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The Gospel of Efficiency: Billy Sunday's Revival Bureaucracy and Evangelicalism in the Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2016

Abstract

This essay investigates the roles of Billy Sunday's staff during his urban revivals in the 1910s, especially the committees and departments they administered. Understanding this revival organization is central to understanding Sunday's success. A corporate organization not only allowed Sunday's team to reach urban populations, it also put evangelicalism culturally in step with the times. This committee structure made outpourings of the Holy Spirit predictable and even guaranteed, and it helped Sunday create 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. Most scholars of American religion are familiar with the outline of Sunday's career, but the labors of his staff and their contributions remain virtually unexplored. Further, there is a looming historiographical problem with how scholars treat Sunday. His most important years as a revivalist were in the 1910s, before the fundamentalist movement began, but his name is virtually synonymous with fundamentalism. This article challenges scholars to interpret Progressive Era evangelicals not in terms of what they became in the 1920s, but in terms of how they shaped and were shaped by an era of urbanization and consumer capitalism.

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Articles
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2016 

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References

1 Beginning in 1910, “hitting the sawdust trail” referred to the moment when Sunday invited sinners to come forward and make a profession of faith. This ritual's name was derived from the tabernacle's sawdust-covered floors, which aided acoustics and muffled the sound of shuffling feet. The term “the sawdust trail” was first used in Bellingham, Washington, an old lumberjacking town. There, the sawdust-covered floors took on added meaning, for lumberjacks used to drop handfuls of sawdust as they went deeper into the forest so they could find their way back home. Reporters could not resist the allegorical connection between sawdust leading lost lumberjacks home and sawdust leading lost sinners home to Jesus, and the term “the sawdust trail” was born. See William G. McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1955), 97.

2 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2004), 748.

3 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, 46.

4 Seeing a “movement” before fundamentalism actually emerged has led to complications regarding what to call this “pre-movement.” Scholars commonly use awkward terms like “fundamentalistic evangelicals” and “protofundamentalists.” See Virginia L. Brereton, Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1990), 168–169; Betty A. DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University, 2000), 1, 7; Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University, 1997), 281; and David Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987), 147, 154. The acceptance of these terms is widespread. See Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 382; Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1993), 13; Dobschuetz, Barbara, “Emma Dryer and the Moody Church: The Role of Gender and Proto-Fundamentalist Identity, 1864–1900,” Fides et Historia 33, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 4152 Google Scholar; Eric R. Crouse, Revival in the City: The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queen's University, 2005), 137; Margaret Bendroth, “Religious Conservatism and Fundamentalism,” in The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, ed. Paul Harvey and Edward Blum (New York: Columbia University, 2012), 309; David W. Bebbington and David Ceri Jones, ed., Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University, 2013), 35, 105, 359, 363.

5 George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University, 2006).

6 McLoughlin, Billy Sunday; Lyle W. Dorsett, Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991); Robert F. Martin, Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 2002).

7 Roger Bruns, Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture; Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University, 2014); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2014).

8 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf/Random House, 1963); Douglas W. Frank, Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986); George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991); Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1993); Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston's Churches, 1885–1950 (New York: Oxford University, 2005); Thekla Ellen Joiner, Sin in the City: Chicago and Revivalism, 1880–1920 (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2007); Stephen J. Nichols, Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ (Downer's Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2008); Barry Hankins, Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, The Roaring Twenties, and Today's Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). One notable exception to this general pattern is Joshua McMullen, Under the Big Top: Big Tent Revivalism and American Culture, 1885–1925 (New York: Oxford University, 2015).

9 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1991).

10 Wiebe, The Search For Order, 114–121.

11 John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 11–26.

12 “Women's Christian Temperance Union (United States),” Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics, ed. Roy P. Domenico and Mark Y. Hanley (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006), 2:601.

13 Moody Bible Institute was part of a larger push in American evangelicalism for practical evangelistic training. During the late nineteenth century, several Bible schools were founded with the intent of giving students of little means a practical, brief, and efficient Christian education (rather than a seminarian one). Besides MBI, two others were in Chicago, the Baptist Missionary Training School (1881) and Chicago Training School (1885). The other major Bible schools of the era were A. B. Simpson's Missionary Training College for Home and Foreign Missions (New York City), R. A. Torrey's Bible Institute of Los Angeles, A. J. Gordon's Gordon Bible College (Boston), William Bell Riley's Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School (Roseville, Minnesota), and C. I. Scofield's Philadelphia School of the Bible. For more on these schools and the American Bible School Movement, see Virginia Brereton, Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1990). For more on Bible schools founded by female evangelists, see Priscilla Pope-Levison, Building the Old-Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era (New York: New York University, 2013).

14 Timothy E. W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015).

15 “Official Program: Chicago, 1915, 5th Worlds and 27th International Convention, July 7–12,” 10–11, 15–22, Moody Church Collection, Billy Graham Center Archives (BGCA), Wheaton College, Wheaton, Ill.

16 Dr. Green, Thomas E., “Revivals and Revivalists,” Hampton's Magazine 24 (June 1910): 794 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

17 “‘Brother’ Sunday Hands Out Bunch Of Hot Ones,” The Pittsburg [sic] Press, December 31, 1913, 8.

18 The New York Times, quoted in ‘Billy's’ Rubicon,” The Literary Digest 54 (April 21, 1917): 1168 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

19 Ibid.

20 Ratcliffe, S. K., “The Man Who Is Sunday,” Living Age 286 (July 3, 1915): 51 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm. For others who call Sunday's assistants experts, see “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry,” The New York American, “Billy” Sunday Extra, no. 3, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm; and “Remarkable Organization of Experts Helps ‘Billy’ Sunday in Stirring People To Repentance,” Trenton Sunday-Times Advertiser, January 2, 1916, newspaper clipping, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm. For more on professionalism and business-like evangelical ministries, see Gloege, Guaranteed Pure.

21 Ma Sunday, quoted in “Billy Sunday Holds a Council of War,” New York Times, April 10, 1917, 22.

22 George Sunday, quoted in “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry.”

23 On Siebert's training at Moody Bible Institute, see Theodore Thomas Frankenberg, Spectacular Career of Rev. Billy Sunday: Famous Baseball Evangelist (Columbus, Oh.: McClelland & Company, 1913), 119. For Pledger's attendance, see Souvenir: “Billy” Sunday Spokane Campaign, December-January-February 1908–1909 (Spokane, Wa.: Trevor Orton, 1909), 3, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm. According to MBI student records, Grace Saxe entered the school from Fort Scott, Kansas in January 1895 and graduated in February 1897. Virginia Asher, a native of Chicago and member of the Moody Church, came to MBI along with her husband William in October 1897, a few months after Saxe graduated. Frances Miller was the last of these workers to graduate from MBI, attending from October 1903-November 1905. See the student records at the MBI Archives (MBIA), Chicago, Ill. For MacLaren's attendance, see Rev. W. A. Sunday Meetings at Springfield, Illinois: Souvenir, March-April, 1909 (Bloomington: C. U. Williams Publisher, 1909), 19. All the MBI catalogues for the years 1895–1905 call the school the “West Point of Christian Work.” See, for instance, “Annual Catalogue: The Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions of the Chicago Evangelization Society,” (1895): 7, MBIA.

24 Bruns, Preacher, 103; Dorsett, Billy Sunday, 102.

25 James Vincent, The MBI Story: The Vision and Worldwide Impact of Moody Bible Institute (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2011); Findlay, James, “Moody, ‘Gapmen,’ and the Gospel: The Early Days of Moody Bible Institute,” Church History 31, no. 3 (September 1962): 322335 Google Scholar. Janette Hassey also has a great early history of the Institute in her work, No Time For Silence: Evangelical Women in Public Ministry Around the Turn of the Century (Grand Rapids, Mich: Academie Books, 1986), 31–38.

26 “Catalogue of The Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions of the Chicago Evangelization Society,” (1897): 20–21, MBIA.

27 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 87.

28 “Organizes Women to Assist Sunday,” press clipping, ca. 1915, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

29 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry.”

30 Hassey, No Time for Silence, 43.

31 There is an extensive record of Asher's activities with Chapman. See especially Scrapbook 3 and 13, Chapman Papers, BGCA. Microfilm. See also McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, 75.

32 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry”; “Persons of All Faiths Await ‘Billy’ Sunday,” Evening Public Ledger [Philadelphia], December 9, 1914, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

33 Frankenberg, Billy Sunday: His Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails (Columbus, Oh.: The F. J. Heer Printing Company, 1917), 107.

34 Joiner, Sin in the City, 119. See also “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry”; and “No Sectarian Line Divides Old Guard of ‘Billy’ Sunday,” Evening Public Ledger [Philadelphia], Night Extra, January 12, 1915, 6. According to her MBI student records, Miller had been doing pastoral work even before her admittance to the school in 1903 and her ordination in 1906.

35 Hassey, No Time for Silence, 43.

36 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry”; “Remarkable Organization of Experts Helps ‘Billy’ Sunday In Stirring People To Repentance”; Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 120.

37 Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 121.

38 “Architectural Features Of The Sunday Tabernacle,” Toledo Daily Blade, April 8, 1911, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm; “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry.”

39 Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 120.

40 “Remarkable Organization of Experts Helps ‘Billy’ Sunday in Stirring People To Repentance.”

41 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently;” “Organizes Women To Assist Sunday;” Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 120.

42 “5,000 Pupils Make Revival Look Like A Football Game,” The New York Tribune, May 12, 1917, 16.

43 Rodeheaver went to Ohio Wesleyan University, a Methodist school, as a young man. See Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 118. Ackely was a Methodist from Philadelphia. See “No Sectarian Line Divides Old Guard.” Grace Saxe declared Baptist as her denominational affiliation for her entrance application at Moody Bible Institute. See the student records, MBIA. See also “No Sectarian Line Divides Old Guard.”

44 Interview with Edna Louise Asher Case by Robert Shuster, November 27, 1981, T1 Transcript, Edna Louise Asher Case Collection, BGCA. See also Dorsett, Billy Sunday, 102.

45 “A Day on the Sidelines with the Sunday Party,” (May 1915): 1, Billy Sunday Ephemera, BGCA.

46 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 65–69, 80–81, 102, and 132. See also the diary and course notes of Mary L. Gilman-DeGris who attended MBI in the late-1880s. “Diary” and “Notebook” in “Course Notes from Students-Various, Louis Williams 1898,” MBIA.

47 The idea of service was central to Sunday's campaigns. His team decorated the tabernacle with banners that read “Saved for Service.” The songbook Homer Rodeheaver published in 1915 was entitled “Songs for Service.” Ma Sunday's central motif in her sermons and articles throughout the 1910s was service above self, whether in one's business relations, marriage, community endeavors, or evangelism. She also explained that the meaning behind the revival's anthem, “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” was service to one's “neighbors and fellow beings.” Virginia Asher likewise invited urban women to “[meet] Jesus in the streets of service.” See The Spectator Sees Billy Sunday,” The Outlook (March 31, 1915): 788 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm; Ma Sunday, “Ma's Column,” The Bell Syndicate, 1917–1918, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm; Ma Sunday, “Draft of True Living” (unpublished mans., ca. 1918), 20–21, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm; “Memorial Service,” May 9, 1937, 3, Virginia Asher Papers, BGCA.

48 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 126.

49 Catherine Brekus argues that itinerancy facilitated female preachers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. See Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998). Female preachers were also common in early Methodism. See Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1991); John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity (New York: Oxford University, 1998); Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York: Oxford University, 2009).

50 For a great discussion of women in public ministry at the turn of the century, see Hassey, No Time For Silence. On the changes in female preachers from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, see Pope-Levison, Building the Old-Time Religion.

51 “Clubwomen Listen to ‘Billy’ Sunday,” The Sun [New York], May 5, 1917, 5. Comments like these refute the notion of Gail Bederman that proponents of Muscular Christianity or church “masculinizers” (like Billy Sunday) worked to kick women out of positions of religious leadership. Urban revivalism actually accommodated new forms of masculinity as well as new gender roles for women. For Bederman's full argument, see ‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–12 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1989): 432–65Google Scholar.

52 Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1964), ix.

53 Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 123 Google Scholar. For other great works on progressives’ emphasis on efficiency, planning, professionalization, and regulation, see Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University, 1991); David B. Danbom, “The World of Hope”: Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical Public Life (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University, 1987); Dawley, Struggles for Justice; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955; Repr. 1972, New York: Alfred A. Knopf); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1994); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement (New York: Oxford University, 2005); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion of in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University, 1991); David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890–1917 (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1970); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999); Shelton Stromquist, Re-inventing the People: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2006); and Wiebe, The Search For Order.

54 Ray Stannard Baker, The Spiritual Unrest (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1910); Green, “Revivals and Revivalists,” (1910), 798. Sunday was particularly concerned about the “gulf between the church and the workingman.” Sunday, quoted in “‘Billy's’ Sermon on Revivals is Full Of ‘Pep’ And Ginger,” The Pittsburg [sic] Press, December 30, 1913, 2. This had been a concern of evangelicals since the immediate post-Civil War period. See James F. Findlay, Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837–1899 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1969), 323–324fn39; Simpson, A. B., “How the Church Can Reach the Masses,” Word, Work and World 1 (January 1882): 2425 Google Scholar; A. T. Pierson, quoted in John Wilbur Chapman, S. H. Hadley of Water Street: A Miracle of Grace (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1906), 196; Charles Stelzle, Messages to Workingmen (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1906); and Josiah Strong, “The Perils of Peace: The Church and the Workingman,” in Studies in the Gospel of the Kingdom, no. 1 (New York: The American Institute of Social Service, 1910), 95.

55 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 125–129.

56 Shailer Mathews, Scientific Management in the Churches (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1912).

57 Bederman, “The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough,” 441–444.

58 Billy Sunday, quoted in “Preachers Chase Fads Instead of Souls,” The Des Moines Capital, n. d., ca. 1914, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

59 See Rev. W. A. Sunday Meetings at Springfield, Illinois, 10–11; Souvenir: “Billy” Sunday Campaign in Spokane, 6; Betty Hoover DiRisio, “New Castle's First Policewoman: Mrs. Rae Muirhead,” Lawrence County Historical Society, New Castle, Penn., http://www.lawrencechs.com/new-castles-first-policewoman-mrs-rae-muirhead/.

60 Rev. W. A. Sunday Meetings at Springfield, Illinois, 10.

61 DiRisio, “New Castle's First Policewoman.”

62 Rev. W. A. Sunday Meetings at Springfield, Illinois, 17–18.

63 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry.”

64 Hassey, No Time for Silence, 43.

65 Rev. W. A. Sunday Meetings at Springfield, Illinois, 17.

66 Hassey, No Time for Silence, 43; Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 120; “Remarkable Organization of Experts Helps ‘Billy’ Sunday In Stirring People To Repentance.”

67 Homer Rodeheaver, Twenty Years With Billy Sunday (Nashville: Cokesbury, 1936), 123.

68 Ibid.

69 “To-day's Programme in the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, April 18, 1917, 14; “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, April 20, 1917, 14; “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, May 3, 1917, 16; “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, June 14, 1917, 16. Saxe's five-point program was intended to help Christian workers “get good results” in personal work. See “Seven Hundred In Bible Class,” The Paterson Morning Call [Paterson, NJ], April 9, 1915, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

70 “Seven Hundred In Bible Class”; “Many in Tears as Billy Sunday Pictures Decline of Home Life,” The New York Tribune, April 19, 1917, 14.

71 Rodeheaver, Twenty Years, 124.

72 Ibid., 124–125.

73 William T. Ellis, “Billy” Sunday: The Man and His Message (Philadelphia, Penn.: Universal Book and Bible House, 1914), 314–315.

74 Special meetings and clubs for businessmen were, as Bederman rightly points out in her article on the Men and Religion Forward Movement, part of the way evangelicals tried to rectify the imbalanced sex ratio in American protestantism. Although the American church had been two-thirds female for as long as records exist, Progressive Era evangelicals suddenly viewed this as a “crisis.” They worked heartily to reach businessmen and overturn the Victorian animosity between religion and the world of commerce. This did adapt religion to a new cultural context and encouraged lay evangelism between businessmen, but in the long run, it also erased the tension between business and religion and blunted evangelicals’ capacity for social criticism, especially regarding capitalism or relations between capital and labor.

75 Dorsett, Billy Sunday, 152.

76 Frankenberg, Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails, 121.

77 Frankenberg, Spectacular Career, 120–121.

78 MacFarlane, Peter Clark, “‘Sunday’ Salvation,” Everybody's Magazine 32 (March 1915): 364 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

79 During the Philadelphia campaign (January-March 1915), the Shop Work Committee (together with the BWIC) averaged about five shop meetings per day by the second week of the revival. Those averages steadily grew until, by the week of March 4, they were averaging fifteen shop meetings per day. Based on these weekly averages, these two committees held over 330 meetings in Philadelphia factories (perhaps 165 per committee). These averages are based on scheduled shop meetings published daily in the Evening Public Ledger. The Shop Committee's performance in Philadelphia was consistent with their performance in other American cities. In Boston (November 1916-January 1917), Isaac Ward held 163 shop meetings, boasting an attendance of 33,673. McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, 214. In New York City (April-June 1917), the Shop Work Committee held “187 meetings in 100 different shops before 50,000 men.” John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quoted in “Billy Sunday O.K., Says John D. Jr.” The Sun [New York], June 18, 1917, 3.

80 Dorsett, Billy Sunday, 103.

81 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry;” “Biography,” Papers of Virginia Healy Asher, BGCA.

82 “Sunday Hits at Shams in Pleading for a Living Wage,” Evening Public Ledger [Philadelphia], January 23, 1915, Night Extra, 2; “24 ‘Trail Hitters’ Fruit of ‘Ma’ Sunday's Sermon,’” Evening Public Ledger, January 25, 1915, Night Extra, 7.

83 Ella Warren Harrison, et al., The Hampshire Colony Congregational Church: Its First Hundred Years, 1831–1931 (Princeton, IL: Press of The Bureau County Record, 1931), 123–124.

84 “40 Years Ago,” The Mason City Globe-Gazette, December 30, 1954, 18; Houseman, Ralph H., “Omaha Ready for Sunday,” The Continent 46 (September 9, 1915): 1219 Google Scholar. Welsh was also a finalist to succeed President Charles Blanchard at Wheaton College during the mid-1920s but was not selected. See W. Wyeth Willard, Fire on the Prairie: The Story of Wheaton College (Wheaton, Ill.: Van Kampen, 1950), 108.

85 “Preliminary Work for ‘Billy’ Sunday Going Ahead Fast,” Evening Public Ledger [Philadelphia], Night Extra, November 21, 1914, 11; “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, April 10, 1917, 15.

86 “Sunday Questions Motives of Many As New Throngs Hit Sawdust Trail,” New York Tribune, April 25, 1917, 14; “Sunday, Atop Pulpit, Wins Men to Trail,” New York Tribune, April 30, 1917, 14; and “Sunday, in Sermon on Mothers, Assails Drinking and ‘Gadding,’” New York Tribune, April 28, 1917, 16.

87 “Women Workers Active Allies of ‘Billy’ Sunday: Extra Corps of Bible Teachers Picked by Evangelist and ‘Ma,’” Evening Public Ledger [Philadelphia], Night Extra, January 5, 1915, 3.

88 In Philadelphia, Lamont held a class at the First Baptist African Church, and in New York City, she taught at the West Side Mission. “Revival Meetings in 23 Churches and Many Factories Today,” Evening Public Ledger, February 10, 1914, Sports Final, 14; “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, May 3, 1917, 16.

89 “Other Shop Meetings,” Evening Public Ledger [Philadelphia], Night Extra, January 19, 1915, 2.

90 “To-Day's Programme in the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, May 8, 1917, 14.

91 “Billy Sunday Asks Support of 300 New York Clergymen,” The New York Tribune, April 10, 1917, 15; “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, April 20, 1917, 14. See also “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, May 16, 1917, 14 and “To-day's Programme In the Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, May 17, 1917, 16.

92 “Mrs. Sunday Goes Under Operation,” The Sun [New York], May 20, 1917, 10.

93 “8,000 Youngsters At Sunday's Party,” The Sun [New York], May 6, 1917, 8.

94 “Heir to Millions and Playmates Hit the Trail,” The New York Tribune, May 13, 1917, 14.

95 “Modern Revival Organized as Efficiently as a Large Industry.”

96 “To-Day's Programme In The Sunday Revival,” The New York Tribune, April 14, 1917, 18.

97 “Billy Sunday Asks Support of 300 New York Clergymen.”

98 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 127.

99 Ma Sunday, quoted in McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, 46.

100 “Sunday's Pet Stories Draw Women's Tears at Afternoon Service,” The New York Tribune, April 14, 1917, 18.

101 Ellis, William T., “In the Light of Billy Sunday,” The Outlook (March 24, 1915): 678 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

102 Philadelphia's Verdict on Billy Sunday,” Literary Digest 50 (April 3, 1915): 755 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm; Billy Sunday In the Big Cities,” Literary Digest 48 (April 4, 1914): 761 Google Scholar; “Sunday Converts in New York Cost Only $1.64 Each,” The New York Evening World, May 1, 1917, clipping, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

103 “Tabernacle Seating 20,000 Where New York Is Hearing Billy Sunday,” New York American, Billy Sunday Extra, no. 3, n. d., ca. April 1917, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

104 Lehmann, R. C., “The Man Who Is Sunday,” Living Age 286 (July 3, 1915): 52 Google Scholar, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

105 Robert A. Wright, “What Manner of Man Is This?” newspaper clipping, 1914, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

106 Odell, Joseph, “The Mechanics of Revivalism,” Atlantic 115 (May 1915): 585 Google Scholar, 589, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

107 Rodeheaver, Twenty Years, 119. See also, McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, 73; and “What Manner of Man Is This?”

108 “Value of Organization,” newspaper clipping, n. d., ca. 1915, Sunday Papers, BGCA. Microfilm.

109 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 3, 8–10.