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Saturday May 15, 1915
From the Metropolitan: "Back of Billy Sunday" by John Reed
But before we get to Reed's article, we stop to notice that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also has a few things to say about this most favored preacher of the Capitalist Class. Miss Flynn is on a tour of the western states, and is currently in California. Her comments were found in yesterday's Santa Ana Register:
Back of Billy Sunday
By John Reed
Illustrations by GEORGE BELLOWS
BILLY Sunday, the sweat pouring from his red face, his trembling tense left leg thrust out behind, both arms stretched wide, as he leaned out over the vast crowd like a diver,
shouted hoarsely:
"Say, it would milk any bishop dry to stand here and preach eight or nine weeks! If you don't believe me, try it."
And twenty thousand people, worked up to the point of hysterics by loathsome, funny
stories, and the uncanny, long-drawn "O-o-o-o-oh, come to Jesus!" broke the tension in a mighty shout of laughter.
So Billy, and "Ma" Sunday, his wife, and George, his son and business agent, and his wife
and baby, motored to John Wanamaker's country house for a day of rest.
Billy had preached sixteen sermons in six days, they said. Homer W. Rodeheaver, his choirmaster and chairman, was also visiting out of town. Jack Cardiff, his ex-prize-fighter trainer and bodyguard, was holding evangelistic meetings on his own account in Reading. Bentley D. Ackley, his secretary, pianist, and the composer of his gospel hymns, was
playing golf at Whitemarsh. Joe Steice, his mechanical inventor and tabernacle constructor, who insists on non-union labor for the glory of the Lord, was at the Central Trades Council, they said with a grin, showing organized labor the wickedness of being organized. Mrs. Ascher and Miss Saxe, subsidiary preachers, alone did not alter their schedule. They were organizing workingmen and working-girls in the factories into Bible classes.
At the white-faced house on Spring Garden Street, which was rented for Sunday, other less important members of the party were about—large, determined-looking women with glasses and a breezy middle-western twang, running up and down stairs and talking loudly about household affairs. A big raw-boned Swedish woman, with the light of Salvation in her eyes, opened the door for us and let us into the parlor—which was the most screamingly hideous example in the world of what bad taste and much money can do. There were heavy gilt moldings, a " satin-finish " wall-paper of violent green leaves and purple morning-glories, mirrors from ceiling to floor, fearful oil paintings in shadow boxes, bunches of artificial lilacs in vases with red electric lights concealed in them. There were enormous wreaths and bunches of flowers standing everywhere, presents to Billy Sunday; pictures in heavy gilt frames; a two-hundred-dollar Victrola; and a railway engine made entirely out of baby-blue wicker, four feet high and seven feet long presented, full of flowers, by the railroad men of the Reading. A white-haired, stout old lady, with the exultant look of a village social leader who has ruined her worst enemy, loomed upon us in the corner. Without any preface she said:
"You're newspaper folks, ain't you? Well, we've jarred this town loose! We've stirred 'em up some! Huh! Conservative Philadelphia! Conservative, indeed!"
Two male members of the party chewing tooth-picks were reading the stock reports in the evening papers. One said:
"I tell you what, Jim; with wheat going the way it is now, those fellows that got in on wheat shorts are certainly the lucky guys!"
He rose abstractedly from his seat, slipped in a record, and the Victrola produced dismal strains of "'Way Down Upon the Suwanee River." The violent smell of continuous cooking drifted from the dining-room, the clatter of dishes; lady members of the party in aprons shouted to one another, "Jane, haven't them beans come yet?"
A STEADY stream of clergymen in chokers, and Y. M. C. A. officials with the hard eye of an efficiency expert, and pale, undernourished converted stenographers and clerks, and fat, emotional women in furs, drifted in and out. The entrance of Mr. Rodeheaver, and the loud voice of the servant-girl saying, "Homer, there's a couple of magazine men in there," caused us to rise.
"What do they want?" said Mr. Rodeheaver suspiciously.
"They want to see Mr. Sunday."
Mr. Rodeheaver came in, a short, stocky man with a deep, sanctimonious voice, suspicious eyes, and the kind of a clammy hand that won't let yours go.
"No, boys, I can't help you. You'll have to see Mrs. Sunday. She runs everything around here. If she tells you you can see Billy, you can see him. Yes, I'm a convert. All the party are converts of Mr. Sunday's. You come back to-morrow morning."
So it occurred to us that we might pass the time interestingly if we looked up members of the Sunday Campaign Committee who had invited Billy Sunday to regenerate Philadelphia.
Now the Campaign Committee is composed of forty-four of the most prominent businessmen of Philadelphia, and about an equal number of clergymen. For the clergymen, we went to the Reverend George H. Bickley, vice-chairman of the entire
committee, a hard-eyed individual, with a slack enthusiastic mouth
"The reason for getting Billy Sunday here is quite simple," he said, smoothly. "It is moral
regeneration—the saving of souls—the first step in the regeneration of the city, the state and the country. Reform is in the air. A number of the most prominent businessmen in Philadelphia, realizing the futility of materialistic reforms—you know, that kind of reform doesn't last, while conversion to Christ does—determined to invite Billy Sunday here to preach. The bringing of men to Christ is the first prime fundamental reform; and, of course, after that is accomplished no other reform is necessary. If all men were converted the world would be good."
"What is it that determines Sunday to come to a city?" I asked.
He misunderstood the spiritual nature of my question.
"The Citizens' Committee secured pledges to the amount of $50,000 to underwrite the cost of the campaign," he said glibly. "We took the pledges to the banks as collateral, and borrowed cash to float the enterprise. In that is included the cost of the tabernacle, rent of offices, employment of staff, literature and rent of halls for meetings, rent of house for the Sunday party, and all other expenses while in town, and payment of two-thirds of the salaries of Mr. Sunday's assistants, which run from $25 to $100 a week. There are eighteen in the party, and most of them are on the payroll. Mr. Sunday himself pays the other third out of his own pocket." He paused and fixed us with his cold eye. "Mr. Sunday doesn't get a cent of that," he said.
"What does he get? " we asked.
"Well, on the last day a thank-offering is collected for him. In Wilkes-Barre it amounted to
$19,000; in Scranton, $21,000; and in Pittsburgh, $29,000. Philadelphia will probably give him anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000."
"Not bad wages," we said to ourselves, "for ten weeks' work. And now, Mr. Bickley, does
Sunday's preaching have any particular effect on social and political conditions?"
"Just what do you mean?"
"I mean, will it help make politics any better in Philadelphia? Will it help workingmen to get a living wage? Will it help clean up the Third Ward, where 130,000 people live packed in one-room tenements in the worst square mile of slums in the world?"
"It will!" said the Reverend Bickley enthusiastically. "It will redeem men from the improvidence that comes from drinking. Slums, you know, are largely the fault of those who live there—dirty, disreputable, vicious people. I can give you two examples. Only two weeks ago a manufacturing man from Riverton, N. J., came to hear Sunday, and 'hit the trail.' He had been accustomed to carousing with his associates in a club, and spending his nights in cards and liquor. He returned to Riverton a new man, and went ceaselessly among his vicious associates preaching Jesus Christ. The following week he sent down five hundred of his employees, and more than a hundred were converted. The other was the son of a millionaire, who was fast dissipating the wealth left him in sacred trust by his father among vile women and viler amusements in the low places of Philadelphia. He owns a woolen mill. One night he went to the tabernacle to scoff at Sunday, and was
filled with the vision of Jesus Christ; the next day that man stopped work at his mill at ten o'clock in the morning and had Billy Sunday preach to his workingmen, and he also testified to his own conversion?"
"Did he raise wages after being converted?"
"N-o," admitted the Reverend Bickley; "you see, he has only been converted a week." He paused. "You don't seem to understand; raising wages is a question of economics, not of religion. It would be utterly impossible anyway to raise wages in the textile industry with conditions as they are. What we need is the Republican Party in power before we can hope to do that."
"So the logical result of Billy Sunday's sermons would be the election of the Republican Party?"
"Well," he agreed, "we hope it will help—" We burst out laughing, and he had the grace to blush as he hurriedly said: "But that is not the important thing, you understand. . . ."
* Since this was written Billy Sunday has ended his campaign in Philadelphia and the papers report that his personal thank-offering amounted to $100,000.
Billy Sunday at Work
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