Purchase
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
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
The Shooting Salvationist chronicles what may be the most famous story you have never heard. In the 1920βs, 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 βmegachurch.β Norris controlled a radio station, a tabloid newspaper and a valuable tract of land in downtown Fort Worth. Constantly at odds with the oil boomtownβs civic leaders, he aggressively defended his activism, observing, βJohn the Baptist was into politics.β 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 Texasβ electric chair. At a time when newspaper wire services and national retailers were unifying American popular culture as never before, Norrisβ 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.
| 
© 2003-2026