Preacher Girl: Uldine Utley and the Industry of Revival

By Thomas A. Robinson

Uldine Utley defined the "girl evangelist" of the 1920s and 1930s. She began her preaching career at age eleven, published a monthly magazine by age twelve, and by age fourteen was regularly packing the largest venues in major American cities, including Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. She stood toe to toe with Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, the most famous revivalist preachers of the day. She became a darling of the secular press and was mimicked and modeled in fiction and plays.
 
In  Preacher Girl, the first full biography of Utley, author Thomas Robinson shows that Utley’s rise to fame was no accident. Utley’s parents and staff carefully marked out her path early on to headline success. Not unlike Hollywood, revivalism was a business in which celebrity equaled success. Revivalism mixed equal parts of glamour and gospel, making stars of its preachers. Utley was its brightest.
 
But childhood fame came at a price. As a series of Utley’s previously unpublished poems reveal, after a decade of preaching, she was facing a near-constant fight against physical and mental exhaustion as she experienced the clash between the expectations of revivalism and her desires for a normal life. Utley burned out at age twenty-four. The revival stage folded; fame faded; only a broken heart and a wounded mind remained.
 
Both Utley’s meteoric rise and its tragic outcome illuminate American religion as a business. In his compelling chronicle of Utley’s life, Robinson highlights the surprising power of American revivalism to equal Hollywood’s success as well as the potentially devastating private costs of public religious leadership. The marketing and promotion machine of revivalism brought both fame and hardship for Utley—clashing by-products in the business of winning souls for Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781481303972

Thomas A. Robinson

Thomas A. Robinson (PhD, McMaster University) is emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and has written numerous books. He specializes in the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and the development of Christianity's distinctive identity in the Roman Empire.

Book preview

Preacher Girl

Uldine Utley and the Industry of Revival

Thomas A. Robinson

Baylor University Press

© 2016 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover Design by Andrew Brozyna, AJB Design, Inc.

Cover image: First professional publicity photo of Uldine Utley. Taken by Boussum Photo Studio (California’s Leading Photographer). Eleven-year-old Utley is dressed in attire much like that worn by female workers in Aimee Semple McPherson’s denomination. Courtesy of Ron Long, from the Ron Long Collection.

978-1-4813-0510-5 (Kindle)

978-1-4813-0397-2 (ePub)

This ebook was converted from the original source file. Readers who encounter any issues with formatting, text, linking, or readability are encouraged to notify the publisher at [e-mail]. Some font characters may not display on all ereaders.

To inquire about permission to use selections from this text, please contact Baylor University Press, One Bear Place, #97363, Waco, Texas 76798.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robinson, Thomas A. (Thomas Arthur), 1951– author.

Title: Preacher girl : Uldine Utley and the industry of revival / Thomas A.

Robinson.

Description: Waco : Baylor University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016003767 (print) | LCCN 2016013635 (ebook) | ISBN

9781481303958 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781481303972 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Utley, Uldine. | Evangelists—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC BV3785.U7 R63 2016 (print) | LCC BV3785.U7

(ebook) | DDC

269/.2092—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003767

For Sharon

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Dreaming Dreams

From Childhood to Hollywood

Chapter 2. Seeing Visions

From Call to Action

Chapter 3. Utley, Inc.

From Ministry to Marketing

Chapter 4. Utley’s Religion

From Pentecostal to Methodist

Chapter 5. Utley’s Revivalism

From Novice to Stage Master

Chapter 6. Kindly Remove My Halo

From Famous to Forgotten

Conclusion

Utley’s Writings

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Preface

Some stories write themselves. An author feels a deep sense of gratitude when that happens. Such was almost the case with this book. I had been exploring a newspaper database regarding some trends in the early 1900s when I saw an article on one page totally unrelated to my interests. It reported on a girl evangelist. The story was curious enough to prod me to search the term girl evangelist. Thousands of hits popped up. Even more curious now, I looked at other terms: girl preacher, boy preacher, boy evangelist, and others. Thousands more articles popped up. Then I noticed something puzzling. Articles on girl preachers were more numerous than on boy preachers, but only for newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s. My curiosity was piqued even more. At that point I brought my niece Lanette Ruff into the project. She is a sociologist, and I am a historian. From this cooperative effort came the book Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). I also established a website on the topic (girlevangelists.org).

For me, the story was not quite complete. I had collected a considerable amount of material on one of the girls in particular, Uldine Utley, clearly the poster child of girl evangelists. Why waste such material? I then began familiarizing myself with a wider sweep of American history as a backdrop to the Utley story. Here was another tale that was writing itself, I thought. Then, as the manuscript neared the stage for some final editing, I was given access to a collection of family memorabilia by Utley’s nephew Ron Long and her niece Linda Brittain. I thought that this would fill in a few gaps and correct some guesses. It did that. But it did more, and what it did caused me to rethink and rewrite much of the manuscript. Here is why.

In the collection of Utley’s materials was a file folder. In it were about one hundred unpublished poems. I was struck by the richness of the poetry almost from the first line I read—poems about love and laughter and life, and poems about loss and labor and loneliness. But as I read, something else became obvious. These poems told the story of the religious star in an almost frighteningly revealing honesty. Utley had written these poems without any intention to publish them. No one else would see them. She could say here what she most deeply felt, not what she knew her audience expected. This is truth as bare and fair as one will ever find it, truth that usually stays hidden. It is not for public consumption.

But Utley changed her mind. She decided to publish these very private poems, for she knew a side of the story of revivalism that never got told, and she knew it needed to be told. She had a title—four short words. On the front of the file folder, she had written Kindly Remove My Halo. Her collapse prevented the telling of that side of the story. This biography attempts to tell both sides of the story of revivalism—or to tell one side of the story of revivalism while letting Utley tell the other side, the side that never gets told.

Pictures tell stories too, and Utley had an abundance of these. Most public figures do. In the collection of Utley’s nephew and niece were scores of photos, from publicity photos and photos of massive crusade audiences to photos of the famous Apache warrior Geronimo in tribal attire, to baby Uldine at every stage of her early life, and various other family members, too. To have such a collection, it helps if one’s father is a photographer—and one’s mother knows Geronimo. To preserve such a collection, especially in an itinerant revivalist world, it helps that photos do not take up much room. Banjos, guitars, and fiddles do, and though these, too, were part of the Utley household, they did not survive. Fortunately, the photos did.

Now, with words that Utley heard thousands of times . . . Allow me to introduce America’s most outstanding girl evangelist, the girl Billy Sunday, the Joan of Arc of the modern religious world . . . Uldine Utley.

Acknowledgments

A number of people helped make the project possible. Uldine Utley’s nephew Ronald Long and her niece Linda Brittain generously shared with me and helped me scan the collection of materials that their mother, Ovella, had saved of her sister’s revivalist career, along with various other family photos and documents. Ron had also written an eighty-one-page history of the family, based on a manuscript his mother had written and on his own determined research, which he supplemented with a compelling photographic record. I am grateful that he shared this private material with me, for it proved a crucial source for sorting out many matters of the family’s history, particularly of materials in chapters 1 and 2 of this book. Ron’s wife, Liz, and my wife, Sharon, were part of a busy sorting and scanning session. Ron continued to work with me closely, checking details, finding some new treasure among the family memorabilia, and scanning or photographing materials I needed. His work was crucial in bringing this book to its present form. Thanks, too, to T. J. Lavigne for sharing his considerable collection of memorabilia and publications he had collected on child evangelists.

As for the final production, there are fewer stylistic blunders and technical and factual inaccuracies because of careful reading of various people. My graduate teaching assistant Ron McTavish and my wife, Sharon, read and commented on the manuscript, and then my careful editor at Baylor University Press, Dr. Gladys Lewis, read and reread and then reread my work again, making stylistic suggestions and catching errors a Canadian might make when speaking of some aspect of Oklahoma or American sensibility. And all of the staff at Baylor University Press, from editor-in-chief to the copy editor to the numerous others involved in the production process, showed the highest level of professionalism and competence. No remaining stylistic oddity, breach of literary convention, or other shortcoming is due to any oversight on the part of any of these, however. All are mine, and some are intended.

Finally, I thank the University of Lethbridge, in particular the Faculty of Arts & Science and the Faculty Association, for their recognition of the importance of research in an academic’s life and for their protection of research leaves.

Introduction

The Girl David

Not many girls are named David. Indeed, none come immediately to mind. David is a boy’s name. Everyone knows that.

But some girls want to be David, and for good reason. The name conjures images of a young hero—small, insignificant, untrained—but ready to fight fearsome giants. No better-known or more-loved story exists anywhere than the young David facing the towering Goliath. Young people, weak people, oppressed people, and people simply with an ear for a good tale have been inspired by that ancient story. They too—perhaps—could be a David. Even if they are girls.

I want to be a David were the exact words that a little nine-year-old girl named Uldine Utley uttered on a Saturday afternoon when asked what she wanted to be.¹ She had just responded to an appeal to give her life to Jesus at the end of a sermon by Aimee Semple McPherson, the hottest woman evangelist of the day, who had just recently burst onto the California scene—a mixture of glamor and gospel next door to Hollywood. The story of David and Goliath had been the theme of McPherson’s sermon, and Utley was stirred by the story. She knew from that point on that her mission was to fight Goliath. And not just any Goliath. Hers was the biggest Goliath of them all—the devil himself.

Utley also knew that there would be no knockout punch in this fight. More than one smooth stone—more than one fight—would be needed to defeat the devil. From one corner of the continent to the other, sometimes in gospel tents and sometimes in the grandest venues of the greatest cities, she would engage the devil on a very public stage. This was no street fight down some dark alley. This was prizefighting. The combat was to be in front of thousands. And the stakes were high. Sinners needed to be saved. Old-time religion needed to be revived. And the devil had to be trounced.

On July 21, 1927, Utley was preparing to go another few rounds with the devil. The location was a huge tent, pitched just across the street from Yankee Stadium. She had started preaching there a few nights before, but this night was different. Another fight was taking place across the street at the stadium. Jack Dempsey of boxing fame had lost his title to Gene Tunney in 1926, and he wanted it back. But he had to earn the right to a title bout, and that meant first taking on other contenders standing in line. On that hot Thursday night, Dempsey climbed into the ring at Yankee Stadium to fight Jack Sharkey, another contender. The crowds cheered and roared, most for Dempsey, who was thought to be somewhat an underdog in this fight. Dempsey won—not in one of the prettiest fights, but a victory nonetheless.²

The other fight that night, in the tent across the street, offered a spectacle just as compelling to its audience as the Dempsey–Sharkey fight did to its. The opponents facing each other in the ring in the tent seemed, at first glance, far less evenly matched than the Dempsey–Sharkey pairing. One was relatively new on the scene—and small; the other, everyone knew—and feared. In one corner was a little girl, barely fifteen years old and short for her age.³ In the other corner were the devil and all of his local agents, who apparently were quite numerous in New York at the time. New York was, as some said, America’s eastern Babylon, and the devil had home-field advantage there.⁴

The little girl, Utley, fought by preaching. And she could preach at least as well as Dempsey could punch. Anyone who heard her knew that. Dempsey fought rarely, one time going three years without a fight. Utley fought nightly, sometimes going for months without a break. In one stretch, she preached seventy sermons in seventy nights to capacity crowds each night in Brooklyn.⁵

On the night in question, the Dempsey fight had the noisier crowd—some eighty thousand—and frequently the roar coming from the crowd around the ring interrupted the preaching of the little girl in the tent.⁶ But the crowd in the tent cheered and roared and laughed too, for they were in a tent meeting, and the decorum that might be expected in a church went out the window (well, actually, out the flap) in a revival tent. Both audiences on that night, one as familiar with booze as the other was with the Bible, sought and saw a spectacle, though the revivalist crowd might have been hesitant to admit that. But it was a spectacle nonetheless, as much as the original David’s taking on Goliath.

Dempsey’s opponent was nothing compared to what Utley was facing. At least, that is how Utley and most in her audience saw it. Even a journalist might have seen it that way. Charles B. Driscoll, in a McClure’s article, spoke of Utley battering away at the devil and his pomps quite successfully.⁷ But not everyone in her audience would have agreed. Some in Utley’s crowd were disappointed spectators who had come downtown hoping to see the Dempsey–Sharkey fight—but the event had sold out. Utley was the next-best spectacle on the street that night. Others in Utley’s audience came in late. They were among the fortunate who had tickets for the Dempsey fight, and after the fight they paused on their way home, observing the curious scene of a little girl acting like a big-time preacher. Utley was taking a little longer to punch out the devil than it took Dempsey to punch out Sharkey. But, then, everyone knew that the devil was a considerably better fighter.

Dempsey won his fight, and Utley won hers. That was the story the little girl and her followers would tell. The devil might claim otherwise, but everyone knew you could not trust the devil’s word on anything, for he had been in the lying business for some time and had become pretty good at it.

Even nearly a hundred years later, lots of people have heard of Jack Dempsey, still famous for being the heavyweight boxing champion from 1919 to 1926. But who has heard of Uldine Utley? Almost no one. Yet she was as much a household name in the 1920s as was the likes of Dempsey. Such a little preacher, odd as she might seem in our day, fit well with the atmosphere of her time, for the 1920s was very much an era of the spectacle and the unusual—a golden age for the eccentric, the exotic, the extreme, and the exceptional.⁸ At no point in history before the 1920s was it easier to get one’s fifteen minutes of fame, and at no point thereafter—until the internet and YouTube made everybody a star, either for their talent or their complete lack thereof (it does not seem to matter which). In the Roaring Twenties one could gain star status for almost any kind of spectacle—good or bad, smart or zany, or borderline crazy. Sports became more professional, and the best athletes became household names: Bobby Jones for golf, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb for baseball, Johnny Weissmuller for swimming, and, of course, Jack Dempsey in the ring. Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart climbed into their planes, conquering the skies above and enthralling their adoring fans below. Tens of thousands would gather around a ring to see which of two men could pummel the other for the right to claim to be the best. Smaller crowds, equally mesmerized by anything novel or notable, would be drawn to some unknown individual who was attempting to perform whatever attention-grabbing feat was the fad of the moment, from sitting on a flagpole (for weeks) to marathon dancing (for months). And if one would rather view spectacles in comfortable seating, one could go to a moving picture show, and there watch the latest blockbuster that Hollywood had produced, as millions of Americans were more and more coming to do on a weekly basis. There were many ways to be entertained in this age of spectacle.⁹

No one was left out. Even babies, hardly able to walk or talk, might find some fame, for Hollywood, itself in its infancy, was making the 1920s and 1930s into the golden age for child stars. Some as young as two became child stars—though most of these ceased to be remembered by the time they were three. A few, such as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Shirley Temple, did have more lasting success, but they were exceptions.

Utley was part of that world where the young and the novel had a stage. By the time of the Dempsey fight, Utley had already been preaching for four years—since she was eleven. And she already had a string of successes. In fact, in the autumn preceding Utley’s revival meetings in a tent opposite Yankee Stadium and the Dempsey fight, she had packed Madison Square Garden with fourteen thousand people¹⁰ for what was the first religious meeting to be held in the new Garden (which had just opened a few months earlier, in December 1925).¹¹ That event was claimed to be the largest religious meeting in the history of New York City to that time. Thirty-one years later, in the summer of 1957, Billy Graham came to New York for his first crusade there. By then Madison Square Garden had increased its seating to eighteen thousand. A reporter, speaking of Billy Graham in New York City, recalled three famous revivalists of the past. One was Billy Sunday; another, Aimee Semple McPherson; and the third, little Uldine Utley.¹²

Religion added even more to the spectacle of the 1920s, especially as atheists and believers mocked and fought each other with equal zeal and evangelistic fervor. Evolution and Darwin got the attention of the courts—and state legislatures. Within the church, modernists and fundamentalists battled each other for control of denomination and dogma. And revivalism was getting a new lease on life, particularly as Pentecostalism, the newest religious experiment on the block, made the revivalist platform a key tool in their proclamation of "the full gospel." And frequently the revivalist stage could offer as good a show as vaudeville or Hollywood. Some revivalists might have been hesitant to speak of such religious efforts as entertainment, for revivalism was too serious a business to be passed off as such—and too serious a business not to add a bit of entertainment in order to attract an audience.

Accolades and Recognition

Utley received the highest praise during her heyday. A leading fundamentalist preacher said that she was the most extraordinary person in America at the time.¹³ Another minister commented: Uldine is truly one of the greatest preachers in the world today.¹⁴ And another minister said that she was one of the greatest evangelists of all time.¹⁵ Each comment ups the praise of the other: greatest in America—greatest in the world—greatest of all time. After the New York crusade of 1927, one minister described Utley’s campaign as more successful than the New York crusades of Moody and Sankey in the 1800s and of Billy Sunday more recently. These were the leading revivalists of the 1800s and early 1900s. The writer went on to say, Just how great this will be only history can tell, but if we can measure results by the need and by the consecration for service of this little messenger of God we are sure the life of Uldine Utley will be one of the outstanding in the history of the Church.¹⁶ Regularly, Utley was linked with Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson (the leading male and female revivalists of the time)—a kind of 1920s revivalist triumvirate.

But not only religious people found themselves coming under Utley’s spell. Utley’s popularity in the secular press and in society at large made her a household name. Newspaper wire services spread her fame across the nation, sending stories about her to the largest cities and the most remote towns. Life magazine attributed a quote simply to Uldine Utley, in a section of quotes from notables, in good company with quotes from the likes of J. C. Penney, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dorothy Dix, and Benito Mussolini, to name a few.¹⁷ For each of those quoted, name alone was sufficient identification. Other leading magazines did the same, commenting on Utley by name alone, assuming that readers would know that she was a child preacher.¹⁸ And, perhaps more in jest but nonetheless illustrating Utley’s wide recognition, some college students in a mock vote in the 1928 U.S. presidential election year wrote in Utley’s name for president.¹⁹

Utley’s name became synonymous for girl evangelist or child orator. Benjamin DeCasseres, a journalist and essayist of Jewish background, described himself as the male Uldine Utley of the high tariff for a night, recalling his soap-box performance at age fifteen some forty years earlier.²⁰ A reviewer of a 1928 play in which a girl evangelist was featured referred to the girl as a newly-found Uldine Utley.²¹ No need existed to tell the readers of these secular publications who Utley was.

Various labels were applied to Utley: Joan of Arc of the modern religious world, the Terror of the Tabernacles, and the Garbo of the Pulpit.²² As the most prominent of the girl evangelists, Utley helped create and shape the girl evangelist archetype that made its way into the literature of the period,²³ and she became the inspiration for plays and fiction, being at least partial spark for the John Meehan and Robert Riskin play Bless You, Sister,²⁴ and for the 1931 movie The Miracle Woman, directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck,²⁵ and perhaps even for the book on which the movie was based, Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry.²⁶ In one case, a slip of an author’s pen and the carelessness of a proofreader’s eye left little doubt about Utley’s impact on the use of the girl evangelist character in fiction. Thornton Wilder wrote a novel titled Heaven’s My Destination, in which a girl evangelist had a minor role. The girl was named Marian Truby. In the first edition of the book, a keen reviewer caught a blooper. On one page, Wilder had called the girl Marian Utley. The New York Times reviewer commented: Mr. Wilder obviously modeled Marian Truby after the actual figure of Uldine Utley. It is amusing to see a novelist thus give himself away.²⁷ Future editions corrected the error.

Flappers and the Fight for the Feminine Ideal

Mixed into the world of spectacle in which girl evangelists had their heyday was a new breed of young women—the flapper.²⁸ In drink, dance, dress, and general deportment, flappers flaunted their new liberties, bringing new meaning to the terms rude and risqué, and shocking conservative society, who saw in them the destruction of traditional values.

These flappers reflected most starkly the radical changes in manners and morals that shaped the 1920s. As the women’s movement made substantial gains for women’s rights, new attitudes toward sexuality were becoming commonplace. World War I had created new opportunities for women, and it had left broken on the battlefields of Europe many of the restraints and sensibilities of the older generation. Perhaps women, and young girls in particular, reflected most starkly the revolution of manners and morals in the 1920s largely because they had been the most restrained by the mores of the past. A new day had dawned. Women knew this, and flappers flaunted this. Cyndi Lauper’s 1980s theme song, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, could have been as much an anthem for the flappers of that period as it was for girls sixty years later. Indeed, flappers had their own song, every bit a match for anything modern entertainers have put forward:

I can show my shoulders,

I can show my knees;

I’m a free-born American

I can show what I please.²⁹

Into this world of the 1920s, little girl preachers fit with ease—in part because they did not fit. These little girls reflected the traditional. In fact, they were often referred to as old-fashioned, a badge they proudly wore. If flappers represented the new vision of the feminine, the little girl preachers represented the old. But that did not discredit them, for not everyone in society was happy with the changes that were taking place. Indeed, the audiences with whom the little girl preachers had their appeal were those alarmed by the rapid and radical changes taking place, and they looked to the little girl revivalists as dedicated and determined defenders of the old and as the finest examples of traditional behavior and beliefs. The 1920s and 1930s thus became the golden age of girl evangelists, with some little girls starting out as young as three, hardly yet able to talk but prepared to preach. Hundreds, and more than likely thousands, honed their revivalist craft, some in small churches and others filling the largest venues of the greatest cities of the United States, wooing sinners to Jesus, calling saints to a more devout life, and challenging the devil for a fight to his face.³⁰

An equally odd spectacle followed them. Little child atheists went from venue to venue, promoting atheism and Darwin, and mocking God and religion. Although these little atheists were but a handful compared to the hundreds of little girl evangelists, they made their mark and gained some prominence, one even becoming the inspiration for a popular movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent film, The Godless Girl. This movie was inspired, in part, by Queen Silver, the best-known girl atheist of the day, though the film was hardly biographical, since the girl atheist of the film converts to Christianity, quite contrary to the long life of Queen Silver dedicated to opposing religion.³¹

The clash between the new morality and traditional values was no minor skirmish done in a corner. The battle had a public and central stage. The chairman of the evangelistic committee that organized Utley’s 1927 New York City revival expressed his concern about the situation:

[T]his jazz age, with its lack of responsibility to the real issues of life, is producing a group of young men and women who have not grasped the possibilities that America and the church hold for them.

We need a revival to overcome the evils that are prevalent today that were practically unknown ten or twenty years ago! These evils are steadily growing and are consuming our young men and women, and the older generation as well. Only an old-fashioned revival of religion will restore things to their normal balance.³²

And who could lead such a revival? Who would be the David to take on this modern Goliath? And was it time, perhaps, for David to be a girl? Hundreds of New York ministers pondered that, then decided it was time.³³ That is how young Utley took center stage in a gospel tent just across the street from the Dempsey–Sharkey fight.

Apparently, the revival committee of these New York clergy had made a good choice sending this young girl to fight Goliath. At least, that is the impression left by a reporter for the Chicago American, even if there was a little hint of tongue-in-cheek in his comment.

When I think of that girl—that child up there—and when I remember all the other young girls in this town—all the flappers off somewhere tonight, dancing, smoking cigarettes, sneaking out between dances to the stair landings and the mezzanines of the hotels and drinking cocktails with boys out of the flasks they brought with them in their party bags—when I think of them and then when I look at that girl up there standing there with those thousands of men and women hanging on her every word with the burden of all their hungry souls upon her heart—well, I guess it is a good place to get out of. I will be going up there in front and kneeling down with the rest of them if I do not beat it out of here.³⁴

Utley as David

Utley was one of the superstars of that period of spectacle, a little girl revivalist, who by the age of eleven was filling large city auditoriums, by the age of twelve was publishing her own monthly magazine, and by the age of fourteen had become as much a household name as the leading adult preachers of the nation and as recognizable as the young child stars beginning to fill the Hollywood stage and screen. She, along with the leading male revivalist, Billy Sunday, and the leading female revivalist, Aimee Semple McPherson, represented the dramatic—and, some said, dying—age of revivalism.³⁵

Thus, Utley, though at one end of the religious extreme in America, was hardly on the fringe of American life. She had a public stage and presence in the heart of the largest American cities: mayors greeted her, civic groups asked her to speak to them, U.S. senators and state legislators sat on her stage, and leading reporters sought interviews.

She was a star, and everybody knew it. But she knew she was something more. She was a David. She had a serious job to do. She had to fight Goliath. And as David came to wear a crown, she would too.

But her crown was a halo.

And halos can be heavy.

1

Dreaming Dreams

From Childhood to Hollywood

Within three weeks of her birth, Utley moved from Durant, Oklahoma. She would make many more moves. It may have been in her blood, for before her birth, her parents had moved often, as her father, an entrepreneur with clear ambition and considerable skills, sought his pot of gold. This was an age where the frontier was retreating,¹ though golden opportunities might still be found there if one got there soon enough—and was lucky enough. But the moves that came from seeking gold would pale when compared to the ones the family would make when their young daughter became a revivalist preacher seeking sinners. From age eleven until she collapsed at age twenty-four, Utley was rarely in one place for more than three weeks (the average length of a crusade), traveling from one end of the country to the other, with hotels as home and diners as kitchens. For much of the earlier part of Utley’s career, her family would have been itinerant too, for she was much too young to be on her own, and, besides, every star, even a preaching star, needs staff.

At the time Utley became a revivalist preacher, her family was living in California. That was sixteen hundred miles west of her birthplace in Oklahoma. Much of this book traces Utley’s life as a revivalist. This chapter follows her family’s moves before that, living on the edge of the disappearing American frontier. That story is one of adventure and adversity, of hope and hardship, of dreams and disappointments, of the highest heights and the deepest depths, of dancing with Geronimo and of digging into the dirt to make a home out of a hole in the ground. Hers was, as she described it shortly before the end of her career, a story packed with drama and almost too strange to be true.²

Stories like this have been told before. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House children books come to mind, with the best-known title in the series, Little House on the Prairie, being adopted as the name of the television series.³ These stories draw on memories of the Ingalls family’s trek from Wisconsin to the Indian Territory near Independence, Kansas, in 1869–1870, where they had homesteaded only a few miles from the Oklahoma border. They lived there only briefly, however, being ordered to leave because their homestead was on Indian land. The family then moved to Minnesota, living for some time in a dugout. The Utley family could have written their own Little House on the Prairie story. They too had lived in a dugout, and for a longer period. They too had lived the American frontier experience. And they had an abundance of colorful, funny, affectionate, and adventurous stories to prove it, easily matching with fact the mixture of fact and fiction in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tales.

In telling the story of Utley, the story of her parents cannot be set aside as unimportant. Simply because they were her parents, their story is part of their daughter’s story. But a closer connection existed between them than is normally the case between parent and child. When their eleven-year-old daughter began her career as a full-time revivalist promoting Jesus, Utley’s parents in their early forties began their new full-time career promoting their daughter, supporting and being supported by Utley’s revivalist successes. And after their daughter collapsed and after years of institutional care brought no recovery, they became their daughter’s sole caregivers from their mid-sixties until they reached their eighties and could no longer carry that load.

Their story is intertwined with that of their daughter’s. But they had their own story, too, and Oklahoma was an important part of it; though for their daughter, Oklahoma was merely a location inscribed on her birth certificate, and the place she left a few weeks after her birth.

Oklahoma

Everyone has heard of Oklahoma. Rodgers and Hammerstein, in their first joint work, made sure of that. Their 1943 musical Oklahoma! won rave reviews and garnered coveted awards. The musical was based on the 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, written by the part-Cherokee writer Lynn Riggs, and featuring such popular folk songs as Git along Little Dogies, Home on the Range, and Skip to My Lou.⁴

The story was set in 1906, one year before Oklahoma gained statehood. In this new state of Oklahoma, five years after statehood, little Uldine Utley’s story was to begin. Her parents’ story started a little before that, in the same year and the same location of the fictional story featured in the play Green Grow the Lilacs and the musical Oklahoma! A young man from Kentucky named Azle Utley, then age twenty-five, began a three-year courtship to woo and wed a blonde-haired gal from Kansas, Hattie Bray, who was two years his junior. But before the story of Azle and Hattie coming to Oklahoma can be told, the story of Oklahoma coming to statehood must be recounted, for without Oklahoma there would have been no wooing and wedding of a guy and a gal born and raised five hundred miles apart.

Oklahoma was late to statehood compared to most of the territory surrounding it—but there was good reason. Oklahoma had never been intended to be like other areas. It was land set aside for Native American settlement: Indian Territory, as it was called. Actually, Oklahoma was the last of Indian Territory.⁵ Years before, Indian Territory had embraced vast lands, but as pressure from white settlement increased, slice after slice of Indian land had been carved off, creating an ever-retreating frontier that still seductively promised golden opportunities for some—at the expense of lands lost for others.

Well over a century before the disappearance of this final parcel of Indian land, Britain’s chief representative in Virginia, Lord Dunmore, was almost prophetic in his analysis of the American attitude and its inevitable consequence. Writing to Lord Dartmouth, Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies, two years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Dunmore provided his assessment of the American colonists’ aspirations. The Americans, he said, for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled. . . . If they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.⁶

Whether Dunmore had captured the American spirit exactly, it seems an apt description of Utley’s family on both her mother and her father’s side, and of many others. Dunmore had identified what he saw as the crucial difference that had developed between the British government and the American colonists regarding the extent to which westward expansion by white settlers should be permitted. In 1763 the colonial government restricted any further white settlement to lands east of the Allegheny Mountain Ridge. Although the British had various reasons for such restrictions, one that seemed pressing was the protection and preservation of the hunting lands of the Indian tribes.⁷ In a previous letter to Dartmouth, Dunmore had stated that westward expansion was an act of Inhumanity and Injustice to the Indians.⁸ Dartmouth would have concurred, being an evangelical Anglican with ties to revivalist John Wesley and to Countess of Huntingdon’s religious circle.

Americans on the frontier might have had a different opinion of Dartmouth’s interest in the Indians. The British attitude seemed to show, as one historian has put it, an insufferable tenderness for the Indians.⁹ But tenderness was to change to toughness with independence from Britain. The western border of the new American nation now extended to the banks of the Mississippi River, opening up the vast lands between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi to white settlement. Shortly after that, the size of the American territories increased again, doubling in what came to be known as the Louisiana Purchase, bringing the land from the Mississippi westward to the Rocky Mountains under American control. In these vast new lands, a multitude of native tribes had their home.

Pushing the frontier ever westward seemed almost in the American blood, as section by section of land in Indian Territory was opened up to white settlement,¹⁰ confirming by action what Dartmouth had detected decades earlier. Particularly after the Civil War, the federal government could and did dismiss or rewrite older treaties they had signed with the native tribes that had (unwisely) chosen to fight for the South in the Civil War, a breach the American government felt voided earlier treaties.¹¹ With continued loss of land to white settlement, by the end of the 1800s, the eastern part of Oklahoma was all that remained of Indian Territory. The last battles of the Indian Wars had been fought, and the last holdouts, Geronimo and his Apache followers, were now in custody in Fort