A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  No mention of money occurred on that first program, but Barrows did ask people to let them know if they felt the broadcasts “meet a need across the land.” Soon he began to remind listeners, in the briefest manner possible, that the program’s continued existence depended on freewill offerings: “Send your letters to Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s all the address you need.” No greater urging was needed. The Hour of Decision caught fire immediately and within five weeks attracted the largest audience the Nielsen rating service had ever recorded for a religious broadcast. In his cautiousness, Graham had ordered the Bennett agency to contract for only 150 stations, the smallest segment of the network ABC would sell, and had made it clear he would cancel immediately if contributions from listeners did not cover the costs. Within a few months, the program aired on all 350 network stations, soon spread to nearly 1,000 stations in the United States, and reached many other parts of the world on at least 30 shortwave stations. Graham’s entry into electronic evangelism stretched him and his ministry in other ways. During the YFC days, a talented preacher could build a reputation with two or three good sermons, and even the longer crusades required no more than a relatively modest stock of material. A weekly program, however, heard by an estimated twenty million people, forced Graham to expand his reading and seek assistance in satisfying the relentless need for fresh material. With Dick Ross’s help, Cliff Barrows quickly assumed primary responsibility for production, overseeing both the more nerve-racking live broadcasts of crusade services and the composite programs in which he blended taped segments from various crusades with a studio sermon from Graham. In mid-1951, Graham launched a television version of the Hour of Decision. Some programs featured filmed segments from live crusades, where Graham was at his best, but most were studio productions that showed him in a study or living room setting. They often included obviously rehearsed interviews and did not allow him to preach with the kind of intensity and effectiveness he could manifest before a large crowd, though he did eventually become more at ease with the conversational format. The program ran for nearly three years on the fledgling ABC television network, but neither Graham nor his associates have ever regarded it as a particularly memorable or effective effort. Years later, he told an interviewer, “They are interesting films, but I can’t find anyone who ever saw one! Prime time on Sunday nights on network TV, and no one remembers.”

  The media ministry required dramatic changes in the scope of Graham’s organization and outreach. The most significant immediate result was the flood of mail that cascaded into the Minneapolis headquarters. From a small packet a postman could carry in one hand, the response grew to more than 178,000 letters during 1951, and twice that the next year. Back in Florida, W. T. Watson had stressed the importance of a mailing list. Billy now told his associates, “Let’s collect all the names we can. I’d rather have the name and address of somebody who supports us than a dollar bill.” Thereafter, in crusades and on the radio, the team put more emphasis on gathering names than on asking for contributions. Badgering people into giving money could offend them; contacting them several times a year with requests for prayer and low-key reminders of financial need would surely prove more effective in the long run. George Wilson, initially skeptical about the value of a mailing list, became one of the leading direct-mail experts in the country. Throughout his ministry, Graham would use a variety of assistants and ghostwriters to help with sermons and publications, but with rare exceptions, he would personally write every letter going out to the list over his signature. “That’s been my own thing,” he explained, “because I felt that God had given me a rapport with our listeners, and people, and I felt I knew what to say.”

  Mainly to take care of the mail, BGEA purchased a modest office building and expanded the staff from George Wilson and a secretary to approximately eighty employees by 1954, and by half again that many a year later. The letters brought more than enough money to ease Graham’s anxiety over paying for the Hour of Decision and enabled him to be a bit bolder in seizing other opportunities for ministry. They also brought so many requests for personal and spiritual advice that in 1952, at Walter Bennett’s suggestion, he began his syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer.” Then, as requests mounted for sermons, books, sheet music, and recordings aired on the programs, Graham and Wilson formed a retail company called Grason, a taxpaying entity whose profits were fed back into BGEA.

  The ministry’s growth and the accompanying increase in income both called for and made possible a more businesslike arrangement for handling the team’s compensation. Despite aggregate attendance of 500,000 and successful inauguration of the Hour of Decision, the Atlanta crusade produced a major embarrassment for Graham. Though he had not sought it, the crusade committee had taken up a substantial love offering for him and his team at the closing service. The next day, the Atlanta Constitution ran two pictures side by side. One showed a group of happy ushers, holding up four large sacks of money; the other showed Billy Graham waving and smiling broadly as he got into a car in front of the Biltmore Hotel, just prior to leaving Atlanta. The pictures appeared in newspapers throughout the country, implying once again that itinerant evangelists, Billy Graham included, were still trying to prove that one could serve both God and mammon. Deeply stung, Graham determined to put all trace of the Elmer Gantry image behind him and asked Jesse Bader, secretary for evangelism at the National Council of Churches, for advice. Bader advised him to have BGEA put him and his team on fixed salaries unrelated to the number of crusades they might hold in a given year. Graham agreed and pegged his own salary at $15,000, comparable to that received by prominent urban pastors at the time but less than he could have made from love offerings—his income from the Atlanta crusade alone came to $9,268.60. He would later accept money for his newspaper column and royalties from some of his books, but never, after the system took effect in January 1952, would he or his team accept another honorarium for their work in a crusade.

  In addition to the thousands of dollars pouring into Minneapolis each week, mostly in small amounts, Graham’s widely publicized pronouncements on the Satanic evils of communism, the God-blessed superiority of the free-enterprise system, and the need to return to the old-fashioned values and virtues of individualist America attracted the favor of several folk able to offer more substantial support. During his 1951 Fort Worth crusade, the crusty Texas oilman, Sid Richardson, less well-known for piety than profanity, took a special liking to him and introduced him to other rich and powerful people, including his personal attorney, John Connally. Another early backer was millionaire industrialist and investor Russell Maguire, an ardent anti-Communist who made a fortune in oil and the manufacture of electrical equipment and Thompson submachine guns, and who contributed a substantial amount of it to various organizations described as fascist by the U.S. attorney general. Not long before he met Graham, Maguire had stirred a controversy by backing the distribution of Iron Curtain over America, a book the Methodist publication Zion’s Herald described as the “most extensive piece of racist propaganda in the history of the anti-Semitic movement in America.” He had also been forced out of a Wall Street brokerage position for “flagrant violations” of the law. Maguire invited Graham to his Palm Beach estate and offered to underwrite the salaries and expenses for him and ten other evangelists selected by him just to keep preaching what he was already preaching. Graham graciously declined this offer, explaining that unfortunately, he did not know ten evangelists with whom he would be willing to be associated in such a venture. When Maguire then offered to free him from all fund-raising activities by underwriting anything he wanted to do, Billy still demurred. W. T. Watson, who helped arranged the meeting and was present at the conversation, marveled at Graham’s reaction. “Most folks would have thought the millennium had come,” he said, “but Billy didn’t bat an eye. He said, ‘Mr. Maguire, I can’t accept it. My work is a spiritual work. We’re getting about fifteen thousand to twenty thousand letters a week. Not all of thos
e letters have a little money in them, but every one of them will say, ‘We’re praying for you.’ If they know there’s a rich man underwriting my work, they’ll stop praying and my ministry will take a nosedive. I can’t accept it.” He did, however, accept $75,000 to help with his new film ministry. Given the backing of such men as Richardson and Maguire, it was probably not sheer coincidence that the first two fictional features produced by Graham’s studio were Mr. Texas, the story of a hard-drinking Texas cowboy who found Christ at the end of his rope, and Oiltown U.S.A., which tells of a millionaire Houston oilman’s conversion and was promoted as “the story of the free-enterprise system of America . . . of the development and use of God-given natural resources by men who have built a great new empire.” The televised version of the Hour of Decision also benefited from a healthy infusion of funds from wealthy Texas supporters. Perhaps influenced by this rewarding association with Texas, Graham began wearing a large western hat, providing newspaper photographers with a favorite image until he decided it was drawing too much attention and put it into retirement, along with a pair of green suede shoes and a shiny green suit that had prompted one reporter to describe him as a “Gabriel in Gabardine.”

  Other 1951 events confirmed Graham’s place as an increasingly popular public figure. In Memphis, at the invitation of the Chicago & Southern Airline, he held an airborne service aboard a four-engine Super Constellation plane that had been outfitted with a portable pump organ and a small gray pulpit from which he preached on “Christianity vs. Communism” and prayed that “the great C & S Airline may be blessed as never before.” Noting that it was the first time he had ever preached above Memphis or any other city, and probably the first time God’s Word had been proclaimed on a commercial airline, he declared optimistically, “I think this trip will set a precedent.” In Seattle, Governor Arthur Langlie served as cochairman of his crusade. Back in Los Angeles, 25,000 people, including Cecil B. De Mille and other moguls of the motion-picture industry, attended the gala premiere of Mr. Texas. The projector broke in the middle of the screening, the film was achingly amateurish—at the film’s climax, the penitent cowboy says, “All my life, I’ve been riding the wrong trail. . . . I’m turning back. I’m going God’s way. I think it’s going to be a wonderful ride”—and reviews were terrible, but five hundred people answered the invitation at the picture’s conclusion, a response Graham regarded as “God’s seal of approval on our weak and faltering beginning in making dramatic motion pictures.” Overseen from Washington, D.C., by Walter Smyth, who had previously headed Youth for Christ in Philadelphia, the film ministry’s first efforts did have a definite catch-as-catch-can quality to them. Dave Barr, another Youth for Christ veteran who was the first man Smyth hired to help in the new venture, recalled the early days with amusement. “Redd Harper [a singing cowboy who starred in Mr. Texas] and I would go around and show it in churches and auditoriums. We’d have a can of film, a guitar, two suitcases, and a bunch of copies of the Gospel of John. Walter would call us every day to tell us where to go next. My job was to introduce Redd. He would sing a little and give his testimony, then we’d take an offering, show the film, and give the invitation. Many times we were so disorganized that we’d just throw the offering in a cardboard box in the back of the car and take it to the bank the next day. There was no blueprint to follow, but thousands of people came to see that film. It was the first Christian western. When Oiltown came along, we tried to profit by what we’d learned, and pretty soon we were in bigger auditoriums, with more publicity and counselor training. And it just grew from there.”

  Despite the increased emphasis on media, crusades remained the heart of Graham’s ministry, and they reached almost full maturity by 1951 with the installation of an extensive counseling and follow-up program overseen by Dawson Trotman, who agreed to spend six months a year helping Graham increase the likelihood that those who made decisions in his crusades would be incorporated into active churches. By early 1952 the evangelistic ministry so consumed Graham’s time and energy and imagination that he began to doubt he could carry on much longer. In what witnesses described as a “low, resigned, and reflective” voice, he told a group of Pittsburgh churchmen: “I’ve always thought my life would be a short one. I don’t think my ministry will be long. I think God allowed me to come for a moment and it will be over soon.” On another occasion, he volunteered that he thought his name was high on “Communist purge lists” and that he expected to die the death of a martyr. With encouragement from Ruth, he resigned his post at Northwestern, but this was hardly preparation for shutting down his ministry. Free at last of a responsibility he had never sought, Graham was poised to attempt to win for Evangelical Christianity a status it had not enjoyed since the days of Charles Grandison Finney.

  9

  Principalities and Powers

  In a span of seven years, Billy Graham had rocketed out of a basement in northern Illinois to become the best-known, if not yet the most influential, leader of a resurgent Evangelical movement. Not since the 1830s had revivalistic Christianity enjoyed the popularity it experienced during the postwar years, and not since Charles Finney had an Evangelical preacher been so in tune with the mood of a nation and so ready to become the symbol of one of its most vital religious traditions as was Billy Graham in 1952. In the years immediately following the war, the nation had thrown itself into an effort to reestablish a semblance of normalcy and stability. In some respects, it succeeded tremendously, but the euphoria stimulated by victory and postwar prosperity soon gave way to new attacks of anxiety. Because it won the war and rebuilt an economy that had lain in ruins a decade earlier, America was thrust into the unsought but well-earned role as leader of the free world. By pumping billions of dollars into foreign aid between 1947 and 1952, it helped its battered allies and enemies avoid total collapse but also inherited some of the resentment aimed at those countries by their colonies and by developing nations unhappy with Western domination. The greatest threat, however, came from the Soviet-led Communist bloc. The temporary sense of atomic invulnerability vanished in a mushroom cloud when Russia crashed the nuclear club in 1949. Communism seemed to be spreading all over the world, and the United States felt it had no choice but to try to contain it. That entailed frustrating efforts to influence the United Nations, where the Soviet Union repeatedly and effectively vetoed most attempts to check its tentacular reach and increased deployment of resources and personnel to lands where Americans were not always welcome and where those in power were not always paragons of democratic government. When Graham and his team met with President Truman in the summer of 1950, the Commander in Chief had mentioned the possibility of sending troops to Korea. A few weeks later, just five years after America concluded what it hoped would be its last war, its young men were once again bound for a distant land, a land most Americans knew or cared little about, in an attempt to rescue it from Communist invasion. A nation so recently proud and confident had been cast anew into turmoil. In this anxious state, it was vulnerable to two ancient and proven appeals: the placing of blame on a scapegoat and the assurance that old, familiar truths were still valid. Billy Graham intuitively understood how to seize that moment. He hammered away at communism, accusing it of trying to undermine the very foundations of Western civilization and damning any effort at appeasement or compromise. At the same time, he trumpeted assurance that the world had not slipped from God’s pocket, that those who were vigilant and put their trust in the verities that had brought them this far could manage an uncertain future with confidence because God was on their side.

  Graham’s largest campaigns in 1952 were in Houston, Texas, and Jackson, Mississippi, but the most important was a five-week crusade in the nation’s capital. Morrow Graham feared her son was taking on too much, too soon, and warned, “Billy, you are now going to your Waterloo.” Her assessment proved overly pessimistic. BGEA claimed a total attendance of 307,000. Time placed the figure at 500,000 and implied, by failing to point out that many people
attended the crusade more than once, that Graham had preached to one third of Greater Washington’s 1.5-million population. But even the more modest figure represents a good response for the dead of winter, and attendance would surely have been greater had it not been for the National Guard armory’s 5,310-person capacity. The high point of the crusade was a climactic rally that drew 40,000 people to the steps of the Capitol despite a steady rain. When Graham first broached the idea of preaching and originating an Hour of Decision broadcast from the Capitol, he was told it would be impossible to arrange, but a call to Sid Richardson, one of House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s key supporters, led to an act of Congress permitting Graham to hold the first-ever formal religious service on the Capitol steps. “In those days,” Graham later observed, “you didn’t need anything but Sam Rayburn’s word for almost anything in Washington. And so we used the Capitol steps.”

  That Billy Graham was able to stimulate acts of Congress signaled his growing influence in the political realm. The invitation to hold the crusade had been initiated by a bipartisan group of senators and representatives, several of whom attended regularly and worked as volunteers at the services, and he managed to forge important and enduring links to power during his sojourn in the capital. Unhappily for him, he was not able to repair the damage done by his 1950 White House prayer meeting. That abortive episode might have convinced a man of less ambition and confidence that he had tried to play out of his league. But Graham’s determination to gain approval for himself and the movement he fronted did not permit retreat. He had acted in naive ignorance, but he meant the President no harm or embarrassment; surely, so innocent a mistake would not be held against him for long. He sometimes poked fun at Truman— “Harry is doing the best he can,” he would say. “The trouble is that he just can’t do any better”—but the President was used to harsher criticism than that. Besides, Truman’s stock was not at its highest, and surely he could understand that association with a popular young preacher carried a symbolic blessing, even if the preacher was not his staunchest defender.