A horde of more than 3,000 University of Minnesota students piled into the Armory to see the rock star of their era.
It was in the fall of 1926, and the students came to hear a brilliant orator — a Baptist pastor — who had emerged as a national voice on one side of the day's burning debate: Whether Darwin's theories of evolution should be taught in public schools.
The pastor wasn't some Bible Belt firebrand from the Deep South. His name was William Bell Riley. A native of Indiana raised in Kentucky, Riley spent 45 years leading his national anti-evolution crusade from his pulpit at the First Baptist Church at 10th Street and Harmon Place in Minneapolis.
This was decades before television evangelists, when Riley's groups — the World's Christian Fundamentals Association and the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota — became the prototype for organizations such as Moral Majority and others that rallied religious conservatives to push for political change.
"The fundamentalist movement of the 1920s was organized here in Minneapolis," said Randy Moore, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota who just co-wrote a story about the forgotten but influential Riley for the Reports of the National Center for Science Education.
Two reporters who covered Riley at his peak of popularity provide helpful descriptions of the austere preacher.
"A tall, strikingly handsome man with a lionesque mane of white hair, a resonant voice and commanding presence," wrote Howard Haycraft, a former editor at the Minnesota Daily.
A decade earlier, in 1913, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer said that Riley "upsets all the notions of an evangelist. He dresses like a prosperous banker and when he steps to the platform, he looks a bank director about to address a meeting of the board of directors. He doesn't rave and he doesn't rant. He doesn't wail and he doesn't weep."