HIS ELECTRIC REVOLVING CROSS TO BEAR
The America that Bill Stidger grew up in was, in many ways, a more innocent land. He was born and raised in the closing decades of the 19th century in the mountains of West Virginia at a time when houses were isolated by distances traveled only on foot or by horse, when homes were lighted with kerosene lamps and when electronic communication was largely a dream. Still, Stidger went on to become “Evangelism’s First Modern Media Star,” capitalizing on the new medium of radio, according to his grandson, Jack Hyland, who has just written a book by that name. Like many powerful stump preachers before him, Bill Stidger was able to move his listeners to religious fervor, but unlike his predecessors, he saw the need to “market” religion. In doing so he used any method at hand to deliver his message, according to Mr. Hyland, an investment banker who maintains homes in Sharon and New York City.
“During the principal years of his ministry, 1913 through 1945, technology and people’s lives changed dramatically,” Mr. Hyland observed. “Suddenly there were cars, movies, radios, telephones. He knew that to keep people coming to church they had to be marketed to. There was no practice he left unexplored, he left no standard church practice unchanged.”
Jack Hyland of Sharon, Evangelist’s Grandson And Biographer
Indeed, it was that feud with Lewis that prompted Mr. Hyland to write about his illustrious grandfather. The Sharon author said he was passing some time one day during a visit to his son at Kenyon College in Ohio when he wandered into the library. “There was a family legend that Bill Stidger had a major battle with Sinclair Lewis,” Mr. Hyland recounted, “so I decided to see if that were true. I found the biography of Lewis written by Mark Schorer, went to the index and found a reference to Stidger. In the book I found that Lewis claimed their relationship had become fiery after being a close friendship. He called [my grandfather] ‘a boor.’ Those were fighting words and I determined to find the truth.”
What followed was an eight-year odyssey during which Mr. Hyland, who was 10 when he had his last visit with his grandfather in 1948, rediscovered that towering personality. He was aided in his quest by the extensive collection of Stidger’s materials that still remained in the family’s possession. “Bill Stidger saved everything about his life—positive and negative,” Mr. Hyland said. “He was planning an autobiography, but the closest he got was to put everything in boxes for each city he lived in. He also wrote over 50 books and had over 300 [recordings of] broadcasts on NBC, all of which were available to me.” Also available was the extensive diary Stidger kept while serving in France during World War I.
The “truth” Mr. Hyland’s research uncovered revealed an all-engulfing personality fueled by endless energy, a strong ego tempered by humanity and, ultimately, a man who stumbled in his closing years over his own human frailty.
Born in 1885, Bill Stidger started life in Moundsville, W.Va., a town remarkable primarily for having the largest Indian burial mound in the United States. At the end of the 19th century, the slow tempo of daily life in the town of 5,000 was disrupted each summer by Methodist revival camp meetings that more than doubled the population. Religious fervor swelled the crowds in the revival tents and wafted through the heat of the Southern nights as the Rev. William B. King exhorted his followers to find salvation. “The town rocked with religion each summer,” said Mr. Hyland. “It was a form of group hysteria. People would climb over chairs to get down the aisles to confess their sins.” One of those saved in such an ecstatic moment was 16-year-old William Stidger, who embraced the Christian faith in a public conversion that was seen as a rite of passage for Southern youths. “He learned about evangelism from the exhorters,” said his grandson.
Not many years later, Stidger knew that he, too, was meant to be a preacher, and he carried that evangelical background into his own ministry. “There was a lot of fundamentalism in his early religious experience,” said Mr. Hyland, “but when he went to Boston University School of Theology, he became so fascinated with ideas about science and how religion and society had to deal with that. He was always adopting new ideas.”
Mr. Hyland says that evangelical religion, particularly as practiced by televangelists, has been corrupted in the public mind by the shenanigans of such people as Jimmy Swaggart and James and Tammy Faye Bakker. “I worried a bit about the title, which was suggested by my publisher [Cooper Square Press],” he reported. “For everyone over 45, evangelism means someone teaching the gospel, and for those under 45, it means televangelists and all that goes with that—fundamentalism, selfishness, greed. …”
For Stidger, using new technology was just a means to bring people to church and, he hoped, to God.
“I have just gone through the most fascinating preaching experience of my life,” he wrote in 1922, “the experience of preaching for two weeks over the radio. As you sit there in the radio room talking, you send your imagination hurtling out across the winter-clad earth, over the roofs of city buildings, out over the snow-covered fields, leaping rivers and lakes … into the hearts and souls of your fellow men, sitting in their homes by their own firesides and you picture them sitting with great eagerness in their souls, waiting, listening for your message and the thing takes hold of your soul. It is a thrilling adventure every time I talk over the radio! … The possibilities of the use of the radio in religion are as boundless as the heart of the God who makes the radio possible. …”
“He believed in advertising and promotion,” said his grandson, who recalled Stidger’s attempts to attract parishioners to his church in Kansas City. “His church was built on a sand dune south of Golden Gate Park,” Mr. Hyland related. “That part of Kansas City was just a great sand waste, and his was a small church. He had trouble getting people to know it was there. So he developed an electrified revolving cross and advertised it all over town. When he had the official lighting, he really packed them in—it was his first standing-room-only congregation.”
The 1915 advertising for the event shows his genius for showmanship. A poster proclaims, “Do Not Be Startled Sunday Night About 9 o’clock At the Strange Light in the Sky –Not a Comet! Not a New Planet! BUT An Electric Revolving Cross on Calvary Church. Come to the Dedication Service and see it lighted for the first time….” Other tricks used to pack his churches were to editorialize about contentious issues from the pulpit and to invite celebrities to appear and address the congregation.
It was the revolving cross, however, that clearly identified him as a source for the character of Elmer Gantry, Mr. Hyland said. The cross appears in Lewis’s book.
Stidger invited his friend Sinclair Lewis to Kansas City and suggested a book about a minister. “Bill was a very prominent preacher in Kansas City and it was clear he wanted to be the model for the minister,” his grandson said. “It would have given him a kind of immortality. But when the book came out, he wanted to distance himself from it. He said that Lewis was drunk when he wrote the book and that it was the product of an inflamed imagination.” Lewis, who did have a drinking problem, had combined two Kansas City preachers, Stidger and Leon Birkhead, to create the portrait of the boozy, sinful Gantry.
“Birkhead was a preacher who had become an atheist, who had totally fallen away from formal belief but who continued to preach,” said Mr. Hyland. “Bill Stidger was flamboyant, big, athletic—all the attractive things that Burt Lancaster was in that role. The character is an amalgamation of the two.
“Lewis was concerned about the rise of fundamentalism, feared that it could even take over the White House,” Mr. Hyland continued. “So rather than extolling it, he chose to lambaste the evangelical fundamentalist style.”
Although Stidger eventually offered an olive branch to Lewis in the form of a published letter, the author never chose to resume the friendship. Stidger lost a prominent friend, but his star continued to rise. Serving in a church in Detroit, he “developed a close personal relationship with Henry Ford” and was recruited to be a spokesman for the auto manufacturer. “Ford had achieved notoriety for his anti-Semitism, even being mentioned in Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ but Bill found other aspects of him to talk about,” reported Mr. Hyland. “[Ford’s] actually better than his reputation, even though he was a cranky, self-absorbed genius.”
While defending Ford, Stidger was stirring political fires. “It was during Prohibition and Bill attacked the mayor of Detroit as being soft on Prohibition,” Mr. Hyland said. “He was very controversial. When he was in San Jose, [Calif.], he was nearly run out of town because he wanted vice squads to raid the Red Light District. Two-hundred prostitutes marched on the church to express what their plight would be if he closed [them] down.” Immensely energetic, Stidger plowed through his career, teaching at Boston University for 20 years, becoming more and more involved in radio, and making frequent guest appearances. From 1937 until 1940 he appeared each noon on a 15-minute broadcast sponsored by Fleischmann’s Yeast. Entitled “Getting the Most Out of Life,” the daily inspirational talk was a combination of music, preaching and advertising. The yeast company sold its yeast as a “tonic” to improve health and vigor, thereby neatly melding with the minister’s messages. In 1936 Stidger prepared a program called “Happy Days,” to promote Roosevelt’s re-election. “He went to the White House many times,” Mr. Hyland said. “There are many stories about being at the White House for Sunday dinners, with Eleanor scrambling eggs.”
Then, as often happens, the bottom began to fall out from under this successful life. In 1940, Stidger had a nervous breakdown. “He just ran out of gas,” his grandson related. “He was plain exhausted. He had been teaching at Boston University, but he had been away so much, they suggested that someone else become head of the department. His radio program was canceled—Bill Stidger was no longer the center of the universe. He did nothing for a year. In a way it was his own ‘conversion.’ It refocused his life.”
Mr. Hyland concedes there was great ego in his grandfather, but says it was “an odd ego.” “At heart he was a newspaper reporter,” he said. “He was interested in other people’s stories.” He also recalls his grandfather’s kindly authority. Mr. Hyland spent a week with his grandmother and grandfather in 1948, the last visit they would ever have.
Invited to go hear his grandfather’s sermon as a guest preacher in a standing-room-only appearance, young Jack Hyland agreed to come if he could bring a comic book with which to amuse himself if he became bored. His grandfather reasoned with him that it would be unseemly for the preacher’s grandson to be reading through the sermon, and they made a deal that, if Jack were bored, he would buy him a much-desired wristwatch. When the sermon was over, the youngster had to admit he had not been bored and would not get the watch. His grandfather acknowledged the compliment—and then bought the watch anyway. “I have very clear memories of him,” Mr. Hyland said.
Stidger died the following year, of a heart attack, but his legacy lives on, more than 50 years after his death. “When I started my research,” the biographer said, “I wrote to Boston University and asked if they would put a notice in the alumni bulletin asking any of his old students to write to me. Within a month, I had replies from 50 of his former students—men in their late 70s to their mid- 90s—and the letters continue to come in. They say he was a huge part of their lives, part of their careers. They have kept their notes from his classes and his letters.”
And Stidger’s life continues to inform the lives of his grandson and great-grandchildren. “There was an intense effort on his part to be a good parent to my mother,” Mr. Hyland said. “My mother brought that same relationship to me, and I tried to bring it my children.”
Stidger’s theatricality and flamboyance has been handed on to his grandchildren. While Mr. Hyland emulated his own father and went into banking, the three children born of his former marriage have taken more artistic roads: his son is a struggling actor; one daughter, now a social worker, was an editorial assistant, and the other daughter is in musical theater.
Mr. Hyland has now moved on to his next literary endeavor, a mystery novel. He is signing the biography June 29 from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at Johnnycake Books in Salisbury. “Evangelism’s First Modern Media Star” is available locally at that shop and on the Internet through Amazon.com. He has also produced a CD with excerpts from his grandfather’s long career as a radio broadcaster. Jack Hyland of Sharon, Evangelist’s Grandson And Biographer
Written by KATHRYN BOUGHTON
© 2002 The Litchfield County Times