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

by Jeff Sharlet

  In 1952, Taft was known as the champion of the “Old Right,” an anachronism in the day of the atom. He was the engineer of the New Deal’s deconstruction, the author of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which spelled the end of labor’s brief reign as the definitive power in American life. Taft-Hartley reduced labor to an “interest group”—eliminated the vision of solidarity as a force that gave people meaning. Maybe Taft dreamed that with labor rebound, the nation’s economic life would return to its pre-Depression condition. But that world was as long gone as the fantasy of the United States as an island, immune from the troubles of other nations. A New Right, New Liberalism, New Middle were rising, shaped by the war and by Europe, by the hunger of an economy that had grown fat on weaponry, by the idea of totalitarianism. Total Cold War was coming. Ideology, technology, and—overlooked by the mandarin historians of the period—theology were converging.

  Taft had the support of the old GOP local party operations, but he did not have God and he did not have Frank Carlson. He would not recruit public piety as a banner for his campaign. His lieutenants were not wily; they were hedgehogs, nudging Taft’s Old Right views along, decrying the possibility of a “garrison state” as if the Cold War hadn’t already led the United States to embrace a permanent military footing, spiritual warfare thinly secularized as “psyops” and arms races against a godless enemy. Such was the method of foxes. Carlson slinked from delegate to delegate behind the scenes, the “‘No Deal’ dealer” smiling and speaking of spiritual things, one nation under God, unity, a general (not a politician!), never speaking ill of old “Mr. Republican” but promising patronage to those who’d abandon him. “The Kansan is clearly the man to see if you want an ‘understanding,’” cooed an admiring reporter.15

  At the Republican convention in Chicago, enough delegates “caressed by personal letters, wined & dined at party shindigs, promised a secure future by politicos,” reached such “understandings” with the general’s lieutenants and sold out their man to the new order.16 To the populist Right, the activists who’d sent delegates to Chicago to stop Ike from entangling America in more of Europe’s troubles, the convention took on “mythic proportions,” a stab in the back of conservatism by Ike and his internationalists.17 Carlson, as conservative as Taft, understood that anger—and how to turn it to his man’s advantage. Jesus, Carlson believed, had been a “psyops” man like Ike, and Christ and the general both taught the same lesson: it was the spirit, not the material, that mattered. Emotions, not facts. Carlson and Eisenhower did not need to crush the anger in Taft’s supporters; they only had to redirect it toward international communism.

  After Eisenhower routed Adlai Stevenson—the electoral vote was 442 to 89, with Ike poaching four states of the Old Confederacy—Carlson set about ensuring Taft’s loyalty to the new regime. His method, though, left some wondering about Eisenhower’s loyalty to the broad middle ground he’d staked out in his campaign. First, Carlson brokered a breakfast between his man and Taft, at which Taft agreed to stand aside while Eisenhower waged Cold War abroad if the general would commit to a war on the New Deal at home. Taft had decided that if he could not be president, he would like to be majority leader; after all, he and Ike shared a distaste for organized labor, indifference to civil rights, and a firm conviction that capitalism constituted a natural law more certain than the physics of nuclear fission. The next afternoon, Carlson met with Taft after church and cut a deal. His—and, implicitly, Ike’s—backing for Senate majority leader, a betrayal of promises already offered to Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. “An amazing political feat,” the columnist Drew Pearson wrote of the Taft revival. “Carlson sold the idea.”18

  The idea Carlson sold was the Idea: Abram’s dream of a big tent conservatism, a political philosophy that denied the reality of the political and disdained “philosophy” as the province of eggheads. In a September 1952 mass mailing, Abram had directed his two-hundred-plus prayer cells across the nation to devote themselves to spreading “alertness to the right choice and vote in the November elections.” God, he wrote, had spoken these words to him: “Your mission is to concentrate on a few men in leadership capacity.” One of his new lieutenants, a Lithuanian named Karlis Leyasmeyer who claimed to have escaped a death sentence at the hands of the Soviets (with the help of the Nazis), added that such men could become a “sixth column,” the secret counterweapon with which the establishment could fight communism. The sixth column would transcend politics. In a voter’s guide prepared for the state of Washington by Abram’s men—a tactic that would be repeated decades later by the Christian Coalition—God tapped both Democrats and Republicans. His slate, however, was of sufficient political conformity for a bipartisan coalition to raise charges of fascism. But the ‘f’ word had lost its power. Most of Abram’s candidates won. “Red” was the new brown, against which all Christian soldiers must fight together. One God, one nation, one ideology.

  DURING THE WINTER following Eisenhower’s election, the United States did not even have an ambassador in Moscow. It was in that particularly cold season that Abram—with the help of Carlson, Billy Graham, and Eisenhower himself—made his master move, following the president’s inauguration with what would become an annual political ritual, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (later to be renamed the National Prayer Breakfast). Not for Abram the clash of politics or even the intellectual battle of theology. His ambition for the breakfast—hosted by Conrad Hilton, presided over by Carlson, blessed by Graham, and sanctified by Ike’s blandest speech yet—was that it serve as a chance to lop off the left end of the political spectrum and cauterize the wound. “Their differences,” wrote the Christian Herald of the several hundred assembled politicians, Democrats and Republicans, “are fused into a striking similarity.”

  Billy Graham had been summoned to the Eisenhower campaign by Carlson. The senator had concluded that the young preacher would be an asset, especially given that some Democrats were actually floating the notion that it was Republicans who were soft on communism and cold toward Christ.19 Although Graham himself was a registered Democrat, he had decided for Eisenhower before the general even announced, and had prayed on the matter with one of his supporters, an oil baron named Sid Richardson. (This period of Graham’s career might be called his oil phase. In 1953, with backing from yet another oil baron, he would release a feature film called Oiltown U.S.A., a tribute to the free market’s ability to foster the virtuous exploitation of God-given resources.) Carlson called Graham to the Chicago GOP convention for an off-the-record meeting. “Carlson had sold Eisenhower on the idea that I could contribute a religious note to his campaign speeches,” Graham would recall.

  “Frankly,” the preacher told the general, “I don’t think the American people would be happy with a president who didn’t belong to any church or even attend one.” (In fact, there have been several.)

  “As soon as the election is over,” Eisenhower promised, “I’ll join a church.”

  Graham wanted more. He’d been talking with Abram about a Presidential Prayer Breakfast, a parachurch ritual they hoped would settle the question once and for all of whether the United States was a Christian nation and the New Testament, not the Constitution, its ultimate authority. Abram had long dreamed of such an event, a public dedication of the governing class to the service of the Christian God, but no president previous to Eisenhower would cooperate. It was Graham, according to his own curiously immodest account, who made it happen. He arranged with Conrad Hilton (to whom he’d been introduced by Carlson) to sponsor the event, and he gave the main address—at most of the first fifteen annual breakfasts. But Carlson was Abram’s pipeline to the White House, and Abram’s invitation to the president-elect went through the No Deal Dealer. Ike declined. “He did not want to set a precedent,” Graham recalled. But Graham intervened, and Ike called Carlson over to say that he would show, after all. There were debts to be paid. Eisenhower was the first twentieth-century Republican to come to power in part through an alliance
of populist evangelicals (led by Graham) and of elite fundamentalism. Now Graham and Carlson wanted their return.20

  “The only one thing,” Ike warned Carlson, “let’s not have any television or radio around.” That suited the man to whom Carlson reported this news. Abram did not much care what the masses saw or did not see. He was playing to an audience of power; “up and out” went his spiritual broadcast. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was wary of advertising his foray into the no-man’s-land between church and state. “You can tell the Cabinet I’ll be there,” Eisenhower instructed Carlson. “I suppose that’s tantamount to telling them to come.” Come, they did, and with the exception of those tapped for Abram’s table, they found their own seating. There were no arrangements, Abram boasted; all were left to fend for themselves, “regardless of rank,” just as in the Kingdom of God—supposing, that is, that such a kingdom were inhabited only by men of high rank, the powerful pretending at egalitarianism within the confines of the most exclusive breakfast club in the land.

  There were 400 such men at the first Prayer Breakfast. It was 8:00 a.m., Thursday, February 5. The theme was “Government Under God.” Abram wore his trademark bow tie. He was sixty-seven that year, and he would soon suffer a heart attack, and soon Stalin would die, and Kinsey would publish his report on Sexual Behavior in the Human, and Fortune magazine would crow over a “spiritual awakening” among top businessmen. At the Mayflower, Conrad Hilton hung above the dais a painting of Uncle Sam on his knees, “not beaten there by the hammer and sickle” but submitting America to Christ, a sentiment the Senate’s chaplain admired. “There are signs,” he observed of the painting-in-lieu of a cross, “that once again, as in the former days of the Nation’s true glory, America is bending its knees.”21 Printed beneath Uncle Sam was a prayer of Hilton’s own composition. Hilton was a Catholic, but he thrilled most to the religion of anticommunism. “Be swift to save us, dear God, before the darkness falls.” There was no darkness in the Mayflower, only bacon. Abram presented Eisenhower’s cabinet to God. “Save them from self-deception, conceit, and the folly of independence of Thee, oh God.” Eisenhower mumbled up to the podium, the pulpit.

  He said, “All free government is firmly founded in a deeply felt religious faith.” And then, “As long as you feed me grits and sausage, everything will be all right.” These were the twin doctrines of a prosperity doctrine.

  “There is the sound,” observed the Senate chaplain, swept away by the deep spirituality of these words, “of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees,” a supernatural sound. He thought it might be Eisenhower’s prayers, winging up to heaven like B–52s.

  TWENTY YEARS LATER, Abram’s successor, Doug Coe, would explain his predecessor’s calm at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast: “It is only one-tenth of one percent of the iceberg,” he’d say. “[It] doesn’t give a true picture of what is going on.”22 The Fellowship’s true work was always both great and small, an accumulation of symbolic gestures and actual legislation. Sentiment and policy cohered into a religiously motivated movement, mostly Republican but also Democratic, that absorbed politicians and ordinary businessmen into its mass so smoothly that the townspeople never noticed; never rallied to resist or to even question the growing blob of political fundamentalism. The Fellowship, wrote one of Abram’s field representatives, “should be primarily an organism and not an organization.”

  “The idea of a Christian lobbyist program might well emanate through the Breakfast Groups,” one of Abram’s original Seattle brothers wrote him. It’s worth noting that the “Christian” issues of the day were not pornography or abortion; they were surveillance and weapons, the perceived need for more of both. Abram’s correspondent wanted “more unity on civil defense”—read, anticommunism—“and foreign policy.” Abram wrote back to say that he’d already moved the Fellowship beyond anything so crass and limited as a lobby. In the 1960s, it began distributing confidential memos to involved members of Congress on its progress around the world. The memos stressed that “the group, as such, never takes any formal action, but individuals who participate in the group through their initiative have made possible the activities mentioned.” The Fellowship was not a conspiracy; it was a catechism, its questions asked in the privacy of Abram’s prayer cells and answered in the public arena.

  In 1954, “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, an initiative sponsored in the Senate by Homer Ferguson, a Republican ICL board member, and financed by ICLer Clement Stone, and “In God We Trust” was added to the nation’s currency by a bill sponsored by a Dixiecrat congressman named Charles E. Bennett, also a member of the Fellowship’s inner circle.23 Bennett, a self-styled ethics crusader, saw himself as a small-government man; God and the dollar would redeem the nation, if only Congress would unshackle them. “Congress can’t remake the soul of America,” he’d say, a notion he evidently thought justified his opposition to civil rights.24 It was Bennett who prayed the opening prayers at Abram’s second Presidential Prayer Breakfast that February, at which Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren—then still a conservative—declared that separation of church and state was fine, so long as “men of religious faith” were in charge of a country he described as “a Christian land, governed by Christian principles.”

  That same year, Abram’s old ally Alexander Wiley, now chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as well as the upper house’s weekly prayer meeting, decided to extend those principles southward. He declared a democratically elected government in Guatemala a front for communist invasion and quietly green-lighted U.S. participation in its overthrow, an action that culminated in a tickertape parade in New York City for the dictator installed in its place by America, and a banquet in his honor at Hilton’s Waldorf-Astoria.25

  And that year a Vietnamese Catholic named Ngo Dinh Diem, “directly and personally aided by God,” by his own account, came to America to appeal to a nation in the grip of religious revival for its support in a fight against godless communism. A year later, Eisenhower obliged, installing Diem’s Christian—and profoundly corrupt—regime over a Buddhist nation when the French lost their hold, the first great step toward the American war in Southeast Asia that Robert Taft had feared. Wiley, a former Taft-style conservative transformed by Abram’s Christ and Ike’s Cold War into a militant internationalist, was the president’s point man in the Senate, bullying liberals and conservatives alike into backing “hard and fast military commitments” to South Vietnam, no questions asked.26

  Nineteen fifty-four was also the year that several Fellowship brothers steered Joe McCarthy off the national stage. It was a matter of politics, not ideology; Tailgunner Joe—raw, red-nosed, thick-browed, uncouth, uncontrolled, hungering Joe—made anticommunism look low-class.

  McCarthy’s downfall and Ike’s disdain for him have been chronicled at great length elsewhere. Less noticed was Eisenhower’s careful use of McCarthy during his campaign. Carlson was the middleman. “I fully expect that Senator McCarthy will be speaking vigorously for the ticket,” Carlson told the press in September 1952. McCarthy did so, lashing out at Ike’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson, as surrounded by communist sympathizers. Weapon deployed. Mission accomplished. “Sen. Frank Carlson of Kansas,” the press dutifully reported, “commented that the General did not owe anything to McCarthy for the speech, and was still a ‘no deal man.’”27 After the election, the press assumed that Carlson would be rewarded for his services with a cabinet post. Instead, Carlson stayed in the Senate of his own volition, where he chaired a seemingly obscure subcommittee on civil service employees. It was a job that allowed him to quietly purge government of far more “security risks”—most of them guilty of no more heinous a crime than loyalty to the New Deal—than McCarthy had ever dreamed of, thousands erased from the rolls through backroom bureaucratic maneuvers.

  Carlson also served on the special committee appointed to consider McCarthy’s censure after he went too far by slinging mud at other senators. But the man who first wrote the resolution to
censure was Carlson’s predecessor as president of the Fellowship, Senator Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont. Flanders was a genteel Republican, an engineer, an industrialist, a banker. His wife collected New England folk songs. Smooth-domed and whiskered, his spectacles slipping down his nose and his pipe in hand, he looked like a professor and was sometimes mistaken for a liberal. But his record was as right-wing as many of the Senate’s more outspoken firebrands. In 1954, the year he moved to censure McCarthy, he revived an old fundamentalist favorite: an amendment to the Constitution that would have rewritten the United States’ founding document to declare, “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ.” And yet, because of his resolution against raving McCarthy, he is remembered as a sane man in paranoid times, footnoted in histories of the Cold War as one who stood up for common sense.

  Only the radical journalist I. F. Stone perceived otherwise. Flanders, he wrote in 1954, did not challenge McCarthy’s paranoia but rather his effectiveness in its promulgation. “To doubt the power of the devil, to question the existence of witches,” Stone wrote following Flanders’s ostensibly heroic gesture, is

  to read oneself out of respectable society, brand oneself a heretic, to incur suspicion of being oneself in league with the powers of evil. So all the fighters against McCarthyism are impelled to adopt its premises…The country is in a bad way indeed when as feeble and hysterical a speech [as Flanders’] is hailed as an attack on McCarthyism. Flanders talked of “a crisis in the age-long warfare between God and the Devil for the souls of men.” He spoke of Italy “as ready to fall into Communist hands,” of Britain “nibbling at the drugged bait of trade profits.” There are passages of sheer fantasy, like this one: “Let us look to the South. In Latin America, there are…spreading infections of communism. Whole countries are being taken over.”28