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Billy Sunday

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William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (November 19, 1862 – November 6, 1935) was an above-average professional baseball player during the 1880s and then the most popular and best-paid American evangelist during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

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Billy Sunday

Early life

Born in 1862 near Ames, Iowa, Billy Sunday grew up fatherless. William Sunday, who had enlisted in the Iowa Twenty-Third Volunteer Infantry, died of disease at Patterson, Missouri five weeks after the birth of his youngest son. At age ten, Sunday's widowed and impoverished mother was forced to send Sunday and his older brother to the Soldiers' Orphans Home in Glenwood, Iowa.[1] At the orphanage, Sunday gained orderly habits, a decent primary education, and the knowledge that he had exceptional athletic ability.[2] At 16, the maximum age for the orphanage, he left to work for Colonel John Scott in Nevada, Iowa, as a stable boy tending Shetland ponies. Scott gave Sunday a home and the opportunity to attend high school. Although there is no evidence that he completed high school, by 1880 "he was much better educated than the typical American."[3]

Moving to Marshalltown, Iowa, he joined the Fire Brigade for which he had been recruited for his athleticism.[4] In Marshalltown, Sunday worked at odd jobs, competed in tournaments with the Fire Brigade, and played for the town's amateur baseball team. Marshalltown native (and future Hall-of-Famer) Adrian "Cap" Anson helped launch Sunday's big league career after being given an enthusiastic account of his prowess by Cap's aunt, Emily Haviland, an avid fan of the Marshalltown team. [5]

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Professional baseball player

In 1883, A.G. Spalding, then President of the Chicago baseball team, signed Sunday on to the defending 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. In 1885, Sunday raced Arlie Latham, champion sprinter of the American Association, and beat him by ten 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 work for the YMCA in Chicago. Sunday spent time as an assistant to another evangelist, J. Wilbur Chapman, before striking out on his own in 1896. Sunday was ordained in the Presbyterian church in 1903. In the 1920s Sunday was one of the first prominent preachers to make use of 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 erecting wooden buildings for his revivals, called tabernacles, and he covered 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.

Sunday is noted for his "fire-and-brimstone" evangelism. Holding a fundamentalist view of the Bible, he often preached fiery sermons against religious liberalism, evolution, alcohol, dancing, card playing and other vices. His pulpit energy attracted many to Christianity. This in turn led to his accumulating a small fortune through contributions at his revivals. Although he did donate significant sums to religious organizations and to charities, the fact remains that his ministry had made him a wealthy man.

Sunday was a major influence in the temperance movement, which led to the adoption of Prohibition in 1919. One of his most famous sermons was "Booze, Or, Get on the Water Wagon." When the tide of public opinion turned against Prohibition, he continued to support, 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.”

Death

Sunday's popularity waned after World War I as radio and movie theaters became his competitors for the public's leisure time.[6] Sunday 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 Great Depression. True to his word, he had preached against alcohol until his dying day.

Notes

  1. ^ Dorsett, 8-10.
  2. ^ Dorsett, 13.
  3. ^ Dorsett, 14. The 4-H baseball field in Nevada, Iowa is named the Billy Sunday field.
  4. ^ Dorsett, 15.
  5. ^ As of the early 1880s, she had been attending Marshalltown games with her husband Marshall, who was presumably quite a fan, having been an official scorer of the local team back in 1871. In 1916, Cap would recall that Emily "finally induced me to give Billy a chance in Chicago. She was what you call a dyed-in-the-wool fan and never missed a game the Marshalltown club ever played." In 1921, Sunday told veteran writer William Phelon Jr., "It was owing to the fact that Capt. Anson of the Chicago team had an aunt in Marshalltown that I became a big leaguer." Cap "had Aunt Emma there and she was greatly interested in seeing me progress in baseball. She praised my playing to Anson, told him I was about the fastest fielder on earth and insisted that he give me a chance with Chicago and he agreed."
  6. ^ Dorsett, 148.

References

  • 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)
  • Rosenberg, Howard W. Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Captain Anson of Chicago. Arlington, Va.: Tile Books, 2006.
  • Sunday, Billy. The Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
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