I
Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia I had formed a conception of
him from the newspapers. First of all, he was a baseball player become
revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, screaming vulgarian, a mob
orator who lashed himself and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap
religious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were fables in slang. I
thought of him as vividly, torrentially abusive, and I thought of his
revival as an orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming in
full view to the public mourners' bench. With the penitents I associated
the broken humanity of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her
knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding over a meeting
that was tossed like trees in a storm.
However this preconception was formed, it at least had the merit of
consistency. It was, that is to say, consistently inaccurate in every
particular.
Consider, in the first place, the orderliness of his specially
constructed Tabernacle. Built like a giant greenhouse in a single story,
it covers an immense area and seats fifteen thousand human beings.
Lighted at night by electricity as if by sunshine, the floor is a vast
garden of human faces, all turned to the small platform on which the
sloping tiers from behind converge. Around this auditorium, with its
forest of light wooden pillars and braces, runs a glass-inclosed alley,
and standing outside in the alley throng the spectators for whom there
are no seats. Except for the quiet ushers, the silent sawdust aisles are
kept free. Through police-guarded doors a thin trickle fills up the last
available seats, and this business is dispatched with little commotion.
Fully as many people wait to hear this single diminutive speaker as
attend a national political convention. In many ways the crowd suggests
a national convention; but both men and women are hatless, and their
attentiveness is exemplary.
It is, if the phrase is permitted, conspicuously a middle-class crowd.
It is the crowd that wears Cluett-Peabody collars, that reads the
Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. It is the crowd for
whom the nickel was especially coined, the nickel that pays carfare,
that fits in a telephone slot, that buys a cup of coffee or a piece of
pie, that purchases a shoeshine, that pays for a soda, that gets a stick
of Hershey's chocolate, that made Woolworth a millionaire, that is spent
for chewing-gum or for a glass of beer. In that crowd are men and women
from every sect and every political party, ranging in color from the
pink of the factory superintendent's bald head to the ebony of the
discreetly dressed negro laundress. A small proportion of professional
men and a small proportion of ragged labor is to be discerned, but the
general tone is simple, common-sense, practical, domestic America.
Numbers of young girls who might equally well be at the movies are to be
seen, raw-boned boys not long from the country, angular home-keeping
virgins of the sort that belong to sewing circles, neat young men who
suggest the Y. M. C. A., iron-gray mothers who recall the numbered
side-streets in Harlem or Brooklyn or Chicago West Side and who bring to
mind asthma and the price of eggs, self-conscious young clerks who are
half curious and partly starved for emotion, men over forty with
prominent Adam's apple and the thin, strained look of lives fairly
care-worn and dutiful, citizens of the kind that with all their
heterogeneousness give to a jury its oddly characteristic effect,
fattish men who might be small shopkeepers with a single employee, the
single employee himself, the pretty girl who thinks the Rev. Mr.
Rhodeheaver so handsome, the prosaic girl whose chief perception is that
Mr. Sunday is so hoarse, the nervously facetious youths who won't be
swayed, the sedentary "providers" who cannot open their ears without
dropping their jaws. A collection of decidedly stable, normal, and one
may crudely say "average" mortals, some of them destined to catch
religion, more of them destined to catch an impression, and a few of
them, sitting near the entrances, destined resentfully to catch a cold.
Very simple and pleasant is the beginning. Mr. Sunday's small platform
is a bower of lovely bouquets, and the first business is the
acknowledgment of these offerings. As a means of predisposing the
audience in Mr. Sunday's favor nothing could be more genial. In the body
of the hall are seated the sponsors of these gifts, and as each tribute
is presented to view, Mr. Rhodeheaver's powerful, commonplace voice
invites them to recognition: "Is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company
here?" All eyes turn to a little patch of upstanding brethren. "Fine,
fine. We're glad to see yeh here. We're glad to welcome yeh. And what
hymn would _you_ like to have?" In loud concert the Pittsburgh Plate
Glass Co. delegation shout: "Number forty-nine!" Mr. Rhodeheaver
humorously parodies the shout: "Number forty-nine! It's a good 'un too.
Thank yeh, we're glad to have yeh here." Not only immense bouquets, but
gold pieces, boxes of handkerchiefs, long mirrors, all sorts of
presents, mainly from big corporations or their employees, are on the
tight platform. One present came from a mill, a box of towels, and with
it not only a warm, manly letter asking Mr. Sunday to accept "the
product of our industry," but a little poetic tribute, expressing the
hope that after his strenuous sermon Mr. Sunday might have a good bath
and take comfort in the use of the towels. Every one laughed and liked
it, and gazed amiably at the towels.
The hymns were disappointing. If fifteen thousand people had really
joined in them the effect would have been stupendous. As it was, they
were thrilling, but not completely. The audience was not half abandoned
enough.
Then, after a collection had been taken up for a local charity, Mr.
Sunday began with a prayer. A compact figure in an ordinary black
business suit, it was instantly apparent from his nerveless voice that,
for all his athleticism, he was tired to the bone. He is fifty-three
years old and for nine weeks he had been delivering about fifteen
extremely intense sermons a week. His opening was almost adramatic. It
had the conservatism of fatigue, and it was only his evident
self-possession that canceled the fear he would fizzle.
The two men whom Sunday most recalled to me at first were Elbert Hubbard
and George M. Cohan. In his mental caliber and his pungent philistinism
of expression he reminded me of Hubbard, but in his physical attitude
there was nothing of that greasy orator. He was trim and clean-cut and
swift. He was like a quintessentially slick salesman of his particular
line of wares.
Accompanying one of the presents there had been a letter referring to
Billy Sunday's great work, "the moral uplift so essential to the
business and commercial supremacy of this city and this country." As he
developed his homely moral sermon for his attentive middle-class
congregation, this gave the clew to his appeal. It did not seem to me
that he had one touch of divine poetry. He humored and argued and smote
for Christ as a commodity that would satisfy an enormous acknowledged
gap in his auditors' lives. He was "putting over" Christ. In awakening
all the early memories of maternal admonition and counsel, the
consciousness of unfulfilled desires, of neglected ideals, the ache for
sympathy and understanding, he seemed like an insurance agent making a
text of "over the hill to the poorhouse." He had at his finger tips all
the selling points of Christ. He gave to sin and salvation a practical
connotation. But while his words and actions apparently fascinated his
audience, while they laughed eagerly when he scored, and clapped him
warmly very often, to me he appealed no more than an ingenious electric
advertisement, a bottle picked out against the darkness pouring out a
foaming glass of beer.
And yet his heart seemed to be in it, as a salesman's heart has to be in
it. Speaking the language of business enterprise, the language with
which the great majority were familiar, using his physical antics merely
as a device for clinching the story home, he gave to religion a great
human pertinence, and he made the affirmation of faith seem creditable
and easy. And he defined his own object so that a child could
understand. He was a recruiting officer, not a drill sergeant. He spoke
for faith in Christ; he left the rest to the clergy. And to the clergy
he said: "If you are too lazy to take care of the baby after it is born,
don't blame the doctor."
It was in his platform manners that Sunday recalled George M. Cohan.
When you hear that he goes through all the gyrations and gesticulations
of baseball, you think of a yahoo, but in practice he is not wild.
Needing to arrest the attention of an incredibly large number of people,
he adopts various evolutions that have a genuine emphatic value. It is a
physical language with which the vast majority have friendly heroic
associations, and for them, spoken so featly and gracefully, it works.
Grasping the edge of the platform table as if about to spring like a
tiger into the auditorium, Sunday gives to his words a drive that makes
you tense in your seat. Whipping like a flash from one side of the table
to the other, he makes your mind keep unison with his body. He keys you
to the pitch that the star baseball player keys you, and although you
stiffen when he flings out the name of Christ as if he were sending a
spitball right into your teeth, you realize it is only an odd, apt,
popular conventionalization of the ordinary rhetorical gesture. Call it
his bag of tricks, deem it incongruous and stagey, but if Our Lady's
Juggler is romantic in grand opera, he is not a whit more romantic than
this athlete who has adapted beautiful movements to an emphasis of
convictions to which the audience nods assent.
The dissuading devil was conjured by Sunday in his peroration, and then
he ended by thanking God for sending him his great opportunity, his vast
audience, his bouquets and his towels. When he finished, several hundred
persons trailed forward to shake hands and confess their faith--bringing
the total of "penitents" up to 35,135.
Bending with a smile to these men and women who intend to live in the
faith of Christ, Billy Sunday gives a last impression of kindliness,
sincerity, tired zeal. And various factory superintendents and employers
mingle benignly around, glad of a religion that puts on an aching social
system such a hot mustard plaster.