Category: Fairfield Iowa

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/.

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/.

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.