The Bully of Bentonville

by Anthony Bianco

  Wal-Mart’s censorious impulses are deeply rooted. “At first, it was a question of ‘Mr. Sam wouldn’t approve of this and Helen surely would not approve.’ Sam was a good ol’ boy, but his wife was pretty close to the vest—Pentecostal almost,” said Jon Lehman, the store manager turned UFCW organizer. “I think it evolved from ‘Sam and Helen wouldn’t approve’ to ‘our customers wouldn’t approve.’” Headquarters was no less protective of the straitlaced sensibilities of its predominantly rural and female workforce. “Stuff came off the shelf when someone complained to the home office, and many times the phone call was coming from the person who put the druggy CD or the sleazy magazine on the shelf,” Lehman said. 30

  Even so, it is unlikely that a retailer as keen to grow as Wal-Mart would have remained so ostentatious in its piety had not America tilted accommodatingly to the right, allowing the company to cement the loyalty of its traditional rural and Southern customer base without a net loss of business. In music, for example, the country music explosion that Wal-Mart’s market clout helped trigger more than offset its principled refusal to cash in on the hip-hop bonanza. And what did Wal-Mart need with Jon Stewart or George Carlin when it was propelling books by conservative scolds like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly to the top of the bestseller lists? No retailer has benefited more from the soaring appeal of Christian-themed books, music, and other merchandise than Wal-Mart, which earns well over $1 billion in revenue a year in catering to the seventy-two million Americans who now describe themselves as born again. 31

  However, it appears that Wal-Mart recently has become less reflexively right wing in its media merchandising as it pushes farther into blue-state, big-city America. In 2004, Wal-Mart finally stopped selling the infamous anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on its Web site. A faked account of rabbis meeting to plot Jewish world domination, the document was concocted by the Czarist police in Russia in the 1890s. Adolf Hitler liked it so much he made it required reading for the Hitler Youth. Although The Protocols was discredited long ago as a racist fraud, Wal-Mart affected neutrality in the disclaimer it attached to the book on Walmart.com. “If…The Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs. We neither support nor deny its message. We simply make it available for those who wish a copy.” 32

  Wal-Mart ignored various complaints until Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center sent Scott a letter of protest in which he confessed to being “astounded that a reputable company would even give consideration to marketing this flagrantly hateful text.” Offering no explanation as to why it plugged The Protocols to begin with, Wal-Mart quietly pulled the tract from its Web site the day after Scott got the letter, explaining its action as a “business decision.” 33

  Surprisingly, Bentonville pushed back when The Timothy Plan, which touts itself as “America’s first pro-life, pro-family, biblically based mutual fund group,” objected in 2002 to the presence of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and other “soft-core pornographic magazines” in the racks next to its checkout lanes. “Go into any one of your stores, publicly introduce yourself as [CEO] of Wal-Mart, get on the speaker system and read aloud to your store’s customers all the words on the cover of any issue of Cosmopolitan,” challenged Timothy Plan president Arthur Ally in one of his four letters to Lee Scott. “Then let me know how it goes so I can decide whether or not we have to add your company to our screens list.” 34

  In an interview shortly after Wal-Mart’s tussle with The Timothy Plan, Tom Coughlin described the checkout display racks as the most problematic real estate in any family-friendly store. “We don’t believe we should be censors or any of that type thing, but, you know, my wife had kids in the shopping cart many a year,” Coughlin said. “I can remember comments she made to me about my own kids being at the checkout counter and having something inappropriate there. My daughter, who had just learned to read, was asking, ‘What does this mean?’ It’s the kind of thing you don’t want.” 35 Even so, neither Coughlin nor Scott deigned to respond to Ally, leaving it to a subordinate to politely tell him to buzz off. “It’s our intention to continue merchandising magazines in the same manner that we currently do,” replied Don S. Harris, Wal-Mart’s top merchandising executive, in the last of four letters to Ally. 36

  Ally, who was born in Palestine under the name Ali Rashad and raised as a Muslim, is a man emboldened by uncompromising convictions. “Our moral foundation is crumbling,” he said. “We are in a war for the soul of America.” 37 Ally unloaded his 9,200 shares of Wal-Mart stock and put the company on the blacklist of morally unworthy corporations that The Timothy Plan distributes to its 10,000 investors and also to 4,000 Christian financial planners. He also solicited letters of support from Morality in Media, the American Decency Association, the American Family Association, and other fellow travelers, bundled them together, and sent them to Bentonville.

  Although Wal-Mart never acknowledged the letters, it soon began inserting U-shaped plastic liners into the checkout racks that partially obscured the covers of Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Glamour, and Marie Claire. The binders blocked offending headlines, but actually accentuated the cleavage that occupied the center of most covers. “It’s a big joke,” complained Ally, who called off his pressure campaign just the same because Wal-Mart also banished three mildly risqué “lad” magazines—Maxim, FHM, and Stuff—from its back-of-the-store reading section. Although Ally hadn’t complained about the lad titles, he was delighted to see them go. “It is soft-core pornography,” he said. “It’s very addictive and leads to harder stuff.” 38

  To confirm the suspicion that Wal-Mart’s decision to yank Maxim, FHM, and Stuff was rooted not in principle but expedience, all one had to do was take a quick tour of its magazine section. Look, there is a nearly naked Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone! Or is it Christina Aguilera? Apparently, Bentonville didn’t mind giving the lad magazines the boot because they do not ring the cash register at Wal-Mart and thus could be sacrificed to Ally without also sacrificing much profit. On the other hand, Rolling Stone is a big seller at Wal-Mart, as are the women’s monthlies that the company grudgingly and ineffectually blindered, even though their cover girls tended to show less skin than did pop princesses Spears and Aguilera on Rolling Stone.

  It appears, in short, that Wal-Mart is starting to become the value-neutral selling machine Jay Allen claims it already is. Bentonville has come to understand that it needs the secular dollar no less than the Christian dollar if it is to meet its ambitious revenue-growth goals. In other words, Wal-Mart now must find a way to make both God and Mammon serve it.

  THE BELMONT SCHISM

  Erin Russell lives with her husband and three young daughters in Belmont, North Carolina, a picturesque but down-on-its-luck textile town of 8,705 that undoubtedly will be engulfed by Charlotte’s exurban sprawl over the coming decade. Russell, who is forty-one years old, commutes a dozen miles east to Charlotte, where she works as an environmental lawyer for a Swiss corporation. Her husband, John Russell, heads daily in the opposite direction to the city of Gastonia, where he once was a public defender and now is in private practice. Erin, who moved to Belmont when she married John in 1996, is not just a newcomer but also a transplanted Yankee and a Catholic in a very Southern, very Protestant community. But Fredonia, the town in western New York where she grew up, was not much bigger than Belmont, and she was starting to feel pretty comfortable amid its leafy, antebellum charms until 2002 when Wal-Mart decided to build a Supercenter a mile from her front door.

  Russell had nothing against Wal-Mart at first. She regularly drove to Gastonia to shop at the Supercenter there. “I loved going to Wal-Mart,” she recalled. “You could get everything, it was convenient.” 1 However, as an ardent believer in the Catholic social justice tradition, Russell was not the sort of consumer who bestowed her commercial allegiance casually. She had stopped buying Nike products a decade earlier because of allegations of labor
abuses in the company’s Asian shoe factories. Now that Wal-Mart was coming to Belmont, she decided it was time to research the company’s business practices. Appalled by what she discovered about Wal-Mart’s wages, its treatment of its workers, its fierce anti-union stance, and its arrogance toward outsiders and its suppliers, Russell added Wal-Mart to the family boycott list and explained her decision at length to her kids. During a trip to Fredonia a few months later, an urgent need to purchase a garbage can arose and the only place open was a Wal-Mart. Erin got as far as the parking lot before six-year-old Grace started to cry. “Grace is my first born and she sees the world in black and white,” said Russell, who turned the car around and drove home empty-handed.

  Russell, who was pregnant with her third child at the time, founded Citizens for Responsible Growth to try to block the company’s entry into Belmont. She went after Wal-Mart with relentless energy and lawyerly thoroughness, advancing all of the standard economic and aesthetic complaints. As an environmental lawyer, she presented the environmental case against Wal-Mart with expert precision. However, Russell went well beyond the traditional critique of Bentonville in her principal argument: that Wal-Mart should not be allowed into Belmont because many of its business practices were immoral and un-Christian. “Do you know that saying, ‘What would Jesus drive?’” asked Russell, a self-described liberal Catholic. “My question is, ‘Where would Jesus shop?’ And the answer is, ‘Not at Wal-Mart.’” 2

  Russell contends that Wal-Mart “stands openly against primary social values taught by the Church”—notably those affirming the dignity of work and the rights of employees to an equitable wage and to a voice in the workplace. The Catholic Church has repeatedly come out in favor of labor unions, beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical in 1891, Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of the Working Person”). 3 Russell particularly likes to quote Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”): “Workers’ rights cannot be doomed to be the mere result of economic systems aimed at maximum profits. The thing that must shape the whole economy is respect for the workers’ right within each country and all through the world’s economy.” 4

  Russell made religion a central issue in the Belmont fight because Wal-Mart’s local development partner happened to be one of the most venerable Catholic institutions in the South: Belmont Abbey. Founded by Benedictine monks in 1876, Belmont Abbey was the first monastery that the Catholic Church established in the postbellum South. In 1910, the Holy See conferred upon Belmont Abbey the status of a diocese unto itself (Abbatia Nullius Diocesis)—the first and only time this distinction has been bestowed in the United States. The twenty-one Benedictine monks who live in prayerful isolation within the walls of Belmont Abbey take vows of poverty. That is, “The monk deprives himself of certain goods which could be an obstacle to his total giving of self to God.” 5 Such goods will be nowhere as temptingly abundant as they will be if Belmont’s new Supercenter opens as planned in late 2006, just a few hundred yards from Belmont Abbey.

  Only one thought inhibited Russell as she steeled herself for battle with Belmont Abbey over its partnership with Wal-Mart: Would she and her husband still be welcome at the abbey church? Although the Russells belonged to St. Peter’s, a small Jesuit parish in Charlotte, they often attended Sunday Mass at the abbey church as a change of pace. Abbot Placid Solari, the head monk, was always civil if rarely cordial, exchanging nods of recognition with Erin when they met. Even so, once Erin began her campaign against Wal-Mart, the Russells were enveloped by hostility every time they set foot in the abbey. “I got a lot of mean looks and stares from people,” she said. “I’m used to it: Lawyers disagree with their colleagues all the time. But the whole process put such a strain on our family. There were times when John would cringe when I told him I was going to a city council meeting.”

  Fifty-three-year-old Abbot Solari presides over both the monastery and Belmont Abbey College, a four-year liberal arts school that is the only Catholic college between Virginia and Florida. A native of Richmond, Solari joined the abbey out of college in 1974, following in the footsteps of an older brother. Placid Solari taught theology at the college and took advanced study in Rome, earning a doctorate in patristics (the study of the early Catholic theologians). In 1995, Solari was elected abbot by his fellow Belmont monks.

  Solari was a Catholic traditionalist who was given responsibility for an institution facing the choice between radical change and slow death. Both Belmont Abbey and its college faced a vexing problem: a dwindling number of recruits. As the number of monks in residence had fallen to twenty-one from a peak population of eighty, the per capita costs of maintaining the monastery had soared prohibitively. Worse, many of the remaining monks were elderly and too infirm to work. Instead of earning salaries as teachers for the benefit of the monastery, they were piling up medical bills. Meanwhile, the college was struggling to lift enrollment to a level that would cover the soaring operating costs that afflicted all institutions of higher learning.

  For decades, the monks had lived off the 700 acres of land the abbey owned, tending to a vineyard and raising cattle, pigs, and chickens. After a new four-lane highway, I-85, sliced right through the heart of the abbey’s acreage in the early 1960s, the farm died, and the monks tried to offset the loss of income by leasing fifty acres to a developer who put up a strip mall. The center—Abbey Plaza—was poorly managed for the most part and was only a modest moneymaker for the Benedictines of Belmont. When he became abbot, Solari could have quickly converted the remaining acreage into a cash fortune by auctioning it off, but he committed himself to maintaining the abbey’s ownership of every acre. “We consider that the property was entrusted to us,” he said. 6

  Eventually, Abbot Solari came to the conclusion that the best way—perhaps the only way—to ensure the long-term survival of the institutions entrusted to his care was to develop the remaining 600 acres of mostly forested former farmland that the abbey owned. This realization caused Solari no little anxiety, for in entering the monastery this Catholic intellectual had deliberately insulated himself from the world of commerce. “I wasn’t attracted to the business world, which is irony now,” Solari said. 7

  Even so, Solari was well aware that the abbey’s land had soared in value as Belmont increasingly was drawn into the expanding orbit of greater Charlotte. The highway project that had doomed Belmont Abbey Farm had advantageously positioned the monastery’s acreage for future development. “It’s funny how things work out,” Solari said. “A painful thing turned out to be a benefit for the college in the long run.” 8 Work had begun on a second highway, I-485, which would intersect with I-85 about two miles from the abbey’s property, further enhancing its commercial appeal.

  Assisted by a host of outside advisers, the abbot methodically put together a plan to build a 350,000-square-foot shopping center on a 130-acre tract. Lots of big retailers were interested in anchoring the center, but they insisted on either buying the building site or using it as collateral for a construction loan. According to Solari, Wal-Mart was the only prospective development partner that was willing to build on land leased from the abbey without encumbering the property with a mortgage and was also willing to cover part of the costs of building infrastructure on the site.

  Wal-Mart already was well established in greater Charlotte, with seven stores. Gastonia, a city of 66,270 just twenty-three miles from downtown Charlotte, had two Wal-Marts of its own, putting Belmont within ten miles of no fewer than four Supercenters. Was there room for another 180,000-square-foot behemoth in little Belmont? Wal-Mart thought so, and its representatives hammered out a preliminary agreement with Belmont Abbey, subject to the necessary approvals from the city of Belmont.

  In choosing to partner with Wal-Mart, Abbot Solari essentially acted alone. There was no formal consideration of the notion either by the abbey or by the college’s board of trustees. James Gearity, who was president of Belmont Abbey College at the time, was unaware of the deal u
ntil Solari informed him of it the day before it was announced publicly in January 2002. “For a while the abbot was just being coy or cute—‘We’re in negotiations, but I can’t tell you who,’” Gearity recalled. “He certainly played it close to the vest, right up to the very end.” 9

  The abbot did take into his confidence Richard Penegar, a retired Gastonia businessman and longtime trustee of Belmont Abbey College. Penegar, who grew up on a local farm, is a courtly, rather soft-spoken man who spent most of his career selling office furniture and also dabbled in real estate development. The Wal-Mart that opened in Gastonia a few years earlier had not hurt Penegar’s business, but he was appalled just the same that the city chose to subsidize the Supercenter with a hefty tax abatement. Penegar was all for developing a shopping center on the abbey’s property, but he urged Solari to partner with someone other than Wal-Mart. “I’ve seen the people in Gaston County who have been laid off from textile jobs, and here is Wal-Mart bringing back from overseas the same products we used to make right here,” Penegar said. “Wal-Mart is the worst of the worst as far as taking advantage of little people.” 10

  Meanwhile, Russell pressed her religious arguments on Solari in several delicately worded letters and e-mails sent after she introduced herself to him at a city council meeting. “You are many times more well-versed than I could ever be in the teachings of the church. My understanding of the teaching may not be as clear as yours,” she wrote. “However, it seems to me that what I have learned from the church can clearly support the contention that Wal-Mart is a questionable partner for a Catholic religious order that seeks to live the gospel.”

  Solari pleasantly surprised Russell by coming to her home one afternoon for a polite if fruitless discussion on the Wal-Mart project. The environmental lawyer wanted to talk ethics and religion; the priest seemed preoccupied with rents per square foot and contract law. As Russell fought on, her dissent became more pointed and more public. “The Abbey owns prime real estate that can be developed without a Wal-Mart,” Russell wrote in an open letter to the entire Belmont Abbey community. “Please don’t compromise the values of the church by entering into this unholy alliance.”