Billy Sunday
 |
Billy Sunday |
William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (
November 19,
1863 â€"
November 6,
1935) was noted first as a professional
baseball player, and then more famously as an
evangelist.
Born in
1863 in
Ames,
Iowa, Billy Sunday grew up in a fatherless household, and the family endured significant poverty during his childhood. His father, also named William, enlisted in the Iowa Infantry Volunteers, four months before Sunday was born. He died while on duty a month after his namesake was born, of an unknown disease contracted in a Union Army camp in
Patterson, Missouri. Sunday's mother was left a widow and mother of three sons. She later remarried and had another son and a daughter.
At the age of 13, Sunday and his older brother were sent to the Soldier's Orphanage in
Glenwood, Iowa. He ran away from the orphanage two years later and worked for Col. John Scott in
Nevada, Iowa, as a stable boy tending
shetland ponies. Scott gave Sunday a home and the opportunity to attend school. (The
4-H baseball field in Nevada, Iowa is named the Billy Sunday field.)
Sunday left high school before graduating and moved to
Marshalltown, Iowa. There, he worked at odd jobs, was a runner on a competitive track team and played for the local baseball team.
Marshalltown native (and future
Hall-of-Famer)
Cap Anson saw Sunday play after being told about him by the Marshalltown coach. In
1883 Anson signed Sunday on to the
National League champions, the
Chicago White Stockings. Sunday struck out four times in his first game, a Major League record, and he didn't get a hit until his fourth game. It is said that the expression, "You can't steal first," originally referred to Sunday. He was an exceptionally fast runner, and, although he was thrown out trying to steal a base in his very first game, he was later regarded as the fastest runner in the league. At one point, Sunday raced
Arlie Latham, champion sprinter of the
American Association and Sunday beat him by fifteen feet. Sunday played
professional baseball for eight years for the Chicago,
Pittsburgh, and
Philadelphia National League teams.
One Sunday afternoon while drinking with some of his Chicago teammates, probably in
1887, Sunday was invited to attend a service at the
Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago. He began attending services at the mission regularly, and it was after one of these services that he embraced the Christian religion. Sunday married Helen A. "Nell" Thompson in
1888 and in
1891, he quit baseball to become a street minister for the
YMCA in Chicago. Sunday spent time as an assistant to another
evangelist before embarking solo in
1896. He was ordained in the
Presbyterian church in
1903. In the
1920s Sunday was one of the first prominent preachers to make use of the the new medium of
radio.
After holding his first revival in
Garner, Iowa, Sunday spent the next dozen years holding revivals in the small towns of the rural
Midwest, preaching temperance, personal salvation, and middle-class values. Baseball was his primary means of publicity, and he used his athleticism and energy to express his muscular version of Christianity.
He was a regular speaker on the
Chautauqua circuit. The
Winona Lake Bible Conference in Indiana hosted one of the larger Chautauqua programs in the Midwest, and Sunday began spending part of every summer there. In
1910 the Sundays moved from Chicago to Winona Lake, and their home there is now a museum.
Also in 1910, Sunday held a revival in Bellingham, Washington. By then Sunday had begun building wooden tabernacles for his revivals and covering the floors with sawdust, to deaden background noise. There in the Northwest, a loggers' term for coming home from the woods began to be used to describe people accepting Christ. From that time on being converted by Billy Sunday was called "hitting the sawdust trail."
Sunday's fame and stature soon outgrew the Midwest and steadily spread across the country. In
1914 he preached at
Carnegie Hall, and in
1915 President
Wilson received him at the White House. He preached in Philadelphia in
1915 and claimed 42,000 converts, and the next year he preached in Boston and "saved" 65,000. Sunday reached the pinnacle of his career in New York City in
1917, when he held a revival that lasted for more than two months and claimed over 98,000 converts.
By
World War I, Billy Sunday had become the most successful evangelist the United States had ever known. His sermons reached hundreds of thousands of people, and he was widely quoted and admired. He was an influential social leader who supported and popularized conservative causes.
Billy Sunday is most noted for his "
fire-and-brimstone" approach to evangelism. Holding a strictly
fundamentalist view, he would often preach fiery sermons against political liberalism,
evolution, alcohol, and so forth. His energy and vitality won many
converts to Christianity. This in turn led to his accumulating a small fortune through contributions at his sermons.
Sunday is noted as being one of the major social influences in the
temperance movement leading to the adoption of
Prohibition in
1919. One of his most famous sermons was "Booze, Or, Get on the Water Wagon," which convinced many people to give up drinking. As the tide of public opinion turned, he continued to strongly support Prohibition, and after its repeal in
1933, Sunday called for its reintroduction. He said, "I am the sworn, eternal and uncompromising enemy of the liquor traffic. I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command." Sunday preached that "whiskey and beer are all right in their place, but their place is in hell."
His popularity waned in his later years and he even became the subject of derision. One of his revival songs, "Brighten the Corner Where You Are," became a drinking song in the
blind pigs that prospered during Prohibition. The line "Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar" called the waiter for another stein of beer. One line in the popular
Frank Sinatra song "Chicago," written by
Fred Fisher in the
1920s, calls "Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down." He died a wealthy man in
1935 at the depth of the
Depression, leaving a large estate as well as
trust funds for his children. True to his word, Billy Sunday had preached against alcohol until his dying day.
*
Selected sermons*
Revival takes a bite out of crime*
Huge database of Sunday images and content*
Billy Sunday's grave*
Audio Sermons by Billy Sunday*
National Prohibition of Alcohol in the U.S.*
Billy Sunday's baseball career*
Billy Sunday Home Museum*
*Allen, Robert.
Billy Sunday: Home Run to Heaven. Mott Media: Milford, MI. 1985
*Bruns, Roger.
Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
*Dorsett, Lyle W.
Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991.
*Ellis, William T.
Billy Sunday: His Life and Message. Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston Co., 1914.
*Firstenberger, William A.
In Rare Form: A Pictorial History of Baseball Evangelist Billy Sunday. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
*Knickerbocker, Wendy.
Sunday at the Ballpark: Billy Sunday's Professional Baseball Career 1883-1890. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
*Martin, Robert F.
Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of American Society, 1862-1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
*McLoughlin, William G.
Billy Sunday Was His Real Name. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
* Nevada Community Historical Society Inc. (2003).
Voices from the Past: The Story of Nevada, Iowa, Its Community and Families. Unknown press (Nevada Community Historical Society, Inc., PO Box 213, Nevada, Iowa 50201-0213; 515-382-6684)
*Sunday, Billy.
The Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
