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TRANSFORMATION IN THE TABERNACLE: BILLY SUNDAY'S CONVERTS AND EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Jeremy C. Young
Jeremy C. Young*
Affiliation:
Grand Valley State University
*
email: jcyoung84@gmail.com
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Abstract

Millions of Americans watched the evangelist Billy Sunday preach during the years 1905–1935, and many were profoundly affected by the experience. Using letters, published and unpublished reminiscences, and other primary source documents, this article reconstructs the emotional experience of Sunday's converts and offers insights into the meaning of conversion and followership in Sunday's and other similar social movements. Through their emotional responses to the evangelist, followers recast socioeconomic problems and community pressures as personal, internal crises that could be resolved through adherence to Sunday's principles. The process of conversion was considered and volitional; it was also a long-lasting act of self-fashioning. Americans who converted in Sunday's tabernacles thoroughly reinvented themselves as followers of Sunday and then set out to remake society according to the evangelist's goals. Generalizing from these insights, the article argues that followership of inspirational leaders was a site of significant agency for Progressive Era Americans. It also identifies emotional experience as a way for historical figures to translate cultural trends into concrete social action. The article concludes by calling for additional research into how emotions shape and condition historical change.

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Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2015, pp. 367 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

On the night of February 17, 1910, Thomas Jenkins did something remarkable: he stood up. Thomas and his wife Mary had traveled through a storm to attend a Billy Sunday revival meeting in Youngstown, Ohio.Footnote 1 Since Thomas had never been particularly religious, his interest in the revival took his devout wife by surprise. In a letter she later wrote to Billy and Nell Sunday, Mary recounted having prayed for weeks, without any sign of success, for her husband's conversion; she was “very near being discouraged.” Thomas “is a man that dont say much,” Mary explained, “but he is a deep thinker.” That night, while the congregation sang and Sunday delivered his energetic sermon, a momentous change took place within Thomas Jenkins's mind. When Sunday invited audience members to “hit the sawdust trail”—to come up to the pulpit and pledge themselves to Christ—Thomas answered Sunday's call. “He leaped from his seat without saying a word to me,” Mary wrote. Down the tabernacle aisle Thomas strode until he reached Sunday and shook the evangelist's hand. Back at home, the conversion continued. Thomas told Mary, “I made the final step, & by the grace of God I mean to stand by my Saviour, untill he calls me home.” Mary opened her Bible and read aloud: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.”Footnote 2 Then she uttered a prayer. Thomas prayed, too, for the first time in his life. “And I tell you he made a beautiful Prayer,” Mary wrote, “with tears streaming down his face, and asked God to forgive his many sins, 46 yrs. old & wasted so much time serving the Devil but Lord I am going to serve Thee from now on.” Overcome with emotion, Mary went to Thomas “and sat on his lap, and we embraced one and other, weeping with joy.”Footnote 3

Thomas Jenkins's personal transformation was only one of many dramatic conversions that William Ashley “Billy” Sunday effected during a thirty-year revival career. Born near Ames, Iowa, on November 19, 1862, Sunday survived a difficult childhood that included a stay in an orphans' home; by 1883, he had found success as a baseball player for the Chicago White Stockings.Footnote 4 Several years later, Sunday experienced a religious conversion at Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission.Footnote 5 Increasingly dedicated to his newfound Christian spirituality, Sunday had quit baseball by 1890 and was soon working the evangelical circuit, first as traveling minister J. Wilbur Chapman's advance man and then as an independent revival preacher.Footnote 6 From around 1905 until his death thirty years later, Sunday reigned as the outstanding evangelist of the age. Sunday himself claimed that a hundred million people attended his revivals and that he had generated a million converts in all. Though scholars generally consider these estimates too high, Sunday's campaigns certainly drew millions of listeners and produced hundreds of thousands of active converts.Footnote 7 Known for his kinetic physical energy in the pulpit and his masculine appeal to male audiences—both characteristics he had developed as a baseball player—Sunday achieved impressive results in large part through a systematic organizational approach that required weeks of preparation before each stop on the revival tour. Among other achievements, Sunday led a nationwide upswing in revivalism, campaigned strenuously for alcohol prohibition and American involvement in World War I, and helped pave the way for the modern mass evangelism of Billy Graham and others.Footnote 8

Though Sunday's exploits are well known, the experiences of his converts have received little scholarly attention.Footnote 9 Far from being silent, however, Sunday's followers were eager to share their experiences with anyone who cared to listen. Mary Jenkins's narrative is just one of many surviving testimonials by Sunday converts and their family members. Sunday's papers contain hundreds of letters written by grateful “trail-hitters” eager to describe their conversions and to thank the evangelist for his influence on their lives. In the days, months, and years after their contact with Sunday, other followers of the charismatic preacher set down their experiences in books, articles, and poetry. The passage of time failed to diminish followers' connection with the evangelist; as late as 1982, at the behest of sociologist Ivan J. Fahs, twenty-seven elderly North Carolinians filled out questionnaires vividly detailing their memories of a Sunday revival nearly six decades earlier.Footnote 10

Taken together, the available testimonials represent a somewhat idiosyncratic cross-section of the Sunday movement. Sunday's evangelical successor Billy Graham received up to fifteen thousand letters per day from eager admirers; if Sunday's epistolary haul was in any way comparable, the few hundred letters in his personal correspondence file constitute only a tiny fraction of the total receipts.Footnote 11 The letters that do survive appear to have been chosen, either by Nell Sunday or a personal secretary of her husband's, to emphasize eloquently written conversion narratives.Footnote 12 This selection process has obscured the demographic diversity of Sunday's followers and elided any shifts in message that may have occurred during the evangelist's career. Though a few letter writers noted their poverty, most testimonials appear to have come from middle-class Americans. Since middle-class people were generally well educated, it is not surprising that their voices predominate among letters kept for their length and eloquence or among published autobiographies or poems. The letters do reflect a relatively even mix of female and male authors—although women usually made up the majority of revival audiences, even given Sunday's signature masculine appeal.Footnote 13 Finally, while few writers identified their racial status, Sunday's well-known racism and hostility to black churches makes it likely that most testimonial authors were white.Footnote 14

Despite their unrepresentative nature, the testimonials constitute a detailed and valuable record of emotional experience in the Progressive Era United States. Specifically, the narratives speak effectively for a type of emotionally laden followership prominent during the period. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans experienced a set of emotions distinctive to their time and place. The economic, social, and cultural upheavals of the period led many middle-class people to embark on what historian Jackson Lears has called a “quest for intense experience”—a search for a potent emotional fulfillment that would provide them with the purpose and direction they felt they lacked.Footnote 15 Americans achieved this intense emotional experience in large part through their responses to charismatic religious or secular leaders. The Third Great Awakening, a broad revival movement in which Sunday and other evangelists played central roles, was one manifestation of this desire to seek emotional sustenance from inspirational figures.Footnote 16 Biographers of charismatic politicians such as William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt have noted the emotional fervor of supporters' letters to these candidates.Footnote 17 Similarly, reformers such as Frances Willard, labor leaders such as Eugene V. Debs, and activists such as Marcus Garvey attracted large numbers of followers whose emotional responses mirrored, at least in part, those of the trail-hitters.Footnote 18

What can Mary Jenkins's letter, and others like it, tell us about this type of emotional followership experience? As recent scholarship in religious history and “emotionology” has pointed out, understanding the emotions of historical figures requires a firm grasp of the cultural context in which these emotions appeared. Emotions, these scholars argue, are experienced and recorded only after being filtered through a fog of social expectations, ritualized narrative forms, and social and linguistic traditions.Footnote 19 Thus, Third Great Awakening Protestant converts such as Thomas Jenkins did not choose conversion in a vacuum, nor were their narratives entirely self-determined. Sunday's followers participated in a long history of American conversion and “enthusiasm” experiences dating back to the early 1700s and including such events as the Methodist “shout tradition,” the First Great Awakening led by George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards in the mid-1700s, the revivals of Charles Grandison Finney in the 1820s and 1830s, and the “Businessmen's Revival” of 1858.Footnote 20 In one sense, Thomas Jenkins's feeling that he was “serving the Devil” derived from the long-standing American culture of revivalism he had absorbed. Even his vulnerability while “weeping with joy” in his wife's arms reflected the championing of “feminine” emotion prominent within the revival context.Footnote 21

Although the emotions of converts reflected themes already present in American culture, the testimonials can help to explain how followers translated those themes into their everyday lives—and, significantly, how followers' experiences themselves helped to shape American society. Most converts, the testimonials reveal, navigated the boundary between self and society in part by recasting external forces as internal ones. Rather than connecting economic and social struggles directly with their unhappiness, they felt motivated by feelings of inadequacy and failure and by family and community pressures. More importantly, the testimonials show that individual acts of followership had real political, social, and religious consequences for American society more generally. The choice to follow Sunday shaped trail-hitters' actions as well as their identities. Having transformed themselves, many followers set out to remake their society; the emotional potency of their conversions spurred them to purposive action in promoting the religious and political goals of the movement they had joined.

Ultimately, the trail-hitter narratives reveal how conversion and emotional experience mediate the transformation of cultural trends into practical social realities. Thomas Jenkins's act of conversion channeled the culture of American revivalism through his own individual experience into a movement of collective social action. The challenge for scholars is to understand how the causes and consequences of that act—and the millions of others like it—helped to shape the American social order.

“I COULDN'T SLEEP WELL THAT NIGHT”: FROM CRISIS TO CONVERSION

Throughout his career, Sunday contended with the charge that tabernacle conversion was merely a way of manipulating Americans. “Billy Sunday is a shocking example of the license which the modern purveyor of religion and virtue, so called, allows himself and is allowed by the public,” wrote the conservative Louisville Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson. “Hysteria in religion is…the most dangerous form of emotion. … It leads to fanaticism and fanaticism is the devil's chosen instrument for the misleading of man.”Footnote 22 A very different cultural critic, the radical poet Carl Sandburg, repeated Watterson's charges against the evangelist. “There is terrific tragedy of the individual and of the crowd in and about Billy Sunday,” Sandburg wrote in 1916. “He is the most conspicuous single embodiment in this country of the crowd leader or crowd operative who uses jungle methods, stark voodoo stage effects, to play hell with democracy.”Footnote 23 In this view, the entire phenomenon of tabernacle conversion was a mental disease whipped up purposefully, and shamefully, by unscrupulous leaders. Follower testimonials show, however, that the reality of conversion was more complicated—and more interesting—than the Watterson-Sandburg portrayal suggests.

Conversion, William James wrote in 1902, begins when individuals feel “consciously wrong inferior and unhappy.”Footnote 24 More recent scholars of religion, agreeing with James, note that converts generally experience a preexisting mental state of “crisis” or “destabilization” that sparks their interest in conversion.Footnote 25 As Grant Wacker has recently shown, Billy Graham's mail was filled with firsthand accounts of such crises, and Sunday's letters were no different.Footnote 26 The experiences of crisis recorded by Sunday's converts, however, varied widely. Laura Anna Danzeisen, for example, was both quite religious and outwardly happy in 1915 when she sang in a choir for Sunday's Philadelphia revival campaign. But “after hearing several of the messages,” her daughter reported, Danzeisen “realized that she had to walk the sawdust trail for herself.”Footnote 27 Danzeisen's conversion may have come upon her unawares; her sense of crisis was probably a weak one. A more common experience was that of trail-hitter Edgar G. Gordon. Prior to his conversion, the Hillsdale, Michigan, schoolteacher had been consumed by self-criticism for his “pool-playing, card-playing, dancing, ‘suds’-sipping” ways. Though Gordon believed his behavior to be wrong, his lack of emotional fortitude had frustrated his previous attempts at self-correction. “I had long had a vision of service and of my duty,” he wrote to Sunday in frustration in 1933, “but until you challenged, until you dared me to be a man, I had not the decision [to act upon it].”Footnote 28

In the turn-of-the-century United States, a general sense of social crisis was certainly palpable enough. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was a nation in the midst of great and rapid changes. The simultaneous growth of industrial capitalism and economic depression threatened job security and threw millions out of work. Middle-class men underwent a crisis of masculinity, while women fought to take on a larger role outside the home. Meanwhile, men and women alike experienced a fundamental and troubling lack of purpose in their lives. Rapid urbanization, massive strikes, growing waves of new immigrants, the breakdown of the Victorian family structure, and increasingly powerful and radical reform crusades completed the overwhelming picture.Footnote 29 Despite the variety in their descriptions of pre-conversion angst, however, trail-hitters did not attribute their crises to external economic or social factors. Concerns such as economic inequality, labor unrest, and urban migration hardly ever appear in the testimonials. Some of Sunday's poorer followers did mention their poverty when they wrote to him. Harry Sherman, for instance, described himself as “a heater in a roll mill” who had “stopt going to school when I was nine years old,” and O. R. Derby noted ruefully that he “live[d] in a shanty by the road.” But even these individuals did not link their economic situation with their attraction to the Sunday movement.Footnote 30

This is not to say that trail-hitters did not undergo social dislocation or economic hardship—probably many did—or to suggest that their inability to connect these underlying causes with their unhappiness lessens the importance of the socioeconomic context. Rather, the narratives of crisis speak to the broader tendency of American Protestant converts to filter broad revival messages through the lens of more immediate contexts. As early as the First Great Awakening, followers of George Whitefield interpreted his sermons as endorsements of local religious factions and statements on recent events.Footnote 31 Sunday's converts experienced the societal underpinnings of the revival even more personally: as individual weaknesses, failings, or sins. Converts perceived the source of their unhappiness as arising from within themselves—and tabernacle conversion was an attempt to address that perception, not to alter an unrecognized socioeconomic reality.

Trail-hitters identified a variety of causes of their discontent. Occasionally, testimonial authors clearly identified a character or lifestyle flaw as their main problem. Charles H. Thurston, a former mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, knew exactly what was wrong with his life: he was an alcoholic. “In spite of all I could do the appetite [for alcohol] held me fast,” he lamented. “This continued for seven or eight years” until a Billy Sunday conversion finally sobered him up.Footnote 32 More commonly, converts experienced only a vague dissatisfaction with themselves, a lack of willpower (as in Gordon's case), or an abiding sense of weakness—a feeling which they often interpreted in religious terms. As Thomas Jenkins told his wife, the problem from his perspective was not with his job, his marriage, or even his behavior—it was that he had “wasted so much time serving the Devil.”

From the pulpit, Sunday did his best to encourage and validate such self-criticism. William Ward Ayer, later a prominent New York minister, recounted that prior to his conversion most preachers had had little to offer him, because they were always “saying, ‘be good! Be good!’ and there were two things wrong with that. One was that I knew I couldn't be good if I wanted to, and the other was I didn't want to be good in the first place.” Sunday's tactics were different. “Billy Sunday said I was a sinner,” recalled Ayer, “and that I needed Christ.”Footnote 33 Ayer, Gordon, and others in crisis found Sunday's criticisms of them reassuring; after all, the evangelist was only acknowledging what they already suspected about themselves, while using a formula of sin and salvation with which they were already familiar. After his conversion, Gordon urged Sunday to continue using the same approach with others: “Go on telling men how much they are worth. When this fails convince them of their worthlessness and insignificance so long as they are out of Christ.”Footnote 34

Sunday was not the only person telling potential followers that they “needed Christ.” Pressure from friends and family members played a large role in translating private crises into tabernacle conversions. After a group of local ministers came upon Thurston drunk at the Cambridge city hall, they urged him to attend a tabernacle service.Footnote 35 Andrew Wyzenbeek, a shop superintendent in Ottumwa, Iowa, became interested in Sunday's 1908 revival campaign after six of his employees, formerly known as “the six dirty Swedes,” suddenly began arriving at work in clean white shirts. “Ole, what happened to you fellows?” Wyzenbeek asked one of the Swedes. “You're different.” Ole responded, “Yeah, Mr. Wyzenbeek. We … we are different. We are new men. We are born again.” Wyzenbeek dismissed the Swedes as “fanatical,” but he could not stop thinking about their experience. “I couldn't sleep well that night. It worried me. But I says, ‘Is there anything to this?’ … I was so curious. I had no idea what they did there [in the tabernacle]. So I went in.”Footnote 36

Class and especially gender considerations played key roles in the social pressure to convert. Many businessmen viewed Sunday's evangelism as a boon to social and workplace harmony; they played key roles in supporting Sunday's revivals and, crucially, in promoting them to their workers. Wealthy Sunday backers such as industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and department store magnate John Wanamaker doubtless hoped converted workingmen would be more docile and less likely to challenge the authority of foremen and owners.Footnote 37 Nonetheless, women were by far the most important source of community pressure. Though Sunday's gender politics were often parochial at best—he called his wife “Ma” and encouraged female audience members to become motherly housewives—women such as Mary Jenkins saw him as a valued ally against their alcoholic, dissolute, or distant male family members.Footnote 38 Sunday's energetic, masculine delivery and his previous career as a baseball player made him the embodiment of “muscular Christianity,” a movement that equated religious fervor with masculinity and physical prowess.Footnote 39 This approach to religion held particular appeal for men, with the preacher boasting a higher proportion of male converts than that of any other evangelist of the time.Footnote 40 Converted husbands, their wives assumed, would refrain from drinking, participate in church activities, and be more attentive to their families. Alcoholic ex-mayor Charles Thurston recalled that his wife had “induced me to promise months in advance that I would go to the Sunday meetings.”Footnote 41 Sunday's mail was filled with letters from similar women thanking him for his benevolent influence on their husbands, brothers, or sons.Footnote 42

When Andrew Wyzenbeek and others set foot inside the tabernacle, they found themselves caught up in a system designed to translate their vague longings into conversions. Revivals had been tightly organized and expertly promoted affairs since George Whitefield's time. Dwight Moody's campaigns in the mid-1800s were particularly renowned for their professionalized structure, which included weeks of local press appeals before Moody ever delivered a sermon.Footnote 43 Contemporary commentators, however, singled out Sunday's revivals as uniquely impressive models of organizational efficiency.Footnote 44 The evangelist's meticulous planning began with the wooden tabernacles themselves; architect Joseph Spiece designed the structures to maximize the reach of the evangelist's voice and to channel trail-hitters toward the pulpit in orderly rows.Footnote 45 More importantly, Sunday carefully cultivated and molded local communities in order to maximize their influence on potential converts. Before each revival campaign, the evangelist sent advance agents to whip up local interest through pre-campaign prayer meetings.Footnote 46 During the revival itself, “personal workers” managed the crowds and encouraged those around them to walk the sawdust trail.Footnote 47 Wyzenbeek himself became a reluctant trail-hitter when a personal worker seated behind him identified him as a potential convert and then, in what apparently was a common practice, literally propelled him toward the pulpit. Though he found the revival experience underwhelming, even Wyzenbeek transformed into an enthusiastic convert after community members, acting on information gathered at the Sunday meeting, took him to hear an inspiring speaker at a local church.Footnote 48

Similarly, the revival meetings themselves were carefully structured to channel seekers' emotions toward conversion. The meetings began with a thirty- to sixty-minute musical service before Sunday even appeared at the pulpit.Footnote 49 Following Sunday's belief that popular gospel hymns “stir memories that drive folks back to their mother's God and Christ,” music directors Fred Fischer and Homer Rodeheaver pioneered the use of these songs in a revival setting.Footnote 50 The Charlotte survey respondents remembered the musical program as being one of the most emotionally significant aspects of the revival. “The singing touched and impressed me most,” wrote R. G. Lineberger. “The huge crowd singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ I'll never forget.”Footnote 51 Florence R. Walker agreed: “The singing was so beautiful. … When a crowd sings you have to feel happy, and more receptive to the message.”Footnote 52

After the musical service had roused the audience emotionally, Sunday's sermon provided the final element necessary for conversion. The evangelist did not create many trail-hitters through oratorical eloquence; in fact, recordings of his rapid-fire delivery indicate that his audience may have had difficulty making out his words.Footnote 53 “I couldn't understand him at all,” Wyzenbeek recalled. “He spoke rapidly. He used big words. In biblical terms. I couldn't understand him at all.”Footnote 54 R. G. Lineberger agreed: “I remember Billy Sunday, not so much for what he said, I'm afraid, but [for] his energetic manner.”Footnote 55 Instead, Sunday perfected two techniques for persuading his audience: the enthusiastic, fist-pounding physical delivery noted by Lineberger and the effective use of storytelling as a rhetorical device.Footnote 56 Though surpassed by the over-the-top antics of fellow evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Sunday's athletic pulpit performances, which often mimicked movements from his ball-playing days, transfixed revival audiences.Footnote 57 Over half a century later, survey respondent Howard B. Arbuckle, Jr., clearly remembered Sunday's “execution of a perfect baseball slide which was so different from the stiff demeanor of most preachers.”Footnote 58 When Sunday “came up to bat or slid in home or stole a base,” reported J. W. Booth, “we were on the edge of the seats.”Footnote 59 And William Ward Ayer “found something so earnest about the man that I couldn't help but listen intently to what he had to say.”Footnote 60

Once he had his audience's attention, Sunday made the case for conversion through parables derived from the Bible as well as from his own baseball career.Footnote 61 For survey respondents James B. Pickard and G. F. Shrum, one particular story from Sunday's athletic past stood out: “He said he was chasing a fly or ground ball,” Pickard reported, “and he prayed if God would let him catch it it would mean that he would know he was called to preach.”Footnote 62 And no fewer than six testimonials mention a sermon in which Sunday broke ten painted vases in sequence to symbolize sinners' breaking of the Ten Commandments.Footnote 63 Philadelphia resident Leslie A. Outterson was riveted by the scene: “I somehow connected the broken vases with the tragedy of my own broken home.”Footnote 64 Later in life, he mused, “I am wondering about Billy Sunday and his ten symbolic vases. How many vases would he smash in describing my record today?”Footnote 65

Troubled by their own personal crises, shepherded by family and friends, moved by the musical service, and convinced by Sunday's performance, many audience members were ready to follow the preacher wherever he might lead. Yet Sunday recognized that conversion was often a lengthy and difficult process; he did not begin asking for converts until at least a week of revival meetings had gone by.Footnote 66 Even so, some who converted too hastily failed to receive the full spiritual benefit of the experience. Charles Thurston first hit the sawdust trail, “moved by an irresistible impulse,” while drunk—though he returned three days later to “reaffirm … in my sober senses what I had already expressed.”Footnote 67 In different ways, Andrew Wyzenbeek and Thomas Jenkins also needed time to ponder the possibility of conversion before, as Thomas put it, they “made the final step.”

As they decided whether to hit the sawdust trail, potential Sunday followers wrestled with a variety of fears. Christianity itself rarely troubled them, since most of Sunday's converts were already Christians before they recommitted themselves in the tabernacle.Footnote 68 Rather, the uniquely emotional nature of Sunday's movement gave them pause. Felicite Clarke, a poet and the estranged wife of a prominent lawyer, found that her experience at the revival meetings challenged her sense of rationality.Footnote 69 In a poem entitled “Heart versus Brain,” Clarke described her emotional response to the tabernacle: “A chord did resound, mid the music profound, / To the soulful vibration of light and of sound, / And darkness of night gave way to the light / That shines on the heart of the man who is right.” Reason, wrote Clarke, was of little use to her in understanding “the problem of life”; Sunday offered her a more fulfilling “music and light” in its place. “Is religion naught but emotion?” she wondered, concluding in frustration, “Why reason should faint when I would be a saint, / Is a problem to stagger the sages.”Footnote 70 Storekeeper T. J. Hutchison experienced the problem somewhat differently. Despite weeks of listening to Sunday's sermons, Hutchison found himself “resisting the call of the Holy Spirit. I had not yet made up my mind.” Hutchison finally decided to follow Sunday only after experiencing a full-blown religious vision: “The room lit up most glorious and my what a scene. The most beautiful picture any one ever seen or ever will see until they get inside the portals of glory.” Within the vision, Hutchison sensed the presence of God: “Its impossible for me to describe him to you. But he was there. And when he left I was ready Sunday afternoon to walk down the saw dust trail for time and eternity.”Footnote 71

Despite the charges of hysteria leveled by critics such as Watterson and Sandburg, the length and difficulty of conversions such as Clarke's and Hutchison's suggests that the decision to convert was often a considered and volitional one.Footnote 72 Notwithstanding the outside pressures or cultural tropes of the revival, when Hutchison, Clarke, and others finally decided to follow Sunday, they meant it. And when followers actually hit the trail, they felt their internal crises melt away in the joy of self-transformation. Psychology graduate student Henry Arthur Bentson, observing a 1915 Sunday revival in Paterson, New Jersey, noted that “most of those who hit the trail seemed to be in a rather pleasant frame of mind.”Footnote 73 “Pleasant” was putting it mildly. Mary Jenkins crowed to the Sundays about the “wonderful change” that had come over Thomas; his relief at no longer “serving the Devil”—and her relief at the change in her husband—was palpable and overwhelming.Footnote 74 During the religious vision that unfolded in T. J. Hutchison's bedroom, “the heart of stone was removed and he [God] gave me a new one. Lifted me up out of the miery clay plased my feet on the solid rock Christ Jesus, and put a new song in my mouth praise his holy name.”Footnote 75 Perhaps the most eloquent statement of the conversion experience was Ole the Swede's testimony to his employer after he and his friends had walked the sawdust trail: “We … we are different. We are new men. We are born again. … We have come to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior. And He put a new spirit and a new heart in us.”Footnote 76

“PLEASE GOD, I'M GOING TO CHANGE”: REMAKING SELF AND SOCIETY

The decision to follow Billy Sunday did more for trail-hitters than merely resolve their internal crises. After all, converts wanted to transform themselves “for time and eternity,” not just for a moment. Accordingly, conversion had a second act whose significance remained long after the trail-hitting was over. After they had gained “a new spirit and a new heart” in the tabernacle, Sunday's followers enthusiastically embarked on a double mission: redefining themselves as purposeful and directed individuals, and reshaping society according to the principles of their newfound leader. The motivation for each task grew from the personal needs of the trail-hitters, yet each goal had important consequences for the world outside the boundaries of the Sunday movement.

For converts, hitting the sawdust trail was the inaugural action of a dramatic self-refashioning. The ensuing process of developing new identities and priorities, though, could be as confusing as it was liberating. Some followers sought to ease the transition by modeling their own personalities after Sunday's own. Jamie Biggerstaff Goldsmith boasted to the evangelist that “I am called ‘Billy Sunday’ here where I work because I go every night and always talking of the Sunday party.” A bit uncomfortably, he added, “Didn't know you had a namesake did you ha ha.”Footnote 77 Similarly, during the revival campaign, Felicite Clarke radically altered the erudite authorial voice of her poems to mimic the language of Sunday's homespun sermons: “And when the final deed is read,” she wrote in one verse, “Where will you duck your punished head?… / You'll credit HELL when you are dead!”Footnote 78

More commonly, followers sought more metaphorical guidance from their leader by cultivating an affinity with him. Often, they addressed Sunday with familiarity or irreverence or imagined him as a personal friend. “When you and Mrs. Sunday want a ‘flapjack,’” declared Eleanor and John P. Fox, who evidently owned an eatery, “don't come to the back door—walk in the front way and give your orders.”Footnote 79 Many of Sunday's correspondents addressed the evangelist by his first name. “You've hit me a lot of times, Bill,” Frances Elder wrote, describing the aptness of Sunday's criticisms of her lifestyle, “but I hope to god the next time you come—you won't be able to hit once!”Footnote 80 A letter-writer named “Mit” achieved a similar sense of camaraderie with Sunday by aggressively defending the preacher's good name. Mit wrote to a local storekeeper that “I always thought you were a good old scout untill you started to knock my best friend ‘Billy’ but if you think you are making any thing by it you are crazy. I myself know of dozens of people who never will buy a thing in your store again.” To ensure Sunday was aware of his status as Mit's “best friend,” the letter-writer cheekily sent the evangelist a copy of this missive.Footnote 81

For most converts, though, following Sunday ultimately meant living according to his teachings, not copying his mannerisms or becoming his friend. In a leaflet that his staff distributed to every new convert, Sunday made clear what he expected from his followers. According to the handout, walking the sawdust trail constituted a commitment to give up vices such as drinking, smoking, dancing, and card-playing; communicate with God through prayer and Bible study; support a local church both financially and through membership; and convert others to Sunday's brand of Christianity.Footnote 82 Trail-hitters could not have been surprised by these precepts, since Sunday's sermons repeatedly emphasized the same points.

The testimonials indicate that Sunday's followers took their leader's values seriously, particularly with regard to proscribed activities. After hearing Sunday preach numerous times in Buffalo, New York, Frances Elder wrote to the evangelist, “I'm just one of those ‘modern’ girls, but please God, I'm going to change.” She vowed to “forget this dancing-drinking craze that has struck us—I'll live as God wants me to live—thanks to you!”Footnote 83 Owing to Sunday's influence, wrote Evangeline M. George in 1930, “I have yet to enter my first theatre, my first dance hall and appear at my first card table.”Footnote 84 In the same way, Edgar Gordon's sense of shame at his earlier “pool-playing, card-playing, dancing, ‘suds’-sipping ways” suggested that he had internalized Sunday's own condemnations of such behavior. Even the elderly survey respondents in Charlotte recalled Sunday's rules clearly. Fifty-eight years after she had attended the revival meetings, Margaret H. Booth noted proudly that she had avoided “cards and alcohol” and “never learned to dance” because of Sunday's memorable exhortations against these amusements.Footnote 85

For many trail-hitters, changing their lives to accord with Sunday's value system was among the more stressful and difficult aspects of followership. Frances Elder asked Sunday to “drop me a line wishing me ‘good luck’ in my new found happiness”; she added ruefully, “I'll need it.”Footnote 86 Simply by altering their behavior in these ways, though, the trail-hitters shaped society outside the confines of the tabernacle community. Just as Ole the Swede's white shirt and changed demeanor helped to motivate his employer's conversion, Sunday's massive nationwide following served as a constant advertisement to non-converts. Over time, Sunday's movement created a natural ripple effect. According to Homer Rodeheaver, Syracuse bank president Lucius A. Eddy—after hitting the sawdust trail himself—singlehandedly procured over four thousand converts over a twelve-year period.Footnote 87 By 1960, William Ward Ayer's decades of evangelism had plausibly “seen thousands of people come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.” Ayer concluded that “what happened to them, happened to them because of what happened to me through Billy Sunday.”Footnote 88 Whether they were ministers or laypeople, other trail-hitters likely had similar impacts on their own communities.

What Sunday's followers truly hungered for, though, was a more direct way of spreading the evangelist's message. As Robert William Aschan watched Sunday's train depart from Des Moines, Iowa, in 1914, he felt spiritually empty, “as though the very soul of the city went away.” Dejectedly, Aschan and his friend H. E. Benson wondered aloud, “What are we going to do now we can't go to the meetings any more[?]” “Let's write to Mr. Sunday,” Benson suggested, “and perhaps he could give us some work to do, so we could be trying to do some good for humanity.” Aschan put the question to Sunday in a letter: “Mr Sunday if you have any thing for a couple of clean cut fellows to do would be more than glad to hear from you and do any thing for you we can.”Footnote 89 Aschan, Benson, and other followers longed to take part in some great collective work that would transfigure their momentary enthusiasms into an enduring sense of purpose—and, in doing so, resolve their internal crises once and for all. Sunday encouraged these sentiments; as historian Robert F. Martin has noted, the evangelist believed that his converts “should be concerned not only with the state of their own souls but should also work to build a stable and harmonious social order.”Footnote 90

In Sunday's exhortation to convert others, many followers found the mission they sought. Some trail-hitters, such as Ayer, went on to become ministers, while followers who were already ministers roused themselves to greater exertions after hearing Sunday preach.Footnote 91 “The second Sunday after my return from [Sunday's 1916 revival in] Boston,” exulted Maine pastor John Graham, “twenty-eight out of thirty-eight in my congregation came forward, some accepting Christ and others for reconsecration.”Footnote 92 Laura Danzeisen began her missionary work by converting her future husband; after attending religious school, the two of them traveled to Tanzania to continue spreading their faith.Footnote 93 Eddy and others who remained laypeople also participated in the work of conversion. Meanwhile, followers who were less successful vowed to redouble their efforts. Jamie Goldsmith confessed to Sunday that he had not “done very much in trying to save souls” before he went to the revival meetings, but now Sunday had “shown me where I stand.”Footnote 94

Followers' determination to share Sunday's message with others also manifested itself in the more formal structures of Sunday-themed fraternal organizations. Male trail-hitters formed numerous “Billy Sunday Clubs,” which were designed to produce new converts, promote Bible study, and perform good works in the community. Women joined “Virginia Asher Clubs”—named after a prominent singer and organizer in Sunday's campaigns—which fulfilled the same functions as the men's organizations.Footnote 95 Testimonials published in a Chattanooga Billy Sunday Club booklet reveal that members viewed the organizations as sites of spiritual renewal and reminders of the work they were undertaking. The Club “means more to me than any human organization I have ever been in,” wrote J. P. McCallie. A. S. Lyons agreed: “The Club has meant more to me, in Spiritual fellowship,” he wrote, “than my church.” H. D. Huffaker added that the organization was “a constant reminder … of my obligation to be a loyal and true soldier of the Cross.”Footnote 96 These clubs often persisted for decades after the revivals that spawned them. In Charlotte, for instance, one survey respondent wrote that the local Virginia Asher Society was still in existence fifty-eight years after its founding.Footnote 97

Following Sunday involved more than just internalizing and spreading a certain type of Christianity. Living in the world of the converted also meant embracing the evangelist's worldview. In Sunday's eyes, America was a society under attack by the demonic forces of sin. The preacher readily acknowledged that American culture was somehow out of joint—otherwise, he could not have appealed to his followers' sense of crisis. However, he downplayed the importance of socioeconomic pressures and inequalities as causes of America's problems and rejected most social reforms as potential solutions. “We've had enough,” he insisted, “of this godless social service nonsense.”Footnote 98 Instead, Sunday emphasized the negative choices of individuals—particularly men—to dance, play cards, drink alcohol, or otherwise act in a sinful fashion. Accordingly, Sunday's message contained a public policy platform that reflected this focus on problematic individual behavior. Among other causes, the evangelist supported woman suffrage (because women voters were more morally sound), anti-vice legislation (to protect families from male sin), child labor laws, and American involvement in World War I.Footnote 99 Most of all, he was an indefatigable champion of prohibition. The evangelist's fiery sermons attacking the liquor industry were legendary, and revivals often doubled as political campaigns for local or state prohibition legislation.Footnote 100

Sunday determined the political issues his revival campaigns embraced, but his followers gave force to those choices. Without a movement behind him, Sunday would have been merely an opinionated man. Instead, Sunday and his nationwide army of followers wielded real political power. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this fact was the acknowledgment by local mayors that Sunday could seriously damage their political careers simply by speaking against them in the tabernacle. Omaha Mayor James C. Dahlman was a typical case. The evangelist had made no secret of his antipathy toward the mayor; the Omaha Bee reported that Sunday would like nothing better than to “inundate Jim and sweep him out of the city hall.”Footnote 101 When Sunday arrived in Omaha in September 1915, Dahlman protected himself by treating the preacher with perfect solicitude. The mayor sang hymns in the front row of the tabernacle, praised Sunday in the press, provided city facilities for the revivals free of charge, and gave every sign that he was about to walk the sawdust trail himself—until Sunday left Omaha, whereupon Dahlman abruptly withdrew his support for all Sunday-affiliated organizations. Dahlman earned the nickname “Foxy Jim” from the press for his skillful manipulation of Sunday, but not all mayors were so confident in their ability to trick the evangelist.Footnote 102 Sunday's comment to a Columbus, Ohio, reporter suggesting that mayor George Karb might have been “elected by the whiskey ring” was enough to send Karb skittering to address that city's tabernacle crowd.Footnote 103

Dahlman and Karb had good reason to fear Sunday, because of the evangelist's proven political influence, particularly where prohibition laws were at play.Footnote 104 In November 1916, for instance, Michigan voters passed a statewide ban on alcohol after Sunday preached in support of the bill in three of the state's largest cities. Even where Sunday lost battles for prohibition, his supporters usually ran up larger-than-expected vote totals for the “dry” cause.Footnote 105 Meanwhile, mayors who were sympathetic to prohibition essentially adopted Sunday's team as their campaign field organization on the liquor issue. “Over a year ago,” wrote Burlington, Iowa, mayor J. S. Caster to Sunday in 1905, “I said to the preachers and the public, that whenever public sentiment would sustain me I would close the saloons on Sunday.” Caster had been able to keep this promise because Sunday's Burlington revival campaign had swayed voters in favor of the measure. “This result was brought about by your work in Burlington,” Caster concluded gratefully, “and I think you ought to have the credit.”Footnote 106

Much of the credit, however, really belonged to Sunday's followers. Their collective power as activists and at the ballot box frightened mayors and passed laws over the objections of local governments. This sort of broad political influence may seem a surprising consequence of trail-hitting, given the vague and personal internal crises and revivalist cultural influences that triggered conversions in the first place. After all, most converts wanted to find emotional and spiritual fulfillment, not to drive national policy debates. Yet the political impact of the Sunday movement was the inexorable result of emotional followership operating on a large scale. “A couple of clean cut fellows” living the Sunday lifestyle might hope to find personal happiness; millions of them acting together could not help but transform society.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A HISTORY OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE

“Hysteria in religion is…the most dangerous form of emotion.” Many Americans of the time surely shared Henry Watterson's criticism of Billy Sunday's followers. Yet the notion that such people were mindless and hysterical could not have been further from the truth. Following Sunday was a volitional process that melded intense emotion with purposive action to achieve concrete results. For Sunday's followers, conversion ultimately became a way of translating overwhelming social problems into more manageable personal crises that could be resolved in an emotionally satisfying fashion. Furthermore, conversion itself was only the beginning of the converts' journey. Because followership was a long-term project involving continuous outside work on behalf of Sunday's values, converts translated their emotional fulfillment into a stable movement with real political consequences. Accordingly, followers perceived the Sunday movement as a valuable activity that allowed them to play a meaningful part in their society.

Some scholars have identified a misguided, counterproductive element in the desire of Sunday's followers and their contemporaries to transform socioeconomic problems into personal ones. Attempts to Christianize unbelievers or to reduce alcohol consumption, after all, failed to redress the actual inequalities underlying turn-of-the-century American society. At the same time, these scholars warn, the pursuit of intense experience devolved too often and too easily into jingoism, militarism, and intolerance.Footnote 107 These criticisms, while valid, could just as easily be leveled at the more conservative elements of Progressivism itself.Footnote 108 As historians have shown, many Progressives drew inspiration from the same evangelical Protestant impulses at the core of white middle-class American culture that informed the Sunday movement. Middle-class Americans' Protestant faith often engendered a moral response to industrialism that impelled them to seek out and “save” others, particularly members of the lower class.Footnote 109 For those possessed of such a worldview, the solution to industrial problems such as poverty, urbanization, and immigration lay not in lessening inequality but in strengthening the moral fiber of Americans from all walks of life. Not only Sunday's followers, but many other middle-class Americans as well, failed to comprehend or to solve the root causes of social dislocation. Similarly, the sins of reactionary nationalism and militarism afflicted many Progressive reformers, not solely those who embraced emotionalism and intense experience.Footnote 110

What distinguished Sunday's movement from other contemporary reform efforts was not its politics or its ideology so much as its role in empowering ordinary Americans to participate in their society. Whether or not Sunday's followers promoted the most effective solutions to America's problems, they wielded real and significant agency in advocating for the solutions they did support. At the same time, other contemporary social movements rooted in emotional followership promoted more far-reaching platforms than did Sunday's revivals—for instance, labor laws and socialism under Eugene Debs, pan-Africanism and black self-sufficiency under Marcus Garvey, and populist economic policies under William Jennings Bryan. Unfortunately, we know very little about the emotional experiences of participants in these movements—particularly because many of the surviving follower testimonials remain unexamined by scholars. To be sure, there are differences between the religious conversions of Sunday's followers and the emotions inspired by secular leaders. After all, it was God, not Gene Debs, who put a new spirit in Ole the Swede and a new song in T. J. Hutchison. Nevertheless, the richness of the Sunday testimonials suggests that additional studies of both religious and secular followers may produce significant insights into the interiority of Progressive Era social movements.Footnote 111

Beyond the Progressive Era context, the follower testimonials suggest a new approach to the study of emotional experience within history. Historians of emotion have long analyzed how emotional experience grows out of cultural influences—in essence, how emotions are an effect of historical trends. The trail-hitter narratives, however, highlight the ways emotions can also be a cause of social change. The emotional experience of followership itself played a central role in providing Sunday's converts with the power to influence their society. By responding so strongly and in such numbers to Sunday's tabernacle message, followers raised the evangelist's profile, increased his visibility, and afforded him a national platform from which to promote his views. By committing themselves emotionally to his cause, too, they refashioned themselves into activists capable of joining together to advocate for a program of social policy. The fact that they came to this external mission in a quest to save their own souls reveals how emotional experiences, and the narratives they inspire, mediate the relationship between cultural influences and personal ones, between individual choices and broader social change.

When Thomas Jenkins stood up on that rainy February night, his act connected internal, personal fulfillment with broader sociopolitical change. Just as thousands of voices joined into a single hymn that echoed through the Youngstown tabernacle, the conversions of Thomas and thousands of his fellow trail-hitters formed a movement whose activities influenced Progressive Era religion, society, and politics in concrete ways. The more we learn about why Thomas stood and prayed and wept with joy, the better we may come to understand his society. By the same token, the more we learn about how emotions condition historical change, the better we may ultimately come to understand the full complexity of our own selves.

Footnotes

Ibid

References

NOTES

1 Dates for the Youngstown campaign, and all other campaign dates cited, can be found in William Gerald McLoughlin, Jr., “Professional Evangelism: The Social Significance of Religious Revivals Since 1865,” vol. 2 (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1953), 771–84.

2 Ps. 1:1.

3 Mrs. Thomas Jenkins to Billy and Helen Sunday, n.d., folder 1, box 31 (microfilm: reel 27), Papers of William and Helen Sunday, Grace College and Theological Seminary.

4 William Gerald McLoughlin, Jr., Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 1–4; Robert F. Martin, Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 5–6, 18–19.

5 Billy Sunday, The Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words (orig. pub. Ladies' Home Journal, 1932–1933; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 48–50; Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 34.

6 Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 44–47; McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 8–10.

7 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 293; Martin, Hero of the Heartland, xiii; Henry Arthur Bentson, “A Psychological Study of a ‘Billy’ Sunday Revival” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1916), 53–55.

8 Biographies of Sunday written in the last twenty-five years include Martin, Hero of the Heartland; Lyle W. Dorsett, Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991); Roger A. Bruns, Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism (New York: Norton, 1992); Wendy Knickerbocker, Sunday at the Ballpark: Billy Sunday's Professional Baseball Career, 1883–1890 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000); and W. A. Firstenberger, In Rare Form: A Pictorial History of Baseball Evangelist Billy Sunday (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005).

9 No historical works examine the testimonials from the two largest sources (Sunday's papers and the Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns project). Two articles by William McLoughlin and Margaret Bendroth, however, examine other follower testimonials in an attempt to understand women's support for Sunday. See McLoughlin, William Gerald Jr., “Billy Sunday and the Working Girl of 1915,” Journal of Presbyterian History, 54 (Fall 1976): 376–84Google Scholar; Bendroth, Margaret, “Why Women Loved Billy Sunday: Urban Revivalism and Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth-Century American Culture,” Religion in American Culture, 14 (Summer 2004): 251–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Introductory material for Collection 295, Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/295.htm (accessed Feb. 27, 2014).

11 Grant Wacker, America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 266.

12 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 16, 76–78, 311.

13 Bentson, “Psychological Study of a ‘Billy’ Sunday Revival,” 58.

14 Emmett Gowen, “Still Raid: Featuring Billy Sunday,” reprinted in Melton Wright, Giant for God: A Biography of the Life of William Ashley (“Billy”) Sunday (Boyce, VA: Carr, 1951), 101–2; McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 274; Bruns, Preacher, 229; Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 116–17.

15 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xiii.

16 William Gerald McLoughlin, Jr., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2, 145–46.

17 Dalton, Kathleen, “Why America Loved Theodore Roosevelt: Or Charisma Is in the Eyes of the Beholders,” Psychohistory Review 8 (Winter 1979): 16–26Google ScholarPubMed; Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006), 193–214.

18 Frances E. Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (Chicago: H. J. Smith, 1889), 344–47; Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 179; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 65, 172, 225, 231; Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press and American Theological Library Association, 1978), 7–9, 17; Theodore G. Vincent, Black Power and the Garvey Movement (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971), 153–54; Lawrence W. Levine, “Marcus Garvey and the Politics of Revitalization” in Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 121–22.

19 Tipson, Baird, “How Can the Religious Experience of the Past Be Recovered? The Examples of Puritanism and Pietism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 43 (Dec. 1975): 696Google Scholar; Stearns, Peter N. and Stearns, Carol Z., “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review, 90 (Oct. 1985): 813, 816, 825CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Robert H. Sharf, “Experience” in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97–98, 110–11. For a more detailed discussion, see Hall, David D., “Review Essay: What Is the Place of ‘Experience’ in Religious History?” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 13 (Summer 2003): 242–45, 250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3, 17–18, 79, 133; John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 241.

21 Corrigan, Business of the Heart, 261, 266–67.

22 Henry Watterson, “The Preacher in Politics” and “Temperance in Religion,” undated editorials, Louisville Courier-Journal, Henry Watterson Papers, University of Louisville, microfilm ed., reel 3.

23 Carl Sandburg to Alfred Harcourt, 1916, quoted in Sandburg, The Letters of Carl Sandburg, ed. Herbert Mitgang (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968), 108; Donald E. Winters, Jr., The Soul of the Wobblies: The I.W.W., Religion, and American Culture in the Progressive Era, 1905–1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 71–72.

24 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), 189.

25 Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 9, 13, 44–46; Massimo Leone, Religious Conversion and Identity: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts (London: Routledge, 2004), 1.

26 Wacker, America's Pastor, 268–70.

27 The exact spelling of “Danzeisen” is not known, as the relevant oral history exists only in audiotape format. Kathryn Marie Hess Feldi interview by Robert Shuster, May 7, 1993, audiotape, side 1, tape 1, Collection 487, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College.

28 Edgar G. Gordon to Billy Sunday, Nov. 16, 1913, folder 42, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

29 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), xiv; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955), 7; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 125–30; Lears, No Place of Grace, 16, 29–31; and Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (orig. pub. The Free Press, 2003; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 48, 54.

30 Harry Sherman to Billy Sunday, Feb. 13, 1914, folder 23, box 1 (reel 1), and O. R. Derby to Billy Sunday, June 1, 1930, folder 39, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

31 Frank Lambert, “Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 136–37, 150–52.

32 Charles H. Thurston, “From One of the Converts” in “Personal Gains from the Sunday Campaign: A Sheaf of Testimonies,” The Congregationalist, Feb. 22, 1917, 257.

33 Interview with William Ward Ayer in The Billy Sunday Story, dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. (orig. pub. Chester Springs, PA: Sacred Cinema/Westchester Films, ca. 1960; Garland, TX: Beacon Video Ministries, 1989).

34 Gordon to Sunday, Nov. 16, 1913, folder 42, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

35 Thurston, “From One of the Converts,” 257.

36 The name “Ole” has been changed from “Ollie” in the transcript to better accord with Wyzenbeek's pronunciation on the audiotape. Andrew Wyzenbeek interview by Robert Shuster, May 16, 1978, audiotape, side 1, tape 1, Collection 43 (Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College), transcript available at http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/trans/040t01.htm (accessed Feb. 27, 2014).

37 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 252–53.

38 Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 85.

39 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 59.

40 Thekla Ellen Joiner, Sin in the City: Chicago and Revivalism, 1880–1920 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 176; McLoughlin, “Billy Sunday and the Working Girl of 1915,” 377; Bentson, “Psychological Study of a ‘Billy’ Sunday Revival,” 58.

41 Thurston, “From One of the Converts,” 257.

42 Mrs. W. T. Skates to Billy Sunday, Jan. 3, 1931, folder 40, box 1 (reel 2); Margaret Bowman Morningstar to Billy Sunday, Sept. 28, 1915, folder 24, box 1 (reel 1); Mary Ellen Reiff to Billy Sunday, 1916, folder 25, box 1 (reel 1); and Mrs. E. H. Cole to Billy Sunday, Dec. 18, 1911, folder 20, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers.

43 Thomas S. Kidd, George Whitefield: America's Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 49; Bruce J. Evensen, God's Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 40–41.

44 Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1918, quoted in Joiner, Sin in the City, 179.

45 Some sources spell the name “Speice.” Homer Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday (Winona Lake, IN: Rodeheaver Hall-Mack, 1936), 122, and tabernacle blueprints, reel 26, Sunday Papers.

46 Bentson, “Psychological Study of a ‘Billy’ Sunday Revival,” 8–9.

47 Wendy A. Danforth Wilson, “The Theatricality of Revivalism as Exemplified in the Artistry of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1974), 19.

48 Wyzenbeek interview, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College.

49 Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 72.

50 Sunday, The Sawdust Trail, 50; James C. Downey, “The Gospel Hymn, 1875–1930” (MA thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 1963), 109–10.

51 R. G. Lineberger questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

52 Mrs. John E. Walker questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

53 The Billy Sunday Story; McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 158.

54 Wyzenbeek interview, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College.

55 Lineberger questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

56 William T. Ellis, “Billy” Sunday: The Man and His Message (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1914), 139; Wilson, “Theatricality of Revivalism as Exemplified in the Artistry of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson,” 41–42.

57 Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 77.

58 Howard B. Arbuckle, Jr., questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

59 J. W. Booth questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

60 Ayer interview in The Billy Sunday Story; italics suggested by Ayer's pronunciation.

61 Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 24.

62 Questionnaires by James B. Pickard and G. F. Shrum, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

63 Myron James, who was interviewed by Wendy Wilson, attributed the performance to Homer Rodeheaver rather than to Sunday. Questionnaires by John Franklin Boyd, Jr., Eugene F. Davis, Alice B. Whitener, and unidentified respondent, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project; Leslie A. Outterson, This I Believe—Thank You, Billy Sunday, for the Goodness and Mercy Which I Know (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1977), 18; and Wilson, “Theatricality of Revivalism as Exemplified in the Artistry of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson,” 30.

64 Outterson, This I Believe, 18.

65 Ibid., 141.

66 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 97–98.

67 Thurston, “From One of the Converts,” 257.

68 Lewis Rambo has termed this type of conversion “intensification,” as opposed to the more stereotypical “affiliation” involving an actual switch between religions or away from nonbelief. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 13.

69 “R. F. Clarke, Lawyer, Cuts off Wife in Will,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1921.

70 Nomad [Felicite Clarke], Varied Verse on Billy Sunday (Tarrytown, NY: Roe Printing Co., 1924), 9–10.

71 T. J. Hutchison to Billy Sunday, 1933, folder 42, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

72 See Wacker, America's Pastor, 258, for a similar conclusion about Graham's followers.

73 Bentson, “Psychological Study of a ‘Billy’ Sunday Revival,” 40, 48.

74 Jenkins to Billy and Helen Sunday, n.d., folder 1, box 31 (reel 27), Sunday Papers.

75 Hutchison to Billy Sunday, 1933, folder 42, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

76 Wyzenbeek interview, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College.

77 Jamie Biggerstaff Goldsmith to Billy Sunday, 1924, folder 33, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

78 Clarke, Varied Verse on Billy Sunday, 5–6, 13, 16–18. Compare Felicite Clarke, The Marble Spirit (Tarrytown, NY: Roe Printing Co., 1924).

79 Eleanor and John P. Fox to Billy Sunday, n.d., folder 1, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers; underscore in original.

80 Frances Elder to Billy Sunday, 1917, folder 26, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers.

81 “Mit” to “Mr. Jeffray,” n.d., folder 1, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers; original full-capitalization removed.

82 Reproduced in Ellis, “Billy” Sunday, insert between pp. 310–11.

83 Elder to Billy Sunday, 1917, folder 26, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers.

84 Evangeline M. George to Billy Sunday, May 29, 1930, folder 39, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

85 Margaret H. Booth questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

86 Elder to Billy Sunday, 1917, folder 26, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers.

87 Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 125.

88 Ayer interview in The Billy Sunday Story; Ann Weldon, “William Ward Ayer: 50 Years of Ministry and Still Going Strong,” Evening Independent, Oct. 11, 1975, 4.

89 Robert William Aschan to Billy Sunday, Dec. 22, 1914, folder 23, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers.

90 Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 138.

91 George Christian to Billy Sunday, Sept. 29, 1932, folder 41, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

92 John Graham, “From a Maine Pastor” in “Personal Gains from the Sunday Campaign: A Sheaf of Testimonies,” The Congregationalist, Feb. 22, 1917, 257.

93 Feldi interview, Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College.

94 Goldsmith to Billy Sunday, 1924, folder 33, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers.

95 Dorsett, Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America, 151.

96 “Historical Sketch of Billy Sunday Club, Chattanooga, TN,” 1926, pp. 10, 13, folder 35, box 1 (reel 2), Sunday Papers,

97 Wade R. Todd questionnaire, folder 17, box 1 (reel 1), Charlotte Evangelistic Campaigns Research Project.

98 Quoted in “Better Be Right Than Be Radical,” Herald of Gospel Liberty 107 (Jan. 14, 1915), 36Google Scholar.

99 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 143–45, 257–60; Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 84; South Bend Tribune, “Sunday Favors Woman's Suffrage,” n.d., quoted in Theodore Thomas Frankenberg, Billy Sunday, His Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails: A Biographical Sketch of the Famous Baseball Evangelist (Columbus, OH: F. J. Heer, 1917), 190.

100 Rodeheaver, Twenty Years with Billy Sunday, 32.

101 Omaha Bee, Oct. 27, 1915, quoted in Valentine, Leslie R., “Evangelist Billy Sunday's Clean–Up Campaign in Omaha: Local Reaction to His 50-Day Revival, 1915,” Nebraska History, 64 (1983): 222–23Google Scholar.

102 Valentine, “Evangelist Billy Sunday's Clean-Up Campaign in Omaha,” 222–24.

103 “Sunday Comes Late Today,” Columbus Citizen, Dec. 28, 1912, 1, quoted in Donald Elden Pitzer, “The Ohio Campaigns of Billy Sunday with Special Emphasis upon the 1913 Columbus Revival” (MA thesis, Ohio State University, 1962), 95, 124.

104 Joiner, Sin in the City, 199–201.

105 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 233. On the Michigan vote, see Maynard Donavon Hilgendorf, “Billy Sunday: ‘I Am Glad I Came to Detroit’: A Study of Rhetorical Strategies in the 1916 Campaign” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1985), 319.

106 J. S. Caster to Billy Sunday, Dec. 20, 1905, folder 14, box 1 (reel 1), Sunday Papers.

107 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 35, 252; Lears, No Place of Grace, 58; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 10–11.

108 Martin, Hero of the Heartland, 103–4.

109 Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 125, 132; Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 28.

110 Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, The Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), viii, 9–10; Alan Dawley, Changing the World: Amerian Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 80–83, 109–16, 139–40.

111 Some of this work has already been done, notably in Dalton, “Why America Loved Theodore Roosevelt,” 16–26; and Kazin, A Godly Hero, 193–214. For a particularly creative approach, see Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement, 7–9, 17. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982), 194–215; and Wacker, America's Pastor, 248–82, are important studies of follower emotion in the 1930s and 1940s.