One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (12 page)

Comments such as these led Billy Graham—and many other Americans—to believe that their democracy needed Dwight Eisenhower. In a letter to Sid Richardson in late 1951, Graham wrote that “the American people have come to the point where they want a man with honesty, integrity, and spiritual power. I believe the General has it. I hope you can persuade him to put his hat in the ring.” Richardson had been friendly with Eisenhower since just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when they met by chance on a train trip through Texas. He urged Graham to “write General Eisenhower some good reasons why he ought to run for the presidency.” “Mr. Sid, I can't get involved in politics,” Graham demurred. But his patron was set on the idea. “There's no politics,” he insisted. “Don't you think any American ought to run if millions of people want him to?” When Graham replied, “Yes, Mr. Sid, I agree he should—” the oilman cut him off with a brusque “Well, then, say that in a letter!” Doing as
instructed, the minister exhorted Eisenhower to run. During the crusade in the capital, Graham related, a district court judge had “confided in me that if Washington were not cleaned out in the next two or three years, we were going to enter a period of chaos or downfall.” The stakes were high. “Upon this decision,” he concluded, “could well rest the destiny of the Western World.” Eisenhower told Richardson that it was “the damnedest letter I ever got. Who is this young fellow?”
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Richardson arranged for the two to meet, sending Graham to the general's offices in Paris shortly after the Washington crusade. Eisenhower made a powerful impression on the preacher. “Although he was in uniform,” Graham later remembered, “his office looked like that of a corporate executive, with walnut-paneled walls, a walnut desk, and green carpeting to match his chair.” The two began talking about their mutual friend, but much of the two-hour meeting served as a chance for Graham to make his case for an Eisenhower candidacy. The minister would later downplay the importance of his visit in the ultimate decision, aware that other Americans—including a congressional delegation led by Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas, a close ally of Abraham Vereide—had likewise made the pilgrimage to Paris. But Graham's spiritual support was surely influential in the general's decision, as was the financial support Richardson promised. Once Eisenhower announced his intentions, the oilman put his vast fortune to work for him. Richardson's direct contribution to the campaign was reportedly $1 million, but he also paid for roughly $200,000 in expenses at the Commodore Hotel in New York, where the general had established offices after returning home, and then covered most of his expenditures during the Republican National Convention in Chicago as well.
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In June 1952, Eisenhower launched his campaign for the presidency in Abilene. The town staged a massive parade in his honor, with a series of floats depicting events in his life, ending with one carrying a replica of the White House with him inside. His parents had long since passed away, but the candidate made an appearance at their old clapboard home, using it as a shorthand for his humble upbringing, his family, and his faith. In his comments, he condemned a set of “evils which can ultimately throttle free government,” which he identified as labor unrest, runaway inflation, “excessive taxation,” and the “ceaseless expansion” of the federal
government. These were commonplace conservative positions, but Eisenhower presented them in religious language that elevated them for his audience. Scotty Reston of the
New York Times
was reminded of William Jennings Bryan, the great evangelist for old-time religion and plain-folks politics. “He appealed to the virtues of a simpler era that this town symbolizes,” Reston wrote. “He appealed not to the mind but to the heart, and his language was filled with the noble words of the old revivalists: frugality, austerity, honesty, economy, simplicity, integrity.” Referring to Eisenhower's memoirs of the war, the journalist noted, “His ‘Crusade in Europe' over, he opened up a second front here as if he intended to start a second crusade in America.”
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Eisenhower encouraged the perception that his candidacy was a religious cause. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he declared the coming presidential campaign to be “a great crusade for freedom in America and freedom in the world.” He appropriated not only Graham's “crusade” brand but also Graham himself. Shortly after Eisenhower secured the nomination in July 1952, the preacher received an urgent call from Senator Carlson, whom he had met months earlier during the Washington crusade, asking him to come to Eisenhower's hotel in Chicago. There the candidate asked if Graham might be able to “contribute a religious note” to some of his speeches for the election season. “Of course, I want to do anything I can for you,” Graham agreed, with the caveat that “I have to be careful not to publicly disclose my preferences or become embroiled in partisan politics.” Soon after, the minister spent a few days with the campaign staff at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, offering scriptural references and spiritual observations that could be used to sanctify the secular positions of the candidate. Before leaving, Graham gave Eisenhower a gift of a silk-sewn red-leather Bible—red because, as one of his associates liked to joke, “a Bible should be read”—which the preacher had painstakingly annotated with his interpretations. Eisenhower treasured the gift, keeping it close at hand during the campaign and placing it on his bedside table at the White House. He seemed to value sincerely Graham's advice, but he also understood the political benefit of his public association with the popular preacher. In a letter to Governor Arthur Langlie, who had been propelled to prominence in large part by Vereide's breakfast groups and had served as cochairman
of Graham's 1951 Seattle crusade, Eisenhower noted with delight that the minister had praised the Republican “crusade for honesty in government” before his radio audience of millions. But Eisenhower wanted more if possible. “Since all pastors must necessarily take a nonpartisan approach,” he acknowledged, “it would be difficult to form any formal organization of religious leaders to work on our behalf. However, this might be done in an informal way.”
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While Graham insisted he could never reveal his political leanings, he spent much of the campaign dropping what seemed to be considerable hints. On domestic matters, Graham had long been sounding Republican themes of rolling back the welfare state and liberating business leaders to operate on their own. But on foreign policy too, Graham closely followed the Republican script for those issues, summed up by South Dakota senator Karl Mundt as the “K
₁
C
₂
” formula for its component elements of “Korea, communism, and corruption.” “The Korean War is being fought,” he told a Houston congregation in May, “because the nation's leaders blundered on foreign policy in the Far East.” He called the Truman administration “cowardly” for not following the advice of General Douglas MacArthur and pursuing “this half-hearted war” rather than unleashing the full powers of the American military. On domestic issues, meanwhile, Graham condemned the “tranquil attitude to communism” in the country, warning that “Communists and left-wingers” posed a danger to the nation and that there already might be “a fifth column in our midst.” As for corruption, Graham pressed the issue early and often, so much so that his comments became indistinguishable from the official Republican slogans. The GOP insisted, “We must clean up the mess in Washington”; at the same time, Graham asserted, “We all seem to agree there's a mess in Washington.” Time and time again, the preacher made a clear political attack from the pulpit, only to walk it back slightly with a shrug and a smile. Once, for example, he made a disparaging comment about Truman, only to cut himself short: “I won't say anything more about that. Except,” he immediately added, “that I have found that after my car has run for a long time, it needs a change of oil. That's the strongest political statement I'm going to make, now.”
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Though the Eisenhower campaign made use of Graham as much as possible, the campaign of his Democratic rival, Illinois governor Adlai
Stevenson, refused to conduct religious outreach of its own. There were plenty of opportunities. In 1951, a group of leading clergymen formed Christian Action, which intended “to draw together Protestants on the non-communist left for the implementation of the implications of the Gospel in social, economic, and political affairs.”
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It was, in essence, a liberal counterpart to James Fifield's Spiritual Mobilization. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who frequently traded barbs with Fifield in the press, served as one of its two national cochairmen.
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In a response to Graham's involvement in the Eisenhower campaign, Niebuhr suggested that Christian Action could counter his work by assembling “an inter-faith committee of ministers for Stevenson.” The group lined up 124 Protestant religious leaders and drafted a statement announcing their support for Stevenson as the candidate who could best lead “the free world in resisting the dread peril of communism.” The Stevenson campaign was divided on the proposal, but ultimately chose not to pursue it due to fears of a negative reaction in the press. Billy Graham had no such reservations. A few days before the election, he announced that he had conducted his own personal survey of 220 religious editors and clergymen and found that they favored Eisenhower over Stevenson by an overwhelming margin of six to one. Graham still insisted that, personally, he was neutral in the race. “I believe, however, it is the duty of everyone who calls himself a Christian to go to the polls and vote,” he asserted. “Every Christian should be in much prayer that God will have his way.”
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While Graham's support was influential, Eisenhower's campaign received similar endorsements from other Christian libertarian leaders. During the Republican National Convention in Chicago, for instance, Vereide's International Council for Christian Leadership held a special breakfast meeting for nearly a hundred convention delegates at the Board of Trade Building. They prayed for the success of the Republican convention and, moreover, “for God's man to be elected this fall, praying that America may become aroused and led by God in the coming election and that God's grace and power may rest upon our country, preparing it for service at home and abroad as a nation under God.” In September 1952, Vereide sent a mass mailing to his national network of more than two hundred breakfast groups. He urged the members of the business and civic elite who participated to devote all their energies to the
cause of raising “alertness to the right choice and vote in the November elections.”
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Likewise, Spiritual Mobilization's
Faith and Freedom
published a manifesto, titled “The Christian's Political Responsibility,” in its September 1952 issue. Advancing arguments that would later be made by the religious right, the magazine sought to convince Christian voters that they had a duty to bring their religious convictions to bear in the ballot box. “The Christian may keep aloof from politics because it is ‘dirty,'” the magazine's editor observed. “In that event, he may be sure the non-Christian cynic will take full advantage of his apathy. Politics will then be ‘played' not according to the principles of Christ, but according to the principles of the anti-Christ. This is precisely what happened in our country to an extent that has shaken the foundations of our Republic. Action
must
be taken, and now.”
Faith and Freedom
followed the lead of Graham and Vereide, claiming it would never endorse one party or the other. But it offered a “political checklist for Christians” that nudged readers rather strongly toward the Republicans. When considering the Christian merits of a particular candidate, party, or law, the editor noted, readers should ask themselves a series of questions: “If it proposes to take the property or income of some for the special benefit of others, does it violate the Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not steal'? If it appeals to the voting power of special interest groups, or to those who have less than others, does it violate the Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house'?” As Spiritual Mobilization made the case for Eisenhower, others noted the connections between them as well. “America isn't just a land of the free in Eisenhower's conception,” journalist John Temple Graves observed that same month. “It is a land of freedom under God.”
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In the end, Eisenhower's “great crusade” for the presidency proved to be every bit as popular as Graham's own crusades. He took more than 55 percent of the popular vote, with even more impressive margins in the Electoral College, where he won 442 to 89. Stevenson only managed to win nine states, all in the still solidly Democratic South, but even there Eisenhower made historic inroads by taking Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida. Outside the region, he won every single state west of Arkansas and virtually every state north of it, including his opponent's home state, Illinois. “Earthquake, landslide, tidal wave,” marveled Marquis Childs in
the
Washington Post,
“whatever it was it worked with the overpowering completeness resembling a natural force.” The famous columnist Walter Lippmann agreed, asserting that the president-elect's “mandate from the people is one of the greatest given in modern times.”
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Reflecting on the election returns, Eisenhower resolved to put that mandate in the service of a national religious revival. He asked Graham to meet with him in the suite Sid Richardson had provided at the Commodore Hotel in New York, to discuss plans for his inauguration and beyond. “I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,” the president-elect confided. “We
need
a spiritual renewal.” Graham, moved nearly to tears, responded with an excited exclamation: “General, you can do more to inspire the American people to a more spiritual way of life than any other man alive!” For the next eight years, Eisenhower would attempt to do precisely that. Working with Graham, Vereide, and countless others both inside and outside his administration, the new president endeavored to lead the nation back to what he understood to be its religious roots. In doing so, however, he would actually transform America into something altogether new.
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