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In March 1918 Billy Sunday came to Chicago for a ten-week revival. Sunday’s sensational New York City campaign in the spring of 1917 followed by revivals in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., brought the revivalist to Chicago as a religious célèbre. The 1918 Chicago revival, however, would be Sunday’s last revival in a major urban area. The campaign replaced J. Wilbur Chapman’s simultaneous model with a highly centralized evangelistic machine complete with a lakefront tabernacle and trained professional staff. Like the revivalists that preceded him, Billy Sunday brought the tools of modernity to the front line in battling Chicago’s sin. Highly centralized and hyper-masculine, the Sunday revival nevertheless maintained revivalism’s mandate for domestic balance. But Sunday’s portrayal of sin tilted the moral schema toward men and elevated a domesticated masculinity as the epitome of righteousness. Strongly influenced by the rhetoric of the Anti-Saloon League and the Social Hygiene movement, revivalist morality found its virtue in man’s nature and agency and, as a result, by 1918 the sins of the city shifted into the female camp. The earlier revivals of Dwight L. Moody and J. Wilbur Chapman had navigated the shifting gender terrain at the turn of the century. Domesticity within the Moody and Chapman revivals had balanced masculinity with femininity and promoted the godly woman as the antidote to the sins of uncontrolled men. The Billy Sunday revival retained the domestic balance, but men increasingly claimed the moral high ground. Earlier 168 Chapter 4 “I’ll Never Be an Angel If I Haven’t Manhood Enough to Be a Man!” The 1918 Billy Sunday Revival revivals placed morality in the hands of women, who served as buffers and antidotes to the degrading forces of the industrial economy. Now, shifting the moral power to men signaled a stronger reconciliation between faith and the business of corporate consumer culture. Revival rituals were increasingly orchestrated, and in the rhetoric of revivalism men became “angels” and women became “frizzle-headed sissies”; repentant male sinners could no longer “come home”; instead they were told to “be a man!” Just as revivalism’s earlier promotion of virtuous womanhood had sustained suspicions about the “respectability” of black women and men, Sunday’s promotion of white masculinity also cast implicit class and racial aspersions. Sunday’s ongoing emphasis upon domesticity perpetuated white middle-class standards that, even if unintentional, celebrated the separateness and superiority of whiteness. Revivalism’s popularization of white domesticity played well within the broader changes in America society as it more rigidly institutionalized and enforced segregation in the second decade of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, revivalism’s mandate to save individual souls and sustain its moral regime motivated Mr. Sunday to reach across racial lines for the cause of Prohibition. For the sake of this moral goal, middleclass blacks and whites rallied around the common cause of outlawing alcohol . But the now-masculinized domesticity of revivalism undercut that same racial unity. In the end, the 1918 moral outreach appears to have less to do with the establishment of religious inclusivity than with the cultivation of its social and racial boundaries. Chicago’s Divided Demography In 1918 Chicago was more deeply divided in terms of race, ethnicity, and status. When World War I erupted, Chicago industries needed workers to fill wartime jobs. In response, thousands of African Americans joined the Great Migration out of the South, moving into Chicago and other northern cities. Between 1910 and 1920 the city’s African American population grew by 148 percent. The migration triggered significant changes within the black community itself. In the first decade of the twentieth century an economically stable middle class had emerged that was fueled by opportunities in business, the professions, and politics. This new middle class favored black-only economic and social institutions in contrast to Chicago’s The Billy Sunday Revival 169 older, more integrationist black elites. The Great Migration, however, meant greater numbers of poorer blacks arriving from the rural South, whose lifestyles accentuated the status differences between the newly arrived and their social “betters.” In particular, the middle class viewed the recent arrivals as threats to their own social responsibility and stability. Of particular concern were the leisure-time activities of the newly arrived migrants who found community in saloons and entertainment in petty gambling. Participation by poorer blacks in what were viewed as “immoral” activities by their black “betters” seemed to validate white...

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