Billy Sunday was an influential heartland evangelist whose message of temperance and holy living was embraced by millions who attended his revivals and tuned into his wireless broadcasts during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Sunday had been a baseball player for the Chicago Whites before converting to Christianity and giving up drinking, smoking, gambling and cussing.
His conversion to holy sobriety was a big part of his appeal as a preacher and boosted his prominence as a Prohibitionist in the 1910s. The record is not clear on how much actual "lobbying" Sunday did to get the Eighteenth Amendment passed in 1920, but it stands to reason that one of the most famous people in the country condemning the manufacture, sale and consumption of booze was a big help to Morris Sheppard, who wrote the Prohibition bills, and other congressional temperance leaders.
Sunday's longest-running revivals was right here in River City, Columbia, where nearly half-million came to hear the man.
Despite efforts by Sunday and his ilk, Prohibition didn't last. Human nature exerted itself in defiance of the law. Speakeasies and gin joints run by the Mob were everywhere and in numbers too great to police effectively.
Folks wanted hassle-free booze and legislators needed a revenue-generating alternative to taxing people already hurting from the Depression. The narrow pietism of conservative preachers was rejected, and Prohibition was laid to rest in 1933.
Billy Sunday himself was laid to rest two years later, at age 72, having lost much of his appeal and stature but still preaching to willing listeners here and there.
The injection of christianist sanctimony into politics today shows that "Sunday Schooling" from 100 years ago has yet to be learned.
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