One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (15 page)

Carlson had been the prime architect of the National Prayer Breakfast, but Vereide benefited most from the new tradition. He was thrilled at how successful the event had been and how broadly its message had
been heard. “Front page publicity was given the conference by practically every newspaper throughout the United States,” he reflected with pride, noting that the prayer breakfast had been reported in ninety-eight foreign countries too, with the Voice of America securing a full recording for later use. “The question now comes to me,” he wrote to the White House counsel: “How may we make this event a springboard for further advances and a continuous teamwork for God and country?” For Vereide, the immediate answer was obvious, as he capitalized on the publicity by starting more prayer groups of government workers. By the following year, he had established seventeen new groups, meeting weekly at the Pentagon and the State Department, as well as the House and Senate. Vereide sought to spread the gospel of breakfast meetings to every conceivable corner of the federal government. In 1959, one of his deputies told a friendly congressman about the next stage in their expansion plans. “We would like to see new groups started soon,” he specified, “in the Atomic Energy Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Communications Commission.”
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Vereide established prayer breakfast groups at private organizations as well, though these too were used to advance the mission of “Government Under God.” For instance, after Chief Justice Vinson died in the fall of 1953 and Earl Warren was confirmed as his replacement, Vereide arranged for a “dedication ceremony” with the Army and Navy Club Breakfast Group. The event, held a few weeks after Warren's appointment, followed in the same tradition used in recent years to consecrate Vinson as well as Associate Justices Harold Burton and Tom Clark. For Warren, the gathering was nothing new. He had spoken to the Senate Prayer Breakfast years earlier and promised Vereide he would work closely with the prayer groups involved in the government of his home state of California. “I have always had an admiration for the purposes of this organization and for those men who have had the conviction to associate themselves with the movement,” Warren now told the crowd of judges, politicians, and businessmen. “I think there is nothing more important in government than to keep the spirit of Christianity and the very firm belief that in these troubled times, and even if the times become more troubled, there is no problem, domestic or international, that cannot be solved by the simple principles of Christianity.”
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While Vereide cultivated these prayer breakfast groups in official and unofficial halls of power, he worked to make the National Prayer Breakfast an enduring tradition. Interestingly, Eisenhower had originally intended to make just one visit. Billy Graham remembered the president indicating that “he would come to the first one but would not promise to come to another one; he did not want to set a precedent.” But Eisenhower was so pleased with his first experience that he returned repeatedly, helping create the misconception that the National Prayer Breakfast was officially “presidential” instead. In February 1954, Eisenhower, Nixon, and several cabinet members returned to the Mayflower ballroom, along with nearly six hundred figures from government and business. Chief Justice Warren offered the main address of the morning. Speaking at length on the role of religion in American political life, he concluded that “no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have, from the very beginning, been our guiding genius.” Looking forward, the chief justice urged the crowd to adhere to “the spirit of Christian religion” to ensure that the country remained strong both in spirit and substance in the days and years to come. In the end, Warren stated emphatically: “We are a Christian nation.”
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The following year, Billy Graham gave the keynote, stressing the same themes. “In the last 25 years,” he said, in an unsubtle swipe at the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, “we have had a spiritual drought.” During the trials of the Great Depression and the Second World War, “we departed from God and we departed from this book called the Holy Bible. . . . But during the past five years,” he marveled, “something has happened. This has been an era of unprecedented religious renaissance and resurgence in the United States.” As he finished, the crowd of nearly a thousand rose in a standing ovation. After Vereide delivered the closing prayer, Vice President Nixon, Chief Justice Warren, assorted members of the cabinet and the judiciary, several hundred senators and representatives, and a host of business leaders joined together, loudly singing a hymn. The lyrics were on their programs, but most knew the words by heart: “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war / With the Cross of Jesus going on before. / Christ our royal Master, leads against the foe / Forward into battle, see his banner go.”
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President Eisenhower had been unable to attend in 1955, but he made his third appearance at the February 1956 event. To commemorate the occasion, Conrad Hilton prepared a special gift: the exact desk from the Statler Hotel at which Eisenhower had written his inaugural prayer. The hotel magnate treated the desk with reverence worthy of a relic, adding a silver plaque engraved with the text. Deeply moved by the gesture, Eisenhower offered some extemporaneous remarks about his “little prayer” and the early days of his administration. “I was seeking to impress upon the audience at that moment that all of us realized a new chief executive would be inaugurated over a nation that was founded on religious faith,” he explained. “Our founding documents so state in explaining our Government and what we intended to do.” Immediately after the breakfast, Eisenhower had the desk placed in the Oval Office. Harold Stassen, the special assistant to the president, was so moved that he insisted that “the breakfast this morning, the words he spoke, the entire ceremony and the subsequent consequences following, will be one of the high points when future historians record this period.”
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F
OR
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ISENHOWER
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“G
OVERNMENT
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God” theme of the first prayer breakfast became a blueprint for his entire administration. The very next day, February 6, 1953, he instituted a new practice of opening all of his administration's cabinet meetings with prayer. Unlike the spontaneous prayer at the inaugural, this came as no surprise to the department heads. A few weeks earlier, they had met for a luncheon at the Commodore Hotel in New York. Ezra Taft Benson, a member of the ruling Council of Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Eisenhower's pick to lead the Department of Agriculture, proposed that they begin with prayer. Eisenhower welcomed the suggestion and asked him to lead them in a brief moment of worship. “When the press discovered that our meeting had begun with a prayer,” Benson later remembered, “reporters badgered James Hagerty, Eisenhower's press secretary, so much that he telephoned me the next day in Washington, D.C., to see if I could provide a copy.” Benson had improvised the prayer and had no text to share, but after repeated pleas from the press
secretary, he reconstructed it from memory and wrote it down for the press—“the only prayer I've ever written out in my life,” Benson stressed. As printed, it ran for nine long paragraphs.
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When the president neglected to open their first formal cabinet meeting with a similar prayer, Benson asked him to institute the practice as a regular feature. “I know that without God's help we cannot succeed,” he wrote. “With His help, we cannot fail.” Eisenhower's new pastor encouraged the innovation as well. He reminded the president that House and Senate sessions routinely opened with prayer but, for some reason, meetings in the executive branch had rarely done the same. “Since you symbolize today a moral resurgence and spiritual counter-offensive in our world,” Elson suggested, “the establishment at this time of the practice of prayer as the initial act at Cabinet meetings would have a tremendous effect upon the Cabinet and the Country.” Thus persuaded, Eisenhower polled his department heads about the proposal, suggesting that “this would be a splendid and helpful habit
provided
that we unanimously—or practically unanimously—have the same desire.” He included a crude ballot with choices for a spoken prayer, a silent prayer, or “no ceremony of any kind.” Everyone wanted some form of prayer, with “silent” beating “spoken” by nearly a two-to-one margin, perhaps due to fears that Benson might again engage in a spiritual filibuster. Thus, at the February 6, 1953, cabinet meeting, the president announced that all their meetings would begin with a silent prayer, though individuals could request a spoken one on special occasions.
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The cabinet's unanimous embrace of prayer was not surprising. With only one exception, they were all conservative Protestants; several had already demonstrated their own commitment to religion in public life. Benson was not the only cabinet member who held a leadership position in his church. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for instance, served as an elder in the Presbyterian Church and was also a prominent leader of the National Council of Churches. The son of a minister, Dulles piously carried his religious convictions to his new post, making so many references to religion and spirituality in his official speeches that the president called him “an Old Testament prophet” while the White House press secretary likened him to a Puritan.
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Though none of the other department heads played as prominent a role in formal church structures as Benson
and Dulles, many found their own ways to embrace religion in public life. For instance, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson and Oveta Culp Hobby, who served as administrator of the Federal Security Agency and then the first-ever secretary of health, education, and welfare, were both founding members of the Committee to Proclaim Liberty. Responding to the prayer proposals, Hobby added a handwritten note for the president: “This kind of leadership will make government service rewarding.”
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It was natural, then, that the cabinet members made the theme of “Government Under God” manifest in their agencies. At the Department of Agriculture, Benson had his top aides pull their chairs into a semicircle around his desk to join him in “a prayer for divine blessing and guidance” before meetings. Dulles brought a similar religious sensibility to the State Department. Clergymen from a variety of faiths and political persuasions had praised his appointment, and he in turn did not disappoint them. In January 1954, for instance, the State Department published an official government pamphlet titled
The Secretary of State on Faith of Our Fathers.
“Our American political institutions are what they are because our founders were deeply religious people,” Dulles wrote. “If ever the political forces in this country became irreligious, our institutions would change. The change might come about slowly, but it would come surely. Institutions born of faith will inevitably change unless they are constantly nurtured by faith.”
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The Pentagon underwent a similarly dramatic transformation. As a new employee explained in February 1954, when he first arrived to work for the Department of Defense “I was immediately struck by signs all over the building urging employees to attend religious services held daily in the building. These services are held for the three major faiths on government time and officiated over by an Army chaplain.” During the Christmas season, hymns were sung in the Pentagon's main corridors; on Good Friday, a religious service was held in the inner court. “I have worked in many federal buildings,” this employee continued, “but have never seen such open and active support of religious groups and practices by federal authorities on federal property as exists at the Pentagon.” Several organizations concerned about the separation of church and state confirmed the facts of his complaints but ultimately decided not to intervene. The American Jewish Congress believed “our limited energies should be
expended in more significant areas,” while the ACLU decided “it was not worth starting a row.” The counsel for the American Jewish Committee agreed, noting he had “little doubt” that such religious activities “would not be frowned on in an administration where cabinet meetings are opened with prayer.”
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As Eisenhower's cabinet focused its attention on spiritual rewards yet to come, its members faced the danger that the press and the public might focus more on the earthly riches they had already amassed. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson had been the country's highest-paid executive as president of General Motors, the world's largest private corporation. Wilson's initial refusal to divest his holdings in the corporation, which had nearly $5 billion worth of contracts with the same federal department he would now lead, had delayed his confirmation and tarnished his image. When asked whether his GM holdings would tempt him to favor his corporation over his nation, Wilson famously answered that he always thought “what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The auto tycoon eventually agreed to release his shares, but he was not the only top Defense Department official whose business associations gave the appearance of impropriety. Deputy Secretary Roger Kyes had been in charge of procurement for General Motors; Secretary of the Army Robert Ten Broeck Stevens's family textile company made uniforms for that branch of the military; Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott had ties to both Chrysler and North American Aviation; and Secretary of the Navy Robert Anderson—put in the post at Sid Richardson's recommendation—had previously managed a major facility for Associated Refineries. There were so many apparent conflicts of interest for the businessmen now running the Pentagon that, in his first official act, Wilson banned department officials from dealing with any companies in which they had any financial stake.
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