New York, the town Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down, was a town Billy Graham feared he might not wake up. “We face the city with fear and trembling,” he said. “I’m prepared to go to New York to be crucified by my critics, if necessary. When I leave New York, every engagement we have in the world might be canceled. It may mean that I’ll be crucified—but I’m going.” In part, this ominous assessment was hyperbole, of a piece with his more common anticipation that a given crusade might ignite a revival that would sweep across the land to inaugurate a new and greater awakening than America (or England or Europe or India) ever experienced. Billy Graham seldom, if ever, spoke of his crusades or other endeavors simply as members of a series, no one of which was likely to differ much from the others, but in this case both his hopes and fears were well grounded. New York was unique. Whether he succeeded or failed, everyone would know—and remember. If he drew mediocre crowds and could persuade only token numbers of them to come down the aisle at the invitation, the mocking publicity sure to follow might indeed consign him to the same fate Billy Sunday faced after leaving New York: playing out the rest of his ministry in the second-line cities of the South and Midwest. If he succeeded, if he came to this citadel of secularism and kept the Garden full and the aisles packed with inquirers, no one could ever again dismiss him as a short-term wonder. It was critically important that he succeed.
For nearly two years, Willis Haymaker, Charlie Riggs, Jerry Beavan, Leighton Ford, and other team members worked to develop a failure-proof crusade machine. Seldom, if ever, has a crusade been able to boast of more competent and influential leadership. The crusade committee, chaired by Roger Hull, vice-president of Mutual of New York, included in its number Chase Manhattan’s George Champion, Norman Vincent Peale, longtime Graham backers Russell Maguire and J. Howard Pew, corporate executives Walter Hoving, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Jeremiah Milbank, Reader’s Digest senior editor Stanley High, and media moguls Henry Luce, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Herald Tribune editor Ogden Reid, and ABC president Robert Kintner. With this kind of clout at the top, and with solid encouragement from members of the Dodge, Phelps, Vanderbilt, Gould, and Whitney families, all of whom had supported Graham’s storied predecessors—the Phelpses, like the Dodges, had joined the Tappan brothers in bringing Charles Finney to New York, and all five families backed Moody and Sunday—-finance chairman Howard Isham, vice-president and treasurer of U.S. Steel, found it relatively easy to raise a large portion of the projected $600,000 budget.
Once again, the team organized a massive worldwide prayer effort. By the time the crusade began, more than 10,000 prayer groups in at least seventy-five countries were meeting daily to beg God’s blessing on Billy Graham and the New York crusade. Illiterate African tribesmen sent a document signed with their thumbprints, promising to pray for the evangelist as he bore witness to the civilizing power of the gospel. In India clumps of Christians in five cities met regularly to pray through the night. In Formosa intercessors formed more than thirty groups, including one comprising Madame Chiang Kai-shek and several of her close friends. In Japan a band of convicts converted while awaiting execution prayed that Americans lost in sin might find the secret of abundant life in Madison Square Garden. The primary effort, of course, was in New York itself, where at least 150,000 people signed prayer-pledge cards. A daily radio program, Noontime Is Prayer Time, encouraged countless others to pray, and 75,000 plastic disks slipped over telephone dials in homes and offices reminded people to “Pray for the Billy Graham New York Crusade.” Other aspects of crusade preparation proceeded with the same bureaucratic thoroughness. The tragic and untimely death of Dawson Trotman, who drowned during the summer of 1956, was a blow to the counselor-training program, but Charlie Riggs, an unassuming Navigator veteran who had worked on Graham crusades since Harringay, stepped into the breach and proved no less effective at screening prospective counselors, gently recommending that they use deodorants and keep a roll of breath mints handy, reminding them to avoid discussing minor theological points that might offend or confuse an inquirer, and patiently teaching them how to help inquirers articulate their decisions and fill out inquirer cards properly. So well did Riggs perform that thirty years later he was still serving as overall director of counselor training for Graham’s crusades. To complement Riggs’s efforts, a retired air force colonel came in to overhaul the processing of decision cards and follow-up mail, and National Council of Churches executive Jesse Bader, who in 1951 advised Graham to pay himself a straight salary, headed up the postcrusade visitation program. And as always, Jerry Beavan mounted a media campaign that kept Graham’s name and face in the public’s eye and ear. Billy professed that “every time I see my name up in lights, it makes me sick at heart, for God said He will share His glory with no man. Pat me on the back and you will ruin my ministry.” Despite this alleged aversion to publicity, he permitted his organization to spend fifty times more than Billy Sunday laid out for the same purpose forty years earlier. In view of this extraordinary level of preparation, the Christian Century made the cynical but perceptive observation that “the Billy Graham campaign will spin along to its own kind of triumph because canny experienced engineers of human decision have laid the tracks, contracted for the passengers, and will now direct the traffic which arrives on schedule. . . . Anticipation has been adroitly created and built up by old hands at the business, and an audience gladly captive to its own sensations is straining for the grand entrance.” The “Graham procedure,” complained the Century, “does its mechanical best to ‘succeed’ whether or not the Holy Spirit is in attendance.”
Not all of Graham’s efforts were mechanical. To help create an awareness that he could communicate with young people, and also to associate himself with a venerable academic and evangelistic tradition that harked back to Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight, Graham made a four-day visit to Yale in February. No sweeping revival occurred, but the thirty-eight-year-old product of a backwater Bible institute and a midwestern Christian college left his mark. He spoke to overflow crowds in venerable Woolsey Hall and spent many additional hours talking with small groups and counseling individual students. The Yale Daily News described him as “looking like a combination Norse god and prep school headmaster,” characterized his preaching as “embarrassingly overdramatic and clearly underintellectual,” chided him for his “banal insights,” and commented on “the irrelevance of his message to the special problem of the Yale undergraduate.” Still, even his detractors acknowledged his genuineness and a Daily News editor admitted that “the ultimate effect of [Graham’s] appearance here was incontrovertibly tonic.” According to the newspaper, at least half the audience at each address stood when he offered the invitation, and “for at least one week in more years than you can count, this University has become a hotbed of violent and concerned religious controversy.” Back in Manhattan, as opening night drew closer, Lane Adams, a former nightclub singer who came to BGEA through Leighton Ford, whom he met while studying at Columbia Theological Seminary, sought to win support in another distinctive community by organizing an outreach program aimed at actors and other entertainers along the Great White Way. Commenting on Graham’s leadership style, Adams recalled that Graham gave him but the barest instructions as to the nature of his task. “Billy has the talent of a master artist,” he observed. “He brought me in, showed me the canvas, which already had a beautiful frame around it, grabbed a palette and paintbrush, daubed a few things on it, and said, ‘Now you get the picture of what I want you to do. You figure out the rest of it.’ Since I had never done it before, all I could do was fumble along, and it worked out pretty well.”
In spite of all the efforts to generate success, anxiety kept Billy gnawing at his fingernails. Fundamentalist charges that he had “sold out to the Modernists” continued to trouble him, despite his determination to proceed without their support. At the same time, not all of the liberal churchmen to whom he had allegedly sold out showered him with pieces of silver. Union Theological Seminary’s Reinhold Niebuhr repeatedly attacked him in the pages of Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis. Niebuhr warned that simplistic revivalism would accentuate the antireligious prejudices of enlightened people, that Graham’s sermons produced an artificial crisis that prompted shallow and essentially meaningless conversions, and that individualistic pietism would divert attention and resources from pressing social problems such as racial prejudice. In an article for Life, he acknowledged that Graham was “obviously sincere” but questioned the promise of “a new life, not through painful religious experience, but merely by signing a decision card.” It simply would not do, wrote the theologian whose own keen insights into the ambiguity and inevitable sinfulness of all human beings (whether once- or twice-born) were perhaps unmatched in this century, to pretend that by walking down the aisle, repeating a “sinner’s prayer,” and checking a box on a quadruplicate form, one could suddenly be freed of past sins and given a new nature that was miraculously oriented in a totally new direction. He marveled that Graham could declare without blinking that “every human problem can be solved and every hunger satisfied and every potential can be fulfilled when a man encounters Jesus Christ and comes in vital relation to God in him.” A message of that sort, Niebuhr said, “is not very convincing to anyone—Christian or not—who is aware of the continual possibilities of good and evil in every advance of civilization, every discipline of culture, and every religious convention.” The success of evangelism, he asserted, has always rested on oversimplification of difficult issues, but Graham, whom Niebuhr regarded as “better than any evangelist of his kind in American history,” had imbued evangelism with “even less complicated answers than it had ever before provided.” In Niebuhr’s eyes, theologically and socially responsible Protestant churches compromised their dignity and integrity by endorsing such a simple message in the hope, probably vain, that they might add a few members to their church rolls.
Graham responded with disarming humility, telling the Saturday Evening Post, “When Dr. Niebuhr makes his criticisms about me, I study them, for I have respect for them. I think he has helped me to apply Christianity to the social problems we face and has helped me to comprehend what those problems are.” He added, however, that “I disagree with Dr. Niebuhr in one respect. I don’t think you can change the world with all its lusts and hatred and greed, until you change men’s hearts. Men must love God before they can truly love their neighbors. The theologians don’t seem to understand that fact.” The evangelist acknowledged Niebuhr’s superior intellect—“I have read nearly everything Mr. Niebuhr has written,” he told one reporter, “and I feel inadequate before his brilliant mind and learning. Occasionally I get a glimmer of what he is talking about”—but he was not tempted to adopt his adversary’s tolerance of ambiguity. “If I tried to preach as he writes,” he explained, “people would be so bewildered they would walk out.” Neither did he shrink from confronting Niebuhr directly. Perhaps remembering his conquest of his critics in London, Graham tried to arrange a personal conversation, but Niebuhr refused to meet with him, even after George Champion prevailed on the chairman of Union Seminary’s board of trustees to urge the theologian to grant Graham the courtesy of at least a perfunctory encounter. Graham was disappointed, but not surprised. “I knew he wouldn’t see me,” he told Champion, “because he’s a Socialist.” Catholics also took critical aim at Graham’s crusade, but with a blend of warmth and wariness that reflected a fascinating ambivalence toward him. Graham shared in a general Evangelical antipathy toward Catholicism, but Catholics benefited from his uncommon spirit of openness and conciliation toward those with whom he disagreed. Team members might speak of Catholics who had been “won to Christ,” clearly implying they had moved from a lost to a saved state, but Billy himself had never engaged in the Catholic bashing to which many Fundamentalists were prone, and Catholics seemed to appreciate this. Still, some priests feared he might rustle sheep from their flocks. Jesuit scholar Gustave Weigel, while commending the evangelist for eschewing hucksterish excesses and demagogic attacks on Catholics, lamented the thinness of intellectual content in his sermons: “He lacks the scholarship of the Catholic Church. . . . He can no doubt tell us what the Bible says, but can he really tell us what the Bible means?” His simple invitation to trust and obey “can be exhilarating; it can be transforming; but it is an uncritical, nonintellectual way of answering the questions of man’s ultimate concern.” Weigel acknowledged, however, that the fundamentals Graham emphasized were clearly essential to vital Christianity, and he declared that he hoped and prayed “that God will lead him to the one true Church.” Other Catholics were less generous. Specifically linking its directive to Graham’s crusade, the archdiocese ordered parish priests to preach a series of nine sermons on basic Catholic doctrines, emphasizing that Christianity involved not simply seeking peace with God or joining the church of one’s choice but adherence to the doctrinal truths contained in the historic creeds and interpreted by the magisterium of the church. Even more pointedly, the Reverend John E. Kelly, representing the National Catholic Welfare Council, expressly forbade Catholics to attend the crusade services at the Garden, to listen to Graham on radio or television, or to read his books or sermons, charging that Graham was “a danger to the faith” who promulgated false and heretical doctrines in such an enticing manner that total abstinence was the only safe course. Even so, Kelly admitted that Graham was “a man of prayer, humble, dedicated,” and one for whom all Catholics should pray. Moreover, he asserted, “Catholic projects for evangelizing the unchurched would be much more effective if they were administered with even half the efficiency of the Graham team.”
These deprecations had their effect. Graham later told one reporter that about a month before the crusade began, his heart had grown cold: “I didn’t have the passion and love I should have had for the souls in New York. I don’t know why. Maybe some of the criticism centered around the campaign got into my heart unawares and brought on the coldness.” The loss of the soul winner’s ardor was only temporary. Stephen Olford, on hand to assist with counseling and follow-up, remembered a visit to Graham’s suite on the top floor of the New Yorker Hotel a few days before the crusade opened. “We walked on to the balcony, looking out over the city, and were standing there discussing the crusade, speculating about who would come and how the Lord would work. While we were talking, suddenly I was aware of this big, tall, broad-shouldered man heaving and breaking down with convulsive weeping. It was almost embarrassing. Billy was crying over the city, like our Lord weeping over Jerusalem.”
Graham realized, of course, that an observer standing on the same parapet months later might perceive little change. In the first of one hundred front-page columns he wrote for the Herald Tribune, he raised the possibility that the crusade “might have tremendous impact on the entire world . . . and could change the course of history by putting a new moral fiber into our society.” He conceded, however, that “when these meetings are over, it may be possible that outwardly New York will seem unchanged. Times Square will still be crowded with tens of thousands seeking peace and happiness that seem so elusive. Probably outwardly, most of the same problems will still exist. But this we know by past experience: Many people will have their decisions for Christ and will be transformed by the power of God. These few, we pray, may begin a spiritual chain reaction in the pulsing life of this great metropolis which will inevitably make its impact upon the future. . . . We sincerely believe that thousands of individuals will be very wonderfully changed inwardly in their relationship with God, a change which certainly will make itself felt in better human relationships.”
The crusade opened on May 15 to a crowd of 18,000 that if not quite a full house, was duly noted as the largest-ever opening-night attendance at an American crusade. With occasional exceptions, newspapers gave Graham generous coverage. In a singular nod to Evangelical Christianity, the New York Times devoted two full pages to the first service, including a verbatim transcript of his sermon. The front page of the tabloid Journal-American blared, “BILLY GRAHAM PLANS FOR BIG NY CRUSADE,” in garish red headlines. A World-Telegram and Sun reporter gushed that Graham “is part Dick Nixon and part Jack Kennedy, with overtones of the young executive behind a Madison Avenue desk.” The Telegraph assigned him to sales rather than to management but was equally complimentary: “He is like an excellent salesman: he describes the goods in plain terms, lets you see them and decide on them. He avoids the old, ranting ways and the pulpit thumping. He is a skilled and wise and practiced salesman of a commodity he truly believes should be in every home. The shrill ways of the medicine pitch, the arch and subtle ways of the stock and bond pitch, the snarled pitch of the Broadway showman never are heard or seen. He is plausibility to the final degree.” Other papers, particularly the Herald Tribune, also provided saturation coverage, even to the point of announcing what his sermon topics would be in upcoming services, and Life magazine put him on its cover.
The inaugural crowd was no fluke. On evenings when the arena would not contain the crowd, Graham conducted impromptu services on Forty-ninth Street for the overflow. The crusade was originally scheduled to run six weeks, but Graham had taken an option on the Garden for a full five months. Within two weeks, when he saw the sustained level of attendance, he decided to extend at least three weeks into July. On June 12 attendance passed the half-million mark, and the campaign seemed to be gaining rather than losing momentum. More than in any previous campaign, television played a major role in focusing widespread attention on Graham. Besides numerous appearances on local stations, Walter Cronkite interviewed him on CBS, John Cameron Swayze visited with him on ABC, and he talked with Steve Allen, Dave Garroway, and Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg on NBC. He also appeared as a guest on Meet the Press. In addition, the team produced a program that aired each night on WPIX-TV at 11:30 P.M., providing news and human-interest stories from the crusade and inviting viewers to call counselors for help with spiritual or other problems. This marked Graham’s first attempt at a telephone ministry, and it proved so successful that by the third week of services, additional phone lines had to be installed to handle calls that came in until one-thirty or two o’clock in the morning.
The real media breakthrough, however, occurred when Graham decided to air his Saturday-evening services live, over the ABC television net work. As soon as it became clear that Billy could fill the Garden regularly, Charles Crutchfield, an old friend who owned a television station in Charlotte, urged him to put the crusade on TV. A few days later, apparently at Crutchfield’s suggestion, Leonard Goldenson, instrumental in getting the televised version of the Hour of Decision on ABC, visited Billy at his hotel and proposed that ABC air the crusade once a week. “I thought it would be tremendous,” Graham recalled, “because nobody else was on nationwide television at that time. But I was scared about the money because ABC had to sell us the time. So I called Mr. Howard Pew and asked him if he would back us if we went in the hole.” Pew balked at first but finally pledged $100,000, enough to underwrite the first two programs, with the expectation that viewer contributions would cover expenses for further programs. As a measure of their confidence, Walter Bennett and Fred Dienert contracted with ABC for four weeks.
The first broadcast, on June 1, posted an 8.1 Trendex rating (against Jackie Gleason’s 12.5 and Perry Como’s 20.0), which translated into approximately 6.4 million viewers, enough to fill the Garden to capacity every day for an entire year, and more than enough to convince Billy Graham that he had finally found the most effective way to use this powerful new medium. The cameras bothered him, his gestures proved too sweeping for the small screen, and technical problems marred the initial telecast. One TV critic wrote that “this is not a good TV program. It is too much sermon, not enough color, not enough music, and misses the climax. [Graham] uses his hands as if they were a windmill, so that the person in the living room loses the Gospel message and becomes just a watcher of the hands.” Variety was more charitable: “As a one-man evangelism show, it was a revelation and a close insight into why audiences respond to this religious phenomenon. As a showman, Graham’s hour performance had all the click elements that translated, say, into the pop music area, make a Lawrence Welk tick. . . . Few performers, whether on TV, stage or film, have the dynamic qualities of Graham or are as sure of themselves, or can ‘treat’ a script with such positive aggressiveness. There’s no unctuous quality, no sanctimonious persuasion. The voice is strong, never borders on hysteria. . . .” The same reporter also had a positive reaction to Graham’s gestures. “He’s a man of perpetual motion,” he conceded, but “the constant gesturing is never accidental, for the vast sweep of both his hands and arms propels and holds the visual attention. This, in addition to the voice that never falters, never gropes for a word or a phrase and is as assured as his beliefs, holds his audiences with almost mesmeric power.”
More important than reviews was the impact on viewers. Almost immediately, letters began to pour in at a then-incredible rate of 50,000–75,000 per week, containing enough money to make it unnecessary to collect Howard Pew’s pledge. In fact, contributions so exceeded expenses that the Council of Churches and several charitable organizations expressed considerable unhappiness with BGEA’s decision to keep the money (approximately $2,500,000, according to Graham’s recollection) to fund future TV ventures. The proportion of viewers volunteering to make some kind of decision for Christ was approximately equal to that registered in the Garden and far outstripped any response generated by the original televised version of the Hour of Decision. The first telecast alone garnered 25,000 inquirers, more than had come forward in the Garden during the first nine weeks of the crusade, and a Gallup poll revealed that 85 percent of American adults could correctly identify Billy Graham; moreover, nearly three quarters of that number regarded him favorably. In an innocent masterpiece of understatement, Christian Life cautiously observed, “Undoubtedly, this fact will affect Graham’s ministry.”
Perhaps no one explained the success of the live broadcasts more perceptively than a journalist who wrote: “When the average, moral, reputable American sees Dr. Graham in a studio telling him he needs to be ‘born again,’ his first impulse will be to discredit him as a religious fanatic. But if the viewer sees thousands of respectable, normal people listening and consenting to all this he hears, and then sees hundreds voluntarily get up and walk to the front in response to a low-pressure request, he’ll begin to consider the message and situation with some sincere, honest interest. It’s much easier to say a single speaker is wrong than to discredit the conviction and decision of thousands.” Graham accepted that assessment. For the next thirty years, while other religious broadcasters experimented with a variety of formats, his television programs continued to be little more than slightly edited reproductions of services at which Billy Graham stands in front of large audiences and preaches what he freely acknowledges is essentially the same sermon.
With network television exposure serving as a kind of ultimate legitimation, the crusade boomed along from triumph to triumph. In addition to the nightly gatherings in the Garden, Graham held several massive outdoor rallies. A noontime meeting on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street drew a crowd variously estimated at between 7,500 and 30,000. Whatever the size of the crowd, and pictures show it was indeed quite large, its members listened respectfully as Bev Shea sang his own composition, “I’d Rather Have Jesus Than Silver or Gold,” and as Graham warned that money and the things it could buy would not provide lasting satisfaction. On July 20, at what had been planned as the closing service until Graham announced another three-week extension, 100,000 people jammed Yankee Stadium in 105-degree heat, and at least 10,000 others were turned away, smashing the stadium’s previous attendance record of 88,150, set when Joe Louis fought Max Baer in September 1935. Richard Nixon addressed the crowd and brought greetings from the President. When noise from airplanes departing and landing at La Guardia Airport threatened to detract from Graham’s sermon, a call by a team representative to the airport manager resulted in a quick change in the flight pattern.
Somewhat disconcertingly, Graham’s triumphs in Madison Square Garden and the financial district and Yankee Stadium had no counterpart north of 125th Street. Racial tension continued to mount in the South, and Martin Luther King’s boycotts, sit-ins, and other forms of nonviolent resistance were turning up the pressure. Graham still felt confrontation was a perilous tactic but was beginning to acknowledge that something more than preaching might be required to secure basic civil rights for minorities. In an interview with the New York Times a few weeks before the crusade, he stressed that the most effective action would be “setting an example of love,” then added, “as I think Martin Luther King . . . has done in setting an example of Christian love.” Given the time and his constituency, this on-the-record endorsement of the controversial civil rights leader was a notable step for the cautious evangelist. However, if he expected it to generate enthusiasm in black churches for the Garden crusade, he was disappointed. Officially, black support of the crusade was heartening; fifty black churches pledged their support, and several black pastors took active roles on crusade committees. Still, the crowds in the Garden were mostly white, and that bothered Graham and his team, who hoped to set an example of interracial fellowship and cooperation. In his Life article the previous fall he had set forth his clear belief that racial prejudice was a sin, and he followed that with similar statements in interviews and press conferences prior to the crusade, observing on one occasion that those who say they love Jesus but hate those whose skin is a different color not only break the commandment to love their neighbor, but by claiming to love God, also take his name in vain. Furthermore, since to hate someone is to wish him dead, such people, he asserted, are guilty of the sin of murder. Some blacks took note of his words; just as the crusade began, a group of black North Carolina ministers invited him to lead a crusade against segregation in his own home state. Still, despite such affirmations and growing awareness of his stand, blacks were not coming out to hear him. Rather than rest content to have it both ways—speaking out against discrimination while letting racist supporters see that his was still a ministry aimed primarily at white people—Graham took concrete steps to follow his own recommendation of “setting an example of love.”
His first move was to integrate his own organization by inviting Howard O. Jones, a young black pastor from Cleveland, to join his team. Jones organized black youth rallies and spearheaded a service in Harlem at which Graham spoke to a packed house of several thousand blacks. He also helped facilitate a rally at a black church in Brooklyn, where Graham admitted, apparently for the first time in public, that antisegregation legislation would be required to end discrimination, though he added that it would come to naught unless it were supplemented by a strong manifestation of Christian love. These efforts helped increase black attendance at the crusade; U.S. News & World Report estimated that by the end of the crusade, blacks composed almost 20 percent of the typical audience. But more essential at this point than any specific task or result was Jones’s mere presence on the team, and that presence did not go unnoticed. Ostensible Christians, outraged by Graham’s integrationist action, bombarded the New York and Minneapolis offices with angry telephone calls and vile letters. The notorious southern racist John Kasper branded Graham a “negro lover” and attacked him for spreading the Christian religion among black people, for whom it was obviously never intended. On the positive side, Ebony magazine did a feature story on Graham in which he said, “There are a lot of segregationists who are going to be sadly disillusioned when they get to heaven—if they get there,” and pointed out that the absence of a color line in heaven, which he believed the Bible taught, seemed to require that Christians observe no color line on earth.
Graham was just warming up. Despite his reservations about confrontational tactics, he took an unexpectedly bold step by inviting Martin Luther King to visit with his team and to participate in a crusade service. Behind the scenes, King met with Graham and team members to brief them on the racial situation in America and to sensitize them to key issues, including changes in terminology they needed to know about if they were to relate to blacks effectively. At a private dinner for King in a hotel suite, Graham asked how he and his followers had avoided violence during the Montgomery bus boycott. King gave the perfect answer: “Prayer and the Holy Spirit.” Graham needed nothing more to convince him that King was a man to be trusted and encouraged. On July 18, before a capacity crowd at the Garden, he invited the black leader to join him on the platform and to lead the congregation in prayer. In his introduction he said, “A great social revolution is going on in the United States today. Dr. King is one of its leaders, and we appreciate his taking time out of his busy schedule to come and share this service with us tonight.” The words did not explicitly condone either the revolution or King’s part in it, and King’s prayer called for nothing more revolutionary than “a brotherhood that transcends color,” but the implication was unmistakable: Billy Graham was letting both whites and blacks know that he was willing to be identified with the revolution and its foremost leader, and Martin Luther King was telling blacks that Billy Graham was their ally. According to both Graham and Jones, King also told the evangelist that “your crusades do more with white people than I could do. We help each other. Keep on.” That public, mutual quasi-endorsement, Howard Jones remembered, “brought the house down on Billy.” A fresh batch of irate responses repeated accusations that Graham was “a straight-out integrationist,” “nigger lover,” and troublemaker; declared he had “lost the South” by abandoning evangelism to jump into politics; and even offered the unlikely explanation that his association with King had finally revealed him for what he was: a Communist. Bob Jones, Sr., a staunch foe of integration, pronounced Graham’s ministry dead in the South. “Dr. Graham has declared emphatically,” he said, “that he would not hold a meeting anywhere, North or South, where the colored people and the white people would be segregated in the auditorium, and I do not think any time in the foreseeable future the good Christian colored people and the good Christian white people would want to set aside an old established social and religious custom. . . .” In fact, Graham had no southern crusade scheduled for the next twelve months, but his views were sufficiently well known and his influence so great that he could not escape involvement in the agony of that troubled region.
By midsummer, Graham was exhausted. He lost so much weight—-thirty pounds by crusade’s end—that, after seeing one of the telecasts, Richard Nixon’s mother called from California to tell him he looked sick and needed to get some rest. He took her advice and began to spend most of the day in bed, working on sermons and husbanding his energy for the daytime appointments he could not avoid and for the enervating combat with Satan each evening in the Garden. Once, he was so distracted that when an attractive woman spoke to him in an elevator, he returned her greeting with a kind of noncommittal friendliness. Not until she got off the elevator did he realize that he had failed to recognize his own wife.
After a final three-week extension, the crusade finally came to an end on Labor Day, September 2. Jerry Beavan had studied the possibilities for a dramatic finish to the campaign. In a letter to Graham not long after the Yankee Stadium rally, he admitted that “we could quite conceivably let the crusade close without another big meeting . . . but the London crusade is most remembered around the world for those two great meetings on that one final day, rather than for all the other terrific meetings along the way. We can never use mere crowds as the sole criterion for the meeting, but the crowds certainly are a yardstick that the public uses.” A second gathering in Yankee Stadium could not possibly draw a bigger crowd, and if even one seat were empty, “it would be racked up as a failure.” One promising option might be to schedule three consecutive services in different locations, one at the Polo Grounds, one at Ebbets Field, and one at Roosevelt Field in New Jersey. Speakers and the press corps would travel to each one and people could be urged to “avoid the congestion; attend the meeting nearest your home.” Such an extravaganza, Beavan suggested, could be advertised as “the evangelistic meeting of all time.” If Graham thought the logistics of a triple service were too complicated, Beavan suggested that perhaps a single holiday rally in Times Square might work. With a keen sense of the dramatic, Graham chose the latter option. On the evening of Labor Day, from a platform set in the midst of neon lights that hawked some of the most tawdry and temporary of the world’s pleasures, he faced a crowd that jammed Times Square and stretched upward along Broadway for block after block to form a shoulder-to-shoulder ribbon of souls apparently numbering well above the one hundred thousand who had filled Yankee Stadium. His voice crackling through the urban canyon, Billy made one final call for spiritual revival. “Let us tell the whole world tonight,” he boomed, “that we Americans believe in God. . . . that our trust is not in our stockpile of atomic and hydrogen bombs but in Almighty God. . . . that we are morally and spiritually strong as well as militarily and economically. . . . Let us tonight make this a time of rededication—not only to God but to the principles and freedoms that our forefathers gave us. On this Labor Day weekend, here at the Crossroads of America, let us tell the world that we are united and ready to march under the banner of Almighty God, taking as our slogan that which is stamped on our coins: ‘In God we trust.’”
Postcrusade assessments contained the familiar recitations of “firsts” and “mosts.” With an average attendance of nearly 18,000 per service, the campaign had been the longest-running and most heavily attended event in the history of Madison Square Garden. Counting the crowds at outdoor rallies, total attendance topped 2,000,000 with over 55,000 recorded decisions for Christ. More than 1,500,000 letters had cascaded into Minneapolis in direct response to the weekly telecasts, and at least 30,000 of those told of additional decisions made in the privacy of homes. Lane Adams’s outreach to entertainers resulted in the conversion or rededication of 500 people and led to the founding of the Christian Arts Fellowship, with opera singer Jerome Hines serving as director. This program also helped keep the platform and “celebrity gallery” stocked with well-known figures—Stuart Hamblen, Dale Evans, Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Dorothy Kilgallen (who wrote a multipart profile of Graham for the Journal-American), Pearl Bailey, John Wayne, Edward G. Robinson, Greer Garson, Gene Tierney, ice-skating star Sonja Henie, boxing great Jack Dempsey, Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine, Giant shortstop Alvin Dark, sportscaster Red Barber, and born-again Peruvian headhunter Chief Tarari, among others—who provided the meetings with publicity and legitimation. Society hostess Perle Mesta gushed, “Isn’t it fantastic! I think he is just wonderful! Certainly we need this. It’s all that’s going to save the world.” He, in turn, thought well of them and was pleased to return the compliments. After meeting Gloria Swanson on the Dave Garroway Today Show, he observed that “America would be a wonderful place if more of our film stars were like Gloria Swanson.”
However much they hoped the stars might be attending the crusade from sincere interest in the Christian gospel, Graham and his team understood that his own considerable celebrity, which they promoted relentlessly, was part of the attraction. To achieve and maintain celebrity, one does well to appear at places where other celebrities (and the people who take their pictures) gather. Sometimes the mixed agendas proved awkward. Gangster Mickey Cohen, fighting to stay out of prison, made an appearance at the crusade and hosted Graham for lunch in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. In later years Cohen claimed that Graham’s people tried to bribe him into becoming a “trophy” convert. Graham and his team flatly deny the allegation, and it seems far more likely Cohen was trying to cast himself in a sympathetic light. But some celebrities, such as black singer and actress Ethel Waters, attended the crusade in a genuine search for meaning. Waters, whose personal life was in serious crisis, found the crusade services a joyful and reassuring return to the simple Christianity in which she had been reared. She soon began singing in the choir and performing solo numbers, including a signature piece, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The crusade marked a profound turnaround for her, and she played a lead role in The Heart Is a Rebel, a World Wide Pictures feature film centered on the New York campaign. Throughout the rest of her life, she appeared as a regular guest performer in Graham’s crusades and remained close to the team, particularly to Grady Wilson, until her death in 1977.
Analysis of decisions registered at the crusade produced results similar to those of other Graham campaigns. In an ambitious study performed by Robert Ferm, approximately one in five inquirers could not be contacted, some because they had given false addresses. Of the remainder, nearly one in three claimed no church affiliation prior to the crusade, but more than 90 percent of these reported that they had become members of a church or were studying to do so. A similar proportion of those who were already church members prior to the crusade claimed to be aware of a significant difference in their lives since their decision. The Protestant Council of New York estimated that 6,000–10,000 new members were added to the metropolitan area’s 1,700 churches, a welcome but not astonishing gain. A few churches saw a substantial influx of new people. Nearly half of the 373 people referred to Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church—the largest number referred to any single congregation—were previously unknown to the ministers; all were tracked down, and nearly 100 joined the church. The Calvary Baptist Church baptized 30 people as a direct result of the crusade, and other churches reported attendance increases of from 10 percent to 40 percent. At the low end of the spectrum, however, a Christian and Missionary Alliance tabernacle near Times Square received ninety cards. Three came from current members; of the remaining eighty-seven, not a single one showed the slightest interest in further contact with the church. More commonly, a high proportion of the people referred to ministers for follow-up were already members of their congregation or denomination, but pastors reported they had become more effective members, forming the nucleus for new prayer and study groups and participating more vigorously in other aspects of the church’s program. Hoping to improve this yield, Graham returned to the city a few weeks after the crusade ended in an attempt to enlist 1,500 ministers and churches in a massive follow-up campaign in which church members would call on 200,000 homes. That effort, however, fell far short of its goal and reaped no notable harvest. Graham and his team would wrestle with the problem of adequate follow-up for the rest of his career, but given the unavoidable reliance on clergy whose attitude toward them would vary from total commitment to barely concealed cynicism, they would never find a fully satisfactory solution.
Few would admit they were disappointed, but even fewer would claim the crusade’s tangible results had exceeded their expectations. On his last night in the Garden, Graham said, “I believe that history will say that 1957 was the year of spiritual awakening,” but it was clear he had not turned New York upside down. “New York probably looks the same,” he admitted. “The crowds still throng Times Square. There are still people going to nightclubs. There’s still lots of crime in the city. Yes, but there is one difference. One tremendous difference! That difference is in the lives of thousands of men and women who will never be the same.” The claim, though difficult to document in a statistically satisfying way, was rendered quite plausible by the thousands of letters that poured into BGEA’s Minneapolis headquarters claiming just such a profound change as a direct result of responding to the invitation Graham offered. In the years to follow, this would become the orthodox interpretation of crusade results. It would not satisfy critics. It would disappoint many supporters, who had worked and hoped for more. But it would be enough to keep the gospel locomotive rolling on down the line.