This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Before Billy Sunday moved into the big time as the evangelist to America's great urban centers, he practiced his techniques and his messages for ten years among the small Iowa and Illinois towns of the corn belt. One of the last of these small-town crusades came in 1905, in Aledo, Illinois, a few miles south of here.
For Aledoans, Sunday was at his most folksy and anti-intellectual. "I don't know any more about theology than a jack rabbit does about ping-pong," he told them. And he was direct. "I'm almost afraid to say anything to wrinkle you faces and make you people laugh," he told his sober audience. "I am afraid I would be arrested for breaking antique bric-a-brac." He preached against bleached hair on women. "I see a head filled with bulk oysters or sawdust," he said.
Sunday spend far more time in Aledo instructing his rural audience on proper entertainments than on saving souls. Card playing had to stop. "Cards and the Bible will not stay in the same house," he warned. Cards were up there with drinking beer and dancing. "The lowest scoundrel in a community," Sunday said, is a dancing Methodist.
And theater was just as bad. Sunday reminded the Aledoans that in the famous Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, ninety Methodists had lost their lives, including several ministers and the president of the Epworth League. He implied God was angry with the Methodists for going to the theater.
There were some appropriate diversions, Sunday admitted. These included ball playing—Billy had played professional ball with the Chicago White Stockings from 1883 until 1886—tennis, parcheesi, checkers, chess, crokinole, authors, and Flinch.
What's the difference, an innocent Aledoan asked him, between cards and Flinch. "Exactly the same as the difference between heaven and hell," Billy said.
That left his audience to turn to other amusements. Aledoans who remember those days will tell you that after Billy Sunday’s visit, the birthrate in Aledo skyrocketed.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
