11/the-summer-billy-sunday-filled-the-platform-1905/.

The year Billy Sunday started talking back to the modern world: 1904

Telephone wires, evolution, an English partnership, and a Pontiac woman’s $20,000 check. Twelve months that showed where the rest of the Sunday story was headed.

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-March 1904, somewhere in the wooden tabernacle at Sterling, Illinois, three telephone receivers sat on a wooden table in front of Billy Sunday’s pulpit. They were wired out to a regional operator. The operator in turn was wired out to telephones in 188 cities and towns across the upper Midwest. While Sunday preached one of his sermons that day — pacing, shouting, leaping — people in 188 places who had never seen him, and probably never would, listened to him preach in something like real time.

Sterling, Illinois. c. 1907.

It is, as far as the record knows, the earliest broadcast preaching event in American religious history. Two decades before radio. Six decades before televised crusades. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch made it the lead detail of a March 20 feature. The Oquawka Spectator followed up three days later. The 41-year-old former baseball player, working a small Illinois town under canvas, had just done something no preacher in the country had ever done.

That was 1904 for Billy Sunday. Not a year of single milestones but a year of firsts — small ones, large ones, technical ones, theological ones, financial ones. By December he had preached his first public anti-evolution sermon, taken his first English-and-Australia booking inquiry, organized his first city-wide ministerial coalition that ended with the entire police force converted, and accepted a single $20,000 donation toward a new YMCA building — the equivalent of roughly $700,000 today. He was just six years out from his last baseball contract. He was about to enter the most consequential decade of his life.

Jefferson and Marshall: the year opens cold

The year began the way most of Sunday’s years began in this decade — in a cold-weather Iowa town, in a temporary tabernacle, on a four-week timetable. Jefferson, Iowa ran from mid-December 1903 through mid-January 1904. The 1,500-seat tabernacle hit standing-room-only capacity on the final night, when 2,600 people came. 107 conversions that single night alone. The published Sioux Falls and Sioux City papers noted Sunday’s $1,400 purse — defending it pointedly: “he gets well paid; it is only right and just.” A 100-voice choir under Fred G. Fischer carried the music.

The Marshall, Minnesota campaign that followed in late January and February drew over 600 converts in a town of just 2,088 people. Some papers claimed Sunday remained in Marshall until early March — but the records show he had to be in Sterling by February 11. The local editor’s dry note that “this doesn’t seem possible” gives us a small glimpse of how the Sunday road schedule looked to people watching it from the outside: punishing, implausible, relentless.

Sterling and the telephone

From February 11 to March 10, Sunday held his Sterling, Illinois campaign in a temporary tabernacle with a 200-voice choir. Over 35 days he preached 73 sermons. Total cumulative attendance came in around 160,000. Final conversion count: 1,678. Sunday’s purse: $3,275 — by far his largest to that point, three-quarters again the size of his previous Carthage record. The previous year’s $2,100 Carthage purse had been flagged as historic. The Sterling number meant the trajectory was real.

It was at Sterling that the telephone broadcast happened. The technology was straightforward in retrospect — long-distance telephone trunk lines were spreading across the upper Midwest in those years, and amplified speaker setups were beginning to appear in public meeting halls. What was unusual was the idea of using them to extend a single revival service across 188 separate towns simultaneously. No one had done it before. Sunday, never one to refuse a press opportunity, agreed to preach to whoever happened to be on the other end of the wires.

The campaign also drew its share of opposition. Flyers circulated in Sterling associating Sunday’s revival with the “wiles of the Devil.” The Rock Island Argus covered the controversy on March 4. Sunday seemed unbothered. The final-day conversion count, $3,275 purse, and 160,000 attendance figure suggested the flyers had not worked.

Galva and the YMCA tithe

Late March through early April Sunday spent at Galva, Illinois, in another tent tabernacle. The Galva numbers were smaller — $1,325 purse, 600 conversions — but the campaign produced a quietly important first. Sunday returned $900 of his $1,325 purse to the local YMCA. He paid Fred Fischer’s salary of $40 out of the same purse. Then he and Fischer left for Rockford with what remained.

This is the earliest documented case of Sunday voluntarily redirecting a substantial portion of his personal purse back into a community institution. Two-thirds of a Galva-size purse, given back. Not as expense-recovery, not as facility-construction, but as a direct gift to a local Christian organization Sunday wanted to support. The pattern would recur. At Galesburg in 1907 he would return $1,600 of his $6,340 purse to the local YMCA. At Winona Lake in 1909 he would donate $500 personally plus all his lecture fees. The Galva 1904 gift was the prototype.

Rockford and the first evolution sermon

From April 14 to May 17, Sunday preached at Rockford, Illinois in a tabernacle that measured 129 by 140 feet, with 5,000 seats. The campaign drew hundreds of people daily who could not get inside. The Sterling YMCA, seventy miles away, sent organized delegations of attendees. A Chautauqua auditorium had been proposed for the meetings; Sunday vetoed it and insisted on his own preferred tabernacle setup. The first documented case in the curated record of Sunday asserting venue control over a local committee. It would not be the last.

Across 50 services, 925 conversions came forward. But the historic note in the Rockford campaign was theological, not numerical. In a sermon during the campaign, Sunday went after the theory of evolution directly. The Quad-City Times of April 21 quoted him calling it “all rot” and a “damnable theory.” The Perry Chief of May 6 reported the same line.

This is, as far as the curated record shows, the earliest public anti-evolution sermon Sunday preached. It predates the major Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy by half a decade, and it predates the Scopes Trial — the moment that fixed anti-evolution preaching as a defining mark of conservative American Protestantism — by twenty-one years. By 1906 he would have a titled sermon for it: “Evolution a Sham.” But in April 1904, somewhere in a Rockford tabernacle, in the middle of a four-week revival campaign, he was already saying it out loud and the papers were already writing it down.

The Rockford campaign also drew opposition from a different direction. The Reverend J.F. Seedoff, a Lutheran pastor in town, preached against Sunday’s coming and gave the Muscatine News-Tribune a long quote: “How can Billy Sunday in a few weeks do what forty ministers are trying to do all the year around? It requires sensationalism… Stay away from Billy Sunday’s tent.” Sunday took no public notice. The 5,000-seat tabernacle filled anyway.

During Rockford, Sunday also played in a demonstration baseball game — possibly the first documented case of him using baseball as a public-relations vehicle for a revival campaign. Coverage spread to multiple regional papers. The ex-major-leaguer leveraged his old identity for the sake of his new one, and the press loved it.

Harvey and the converted police force

Late May through late June Sunday spent at Harvey, Illinois. The campaign produced 427 conversions. But the line that the Louisville Courier-Journal carried on June 20 was the line that traveled: Sunday had “converted the entire police force.”

The claim was probably exaggerated in detail and probably accurate in essence. Harvey was a small town of a few thousand people with a correspondingly small police department. A revival campaign that produced 427 conversions across six weeks would have plausibly captured most or all of the men carrying badges. But what the Courier-Journal headline did was give Sunday a story that could be reduced to a single sentence — and it traveled. By 1909, Spokane newspapers were reporting on Sunday’s revivals with similar headlines about converted firemen and converted police officers. Harvey 1904 invented the form.

Keokuk, an English overture, and the second call

The Keokuk, Iowa campaign ran from September 30 to October 31 in a tent tabernacle seating 2,500 to 3,000, on the corner of Main and Twelfth Streets. The conversion total was around 1,000. Sunday’s purse came in at $2,100. The Sunday October 23 service drew 13,000 attendees.

Two moments stand out. First, the Waterloo Courier of October 5 reported that Sunday’s schedule was now booked through January 1906, “when he may join an English evangelist for work in Great Britain and Australia.” This is the earliest documented suggestion that Sunday was considering an overseas ministry. He would never make that trip — but the fact that it was a serious public conversation in 1904 means his American profile had reached a tier where international tours were plausible options. Most American evangelists, then as now, never approached that tier.

The second moment came on the closing night, October 31. Sunday formally dismissed the meeting at the end of his service — and converts kept coming forward anyway. He extended the call. More came. Eventually he closed for the night. The detail is striking enough that it appeared in multiple papers. Anyone who has watched a Promise Keepers stadium event or a Franklin Graham crusade with a “second call” segment knows the moment intuitively. Keokuk 1904 is one of the earliest documented instances in Sunday’s career.

Two years later, in March 1906, the Mattoon Journal Gazette and Times-Courier published its multi-campaign stickiness analysis. Keokuk came in at 75 percent of its converts still “living the new life” — one of the strongest results in the entire study.

Pontiac and a $20,000 check

From November 5 to December 5, Sunday held a revival at Pontiac, Illinois, in a large temporary tabernacle seating 2,500. The campaign produced over 1,000 conversions. The Herald and Review of December 6 noted that “1,000 souls” had been saved.

But the financial story of the Pontiac campaign was extraordinary. A wealthy woman of Pontiac, attending the services, donated $20,000 toward a new YMCA building. In 1904 dollars. The equivalent of roughly $700,000 today. It is the single largest charitable gift documented in any Sunday revival in the curated record up to that point.

This is a different kind of revival economics than the Galva $900 YMCA gift from Sunday’s own purse seven months earlier. Galva had been about Sunday redirecting his compensation. Pontiac was about Sunday’s preaching catalyzing a major capital gift from an attendee. Both pointed at the same outcome — durable institutional change in the towns Sunday visited — but they reflected very different economic mechanisms. Both would shape Sunday’s revival approach for the next decade.

What 1904 was about

The 1902 essay framed that year as the moment Sunday’s preaching style locked into its mature form. The 1903 essay framed that year as quiet pivot — three foundations being laid for what was to come. The 1904 record reads differently from either. It is the year Sunday started taking positions on big subjects, in public, that he would carry for the rest of his career.

A position on technology. The Sterling telephone broadcast was not just a press stunt. It was a working model of using new technology to extend a single preaching event beyond its physical room. Sunday would never become a radio preacher in the systematic sense Charles Fuller or Aimee Semple McPherson did. But the 1904 Sterling moment showed he was completely comfortable being the test subject for whatever broadcast technology the period happened to offer.

A position on evolution. The Rockford anti-evolution preaching predates the Scopes Trial by two decades and the Modernist controversy by half a decade. By the time the rest of conservative Protestantism caught up to the evolution question, Sunday had been preaching against it for years. His Rockford lines — “all rot,” “damnable theory” — would, with relatively little modification, still be his lines in the 1920s.

A position on temperance and civic engagement. Harvey’s converted police force, Pontiac’s wealthy YMCA donor, Keokuk’s “second call” pattern: Sunday’s revivals in 1904 were starting to look less like devotional events and more like coordinated civic interventions. The institutional results — new YMCAs, new church buildings, transformed police departments — were the same kind of outcomes Centerville had produced in 1903, but on a larger scale and across more towns. He had found the formula. He was now applying it.

A position on his own scale. The casual reference to a possible English-and-Australia tour in October told you everything about where 1904 had put Sunday in the public mind. He was still preaching to towns of 2,000 to 5,000 people in southern Iowa and central Illinois. But he was also being talked about in terms of international evangelism. Both things were true at once, and 1904 was the year both became possible to say in print without anyone laughing.

By the time Sunday opened his Redwood Falls, Minnesota campaign in mid-December 1904, the trajectory he had been on since the Wheaton leap of 1902 was no longer ambiguous. The Chautauqua bookings would explode in 1905. The bigger purses were already coming. The audiences were already growing. And the positions he had taken in 1904 — on evolution, on civic engagement, on broadcast technology, on the size of his own ministry — were the positions he would still hold thirty years later.

1904 was the year Billy Sunday’s preaching grew up.

How to cite this post

Chicago: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Started Talking Back to the Modern World: 1904.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), June 9, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/09/the-year-billy-sunday-started-talking-back-to-the-modern-world-1904/.

MLA: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Started Talking Back to the Modern World: 1904.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935), 9 June 2026, evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/09/the-year-billy-sunday-started-talking-back-to-the-modern-world-1904/.

APA: McNutt, K. (2026, June 9). The year Billy Sunday started talking back to the modern world: 1904. Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/09/the-year-billy-sunday-started-talking-back-to-the-modern-world-1904/

Turabian: McNutt, Kraig. “The Year Billy Sunday Started Talking Back to the Modern World: 1904.” Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935). June 9, 2026. https://evangelistbillysunday.com/2026/06/09/the-year-billy-sunday-started-talking-back-to-the-modern-world-1904/.