In 1934 pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson went on a national preaching tour to promote her political sermon “America Awake!” Praising “those staunch souls” who were “lifting up hand and voice” to turn the nation “back to the Faith of Our Fathers,” she challenged what she perceived as the nation's secularizing trends. More than two million people—one in every fifty Americans—attended her meetings in addition to even larger audiences that listened in by radio. While she was traveling through Washington, D.C., her publicist, Guido Orlando, introduced the charismatic preacher to Louisiana Senator Huey Long. According to Orlando, “The Kingfish and the Angel clicked so well that, before I could get Aimee out of there, they had decided to run for President and Vice President on the same independent ticket.” Long's assassination the following year foiled the potential plan, leaving no way to confirm Orlando's account. What can be confirmed from abundant new sources is that McPherson was far more politically active and her influence far greater than historians have realized.
Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the way-ward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?
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