by Jeff Sharlet
What of the pamphlet’s promise that “representatives of both capital and labor find common ground” at such? Of seventeen speakers, only one spoke for labor, James Duncan (possibly the “Jimmy” of Abram’s first sessions). An officer of the International Association of Machinists, Duncan helped drive a rift into the West Coast labor movement with his firm opposition to a popular rank-and-file initiative to allow African Americans to work for Boeing. His involvement with the bosses who made up the membership of the Seattle Breakfast Group provides a portrait of the labor leadership with which Abram’s Fellowship felt it could stand on common ground: violent, reactionary, and thick with bigotry.
Abram himself never made an explicitly racist remark in his life, but he practiced a paternalism that amounted to a quiet declaration of his views on the matter. Some of Abram’s closest allies would be Dixiecrats such as South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who became a coleader with Abram of the senate’s weekly prayer breakfast, and Mississippi senator John Stennis. At the left end of Abram’s spectrum were men such as Representatives Brooks Hays of Arkansas and John Sparkman of Alabama, “moderates” who felt that slow and limited integration was an acceptable option, if not a necessity. Activism on its behalf bordered on treason.
Duncan evidently felt the same way, only more so. In 1941 at Boeing, Seattle’s biggest employer, Local 751 of the Aero Mechanics Union voted to allow African Americans to join its membership, already 9,100 strong and sure to grow as the war demanded more planes. But the local’s parent, Duncan’s International Association of Machinists, claimed the union’s constitution barred nonwhites, union democracy and the war effort be damned. The International accused the local’s president of communism and replaced him in a coup with a red-baiter named Harry Bomber. To validate Bomber’s unelected leadership, the International rented out Seattle’s Civic Auditorium for a mass meeting of anti-red—and anti-black—workers. The city fathers, who by then comprised Abram’s purest “God-led” political machine, approved; a few days before the meeting, the Seattle Times declared it “one of the most important in Seattle’s labor history.”28
Most of the members of the local didn’t think so. Out of 9,100, only 2,000 attended, and just over half of those even bothered to vote on the International’s slate of rigged issues. Even then, they cleared a man accused of communism of all charges. After the meeting, goons associated with the pro-business, anti-black slate delivered beatings to those they considered leaders of the pro-black faction. The victims filed charges. The district attorney, B. Gray Warner—a Fellowship man—took the case so seriously he declared its proper handling a matter of “national defense.” That is, the victims were hindering national defense by complaining instead of buckling down to work. No cases went to trial.
By 1943, the progressives beaten, jailed, driven out of town, or cowed into submission, the Machinist leadership of which the Fellowship’s Duncan was an officer produced an edition of their newsletter, Aero Mechanic, featuring a cartoon of a black man applying for a job at Boeing. “Stable Lizers,” he says, in response to a question about airplane stabilizers. “Yas Suh! Ah sho knows ’bout dem.” In an inset, we see a black man sweeping a stable.29
SUCH WAS THE underbelly of elite fundamentalism’s labor-management “reconciliation”—the principles of Moral Re-Armament in practice, the fruits of Barton’s business theology applied to the real world. In 1938, Barton ran for Congress. Like Abram, he believed economic depression to be a result of spiritual disobedience, though Barton preferred the term distance. The New Deal had moved us away from Jesus, he thought, by substituting man-made legislation for divine will, as revealed in the working of Christian businessmen unhindered by regulations. So in 1938 he won a seat in Congress by promising to “Repeal a Law a Day.” Or, in the slang of today’s fundamentalism: Let Go, and Let God.
The Wall Street Journal thought it a capital idea. “It is not that one congressman, more or less, especially a new one, can arrest the hitherto unstoppable juggernaut” of government, the paper editorialized, “but that [Barton’s] election can well serve as a beacon to encourage other reasonable men, who have demonstrated their success in industry…to take action against the web of legislation in which the nation is currently struggling.”30
Conventional wisdom holds that it was Ronald Reagan who began the real dismantling of the New Deal, but a closer examination of the legislative record reveals that the process began as early as 1943, in the midst of the war, when conservative southern Democrats teamed up with Republicans to pass the anti-union Smith-Connally Act, the first step in what would eventually become the repeal of most of labor’s New Deal gains. In 1948, Representative Paul B. Dague, then one of Abram’s disciples, wrote in a Fellowship newsletter that Abram’s weekly meetings for congressmen had produced in them the “conviction that more of God’s mandates and the teachings of the Nazarene must be written into current legislation.” He did not offer examples. It is easy to guess, however, that he had in mind the previous year’s Taft-Hartley Act, known by even conservative unions as the “slave labor law” for the ends to which it went to roll back the New Deal and replace strikes with employer-controlled “conciliation,” a hallmark of Abram’s vision for “industrial peace.” The “teachings of the Nazarene” for such politicians amounted to deregulation, the removal of government intervention from matters they thought firmly taken in hand by Jesus and His chosen representatives. They were not libertarians; they were authoritarians.
“Our people as a whole have become the most highly organized in the world,” declared Abram’s Better Way pamphlet.
All the vital activities of industry, commerce, and government are carried on by corporations and other formal organizations. Such bodies are continually growing in size, and hence the top leadership is continually growing in power and influence.
We have entered an era when the masses of the people are dependent upon a rapidly diminishing number of leaders for the determination of their pattern of life and the definition of their ultimate goals. It is the age of minority control. [Emphasis mine.]
Lest anyone mistake Abram’s meaning during wartime, the pamphlet went on to point to the Axis powers as examples of what could go wrong if “minority control” got into the wrong hands. The pamphlet had good things to say about Hitler’s “youth work,” but it had no use for Hitler’s military adventurism, the crudest and ultimately most ineffective form of evangelism ever invented. But just as a minority “can wreck a nation,” a “righteous ‘remnant’” chosen by God can redeem it. “Men whose success shows them to have the ability to lead cannot evade the responsibility for delivering America from its present curse of spiritual indifference and moral decadence. These are the men whom others will follow.”
Years later, at the height of American postwar affluence—the days when millions were questioning the wisdom of “following”—a German-Jewish refugee named Herbert Marcuse (writing not long after Kissinger paid his tribute to the subtleties of status quo power) would capture in his One-Dimensional Man the contradictions of Abram’s Better Way, his celebration of strongmen and his fetish for conformity, his belief in providence and his reliance on behind-the-scenes planning, his love of liberty and his insistence on obedience.31 After the years of fascist pageantry and war, wrote Marcuse in an essay titled “The New Forms of Control,” comes the age of “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.”
THE MINISTRY OF PROPER ENLIGHTENMENT
He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that “they had always been against it,” whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they had been told to do. However, times change.
—HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL (1963)
MANFRED ZAPP, A NATIVE of Düsseldorf by way of Pretoria, merited a line in the news when he stepped from an ocean liner onto the docks of New York City on September 22, 1938, a warm, windy day at the edge of a South Atlantic hurricane. Just a few words in the New York
Times’ “Ocean Travelers” column, a list of travelers of note buried in the back of the paper. By the time he left the United States, his departure would win headlines.
Zapp quickly established himself, settling first at the Gladstone Hotel and later in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, surveying his options for office space before moving on to East Forty-sixth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, where a staff of ten soon joined him, Germans and German Americans, a dull-looking lot in whose company Zapp fairly gleamed.1 He was thirty-five years old with Berlin behind him and the sea of Manhattan society before him, and when he spoke, the swells tittered or growled with approval for the Wagnerian vitality they imagined in his German-inflected Americanese. “I regard myself as having arrived in the place I always wanted to be,” he exulted.2 His chestnut hair was thinning and his cheeks swelled out into jowls, but big bones beneath and a strong cleft chin kept him handsome. He wore elegantly tailored pinstripes and shirts of slightly eccentric design. With the arch of a brow, he made smoking a pipe look more mysterious than old-fashioned. He was heir to a modest coal fortune, but he did not consider himself a businessman. He had earned an advanced degree, but he did not insist on being called “doctor,” in the German fashion. He thought of himself as a journalist—“a respectable newspaperman!” he would spit at interrogators after he’d been captured.
Zapp had been given charge of the American offices of the Transocean News Agency, ostensibly the creation of a group of unnamed German financiers. He had recently left a similiar post in South Africa. “It is of paramount importance,” the German chargé d’affaires in Washington had written Zapp the month before his arrival, “that a crossing of wires with the work of the D.N.B.”—Deutschland News Bureau—“be absolutely avoided.” DNB was transparently the tool of the Nazi regime and thus under constant scrutiny. Transocean, as an allegedly independent agency, might operate more freely. “My task here in America is so big and so difficult,” Zapp wrote the German ambassador to South Africa a month after he arrived, “that it demands all my energies.”3
What was Zapp’s task? During his American tenure, he flitted in black tie and tails from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue enjoying the hospitality of rich men and beautiful women—the gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote of Zapp’s “madcap girlfriend,” a big-spending society girl who seemed to consume at least as much of Zapp’s attention as the news. He avoided as much as he could discussions of what he considered the tedium of politics. His friends knew he had dined with Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and Roosevelt himself, and some must also have known that he had worked quietly—and illegally, if one must be technical—against the president’s reelection. But one did not ask questions. He traveled, though no one was quite sure where he went off to. One moment he was hovering over the teletype in Manhattan; the next he was to be found in Havana, on the occasion of a meeting of foreign ministers. Some might have called him a Nazi agent, there to encourage Cuba’s inclinations—a popular radio program, transmitted across the Caribbean, was called the The Nazi Hour—but Zapp could truthfully reply that he rarely stirred from the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, where he sat sipping cocktails, happy to buy drinks for any man—or, preferably, lady—who cared to chat with him.4
The fact was that Zapp was a man with little interest in political machinations. He thought of himself as an empirical man. He loved details and statistics—his idea of news ran toward almost artistic stacks of data and systemized summaries of man-in-the-street interviews—and he considered the conclusions he drew from them not ideological but factual. He was a commonsense man. Consider his rebuttal to a widely reported speech by Monsignor John A. Ryan, the “Right Reverend New Dealer” whose Catholic social justice writings inspired much of Roosevelt’s program. “The German Reich,” declared Zapp, irritated by the monsignor’s partisan Catholicism, “with its new conception of the State, is in the last analysis nothing more than the national community itself.”5
To Zapp, totalitarianism—the term he preferred to fascism—was, once pruned of its absurdities, a sensible and lovely idea. The torches and the “long knives,” the death’s-head and all that red-faced singing and table pounding, these activities Zapp did not care for. He actually preferred life in America, the canyons of Manhattan and the ginlit balconies of the city’s best people, conversations that did not begin and end with barking devotion. “Heil Hitler!” Zapp signed his letters with this invocation, and a portrait of the Führer hung in his office, but Zapp the journalist was too sensitive a recording device to enjoy all that arm snapping. If only Manhattan and Munich, Washington and Berlin, could be merged. It was a matter not of warfare but of harmony, democracy’s bickering and bile giving way to the “new conception,” in which power and will would be one.
Within a year, however, Zapp found cause to resist returning to that fine new system. After a series of unsolved murders and perplexing explosions and intercepted transmissions led the FBI to raid Nazi front organizations in Boston, Baltimore, Buffalo, Denver, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Zapp’s spartan office off Fifth Avenue, where they found what they believed to be evidence of the orchestration of it all, Zapp began to reconsider his enthusiasm for Hitler’s new order. He had failed the Führer. How would his will judge him? What power would be exerted in the Gestapo “beating rooms” that Transocean employees had once considered themselves privileged to tour?
The FBI seized him and his chief deputy and whisked them away to cold, bare rooms, on Ellis Island, no less, where not long before, the rabble of Europe had been processed into “mongrel” America, land of “degenerate democracy,” as Roosevelt himself quoted Zapp in a speech denouncing Germany’s “strategy of terror.”6
This last phrase as applied to Zapp’s pursuits was perhaps unfair. “We now know why Nazi sabotage efforts failed,” the Washington Post would announce after the war. Zapp and his fellow Nazi spies had been too busy bickering.7
On one side were saboteurs of the “old line,” men who planted little bombs disguised to look like chewing gum and set giant fires meant to be understood by Washington as arson, skulking and hulking figures who photographed munitions factories and murdered German American informants they suspected of disloyalty to their dishonest cause.
On the other were men such as Zapp. Along with a D.C.-based diplomat named Ulrich von Gienanth (whom he would rejoin after the war in Abram’s prayer meetings), Zapp considered the coming conflict between the United States and the Reich one to be resolved through quiet conversation, between German gentlemen and American “industrialists and State Department men.”
Von Gienanth, a muscular, sandy-haired man whose dull expression disguised a chilly intelligence, “seems to be a very agreeable fellow,” Zapp wrote his brother, who had studied in Munich with the baron-to-be. Only second secretary in the embassy, von Gienanth maintained a frightening grip over his fellow diplomats. He was an undercover SS man, the ears and eyes of the “Reichsministry of Proper Enlightenment and Propaganda,” charged with keeping watch over its secret American operations. He was, in short, the Gestapo chief in America. While Zapp worried about his legal prospects in the Indian Summer of 1940, von Gienanth was likely waiting for news of a major operation in New Jersey: the detonation of the Hercules gunpowder plant, an explosion that on September 12 killed forty-seven and sent shockwaves so strong that they snapped wind into the sails of boaters in far-off Long Island Sound.8
Von Gienanth did not approve of such gestures. So firmly did he oppose them as counterproductive, in fact, that he even attempted to denounce to Berlin the Nazi agents who perpetrated such deeds. Double agents or worse, his faction suggested, secret Jews bent on smearing the honor of the Reich.
Von Gienanth’s initiatives were whimsical by comparison. Once, for instance, he paid a pilot to dump pro-Nazi antiwar fliers on the White House lawn. He devoted himself to changing Goebbels’s gold into dollars, and those dollars into laundered “donations” to the America First Committee, where unwitting isolationists
—Abram allies such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg and America First president Robert M. Hanes among them—stumped for recognition of the “fact” of Hitler’s inevitability.
Like Zapp, von Gienanth considered himself a commonsense man.
And Zapp—Zapp simply reported the news and sold it on the wire. Or gave it away. To the papers of Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and to the small-town editors of America’s gullible heartland, Zapp offered Transocean reports for almost nothing. In some South American countries, 30 percent or more of foreign news—the enthusiastic welcome given conquering German forces, the Jewish cabal in Washington, the moral rot of the American people—was produced by or channeled through Zapp’s offices. On the side, he compiled a report on Soviet-inspired “Polish atrocities” against the long-suffering German people and distributed it to thousands of leading Americans, the sort sympathetic to the plight of the persecuted Christian. Zapp’s sympathetic nature would prove, after the war, to be as genuine as his distorted sense of history’s victims.
Not long after Zapp’s capture, the Gestapo seized two American reporters in Germany. The United States traded. With a Coast Guard plane keeping watch overhead, Zapp and von Gienanth sailed with several hundred other deported fascist agents aboard the USS West Point, bound for Lisbon.9 When soldiers from the American 89th Division captured him again in April of 1945—an occasion for national headlines in the United States—he pled his failure on behalf of the Führer as his defense, as if his ultimate incompetence as a German spy in America before the war proved that he’d always been a secret enemy of Hitler’s regime.
