An American History

800 ★ CHAPTER 20 From Business Culture to Great Depression

of modernism and to combat the new individual freedoms that seemed to con-

tradict traditional morality. Their most flamboyant apostle was Billy Sunday, a

talented professional baseball player who became a revivalist preacher. Between

1900 and 1930, Sunday drew huge crowds with a highly theatrical preaching

style and a message denouncing sins ranging from Darwinism to alcohol. He

was said to have preached to 100 million people during his lifetime— more than

any other individual in history.

Much of the press portrayed fundamentalism as a movement of back-

woods bigots. In fact, it was a national phenomenon. Even in New York City,

the center of the new modern culture, Fosdick was removed from his minis-

try in 1924 (whereupon John D. Rockefeller Jr. built the interdenominational

Riverside Church for him). Fundamentalism remained an important strain of

1920s culture and politics.

Prohibition, which fundamentalists strongly supported, succeeded in

reducing the consumption of alcohol as well as public drunkenness and drink-

related diseases. Often portrayed (especially in Hollywood movies) as a glam-

orous episode of gangland battles and drinkers easily outwitting the police,

Prohibition in fact was effectively enforced, albeit selectively. While wealthy

Americans continued to enjoy access to liquor, many poor, black, and immi-

grant communities suffered large- scale arrests and jailings, often accompanied

by police violence. Later deemed an unmitigated failure, enforcement of Prohi-

bition in fact led to the building of new federal prisons and laid the foundation

for powerful national action against crime and immorality, a precursor to the

more recent federal war on drugs.

A 1923 lithograph by George Bellows captures the dynamic style of the most prominent
evangelical preacher of the 1920s, Billy Sunday.