One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (40 page)

In late September 1966, Dirksen succeeded in finally bringing his amendment to the floor for a vote. In a bit of legislative sleight of hand, he took a pending resolution about the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), removed the original text, and replaced it with the Dirksen Amendment. Before the Senate could vote, however, Bayh offered an alternative proposal of his own. “I don't want the Senate to play God,” he explained, “and we're close to it.” The real problem, he insisted, was popular confusion over the real meaning of the Supreme Court's rulings. And if they amended the Constitution to clarify every decision of the Court, it would soon be “five feet high.” Instead, Bayh called for a resolution that simply expressed the “sense of Congress” that the Court's rulings still allowed for periods of silent meditation in schools. Dirksen dismissed the compromise, claiming that a nonbinding resolution was “a frivolous thing” and “not worth a damn.” The schools needed religion. “They teach the little children sex in the schools,” Dirksen argued in a full-throated appeal. “They teach them about Communism. They even teach them ballet! Why not God Almighty?”
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Dirksen ultimately failed to convince his colleagues that the prayer amendment would not do more harm than good. His opponents offered rationales taken directly from the arguments made by religious leaders in the House and Senate hearings. “One's religious practice,” majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana said, is “too personal, too sacred, too private to be influenced by pressures for change each time a new school board is elected.” Even conservative members who had been assumed to be supporters of the Dirksen Amendment seemed to have taken the words of religious leaders to heart. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a former state supreme court judge and a member of the Judiciary Committee, drew on their language in an impassioned speech that a reporter noted “fairly shook” the chamber. “If you're going to amend the Constitution,” he shouted at Dirksen, “for God's sake, draw an amendment that will give religious equality to everyone in the United States regardless of what his religion might be!” In the end, the Dirksen Amendment failed. With a final tally of 49 to 37, it fell nine votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Bayh's resolution went down to an even larger defeat. Needing only a simple majority, it was beaten back by a margin of 33 to 51.
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Undaunted, Dirksen refused to accept defeat. “This crusade will continue,” he announced. “The next time, we will be better organized throughout the country.” In a telephone call the night before the vote, he had been assured by Dr. Daniel Poling, the eighty-one-year-old fundamentalist and former editor of the
Christian Herald,
that a new grassroots organization would rise up to champion the cause of school prayer. Its leaders would be Poling, Billy Graham, and a “Catholic prelate” to be named later. That specific organization never came to pass, but the proposal was prescient. For too long, religious conservatives believed that their voice in political matters—especially when it came to the role of religion in public life—had been drowned out by the more liberal leaders of their denominations. If conservative Christians at the grassroots would simply organize themselves according to their
politics
rather than their particular denominations, they could end the reign of the religious establishment. If effective leaders could bridge the long-standing gaps between different faiths—and bring together, as Poling proposed, conservative Catholics with fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants—then laypeople would finally have their say.
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CHAPTER 8

“Which Side Are You On?”

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tiny borough just outside East Rutherford, a middle-aged longshoreman named Walter Lantry had watched the struggle over school prayer with growing alarm. A devout Catholic and active member of the Knights of Columbus, he worried that the religious foundation of the nation was being eroded, first by the actions of the Supreme Court and then by the inaction of Congress. In the fall of 1964, Lantry found a way to fight back: he created large banners bearing the words “One Nation Under God” to be flown as a show of patriotic faith. “My idea came after I read a small article by Madalyn Murray on removing prayer from the public schools,” he told reporters. “The purpose of the pennant was only to alert the American public to what was taking place. We lost prayer in the schools while we were sleeping. The Supreme Court is more or less governed by the will of the people, and a lot of noisy minority groups have been taking advantage of it. I wanted to make the majority noisy too, to create a fervor.”
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In October 1964, the “One Nation Under God” banners began spreading across the New Jersey suburbs, appearing on flagpoles at borough halls, municipal offices, city parks, and public schools in some sixty towns. Officials explained their support in specific terms. As Sayreville borough council president Joseph A. Rzigalinski said, “It is a good way of combating the Supreme Court decision barring prayer in the public schools.” Sayreville's mayor agreed that there was nothing untoward in it. “After all, we have the words ‘In God We Trust' on our money,” he pointed out,
“and we say ‘One Nation Under God' when we salute the flag.” (The only question was how best to express the sentiment. According to an official with Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, “Sayreville, NJ, citizens for hours argued over whether ‘One Nation Under God' banners should be placed on city garbage trucks. Some claimed this would please atheists. No one wanted to do this. Others argued that ‘Garbage men believe in God, too.'”) The pennants proved incredibly popular. Small ones cost $1.45, large ones $3.25. Sales soon took off in New York and Connecticut, and by early 1965, Lantry was filling orders in twenty-seven different states, mostly in the Midwest and West. Three of his local suppliers soon ran out of stock, but not before turning a $60,000 profit. National organizations such as the American Legion and the John Birch Society stepped in to meet the demand.
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As the “One Nation Under God” banners spread, so did the sense of defiance for those who flew them. In November 1964, the New Jersey Knights of Columbus pledged that an “all-out war and the full resources of the state council” would be brought against anyone who dared mount a legal challenge against the pennants. When the state ACLU sent letters to boroughs flying the banner, expressing concern that government officials were supporting a measure “motivated largely to demonstrate defiance and contempt for a ruling of the United States Supreme Court,” the civil liberties group found itself roundly vilified. “If they want to make an issue of it,” said Midland Park's mayor, “let them take it to court.” “I'll fight this thing to the hilt,” vowed the deputy mayor of South Hackensack. Even the ads for the pennants took on a confrontational tone: “Which Side Are You On?” Conservative organizations, from the mainstream American Legion to the extremist John Birch Society, quickly rallied to the cause, giving “one nation under God” an ever more partisan tone in the late 1960s. Soon enough, the phrase was being used to promote not just the original cause of school prayer but a host of other issues dear to conservatives.
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Most notably, as American involvement in Vietnam escalated, pro-war hawks increasingly employed the phrase both to show support for the war and to silence its critics. In May 1965, as the first regular US Army troops were sent into combat there, Walter Lantry told a correspondent that a brand-new set of “One Nation Under God” postcards had been
“distributed in the thousands by religious, civic and patriotic groups in backing our President in his stand in Viet Nam.” For Lantry, supporting the troops was not an abstract idea; his son, a Coast Guard lieutenant, was stationed in Vietnam. While they worried about his safety overseas, Lantry and his wife focused on shoring up support for the war at home. When they heard that Rutgers University professor Eugene Genovese said at an antiwar “teach-in” that he was rooting for a communist victory, they traveled downstate to take part in a similar event in October 1965. They convinced the moderator to begin the program with the Pledge of Allegiance and national anthem, but such shows of patriotic unity were soon swept away by the conflict over the war. A few hours into it, Mrs. Lantry slapped a sneering male student, who then slapped her back before the crowd could separate them. As the war expanded, such confrontations became increasingly commonplace. By 1967, there were nearly half a million American troops in Vietnam, prompting more protests from the men who would be drafted next and more counterprotests from the parents of those who already had been. In April, after hundreds of thousands of protesters came together for the largest antiwar demonstration in New York City's history, the head of the American Legion's “One Nation Under God committee” urged supporters to rally around the phrase as a show of their support. “In these days when many young Americans (while only a minority) are protesting against our President's Policy on Viet Nam,” he said, “we of the American Legion should lead the way to remind all Patriotic Americans that our country truly is ‘
ONE NATION UNDER GOD
.'”
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By the late 1960s, “one nation under God”—and the broader fusion of patriotism and piety that it had come to represent—had become an important touchstone in an aggressive new conservatism. Frustrated by a “noisy minority” on the left, Lantry had hoped the rallying cries of religious nationalism might “make the majority noisy, too.” And, indeed, it soon found its voice. Political observers began to speak about an emerging “Silent Majority” of ordinary Americans who rejected the liberal movements of the era, especially the protests against the Vietnam War, but who had not yet made their opposition known. In the 1968 presidential election, the signs of this Silent Majority's emergence were everywhere. When the conservative populist George Wallace launched his independent presidential campaign that year, reporters were struck by a common
theme on cars across the South. “The largest number of bumper stickers by far advertise Wallace for President,” one journalist noted. “Coming in second are those which read: ‘One Nation—Under God' or ‘God is not dead: I talked with Him this morning!'” (Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey tried to pry the phrase away from Wallace, telling a crowd of Connecticut factory workers that America should be “one nation under God, not under a demagogue.” For such sacrilege, he was loudly booed.) Wallace was a capable champion of this ascendant conservatism, but he could never match the two men who had been present at the creation of that politics: Richard Nixon and Billy Graham.
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When the Cold War era's religious nationalism took root during Dwight Eisenhower's administration, his vice president and his favorite preacher had been key agents in the change. Nixon and Graham had front-row seats, often literally, for major developments in that transformational moment in American political culture, from the first inaugural prayer and first presidential prayer breakfast, through the adoption of the mottos “one nation under God” and “In God We Trust,” and on to the era's wider embrace of religion in industry, advertising, and entertainment. They understood the political power of public displays of faith and, more important, the price of its absence. When he tried to explain his razor-thin loss in the 1960 presidential race, Nixon often singled out a last-minute decision by
Life
publisher Henry Luce to scrap an article in which Graham had given him a strong endorsement. Both Nixon and Graham believed the article would have made the difference.
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Eight years later, they were determined not to repeat that mistake. Echoing his earlier service to Eisenhower, Graham proved pivotal both in Nixon's decision to run and in his performance on the campaign trail. “You are the best prepared man in the United States to be president,” Graham reportedly told him in January 1968. “I think it is your destiny to be president.” Unlike his coy approach in 1952, this time he made no secret of his support. At a Billy Graham crusade in Portland, Oregon, he introduced Nixon's daughters to the crowd and announced that “there is no American I admire more than Richard Nixon.” At the Republican National Convention in Miami in August, Graham provided a prayer after Nixon's acceptance speech and then participated in top-level discussions about potential running mates. In September, Nixon took a place of
honor next to Graham on stage at another crusade in Pittsburgh, where the preacher told the worshipers and those watching at home that his long friendship with Nixon had been “one of the most moving religious experiences of my life.” Shortly before the election, Graham informed the press that he had already cast an absentee ballot for Nixon, a fact that was repeated in Republican television ads right up to election day. That night, after Nixon's victory had been confirmed, the president-elect welcomed the minister to his suite in a New York City hotel where his family, friends, and advisors had gathered. “Billy, I want you to lead us in prayer,” Nixon said. “We want to rededicate our lives.” As Graham recalled, they all joined hands as he offered a short blessing. “And then [Nixon] went straight off to meet the press.”
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When Nixon entered the White House, he brought Graham with him. A constant presence and trusted advisor, the minister became, in the words of biographer Marshall Frady, “something like an extra officer of Nixon's Cabinet, the administration's own Pastor-without-Portfolio.” Others were more critical. Will Campbell, a liberal southern preacher, denounced Graham as “a false court prophet who tells Nixon and the Pentagon what they want to hear” while journalist I. F. Stone dismissed him as a “smoother Rasputin.” Whatever the critics said, Graham's influence in the Nixon White House was profound. His words and deeds helped make piety and patriotism seem the sole property of the right. By the mid-1970s, the transformation was so complete that novelist Walker Percy asserted that a southern conservative was just “Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week.” In truth, the words of the two men were practically interchangeable. “I have faith in [America] not because we are the strongest nation in the world, which we are, and not because we are the richest nation in the world, which we are,” Nixon announced at ceremonies for Billy Graham Day in 1971; “but because there is still, in the heartland of this country, a strong religious faith, a morality, a spiritual quality which makes the American people not just a rich people or a strong people, but . . . a people with that faith which enables them to meet the challenge of greatness.” After the president's address, a reporter asked Graham if he thought Nixon might be sounding more like a preacher these days. Perhaps, he mused. “Maybe I'm sounding more like him.”
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