There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

26 Billy Sunday Came to Trenton on Monday

124 There’s More to New Jersey . . . “I’m sure glad. I read about you in the paper and I’ve come six miles to see you and I’ve been waiting for a long time. Yes, I’m sure glad I saw you!” It was a striking encounter between two self-reliant women, and Alice Ramsey remembered the moment for the rest of her life. 26 Billy Sunday Came to Trenton on Monday Billy Sunday was his real name, and he was America ’s most famous preacher, bigger than all the modern television evangelists put together. And on a Monday in 1915, Sunday came to New Jersey to bring the word of God to the state legislature. In his youth, the Iowa-born Billy Sunday was a popular outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings baseball team. While making the rounds of Chicago bars with his teammates one night in 1886, he paused to listen to a missionary band playing hymns on the street corner. He followed the band to a storefront mission and before long was won over to Christ. Billy Sunday quit stealing bases and started saving souls, traveling the countryside as an itinerant minister. He brought to the revival trail a powerful stage presence that, together with his fame as a former baseball star, carried him to the top rank of evangelists. His appearances attracted thousands of followers. Wealthy men like the millionaire John D. Rockefeller bankrolled Sunday’s campaigns, and the evangelist appeared in small towns and big cities across the nation. A Billy Sunday performance was something to behold. Pouring sweat and with the veins in his neck bulging, the muscular preacher would leap about the stage, jump up on tables, punch the air with his fist, and smash chairs to smite the devil. Billy Sunday Came to Trenton on Monday 125 He was a fundamentalist who believed in the literal truth of the Bible. He was against sin, of course, but against much of the modern world as well, including what he believed were wicked foreign philosophies like evolution, psychology, birth control, atheism, and socialism. He assured his faithful that Darwin, Galileo, and Plato were all in Hell. He was one of the leading voices in the nation for a total ban on alcohol. In 1915, when he was at the height of his fame, the fifty-two-year-old preacher was holding a revival in Philadelphia when some members of the New Jersey legislature invited him to cross the Delaware to Trenton to speak in the State House on Monday, March 15. New Jersey in those years was changing from the rural, old-time Protestant America that Billy Sunday represented. It was a state with growing cities, filled with foreigners. More than half the people of the state were immigrants or their children. City folk outnumbered farmers by more than two to one. Party bosses and lobbyists from saloons and other special interests played a powerful role in state government. But Trenton turned out for Billy Sunday. A crowd estimated in the thousands waited for hours outside the State House to see him. Some of Sunday’s fans outside climbed on the ledge of the State House to peer through the window. Inside, the Assembly chamber was filled to its maximum capacity of four hundred. Every seat in the galleries and on the floor was filled. In the audience were senators, assemblymen, reporters, State House janitors, and members of the public, as well as Governor James Fielder. The business of the government was adjourned for the day. Billy arrived at the State House that afternoon in a limousine donated by the Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker. The evangelist flashed his famous smile and waved as he emerged from the car, accompanied by his well-known wife, Helen “Ma” Sunday. A delegation of legislators led the Sundays into the Assembly chamber. Once inside, the Speaker of the Assembly and the president of the Senate turned over the chamber to Billy. The evangelist’s musical director, Homer Rodeheaver, warmed up the audience by leading them in the hymn “Brighten the Corner,” accompanied by a trumpet and portable organ. Then the master himself stepped up to the Assembly Speaker’s 126 There’s More to New Jersey . . . desk. The evangelist had a repertoire of hard-hitting sermons that he delivered from memory, and for his Trenton audience he selected one of the...