Introduction

Abstract

T his was the scene unfolding before fourteen-year-old evangelist, Uldine Utley as she stood poised on the mammoth stage of Madison Square Garden before a vast sea of strangers on this Halloween evening in 1926. This night was Uldine’s final service of a four-week, two-sermons-a-day evangelistic campaign in New York City where the crowds had responded enthusiastically to the diminutive, blue-eyed, fair-haired evangelist, outfitted in her customary white robe, hose, and shoes, with a bulky, leather-bound Bible held high in her petite hand. No venue could be more appropriate for the climactic conclusion of her evangelistic campaign. Madison Square Garden, dubbed the “palace of pleasure,” had a long tradition of staging the unusual since its 1874 incarnation as P.T. Barnum’s Monster Classical and Geological Hippodrome, when it hosted a circus of elephants, Japanese acrobats, tattooed fire eaters, and female chariot drivers. Now, five decades later, scheduled between prize fights, six-day bicycle races, beauty contests, and horse shows, another curiosity was drawing crowds by the thousands to this legendary venue, “Dedicated to Athletics, Amusements and the Industrial Arts.”²

Stretching out before me into an indefinite ocean of faces, sit fourteen thousand people. They are strangers to me, and have seemed to come from nowhere into here. Outside the rain is beating down upon this great metropolis in torrents and the streets in some places seem almost rivers. Yet here, in the new Madison Square Garden, people are singing songs of praise and the choir of hundreds of voices rises behind me like some huge mountain, it seems to me. And oh, how they do sing!… It is all so much of a miracle to me: these fourteen thousand faces, these exultant voices of praise, these “Amens” I hear. A miracle because I realize it is all the working of my Saviour whose love fills my heart with melody today.¹