The F Word
The defenders of the status quo,” Henry K issinger wrote in
his doctoral dissertation, published as A World Betrayed in 1957,
“. . . tend to begi n by treating revolutionary power as if its protesta-
tions were merely tactical.” That this comment is su ciently ambig-
uous to be wor thy of the sl ippery car eer th at followed it tak es noth ing
from the weight of its i nsight, and, more, its double meaning.
Kissinger himself provides a perfect illustration. Like most brilliant
political players, he became both a defender of the status quo and a
revolutionary, a champion of American hegemony where it already
existed and a clever tactician of revolution on behalf of that power
where it had not yet been achieved. The vast array of actors that com-
prise American fundamentalism do not include any single tactician of
Kissinger’s caliber, and yet they have, as a movement, functioned i n
just such a fashion, building on the foundation of American Protes-
tantism’s traditional power to strategize both its expansion and, in
true revolutionary fashion, its transformation.1
In one sense, the men Abram Vereide gathered for bacon and eggs
and Bible were defenders of the status quo. They sought not so much
spiritual sustenance as stabil ity, an end to the Depression’s hurdy-
gurdy years. Men, women, and children dwindled into thin and hope-
less creatures, listless and dull-witted and red-eyed. Then would come
a strike or a street ght or a mob that had decided to take vegetables
from a moving train, or to march on city hall, and out came the bulls
like it was Pamplona. And there were words in the air, and a family
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 115
cold and huddled around a radio, heads bent toward the voice of a man
such as Father Coughl in, the “radio priest” from Detroit, the Shrine of
the Little Flower, preaching and ranting to more m ill ions than the
president himself some eve nings. What did he want? He was no com-
munist, that was for certain. He called them the “Red Fog.” But he was
no friend of things as they were, either. He was a furious man, his voice
dulcet but his words full of hatred for the capital ists who had lined
their silk pockets. Coughlin, as much as or more than the communists,
seemed like he might call for blood one day, and soon.2 It was against
that threat, as much as com munism, that Abram schemed.
Abram’s men did not consider themselves blameless. But they
believed their folly didn’t l ie in the economics of do- as-you-will that
had brought the nation and the city to those days of breadlines and
street battles. Their sin was slippage. They had enriched their co ers
at the expense of their souls. Money was like power: Those who had
it should not speak of it, concern themselves with it, acknowledge its
existence as a factor. To do so was worse than bad manners; it was
blasphemy, an attempt to refute God’s ordering of econom ic a airs.
So they sought a return to that order. To reclaim it, they had to
take steps they had never taken before. One of these was reading the
Bible, a book that for most of them was long in the past, of interest
only to grandmothers; now, they were determined to nd in it a
message for men such as themselves. They promised one another that
they would study at least a chapter a day. Understanding was another
matter. The churches had failed. They no longer taught truth but in-
sisted on metaphor. The best pulpits were manned, if that word
could be used, by foppish intel lectuals who debated like Jews, si fting
sentences like sand for grains of meaning. A useless endeavor. The
ocean was crashing upon them. They needed rocks to stand on. They
needed marching orders. “Men who did not want to be preached at”
turned to one another for con rmation of their spiritual gleanings,
“teachings practical in business, government, and social li fe,” wrote
Abram. “ We discovered that, as the eye is made for light and the ear
for sound, so the human personality is made for God. We discovered
that sanity and normalcy are to be Christ-like.”
116 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
That sum mer Abram took a core of Christ-committed leaders—
a railroad man and a lumberman and a banker, a car dealer, a cloth-
ier, and a navy commander—on a retreat to the Canyon Creek
Lodge, alongside a river amid the peaks of the Cascades. He gathered
his troops around a tall stone hearth and led them in a “spiritual in-
ventory,” each man taking turns listing aloud that which troubled
their city, their state, thei r corporation. Hunger, pride, whores,
Harry Bridges, booze, degenerates, sloth, corruption, the Team-
sters. Women with short hair. Commu nism in the colleges. Sailors, a
dirty, immoral lot. Pessimism. Racy movies. The Soviet Union. The
color red, in general, the “red tide,” the “red menace,” the “red-hued
progeny” of Stalin. Also brown, for Brownshirts, a force so vital, so
strong, so bursting with muscle—could America possibly compete
with the fabulous rising of Italy, Germany, Austria? Round the room
the men went, moaning their fears and their losses and thei r fail-
ures. They fell to their knees, old men’s joi nts creaking, overwhelmed
by the godlessness surrounding them, and, yes, they confessed,
within them. “ Utter helplessness,” Abram recorded.
They had been reading the Bible for months, and most must have
known its darkest corners, the truth of an angry God not as a bearded
man in heaven shaking an ancient nger but more like the wilderness
growling in the dark at the edge of the city. “He was like a bear wait-
ing for me,” warned Jeremiah, “li ke a lion in secret places.” To them
the thud of the billy club and the shriek of the gas canister were the
sounds not of repression but of Christian civilization making its
last stand. The tribes of labor were whooping. If history taught any
lesson, it was that no Custer could save society from the coarse-clothed
savages. “ Subversive forces had taken over,” observed Abram. “What
could we do?”
It was at this moment on the edge of hysteria when a young law-
yer named Arthur B. Langlie, kneeling among the big men, discov-
ered his calling. A at-faced, blue-eyed Scandinavian like Abram,
Langlie was thirty- ve years old that July, known equally for his
wide smile and his zealous religion, a sharp-nosed teetotaling man
who could work a party with just a glass of water in his hand.
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 117
He rose from his knees. “Men, it can be done,” he said. “I am
ready to let God use me.”
Abram’s brotherhood was ready to use him, too. On the spot one
rich man said he would nance Langlie’s crusade, and others followed
with promises of time and connections. Langlie would be their key
man. Abram’s heart must have been pounding. This was what God
had shown him. The brothers gripped hands in a circle before the re-
place and sang a song in the mountai ns for the city they meant to
save.
Faith of our fathers, living still
In spite of dungeon, re, and sword:
Oh, how our hearts beat high with joy . . .
“There,” Abram would declare, “was born a new regime.” It was
the beginning of the movement of elite fundamentalism that would,
in the 1980s, come to be known as “the Family.”
That meeting also marked a turning point in Langlie’s long and
successful pol itical career. Langlie came to the prayer movement as a
representative of a brotherhood of young businessmen across the
state of Washington called the New Order of Cincinnatus. Twelve
hundred strong, the Cincinnatans presented a “New Order” of moral
and economic force in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. Younger than
Abram’s establishment gures, the Order ran candidates for o ce
under the banner of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus, sum-
moned from his farm ve centuries before Christ to assume dictato-
rial power over a populace too exhausted by in ghting to make
decisions for itself.
When several of Langlie’s Cinci nnatans showed up at the city
comptroller’s o ce to register, they came anked by men of the
Order wearing identical white shirts, joining a rai nbow of li ke-
minded lovers of discipline and i ntimidation—not just Mussolini’s
Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts but the Greenshirts of the
118 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Blueshirts of Ire-
land, and, in America, the Silver Shirts, the initials of which, SS,
deliberately chosen, justi ed the amboyant color. The men of the
Order gave themselves mi litary ranks and considered adding a sieg
heil–style salute to their public image, but decided that would be “too
fascist.” The Order’s rst “National Commander,” an excitable former
Republican operative, saw models for such qualities in the strong
men across the Atlantic and the bureaucrats who made their govern-
ments run like Henry Ford’s assembly lines. The Order craved e -
ciency. One of its rst goals after its formation in 1933 was a Washington
state constitutional convention at which local police forces would
be eliminated and replaced with troopers trained at retooled state
colleges.3
Langlie never o cially joined the Order, but he became its chief
candidate. The year of the big strike, the Order took control of Seat-
tle’s city council by invoking middle-class fears of a Wobbly insurrec-
tion. Poverty, it mai ntained, was part of the natural way of things.
The Order had two solutions to econom ic malaise: slash taxes and
attack vice. As councilman, Langlie purged the city’s police depart-
ment, which routinely ignored Sunday liquor sales, Chinese gam-
bling halls, and the prostitution that prospered in a port city like
Seattle. He then turned his ax toward the re department (poor
moral specimens) and public school teachers (indoctrinating the
youth with godless notions). With his allies in the Order, he suc-
ceeded in passing a bud get so brutal that the city’s conservative Re-
publican mayor, whose rst act i n o ce had been to literally lead a
police charge against the previous year’s strikers, vetoed it as con-
temptuous of human su ering. So Langlie decided to depose him.
The Order’s rise won attention as far away as Manhattan, where a
titillated New York Times thrilled to the movement’s youthful fervor.4
In Abram’s tel ling, Langlie stood, pledged himself, and simply
ascended to publ ic o ce. Langlie had in fact taken his city council seat
without the trouble of an election; his opponent, wary of a public ght
with the Order, simply stepped down and appointed Langlie to re-
place him. But despite the Order’s white- shirted military manner and
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 119
the nancial backing of Abram’s brotherhood, his rst bid for the
mayoralty failed. The Democrat who’d been ousted in 1934, a am-
boyantly corrupt opportunist named John Dore, charged Langl ie with
running as the candidate of a “secret society.” Dore wound up his
campaign with a ninety-minute speech denouncing Langl ie as a fascist
so dangerous that his own almost-open corruption was preferable.
The city that had thrown Dore out in a special election only a year
before agreed with that diag nosis: Democrats, radicals, and even Re-
publ icans united to return the crook to power.
“The insincerity of [Dore] is almost unquestionable,” the novelist
Mary McCarthy observed. Double-chinned Dore perched his spec-
tacles on the end of his nose and reveled in his royal belly and, as a
sign of his high regard for the common man, occasionally went down
to the docks and passed out glasses of beer to incom ing sailors. As far
as conservatives were concerned, he might as well have grown a mus-
tache and changed his name to Stalin. But Mary McCarthy under-
stood that the “ Soviet of Washington,” as one wag dubbed the state,
was more like a vaudeville routine than a government on the verge of
a worker’s utopia. “The state of Washington is in ferment,” she wrote
in The Nation; “ it is wild, comic, theatrical, dishonest, disorganized,
hopeful; but it is not revolutionary.”5
Dubbed “Labor’s Mayor” by the conservative press, Dore was
really the right-wing Teamster chief Dave Beck’s man. “Dave Beck
runs this town, and I tell you it’s a good thing he does,” Dore de-
clared as he squared o with Langlie again in 1938, a bald confession
of fealty to bossism. The race garnered broad attention, “a mayoralty
election of national signi cance,” in the words of the New York Times.6
At stake seemed to be the future of organized labor in the North-
west, which, as one of the labor movement’s strongholds, was a
bellwether for the nation. Dore stood for Beck, and Beck stood for
the old, management-friendly craft unions of the American Federa-
tion of Labor. His opponent on the Left, Lieutenant Governor Vic
Meyers, championed the newborn Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions, an alliance of more militant, pro-worker unions. And out in
right eld stood Langlie, so far from friendly to any labor union that
120 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
even the rabidly right-wing Los Angeles Times tagged him as “ultra-
conservative.”7
Lieutenant Governor Meyers, the most well-liked man in the
state, should have won. But for once the Left did itself in with a sense
of humor. Meyers had entered public service in 1932 as a joke. A
beaming, mustache-twirling master of ceremonies at the city’s most
fashionable nightclub, he’d campaigned at the head of an oompah
band, wearing the uniform of a circus drum major. If elected, he’d
prom ised, he’d put a pretty girl hostess on every streetcar.
Such was the state of the union in 1932—its disgust with the big
business do-nothingism of Herbert Hoover—that Meyers and his
trombone campaign marched into o ce on FDR’s coattails. By 1938,
though, after years of strikes and police violence, Meyers had grown
serious about doing something for working people. Unfortunately,
he still loved a good costume, and he campaigned dressed as Ma-
hatma Gandhi. Even Harry Bridges, Meyers’s chief backer, couldn’t
make the bandleader look like a serious candidate.
So Dore and Meyers canceled each other out, and between them
slipped the winner, Arthur B. Langlie. The verdict was in: neither
the AFL nor the CIO represented the future. “Good government,” as
Langlie called his platform of bud get slashing and punishi ng moral
rectitude, trumped labor. “ Seattle Deals Radicals a Blow,” declared
the Los Angeles Times. “ Whole Left Wing Beaten,” ampli ed the New
York Times.8
What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his broth-
erhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence
that Langlie ever even took a dri nk, much less a bribe.) The days of
“ honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another
perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and
Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as
legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around
the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the
law to serve them. His kind of good government meant deals for
your friends but not envelopes full of cash. He didn’t rule through
fear or nesse but through prayer. If Abram and Langlie could help it,
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 121
there would be no bullets, no bribes. Instead, there would be a circle
of men listening to Jesus by listeni ng to one another’s remarkably
similar views. It was the rst ful llment of Abram’s dream of gov-
ernment by God.
And although no one could see it in 1938, the shape of the Langlie
campaign—the New Order of Cincinnatus as his political comman-
dos, Abram’s God-picked elites, by then coming to be known as “the
Fellowship,” as his brain trust, and Abram’s old network of housewives
transformed into “prayer group” precincts for Langl ie—was a bell-
wether indeed. Not of labor’s future—that was already eroding—but
of prayer breakfast pol itics in the Christian nation to come.
“We work with power where we can, build new power where we
can’t.” These words belong to Doug Coe, who seized the Fellowship’s
top spot in a succession struggle following Abram’s death in 1969 and
began transforming it into what I eventually encountered as the Fam ily.
His blunt formulation of the Fellowship’s political theology is as much
in play now as it was in 1969, and, indeed, in 1938, when Abram and
his quiet gathering of businessmen staked Langlie to the beginning of
his career. On the face of it, such words seem brutal, a foreshadowing
of revolution—or counterrevolution, as conservatives like to say.
And yet Langlie- as-mayor, then governor, demonstrated the Fel-
lowship’s subtler ambitions. Theocratic by instinct and fasci nated by
fascism accordi ng to the fashion of the times, the Fellowship never
molted i nto Europe an- style authoritarianism. Its most radical goals
were (and remain) long-term, its method—the man- method, Abram
called it—painstaking, dependent not on mass conversion but on
individual assimilation i nto polite fundamentalism. “The more im-
personal our order becomes,” observed Theodor Adorno in a study
of 1930s fundamentalism, “the more i mportant personality becomes
as an ideology.” Abram’s man-method was a perfect il lustration of
this truth, but whereas Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany, saw
this trend as leading only to populist demagogues, Abram recognized
that “personality” in place of ideology could also preserve elite power
122 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
in an age of mass movements. Good manners mattered to the immi-
grant preacher; the men he drew to him tended to be discreet, pol-
ished characters. They were fundamentalism’s avant-garde, its most
radical thinkers, but to all appearances they were creatures of the
country club, golf course crusaders.
Langlie epitomized the breed. In 1935, at the Canyon Creek
Lodge, he rose from his knees as a “God-led” politician, literally a
theocrat, and he campaigned as a modern-day Cincinnatus. As gov-
ernor, he attempted (and failed) to pass a law giving him the power
to suspend the law—almost all of it—if he desired.
So Langlie accepted the constraints of democ racy as he found
them. He did what business asked: purged welfare rolls, abolished
guaranteed wage laws, denounced Democrats as un-American. In
1942, he i nvestigated the possibility of using martial law to suppress
organized labor, but when his advisers told him it would be unconsti-
tutional, he settled for ordi nary strikebreaking.9 He governed, in
other words, as a right-wing Republican.
And yet the Fellowship was attracted to a kind of soft fascism. In
1932, Abram took as a Bible student Henry Ford. By then, the auto-
maker was a wizened old leather strop of a man, wary of controversy.
He had been the American publisher of the notoriously fraudulent
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fantasia concocted i n czar-
ist Rus sia to justify pogroms against Jews, and the author of The Inter-
national Jew, a book many Nazis would later credit with awakening
their Aryan anti-Sem itism. During the previous decade, historians
suspect, he’d illegally nanced Adolf Hitler. But it was not just na-
tional socialism’s bigotry that Ford supported, nor even mainly that.
What Ford, inventor of the assembly line, loved above all was e -
ciency. Even his war of words against the Jews had been in the inter-
ests of standardization, the purging of “others” from the American
scene. And yet, in 1932, Ford wanted certain details of his campaign
for American purity to disappear. He wanted to sell cars to Jews. He
was i n need of a makeover, a quick bath in the Blood of the Lamb.
Ford’s wife heard Abram speak in Detroit and insisted that he
meet with her husband, no doubt guessing that Abram’s theology of
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 123
biblical capitalism would sit well with the tycoon, an eccentric reli-
gious thinker who had been raised on populist American fundamen-
talism. Abram and Ford traded Bible verses through a series of meetings
in Ford’s o ces, and then Ford invited Abram to his home in Sud-
bury, Massachusetts. “They were together two days,” rec ords Abram’s
biographer Grubb, “[Ford] unloading about spiritual, intellectual,
and business problems, and Abram seeking to give the answer for
himself and the nation.” Abram thought Ford “befuddled,” full of
hal f- baked religious notions gathered from partial readings of Hindu
texts and theosophy. “The question was,” Abram thought, “How
could he be untangled?”
Their meetings continued in Michigan. Abram was drawn like a
moth to the great man’s wealth—to the possibility that Ford might
put his tremendous worldly resources behind a campaign for govern-
ment by God. But he was frustrated by Ford’s failure to settle on one
simple fundamental ist explanation of life and the universe, until, at
their nal meeting, Ford nally shouted, “Vereide, I’ve got it! I’ve got
it! I found the release that you spoke of. I’ve made my surrender. The
only thing that matters is God’s will.”
But Ford continued to see divine will best expressed in German
fascism. As Hitler’s power grew, Ford became more comfortable
expressing his admiration. It was mutual; the Führer hu ng a portrait
of Ford behind his desk and told the industrialist, on a visit Ford paid
to Nazi Germany, that national socialism’s accomplishments were
simply an implementation of Ford’s vision.
That was a perspective that, unli ke theosophy, gave Abram no
pause. Such was the nature of Abram’s ecumenicism. For Jews he felt
nothing, one way or the other, but he would no more discriminate
against an anti-Semite than against a Presbyterian. He welcomed the
vigor anti-Sem itism brought to his cause. After the war, another ma-
jor American fascist sympathizer—Charles Lindbergh—would pre-
side for a brief period over a prayer cell modeled on Abram’s original.
Lindbergh rst came under FBI scruti ny, in fact, for his association
with a man who would become a stalwart of Abram’s inner circle and
a member of the board of the Fellowship, by then incorporated as
124 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
International Christian Leadership. Merwin K. Hart was an “alleged
promoter of the American Fascist movement,” according to FBI les,
and denounced publicly as a Nazi in all but name by Robert H. Jack-
son, the FDR-era attorney general who went on to serve as a justice
of the Supreme Court and chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.
To Abram, Hart was a dapper habitué of New York’s blue blood
clubs, a crucial node in his network of top men. He was a recruiter;
operating out of the Empire State Building, he organized busi ness
executives bent on breaking the spine of unionism into an organiza-
tion called the National Economic Council, and from those ranks he
selected men for the Fellowship whose devotion to the antilabor
cause was religious in intensity. Hart was Abram through a glass,
darkly: if Abram could not distinguish between men of power and
men of morals, Hart could not tell the di erence between commu-
nists and Jews, who through “deceit” and “trickery,” he preached,
threatened the “complete destruction” of the American way of life.10
Then there were the actual Nazis who would joi n Abram’s prayer
circles in the postwar years. But that story must wait until the next
chapter. To understand Abram’s weirdly ambivalent relationship with
fascism—to understand the uneasy echoes of the last century’s most
hateful ideology in contemporary American fundamentalism—we
must exhume an unlikely pair of “thinkers”: Frank Buchman and
Bruce Barton, two of the most i n uential hucksters of early twentieth-
century America.
Buchmanism
In 1935, Frank Buchman was at the height of his powers, a small,
well-nourished, and well- tailore d man of no natural distinction, who
found himself touring the world in the company of kings and queens
and bright, young, rosy-cheeked lads from Oxford and Cambridge
and Princeton. True, Buchman was banned from Princeton, where
as a Lutheran minister he had stalked students he thought eligible for
soul surgery, as he would come to call his variation on the born- again
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 125
procedure; and Oxford University was contemplating legal measures
to stop him from using its name for his movement. He was then call-
ing his followers the “Oxford Group,” havi ng discarded “First Cen-
tury Christian Fellowship” —a name Abram would later consider—as
perhaps boastful, not to mention inaccurate when applied to Buch-
man’s hundreds of thousands of twentieth-century devotees. “Oxford
Group,” though, was no more descriptive of the international ci rcuit
of confessional “ house parties” for the well-to-do inspired by Buch-
man. He had not attended Oxford (or Cambridge, though he would
claim the latter in his Who’s Who biography). He was a graduate of
modest Muhlenberg College in what was then Pen nsylvania coal
country.11
“Moral Re-Armament,” coined by Buchman as Europe entered
World War II, was the name that eventually stuck. Not quite an
organization—there were no dues or membership rol ls—but less
democratic in spirit than a social movement, Moral Re-Armament
deployed its military metaphors through Buchman’s never-ending
lecture tour, propaganda campaigns, and the spiritual warfare prac-
ticed by his disciples in service of an ideology “Not Left, Not Right,
but Straight,” in the words of one of Buchman’s hagiographers.12
Moral Re-Armament’s aims were so broadly utopian as to be mean-
ingless, but in practice it served distinctly conservative purposes: the
preservation of caste. “There is tremendous power,” preached Buch-
man, “i n a minority guided by God.”13
It is probably most accurate to name Buchman’s innovation as did
the papers of his day: Buchmanism. After all, it was Buchman’s
idea—later adapted and sharpened by Abram—that the mass evan-
gelism practiced by men such as Charles Fi nney and Billy Sunday
would never appeal to the “best people,” those whom the liquor
salesman’s son from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, had dreamed of culti-
vating for Christ since his rst job, running a home for troubled boys
in Philadelphia, had ended in abrupt dismissal.
The cause of Buchman’s ring is murky, as is the precise nature
of the charges leveled against him at Pri nceton. In the rst case he
seems to have paid too little attention to the children’s needs, and in
126 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
the second, too much to the undergraduates. In particular, the uni-
versity’s president resented Buchman’s fasci nation with the sex lives
of young Princetonians. Buchman estimated that between 85 and 90
percent of all sin is sexual, and thus to him it was natural to encour-
age young men to confess theirs in detail.14 There is no evidence that
he took advantage of the information. He had kissed a girl once when
he was a boy, but thereafter lived as a sort of eunuch. In college his
nickname was “Kate,” and in the drama society he played mainly fe-
male roles. Many close to him thought it obvious that he inclined to-
ward the best-looking men of the best universities, but in terms of
Christian conservatism and the anxieties that plague it today, he was
ahead of his time in the fury with which he denounced homosexual-
ity as a threat to civilization. Moreover, he was an exceedingly care-
ful student of the crisis: In a pamphlet titled Remaking Men, he
observed, “there are many who wear suede shoes who are not homo-
sexual, but i n Europe and America the majority of homosexuals do.”
Also, Buchman declared, their favorite color is green.15
Buchman’s own eyes were emerald, and capable of the most pen-
etrati ng glances. His followers believed he knew their sins before
they confessed them. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and, though
bald, was more than once described as “shampooed.” He loved to be
clean. Most striking about his appearance was his head; despite gi-
ant, pointed ears, it seemed several sizes too small for his round
body. “Frank,” as he insisted on being called, was the gnome of early
twentieth- century elite fundamentalism.
In the early 1930s, he and Abram crossed paths. Buchman was in
Ottawa to perform soul surgery on Canadian members of Parlia-
ment, and Abram, fresh from what would prove to be his short-lived
salvation of Henry Ford (Ford would later require renewal by Buch-
man, for whom he built a retreat in Michigan), was lecturing in
Canada on behalf of Goodwill Industries. The two met, and Abram
suggested to Buchman that he come on with Goodwill as a chaplai n,
to infuse the organization with his “life-changing” evangelical fervor.
Buchman answered by proposing a Quiet Time.16
Besides confession of sexual sin, Quiet Time was the core practice
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 127
of Buchmanism: a half-hour-long period of silence in which the be-
liever waited for “Guidance” from God. Guidance was more than a
warm feeling. It came in the form of direct orders and touched on
every subject of concern, from the transcendent to the mundane.
“The real question,” Buchman would preach, “is, ‘Will God control
America?’ The country must be ‘governed by men under instructions
from God, as de nitely given and understood as if they came by
wire.’ ”17 Guidance meant not just spiritual direction but declaring
one’s own decisions as divinely inspired. “We are not out to tell God,”
Buchman announced to an assembly of twenty- ve thousand in 1936.
“We are out to let God tell us. And He will tell us.”18
“What did God say to you? ” Buchman asked Abram when their
Quiet Time was completed. Abram believed he had heard God’s
voice several times in his life, and had even considered the possibility
that he might be a prophet, but he had not yet been exposed to the
idea that God spoke to men regu larly and in detail. “He didn’t say any-
thing,” Abram confessed, disappointed.
Well, Buchman replied, God had spoken to him. “God told me,
‘Christianize what you have. You have something to share.’ ”
Blander words no Sunday school teacher ever spoke, but to
Abram they seemed like a revelation. God had told Buchman not to
join Goodwill, but that didn’t matter. What was important was the
discovery that God should be consulted not just on broad spiritual
questions but on absolutely everything. This, Abram decided, was
what it meant to die to the self: to turn all responsibility over to
God. That such a transfer meant the abdication of any accountability
for one’s actions, that it provided justi cation for any ambition, did
not occur to him.
Thereafter he transformed his daily prayer ritual i nto Buchmanite
Quiet Time. And, soon enough, God lled the silence with instruc-
tions: go forth, he said, and build cells for my cause like Buchman’s.
The cell of spiritual warriors that elected Arthur Langlie was one
result. That cell of men listening to God during their Quiet Time
doubled itself, and the two became four, the four became eight. The
many cells for congressmen and generals and lowly government
128 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
clerks in the Washi ngton, D.C., of the present are the o spring of
that origi nal mitosis, catalyzed by Buchman. But to call them Buch-
manite wou ld n’t be quite right. When Buchman spoke of Christi-
anity’s “new illum ination,” “a new social order under the dictatorship
of the Spirit of God” that would transform pol itics and eradicate the
con ict of capital and labor, Abram took him literally.
Abram never actually attended a Buchman house party. Had he
done so, he m ight have veered away from his new enthusiasm. The
most successful events took place at one of the estates around the world
that Buchman used as outreach stations. He had won the allegiance of
a number of wealthy widows and heiresses and neglected wives of
businessmen, and they regularly showered him with riches, including
their great homes, to which Buchman would invite select groups for
a day in the country. There would be tennis and golf and some pray-
ing, and then the group would gather for the party. A re would be
built, the lights dim med, and Buchman or a trained confessor might
begin with some minor transgression, a tra c ticket, a youthful
prank. Another Buchman veteran m ight then up the ante. “ Some lad
might now turn evidence against a governess or an upstairs maid,”
observed a New Yorker writer in 1932. And from there it was on to the
weaknesses that a ict not just college boys but also the grand dames
who ocked to Buchman and the big men they dragged in their wake,
all stumbl ing over one another in elaborate description of their pri-
vate perversions, how they had been blinded to their purpose i n l ife
by sexual desire, and how “Guidance” had saved them. Around the
circle they went, spurring one another on.
And yet Buchmanism was not purely narcissistic. Once one had
been “changed,” as Buchmanites called the experience of coming
through soul surgery successfully, one was ready for political action.
What sort of action? On this, Buchman was vague. Like Abram, he
considered industrial strife an a ront to God, to be solved by
“changed” men among the captains of industry. Like Abram, he con-
sidered the sharp elbows of democracy an insult to the “dictatorship
of the Holy Spirit.” And it was from Buchman that Abram surely ab-
sorbed the idea of a leadership of “God-led” men organized into cells,
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 129
consulting not the unchanged masses but the mandate of Jesus as He
revealed Himself to them behind closed doors. Beyond that, though,
Buchman rarely went. Even more than Abram, he so desired the
company of powerful people that he was loath to align himself too
closely with any one faction. But in 1936, in a sympathetic portrait
published by the New York World- Tele gram, Buchman named names.
“But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered
to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such
a man, God could control a nation overnight and solve every last,
bewildering problem.” He seemed to think the pro cess had already
started: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front
line of defence agai nst the anti-Christ of Communism,” he told the
reporter.19
Buchman had just returned from the Olympic Games i n Berlin,
orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels as a visual symphony of black and
red swastikas and ea gles and the long, lean muscle of Aryan athleti-
cism. Most of the world would remember the “Nazi Olympics” for
the African American athlete Jesse Owens, but Goebbels’s spectacle
achieved its desired e ect on Buchman, who left Berlin with a surg-
ing admiration for the vigor of the Third Reich. In particular, Hein-
rich Himm ler, the chief of the Gestapo, had impressed him as a
“great lad,” a man whom he recommended to his followers in Brit-
ish government. The sentiment, to be fair, was not mutual. After
World War II, Buchman’s followers, eager to “wash out” their lead-
er’s past, would produce Gestapo documents condemning Buchman-
ism, though in terms not exactly reassuring: Himmler, it seems, saw
Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament as too close of a competitor to na-
tional socialism.
In 1936, ush with the excitement of Hitler’s Olympics, Buchman
gathered some American Oxford Group men at a house party at a
Lenox, Massachusetts, estate. The Oxfordites sat on the oor in their
tweeds as Buchman described the vision he brought back with him.
“Suppose we here were all God-controlled and we became the
Cabinet,” he said. Then he designated the World- Tele gram reporter
secretary of agriculture and poi nted to a recent Princeton graduate
130 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
(they came to him, since he could not go to them) to replace Cordel l
Hull, Roo sevelt’s secretary of state. Around the room he went, re-
ferring not to the talents of his followers but to their willingness to
govern by Guidance.
“Then,” he continued, “in a God-controlled nation, capital and
labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-
controlled situations.” The distribution of wealth would remain as it
was, but the workers would be content to be led by employers who
were not greedy but God-controlled. Echoing the words of U.S.
Steel’s James A. Farrell that had so inspired Abram in 1932, words
which the Fellowship repeats to this day, Buchman declared, “Hu-
man problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be
solved by immoral measures.”
In 1936, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh
openly adm ired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of govern-
ment to which these words poi nted. Human problems, Buchman told
his little group that night in Lenox, require “a God-control led de-
mocracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, said Buch-
man, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”
He paused. He let his emerald eyes glide over the young man-
hood of Buchmanism, sitting cross-legged on the oor before hi m as
if he was a Greek philos opher. Frank sm iled and adjusted the red rose
in his boutonniere.
“There is a book in the store windows in London and New York,”
Buchman told an assembly at the Metropol itan Opera House in No-
vember of 1935. “The title is It Can’t Happen Here. Some of you who
read the very important words of the Secretary of State, ‘Our own
country urgently needs a moral and spiritual awakening,’ may have
said the same thing, ‘It can’t happen here.’ ”
Buchman had taken the stage that eve ning to tell Manhattan’s
wealthiest that it could. “Thi nk of nations changed,” he told his audi-
ence, urging them to imagine soul surgery on a national scale, or
something even grander: “God- controlled supernationalism.” 20
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 131
Buchman never was one for details. Had he bothered to pick up
the book he considered too pessimistic, he would have discovered
that the It of the volume’s title was fascism. Five years earlier, the
book’s author, Sinclair Lewis, had become the rst American to win
the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of novels such as Bab-
bit, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry. It Can’t Happen Here wasn’t Lewis’s
nest work, but it contained some of his scariest writing. Can’t hap-
pen here? Lewis’s novel contended that it already had, in countless
little rooms across the country, at gatherings of Rotarians and the
Daughters of the American Revolution, in hot- blooded church meet-
ings and movie houses where gun ghters bestrode American dreams
like Mussol inis in spurs. All that was wanting was the right key man
to take up the sword and the cross and move into the oval o ce. In
the novel, that man is Senator Buzz Windrip, a folksy southerner
backed by a radio preacher called Bishop Peter Paul Prang and his
“League of Forgotten Men.”
The story opens with the “Ladies Night Dinner” of a small town
Rotary Club, and Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimm itch, an expert on “Child
Culture,” lecturing a group of concerned citizens in eve ningwear.
Her sermon could have been lifted directly from Abram: “I tell you,
my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are
sel sh! Here’s a hundred and twenty mil lion people, with ninety- ve
per cent of ’em only thinki ng of self, instead of turning to and helping
the responsible business men to bri ng back prosperity! All these cor-
rupt and sel f- seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only
of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate em-
ployer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!
“What this country needs is Discipli ne.”
The novel’s voice of reason is the local newspaper editor, one
Doremus Jessup, i nto whose mouth Lewis packs a dense but brief ac-
count of the authoritarian strain i n American history.
Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more
hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look
how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana,
132 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip
owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin
on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how
casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting
and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of Presi-
dent Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Wind-
rip’s, be worse? Remember the Ku Klux Klan? Remember
our war hysteria, when we cal led sauerkraut “Liberty cab-
bage” and somebody actually proposed calling German mea-
sle s “Liberty measles”? And wartime censorship of honest
papers? Bad as Rus sia! Remember our kissing the—well,
the feet of Billy Sunday, the m illion-dol lar evangelist . . .
Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obe-
dience to Wil liam Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology
from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scienti c experts
and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the
teaching of evolution? . . . Remember the Kentucky night-
riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to en-
joy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down
people just because they might be transporting liquor—no,
that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in al l history has
there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!21
And yet that fruit was never plucked. The United States did not
then—and has not yet—succumbed to fascism. Nor, for that matter,
does the contemporary Christian Right embrace even a modern strain
of “national socialism.” Many of the ingredients are there: m ilitaristic
patriotism, a blurry identi cation of church with state, a reverence
for strong men, a tendency to locate such men at the top of corporate
hierarchies, even a hated “other” (for American fundamental ists, Jews
and Catholics gave way to communists, and now the populist front of
the movement is divided over whom to demonize more, Muslims or
gay people).
But other elements of Europe an- style fascism never emerged in
the United States. Despite the nation’s near constant involvement in
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 133
one war or another for the last sixty years, it has never adopted an
ideology that explicitly celebrates violence. Nor do we have a signi -
cant secret police force. And it is Christianity itself that has pre-
vented fundamentalists, America’s most authoritarian demographic,
from embracing the cult of personality around which fascist states
are organized. No matter how much the movement may revere Ron-
ald Reagan or George W. Bush or the next political savior to arise,
such men must always accept second billing to Jesus—The Man No-
body Knows, in the words of Bruce Barton’s 1925 best seller, perhaps
the most in uential forgotten book of the twentieth century.
Barton’s publisher boasted that the book could be read in two
hours, but most readers could bounce through it in half that time.
Less a narrative than a collage of advertisi ng copy, The Man Nobody
Knows o ered Christ on the cheap as “the most popu lar dinner guest
in Jerusalem!”22
Exclamation points come by the bushel in Barton’s work. “A fail-
ure!” the book opens—and here the exclamation point must be read
as an i ncredulous question mark, a quotation of the supposed liberal
view of Christ as “weak and puny,” an e eminate sadsack who died
on the cross because he could not do better. Barton responds with
the greatest Fortune magazi ne story ever told: “He picked up twelve
men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an orga-
nization that conquered the world.”
Barton himself was such a man. Shaped like a shoe box, he had a
at-faced head atop a rectangle of a body but was handsome all the
same in that lock-jawed manner that makes some men look like they
were born to captain industry. Barton’s name lives on as one fourth
of the advertising giant Batten, Barton, Dursti ne, and Osborne, but
his slim volume on Christ as the ultimate salesman exists now only as
an academic curiosity, evidence to historians of the “secularization”
of religion duri ng the 1920s. Published in the same year as the Scopes
mon key trial took place, The Man Nobody Knows has long looked to
such observers like proof that the chief concern of
secularism—busi ness—had subsumed theology. Barton made Jesus
into a management guru, and pro t trumped prophet. Even in the
134 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
era of a president who touts as his twin quali cations a business de-
gree and his intimate relationship with Jesus, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby
and Lewis’s Babbitt are celebrated as the de nitive texts of that earlier
age, the stories that shaped the later course of the nation.
And yet i n the 1920s, The Man Nobody Knows outpaced them both.
It was the book read on streetcars and the title punned on by admir-
ers, the volume distributed i n bulk at Christmas to friends and em-
ployees. So, too, its themes thrive now, far more so than Fitzgerald’s
despair or Lewis’s contempt for capitalism. Gatsby and Babbitt may
still be debated in high school English classrooms, but Barton’s
entrepreneur-Christ prospers on a broader scale, the “Master,” as
Barton called him, of best sellers such as God Is My CEO: Following
God ’s Principles in a Bottom- Line World, and Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wis-
dom for Visionary Leadership, and, most in uentially, Rick Warren’s
spiritual time- management manual, The Purpose- Driven Life —more
than 25 million copies sold since publication in 2002.
In Barton’s own day, Frank Buchman declared The Man Nobody
Knows one of the “three outstanding contributions to [his] life and
work.” 22 Abram did not record whether he, too, had read it, but he
wouldn’t have had to; Barton’s business-faith had entered the blood-
stream of American Christianity. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the
rise of Abram’s elite evangelicalism absent the pre ce dent of “top
man” rel igion set by The Man Nobody Knows. If the book espoused a
literally fundamentalist Jesus—a Christ stripped clean of all that
Barton considered feminizing cultural accretion—Barton was not,
himself, a fundamentalist. He was less interested in the doctrinal
battles of separatist rel igion than i n the driving force of Christianity
as the best means for national e ciency. In this sense, he followed
the example set by one of his chief theological advisers, Harry Emer-
son Fosdick, even as he hewed to a morality and politics more akin to
that of Billy Sunday.
In 1922, Fosdick had preached a sermon that drew the battle
lines and became a manifesto of sorts for modernist Christians. “Shall
the Fundamentalists Win?” attempted to prove that they couldn’t.
Ironically, it also established the political and theological vision that
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 135
would allow more sophisticated fundamentalists such as Abram to
build for the future.
“We must be able to think our modern life clear through in
Christian term s, and to do that we also must be able to think our
Christian faith clear through in modern terms,” Fosdick preached
from the pulpit of New York’s First Presbyterian Church. Remind-
ing his congregation of advances in science and, even more danger-
ously, biblical scholarship—the German “higher criticism” which
held that the Bible could be better grasped with a knowledge of its
historical context—he declared that “the new knowledge and the old
faith [have] to be blended in a new combination.”
Fosdick imagined that combination to be cosmopolitan and liter-
ary, shaped by a grasp of metaphor and a benign disdain for the liter-
alists of years past. He had no concept of the other meanings future
Christian conservatives would take from his call, shu ing the parts
around not in the service of high-mi nded liberalism but of sophisti-
cated, science-fueled fundamentalism. Fosdick’s accommodationist
vision of modernism illum inated the path for a traditionalist crusade
in which later fundamental ists —in uenced, not so indirectly, by
Marx, whom some read with the idea of turning his ideas to conser-
vative ends —realized that they could seize the means of cultural and
political production. They could make better radio than the liberals,
better propaganda, and most of all, they could shape and run and -
nance better politicians. Not just morally superior legislators but bet-
ter hacks—men (and, eventually, women) who took from modernism
only its rule book, not its goals, and bested its pure champions at the
game they thought they’d invented.
Fosdick smoothed the way with his powerful denunciation of
denominations, soon to become a bête noire of Christians who de-
ned their faith by the “fact” of spiritual war, in which there are ulti-
mately only two sides, theirs and the enemy’s, Christ’s and Satan’s.
“If,” preached Fosdick, “ during [World War I], when the nations
were wrestling upon the very brink of hell and at ti mes all seemed
lost, you chanced to hear two men i n an altercation about some mi-
nor matter of sectarian denominationalism, could you restrain your
136 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
indignation? You said, ‘What can we do with folks like this who, in
the face of colossal issues, play with the twiddlywinks and peccadil-
los of religion?’ ”
Of course, those “twiddlywinks” are the i ntellectual marrow of
Christianity and the convictions that prevent its more ancient pre-
cepts from merging too easily with modern politics. Barton, li ke
Fosdick, saw no reason not to do so. Upon returning to the United
States from a Europe an tour in 1930, he wondered, “How can we
develop the love of country, the respect for courts and law, the sense
of national obligation, which Mussolini has recreated in the soul of
Italy? ”23
He praised Mussolini’s “e ciency and progress” and Hitler’s
mastery of the adman’s science, psychology, after another Europe an
visit in 1934. “Only strong magnetic men inspire great enthusiasm
and build great organizations,” he’d noted in The Man Nobody Knows.
He wasn’t defending the dictators’ disregard for rights, he i nsisted,
but he had to adm ire Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda, so detailed in
its documentation of Jewish in uence in Germany that one could
easily see why Hitler’s rise “was not an unnatural thing to have hap-
pen.” 24 Declari ng himself of a “generous” frame of mind, he said that
he preferred Roo sevelt, whom he considered an antibusiness “ dicta-
tor,” to Hitler. Still, he seemed to see more similarity between them
than di erence. “Every new deal has to have some one to blame
when all the promises do not come true. We blame the reactionar-
ies; Hitler blames the Jews.” Four years later, Barton entered Con-
gress as a leading isolationist, opposed not only to war with the Axis
powers but to aid to the Allies as well.
But Barton was not a fascist in the vein of Henry Ford (whom he
quoted as an authority on Christian business in the Man Nobody Knows)
or even fuzzy-brained Frank Buchman. He was an advertising man, an
optimist. In an editorial for the Wall Street Journal titled “Hard Times,”
Barton quoted the Journal’s publisher on the necessity of poverty:
“What is taking place on this earth is a great experiment in the devel-
opment of human character. The Creator is not interested in money or
markets, but in more enduring men . . . su ering develops them.” 25
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 137
That the subjects of this great experiment were not as interested in
this development as were the captains of industry mildly puzzled Bar-
ton but did not bother him. He felt certain that they could be per-
suaded with a jingle and a catchy slogan, a “ juster” peace.
Such newspeak represents the chummy self-satisfaction of a mind
that mistakes the e ciency of short phrases for depth of meaning. In
The Man Nobody Knows Barton tells the story of a newspaperman as-
signed to cover an unnamed great issue of the day i n a single column.
When the reporter protested that one column was not enough space,
his editor told him to review the Book of Genesis—all of creation
summed up in a tidy 600 words. Not for Barton the lingering work
of theologians, who nd in sc ripture at least as many questions as
answers. Nor was he a man for the thickets of pol itical theory, a
limitation which, given his stated sympathies for strongmen, may
have saved him from a more frightening path. Mein Kampf ? That
doorstopper weighed in at nearly 1,0 00 pages. Barton simply lacked
the patience for fascism; Hitler was too deep for him.
But he also took one of fascism’s central premises too seriously to
embrace the ideology’s violence. Fascism, the word itself derived from
the Latin for a bundle of sticks bound together and thus unbreakable,
promised unity. Barton wanted that: unity. As an advertising man, he
bel ieved it could be achieved through persuasion rather than force of
arms. Moreover, he understood that the best way to sell a product was
not fear alone but fear plus desire: to stoke the consumer’s anxiety
that he or she lacked something, and then to press some button in the
brain that led to the conviction that acquiring it would lead to happi-
ness. Consumption, not fascism, was the core of his Christianity.
For Barton, and later Abram, the something was Jesus, the ulti-
mate “personality.” To Barton, one nation under God meant a nation
of consumers, their deepest needs and greatest wants in perfect ac-
cord with the products of BBD& O’s clients, General Electric and
General Motors and, in 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. For
Abram, unity meant the boss with his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder,
138 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Christ’s masculi ne love owing through his CEO key man and into
the workingman’s bones. Not fascism; in the future Barton and
Abram helped forge, God’s love would be hu ngered for and accepted
gladly. There would be no secret police, no jackboots, no Buzz Win-
drip, no cult of personality.
Rather, a Babbitt cult, as one of Barton’s Christian critics put it, a
cult of many personalities, all of them more or less the same, vessels
lled with His manliness, His will. The “man-method” that Abram
shaped from Buchman’s “Guidance” and Barton’s big business theol-
ogy, the freedom he dreamed of and preached for the next three de-
cades, was that of obedience. In a 1942 pamphlet titled Finding the
26 one of Abram’s lieutenants described the Babbitt cult
Better Way,
Abram had created and then replicated in San Francisco (led by a
former secretary of the navy), Los Angeles (chaired by an oilman),
and Philadelphia (started by Dr. Dan Poli ng, the squeaky-clean radio
preacher who would also serve as frontman for the city’s Republican
machine), as well as Chicago, New York, Boston, and some sixty
other cities.27
Washington, D.C. was one of them. That year, with the help of
Senator Ralph Brewster of Maine—a calculating character, both a
Yankee and a Klansman, Brewster evidently recognized Abram’s
more amiable Fellowship as the coming club for backroom dealing—
Abram convinced dozens of congressmen to begin attending his
weekly breakfast prayer meetings at the Hotel Willard. Abram him-
self was staying at the University Club, a clumsy old building next
door to the Soviet embassy. His rst meeting at the Willard took
place in the midst of a blizzard i n January 1942. Seventy-four men,
most of them congressmen, gathered to hear addresses by Howard
Coonley, the ultraright president of the National Association of
Manufacturers—and Abram. “The big men and the real leaders in
New York and Chicago look up to me in an embarrassing way,” he
wrote his wife, Mattie.
It was true. The president of Chevrolet requested an afternoon
with Abram, and the president of Q uaker Oats insisted on a morning
meeting. I n Chicago, he dined with steel magnates and railr oad titans
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 139
and Hughston McBain, the president of Marshall Field. In New York,
Thomas Watson of IBM summoned a group of men to hear Abram
speak at the Banker’s Club, Coonley opened doors for Abram to dis-
cuss God and labor with the president of General Electric, and J. C.
Penney, one of the nancial backers of modern fundamentalism,
took Abram to Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue to meet
Norman Vincent Peale, the apostle of “positive thinking” and possi-
bly the most deliberately banal man in American history. Abram
soon joined Peale as one of “the Twelve,” a council of Christian con-
servative leaders bent on working behind-the- scenes to rebrand fun-
damentalism in Peale’s feel-good terminology.
In Washington, Abram was even more popular. “Congressman
Busbey reported how respected, loved, and admired your husband
was there and the contribution he had made to Congress,” he wrote
Mattie. In the eve nings he summoned maids and busboys to his rooms
for knee-cracking prayer sessions that stretched into the night. Black
people, he liked to boast, loved him, and congressmen, he claimed,
ocked to him. Within a year of his arrival, he could stroll freely into
ne arly any o ce i n Washington. Senators Alexander Wiley of Wis-
consin, Raymond Willis of Indiana, and H. Alexander Smith of New
Jersey functioned as his lieutenants. Representative Walter Judd, a
former medical missionary from Minnesota, later to become a red
hunter nearly as cruel as McCarthy, became Abram’s man on the
House oor. David Lawrence, publisher of U.S. News (now U.S. News
and World Report), the most in uential media conservative in the coun-
try, joined the board of directors of Abram’s newly formed National
Comm ittee for Christian Leadership. Lawrence was Jewish, but with
Abram he prayed to Jesus as the only hope against communism —
never mind that the Soviets were American allies at the time.
To fu rther spread the Idea, Abram’s Finding the Better Way ex-
plained that the Breakfast Groups—the basic unit of the Fellow-
ship, from which some men would be recruited into cells—were
nonpartisan, open to everyone. But those who chose to attend were
of a disti nc t caste. According to the pamphlet, a “typical meeti ng”
of the Seattle group consisted of prayers, “comments,” and personal
140 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
testimonies by top executives from an array of regional and national
corporations. There was a man from J. C. Penney, and the president
of Seattle Gas. The president of Frederick & Nelson, then the North-
west’s largest department store—and its arbiter of upper-class
tastes—o ered “comments,” as did an executive from the Chicago,
Milwaukee, St. Paul & Paci c Railroad. The Democratic candidate
for governor and the Republican candidate for the Senate made ap-
pearances, but the Republican got the better spot: the closing prayer,
following Abram’s summation. Clearly, “typical” meetings made for
valuable campaign stops.
What of the pamphlet’s promise that “ representatives of both
capital and labor nd common ground ” at such? Of seventeen speak-
ers, only one spoke for labor, James Duncan (possibly the “Jim my” of
Abram’s rst sessions). An o cer of the International Association of
Machinists, Duncan helped drive a rift into the West Coast labor
movement with his rm opposition to a popular rank- and- le initia-
tive to allow African Americans to work for Boeing. His involvement
with the bosses who made up the membership of the Seattle Break-
fast 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, i f not a necessity. Activism on
its behalf bordered on treason.
Duncan evidently felt the same way, only more so. I n 1941 at Boe-
ing, Seattle’s biggest employer, Local 751 of the Aero Mechanics
Union voted to al low African Americans to join its membership, al-
ready 9,10 0 strong and sure to grow as the war demanded more
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 141
planes. But the local’s parent, Duncan’s International Association of
Machinists, claimed the union’s constitution barred nonwhites, union
democracy and the war e ort 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 val idate 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 fa-
thers, 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 thi nk 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 meet-
ing, goons associated with the pro-business, anti- black slate delivered
beatings to those they considered leaders of the pro-black faction.
The victims led 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 subm ission, the Machinist leadership of which the Fel-
lowship’s Duncan was an o cer produced an edition of their news-
letter, Aero Mechanic, featuring a cartoon of a black man applyi ng 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 spi ritual disobedience, though Barton
142 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
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 busi nessmen unhin-
dered by regulations. So in 1938 he won a seat in Congress by prom-
ising to “Repeal a Law a Day.” Or, i n 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 cur-
rently struggling.”30
Conventional wisdom holds that it was Ronald Reagan who be-
gan the real dismantling of the New Deal, but a closer examination
of the legislative record reveals that the pro cess began as early as
1943, in the midst of the war, when conservative southern Demo-
crats teamed up with Republicans to pass the anti-union Smith-
Con nally Act, the rst 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 meeti ngs for congressmen had pro-
duced 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 o er examples. It is easy to guess, however, that he had in
mind the previous year’s Taft- Hartley Act, known by even conserva-
tive 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 “teachi ngs of the Nazarene” for such politicians amounted to
deregulation, the removal of government intervention from matters
they thought rmly taken in hand by Jesus and His chosen representa-
tives. 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.
The Family by The Family by Jeff Sharlet| 143
All the vital activities of industry, commerce, and govern-
ment are carried on by corporations and other formal orga-
nizations. Such bodies are continually growing in size, and
hence the top leadership is continually growi ng in power and
in uence.
We have entered an era when the masses of the people
are dependent upon a rapidly dim inishing number of leaders
for the determination of their pattern of life and the de ni-
tion of their ultimate goals. It is the age of minority control.
[Emphasis mine.]
Lest anyone mistake Abram’s meaning during wartime, the pam-
phlet went on to poi nt to the Axis powers as examples of what could
go wrong if “mi nority control” got into the wrong hands. The pam-
phlet 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 i ne ective form of evangelism ever invented. But just as a mi-
nority “can wreck a nation,” a “ righteous ‘remnant’ ” chosen by God
can redeem it. “Men whose success shows them to have the abi lity to
lead cannot evade the responsibility for delivering America from its
present curse of spiritual indi erence and moral decadence. These
are the men whom others will follow.”
Years later, at the height of American postwar a uence —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 i n 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 planni ng, his love of liberty and his insistence on obedience.31
After the years of fascist pageantry and war, wrote Marcuse in an es-
say titled “ The New Forms of Control,” comes the age of “comfort-
able, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.”
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