A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Sunday preached the same simple gospel proclaimed by Moody: “With Christ you are saved, without him you are lost. . . . You are going to live forever in heaven or you are going to live forever in hell. It’s up to you and you must decide now.” He characterized the atonement as a business deal: Christ had paid the price for salvation, and God had canceled the debt; not to accept the offer meant “not giving God a square deal.” What he preached, Sunday said, “is the fact that a man can be converted without any fuss.” For some men, admittedly, conversion might involve a considerable transformation. But “multitudes of men live good, honest, upright, moral lives. They will not have much to change to become a Christian.” All they required, in fact, was to hit the sawdust trail, shake Billy Sunday’s hand for approximately one second, and live according to middle-class mores. “So it sums up,” he summed up, “that all God wants is for a man to be decent. Gee whizz!” Indeed, what could be simpler?

  After the early years, Billy left most of the actual operations of his revivals to Ma Sunday and his associates, but he took understandable pride in his organization’s businesslike efficiency. Noting that “this is a day of specialists,” he hired assistants to stimulate interest, generate financial support, handle publicity, get the tabernacle built, recruit tens of thousands of volunteers, organize hundreds of cottage prayer meetings, work with special-interest groups, organize delegations and assign specific nights they would be expected to attend the services (thus assuring a good crowd every night), help him with sermon preparation and Bible study, and compile statistics. Nothing was intentionally left to chance.

  During his heyday Sunday gleaned an annual income of approximately $80,000, which he showed off by dressing sharply and sporting such expensive accoutrements as diamond rings and stickpins. Predictably, critics carped at both the high cost of his campaigns and the good living they provided him, but his supporters accepted his claim that no man alive could produce a comparable harvest at the same price. Given the ease with which salvation could be obtained, Sunday had little difficulty coaxing people to accept it, but anecdotal responses from individual pastors and more systematic studies by both friends and critics of his revivals revealed that between 50 percent and in some cities, as many as 80 percent of trail hitters were either church members who simply checked “reconsecration” on their decision cards or the children of members who would probably have joined the church eventually without any boost from Sunday. As for “first timers,” once the out-of-towners and fictitious names and false addresses were eliminated, a discouragingly small percentage ever affiliated with a church.

  The simple decency that Sunday wanted Christians to manifest amounted to little more than adhering to dominant political and economic orthodoxies and upholding the moral standards of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class. He further asserted that “there can be no religion that does not express itself in patriotism.” To express his own patriotism during World War I, he appeared with Will Rogers at “Wake Up America” rallies, vehemently damned the Germans (even teaching children to hiss the German flag), encouraged young men to volunteer for the army, recommended the jailing of those who criticized President Woodrow Wilson and his policies, and, at the President’s request, helped sell an estimated 100 million dollars in Liberty bonds. His economic views consisted of an unreflective espousal of laissez-faire free enterprise. He occasionally acknowledged the distortions unchecked capitalism produced but opposed any government interference, insisting that anyone who made a reasonable effort could succeed in America. He characterized the Social Gospel espoused by the new Federal Council of Churches (founded in 1908 and later renamed the National Council of Churches) as “godless social service nonsense,” un-American in motivation and result. Like Horatio Alger, he counseled poor people to view their poverty as an opportunity to demonstrate grit and move up the ladder, perhaps by taking his advice to “go out west and study and be a horticulturist.”

  For the most part, Sunday’s moral and social agenda amounted to little more than a kind of muscular perfectionism, with an emphasis on personal vices. Wherever he went, he cooperated with Prohibitionist forces, and his booze sermon was often the high point of his revivals. Renouncing these manly vices, however, would not make a man a Milquetoast. After all, Billy Sunday had given them up, and who could name a manlier man than he? By being pure and tough, Sunday asserted, the good people of America could regain control of their lives and their country itself. They could close down the saloons, defeat the kaiser and his pagan hordes, drive skeptics and evolutionists whimpering into a corner, and beat back the challenges to traditional Protestant hegemony posed by the foreigners who were trying to take over American cities. He saw his own role in this process as being “a giant for God” who could, by his preaching and example, make it “easier for people to do right and harder for them to do wrong.” Despite the scorn he drew from some religious and political critics, Sunday was unquestionably a national hero. Laudatory books about him became best-sellers, public-opinion polls regularly placed him high on the lists of greatest living Americans, national and state legislative bodies invited him to pray or address their assemblies, and presidents received him at the White House.

  As Sunday rode the crest of his popularity, Evangelical Christianity seemed to have regained its stride. It possessed a well-thought-out and consistent view of the inspiration of the Scriptures, worked out during the 1880s at Princeton Theological Seminary, which had become the movement’s intellectual center. Between 1910 and 1915, a widely distributed set of twelve volumes entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony of the Truth, set forth the movement’s basic doctrines and proved crucial in getting the name Fundamentalist established as the most common appellation for the conservative Protestant wing of the church.

  The war and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 provided Fundamentalism with what was to become one of its major elements: religious nationalism. Sunday and other Fundamentalist leaders declared that Satan himself was directing the German war effort and implied it was part of the same process that began with the development of biblical criticism in German universities. Modernism, they asserted, had turned Germany into a godless nation and would do the same thing to America. When the rise of communism and the rash of strikes, bombings, and advocacy of radical causes immediately following the war helped produce the Red Scare, Fundamentalists were among the most scared. In 1919 Sunday offered his audiences his solution for dealing with radicals: “If I had my way with these ornery wild-eyed socialists and IWW’s, I would stand them up before a firing squad.” As for Reds, he said he would “fill the jails so full . . . that their feet would stick out the windows.”

  Sunday’s career reached its apex with his New York City revival in 1917, a campaign that reaped a harvest of over 98,000 trail hitters in ten weeks. Then, with marked suddenness, he lost his grip on the national consciousness. He remained active on the revival field until his death in 1935, but the great cities of the North and East stopped inviting him, and he played out the string in smaller southern cities and towns. Billy Sunday left little tangible legacy—no important writings, no college or training school, no distinctive approach others have preserved. Still, the simple fact that he held over three hundred revivals, spoke without a loudspeaker to audiences whose aggregate number exceeded one hundred million, and registered more than a million trail hitters (whatever their motivation) won for him a permanent place in the first rank of American evangelists.

  Sunday’s decline coincided with a decline of revivalism in general, and some observers believed he was surely the last great warrior of his tribe. But the line had not come to an end. A scant year before Sunday died, November 6, 1935, a gangly teenager strolled self-consciously into an itinerant evangelist’s “Billy Sunday-type tabernacle” in Charlotte, North Carolina. As a child, he had heard Sunday preach, but stepping into the famed evangelist’s shoes could not have been further from his mind. And when he hit the sawdust trail later that evening, neither he nor anyone who
watched him stride nervously down the aisle could have suspected that the boy who would become the most famous preacher of all time had just declared his intention to spend his life preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

  Part 2

  America’s Sensational Young Evangelist (1918–1949)

  3

  Billy Frank

  The first pains struck as the hall clock announced the beginning of November 7, 1918. Throughout the long night and the longer crystal-bright day, Morrow Graham labored to bring forth her first child. Finally, as the light began to fade from the late-autumn sky, William Franklin Graham, Jr., issued his first call on the world’s attention. A year earlier, Billy Sunday had marked the zenith of his career with a triumphant ten-week campaign in New York City. No one imagined this tiny creature, wiggling his toes as his father examined him proudly by the light of the evening fire, would one day surpass any achievement by Sunday or Moody or Finney or Whitefield. No more than the usual number of dark red apples fell from the huge tree in the front yard, and no aged Simeon appeared at the two-story farmhouse to declare he was ready to depart this life, having seen at last the child the Lord had promised. Still, less from any premonition of greatness than from a deep-seated desire to seek and do God’s will, Frank and Morrow Graham hoped and earnestly prayed that their firstborn son, Billy Frank, might one day feel himself singled out for special assignment by the Lord of the Universe.

  The Grahams’ Scotch-Irish forebears had immigrated to the Carolinas before the American Revolution. Both their fathers had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Ben Coffey, Morrow’s father, lost a leg and one of his piercing blue eyes on Seminary Ridge during the first day of fighting at Gettysburg in 1861, and Crook Graham carried a Yankee bullet in his leg till the day he died in 1910. Coffey, not yet twenty when he went off to war, passed the next fifty-five years in tranquil anonymity, scratching a living from a small vegetable farm in the Steele Creek community near Charlotte, North Carolina. He and his wife Lucinda reared their third daughter, Morrow, to be a classic Southern Christian Lady, attentive to Scripture, faithful in public worship at the Steele Creek Presbyterian Church and in her personal devotions at home, and schooled for a year at Charlotte’s Elizabeth College in music, manners, and public speaking of the sort befitting a proper lady. She was small, and her clear blue eyes and long blond hair gave her a delicate look, but her strong chin and forthright smile conveyed an impression of will and character, a signal that was not misleading. William Crook Graham, in noisy contrast to Ben Coffey, was an uproarious rascal, a sometime Klansman and full-time whiskey-drinking hell-raiser with a great black beard, a penetrating gaze, and a blustery rambunctiousness that kept him in or near trouble all his life. Moderate in nothing but work, Crook produced a brood of eleven children, the eighth of whom, Frank, seemed almost his polar opposite. The last words his God-fearing, long-suffering mother spoke to him before she died, when he was about ten, were “Frank, be a good boy,” and he had tried to honor her memory. Though he grew to be large and strong like his father, with dark wavy hair and steel-blue eyes, he was polite, restrained, unpretentious, and devoid of vices other than card playing and an occasional cigar. He had seen the demon in the bottle, and he wanted no commerce with it. He gave himself so fully to work that he found it difficult to relax and impossible to play; his children doubt he ever played a game or went fishing, and they tell of occasional trips to the shore when he would roll up his trousers, splash about for a few moments in his bare feet, then abruptly retire to his accustomed spot on the sidelines of worldly pleasure. He enjoyed telling jokes and spinning yarns, but those who knew him insist they never heard him utter a word of profanity or repeat an off-color story. When Crook died in 1910, twenty-year-old Frank just naturally took charge of the run-down four-hundred-acre farm his father had staked out four miles from Charlotte. Aided by his younger brother, Clyde, with whom he eventually split the property, he quickly worked it into a prosperous enterprise. In the process, he established himself as one of the most eligible and attractive young bachelors in Mecklenburg County.

  When Morrow Coffey spotted Frank at a lakeside amusement park one summer evening, spiffily splendid in his favorite ensemble of navy-blue jacket, white trousers, and Panama hat, she welcomed his attentions and happily accepted his offer of a ride in his snappy new buggy. If he moved with speed and confidence that evening, he soon adopted a more measured step. Frank wanted a wife, but not until he was certain he could support her comfortably and he was already responsible for Clyde, an older sister, a niece, and a cousin, all of whom lived with him at the family farm, so he courted Morrow steadily and exclusively for six years before they finally wed. After a five-day honeymoon at the plush Biltmore House near Asheville, he moved her out to the farm flanking the one-lane sand-clay thoroughfare known grandly as Park Road. Billy Frank was born two years later, followed soon by Catherine, then Melvin, and, after an eight-year gap, Jean. To make room for his growing brood, Frank purchased a house across the road for his siblings and other relatives.

  Old Crook Graham had not put much value on education, and Frank’s scant three years of formal schooling gave him but the barest acquaintance with reading and writing, so Morrow kept the production records and took care of the billing. Working with and aided by a growing contingent of tenant farmers, the Grahams built one of the largest dairy farms in the area, with seventy-five cows and four hundred regular customers, and Frank installed his family in a handsome new colonial-design brick home with indoor plumbing. With its red barns trimmed in white, its towering silos, and its corn and hay crops growing tall right up to the well-tended fences, the Graham farm resembled a calendar picture of rural America. To keep farm work from grinding down his delicate wife, Frank brought in city water and electricity, projects most neighbors thought unrealistic because of the distance from the edge of town. Even so, Morrow carried her share of the load, rising early to fix a five-o’clock breakfast for the milkers, cooking all day on a wood stove for extra field hands during harvest season, and putting up hundreds of jars of fruits and vegetables each year.

  Billy Frank sometimes tested his mother’s patience and nerves by his constant “running and zooming” through the house. Even though he was sick more than the other children, Morrow remembered that “there was never any quietness about Billy. He was always tumbling over something. He was a handful. I was relieved when he started school.” Apparently hyperactive before the term was invented, he careened through early childhood at full throttle, gleefully overturning egg baskets, knocking plates from the kitchen table, sending a bureau chest crashing down a full flight of stairs, and pelting a passing auto with rocks, all less from any obvious sense of meanness than from a simple desire to see what effect his actions would produce. At one point the Grahams took him to a doctor, complaining that “he never wears down.” They were told, “It’s just the way he’s built.” Fortunately, little of the boy’s boundless energy fueled anger or rebellion. Mother and siblings alike remember him as an essentially happy child, given to no more than ordinary mischief and blessed with a remarkable ability to please and charm. His first string of spoken words— “Here comes Daddy, sugar baby”—echoed the tones in which his mother introduced him to the world and presaged the gentle, optimistic sweetness that would smooth his way through life. Morrow also taught him the value of a thoughtful gesture. As he waited for the bus to take him to the second day of first grade at the little Sharon school, she suggested he take a handful of flowers to his teacher, who would “just love you for it.” The fear that new schoolmates would tease him and that his teacher might think him a peculiar child mortified Billy Frank, but he did as Mother suggested and, as Mother had predicted, the teacher found favor with both the gift and the giver. The boy found such satisfaction in the episode that until he was fifteen or sixteen, he seldom passed a week without romping into the woods back of the big barn to gather a bouquet of wildflowers or some other treasure to bring home to his mother. As one mi
ght guess, Mother just loved him for it.

  The Graham home, however, was not all sugar babies and wildflowers. Frank and Morrow held their children to a stern discipline. A simple directive brought obedience in most matters, but neither parent saw anything amiss in the frequent use of corporal punishment, and Billy Frank felt the sting of Morrow’s hickory switches and the bite of Frank’s belt hundreds of times during his first dozen years. Looking back, Morrow once suggested they could have gotten by with a lighter touch and admitted she had sometimes turned her head while Frank applied his belt to a young transgressor’s backside: “I knew what he was doing was biblically correct,” she conceded, “and the children didn’t die,” but “I think I would use a lot more psychology today.” Not all forms of psychology were entirely absent; on the day Mecklenburg County went “wet,” Frank used a bit of homegrown aversion therapy on Billy and Catherine, forcing them to drink beer until they vomited.

  This seriousness of purpose and wariness of the world had its roots and reinforcement, not surprisingly, in church. As part of his effort to be a good boy, Frank “got religion” when he was eighteen. It had not been easy. He had been feeling that “things were not right in his heart,” so when three old confederate veterans held a revival at a Methodist chapel known as the Plank Meetinghouse, he decided to seek whatever peace of soul they might be offering. On the first night, when the preacher gave the “altar call,” Frank went down to the “mourner’s bench” and prayed for salvation or deliverance or assurance or whatever it was folk were supposed to find there, but as an old friend put it, “He just couldn’t see the light or ‘pray through.’” For the next nine nights, he returned to the meeting in an increasingly desperate quest for some sign of God’s favor. Failing to experience anything he could identify as positive, he began to worry that he had unwittingly committed the unpardonable sin and that God had hidden his face from him forever. He lost his taste for food, and the same friend recalled, “He wouldn’t have picked up a five-dollar bill if he had seen it in the road.” On the tenth night, as he headed his buggy toward the chapel, the bright moonlight glinting off his rig and team seemed to illuminate his soul and assure him that Jesus Christ had paid the debt for his sin—not just the sin of the world, but the sin of Frank Graham of Charlotte, North Carolina—on the cross of Calvary. At that moment, as he related it, he put his faith in Christ alone, and the burden of his heart rolled away. When he pulled up to the chapel, a friend who saw his beaming face recognized immediately that he had been born again, and Brother Coburn, one of the old preachers, proclaimed his own confidence that “this young man is going to preach Christ.” That spur-of-the-moment prophecy haunted Frank for decades, but he was not a public man and he decided that until the Lord gave him a more definite sign, he would keep on plowing corn and milking cows. No such sign ever came and, indeed, that one brief episode of internal tension and release seems to have been the sole occasion when Frank Graham’s religion exhibited any signs of what William James called the “tender mind.” He attended church and lived circumspectly, and that seemed to him to be sufficient.