From the gin scare to the drug war, moral panic about the off-work activities of our class has been a constant of capitalism. Billy Sunday was a former baseball player turned Bible-pounding evangelist known for his anti-booze sermons to workers in the early 20th century. His name (it was his real name) became synonymous for such characters, of which U.S. history is full. Philips Russell looks into the anti-alcohol campaign and finds himself hankering for a “long, tall, cool glass of beer.”

‘Billy Sunday as a Social Symptom’ by Phillips Russell from New Review. Vol. 3 No. 6. May 15, 1915.

THE state of Pennsylvania is at present suffering from a pestilence of religious revivalists. Like locusts they have settled down upon a population already sorely beset by the thousand evils that accompany a highly developed industrial system. A Philadelphia newspaper recently contained accounts of no less than six “big” revivals in progress in six of the important manufacturing centers in the eastern part of the State. The very heavens resound with cries of “Repent ye!” and the midnight silences echo with the clink of the after-service counting of collections.

It is not without significance that almost coincident with the arrival in Pennsylvania of the Rev. William Ashley Sunday, there was launched by certain mysterious powers a tremendous agitation for laws restricting the sale of liquor and a sudden wave of protest against the passage by the State Legislature of a workmen’s compensation law. It may seem peculiar to connect Mr. Sunday’s religious campaign with the latter two, and yet that such a connection exists is fairly evident.

The manufacturers of the State, than whom there is no more reactionary or purblind group of capitalists in the world, conducted their agitation against the compensation law for some weeks, but made little headway. The new Governor favored the passage of the measure for political reasons; and public sentiment, which generally means middle class sentiment, was behind it for no particular reason except that it was felt that Pennsylvania ought not to lag behind other “great” states in social legislation.

So the manufacturers decided to make the best of the situation, saying, in effect: “Oh, very well; take your old compensation law. But, mind you, if we have got to pay for accidents that happen in our establishments, there aren’t going to be any more accidents. Or if we do continue to have accidents and we do have to pay for them, our profits have got to be increased enough to make up for the difference. We aren’t going to have a workingman go out for lunch, take a drink, and then come back into the shop with vision obscured or brain fuddled enough to cause him to lose a hand that will cost us $500. Nor are we going to permit a man to come in 15 minutes late on a Monday morning because there has been a Sunday night beer party at his house. Booze must be put beyond our workmen’s reach. We have got to have more regularity in working hours, more productiveness and more efficiency.”

There are two methods, favored throughout history, of separating a man from the thing that he desires. One is to work on his superstitions and make him believe that it is sinful for him to have it; and the other is to work on his fears and threaten him with punishment if he does have it.

The capitalists of Pennsylvania are using both methods in their determination to make the worker efficient, that is, profit-producing.

I have heard Mr. Sunday preach and I have read his sermons. He is not a new thing under the sun, not a freak, not necessarily a crook or a dishonest man. He is simply the Apostle Paul in a 1915 model, well tailored business suit, with St. Paul’s outlook on life, but with none of that saint’s prosiness or pessimism. Paul was a reformed roué and there is nothing so tiresome as a one-time Don Juan’s preachments against the sins that he is too old longer to commit.

The Rev. Billy was “one of the boys,” too, as he often remarks, with a scarcely suppressed smacking of the lips. So vivid is his description of the wine-bibber’s sinful pleasures that he imparts to one an almost overpowering thirst. I don’t know when I have absorbed a long, tall, cool glass of beer with more lustfulness, with more Bacchic abandon, than the minute after I had issued from the Sunday tabernacle where I heard the evangelist for the first and only time.

But it is when the Rev. Billy excoriates the sins that are associated with women that he is at his best. Behind each adjective peeps the satyr, behind each jest lurks the saloon loafer with his beery stories. So inflaming to the imagination is his description of the illicit indulgences of the dance, of the exposure of the feminine person seen in the musical comedy chorus, that it is not to be wondered at that a former Marine Corps surgeon who heard him in one of his early sermons in Philadelphia, went to his room and so mutilated himself that he died.

St. Paul’s virtues were all negative. Refrain from sin, he said; live clean, be faithful to your masters. So preaches Billy–abstain from liquor and from women, be “on the level” with your boss. In short: don’t drink, because it impairs your efficiency as a profit producer; don’t sport with Amaryllis in the shade or play with the tangles of Naera’s hair, because you will stay up late and won’t feel like working the next day; do your damndest for your employer, because he supplies you with a chance to work for him.

So much for the Rev. Billy as regards Pennsylvania. Why he was brought to Paterson, everyone knows. In the most open fashion it was stated that he was needed there to allay the discontent, to divert the minds, of the silk mill workers whose revolt upset the state two years ago.

In addition, there may be another and larger reason for Billy’s popularity with the capitalist class and the capitalist press. From remarks heard and signs noted here and there, I have reason to believe that certain large employers of labor were severely frightened by the activities of Frank Tannenbaum and the unemployed in New York last winter a year ago. New York is not, in the strict sense of the word, an industrial center; it is not dependent upon one, two, or a dozen establishments which employ great armies of men. New York’s capitalists can afford to be careless and to take chances. But Philadelphia’s and Paterson’s cannot. Hence the importation of the sooth-saying Billy.

Does Billy earn his pay? He must have done so in Philadelphia. Listen to the words of a Pennsylvania Railroad official at the farewell banquet given to Mr. Sunday:

“Our employees are more courteous, more faithful to their duties, more efficient, since Billy came to town.”

The italics are mine.

The New Review: A Critical Survey of International Socialism was a New York-based, explicitly Marxist, sometimes weekly/sometimes monthly theoretical journal begun in 1913 and was an important vehicle for left discussion in the period before World War One. Bases in New York it declared in its aim the first issue: “The intellectual achievements of Marx and his successors have become the guiding star of the awakened, self-conscious proletariat on the toilsome road that leads to its emancipation. And it will be one of the principal tasks of The NEW REVIEW to make known these achievements,to the Socialists of America, so that we may attain to that fundamental unity of thought without which unity of action is impossible.” In the world of the East Coast Socialist Party, it included Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Herman Simpson, Louis Boudin, William English Walling, Moses Oppenheimer, Robert Rives La Monte, Walter Lippmann, William Bohn, Frank Bohn, John Spargo, Austin Lewis, WEB DuBois, Arturo Giovannitti, Harry W. Laidler, Austin Lewis, and Isaac Hourwich as editors. Louis Fraina played an increasing role from 1914 and lead the journal in a leftward direction as New Review addressed many of the leading international questions facing Marxists. International writers in New Review included Rosa Luxemburg, James Connolly, Karl Kautsky, Anton Pannekoek, Lajpat Rai, Alexandra Kollontai, Tom Quelch, S.J. Rutgers, Edward Bernstein, and H.M. Hyndman, The journal folded in June, 1916 for financial reasons. Its issues are a formidable and invaluable archive of Marxist and Socialist discussion of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/newreview/1915/v3n06-may-15-1915.pdf