Period magazine coverage – Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935)

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.

The Business of Revival: Tabernacles, Guarantees, and the “Grafter” Question

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

Sooner or later, every discussion of a famous revivalist arrives at the same question: what about the money? Lindsay Denison’s 1907 profile does not dodge it. In fact, it lays out the financial machinery of a Billy Sunday revival in unusual detail — and then takes the “grafter” charge head-on.

God helps those who help themselves

Sunday’s whole operation rested on a piece of practical theology: God helps those who help themselves. He had no intention of letting his revivals be dragged down by the constant whine of money-begging, so he built the funding in advance.

The process began only after the ministers of all a town’s evangelical churches signed a joint invitation and agreed to close their own churches and throw their full energy behind the revival. Once that was secured, the town had to put up real money. Typically a stock company was formed — an incorporated “Evangelical Association” — that issued shares to raise the necessary funds.

The list of what Sunday required was specific, and he printed it in a little pamphlet covering every detail. The town had to erect a wooden tabernacle with fixed seats. It had to guarantee board and lodging for Sunday and his entire company, cover their travel expenses, pay half of Fred Fischer’s salary, and handle the printing and advertising. On top of that, committees of church members had to be organized to serve as ushers, as personal workers pursuing converts, and as the choir.

A company to support

That company was not small. Beyond Mr. and Mrs. Sunday, it included Mr. and Mrs. Fischer; the Rev. T. E. Honeywell, secretary and associate evangelist; Miss Miller, a Bible-class teacher; and Fred Seibert — a former cow-puncher turned evangelist who handled most of the sexton’s duties between meetings and also sold the hymn books. Supporting that traveling staff, plus building a tabernacle from scratch, was a serious undertaking for a town of a few thousand.

The part the critics missed

Here is the distinction Denison is careful to draw, and it is the heart of the matter.

All of that up-front money — the shares, the tabernacle, the guarantees — went to expenses, not to Sunday’s pocket. He took none of it for himself. He even refused to guarantee that the collections taken at the services would be enough to repay the subscribers who had advanced the money. And yet, Denison reports, he had never once failed to raise enough within ten days or two weeks to square those accounts.

From the moment the guarantors were reimbursed until the final day of the revival, money was simply not mentioned — not by Sunday, not by anyone, with no collections taken at all. He deliberately minimized the money-raising in both time and eloquence.

“Give what you want to”

Sunday’s own income came from a single appeal on the very last day, made on the plain principle that the laborer is worthy of his hire. He explained that this closing collection was for himself, his family, and his helpers, standing in for the ordinary salaries and wages they might have earned in secular work. And he set no figure on it.

His pitch was disarmingly open-handed: people should give what they wanted to, in proportion to how much good they felt he had done the town. He could get along, he said, even if they gave nothing, because plenty of people had already been more generous than he deserved — though he added, pointedly, that those who labor for Christ ought to be able to live as well as those who labor for the Devil. Beyond that, it was up to them.

In Fairfield, the result was striking. After paying $3,200 to cover the revival’s expenses, the town gave Sunday a farewell thank-offering of $3,660. Even after the share he distributed among his helpers, Denison concluded, his own reward compared well with the salaries some big-city churches paid their pastors.

The grafter charge — and the rubber gloves

This was exactly the figure that drew sneers. Critics pointed to Sunday’s comfortable income, questioned his sincerity, and lumped him in with preachers better known for their finances than their good works.

Denison’s rebuttal is pointed: Sunday never raised money “for the Lord” and then quietly banked it to his own credit. The expense money was genuinely spent on the revival; his own pay came openly, once, at the end, with no pretense about what it was for. (As we saw earlier in this series, Sunday also had a long memory for the lean years — he liked to note that nobody called him a grafter back when the 1893 hard times left him too poor to afford trolley fare.)

He was, Denison admits, slow to discuss these criticisms, because he was apt to lose his temper over them — and sometimes did. When the editors of a small newspaper in nearby Brighton took it upon themselves to call him a grafter, Sunday held his wrath for three days. Then he aired it the only way the pulpit allowed: in a prayer.

Working down a list of surrounding towns he asked God to bless, he arrived at the Brighton editors and suggested the Almighty might tackle them too — but cautioned the Lord to be careful and take along a bottle of disinfectant, since he wasn’t sure much could be done with them. And if God did decide it was worth a try, Sunday added, here was a pointer: wear rubber gloves.

The congregation dissolved into smothered laughter and a roar of approving amens. It was not, perhaps, the most charitable prayer ever offered — but it tells you exactly how a proud man, stung by an accusation he believed unjust, defended his good name when he couldn’t quite manage to turn the other cheek.

Next in the series: “To-morrow” — inside Billy Sunday’s last day in Fairfield.

Preaching the Devil in Plain English: Billy Sunday’s Pulpit Style

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

For three hundred years, Lindsay Denison observed, Americans had been accustomed to discussing God and the soul in the stately cadences of the King James Bible. To depart from that vocabulary had come to feel almost like sacrilege. Billy Sunday departed from it completely.

He talked about God and salvation, Denison wrote, exactly the way people talked to one another six days a week — across a shop counter, over the dinner table, out on the street. That was the scandal of his preaching, and it was also the secret of it.

1908 period postcard of Billy Sunday preaching at Bloomington, Illinois.

The Devil who came from Missouri

The clearest example in the article is a stretch of Sunday’s sermon on “Temptation,” built on Satan’s effort to corrupt Christ in the wilderness.

Sunday had no patience for the modern, comfortable idea that the Devil was merely a figure of speech — a poetic personification of human sin. People who said so, and especially the ministers who said so, he flatly called liars, because to him they were calling the Bible itself a lie. There was a Devil, he insisted, and he was no fool: a smooth operator who was, at that very moment, running up and down the aisles of the tabernacle trying to keep sinners indifferent to their own salvation.

Then came the part that made audiences gasp and laugh at once. Sunday staged the wilderness temptation as a piece of street theater. The Devil swaggers up to a weary, hungry, lonely Christ, looks him over from sweat-stained brow to dusty hem, and sneers. And when Christ admits who he is, the Devil laughs and throws down a challenge in the slang of a Missouri skeptic: he’s not so easily fooled, Christ will have to show him — turn these stones into bread and produce the goods.

To stage Satan as a wisecracking “show-me” doubter was, by every standard of nineteenth-century pulpit decorum, outrageous. Denison watched the ministers seated behind Sunday wince. But he also watched the crowd, and he came to understand that their laughter and applause were not the jeering of sinners at sacred things. It was the delight of plain people hearing the old Bible stories made suddenly new, real, and as immediate as the incidents of their own daily lives.

The pointing finger

If the Missouri Devil was Sunday at his most entertaining, another passage shows him at his most uncomfortable — and most effective.

Mid-sermon, he would single out individuals in the crowd. Without naming names, he turned an accusing finger on a man who had spent sixty dollars on tobacco in two years while his wife went without a new dress; on a woman pouring time and money into fancy hats and card parties while her husband fled badly cooked meals and her children ran wild in the streets; on a respectable citizen and what he really bought behind the druggist’s counter; on a group of boys at the back who slid down in their seats as he spoke. Each thrust landed on someone, and the whole congregation felt the danger that the next one might land on them.

It was a remarkable bit of crowd control — intimate, theatrical, and faintly terrifying. Denison noted heads quailing and boys shrinking down their benches. Sunday had turned the anonymous safety of a large audience into the exposed feeling of being known.

A whole body in the pulpit

Sunday did not preach with his voice alone. Denison describes a man with the lope of a professional athlete and the tense springiness of a cat, a penetrating voice pitched just short of harshness.

In his very first Fairfield sermon, growing overheated, he peeled off his coat, then his waistcoat, then his tie and collar — and even then his gestures grew so violent that sweat flew from his brow and ears as he beat the pulpit and tossed his head until he was hoarse. He acted out the gait and gestures of every character in his stories. When he preached on the wages of drink, he seized a chair and swung it over his head to dramatize a drunkard’s violence, then dashed it to the platform so hard the legs splintered. The performance was physical, even alarming, and it riveted the room.

Fear as the engine

For all the humor and showmanship, Denison was clear-eyed about the machinery underneath. Sunday preached the old, old doctrine of damnation, and he got his results by inspiring fear and gloom in the hearts of sinners — the fear of sudden death with torment waiting beyond it.

He spoke of the love of Christ, too, and with real tenderness. But even that he turned into a weapon: a tender reproach aimed at the hard-hearted, a way of making the unrepentant feel the full weight of what they were refusing. The joy came later, as a revival neared its close; the early going was meant to frighten.

Why the commonness worked

It would be easy to read all this — the slang, the theatrics, the chair-smashing — as mere sensationalism. Denison resists that reading, and his reason is worth holding onto.

No man, he wrote, could talk to three thousand sensible people night after night for a month in such language and hold them, unless they believed he was honest. The vehemence and the commonplace vocabulary would have defeated themselves if Sunday’s sincerity had not shone unmistakably from his face. The plainness was not a trick laid over the message. It was the message — proof, to the people in those benches, that salvation was meant for ordinary folks like them and not only for the genteel and the instinctively religious.

That conviction is the thread connecting Sunday’s pulpit to everything else about his revivals — including, as we’ll see next, the music.

Next in the series: Combs, Megaphones, and “Old Kentucky Home” — the music of a Billy Sunday revival.

“He Is Doing God’s Work”: A 1907 Magazine Discovers Billy Sunday

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

In the autumn of 1907, a New York journalist named Lindsay Denison stepped off a train into a tidy, prosperous Iowa town of about five thousand people. He had come a long way to watch a man preach.

The town was Fairfield. The man was the Rev. William A. “Billy” Sunday — former professional ballplayer, ordained Presbyterian minister, and the most electric revivalist the American Midwest had ever produced. Denison’s assignment was to explain him to the readers of The American Magazine, a national publication based a thousand miles east of the cornfields where Sunday did his work.

That distance is the whole story. In 1907, Billy Sunday was a regional sensation — a small-town, big-tent evangelist who worked a tight circuit through Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado. But the fact that a New York magazine sent a reporter “all the way from New York,” as Sunday himself noted in one of his prayers, tells you something was shifting. The country was beginning to take notice.

A reluctant convert among the clergy

The article opens not with Sunday’s own voice but with the voice of a man he had thoroughly rattled: the Rev. Pearse Pinch, pastor of Fairfield’s Congregational church. Pinch’s testimony is one of the most striking things in the whole piece, precisely because it is so conflicted.

Sunday, by Pinch’s account, had trampled all over his theology and “kicked my teachings up and down that platform like a football.” The man had offended every refined notion the pastor held about his sacred profession. And yet — Pinch could not argue with the results. His congregation would grow by hundreds. So he humbled himself, gave the credit to Sunday and to God, and reached a conclusion he could not escape: the man was doing God’s work, and that he knew.

It is a perfect frame for the series ahead, because it captures the central tension of Billy Sunday’s whole career. Refined clergymen were horrified by his slang, his theatrics, his shirt-sleeve oratory. And then they watched the converts pour down the aisles, and they stopped arguing.

The numbers that made people look twice

Denison did not bury the lead. By 1907, Sunday had spent twelve years converting more than one hundred thousand men and women to a public profession of faith — and, crucially, he sent them into the churches and they stayed. A survey of ministers in eleven towns where Sunday had held revivals came back unanimous: the share of backsliders was small, even negligible.

This is what separated Sunday from the caricature of the fly-by-night tent preacher. He was, in Denison’s framing, making more church members than all the ministers of the Middle West working together. And he funneled converts not only into his own Presbyterian rolls but into the Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Congregationalist, Roman Catholic, and Christian churches as well.

A man, not a “theological phonograph”

What made him work? Part of the answer, Denison found, was that Sunday never behaved like a clergyman descending on sinners. When he first arrived in Fairfield, he walked the stores around the public square and talked shop — cloth, horses, shoe leather, Chicago trade prices — and he knew his subjects well enough to impress the tailor, the livery man, and the shoe dealer.

By the time those introductory calls were done, the town had reached its verdict: Bill Sunday was a human being, not a theological phonograph. That instinct — to meet ordinary people as a peer rather than to preach down at them — is the thread that runs through everything else, from his plain-spoken sermons to the popular tunes his choir sang.

Why this series

Over the next several posts, we’ll work through Denison’s 1907 profile piece by piece: Sunday’s improbable journey from center field to the pulpit, the famous footrace that tested his new faith, the pulpit style that scandalized and converted in equal measure, the carnival-bright music of his meetings, the hard questions about money, and the unforgettable final day of the Fairfield revival.

Read as a whole, the article is more than a snapshot of one revival in one Iowa town. It is an early national notice of a man about to become one of the most famous preachers in America — caught at the very threshold, just before the rise steepened.

As Denison put it in his closing line, the spiritual ferment Sunday helped lead was spreading and intensifying across the country. What it would all come to, he wrote, was no part of his business to guess.

But it was worth watching.

Next in the series: From Center Field to the Pulpit — the conversion of Billy Sunday.