On countless occasions over the past forty years, usually at a press conference preceding a major crusade, Billy Graham has declared that he sensed religious revival was breaking out and about to sweep over the land. In 1948 he happened to be right. During the 1940s church membership in America rose by nearly 40 percent, with most of the growth coming after the end of the war, when the nation tried to reconstruct normalcy on the most dependable foundation it knew. Church building reached an all-time high, seminaries were packed, and secular colleges added programs in religious studies. Religious books outsold all other categories of nonfiction, and Bible sales doubled between 1947 and 1952—the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible sold two million copies in 1950 alone. While Graham and his colleagues in Youth for Christ and the Southern Baptist Youth Revival movement were packing civic auditoriums and stadia William Branham, Jack Coe, A. A. Allen, and Oral Roberts were filling stupendous nine-pole circus tents with Pentecostal believers desperate to see afflictions healed, devils cast out, and the dead raised.
For evangelists it was like being a stockbroker in a runaway bull market. As in other fields, however, the boom attracted some whose motives and methods were less than sanctified, who fell prey to the temptations described in Scripture as “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (I John 2:16), but better known by their street names: sex, money, and power. Despite good intentions and behavior, Graham and his associates occasionally found themselves the objects of suspicion and condescension from ministers and laypeople alike. They learned that Elmer Gantry, whom Sinclair Lewis had assembled from skeletons and scraps found in the closets of real-life evangelists, was a deeply entrenched cultural stereotype. As they contemplated the checkered history and contemporary shortcomings of itinerant evangelism (the term itself had a kind of siding salesman’s rhinestone ring to it) and talked with veteran campaigners, they realized that much of the skepticism was warranted. To prepare his own defenses, Graham called Bev Shea, Grady Wilson, and Cliff Barrows to his hotel room during a campaign in Modesto, California, in November of 1948. “God has brought us to this point,” he said. “Maybe he is preparing us for something that we don’t know. Let’s try to recall all the things that have been a stumbling block and a hindrance to evangelists in years past, and let’s come back together in an hour and talk about it and pray about it and ask God to guard us from them.”
The assignment was easy. They had all seen enough evangelists rise and fall or leave town in a cloud of disillusionment to be able to pinpoint the key problems readily. When they regrouped in Graham’s room later in the afternoon, each had made essentially the same list, which came to be known in the oral tradition as the Modesto Manifesto. The first problem was money. The most rectitudinous of men could find it difficult not to pull out a few extra flourishes when the love offering was collected. When he traveled for YFC, Graham turned offerings over to local or national bodies and was paid a straight salary, but no parent body existed to fund his independent revivals, so the group saw no viable alternative to the love-offering system, even though it made them uncomfortable. They did, however, pledge not to emphasize the offering and to try to keep themselves as free as possible of suspicion regarding the way they handled the money by asking members of the sponsoring committee to oversee the payment of all bills and disbursement of funds to the revival team. On one occasion, Bev Shea sent the sponsoring committee a check for thirty dollars, just in case the hotel had levied a charge for extra laundry service for his infant son.
The second potential problem was immorality. As energetic young men in full bloom, often traveling without their families, charged with the raw excitement of standing before large and admiring crowds, and living in anonymous hotels and tourist courts, all of them knew well the power and possibilities of sexual temptation, and all of them had seen promising ministerial careers shipwrecked by the potent combination of lust and opportunity. They asked God “to guard us, to keep us true, to really help us be sensitive in this area, to keep us even from the appearance of evil,” and they began to follow simple but effective rules to protect themselves. They avoided situations that would put them alone with a woman—lunch, a counseling session, even a ride to an auditorium or an airport. On the road, they roomed in close proximity to each other as an added margin of social control. And always, they prayed for supernatural assistance in keeping them “clean.”
Two other problems, less imperious in their proddings than money or sex but capable of generating cynicism toward evangelists, were inflated publicity and criticism of local pastors. Because it helped win invitations to bigger churches and cities and thus fed their egos and fattened their pocketbooks, evangelists had grown accustomed to exaggerating their crowds and their results, both in advance publicity and in reports to Evangelical publications. Critics accused them of counting arms and legs instead of heads, and the phrase evangelistically speaking signified that anyone interested in accuracy should discount an itinerant’s reports of his own accomplishments. D. L. Moody refused to keep statistics lest he be drawn into exaggeration or boasting. Billy Graham and his team were too wed to the modern ethos to adopt that approach, but they did begin to use a consistent procedure. Instead of generating their own figures, they usually accepted crowd estimates given by police or the fire department or arena managers, even when they felt the official estimate was too low, and they readily admitted that many who came down the aisles during the invitation were counselors assigned to help inquirers, not inquirers themselves. As for the criticism of pastors, they had heard Mordecai Ham and his ilk attack the local clergy to gain attention and make themselves look good, then leave town while the hapless pastors tried to regain the confidence of their parishioners. Graham was determined to avoid this destructive course. He would gladly meet with pastors who criticized him but would not publicly criticize men who planted the seed and tilled the fields that he swooped in to harvest.
The next several months passed uneventfully with a return visit to England and respectable but modest outings in Miami and Baltimore. Then came an effort in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Graham and his colleagues remember as the nadir of their public careers. Grady Wilson, given to plain speech, called it “the sorriest crusade we ever had,” adding that “Billy was about ready to give up the ministry after Altoona.” Less bluntly, Cliff Barrows conceded that “several contributing factors combined to keep it from standing out as one of the most blessed of events.” The problems began as soon as Graham hit town and learned that the several invitations he had received to hold a campaign had not been repeated requests from a single body, as he had hoped, but separate inquiries from rival ministerial associations that were at each other’s throats and not about to cooperate in a joint venture. Once the meeting started, a large mentally deranged woman repeatedly interrupted the services by threatening to kill Cliff Barrows if she ever saw him on the street, screaming that Indians were about to attack Billy Graham, and rushing the platform with such determination to cause trouble that it took Grady Wilson and two ushers to restrain her. Overall, Barrows recalled that “we didn’t do much in Altoona but pray and wonder what had happened and wish the meeting would get over with so we could get out of town.”
Grady’s comment about Billy’s leaving the ministry was intentionally hyperbolic, but the bloom of the YFC triumphs did seem to fade a bit, and Graham’s confidence that God was preparing him for a glorious ministry began to falter. Simple ambition played its part here; Billy had always liked standing out from the crowd, and he must have enjoyed the intoxicating rush that few experiences can provide so fully as drinking in the attention and adoration of a rapt multitude. But there was more, and not to appreciate that would be to misunderstand Billy Graham, who has carried with him since his midteens an obsessive determination to discern and perform the will of God. A small but telling incident shortly after the Altoona meeting offered a glimpse of this compulsion. During a gathering at a Michigan Fundamentalist conference center whose very name, Maranatha (“Come, Lord”), signified its eschatological orientation, Graham and two other featured speakers, including Roy Gustafson, an old friend from Florida Bible Institute, went out into a field one evening after the services to see the aurora borealis. As they contemplated the beauty and mystery of the northern lights, they fell easily to talking of the celestial manifestations that might accompany the Second Coming. None of them doubted that the rapture and the millennium would soon bring the present “dispensation” to an end, and all three assumed they would be in the company of those whisked into the clouds, so the prospect held no terror whatever for them. But Graham raised a lone qualification to his basically joyful anticipation: “I want the Lord to come,” he said, “but I sure would like to do something great for him before he comes.” He knew salvation was by grace, but he aspired to enter God’s presence at the Judgment with a suitable token of gratitude. Typically, the men ended their reflections in prayer. Gustafson, who went first, knelt on his handkerchief to protect his trousers from dampness and grass stains. When Billy’s turn came, his friends heard not his customary clear resonance but a muffled groaning. When Gustafson cocked open an eye to discover the cause of the unusual sounds, he saw that Billy, still wearing his suit and tie and far away from any crowd that might acclaim his piety and humility, had thrown himself face forward onto the ground in abject prostration and was beseeching God for an opportunity to serve him more fully. A second incident at the same conference made it clear that Graham did not view greater service as an avenue for greater gain. When conference leaders gave him a twenty-three-hundred dollar love offering for his efforts, he handed the entire amount to Roy Gustafson, who was about to leave on a Central American mission.
Graham’s fear that he might fall short in his efforts to serve God had another source that was far more troubling than the mediocrities of Miami and Baltimore and the depressing failure of Altoona. If he had a peer among his YFC colleagues, it was unquestionably Chuck Templeton. Darkly handsome, intelligent, and intellectually curious despite his lack of a high school education, and more worldly wise than most of his colleagues by dint of a troubled homelife that had forced him to fend for himself since his early teens, Templeton was generally acknowledged to be the most versatile of the YFC evangelists, able to preach a soul-winning message or lead a devotional service or emcee a stadium rally with great and equal effectiveness. “He was not an expositor of the Word,” Torrey Johnson recalled. “He did not know his Bible as thoroughly as some others, [but] he loved it and preached it. The only danger with him was that he was so eloquent, you were taken up with his eloquence more than with the substance.” Templeton himself, while deeply fond of Billy Graham, had no doubt his own preaching was superior to Graham’s in both technique and content, though he acknowledged that no one could match Billy’s success when it came to inviting people to accept Christ. “He got more results than anybody,” Templeton remembered. “We would travel together and preach on consecutive nights. He would get forty-one; I would get thirty-two. In the next town, I would get seventeen, he would get twenty-three, or I would get two hundred and he would get three hundred. Very clearly, he was going to be a well-known figure.” Still, in the early years of YFC, most observers would probably have put their money on Templeton; in 1946, when the National Association of Evangelicals published a pictorial spread of Evangelicals “best used of God” in the organization’s five-year history, it named both Johnson and Templeton but omitted Billy Graham. And a YFC veteran looking back on these exciting days remembered that “this boy Charlie Templeton could just preach fantastically. That was before he went to seminary.”
The ominous overtone of that brief assessment pointed to the heart of the crisis both Graham and Templeton faced. After three years on the rally and revival circuit, Templeton had come to believe that the success he and the other young lions of the YFC enjoyed was illusory, that they were offering their audiences meringue instead of meat, and garnering their “decisions” by force of personal attractiveness rather than by convincing presentation of a substantial message grounded on a solid rock of understanding. Increasingly troubled, he decided to resign from YFC and his flourishing independent church in Toronto to pursue a formal education. Even without a high school diploma, he managed to gain admission to Princeton Theological Seminary and prepared to enroll in the fall of 1948. Knowing that Graham shared at least some of his feelings about the need for further disciplined study, he went to Montreat to enlist him as a partner in the venture. He said, “Bill, we are getting by on animal magnetism and youthful enthusiasm and natural talent, but that’s not going to work when we’re forty or fifty. You’ve got to come with me.” The idea intrigued Graham, but he protested that increased evangelistic opportunities, his duties at Northwestern, and the incongruity of a college president’s returning to school would make enrollment in an American seminary unfeasible. Lest his friend think these were polite dodges, however, he made a counterproposal. “I never will forget,” Templeton recalled. “He got up out of his chair and walked across the floor with his hand out. And he said, ‘Chuck, go to Oxford and I’ll go with you.” Templeton regarded Graham’s proposal to devote at least two years to graduate work at Oxford as genuine but chose to stay his own course. “It had been an enormous problem to get into Princeton,” he explained, “and I couldn’t change my mind at this stage, but if I had shaken his hand I have no doubt in the world that the whole history of evangelism would have changed. Billy would have been ruined by going to Oxford, or he would have left at midterm. It undoubtedly would have diminished him in some way. I’m not saying this in a disdainful way, but Billy was not interested in the scholarly side of things. He was not interested in reaching for conceptual or intellectual horizons.”
Graham undoubtedly valued the immediate satisfactions of packed auditoriums and crowded aisles and growing schools more than the less tangible pleasures of the life of the mind, but he did begin to read serious academic theology, some of it suggested by John Mackay, then president of the Princeton seminary. Over the following academic year, when his travels brought him to New York, he and Templeton met several times in a room in the Taft Hotel, just off Times Square, for long bouts of prayer and discussion in which he struggled to defend received belief against the attacks Templeton mounted with his newly acquired weapons from the seminarian’s armamentarium: historical and literary criticism of the Bible, theology viewed as a creative enterprise rather than scrupulous adherence to a blueprint, epistemological allegiance to the methods and findings of natural science, and the relativizing lessons of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. At one point Graham uttered what Templeton called “a declaratory sentence in the evolution of Billy Graham.” Flustered by his inability to counter Templeton’s arguments, he said, “Chuck, look, I haven’t a good enough mind to settle these questions. The finest minds in the world have looked and come down on both sides of these questions. I don’t have the time, the inclination, or the set of mind to pursue them. I have found that if I say, ‘The Bible says’ and ‘God says,’ I get results. I have decided I am not going to wrestle with these questions any longer.” Exasperated by this unblinking abdication of the struggle that was wrenching his own soul, Templeton issued a sharp rebuke: “Bill, you cannot refuse to think. To do that is to die intellectually. You cannot disobey Christ’s great commandment to love God ‘with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind!’ Not to think is to deny God’s creativity. Not to think is to sin against your Creator. You can’t stop thinking. That’s intellectual suicide.”
Templeton’s charge stung, and Graham continued to wrestle with both conscience and intellect. His dilemma was real and threatening. If Scripture were not truly God’s inspired revelation, God’s literal Word, directly transmitted to the human agents who committed it to writing and trustworthy in every respect, how could he continue to preach it with the same assurance and power? How could he remain as president of a school founded on unquestioned faith in the absolute dependability of Scripture? Indeed, if any portion of the Bible were seen to be unreliable, how could one trust any other portion, including the central affirmations of the Christian faith? On the other hand, if the Bible were all he believed and desperately wanted it to be, why couldn’t he answer Chuck Templeton’s questions? And why did the faculty and students at the world’s best universities seem, when confronted with the evidence, to move inexorably away from the positions he held? For an honest young Fundamentalist, there could scarcely be a greater threat. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Billy Graham understood more fully than ever before the Apostle Paul’s observation that “if Christ is not risen” (which is to say, if what believers affirm about Jesus is not true) then “we are of all men most miserable.”
The resolution came at a student conference at Forest Home, a retreat center in the San Bernadino Mountains near Los Angeles. Both Graham and Templeton were featured speakers, and their conversations, joined by others asking similar questions, rekindled Billy’s doubts. In fresh turmoil, he went for a walk in the serene pine forest. About fifty yards off a main trail, he sat for a long time on a large rock, his Bible spread open on a tree stump. As he struggled once more with his doubts and his commitment, he finally made the pragmatic decision to abandon doubt and cling to commitment. With the same spirit of surrender he had shown on the eighteenth green at Temple Terrace, he said, “Oh, God, I cannot prove certain things. I cannot answer some of the questions Chuck is raising and some of the other people are raising, but I accept this Book by faith as the Word of God.” Chuck Templeton could not or would not make such a surrender, but he understood Graham’s reaction. “I could not live without facing my doubts,” he said. “Billy could not see but that doubt was sin. It flew in the face of being a southern country boy, raised in a religious family, married to a missionary’s daughter. To doubt God was to do wrong.” After completing his studies at Princeton and serving for a time as a successful evangelist for the National Council of Churches—Princeton’s dean called him “the most gifted and talented young man in America today for preaching mission work”—Templeton recognized he was no longer a believer in any kind of orthodox sense and that it was intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. Shortly afterward he left the ministry and returned to Toronto, where he pursued a multifaceted career as a newspaper columnist and editor, radio and TV commentator, novelist, and screenwriter. In sharp contrast, Graham’s conscious resolution that he would never again entertain any doubts whatsoever about the authority of Scripture galvanized his faith and, as he later observed, “gave power and authority to my preaching that has never left me. The gospel in my hands became a hammer and a flame I felt as though I had a rapier in my hands and through the power of the Bible was slashing deeply into men’s consciousness, leading them to surrender to God.” Today, at Forest Home, a bronze tablet identifies the Stone of Witness where Billy Graham accepted, once and for all, the absolute authority of the Scriptures.
Fortified with his newly refinished faith, Graham plunged headlong into the campaign that would make him a national figure. For several years, a group of laymen operating under the banner of Christ for Greater Los Angeles sponsored revivals featuring a well-known preacher who could be counted on to draw a respectable crowd of fellow Fundamentalists and perhaps a smattering of the unsaved. Jack Shuler had been the evangelist for two of their meetings, and Chuck Templeton had shared the preaching with another YFC evangelist two years earlier. For the 1949 edition, they invited Billy Graham. The sponsoring committee enjoyed good support from approximately a quarter of Los Angeles—area churches, so a respectable outing seemed assured, but Graham wanted more than that, and he set about to get it. For the first time, a Billy Graham campaign began to assume what would eventually become its mature form. Nine months before the meetings began, the organizers engaged veteran revivalists J. Edwin Orr and Armin Gesswein to conduct preparatory meetings throughout the Los Angeles area. As a result of their efforts, nearly eight hundred small groups were meeting regularly to pray for the campaign long before it began in September. Then, two weeks before opening night, Grady Wilson flew in from South Carolina to organize still more prayer meetings, some lasting all day or all night, and around-the-clock prayer chains involving hundreds of people. The supernatural benefits of prayer are inherently impossible to measure, no matter what one believes about the practice, but the mobilizing of thousands into prayer groups undoubtedly stimulated their enthusiasm for the campaign and must have boosted Graham’s confidence. As further support, Cliff Barrows recruited a large choir, and Dawson Trotman, founder and leader of The Navigators, a live-wire group of young people who emphasized personal evangelism, trained counselors to help inquirers clarify their decisions and direct them into Bible-believing churches.
Graham may have surrendered his doubt and pride at Forest Home, but he did not relinquish his faith in publicity. On the contrary, he pressured a wary committee into spending $25,000 for posters, billboards, radio announcements, and newspaper ads urging Los Angelenos to “Visit the Canvas Cathedral with the Steeple of Light,” to hear “America’s Sensational Young Evangelist,” and enjoy old-fashioned revival services featuring a “Dazzling Array of Gospel Talent.” The Canvas Cathedral, a Ringling Brothers circus tent pitched at the corner of Washington and Hill streets and sporting a garish midway-style picture of Graham on a long cloth marquee, was itself a grand attention getter. Billy’s fascination with celebrities and his keen appreciation for the role they could play in lending both legitimation and panache to a cause blossomed in this city of radio and movie stars. Through Henrietta Mears, a wealthy and flamboyant woman who grew up in W. B. Riley’s church in Minneapolis, founded Forest Home, and taught a Sunday school class of several hundred members at the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, Graham gained access to the Hollywood Christian Group, an organization of mostly minor actors and other media personalities he hoped would lend their names and influence to the campaign. One of the best known but least devout, Stuart Hamblen, agreed to plug the meetings on his popular western-flavored radio show. Graham also cultivated high-level official support and won public endorsemerit from the city’s mayor. Filling a 6,000-seat tent remained a daunting task, but a good meeting seemed assured.
Two years of campaigning had helped the Graham team evolve a style that toned down the gaudier aspects of the YFC rallies while retaining enough enthusiastic flash to attract and hold attention. Cliff Barrows played his trombone and led the singing with a cheerleader’s vivacity, but the hymns were familiar, designed to reassure the timid that despite the circuslike trappings, the services themselves were much like those in the churches in which most had been reared. Barrows kept applause to a minimum, and if guest performers ever crossed the line of propriety and good taste, Bev Shea’s dignified renditions always restored a sense of seriousness before Graham entered the pulpit. Billy (Cliff was now introducing him as “Dr. Graham”) still spoke with great intensity and fervor, but he never slipped into the wild hysteria or demagogic rantings that drew unfavorable attention to some of the stars of the Pentecostal healing revival, and he told reporters that “I want to do away with everything that is criticized in mass evangelism. We believe it is a spiritual service. We don’t believe it is a concert or a show.”
Whether traceable to his Forest Home experience or simply to the realization that never before had he possessed such an opportunity, Graham preached with a force and authority that impressed even his colleagues. Standing behind a pulpit with a plywood facade cut to suggest a giant open Bible, he began most of his sermons by reading a lengthy passage of Scripture and launching immediately into a ringing litany of what would happen if folks did not heed the clear lessons contained in that portion of God’s Word. Throughout virtually the entire performance, he stayed in motion, using a lapel microphone that gave him freedom to stalk back and forth across a long platform while Cliff Barrows played the cord in and out to keep him from getting tangled in it. Some observers calculated that he walked at least a mile per sermon, and some found his pacing a distraction, but it kept attention riveted on him, and it made listeners in all sections of the tent feel he was speaking directly to them at least part of the time, particularly when he stopped suddenly, leaned forward with both hands on his knees, and announced with glowering ferocity the judgment of God upon them, their city, and their nation. Little of this was accidental. Graham acknowledged that he not only rehearsed his sermons but sometimes listened to a wire recording of previous presentations to make sure he had every nuance down pat, and he was clearly aware of the importance of nuance. “I’ve learned to look straight at them,” he explained. “Say I’m preaching to an audience of three or four thousand. I can look straight at them, and I can tell when a man way back in the auditorium blinks his eyes. When he does that, I know it’s time for a change of pace, or I’ll lose some of the people. That’s what I’ve trained my voice for. It’s a change of pace that’s the secret. I speak in loud tones—oh, not boisterous, but good and loud—and then I soften the voice. It’s that difference in delivery that holds them.” The more turbulent aspects of his style would eventually disappear along with his hand-painted ties and bright argyle socks and the voluminous double-breasted suits that hung on his bony frame like a scarecrow’s garment, but films from this campaign show the trademark gestures that already connected speech and sinew in easily recognizable patterns. He shaped his hands into pistols and fired his accusations into the transfixed crowd. His arms became machetes as he hacked his way through the jungle of contemporary sin. His clenched fist descended with such power and fury that none could doubt he had made the wrath of God his own. And over and over, again and again, as he held the limp-backed book high overhead or drew his hands down like lightning to where it lay open on the pulpit, he declared that his words should be heeded not because they were his but because “the Bible says . . . !”
The content of Graham’s sermons also foreshadowed his later preaching. At the opening service, he ran through the catalogue of problems—adultery, divorce, crime, alcohol abuse, suicide, materialism, love of money, and general moral “deteriation”—that marked Los Angeles as a “city of wickedness and sin” and warned that the only choices before it were “revival or judgment.” These, of course, were evangelistic evergreens, safely transplantable in any urban soil. During this campaign, however, Billy alarmed his audiences with a brand-new threat: atomic-powered communism. A year earlier he had ventured an opinion that the Soviet Union had the bomb and was prepared to use it on America or any other country that dared defy it. Now, reality replaced speculation. Just two days before the campaign began, President Truman announced that the Russians had successfully tested an atomic bomb and for two years had been building a nuclear arsenal that would drastically alter the imbalance of power America had enjoyed since the end of World War II. Graham seized upon this stunning revelation and hammered it home throughout the campaign. Reminding his audiences that he had visited a devastated Europe six times since the war, he declared that “across Europe at this very hour there is stark, naked fear among the people. . . . An arms race, unprecedented in the history of the world, is driving us madly toward destruction!” The line had been drawn, he thundered, between communism and Western culture, and no accommodation was possible. “Western culture and its fruits had its foundation in the Bible, the Word of God, and in the revivals of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Communism, on the other hand, has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. Communism is not only an economic interpretation of life—Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.” The fire of that war, he warned, would fall directly upon them, because “the Fifth Columnists, called Communists, are more rampant in Los Angeles than any other city in America. . . . In this moment I can see the judgment hand of God over Los Angeles. I can see judgment about to fall.”
The only hope, the prophet said, was repentance and revival. “It is the providence of God,” he declared, “that he has chosen this hour for a campaign—giving this city one more chance to repent of sin and turn to a believing knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . This may be God’s last great call!” And who would issue that call? “Let me tell you something,” Graham said. “When God gets ready to shake America, He may not take the Ph.D. and the D.D. God may choose a country boy. God may choose the man that no one knows, a little nobody, to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day, and I pray that He would!”
Graham’s preaching drew fair crowds and produced acceptable conversion rates, but at the end of the three scheduled weeks, little other than expense distinguished the revival from those of previous years. The weather was unseasonably cold, attendance was flagging—workers spaced the seats to make the crowds appear larger than they actually were—and Billy was out of sermons. It was customary to extend a successful revival, but several committee members thought it time to bring this one to a close. After some discussion, one man suggested they “put out a fleece” and let God decide. If the cold weather continued, they would end the campaign; if a warm front blew in by the time the services ended that same evening, they would take that as a sign God wanted the meetings to continue. Weather miracles are hard to count on or certify, and no record exists to indicate whether or not the gentleman had already checked the forecast for that day, but a few hours later, while Graham preached, committee members on the platform noticed a flutter in the audience as people began to fan themselves with programs and song sheets. Soon, Billy himself noticed the heat and asked ushers to raise the flaps on the west side of the tent to let in fresh air. The committee had its miracle, and when the sermon ended, the man who had challenged God to show his hand happily announced that the services would continue on a week-to-week basis.
Almost immediately, that decision proved to be a good one. Stuart Hamblen had made good on his promise to plug the meetings on his radio program and had attended several services, apparently enjoying his role as a prominent patron. The son of a Methodist minister and one of the original members of the Stars Christian Fellowship Group, Hamblen was also well-known as a backslider who drank, gambled, sang with dance bands and owned a stable of racehorses, all significant transgressions in Evangelical eyes. Graham regarded Hamblen as “a key man in the area with tremendous influence” and appreciated his encouragement but eventually concluded that the singer’s public show of piety was an unacceptable pose and made a pointed public effort to bring him to repentance, declaring from the pulpit that “there is someone in this tent who is leading a double life. There is a person here tonight who is a phoney.” The barely veiled accusation offended Hamblen, but it also hit the mark. When he realized that an extended campaign meant further attacks, his resistance crumbled. After a terrifyingly violent mountain storm ended a drunken hunting trip, taken in part to get away from his wife Suzy’s insistent nagging that he “get saved,” Hamblen showed up at Graham’s apartment in the middle of the night. When Grady sleepily opened the door, Hamblen lurched in, fell on his knees, grabbed Billy around the legs, and boozily begged for help in straightening out his life. Billy, not at his best when awakened unexpectedly said, “Stand up, Stuart. You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Hamblen acknowledged his condition but insisted Graham help him, so they sat down at the kitchen table and Billy began to read the Bible to him and explain what he needed to do. Finally, at the climax of an extended and tearful prayer session, Hamblen declared, “Lord, you’re hearing a new voice,” and asked God to forgive his sins. At that moment, he later recounted, “I heard the heavenly switchboard click.” Improbable as it seemed to skeptical acquaintances, Hamblen’s conversion took. He told his radio audience of his experience, urged them not to smoke or drink the products advertised on his program (a move that cost him his job), promised to sell all but one of his racehorses (“I will keep El Lobo [who had won a fifty-thousand-dollar race at Santa Anita], but only for sentimental reasons. I will never race him again”), and invited his listeners to come to the big tent, where he would sing and give his testimony. A few days later, his overjoyed parents flew in from Texas to praise Billy Graham for his role in bringing their prodigal son home. When good friend John Wayne commented on the remarkable transformation, Hamblen told the Duke, “It is no secret what God can do.” Wayne suggested he write a song about it, and the result, beginning with those same words, became a country-music standard.
The publicity boomlet detonated by Hamblen’s conversion more than justified the decision to continue the revival, but it paled beside what followed. Apart from ads, newspaper coverage of the campaign had been limited to a brief account of the opening service and stories in the Saturday religion section. Then, one evening, quite without warning, a cluster of reporters and photographers met Graham when he arrived at the tent. Puzzled, even somewhat frightened, Billy asked a reporter what had happened. “You have just been kissed by William Randolph Hearst. Look here.” He showed him a scrap of paper torn from a wire-service machine. “Here’s what’s happened. The boss has said, ‘Puff Graham.’”
Accounts of Graham’s career have typically portrayed the Hearst endorsement as a complete surprise, unsought and unexpected. The reality was less dramatic. All the Hearst papers had boosted YFC—Hearst had sent his “Puff YFC” telegram in 1946—but none had done more for the organization than the Los Angeles Examiner, the largest West Coast newspaper at the time. Its publisher, R. A. Carrington, though not particularly religious himself, admired the organization, gave its activities good coverage in the newspaper, did much of its printing free of charge, and arranged for the paper to sponsor various YFC projects. Most notably, Carrington had given YFC leader Roy McKeown a weekly column in the Sunday Examiner to report on YFC activities for a five-state region. A committee member for the revival, McKeown contacted Carrington to ask if the paper might give Graham and the meetings special attention. Carrington met with Graham, then telephoned “the chief” (Hearst), and the rest was publicity. Billy’s YFC days had convinced him Hearst’s endorsement could be valuable, but he feared the notorious old titan’s strong opinions and unconventional lifestyle, particularly his widely publicized liaison with actress Marion Davies, might contaminate any stream of publicity. Filled with anxiety and indecision, Graham pulled Edwin Orr aside to ask for advice. Orr’s response was simple: “Billy, if this is of God, he will make the press work for you for nothing.” Graham accepted this counsel and became a truly national figure almost overnight. The next morning, the Examiner and the city’s other Hearst paper, the Herald, gave him banner headlines, and twelve other papers in the Hearst chain also gave the campaign extensive coverage. Within days the Associated Press, the United Press, and the International News Service picked up the story, and Time, Newsweek, and Life followed soon afterward with major feature stories. Strangely, Graham never met his benefactor—“I never wrote him, I never thanked him, I never had any correspondence or telegrams or anything else. I suppose I could have met him, but I never thought he would see a person like me at that time”—and still professes not to know exactly why Hearst decided to back his ministry. An ardent anti-Communist, Hearst may have been attracted by Graham’s stern warnings against the Red Menace. Another possibility is that he regarded Graham as a positive moral influence, a successor to Billy Sunday, whose career he had also boosted. The tycoon’s son, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., may have provided the most likely explanation when he observed that quite simply his father was interested in whatever attracted the greatest number of people. He saw that Graham had an uncommonly accurate bead on the anxieties of a large segment of the American public and was more than happy to use him to sell papers.
As the revival stretched from three to eight weeks, Graham had to call on friends for sermon ideas and outlines. A missionary just back from Korea offered him his entire stock of sermons. At one point, he resorted to reading Jonathan Edwards’s classic, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” word for word except for a few minor emendations. Out of illustrations, he fell back on more copious use of Scripture, a technique he felt improved his sermons. Whether it was his preaching or the publicity or, as all participants felt, the prodding of God’s Spirit, the crowds grew so large that a tent expanded to seat 9,000 (with the seats scrunched together) was sometimes full hours before the service started, forcing thousands of latecomers to listen from the periphery and creating such a traffic problem that police eventually closed off a street rather than try to keep it clear.
The conversion of Olympic miler and war hero Louis Zamperini and gangland wiretapper Jim Vaus stimulated further publicity. Zamperini, who created a minor sensation at the 1936 Berlin Olympics when he pulled down a Nazi flag from Hitler’s Reichstag, had spent forty-six days bobbing about on a raft in the Pacific, followed by a harrowing stay in a Japanese POW camp. When the war ended, he never managed to put his life back together and had begun to drink heavily. Dragged to the revival by his wife, Zamperini saw Graham more “as an athlete than as a man of God” and reached out in desperation for the new life he offered. Vaus’s conversion rivaled Hamblen’s for its publicity value. Fundamentalist religion was hardly alien to Jim Vaus. Before being expelled, he had studied for the ministry at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, where his father was a professor, and he spent a year at Wheaton, where he got into trouble for wiretapping a girls’ dormitory. Deciding he had misread his call, Vaus turned to crime, which led to a term in state prison for armed robbery. After release, he served in the military and, despite a court-martial sentence for misappropriation of government property, earned an honorable discharge, but soon turned again to crime and became an assistant to the notorious West Coast crime czar, Mickey Cohen. Vaus knew Stuart Hamblen, and when he read of the singer’s return to God, he decided to attend Graham’s revival. He insisted he went largely because he had nothing better to do. Once inside, however, he found himself enfolded in the familiar environment in which he had been reared, and he struggled only briefly before stepping forward to accept Billy Graham’s invitation.
Predictably, the reclamation of an authentic gangster drew the media’s attention, but the real publicity bonanza came when Vaus arranged a late-night meeting between Graham and Mickey Cohen at the mobster’s home. Cohen had dismissed his servants and was in the house alone. Neither man’s experience had furnished him with a clear sense of protocol for dealing with the other, but both were anxious to please. To prove he was not wicked as the preacher might have heard, Cohen talked of the charitable causes he supported and, after searching the bookshelves and tabletops in several rooms, triumphantly produced a Bible he had received in appreciation for his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the new state of Israel. Graham was careful not to offend the gangster, but he gingerly presented an outline of the gospel Jim Vaus had embraced. Cohen gave no sign he was “almost persuaded,” but to demonstrate his goodwill, he took the evangelist back to his bedroom, showed him his huge closets full of expensive suits, and gave him a necktie as a souvenir of the visit. As they parted, he told Graham a bit ruefully, “I’ve given Jim everything he ever wanted, but now he leaves me and he’s going with you.” Then, according to Vaus, he turned to his former henchman and said, “Jim, if the whole world turns against you for the decision you made, remember that there’s one little Jew who thinks the world of you for that decision and for the guts you’ve had to stand up for it.” The visit was supposed to have been secret, but the next day’s headlines trumpeted the nocturnal meeting between the gangster and the preacher. Graham was chagrined that the story had leaked, but Cohen did not complain—an insatiable publicity seeker, he may well have leaked the story himself—and the revival received another round of front-page coverage.
As the campaign entered its “Sixth Great Sin-Smashing Week,” such notables as Gene Autry and Jane Russell began to attend, and Cecil B. De Mille, the father of cinematic biblical epics, offered Graham a screen test. The wife of the head of Paramount Studios hosted a ladies luncheon for him at the Wilshire Country Club. Louella Parsons interviewed him at a posh Sunset Strip restaurant and wrote a gushing column about the appeal of “this really naive, humble man.” The AP called the revival “one of the greatest the city ever has witnessed,” Life pronounced it “the biggest revival in Los Angeles since the death of Aimee Semple McPherson,” and Time declared that “no one since Billy Sunday” had wielded “the revival sickle” with such success as “this thirty-one-year-old, blond, trumpet-lunged North Carolinian.” Back in North Carolina, Morrow Graham wanted desperately to accept Billy’s invitation to join him at the scene of his triumph, but “Mr. [Frank] Graham never enjoyed trips—he just didn’t like to travel—and I wouldn’t go without him.” By the time the revival ended on November 20, a day on which a large contingent of prostitutes and skid-row derelicts showed up to ask someone to pray for them, aggregate attendance for the eight weeks approached 350,000, with inquirers numbering approximately 3,000. Nearly seven hundred churches, almost three times more than at the beginning, were lending at least some measure of support. Charles Fuller and another famed radio preacher, “Fighting Bob” Shuler (Jack Shuler’s father), had thrown their full weight behind Graham, and a number of preachers who had been cool toward the campaign at the beginning came around “to ask forgiveness for a few things they had said about evangelism, Youth for Christ, and some of the ‘hot-rodders’ in wide ties.’” Suddenly, whatever Billy Graham said on any subject was likely to find its way into the newspapers, a phenomenon that justifiably stirred his anxiety. Shortly after the revival began to boom, Graham called Armin Gesswein in Chicago to say, “You better get back out here real fast, because something has broken out that is way beyond me.” In the months that followed, he had little time to reflect on just what it was that had happened or his capacity to handle it. On the train back to Minneapolis, conductors and passengers treated him like a hero, reporters crowded on board to press their inquiries, and a band of Northwestern colleagues welcomed him home in the middle of the night. The next day, while reporting on the campaign to a Northwestern audience, he faltered, then sat down without finishing, overcome by the magnitude of the turn his life had taken.