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In the fall of 1949, a revival campaign was going on in downtown Los Angeles, and there was excitement in the air—perhaps too much excitement. The young evangelist leading the crusade, Billy Graham, was worried. Some famous people had just been converted—a wiretapper for the mob, an Olympic medalist and war hero, and a cowboy musician—and now every night the big tent was swarming with reporters and photographers. Graham feared the carnival atmosphere would drive off the Holy Spirit. So he went to a car in the back corner of the lot for a private conversation with a trusted adviser. There he met J. Edwin Orr, an Irish-born roving revivalist. Orr had a large book with him, ready to point the younger preacher to some wisdom. It was not a Bible, however, but Orr's doctoral dissertation. Billy Graham was getting a lesson in revival history. Orr quoted a chronicler of the "Prayer Meeting Revival" of 1857-58, who said that the press was "taken possession by the Spirit, willing or unwilling, to proclaim His wonders." So Orr advised Graham not to fear the news media, for "the Lord may make the American Press act as His publicity agent for nothing." Graham went forward with renewed confidence.
The wonders of grace, proclaimed by the secular press: that was part of the enduring charm of the Revival of 1857-58. According to its main chroniclers, the Revival started in the fall of 1857, at a prayer meeting in a Dutch Reformed Church in the heart of New York City's financial district, just as a financial panic began to paralyze the city. Businessmen packed that prayer meeting and others, as they appeared in New York and other cities. Revivals broke out at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia that winter, while lay teams of evangelists, led by the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Methodists, swept through cities. The church periodicals reported revivals in the hinterlands. Then, beginning in late February 1858, two major daily newspapers, the New York Heraldand the New York Tribune, made the Revival continual front-page news. The media publicity convinced many that a great awakening was afoot and encouraged widespread copying of the activities in New York. Then, nearly as suddenly as it had begun, the Revival was over. That summer the ordinary rhythms of church life reappeared, and while some revival activities restarted the following fall and winter, they were largely a diminished afterglow.
The Revival brought some lasting results. In 1858, the Protestant churches recorded their greatest accession ever, of nearly 500,000 new members. The Methodists alone gained 130,000. The newly emerging YMCAwas a chief agent of the Revival and became a leading ministry thereafter. A "revival generation" of religious activists became the nation's postwar evangelical leaders: Dwight L. Moody, urban mass evangelist; John Wanamaker, exemplary Christian businessman; George H. Stuart, organizer of the United States Christian Commission (a "y"-related ministry to the Union soldiers); holiness advocate Hannah Whitall Smith; Annie Wittenmyer, organizer of the Women's Temperance Crusade; and Lottie Moon, the legendary Southern Baptist missionary to China.
Ever since, suggests Kathryn T. Long, the author of The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening, this revival has fascinated American evangelicals. Its initial setting was urban, commercial, and middle class, and it emphasized ministry to men. For generations thereafter, the Revival's mythic memory as God's invasion of modern, urban America framed evangelicals' expectations for the next awakening. When Billy Graham preached in Times Square, on Wall Street, in Madison Square Garden, at Yankee Stadium, and in Central Park in 1957, with meetings broadcast on network television, evangelical leaders heard echoes from a century before. Graham had learned his revival history well.
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