“Geared to the Times, Anchored to the Rock”
The social, economic, and psychic dislocations created by the twenties, the Great Depression, and global war generated enormous concern over the welfare of the young. Conservative Christians shared with many Americans the struggle to keep food on the table and the fear that their adolescent sons might soon be facing enemy guns in Europe or in the Pacific, but what troubled them more deeply was the possibility that their beloved children would abandon faith in God, would live and die outside the community of the redeemed, and thus spend eternity in a hell of fire and brimstone, where thirst is never slaked and the worm dieth not. To ward off this specter, Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders all over the country began holding Saturday-night rallies designed to offer young people, especially young soldiers and sailors stationed far from the safe harbor of their homes, a blend of wholesome entertainment, patriotic fervor, and revivalist exhortation.
Because significant efforts were beginning almost simultaneously, the chronology of this movement is a bit imprecise, but certain key leaders stand out. Clearly, one of the first and most important was Jack Wyrtzen, a New York City bandleader-turned-minister whose Word of Life radio broadcast and rallies began in 1940 and by 1944 were packing Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. In Toronto a handsome, spellbinding young preacher named Charles Templeton enjoyed comparable success, as did alert and enterprising leaders in Indianapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and other cities throughout the United States and Canada. Though less a commanding public figure than these men, one of the most enterprising participants in the rapidly spreading movement was George Wilson, a layman who owned a Christian bookstore and served as business manager for William Bell Riley’s Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis.
Torrey Johnson had attended rallies in Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis and determined to start a similar program in Chicago, where Bev Shea had been urging him to do something for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed in the Chicago area and spending their weekends aimlessly wandering its downtown streets. Johnson leased the three-thousand-seat Orchestra Hall, next door to the USO, and invited Billy Graham to speak at the inaugural rally of the Chicagoland Youth for Christ. On May 27, 1944, ten days before D day, the young pastor got his first real taste of mass evangelism. Backstage before the service, as he paced back and forth, biting his nails and fearing in equal measure that no one would show up to hear him or that he would fail in front of a large crowd, he suffered what he remembers as “the worst fit of stage fright of my life.” His anxiety did not abate when he stepped onstage before a huge crowd of almost three thousand, by far the largest audience he had ever faced. But when he began to preach, fear departed and fire roared. He electrified the gathering with his exuberance and command of Scripture, and when he gave the invitation, forty-two people responded.
Torrey Johnson had made no provision to funnel these young trail hitters into churches or to put servicemen in contact with military chaplains, but he satisfied his conviction that such rallies could stir the hearts of the young and serve as a catalyst for revival. The Orchestra Hall meetings continued all summer (until the Chicago Symphony reclaimed the building for its fall season) and proved popular not only with servicemen but also with sheltered young people who relished the excuse and opportunity to be downtown on Saturday night. In October, following a rally that drew a capacity crowd of nearly thirty thousand to Chicago Stadium, the series moved into the Moody Church, where crowds grew so large that Johnson often scheduled two identical programs back-to-back. Similar meetings were occurring in at least two hundred other cities, and Torrey Johnson, now being called the “Bobby-Sox Evangelist” and “the Second Moody,” spent much of his time on the telephone trying to help ministers across the country get still more programs under way.
Just as these meetings were giving Billy a glimpse of what the future might hold, the army finally accepted him for the chaplaincy and gave him a commission as a second lieutenant. As he prepared to leave for the government’s chaplaincy training program at Harvard Divinity School, he contracted a severe case of the mumps, “with all the complications.” During six extremely painful bedridden weeks, his temperature reached 105 degrees, he suffered bouts of delirium, and at times it seemed doubtful he would survive. Even after the crisis passed, doctors told him he might never have children. When listeners to Songs in the Night learned of his condition, one compassionate woman sent him a hundred dollars, with the request that he and his wife spend it on a restful convalescence. A few days later, he and Ruth drove to Miami to spend a few days in the Florida sun. Torrey Johnson happened to be in Miami at the time and offered to take Billy fishing. On the boat, where no telephone calls could interrupt his sales pitch, Johnson laid out a plan. If he could get Chuck Templeton and George Wilson and other young leaders to cooperate, he wanted to coordinate existing youth programs and establish new ones under the aegis of a single organization, to be known as Youth for Christ International. With compelling conviction and persuasiveness, Johnson convinced Billy that if they could sweep young people into a great tide of revival, they could place Evangelical Christianity at the heart of a movement to revitalize American culture. “If I can swing it, will you come join us?” he asked. “We’ll pay you seventy-five dollars a week.”
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 grateful 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 astonishment 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.
Graham returned to England in the fall of 1946 for a six-month tour. This time he invited Cliff and Billie Barrows to serve as his musical team. Barrows had joined YFC and was enjoying notable success not only as a singer and gospel trombonist but also as an evangelist. He intended to continue preaching but readily accepted the opportunity to assist Graham. Despite their drive, both men possessed amiable, conflict-avoiding spirits and a genuine appreciation for the other’s abilities. It was during that first trip that according to Barrows, “God really knit our hearts together in a special way.”
The winter was bitterly cold, the worst in decades, and economic conditions had improved little since the first visit. To save money, the group frequently boarded in homes rather than in hotels, and Graham and George Wilson often slept in the same bed fully dressed and wearing shawls over their heads to keep warm. On occasion they spoke in stone churches so cold and dank that fog obscured part of the congregation from their view. These hardships, however, neither dampened their spirits nor cooled their ardor. Over a six-month period, Graham spoke at 360 meetings, with extended campaigns in Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast, and London. The Manchester effort early in 1947 marked his first true citywide campaign, but the Birmingham meetings stood out because of opposition from the local clergy, who not only refused to cooperate but persuaded the city council to withdraw permission for him to use the civic auditorium. Instead of following the venerable revivalist tradition of seeking popular support by skinning the local clergy for their hide-bound, moss-backed resistance to God’s will, Graham chose a more winsome and successful course: He spoke to his critics directly and simply melted their resistance. Armed with a list of clergymen most opposed to his efforts, he called on each one, “not to argue, only to explain, and if you don’t mind, to pray.” In almost every case, he won them over with his warmth and sincerity, humbly acknowledging his own shortcomings as a preacher and easily convincing them that his only interest was in helping them further the cause of Christ in their country. One vocal critic of “America’s surplus saints” described his own capitulation: “Billy called on me. He wasn’t bitter, just wondering. I ended up wanting to hug the twenty-seven-year-old boy. I called my church officers and we disrupted all our plans for the nine days of his visit. Before it was over, Birmingham had seen a touch of God’s blessing. This fine, lithe, burning torch of a man made me love him and his Lord.” The city council reversed its decision, and by the end of the meetings, the twenty-five-hundred-seat auditorium was packed each night for what newspapers called “the greatest spiritual revival the city had experienced in a generation.”
From a spiritual standpoint, the key development was Graham’s encounter with Stephen Olford, an eloquent and powerful young Welsh evangelist whose missionary father had been converted by R. A. Torrey. The two men met briefly during the spring visit, and Graham had been impressed by a powerful sermon Olford had given on the work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. This time the men spent two days together, except for evening services, in the cold, drab bedroom of a miner’s home in the little Welsh town of Pontypridd, not far from Olford’s home in Newport, South Wales. In that bleak setting, Olford led Billy step by step through the process that had produced a profound spiritual renewal in him a few months earlier. “The first day we spent on the Word; not memorizing texts—he was quite good at that—but on what it really means to expose oneself to the Word in one’s ‘quiet time.’ Billy admitted that he’d never had a quiet time in the sense in which I’d described it. That seemed to make a tremendous impression. He was so teachable, so beautifully humble and reflective. He just drank in everything I could give him.”
The effects of the first day’s conversation did not show immediately. Graham preached that evening and Olford thought, “Quite frankly, it was very ordinary. Neither his homiletics nor his theology nor his particular approach to Welsh people made much of an impact. The Welsh are masters of preaching, and the Welsh people expect hard, long sermons with a couple of hours of solid exposition. Billy was giving brief little messages. They listened, but it wasn’t their kind of preaching.” The crowd was small and response to the invitation meager. The next day in the bedroom, Olford concentrated on the work of the Holy Spirit. “I gave him my testimony of how God completely turned my life inside out—an experience of the Holy Spirit in his fullness and anointing. As I talked, and I can see him now, those marvelous eyes glistened with tears, and he said, ‘Stephen, I see it. That’s what I want. That’s what I need in my life.’” Olford suggested they “pray this through,” and both men fell on their knees. “I can still hear Billy pouring out his heart in a prayer of total dedication to the Lord. Finally, he said, ‘My heart is so flooded with the Holy Spirit,’ and we went from praying to praising. We were laughing and praising God, and he was walking back and forth across the room, crying out, ‘I have it. I’m filled. This is the turning point in my life.’ And he was a new man.”
Whether this experience was ultimately more critical than Billy’s decision at Mordecai Ham’s tabernacle or his surrender on the golf course at Temple Terrace is impossible to measure, but it clearly had an impact, and his Welsh audience seemed to sense it. That evening, Olford recalled, “for reasons known to God alone, the place which was only moderately filled the night before was packed to the doors. As Billy rose to speak, he was a man absolutely anointed.” Perhaps conscious that it was a significant moment, or perhaps short of sermons, Graham preached an old favorite, based on the biblical story of the Feast of Belshazzar, and the normally unemotional Welsh jammed the aisles as soon as he began his invitation. “Practically the entire audience responded,” Olford remembers. “My own heart was so moved by Billy’s authority and strength that I could hardly drive home. My parents were still alive then, and when I came in the door, my father looked at my face and said, ‘What on earth has happened?’ I sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘Dad, something has happened to Billy Graham. The world is going to hear from this man. He is going to make his mark in history.’ His response was absolutely wonderful. He said, ‘It won’t be the first time America has taken a lead in evangelism.’” Others shared Olford’s sense that Graham’s preaching had taken on a new dimension, that he was not simply delivering sermons but speaking of a God whom he knew in a close, personal way. Chuck Templeton also noticed that Billy’s preaching “seemed to be taking on, more and more, a largeness and authority in the pulpit, to be going for a certain magnificence of effect. It became fascinating, really impressive, to watch him.”
By mid-1947, Youth for Christ and the similar Southern Baptist Youth Revival movement it spawned constituted a phenomenon sufficiently significant to attract the attention of secular and theologically liberal critics. With memories of the Hitler Youth fresh in their minds, some feared that these patriotic, Fundamentalist rallies, which by now were attracting perhaps a million young people each week, could easily become authoritarian, protofascist gatherings, manipulated by political opportunists whose hand-painted ties barely covered hearts of darkness. To these, the young who streamed into auditoriums and stadia in over a thousand cities were simply “dumb sheep,” differing little from those who had flocked to hear the fanatical bleating of Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long, anti-Semites Gerald Winrod and Gerald L. K. Smith, and various spellbinding Communist orators. William Randolph Hearst’s appraisal of YFC as a “good and growing thing” that “will never be good enough or big enough until it involves all of our young people in this country” served only to confirm their troubled suspicions. Insofar as YFC had a political orientation, it was indeed largely conservative, but apart from a decided anticommunism and a strong patriotic strain, politics was neither its manifest nor hidden agenda. It was, as it purported to be, a religious movement, a resurgence of the Fundamentalism that had been licking its wounds for two decades, awaiting just such an opportunity to challenge the liberal Protestantism that had held undisputed sway since the mid-1920s.
Billy Graham had at least some self-conscious inkling of what was happening. He declared that his travels had convinced him that Modernism was on the ropes and that Evangelicals had a real chance to deliver a knockout blow, not only in America but around the world. To a nation that had emerged victorious from war on two far-flung fronts and welcomed whatever help it could get in its efforts to redrop its anchors and reattach its roots, his bold and confident assertion that a virile, athletic, victorious, freedom-creating Christ was the answer held enormous appeal. Though he remained largely unknown outside Evangelical circles, song sheets from his rallies scarcely exaggerated when they described him as “America’s foremost youth leader . . . whose ministry God is blessing more than any other young man in his generation.” As a YFC headliner, Graham was widely sought for rallies throughout the country, but the addition of dozens of full-time staffers and evangelists enabled him to obtain some respite from the grueling round of travel. He used this opportunity to move into a more general kind of evangelism, remaining under the aegis and on the payroll of YFC but holding longer campaigns aimed not just at youth but at the general public. Still, a 1947 publicity brochure for his first American citywide campaign, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, contained a strong pitch to youth, calling him “A Young Athlete with a Twentieth-Century Gospel Message” and promising “terrific programs paced to a teenage tempo . . . fastmoving . . . enjoyable . . . captivating.”
The key campaign of the 1947 fall season took place in Charlotte. The invitation, from the same Christian Men’s Club that had invited Mordecai Ham a dozen years earlier, arrived while he was in London. The committeemen failed to take the six-hour time difference into account and telephoned him in the middle of the night, but he accepted without hesitation. As the day approached, however, anxiety seized him and he began to fear that the honor achieved abroad would be without profit in his own country. Almost obsessively determined not to fail at home, he drove his advance men to a thorough job of preparation and spent heavily on a professional saturation-advertising campaign that included airplane-drawn sky banners and leaflet bombings, regular press releases to thirty-one local newspapers, and five thousand telephone calls a day, in addition to the standard run of brochures, billboards, bumper stickers, bus cards, radio spots, window placards, and personal appearances at civic clubs and school assemblies. He also plumped up the services with a gaggle of gospel variety acts that included a Salvation Army band, a brass quartet from Bob Jones College, a child piano prodigy, and the “world’s foremost marimba player.” On opening night Gil Dodds ran an exhibition race against a miler from the University of North Carolina. As the rubber-soled tennis shoes of the two harriers flapped around the wooden floor of the armory, Grady Wilson, not easily embarrassed by incongruity, thought to himself, “This is awfully silly. This is really a little absurd.” But the crowd seemed impressed when Dodds mounted the platform and said, “I wonder how many of you here tonight are doing your best in the race for Jesus Christ,” and when Graham gave the invitation, an unusually high number of young people responded. The eighteen-service campaign drew 42,000 people and marked the first time the original Graham team—Billy, Cliff, Grady Wilson (“We didn’t really ask Grady to come with us,” Graham recalled; “he just joined us and we paid him a little salary”), and Bev Shea—-worked together in a campaign. Because he wanted to keep Shea with him, Billy persuaded the Charlotte committee to raise the singer’s pay twice during the meetings.
The Charlotte campaign marked one of the first recorded instances of Graham’s warnings against communism, a theme that would occupy a major place in his preaching over the next decade. The local boy who had toured a ravaged Europe himself and who regularly received firsthand reports from YFC colleagues in other lands warned the home folks that “Communism is creeping inexorably into these destitute lands; into war-torn China, into restless South America. . . . You should see Europe. It’s terrible. There are Communists everywhere. Here, too, for that matter.” The only hope, he thundered, is worldwide revival. “Unless the Christian religion rescues these nations from the clutches of the unbelieving, America will stand alone and isolated in the world.” He also struck another note that he would sound again and again in this age that thrilled (or shuddered) at the words and deeds of such titans as Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, MacArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower: the deep-seated need for an exemplar, a hero. “American youth must have a hero,” he proclaimed. “It may be a football player, a general in the army, or some other glamorous person.” This perception doubtless underlay the packing of evangelistic services with appearances by Christian celebrities, but their task was, like his own, to point beyond themselves to the Star of Stars, the Hero of Heroes: “Jesus Christ is the Hero of my soul and the coach of my life.”
One further momentous and largely unsought accomplishment remained for 1947. When the YFC evangelists spoke at George Wilson’s rallies at the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, the church’s old and ailing pastor and Fundamentalist patriarch, William Bell Riley, always made it a point to attend the services, observing from a wheelchair or, when weather permitted, from a convertible pulled into a doorway. Well past eighty, Riley was actively seeking someone to take the reins of his Northwestern Schools, which consisted of a Bible school, a seminary, and a brand-new liberal arts college, touted in Evangelical publications as having a “course and bearing [that will] save our young people from the poisonous sting of pagan philosophies which have become the devil’s substitutes, and which have been palmed off under the high-sounding and yet empty phrase of: ‘EXACT SCIENCE.’ The college is coeducational, fundamental, and millennial.” Riley talked to both Graham and Torrey Johnson about becoming president of the schools. When Johnson made it clear he was staying with Youth for Christ, the old man turned all his attention to Graham, whose career he had followed since their first meeting at Florida Bible Institute. He broached the subject on several occasions, but Billy balked, objecting that he had little talent or inclination for administration and could not hold evangelistic campaigns and run the schools at the same time, a point Torrey Johnson had made. Riley countered by pointing out that the crusades would feed students and money into the schools and that when his glory days on the revival circuit passed, as they surely would, he would need a permanent home base. Graham professed to be flattered but continued to insist he did not feel led of God to accept the opportunity. “I have been waiting for Heaven’s signal,” he wrote. “I have not received it.” Privately, he also harbored doubts about the wisdom of assuming a mantle stiffened by Riley’s intransigent Fundamentalism—in many ways, the very kind of pugnacious dogmatism the National Association of Evangelicals was seeking to avoid—and stained with anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic bile foreign to Billy’s irenic spirit.
Accustomed to getting his way and quite willing to invoke the authority of heaven in support of his position, Riley summoned Graham to his sickbed during the summer of 1947, pointed a bony finger directly at him, and, as portentous lightning and thunder streaked and crashed outside the window, declared imperiously, “Beloved, as Samuel appointed David King of Israel, so I appoint you head of these schools. I’ll meet you at the judgment-seat of Christ with them.” Unable to resist the combination of biblical precedent, deathbed dramatics, and celestial fireworks, Graham relented, but only to the point of agreeing to serve as interim president if Riley died before July 1, 1948, which would cover the next academic year. When the old man died on December 6, 1947, Billy Graham became, at twenty-nine, the youngest college president in America. After six months as interim and six more as acting president, Graham accepted full-time status, but he drew no salary and spent little time on campus. Fearing the job would divert him from evangelism, and opposing it from the outset, Ruth showed no interest in being the first lady to a husband unlikely to spend more time in Minneapolis than he was spending in Montreat. When a school administrator called to ask when she would be moving into the president’s mansion, she gave a clipped and accurate answer: “Never.” A few months later, shortly after the birth of a second daughter, Anne, she borrowed $4,000 to buy a small house across the street from her parents in Montreat.
As a largely absentee president, Graham established a pattern of leadership he would follow throughout his career: He raised money, enlisted boosters, stayed in touch by telephone, left the day-to-day administrative work to a coterie of trusted associates, and occasionally complicated their jobs by making decisions and commitments based more on well-meaning impulse than on informed understanding of relevant facts and issues. In one of his first moves, he persuaded T. W. Wilson to become Northwestern’s vice-president and de facto chief administrator. Wilson was understandably hesitant. One of YFC’s most successful evangelists, he wanted to pursue his career. Moreover, he realized he was no more qualified than Graham to run a college. “I told him,” Wilson recalled, “that I would be a miserable flop, but he called me every night for about ten nights, wanting to know if I had made up my mind yet.” Then, as later, Graham tended to identify making up one’s mind with accepting his wishes; T.W. finally caved in under the pressure and moved to Minneapolis. George Wilson was already on hand as business manager, and Graham quickly put his confidence in Gerald Beavan, a professor of psychology, theology, and Hebrew whom he appointed registrar. When he discovered that Beavan also had experience in advertising and journalism, he enlisted him to prepare publicity for his preaching campaigns and to make sure that news of his successes reached the relevant media.
Graham had little feel for the way academic institutions operate. He began his first letter to the faculty with the salutation “Dear Gang.” He awarded raises without consulting department chairmen, deans, or financial committees. He hired a man trained in English to teach math. “He hired him because he liked him,” T.W. explained. “Some of the students knew more about math than he did. We had to make some adjustments there.” He appeared at board meetings to discuss issues or projects that would normally require weeks or months of research and discussion by faculty and administrative committees and expected the board to reach a decision in time for him to catch a plane. When he felt he had given the matter all the time he could spare, he would look at his watch and tell his faithful vice-president, “T, you better do the rest. Good-bye.” Several of Graham’s associates from this period have tactfully observed that “Billy was called to be an evangelist, not an educator,” but his tenure at Northwestern was by no means a failure. His growing prominence in Evangelical circles attracted students to all three schools, causing a jump from eight hundred to approximately twelve hundred students. On the map of American higher education, the schools were little more than an obscure dot, but in the parochial universe of Fundamentalist Christianity, they were rising stars. And their leader’s lack of appropriate academic credentials was soon papered over with the first four of what would become a stack of honorary doctorates. Ironically, one of the first schools to honor the Reverend Dr. Graham was Bob Jones College. YFC had funneled hundreds of students to the college, and Dr. Bob was duly grateful. In a reciprocal gesture of reconciliation, Graham invited Jones to speak at Northwestern’s 1948 commencement, the first to be held during his presidency.
In late summer of 1948, Graham attended (as an official observer, not a delegate) the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC). He was uncomfortable with the liberal theology dominating the WCC and the ecumenical movement it represented, but he remembered that two of the movement’s most important spiritual ancestors had been D. L. Moody and one of Moody’s close friends, John R. Mott, and he felt Evangelicals had been partly to blame for the direction it had taken, since they had pulled out to maintain their separatist purity instead of remaining involved and trying to check the movement’s drift to the left. The vision of a unified Christian community so captured his expansive nature that he later characterized his attendance at these meetings as “one of the most thrilling experiences of my life up to that moment.”
In the fall of that year, Graham and Barrows took a leave of absence from YFC to devote full time to their own campaigns. For Graham, the move to a wider and independent ministry had come to seem inevitable. He had emerged from the pack as the most successful YFC evangelist, his meetings garnering more space in Evangelical publications than any other young preacher, including Chuck Templeton and Jack Shuler, his only real competitors. For Cliff Barrows, however, becoming the second member of the Graham/Barrows Campaign team meant the subordination of his own ministry to Graham’s. Such a subordination was not easy. When he and Billie were not traveling with Graham in Europe, they were enjoying considerable success with their own revivals, mostly on the West Coast. Cliff was a gifted preacher, and he and Billie combined talent, enthusiasm, transparent sincerity, and a remarkable lack of egotism into a highly winsome package. They clearly had the option to remain in a leading role with YFC or to establish their own independent evangelistic ministry, or to get off the road and serve as a pastor or minister of music. Yet Cliff not only recognized that he would probably never quite equal Graham’s success as an evangelist; he also saw that their most notable abilities were complementary rather than competitive and that they could accomplish far more together than either could alone or, for that matter, in tandem with anyone else they knew. One evening in Philadelphia, Cliff and Billie came to Graham’s hotel room to give him their decision. “Bill,” Cliff said, using that address to distinguish his friend from his wife, “God has given us peace in our hearts. As long as you want us to, from now till the Lord returns, or whenever, I’ll be content to be your song leader, carry your bag, go anywhere, do anything you want me to do.” It was a notable surrender of self, all the more so because it was volunteered rather than demanded. Forty years later, in a nearly empty cafeteria near his home in Greenville, South Carolina, Barrows reflected on the sacrifice of ego he had made and said in a quiet tone, utterly free of dissimulation, “I still have that same peace of mind and heart. I think Bill knows that.”
Graham remained on YFC’s board of directors and still actively promoted and encouraged its activities, but he was now largely on his own, receiving his primary support from love offerings collected in crusade services. At this point he still took no salary from the Northwestern Schools, which he continued to direct by telephone and proxy. His fame was confined mainly to the Evangelical world, and when he hit the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and magazines a year later, he appeared to be an overnight sensation, an inexplicable meteor. In fact, much of the success he would shortly enjoy could be traced directly to his four years with Youth for Christ. In that brief but critical period, he obtained preaching opportunities and experience few free-lance evangelists could have matched, and they had their effect. In keeping with YFC’s pledge to be “Geared to the Times,” Billy made it a standard aspect of his preaching to proclaim the “good news” against a contrasting background of bad news from contemporary events and circumstances, leading numerous observers to say that he preached as if he had “a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” He spoke of “how sleek Russian bombers are poised to drop death upon American cities; how Communism and Catholicism are taking over in Europe; how Mohammedanism is sweeping across Africa and into Southern Europe.” And in good dispensationalist fashion, he interpreted these dreadful portents, particularly when coupled with the imminent establishment of the state of Israel, as indisputable signs that the second coming of Christ lay but a short time in the future.
As important as becoming a more competent practitioner of his craft, Graham also established strong bonds with the small handful of men who would remain at his side for the rest of their lives, and he built a network of contacts with ministers and leading laymen who trusted him and would welcome the opportunity to work with him in his own citywide crusades. He learned that Charles Finney had been justified in commending “the right use of the constituted means,” and that revivals and successful evangelistic efforts are more likely to be “prayed down” when they have also been “worked up” by meticulous organization and copious publicity. Finally, in his role as college president, he was continuing to become aware of his strengths and, not insignificantly, his weaknesses as a leader. At age thirty, a precedented point at which to begin a wider ministry, Billy Graham was ready for higher ground.