The Family

by Jeff Sharlet

  3. THE REVIVAL MACHINE

  1. Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Harper and Row, 1965), p. 79.

  2. Charles G., Finney, The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, ed. Garth M. Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis (Zondervan, 1989), p. 66. The first edition of Finney’s memoirs was published in 1876; the edition I rely on most is published by one of the biggest evangelical publishers of today but is a scholarly work in the sense that it reflects the text as Finney intended it, not as his nineteenth-century publishers presented it. Finney, who in his old age dictated these memoirs to a former student, is one of the great underappreciated memoirists of American letters. His memoirs are not high art, but they are storytelling in a distinct American vein, and I make extensive use of them in this chapter. Biographical details are taken from the memoirs unless otherwise indicated.

  3. Ibid., jacket blurb.

  4. William C. Cochran, “Charles Grandison Finney Memorial Address” (J. B. Lippincott, 1908).

  5. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 92.

  6. Marianne Perciaccante, Calling Down Fire: Charles Grandison Finney and Revivalism in Jefferson County, New York, 1800–1840 (State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 38.

  7. I don’t mean to suggest that the arguments of Finney scholars such as William G. McLoughlin, Keith J. Hardman, Allen C. Guelzo, John L. Hammond, and others miss the point. Indeed, from their close readings of nineteenth-century theological disputes they derive great insights into the evolution of American religion and politics. (Of particular interest in the latter regard are Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 [Hill and Wang, 1978], and “God and Mammon,” chapter 7 of Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 [Oxford University Press, 1991], both of which are among the rare works of academic specialization that are also splendid reading.) Rather, I mean to simply single out the strand of Finney’s life that I believe is most relevant to the genealogy of American fundamentalism as it has appeared in recent times.

  8. For a discussion of the “machinery” of revival and its critics, see “The Businessmen’s Revival,” chapter 1 of John Corrigan’s Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2002). Mark A. Noll provides a succinct description of Finney’s “new measures” in A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (William B. Eerdmans, 1992; reprint edition, 2003), pp. 176–77.

  9. Charles Chauncey, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Rogers and Fowle, 1743), p. 218, cited in Eric Leigh Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 71.

  10. Finney, “Human Government,” in Finney’s Systematic Theology (Bethany House, 1994).

  4. UNIT NUMBER ONE

  1. My account of Abram’s early life is shaped by his own reminiscences in letters and notes for a biography, stored in collection 459 of the Billy Graham Center Archives, but the major details and quotations are for the most part from the two full-length, English-language biographies (there is a third, by an evangelical admirer, in Norwegian) written about Abram: Modern Viking: The Story of Abraham Vereide, Pioneer in Christian Leadership (Zondervan, 1961), written by a revivalist named Norman Grubb mainly for private distribution to Abram’s followers; and Abraham, Abraham, by Abram’s son, Warren Vereide, and Claudia Minden Weisz, a privately published book (I received my copy from a former member of the Fellowship). The Abram story would be retold over the years in the literature produced by his various organizations; where I rely on such material in future chapters, I’ll provide additional notes.

  2. James C. Hefley and Edward E. Plowman, Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power (Tyndale House, 1975), p. 100.

  3. Mauritz A. Hallgren, “Panic in the Steel Towns,” The Nation, March 30, 1932.

  4. Richard C. Berner, Seattle in the 20th Century, vol. 2, Seattle, 1921–1940: From Boom to Bust (Charles Press, 1992). For Seattle history, I rely on Abram’s memoir, documents from the Washington State archives, and most of all the incomparable and epic multivolume Seattle in the 20th Century, by Richard C. Berner, who presents pieces of nearly every significant primary source on the city’s politics and culture during the period he covers. In this chapter and in chapter 5, I draw especially on volume 2, Seattle, 1921–1940: From Boom to Bust (Philadelphia: Charles Press, 1992) and volume 3, Seattle Transformed: World War II to the Cold War (1999).

  5. Except where particular sources are indicated, my account of Abram’s nightmare nemesis, Harry Bridges, the strike of 1934, and the factors that fed into it is based on the following: Charles P. Larrowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States (Lawrence Hill and Coe, 1972); David F. Selvin, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco (Wayne State University Press, 1996); Mike Quin, The Big Strike (Olema, 1949); Paul Eliel, The Waterfront and General Strikes, San Francisco, 1934 (Hooper, 1934); Warren Hinckle, The Big Strike: A Pictorial History of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike (Silver Dollar Books, 1985); J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (Simon and Schuster, 1997), Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (Viking, 1934).

  6. Tillie Lerner, “The Strike,” Partisan Review, September–October, 1934.

  7. Abraham Vereide, notes prepared for Grubb, Modern Viking, from collection 459 of the BGCA, no box number.

  8. Evelyn Seeley, “Our Number One Fascists,” The Nation, April 15, 1936.

  5. THE F WORD

  1. Kissinger’s graduate work was recently brought to public attention by the economist Paul Krugman in The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (W. W. Norton, 2003). Unfortunately, Krugman reads Kissinger too literally, settling for the either/or dichotomy established at first glance and then translating it to the present political situation as us (the secular state) versus them (the “right-wing movement” as “revolutionary power”). Krugman falls for this intellectual trap despite the fact that he acknowledges that the right-wing movement controls much or most of the state (depending on the electoral moment). The us and the them, status quo and revolutionary power, are not so different after all. As Pogo famously put it, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

  2. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 83–95.

  3. Robert O. Paxton writes on the fascist penchant for colored shirts and its relationship to the appearance of perfect unity in The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

  4. “Cincinattus Drive Is Sped in Seattle,” New York Times, March 1, 1936.

  5. Mary McCarthy, “Circus Politics in Washington State,” The Nation, October 17, 1936.

  6. Richard L. Neuberger, “State of the Slapstick in Politics,” New York Times, February 20, 1938.

  7. “Seattle Deals Radicals a Blow,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1938.

  8. Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1938; New York Times, March 10, 1938.

  9. Michael Janson, “A Christian Century: Liberal Protestantism, the New Deal, and the Origins of Post-War American Politics” (dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2007), pp. 163–70.

  10. Hart’s involvement with ICL; Edward Cabannis to Abram, July 24, 1951. Folder 6, box 166, collection 459, BGCA. FBI on Hart and Lindbergh, and Hart on the Jews: Max Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 252. Robert H. Jackson on Hart: “Democracy Under Fire,” delivered to a meeting of the Law Society of Massachusetts, Boston City Club, Boston, Massachusetts, October 16, 1940.

  11. For biographical details in this sketch of Buchman, I am indebted to the popular press of the era, which found Buchman a subject for admira
tion or a source of amusement, and especially to Tom Driberg’s The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament: A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement (Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). Driberg was the first British journalist to investigate Buchman in the late 1920s. By the time he published his book-length study, however, he was a member of Parliament for Labour, and Buchmanites had long sought to discredit him as a communist and homosexual. Driberg had, indeed, joined the British Communist Party as a young man, but as his biographer Francis Wheen writes in The Soul of Indiscretion: Tom Driberg—Poet, Philanderer, Legislator, and Outlaw (Fourth Estate, 2002), he had been expelled when it was discovered that he was reporting to M15. His homosexuality was hardly a secret; he was famous for it, and in case there was any confusion he outed himself once again in The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament. He died a British peer, Baron Bradwell, in 1975 and was charged with having been a KGB spy in 1999 by the ex-KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who claimed that the Soviets blackmailed Driberg on threat of exposure of his sexuality. This seems a rather dubious assertion, given the fact that Driberg was out, and Driberg’s defenders say that their man had once again played double agent. Such facts are hard to ascertain, but for certainty’s sake in my reliance on his account of Buchman, I’ve used only information that Driberg clearly sourced; flamboyant in politics and romance, he was a moderate writer who made his case with care.

  12. Peter Howard, Frank Buchman’s Secret (Heinemann, 1961), p. 28. Howard’s short book is an exercise in distortion. The most egregious of its misrepresentations is Howard’s celebration of the Moral Re-Armament men who fought for the Allies in World War II. While many MRA followers no doubt did fight, MRA went to such ends in seeking to obtain exemptions for military service for British and American followers that Colonel Arthur V. McDermott, New York City’s draft director, declared that MRA was “reeking with hypocrisy and bad faith.” Quoted in Driberg, The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, p. 75.

  13. Frank Buchman, “Guidance or Guns,” speech delivered at Interlaken on September 6, 1938, in Remaking the World: The Speeches of Frank Buchman (Bland-ford Press, 1961), p. 63.

  14. This fact, and the following description of a typical Buchmanite house party, are derived from “Soul Surgeon,” a profile of Buchman by Alva Johnson in the April 23, 1932, New Yorker, pp. 22–25.

  15. Buchman, Remaking the World.

  16. Grubb, Modern Viking, p. 51.

  17. Buchman, “Will God Control America?” broadcast from Philadelphia, June 19, 1936, in Remaking the World, p. 33.

  18. Buchman, “How to Listen,” speech delivered in Birmingham, England, July 26, 1936, in Remaking the World, p. 35.

  19. William A. H. Birnie, “Hitler or Any Fascist Leader Controlled By God Could Cure All Ills of World, Buchman Believes,” New York World-Telegram, August 26, 1936. Buchman’s high opinion of Hitler so addled his senses, writes Driberg in The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament (pp. 66–67), that before a trip to Germany he had one of his followers, a U.S. assistant attorney general, request a meeting with FDR for Buchman on the grounds that “Herr Hitler” had himself requested a meeting with Buchman, and Buchman would be embarrassed to report to Hitler that his own president would not receive him. It’s not known whether or not Buchman did, in fact, meet Hitler, but if so, he must have been red-faced; Roosevelt wanted no truck with Moral Re-Armament’s gnome.

  20. Buchman, “Miracles in the North,” speech delivered in New York City, November 20, 1935, in Remaking the World, pp. 19, 23.

  21. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (Doubleday, Doran, 1935), p. 21.

  22. Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), p. 97.

  23. American magazine, June 1930, p. 202, quoted in Barton in Blunderland, a 1937 campaign pamphlet for the American Labor Party.

  24. “Dollar’s Eagle Is a Sparrow, Barton Finds,” Washington Post, June 10, 1934.

  25. Bruce Barton, “Hard Times,” Wall Street Journal, March 30, 1926.

  26. Finding the Better Way, periodicals, collection 459, Records of the Fellowship Foundation, BGCA.

  27. Grubb, Modern Viking, p. 66. Poling’s relationship to the Philadelphia machine is discussed in “Ring Job Ordered,” Time, August 6, 1951.

  28. Richard C. Berner, Seattle in the 20th Century, volume 3, Seattle Transformed: World War II to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Charles Press, 1999), p. 52.

  29. Ibid., p. 54.

  30. “Barton Breaks a Lance,” Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1937.

  31. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 2nd edition (Beacon Press, 1991), p. 1.

  6. THE MINISTRY OF PROPER ENLIGHTENMENT

  1. “Nazi Envoy Silent on Agency Ouster,” New York Times, January 17, 1941.

  2. Quoted in “D.C. Trial Bares German Secrets,” Washington Post, July 24, 1941.

  3. “It is of paramount…”: Hans Thomsen to Zapp, August 30, 1938, reproduced in full in “Excerpts from White Paper on Nazi Activities Here Released,” New York Times, November 22, 1940. “My task here…”: Zapp to Rudolf Leitner, then the German ambassador to South Africa, November 25, 1938, in ibid.

  4. “You can easily recognize Manfred Zapp, the Nazi agent, his madcap girlfriend, and…John Edgar Hoover,” Walter Winchell wrote in a blurb for High Stakes (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942), a thinly fictionalized account of the FBI’s investigation of Zapp by the journalist Curt Riess, a German émigré considered an authority on Nazi espionage. For Zapp in Havana, see Willard Edwards, “Find 200 Agents in Havana Push Cause of Hitler,” Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1940.

  5. Zapp’s antagonism toward Ryan was all the more remarkable for the fact that Ryan occasionally struck a friendly note for fascism, as in his 1937 defense of Generalissimo Franco’s fascist rebellion in Spain. Wilson D. Miscamble, “The Limits of American Catholic Anti-Fascism: The Case of John A. Ryan,” Church History, 59, no. 4 (December 1990): 523–38. Zapp’s rebuttal: Winifred Mallon, “Asks Public to Rise on Neutrality Act,” New York Times, July 14, 1939.

  6. “Roosevelt’s Attack Comes as G-Men Order Probe of Nazi Press Service,” Washington Post, October 25, 1940.

  7. Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round,” Washington Post, October 25, 1946.

  8. “Huge Area Shaken, But City Escapes,” New York Times, September 13, 1940.

  9. “West Point Sails With Axis Agents Ousted from the U.S.,” New York Times, July 16, 1941.

  10. “German Newsmen Tour Army Bases,” Information Bulletin, September 1951 (U.S. High Commissioner’s Office), p. 72. University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.

  11. Correspondence between Donald C. Stone and Hoffman, “Re attached report by Donald C. Stone: Implications of Mutual Security Act and Requirements for Action, October 4, 1951,” correspondence, 1951, Economic Cooperation Administration File, Paul G. Hoffman Papers, Truman Presidential Museum and Library. “My main use…”: Stone to Abram, undated, circa 1948, folder 21, box 474, collection 459, BGCA.

  12. National Security Council directive 10/2, quoted in Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (University of Kansas Press, 2006), p. 39.

  13. Letter to Abram, from unknown correspondent, December 25, 1945, folder 4, box 168, collection 459, BGCA; and Grubb, Modern Viking, pp. 101–2.

  14. Timothy George, “Inventing Evangelicalism,” Christianity Today, March 2004.

  15. “I believe honestly…”: Dianne Kirby, “Harry Truman’s Religious Legacy: The Holy Alliance, Containment and the Cold War,” in Religion and the Cold War, ed. Diane Kirby (Palgrave, 2003), p. 86. Truman and MRA.: Driberg, The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, p. 92. Truman’s meeting with Robertson: Donald C. Stone to John R. Steelman, the first man to hold the office later known as White House chief of staff, January 23, 1948, folder 21, box 474, collection 459, BGCA.

  16. “Imperial interests”: Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War That Never E
nded (Yale University Press, 2005), p. 581. Carlson: The phrase had popped up in Fellowship correspondence the year previous, but it seems that Carlson debuted it publicly and may well have coined it. In an undated memo he wrote in apparent preparation for the conference, he declares Worldwide Spiritual Offensive as the “theme” that unites church and state into a force strong enough to confront the “Red Hordes.” Worldwide Spiritual Offensive in his view was distinctly American, since only the “new race” of Americans, “conscious of its dependence on divine providence,” could confront the “alien way of life” practiced by leftists and foreigners (memo and speech). Folder 1, box 505, collection 459, BGCA. Broger: “Moral Doctrine for Free World Global Planning” was a presentation Broger made to a Fellowship group on June 14, 1954. No box number, collection 459, BGCA. The doctrine consisted of a study of communism and Broger’s plan for reforming society after a “global war” using Fellowship-style networking, using “indoctrinated personnel who will form nucleus groups” to implement “the highest concepts of freedom, whether socially acceptable or not.”