March 28, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the world was changing, and Aimee Semple McPherson certainly took note, becoming one of the first evangelizers to harness the power of national radio to spread the word of her mission.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next the
story of the first televangelist and the originator of the megachurch,
the Pentecostal preacher Amy Semple McPherson. She rose to prominence
in the nineteen twenties using innovative techniques to spread.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The Gospel and became a household name.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Here to tell the story is doctor Matthew Sutton, Chair
of the History Department at Washington State University and author
of the book Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of
Christian America.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
And then I know, if God is my judge, that
I don't amost anything in myself. I know, I'm just
a girl from the farm.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
But I know I should have God ever called anyone,
God called me, and God.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Put it on myself because Weda Sarsburg off with.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Around the world.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
If you were living in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
you would certainly know who Amy Simple McPherson was. She
was one of the most famous Americans at the time
in the sense that she had created a Christian ministry
that seemed very relevant to the needs and desires and
interests of Americans in this period, and so she became
(01:27):
a celebrity on par with Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin.
When I would give talks in the early two thousands,
when there were more people still alive from the nineteen
thirties and nineteen forties, I almost never gave a talk
in which some old person didn't come up to me
and tell me when they had visited Los Angeles they
saw McPherson. That was just something everybody did in this erab.
You wanted to see the Hollywood studios, you wanted to
(01:49):
go to the beach, and you wanted to see Amy
McPherson on her stage. McPherson grew up in Canada. She
grew up on a rural farm. She joined the Salvation
Army as a teenager basically because her mother was working
with the Salvation Army. And what that experience taught her
(02:09):
was the importance of evangelism, of trying to make converts
to Christianity. But it also taught her how to use
innovative methods, how to take the Christian message to the
public rather than wait for the public to come to you,
to come to a traditional church. And so from there
she decided to launch her own ministry in the nineteen tens,
(02:31):
and so she moved to the United States. She traveled
around the country and what she called her gospel car.
This was, of course, in the early days of automobile travel,
and she would just hold revivals. She had a cheap
tent she would set up as she went from city
to city to city, and she would draw the attention
of all kinds of Americans, and she was very good
at using publicity to bring attention to her stories. She
(02:53):
ultimately decided that it would make sense to settle down,
and she had two small children. Her first husband had
passed away, the father of her children, and so she
decided that rather than keep traveling, that she would build
essentially a permanent revival tabernacle, a place where people could
come to her, experience her four score gospel, and then
take it back out to the rest of the country.
(03:15):
And she settled on Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties,
and Los Angeles in that period was exploding, and so
McPherson recognized that Los Angeles was becoming a tourist destination,
and so she essentially made her church part of that.
She had pretty humble plans of building a large revival tent,
basically some inexpensive wooden tabernacle. Instead, she built a huge
(03:40):
five thousand seat theater. It had three tiers, It was
basically filled with oppera chairs rather than pews, It had
a huge orchestra pit, it had a beautiful stage, and
it was the state of the art church that really
was the perfect place for her to preach her evangelistic
message in what symbol was a new era in church building,
(04:02):
this sense that churches were not going to be these
kind of old, boring, puritanical functionary but was going to
be a place of comfort, a little bit lavish, where
people could come and be entertained. And so it really
set the foundation for the megachurch movement. McPherson also recognized
very early on the power of radio, and so she
(04:23):
built her own radio station and immediately took her fourscore
Gospel onto the air, and so it really drew even
larger audiences from all over the Western United States. So
the gospel that McPherson preached drew on earlier revivalist ideas,
and she called it the four score Gospel, and what
she emphasized was Jesus as Savior, so that was the
(04:45):
first of the four squares. The second was that He
was the healer, and this had to do with the
kind of Pentecostal emphasis on the idea that God could
intervene in your life today and could bring you healing, physical, emotional.
So Macpherson believed that she could lay hands on people
and they might be healed. The third piece of the
four score gospel was that Christ was the baptizer and
(05:09):
the Holy Spirit, and the idea was that you would
have a secondary experience after salvation, this kind of moment
of sanctification where you would be purified by the Holy Spirit,
freed from sin, and live a more godly holy life.
And then the final part of it that she emphasized
was Jesus as the soom coming king. She really emphasized
(05:29):
the imminent apocalypse. She believed she was living in the
last days, that Jesus was coming back soon, that the
rise of the anti Christ was imminent, and that the
world was careening towards this global battle of armageddon, and
that things were going to get really bad before they
got better, before Jesus returned to establish his kingdom on earth.
And so for her she believed that the US had
(05:50):
special divine origins, and so her sermons tended to be
very patriotic, very pro American. And this is true of
many immigrants, right. She was a Canadian, so she'd come
to the United States and really embraced the United States.
And so she blended with her message the sense that
the United States was the new Chosen Land, was the
new Israel, and was a place that God had destined
(06:12):
for this special work in his last days. What made
her services so attractive is what she did on every
Sunday night. She rather than deliver a traditional service behind
a pulpit, she developed what she called illustrated sermons, and
she drew on the talents of Hollywood to do this.
She recruited producers, actors, lighting artists, prop designers, set designers,
(06:38):
and she would have these huge, elaborate productions on Sunday nights,
these stories, these plays, and she often took the starring role,
of course, in which she embodied different biblical stories, different
messages of the Christian Gospel. She was very explicit about
this that you needed to do something to compete with
Hollywood with movies with radio, and so the way to
do that was to essentially take the tool of Tinseltown
(07:01):
and make them your own. And one of my favorites
was called the Heavenly Aeroplane. She had to get up
to San Francisco for a radio exposition and she didn't
have a lot of time to get up there and
get back, and so she charted a plane. And this
was in the nineteen twenties, early nineteen twenties, in the
early days of flying. So it was a biplane, one
of these planes that you think of, you know, World
(07:21):
War two fireplanes, which is two seats. So it's her
and the pilot. Pilot didn't see a giant pothole in
the runway, drove the wheel right into it and essentially
crashed the landing gear. So the plane did a nosedive,
the tail flipped up into the air, and McPherson went
tumbling out of the plane. And it was this really
dangerous kind of catastrophic runway plane crash. Luckily nobody was hurt.
(07:45):
McPherson walked away unscathed. What it did was it got
a bunch of national media attention because this was a
famous American in a plane accident, and so she used
that attention like she always used me attention to craft
an illustrated sermon. So when prishioners came into Angela's temple
(08:05):
that next Sunday night, what they saw on the stage
was a miniature airplane, extra two miniature airplanes, and the
stage was decorated as an airfield, and she had the
planes connected to wires, and one, she said, was piloted
by the Devil, the other one was piloted by Jesus,
and the planes would fly over the congregation, fly around
the whole church, and she would encourage prishioners to make
(08:25):
a choice, did they want to be on the Devil's
plane or did they want to be on Jesus's plane.
And of course, at the end of her message, the
Devil's plane crashed into this heap, this pile on the
church stage, while Jesus's plane flew up to the Heavenly City,
to this little model of heaven that she had built
that was suspended from the top of the church. And
it was these kinds of elaborate sermons with props, with costumes,
(08:50):
with extras, with actors, with innovative technology. The idea that
these planes are going to be flying all over church
is what was so exciting and so enticing about her.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to doctor Matthew Sutton tell the
story of Amy Simple McPherson, and my goodness, what a
story indeed, taking church and the gospel to another level,
to a new level, and to compete in the end
with high entertainment from Los Angeles by building the first
mega church in Los Angeles. When we come back more
(09:24):
of Amy Simple McPherson's story here on our American stories,
and we return to our American stories, and the final
(09:44):
portion of our story on Amy Semple McPherson telling the
story is Matthew Sutton.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Let's return with the story.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
So macpherson grew up at Pentecostal. She had experienced this
baptism in the Holy Spirit, as she described it's spoken tongues.
She believed she had been healed of a injury. She
believed she could heal others through prayer at times, and
so she very much embraced Pentecostalism in her early career
as she was traveling in the country as a revivalist.
(10:15):
But once she settled into Los Angeles, as her status increased,
as her audience grew, as she moved up into the
middle class, she downplayed some of the more exotic and
esoteric dimensions of Pentecostalism, and so a typical service in
Angelis Temple would not have people speaking in tongues, would
not have prayer for divine healing, certainly wouldn't have people
(10:37):
dancing in the aisles. All those things still happened in
her congregation, but they usually happened in rooms off to
the side of the main sanctuary, so people could go
into these separate rooms pray for healing, pray for the
baptism and the Holy Spirit. If they spoke in tongues,
they spoke in tongues. But mcpherston didn't want those kinds
of things happening during services, and she certainly didn't want
(10:58):
them being captured by the radio microphones in broadcast out
to much of the rest of the country, where they
might sound kind of weird in some ways. Though at
the end of her career she really re embraced that heritage.
In the late thirties and nineteen forties, she returned to
her Pentecostal roots. That's also the moment when she really
(11:19):
made a clear effort to integrate her church racially integrate
her church. She brought some leading Black Pentecostals to speak
at her church, and she began to champion civil rights
in ways that she never did in the nineteen twenties.
That for much of her career in becoming middle class
and respectable, that also meant embracing Jim Crow, segregation and
(11:40):
really setting aside black civil rights. But at the end
of her career, I think she recognized the sin of
that choice and began to move away from it and
to focus more on trying to reintegrate the Pentecostal movement
that had some integrative origins that had really lost it.
By the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, McPherson was in
(12:05):
the nineteen twenties one of the most famous Americans in
the country. She was profiled in all of the major magazines.
She was regularly in the major newspapers, But things took
a turn in nineteen twenty six. At that point, she vanished.
She disappeared. Her family and her church leaders presumed that
she had died. She had gone for a swim down
(12:27):
in Venice Beach in southern California and never came back.
A little over a month later, though she stumbled across
the Mexican border into Arizona with this crazy story of
having been kidnapped, taking them to Mexico and held for ransom,
And in fact, there were ransom notes that arrived at
her church at her Angelis Temple organization, but there were
(12:49):
all kinds of crank notes that they were receiving, so
it's hard to know what was legitimate in what was
not legitimate. Her story, which she stuck to to the
end of her life, was that she had been kidnapped
and that the kidnappers wanted to sell her back as
a way to raise money. The other reason she believed
she had been kidnapped a claim she had been kidnapped
was that she had taken on the Los Angeles criminal underground,
(13:13):
that she was really trying to stop the trade, especially
in illegal alcoholism alcohol this was in the era of prohibition,
and also trying to take on the dance clubs. That
she was taking a stand for this kind of moral integrity,
and that those who were complicit in these underground businesses
wanted to stop her. So that was her story. At
the same time, though, enterprising journalists began asking questions and
(13:36):
began pursuing this story and what they discovered was that
at the same time that McPherson had disappeared, her radio engineer,
guy named Kenneth Ormiston, had also disappeared. He had also vanished,
just walked away from his job and was gone. And
what journalists discovered was that while McPherson was gone, he
was up in Carmel, a beautiful beachtown in northern California,
(13:58):
with a heavily disguised woman. So he checked into a hotel.
He was there with a woman, and it was never
clear who this woman was, And after the fact, McPherson's
mother acknowledged that there had been rumors in the church
that Amy was having an affair with this ormuson before
the kidnapping. There were worries and there were concerns that
perhaps they had grown too close and the radio engineer
(14:20):
was actually married at the time when McPherson returned. When
these stories broke, the local district attorney launched an investigation,
first to determine whether or not there could be charges
against these alleged kidnappers, and then ultimately he determined that
she had lied. He took his evidence before a grand jury,
and the grand jury issued criminal indictments against McPherson, and
(14:42):
so there was a subsequent major trial that dragged on
and on, and it was covered in the national news.
This was huge story. All the major journalists in the
nation were covering it. It was on the you know,
in the New York Times, in the La Times, of course,
in the New Yorker, in all the major magazines, and
so Americans were obsessed over this trial and trying to
determine whether or not McPherson had had an affair. The
(15:05):
district attorney ultimately decided to drop the case, drop the charges.
He was probably pressured into doing that by William Randoff Hurst,
the major media tycoon of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.
It may be that McPherson blackmailed Hurst. Hurst, at the
time was having an affair with a Hollywood actor. McPherson
found out about this, and she communicated to him that
(15:26):
she was going to use the power of her radio
station to embarrass him for his moral foibles if he
was going to continue to try to embarrass her through
his use of the media. But we don't ultimately know
what happened in that month that McPherson was gone. Certainly
the circumstantial evidence makes it appear that she was having
an affair. There was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate
(15:47):
that she was the woman with Kenneth or Minston and Carmel,
and there was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that
she was kidnapped. The kidnappers were never found, There was
never anybody who acknowledged that they had been involved. With
this day, we don't really know. It's one of the
great unsolved mysteries in American history. After the trial, McPherson
(16:08):
took a hit in publicity. A lot of people were
very skeptical about her, very cynical of her, and so
she spent some time sort of regrouping. She made a
few additional but I think she would acknowledge were poor choices.
After that, she rushed into another marriage with a guy
who was really kind of a disaster for her ministry.
(16:29):
He was a heavy drinker, probably a womanizer, probably didn't
care that much about her ministry. At the same time,
McPherson had a falling out with her mother, who had
been her right hand person in the ministry. McPherson had
a falling out with her at that point adult daughter.
So there's just one scandal after another, there were rumors
(16:50):
of financial impropriety. McPherson really embraced the Hollywood lifestyle. She
started dressing in the latest Hollywood fashions, wearing expensive jewelry.
She bought a really nice house in this resort town
outside of southern California. She was driving really nice cars,
and so it really hurt her reputation. But in the
mid nineteen thirties she sort of had this moment of
(17:12):
redemption where she wanted to return to her roots, and
then at that point her ministry began to really rebuild
once again, so that by the nineteen forties she had
really rebuilt her ministry. Churches related to her ministry were
expanding all over the country. So it really established the
foundations for a denomination, the International Church of the Force
(17:33):
Work Gospel, which is still a major major American denomination
today with a huge missionary apparatus that has churches all
over the world. McPherson died in nineteen forty four of
an overdose of barbituates. There were rumors at the time
that it might have been a suicide. It probably was not.
(17:54):
These were heavy sleeping pills she would take when she
would preach her revival services. She would get up. She
really needed drugs to come back down to be able
to get any kind of relaxation. In this particular drug,
you could take it and forget that you had taken it,
and so it's likely that it was an accidental overdose.
But it ended her life in tragedy, which was much
(18:15):
of how she lived that It was the story this
American dream of becoming one of the nation's most innovative
preachers and revivalists, but also was one that led her
own life in deep dark places, real real unsatisfactory, real
unhappiness within her career.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
How many out there know you are Christian Europe. Come on, now,
that's God's.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
A deal with She just had this ability to make
people feel warm and seeing and encouraged and heard, and
people really resonated with her. She was also very charismatic,
but also very humble that she because she came from
the far, because she was relatively poorly educated, she made
(19:04):
herself very relatable to average Americans. She was never condescending,
she never talked down to them. She was encouraged them
and met them where she was at.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by her own Megan Pidcock, and a terrific job on
the storytelling by Matthew Sutton. He's the author of the
book Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Oh what a story we heard.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
She develops a real pension for spreading the gospel, develops
innovative techniques to do it, a real show woman in
the end, and it ends up building America's first megachurch.
There's scandal, there are problems, as almost always happens in
these regards, and she dies in the end of a
barbiturate overdose in nineteen forty four. But what a life
(19:52):
she led in the nineteen twenties, as famous as Mary
Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. And in the end, her work,
through the use of the most modern technology known to man, radio,
spread the gospel to millions. The story of Amy Simple
McPherson here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next the
story of the first televangelist and the originator of the megachurch,
the Pentecostal preacher Amy Semple McPherson. She rose to prominence
in the nineteen twenties using innovative techniques to spread.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The Gospel and became a household name.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Here to tell the story is doctor Matthew Sutton, Chair
of the History Department at Washington State University and author
of the book Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of
Christian America.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
And then I know, if God is my judge, that
I don't amost anything in myself. I know, I'm just
a girl from the farm.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
But I know I should have God ever called anyone,
God called me, and God.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Put it on myself because Weda Sarsburg off with.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Around the world.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
If you were living in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties,
you would certainly know who Amy Simple McPherson was. She
was one of the most famous Americans at the time
in the sense that she had created a Christian ministry
that seemed very relevant to the needs and desires and
interests of Americans in this period, and so she became
(01:27):
a celebrity on par with Mary Pickford or Charlie Chaplin.
When I would give talks in the early two thousands,
when there were more people still alive from the nineteen
thirties and nineteen forties, I almost never gave a talk
in which some old person didn't come up to me
and tell me when they had visited Los Angeles they
saw McPherson. That was just something everybody did in this erab.
You wanted to see the Hollywood studios, you wanted to
(01:49):
go to the beach, and you wanted to see Amy
McPherson on her stage. McPherson grew up in Canada. She
grew up on a rural farm. She joined the Salvation
Army as a teenager basically because her mother was working
with the Salvation Army. And what that experience taught her
(02:09):
was the importance of evangelism, of trying to make converts
to Christianity. But it also taught her how to use
innovative methods, how to take the Christian message to the
public rather than wait for the public to come to you,
to come to a traditional church. And so from there
she decided to launch her own ministry in the nineteen tens,
(02:31):
and so she moved to the United States. She traveled
around the country and what she called her gospel car.
This was, of course, in the early days of automobile travel,
and she would just hold revivals. She had a cheap
tent she would set up as she went from city
to city to city, and she would draw the attention
of all kinds of Americans, and she was very good
at using publicity to bring attention to her stories. She
(02:53):
ultimately decided that it would make sense to settle down,
and she had two small children. Her first husband had
passed away, the father of her children, and so she
decided that rather than keep traveling, that she would build
essentially a permanent revival tabernacle, a place where people could
come to her, experience her four score gospel, and then
take it back out to the rest of the country.
(03:15):
And she settled on Los Angeles in the nineteen twenties,
and Los Angeles in that period was exploding, and so
McPherson recognized that Los Angeles was becoming a tourist destination,
and so she essentially made her church part of that.
She had pretty humble plans of building a large revival tent,
basically some inexpensive wooden tabernacle. Instead, she built a huge
(03:40):
five thousand seat theater. It had three tiers, It was
basically filled with oppera chairs rather than pews, It had
a huge orchestra pit, it had a beautiful stage, and
it was the state of the art church that really
was the perfect place for her to preach her evangelistic
message in what symbol was a new era in church building,
(04:02):
this sense that churches were not going to be these
kind of old, boring, puritanical functionary but was going to
be a place of comfort, a little bit lavish, where
people could come and be entertained. And so it really
set the foundation for the megachurch movement. McPherson also recognized
very early on the power of radio, and so she
(04:23):
built her own radio station and immediately took her fourscore
Gospel onto the air, and so it really drew even
larger audiences from all over the Western United States. So
the gospel that McPherson preached drew on earlier revivalist ideas,
and she called it the four score Gospel, and what
she emphasized was Jesus as Savior, so that was the
(04:45):
first of the four squares. The second was that He
was the healer, and this had to do with the
kind of Pentecostal emphasis on the idea that God could
intervene in your life today and could bring you healing, physical, emotional.
So Macpherson believed that she could lay hands on people
and they might be healed. The third piece of the
four score gospel was that Christ was the baptizer and
(05:09):
the Holy Spirit, and the idea was that you would
have a secondary experience after salvation, this kind of moment
of sanctification where you would be purified by the Holy Spirit,
freed from sin, and live a more godly holy life.
And then the final part of it that she emphasized
was Jesus as the soom coming king. She really emphasized
(05:29):
the imminent apocalypse. She believed she was living in the
last days, that Jesus was coming back soon, that the
rise of the anti Christ was imminent, and that the
world was careening towards this global battle of armageddon, and
that things were going to get really bad before they
got better, before Jesus returned to establish his kingdom on earth.
And so for her she believed that the US had
(05:50):
special divine origins, and so her sermons tended to be
very patriotic, very pro American. And this is true of
many immigrants, right. She was a Canadian, so she'd come
to the United States and really embraced the United States.
And so she blended with her message the sense that
the United States was the new Chosen Land, was the
new Israel, and was a place that God had destined
(06:12):
for this special work in his last days. What made
her services so attractive is what she did on every
Sunday night. She rather than deliver a traditional service behind
a pulpit, she developed what she called illustrated sermons, and
she drew on the talents of Hollywood to do this.
She recruited producers, actors, lighting artists, prop designers, set designers,
(06:38):
and she would have these huge, elaborate productions on Sunday nights,
these stories, these plays, and she often took the starring role,
of course, in which she embodied different biblical stories, different
messages of the Christian Gospel. She was very explicit about
this that you needed to do something to compete with
Hollywood with movies with radio, and so the way to
do that was to essentially take the tool of Tinseltown
(07:01):
and make them your own. And one of my favorites
was called the Heavenly Aeroplane. She had to get up
to San Francisco for a radio exposition and she didn't
have a lot of time to get up there and
get back, and so she charted a plane. And this
was in the nineteen twenties, early nineteen twenties, in the
early days of flying. So it was a biplane, one
of these planes that you think of, you know, World
(07:21):
War two fireplanes, which is two seats. So it's her
and the pilot. Pilot didn't see a giant pothole in
the runway, drove the wheel right into it and essentially
crashed the landing gear. So the plane did a nosedive,
the tail flipped up into the air, and McPherson went
tumbling out of the plane. And it was this really
dangerous kind of catastrophic runway plane crash. Luckily nobody was hurt.
(07:45):
McPherson walked away unscathed. What it did was it got
a bunch of national media attention because this was a
famous American in a plane accident, and so she used
that attention like she always used me attention to craft
an illustrated sermon. So when prishioners came into Angela's temple
(08:05):
that next Sunday night, what they saw on the stage
was a miniature airplane, extra two miniature airplanes, and the
stage was decorated as an airfield, and she had the
planes connected to wires, and one, she said, was piloted
by the Devil, the other one was piloted by Jesus,
and the planes would fly over the congregation, fly around
the whole church, and she would encourage prishioners to make
(08:25):
a choice, did they want to be on the Devil's
plane or did they want to be on Jesus's plane.
And of course, at the end of her message, the
Devil's plane crashed into this heap, this pile on the
church stage, while Jesus's plane flew up to the Heavenly City,
to this little model of heaven that she had built
that was suspended from the top of the church. And
it was these kinds of elaborate sermons with props, with costumes,
(08:50):
with extras, with actors, with innovative technology. The idea that
these planes are going to be flying all over church
is what was so exciting and so enticing about her.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
And you've been listening to doctor Matthew Sutton tell the
story of Amy Simple McPherson, and my goodness, what a
story indeed, taking church and the gospel to another level,
to a new level, and to compete in the end
with high entertainment from Los Angeles by building the first
mega church in Los Angeles. When we come back more
(09:24):
of Amy Simple McPherson's story here on our American stories,
and we return to our American stories, and the final
(09:44):
portion of our story on Amy Semple McPherson telling the
story is Matthew Sutton.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Let's return with the story.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
So macpherson grew up at Pentecostal. She had experienced this
baptism in the Holy Spirit, as she described it's spoken tongues.
She believed she had been healed of a injury. She
believed she could heal others through prayer at times, and
so she very much embraced Pentecostalism in her early career
as she was traveling in the country as a revivalist.
(10:15):
But once she settled into Los Angeles, as her status increased,
as her audience grew, as she moved up into the
middle class, she downplayed some of the more exotic and
esoteric dimensions of Pentecostalism, and so a typical service in
Angelis Temple would not have people speaking in tongues, would
not have prayer for divine healing, certainly wouldn't have people
(10:37):
dancing in the aisles. All those things still happened in
her congregation, but they usually happened in rooms off to
the side of the main sanctuary, so people could go
into these separate rooms pray for healing, pray for the
baptism and the Holy Spirit. If they spoke in tongues,
they spoke in tongues. But mcpherston didn't want those kinds
of things happening during services, and she certainly didn't want
(10:58):
them being captured by the radio microphones in broadcast out
to much of the rest of the country, where they
might sound kind of weird in some ways. Though at
the end of her career she really re embraced that heritage.
In the late thirties and nineteen forties, she returned to
her Pentecostal roots. That's also the moment when she really
(11:19):
made a clear effort to integrate her church racially integrate
her church. She brought some leading Black Pentecostals to speak
at her church, and she began to champion civil rights
in ways that she never did in the nineteen twenties.
That for much of her career in becoming middle class
and respectable, that also meant embracing Jim Crow, segregation and
(11:40):
really setting aside black civil rights. But at the end
of her career, I think she recognized the sin of
that choice and began to move away from it and
to focus more on trying to reintegrate the Pentecostal movement
that had some integrative origins that had really lost it.
By the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, McPherson was in
(12:05):
the nineteen twenties one of the most famous Americans in
the country. She was profiled in all of the major magazines.
She was regularly in the major newspapers, But things took
a turn in nineteen twenty six. At that point, she vanished.
She disappeared. Her family and her church leaders presumed that
she had died. She had gone for a swim down
(12:27):
in Venice Beach in southern California and never came back.
A little over a month later, though she stumbled across
the Mexican border into Arizona with this crazy story of
having been kidnapped, taking them to Mexico and held for ransom,
And in fact, there were ransom notes that arrived at
her church at her Angelis Temple organization, but there were
(12:49):
all kinds of crank notes that they were receiving, so
it's hard to know what was legitimate in what was
not legitimate. Her story, which she stuck to to the
end of her life, was that she had been kidnapped
and that the kidnappers wanted to sell her back as
a way to raise money. The other reason she believed
she had been kidnapped a claim she had been kidnapped
was that she had taken on the Los Angeles criminal underground,
(13:13):
that she was really trying to stop the trade, especially
in illegal alcoholism alcohol this was in the era of prohibition,
and also trying to take on the dance clubs. That
she was taking a stand for this kind of moral integrity,
and that those who were complicit in these underground businesses
wanted to stop her. So that was her story. At
the same time, though, enterprising journalists began asking questions and
(13:36):
began pursuing this story and what they discovered was that
at the same time that McPherson had disappeared, her radio engineer,
guy named Kenneth Ormiston, had also disappeared. He had also vanished,
just walked away from his job and was gone. And
what journalists discovered was that while McPherson was gone, he
was up in Carmel, a beautiful beachtown in northern California,
(13:58):
with a heavily disguised woman. So he checked into a hotel.
He was there with a woman, and it was never
clear who this woman was, And after the fact, McPherson's
mother acknowledged that there had been rumors in the church
that Amy was having an affair with this ormuson before
the kidnapping. There were worries and there were concerns that
perhaps they had grown too close and the radio engineer
(14:20):
was actually married at the time when McPherson returned. When
these stories broke, the local district attorney launched an investigation,
first to determine whether or not there could be charges
against these alleged kidnappers, and then ultimately he determined that
she had lied. He took his evidence before a grand jury,
and the grand jury issued criminal indictments against McPherson, and
(14:42):
so there was a subsequent major trial that dragged on
and on, and it was covered in the national news.
This was huge story. All the major journalists in the
nation were covering it. It was on the you know,
in the New York Times, in the La Times, of course,
in the New Yorker, in all the major magazines, and
so Americans were obsessed over this trial and trying to
determine whether or not McPherson had had an affair. The
(15:05):
district attorney ultimately decided to drop the case, drop the charges.
He was probably pressured into doing that by William Randoff Hurst,
the major media tycoon of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties.
It may be that McPherson blackmailed Hurst. Hurst, at the
time was having an affair with a Hollywood actor. McPherson
found out about this, and she communicated to him that
(15:26):
she was going to use the power of her radio
station to embarrass him for his moral foibles if he
was going to continue to try to embarrass her through
his use of the media. But we don't ultimately know
what happened in that month that McPherson was gone. Certainly
the circumstantial evidence makes it appear that she was having
an affair. There was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate
(15:47):
that she was the woman with Kenneth or Minston and Carmel,
and there was never any conclusive proof to demonstrate that
she was kidnapped. The kidnappers were never found, There was
never anybody who acknowledged that they had been involved. With
this day, we don't really know. It's one of the
great unsolved mysteries in American history. After the trial, McPherson
(16:08):
took a hit in publicity. A lot of people were
very skeptical about her, very cynical of her, and so
she spent some time sort of regrouping. She made a
few additional but I think she would acknowledge were poor choices.
After that, she rushed into another marriage with a guy
who was really kind of a disaster for her ministry.
(16:29):
He was a heavy drinker, probably a womanizer, probably didn't
care that much about her ministry. At the same time,
McPherson had a falling out with her mother, who had
been her right hand person in the ministry. McPherson had
a falling out with her at that point adult daughter.
So there's just one scandal after another, there were rumors
(16:50):
of financial impropriety. McPherson really embraced the Hollywood lifestyle. She
started dressing in the latest Hollywood fashions, wearing expensive jewelry.
She bought a really nice house in this resort town
outside of southern California. She was driving really nice cars,
and so it really hurt her reputation. But in the
mid nineteen thirties she sort of had this moment of
(17:12):
redemption where she wanted to return to her roots, and
then at that point her ministry began to really rebuild
once again, so that by the nineteen forties she had
really rebuilt her ministry. Churches related to her ministry were
expanding all over the country. So it really established the
foundations for a denomination, the International Church of the Force
(17:33):
Work Gospel, which is still a major major American denomination
today with a huge missionary apparatus that has churches all
over the world. McPherson died in nineteen forty four of
an overdose of barbituates. There were rumors at the time
that it might have been a suicide. It probably was not.
(17:54):
These were heavy sleeping pills she would take when she
would preach her revival services. She would get up. She
really needed drugs to come back down to be able
to get any kind of relaxation. In this particular drug,
you could take it and forget that you had taken it,
and so it's likely that it was an accidental overdose.
But it ended her life in tragedy, which was much
(18:15):
of how she lived that It was the story this
American dream of becoming one of the nation's most innovative
preachers and revivalists, but also was one that led her
own life in deep dark places, real real unsatisfactory, real
unhappiness within her career.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
How many out there know you are Christian Europe. Come on, now,
that's God's.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
A deal with She just had this ability to make
people feel warm and seeing and encouraged and heard, and
people really resonated with her. She was also very charismatic,
but also very humble that she because she came from
the far, because she was relatively poorly educated, she made
(19:04):
herself very relatable to average Americans. She was never condescending,
she never talked down to them. She was encouraged them
and met them where she was at.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by her own Megan Pidcock, and a terrific job on
the storytelling by Matthew Sutton. He's the author of the
book Amy Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Oh what a story we heard.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
She develops a real pension for spreading the gospel, develops
innovative techniques to do it, a real show woman in
the end, and it ends up building America's first megachurch.
There's scandal, there are problems, as almost always happens in
these regards, and she dies in the end of a
barbiturate overdose in nineteen forty four. But what a life
(19:52):
she led in the nineteen twenties, as famous as Mary
Pickford or Charlie Chaplin. And in the end, her work,
through the use of the most modern technology known to man, radio,
spread the gospel to millions. The story of Amy Simple
McPherson here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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