Education Quote by Billy Sunday

Sunday’s line is a dare dressed up as common sense, and it works because it rigs the game before anyone answers. “Show me where” sounds like an invitation to evidence, but it’s really a prosecutorial move: the saloon is presumed guilty, and the listener is put on the defensive for even imagining a counterexample. The word choice is surgical. “Saloon” isn’t just a place to drink; it’s a whole ecosystem of vice in the early 1900s Protestant imagination - urban, immigrant, male, loud, politically corrupt. By targeting that single symbol, Sunday can condemn an entire social world without naming the people in it.

The list that follows is a coalition-building strategy disguised as moral inventory. Business, education, church, morals: he’s stitching together bosses, schoolmarm reformers, pastors, and anxious parents into one “we.” That “we” is doing heavy lifting. It flatters the audience into believing their values are synonymous with the nation’s values, then frames the saloon as an alien threat to “anything we hold dear.” It’s not just an argument for temperance; it’s an argument for social control, for whose habits count as respectable citizenship.

Context matters: Sunday was a celebrity evangelist in the run-up to Prohibition, when the Anti-Saloon League mastered modern political messaging. This sentence borrows that playbook: reduce a complex public-health and labor issue to a moral binary, turn private behavior into public emergency, and make disagreement sound like betrayal. The intent isn’t to debate alcohol. It’s to make abstinence feel like patriotism.