Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

Steven P. Miller

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812206142
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment.Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.

CHAPTER ONE

“No Segregation at the Altar”

Growing up in the rural South, I had adopted the attitudes of that region without much reflection.
—Billy Graham, 1997

The audience may be segregated, but there is no segregation at the altar.
—Billy Graham, 1952

BILLY GRAHAMENTERED the 1950s as a nationally known evangelist who was also an identifiable southerner and a Christian fundamentalist. The following decade saw a struggle—sometimes public, often unstated—between his singular position as an evangelist and the other, seemingly more expendable, labels. While parting ways with many of his fundamentalist allies, Graham chose to retain his regional identity. This decision meant he would ultimately have to address the specifically southern problem he and his fellow moderates politely called the “race question” or the “race problem” (hesitant as they were to use the more prescriptive term “civil rights”). Graham's southern identity was evident in many things—his theological sensibilities, his political and social relationships, and his zealous Cold War apocalypticism—but expressed itself most strikingly when civil rights reemerged as a national issue in the early 1950s. As an evangelist, Graham also situated his response to race within the larger context of his ministerial priorities, which in many respects transcended matters of region. At some level, he attempted to square his inherited racial customs with his theology, his southern background with his increasingly inclusive ministry.

Graham's early response to the race issue revealed the elusive nature of his racial moderation. During the post–World War II years preceding the rise of “massive resistance” to desegregation in the South—a time when even parts of the Deep South were not yet a completely “closed society” on matters of race¹ —Graham formulated views and rhetorical postures that lasted him for decades. He evolved from a tacit segregationist to a tepid critic of Jim Crow and, finally, to a practitioner of desegregation in his crusade services. The sources and motivations for his changing stance on racial segregation ranged from the theological to the intellectual and the political. They included his exposure to theological spheres outside southern fundamentalism, his concern about his public image, his desire to evangelize within the black community, and his burgeoning Cold War internationalism.

In his discussion of racial matters, Graham retained a familiar evangelical language buttressed by both his celebrity status and his recognizability as a southerner. He also cultivated public positions reflective of his regional affiliation: defensiveness about the South, denunciation of “extremists on both sides” of the civil rights debate, and prophecy of racial disharmony in the North. Graham's actions were never radical, and he cultivated close ties with southern politicians of all stripes. Still, he implicitly (and, with time, explicitly) acknowledged and accepted the fact that the Jim Crow system was on borrowed time—theologically and, quite possibly, politically. While not playing as visible a role in the South during the first half of the 1950s as he later would, Graham paved the ground for his subsequent regional leadership.

The Making of a Racial Moderate

Graham first entered the national spotlight in the fall of 1949 during his two-month-long Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign. The Los Angeles revival holds a firm place in the Graham mythology. He came to Southern California as a representative, if quite successful, preacher following the well-traveled fundamentalist revival circuit. By the close of the Los Angeles meeting, held in an elaborate circus tent dubbed the “Canvas Cathedral,” Graham stood as the heir apparent of Billy Sunday, the last nationally prominent male evangelist, whose career had peaked in the 1910s.

Graham arrived in Los Angeles toward the start of a well-publicized postwar national religious revival that eventually saw Congress add “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Churches and synagogues boomed along with the birth rate. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Graham's chosen denomination, saw five hundred new churches built between 1946 and 1949, with the denomination growing by around 300,000 members during the same period. “Religion-in-general,” in historian Martin E. Marty's famous phrase, gained new credence during the postwar years. “Our government,” President Dwight Eisenhower flatly declared, “makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.” Such reflexive, but not self-reflexive, “faith in faith,” as Marty also called it, did not inevitably portend a revival of the old-time gospel.² Ye t it certainly offered an opening for an evangelist claiming that the faith of the fathers could resolve the conundrums of modern man.

The Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign took a while to gain steam. The pivotal moment came when newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst ordered his army of editors to “Puff Graham,” words that Graham supporters have happily recounted almost from the moment their effects first registered. Hearst, who was likely drawn to the strident anticommunist message of the dynamic young evangelist, had already “puffed” Youth for Christ (YFC), the evangelistic organization for which Graham then worked. This time, the instructions stuck. Word about the lanky young evangelist quickly spread from the headlines of Los Angeles newspapers to the pages of Time, Life, and Newsweek.³ Graham became a religious media phenomenon to a degree unseen on North American soil since the eighteenth-century peregrinations of English evangelist George Whitefield. The hoopla thrust Graham into a national mainstream from whose current he has rarely strayed since.

Graham's success in Los Angeles and other areas outside his native South had more to do with his southern background than is initially apparent. In his early career, the evangelist benefited from the continuing migration of white southerners westward and northward in search of industrial jobs. The white southern diaspora, a phenomenon less explored than the related Great Migration of black southerners, left a distinct imprint on twentieth-century American Christianity. The 1949 Los Angeles revival drew strength from the many fundamentalist-inclined “country preachers” who had moved from Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma to the “Southland” of California. The list included Methodist fundamentalist “Fighting” Bob Shuler, a Texas transplant. Long Beach radio station KGER, owned by Arkansas fundamentalist entrepreneur John Brown, was the first to broadcast news of the upcoming revival meetings. Radio host and country and western musician Stuart Hamblen, the first of several celebrity converts in Los Angeles, hailed from Texas. Similar patterns appeared elsewhere. The chair of Graham's 1952 Detroit crusade was a southern preacher. So was the powerful fundamentalist Baptist minister William Bell Riley, a Kentucky native who in 1947 appointed Graham to succeed him as president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis.⁴

Unlike the preachers of the southern diaspora, Graham was a “commuting southerner,” rather than a migrant.⁵ Even though the evangelist built his reputation in the Midwest, especially through his partnership with Torrey Johnson—head of the Chicago-based YFC—he remained a southerner in the eyes of most of the public, as well as in his own. In 1952, Graham struck a Time writer as a flamboyant product of the country South whose concept of fashion entailed “a jaunty sky-blue gabardine,” along with “a blue and white tie and square-folded white handkerchief, thick-soled, reddish-brown shoes, a cowboy belt with a silver buckle and silver tip.” Graham also played the part in his language patterns. He closed his ABC radio broadcast with the colloquial send-off, “May the Lord bless you real good,” and referred to the daughter of President Harry Truman in personal correspondence as “Miss Margaret.”⁶

Newfound fame both permitted and forced Graham to address a host of national concerns beyond the purview of altar calls and gaudy garb. On one such issue, the global threat of communism, Graham never hesitated to voice his opinion. On another matter, race, he remained strikingly more circumspect. When he did address the race issue, however, he spoke not only as an evangelist but also as a southerner whose background lent him a certain amount of the authority on the subject.

Like most white southerners of his generation, Graham grew up as a de facto segregationist—in his own words, someone who “had adopted the attitudes of that region without much reflection.” In this and other senses, his southern heritage was impeccable. As the evangelist would proudly note throughout his lifetime, he was descended from Confederate veterans on both sides of the family. In Graham's rural home area of Sharon Township, located just outside Charlotte, his Scotch-Irish, God-fearing, dairy-farming family was of a demographic type. Like the South as a whole, Graham later reflected in his autobiography, his section of the North Carolina Piedmont “had never fully recovered economically from the Civil War and Reconstruction.” A successful dairy enterprise, however, put the Grahams comfortably above the economic mean, even during the Great Depression. The local African Americans whom Graham knew best were thus family employees. Later, he reminisced with unintended condescension about his childhood admiration for Reese Brown, a black foreman who had “a tremendous capacity for working hard” and whose wife made “fabulous buttermilk biscuits in the tenant house that was their home.” Such fond memories reflected an upbringing in which racial moderation translated as benevolent paternalism. (In 1965, during a ceremony in which Graham received an honor for his work on racial issues, Graham praised Brown and presented the aging man with a watch.)⁷

The Christian faith of Graham's youth did not challenge his racial worldview—nor was there good reason to expect it would. In 1934, as a scrawny, playful teenager, Graham famously responded to the brimstone-laden altar call of Kentucky evangelist Mordecai Ham. The hard-hitting revivalist who drew Graham down the sawdust trail was a militant fundamentalist whom Graham later felt compelled to defend against charges of anti-Semitism and support for the Ku Klux Klan.⁸ “Even after my conversion,” Graham admitted in 1960, “I felt no guilt in thinking of my dark-skinned brothers in the usual patronizing and paternalistic way.”⁹ His gradual racial awakening did not commence for another decade and a half, after he had attended such segregated institutions as Bob Jones College, whose tightly regimented environment he endured for a mere semester, and Florida Bible Institute, another unaccredited fundamentalist school, from which he graduated in 1940.

A key component of Graham's racial evolution was his exposure during the early 1940s to a moderate brand of northern Protestant fundamentalism then beginning the protracted but conclusive process of refashioning itself as “evangelicalism.” Graham entered this world by way of Wheaton, Illinois, a town thirty miles west of Chicago that served as an incubator for the neo-evangelical project. His 1940 enrollment at Wheaton College represented one of the few times the budding preacher had crossed the Mason-Dixon line. At Wheaton, Graham remembered, “people looked at me curiously, as if my heavily accented drawl were a foreign language.”¹⁰ The racial views of southerners of Graham's generation often evolved in the context of comparatively moderate racial environments.¹¹ While a city like New York or Austin more classically fitted the bill, Chicagoland fundamentalism provided an impetus for Graham's views on race to evolve.

Graham would most likely never have become the leading spokesperson for postwar American evangelicalism had he not passed through Wheaton, then, as now, a leading institution of higher education within conservative, nonmainline Protestant circles. The history of Wheaton paralleled—and, in many respects, influenced—the trajectory of American evangelicalism itself. The college, as Graham occasionally noted later in his career, had deep roots in antebellum evangelical abolitionism. Under the leadership of President Jonathan Blanchard (who took over the newly renamed Wheaton College in 1860), the school presented itself as an abolitionist, coeducational institution in the best tradition of antebellum evangelical reform. The brother of abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy served as a trustee, and early alums included a nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Blanchard made a point of admitting and granting scholarships to black students. Even though Wheaton's commitment to social reform weakened considerably into the twentieth century, the college would have contained a small number of black students during Graham's matriculation there.¹²

Importantly, Graham majored in anthropology at Wheaton. While he later struggled to explain his decision to study a subject commonly linked with agnosticism, if not outright atheism, he was interested enough in the field momentarily to consider pursuing a master's degree at the University of Chicago. He went so far as to register for classes there; but a hectic ministerial schedule precluded further dalliances in academia.¹³ By then, though, his studies had given him some awareness of the cultural relativity of race. In 1950, several years before Graham publicly identified himself as a supporter of desegregation, he noted that as a student he had “practically memorized” a textbook titled Up from the Ape and written by the evolutionary anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton.¹⁴ A Harvard professor, Hooton emphasized the highly relative nature of racial categories and categorically dismissed quasi eugenicists, calling them “ethnomaniacs.” Although not denying the significance of racial differences, physical and otherwise, Hooton argued that “a ‘pure race’ is little more than a philosophical abstraction and that the great cultural achievements of humanity have been produced, almost invariably, by racially mixed peoples.” He specifically attacked the simplistic chauvinism of arguments for Negro inferiority. Graham filtered such ideas through the net of his true focus at Wheaton, evangelism. While Hooton wrote from an explicitly secular perspective, his universalistic understanding of humanity reinforced Graham's faith in a Christian gospel open and communicable to all peoples.¹⁵

At Wheaton, Graham met his future wife, Ruth Bell, a model of piety whose prayerful coyness attracted the aspiring groom. Their marriage actually bolstered his southern identity. Ruth's father was L. Nelson Bell, a surgeon and longtime missionary in Nationalist China but also a native Virginian, graduate of Washington and Lee University, and an influential lay leader in the conservative wing of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (which was also referred to as the Southern Presbyterian church). Bell, whom Graham ranked behind only his parents and wife as a life influence, heavily mediated the way the evangelist applied his theological views on race to the social context of the South.¹⁶ During the latter half of the 1950s, at least, Bell functioned as a conservative brake on the evangelist's opinions concerning racial policy. The well-connected Bell also strengthened the ties between Graham and a host of southern religious leaders. After the Bells moved to the Southern Presbyterian mountain retreat community of Montreat, North Carolina, Billy and Ruth followed them there in 1945.¹⁷

Wheaton may have planted seeds for Graham's subsequent doubts about the racial norms of his home region, yet their public sprouting was a while in coming. In his subsequent telling, the climax of his years-long struggle to reconcile a tacit acceptance of Jim Crow with a strident promotion of the gospel message came at the start of a March 1953 crusade service in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, Graham personally removed the ropes separating the black from the white sections of the audience.¹⁸ This was the first time he had not followed the dictates of the local crusade committee regarding segregated seating. The Chattanooga incident served as a key moment in Graham's “racial conversion narrative,” to use a literary scholar's term for self-styled accounts in which “products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society…confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment.” Graham himself spoke of his own “racial conversion” on at least one occasion.¹⁹

Graham's racial development paralleled his theological and temperamental transition from Protestantism fundamentalism to neo-evangelicalism. During the 1940s, as noted above, an influential group of moderate fundamentalists associated with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and hailing mostly from Reformed backgrounds began embracing the label “evangelical,” the source of its most common current American usage. While not departing from core fundamentalist doctrines, these “neo-evangelicals” projected an evangelistic optimism not seen since the irrecoverable era before World War I when Protestants of all stripes could speak of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” (the motto of the...