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Why Women Loved Billy Sunday: Urban Revivalism and Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth-Century American Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Margaret Bendroth
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Abstract

Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935) is well-known for an aggressively masculine platform style that was clearly aimed at attracting a male audience to his urban revival campaigns. Less recognized but equally important are Sunday's meetings for “women only,” in which the handsome, athletic evangelist preached passionate, explicit sermons on sexual vice to an audience that had been purged of all male interlopers. Though Sunday's ostensible purpose was to reinforce traditional Victorian morality—the sermons were originally meant to rail against birth control—the social context for his message subtly undermined its conservative aim. As is illustrated by his campaign in Boston during the winter of 1916–1917, Sunday was perceived by many of his contemporaries, both men and women, as scandalously frank to the point of sexual crudeness. Critics and supporters alike described him in the same terms they used for vaudeville and theater idols, a notion that ex-baseball player Sunday did little to dispel. Yet, evangelical Protestant women came to hear his muscular Christian message anyway. The ability of his female audiences to adapt to—and obviously enjoy— Sunday's physical stage presence suggests that often-used terms like “feminization” and “masculinization” are too stark to describe the transition from Victorian to modern forms of religious behavior. Women's response to Sunday, situated at the intersection of evangelical religion and popular entertainment culture, demonstrates the durability of feminine religious tastes and suggests ways in which the blurring and confusion of formal gender categories factored into the transition from Victorian piety into the more individualized, popularized forms of religious faith in the twentieth century. Women were not passive observers in the transformation of American religion but central to the nature and direction of its survival.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 251 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2004

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References

Notes

1. Harold E. Somerville, “Women Storm Tabernacle to Hear Billy,” Boston Herald, January 13, 1917, 1; “Women … 10,000, Men …. 1,” Boston Evening Globe, January 12, 1917, 1 [referring to the afternoon meeting only]; Ruth Spindler, “Jammed at the ‘Women Only,’” Boston Globe, January 13, 1917, 1.

2. “Sunday Blames Preachers,” Boston Globe, December 6, 1916, 5; “Sunday Wants Fighting Saints,” Boston Globe, December 2, 1916, 2.

3. “A Tribute by Mrs. Helen Thompson (“Ma”) Sunday,” in Ellis, William T., Billy Sunday: The Man and His Message (Chicago: John C. Winston Co., 1936), 435–36Google Scholar.

4. See, e.g., Bederman, Gail, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’; The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41 (September 1989): 432–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

5. Kibler, Alison, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 5, 9, 10Google Scholar.

6. Oberdeck, Kathryn, The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 1884–1914 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1, 2Google Scholar. See also discussion of religion and commercial culture in Winston, Diane, Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

7. See Kane, Paula, Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and O’Toole, James, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O’Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859–1944 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

8. According to 1916 census figures, Episcopalians were the most numerous of Boston's Protestants (17,790) , followed by Baptists and Congregationalists (both around 15,000), and then Unitarians and Methodists (around 9,000 each). See Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1916; Part 1, Summary and General Tables (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 123.

9. Liberals quoted in McLoughlin, William, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 52–53 Google Scholar; “Getting Ready for Billy Sunday,” Watchman-Examiner, September 28, 1916, 1254. For a more complete story of the revival, see Bendroth, Margaret, “Billy Sunday and the Unitarians, Boston 1916–1917,” Mid-America 82 (Fall 2000): 283–93Google Scholar.

10. “Statistics of Boston's Record-Breaking Revival,” Boston Globe, January 22, 1917, 5. Most of the converts were from evangelical churches, primarily Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists, but the total also included more than 1,000 Roman Catholics, almost 300 Unitarians, and 177 “Hebrews.” See “Boston Trail Hitters,” Congregationalist, February 1, 1917, 149.

11. “Sunday's Sermon ‘For Women Only,’” Boston Globe, January 12, 1917, 9; “Billy Talks Plainly to Audience of Women,” Boston Herald, January 13, 1917, 9. On Sunday's relationship with the press, see Laurence Winship, “Billy Sunday and the Fourth Estate,” Congregationalist, January 11, 1917, 52.

12. On Sunday's account, see “Thursday Afternoon's Sermon,” in The Omaha Sermons of Billy Sunday, September–October, 1915; Reported by the Omaha Daily News (Omaha: Daily News, 1915), 136. For samples of Sunday's sermons on motherhood, see “Sunday Preaches on Mother's Love,” Boston Globe, December 1, 1916, 4. The audiences for these sermons were predominantly female as well.

13. “Sunday's Sermon ‘For Women Only.’” The Boston papers did not print the poem in full; the version here came from Buffalo newspapers a few weeks later: “Thirty Thousand Women Hear Rev. Sunday Preach,” Buffalo Enquirer, March 10, 1917, 3.

14. Spindler, “Jammed at the ‘Women Only,’” 2.

15. Church membership statistics are relevant to the campaign, since every trailhitter signed a card indicating a denominational preference, and the Sunday organization forwarded these to the congregation geographically closest to the individual's street address. Figures for Tremont Temple are founded in yearly congregational reports, e.g., Tremont Temple Baptist Church, Annual Report for the Year Ending April 1, 1917; those for Park Street (Congregational) Church are from published denominational yearbooks, e.g., Year-Book of the Congregational and Christian Churches (New York: Executive Committee of the Central Council of the Congregational and Christian Churches, 1917). In 1917, only 41 percent of Tremont Temple's new members were male—compared to 45 percent in 1916, 50 percent in 1915, and 46 percent in 1918. Only 34 percent of Park Street Church's new members in 1917 were male. The local press reported similar figures in Detroit, where some 61 percent of trail hitters were female. See Engelmann, Larry D., “Billy Sunday: ‘God, You’ve Got a Job on Your Hands in Detroit,’” Michigan History 55 (1971): 17 Google Scholar. Part of the reason behind the influx of women were the less-publicized efforts of the several female evangelists in Sunday's entourage. During Sunday's six-week stay in Boston, they blanketed the city with some 322 Bible study meetings for school girls, working women, parents, and society dames, reporting an aggregate attendance of 152,852 women. See, e.g., “Reaching Boston Business Women,” Congregationalist, January 18, 1917, 73; Grace M. Boynton, “The Women Behind Mr. Sunday,” Congregationalist, December 7, 1916, 763; “Revival Work for Businesswomen,” Boston Globe, January 6, 1917, 6; and “Statistics of Boston's Record-Breaking Revival,” Boston Globe, January 22, 1917, 5.

16. Somerville, “Women Storm Tabernacle to Hear Billy,” 1. It is noteworthy that the descriptions of unruly crowds came only from male reporters, who because they were not allowed admittance to the meeting, probably had no other story to file. But Boston was not the only place where the women-only meetings were described in this fashion. In Buffalo, the press reported “weird stories” from other cities in which women had attacked policemen with hat pins, and in one case, “literally pulled the clothes from one officer” in their frenzy to gain admittance to the tabernacle. “Thirty Thousand Women Hear Rev. Sunday Preach,” Buffalo Enquirer, March 10, 1917, 3. For an account of the Buffalo crusade, which directly followed the Boston one, see “‘The Greatest Show That Ever Came to Town’—An Account of the Billy Sunday Crusade in Buffalo, New York, January 28–March 25, 1917,” Niagara Frontier 22 (Fall 1975): 54–67. Descriptions of a food riot in 1917 also had Boston women “storming” a meeting. See Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 146–49.

17. “Personal Gains from the Sunday Campaign: A Sheaf of Testimonies,” Congregationalist, February 22, 1917, 256.

18. “Figures and the Sunday Campaign,” Watchman-Examiner, February 1, 1917, 135; “Boston Trail Hitters,” Congregationalist, February 1, 1917, 149.

19. On men's meetings, see Joseph Edgar Chamberlain, “Trail-Hitting at the Tabernacle, Psychologically Considered,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 6, 1916, 1. On Sunday's female audience, see, for example, “Revival Work for Businesswomen,” Boston Globe, January 6, 1917, 6; and “Sunday Preaches to Beacon-Street Women,” Boston Globe, December 28, 1916, 1, 2.

20. Herbert Atchison Jump, “Billy Sunday, the Preacher,” Congregationalist, November 30, 1916, 734.

21. Rodeheaver, Homer, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday (Winona Lake, Ind.: Rodeheaver Hall-Mack Co., 1946)Google Scholar; M. Ada Oertly to William A. Sunday, April 12, 1933, Billy Sunday Papers, box 1, folder 42. [The Sunday papers are located near Sunday's summer home at Grace College, Winona Lake, Indiana; they are also available in microfilm at the Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton, Illinois.]

22. The standard biography is McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, but see also Dorsett, Lyle, Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991)Google Scholar; and Bruns, Roger A., Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992)Google Scholar.

23. On conservatives, see DeBerg, Betty, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Bendroth, Margaret, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. On liberals, see Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough.’”

24. “Sunday's Blood Is Up,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1916, 2. See also Martin, Robert, “Billy Sunday and Christian Manliness,” Historian 58 (Summer 1996): 811–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 93–94. Although the Boston press was fairly reticent about Sunday's personal life, this was not true of other cities. See, e.g., “Keeps in Fettle Same as Athlete,” Buffalo Courier, January 28, 1917, 68, and photo idem January 31, 1917, 1; and “The Fighting Pastor,” in The Omaha Sermons of Billy Sunday, 55. In fact, however, Sunday spent much of his free time resting in bed, also on the advice of Dr. Kelly. See “Sunday Lives to Conserve Energy,” in The Omaha Sermons of Billy Sunday, n.p. Perhaps in response to this scenario, during the Boston campaign a Cambridge woman wrote to Mrs. Sunday with detailed instructions (and a diagram) describing back rub techniques she had used on her own husband to help calm his nervousness. Cambridge woman to Mrs. William A. Sunday, January 21, 1917, Sunday Papers, 1–26.

26. Spindler, “Jammed at the ‘Women Only,’” 2. This was the only newspaper account of a Sunday meeting that referred to his clothing. See also Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 12, 13.

27. “Foss Hits Trail as 13,000 Cheer,” Boston Globe, December 18, 1916, 1, 5.

28. Long, Kathryn, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 69, 73Google Scholar.

29. See, e.g., Mallalieu, Bishop Willard F., “Mr. Moody's Ministry to Men,” in Moody: His Words, Works, and Workers, ed. Davenport, Henry (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1877), 124–34Google Scholar. On Moody's revival in Boston, Bruce J. Evensen, “‘It Is a Marvel to Many People’: Moody, Dwight L., Mass Media, and the New England Revival of 1877,” New England Quarterly 72 (June 1999): 251–74Google Scholar.

30. “Like a Tidal Wave, Revival Is Sweeping Over Greater Boston,” Boston Globe, February 2, 1909, 1, 7; “Intense Fervor, Big Crowds at Sunday Revival Service,” Boston Globe, February 1, 1909, 1. See also Bendroth, Margaret, “Men, Masculinity and Urban Revivalism: J. Wilbur Chapman's Boston Crusade, 1909,” Journal of Presbyterian History 75 (Winter 1997): 235–46;Google Scholar and Conrad, A. Z., ed., Boston's Awakening: A Complete Account of the Great Boston Revival Under the Leadership of J. Wilbur Chapman and Charles M. Alexander, January 26th to February 21st, 1909 (Boston: King's Business Publishing Co., 1909)Google Scholar.

31. “Vast and Spellbound,” Boston Globe, February 4, 1909, 1. According to some accounts, the majority of Chapman's converts were men. See “Preaches to 10,000,” Boston Sunday Globe, February 21, 1909, 2.

32. See “The Gains Against License,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 6, 1916, 2. On Boston and prohibition politics, see Bendroth, “Billy Sunday and the Unitarians, Boston 1916–1917”; and Duis, Perry, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1983] 1999)Google Scholar. On prohibition and other local campaigns, see Engelmann, “Billy Sunday: ‘God, You’ve Got a Job on Your Hands in Detroit,’” 1–21; Baldwin, David A., “When Billy Sunday ‘Saved’ Colorado: That Old-Time Religion and the 1914 Prohibition Amendment,” Colorado Heritage 2 (1990): 34–44 Google Scholar; and Soden, Dale E., “Billy Sunday in Spokane,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 79 (January 1998): 10–17 Google Scholar.

33. R. A. Torrey to Rev. William A. Sunday, December 5, 1917, Billy Sunday Papers, box 1, folder 26.

34. Cohan, George M., Hit-the-Trail Holliday: A Comedy in Four Acts (Cohan and Harris, 1916), 113–14, 100Google Scholar. A New York reviewer found the play an accurate portrayal but complained that it had neither the “punch nor the pace” of Sunday in person. See “Dramatizing Billy Sunday,” Literary Digest, October 2, 1915, 713.

35. See Radway, Janice, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

36. Sunday, William, Great Love Stories of the Bible and Their Lessons for To-Day (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917), 14 Google Scholar. The style is clearly Sunday’s, though most of the book was apparently ghost-written by an author who later complained that he wasn't paid for his work.

37. Ibid., 111, 176, 196.

38. Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, [1976] 1995) 5, 12Google Scholar.

39. F. M. Davenport, “The National Value of Billy Sunday,” Outlook, June 9, 1915, 311–15; McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 52–53, 151.

40. Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 21.

41. “Billy Sunday Hammers Sin in Three Initial Sermons before Great Throngs in Tabernacle,” Buffalo Courier, January 29, 1917, 1, 2.

42. Spindler, “Jammed at the ‘Women Only,’” 2. According to Spindler, no one fainted at the afternoon meeting, and only 10 women had to be helped out of their seats in the evening.

43. Joseph Edgar Chamberlain, “Trail-Hitting at the Tabernacle, Psychologically Considered,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 6, 1916, 1; Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 32.

44. Ezra Butter Newcome to Mr. Hosmer, Ministerial Association of Freeport, Iowa, November 15, 1905, Sunday Papers, box 1, folder 15.

45. McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 178–79; “Princeton's Thrust at Billy Sunday,” Literary Digest, April 24, 1915, 959–60.

46. The original version of the poem by Carl Sandburg, “To Billy Sunday,” appeared in The Masses and has been recently republished. The first published title, in the 1916 edition of his poems, was “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter.” See O’Neill, William, ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), 224–25Google Scholar; Hendrick, George and Hendrick, Willene, eds., Billy Sunday and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993)Google Scholar; and review by Mitgang, Herbert, “Billy Sunday and Other Poems,” The Progressive 58 (July 1994): 40–41 Google Scholar.

47. “Stop Your Quibbling, ‘Billy’ Gets the Answer,” n.d., Sunday Papers, box 1, folder 1; Robert Matthew [?] to Mrs. Sunday, 1913, Sunday Papers, box 2, folder 21. Mrs. Sunday evidently refused.

48. Frederick W. Betts, Billy Sunday: The Man and His Method (Boston: Murray Press, 1916), 30, 31.

49. “Universalist's Opinion of ‘Billy’ Sunday,” Watchman-Examiner, February 10, 1916, 168.

50. Herbert Atchinson Jump, “A Billy Sunday Hippodrome,” Congregationalist, December 14, 1916, 814–15.

51. “A New Opportunity,” Christian Register, September 14, 1916, 860; Billy Sunday: The Position of a Non-Cooperating Church; A Sermon Preached in the Central Congregational Church, Boston, Mass., on Sunday, November 12, 1916 by the Minister, Rev. Willard L. Sperry and now printed by request of many members of the Congregation (Boston, 1916), 16–17.

52. Erenberg, Lewis, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 76–79 Google Scholar, passim; Snyder, Robert W., The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford, 1989), 12 Google Scholar.

53. Kibler, Rank Ladies, 32; Snyder, Voice of the City, 133.

54. C.H.W. “Men and Things in Boston,” Watchman, January 10, 1901, 13.

55. Kibler, Rank Ladies, 51; Snyder, Voice of the City, 32, 33, 105.

56. Snyder, Voice of the City, 143–45; Ullman, Sharon, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 42 Google Scholar.

57. Hansen, Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1–2 Google Scholar; Snyder, Voice of the City, 33. See also Rabinovitz, Lauren, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

58. Hanson, Babel and Babylon, 260.

59. Stansell, Christine, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2000), 7, 226Google Scholar.

60. Kirchwey, Freda, ed., Our Changing Morality: A Symposium (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, Inc., 1924), v.Google Scholar

61. Mathisen, James A., “Reviving ‘Muscular Christianity’: Gil Dodds and the Institutionalization of Sports Evangelism,” Sociological Focus 23 (August 1990): 238 Google Scholar, passim.