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Mm-hmm. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. 100 years ago, Billy Sunday was among the most famous and influential men in America. Here to share another story is Robert Morgan, who is the author of 100 Bible Verses That Made America, Defining Moments That Shaped Our Enduring Foundation of Faith. Let's take a listen.
His name was Billy, and he was an evangelist, but he wasn't Billy Graham. Before Billy Graham, there was Billy Sunday. This man was born in 1862 outside Ames, Iowa, in a little log cabin with rough boards for a floor. It was during the Civil War, and Billy never saw nor knew his father. The elder Sunday, William, was a contractor and brickmason.
He enlisted in the Union Army, and while fording a river, he became wet to the skin, contracted a severe cold, and died from pneumonia during the war. He was buried at Camp Patterson in Missouri. The young widow, Mary, tried to raise her new baby and his older brother, Ed, but it was a hard prairie life. Billy grew up milking cows, cutting wood, building fences, and riding horses. Despite her best efforts, Mrs.
Sunday couldn't provide for her boys, and at length she sent them to the soldiers' orphans home at Glenwood, Iowa. Billy later recalled how she took them to the train station, her eyes red with tears, and put them on the train without even being able to give them enough money for the ticket. A kind railroad man, touched by their story, let them ride for free. When Billy was fourteen, he went with his brother Ed to live with their grandfather back near Ames. Shortly afterward, Billy was able to enroll in high school.
He proved to be a sensational athlete. His speed as a runner was incredible, and he became known as one of the few people in the country who could run 100 yards in 10 seconds. After graduating from high school, Billy moved to another town and joined the local baseball team. He excelled as a player. and caught the attention of Cap Anson.
Also from Iowa, who had been a famous baseball player with the Chicago White Stockings, today known as the Chicago Cubs. Anson persuaded Billy to move to Chicago and join the team. And just like that. Billy Sunday became a professional baseball player. His speed and athleticism, along with his outgoing and friendly personality, made him a celebrity wherever he went.
He specialized in stealing bases with 94 steals in just one season. He was the first man to circle the bases in 14 seconds from a standing start. He stole 96 bases in one season, which was a record second only to Ty Cobb's 98. One day he was strolling around the Chicago streets with some of his baseball friends. He saw a small crowd gathered in an empty lot and at the corner of State and Van Buren streets.
It was an outdoor evangelistic rally. Billy and his friends stopped to listen and soon sat down on the curb and heard every word of the sermon. He did the same for several nights in a row. The Pacific Guard mission had been started by Colonel George Clark and his wife Sarah. It was Sarah who sat down with him.
Talked with him like a mother, and led him to confess Jesus Christ as his Savior. Not long after his conversion, Billy suffered an injury while sliding into base. He always slid head first, but this time something went wrong and he hurt his knee. When the Chicago White Stockings took a promotional trip around the world, Billy was advised by his doctor to stay home, and soon he was working actively in a nearby Presbyterian church. He also joined the YMCA.
which at that time was focused on training young men in the Bible. Billy learned everything that he could. One Sunday he was asked to teach a class of young men. The guys in the class wanted to talk to him about his baseball career. Finally, he promised to meet with them the next day to talk about baseball if he could only teach them the Bible during the class period that day.
Well, that was the beginning. For several years, Billy played professional baseball in Chicago and then in Pittsburgh and finally for the Philadelphia Phillies, all the while teaching the Bible and giving religious talks at YMCAs in every city where the team traveled. Before long, pastors began asking him to speak from their pulpits at Sunday services. One newspaper said, It is something of a novelty to see a professional ball player get up in the pulpit and forgetting base hits, home runs, brilliant catches, and the roar of the crowd for a while, expound on the great doctrines of Christ in such a forcible manner as to almost bring tears to the eyes of over 1,500 people. Along the way, Billy met a young woman named Helen Thompson.
She was a Sunday school teacher. Her father too had been a Union soldier in the Civil War and had been wounded at Shiloh. Billy was 24 years old when they met and they were married in 1888. Billy retired from baseball in 1891 to engage in Christian work and he became an assistant to one of the best known evangelists of the day, Dr. J.
Wilbur Chapman. This went on for three years until Chapman accepted the invitation of a church to become its pastor.
Well, that freed up Billy to begin conducting his own campaigns and crusades, mostly in Iowa at first. These meetings were held in large churches or auditoriums. But these proved too small for the numbers, but even the largest tents were too small.
So the advance teams began building special tabernacles that could hold enormous crowds. One reporter said. You are in the largest room you ever saw. and the whole scene is glorious with electric light and bunting. The building you have entered will seat about 10,000 and there is standing room for 2,000 or 3,000 more.
Well, Billy Sunday was perhaps the most athletic preacher who ever lived. He ran back and forth across the platform. Jumped onto chairs, pounded the pulpit, kicked the pulpit, shook his fist, leaped into the air, and traveled at least a mile per message around the stage.
Sometimes he smashed chairs across the pulpit. and then suddenly he would lean over the desk. Look exhausted, his suit wet with perspiration, and say, You know that God has spoken to you. You know that without Christ you are lost and that with Him you are saved. You know your duty and your privilege and now without another word from me and before anyone can have a chance to say anything to you, how many of you will settle the great question without the delay of another minute by coming forward to take me by the hand and by so doing confess and accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior who will come.
From all over the tabernacle, people would come forward in large numbers to give their lives to Christ. I was brought to Christ through the preaching of the evangelist Billy Sunday in the city of Boston. I was 24 years of age at the time. and utterly indifferent to the things of God, an agnostic, I think. At least I was read in the literature of agnosticism and felt that I could answer most of the propositions that preachers put before me concerning my responsibility to God.
The church didn't have much for me, it seemed. Always I felt the preacher was saying, be good, be good, and there were two things wrong with that. One was that I knew I couldn't be good if I wanted to, and the other was I didn't want to be good in the first place. But this man told me something else. Billy Sunday said, I was a sinner.
and that I needed Christ. I found something so earnest about the man that I couldn't help but listen intently to what he had to say. As I recall, I didn't believe a word he was saying. but was impressed with the fact that he believed everything that he said. And you've been listening to Robert Morgan, author of 100 Bible Verses That Made America.
and you're hearing the story of Billy Sunday. He never really knew his father or lost him in the Civil War to pneumonia. His mom couldn't handle raising the kids. Off he was sent to various homes and then ultimately to family. While in high school, he excelled as an athlete, as a baseball player, and would join the team in Chicago, the professional team that would become the Chicago Cubs.
And an A space dealer, he was 96 in the season, only Ty Cobb. Add more. What drew him to the Lord was an evangelical rally. He went nights in a row, then gave his life to the Lord, and then ultimately, well, he just started to preach. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Billy Sunday.
The Billy Graham of his day here. on our American stories. Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts. I um I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown.
Some things you'd rather type. Then say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful.
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America needs to be taken down to God's bathhouse and the hose turned on her. And the time isn't far distant when the wheels of God's judgment are going to go sweeping through this old God-hating world. And I want to take a pledge in this audience to join me in a pledge that you will never rest until this old God-hating, Christ-hating, whiskey-soaked, Sabbath-breaking, blaspheming, infidel, bootlegging old world is bound to the cross of Jesus Christ by the golden chains of love. Billy Sunday's mother, who had so carefully put her sons on the train for the orphanage years before, lived long enough to see her son preaching to the great crowds. She had a special seat on the platform in many of his great meetings.
The floors of the tabernacle were sawdust and the aisles were sawdust. That gave rise to a famous phrase that developed from the Billy Sunday Crusades, hitting the sawdust trail. It meant going forward to be saved. When Billy's Sunday campaign came to town, it was a sensational event. One newspaper said about the meeting in that particular town.
Every walk of life was influenced. It could not be resisted. It went into every office, every shop, every home, every street. It claimed converts in every profession. The police of the city were captured.
Every policeman placed on duty at the tabernacle hit the Saada's trail. The chief himself, seated on the platform, made a hearty and open confession of Christ. Lawyers, physicians, merchants, artisans of every description all added their quota to the harvest of the evangelist. The newspaper article went on to say, Men and women were carried off their feet. Men who had never listened to a religious appeal surrendered to the call of Christ.
Many who had hated evangelism and feared the gospel. were caught in the throes of decision. The total number of converts during the campaign was 18,149. There were 95 tabernacle meetings held, and the aggregate attendance was nearly a million people. Everywhere Billy Sunday went resulted in the town or city being changed.
The Ohio State Journal said about the story and statistics of one Ohio city, and the opinion of men who have studied the campaigns of great revivalists. This record surpasses all figures thus far compiled in the United States and abroad and may be taken as the greatest evangelistic demonstration of modern times. For more than seven weeks, hundreds of businessmen neglected their private affairs. For an equal period, social engagements were disregarded or sidetracked. For that length of time, 60 churches closed their doors so people could attend the meetings, and the pastors devoted most of their time to advancing the work of the campaign.
And during all those days, the Reverend Billy Sunday, the baseball evangelist, talked and prayed, sweated and pranced about the platform, besought and entreated with sinners, flayed with scalding invective every sort of wickedness, and endeared himself personally to the multitudes who either had been openly or covertly antagonistic. Under the spell of his oratory and the persuasive influence of his co-workers, all manner of men were made to take a new view of life. City and county officials, saloon keepers and professors, society women and shop girls, school children, and avowed agnostics stood up and said, publicly, I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. When Sunday held a campaign in Los Angeles, he met Charlie Chaplin. The famous actor later said, I was swept off my feet.
I had known I was to meet him and had tried to think of some nice things to say. But I just could not talk. I had a bad attack of stage fright. He put his arm around my shoulder and then I felt sure he was going to ask me about my soul. But he did not.
He asked me to join the family in his dressing room. I followed him in, still dazed. There was nothing artificial about the manor's family. I did not think of him then as Reverend Mr. Sunday.
Like just plain belly. Come in!
Well, in all, Billy preached for about 40 years and held more than 300 campaigns or crusades. He was seen and heard by an estimated 100 million people, more than any other person in history up to that point. It's estimated he led over a million people to place their faith in Christ. In spite of that, people sometimes look back and criticize Billy Sunday for his theatrics. For the large love offerings he received at the end of each meeting, and for his alleged neglect of his children.
Billy and Helen had three sons and a daughter, each of whom suffered tragedy. Helen Sunday died of pneumonia in 1932. George was arrested for drunkenness and auto theft before he committed suicide in 1933. After Billy Sunday's death in 1935, Billy Jr. died in an automobile crash.
And Paul, who became a test pilot, died in an airplane crash in 1944. After World War I, Billy's popularity waned and his health declined. Their daughter's death devastated him. And not long afterward, as he was preaching, Helen saw that something was wrong with him. She slipped out of the crowd into the church office and told one of his associates to go onto the platform and help him.
The man said, What will I do? Mars Sunday said. I don't know, but something is wrong. You'll just have to figure it out yourself. You'll just have to let the Lord lead you in what to do.
The man went on to the platform and put his hand on Billy's shoulder. He said, Voss, you're not feeling very well just now. Let me finish the sermon for you. He led Billy to a side door and a doctor was waiting there. Billy had suffered a heart attack.
After a long recovery and with invitations coming from all over the country, Billy tried to preach again. but he had another heart attack in Chattanooga. After another recovery, he accepted yet another invitation to preach. A few days later, Billy was so weak he was sitting in a chair with a blanket around his knees. He felt like eating some rice krispies.
and coal milk. In a few minutes he called out, Nell, Come quick, I've got an awful pain. He said it was running across his chest. They put an ice bag on his chest and a hot water bottle on his feet. He relaxed and Nell went over to the desk to write some letters.
He said, I'm getting dizzy, Ma. And he was gone. It was November 6, 1935. Billy Sunday was 72 years old. But Billy's influences lived long after him.
and it paved the way for that other famous Billy, Billy Graham. There's not a person here that could live the Christian life except... Except Christ live it through you and in you. Yeah. How odd.
The two billies spanned the twentieth century. Bringing the Gospels to the masses. Billy Sunday in the early days. and Billy Graham. For the rest of the century.
and a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Robert Morgan, who's the author of 100 Bible Verses That Made America. And what a story he told here. The two billies that would do evangelical crusades throughout the world and throughout the 20th century. Without Billy Sunday, More than likely, there may not have been a Billy Graham.
These two guys were the bookends of this remarkable century. Billy Sunday's campaigns when they came to town changed the town. Everybody came, skeptics, atheists, agnostics, and believers alike, lawyers, doctors, merchants. Men and women carried off their feet. Hundreds of millions witnessed and one million or more gave their lives to Christ as a result.
and then the death bioheart attack. But what a life lived, the life of Billy Sunday. the baseball evangelist who led the way for Billy Graham. Here on Our American Stories. Imagine winning game day before the whistle blows.
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