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J. Frank Norris and the Murder Trial that Captivated America
Steerforth
July 2011
On Sale: July 12, 2011
384 pages
ISBN: 1586421867
EAN: 9781586421861
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The Shooting Salvationist chronicles what may be the most
famous story you have never heard. In the 1920’s, the
Reverend J. Frank Norris railed against vice and
conspiracies he saw everywhere to a congregation of more
than 10,000 at First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas,
the largest congregation in America, the first “megachurch.”
Norris controlled a radio station, a tabloid newspaper and a
valuable tract of land in downtown Fort Worth. Constantly at
odds with the oil boomtown’s civic leaders, he aggressively
defended his activism, observing, “John the Baptist was into
politics.”
Following the death of William Jennings Bryan, Norris was a
national figure poised to become the leading fundamentalist
in America. This changed, however, in a moment of violence
one sweltering Saturday in July when he shot and killed an
unarmed man in his church office. Norris was indicted for
murder and, if convicted, would be executed in the state of
Texas’ electric chair.
At a time when newspaper wire services and national
retailers were unifying American popular culture as never
before, Norris’ murder trial was front page news from coast
to coast. Set during the Jazz Age, when Prohibition was the
law of the land, The Shooting Salvationist leads to a
courtroom drama pitting some of the most powerful lawyers of
the era against each other with the life of a wildly
popular, and equally loathed, religious leader hanging in
the balance.
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