Springfield, Illinois – Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935)

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.

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/.

When Springfield Stood Still: Billy Sunday’s 1909 Earthquake

Springfield, Illinois
February 26 – April 11, 1909

In the spring of 1909, something happened in Springfield that people would talk about for decades.

Not a political convention.
Not a legislative battle.
A revival.

For forty-five days, the capital city of Illinois — population 51,678 — was overtaken by a wooden tabernacle, a former professional baseball player turned evangelist, and what many believed was a visitation of God.

By the time it ended, nearly 5,000 people had walked the sawdust trail.

And Springfield would never quite be the same.

The Numbers — and the Scale

The statistics alone are staggering.

4,729 reported conversions
774 converts on the final day alone — the largest single-day total of Sunday’s career to that point
607,000 total attendance over the course of the campaign
35,000+ at the final Sunday service
$20,218 in total contributions
- $10,734 to Sunday
- $9,483 to campaign expenses

To put this in perspective: Springfield’s population was just over 51,000. Attendance over the campaign equaled more than twelve times the city’s population.

One hundred thousand people attended special weekday meetings.
35,800 participated in cottage prayer meetings.

This was not a tent revival on the fringe of town.

This was the town.

Even Governor Charles Deneen and members of his family were reported among the converts on the closing day, joining First Methodist Episcopal Church . When the governor walks the aisle, you know something seismic is happening.

And yet, remarkably, Billy Sunday himself was reportedly disappointed with the conversion numbers. He believed “personal work was not begun early enough.”

That was Sunday. Five thousand souls, and he still thought the church could have done more.

The Night Billy Was Horsewhipped

The campaign did not begin quietly.

On opening night, in front of 8,000 people, Sunday was assaulted.

A man named Sherman Potts rushed forward with a buggy whip and struck Sunday multiple times. The audience teetered toward panic. Women wept. Children screamed. Sunday leapt from the platform and knocked his assailant down. They rolled in the aisle before ushers and police subdued the attacker.

The papers reported that Potts had previously been declared insane and had been confined at Jacksonville. He claimed he acted in defense of women’s virtue, alleging that Sunday had criticized them.

What could have ended the revival instead amplified it.

Fred Fischer directed the choir to sing, calming the crowd. The meeting continued.

Springfield had just witnessed the kind of drama that headlines love — and revivals sometimes ride.

The “Judgment” Sermon and the Men

On one Sunday afternoon, 8,000 men packed the tabernacle to hear Sunday preach what was described as his “judgment” sermon.

Three hundred men responded.

Sunday’s masculine appeal — direct, confrontational, athletic — was reshaping revival culture. This was not sentimental religion. It was muscular, public, civic.

He preached like a ballplayer sliding into home — coat off, body leaning, words cutting.

And men came.

Mother’s Day: 9,000 White Handkerchiefs

One of the most remarkable moments came on Mother’s Day.

Sunday requested that every person wear a white flower or ribbon in honor of mother. If your mother was alive, do her an act of kindness. Write her. Telegraph her. Give her a gift. If she was gone, do something kind for someone else’s mother.

He invited businessmen to close their stores from 2–4 p.m. and pledged that an offering would go to the Woman’s Club for distribution to city charities.

Then it happened.

Nine thousand white handkerchiefs rose in the air in honor of mothers.

In an era before official federal recognition of Mother’s Day, Springfield became a tableau of white cloth and public gratitude.

It was revival fused with civic virtue. Sunday understood symbolism.

Inclusion: Deaf Mutes and Interpreted Sermons

Another remarkable feature of the campaign was the regular attendance of a large group of deaf men from Jacksonville.

Professor Frank Reed, Jr., of the State School interpreted Sunday’s sermons. Reports indicate that between thirty and forty deaf attendees were converted during the Springfield meetings .

When the offering was taken, the deaf men gave ten dollars — a meaningful sum in 1909. Sunday seized the moment: 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?

That’s classic Sunday — sharp, public, convicting.

The Ushers, the Machinery, the Organization

Photographs from the campaign show massive ranks of ushers — disciplined, suited, organized.

Springfield was not spontaneous chaos. It was structured revival.

This was the era when Sunday’s campaigns became logistical marvels:

Massive wooden tabernacle
Coordinated prayer meetings
Choirs
Personal workers
Cottage gatherings
Financial accountability

The revival was both spiritual movement and operational achievement.

Sunday was not merely a preacher. He was building a machine.

“A Good and Great Man”

After the campaign, C. C. Sinclair, pastor of Stewart Street Christian Church, offered this assessment:

“A good and great man, mighty in word and in deed; a prophet, and more than a prophet… The church has been purged and strengthened, and Springfield is being turned to God. It is such a revival of religion as comes to a community but once in a generation.”

That language is not casual.

Once in a generation.

Springfield’s churches reported strengthening and purging — language that suggests repentance within the church as much as conversion outside it.

Revival, for Sunday, was not merely altar calls. It was institutional recalibration.

Why Springfield Mattered

Springfield 1909 was a hinge moment.

It proved Sunday could sustain massive attendance over weeks.
It demonstrated his appeal to political and civic leadership.
It showed that controversy could fuel momentum.
It fused patriotic symbolism, moral reform, and evangelical urgency.
It revealed a revival model scalable to larger cities.

1909 postcard of Springfield, Illinois. Color-corrected. Author’s collection.

In many ways, Springfield was the rehearsal for the metropolitan campaigns to come.

And for a city of 51,000 to generate 607,000 in cumulative attendance? That’s not ordinary religious enthusiasm.

That’s a cultural event.

The Artifact That Survived

I own a 60-page souvenir booklet titled Rev. W. A. Sunday Meetings at Springfield, Illinois (c. 1909). When it arrived in November 2025, the bottom left corner throughout the entire booklet had been ripped away and was missing from the package .

It’s fragile. Imperfect. Scarred.

But so is revival history.

What Springfield experienced in 1909 was messy, dramatic, organized, emotional, public, controversial, generous, patriotic, and deeply evangelical.

It was America before the Great War.

It was Protestant civic religion at full throttle.

It was Billy Sunday in ascent.

And for forty-five days, Springfield stood still —
while thousands walked forward.

Mother’s Day, 1909

ONE of the most impressive and successful days in the great campaign was Mother’s Day, as suggested by Rev. Mr. Sunday. The following request was published:

Every person is requested to wear a white flower or ribbon to-day in honor of mother. If your mother is alive do her an act of kindness. Telegraph or write to her, or give her a gift to express your love. If mother is not alive, perform an act of kindness to somebody else’s mother. The services at the tabernacle will be for mothers, although everybody is invited. Businessmen are invited to close their places of business from two to four o’clock, or at least to let as many employees off as possible. An offering will be taken at the tabernacle to be given to the Woman’s Club to be distributed to the charities of the city as the club deems best.

W. A. Sunday

Source (text above): 1909 Springfield, Illinois souvenir booklet

Who is Billy Sunday c. 1909

The Billy Sunday campaign published a souvenir booklet in 1910 that summarized the Springfield, Illinois campaign (Feb 26 – Apr 12, 1909). The following narrative shared much about the Rev. William A. ‘Billy’ Sunday

Rev. W. A. Sunday

WILLIAM ASHLEY SUNDAY is the best beloved and the most abused, the simplest and the most misunderstood, the most soulful and the most like a vaudeville performer, the most powerful in oratory and the least appealing to the emotions, the most persuasive and the most controversial, the most scholarly and the plainest, not to say coarsest, the greatest poet in essence and the greatest scrapper, of any man on the forum, the platform, or the stage of the world today.

He has been styled, the polygonal preacher, because he has so many sides, each a complete, finished, forceful fact. A character picture of the man, to be complete, must be a description of each of these baker’s dozen sides of his personality, none of which is much more important than any other one. The most that can be done within a small space—or indeed within any limitation of space—is to sketch in broad lines the mere outlines of this evangelist who is preaching the gospel of peace on earth and fighting the devil with the hottest of fire at the same time.

His father was killed in the civil war. The little boy was sent to the Iowa home for soldiers’ orphans. Later he made his own living at a youthful age, and his school teacher of that time says she would often watch him on the playground and wonder whether he would be the greatest crook or the greatest power for good in America—she was even then sure he would be one of the two. The boy took the right hand road.

When a young man he was a locomotive fireman on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and lived at Marshalltown. This was also the home of the famous A. C. Anson, captain of the old Chicagos, who watched Billy Sunday play baseball on corner lots while at home in Marshalltown. Anson took him to Chicago, discovered in him a great baseball player, and Sunday held the record for base running for years, a record which he still holds; was the second man chosen on the All-American team to tour the world—an accident to his knee kept him from making the tour—and was a popular idol of the fans.

An old time catcher for the Louisville team says that in those days when en route the rest of the men would play poker in the Pullman, but Billy Sunday was always back on the cushions with a book. He has kept close to books ever since. He has a remarkable faculty of choosing the very best and most authoritative writing on any particular subject and reading that only—and hence the range of subjects upon which he is thoroughly and accurately informed, includes almost everything from histology to astronomy and from bacteriology to history—it is a little interesting to notice that chemistry is the one topic unmentioned in his sermons. Three medical college professors who met at the end of his sermon which includes a half hour of the deepest microscopical pathology, agreed that William A. Sunday is the only layman they ever heard or read who was accurate in all he said about medical science.

One night a bunch of baseball players strolling along a Chicago street ran into a curbstone evangelist and stopped to be amused. Sunday stayed after the others went on. He went from there to the Pacific Garden mission, where he was converted. He kept on playing baseball, and nobody who ever heard it will ever forget his own description of how the others of that famous Chicago team approved his home run into Christianity.

A little later he was employed by the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Association at a small salary, only part of it paid during the panic of 1893, and refusing offers of $500 a month to return to the diamond. As a part of his work, he addressed groups of men—he always did know men, because of his early life and hard struggles. The addresses became longer and stronger with the growth of the work and experience in it. That great evangelist, Wilbur F. Chapman, took Sunday away from the Chicago Y.M.C.A. to be his assistant. Sunday learned the art of evangelizing and after learning it thoroughly treated it as Napoleon treated the art of war—he re-made it for himself, so that its old practitioners hardly recognize it, and at the same time made it produce victories hitherto undreamed of. The William A. Sunday methods of campaigning for Christ are unlike any others; they include the best of those of the past and many things unique; probably only Sunday could use them successfully in all their details; but it seems certain that they have factors not found in most others which really are the corner stones of successful work in evangelism. Some of the chief parts of the art of evangelism, as practiced by William A. Sunday, are these: Absolute accuracy in every statement made, whether one of the essential parts of the argument, or merely an illustration; hew close to the line that Jesus Christ laid down, regardless of the falling chips, and wherever that line leads; use language that everybody can understand, never talk down to an audience, but be lucid to the most ignorant while you are talking up to the most scholarly persons before you; avoid sectarianism; demand united work from all the evangelical churches in the city, and push united work by all the members of those churches; roast the skin of vice and sin in all its forms, from backsliding and carelessness to murder and adultery, rub salt into the burnt flesh, and then apply a healing balm that causes the object of the criticism to leave the tabernacle chastened in spirit, but loving the rod that smote him; avoid all fads and fancies, all tangential movements of society, but do a common thing in a most unusual way; and—many others. Starting with small towns and a few hundred converts at each series of meetings, the same plan of campaign has been used for all the years involving campaigns in cities of all sizes, and the first meetings years ago were, so far as Mr. Sunday is concerned, almost exactly like the meetings in Springfield. Of course, some minor modifications have been made, but these are few. Always there are the first sermons to get the church members back out of the world into the influence of Christ and to get the public to come to the tabernacle—the public seems to find its greatest attraction in hearing church-member hypocrites and Pharisees skinned like eels. Always the strenuosity of the sermons almost imperceptibly lessens gradually until the preacher who preaches as man never preached before is less athletic and more rhetorical about the middle of the series. Then, to the amazement of people who judged the man from his first pulpit stunts, the Reverend William Ashley Sunday preaches like the great orator that he is, the scholar that he is, the poet-philosopher that he is. This many sided man cannot be even sketched within a hundred pages. There is competent authority for saying of him these superlatives as being strictly true: He understands the minds and feelings of men as few men ever have done. He is one of the greatest orators the world has ever seen—and this is proved by the results of his work.

He is one of the most remarkable stylists in literature, his perfect imitation in one hour of the styles of Carlyle, Gibbon, Ingersoll, and several other writers of individual styles being an unprecedented feat.

He is said by scientists to be the most—and indeed the only—perfectly accurate preacher in matters of science. And a large part of his sermons deal with science.

He appeals entirely to the reason of the people, and rarely or never to their emotions, and in this he is the greatest of evangelists in the opinion of many people.

In numbers of converts, dramatic height of scenes, and wonderful stirring of the audience, several of his meetings have eclipsed anything in the history of evangelism since pentecost—and the most of these have been meetings for men.

Who is Hellen ‘Ma’ Sunday? c. 1909

The following is a biographical sketch of Helen Sunday, wife of Billy Sunday. Part of the 1909 Springfield campaign souvenir.

Mrs. W. A. Sunday

THE biographer who omits to study the wife of his subject certainly will miss the key to his problem of investigation. The world talks of the influence of the mothers upon its men; but it, curiously enough, generally omits appreciation of the strong influence of the wife upon any man; and perhaps more men have been made and unmade by their wives than by their mothers, when heredity is omitted from the matter.

Mrs. William A. Sunday was a girl of great strength of character when she was Miss Helen A. Thompson, the daughter of a Chicago business man. She married a famous baseball player and found herself the wife of one of the greatest of evangelists—and she not only made the revolutionary change with him but is one of the chief causes of William A. Sunday being what he is in the eyes of the world. She was a church worker, a shining exception to the rule of the results of marrying a man to make him better. She upheld the hands of her husband when he was in poverty and the poorly paid worker of the Chicago Y.M.C.A., writing letters declining, for seven times his salary, to return to the baseball field. When William A. Sunday was starting out as an evangelist along entirely new lines of endeavor which merged into In his entirely unprecedented lines of achievement, his wife helped greatly to keep up his courage, keep him along the line he had chosen, and keep him as much as possible free from worries. Mrs. Sunday complements her husband perfectly—they are not at all similar, and she is strongest where he is weakest and weakest where he is strongest. If he had a helpmeet like himself, Mr. Sunday might be plunging into hot water every month and every year. Luckily for him, his wife guides him around and over most obstacles, keeps his fingers out of the fire, and does what Mr. Sunday never thinks of doing—looks after his own interests.

The wedding of Mr. and Mrs. William A. Sunday was not the kind one finds pictured in Paul and Virginia by any manner of means; it was a twentieth-century marriage of two distinct individuals joining as helpmeets, without either submerging a personality in the other—certainly not the old kind of entire submergence of the wife in the husband. They disagree about as many things as other people do, but each knows in what things the other is best informed or strongest, and the one best qualified always decides the question. The result is that they are more free from actual, important disagreements—the kind called love spats or marital troubles—than most people. This is a match of brains as well as of hearts, of sense as well as of souls, and of respect as well as of love.

Mrs. Sunday does what she can in public during a series of meetings conducted by her husband, but the most important thing she does is to keep her husband able to do the great things he accomplishes in every city in which he works. She is a perfect wife for a very remarkable man.

“BILLY” SUNDAY ASSAULTED.

Page 2 of The Britt News, published in Britt, Iowa on Thursday, March 4th, 1909
Horsewhipped by Religious Zealot at Springfield.

Rev W. A. Sunday, better known as “Billy” Sunday, a former baseball player, who is now an evangelist, was horsewhipped Friday night by a religious fanatic at the Sunday tabernacle in Springfield, Ill., where, in the presence of 8,000 persons he was conducting the opening meeting of a religious revival.

The evangelist had just made his opening remarks and was leaning against the pulpit while a hymn was sung by Fischer and Butler, his choral leaders, when a powerful man who says his name is Sherman Potts ran forward with a buggy whip and struck Sunday several terrific blows.

Sunday leaped from the platform and dashed at his assailant, whom he knocked down. The audience was on the verge of a panic, with women weeping and children screaming while Potts and Sunday rolled and tumbled in the aisle.

Mr Fischer directed the choir and the audience to sing, and in a few moments the entire audience was calmed Several men seized Potts and held him until policemen came and took him to jail.

Mr Sunday suffered several painful bruises from the whip The prisoner said his home was near Lexington, Ill According to his statements at the jail he was once declared insane and committed to the Jacksonville asylum, whence after a brief confinement he was released.

He made the attack he said, in defense of the virtue of women which he declared had been criticized by the evangelist The police say that Potts is a religious fanatic.

Page 2 of The Britt News, published in Britt, Iowa on Thursday, March 4th, 1909.

Springfield, Illinois (early 1909)

Billy Sunday Comes to Springfield, Illinois (February–April 1909)

From February 26 to April 11, 1909, Springfield, Illinois became the center of one of Billy Sunday’s most significant early urban revivals.

This campaign followed a string of highly successful meetings in 1908, including his powerful revival in Bloomington, Illinois. By the time Sunday arrived in Springfield, he was already becoming a nationally recognized figure — a former baseball star turned evangelist whose name drew crowds, controversy, and intense public attention wherever he preached.

For six weeks, a massive wooden tabernacle dominated 2nd Street between Monroe and Capitol. Built specifically for the meetings, the structure was simple in design but enormous in scale, capable of holding thousands of people at a time. Night after night, it filled with hymn singing, prayer, and Sunday’s unmistakable blend of humor, blunt moral challenge, and urgent appeals for personal decision.

Tens of thousands attended over the course of the campaign. Families came together, churches cooperated, and people traveled from surrounding towns to hear the most famous preacher in America.

By the end of the revival, newspapers and church leaders reported that 4,729 people had made public commitments to Christ. These were not just momentary emotional responses; many went on to join local congregations and participate in community life.

One of the most lasting outcomes of the Springfield meetings was the founding of Washington Street Mission. Born out of the spiritual energy of Sunday’s campaign, the mission was created to serve the poor, hungry, and vulnerable in the city — and it continues that work to this day, more than a century later.

The timing of the revival made it especially meaningful.

Only a few months earlier, Springfield had been shaken by the 1908 Race Riot, one of the most violent racial conflicts in Illinois history. Tensions still lingered when Sunday arrived. His sermons, which emphasized repentance, moral reform, and personal responsibility, resonated deeply in a city searching for healing and stability.

While Sunday did not directly address political or racial issues in the modern sense, his call for transformed lives and renewed community carried special weight in a town still recovering from turmoil.

The Springfield campaign marked a turning point in Billy Sunday’s ministry. It was one of his first major city-wide revivals and helped launch a decade in which he would preach in America’s largest urban centers — from New York to Los Angeles.

More than just a revival, Springfield in 1909 was a milestone. It showed that Sunday could move beyond small towns and regional fame to shape the moral conversation of the entire nation.

For six weeks that spring, Springfield was not just the capital of Illinois — it was the pulpit of America.