One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (6 page)

These corporate leaders increased their commitment to Spiritual Mobilization because they believed there was a fast-expanding totalitarian threat that endangered the nation. Although these were the early years of the Cold War panic, these businessmen were alarmed less by the foreign threat of the Soviet Union and more by the domestic menace of liberalism, which had been recently reinvigorated by President Truman's surprising reelection in 1948. In their private correspondence, Fifield and his funders made it perfectly clear that the main threat to the American way of life, as they saw it, came from Washington, not Moscow. “There is a very much accelerated response to the efforts of Spiritual Mobilization,” Fifield confided, “because it is so obvious that the battle to collectivize America is really on, and on in earnest since the announcement of President Truman's legislative program.” Pew wholeheartedly agreed. “According to my book there are five principal issues before the country: The socialization of industry, the socialization of medicine, the socialization of education, the socialization of labor, and the socialization of security,” he noted. “Only through education and the pressure which the people exert on their politicians can we hope to prevent this country from becoming a totalitarian state.”
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To educate Americans about the impending threat, Spiritual Mobilization took an even more aggressive approach to public relations in 1949. First it launched
The Freedom Story,
a fifteen-minute radio program consisting of a dramatic presentation and brief commentary from Fifield. The broadcasts were marketed to stations as a means of fulfilling their public service requirements in a way that would attract listeners. This allowed the organization to secure free airtime for the program, but it also
dictated significant changes in its content. In the original scripts, Fifield had directly attacked the Democrats, but his lawyer warned him about being “too plain spoken.” “I admire your determination not to side-step the issues,” he wrote, but “you can only go so far with respect to currently controversial and specific issues without disqualifying the program as a public service feature.” As a solution, his counsel suggested that Fifield use “from time to time a horrible example from current experience in the socialist and communist countries of Europe and Asia. We could go as far as we want in that field in the dramatic part of the program,” he continued, “and your speech could be developed in such a way as to make it plain enough to your radio audience that we are heading for the same kind of situation here.”
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Accordingly, the topics dramatized and discussed on
The Freedom Story
varied considerably, even as the underlying message about the dangers of “creeping socialism” remained a constant. Heeding the advice of his legal counsel, Fifield relied on foreign examples to illustrate the issue, decrying the impact of collectivism in communist lands. But the minister tackled domestic subjects as well. One week, the show explored Reconstruction, claiming that southern states had thrived without federal policies or subsidies after the Civil War; the next, it celebrated the history of the Boy Scouts, arguing that the private organization's success stemmed directly from a lack of government meddling.
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Fifield's financial backers helped secure free airtime for these programs across the nation. “Republic Steel is taking steps to get them on radio stations in every town where they have a factory or office,” Fifield noted in March 1949. “We are expecting to be on one hundred fifty radio stations by June.” A year later,
The Freedom Story
was broadcast on a weekly network of over five hundred stations; by late 1951, it aired on more than eight hundred.
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Meanwhile, Spiritual Mobilization launched a new monthly magazine,
Faith and Freedom,
edited by veteran journalist William Johnson. The publication printed the work of an expanding network of libertarian and conservative authors, including Ludwig von Mises, leader of the Austrian School of economics; Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education; Henry Hazlitt, a founding member of the American Enterprise Association (later renamed the American Enterprise Institute); Clarence Manion, a former dean of Notre Dame's College
of Law who became a noted right-wing radio host in the 1950s; Felix Morley, founder of the far-right journal
Human Events;
and Rose Wilder Lane, who had cowritten the Little House on the Prairie series with her mother before attacking the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal in her own work.
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While libertarian and conservative laymen dominated the pages of
Faith and Freedom
, the journal purposely presented itself as created
by
ministers
for
ministers. Spiritual Mobilization had long operated on the principle that clergymen could not be swayed through crude propaganda. “The articulation should be worked out before-hand, of course, and we should be ready to help the thinking of the ministers on it,” Haake noted in one of his early musings on Spiritual Mobilization, “but it should be so done as to enable them to discover it for themselves, as something which they really had believed but not realized fully until our questions brought it out so clearly. I am sure we may not
TELL
them: not as laymen, or even as fellow clergymen. We must help them to discover it themselves.” The new magazine embraced this approach wholeheartedly. “We know there are countless questions unanswered about individual liberty,” Johnson announced in the first issue. “We want a magazine which will serve the ministers who will shape the answers to these questions, a magazine which will stimulate them, a magazine which will challenge them, a magazine which will earn a place in their busy schedules.”
Faith and Freedom
sought input from subscribers, not simply printing letters but soliciting sermons that expounded on “the moral and spiritual significance of individual liberty” for publication in a monthly feature called “The Pulpit and Liberty.” Ultimately, Johnson argued, the magazine would receive a great deal of its direction from the clergymen who read it. “We shall,” he wrote, “depend heavily on ministerial guidance and criticism in developing a useful periodical for you.”
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Faith and Freedom
thus presented itself as an open forum in which ministers could debate a wide variety of issues and disagree freely. But there was an important catch. “Clergymen may differ about politics, economics, sociology, and such,” Fifield stated, “but I would expect that in matters of morality all followers of Jesus speak in one voice.” Because Fifield and Johnson insisted that morality directly informed politics and economics, they were able to cast those who disagreed with them on those
topics as essentially immoral. For his part, Fifield claimed he approached all issues with an open mind and a desire to follow God's will. “There have been many solutions suggested for meeting today's and tomorrow's problems, and there will be more,” he noted in his first column. “Before we accept any proposal or remedy, we have the obligation to measure it, not only as to its probable effectiveness, but as to whether the proposal does not conflict with Christian principle and the spiritual values of liberty and personal responsibility.” Not surprisingly, when Fifield held liberal proposals to this standard, they always fell short. Time and time again, he condemned a variety of “socialistic laws,” such as ones supporting minimum wages, price controls, Social Security pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, veterans' benefits, and the like, as well as a wide range of federal taxation that he deemed to be “tyrannical” in nature. In the end, he judged, such policies violated “the natural law which inheres in the nature of the universe and is the will of God.”
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Indeed, for all of its claims about encouraging debate,
Faith and Freedom
did little to hide its contempt for liberal ministers. The magazine repeatedly denounced the Social Gospel and, just as important, clergymen who invoked it to advocate for the establishment and expansion of welfare state programs. Johnson even devoted an entire issue to the subject. “The movement is directed by a small, unusually articulate minority who feel political power is the way to save the world,” he warned in his opening comments. “Unclothed, their gospel is pure socialism—they wish to employ the compulsion of the state to force others to act as the social gospelers think they should act.” Irving Howard, a Congregationalist minister, darkly noted the “pagan origin of the Social Gospel” in nineteenth-century Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, claiming it was part of a larger “impetus to a shift in faith from God to man, from eternity to time, from the individual to the group, [from] individual conversion to social coercion, and from the church to the state.” Other contributors drew ominous comparisons between the Social Gospel and similarly suspect ideologies. “Communism aims to destroy the capitalist minority no matter what killing, stealing, lying, and covetousness are required,” argued one. “The Social Gospel calls for the destruction of this minority by the more peaceful means of the popular vote, to put it bluntly, by
socialized
covetousness, stealing, and the bearing of false witness.”
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Consistently libertarian, the contributors to
Faith and Freedom
varied only in terms of style and sophistication. The June 1950 issue, for instance, featured four articles, each advancing the same message from different angles. In the first, George S. Benson, president of conservative Harding College, offered a folksy parable about a group of seagulls who let themselves be fed by shrimp boats and soon forgot how to care for themselves. “The moral,” the author noted for those who somehow missed it: “A welfare state, for gull or man, always first destroys the priceless attribute of self-reliance.” Next, Ludwig von Mises advanced a sophisticated argument to disprove “the passionate tirades of Marx, Keynes and a host of less well-known authors.” Prominent missionary R. J. Rushdoony then explained how “noncompetitive life” on a Native American reservation, which he called “the prime example in America today of a functioning welfare society,” inevitably reduced its residents to a state of “social and personal irresponsibility.” The fourth and final article, “Human Rights and Property Rights,” by industrial relations author Allen W. Rucker, asserted that any effort to take control of private property was “in direct violation of the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal.' That Commandment is not limited in the slightest degree; it is an adjuration laid upon all men, whether acting as individuals, as an organization, or as a state.”
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Conservatives concerned about the “creeping socialism” of the welfare state under Truman were emboldened by the Republican gains in the midterm elections of 1950. In an upbeat letter to Alfred Sloan, the head of General Motors and an ardent supporter of his work, Fifield reflected on the recent returns. “We are having quite a deluge of letters from across the country, indicating the feeling that Spiritual Mobilization has had some part in the awakening which was evidenced by the elections,” he wrote. “Of course, we are a little proud and very happy for whatever good we have been able to do in waking people up to the peril of collectivism and the importance of Freedom under God.” But the battle was far from won. “I do not consider that we can relax our efforts in any way or at any point,” Fifield noted. “It is still a long road back to what was and, please God, will again be America.”
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For Fifield and his associates, the phrase “freedom under God”—in contrast with what they saw as oppression under the federal government—became an effective new rallying cry in the early 1950s. The minister
pressed the theme repeatedly in the pages of
Faith and Freedom
and in his radio broadcasts of
The Freedom Story,
but he soon found a more prominent means of spreading the message to the American people.
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I
N THE SPRING OF
1951, Spiritual Mobilization's leaders struck upon an idea they believed would advance their cause considerably. To mark the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, they proposed for the week surrounding the Fourth of July a massive series of events devoted to the theme of “Freedom Under God.” According to Fifield's longtime ally William C. Mullendore, president of the Southern California Edison Company, the idea originated from the belief that the “root cause of the disintegration of freedom here, and of big government, is the disintegration of the nation's spiritual foundations, as found in the Declaration of Independence. We want to revive that basic American credo, which is the spiritual basis of our Constitution.”
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To that end, in June 1951, the leaders of Spiritual Mobilization announced the formation of a new Committee to Proclaim Liberty to coordinate their Fourth of July “Freedom Under God” celebrations. The committee's name, they explained to a crowd of reporters, came from the tenth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of Leviticus, in which God instructed Moses that the Israelites should celebrate the anniversary of their arrival in the Promised Land and “proclaim liberty throughout all the land and to the inhabitants thereof.” This piece of Scripture, organizers noted, was also inscribed on the crown of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The committee originally had just fifty-six members, equal to the number of signers of the Declaration, but the list quickly expanded as others clamored for a place. Although the committee claimed to seek a spiritual emphasis for the upcoming holiday, very few religious leaders actually served in its ranks. Indeed, aside from Fifield and his longtime friend Norman Vincent Peale, the founding ministerial members of the committee included only a liberal Methodist bishop, G. Bromley Oxnam; the Catholic bishop of the Oklahoma City–Tulsa diocese; and a rabbi from Kansas City.
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