Billy Sunday

American evangelist

• Born: November 19, 1862
• Birthplace: Ames, Iowa
• Died: November 6, 1935
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Sunday was the most flamboyant and colorful of the many Christian revivalists of early twentieth century America. Born in poverty in a log cabin, he was a successful major league baseball player before becoming an evangelist. Sunday preached to more than one million persons in the days before radios and speaker systems, and approximately one million of these persons came “down the sawdust trail” and were “saved” as a result of his efforts.

Early Life

Billy Sunday was born in Ames, Iowa, the youngest of three sons of William Sunday, of Pennsylvania German descent, and Mary Jane Corey. The family name had been Sonntag in Germany but was Americanized to Sunday in the early nineteenth century. “Willie” Sunday never saw his father, a private in the Union army who died of pneumonia approximately one month after his third son’s birth. The widowed mother and three children, in desperate financial straits, struggled to survive on a government pension and some limited assistance from her parents. After six years, Mrs. Sunday was remarried to a man named Heizer. After two more children were born, Heizer disappeared, and the mother and five children were forced to move in with the Coreys.

As an infant, Billy Sunday was very sickly. He could barely walk at age three but was “cured” by an itinerant healer’s syrup made from various roots, herbs, and leaves. (Sunday later claimed that nature provides a cure for every human ailment, if one can only discover it.) Young Sunday never got along with his stepfather Heizer, but he loved and admired his grandfather, Martin “Squire” Corey, very much. His youth was one of poverty and hard work. In 1874, he and his brother Edward were sent to the Soldiers’ Orphans Home at Glenwood (later at Davenport), Iowa. It was there that Sunday learned the disciplines of hard work, neatness, and cleanliness that remained with him throughout his life.

Sunday’s early educational and religious training was not impressive. Never an outstanding student, he did manage to complete the equivalent of grammar school at the orphanage. Religious training there consisted primarily of memorizing verses of Scripture, which made little impression on him until later in his life. He was better known for his running and fighting ability than his scholarship or religious interests. Soon after leaving the orphanage in 1876, he was employed by Colonel John Scott in Nevada, Iowa, as a stable boy and performer of various chores. Scott, who at one time had been lieutenant governor of Iowa, and his wife took him into their home in Nevada. Sunday attended high school there and also worked as a school janitor before drifting to Marshalltown in the next country, where he found employment as an undertaker’s assistant and in the undertaker’s furniture store.

It was at Marshalltown that Sunday’s athletic ability as a runner in the local fire brigade and as a baseball player surfaced. When his baseball team won the state championship in 1883, Sunday caught the eye of A. C. “Pop” Anson, manager of the Chicago Whitestockings, a major league team owned by A. G. Spaulding, and Sunday was soon persuaded to join the Whitestockings at a salary of sixty dollars a month. Sunday’s baseball career lasted eight years, from 1883 to 1991; he played for teams in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as Chicago. He claimed to have set two major league records during his career: He circled the bases in fourteen seconds flat from a “standing start,” and he once stole ninety-five bases in a single season, a record first surpassed by the legendary Ty Cobb in 1915. He also batted .359 one season, although his career batting average was one hundred points below that mark.

In Chicago, Sunday met and eventually married Helen A. “Nell” Thompson, daughter of a dairyman and ice-cream manufacturer. A staunch Presbyterian and devoted worker in the Christian Endeavor Society, Nell influenced Sunday to begin attending the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church. Her father, however, was not willing for her to marry a professional baseball player who worked during the winter as a locomotive fireman, and it took nearly three years for them to gain his permission to marry, on September 5, 1888. The couple had four children: Helen, George, William, and Paul. Nell eventually played a prominent role in Sunday’s evangelistic crusades, handling much of the hiring and firing of personnel and other business decisions, as well as protecting his rest periods and smoothing over problems brought on by his quick temper and his overgenerosity with time and money. Unfortunately, Sunday’s later years were marred by many personal problems associated with various family members. His mother was remarried and widowed a third time before her death in 1916. His best friend, J. Wilbur Chapman, died two years later. Two of Sunday’s sons, George and William, were divorced and remarried, and George took his own life in 1933. In that same year, Sunday’s only daughter, Helen, died, and, probably not coincidentally, Sunday suffered his first heart attack.

Life’s Work

Sunday’s conversion took place in 1886. He and some baseball teammates, after getting “tanked up” in a Chicago saloon on a Sunday afternoon, stopped at the Pacific Garden Mission to listen to an evangelistic group singing “the gospel hymns that I used to hear my mother sing back in the log cabin in Iowa.” Invited inside, Sunday liked what he heard; he returned again and again until one night he went forward and publicly accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. Subsequently, he gave up drinking, gambling, swearing, and going to the theater; he even refused to play baseball on Sunday. He began to take Bible courses at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Chicago, then was offered and in 1891 accepted full-time employment with the YMCA.

Sunday’s YMCA work brought him to the attention of J. Wilbur Chapman, later to become the most famous and successful professional evangelist of the early twentieth century. Sunday became Chapman’s advance man, preparing various communities for the evangelist’s revivals with meticulous attention to all the many details involved in assuring the success of such campaigns. He and Chapman became fast friends during the years Sunday worked for him, until Chapman abruptly decided to give up revivalism (temporarily, as it turned out) in December, 1895. Sunday’s apprenticeship to Chapman served him well in later years. He began his own independent career as a revivalist in January, 1896, and during the next five years conducted more than sixty evangelistic campaigns in the Midwest, mostly from tents in the smaller towns of Iowa and Nebraska.

The years 1901-1906 were formative ones for Sunday and for his campaigns. He developed many of his most flamboyant techniques and perfected the businesslike approach to revivalism that became his trademark. He also began to attract criticism for these and other tactics, as well as what many local ministers thought was a growing tendency on his part to condemn their efforts to enhance his own. Sunday quit using tents for his revivals during this period, requiring instead that local wooden “tabernacles” be built for his meetings. (This followed a disastrous snowstorm in Salida, Colorado, in October of 1905, in which the snow was said to have fallen so fast that it piled up three feet deep on the tent until it broke the poles and “tore the tent into ribbons.”) The tabernacles with which Sunday replaced his tents had wooden floors that were so noisy that he insisted on covering the floor with sawdust. Thereafter, “hitting the sawdust trail” became synonymous with dedicating one’s life to Christ after coming to the front of the tabernacle during the “altar call” at one of his services.

Sunday was ordained by Chicago Presbytery on April 15, 1903, despite his lack of a theological education, ordinarily a strict Presbyterian requirement. He believed, correctly, as it turned out, that his success as an evangelist and “soul winner” would more than make up for any educational deficiencies. The presbytery’s examination was less than demanding; one member of Sunday’s examining board is said to have commented that “God has used him to win more souls to Christ than all of us combined, and must have ordained him long before we ever thought of it.” After a few perfunctory questions, most of which Sunday reportedly could not answer, he was passed anyway and became an ordained Presbyterian minister, a position of some prestige and psychological value to him in his work.

When Sunday began his work as an independent revivalist in 1896, he was thirty-four years old, five feet eight inches tall, and had a slim athletic build and an open, likable face. He wore his thin, prematurely balding hair parted in the middle. He had friendly, sparkling blue eyes, but his most impressive feature was probably his charming, infectious smile and boyishness. In his early efforts to imitate Chapman, he may have tried too hard to be dignified, but by 1900 he gave this up and began to develop his own sensational style, which entertained as well as moved his audiences. He had a definite talent for dramatization, and he blended his personal magnetism and sensational oratory with theatrical gestures that kept his audiences spellbound.

Sunday’s salty, idiomatic slang and explosive preaching style in which he moved rapidly all over the podium led one biographer to call him a “gymnast for Jesus.” It was conservatively estimated that he traveled more than a mile during the course of delivering a single sermon, and his athletic build and intensity of physical exertion both entertained the masses and stimulated the critics. He would race to and fro on the platform, stamping the floor, pounding the pulpit (during those rare occasions when he stood behind it); he would stand on a chair or the pulpit, swing a chair over his head, fall to the floor, slide, jump, whirl, and even do handsprings. A master of timing, he knew how to elicit applause or laughter. He spoke very rapidly, but in short, staccato sentences, and he acted out practically every word he uttered. Thus, even those who could not hear his words could see them, and he almost never failed to get the response he wanted. At the conclusion of his famous sermon “To Men Only,” he parodied the comic poem “Slide, Kelly, Slide” by making a running dive across the length of the platform on his stomach, then imitating the “Great Umpire of the Universe” by jumping to his feet and yelling “You’re out, Kelly!” all this to dramatize a former baseball teammate named Kelly who had “taken to booze,” and thus failed to make it “home to Heaven,” according to Sunday.

Significance

Among the many targets of Sunday’s ridicule and oratory was the theory of evolution, as well as science and learning in general whenever it conflicted with a literal interpretation of Scripture. Sunday railed against political corruption, slum housing, and oppressive labor conditions; yet he also attacked the Social Gospel movement of his day, which sought to alleviate such problems. Sunday sincerely believed that his “moral approach to reform” would change the hearts of individual men and women, who would subsequently set out to change the institutions of society.

Sunday believed that the root of virtually all evils of American society was “booze.” He aided the amazingly successful Prohibition movement immeasurably through his most famous sermon of all, his “Booze Sermon.” This sermon stirred millions of Americans in the dozens of cities where he preached it. Sunday closely allied himself with the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 (although he never was on its payroll, as were many other evangelists of the day). He aroused public opposition to alcohol in many cities and states, and his followers were quick to claim credit whenever “dry” votes carried in local options or statewide referenda. Certainly the liquor industry expended enough money and energy in opposing Sunday’s efforts to indicate that they considered him influential. After Prohibition became a reality in 1920, he presided over a mock funeral for “John Barleycorn” before ten thousand persons in Norfolk, Virginia.

Sunday probably reached the peak of his popularity during the years of World War I. Although he rarely mentioned the war prior to American involvement in 1917, his superpatriotism thereafter served to fan the flames of nationalism and, subsequently, nativism. In a famous prayer before the United States House of Representatives in 1918, Sunday reminded God that “we are in a life-and-death struggle with one of the most infamous, vile, greedy, avaricious, bloodthirsty, sensual, and vicious nations that has ever disgraced the pages of history.” In countless similar jingoistic diatribes against the German “Hun” he railed on about “Kaiser Bill and his dirty bunch of pretzel-chewing, limburger-eating highbinders,” much to the delight of largely sympathetic audiences. Sunday also encouraged young men to enlist or, at least, to register for the draft. Recruiting stations for both the Army and the Navy were placed near the entrance to his were chosen tabernacle, and harsh vitriol was poured out on all who chose not to enlist or who opposed military conscription. Sunday also claimed credit for selling more than a hundred million dollars worth of Liberty and Victory bonds during the years of American involvement in the war.

Sunday’s popularity declined rapidly after the war, as the public became aware that the Peace of Versailles had failed to achieve the moral aims for which most Americans believed the war had been fought. In the postwar years, Sunday’s rhetoric and demagoguery did not change, although his audiences had changed. His great crusades for Prohibition and liberty were over; people tired of professional evangelism and soon turned for entertainment to films, radio, the automobile, and athletic events. Sunday continued to preach, mostly before smaller audiences, almost up to the time of his death, of a second heart attack, in 1935, but his later years were marred by remarks about the “social inequality” of whites and blacks, by his racially segregated services in the South, as well as by open support of his program by the Ku Klux Klan (neither solicited nor repudiated by Sunday), and by his increasingly shrill opposition to pacifism, socialism, labor “agitators,” “liberals” of all stripes, Catholics, atheists, Unitarians, Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, and practically all nonnative-born Americans. As one biographer put it,

The fact that Sunday continued to find widespread support throughout the 1920’s despite the reactionary extremism of his message indicates the extent to which the nation had turned aside from its principles. . . . Although Sunday was an almost forgotten man at his death, he had been a representative spokesman for the time in which he lived. He won recognition and fame precisely because he embodied so accurately the cultural pattern of his era. If Billy Sunday’s career was, in the long run, a failure, it was a failure shared by a generation of Americans.

Bibliography

Betts, Frederick W. Billy Sunday: The Man and Method. Boston: Murray Press, 1916. An anti-Sunday polemic based on a series of articles first published in the Universalist Leader by an opponent of a revival he held in 1915 in Syracuse, New York. This volume contains some interesting insights into Sunday’s techniques but is of little value otherwise.

Brown, Elijah P. The Real Billy Sunday. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914. An authorized biography of the evangelist in midcareer by one of his early assistants, this volume is of limited value both because of its early date and its extreme pro-Sunday bias. Three of his complete sermons are included.

Ellis, William T.“Billy” Sunday: The Man and His Message. 1914. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1936. Another “authorized” biography of Sunday in midcareer. More than half of this volume consists of excerpts from his sermons, topically arranged. The revised edition is somewhat less favorably biased than the original. The famous Booze Sermon is included in its entirety.

Frankenberg, Theodore T. The Spectacular Career of Rev. Billy Sunday, the Famous Baseball Evangelist. 1913. Rev. ed. Billy Sunday: His Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails. Columbus, Ohio: F. J. Heer Printing, 1917. Another midcareer biography, somewhat more revealing of personality than the two authorized ones. No material from his sermons is included.

McLoughlin, William G. Billy Sunday Was His Real Name. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. The only real objective biography of Sunday available, this volume, by a skilled historian and professor at Brown University, is the result of extensive research and numerous interviews with Sunday’s associates and his widow. Written in lively style, this book may be considered the definitive biography of Sunday.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham. New York: Ronald Press, 1959. Another valuable work by McLoughlin, extensively researched and documented. Analyzes Sunday’s life and career in its context of American religious revivalism since 1825.

Martin, Robert F. Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862-1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Concise and well-researched biography. Martin maintains that Sunday was popular in the 1920’s because many Americans found his traditional values comforting during a time of great economic and social change.

Rodeheaver, Homer. Twenty Years with Billy Sunday. Nashville, Tenn.: Cokesbury Press, 1936. Written by the multitalented master of ceremonies, choirmaster, soloist, and trombonist for Sunday’s campaigns, this volume describes some of his techniques as well as certain aspects of his personality. It is primarily interesting, however, for its insights into the musical aspects of mass evangelism.

Sunday, William A. The Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. A re-publication of Sunday’s autobiography, which was originally serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1932 and 1933.