Almost immediately, that decision proved to be a good one. Stuart Hamblen had made good on his promise to plug the meetings on his radio program and had attended several services, apparently enjoying his role as a prominent patron. The son of a Methodist minister and one of the original members of the Stars Christian Fellowship Group, Hamblen was also well-known as a backslider who drank, gambled, sang with dance bands and owned a stable of racehorses, all significant transgressions in Evangelical eyes. Graham regarded Hamblen as “a key man in the area with tremendous influence” and appreciated his encouragement but eventually concluded that the singer’s public show of piety was an unacceptable pose and made a pointed public effort to bring him to repentance, declaring from the pulpit that “there is someone in this tent who is leading a double life. There is a person here tonight who is a phoney.” The barely veiled accusation offended Hamblen, but it also hit the mark. When he realized that an extended campaign meant further attacks, his resistance crumbled. After a terrifyingly violent mountain storm ended a drunken hunting trip, taken in part to get away from his wife Suzy’s insistent nagging that he “get saved,” Hamblen showed up at Graham’s apartment in the middle of the night. When Grady sleepily opened the door, Hamblen lurched in, fell on his knees, grabbed Billy around the legs, and boozily begged for help in straightening out his life. Billy, not at his best when awakened unexpectedly said, “Stand up, Stuart. You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Hamblen acknowledged his condition but insisted Graham help him, so they sat down at the kitchen table and Billy began to read the Bible to him and explain what he needed to do. Finally, at the climax of an extended and tearful prayer session, Hamblen declared, “Lord, you’re hearing a new voice,” and asked God to forgive his sins. At that moment, he later recounted, “I heard the heavenly switchboard click.” Improbable as it seemed to skeptical acquaintances, Hamblen’s conversion took. He told his radio audience of his experience, urged them not to smoke or drink the products advertised on his program (a move that cost him his job), promised to sell all but one of his racehorses (“I will keep El Lobo [who had won a fifty-thousand-dollar race at Santa Anita], but only for sentimental reasons. I will never race him again”), and invited his listeners to come to the big tent, where he would sing and give his testimony. A few days later, his overjoyed parents flew in from Texas to praise Billy Graham for his role in bringing their prodigal son home. When good friend John Wayne commented on the remarkable transformation, Hamblen told the Duke, “It is no secret what God can do.” Wayne suggested he write a song about it, and the result, beginning with those same words, became a country-music standard.
The publicity boomlet detonated by Hamblen’s conversion more than justified the decision to continue the revival, but it paled beside what followed. Apart from ads, newspaper coverage of the campaign had been limited to a brief account of the opening service and stories in the Saturday religion section. Then, one evening, quite without warning, a cluster of reporters and photographers met Graham when he arrived at the tent. Puzzled, even somewhat frightened, Billy asked a reporter what had happened. “You have just been kissed by William Randolph Hearst. Look here.” He showed him a scrap of paper torn from a wire-service machine. “Here’s what’s happened. The boss has said, ‘Puff Graham.’”
Accounts of Graham’s career have typically portrayed the Hearst endorsement as a complete surprise, unsought and unexpected. The reality was less dramatic. All the Hearst papers had boosted YFC—Hearst had sent his “Puff YFC” telegram in 1946—but none had done more for the organization than the Los Angeles Examiner, the largest West Coast newspaper at the time. Its publisher, R. A. Carrington, though not particularly religious himself, admired the organization, gave its activities good coverage in the newspaper, did much of its printing free of charge, and arranged for the paper to sponsor various YFC projects. Most notably, Carrington had given YFC leader Roy McKeown a weekly column in the Sunday Examiner to report on YFC activities for a five-state region. A committee member for the revival, McKeown contacted Carrington to ask if the paper might give Graham and the meetings special attention. Carrington met with Graham, then telephoned “the chief” (Hearst), and the rest was publicity. Billy’s YFC days had convinced him Hearst’s endorsement could be valuable, but he feared the notorious old titan’s strong opinions and unconventional lifestyle, particularly his widely publicized liaison with actress Marion Davies, might contaminate any stream of publicity. Filled with anxiety and indecision, Graham pulled Edwin Orr aside to ask for advice. Orr’s response was simple: “Billy, if this is of God, he will make the press work for you for nothing.” Graham accepted this counsel and became a truly national figure almost overnight. The next morning, the Examiner and the city’s other Hearst paper, the Herald, gave him banner headlines, and twelve other papers in the Hearst chain also gave the campaign extensive coverage. Within days the Associated Press, the United Press, and the International News Service picked up the story, and Time, Newsweek, and Life followed soon afterward with major feature stories. Strangely, Graham never met his benefactor—“I never wrote him, I never thanked him, I never had any correspondence or telegrams or anything else. I suppose I could have met him, but I never thought he would see a person like me at that time”—and still professes not to know exactly why Hearst decided to back his ministry. An ardent anti-Communist, Hearst may have been attracted by Graham’s stern warnings against the Red Menace. Another possibility is that he regarded Graham as a positive moral influence, a successor to Billy Sunday, whose career he had also boosted. The tycoon’s son, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., may have provided the most likely explanation when he observed that quite simply his father was interested in whatever attracted the greatest number of people. He saw that Graham had an uncommonly accurate bead on the anxieties of a large segment of the American public and was more than happy to use him to sell papers.
As the revival stretched from three to eight weeks, Graham had to call on friends for sermon ideas and outlines. A missionary just back from Korea offered him his entire stock of sermons. At one point, he resorted to reading Jonathan Edwards’s classic, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” word for word except for a few minor emendations. Out of illustrations, he fell back on more copious use of Scripture, a technique he felt improved his sermons. Whether it was his preaching or the publicity or, as all participants felt, the prodding of God’s Spirit, the crowds grew so large that a tent expanded to seat 9,000 (with the seats scrunched together) was sometimes full hours before the service started, forcing thousands of latecomers to listen from the periphery and creating such a traffic problem that police eventually closed off a street rather than try to keep it clear.
The conversion of Olympic miler and war hero Louis Zamperini and gangland wiretapper Jim Vaus stimulated further publicity. Zamperini, who created a minor sensation at the 1936 Berlin Olympics when he pulled down a Nazi flag from Hitler’s Reichstag, had spent forty-six days bobbing about on a raft in the Pacific, followed by a harrowing stay in a Japanese POW camp. When the war ended, he never managed to put his life back together and had begun to drink heavily. Dragged to the revival by his wife, Zamperini saw Graham more “as an athlete than as a man of God” and reached out in desperation for the new life he offered. Vaus’s conversion rivaled Hamblen’s for its publicity value. Fundamentalist religion was hardly alien to Jim Vaus. Before being expelled, he had studied for the ministry at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, where his father was a professor, and he spent a year at Wheaton, where he got into trouble for wiretapping a girls’ dormitory. Deciding he had misread his call, Vaus turned to crime, which led to a term in state prison for armed robbery. After release, he served in the military and, despite a court-martial sentence for misappropriation of government property, earned an honorable discharge, but soon turned again to crime and became an assistant to the notorious West Coast crime czar, Mickey Cohen. Vaus knew Stuart Hamblen, and when he read of the singer’s return to God, he decid
ed to attend Graham’s revival. He insisted he went largely because he had nothing better to do. Once inside, however, he found himself enfolded in the familiar environment in which he had been reared, and he struggled only briefly before stepping forward to accept Billy Graham’s invitation.
Predictably, the reclamation of an authentic gangster drew the media’s attention, but the real publicity bonanza came when Vaus arranged a late-night meeting between Graham and Mickey Cohen at the mobster’s home. Cohen had dismissed his servants and was in the house alone. Neither man’s experience had furnished him with a clear sense of protocol for dealing with the other, but both were anxious to please. To prove he was not wicked as the preacher might have heard, Cohen talked of the charitable causes he supported and, after searching the bookshelves and tabletops in several rooms, triumphantly produced a Bible he had received in appreciation for his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the new state of Israel. Graham was careful not to offend the gangster, but he gingerly presented an outline of the gospel Jim Vaus had embraced. Cohen gave no sign he was “almost persuaded,” but to demonstrate his goodwill, he took the evangelist back to his bedroom, showed him his huge closets full of expensive suits, and gave him a necktie as a souvenir of the visit. As they parted, he told Graham a bit ruefully, “I’ve given Jim everything he ever wanted, but now he leaves me and he’s going with you.” Then, according to Vaus, he turned to his former henchman and said, “Jim, if the whole world turns against you for the decision you made, remember that there’s one little Jew who thinks the world of you for that decision and for the guts you’ve had to stand up for it.” The visit was supposed to have been secret, but the next day’s headlines trumpeted the nocturnal meeting between the gangster and the preacher. Graham was chagrined that the story had leaked, but Cohen did not complain—an insatiable publicity seeker, he may well have leaked the story himself—and the revival received another round of front-page coverage.
As the campaign entered its “Sixth Great Sin-Smashing Week,” such notables as Gene Autry and Jane Russell began to attend, and Cecil B. De Mille, the father of cinematic biblical epics, offered Graham a screen test. The wife of the head of Paramount Studios hosted a ladies luncheon for him at the Wilshire Country Club. Louella Parsons interviewed him at a posh Sunset Strip restaurant and wrote a gushing column about the appeal of “this really naive, humble man.” The AP called the revival “one of the greatest the city ever has witnessed,” Life pronounced it “the biggest revival in Los Angeles since the death of Aimee Semple McPherson,” and Time declared that “no one since Billy Sunday” had wielded “the revival sickle” with such success as “this thirty-one-year-old, blond, trumpet-lunged North Carolinian.” Back in North Carolina, Morrow Graham wanted desperately to accept Billy’s invitation to join him at the scene of his triumph, but “Mr. [Frank] Graham never enjoyed trips—he just didn’t like to travel—and I wouldn’t go without him.” By the time the revival ended on November 20, a day on which a large contingent of prostitutes and skid-row derelicts showed up to ask someone to pray for them, aggregate attendance for the eight weeks approached 350,000, with inquirers numbering approximately 3,000. Nearly seven hundred churches, almost three times more than at the beginning, were lending at least some measure of support. Charles Fuller and another famed radio preacher, “Fighting Bob” Shuler (Jack Shuler’s father), had thrown their full weight behind Graham, and a number of preachers who had been cool toward the campaign at the beginning came around “to ask forgiveness for a few things they had said about evangelism, Youth for Christ, and some of the ‘hot-rodders’ in wide ties.’” Suddenly, whatever Billy Graham said on any subject was likely to find its way into the newspapers, a phenomenon that justifiably stirred his anxiety. Shortly after the revival began to boom, Graham called Armin Gesswein in Chicago to say, “You better get back out here real fast, because something has broken out that is way beyond me.” In the months that followed, he had little time to reflect on just what it was that had happened or his capacity to handle it. On the train back to Minneapolis, conductors and passengers treated him like a hero, reporters crowded on board to press their inquiries, and a band of Northwestern colleagues welcomed him home in the middle of the night. The next day, while reporting on the campaign to a Northwestern audience, he faltered, then sat down without finishing, overcome by the magnitude of the turn his life had taken.
Part 3
“From Vict’ry Unto Vict’ry” (1950–1960)
8
Evangelism Incorporated
Billy Graham opened the second half of the century with a little-heralded campaign in Boston. The leaders of the Evangelistic Association of New England, who had watched Billy Sunday’s 1917 crusade spawn over fifty new churches, hoped Graham might kindle similar fire in a region whose religious life was now shaped by a Roman Catholic majority and a cultural elite comprised largely of Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians. Actual expectations, however, were modest. After a delegation scouted Graham’s 1949 Baltimore campaign, the association decided to sponsor only one service, on New Year’s Eve. They felt Graham’s style was too intense to appeal to New Englanders, and his reputation insufficient to justify a greater commitment. Allan Emery, Jr., whose father had brought Billy Sunday to Boston, served as general chairman for the service and helped persuade his pastor, Harold John Ockenga, to invite the young evangelist for a ten-day continuation effort at the venerable Park Street Church, New England’s most prestigious Evangelical congregation. Ockenga, a scholarly man and probably the single most influential figure in Evangelical circles at the time, had refused a YFC request to have Graham hold a rally in 1947, primarily because he knew nothing about him and was not inclined to throw his prestige behind an untested product, particularly a southern Bible school preacher with a known penchant for loud suits and hand-painted ties. In the interim, however, he had learned more about Graham and figured that at worst, he could do no real harm in ten days.
Helped by publicity from the recent Los Angeles revival, the sparsely advertised New Year’s Eve service at Mechanics Hall drew more than 6,000 people, a surprise that led Ockenga to reserve the auditorium and announce a service for the next afternoon. That impromptu and (apart from announcements in churches the next morning) unpublicized gathering packed the building again. The scheduled evening service a few hours later filled the Park Street sanctuary and two auxiliary rooms and left more than 2,000 would-be worshipers frustrated because they could not get in. This unexpected response unnerved Graham. Though he believed God had been at work in Los Angeles, he also knew that months of preparation, thousands of dollars spent on promotion, and a windfall of publicity had contributed to that campaign’s success. But in Boston, with little preparation or publicity, the response was similar. This both exhilarated and terrified him. As soon as the service ended, he called Emery and Ockenga into a room and asked them to pray “that the Lord will keep reminding me of the fact that this is all of grace and to Him is all the glory, because I realize if I take the smallest credit for anything that has happened so far, that my lips will turn to clay.” Emery was astonished: “Instead of praying for the various problems we might foresee, such as finances, follow-up, converts, or anything else, here, after this unexpected triumph, Billy’s concern was that the Lord keep his hand on him. He also wanted us to [help] him continue moment to moment to give God the glory. This is something we had never seen before. I will never forget it, because as I look back and as I continue to see his ministry, I see that same ingredient, that same principle at work in his life: ‘To Him is all the glory.’ He has wanted to stand behind, to hide, as it were, so there wouldn’t be any temptation for him to take credit for what he sincerely believes and knows to be the work of God himself.” If what followed fell short of the Great Awakening stirred by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, it did cause dry bones to rattle in normally sedate New England. The announced run of nine days stretched to eighteen, and under pressure from crowds that consistently e
xceeded the capacity of every venue, the revival itself became itinerant, moving, as booking schedules permitted, from Park Street Church to Mechanics Hall, to the opera house, to Symphony Hall, back to Mechanics Hall, and finally to Boston Garden for a climactic service that attracted more than 25,000, of whom 10,000 were turned away. The crowds themselves drew attention, not only for their size, but also for their practice of singing hymns as they walked along the streets or rode home on subways and buses after the meetings. One lifelong New Englander remembered that “there was just a spirit of unanimity, joy, and happiness that I’ve never seen since.”
That Graham created a sensation in Los Angeles probably impressed few Bostonians, but the press could not afford to ignore stories in Time and Life and on the major wire services. Still, a precampaign press conference at the Hotel Bellevue drew few of the city’s top reporters. Graham opened the session in disarming fashion by good-naturedly chiding his sponsors for referring to him as “Doctor,” noting that the title was honorary, not earned, but the questioning was rather perfunctory until a reporter asked Graham how much money he expected to garner from the effort. The evangelist explained that the Northwestern Schools paid him $8,500 a year (he had finally started accepting a salary), that he would receive no income from the crusade, and that a committee from the Park Street Church would release a full, audited financial statement when the meetings ended. The reporter kept pressing Graham to admit he expected to get rich from his campaigns. Seldom has an evangelist been armed with a better reply to this ubiquitous question. Just before the press conference began, a bellman handed Graham a telegram, which he read and stuck in his pocket without comment or discernible reaction. “I can still see him,” Allan Emery recalled. “He took out that crumpled telegram and said, ‘Sir, if I were interested in making money, I would take advantage of something like this.’” The telegram, according to Emery, offered Graham a substantial sum—“something like $250,000”—to star in two Hollywood films. As the reporters passed it around, judging both it and Billy Graham to be authentic, their attitude visibly changed. “From then on,” Emery said, “we got nothing but the top reporters, and we got front-page coverage on every single one of the five dailies.”
A Prophet with Honor Page 17