One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (21 page)

The phrase “In God We Trust,” used on many American coins since the Civil War, became an important touchstone of religious nationalism during the Eisenhower administration. In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower, and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield helped introduce a popular new postage stamp with the phrase.
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At the same time, Rabaut continued his campaign to have the motto of “In God We Trust” used as the postmark on all mail. “The new 8-cent stamp is, of course, a step in the direction of proclaiming our national belief,” he told the House. “Use of the motto as a cancellation mark would give it a wider distribution and bring it more constantly to the attention of our people.” When that proposal failed to progress, Rabaut tried a slightly different approach the next year, suggesting that a new canceling stamp be issued with the words “Pray for Peace.” The measure sped through the House, though it met some resistance in the Senate. Supporting the idea, Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island pointed to the recent precedent of adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and suggested this
would be another way to get an “inspirational element” into American life. “What harm does it do?” the Catholic senator asked. Senator Clifford Case, a New Jersey Republican and a Presbyterian, responded that “it is a question of who does it. I don't think the government has any business to tell anybody to do anything in a religious way and this in a sense is that.” Pastore protested, “We are not telling anybody to do anything.” “If we authorize it,” Case replied, “we are.” Such concerns were in the minority, however, and the Senate soon passed the measure. Despite reservations about the $250,000 cost of creating a new canceling stamp, the president swiftly signed the proposal into law. Taking note of the revival at the Post Office, the theologian William Lee Miller joked that now “the devout, in place of daily devotions, can just read what is stuck and stamped all over the letters in their mail.”
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Following the enthusiastic reaction to the arrival of the “In God We Trust” stamp in April 1954 and the addition of “under God” to the pledge in June 1954, the public clamored for religious language to be placed on paper currency as well as coins. On August 21, 1954, the American Numismatic Association passed a resolution at its annual convention in Cleveland calling for the inscription of “In God We Trust” on all forms of American money; just nine days later, the American Legion passed an almost identical resolution at
its
annual convention in Washington, D.C. Donald Carroll, the state commander of the Florida American Legion, who offered the resolution, insisted he arrived at the idea independently, following a talk he had given in Gainesville. “I had been talking on the subject of this government being based upon a belief in God,” Carroll told a friend, “and the fact that the pledge to the flag has been recently amended to include the words ‘under God,' and the fact that all our coins and also two recent issues of an eight-cent stamp and a three-cent stamp bore the motto ‘In God We Trust.'” After the speech, a man asked why paper currency did not carry the same inscription. It struck Carroll as an excellent question, one he raised at the Legionnaires' convention in August and then again in a letter to his congressman that December.
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Congressman Charles E. Bennett was the perfect champion for the proposal. The Jacksonville representative was, if anything, a fighter. He had resigned a seat in the state legislature to enlist in the Second World War, earning distinction as a guerrilla in the Philippines before
contracting polio and losing use of his legs. Returning home, he won a congressional seat as a Democrat in 1949 and held it, long past the point when the rest of his region became reliably Republican, until he finally decided to resign in 1993, after forty-four years of service. Despite his many accomplishments, Bennett constantly felt the need to prove himself. To convince constituents that his handicap did not hold him back, for instance, he never missed a single roll call in the House. A devout member of the Disciples of Christ, he served as the chamber's conscience. In 1951, he proposed a new code of ethics—he called them “the Ten Commandments”—which then became the nation's first ethical code for government employees seven years later. Seeking to set a good example, Bennett refused to accept his congressional salary, his veteran's disability checks, and his Social Security benefits. Not surprisingly, one colleague grumbled that the Floridian was perhaps “a little too pious.”
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All these traits recommended Bennett as a champion of Carroll's idea, but Carroll believed another stood out. “You would be a most natural one to sponsor Federal legislation to require the addition to our paper money of these words,” he wrote, “for you are (unless the position has recently been changed) Chairman of the House ICCL Group.” As it turned out, Bennett's one-year term as the leader of Vereide's prayer breakfast group had concluded the previous spring. But during his tenure as chair, he had proven himself to be committed to the ICCL cause of bringing religious revival to the political world. In January 1954, Bennett attended a major conference for government officials at the Fellowship House, where he offered both a scripture lesson and his thoughts on the need for public faith. “The minds and hearts of people are being challenged as never before in the last fifty years,” Bennett said. “The future is in the hands of those who really have a strong faith in God.” Not surprisingly, his fellow ICCL members agreed. Senator Homer Ferguson said they needed to “remember the words carved above the door in the Senate, ‘In God We Trust.'” (Ironically, Ferguson, whose greatest claim to fame would be adding “under God” to the pledge a few months later, added, “We cannot do this by only repeating those words or carving them in concrete and stone. Each of us as we go about our tasks must live those words.”)
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For Bennett, religious organizations such as the ICCL offered not just inspiration for action but assistance as well. In January 1955, soon after
he introduced the bill calling for the motto's addition to all paper currency, he searched for supporters. “Perhaps some of your Representatives or Senators in ICCL might put in a good word for it,” Carroll suggested. Actually, they already had. Senator Carlson, for instance, had been blanketing his colleagues with letters to recruit them for the currency proposal in particular and the larger ICCL cause in general. By all appearances, the letters were effective. “I am very much interested in your movement to put God back into the government of this great nation,” responded Representative Philip J. Philbin, a Catholic Democrat from Massachusetts. “I think there is much room in this country for restoring those great spiritual values which lie at the very base of our great government and our great free system of enterprise.”
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As congressional support grew, Bennett sought endorsements from the executive branch. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey demurred at first, claiming that “a clear precedent appears to have been set in past years for Congressional action in such a matter.” But once Eisenhower expressed his support, the Treasury Department came on board, adopting a role that was both supportive and supporting. Its officials let congressional advocates take the lead but offered assistance at every turn. They explained that the cost of changing the design of currency was usually prohibitively high, but as luck had it, the department was already installing a new procedure for printing currency that required the creation of brand-new dies, rolls, and plates. “We find that, in connection with this redesigning, the inscription ‘In God We Trust' can be included in the design with very little additional cost,” a Treasury official reported. Eisenhower authorized the plan in late April 1955 and then reviewed draft designs for the new money, ultimately choosing one that located the motto most prominently on the back of the bill.
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A few weeks later, the House Committee on Banking and Currency convened to consider the proposal. Democrat Herman Eberharter, a liberal Catholic from Pittsburgh, was so enthusiastic about the idea that he cut short a three-month convalescence from a major illness and returned to the House for the hearing. To his delight, he found his colleagues virtually unanimous in their support. The lone objection came from Representative Abraham Multer from Brooklyn. As a Jew, he was wary of dissenting too strongly on issues of faith. “I want it made crystal clear on
this record that I think I am as religious as any man in the House,” the liberal Democrat began. “We may differ in our forms, but I respect every other person's form or ritualistic observance, and I know they do mine, too.” But, he added, “I feel very strongly that it was a mistake to put it on coins in the first place, and this is perpetuating a grievous error.” The inscription debased God, Multer argued, and brought no one closer to Him. “I don't believe it has inspired one single person to be more religious because we have these words on our currency,” he said. “If we are going to have religious concepts—and I am in favor of them—I don't think the place to put them is on our currency or on our coins.” Despite these sentiments, Multer indicated he would do nothing to oppose the bill. Accordingly, the Banking and Commerce Committee gave its unanimous support to the measure. Its official report asserted that the phrase “In God We Trust” best expressed “the spiritual basis of our way of life,” and the committee therefore urged the House of Representatives to mandate its use on all coins and currency. The House did so, with almost no debate and a quick vote, on June 7.
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The bill's movement through the Senate was even easier. Earlier that term, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas introduced a proposal that was virtually identical to the one Representative Bennett had ushered through the House, and now, in his role as chairman of the Senate Banking and Commerce Committee, the liberal Democrat moved the bill through his chamber with ease. Fulbright knew his colleagues were on board. “We thought it was so nearly in unanimity in the subcommittee, I didn't call hearings,” reported Oklahoma's Mike Monroney, a moderate Democrat. “In fact, we didn't even have a meeting.” Instead, he canvassed members of the subcommittee and, finding them all in favor, passed the proposal on to the full committee. The senators were unanimously in favor but felt duty-bound to mention the few complaints they had received. Monroney reported receiving a telegram that morning, “the first adverse comment we have had,” while his colleague Wayne Morse of Oregon, a liberal Republican, added that there had been, “to my utter surprise,” a half dozen notes of protest sent to his office from ethical and humanist groups. Although the committee acknowledged these complaints, it never bothered to discuss their content. Despite their own political and religious differences—Fulbright was a Disciple of Christ, Monroney an Episcopalian,
Morse a Baptist—the senators came together in their common embrace of the motto and passed it unanimously. The full Senate followed, passing the measure in another unanimous voice vote on June 29.
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As the bill moved to the White House, supporters hoped they might secure a public ceremony for the signing. “The National Association of Evangelicals asked about it,” a presidential aide noted, “and are very much interested in the bill.” But Eisenhower begged off, noting that so many important bills had passed at the end of the congressional session that he wanted to keep such ceremonies, in the words of his aide Bryce Harlow, “to a bare minimum.” He signed the bill privately on July 11, making sure Bennett received one of the pens. Even without a ceremony, White House officials still hoped they could use the new law for political gain. In March 1956, the deputy press secretary, Murray Snyder, reported that he had been in contact with the Treasury Department about their progress in adding “In God We Trust” to the redesigned dollar and had asked them “to consult with the White House on the timing of the launching of this new bill.” To his delight, he learned that “it might be summer or perhaps early fall, which would be wonderful for our purposes. It seems to me it should be timed to coincide with a major holiday so that the full benefits of a ‘non-political' ceremony might be derived—all the coverage the traffic will bear.”
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Due to delays in the installation of the new high-speed printing presses at the Treasury Department, however, the first batch of bills with “In God We Trust” were not produced until the following year. Even as the printing began, Treasury officials explained to an eager public that “placing of the notes in circulation would have to be delayed until October to permit the production of an adequate supply for all sections of the country.” The bureau had to work nonstop, “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for three months,” in order to produce some forty million new bills with the motto. Adding another souvenir to his collection, Bennett arranged to have a picture taken of him turning in an old dollar bill to Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson in exchange for a new one. The White House staffers who had hoped to capitalize on the bills' release did not make out as well. “America must have a trust in God,” the
Oregonian
observed, “but the motto might be better inscribed on our hearts than on our bank notes.” The
Chicago Tribune,
meanwhile, sarcastically saw some benefit
in the change, noting that the motto's addition coincided with a government announcement that the cost of living had gone up once again, the fifteenth hike in sixteen months. “In these days of inflation,” the paper joked, “politicians turn thankfully to a spiritual anchor.”
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