Billy Sunday
In March of 1918, a giant wooden structure—a tabernacle—began to rise along the shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago’s Loop. This was to be the headquarters for one of the biggest religious revivals to hit Chicago in years. That’s because Billy Sunday was coming back to his hometown.
Sunday remains a uniquely American story. He had been a pro ballplayer in the late 1800s with the Cubs (then known as the White Stockings) and Pittsburgh, finishing with a brief stint in Philadelphia. He found religion after hearing a sermon at Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission and gave up baseball for religious work. Though he lacked formal training, he began preaching around the Midwest, developing a unique style of evangelism using off-beat and off-color language—controversy tended to swarm around Sunday’s persistent use of the word, “damn,” and other foul phrases in his sermons. Away from the pulpit, he maintained a down-home image by always traveling with his soft-spoken wife, “Ma” Sunday.
In the early 20th century, Sunday’s folksy style struck a chord with Americans. Athletic and lithe, he riled up his crowds with nonstop energy, moving to the thunderous rhythms belted out by the two grand pianos that accompanied him on stage, sometimes even smashing 
Billy Sunday limbers up before the camera. His use of bodily theatrics—tumbling and smashing chairs on stage—were a key part of his appeal. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.) chairs to drive home his points. He would work the crowd into a frenzy, then invite the “unsaved” to the stage to promise him that they would live a Christian life. These converts were known as “trail-hitters,” because Sunday’s tabernacle featured aisles covered in sawdust, and walking to him to make the Christian pledge was dubbed, “hitting the sawdust trail.” Sunday’s popularity grew around the country, and in 1917, he had held a revival in New York that claimed a record 98,000 trail hitters.
The war suited Sunday perfectly, for two reasons. First, it gave him a suitable backdrop for his primary aim: outlawing booze in America. War helped the prohibition argument, because the manufacture of alcohol took away from resources that could benefit the war effort and, besides, most brewery owners in the U.S. were German. Additionally, booze had a negative effect on American soldiers. These were not the moral arguments that people like Billy and other temperance backers favored, but they were effective. The passage of the Prohibition amendment was as much about patriotism as about morality.
The war also matched up well with Sunday’s throaty, fire-and-brimstone style. The harsh reality of war was stamped onto Americans psychologically, and Sunday’s preaching fit comfortably into a mind already primed for violence. The Chicago Daily News described one of his sermons: “Hate, expressed in groups of blunt, coarse epithets spurted from his lips. … Words few people dare utter, and not put in print, burst from Billy Sunday’s mouth with a sort of triumph.”
Sunday wove into his sermons harsh and inflammatory observations about the war. He claimed he’d like to kill the Kaiser himself. He said of Germany, “She has used her power to burn cities, sack cathedrals and slay men, murder children, rape women, starve people and inoculate with typhoid and tuberculosis germs. The religion of Germany is the roar of the cannon, the spit of the machine gun, the shrieks of the dying, battlefields drenched with blood. She is happy when she sees these horrors.” The previous December, in Atlanta, when a German pacifist harangued Sunday during a sermon, Sunday invited him onto the stage and punched him. A fistfight ensued. Some in Sunday’s audience piously shouted, “Sock him! Kill him! Lynch him!”
Little wonder that, in the midst of the war, Chicago—and America—was having a difficult time setting its moral compass.
Sunday’s arrival in Chicago in March was front-page news, and until he wrapped up on May 19, the papers followed his movements and reported on his speeches. He was a celebrity. He was warmly received in the office of Mayor Thompson and, in April, welcomed Douglas Fairbanks to his stage. (Sunday was friendly with both, despite Thompson’s support for vice districts and Fairbanks’ well-publicized affair with Mary Pickford—for all his ranting on morality, Sunday had no trouble overlooking the shortcomings of famous friends.) Meatpacking king J. Ogden Armour donated $2,500 to Sunday’s collection box. Sunday visited Cap Anson, his old manager and teammate in Chicago, considered among baseball’s best-ever players. He even dropped in to visit a very conservative Chicago federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in the middle of the biggest trial of the year.
In the end, Sunday’s Chicago revival was a disappointment. He preached 133 sermons at the tabernacle and attracted only 47,609 trail-hitters, well below his goal of 100,000. (he attributed this to the draft.) A few months later, according to a Chicago Tribune article, a group of Chicago Presbyterian ministers sent a rebuke to Sunday, chiding him on his use of foul language and noting that the trail-hitters he attracted usually were just caught up in the moment, and that very few actually became consistent church-goers.
The ministers stated: “We would have been glad if all profanity and all vulgar expressions which really shock the moral sense could have been omitted. We believe, too, that better results would have been obtained if the invitation to trail hitters had not been so indiscriminate.”
- Billy Sunday Ballplayer turned Evangelist
- Getting Around Chicago Automobiles, Streetcars & the L
- The IWW Trial Industrial Workers of the World
- Labor The Growth of Unions
- Loyalty Pro-American Sentiment
- Prohibition Chicago & the Ban on Alcohol
- Terrorism Dynamite Girl and Other Bombings
- Vice Districts The "Wide-Open Town" Philosophy
