Almost thirty years after his conversion at the Pacific Garden Mission, Billy Sunday was nearing the peak of his revival career. In the fall of 1914, he and his team readied for their grand entrance into America's national consciousness with a revival in Philadelphia, the third largest city in the country. An autumn chill had settled on the city as it hummed with preparations for the ten-week campaign, set to begin January 3, 1915. On the corner of Nineteenth and Vine, the rhythmic ping of hammers and nails filled the air as volunteers assembled pine wood boards and tarred paper into a 20,000 person tabernacle—the “glory barn” as the press called it. About ten blocks south, a room inside the Philadelphia Stock Exchange buzzed with the typing of 75 clerks and the incessant ringing of telephones. It was the revival's temporary headquarters. Here, young men whisked in to drop off their usher applications before all the slots were filled, and Sunday's advance agents and local leaders coordinated a dozen committees to finalize the revival's logistics before opening day.
Meanwhile, 15,000 volunteers fanned out into neighborhood blocks to invite friends and strangers to prayer meetings and distribute fliers advertising Sunday's services. In the churches, Rev. George Dowey, one of Sunday's assistants, partnered with local pastors to enroll 20,000 new members in men's Bible classes before the New Year. By late December, 3,600 voices flooded the newly finished tabernacle as the choir rehearsed for the dedication. In YMCAs across the city, 1,500 men and women packed into classrooms for “personal worker” training. During tabernacle services, these trained lay evangelists would counsel sinners laboring over their salvation and encourage them to walk down the sawdust-covered aisles to make a profession of faith—or “hit the sawdust trail” as Sunday called it.Footnote 1
When the rest of Sunday's paid assistants arrived in early January 1915, they organized this grassroots energy into a vast network of committees and departments. There were departments for Men's Work and Women's Work and committees to hold religious meetings in factories over the lunch hour. There were committees for students and young people, for neighborhood prayer meetings and Bible study, and for the ushers, choir, and personal workers. With more than twenty committees in all, these specialized departments comprised a revival bureaucracy complete with an organizational hierarchy, a subdivision of labor, expert plans, and expected results. This structure made Sunday's revivals a marvel of efficiency to religious and secular observers alike, and it reflected the impulse in twentieth-century evangelicalism to professionalize religious work along corporate lines.
Yet this centralization did not make local people passive consumers rather than active participants in the revival. Instead, democratization and centralization comingled in Sunday's urban campaigns. On each committee, local chairs, sub-chairs, and hundreds of volunteers worked alongside one of Sunday's assistants. Together, they carved the city into districts, deployed large bands of lay workers, held hundreds of meetings outside the tabernacle, and trained local men and women in effective evangelism. Understanding Sunday's revival organization is central to understanding his success, for this revival bureaucracy fueled by the voluntarism of thousands of men and women enabled him to reach urban populations more effectively than any evangelist of the day.
Billy Sunday was the most famous American evangelist in the early twentieth century, leading what scholars sometimes call the Third Great Awakening when “650 active evangelists” and “1,200 part-time campaigners” roamed the nation.Footnote 2 Born in 1862 in Ames, Iowa, this son of a deceased Civil War veteran spent his boyhood in the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans Home before becoming an outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings in 1883. At age 23 he wandered into the Pacific Garden Mission, a rescue mission in the slums of Chicago, where he experienced a religious conversion. Soon after, he met his bride Helen Amelia Thompson, and they married in September 1888. Three years later, he gave up the rowdy and itinerant lifestyle of a professional baseball player, not to mention a salary of $500 to $1,000 a month, to become an Assistant Secretary for the Chicago YMCA. He made his first foray into revivalism in 1894 as the advance man for John Wilbur Chapman, at the time considered Dwight L. Moody's successor. After a two-year apprenticeship, he became an independent revivalist and spent ten years touring the small towns of the rural Midwest, what he called the “kerosene circuit.” But by the early twentieth century, he began to venture into metropolitan areas. Between 1906 and 1918, he held revivals “in ten of the fifteen largest cities in the United States and in more than one-third of the cities which had over 100,000 inhabitants.”Footnote 3 By the mid-1910s, Billy Sunday was a household name.
During the Progressive Era, Sunday set the standard for urban revivalism and became the nation's most successful and beloved revivalist. He could attract crowds of 20,000 people twice or three times a day and sustained these levels for eight to ten weeks at a time. Famous for his unorthodox preaching style, which included street slang, pantomime, humor, and kinetic vigor, his popularity rivaled movies stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. According to scholars’ best estimates, Sunday spoke to over one hundred million people during his thirty-five year evangelistic career and converted one million of them. In the American revival tradition, he provided a bridge between Moody and Billy Graham. Charles Finney organized revivalism and Moody tied it to businessmen, but Sunday made it corporate, systematic, and even scientific. He and his team created a standardized formula of advance work and committee organization that was replicable in cities across the nation, and his sermons, drawing heavily from the emerging entertainment industry, attracted a truly mass audience. In other words, his was a revivalism for an age of mass production and consumption.
Although most scholars of American religion are familiar with the outline of Sunday's career, the labors of his staff and their contributions to his revival ministry remain virtually unexplored. Sunday was the public face of the revival, but it was this team of brilliant administrator-evangelists who created the bureaucratic organization central to his success. Yet, no biographer since William G. McLouglin (1955) has given these men and women significant attention. Far from being background figures, Sunday's assistants were tremendous evangelists in their own right. They were highly educated and possessed remarkable executive skill, and many of them were women. They spread out across the city taking revival meetings to urban populations, and the specialized departments they created rationalized revivalism by subdividing densely populated areas into districts and demographics. Their actions reflected Progressive Era evangelicals’ faith in efficiency, rational planning, and corporate solutions and put evangelicalism in step with the cultural currents of the day.
Historians of conservative evangelicalism in the Progressive Era are usually most interested in tying their narratives to the fundamentalist movement that emerged in the 1920s, which they believe has influenced so much of modern evangelicalism. However, scholars’ overriding focus on fundamentalism has often caused them to see Progressive Era religion as the prelude to a more interesting and significant story, setting up all the ingredients, parties, and controversies that later combined after World War I to create fundamentalism. This has led to difficulties in taxonomy, especially regarding what to call these evangelicals who later became fundamentalists.Footnote 4 But more important than our definitions, this pattern causes scholars to interpret Progressive Era evangelicalism for what it became rather than what it was. In the process, scholars miss the unique characteristics of American evangelicalism in the Progressive Era, especially the ways that religious expression shaped and interacted with the formative stages of urbanization and consumer capitalism. Scholars also lose sight of the ways these evangelicals’ actions and attitudes were distinct from fundamentalists and gloss over the startling diversity of Progressive Era evangelicalism, even among its conservative branches. In some ways revivalism was part of fundamentalism's intellectual and historical pedigree,Footnote 5 but revivalism also bore many tensions with that later movement, especially in revivalists’ concern for catholicity and unity, theological pragmatism, and embrace of female leadership.
The tendency to funnel the narrative of early twentieth-century evangelicalism into the fundamentalist-modernist controversies is particularly reflected in the historiography of Billy Sunday. Although his most influential years on both American religion and American culture came in the 1910s, before the inauguration of the fundamentalist movement, his name is virtually synonymous with fundamentalism and his greatest legacy is how his revivals paved the way for that later movement. While several scholars, especially Sunday's biographers, have documented the evangelist's creative interactions with popular culture and his use of modern methods,Footnote 6 a fundamentalist caricature of the revivalist remains both among biographers and esteemed scholars of American religious history.Footnote 7 When scholars talk about Sunday or integrate him into their own research, it is almost always to support some fundamentalist narrative. To this end, they usually draw from his post-1917 sources, his least successful and least influential years, when he did follow other conservative evangelicals into the fundamentalist movement. If researchers do draw from his pre-1917 sources, they are often decontextualized from his holistic body of actions and ideas in the Progressive Era, for scholars are usually looking for bits of evidence that fit their fundamentalist paradigm.Footnote 8
There is more to Sunday's urban revivals in the 1910s than some precursor to fundamentalism, and they should not be interpreted through a fundamentalist lens of militancy, anti-liberalism, anti-modernism, or prophecy mongering. Implying that these qualities were the center of his ministry in the 1910s is not only wrong, it also loses sight of the tension between fundamentalists and revivalists and views fundamentalism as the only popular expression of conservative evangelicalism in the early twentieth century. A specialist may know better than to call Sunday a fundamentalist, but revision in the larger historiography requires more concentrated attention to his career in the 1910s and a willingness to interpret those years apart from fundamentalism.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sunday and his team created a revivalism for an age of mass production, one that was palatable to a cross-class and nationwide audience and reproducible in cities across the country. The bureaucratic organization they formed was one of their main contributions to the American revival tradition. Rather than fighting modernization, prophesying the apocalypse, or trying to recreate the past in the present, these evangelicals embraced urbanization, the methods of modern business, and the radical democratization of gender roles for women.
As an expression of popular religion, Sunday's revivals also reveal a slice of popular American culture. Ideas of efficiency and expertise cut across many segments of Progressive Era society, from business and industry to progressive reformers and social scientists. Sunday's ability to tailor revivalism to this cultural impulse allowed him to speak to and become attractive to many different kinds of people. His use of systematic organization also demonstrates that evangelicals participated in the paradigmatic shift from an agricultural orientation to an urban, bureaucratic one. Although scholars often view modernization as a process of displacing evangelical or “village” values, it actually hinged on evangelicals adopting and even promoting the values of regimentation, order, efficiency, and rationalization.Footnote 9 By weaving these into their revival program, Sunday and his team made the modern bureaucratic orientation palatable to millions of Americans.
I. Revival Experts
The turn of the century was an era of professionalization. Middle class experts gathered themselves into various organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, setting modern standards for the field, requiring more academic training, limiting entrance, and centralizing examinations and licensing. The professionalization of these fields, which were widely held in disrepute during the nineteenth century, led to increased social engagement, especially through public policy. New medical fields emerged like public health, and a new generation of lawyers longed to use its “specialized knowledge” to shape “the social implications of law.” A similar pattern characterized dentists, teachers, journalists, academics, and social workers. All these middle-class professionals viewed themselves as experts and scientists, rationally applying scientific methods to their subjects. They also possessed a vision and a zealous sense of mission—a belief that the correct applications of their expertise could transform the urban landscape.Footnote 10 Along with Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous designer of Central Park, and Daniel Burnham, the visionary behind the White City at the World's Columbian Exposition, these professionals hoped to refine and even perfect the social and moral order of American cities.Footnote 11
At the same time, Christian organizations experimented with ways to apply professionalism to ministry and evangelism. The Women's Christian Temperance Union had been using bureaucratic organizational structures since the 1880s. Under Frances Willard, the WCTU developed six specialized departments, one for “education, evangelism, social outreach, organizational extension, legal work, and prevention,” each headed by a superintendent.Footnote 12 In many ways, the WCTU provided the organizational model for social settlements like those founded by Jane Addams. Similarly, under Wilbur Messer, the Chicago YMCA (where Sunday worked during the 1890s) organized their programs into four departments administered by a hierarchical network of superintendents and secretaries. New Bible training schools emerged offering students specialized knowledge in the most scientific methods of evangelism. Chief among these was Moody's Chicago Evangelization Society (renamed Moody Bible Institute or MBI after his death), but this was by no means the only evangelistic training school of the day.Footnote 13 In the early twentieth century, MBI became a pioneer in applying corporate structures and methods to evangelical ministries, from vertical and horizontal integration to advertising and branding.Footnote 14 Even young people's organizations were swept up in the push for professionalism. The major themes of the Christian Endeavor Society's 1915 World Convention were efficiency, cooperation, experts, and training.Footnote 15 Social Gospelers and settlement workers used professionalization to expand the scope of Christian service, but they were not the only ones. As conservative evangelicals adapted to the urban context, they also sought to widen their evangelistic fields through better training, standardized and business-like methods, and bureaucratic organization.
Sunday and his team were part of this larger push for professionalization. Especially after 1912, they viewed themselves as experts in their craft. Although in 1910 Sunday disdained the term “professional evangelist,”Footnote 16 by December 1913 he embraced and even promoted the idea that “An evangelist is a specialist.”Footnote 17 During the Progressive Era, Sunday and his assistants branded themselves as a firm of religious consulting specialists, called “to remedy an undesirable condition in the religious life” of a city by working “according to their own approved and tested methods.”Footnote 18 Much like medicine and law, this professionalization modernized a nineteenth-century tradition that many urbanites viewed with suspicion. In 1917, even The New York Times marveled:
[Sunday's team is] a picture of a remarkable religious organization—one which follows the most modern business methods in organization, subdivision of labor, the employment of experts for carefully outlined fields, the development and extension of personal contact with the ideal object of reaching every man, woman, and child in New York City, and, above all, an appreciation and practical utilization of the importance of advertising.Footnote 19
Like Moody before him, Sunday brought respectability to American revivalism. A standardized revival, run in a business-like fashion and administered by “a group of marvellously [sic] skilled experts,” was the kind of revivalism a new class of professionals could get behind.Footnote 20
Although Billy was the face of the organization, his wife, whom he and America affectionately called “Ma,” was truly in charge of hiring, and she was quite adept at identifying talented evangelists to be the “officers of the campaign.”Footnote 21 Once hired, each staff member was “absolutely master in [his or her] department,” which enabled them to use their unique backgrounds and training to develop plans for urban evangelism.Footnote 22 The men and women Ma chose were indeed experts in urban evangelism. Six staff members—Fred Siebert, Clifton Pledger, Grace Saxe, Virginia Asher, Frances Miller, and Annie MacLaren—took coursework at MBI, hailed “the ‘West Point’ of Christian work” at the turn of the century.Footnote 23 Some of Sunday's assistants even worked at MBI for a time, including Annie MacLaren, an early soloist for the team, and Virginia Asher, who taught classes there before joining Sunday's revivals in 1912.Footnote 24
MBI at the turn of the century was not a seminary but a school for practical evangelism.Footnote 25 Situated in the heart of Chicago's River North district, MBI students were drilled in urban evangelism. Part of their curriculum was doing hands-on evangelistic work every week. This “Practical Work Course” included church work (especially singing, ushering, and prayer meetings), as well as city and rescue mission work. Every student learned how to conduct evangelistic meetings for women, children, and young people, and how to do open-air preaching. Pupils were also schooled in systematic neighborhood canvassing.Footnote 26 To evaluate their progress, students submitted bureaucratic forms, such as weekly report cards and memorandum, that documented their development in terms of empirical results.Footnote 27 The activism, emphasis on practical outcomes, and bureaucratic orientation stressed at MBI continued to inform Sunday's assistants as they formed their own committees and ministries in his revivals.
The expertise of Sunday's staff was also a product of their experience with other famed revivalists. Grace Saxe led Bible classes for two years with R. A. Torrey's revivals,Footnote 28 and Sunday's song leader Homer Rodeheaver conducted music for about six years with William Biederwolf.Footnote 29 Asher was converted at the Moody Church, at the time pastored by Torrey, and after becoming a member she started evangelistic work through the outreach programs at Moody Church.Footnote 30 Soon, she began holding open-air meetings with her husband near the Ferris wheel in Chicago, and she later entered slum evangelism in Duluth, Minnesota. During the early twentieth century, she spent seven years with Sunday's old boss, John Wilbur Chapman, conducting religious meetings in saloons and jails.Footnote 31 This exchange of personnel suggests not only a national network of revivalists. It also showcases the way evangelicals continued to value pragmatic experience even as they gained specialized training. While progressive reformers were often tinged with elitism, retaining this grain of populism amid professionalization helped evangelical revivalism stay in touch with the people.
Ma also hired assistants with executive ability and experience leading large organizations. Alice Gamlin, the Director of the Boys and Girls Department, was head of the New York State Sunday School Association, and Rev. George Dowey, who organized men's Bible classes, was the General Secretary of the Philadelphia Sabbath School Association.Footnote 32 Homer Rodeheaver also possessed administrative savvy, founding his own music publishing company during the 1910s.Footnote 33 Several assistants had leadership experience as pastors, including Frances Miller, who was employed as a Congregationalist pastor before entering MBI in 1903. After graduating, she led Bible classes for the Chicago YWCA, and in 1906, she was ordained as a Congregationalist minister.Footnote 34 Before joining the Sunday Party, Saxe had done some supply preaching at “a Methodist Episcopal pulpit.”Footnote 35 Other pastors on the team included Isaac Ward and John Wallace Welsh, both of whom conducted factory meetings and helped with the Men's Department. Also among this number was L. K. Peacock, an assistant evangelist and sometimes Sunday's advance man from 1911–1914.Footnote 36 Peacock even had the distinction of being the youngest moderator of the United Presbyterian Synod before 1913, indicative of both his talent and ambition.Footnote 37 Sunday's assistants were more than evangelists. They were excellent leaders and administrators.
As the team began working in larger urban areas and as advertising became more central to revivals, Ma began hiring assistants with backgrounds in the press. The tabernacle architect, A. P. Gill, was a printer and George Sunday, their eldest son, previously worked as the assistant advertising manager for a mill in Ohio.Footnote 38 Miller had worked for a newspaper in St. Louis, which not only gave her an appreciation of the press's influence but also helped her relate to employed women.Footnote 39 One of Sunday's pianists, Bob Matthews, was an editor for the Chicago Tribune and coordinated Sunday's publicity efforts after 1916.Footnote 40 Saxe was also a former newspaper reporter.Footnote 41 In fact, she was converted while on assignment at A. B. Simpson's meetings in St. Louis. Similarly, Sunday's advance man for the New York City revival, A. B. Macdonald, was an editor for the Kansas City Star who was converted while covering Sunday's meetings in Kansas City, Missouri in 1915.Footnote 42 The more they worked in metropolitan areas, the more the Sundays understood that they needed men and women well versed in what made an attractive story and how to sell it. They wanted assistants with practical temperaments who were willing to do “field work,” and they wanted a team that understood the rhythm and hum of American cities. Former reporters, printers, and advertisers, they found, made great urban evangelists.
Two remarkable qualities stand out among this expert staff. First, the team was distinctly and intentionally interdenominational. As a theological pragmatist and a revivalist, Sunday wanted to reach the broadest possible audience. He and his wife, therefore, stressed catholicity in their party. Of the ministers they hired, two were Congregationalists, one was Reformed, and one was Presbyterian. Rodeheaver and B. D. Ackley, who led the revival's music, were both Methodists, and Saxe was a Baptist.Footnote 43 Asher, who did evangelism among employed women, was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church and later converted to protestantism.Footnote 44 During Chapman's revivals and also in Sunday's, she continued to carry a Catholic Bible with her and even read out of it during her evangelistic services in saloons and factories.Footnote 45 The team's interdenominationalism also included ties to the Holiness movement. In the 1880s and 1890s, when most of Sunday's assistants attended MBI, that institution was heavily influenced by multiple strains of the Holiness movement.Footnote 46 During the 1910s, the Keswick theme of “power for service” distinctly influenced the Sunday party's mission and message.Footnote 47 The very composition of this team reflected the driving theme of Sunday's ministry: crafting an interdenominational, practical, activist faith of personal and social holiness. Shorn of theological exactitudes and centered on service, this message was uniquely suited to reaching the mass audiences of Progressive America.
The second remarkable aspect of Sunday's team was the proportion of women leaders. This illuminates, first, the power of Ma within the organization. But it also provides a contrast between Sunday's revivals and other evangelical institutions that used corporate methods in this era, such as MBI, whose push for professionalization meant increasing male leadership.Footnote 48 Although men dominated Sunday's staff before 1907, after Ma permanently joined the party in 1908 the organization always included several women. In the Spokane revival (1908–09), three of Sunday's seven assistants were women. By 1911, the proportion had risen to four of eight. The biggest surge in female leadership came in the 1915 Philadelphia campaign when the Sundays added five women to the party. In that city, about two-thirds of Sunday's paid revival assistants were women. Urban revivalism provided an ideal testing ground for female evangelists in the Progressive Era. Not only was this ministry itinerant, which had facilitated female preachers in the nineteenth century, it was also outside the bounds of denominational and church structures.Footnote 49 Like their nineteenth-century sisters, the women on Sunday's revival team got to try their hand at public ministry. But female evangelists in the Progressive Era also had the opportunity to administer large organizations.Footnote 50
These evangelists were public examples of the modern woman, and they helped evangelicals adjust to the changing gender roles of the era. Although Billy and Ma often derided flappers and the “new woman” that flirted, smoked, drank, and frequented cabernets, they advocated an evangelical version of the “new woman” who used her liberation to enlarge her field of service. When covering Sunday's address to club women in New York, The Sun reported:
His speech celebrated the new era of woman. The time had passed, he said, when all she could do was to “bake beans, patch pants and darn socks, run bazaars and rummage sales and keep the church steeples from falling off.” He delivered a wealth of statistics about the number of wage earning women, &c., which sounded as if he had been having a heart to heart talk with the suffs [suffragists] and wound up by giving the sex a good sendoff as possible army generals. “When the Lord needed some one to lead the battle He chose Deborah,” said Billy, “and Deborah showed that women know something about military tactics.”Footnote 51
There were many women in Sunday's life who knew something about leadership and administration, not least of all his wife. What Sunday dismissed about the “new woman” was that her liberation was used for self-indulgence and morally questionable activities. Although he advocated a Muscular Christianity and decried “feminized” Victorian protestantism, Sunday did not want to push women out of church leadership positions. Rather, he envisioned pioneering and public roles for them. Unlike Moody, Sunday was an advocate of women's suffrage. He supported women breaking out of Victorian domesticity and even becoming public preachers and leaders of men if it meant improving their communities and the Kingdom of God. What Sunday demanded from the Progressive Era's new woman, no less than its new man, was purposeful service to something larger than the self. By including female evangelists in his team, Sunday harnessed changing gender norms to evangelical ends. In the process, he legitimized those transformations for a generation of Americans.
II. Revival Bureaucracy
Between 1907 and 1911, Sunday usually employed seven to ten assistants, but by 1915 it was not uncommon for him to have upwards of fifteen main revival assistants and travel with a party of 26. Especially between 1912 and 1915, these assistants began organizing their own departments and formulating systematic plans for urban evangelism. The programs they created brought specialization and professionalization to revivalism and signaled a new era in Sunday's career. With a corporate revival organization managed by a team of experts, Sunday was ready to move from cities of 100,000 to the metropolitan areas of the North and East that increasingly began to extend invitations to him. After 1912, Sunday burst into the national consciousness—but his rise to larger fields and national fame rested on the revival bureaucracy crafted by this fine team of assistants.
That Sunday's revivals came of age at this moment was of profound importance. In 1912, progressivism was swelling to a fever pitch both politically and ideologically. That year, Teddy Roosevelt formed the Bull-Moose Party, Herbert Croly published the progressive manifesto The Promise of American Life, and female reformers established what would become a bastion of progressive legislation, the Children's Bureau. Frederick Winslow Taylor had published The Principles of Scientific Management the previous year, and his theories on labor efficiency were reaching the peak of their influence in American industry. Roosevelt, Croly, and Taylor all celebrated “a gospel of efficiency,” in which experts would pilot American growth through careful regulation, centralization, new management techniques, and scientific principles. These methods would make industrialization more efficient, ease tensions between social classes, and restore unity to a diverse, urban society. In essence, efficiency and sound management promised to bring order to the chaos of industrialization and urbanization. This gospel of efficiency ignited “a secular Great Awakening” in America that promised social salvation through rational planning.Footnote 52 Indeed, the shared language of efficiency was one of the main elements that tied the rather disparate strands of the progressive movement together.Footnote 53
The promise of efficiency also captivated American protestantism. During the Progressive Era, evangelicals worried extensively about how to evangelize the urban masses. Progressive reformer Ray Stannard Baker documented his concerns in The Spiritual Unrest, and numerous voices noted the discrepancy between declining church attendance and population growth.Footnote 54 The gospel of efficiency seemed to promise a way to do and achieve more with less in densely populated areas. In Chicago, MBI President Henry Crowell began instituting a corporate administrative structure during the early twentieth century.Footnote 55 By 1912, Dean of the Chicago Divinity School Shailer Mathews was encouraging the application of Taylor's principles of scientific management to religious work in his address “Scientific Management and the Churches.”Footnote 56 That same year, the Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM) used a corporate, bureaucratic structure to organize a national campaign for evangelism among men. The Movement boasted “an executive committee . . . eleven subcommittees, and another committee ‘composed of the one hundred strongest men in the city.’” It also divided work into six departments, one for “Bible Study, Boy's Work, Community Extension, Evangelism, Missions, [and] Social Service.” In cities across the nation, “experts” or “specialists” organized “religious revivals on scientific lines,” and at nightly meetings called “institutes,” they trained laymen for evangelism, Bible teaching, and social service.Footnote 57 In its ethos and organization, the MRFM reflected Progressive Americans’ exaltation of scientific management, corporate business models, and expertise. It also shared striking organizational similarities with Sunday's revivals.
Sunday and his team tapped into these same cultural currents as they refit the revival tradition to metropolitan centers. In particular, they were concerned about “the lack of efficient personal work,” or one-on-one evangelism in urban areas. Sunday argued: “The medical school teaches you to be a doctor, the law school teaches you to be an attorney, and the church should teach people to save souls.”Footnote 58 The purpose of Sunday's revivals, therefore, was not just to bring lost sinners to Jesus in the tabernacle. It also served as a specialized training school for local Christians, almost like an itinerant Bible institute. To meet both ends, Sunday's team engineered a system of revivalism that drew from progressive ideology and modern business management. It boasted a team of experts, a specialized division of labor, systematic planning in each department (which standardized the best evangelistic practices), and the thorough training of local Christian workers. These assistants broke urban populations down into their constituent parts and developed specialized ministries for employed women, businessmen, shop workers, and children. They also deployed an army of local lay evangelists to work each field. Their methods, like those at MBI, centered on systematic canvassing, evangelistic meetings, prayer meetings, Bible studies, and personal visitations, all superintended by a bureaucratic ethos. The product was an evangelical application of the gospel of efficiency, which brought order and professionalization to urban revivalism.
One of the earliest departments formed by Sunday's staff was the Women's Work Department, led by Rae Muirhead from 1908 to 1910. Muirhead had a captivating personal story. Originally from a wealthy family, she left her alcoholic husband two months before the birth of their first child. Now an unwed mother, her aristocratic family shunned her and she struck out on her own. As she remembered it, “I had brains and two hands and determined to work for my child.” Sadly, the child died while still a toddler, and Muirhead, not a Christian at the time, became increasingly “bitter against God . . . for robbing her” of both a husband and a baby. Muirhead eventually became a detective for the New York City police commission under Theodore Roosevelt, but she left New York for Chicago when evangelized too vigorously by a missionary. As a member of the Chicago police force, she helped suppress prostitution trafficking, a job that brought her into contact with the Pacific Garden Mission where she was converted. Because of her experience among working women and prostitutes, she did slum evangelism for six years before joining the Sunday party in 1908.Footnote 59 As the head of the Women's Work Department, Muirhead widened the scope of the revival. She conducted women's meetings, held evangelistic services in factories, laundries, and schools, witnessed to prostitutes, and helped organize YWCAs in the cities Sunday visited.Footnote 60 She also formed organizations called Rae Muirhead Business Women's Groups, which were social-religious clubs meant to institutionalize the revival among working women.Footnote 61
When Muirhead left the team in 1910, Miller took over her post. With her schooling at MBI and time with the Chicago YWCA, she was thoroughly trained in urban evangelism, especially how to conduct meetings for women. Like Muirhead, she had worked for a living before becoming an evangelist. But one of her most unique attributes was her time as a pastor, which gave her tremendous administrative abilities. Between 1910 and 1911, she served as both Director of Women's Work and Director of Bible Study. Her principle focus in the latter department was teaching local Christians how to be “soul winners.” The Billy Sunday Evangelistic Association in Springfield, Illinois compared her to a “trained physician who diagnoses” a sinner's heart and “then prescribes” a specific “Scripture remedy.” In addition to practical evangelistic training, she also taught “systematic Bible study classes” for men and women who wanted a more academic course. But preparing for all these lectures, in addition to leading the Women's Work Department, meant Miller was “conducting four or more meetings a day.”Footnote 62 Therefore, in 1911 Ma hired Saxe as the new Director of Bible Study and Miller devoted her full attention to evangelizing to urban women.
According to Billy and Ma, Saxe was “the finest Bible teacher in the United States.”Footnote 63 A native of Fort Scott, Kansas, she enrolled at MBI in 1895. After graduating, she traveled with Torrey's revivals for a few years and became a Bible instructor of some repute. In 1907, she began holding her own interdenominational Bible lectures, with about 1,500 people attending her first one in Buffalo, New York.Footnote 64 Soon, she became one of the most well-known Bible teachers in the United States. Indeed, Miller credited her own interest in Bible teaching to Saxe, even before the latter had joined the team.Footnote 65 Saxe taught overseas to Egyptian men studying at the American Mission College in Cairo, contributed to several religious magazines, and authored many books for Bible study.Footnote 66 Rodeheaver once declared, “She had the rare faculty of making Bible study interesting.”Footnote 67
During Sunday's revivals, Saxe usually held two Bible classes a day every Tuesday through Friday. The first of these was on the tabernacle platform immediately following Sunday's afternoon service. The second was usually at a local church, which took the revival outside the tabernacle and into the community and gave those who could not get to the glory barn the chance to receive evangelistic training. Saxe's lessons were geared toward the practical application of the Bible more than deep theological or academic study, indicative of her training at MBI. Her method was to use “a series of questions about each chapter,” which made lessons easy to understand and recall.Footnote 68 One of her regular lectures was on “personal evangelism,” and she even had a five-point program for students to remember when doing personal work.Footnote 69 Saxe was masterful with a blackboard, and her tabernacle Bible classes were quite popular; attendance was often between 700 and 1500.Footnote 70 As Director of Bible Study, Saxe instructed both men and women, demonstrating the way urban revivalism reversed Victorian gender roles and allowed women to become the spiritual leaders of men.
At about the time Ma hired Saxe, the Men's Department began to significantly widen its scope and organization. Sunday's revival program before 1910 had included special noon meetings for businessmen downtown, probably led by assistant evangelists I. E. Honeywell and John M. Linden.Footnote 71 But when Rodeheaver joined the team in 1910, he brought a plan he had used with great success under William Biederwolf that made businessmen's meetings the foundation of permanent personal workers leagues. Out of these meetings, then, came Business Men's Clubs, sometimes called Billy Sunday Clubs, whose members continued evangelizing in “groups of four or five” after Sunday left town.Footnote 72 In 1911, members of Wichita's Business Men's Club organized themselves into “Gospel Teams,” groups of unsalaried, self-supporting lay evangelists who traveled throughout the state and region holding religious services “especially for men.” By 1914, Wichita's club had established 300 new interdenominational Gospel Teams that reported a total of 11,000 conversions. They even formed a national federation.Footnote 73 Clubs like these seemed to prove that evangelicals could efficiently reach the masses through trained lay evangelists. During the 1910s, Billy Sunday Clubs became a regular feature of his revivals, and some local chapters had dramatic long-term impacts.Footnote 74 In 1934, a young man named Billy Graham was converted at a revival sponsored by the Billy Sunday Club in Charlotte, North Carolina.Footnote 75
In 1911, I. E. Honeywell left the team to become an independent evangelist, and Ma Sunday hired L. K. Peacock to take his place as Director of the Men's Department.Footnote 76 A graduate of Allegheny Theological Seminary and Westminster College, he was a highly educated man. Originally from Houston, Pennsylvania, about 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, he also had a heart for laborers.Footnote 77 When he took over as Director, he expanded the work of the department by creating a new committee to reach these men. By 1913, the resulting Shop Work Committee had begun to take shape. During the Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania campaign, Peacock and his local assistants held meetings in mills and factories over the lunch hour, planned street parades for shop workers, and organized delegations of coal miners, unions, and manufacturing laborers that sat in the tabernacle en bloc.Footnote 78 Between 1913 and 1917, this new addition to the Men's Work enabled the team to reach 30,000 to 50,000 working class men in each city they visited.Footnote 79
As he organized this committee, Peacock took heavy cues from the women of the party, who by 1912 were formulating their own plans for evangelizing to women employed in stores, shops, and factories. This expansion in the Women's Work Department was the direct result of bringing Asher to the team. The Sundays and Asher had run in the same circles for years. They both served with Chapman's revivals (though at different times), and they both called Chicago home. They even attended the same church while living in the Windy City, Jefferson Park Presbyterian. In fact, Virginia's husband William had been an assistant pastor there during the 1890s when the Sundays also attended. During the winter of 1911–1912, Ma became too ill to finish the revival in Canton, Ohio and asked Asher to help with the remainder of the campaign. She was such a great singer, administrator, and evangelist that the Sundays asked her to stay on permanently after this debut.Footnote 80
Asher's major contribution to the Sunday organization was creating the Business Women's Invitation Council (BWIC), a division of the Women's Work Department and the largest and most bureaucratically organized committee in the revival. Drawing from her evangelistic experience among slum-dwellers, sailors, and laborers at the Duluth Bethel in Minnesota, Asher crafted a revival program to reach working class women.Footnote 81 She organized the committee into three divisions, each with its own sub-committees and lay leadership. Before the revival even began, local BWIC leaders conducted a systematic survey of employed women and used this data to district the city. BWIC leaders then assigned two female lay evangelists to each section of businesses. These local women, along with Asher, Miller, and Ma, held revival meetings in factories during the lunch hour, passed out religious literature and tabernacle tickets, and formed friendships with working class women. This committee also sponsored a lunch ministry that provided employed women with a cheap meal (followed by a brief religious meeting) at two downtown churches three times a week. Like Muirhead, Asher formed social-religious clubs called Virginia Asher Councils near the end of the revival to encourage local women to continue these lines of service. As with the Shop Work Committee, this addition to the revival machinery and especially its scientific methods allowed the team to extend the revival beyond the tabernacle, reaching even working class audiences.
After Asher joined the team, the Women's Work Department also expanded its use of women's rallies outside the tabernacle. Sunday had always liked having special meetings for women inside the tabernacle, but these rallies in civic theaters, armories, and opera houses imbedded the revival more directly in the community and provided a more comfortable environment for those raised outside the church than even the tabernacle offered. Indeed, it is quite instructive that Sunday's female assistants called these meetings “rallies” rather than “services.” It was much less intimidating for co-workers to invite their friends to a rally than a church service, and it was much easier for the invited person to accept. Being outside the confines of ecclesiastical structures also gave female evangelists more freedom to preach. At these rallies, the women of the party made a name for themselves as evangelists in their own right. Ma was in constant demand to speak at women's societies, and Asher's sermon entitled “Purity” became famous in Philadelphia.Footnote 82
By 1913, the basic framework of Sunday's revival bureaucracy was complete. From this foundation, the Women's Department, Men's Department, BWIC, Shop Work Committee, and Bible Study Committee only grew. Each new director brought new initiatives to expand the revival's work and created the necessary sub-committees or organizational models. For instance, when Peacock left the team in 1914 to start his independent revival career, Ma hired John Wallace Welsh to take his place as Director of the Men's Department. Born in Almira, New York and raised in Newton, Kansas, Welsh received his B.A. and M.A. from Northwestern and pursued his theological education at Princeton.Footnote 83 He was also a man of “unusual skill in management and organization.”Footnote 84 During Welsh's tenure, the Men's Department added yet a third committee that led a drive to increase enrollment in men's Bible classes at local churches. Similarly, when Isaac Ward took over as Director in 1916, the Men's Department began to employ the same districting methods used by other committees, which provided leadership opportunities for local men in each district.Footnote 85 The Men's Committee also began organizing mass meetings along the same lines as women's rallies and recruited delegations of bankers, stock brokers, and lawyers to attend tabernacle services.Footnote 86
Expanding the work of these committees often demanded hiring new assistants. In 1915, Ma hired Rev. Dowey to coordinate the men's Bible class enrollment drive. That same year, she also hired an assistant for Saxe named Jean Lamont who had worked for Honeywell after he started his independent revival career.Footnote 87 Lamont's addition meant the Bible Study Committee could hold more classes in more places among diverse populations.Footnote 88 She also lightened Saxe's load and allowed her to work more closely with the Personal Work and Neighborhood Prayer Meeting Committees to train efficient volunteers.Footnote 89 Because of Lamont's help, Saxe was able to hold regular meetings with all the Neighborhood Prayer Meeting volunteers in New York City to outline their work and help them with their weekly lessons, such as “The Joy of Winning Souls.”Footnote 90 More assistants, therefore, facilitated both the expansion of committees and the increased training of lay evangelists.
More team members also meant new committees, and Sunday's team added two new departments to the revival machinery in 1915: the Boys’ and Girls’ Committee and the Student Committee. Alice Gamlin, Director of the Boys’ and Girls’ Committee, had a truly metropolitan view of her work. She used a districting plan to reach youngsters in every part of a city, even at the Five Points Mission in New York. In usually two districts each night, Gamlin held meetings for children, their Sunday school teachers, and sometimes their parents. She arranged meetings in foreign languages and organized citywide children's rallies at the tabernacle.Footnote 91 In New York City, reporters called these rallies a “Kid Party,” which more accurately described the atmosphere in the tabernacle. There was a choir of 1,000 children directed by Rodeheaver, as well as “solos, duets, and groups, not to mention the whistling accompaniment by the boys” and “plenty of fife and drum corps.” The children came parading in “chaperoned by Sunday school teachers or scoutmasters or mission workers[,] and at the head of each group there were American flags, banners and fluttering pennants.”Footnote 92 At the meeting's conclusion, “the name of each of the children was written down on a slip to be turned over to Sunday school workers in the different districts where the children live.”Footnote 93 At these rallies, boys and girls were delighted by Rodeheaver's magic tricks and listened to Sunday talk about clean living, which to this crowd meant obeying their parents and not playing marbles for keeps.Footnote 94 As in Sunday's regular tabernacle services, the emphasis in children's meetings was on right living more than salvation, and evangelization was tethered to bureaucratic forms and processes.
While Gamlin reached urban children, Florence Kinney organized the Student Department to disciple young women. Kinney was a former instructor at a female seminary in Ohio and therefore particularly suited to work with this crowd.Footnote 95 Every day after the closing bell, she held a meeting for high school girls at a church near the school. The students served as “delegates” in their high schools, spreading enthusiasm about the revival and asking peers to attend committee-sponsored meetings.Footnote 96 Despite her theological training, Kinney emphasized a nondenominational message. She argued that the Student Department existed to teach “the ideals of Christian leadership, not to preach religion.”Footnote 97 Encouraging right living and civic-mindedness among young women allowed even secular school administrators to appreciate the efforts of this committee. Dedicating an entire department to grooming future female leaders also demonstrates how important it was to Sunday's party that evangelicals capitalize on and promote the democratizing gender roles of the era.
After 1912, Sunday's network of committees became increasingly intricate. At the same time, this centralized structure did not exclude local people from the revival process. Sunday's assistants operated with the aid of local chairs and sub-chairs who helped them navigate local conditions, district the city, conduct meetings, and recruit volunteers. Before the revival began, local people built the tabernacle, secured advertising, and received training as ushers, choir members, and prayer meeting leaders. Local pastors were involved in the entire revival process, from inviting Sunday to their city and preaching revival sermons before opening day, to training personal workers and serving on the Shop Work Committee. Even the highest administrative echelons of the revival—the Executive Committee, Finance Committee, and General Committee—were staffed by local people. While they received advice from Ma Sunday, the advance man, or Sunday's assistants, local citizens controlled the purse, conducted all the advance work, and served on all the revival's committees.
By way of comparison, Henry Crowell's Extension Department at MBI left the logistics of planning a revival to the professionals at the Institute (and left very little for local people to do).Footnote 98 But Sunday's revivals relied on 30,000 to 50,000 local volunteers. These men and women were not merely consumers of a religious product. They were active, trained Christian workers who participated in its creation. Their presence tempered the revival's centralizing tendencies with a resounding grain of populism. Mass urban revivalism required efficient machinery, but it also required lay evangelists, especially women.
III. The Science of Revivalism
Early in her husband's evangelistic career, Ma was skeptical that revivalists could effectively work in cities larger than 30,000. “When they're larger than that,” she said, “it is impossible to reach everybody.”Footnote 99 But by the 1910s, she found that the specialization of campaign ministries made large-scale revivalism feasible in metropolitan areas. It brought order to the chaos of evangelizing densely populated cities and allowed the revival to reach urban residents in more ways, often outside the tabernacle. This bureaucratic organization was therefore a direct response to both the challenges and possibilities of the urban context; faced with the need to evangelize millions in sprawling cities that were home to diverse populations, evangelicals used the methods of the city to broaden their evangelistic net.
During the 1910s, Sunday's assistants and local volunteers created a system of revivalism that they hoped would address the spatial and numerical problems of the city. Ma began by intentionally weaving centralization into the revival's organizational structure. She cleverly wielded the press and Billy's celebrity to make him the revival's main attraction. A Chicago native, Ma understood that the revival needed her husband's compelling personality and platform style in order to capture the attention of an entire metropolis. When describing the organization she created, Ma often used the symbol of the wheel, illustrating how all the spokes (the committees) led to the tabernacle where her husband preached. But just as important was how the spokes extended the revival's reach into the community. This network of committees and the assistants and volunteers who staffed it allowed Sunday's team to bring revival to millions of urbanites. While thousands could be reached in the tabernacle, these committees took the revival into secular spaces, like shops and opera houses, and reached hundreds of thousands of people from all classes and areas of the city. In other words, Sunday's bureaucratic organization fed the revival's centralizing tendencies. But it also diffused the revival into the community and empowered a multitude of lay evangelists, especially women.
Sunday rarely defended or rationalized the strategies of his revival organization, but he did seem to understand that urban revivals required a good ground game. Sunday declared in his New York City revival:
No political campaign is won by stump speakers; it is won by man to man canvass . . . when Benjamin Harrison was running for President against Grover Cleveland that fact meant something to Harrison's campaign manager. He divided, sub-divided and sub-sub-divided the city until he had it split into blocks and somebody in charge of every block who was to make it his business to know how every man voted on Election Day. Ben Harrison won, and Christ can win in New York if you'll get out and get votes for Him.Footnote 100
Sunday recognized that he could only do so much as the “stump speaker” in the tabernacle. Urban revivals demanded a centralizing force that could fixate the attention of a city. But, as in politics, they also needed expert managers who created rational evangelistic plans and thousands of local Christian workers who carried them to completion.
As Sunday's revival program became more closely aligned with corporate models, his revivals acquired a scientific regularity. In fact, Sunday and his team were so confident in this “machinery of evangelism” that they actually expected results (in the form of converted or re-consecrated souls) much as a factory expected a finished product.Footnote 101 With dozens of committees plowing the field beforehand and dozens more working in the community during the revival, converts were all but assured. Although Sunday always gave ultimate credit to the power of the Holy Spirit, by 1913 his team had created a formula for urban revivals that made results duplicable in cities across the nation. To read the coverage of one revival was to read the coverage of them all. In an industrialized setting, the revival process became rationalized and data-driven, and its success empirically tabulated, whether in the size of Sunday's free-will offering, the number of converts, or their average cost (which usually landed between $1.25 and $2.10 per soul).Footnote 102 The corporate organization of Sunday's revivals lent a new meaning to mass revivalism. Not only was it evangelism to large audiences. In an era of mass production, it meant standardizing revival methods to make outpourings of the Holy Spirit scientific, reproducible, even guaranteed events. In other words, it meant producing revivals like a product for mass consumption.
The organizational efficiency of Sunday's campaigns gave his revivals a broad cultural appeal, even among those suspicious of the revival's spiritual aims. The New York American extolled: “Every detail is planned and carried out with the efficiency which characterizes everything about Mr. Sunday's work.”Footnote 103 Across the Atlantic, a British reporter dubbed Sunday's organization “perfected scientific management,”Footnote 104 and in the Midwest, a Des Moines reporter called it “a gospel machine that has become a marvel of efficiency, exciting the wonder and admiration of trained businessmen wherever it is seen in action.”Footnote 105 Even critical minds, like Joseph Odell from the Atlantic, were fascinated by the way Sunday's team had taken “the spasmodic and spontaneous” revival and given it the look and feel of a modern “trust.” “The most astute political leaders,” he continued, “are openly anxious and frankly eager to learn the principles by which such vast mass movements are achieved.” According to Odell, Sunday's “military staff” left no “detail of the campaign . . . to chance” and used “all of the efficiency methods and forms of organization known to a typical modern business.”Footnote 106 Sunday's revival structure was not just a reflection of modern business principles—it was a model of them on par with Standard Oil and U. S. Steel.Footnote 107
An Omaha paper pointed to the broader lesson of this efficient organization: “The Billy Sunday campaign is giving Omaha a demonstration of the value of organization and co-operation . . . Omahans can do big things if they will join together and work for them. The principle of co-operation shown in the Billy Sunday campaign can well be applied to other civic movements.”Footnote 108 During the early twentieth century, progressive reformers’ gospel of efficiency promised to unite the nation, especially its diverse social classes, through expert management and systematic planning. In the same vein, Sunday's revival machinery facilitated civic cooperation and Christian unity through a well-planned and expertly administered campaign. He and his team were in effect social scientists of revivalism, applying their specialized knowledge to the dream of perfecting the moral and social order of urban America.
Sunday's revival team was only one of many evangelical institutions that experimented with corporate forms of organization in the early twentieth century. None of Sunday's assistants had direct connections to the WCTU or other women's clubs, nor with the MRFM, but many of them had roots at MBI. Even without direct connections, though, all these evangelicals inhabited a common religious world that allowed them to imitate and improve upon the techniques they saw others using. As Timothy Gloege has pointed out, the use of corporate methods was central to the strategies and mindset of fundamentalism.Footnote 109 But this twentieth-century push toward professionalization and bureaucratization influenced more than just fundamentalism. Before the inauguration of that movement, these methods inspired and characterized myriad other urban ministries, one of which was Sunday's urban revivals. Thus Sunday was not an innovator in applying business methods to evangelicalism. Like much else in his career, the former baseball player was best at keeping his finger on America's cultural pulse and absorbing and reflecting what he saw. His revival team may have boasted more extensive planning and corporate organization than other revivalists of the day. But Sunday's application of the gospel of efficiency is important precisely because it was not unique to him—it reflected one of the most dominant impulses in Progressive Era evangelicalism.
In the Progressive Era's cultural milieu, what made Sunday's revivals unique was how they tethered Americans’ thirst for democratization to their enthusiasm for systematic planning. Taken together, Sunday's bureaucratic committee structure and the lay evangelists it trained and deployed reflected both the “top down” and “bottom up” aspects of progressivism, or its scientific and populist impulses. A unique blend of experts and grassroots laborers, Sunday's team legitimized the increasing democratization and professionalization of the era. In the places reserved for female leadership and lay evangelism, and in their use of experts, efficiency, specialization, and corporate management, Sunday's team created a unique vision of modernization that worked with rather than against evangelical religious belief.
Unlike the Moody network that scholars have pointed to as an incubator of fundamentalism, Sunday's revivals showcased the public leadership and power of women in Progressive Era evangelicalism. Ma was the central figure in creating this revival bureaucracy, and she was joined by a corps of talented and professional female evangelists and laywomen. In fact, Sunday's urban revivals relied so heavily on women that it is hard to imagine his campaigns operating successfully without them. Reviving metropolitan areas demanded administrators and large bands of lay evangelists, and women stepped in to fill the void. In an era of changing gender roles, many women hungered to use their newfound public power and administrative skills to transform the cities through urban ministries. Their fields of choice included not only settlement houses, the YWCA, and reform organizations, but also urban revivals. In turn, urban revivals worked alongside Hull House, women's clubs, and the Children's Bureau to create of a female culture of professionalism in the early twentieth century.
Sunday's scientific revivalism did not solve revivalists’ longstanding problem of making spiritual awakenings permanent. Like nineteenth-century revivals, the religious fervor of his campaigns eventually cooled. Some communities reported superb long-term results in terms of church members added, the religious tone of the city, and civic reform, but others were much more critical of the revival's temporary effects. For historians, though, evaluating Sunday's long-term impact is best accomplished not through tabulating converts or church members but by studying the social transformations that took place through the medium of Sunday's big-tent revivalism. In describing the process of modernization, scholars now realize it is unfair to paint Sunday and other conservative evangelicals as simply wanting to return to rural America or as being left behind in the transition to modern values. Yet it is an equal disservice to characterize Sunday (and in the larger view, this period of American evangelicalism) as a mere precursor to fundamentalism. Progressive Era evangelicals helped further, not resist, the social changes that created modern America. Sunday's revivals stood at an important nexus of religion and culture, and both American evangelicalism and popular culture were changed after contact. During the Progressive Era, Sunday's bureaucratic revivals lent religious legitimacy to Americans’ obsession with business, rational planning, institutional solutions, and expertise. In turn, evangelicals shaped the particular manifestations of these cultural impulses, from the religious notes in progressive reform, to business enterprises founded on religious missions, to the plethora of parachurch institutions organized along corporate lines. While evangelicals’ enthusiasm for bureaucracy and experts later waned in the twentieth century, mitigated by that tradition's historic populism, the way Sunday's revivals united the worlds of commerce and religion and lauded efficiency has remained an important part of the twentieth-century evangelical mind.
