Billy Sunday and the Modern City

Why America’s Greatest Revivalist Preached to the Crowds

I actually think this has the potential to become one of the stronger essays on EvangelistBillySunday.com. The key is notto argue that Billy Sunday was consciously following Samuel Lane Loomis. We simply don’t know that. Instead, we can argue something stronger historically:

Billy Sunday’s ministry became one of evangelical Protestantism’s most visible responses to the urban crisis that Loomis had identified a generation earlier.

That is a defensible historical argument.

Billy Sunday and the Modern City

Why America’s Greatest Revivalist Preached to the Crowds

“The city had become America’s greatest mission field—and Billy Sunday intended to meet it there.”

When Billy Sunday launched his ministry in the late 1890s, America was changing faster than most people could comprehend.

Small farming communities were giving way to booming cities. Factories drew workers from the countryside. Immigrants poured into urban neighborhoods. Streetcars stretched cities outward, skyscrapers climbed upward, and millions of people suddenly found themselves surrounded by strangers rather than neighbors.

To many Americans, these changes represented remarkable progress.

To many Protestant leaders, however, they also represented an unprecedented spiritual challenge.

Few understood that challenge more clearly than Samuel Lane Loomis.

A Warning Before Billy Sunday Arrived

In 1887, nearly a decade before Billy Sunday conducted his first independent revival campaigns, Presbyterian minister Samuel Lane Loomis published Modern Cities and Their Religious Problems.

His concern was straightforward.

America’s cities were growing faster than the Church was adapting.

The methods that had served rural America for generations were proving inadequate for crowded neighborhoods where churches competed with saloons, theaters, political machines, and the relentless pace of modern life.

Loomis believed the city itself had become the nation’s greatest missionary field.

The Church, he argued, must stop waiting for people to come through its doors and instead find new ways to reach the people where they lived.

Although there is no evidence Billy Sunday ever read Loomis’s book, history suggests that his ministry became one of the clearest answers to the challenge Loomis described.

Billy Sunday Understood the City

Billy Sunday’s revival campaigns were never random.

As his ministry expanded during the first two decades of the twentieth century, he increasingly focused on America’s growing cities.

Chicago.

Pittsburgh.

Philadelphia.

Scranton.

Columbus.

Syracuse.

New York.

These were not simply convenient locations.

They were places where America’s future was being written.

They were centers of industry, immigration, commerce, politics—and moral struggle.

Sunday instinctively recognized that if the gospel could influence the city, it could influence the nation.

Taking the Church to the People

Loomis criticized churches that expected the city to come to them.

Billy Sunday reversed the equation.

Rather than relying on existing church buildings, he erected enormous temporary wooden tabernacles capable of seating thousands.

These structures became impossible to ignore.

They stood in the heart of the city, inviting businessmen, factory workers, immigrants, politicians, homemakers, laborers, and curious skeptics to hear the gospel.

In effect, Billy Sunday took the Church into the public square.

A United Church for a Divided City

Another concern Loomis raised was the fragmentation of Protestant churches.

Individual congregations often labored independently while cities expanded around them.

Billy Sunday’s solution was cooperation.

Months before each campaign, committees representing dozens—and often hundreds—of churches organized every aspect of the coming revival.

Pastors who ordinarily worked independently prayed together.

Business leaders served together.

Volunteers visited homes together.

Choirs brought together singers from many denominations.

Sunday did not erase denominational differences.

He simply reminded Christians that the city was larger than any one congregation.

Speaking to Urban Problems

Critics sometimes portray Billy Sunday as a preacher obsessed with alcohol.

History tells a richer story.

Sunday addressed nearly every moral challenge associated with modern urban life.

He preached against drunkenness because he believed it devastated families.

He condemned political corruption because he believed dishonesty weakened public trust.

He confronted gambling because he saw it exploiting the vulnerable.

He denounced sexual immorality because he believed it fractured marriages and homes.

His sermons were not disconnected moral lectures.

They were directed toward the realities Americans encountered every day in rapidly growing cities.

Organized for a Modern World

One of the greatest misconceptions about Billy Sunday is that he relied solely on emotion.

In reality, his campaigns were remarkably organized.

Advance teams arrived months before meetings began.

Volunteer committees handled publicity, finances, transportation, ushers, music, prayer meetings, and follow-up.

Local newspapers received regular updates.

Businesses adjusted schedules.

Entire cities prepared for the arrival of the revival.

Ironically, while Sunday preached against many of modern society’s moral failures, he embraced many of modern society’s organizational strengths.

He understood that reaching a modern city required modern methods.

Why Millions Came

The popularity of Billy Sunday cannot be explained simply by his energetic preaching style.

Americans came because they sensed he was addressing questions larger than themselves.

How do families remain strong when society is changing so quickly?

How does honesty survive in competitive business?

Can communities preserve moral convictions amid rapid growth?

Can churches still shape public life?

These were not abstract questions.

They were the defining questions of urban America.

Billy Sunday offered answers rooted not in political ideology or social theory, but in the transforming power of Jesus Christ.

Reading Billy Sunday in Historical Context

Understanding Billy Sunday requires more than reading his sermons.

It requires understanding the world that made those sermons necessary.

Samuel Lane Loomis recognized that America’s greatest challenge was no longer reaching isolated frontier settlements.

It was reaching the crowded, anonymous, morally complex modern city.

Billy Sunday became one of the most influential evangelists to answer that challenge.

He did not merely preach in America’s cities.

He sought to reclaim them—one heart, one home, one church, and one revival at a time.

To Understand Billy Sunday, You Must First Understand the American City

To Understand Billy Sunday, You Must First Understand the American City

“Billy Sunday didn’t simply preach against sin. He preached into a nation struggling to hold itself together.”

One of the greatest mistakes we can make in studying Billy Sunday is viewing him in isolation.

Too often, we imagine Sunday as a colorful evangelist—a former professional baseball player who sprinted across the platform, smashed chairs for emphasis, and denounced liquor with unmatched enthusiasm. Those things are certainly true. But if that is all we see, we miss the larger story.

Billy Sunday was not merely a personality. He was a product of his time, and perhaps more importantly, he became one of the defining voices responding to one of the greatest social transformations in American history.

To understand Billy Sunday, we must first understand the America in which he preached.

A Nation Turned Upside Down

Between 1820 and 1920, the United States experienced astonishing change.

Millions left rural communities for rapidly growing cities. Waves of immigrants arrived from around the world. Railroads connected distant regions into a single national economy. Factories replaced farms. Skyscrapers reshaped city skylines. Electric lights, streetcars, telephones, and mass-produced goods transformed everyday life.

For many Americans, progress was exhilarating.

For others, it was deeply unsettling.

The close-knit communities that had once provided moral accountability were disappearing. In their place emerged crowded neighborhoods where neighbors were strangers, saloons flourished, political corruption thrived, prostitution was visible, crime increased, and families often struggled simply to survive.

Many Americans wondered whether the nation’s moral foundations were beginning to crumble.

Paul Boyer and the Search for Moral Order

Historian Paul Boyer explored this remarkable period in his influential book Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920.

Boyer argued that countless Protestant leaders were driven by a single concern: how could moral order be preserved in a rapidly urbanizing nation?

They did not simply preach sermons.

They built institutions.

Sunday schools multiplied. Rescue missions opened. YMCA chapters expanded. Bible societies distributed millions of Scriptures. Temperance organizations grew. City missions sought to reach neighborhoods that traditional churches struggled to influence.

These efforts represented far more than isolated ministries.

Together they formed a broad movement attempting to answer one pressing question:

How do you preserve Christian character in a society that is changing faster than anyone imagined possible?

Billy Sunday Arrives

Into this world stepped Billy Sunday.

He did not invent concerns about drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, broken homes, or political corruption. Those issues had occupied Protestant leaders for decades.

What Sunday did possess was an extraordinary ability to communicate those concerns with unusual passion, clarity, humor, and urgency.

He could hold thousands spellbound.

He spoke the language of ordinary people.

He transformed moral conviction into unforgettable images and memorable phrases.

Most importantly, he persuaded millions that the battle for America’s future was not merely political or economic.

It was spiritual.

More Than an Evangelist

Modern readers sometimes reduce Billy Sunday to a caricature—a loud prohibitionist or an emotional revival preacher.

That misses the larger historical reality.

Sunday saw himself as calling individuals to faith in Jesus Christ. Yet he also believed transformed individuals could renew homes, churches, communities, businesses, and ultimately the nation itself.

His revivals therefore addressed both the soul and society.

When Sunday preached against alcohol, he was not merely attacking a beverage.

He believed alcohol destroyed families.

When he denounced dishonesty in business, he was defending integrity.

When he challenged men to become faithful husbands and fathers, he was calling them back to responsibilities he believed were essential to a healthy civilization.

Whether one agrees with every conclusion he reached, it is impossible to understand his ministry apart from these broader concerns.

The Organization Behind the Evangelist

There is another important lesson Boyer helps us see.

Billy Sunday’s ministry was astonishingly well organized.

Long before modern event management became commonplace, Sunday’s campaigns mobilized entire cities.

Committees recruited volunteers.

Thousands joined mass choirs.

Newspapers covered meetings daily.

Business leaders participated.

Churches cooperated across denominational lines.

Follow-up systems helped connect new converts with local congregations.

None of this happened accidentally.

Sunday inherited nearly a century of organizational innovation developed by evangelical Protestants seeking to reach growing American cities.

His campaigns represented the maturity of that movement.

Reading Billy Sunday with Fresh Eyes

When we understand the world Billy Sunday inherited, we begin asking better questions.

Instead of asking only, “Why did Billy Sunday preach so forcefully?”

We ask:

Why were millions eager to hear him?

Why did civic leaders invite him?

Why did newspapers devote front-page coverage to his meetings?

Why did entire cities build temporary wooden tabernacles capable of seating thousands?

The answers lie not simply in Billy Sunday himself but in the anxieties and aspirations of the nation he served.

America was searching for moral stability amid extraordinary change.

Billy Sunday became one of the most recognizable voices offering an answer.

Looking Beyond the Caricature

History deserves better than caricature.

Billy Sunday was neither merely a religious celebrity nor simply a crusader against alcohol.

He stood at the intersection of faith, culture, urbanization, and one of the most significant periods of transformation in American history.

Understanding that larger story does not require us to agree with every sermon he preached.

It does require us to appreciate why so many Americans believed his message mattered.

If we wish to understand Billy Sunday fairly, we must first understand the world that shaped both his audience and his ministry.

Only then can we appreciate why, for millions of Americans, Billy Sunday was far more than an evangelist.

He became a voice calling a rapidly changing nation back to what many believed were its moral and spiritual foundations.

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/.

Marshalltown, 1909: Home Turf, Hard Numbers, and a Blaze of Glory

April 25 – June 6, 1909
Marshalltown, Iowa

Fresh off a successful campaign in Springfield, Billy Sunday and his team rolled into Marshalltown in late April of 1909. This was not foreign soil. It was home turf.

Sunday had been raised in Iowa, shaped by its churches, and had even lived briefly in Marshalltown in the early 1890s while learning the mechanics of evangelistic work. By 1909 he returned not as an unknown ballplayer-turned-preacher, but as a nationally rising evangelist whose methods were becoming increasingly organized, efficient, and powerful.

Marshalltown was the right kind of proving ground. Large enough to sustain a six-week revival. Small enough to rally around one of its own.

The Setting: A City Poised for Revival

Marshalltown in 1910 had a population of 13,374—a fraction of Springfield’s 51,678. It was a growing industrial town, commercially strong, strategically located, and connected by rail. It was not metropolitan. But it was energetic.

A wooden tabernacle was erected at the corner of Third and Main, seating 5,000. The Sunday machine was now running at full stride.

Opening night—April 25—saw over 12,000 people attend across all services. On the final day, June 6, Sunday preached to 13,200. In a town of just over 13,000 residents, that level of saturation is staggering.

By campaign’s end:

2,000 total conversions (125 on the final day)
84 tabernacle meetings
528 cottage prayer meetings
Nearly 200,000 in total attendance

For six weeks, Marshalltown was consumed by revival.

The Money and the Machine

The final purse for Sunday was $6,139.
Total funds raised during the campaign reached $12,894.

For comparison, that purse nearly matched Muscatine’s and approached Ottumwa’s from the previous year. Financially, Marshalltown demonstrated strong committee organization and enthusiastic backing. This was not a struggling campaign.

It was disciplined. Systematic. Mature.

The press block used to print Sunday’s image during this period—now in my collection—reflects that growing sophistication. By 1909, Sunday was no longer improvising revivals. He was executing them.

Did Marshalltown “Underperform”?

One skeptical paper, the Davenport Weekly Democrat and Leader, suggested that Marshalltown’s results did not compare favorably with Fairfield, Ottumwa, Muscatine, and Decatur.

On the surface, that seems correct.

Measured per capita:

Marshalltown: ~149 converts per 1,000 residents
Fairfield: over 220 per 1,000
Muscatine: about 224 per 1,000
Decatur: around 200 per 1,000
Ottumwa: about 158 per 1,000

In raw totals, Marshalltown trailed Muscatine (3,579–3,612), Ottumwa (3,481), and especially Decatur (6,209).

So yes—the numbers were not dominant.

But numbers alone miss something important.

The Press: Praise and Pushback

The reaction was revealing.

The Audubon Republican declared the meetings closed in a “blaze of glory.” It reported over 500 cottage prayer meetings and said the town had been “thoroughly stirred up.”

The Marshalltown Evening Times-Republican went further, calling Sunday:

“One of the splendid prophets of the elder time…”
“One of the greatest revivalists in existence.”
“One of the plainest, simplest and happiest of men…”

Meanwhile, the skeptical Davenport Weekly Democrat and Leader offered sharper commentary. It described Sunday as a “contortionist of uncommon ability” with “remarkable versatility,” while acknowledging the “magnetic power of Mr. Sunday.”

Its most fascinating observation was psychological:

“The psychology of it all is that the people who are not regular attendants at churches must be reached not as individuals but in mass. They like to be moved by each other; and it is probable that this explains the success Mr. Sunday attains. He is helped greatly by the excitement and the enthusiasm of the crowds…”

That critique reads today like an astute analysis of mass evangelism. It wasn’t merely preaching. It was momentum. Atmosphere. Collective energy.

Sunday understood something about crowds that many pastors did not.

What Marshalltown Really Proved

Marshalltown was not Sunday’s most explosive campaign numerically.

But it demonstrated something perhaps more important in 1909:

Massive attendance penetration in a modest city
Financial stability and strong committee structure
Organizational maturity (over 600 total meetings)
National press attention—positive and critical

Marshalltown proved that Sunday could saturate an entire city.

Critics were talking. Admirers were praising. Nearly 200,000 attendances in six weeks ensured that no one in town was untouched by the revival’s presence.

He was no longer just holding meetings.

He was creating civic events.

A Blaze of Glory

The revival closed the way many Sunday campaigns did—intense, loud, emotional, decisive. A blaze of glory.

Marshalltown may not have produced the highest per-capita conversion rate of his Iowa stops. But it stands as a revealing moment in his rise.

Magic lantern slide. Author’s collection.

By 1909, Billy Sunday was refining his method. The tabernacle system was humming. The prayer networks were mobilized. The press was watching closely.

And Iowa—his Iowa—was watching one of its own step onto a larger stage.

Marshalltown mattered because it showed that Sunday’s machine worked not just in isolated bursts, but in sustained, organized, city-wide saturation.

For a hometown son, that was no small thing.

Billy Sunday’s take on society (c 1907) in his day?

The following appeared in The Times (Streator, Illinois) · Sat, Jan 26, 1907 · Page 2

REV. BILLY SUNDAY DEFINES WHAT HE TERMS SOCIETY OF THE PRESENT DAY.

In one of his series of revival sermons at Kankakee Rev. William Sunday paid his respects to present day “society.” Following are a few spitballs that he tossed over the plate:

“I believe in Christian society, but nine-tenths of society is on the road to perdition.

Society’s going to hell at a rate that’s dazzling. Where will you find the sheriff or judges who dare arraign the rich law breaker?

What is the reason they, don’t? Damnable politics. Society is hastening to the judgment that overtook Pompeii and Herculaneum, and some time may be buried in cinders and ashes thirty feet deep. I don’t know what method God will use to purify society, whether it will be fire or pestilence or famine. The only law some people will recognize; is the law of their desires.

“If you people don’t turn from your cussedness, God will do something to stagger you. He’s done it before and don’t think that He won’t do it again.” Sunday then drew a lurid word pie-ture of a brilliant drawing room in which a number of society dames were drawn about, a card table playing progressive euchre, while a waiter served them frappe.

On the other hand he pictured the back room of a stale beer joint, where four blear eyed, vermin covered old soaks, without clothing enough on their backs to flag a hand car, played penny ante for a jack pot of a few greasy old pennies.

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

“There’s where your boy matriculates.

Here’s where he graduates. There’s where he backs out of the yard.

Here’s where his ticket is punched on the last division to hell.

“Society’s all right, lodges are all right, clubs are all right; but don’t think that’s all. I pity those whose visions are bounded by soups, frappes, and their Falstaffian appetites. I respect more one God-fearing, sox, darning old mother in Israel than a train load of good for nothing, gum chewing fudge eating, sizzle headed eissies who sit down and play rag time all day.”

And here the speaker gave a side-rending interpretation of a rendition of two popular rags.

“What America needs is not more railway extension and a lower tariff and a bigger wheat crop, but a baptism of the oldtime religion.”

The Times (Streator, Illinois) · Sat, Jan 26, 1907 · Page 2

Billy Sunday’s methods? An American Product

“Billy Sunday is an American Product – Where methods differ

More Lasting Good.

The old school of revivalists were of the itinerant class, moving rapidly through the country, their evangelism seemed sudden in its effect and I am afraid somewhat evanescent in its general results. It is just here that Mr. Sunday’s campaign gives promise of more lasting good. His coming has been carefully prepared for, his meeting place is undenominational in character. It is a movement conducted with great business acumen and sound common sense. He trains the ministers and church workers in such a way as to make them capable of caring for the harvest when it comes. Like a good farmer, he prunes the fruit trees with vigor cuts out all the dead wood and sprays them well to get rid of moths, beetles and canker worms, so that when the new fruit shall ripen it will be sound and beneficial. And the leaves of the trees shall be for the healing of the nations. Mr. Sunday is a man endowed with a great faith, He prays for the blessing, he prepares for the blessing, he is sure of getting it and it is therefore no surprise that he is so eminently successful.”

Time-Republican. Thur, Mar 05, 1914 ·Page 10

$10,000 Raised In Ten Minutes for Negro YMCA – Atlanta 1917-1918

“Atlanta, Jan. 1.—Ten thousand dollars raised within ten minutes by white citizens of Atlanta yesterday assures the negroes of this city success in completing their Y.M.C.A. building. The white people are pledged to raise another ten thousand if necessary. A fifty thousand dollar fund was needed to obtain the gift of $25,000 from Julius Rosenwald. C.W. McClure made a donation with the statement that the friendly relations between the whites and the negroes were better than ever since Billy Sunday preached to both.”
Jan 1 paper

In the waning days of 1917, as Atlanta turned the page to a new year, a remarkable act of interracial philanthropy unfolded that would leave a lasting mark on the city’s history. Newspapers reported that ten thousand dollars had been raised in just ten minutes by white citizens of Atlanta to help fund a new YMCA building for the city’s Black community. The drive was part of a larger campaign to secure a matching gift of twenty-five thousand dollars from Julius Rosenwald, the Sears, Roebuck & Co. magnate whose generosity was transforming African American education and social life across the South. Local businessman C.W. McClure, who helped spearhead the effort, remarked that the relations between whites and Blacks in Atlanta had improved markedly since evangelist Billy Sunday had preached to both communities during his campaign there.

The fruits of that campaign materialized in the Butler Street YMCA—known in its day as the “Negro Y.” Built between 1918 and 1920, the new structure rose in the heart of the Sweet Auburn district, the beating center of Black enterprise and culture in Atlanta. The project followed Rosenwald’s signature pattern: a challenge grant that required local citizens—both white and Black—to raise the balance. The local enthusiasm kindled by Sunday’s revival evidently carried over into civic generosity, helping to meet the $50,000 goal needed to unlock Rosenwald’s contribution.

The Butler Street YMCA quickly became one of the South’s most important centers of African American life. Designed by the firm Hentz, Reid & Adler and built under the direction of Black contractor Alexander D. Hamilton, the facility was impressive for its time—three stories of brick and stone housing a swimming pool, gymnasium, dormitories, meeting halls, and classrooms. It provided a wholesome environment for young men seeking moral and social uplift in a city that offered them few such spaces.

More than a recreational facility, the Butler Street Y grew into a cornerstone of civic and spiritual leadership. Over the decades it came to be known as the “Black City Hall” of Atlanta, hosting meetings that shaped the course of civil rights and community advancement. Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Maynard Jackson, and Vernon Jordan would later pass through its doors. The Y stood as a living emblem of what cooperative goodwill and faith-inspired philanthropy could achieve during an era when segregation still divided the city.

The 1918 campaign that launched the Butler Street YMCA was more than a fundraising victory. It was a moment when revival energy turned outward—when the social conscience stirred by Billy Sunday’s preaching translated into practical generosity. In helping to fund the YMCA, the people of Atlanta built not only a structure but also a bridge between communities, one that carried forward the spirit of reform, service, and reconciliation that Sunday’s message had kindled. The Butler Street Y remained for nearly a century a monument to that brief but luminous cooperation—a place where faith met action and where the legacy of revival took tangible form in brick, mortar, and hope.

Butler YMCA, image from their Facebook page

Billy Sunday favored women’s suffrage.

BILLY SUNDAY IS FOR SUFFRAGE FIRST, LAST AND ALL THE TIME

Woman suffragists ought to like Billy Sunday.

“Do you favor woman suffrage?” he was asked the other day.

“Why not?” he hurled at the reporter just as though the latter were an “anti.”

“I don’t know,” murmured the representative of the press, in a tone measured to encourage Mr. Sunday to a further discussion of the subject. And Mr. Sunday was quite willing to talk about it. And talk he can on any subject.

He launched into one of the most picturesquely worded and one of the most emphatic indorsements of woman suffrage that its most ardent supporters could ever wish to have, “Why shouldn’t women have the franchise? They are as worthy of it as the men,” was the substance of what he said.

There are 6,000,000 women and girls working for a livelihood in this country, he statistically declared to the reporter.

He urged that the working woman fills an important place in the industrial and business life of the country.

“Take them out of the offices, mills, factories and stores, and you’ll miss them quickly enough.” These 6,000,000 women so engaged were advanced as one of Mr. Sunday’s reasons for granting the franchise to women.

All an interviewer of Mr. Sunday can hope to do is to get impressions. In answering one question he said enough interesting things on the equal suffrage question to fill a small volume. He invented enough aphorisms and sprung enough epigrams to make an issue of Elbert Hubbard’s Philistine look like a mere sample package.

If you go to interview Mr. Sunday take the best stenographer in the state with you. No, take two or three. Mr. Sunday uses words with exceeding celerity. He confessed that he could use as many as 350 a minute. The interviewer gained the impression that he was trying to break the speed limit yesterday.

“There’s only one stenographer I have known who could get my speeches in full,” he said, “and he missed one word in ten.”

The South Bend Tribune. Thu, May 15, 1913 ·Page 9

Billy Sunday believed (c 1913) that the Y.M.C.A. was drifting from its core mission

Y. M. C. A. Drifting Away.

“They are fighting and talking about the needs of an institutional church, they are having gymnasiums and socials. But don’t forget the fact that salvation is the prime end of everything. I don’t object to the gymnasium and all such things if they make them a means to an end. But remember that salvation of the soul is the end which we need. That is what is the matter with the church to-day, she is losing sight of that one fact. The Y. M. C. A. is drifting away from what it used to do for the people. I don’t object to the Y. M. C. A. I don’t object to gymnasiums. I do object when they make that the prime thing, putting in pool tables and such things. The church and the Y. M. C. A. and the Salvation Army are getting away from the fact that the salvation of the soul is the supreme end. I want to see the salvation of the soul the supreme end of the world.”

Citation: The South Bend Tribune. Sat, May 03, 1913 ·Page 12