The Billy Graham New York Crusade, 1957

Spectacular Revival.

In the summer of 1957 the Billy Graham Crusade filled Madison Square Garden with the most spectacular revival meeting since the decline of Billy Sunday earlier in the century. After a series of highly publicized revivals in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe, Graham and his associates were willing to tackle the city even Billy Sunday had been unable to tame.

Planning.

By 1957 the Graham team, organized as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, had fully polished their system. A huge budget, amounting to six hundred thousand dollars, was set and guaranteed by a group of wealthy backers. A significant percentage of the Protestant churches in the city were brought in as supporters of the crusade, as Graham's revivals were called. (The support Graham received from more-liberal Protestants brought a rift between him and more-conservative fundamentalists.) In the weeks before the...

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