The conservative Dutch Reform Church that provided the religious guidance for Van Raalte, and eventually the Prince family, based its beliefs on the teachings of a seventeenth-century minister, John Calvin. One of the main tenets of Calvinism is that of predestination—the belief that God has predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation. Calvinists believe that people have no business meddling or vainly trying to divine God’s decisions. The religion also teaches strict obedience and hard work, acting on the belief that God will steer followers but that they are responsible for the work. Calvinists have long taken pride in their work ethic. The town of Holland boasts that its villagers dug the canal to Lake Michigan—that would prove valuable for trade—with their own hands, and then set down their shovels and immediately constructed the bridge over their new channel.4
It was this famed work ethic that found Erik Prince’s grandfather Peter Prince, owner of the Tulip City Produce Company, on a truck heading to Grand Rapids, thirty miles away, for a business meeting in the early morning hours of May 21, 1943. Shortly into the trip, Prince complained of heartburn to his fellow wholesale produce dealer, and they pulled over for a few minutes. Soon, they continued on, and near Hudsonville, halfway through the trip, Prince slumped over against his colleague, who was driving. A doctor in the town pronounced him dead on arrival at the age of thirty-six.5 Peter’s son, Edgar, was eleven years old.
A decade later, Edgar Prince graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree and met Elsa Zwiep, whose parents owned Zwiep’s Seed Store in Holland and who had just completed her studies in education and sociology at nearby Calvin College.6 The two married, and Edgar followed family tradition and joined the military, serving in the U.S. Air Force. The couple moved east and then west as Edgar was stationed at bases in South Carolina and Colorado. Though it’s unclear whether Peter Prince was a veteran—he came of age for the draft during the window between World War I and World War II—four of Peter’s five brothers were in the Army at the time of his death.7 Though Edgar Prince had traveled far and wide during college and the Air Force, his hometown of Holland beckoned him and Elsa back to Lake Michigan and to the strict religious and cultural traditions embraced by the Prince family. “We find Holland a very comfortable place to live,” Edgar Prince said in a book written about Holland’s downtown, which included three chapters on the family. “We have family here. We enjoy the recreational opportunities. We like the community’s heritage, which is based on the Dutch reputation for being neat, clean, orderly, and hard working. Their standard has always been excellence.”8
Upon returning to the town, Edgar rolled up his sleeves and started working in die-casting, rising to the position of chief engineer at Holland’s Buss Machine Works.9 But Edgar had much bigger ambitions and soon quit. In 1965, Prince and two fellow employees founded their own company that made die-cast machines for the auto industry.10 In 1969, he shipped a sixteen-hundred-ton machine capable of creating aluminum transmission cases every two minutes.11 By 1973, Prince Corporation was a great success, with hundreds of people working for the company’s various Holland divisions.12 That year, the company began production of what would become its signature product, an invention that would end up in virtually every car in the world and put Edgar Prince on his way to becoming a billionaire: the ubiquitous lighted sun visor.13
But while wealth and success were in abundance in the Prince family, the sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days had been taking their toll on Edgar, and in the early 1970s, he nearly fell to the same fate as his father when he suffered a serious heart attack.14 “It was then, while he lay in a hospital bed reflecting on what all his labor had won for him, that he committed himself anew to his faith in Jesus Christ,” recalled Prince’s friend Gary Bauer, one of the early leaders of the religious right and founder of the conservative Christian lobby group the Family Research Council. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God. From that point forward, the Prince Corporation was blessed with unprecedented growth and financial success.”15 Edgar Prince recovered from the heart attack and steered his company toward amazing prosperity. Prince Corporation soon expanded into map lamps, visors that could open garage doors, consoles with ashtrays, and cup and change holders, among many other products.16 By 1980, the Prince empire boasted numerous plants and more than 550 employees.17 As Erik Prince later recalled, “My dad was a very successful entrepreneur. From scratch he started a company that first produced high-pressure die-cast machines and grew into a world-class automotive parts supplier in west Michigan. They developed and patented the first lighted car sun visor, developed the car digital compass/thermometer and the programmable garage door opener.”18 But, Prince said, “Not all their ideas were winners. Things like a sock-drawer light, an automated ham de-boning machine and a propeller-driven snowmobile didn’t work out so well for the company. My dad used them as examples of the need for perseverance and determination.”19
In that respect, it wasn’t the only way in which the product itself seemed of secondary importance to Prince. “People make the difference,” read the copy from an old Prince Corporation brochure. “It isn’t magic that brings excellence to a company; excellence is the result of commitment and hard work by dedicated people. Whether we’re talking about products or processes, no wizardry or easy formulas will solve the challenges of tomorrow. People will.”20 Edgar Prince was fond of initiatives like one where executives stuck to a strict exercise regimen. Three days a week from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. the executives met at the Holland Tennis Club, which Prince also owned.21 In 1987, Prince opened a sprawling 550,000-square-foot facility spread over thirty-five acres, its fourth manufacturing center and home to many of its now fifteen hundred employees.22 The Prince “campus” centerpiece featured nearly five thousand feet of skylights and amenities like a basketball and volleyball court.23 He never made employees work on Sundays and flew executives home from business trips promptly so they could be with their families on the Lord’s Day.24
Detroit’s auto industry may have been suffering in the 1980s, “but you’d never know it from the Prince Corporation,” read the lead of a story in the Holland Sentinel.25 “My family’s business was automotive supply—the most viciously competitive business in the world,” Erik Prince told author Robert Young Pelton. “My father was focused on quality, volume, and customer satisfaction. That’s what we talked around the dinner table.”26 But Edgar Prince had more than the success of his business and his employees on his mind, and with the money flowing into Prince Corporation, he finally had the means to achieve the higher goals to which he aspired. That meant pouring serious money into conservative Christian causes. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” recalled Gary Bauer. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.”27
In the 1980s, the Prince family merged with one of the most venerable conservative families in the United States when Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team.28 Amway was a powerhouse distributor of home products and was regularly plagued by accusations that it was run like a cult and was nothing more than a sophisticated pyramid scheme.29 The company would rise to become one of the greatest corporate contributors in the U.S. electoral process in the 1990s, mostly to Republican candidates and causes, and used its business infrastructure as a massive political organizing network.30 “Amway relies heavily on the nearly fanatical—some say cultlike—devotion of its more than 500,000 U.S. ‘independent distributors.’ As they sell the company’s soaps, vitamins, detergents, and other household products, the distributors push the Amway philosophy,” reported Mother Jones magazine in a 1996 exposé on the company.31 “They tell you to always vote conservative no matter what. They say liberals support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place,” Karen Jones, a former Amway distributor
, told the magazine. “They say we need to get things back to the way it’s supposed to be.”32 Amway leaders also reportedly used “voice-mail messages, along with company rallies and motivational tapes, to mobilize distributors into a potent domestic political force.”33
Betsy and Dick’s union was the kind of alliance common among the families of monarchs in Europe. The DeVos family was one of the few in Michigan whose power and influence exceeded that of the Princes. They were one of the greatest bankrollers of far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of prominence. For a time, Betsy and Dick lived down the street from the Prince family, including Erik, who is nine years younger than his sister.34
In 1988, Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson began building what would become the Family Research Council (FRC), the crusading, influential, and staunchly conservative evangelical organization that has since taken the lead on issues ranging from banning gay marriage to promoting school vouchers for Christian schools to outlawing abortion and stem-cell research. To get it off the ground, though, they needed funding, and they turned to Edgar Prince. “[W]hen Jim Dobson and I decided that the financial resources weren’t available to launch FRC, Ed and his family stepped into the breach,” wrote Bauer. “I can say without hesitation that without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council.”35 Young Erik would go on to become one of Bauer’s earliest interns at the FRC.36 It was one of many right-wing causes that the Princes would join the DeVoses in bankrolling, leading to what would be known as the Republican Revolution in 1994, which brought Newt Gingrich and a radical right-wing agenda known as the Contract with America to power in Congress, wrestling control from the Democrats for the first time in forty years. To support the “revolution,” DeVos’s Amway gave some $2.5 million to the Republican Party in what was the single largest soft-money donation on record to any political party in history.37 In 1996, Amway also donated $1.3 million to the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau to pay for Republican “infomercials” broadcast on Pat Robertson’s Family Channel during the RNC convention.38
Erik’s sister Betsy DeVos would go on to chair Michigan’s Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and from 2003 to 2005; at times she flirted with running for the U.S. Senate.39 She was also a George W. Bush “Pioneer” fundraiser, bringing in more than $100,000 for his campaign.40 Her husband, Dick, was the GOP candidate for governor in 2006, a race that he ultimately lost.41 Seasoned observers of Michigan politics say it would be hard to overestimate the influence the DeVos family has on politics in the state. “Anyone who runs for a significant Republican office in Michigan has to check with the DeVos family,” said Calvin College political science professor Doug Koopman. “They are perceived within that community as being not only a source of funds but a judge of [a candidate’s] fitness.”42
The Prince and DeVos clans were also a major driving force behind the Michigan Family Forum (MFF), the state’s chapter of Jim Dobson’s Focus on the Family.43 Besides the tens of thousands of dollars that the Prince family poured into the MFF, another of Erik Prince’s sisters, Emilie Wierda, has served as its treasurer.44 The MFF has mobilized voters in conservative churches to support legislators who have backed the Christian right’s agenda. Beginning in 1990, the MFF ran what was essentially a backdoor lobbying system, through the establishment of more than one thousand church-based Community Impact Committees (CICs), which operated under the radar, away from public scrutiny.45 “The CICs offer advantages to political organizing that other Christian Right organizing doesn’t have,” Russ Bellant wrote in his 1996 book The Religious Right in Michigan Politics. “Because they are based in churches, their meetings are not visible in the world of politics. Since laypersons rather than pastors may run these groups, they may not have a high profile even in the church community outside the Family Forum network.”46 The MFF also established the Michigan Prayer Network, which consisted of “prayer warriors” assigned to nearly every legislator in the state.47 While the groups were prohibited from expressly lobbying, the effect of asking legislators to “pray” for issues like school choice and against gay rights made it, as one Michigan legislator put it, “just another lobbying gimmick.”48
While opening his wallet to the Christian right, Edgar Prince also became a patron to the entire community of Holland, investing millions of dollars into Hope College, founded by Albert Van Raalte, and its equally devout rival Calvin College, Edgar’s wife’s alma mater.49 He and Elsa almost single-handedly reengineered and brought a boom to Holland’s downtown, saving it from the fate hundreds of other small towns had suffered throughout the Midwest as they gradually slipped into economic oblivion due to poor urban planning coupled with outsourcing, downsizing, layoffs, and the overall decline of U.S. manufacturing. The Princes helped establish the Evergreen Commons, a popular senior center downtown, and lobbied hard for the preservation and restoration of historic landmarks in town.50 They fought for a well-planned city that would exist and thrive for generations while maintaining what they saw as a necessary connection to its Dutch roots. They personally took on causes like saving an 1892 stone clock tower that had once been a cornerstone of downtown before falling into disrepair.51 Some of Edgar Prince’s ideas for maintaining a vibrant downtown seemed utterly insane. He envisioned and campaigned hard in the late 1980s for an underground system of heated pipes that would melt snow and ice throughout the downtown business district, ensuring that strollers could be pushed along the sidewalks even during western Michigan’s harsh winters.52 When the city balked at the $1.1 million plan, Prince ponied up a quarter of the funding himself.53
All the while, Edgar Prince continued to balance his business and religious obligations, both to his local Dutch Reform Church and the Prince Corporation. “Ed was at his best and was most valuable to [the Family Research Council] during the dark and difficult times—during the confirmation battle over Clarence Thomas, following the bitter disappointment of the Supreme Court’s unexpected pro-abortion ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, through the anti-family shift in the Congress in 1992, and in recent months with the wave of efforts by some to redefine the traditional family and undermine marriage,” Gary Bauer wrote of Prince in 1995.54 Prince Corporation continued to flourish, a “boom built on Biblical principles,” Bauer wrote.55 In 1992, the company roster had grown to 2,250 employees.56 By early 1995, it had ballooned to more than 4,000 employees and $400 million in annual sales.57 Prince had also married his business acumen with his desire to see Holland thrive and had founded Lumir Corporation, which became Holland’s foremost downtown developer, responsible for projects like the $2.5 million Evergreen Commons Senior Center.58 But tragedy would soon strike the Prince empire.
At about 1:00 p.m. on March 2, 1995, Edgar Prince had one of his usual chats with Prince Corporation president John Spoelhof,59 a longtime friend with whom he had just gone skiing in Colorado a week earlier.60 They said good-bye, and the sixty-three-year-old Prince stepped into the elevator at his company’s headquarters. Inside, he suffered a massive heart attack and was found on the floor fifteen minutes later.61 Despite CPR attempts by two Prince employees, Edgar was pronounced dead within the hour.62 “I saw him probably two minutes before he passed away,” Spoelhof said. “I looked at the expression of his face and the color of his face and Ed was Ed. I knew him so well all these years; if he would have been a little ashen, I would have noticed.”63
As happens with the deaths of kings, patriarchs, and heads of state, the town of Holland entered a period of intense mourning. The flag flew at half-staff.64 Every newspaper in the region ran front-page stories eulogizing Prince, accompanied with sidebars and pictures and timelines. More than one thousand people gathered at the Christ Memorial Reformed Church to hear evangelical leaders James Dobson and Gary Bauer, who referred to Edgar as his “mentor,” eulogize Prince.65 Bauer remembered how Prince was adamant that the Family Re
search Council’s new headquarters in Washington, D.C., should have a cross atop it, to remind the President, members of the Supreme Court, and Congress “that this is one nation under God’s judgment.”66 In the Grand Rapids Press Lakeshore supplement, the banner headline read “A Christian Man,” and the Rev. Ren Broekhuizen said, “Ed Prince was a gifted and developed individual who never took his eyes off the goal of honoring Jesus Christ in his life.”67 That pastor, a friend of Prince’s for two decades, would marry Edgar’s widow Elsa five years later.68
At the time of his father’s death, Erik Prince was a Navy SEAL serving a string of deployments in Bosnia, Haiti, and the Middle East.69 Even still, he had happened to visit his father just a week before his death, when Edgar made the sign of the cross on Erik’s daughter’s forehead during her baptism. 70 Erik remembered that his father had taught him never to say, “I can’t.”71 At the time of his death, Edgar had been married to Elsa for forty-one years, and they had raised three daughters in addition to Erik. “Dad was definitely the shepherd of his family, and he would bring the whole family together every chance he could. He’d make all the arrangements and take care of all the details,” Erik told the Holland Sentinel after Edgar’s death.72 Erik seemed elated that his father had been able to meet and baptize his first-born daughter, Sophia, but that elation was tinged with regret: “He loved her. That was the last time I saw him. My regret is my kids will never know him. I wanted them to be able to talk to him, to learn from him.”73
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army Page 9
