by Jeff Sharlet
20. FDR has long been a problematic figure for American fundamentalism, and not just because of his impossible-to-ignore leadership in World War II. On one hand, the New Deal benefited too many in both the populist rank and file of fundamentalism and at the elite level of Dixiecrat politicians for the movement to condemn FDR altogether. On the other hand, the avant-garde of fundamentalism was born in 1935 in response to FDR’s perceived godless socialism. What is to be done with this historical paradox? William J. Federer, an accountant-turned-historian who has become a best-selling fundamentalist historian, attempts to resolve the dilemma with The Faith of F.D.R. (Amerisearch, 2006), a compilation of every banal piety Roosevelt ever uttered. Federer hopes the book will cement FDR, war-president, into the fundamentalist pantheon.
21. Grubb, Modern Viking, p. 105. “Nominal membership”: Otto Fricke, J. W. E. Sommer, Georg Reichel, Professor Landon Bender, Paul Orlamunder, Friedreich Wunderlich, to Abram, August 26, 1946, folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
22. J. F. Byrnes, “Restatement of Policy on Germany, Stuttgart,” September 6, 1946. http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga4–460906.htm accessed August 20, 2006.
23. “You are God’s man”: Abram to Fricke, August 29, 1947, folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
24. Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 49.
25. Hans Spier, From the Ashes of Disgrace: A Journal from Germany, 1945–1955 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), pp. 31–32.
26. Hans Kempe to Abram, February 5, 1948, folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
27. Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 2–6.
28. “Meeting Agenda,” in folders 46–50, box 585, collection 459, BGCA.
29. Most of this money came in individual donations raised by Abram’s prayer cells (see Gedat to Abram, January 14, 1951; Abram to Gedat, April 18, 1951, folder 7, box 218, collection 459, BGCA), but some apparently came from the Mellon Foundation, as well. Gedat to Abram, March 26, 1950, folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
30. In The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall delivers conclusive evidence that settles the debate over whether or not Nazism conceived of itself as anti-Christian: not at all. In fact, much of the top leadership, Steigmann-Gall documents, considered the cross and the swastika two different symbols for one great idea.
31. “Directive to Commander-in-Chief of United States Forces of Occupation Regarding the Military Government of Germany,” April 1945 (JCS 1067). Available online from the U.S. Embassy to Germany at http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga3–450426.pdf.
32. “Asiatic nihilism”: Dr. H. O. Ahrens to Abram, November 10, 1949, folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Ahrens was a vocal and effective lobbyist for German industrialists determined to avoid the dismantling of factories used for military production. At the time of this letter, he was taking one of Abram’s American operatives, William Frary von Bromberg (who claimed the title of baron, perhaps falsely) on a tour of such properties.
33. Abram to Fricke, September 21, 1949; Fricke to Abram, October 17, 1949; Abram to Fricke, November 2, 1949; folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Gedat quoted in Inge Deutschkron, Mein Leben nach dem Überleben (Dtv, 2000), p. 130.
34. The involvement of Abs, Schmelz, Rohrbach, and Speidel is reported in “The Highlights of the ICL Conference at Castle Mainau, Germany, June 14–17, 1951,” an account by the ICL employee Wallace Haines, and an undated, untitled report on the same conference by a German ICL employee, Margarete Gärtner (herself a former prewar propagandist for German expansion), folders 10 and 11, respectively, of box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
35. Hans von Eicken, a leader with Gedat and Fricke of the German division of the Fellowship, wrote to Abram on July 11, 1951, to tell Abram that the German Fellowship’s advocacy on behalf of Pohl and another war criminal, Otto Ohlendorf—an influential economist who’d boasted at his trial of having overseen the murder of 90,000 Jews and other non-Aryans—had helped soothe the concerns of those in “important circles” who felt that the German Fellowship was the “cleverly engineered product of an American power group.” Folder 7, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. On October 12, 1951, von Neurath’s daughter had written Abram a letter begging for help with the case of her father. He’d been treated well by his American guards, she wrote, but persecuted by the Soviets who ran the prison in tandem with the United States. She was outraged that her father, one of the seven “Major War Criminals,” suffered from bad dentistry. “It was difficult for him to talk,” during her last visit to him in prison, “as his artificial set of teeth—put in about a year ago at Spandau—was fitting very badly.” Abram opened a file on the case. “Can we do anything about this?” he wrote in a note to one of his aides. “Maybe [Congressman O. K.] Armstrong should see this.” Von Neurath won his release as a medical parolee in 1953 (Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment [University of North Carolina Press, 1998], p. 245), but besides this letter, the file Abram opened is lost, leaving us uncertain whether Abram’s intervention played a part in von Neurath’s good fortune. Winifred von Mackensen (née von Neurath) to Abram, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
36. “Church Group Votes, Elects 17 from Congress,” Washington Post, January 14, 17, 1945. “Panty-waist diplomacy”: Grose, Operation Rollback, p. 6.
37. Lance Morrow, The Best Year of their Lives: Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power (Basic Books, 2005), p. 128. Jack Powers, South Bend Tribune, February 24, 1991.
38. Address to the United States Senate, February 5, 1946. One can find extensive excerpts from the speech on a number of Holocaust revisionist Web sites, including, as of 2006, http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/wars/witness2history/21.html.
39. Spier, From the Ashes of Disgrace, p. 27.
40. Lecture to the Frankfurt chapter of International Christian Leadership, August 9, 1950, folder 11, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
41. Von Gienanth to Wallace Haines, ICL “Field Director for Europe,” March 29, 1952, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
42. Abram to Ropp, October 6, 1953, folder 3, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Ropp was himself an admirer of Merwin K. Hart, the anti-Semitic American fascist whom Abram had welcomed into the Fellowship’s inner circle. Ropp to Wallace Haines, August 12, 1952, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
43. Frances Hepp, April 23, 1947, folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
44. Haines to Abram, June 23, 1951, folder 8, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
45. This account of the meeting at Mainau is drawn from K. C. Liddel, “Notes on Mainau Conference,” June 28, 1951, folder 8, box 218, collection 459, BGCA; Wallace Haines, “The Highlights of ICL Conference at Castle Mainau, Germany,” folder 10, box 218, collection 459; Christian Leadership News, September 1951, collection 459; Margarete Gärtner, “Newsletter,” July 30, 1951, folder 10, box 218, collection 459; undated reports for Abram by Margarete Gärtner in folders 10 and 11, box 218, collection 459. Gärtner’s past as a propagandist is referred to in John Hiden and Thomas Lane, eds., The Baltic and the Outbreak of the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 126. The U-boat commander was Reinhard Hardegen. The fascist editor was Benno Mascher. Bishop Wurm’s anti-Semitic remarks can be found in Wolfgang Erlich, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 201.
46. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press, 2005), p. 61.
47. Dallas, 1945, p. 615.
48. Zapp to Abram, September 16, 1950, folder 6, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.
49. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 149.
7. THE BLOB
1. Interview with Kate Phillip
s in Tom Weaver, Science Fiction Confidential: Interviews With Monster Stars and Filmmakers (McFarland, 2002), pp. 234–46.
2. Joshua Muravchik, “Losing the Peace,” Commentary, July 1992.
3. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” in The Radical Right ed., Daniel Bell (Anchor Books, 1964), p. 76.
4. A revealing statistic overlooked by conventional historians of the Cold War: between 1935, the year Abram and his fundamentalist elite came in from the cold of domestic exile, and 1980, the commencement of the Reagan era, the average number of American evangelical missionaries overseas grew from 5,000, many of them engaged in small projects close to home, to 32,000 spread all over the globe. Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 184. The anthropologist David Stoll explores the interconnections—ideological and actual—between the U.S. covert operations and the network of evangelical missionaries connected to what was then the largest missionary organization in the world in Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?: The Wycliffe Bible Translators in America (Zed Press, 1982). Stoll takes pains to explain that such interconnections did not constitute a conspiracy, but rather, an overlapping worldview in which spiritual and imperial interests were not easily distinguished. As recently as 2006, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez expelled a group of evangelical missionaries he claimed were U.S. spies, Christianity Today felt compelled to condemn “The CIA Myth,” apparently persuasive enough to seduce even some of the magazine’s conservative evangelical readers. Deann Alford, January 2006.
5. Quoted in Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (Guilford Press, 1995), p. 101.
6. “Our press,” reads a memo in Abram’s files on Cuba and the American media’s ambivalence toward Castro, “is infested with crypto-Communists [and] intellectual prostitutes in their hire.” Whether the Fellowship would extend that charge to even the evangelical press is unclear, but there can be no doubt on their position with regard to détente with Castro.
7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” 1958. Eisenhower accused the Soviets of waging “total cold war,” to which, he said, the United States must respond with “total peace” in which “every asset of our personal and national lives,” particularly religion, would be dedicated to the fight. Ike also believed in “progress” as defined by the Atlas, Titan, Thor, Jupiter, and Polaris missile programs. The fact that such literally totalitarian ambitions were considered calming is an indicator of the fear and loathing that infused the ostensibly bland 1950s.
8. Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Kansas State University Press, 2006), pp. 270–75.
9. Reverend John Collins, chairman of Christian Action, to Abram, September 8, 1950, folder 2, box 202, collection 459, BGCA.
10. Osgood, Total Cold War, p. 40.
11. “Government Curbs Scored,” New York Times, May 11, 1949.
12. Grubb to Abram, August 21, 1953, folder 2, box 202, collection 459, BGCA.
13. Perhaps they carried with them reprints of a Look magazine article Abram had had made, his chief piece of literature that year. The lead story was by Norman Vincent Peale, Abram’s colleague in the Twelve. Why was America experiencing a spiritual revival? Simple, said Peale: “for the first time in the country’s history, we are filled with fear.” Peale’s solution: “It is now widely recognized that prayer is a skill, that it is an actual power.” The demand of the hour, wrote Peale, was organizing such power into action, a “vital spiritual force.” His inspiration? “The Vereide Organization,” which inculcated “the country’s lawmakers” in “the importance of divine guidance.” Abram’s reprint of Peale’s May 22, 1951, Look article, “The Place of Prayer in America,” was titled “These Scandalous Years in Washington,” a reference to widespread suspicion that the Truman administration was riddled with red agents. Folder 51, box 585, collection 459, BGCA. “Direct relationship…”: Associated Press, “Wiley Trip Declared in U.S. Interest,” Washington Post, May 21, 1952. Particularly controversial was Wiley’s decision to bring his much younger new bride for a vacation, a practice that under Eisenhower would become unofficial policy, the chumminess of power couples meeting their peers used to cement “relationships” with foreign nations, as David F. Schmitz writes in Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United States & Right-Wing Dictatorships (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 183.
14. Wilhelmina was at that point technically “princess,” having passed her throne to her daughter, Juliana, but she was still referred to as queen, and both women were strong supporters of the Fellowship, though whether out of religious sentiment or other motives—the royal family was responsible for the interests of Royal Dutch-Shell Oil—is unclear in Abram’s papers.
15. Robert C. Albright, “Ike Can’t Find Titles for All His Talented Help,” Washington Post, June 22, 1952.
16. “The June Brides,” Time, June 23, 1952.
17. In Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton University Press, 2005), the historian Donald T. Crichtlow argues that this sense of betrayal led to the formation of the New Right that would propel Barry Goldwater to the GOP nomination twelve years later. See pp. 46–47.
18. Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round: Taft Talks Way Back to the Top,” Washington Post, December 22, 1952.
19. Two of the Democratic candidates for the nomination, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, were Breakfast Groupers. The eventual nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, was decidedly not, but his hawkish liberalism would lead him into even more militant expressions of faith. The “one supreme difference” between the United States and the USSR, Stevenson told a “Washington Pilgrimage” of Christian nationalists, “is that America and its leaders believe in God; the rulers of Russia have turned their back on God and deny His very existence.” “Presidential Candidates Speak Out For Religion,” Washington Post, May 3, 1952. Stevenson’s surprising piety may be understood as a sign of the times; the 1952 election was, according to the Washington Post, the first time all presidential candidates had publicly paid tribute to America’s ostensible religious—read, “Christian”—heritage.
20. Graham’s account of his role can be found in “The General Who Became President,” chapter 12 of his autobiography, Just As I Am (HarperSan-Franciso/Zondervan, 1997), in which he says he met Abram during his Northwest Crusades. He does not mention the fact that Abram had been recruited by his own former Seattle cell—doubling as the sponsoring committee for the Graham Crusade’s visit—to seek federal funds for a cover for the city’s Memorial Stadium to ensure the Crusade’s success. “Graham wants this,” wrote Abram’s Seattle lieutenant, a wealthy lawyer named Warren Dewar. “Langlie and Devin”—the governor and the mayor of Seattle, both men whose careers had been made by Breakfast Group connections—“want it too.” Dewar suggests that $18,000, possibly federal funds, had already been directed toward Graham’s appearance. Dewar to Abram, May 16, 1951, folder 7, box 168, collection 459, BGCA. Reference to Oiltown U.S.A. may be found in the BGEA’s collection 214, the records of World Wide Pictures, Graham’s film production company.
21. Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, quoted in Grubb, Modern Viking, pp. 130–32.
22. Nick Thimmesch, “Politicians and the Underground Prayer Movement,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1974. Thimmesch, who admired the Fellowship, described it thusly: “They are secretive and guarded in discussing their experiences or activities…They genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they shun it.”
23. Ferguson: Ferguson was a longtime inner circle member who regularly appeared in the Fellowship’s brochures for new prospects. Bennett: Bennett’s membership in ICL was reported in the July 1959 issue of Moody Monthly, the magazine of the fundamentalist Moody Institute in Chicago, in “Christians in Your Congress,” by Donald H. Gill. Other members cited included Strom Thurmond, James B. Utt—t
he Orange County congressman who believed that the United Nations was training Africans to conquer the United States—and Representative Bruce Alger, the Dallas Republican who would lead a “mink coat mob” made up of his wealthy female supporters in a spitting attack on Ladybird Johnson. Bennett, a signer of the infamous Southern Manifesto, remained close to the Fellowship for decades. “I ask too much of you already,” he wrote Doug Coe on January 27, 1987, “and therefore am not pressing for a particular appointment, but anytime that suits you I would certainly like to see you.” Folder 4, box 166, collection 459, BGCA.
24. Hefley and Plowman, Washington: Christians in the Corridors of Power, pp. 120–21.
25. Associated Press, “Eisenhower Joins in a Breakfast Prayer Meeting,” New York Times, February 5, 1954. Eisenhower didn’t speak at the second breakfast, but Vice President Nixon did, initiating a tradition Nixon maintained for the rest of the decade. Personally indifferent to Abram’s piety, he recognized the value of the Prayer Breakfast’s pulpit and made it his own. Guatemala: Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (Verso, 1993), pp. 26–29.
26. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 60–62. “Wiley Would End Attack on Dulles,” New York Times, July 25, 1954.
27. “McCarthy to be Asked to Aid Ike,” Washington Post, September 18, 1952. Ferdinand Kuhn, “McCarthy’s Charges in Speech Stir Angry Denials, Protests,” Washington Post, October 29, 1952.
