Billy Sunday

If you want milk and honey on your bread, you'll have to go into the land where there are giants.

There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.

God pays a good mother. Mothers, get your names on God's pay-roll.

The man who can drive a hog and keep his religion will stand without hitching.

The right preaching of the Gospel will never hurt anything good.

If you would have your children turn out well, don't turn your home into a lunch counter and lodging house.

Man was a fool in the Garden of Eden, and he has taken a good many new degrees since.

The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn't hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees.

There would be more power in the prayers of some folks if they would put more white money in the collection basket.

What have you given the world it never possessed before you came?

Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in.

CHAPTER IX

Battling with "Booze"

The man who votes for the saloon is pulling on the same rope with the devil, whether he knows it or not. – Billy Sunday.

There is a tremendous military advantage in having a definite enemy. The sermons that are aimed at nothing generally hit it. Billy Sunday is happiest and most successful when attacking the liquor evil. Down among the masses of men he learned for himself the awful malignity of strong drink, which he deems the greatest evil of our day.

So he fights it. Everybody will admit – the saloon-keeper first of all – that Billy Sunday is the most effective foe of the liquor business in America today. Small wonder the brewers spend large sums of money in circulating attacks upon him, and in going before him to every town where he conducts meetings, spreading slanders of many sorts.

There is a ghastly humor in the success the brewers have in enlisting the preachers to make common cause with them in discrediting this evangelist. Shrewd men have come quite generally to the conclusion that they will not give aid and comfort to the enemies of righteousness whose interests are best served by criticism of Billy Sunday. All incidental questions aside, Sunday does the Lord's work and is on the Lord's side. It is a pitiable spectacle to see the Lord's servants attacking him; though it is quite understandable why the liquor interest should spend large sums of money in antagonizing Sunday. It would be worth a million dollars to them any day if he could be put out of action.

Wherever Sunday goes a great temperance awakening follows. In eleven of fifteen Illinois towns where he campaigned "dry" victories were won at the next election. Fifteen hundred saloons were put out of business in a single day in Illinois, largely as the result of his work. With characteristic indifference to figures and tabulated results, Sunday has kept no record of the communities which have gone "dry" following his meetings. That consequence is common. His recent presence in Pennsylvania is the surest token that the Keystone State will not much longer be the boasted Gibraltar of the liquor interests. Even up in Pennsylvania's coal regions, with their large foreign population, many communities are going "dry," while individual saloons are being starved out. Within about a year of Sunday's visit there, the number of saloons was reduced by more than two hundred.

So intense is Sunday's zest for temperance that he will go anywhere possible to deliver a blow against the saloon. He has toured Illinois and West Virginia in special trains, campaigning for temperance. During the Sunday campaign in Johnstown ten thousand men in a meeting organized themselves into a Billy Sunday Anti-Saloon League. In Iowa literally scores of towns and counties are reported as having gone dry as a direct result of the Sunday meetings. Muscatine, Ottumwa, Marshalltown, Linwood and Centerville are communities in point. Thirteen out of fifteen towns in Illinois visited by Sunday voted out the saloon. West Virginia's temperance leaders utilized Sunday in a whirlwind campaign through the state. He spoke in ten towns in five days, traveling from point to point in a special car. It is now history that West Virginia went dry by ninety thousand majority. His latest work in the West has been timed to precede elections where the temperance question was an issue. Next to his passion for the conversion of men and women is this consuming antagonism to rum.

More important than his own valiant blows against the saloon is the fact that Sunday makes enemies for the liquor business. Practically all of his converts and friends become enthusiastic temperance workers. In western Pennsylvania he converted practical machine politicians to the old time Gospel and to the temperance cause.

Every campaign is full of incidents like that of the blacksmith, a part of whose business came from a large brewery. When this man became a Sunday convert and a temperance "fanatic," as they termed him, the brewers' business was withdrawn. But the loyalty which Sunday infuses into his followers, rallied to the man's help, and such a volume of Christian business was turned his way that his conversion and the loss of the brewery trade turned out to his profit.

In the Outlook of August 8, 1914, Lewis Edwin Theiss introduces a powerful article, "Industry versus Alcohol," with this Billy Sunday story:

"We were discussing Billy Sunday and the economic effect of his work.

"'The vice-president of the C – Iron Works told me,' said a manufacturer of railway cars, 'that his company could have afforded to pay its employees a quarter of a million dollars more than their wages during the period that Billy Sunday was working among them.'

'The corporation concerned is one of the great steel companies of the country. It employs thousands of men.

"'Why was that?' I asked.

"'Because of the increased efficiency of the men. They were steadier. Accidents decreased remarkably. They produced enough extra steel to make their work worth the quarter million additional.'

"'It is interesting to find that religion has such an effect on every-day life,' I observed.

"'Religion as such had little to do with it,' replied the car-maker, 'except that it started it. The thing that made those men efficient was cutting out the drink. Billy Sunday got them all on the water wagon. They became sober and stayed sober. They could run their machines with steady hands and true eyes. The men themselves realize what a difference it makes. They are strong for prohibition. If the people of Pittsburgh and its vicinity could vote on the temperance question today, the saloons would be wiped out there.'

"'The manufacturers are strong for prohibition, too. They never gave much thought to the matter before. But this demonstration of Billy Sunday's has made us all strong for prohibition. We know now that most of our accidents are due to whisky. For years we have been trying to find a way to secure a high degree of efficiency among our men. We never succeeded. Along comes this preacher and accomplishes more in a few weeks than we have ever been able to do.

"'We know now that until booze is banished we can never have really efficient workmen. We're fools if we don't profit by what he has shown us. Take it from me, booze has got to go. We are not much interested in the moral side of the matter as such. It is purely a matter of dollars and cents. They say corporations have no souls. From this time forth corporations are going to show mighty little soul toward the man who drinks.'"

A great parade of men marks the close of a Sunday campaign. In Scranton the line of march was broken into by a brewer's wagon. The driver was not content with trying to break the line of parade, but he also hurled offensive epithets at Sunday and his converts. Perhaps passive endurance was the virtue called for on this occasion; but it was certainly not the virtue practiced. For those husky mill workers stepped out of line for a moment, bodily overturned the brewer's wagon, and sent the beer kegs rolling in the street, all to the tune of the Sunday war song, "De Brewer's Big Horses Can't Run Over Me."

This song, written by H. S. Taylor, is the most popular one in the Sunday campaign. It is by no means a hymn of worship, but rather a battle-cry. When thousands of men lift their voices in this militant refrain, with whistles blowing and bells ringing in the chorus, the effect is fairly thrilling. Words and music are beneath the consideration of the scholarly musician; but they strike the common mind of the American who wants a battle hymn.

DE BREWER'S BIG HOSSES.A (#Footnote_A)

Oh, de Brewer's big hosses, comin' down de road,
Totin' all around ole Lucifer's load;
Dey step so high, an' dey step so free,
But dem big hosses can't run over me.

Chorus

Oh, no! boys, oh, no!
De turnpike's free wherebber I go,
I'm a temperance ingine, don't you see,
And de Brewer's big hosses can't run over me.

Oh, de licker men's actin' like dey own dis place,
Livin' on de sweat ob de po' man's face,
Dey's fat and sassy as dey can be,
But dem big hosses can't run over me. – Cho.

Oh, I'll harness dem hosses to de temp'rance cart,
Hit 'em wid a gad to gib 'em a start,
I'll teach 'em how for to haw and gee,
For dem big hosses can't run over me. – Cho.

A (#FNanchor_A) Reproduced by permission. Copyright, 1887, by Fillmore Bros. Homer A. Rodeheaver owner. International copyright secured.

Sunday is the Peter the Hermit of the temperance crusade. He inflames men's passions for this righteous war. Most critics call his sermon on "booze" his greatest achievement. He treats the theme from all angles – economic, social, human, and religious. When he puts a row of boys up on the platform and offers them as one day's contribution to the saloon's grist of manhood which must be maintained, the result is electric; all the militant manhood of the men before him is urged to action.

THE FAMOUS "BOOZE" SERMON

Here we have one of the strangest scenes in all the Gospels. Two men, possessed of devils, confront Jesus, and while the devils are crying out for Jesus to leave them, he commands the devils to come out, and the devils obey the command of Jesus. The devils ask permission to enter into a herd of swine feeding on the hillside. This is the only record we have of Jesus ever granting the petition of devils, and he did it for the salvation of men.

Then the fellows that kept the hogs went back to town and told the peanut-brained, weasel-eyed, hog-jowled, beetle-browed, bull-necked lobsters that owned the hogs, that "a long-haired fanatic from Nazareth, named Jesus, has driven the devils out of some men and the devils have gone into the hogs, and the hogs into the sea, and the sea into the hogs, and the whole bunch is dead."