Magnetic! Mysterious! This Aimee Semple McPherson “God’s Go-Getter”
Editor’s Note: This is the first of three articles by Allene Sumner, writer for The Times-Union and NEA Service, on the picturesque life of Aimee Semple McPherson, noted evangelist now under arrest in Los Angeles.
By Allene Sumner
Copyright, 1926, NEA Service, Inc.
“God’s go-getter” and “God’s saleswoman,” they call Aimee Semple McPherson, woman evangelist of mystery, out in Los Angeles, where the lights of her temple meet the lights of the stars—
Out in Los Angeles, where some say God Himself snatched her from the evil hands of Mexican kidnapers, and where others say love for Kenneth Ormiston, her temple radio operator, and not kidnapers, kept her from her flock.
All the story writers of all times, all climes, could not conjure up a woman more alluring, more magnetic, more perplexing than this woman who today faces prison bars on a charge she broke faith with the multitude.
Blind See, Lame Walk.
The blind have been made to see at her touch—they say.
The lame have been made to walk—
The very heathen have fled their jade-eyed idols at sight of this queenly woman with ropes of chestnut hair.
“Who’s Who” starts the glamorous story for us. Aimee Kennedy was born in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada, Oct. 9, 1890, it says. The woman who gave her birth was a Salvation Army lassie who changed the tinkle of her tambourine for the clank of a dishpan when love and marriage seemed her way of service.
The story goes on with a little pig-tailed girl of five, wide-eyed beside a kneeling mother, who, holding the tiny hand of her daughter, looked up into the heavens and shouted—
“She is yours, Lord. I couldn’t do the job myself. But take this child and use her for your kingdom!”
A little girl of a Canadian farm, going sleighing to a revival, converted, vowing that nothing could check the task her mother had put upon her—this is the Aimee of childhood.
But the little zealot’s eyes were soft and brown, and at 17 love came to her even as to her Salvation Army mother in the years ago.
Love and marriage, though, only quickened the flame of Aimee’s zeal.
Her husband was Robert Semple, preacher and evangelist. Aimee traveled the world over with him, from circuit riding in bleak Canadian wilds to fashionable London churches and then into yellow China.
Semple died, leaving his wife penniless and about to be a mother.
When the little daughter, Roberta, was six weeks old, somehow or other the mother managed to get back to Canada, preaching as she went, with her babe in her arms.
Lean and hungry years. The streets for a church, a rickety wooden chair for a pulpit. Two listeners to her word when first she preached. Fifty the second time.
A sixty-dollar collection.
The young mother-evangelist bought her a “gospel auto,” touring the highways and byways, shouting and whispering the word of God.
But she still was young, comely. She had her little girl! She wanted a home “like other women.”
She encountered Harold McPherson. Aimee now was 23.
McPherson, Aimee says, promised to evangelize with her—tread all the barren paths the world over with her, entreating unbelievers, giving all to the Lord.
They were married in New York. Eight years ago she divorced him, giving as cause his apathy toward her great work, citing him as a drag upon her. There was a little son, Rolf, now.
Aimee Semple McPherson, her children with her, set forth in her gospel auto. Human swarms greeted her as she went westward.
They wept and clung to the beautiful woman, shouting that God’s kingdom on earth had come. Purses were emptied at her feet.
And Aimee traveled westward. Los Angeles was her final stop.
“Here,” said she, “I will preach.”
NEXT: In Los Angeles.
("Magnetic! Mysterious This Aimee Semple McPherson!," Rochester Times-Union, Tue, Sep 21, 1926)
HUGE TEMPLE AND FLOCK OF 20,000, MRS. McPHERSON WITHIN 5 YEARS
Accuses Aimee of Hoax
Editor’s Note—This second of three articles by Allene Sumner on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson tells how the magic of the woman evangelist’s words gripped Los Angeles and brought forth one of the greatest temples of worship in the land.
By ALLENE SUMNER
NEA Service Writer
Two “shows” vie for the attention of tourists on the Pacific coast. One is the race tracks and gambling dens of Tia Juana. The other is the Aimee Semple McPherson religious ceremonies in Angelus Temple at Los Angeles.
Radically different in character, they are alike to the extent both are colorful bizarre.
Both play to packed houses.
The tourist learns very quickly that wedging his way into one of the 6000 free seats of Aimee McPherson’s great “House That God Built” is no easy feat.
Five Busy Years
Five years ago it was that the most widely known woman evangelist of all times parked her “gospel auto” on a side street of Los Angeles. With her were her mother, Mrs. Minnie Kennedy, and her two children. They had motored across the country from New York.
Only five years ago! But that day last May when Aimee seemed to have disappeared into the sea at Ocean Park, no less than 20,000 of her followers despaired on the shore. They commanded God to “give us a sign!”
They cast themselves into the waves, some to drown—
They sent blasts of dynamite down into the sea, watching terror-frozen for what the sea might yield—
They flew in planes over the deep, looking for their “sign”—
They sobbed and moaned at sight of their loved prophetess’ green bathing cap bouncing on the waves kissed [illegible], fought to touch it.
Thus in five years had Aimee Semple McPherson put her mark upon the heart and soul of this growing city of the coast.
The vast white bulk of her Angelus Temple crowned the hills. Aimee herself was reputed a millionaire. Her daily overhead at the temple was $1,000.
How had she done it?
It all began as that rickety “gospel auto” wheezed across the plains. Aimee standing by the chugging engine, talking of God, to bewildered crowds, begging them for “God’s tithe.”
Work-roughened hands of the farm and factory, polished-nailed hands of the professional world, dug down for Aimee.
“For my great Temple!” she told them.
She went to Los Angeles, she said, because her little daughter, Roberta, recovering from illness, asked to go where it was always sunshine and where she could have a yellow bird that would sing all the time.
No Temple at First
There was no million-dollar temple at first. Mrs. McPherson gave her dramatic movie-illustrated sermons in store rooms. Her first crowds of 10 became 500 the second time she preached. Then larger audiences. Larger collections.
There were gifts. Huge sums of money “for God’s work.” A beautiful home for herself.
Meanwhile the world would not let Los Angeles have Mrs. McPherson all to itself.
The sophisticated eastern metropolitan world begged her to come to them. London, New York, even her old haunts of China begged her to come back.
She filled a London engagement and went to New York twice—first holding her revival in a remote hall, the second time downtown in a fashionable sophisticated church.
Each time she returned to Los Angeles with more funds.
The Great Day
The time seemed ripe at last. Aimee made her plea and the house of God seemed built overnight.
“I’ll give the paint!”
“I’ll give the lumber!”
“I’ll do the plumbing!”
These shouts filled her revival hall the night she told her flock of her great dream.
The towers of Angelus Temple are seen for miles about. The wires of station KFSG shine atop it.
The evangelist is as well known to listeners of this station as to those who see her in person.
Ten thousand devout, thrill-loving, worshipping people crowd Angelus Temple three times each Sunday fighting for a chance to hear their woman leader.
This is an age of churches deploring that people will not go to church!
Copyright, 1926, NEA Service, Inc.
(The Paragould Soliphone, Friday, September 24, 1926)
IS AIMEE ACTRESS, DANCER OR HYPNOTIST?
Mrs. McPherson Puts Real Drama Into Her Church Services—And Los Angeles Can’t Figure Out Just How She Does It—Whatever It Is, She Certainly Gets Results!
**Editor’s Note—**This is the last of a series of three articles by Allene Sumner, special writer for The Paragould Soliphone and NEA Service, on Aimee Semple McPherson, Los Angeles’ famous evangelist.
By ALLENE SUMNER
NEA Service Writer
Copyright, 1926, NEA Service, Inc.
A flash of biting lightning—
A roar that rends the thunder-
angry waters—
That’s the vast organ in Angelus Temple, “the Church That God Built,” itself, it must be admitted, by the mightiest hands of Aimee Semple McPherson, evangelist, known as “God’s Go-Getter.”
Nearly 8000 people cram the amphitheater. Thousands more stand like restless outside, listening to the radio voice of their leader, if they cannot see her.
The hum of the motion picture machine and a light on the silver sheet to the size of a small farm, above the tabernacle platform—
A picture of a storm-tossed boat, grass-green sailors, then the quick white shot of the breaching waves!
Aimee—the actress!
Quiet rhythm of organ. Then the storm subsides, lilies of Heaven are trapped in a blue-soaked somewhere higher, bend nearer in the folds of the scene, there!
The organ and the throated thousands burst into a thunderous, galloping singing of “Throw Out the Lifeline,” as the boat rocks perilously on the screen, and drenched women and children ride the brushes-foamy—
The lights of the great temple are out. Only blinding white light upon the woman on the stage, her fluted hands outstretched to her people who thirst for the living word.
She talks to them—about the perils of sin, and life, the rocks and reefs of sin, and Christ and God, the lifesavers ever ready with rope and boat and breeches-buoy.
Her voice is the roar of thunder and the sweetness of woman. Her head is queenly. Her body graceful. They tell how Aimee once weighed 240, and starved it off along with diet and epsom salt baths because “I cannot hold my people without grace.”
Swaying the Crowd
A landslide quivers over the mighty house. The woman on the platform has quietly said—
“Now if there are any of you who want to come to this Savior, come here to me. Or I will come for you, if you will raise your hand.”
Old men and women, tear-cheeked, flappers of their teens, diffident, bewildered children move toward her like moths to the candle.
Sometimes hysterical, they cling to her body, kissing her hands, her dress—while the organ and the congregation pulse and sway.
Aimee Semple McPherson draws the biggest house because she, like Los Angeles, where the gaudy film structures flaunt the tinkling bells of fetes, competes with shrewd showmanship and hymns.
Perhaps it is because she gives them drama—color—sound—pulling them touched by the tongue of the common man and woman.
Aimee Kennedy Semple McPherson was even born with the equipment dramatic.
There is a long white scar on her left ankle. Aimee says that once, when the bold bad bandits demanded the answer to certain questions which said answer would prove to her mother that she was alive, they burned this scar with cigar ash and even threatened to cut it off and mail it to her mother in proof that the daughter for whom ransom was demanded was actually alive.
Trying to Analyze Her
The woman evangelist is denounced by some as a hypnotist. They use words rather worse than that. They talk of hypnotic, sexish, hypnotic sex appeal.
They say that when Aimee leaves her platform dances and sways from side to side, clasping her hands, chanting, shouting, she is sending forth emotional vibrations that the thousands catch like a contagion and sway and chant and moan and sing with her.
They say that the religious orgy is really a sexual orgy.
They say it to Aimee, who smiles and says—
“Those with evil in their hearts ever damn God’s ways.”
Perhaps it is the crowd’s belief in her healing powers that explains much. Mrs. McPherson did not combine the healing stunt with her “Four Square Gospel” when she first began evangelizing.
It was her healing power, she explains, that took her to the moon or bedlam the May day when she bathed in the sea.
A woman rushed up to her begging her to look at her sick child who lay asleep in a car on the beach.
No one knows this! Mothers of ailing children dog the woman evangelist constantly, holding out puny young to be touched.
Mrs. McPherson’s power as a healer was unknown to even herself, she says, until a man with a withered arm rushed up to her platform, begged that she pray that he be healed, and went away a whole man, she did so.
Her Greatest Asset
Some say that only one thing—her voice—a voice of wonderful power and sweetness—explains her.
One of the jurymen who heard her kidnaping tale said:
“God knows whether she’s innocent or guilty! But God what a voice! I kept praying she wouldn’t stop!”
Aimee’s church is always theatrical. She speaks of heaven, a choir of robed angels flit behind her, palms in their hair and harps in their hands.
Actor Kennedy says bills like $700 for costumes for one service. Choirs, orchestras, bands of all descriptions are on the McPherson payroll!
Preacher Aimee talks vividly. Her texts always are dramatic ones. The story of Salome, for instance. Aimee rides over in scene of passion. She is detailed, emotional as she gives a vivid picture of Salome and her wiles. She follows this up with a modern triangle discussion.
Love for Love
She is compassionate, tender, sympathetic. She loves her flock as individuals. They reciprocate love for love.
She is always humorous. She makes no bones of her present plight. But she has no sense of shame about it.
She said over the radio recently that she heard Mary Pickford was glum, to tune her radio in on her station for playing about Doug so much.
There is a Rotary or Kiwanis comradeship to her services.
“God evening, folks,” sings Aimee. “Now each one of you turn to three neighbors and say ‘God bless you!’ to them!”
It will take much more than her imprisonment to cause the 20,000 faithful to lose faith!
(The Paragould Soliphone, Monday, September 27, 1926)