Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  As we knelt together to pray before climbing into our berths, we were both grateful and afraid. We could hardly find words to express to the Lord our thanks for His many mercies to us personally, and for His blessing on the Los Angeles Campaign. But we feared that we did not have the capacity to live up to our responsibilities. People were expecting so much from us now.

  When the train stopped briefly in Kansas City, we were met by a couple of reporters. When we got to Minneapolis, the press was again there to interview us, along with some Twin Cities pastors and faculty and students from Northwestern Schools. Until then it had not fully registered with me how far-reaching the impact of the Los Angeles Campaign had been. I would learn over the next few weeks that the phenomenon of that Los Angeles tent Campaign at Washington and Hill Streets would forever change the face of my ministry and my life. Overnight we had gone from being a little evangelistic team, whose speaker also served with Youth for Christ and Northwestern Schools, to what appeared to many to be the hope for national and international revival. Everywhere we turned, someone wanted us to come and do for them what had been done in Los Angeles. What they didn’t know, however, was that we had not done it. I was still a country preacher with too much on my plate. Whatever this could be called and whatever it would become, it was God’s doing.

  In the middle of all the press hoopla in Minneapolis, one of George Wilson’s little girls ran up and handed me a rose.

  “Uncle Billy,” she said, “we prayed for you.”

  And of course I had my own two little daughters praying for me every night. That put it all in perspective. That was the whole secret of everything that had happened: God had answered prayer.

  10

  Whirlwind

  Boston, Columbia, New England, the Team 1950

  Was Los Angeles a flash in the pan, a quirk, a unique event caused by better organization or greater advertising? Or was it the symptom of something deeper, a new hunger for spiritual reality? Boston, the next Campaign—scheduled to begin less than six weeks after the close of the Los Angeles meetings—would provide the answer.

  Discussions about going to Boston had taken place long before the Los Angeles meetings. The Evangelistic Association of New England (a fellowship of evangelical pastors) had asked me to hold a New Year’s Eve service in Mechanics Hall, and Dr. Harold John Ockenga had invited me to preach for a week afterward in the historic Park Street Church in downtown Boston.

  Though I was intimidated by Boston’s reputation as the educational and cultural capital of the United States, I took the opportunity to conduct a Campaign there as a gift from God.

  BOSTON

  “EVANGELIST HERE TO VIE WITH NEW YEAR’S FUN,” read the headline in the Boston Herald on December 30, 1949. The accompanying story went on to say, somewhat skeptically, that I was “a youthful evangelist who thinks he can outrival the convivial lures of New Year’s Eve with a Mechanic’s Building religious rally tomorrow night.”

  Not everyone in Boston renounced traditional New Year’s Eve observances, of course, but that first meeting of the Campaign unexpectedly drew a capacity crowd.

  “Although hotels, night clubs and bars in the city were crowded last night,” reported the Boston Sunday Globe, “the largest gathering in all of Greater Boston packed Mechanics Building to hear Rev. Billy Graham, crusader for Christ. . . .”

  The announced sermon topics for the opening weekend were phrased to catch interest: “Will God Spare America?” “Must We Fight?” “The New Social Order.” But people soon found out that my theme was always the same: God’s redemptive love for sinners, and the need for personal repentance and conversion. The topics were timely, but the basic message was eternal. “I doubt that mankind will ever see the year 2000,” the Boston Globe quoted me as saying. “Our wild, sinful way of living in this country must be a stench in the holy nostrils of God.”

  I hadn’t expected our arrival to cause much controversy, but it did. Many in Boston considered me a throwback to Puritan times, hopelessly out of date. Some extreme liberal and Unitarian clergy said I was setting back the cause of religion a hundred years. I replied that I did indeed want to set religion back—not just a hundred years but nineteen hundred years, to the Book of Acts, where first-century followers of Christ were accused of turning the Roman Empire upside down.

  Quite a lot of publicity was given to my taking issue publicly with Harvard’s distinguished professor of anthropology Dr. Earnest A. Hooton, for his defense of a “mercy killing” and his attack on a God who would call such an act murder. As a college major in his field, I had read his famous book, Up from the Ape , and I respected his scholarship. But his attitude toward religion and the Ten Commandments struck me as intellectually arrogant.

  As our support swelled, the meetings were extended. After two nights with Dr. Ockenga, we left Park Street Church and went back to Mechanics Hall for as long as it was available. We then moved briefly to the Opera House and concluded at the 13,000-seat Boston Garden on Monday, January 16. Crowds were unprecedented; thousands had to be turned away on some occasions. After more than doubling the original schedule to seventeen days, we at last ran out of available meeting spaces.

  Response to the Invitation at each service overwhelmed us physically. There had been no significant training of counselors in advance of the meetings. Hence, all of us on the Team—including Grady, Cliff, Bev, and myself—met with individual inquirers, helped by volunteers who stepped forward on the spur of the moment.

  Heartening to us also was the response of the Roman Catholic Church, remarkable especially in light of the fact that the landmark decisions on ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council were still years away. “BRAVO BILLY!” read the editorial headline in the Pilot, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese. “We are ‘not amused’ by his critics, some unfortunately among the Protestant cloth. . . . If, as some people seem to think, the non-Catholic Christian congregations of New England are disintegrating, we are not such bigots as to rejoice therein.”

  Should we leave Boston, or should we stay? That was the question. After much thought and prayer, we decided to leave. If we had stayed for six weeks or six months more, might God have sent a sweeping revival to New England like the Great Awakening in an earlier century? On the train leaving the city of the baked bean and the cod, my misgivings almost made me get off at the next stop. So many doors of opportunity stood ajar all over the region, even at the renowned New England universities, beckoning us to walk in.

  In the end, I continued on to Toronto to fulfill a scheduled engagement. One thing was clear to me, though. We should follow up as soon as possible with a Campaign that would go beyond Boston into the rest of New England.

  In my closing sermon of the Boston Campaign, I mentioned having talked to an unnamed underworld figure. When we arrived in Niagara Falls on our way to Toronto, the police were waiting and the Boston newspapers were calling. It seemed that the multimillion-dollar robbery of the Brink’s Boston express office had occurred on January 17, the day after the Campaign closed. The law officers thought I knew something about it. But the underworld figure I had in mind was Jim Vaus on the West Coast. Their interrogation gave Grady and me some much-needed comic relief.

  COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

  In late winter of 1950, we held our first major southern Crusade in Columbia, South Carolina. Governor Strom Thurmond invited Ruth and me to come and stay in the governor’s mansion as his guests.

  One day while there, we received a call from a Mr. Howland, the head of the Atlanta office of Time and Life, saying that the founding editor and publisher, Henry Luce, wanted to come down and spend two or three days with us. Mr. Luce, it seemed, had received a letter from his friend, senior statesman and financier Bernard Baruch, who was vacationing at Hobcaw Barony, his plantation near Charleston. The morning newspaper in Columbia, the State, was carrying my sermons each day, and Mr. Baruch had been reading them. He had told Mr. Luce that this was something he thought America nee
ded and that he should send some of his people to get acquainted with me. Henry Luce decided to come himself.

  We were meeting in the Township Auditorium, seating about 3,800. Most of the ministers in the city were supporting the Campaign. Helping us tremendously was fellow Wheatonite Don Hoke, by then a professor at Columbia Bible College.

  The night Mr. Luce came, I was very tense because I had announced I was going to preach on divine judgment. I thought to myself, “Henry Luce will be turned off by my sermon on judgment.” But the more I thought about it, the more I felt certain that the Holy Spirit had led me to speak on that subject, regardless of who would be in attendance. As I preached it, I felt a tremendous sense of God’s power, and a number of people responded to the Invitation. Mr. Luce himself responded in a way. He decided that his magazines would not only carry newsworthy articles about our work but also support us editorially. It seemed his parents had been missionaries in China, as Ruth’s had been, and their spiritual legacy to him was evident in some of his attitudes.

  One of the most important developments from our South Carolina meetings was the growth of our Team, a group of dedicated people who would strengthen our work for years to come.

  Willis Haymaker first joined our Team in Columbia to help us with organization. His credentials were impressive; a former banker, he had worked for Billy Sunday, Gipsy Smith, and Bob Jones (father and son). He arranged a variety of small gatherings for us and reserved and dispensed blocks of tickets for cooperating churches during the Campaign. It was Willis, in his preliminary work in Columbia, who urged us to drop the word Campaign in favor of Crusade. The word Campaign, Willis pointed out, had been used for many years by evangelists, and was associated in the public mind with outmoded (or even sensationalist) ways of doing things. A new word was needed, he felt, and we agreed on Crusade.

  Willis’s wisdom and experience soon became indispensable. Not only did he know how to organize a Crusade, but he was also upbeat and enthusiastic. He would go before us into a city to analyze the situation and see if we should hold a Crusade there. Then, once we decided to go, he would set up the office and enlist key people to organize every detail. He would also call on the local Catholic bishop or other clerics to acquaint them with Crusade plans and invite them to the meetings; they would usually appoint a priest to attend and report back. This was years before Vatican II’s openness to Protestants, but we were concerned to let the Catholic bishops see that my goal was not to get people to leave their church; rather, I wanted them to commit their lives to Christ.

  At Columbia we were also joined for the first time by Tedd Smith, a Canadian recently graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. He had been secretary and pianist for Chuck Templeton both in his church and with Youth for Christ. In the early days, when we traveled, he would often act as my secretary as well as my pianist, and he was a great typist. One of his vital but unrecognized tasks was to make sure there was always a glass of warm water for me at the pulpit when I got up to speak; ice water only tightens the throat muscles.

  For our closing meeting in Columbia, we booked the Univer-sity of South Carolina stadium for a big open-air meeting. With 40,000 in attendance, the meeting made national news, and both Life and Time carried stories on it. What had begun in Los Angeles and continued in Boston now took the South by storm.

  After the Crusade, Governor Strom Thurmond provided us with a state police escort for a hastily prepared two-week preaching tour of the state. That itinerary included a return to Bob Jones University (relocated by then in Greenville, South Carolina), where I was introduced to a crowded auditorium by Bob Jones, Jr. My sermon, which was on Belshazzar that day, was also carried live on the campus radio station, WMUU (acronym of World’s Most Unusual University).

  The day after the end of our whirlwind tour, I flew back to Boston, determined to pick up where we had left off a couple of months before.

  NEW ENGLAND

  At the end of March 1950, a circulation war was raging among Boston’s five daily newspapers. They chose to make us a focal point of their competition, sending fifteen or twenty reporters with us everywhere. In addition, Look magazine sent senior reporter Lewis Gillenson to cover us, and both the United Press International and the Associated Press sent correspondents. It had been a long time since religion had gotten such press attention in Boston, if it ever had (although the city editor of the Boston Post wrote to wool merchant Allan Emery, Jr., that the paper had covered earlier evangelistic meetings by Billy Sunday, Gipsy Smith, and J. Wilbur Chapman).

  I did not know how to conduct myself in front of the reporters. Sometimes in my innocence I made statements on politics and foreign affairs that were outside my jurisdiction as a preacher. But experience was gradually teaching all of us to be more careful.

  Once I sent Grady to preach for me in Fall River, Massachusetts, because I had a touch of the flu. That afternoon one of the Boston newspapers carried a headline based on Grady’s effort to impress them that I really was sick. “GRAHAM CARRIES GOSPEL DESPITE DEATH PERIL.” Even though we got a good laugh out of it, we took the lesson seriously. It was not necessary for us to exaggerate anything.

  An intensive twenty-day itinerary beginning on March 27 took us to about fifteen cities, with many one-night rallies. In addition, Grady preached in a dozen places, and Cliff led at least one Saturday afternoon children’s service. Grady and Jack Wyrtzen substituted for me on two occasions when I was sick, and I myself preached at least twenty times. In addition, there were the constant automobile trips to new destinations, and new committees to meet once we got there. But what a work God did during this tour of New England! Of the many thousands of people who attended the meetings in churches, school and municipal auditoriums, sports stadiums, and theaters (and even an airplane hangar in Houlton, Maine), hundreds of them made commitments to Jesus Christ. Everywhere, despite often bitterly cold or rainy weather, overflow crowds packed surrounding streets and waited until I came out and gave a short sermon for them. Police escorts did a great job of getting us through.

  Although we held meetings during 1950 in a wide range of settings in the Northeast, it was the opportunities at New England universities—among them, MIT, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Vassar, Wellesley, and the University of Massachusetts—that touched me most deeply. They had an impact on me in at least two ways.

  First, they demonstrated beyond doubt that in spite of what often appeared to be a lack of seriousness, many students were open to the Gospel and would give it a respectful hearing. We were such celebrities all over this area that the students were fascinated by and curious about who we were and what we had to say. It was more than that, however. I detected, in fact, a deep-seated spiritual hunger on the part of many. The anxieties of the Atomic Age and the moral decline and confusion evidenced by the recently released first Kinsey report were causing many thoughtful students to reevaluate their lives and give more thought to their need for a spiritual foundation.

  Second, my appetite for more opportunities to speak in university settings had been sharpened. I always felt the power of the Holy Spirit in these student meetings. I didn’t claim to be an intellectual, nor did I have the academic training to answer every philosophical question that might be raised. But I had come to realize that there was absolutely no need to apologize for the Gospel of Jesus Christ in academic settings. The Gospel could more than hold its own. It alone dealt with the deepest questions of the human mind. It alone met the deepest yearnings of the human heart. As someone once commented to me, the Gospel wasn’t so much examined and rejected on most university campuses as it was ignored.

  In spite of my deep desire to give more time to universities, however, I had relatively little opportunity to do so during the next couple of years. Following our 1949 and 1950 meetings, there was an explosion in invitations to hold citywide Crusades. In responding to those invitations, I was kept in constant motion.

  What could we do for the closing meeting in Boston in order to
accommodate those reportedly wanting to attend from all over New England? The decision was made to use the Boston Common. (We called it a Peace Rally because war clouds were gathering in the Far East, and we felt the word peace was something everyone could rally around.)

  The prospect of preaching on the historic Boston Common was numbing to me for a number of reasons.

  A big open space in the heart of a city was a far cry from, say, a junior high school auditorium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Would enough people show up to make a respectable crowd?

  Staging the meeting outside posed a weather problem too. I have never been quite sure who controls the weather. Although we always prayed for clear skies, I had had to preach in all kinds of storms.

  Then there was the question of my own stamina. The Lord tells us to be anxious for nothing (see Philippians 4:6), but that’s always been a hard lesson for me to learn.

  It was raining when I got up that Sunday morning. Pouring! I gathered the Team in my hotel room. “Let’s pray and ask God to clear the sky, if it’s His will,” I urged.

  When we were finished, my anxiety lifted. I had complete peace of heart, even when the newspapers phoned about noon to ask if we were going to cancel the meeting because of the bad weather.

  “No,” I said. “The sun will be shining by the time the meeting begins at three o’clock.” They laughed. So did my friends.

  At two o’clock, as the first hymn was being sung, the rain stopped. One hour later, when I stepped to the pulpit to preach, a sun-drenched crowd—reported by the Boston Post to be 50,000 strong—smiled up at me.

  I remembered reading that George Whitefield had preached there in 1740 to many thousands of people without benefit of an amplification system. What a voice he must have had! Incidentally, I borrowed Whitefield’s topic for my sermon that day: “Shall God Reign in New England?”

  At that time, Protestantism in New England was weak, due in part to theological differences within some denominations, the influence of Unitarian ideas in other denominations, and the strength of the Roman Catholic Church. In spite of all that, a number of Roman Catholic priests and Unitarian clergy, together with some of their parishioners, came to the meetings along with those from evangelical churches. With my limited evangelical background, this was a further expansion of my own ecumenical outlook. I now began to make friends among people from many different backgrounds and to develop a spiritual love for their clergy.