Gideons Bibles are placed in hotel rooms for the first time - November 10th, 1908

On this day in 1908, the first Gideons Bibles were placed at the Superior Hotel in Montana. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio,
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that flips through the pages of history to deliver
old news in a new way. I'm Gabe Lucier, and
in this episode, we're searching for answers to questions that
have baffled hotel guests for more than a century. Who

(00:23):
or what is Gideon? And why is there Bible in
my bedside drawer? The day was November tenth, nineteen oh eight.
The first Gideon's Bibles were placed at the Superior Hotel
in Montana. If you've ever spent the night at a hotel,

(00:45):
especially in the US, there's a decent chance you've encountered
one of the books yourself. There's a copy in the
nightstand drawer of roughly eighty percent of American hotel rooms,
and you'll also find it, to a lesser extent at
hotels in more than one hundred and ninety other countries.
But even if you've never seen a Gideon's Bible yourself,

(01:06):
you've probably at least heard of it. After all, the
Beatles did give the book a pretty memorable shout out
in their nineteen sixty eight song Rocky Raccoon, Rocky Rocko.
If I'll back in his room, only too fine. Gideon's
Bible A Gideon jet down and he left it, no

(01:31):
doubt do help. We're good Rockies read Bible. The name
Gideon's Bible is a little confusing the first time people
hear it. Paul McCartney takes it to mean that the
hotel Bible belongs to a man named Gideon, but there's
no apostrophe in the name, which means it's plural, not possessive.

(01:53):
Another common theory is that the name refers to a
specific translation of the Scriptures, presumably written by someone named Gideon,
but most of the books are actually just the King
James version, the most widely known version in the world.
In reality, the name refers to Gideons International, the group
that distributes the hotel Bibles. Its members, all male missionaries

(02:17):
and Christian businessmen, are known as the Gideons, and they
provide the Bibles free of charge to any hotel that
agrees to place them in the rooms. Today, the organization
is best known for its Bible distribution, but the Gideons
actually existed for a full decade before the practice began.
It all started in eighteen ninety eight when two traveling

(02:40):
salesmen crossed paths at the Central Hotel and Bosco Belle, Wisconsin.
Their names were John Nicholson and Samuel Hill, and though
they were complete strangers, the men wound up sharing a
room that night as there was only one available. They
made the best of the awkward situation by talking about
their lives on the road, eventually finding common ground in

(03:02):
their Christian faith. Both men agreed there should be some
kind of association for Christian commercial travelers like themselves, and
by the next morning they decided to form one together.
One year later, Nicholson and Hill held an open meeting
at a y MCA in Janesville, Wisconsin for any traveling
business men seeking quote, mutual recognition, personal evangelism, and united

(03:27):
service for the Lord. Only one other person showed up
that day, a man named William J. Knights, but he
proved to be a valuable addition to the group, as
he's the one who suggested they call themselves the Gideons.
Knights took the name from an Old Testament figure in
the Book of Judges, a farmer turned prophet who leads

(03:48):
a small band of untrained men to victory over a
much larger army. The Gideons, as they called themselves the
International came later slowly grew their numbers over the next
few years. Most of the members frequented hotels while traveling
for work, so they started brainstorming ideas for how to
share their faith while on the road. One member, Fred Woodcock,

(04:11):
suggested that they take a page from the Commercial Traveler's
Christian Association, a group he came across while visiting England.
Some of its members had started leaving behind a Bible
at every hotel they stayed at, and Woodcock thought the
Gideons should do something similar. The main goal would be
to spread the Gospel to any guests who were interested
in reading it, but if the Gideons could print their

(04:33):
own labeled Bibles, that would be even better, as it
would help grow their membership by letting other travelers know
about the group. The biggest turtle besides the cost, would
be clearing the idea with each hotel so that the
staff didn't remove the Bible thinking it had been left
behind by mistake. The first person to put the plan
in action was a Gideon named Archie Bailey. He was

(04:56):
the accountant for a railroad contractor who was opening a
new route in the town of Superior, Montana, and during
the expansion, Bailey was a frequent guest at the nearby
Superior Hotel. One autumn day in nineteen o eight, he
stopped by the front desk and asked if he could
leave a Bible there for other guests to borrow. The
hotel's proprietor, Edna Wilkinson, loved the idea, and once Bailey

(05:19):
had explained the concept of the Gideons and their Bible
outreach plan, she told him he could place a Bible
in every room if he wanted to. Bailey gladly took
her up on the offer, using his own money to
print the first batch of Gideon's Bibles. Then, on November tenth,
he returned to the Superior Hotel and placed one of
the books in each of the twenty five rooms. It

(05:41):
didn't take long for the program to catch on with
his fellow Gideons, and soon the group was distributing Bibles
in bulk to hotels across the country and eventually across
the world. If you're wondering why they chose hotels specifically,
it was largely to maximize their readership. They figured that
the average which bible should stand up to about six

(06:02):
years of wear and tear before needing to be replaced.
So assuming a hotel room gets a new guest every night,
that's about twenty two hundred different people who might pick
up the book during its lifespan. The way it works
today is that local Gideon members will visit a newly
opened hotel and present the general manager with a Bible.

(06:22):
Then they'll offer to provide enough books for each room,
plus some extras for the housekeeping staff to replaces needed.
That last part is crucial because there's always the possibility
that a guest will take the book. Each copy costs
the Gideons about five dollars, so those losses do add up,
but the group still encourages people to take the Bibles

(06:43):
if they need them. It's also worth noting that Gideon's
Bibles aren't given out exclusively to hotels. They're also provided
to any military base, hospital, prison, nursing home, or college
campus that's willing to accept them. In total, the Gideons
have distributed more than two billion Bibles since nineteen oh eight,

(07:04):
all of which have been paid for entirely by donations
to the group. Today, there are approximately three hundred thousand
members worldwide, and together they place more than a million
Bibles in hotel rooms each year. That said, the number
of hotels accepting Gideon's Bibles has dropped steeply in the
last two decades, about twenty percent since two thousand and six.

(07:28):
One reason for that decline is the growing secularization of
the US and other countries. It's simply more controversial than
it once was to stock a room with religious materials unprompted.
There's also the question of practicality. In a world where
anyone so inclined can access a Bible on their phone, tablet, laptop,

(07:48):
or even their watch, is it worth the time and
money to keep a physical copy in every room. The
Gideons seem to be grappling with that question themselves, as
they recently announced a period of quote refocusing and rebalancing
for their ministry. They say that distributing Bibles was never
intended to be their main focus, just as it wasn't

(08:10):
during the group's first decade of existence. But whatever other
projects the Gideons may launch, they still plan to keep
placing Bibles in the US and abroad for many years
to come, whether anyone reads them or not. I'm Gabe
Luesier and hopefully you now know a little more about

(08:31):
history today than you did yesterday. You can learn even
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comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my way
by writing to this Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks
to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks to

(08:53):
you for listening, and I'll see you back here again
soon for another Day in History class. The interspected to
be the