A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Billy found the offer appealing. At this point he knew little about Evangelical history and certainly had no vision of recreating the hegemony Charles Finney and his friends had enjoyed a century earlier. Neither was he involved in the strategies of the new National Association of Evangelicals in more than a casual way. His main motive, by now his abiding obsession, was “to win as many to Christ as I could,” and this seemed to be the best chance he was likely to get. It also promised to feed his pleasure at standing in the circle of Christian leaders. More mundanely, he relished the chance to see the country, and he and Ruth sorely needed an increase in salary. Ruth also liked the idea; for some time, she had been chipping away, reminding him that God had called him to evangelism, not the pastorate. Since the church expected him to leave for the army, the cutting of that tie would not be difficult. Billy found it awkward to resign his chaplaincy commission after pushing so hard to obtain it, but when he learned that the weight loss and weakness caused by his illness would limit him to a stateside desk job, he requested and received permission to be released from his commitment. Soon afterward, early in 1945, he accepted Johnson’s invitation, with the stipulation that his duties include “not one bit of paper work.”

  Chicago’s importance as a cultural and economic center, its location in the heartland of midwestern Evangelical Christianity, and Torrey Johnson’s dynamism combined to move the Chicagoland Youth for Christ into the front rank of the most notable youth movement in America at the time. In July 1945 more than six hundred youth leaders from all over North America met at the famed Fundamentalist conference center at Winona Lake, Indiana, and formed Youth for Christ International. They accepted the doctrinal statement fashioned by the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and held themselves out as a viable alternative to theological liberalism. Torrey Johnson was elected president, George Wilson was named secretary, and at Chuck Templeton’s nomination, Billy Graham became the organization’s first official field representative, a role he had already been filling unofficially for several months. Significantly, none of the participants paid much attention to denominational labels. “We never inquired as to a man’s background,” Johnson noted. “It didn’t even occur to us. We just loved Jesus Christ supremely.”

  As field representative, Graham traveled almost constantly, speaking at rallies of high school and college students, addressing civic clubs and Gideons and Christian businessmen’s groups, and showing ministers and youth leaders how to establish Youth for Christ (YFC) chapters in their cities. More than once he had to dissociate YFC from free-lance evangelists who had built up extravagant expectations, then absconded in the wake of financial or moral misadventures. Seeing the terrible disillusionment trusting church folks had suffered stirred deep revulsion within him and added an increasingly dogged determination to adhere to high standards of morality and ethics. During 1945, with the help of a credit card provided by one of the organization’s wealthy backers and automobiles furnished by car dealers and other supporters, Graham visited forty-seven states, logging at least 135,000 miles and receiving United Airlines’s designation as its top civilian passenger. Perhaps sensing the start of a lifelong pattern, and pregnant with their first child, Ruth Graham packed their meager possessions and moved in with her parents, who had settled in Montreat after the war forced them out of China. Her mother taught her skills of homemaking that had not come naturally to her. More important, her parents provided her with companionship to ease the loneliness she felt during her husband’s long absences, and family to share important moments—when their first child, Virginia (always called “GiGi”), was born on September 21, 1945, Billy was away on a preaching trip. Though she found great comfort in the bosom of her family, Ruth displayed an unusual capacity for solitariness, and she soon developed a stock response she would still be repeating decades later: “I’d rather have a little of Bill than a lot of any other man.”

  The rounds of meeting with eager church leaders during the day, preaching to thousands of excited young people in the evenings, then piling back onto a noisy DC-3 for a bumpy all-night ride to the next city where the whole process began anew the next morning, was exhilarating but exhausting. Graham and Johnson needed help and persuaded Chuck Templeton to leave Toronto to work full-time for YFC. Graham then lured T. W. Wilson from a Georgia pastorate by providing him with a plane ticket to Los Angeles, arranged for him to address a crowd of 6,000—by far the largest he had ever faced—and pointed out, “T, you could be doing this all the time.” These were heady days for the young movement. As Chuck Templeton observed, “We were just these dynamic, handsome young guys, you know, full of incredible energy, full of vitality, and we were totally committed . . . every one of us. We really thought we were involved in a dramatic new resurgence of revivalism over the country.” To underline their announcement that Christianity did not have to be drab and dismal but could provide “Old-fashioned Truth for Up-to-date Youth” and be “Geared to the Times, but Anchored to the Rock,” YFC leaders wore colorful suits and sport coats, neon “glo-sox,” garish hand-painted ties, and gaudy bow ties, some of which lit up. The rallies themselves were a sort of Evangelical vaudeville, with usherettes, youth choirs and quartets and trios and soloists, “smooth melodies from a consecrated saxophone,” Bible quizzes, patriotic and spiritual testimonies by famous and semifamous preachers, athletes, entertainers, military heroes, business and civic leaders, and such specialty acts as magicians, ventriloquists, and a horse named MacArthur who would “kneel at the cross,” tap his foot twelve times when asked the number of Christ’s apostles and three times when asked how many persons constituted the Trinity, a performance that led emcees to observe that “MacArthur knows more than the Modernists.” The sermon, of course, was the climax toward which all the preliminaries pointed. As Billy Graham observed, “We used every modern means to catch the attention of the unconverted—and then we punched them right between the eyes with the gospel.”

  George Wilson once produced a show that included a sonata for one hundred pianos, but no program ever packed more excess wallop than Torrey Johnson’s Soldier Field rally on Memorial Day, 1945. Johnson’s friends had warned him he could never hope to fill Chicago’s largest facility, but his faith was such that he mortgaged his home to guarantee the twenty-two-thousand-dollar rental fee. Spurred by the twin specters of humiliation and homelessness, he spared no effort to prove the doubters wrong. For weeks beforehand, five evangelistic teams held one-night rallies in 150 cities and towns in the Chicago area to drum up a crowd, and Evangelical publications carried stories promising a grand spiritual extravaganza. The publicity worked, and on the appointed day 70,000 young people packed the cavernous stadium to the light poles. Few could have felt Torrey Johnson had not delivered what he had promised. A 300-piece band accompanied a 5,000-voice choir and soloist Pruth McFarlin, “America’s greatest negro tenor.” Bev Shea sang, and an ensemble of eight grand pianos, eight marimbas, and one vibraharp entertained the crowd with “a heartwarming medley of old-fashioned hymns and classics.” In keeping with the organization’s admiration for a kind of muscular Christianity, a natural theme for virile young men in a wartime atmosphere, world-champion miler Gil Dodds ran an exhibition race, and a young man from the University of Virginia told how Christ had helped him become national intercollegiate boxing champion in the 155-pound class. A missionary pageant followed, featuring hundreds of young people dressed in costumes “representing the bleeding nations of the world and disclosing their spiritual need.” As part of its unabashed patriotic emphasis, especially appropriate on this Memorial Day as the first troops were returning from Europe after the German surrender, the program gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. In addition to an abundant display of flags and the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” four hundered white-clad nurses formed a marching cross that entered the field as the band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Then, while every serviceman stood to receive the applause of the gratefu
l and admiring throng, Rose Arzoomanian sang “God Bless Our Boys,” and four hundered high school students placed a memorial wreath on a platform crowned by a large blue star. After taps was sounded, Lieutenant Bob Evans, a Wheaton graduate and chaplain who had been wounded several times and had pledged to return to Europe to preach the gospel in the very places where he had fallen, appealed to the crowd to sign applications for war bonds while a lone drummer played a dramatic solo from the middle of the field. Finally, after a stirring challenge from featured speaker Percy Crawford, another pioneer in the youth-rally movement, all the lights in the stadium went out. As the choir sang “The Gospel Light house,” a strong beacon circled the stands, falling on the crowd to remind them of their own obligation to be “the light of the world.” Then, while George Wilson pronounced the benediction in total darkness, a huge black-light sign, high on the platform and hidden till this moment, eerily proclaimed the heart of the Evangelical message: “JESUS SAVES.”

  Torrey Johnson had a habit of making assignments by telling his young assistants, “I believe God wants you to go to. . . .” At least in retrospect, two such directives must have seemed especially providential to Billy Graham. On one of his earliest trips for YFC, he spoke at a Minneapolis rally, where he formed an immediate and durable bond with George Wilson. Then, during the summer of 1945, while trying to spend more time at home with Ruth during her pregnancy, he spoke at the Ben Lippen Conference Center in neighboring Asheville. Shortly before the meeting was to begin, he discovered that his regular song leader had unexpectedly returned to Chicago. Someone suggested he enlist Cliff and Billie Barrows, two young musicians who were spending their honeymoon in the area. Both Cliff and Billie had attended Bob Jones College, and Cliff had heard Graham speak, but they had never met. Barrows, an appealing young California athlete with a radiant wholesomeness that could light up a tabernacle, had served as a chorister for Jack Shuler, a young evangelist at least as popular as Graham. Billy was less than enthusiastic about using an unknown musical team but had little choice. That night Billie Barrows played the piano, Cliff sang a solo, the two of them sang a duet, and Billy Graham preached on “Retreat, Hold the Line, and Advance.” Graham must have shared Cliff’s assessment that “we had a wonderful evening together”; within a year, they formed one of the closest and most enduring partnerships in evangelistic history.

  In the spring of 1946, YFC earned its “International” designation. While some of its young dynamos whirled off to Japan, China, Korea, India, Africa, and Australia, Graham, Templeton, Johnson, and singer Stratton Shufelt made a forty-six-day tour of the British Isles and the Continent, accompanied by Wesley Hartzell, a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Herald-American. Hartzell, a committed Christian, had been a delegate at YFC’s founding meeting at Winona Lake, but he was assigned to this trip on an editor’s inspired hunch that “Graham might turn out to be a top news-maker.” Hearst had already shown considerable interest in YFC, apparently because he liked its patriotic emphasis and felt its high moral standards might help combat juvenile delinquency. Not incidentally, he also figured that any movement attracting nearly a million people to rallies every Saturday night might help him sell some newspapers. According to Johnson, who never had any direct contact with Hearst, the reclusive publisher sent his Chicago editor a telegram shortly after the Soldier Field rally. It contained only two words: “PUFF YFC.” A short time later, all twenty-two Hearst papers carried a full-page story on the YFC movement. Further coverage followed, and other papers picked up the story. In February 1946, Time devoted four columns to the movement, quoting President Truman as saying, “This is what I hoped would happen in America.” Time also noted that some Americans viewed “the pious trumpetings of the Hearst press on YFC’s behalf” as ominous, apparently fearing the movement might become an instrument of Hearst’s conservative social and political views. As the old titan watched the organization grow, he apparently realized that Graham and Templeton were its two brightest stars and decided to assign someone to chronicle their ascent. Hartzell’s reports of the British trip appeared not only in the Hearst papers but on the International News Service wire as well, providing potential exposure to virtually every significant newspaper in America.

  Johnson, Graham, and Templeton understood the value of such publicity and did what they could to live up to their billing. Before they left, they held large send-off rallies in Charlotte, Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago, then booked the first-ever commercial flight from Chicago to London. To make sure they received a share of the free publicity this inaugural flight generated, they arranged for a large party to see them off at the airport, and they knelt in prayer as long as photographers requested. The experience of playing to crowds that consistently bolstered their sense of being conquerors for Christ led to a telling brush with hubris on this trip. During a weather-induced stopover at an American air force base in Newfoundland, Torrey Johnson led the base’s social director to believe that the group was “sort of like the USO” and wangled an invitation to present a program to the airmen. Accustomed to speaking to servicemen and excited by the prospect of addressing a captive audience, the young preachers failed to reckon with the fact that their stateside audiences were hardly a random selection of the population, and that the wholesome fare that wowed sheltered Evangelical youngsters might not have the same appeal for a cross section of enlisted men starved for a little excitement. Chuck Templeton served as master of ceremonies and introduced the troupe. The men quickly registered their disappointment at the absence of women in the group, and after Strat Shufelt’s helplessly wholesome version of “Shortnin’ Bread,” Torrey Johnson’s hokey appeal to regional pride (“How many are here from Chicago? How many from Philadelphia? How many from Charlotte?”), and Templeton’s own rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross,” the mood in the Quonset-hut auditorium turned ugly, with boos and whistles and curses. Templeton thought they should bail out and cut their losses before the situation got even worse and refused to go back onstage. Graham was also uneasy about the turn things had taken but felt he should not pass up the chance to preach. After a brief prayer, Templeton recalled, “Billy went out there and preached in typical, absolutely unvarying fashion from what he usually did. He told a couple of jokes and then just waded on into a regular sermon.” When he finished, the base commander was waiting in the wings, white with rage. While he herded Johnson into his office to vent his anger, Templeton and Graham rushed outside and began to pray in agony, begging God to forgive them for flying under false colors. “It was essential Billy,” Templeton observed. “He was fearless when he went out to face that crowd, and completely true to his beliefs. Then, when he realized we were in the wrong, he just opened his heart to God’s reproval. We were pretty cocky. We needed to be reproved. It was probably a good thing.”

  This first international trip, one of six Graham would make during the next three years, was a true case of innocents abroad. Shufelt was the only member of the group ever to have been to Europe, and none of them had much sense of history, customs, or even of the distances between major cities. In a nation still climbing out of the rubble of war, still frequently dark from voluntary and involuntary blackouts, still devoid of all but the most basic consumer goods, the sight of these exuberant, backslapping young Americans in pastel suits, racetrack sport coats, and rainbow ties scandalized some but captivated others. Tom Rees, a London lay evangelist who had organized Britain’s Youth for Christ meetings before he ever heard of Torrey Johnson, described the young evangelists as “like a breath from heaven in a suffocated time, men who brought brightness in the midst of all our darkness.” And in Manchester, when the group interpreted the astonished gapes of a welcoming party as disapproval and changed into more conservative clothes for dinner, their hosts insisted, “Please go up and change your clothes again. We want you just like you were.” Before the trip was over, they had given away most of their loudest neckties to sober-sided English clergymen, sometimes because they mistook as
tonishment for admiration.

  Their enthusiastic preaching style stimulated a similar response. Anglican cleric Tom Livermore recalled the first time he heard Graham speak, his bright red bow tie poking out over the top of a clerical robe. “He spoke for fifty-seven minutes, which was an All-England record at the time. The English people wanted to take breaths for him. Stenos estimated he was speaking 240 words per minute, but they couldn’t keep up with him. People were just overcome. He bashed the Bible into them. He bashed the message into the minds of the people. This didn’t make his work any easier.” If Billy’s machine-gun delivery put off some of its audience, it did not completely miss the mark. Overall, Livermore said, “It was terrific. Forty people came forward.” Though they arrived with almost no specific agenda and few contacts to help them implement one, they managed to organize rallies that drew an aggregate attendance estimated at more than 100,000. Response on the Continent was mixed. The young preachers met resistance to their simplistic attitude toward Scripture and their non-Calvinist confidence in the ability of humans to lay hold of salvation. And when theology posed little problem, they were still so . . . American. Nevertheless, they managed to found YFC organizations in numerous major cities, often with the help of American servicemen. Key assistance in gaining the cooperation of American military personnel and local officials throughout occupied Europe came from Paul Maddox, Chief of Chaplains for the European Command and a man who would eventually come to work for Graham in America.