The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  Then—a sign, Abram thought—through the woods, came a man who found Abram wiping away his tears. The man had a beautiful smile. He opened his mouth to speak. Abram would later remember not so much the words as their sound: this messenger from God was a Norwegian. Not an angel but a former saloonkeeper who’d found Jesus before he’d found Abram. As if, Abram thought, God was lining up all his experiences in the New World to reveal a singular lesson. Ye have not chosen me, but I chose you… The Norwegian took Abram home to live with his family that Fourth of July, and through him Abram eventually found his way to a Methodist seminary, the free education he had boasted of to his father, and the hand in marriage of a well-off minister’s daughter, the middle-class step up into American life Abram had been looking for. Whatsoever you ask the Father in my name, he shall give it to you.

  The one word that does not appear in the notes on his life Abram prepared near the end of his life, when instead of sheepskin he wore silk and gabardine, when instead of miners and cowboys he preached to senators and presidents, is power. But in 1935, when Abram was just beginning to dream his real ministry, he wrote the word once, in the margin of a church program. It was at the bottom of a list of names of men he had recruited. Besides each was a responsibility: organization, finances. Beside his own name, he wrote power—and then crossed it out. If it must be said, it can’t be had. Power, Abram realized as he moved through the high corner offices of businessmen and leaders, has nothing to do with forcing the devil behind you or making the company increase your wages. Power lies in things as they are. God had already chosen the powerful, his key men. There they are, Jesus whispered in Abram’s ear; go and serve them.

  Throughout the 1920s, Abram directed Seattle’s division of Goodwill Industries. He didn’t just open stores for used clothes; he organized 49,000 housewives into thirty-seven districts and set them to work salvaging goods for the poor. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, governor of New York, invited Abram to his office to discuss his organizing system. Later he’d come to see Russian red running throughout Roosevelt’s New Deal, but at the time Abram was captivated by another man summoned to advise the governor, James Augustine Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation. Abram had met industry chiefs before then, but here was a titan. A tall, stern man of dark suits and high collars, Farrell had led U.S. Steel for decades, since not long after its creation as the biggest business enterprise in history, and he had a reputation as an industrial free thinker. The year before he’d rebuked a group of businessmen for treating workers like animals. Farrell looked on his employees more like children. Big business, he believed, ought to act as a big brother, and to that end he insisted that the age of competition had passed; captains of industry must be freed of antitrust legislation so that they might better council together for the good of the innocent and the poor.

  Abram fixed his rapt attention on the “steel shogun,” as the press of the time called the industrialist. “Mr. Farrell reviewed the history of America,” he’d remember, “and pointed out that we have had nineteen depressions—five major ones—and that every one was caused by disobedience to divine laws.” Farrell offered no evidence for his dismissal of economic factors, but he did have a solution on hand. “Now,” Abram recorded his words, “I am a Roman Catholic and we don’t go in much for revivals and such things, but I am sure as I am sitting here that if we don’t get a thorough revival of genuine religion…with a return to prayer and the Bible”—an oddly Protestant aim—“we are headed for chaos.” Farrell suggested that the time had come for the “leaders of industry” to take the reins not just of the economy but of the entire nation in order to restore it to a godly path.

  Farrell, a former steelworker himself and thus living proof in his own mind that equal opportunity existed for all, was likely too modest to mention U.S. Steel’s own efforts in this regard; most notably, its relief program for the Pennsylvania steeltown of Farrell, renamed just that year in honor of the great man himself. A desperate measure by a community of 30,000 utterly dependent on U.S. Steel and starving because of that fact. In Farrell, U.S. Steel fought the spiritual roots of its economic woes not through revival but by evicting from company housing those who were not part of the nation’s godly heritage: foreign-born workers, black workers, and even the old white men who had built Farrell and now approached retirement and pensions. U.S. Steel replaced them all with young peons paid low wages. It was not a matter of getting the job done, since the mills were shuttered and there was no work to be done. U.S. Steel simply saw an opportunity for a correction.3

  But then, so did the men and women whom companies such as U.S. Steel were liquidating. It’s hard now, in the present United States, to imagine the fear that attended the Depression years, and harder still to remember the anger. Most forgotten of all is the optimism of ordinary people pushed to an edge over which they peered and saw not the abyss they had been told by their employers and their politicians awaited them, but—maybe, if they built it themselves—a future dramatically different from the past.

  The 1930s were the hungry years, yes; but they were also radical, which is to say, visionary—an era of political imagination. American history has plunked Roosevelt at the left edge of the spectrum of our political life, but at the time Roosevelt was closer to the middle. To his right were fools and fascists; these were the days when one might respectably admire the methods of “Mr. Hitler” and wonder, in the pages of newspapers or on the floor of Congress, whether there might not be some part of his approach for Americans to copy. And to Roosevelt’s left? There lies the missing history of America without which the rise of Abram’s religion, the fundamentalism of the “up and out,” the gospel of power for the powerful that soothes the consciences of fundamentalism’s elite to this day, cannot be understood. The elite fundamentalist movement of which Abram would be a pioneer arose in response to a radical age. Abram’s biographers say that for a brief moment in 1932, a Roosevelt aide charged with building a brain trust from which the future president’s cabinet could be constructed promoted Abram to take charge of a social services portfolio on the strength of his Goodwill work, and began including him in meetings. “Abram was introduced to the inner workings of the economic and political forces of the nation,” wrote Abram’s friend and biographer Norman Grubb. There he saw “how serious was the danger of leftwing elements actually taking over the nation.”

  As far as Abram was concerned, they did. He had begun drawing up plans for government-backed religious revival as a cure for the nation, but FDR went the way of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s name rarely appears in Abram’s papers thereafter.

  Nor, for that matter, does the name of anyone Abram thought beyond God’s sphere of influence. Abram perfected a feel-good fundamentalism that was every bit as militant and aggressive as today’s populist front but incapable of uttering a harsh word. It was country club fundamentalism, for men who believed in their own goodness and proved it to themselves and each other by commending Christ and the next fellow’s fine effort at following His example. They followed the law of kindergarten: if you have nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all. Or put it in terms of abstraction, the preeningly polite language of upper-class religion: One might talk about a “Red Menace,” but good Christians did not discuss what they deemed Roosevelt’s communistic tendencies: One might bemoan moral decay, but it would not do to mention the name of a fellow businessman who kept ladies on the side. Only once, in the notes Abram gave his friend Grubb, did he come close to identifying an enemy: the notorious “B.”

  Who is B? The Red Menace in the shape of a man, subversion personified, a zombie from Moscow.

  That is, B belonged to a union. Which union? Hard to say. Two candidates present themselves, but neither fits Abram’s description precisely. Rather, the mysterious B who inspired Abram to gather his decades of work and contacts and fundamentalist refinements into the Idea seems to be an amalgam of the two most powerful labor chiefs on the West Coast in 1935, and, indeed
, perhaps the country: Dave Beck, the Teamster warlord of Seattle, and Harry Bridges, the Australian-born champion of longshoremen from San Diego to Vancouver.

  The two men were a study in contrasts. Beck, with his “pink moon face and icy blue eyes,” as the journalist John Gunther described him, a union leader so conservative he was “probably the most ardent exponent of capitalism in the Northwest,” ran Seattle like a fiefdom with bully-boy squadrons of brass-knuckled goons and a mayor who actually boasted of being in Beck’s pocket. Bridges, “a slight, lanky fellow,” observed the radical writer Louis Adamic, “with a narrow, longish head, receding dark hair, a good straight brow, an aggressive hook nose, and a tense-lipped mouth,” operated out of San Francisco but at only thirty-four years old had a rank-and-file following across the trades and industries up and down the coast. Beck wore double-breasted suits and painted ties and thought he looked pretty damn good in black and white on the front page of a paper. Bridges dressed like the longshoreman he was: black canvas Frisco Jeans with his iron cargo hook hanging from the back pocket, denim shirt, and a flat white cap. A shave, maybe, for a special occasion. He rarely spoke to reporters.4

  Beck’s integrity can best be summed up by the fact that years later—by then he was the boss of the whole union—when he was summoned to Washington to account for himself and his mysterious riches, he pled the Fifth, got drummed out of the Teamsters like a bad punch line, and Jimmy Hoffa took over. After Beck, even the Kennedy brothers thought Hoffa was good news.

  Bridges? In 1934, the legend spread that the San Francisco ship owners sent an ex-prize fighter with $50,000 to try and buy him. Bridges met the boxer alone; considered putting the cash into the strike fund; but said no because he gleaned it was a trap. Had he taken the money, he would have been dead in two minutes, and his union brothers would have found an impossible wad of cash on his corpse, and that would have made for a very different story than the one that got around.

  Abram knew Beck was a crook and probably knew Bridges was not, but he likely loathed them with equal intensity. Beck’s muscle made a mockery of the government of God-led men Abram dreamed of for Seattle, and Bridges’s pure-hearted radicalism must have seemed to Abram like a devil’s parody of religious conviction.

  “‘B’,” wrote Abram of the conditions that sparked the Idea, “had a lot of folks up in arms against him, but most of them had now involved themselves in one way or another and didn’t dare squeal. Some played the game and liked it, and others paid through the nose; but whether you were a businessman, a contractor, or a labor leader, you went along.”

  This “B” is almost definitely Beck; no businessman in America “went along” with Harry Bridges. And yet it was Beck, ironically, who inadvertently exposed big business of the 1930s for what it was: a racket with rewards reserved for the big men. In most parts of the country, that would be someone like James A. Farrell or Henry Ford, commanding Pinkertons and the police; in Seattle, it was Dave Beck, Teamster, who owned the law. That’s why Abram hated him: Beck was living evidence that God’s invisible hand blessed the ruthless as much as or more than those whom he considered the deserving.

  But Abram had been living in San Francisco in 1934, leading prayer meetings for a group of business executives at the Pacific Union Club, and he had witnessed the power of Bridges up close, worse than anything he had seen during his years of preaching and organizing in Boston, New York, and Detroit. “It was the utter helplessness of the rank and file,” wrote his friend Grubb, “under the political control of subversive forces in the saddle.”

  That’s not Beck—his hit squads struck any union meeting that showed radical inclinations harder than the most brutal lumber baron could imagine. Abram wanted to convert communists; Beck wanted them beaten and dumped in the drink. No, the “subversive forces in the saddle” must have been Bridges, although Bridges was not subversive, he was a revolutionary. And in 1934 and ’35, to Abram—indeed, to much of the world—it looked as if he might be successful.

  BRIDGES WAS THE anti-Abram. Raised middle class and Roman-Catholic in Melbourne, Australia, he shipped out to sea when he was sixteen and got off the boat in America four years later. Abram had his faith, and Bridges had his. God hadn’t spoken to him; a Wobbly had—a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. They aimed for one simple goal, paradise on Earth. They called it One Big Union and fought for it with the fine art of sabotage: Wobblies blasted steam into the pipes of refrigerated shipping containers, sabotaged blacktop so it cracked open, literally jammed wrenches into the works. They didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor; they were the poor, and they took. Most of all, though, they lingered and gabbed and winked at one another and then quit—they loved leaving work behind. “Hallelujah, I’m a bum again,” went a favorite American Wobbly song. Abram had nightmares about such hymns, mistook their radicalized Tin Pan Alley humor for the ponderous phrasing of the European “Internationale.”5

  But the Wobblies weren’t red; they were romantic, deliberately and desperately so, skeptical of power and organization and compromise, and constantly amused by themselves. Sabotage, after all, is a kind of joke—not just on the bosses but also on anyone who works, on the very idea of work. The God Wobblies believed in had made humanity not for hard labor but for pleasure. Why else did He give us legs on which to dance?

  And yet the first noble truth of the Wobblies was suffering, a sure thing for as long as there was a ruling class with which to wage war. So Wobblies fought, but they fought for the paradise they felt in their bones and their bellies had been promised to them. A city upon a hill. What else was worth fighting for?

  Their dream was ill defined, less an agenda than a story, about class warfare and the spoils that would one day go to the victors. They didn’t have politics, they had a parable.

  Wobblies whispered in young Bridges’s ears as God had spoken to Abram in the elder trees. But Bridges was of a more independent turn of mind. He liked the Wobbly story about the One Big Union still to come, and took it as his own, but he didn’t believe workers would win squat without organization. That idea he took from the communists, though he wasn’t a communist, either. Like Abram, he loved to be around people and yet was a loner, kept his own counsel, looked inward, and what he found there he told no one. But unlike Abram, there is no record of him crying but for the day he stood by the coffins of two men he had led out on strike. The police had shot them down. Bridges wept and said nothing.

  What the two men shared were dreams. The Australian and the Norwegian were utopians in the American vein. Bridges thought the Promised Land awaited construction; Abram thought it was simply to be recovered. Bridges had read a bit of theory, Abram some theology, but both believed that they could bring forth the good life for all who would accept it without recourse to ideology. Bridges took the communists into his ranks but never entered theirs, Abram strolled along the fence of fascism but never hopped over. Neither man cared much about ideas; both believed in power. Bridges wanted to see it redistributed. Abram wanted to see it concentrated.

  Like Abram, Bridges knocked around, first as a sailor, then as an oil rigger, and finally as part of a San Francisco steel gang, unloading heavy metal on the docks. Like Abram, he’d been beaten out of his wages. He got beaten every day, in fact, just like every other longshoreman. The shipowners had multiple methods for keeping their workers in line. Once, the San Francisco dockers had been among the toughest union men in the country, but the company had broken them back in 1919, herding them into the “Blue Book,” a company collective in which the CEO effectively served as union boss, negotiating with himself. The bosses thought they were being kind. So did Abram. To him, such arrangements seemed like the “reconciliation” promised by Christianity, the solution at last to the old problem of labor and capital. The laws of property obtained—was it not the company’s right to hire and fire at will?—but were softened, in the minds of Blue Book believers, by the company’s voluntary decision to treat its employees not as h
ostile contractors but as children. That made sense to Abram, who divided the world between big men and little men and preferred the company of the former.

  By 1933, the “children,” the workers, ate—that is, earned—only if they could survive the shape-up, the speed-up, and the straw boss. The shape-up began before dawn, in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle. Along the Embarcadero, the long curving cobblestoned street between the Bay City and its eighty-two piers, 4,000 men gathered in the fog and the dark, hoping to be picked for one of fifteen hundred jobs. They jostled for a place close to the front of the crowd and puffed themselves up to look thick and strong even if they hadn’t eaten in days. They felt, more than one man would remember, like whores trying to look pretty. The picker—the pimp—was called the straw boss. If you wanted to be chosen, you promised him a part of your wages. And if he gave you a job, you might work for four hours or twenty-four. You might work with a gang or with a small crew, too few men for the task. That was the speed-up: the job didn’t go faster; you did. Longshoremen were not a delicate breed, but they collapsed with exhaustion and some dropped dead, their heart muscles bursting. Say a word about what you saw around you, and you were gone. Silence was golden. For the company, that is. In 1933 it shaved a dime off wages, and the Blue Book “union” accepted the loss as the cost of harmony.

  But a few men didn’t, and that summer, emboldened by FDR’s New Deal, they organized. By spring of 1934 they were talking strike. In May it sparked: first in Seattle, where longshoremen battled deputized vigilantes, took their riot clubs away from them, and sent five to the hospital; then in San Francisco, where police shot a twenty-year-old kid in the heart as he led a striker’s charge just hours after joining the union. There was something almost quixotic in the first responses of the owners: in San Francisco, shippers trolled fraternity houses for the state’s best young men, who considered a few days of heavy labor the duty of gentlemen, and the Berkeley football coach recruited three squads of big-shouldered boys from the Golden Bears to join down-on-their-luck white-collar workers on a floating barracks for strikebreakers, a ship called the Diana Dollar.