Back Home Again (and Again) in Indiana: E. Howard Cadle, Christian Populism, and the Resilience of American Fundamentalism

THEO ANDERSON

Four days before Christmas 1942, the New York Times published an obituary for Indianapolis-based evangelist E. Howard Cadle. Drawing from his 1932 autobiography, the Times offered a summary of Cadle's career. Having spent his youth entangled in various vices, so the story went, Cadle converted to Christianity as a young adult and "promised his mother he would reform and spend his life helping unfortunates." Success in several business ventures led to the construction of the Cadle Tabernacle in downtown Indianapolis in 1921. After losing control of the building within two years, Cadle mounted a successful campaign to buy it back in 1931. Using the Tabernacle as his base of operation, he gained a vast regional audience over the course of the next decade by becoming an "evangelist of the air," as the Times's headline tagged him. The moniker possessed a double meaning: it referred both to his practice of conducting revival meetings in distant locations, which he reached by his private airplane, and to his daily radio program on Cincinnati station WLW. The obituarist noted that Cadle "broadcasts his Sunday and weekday preachments to an audience that in 1939 answered with 4,000 letters a week."1	1
Indianapolis-based evangelist E. Howard Cadle, c. 1932 How I Came Back (1932)
Cadle's obituary was by no means the first notice that he had received from national publications. In March 1939, Life had published a five-page photo spread about his evangelistic pursuits, describing him as the most recent "in the long line of free-lance revivalists who have won fame and fortune by exhorting U.S. sinners to repentance." The same year, Radio Guide characterized him as "a combination of Horatio Alger's most persistent and heroic character, Henry Ford, and Billy Sunday."2	2
Despite the attention that Cadle's life and death attracted in major media outlets, his fame proved fleeting. The Cadle Tabernacle stood at the corner of New Jersey and Ohio Streets for twenty-five years after the founder's death, but both the building and the evangelistic operation began declining rapidly in the mid-1950s. Historian Kenneth Jackson, researching a book about the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, observed the structure in its last days and described it as "an unwashed and unimpressive building .... The creaking floors are now covered with dust; the air is musty. The ghostlike atmosphere is quite unlike that which prevailed in the 1920s, when the auditorium reverberated with the prayers and hymns of the faithful."3 The Cadle family sold the building soon afterward, and the new owner razed it to make way for a parking lot. Cadle's radio program continued under the supervision of his two eldest children; when it ceased production after their deaths in the early 1990s, the last lingering trace of the evangelist's erstwhile fame, or even his existence, faded from public consciousness. Today the most visible surviving tribute to Cadle and his Tabernacle can be found not in Indianapolis, but 100 miles south of the city, where an etched rendering of the Tabernacle on the back of Cadle's tombstone in a small graveyard in Fredericksburg stands as a curious testament to a nearly forgotten past.	. . .