Books: Huckster in the Tabernacle

BILLY SUNDAY WAS HIS REAL NAME (325 pp.)— William G. McLoughlin Jr. —University of Chicago Press ($5.50).

The people of the U.S., who dearly love a good show and are addicted to the principle of truth by endorsement, could not resist a born showman who had once batted .359 for the Chicago White Sox. His name, Billy Sunday, seemed like an assurance of all things good and democratic, and he was endorsed by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

This helps explain the remarkable fact that a man who boasted that he did not know “any more about theology than a jack rabbit knows about pingpong” should have drawn the greatest congregations in history. In the days before radio had disembodied the audience, 100 million Americans came “in person” to hear Billy Sunday. He “saved” a million of them, at the cost, he said, of $2 a soul.

Home Run in Heaven. He was the nation’s favorite orator, at the peak of his decibels more popular even than silver-tongued William Jennings Bryan. Billy put up tabernacles wherever he went—basilicas of raw boards on the reassuring lines of a barn. The tabernacle had several advantages over the tent—it was safer, the used lumber could be sold, and the noise of hammering in the little towns advertised Sunday’s approach for a week in advance. Carloads of sawdust provided an acoustical baffle and a path for sinners to walk forward. On a stage high above the audience, flanked by brass instruments and brass-throated singers, Billy Sunday’s sack suit, white waistcoat, wing collar and spats were put through some of the strangest performances ever enacted in the name of religion. The show awed even the reporters, who sat below the stage in a fine rain of perspiration from the evangelist’s flailing arms and contorted brow.

Billy put on a vaudeville show for the Lord and organized it on big-business lines. Apart from his habitual pitcher’s stance, he had a repertory of skits which included 1) the unrepentant drunk; 2) the “red-nosed, buttermilk-eyed, beetle-browed, peanut-brained, stall-fed old saloonkeeper”; 3) the society woman who spends her time on yachts drinking wine, her “miserable hands red with blood.” His masterpiece was probably his theological version of the popular poem, Slide, Kelly, Slide! In this, Sunday impersonated both God (The Great Umpire of the Universe) and poor Kelly himself, who had taken to the booze. It was climaxed by a home-base slide across the splintery pine boards and the dramatic cry: “You’re out, Kelly!” (i.e., of Heaven).

Forgotten Man. Were the thousands who hit the sawdust trail much different from what they were before they hit? Author William G. McLoughlin Jr., a political science professor at Brown University and Billy Sunday’s first full-dress biographer, believes that most of the “converts” were already pious members of the rural middle class, giving themselves a resounding vote of confidence. Sunday’s product was relatively painless. Only a hog-jowled anarchist, an evil foreign monarch or a bedizened society woman could object to it. Billy’s converts did not have to wrestle with the Lord on their knees and publicly confess their sins. They accepted the evangelist’s big, red-blooded handshake and sometimes they signed a vague little pledge card.

But the U.S. began to tire of Sunday. Heywood Broun (not yet a Roman Catholic) called him the “tank-town Torquemada.” Princeton’s Dean Andrew West, “in the name of … the purity and sanctity of our Christian faith,” denied Billy permission to speak on the campus. He died in 1935, most forgotten of men. Booze was legal again, the tabernacle lumber was being used for CCC camps, and other trombones were heard in the land.