A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  More important than reviews was the impact on viewers. Almost immediately, letters began to pour in at a then-incredible rate of 50,000–75,000 per week, containing enough money to make it unnecessary to collect Howard Pew’s pledge. In fact, contributions so exceeded expenses that the Council of Churches and several charitable organizations expressed considerable unhappiness with BGEA’s decision to keep the money (approximately $2,500,000, according to Graham’s recollection) to fund future TV ventures. The proportion of viewers volunteering to make some kind of decision for Christ was approximately equal to that registered in the Garden and far outstripped any response generated by the original televised version of the Hour of Decision. The first telecast alone garnered 25,000 inquirers, more than had come forward in the Garden during the first nine weeks of the crusade, and a Gallup poll revealed that 85 percent of American adults could correctly identify Billy Graham; moreover, nearly three quarters of that number regarded him favorably. In an innocent masterpiece of understatement, Christian Life cautiously observed, “Undoubtedly, this fact will affect Graham’s ministry.”

  Perhaps no one explained the success of the live broadcasts more perceptively than a journalist who wrote: “When the average, moral, reputable American sees Dr. Graham in a studio telling him he needs to be ‘born again,’ his first impulse will be to discredit him as a religious fanatic. But if the viewer sees thousands of respectable, normal people listening and consenting to all this he hears, and then sees hundreds voluntarily get up and walk to the front in response to a low-pressure request, he’ll begin to consider the message and situation with some sincere, honest interest. It’s much easier to say a single speaker is wrong than to discredit the conviction and decision of thousands.” Graham accepted that assessment. For the next thirty years, while other religious broadcasters experimented with a variety of formats, his television programs continued to be little more than slightly edited reproductions of services at which Billy Graham stands in front of large audiences and preaches what he freely acknowledges is essentially the same sermon.

  With network television exposure serving as a kind of ultimate legitimation, the crusade boomed along from triumph to triumph. In addition to the nightly gatherings in the Garden, Graham held several massive outdoor rallies. A noontime meeting on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street drew a crowd variously estimated at between 7,500 and 30,000. Whatever the size of the crowd, and pictures show it was indeed quite large, its members listened respectfully as Bev Shea sang his own composition, “I’d Rather Have Jesus Than Silver or Gold,” and as Graham warned that money and the things it could buy would not provide lasting satisfaction. On July 20, at what had been planned as the closing service until Graham announced another three-week extension, 100,000 people jammed Yankee Stadium in 105-degree heat, and at least 10,000 others were turned away, smashing the stadium’s previous attendance record of 88,150, set when Joe Louis fought Max Baer in September 1935. Richard Nixon addressed the crowd and brought greetings from the President. When noise from airplanes departing and landing at La Guardia Airport threatened to detract from Graham’s sermon, a call by a team representative to the airport manager resulted in a quick change in the flight pattern.

  Somewhat disconcertingly, Graham’s triumphs in Madison Square Garden and the financial district and Yankee Stadium had no counterpart north of 125th Street. Racial tension continued to mount in the South, and Martin Luther King’s boycotts, sit-ins, and other forms of nonviolent resistance were turning up the pressure. Graham still felt confrontation was a perilous tactic but was beginning to acknowledge that something more than preaching might be required to secure basic civil rights for minorities. In an interview with the New York Times a few weeks before the crusade, he stressed that the most effective action would be “setting an example of love,” then added, “as I think Martin Luther King . . . has done in setting an example of Christian love.” Given the time and his constituency, this on-the-record endorsement of the controversial civil rights leader was a notable step for the cautious evangelist. However, if he expected it to generate enthusiasm in black churches for the Garden crusade, he was disappointed. Officially, black support of the crusade was heartening; fifty black churches pledged their support, and several black pastors took active roles on crusade committees. Still, the crowds in the Garden were mostly white, and that bothered Graham and his team, who hoped to set an example of interracial fellowship and cooperation. In his Life article the previous fall he had set forth his clear belief that racial prejudice was a sin, and he followed that with similar statements in interviews and press conferences prior to the crusade, observing on one occasion that those who say they love Jesus but hate those whose skin is a different color not only break the commandment to love their neighbor, but by claiming to love God, also take his name in vain. Furthermore, since to hate someone is to wish him dead, such people, he asserted, are guilty of the sin of murder. Some blacks took note of his words; just as the crusade began, a group of black North Carolina ministers invited him to lead a crusade against segregation in his own home state. Still, despite such affirmations and growing awareness of his stand, blacks were not coming out to hear him. Rather than rest content to have it both ways—speaking out against discrimination while letting racist supporters see that his was still a ministry aimed primarily at white people—Graham took concrete steps to follow his own recommendation of “setting an example of love.”

  His first move was to integrate his own organization by inviting Howard O. Jones, a young black pastor from Cleveland, to join his team. Jones organized black youth rallies and spearheaded a service in Harlem at which Graham spoke to a packed house of several thousand blacks. He also helped facilitate a rally at a black church in Brooklyn, where Graham admitted, apparently for the first time in public, that antisegregation legislation would be required to end discrimination, though he added that it would come to naught unless it were supplemented by a strong manifestation of Christian love. These efforts helped increase black attendance at the crusade; U.S. News & World Report estimated that by the end of the crusade, blacks composed almost 20 percent of the typical audience. But more essential at this point than any specific task or result was Jones’s mere presence on the team, and that presence did not go unnoticed. Ostensible Christians, outraged by Graham’s integrationist action, bombarded the New York and Minneapolis offices with angry telephone calls and vile letters. The notorious southern racist John Kasper branded Graham a “negro lover” and attacked him for spreading the Christian religion among black people, for whom it was obviously never intended. On the positive side, Ebony magazine did a feature story on Graham in which he said, “There are a lot of segregationists who are going to be sadly disillusioned when they get to heaven—if they get there,” and pointed out that the absence of a color line in heaven, which he believed the Bible taught, seemed to require that Christians observe no color line on earth.

  Graham was just warming up. Despite his reservations about confrontational tactics, he took an unexpectedly bold step by inviting Martin Luther King to visit with his team and to participate in a crusade service. Behind the scenes, King met with Graham and team members to brief them on the racial situation in America and to sensitize them to key issues, including changes in terminology they needed to know about if they were to relate to blacks effectively. At a private dinner for King in a hotel suite, Graham asked how he and his followers had avoided violence during the Montgomery bus boycott. King gave the perfect answer: “Prayer and the Holy Spirit.” Graham needed nothing more to convince him that King was a man to be trusted and encouraged. On July 18, before a capacity crowd at the Garden, he invited the black leader to join him on the platform and to lead the congregation in prayer. In his introduction he said, “A great social revolution is going on in the United States today. Dr. King is one of its leaders, and we appreciate his taking time out of his busy schedule to come and share this service with us tonight.” The words did n
ot explicitly condone either the revolution or King’s part in it, and King’s prayer called for nothing more revolutionary than “a brotherhood that transcends color,” but the implication was unmistakable: Billy Graham was letting both whites and blacks know that he was willing to be identified with the revolution and its foremost leader, and Martin Luther King was telling blacks that Billy Graham was their ally. According to both Graham and Jones, King also told the evangelist that “your crusades do more with white people than I could do. We help each other. Keep on.” That public, mutual quasi-endorsement, Howard Jones remembered, “brought the house down on Billy.” A fresh batch of irate responses repeated accusations that Graham was “a straight-out integrationist,” “nigger lover,” and troublemaker; declared he had “lost the South” by abandoning evangelism to jump into politics; and even offered the unlikely explanation that his association with King had finally revealed him for what he was: a Communist. Bob Jones, Sr., a staunch foe of integration, pronounced Graham’s ministry dead in the South. “Dr. Graham has declared emphatically,” he said, “that he would not hold a meeting anywhere, North or South, where the colored people and the white people would be segregated in the auditorium, and I do not think any time in the foreseeable future the good Christian colored people and the good Christian white people would want to set aside an old established social and religious custom. . . .” In fact, Graham had no southern crusade scheduled for the next twelve months, but his views were sufficiently well known and his influence so great that he could not escape involvement in the agony of that troubled region.

  By midsummer, Graham was exhausted. He lost so much weight—-thirty pounds by crusade’s end—that, after seeing one of the telecasts, Richard Nixon’s mother called from California to tell him he looked sick and needed to get some rest. He took her advice and began to spend most of the day in bed, working on sermons and husbanding his energy for the daytime appointments he could not avoid and for the enervating combat with Satan each evening in the Garden. Once, he was so distracted that when an attractive woman spoke to him in an elevator, he returned her greeting with a kind of noncommittal friendliness. Not until she got off the elevator did he realize that he had failed to recognize his own wife.

  After a final three-week extension, the crusade finally came to an end on Labor Day, September 2. Jerry Beavan had studied the possibilities for a dramatic finish to the campaign. In a letter to Graham not long after the Yankee Stadium rally, he admitted that “we could quite conceivably let the crusade close without another big meeting . . . but the London crusade is most remembered around the world for those two great meetings on that one final day, rather than for all the other terrific meetings along the way. We can never use mere crowds as the sole criterion for the meeting, but the crowds certainly are a yardstick that the public uses.” A second gathering in Yankee Stadium could not possibly draw a bigger crowd, and if even one seat were empty, “it would be racked up as a failure.” One promising option might be to schedule three consecutive services in different locations, one at the Polo Grounds, one at Ebbets Field, and one at Roosevelt Field in New Jersey. Speakers and the press corps would travel to each one and people could be urged to “avoid the congestion; attend the meeting nearest your home.” Such an extravaganza, Beavan suggested, could be advertised as “the evangelistic meeting of all time.” If Graham thought the logistics of a triple service were too complicated, Beavan suggested that perhaps a single holiday rally in Times Square might work. With a keen sense of the dramatic, Graham chose the latter option. On the evening of Labor Day, from a platform set in the midst of neon lights that hawked some of the most tawdry and temporary of the world’s pleasures, he faced a crowd that jammed Times Square and stretched upward along Broadway for block after block to form a shoulder-to-shoulder ribbon of souls apparently numbering well above the one hundred thousand who had filled Yankee Stadium. His voice crackling through the urban canyon, Billy made one final call for spiritual revival. “Let us tell the whole world tonight,” he boomed, “that we Americans believe in God. . . . that our trust is not in our stockpile of atomic and hydrogen bombs but in Almighty God. . . . that we are morally and spiritually strong as well as militarily and economically. . . . Let us tonight make this a time of rededication—not only to God but to the principles and freedoms that our forefathers gave us. On this Labor Day weekend, here at the Crossroads of America, let us tell the world that we are united and ready to march under the banner of Almighty God, taking as our slogan that which is stamped on our coins: ‘In God we trust.’”

  Postcrusade assessments contained the familiar recitations of “firsts” and “mosts.” With an average attendance of nearly 18,000 per service, the campaign had been the longest-running and most heavily attended event in the history of Madison Square Garden. Counting the crowds at outdoor rallies, total attendance topped 2,000,000 with over 55,000 recorded decisions for Christ. More than 1,500,000 letters had cascaded into Minneapolis in direct response to the weekly telecasts, and at least 30,000 of those told of additional decisions made in the privacy of homes. Lane Adams’s outreach to entertainers resulted in the conversion or rededication of 500 people and led to the founding of the Christian Arts Fellowship, with opera singer Jerome Hines serving as director. This program also helped keep the platform and “celebrity gallery” stocked with well-known figures—Stuart Hamblen, Dale Evans, Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Dorothy Kilgallen (who wrote a multipart profile of Graham for the Journal-American), Pearl Bailey, John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson, Greer Garson, Gene Tierney, ice-skating star Sonja Henie, boxing great Jack Dempsey, Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine, Giant shortstop Alvin Dark, sportscaster Red Barber, and born-again Peruvian headhunter Chief Tarari, among others—who provided the meetings with publicity and legitimation. Society hostess Perle Mesta gushed, “Isn’t it fantastic! I think he is just wonderful! Certainly we need this. It’s all that’s going to save the world.” He, in turn, thought well of them and was pleased to return the compliments. After meeting Gloria Swanson on the Dave Garroway Today Show, he observed that “America would be a wonderful place if more of our film stars were like Gloria Swanson.”

  However much they hoped the stars might be attending the crusade from sincere interest in the Christian gospel, Graham and his team understood that his own considerable celebrity, which they promoted relentlessly, was part of the attraction. To achieve and maintain celebrity, one does well to appear at places where other celebrities (and the people who take their pictures) gather. Sometimes the mixed agendas proved awkward. Gangster Mickey Cohen, fighting to stay out of prison, made an appearance at the crusade and hosted Graham for lunch in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. In later years Cohen claimed that Graham’s people tried to bribe him into becoming a “trophy” convert. Graham and his team flatly deny the allegation, and it seems far more likely Cohen was trying to cast himself in a sympathetic light. But some celebrities, such as black singer and actress Ethel Waters, attended the crusade in a genuine search for meaning. Waters, whose personal life was in serious crisis, found the crusade services a joyful and reassuring return to the simple Christianity in which she had been reared. She soon began singing in the choir and performing solo numbers, including a signature piece, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The crusade marked a profound turnaround for her, and she played a lead role in The Heart Is a Rebel, a World Wide Pictures feature film centered on the New York campaign. Throughout the rest of her life, she appeared as a regular guest performer in Graham’s crusades and remained close to the team, particularly to Grady Wilson, until her death in 1977.

  Analysis of decisions registered at the crusade produced results similar to those of other Graham campaigns. In an ambitious study performed by Robert Ferm, approximately one in five inquirers could not be contacted, some because they had given false addresses. Of the remainder, nearly one in three claimed no church affiliation prior to the crusade, but more than 90 percent of these reported that they had become members of a church or w
ere studying to do so. A similar proportion of those who were already church members prior to the crusade claimed to be aware of a significant difference in their lives since their decision. The Protestant Council of New York estimated that 6,000–10,000 new members were added to the metropolitan area’s 1,700 churches, a welcome but not astonishing gain. A few churches saw a substantial influx of new people. Nearly half of the 373 people referred to Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church—the largest number referred to any single congregation—were previously unknown to the ministers; all were tracked down, and nearly 100 joined the church. The Calvary Baptist Church baptized 30 people as a direct result of the crusade, and other churches reported attendance increases of from 10 percent to 40 percent. At the low end of the spectrum, however, a Christian and Missionary Alliance tabernacle near Times Square received ninety cards. Three came from current members; of the remaining eighty-seven, not a single one showed the slightest interest in further contact with the church. More commonly, a high proportion of the people referred to ministers for follow-up were already members of their congregation or denomination, but pastors reported they had become more effective members, forming the nucleus for new prayer and study groups and participating more vigorously in other aspects of the church’s program. Hoping to improve this yield, Graham returned to the city a few weeks after the crusade ended in an attempt to enlist 1,500 ministers and churches in a massive follow-up campaign in which church members would call on 200,000 homes. That effort, however, fell far short of its goal and reaped no notable harvest. Graham and his team would wrestle with the problem of adequate follow-up for the rest of his career, but given the unavoidable reliance on clergy whose attitude toward them would vary from total commitment to barely concealed cynicism, they would never find a fully satisfactory solution.