Unit Number One
The Idea, Part 1
Afamiliar tableau: a man on his knees before dawn,
praying secret prayers for guidance. Only now it’s the 1920s, and the
heir to the title of First Revivalist is Billy Sunday, a former ballplayer
who worked the stage as if he was covering second base and calling
the game at the same time, dashing back and forth between velvet
curtains, winding up for a big throw and hollering at the batter. Sin-
ner! was Sunday’s cry. He railed against reds and women’s libbers and
tippling bohem ians. Christ he considered a man of action and then
some. Jesus, he preached, was a boxer, a brawler, a two- sted man’s
man who was also God. A twofer! Gone was the Jesus of Jonathan
Edwards, austere and intellectual. And fading, too, was Finney’s
Christ, an idea of the divine that re ected Finney’s own raw, native
vision. Sunday preached a prosperity gospel—God loves the
wealthy—and lived it as well. He was not a crook but a hustler, milk-
ing the masses with his holy-rolling vaudeville routines. Preoccupied
with fame, he revived the nation again but left it largely u naltered.
He did not advance the theocratic project, was not the next key man
of American fundamentalism.
That honor goes to our man kneeling in the dim blue of predawn
Seattle, murmuring prayers in a foreign tongue. The man is a Norwe-
gian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, known to most as Abram, a
preacher who has found in America the stature and respectability—by
88 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
way of a prestigious pulpit—that eluded him in his native Norway.
Still, something is beyond his grasp. He wants the peace he’s certain
God has promised him, yet su ering, in the abstract, distracts him.
Abram is immune to despair by this point in his life, but it bothers
him, and he wishes it wouldn’t.
He is a big man— t and square in the shoulders and in the jaw,
his face broad, severe, and intensely handsome—and a bighearted
man, too, and intelligent, but also simple, and glad to be so. He likes
things to be in their places: God in His heavens, Abram by his Bible,
men working where God puts them, al l content with their calling.
So it is clear something is wrong with the world: the poor. They are,
it seems plai n to him, out of place. Literally out of order. Something
has gone wrong. God prom ised us we would be happy when we
reached the Prom ised Land, and what, if not that, is America?
So what does God have in mi nd? Abram has not yet found an an-
swer. He keeps praying.
This morning, 4:30 a.m., he prays alone but he is not alone. His
son, Warren, is watching. He has newspapers to deliver. He moves
quietly through the darkened house, pulling on socks and dungarees
and tiptoeing down the back stairs so as not to wake his mother, so
often ill, restricted to bed but never resting easy. Just before the last
step, Warren hears a noise—a sudden intake of breath followed by an
exhalation. Li ke laughter, only it’s followed by a moan. Then Warren
hears a voice com ing from the kitchen. Perched on his step like a
mouse, not making a sound, Warren listens to his father’s deep mur-
mur, still thick with the accent of the fjords. Abram’s voice sounds
strange—not the way it does when he speaks to Warren or Warren’s
mother or to the big men he counts as his friends. This morning he
sounds as if he is talking to someone he loves and respects and of
whom he is just a little bit afraid.
“Do you want me, Lord, to go as Thy Ambassador?”
Silence. Abram’s shoulders seem to settle. Maybe he smiles. He
has received instructions.
“It is done,” Abram says, and Warren takes advantage of his father’s
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 89
moment of serenity to slip out into the early morning, leavi ng Abram
alone with his God.1
Abram prayed like this for years, and the years grew darker, the
poor poorer, the world more broken, until one day in April of 1935 he
received not just instructions for the day before him but a vision for
the decades; God’s hand moving His people in an entirely new direc-
tion. T he revelation God gave him was simple: To the big man went
strength, to the little man went need. Only the big man was capable of mending
the world. But who would help the big man? Who would console him
when he, as Abram did sometimes, wept in the early mornings? That
the big men of society wept Abram never doubted. He thought that
powerful people, so clearly blessed by God, must surely possess equally
great reserves of compassion and love that they wished to shower
down on the weak, if only someone would show them how.
Abram would show them how. This was his vision. His life thus
far—in 1935, he was forty-nine, his once-dark brow gray like a
North Paci c breaker—had followed an arc, he believed, but it had
taken him a long time to see it. His m inistry, he now real ized, was
not “among those who have had the bottom knocked out of life, its
derelicts, its failures,” as a friend would write years later, “ but, ultima-
tely, among those even more in need, who live dangerously in high
places.”
For nearly 2,0 00 years, Abram concluded, Christianity—that
is, the religion, the rituals, the stu of men with their weak, si nful
minds—had bent all its energies toward the poor, the sick, the starv-
ing. The “down and out.” Christianity gave them shes when it could
and hope when it had nothi ng else to o er. But what good had it
done? What had been accomplished between Calvary and 1935?
Just look at Seattle, Abram’s adopted hometown: nearly half the
city was on relief, and the other half was dark-eyed, eyeing the bless-
ings of the “top men” with envy, which is a blight on a man’s soul. A
rich man may have little hope of getting into heaven, but an envious
90 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
man could turn to violence and lose all hope for this world or the next.
Abram had to help such creatures, the derel icts, the failures. How? By
helping those who could help them—the high and the mighty—that
they m ight distribute the Lord’s blessings to the little men, whose envy
would be soothed, violence averted, disorder controlled.
Thereafter, Abram would spend his days arrangi ng the spiritual
a airs of the wealthy. It would be another decade—ten years spent
cultivating not just Seattle’s big men but those of the nation—before
Abram would coin a phrase for his vision: the “new world order.” By
then, 1945, he’d moved to Washington, D.C., and he cut a di erent
gure than he had as a preacher. He wore double- breasted suits with
lapels like wings, polka-dotted bow ties, and wide- brimmed fedoras.
He was often seen with his dark overcoat thrown over his shoulders
like a cape. Other men considered hi m a spectacular dresser; those
who knew him wel l considered his stylishness itself a minor m iracle,
since Abram was not wealthy. But God provided. As a young itiner-
ant preacher, he’d traveled on horse back with a six-gun and a Bible,
travel ing from farmer to farmer. Now, he carried a silk handkerchief
instead of a pistol, and he moved from rich man to rich man. He
stayed in the best hotels and clubs —the Waldorf-Astoria in New
York, the Union League in Chicago, Hotel Washi ngton in the na-
tion’s capital—as the guest of friends, and he traveled over the years
in the best cars (God led a rich man to give him the use of a
twenty-thousand-dollar Duesenberg), on private planes, i n Pullman
cars especially reserved for his use.
When as a young preacher out West he had once faced a pressing
debt of twenty- ve dollars and had no hope of paying it, a woman
unknown to him squeezed twenty- ve dollars into his hand. She told
him, he claimed, that she had been moved by God to give him cash;
had set out for his church with ve dollars; had been stopped by the
Lord at the threshold and been given to understand that Abram re-
quired more of her; had plucked another twenty dollars from her
purse; and had oated toward the beauti ful preacher, her money—
the equivalent today of hundreds of dollars —pressed, through no
will of her own, from her hand to his.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 91
His hands were enormous, his ngers long. His face was granite—
a straight, lipless line of a mouth and a jaw so square it could’ve been
used i n a geometry class. His eyes, set deep and serious beneath long
dark lashes and craggy brows, looked like pale ice. They were the
eyes not of a seducer but a persuader, a gaze men more than women
remembered. “God gave hi m a majestic gure,” his eldest son, War-
ren, would recal l. Like all those entranced by his father, Warren be-
lieved that God had granted Abram his manly appearance for a
purpose: to win powerful men to his cause.
Abram would become an exponent of a rel igion for the elite—the
“up and out,” as he called them —for the rest of his life. He termed
this trickle- down faith the Idea, and it was really the only idea he ever
had—the only one, he bel ieved, God gave him. In one sense, it was
nothing more than a defense of the status quo. It neither challenged
power nor asked for anything from the powerful but their good in-
tentions. In another, it was the most ambitious theocratic project of
the American century, “every Christian a leader, every leader a Chris-
tian,” and this ruling class of Christ-committed men bound in a fel-
lowship of the anointed, the chosen, key men in a voluntary
dictatorship of the divine.
From Seattle, Abram traveled the world with the Idea, winning to
its self-satis ed simplicity the allegiance of senators, ambassadors,
business executives, and generals. Every president beginning with
Eisenhower has attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast Abram
founded in 1953. He never achieved his dream—the United States is
no more a theocracy today than it was in Charles Finney’s lifetime—but
in his pursuit of it he stood at the vanguard of an el ite fundamental ism
that shaped the last half century of American and world politics in
ways only now becoming visible. Abram, observed two approving
evangelical writers in a 1975 study, Washington: Christians in the Corri-
dors of Power, “personally in uenced thousands of community, national,
and world leaders, who in turn in uenced countless others, a remark-
able chain reaction . . . Many of them have never heard of [Abram],
much less seen him. But his shadow is upon them.” 2
Shadow is indeed the word for Abram’s legacy. In 2005, Time
92 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
magazine labeled Abram’s successor, Doug Coe, the stealth persuader,
a term that might just as easily have t his mentor. Abram’s upper-
crust faith was not a conspi racy, but it was not meant for the masses,
either. Until recently, those masses—fundamentalist as well as
secular—barely knew it existed.3
Abram heard his own peculiar God for the rst time in Norway,
one June morning in 1895 when as an eight-year-old boy he was tak-
ing his father’s cattle to pasture in the high cold elds of the Norwe-
gian village from which Abram’s family took their surname. In later
life, Abram would often insist that he had been born poor, but among
the white houses and red barns of the one-thousand-year-old village
of Vereide, his family’s home—close to the church and surrounded
by oak trees —was far from the humblest. The inlet near the village
was narrow enough to resemble a river, and over it loomed two
mountai ns, the peaks of which were perfect triangles of black and
white, laced with snow even in June. In between stretched farmland,
the future that awaited Abram if he remained. His father was a fore-
man of sorts for land owned by the crown. But Abram was restless, a
popular boy yet angry and given to ghting.
His mother had died shortly before the June day on which he rst
heard God’s voice, and her last prayers had been for a calm ing of her
boy’s temper. That June morning, he took those prayers with him
into the elds. As he closed the gate behind him, his grief combined
with his anger into a cloud of guilt and regret, of longing for his
mother and for the good son he believed he should have been. He
couldn’t bear himself: he ran. He abandoned the cows. He hid in a
grove of elder trees, crying and shivering despite the sun that crept
through the leaves. A brook burbled, and the ai r smelled of cow
dung. He wanted to pray, but he didn’t know how. He’d never paid
attention to his mother’s prayers. Then, into his mind came words:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee and called thee by name, thou art mine.
Abram would later say that at the time he had not yet read the
Book of Isaiah, from which those words came. Perhaps he had read
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 93
the verse, or heard it spoken by his mother, or maybe it was as he’d
come to believe years later, in America: a supernatural call to the
divine. Whichever the case, t hose words were the rst i ntimations
of what would become Abram’s theology. They resolved the age-old
question of theodicy—why does God let bad things happen to good
people?—by ignoring the fact that they had happened at all. Rather
than wrestle with grief and loss, as the best Christian thi nki ng does
so profoundly, Abram found in the grove the seeds of a faith that he’d
thereafter use as a shield against even the awareness of pai n, of doubt,
of the danger of despair and the hard, precious hope won from that
knowledge. This was the birth of Abram’s “positive” Christianity: the
censorship of su ering.
Ten years later, eighteen years old and educated to that point but
with no prospects in Norway other than a life in the eld, Abram left
for America, the “ land of the Bible unchained,” as he dreamed of it.
He arrived at Ellis Island after a stormy voyage, and very rst thing a
woman rushed up to him and said, “Welcome!” and pressed into his
hands a New Testament. Abram thought her rude and wonderful,
just like America. But her kindness added no advantage. Besides his
new American Bible and a Norwegian copy, he had nothing. His
clothes were homespun, stitched by his sisters; his shoes were goat-
skin, from a goat he had slaughtered; his suitcase was a leather box of
his own devising. He had only the name of a countryman who would
help to seek out in Butte, Montana, a boomtown run like a efdom
by giant Anaconda Copper, and just enough money to get there, a
hard journey of fteen days.
His con nection turned out to be a man in a shack by the railroad,
but the old hand knew what to do with a new Norwegian. “Let’s go
uptown and meet the boys,” he said, and took Abram past a row of
brothels punctuated by whore-lined alleys to a saloon. At the saloon
Abram’s guide sat him at a bar amid a gang of m iners who sweated
whiskey and copper, and all clinked glasses in his honor. He would
not raise his glass. They called him a dumb greenhorn. He didn’t
care. They cursed him. He stood up, broad- shouldered and straight-
backed, his icy blue eyes set in handsome features, ruddy but clear, a
94 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
rebuke to the scars hard labor and whoring had written across his
companions. He frowned upon them, the whiskey, the cleavage of
women, the stink of the men, the rumble of the bar, the land of
mammon unchained.
“You are in America now—do like Americans do,” one man
said.
That was exactly what Abram planned; he would do as the
Americans of his imagination did. “No, thank you,” he said, his
voice controlled. “I never tasted liquor i n my life, and I can get along
without it.”
Into the cold night under a sky lled with strange stars, he walked
until he came to the cli s that loom over Butte. He shivered and
stared at the mines below, lit up for night shifts like glittering stones.
There he wept, and then he shouted, to the God he had been certain
he would nd i n America. And out of the darkness, he would say to
the end of his days, he heard the voice of his Lord, speaking the clean
English the imm igrant would soon master. This time the words came
from Proverbs: There is yet a future and your hope shall not come to
naught.
“In America,” he’d assured his worried father, “education is free,
money is plentiful, and everyone has a chance.” Instead, his rst ex-
perience of the United States was the savage li fe of immigrants, men
and women pressed i nto the hardest, most dangerous work. In the
days that followed, he did such labor himself, knocking around the
copper camps of Montana, a once-healthy farm boy eventually laid
low by sickness and industrial poison, “copper-tinged water” that put
him into a state of sem iconsciousness that lasted for days, halluci na-
tory hours spent at on his back in the shack by the railroad tracks,
his gaunt body sweating away the butter and beef and herring on
which he had grown strong in Norway. It was God’s doing, he be-
lieved: “The Europe an starch had to be washed out.”
And it was. The boy from the village that bore his family name
worked as a section hand, a oor mopper, and a hard laborer, beaten
out of his wages again and agai n by crooked bosses who called him a
“ big-footed Norwegian”—feet, apparently, being the currency of
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 95
bigotry with regard to Norsemen. On the Fourth of July 1905,
Abram asked to be paid for work he had done as a paint er in the town
of Basin so he could buy some “American clothes” to celebrate the
holiday. Stick it, said the boss. So Abram took the American option:
“when I heard the train whistle, bound from Basin to Butte, I said
goodbye.” In Butte on that Fourth of July, Abram spent his last dime
on a streetcar ride to a park on the edge of the city, where he found a
grove of trees far from the American celebration. He had no money,
no friends, no place to sleep. The city was too far behind for him to
walk back, but that didn’t matter: Abram wanted to die right there
and be done. It was a moment like Finney’s, only starker: Abram’s
su ering was in his belly as well as his soul. He sat in the shade of the
trees beneath the high pl ains sun and waited for an answer. He’d
brought all his possessions with him in a small bundle—the goat hide
suitcase from home lost along the way—and from it he took out his
New Testament and began to read through his tears. As his eyes
scanned the now-familiar words, he sensed God Himself once again
speaki ng: Ye have not chosen me, but I chose you . . . The Gospel of John,
chapter 15, verse 16 . . . Whatsoever you ask the Father in my name, he
shall give it to you.
Then—a sign, Abram thought—through the woods, came a man
who found Abram wiping away his tears. The man had a beautiful
smile. He opened his mouth to speak. Abram would later remember
not so much the words as their sound: this messenger from God was
a Norwegian. Not an angel but a former saloonkeeper who’d found
Jesus before he’d found Abram. As i f, Abram thought, God was lin-
ing up all his experiences in the New World to reveal a singular les-
son. Ye have not chosen me, but I chose you . . . The Norwegian took
Abram home to live with his fami ly that Fourth of July, and through
him Abram eventually found his way to a Methodist sem inary, the
free education he had boasted of to his father, and the hand in mar-
riage of a well-o minister’s daughter, the m iddle-class step up into
American l ife Abram had been looking for. W hatsoever you ask the Fa-
ther in my name, he shall give it to you.
The one word that does not appear in the notes on his life Abram
96 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
prepared near the end of his life, when instead of sheepskin he wore
silk and gabardi ne, when instead of miners and cowboys he preached
to senators and presidents, is power. But in 1935, when Abram was
just beginning to dream his real ministry, he wrote the word once,
in the margin of a church program. It was at the bottom of a list of
names of men he had recruited. Besides each was a responsibility: or-
ga ni za tion, nances. Beside his own name, he wrote power—and then
crossed it out. If it must be said, it can’t be had. Power, Abram real-
ized as he moved through the high corner o ces of businessmen and
leaders, has nothing to do with forcing the devil behind you or mak-
ing the company increase your wages. Power lies in things as they
are. God had already chosen the powerful, his key men. There they
are, Jesus whispered in Abram’s ear; go and serve them.
Throughout the 1920s, Abram directed Seattle’s division of
Goodwill Industries. He didn’t just open stores for used clothes; he
organized 49,000 housewives into thirty- seven districts and set them
to work salvaging goods for the poor. In 1932, Franklin Roo sevelt,
governor of New York, invited Abram to his o ce to discuss his or-
ganizing system. Later he’d come to see Rus sian red running through-
out Roo sevelt’s New Deal, but at the time Abram was captivated by
another man sum moned to advise the governor, James Augustine
Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation. Abram had
met industry chiefs before then, but here was a titan. A tal l, stern
man of dark suits and high collars, Farrell had led U.S. Steel for de-
cades, since not long after its creation as the biggest business enter-
prise in history, and he had a reputation as an indust rial free thinker.
The year before he’d rebuked a group of businessmen for treating
workers like ani mals. Farrell looked on his employees more li ke
children. Big business, he believed, ought to act as a big brother,
and to that end he i nsisted that the age of competition had passed;
captains of industry must be freed of antitrust legislation so that
they might better council together for the good of the innocent and
the poor.
Abram xed his rapt attention on the “steel shogun,” as the press
of the time called the industrialist. “Mr. Farrell reviewed the history
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 97
of America,” he’d remember, “and pointed out that we have had
nineteen depressions— ve major ones —and that every one was
caused by disobedience to divi ne laws.” Farrell o ered no evidence
for his dismissal of economic factors, but he did have a solution on
hand. “Now,” Abram recorded his words, “I am a Roman Catholic
and we don’t go i n much for revivals and such things, but I am sure as
I am sitting here that if we don’t get a thorough revival of genuine
religion . . . with a return to prayer and the Bible” —an oddly Prot-
estant aim—“we are headed for chaos.” Farrell suggested that the
time had come for the “leaders of i ndustry” to take the reins not just
of the economy but of the entire nation in order to restore it to a
godly path.
Farrell, a former steelworker himself and thus living proof in his
own m ind that equal opportunity existed for all, was likely too mod-
est to mention U.S. Steel’s own e orts in this regard; most notably,
its rel ief program for the Pennsylvania steeltown of Farrell, renamed
just that year in honor of the great man himself. A desperate measure
by a community of 30,000 utterly dependent on U.S. Steel and
starving because of that fact. In Farrell, U.S. Steel fought the spiri-
tual roots of its econom ic woes not through revival but by evicting
from company housing those who were not part of the nation’s godly
heritage: foreign-born workers, black workers, and even the old
white men who had built Farrell and now approached retirement and
pensions. U.S. Steel replaced them all with young peons paid low
wages. It was not a matter of getting the job done, since the mills
were shuttered and there was no work to be done. U.S. Steel simply
saw an opportunity for a correction.3
But then, so did the men and women whom companies such as
U.S. Steel were liquidating. It’s hard now, in the present United
States, to imagine the fear that attended the Depression years, and
harder stil l to remember the anger. Most forgotten of all is the opti-
mism of ordinary people pushed to an edge over which they peered
and saw not the abyss they had been told by their employers and their
politicians awaited them, but—maybe, i f they built it themselves—a
future dramatically di erent from the past.
98 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
The 1930s were the hungry years, yes; but they were also radical,
which is to say, visionary—an era of political imagination. American
history has plunked Roo sevelt at the left edge of the spectrum of our
political life, but at the time Roo sevelt was closer to the middle. To his
right were fools and fascists; these were the days when one might re-
spectably admire the methods of “Mr. Hitler” and wonder, in the
pages of newspapers or on the oor of Congress, whether there might
not be some part of his approach for Americans to copy. And to Roo-
sevelt’s left? There l ies the m issing history of America without which
the rise of Abram’s religion, the fundamentalism of the “up and out,”
the gospel of power for the powerful that soothes the consciences of
fundamentalism’s elite to this day, cannot be understood. The elite
fundamentalist movement of which Abram would be a pioneer arose
in response to a radical age. Abram’s biographers say that for a brief
moment in 1932, a Roo sevelt aide charged with building a brain trust
from which the future president’s cabinet could be constructed pro-
moted Abram to take charge of a social services portfolio on the
strength of his Goodwil l work, and began including him in meetings.
“Abram was introduced to the inner workings of the economic and
political forces of the nation,” wrote Abram’s friend and biographer
Norman Grubb. T here he saw “ how serious was the danger of leftwing
elements actually taking over the nation.”
As far as Abram was concerned, they did. He had begun drawing
up plans for government- backed religious revival as a cure for the na-
tion, but FDR went the way of the New Deal. Roo sevelt’s name
rarely appears in Abram’s papers thereafter.
Nor, for that matter, does the name of anyone Abram thought
beyond God’s sphere of in uence. Abram perfected a feel-good fun-
damentalism that was every bit as militant and aggressive as today’s
populist front but incapable of uttering a harsh word. It was country
club fundamentalism, for men who believed in thei r own goodness
and proved it to themselves and each other by commending Christ
and the next fellow’s ne e ort at following His example. They fol-
lowed the law of kindergarten: if you have nothing nice to say about
someone, say nothi ng at all. Or put it in terms of abstraction, the
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 99
preeningly polite language of upper-class religion: One might talk
about a “Red Menace,” but good Christians did not discuss what they
deemed Roo sevelt’s communistic tendencies: One might bemoan moral
decay, but it would not do to mention the name of a fellow busi ness-
man who kept ladies on the side. Only once, in the notes Abram gave
his friend Grubb, did he come close to identi fyi ng an enemy: the no-
torious “B.”
Who is B? The Red Menace in the shape of a man, subversion
personi ed, a zombie from Moscow.
That is, B belonged to a union. Which union? Hard to say. Two
candidates present themselves, but neither ts Abram’s description
precisely. Rather, the mysterious B who inspired Abram to gather his
decades of work and contacts and fundamentalist re nements into
the Idea seems to be an amalgam of the two most powerful labor
chiefs on the West Coast in 1935, and, indeed, perhaps the country:
Dave Beck, the Teamster warlord of Seattle, and Harry Bridges, the
Australian- born champion of longshoremen from San Diego to Van-
couver.
The two men were a study in contrasts. Beck, with his “pink
moon face and icy blue eyes,” as the journalist John Gunther de-
scribed him, a union leader so conservative he was “probably the
most ardent exponent of capitalism in the Northwest,” ran Seattle
like a efdom with bully-boy squadrons of brass-knuckled goons and
a mayor who actually boasted of being in Beck’s pocket. Bridges, “a
slight, lanky fellow,” observed the radical writer Louis Adamic, “with
a narrow, longish head, receding dark hai r, a good straight brow, an
aggressive hook nose, and a tense-lipped mouth,” operated out of San
Francisco but at only thirty-four years old had a rank- and- le follow-
ing across the trades and industries up and down the coast. Beck
wore double- breasted suits and painted ties and thought he looked
pretty damn good in black and white on the front page of a paper.
Bridges dressed like the longshoreman he was: black canvas Frisco
Jeans with his i ron cargo hook hanging from the back pocket, denim
shirt, and a at white cap. A shave, maybe, for a special occasion. He
rarely spoke to reporters.4
100 | JEFF SHARLET
Beck’s integrity can best be summed up by the fact that years
later—by then he was the boss of the whole union—when he was
summoned to Washi ngton to account for himself and his mysterious
riches, he pled the Fifth, got drummed out of the Teamsters like a
bad punch line, and Jimmy Ho a took over. After Beck, even the
Kennedy brothers thought Ho a was good news.
Bridges? In 1934, the legend spread that the San Francisco ship
owners sent an ex-prize ghter with $50,0 00 to try and buy him.
Bridges met the boxer alone; considered putting the cash into the
strike fund; but said no because he gleaned it was a trap. Had he taken
the money, he would have been dead in two minutes, and his union
brothers would have found an impossible wad of cash on his corpse,
and that would have made for a very di erent story than the one that
got around.
Abram knew Beck was a crook and probably knew Bridges was
not, but he likely loathed them with equal intensity. Beck’s muscle
made a mockery of the government of God-led men Abram dreamed
of for Seattle, and Bridges’s pure-hearted radicalism must have
seemed to Abram like a devil’s parody of religious conviction.
“ ‘B’,” wrote Abram of the conditions that sparked the Idea, “had
a lot of folks up in arms agai nst him, but most of them had now i n-
volved themselves in one way or another and didn’t dare squeal.
Some played the game and liked it, and others paid through the nose;
but whether you were a businessman, a contractor, or a labor leader,
you went along.”
This “B” is almost de nitely Beck; no businessman i n America
“went along” with Harry Bridges. And yet it was Beck, ironically,
who inadvertently exposed big business of the 1930s for what it was:
a racket with rewards reserved for t he big men. In most parts of
the country, that would be someone like James A. Farrell or Henry
Ford, commanding Pi nkertons and the police; in Seattle, it was
Dave Beck, Teamster, who owned the law. That’s why Abram hated
him: Beck was living evidence that God’s invisible hand blessed the
ruthless as much as or more t han those whom he considered the de-
serving.
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 101
But Abram had been living in San Francisco i n 1934, leading
prayer meetings for a group of business executives at the Paci c
Union Club, and he had witnessed the power of Bridges up close,
worse than anything he had seen duri ng his years of preaching and
organizing in Boston, New York, and Detroit. “It was the utter help-
lessness of the rank and le,” wrote his friend Grubb, “under the po-
litical control of subversive forces in the saddle.”
That’s not Beck—his hit squads struck any union meeting that
showed radical inclinations harder than the most brutal lumber baron
could imagine. Abram wanted to convert communists; Beck wanted
them beaten and dumped i n the dri nk. No, the “subversive forces in
the saddle” must have been Bridges, although Bridges was not subver-
sive, he was a revolutionary. And i n 1934 and ’35, to Abram—indeed,
to much of the world—it looked as if he might be successful.
Bridges was the anti-Abram. Raised middle class and Roman-
Catholic in Melbourne, Australia, he shipped out to sea when he was
sixteen and got o the boat in America four years later. Abram had
his faith, and Bridges had his. God hadn’t spoken to him; a Wobbly
had—a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. They aimed
for one simple goal, paradise on Earth. They called it One Big Union
and fought for it with the ne art of sabotage: Wobblies blasted steam
into the pipes of refrigerated shipping containers, sabotaged blacktop
so it c racked open, literally jammed wrenches into the works. They
didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor; they were the poor,
and they took. Most of all, though, they lingered and gabbed and
winked at one another and then quit—they loved leavi ng work be-
hind. “Hallelujah, I’m a bum again,” went a favorite American Wob-
bly song. Abram had nightmares about such hymns, m istook their
radicalized Tin Pan Alley humor for the ponderous phrasing of the
E u r o p e
a n “ I n t e r n a t i o n a l e . ” 5
But the Wobblies weren’t red; they were romantic, deliberately
and desperately so, skeptical of power and or ganization and compro-
mise, and constantly amused by themselves. Sabotage, after all, is a
102 | JEFF SHARLET
kind of joke—not just on the bosses but also on anyone who works,
on the very idea of work. The God Wobblies believed in had made
humanity not for hard labor but for pleasure. Why else did He give us
legs on which to dance?
And yet the rst noble truth of the Wobblies was su ering, a
sure thing for as long as there was a ruling class with which to wage
war. So Wobblies fought, but they fought for the paradise they felt in
their bones and their bellies had been promised to them. A city upon
a hill. What else was worth ghting for?
Their dream was il l de ned, less an agenda than a story, about
class warfare and the spoils that would one day go to the victors.
They didn’t have politics, they had a parable.
Wobblies whispered in young Bridges’s ears as God had spoken
to Abram in the elder trees. But Bridges was of a more independent
turn of mind. He liked the Wobbly story about the One Big Union
still to come, and took it as his own, but he didn’t believe workers
would win squat without organization. That idea he took from the
com munists, though he wasn’t a communist, either. Like Abram, he
loved to be around people and yet was a loner, kept his own counsel,
looked inward, and what he found there he told no one. But unl ike
Abram, there is no record of him crying but for the day he stood by
the co ns of two men he had led out on stri ke. The police had shot
them down. Bridges wept and said nothing.
What the two men shared were dreams. The Australian and the
Norwegian were utopians in the American vein. Bridges thought the
Prom ised Land awaited construction; Abram thought it was simply
to be recovered. Bridges had read a bit of theory, Abram some theol-
ogy, but both believed that they could bring forth the good life for all
who would accept it without recourse to ideology. Bridges took the
com munists into his ranks but never entered theirs, Abram strolled
along the fence of fascism but never hopped over. Neither man cared
much about ideas; both believed in power. Bridges wanted to see it
redistributed. Abram wanted to see it concentrated.
Like Abram, Bridges knocked around, rst as a sailor, then as an
oil rigger, and nally as part of a San Francisco steel gang, unloading
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 103
heavy metal on the docks. Like Abram, he’d been beaten out of his
wages. He got beaten every day, in fact, just like every other long-
shoreman. The shipowners had multiple methods for keeping their
workers in line. Once, the San Francisco dockers had been among
the toughest u nion men in the country, but the company had broken
them back i n 1919, herding them into the “Blue Book,” a company
collective in which the CEO e ectively served as union boss, negoti-
ating with himself. The bosses thought they were being kind. So did
Abram. To him, such arrangements seemed like the “reconciliation”
prom ised by Christianity, the solution at last to the old problem of
labor and capital. The laws of property obtained—was it not the
company’s right to hire and re at wi ll?—but were softened, in the
minds of Blue Book believers, by the company’s voluntary decision to
treat its employees not as hostile contractors but as children. That
made sense to Abram, who divided the world between big men and
little men and preferred the company of the former.
By 1933, the “children,” the workers, ate —that is, earned—only
if they could survive the shape-up, the speed-up, and the straw boss.
The shape-up began before dawn, in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle.
Along the Embarcadero, the long curving cobblestoned street between
the Bay City and its eighty-two piers, 4,000 men gathered in the fog
and the dark, hoping to be picked for one of fteen hundred jobs. They
jostled for a place close to the front of the crowd and pu ed themselves
up to look thick and strong even if they hadn’t eaten in days. They felt,
more than one man would remember, like whores trying to look
pretty. The picker—the pimp—was called the straw boss. If you
wanted to be chosen, you promised him a part of your wages. And if he
gave you a job, you might work for four hours or twenty-four. You
might work with a gang or with a small crew, too few men for the task.
That was the speed-up: the job didn’t go faster; you did. Longshoremen
were not a delicate breed, but they collapsed with exhaustion and some
dropped dead, their heart muscles bursting. Say a word about what you
saw around you, and you were gone. Silence was golden. For the com-
pany, that is. In 1933 it shaved a dime o wages, and the Blue Book
“union” accepted the loss as the cost of harmony.
104 | JEFF SHARLET
But a few men didn’t, and that sum mer, emboldened by FDR’s
New Deal, they organized. By spring of 1934 they were talking
stri ke. In May it sparked: rst in Seattle, where longshoremen bat-
tled deputized vigilantes, took their riot clubs away from them, and
sent ve to the hospital; then in San Francisco, where police shot a
twenty-year-old kid in the heart as he led a striker’s charge just hours
after joining the union. There was something almost quixotic in the
rst responses of the owners: i n San Francisco, shippers trolled fra-
ternity houses for the state’s best young men, who considered a few
days of heavy labor the duty of gentlemen, and the Berkeley football
coach recruited three squads of big-shouldered boys from the Golden
Bears to join down-on-their-luck white-collar workers on a oating
barracks for strikebreakers, a ship called the Diana Dollar.
Abram followed a teeth-rattling roller coaster of news for months,
as the papers reported one day a red tide rising and the next labor
peace in the o ng. Neither story was true. The army of strikers
grew larger and larger, bakers and cooks and waiters and even the
proud and conservative Teamsters swelling the dockers’ ranks.
No peace was coming. “Riot Expected,” declared the papers in
one of their grimmer moods. The Chamber of Commerce drafted a
declaration and put it on the front page of the Chronicle: “American
principles” vs. “un-American radicalism.” The chamber stood for
“free labor,” for the “American Plan,” for the “right to work.” Lose
San Francisco, and Seattle and Portland would fall like dominoes.
“The winning of the strike means the abandoning of control by pri-
vate owners over their own property,” declared the columnist Chapin
Hall. “ San Francisco is the real seat of war and right nobly is she
standing up to the ring li ne.”
Seven hundred policemen i n dark blue patrolled the waterfront
on foot and i n black cars and on high chestnut horses. Twice that
number and more picketed or searched for strikebreakers. The mid-
dle class began contemplati ng last-minute vacations. The wives of
the wealthy bunkered up at the Union Club, where Abram led prayer
meetings for businessmen. As the blue tear gas sent tendrils up the
hill, they must have felt frustrated by his optim istic lessons in biblical
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 105
capitalism. Scripture has much to say about honest dealing and even
more about handling the heathen, but not once does it mention orga-
nized labor. Kenneth Kingsbury, the president of the Standard Oil of
California (and later a member of Abram’s movement), peered out of
the club’s windows one day and saw pickets peering back; he pan-
icked. A sign of the apocalypse, Kingsbury instructed a federal man
to write his employers i n Washington, was that Kenneth Kingsbury
could not leave the club to hail a cab.
On July 3, the Industrial Association of San Francisco resolved to
open the port by force. Mayor Angelo Rossi, a orist by trade, did
not stop them. At 1:30 p.m. the steel doors of Pier 38 rolled up, and
ve trucks full of goods from the moribund ships in the harbor rolled
out, police cruisers behind and alongside them. Driving the trucks
were not ordinary strikebreakers but business executives, “key men,”
in Abram’s vernacular. Young James A. Folger of Folger’s Co ee
took the lead. A crowd of 5,00 0 pickets watched without making a
sound. The busi nessmen raced to a warehouse four blocks inland and
unloaded: birdseed, co ee, and tires. They went back for more. The
strikers looked on. No songs, no chants, no stones. Silent witness to
the labor of businessmen. This was the story the papers told when
Abram opened their pages on the Fourth of July 1935, his twentieth
anniversary in “the land of the Bible unchained.”
Did Folger and his 700 bodyguards in blue think, for just a mo-
ment, that peace was at hand? A police captain with gold braid
gleaming on his shoulder, riding on the running board of a police
cruiser with his revolver in the air, shouted, “The port is open!”—
and gave the strikers the signal for which they had waited. They
roared and attacked with cobblestones ripped from the street and
bricks and stones, with clubs they tore from policemen’s hands and
with wooden shafts they hurled like spears. The police opened re
into the crowd.
And with that, the rst ght was over—thousands melted into
alleys, dragging the wounded with them. Blood pooled between the
cobblestones. The air smelled acrid. At night the blue and green
lights of helpless ships blinked from the bay and went unanswered.
106 | JEFF SHARLET
The pool hal ls, the bars, the tattoo parlors, the brothels, were silent.
Vice had been conquered, the Christian city on a hill defended from
the barbarians.
There were not many picnics on the Fourth. A train burned and
thirteen policemen’s wives were given reason to curse the red bas-
tards. The governor said troops were coming. The commanders of
the Guard strategized.
“My men . . . will talk with bayonets,” said their general.
This was not what Abram had dreamed of. Where were his key
men, his top men, his up and out? Out of the city, hiding in the
hills.
The next morning, the police went forward in waves, rows of
Martians in khaki gas masks and black helmets, revolvers drawn. A
few blocks from the water, on Rincon Hill, a knoll tall as a four- story
building, a crowd of longshoremen gathered. From widemouthed
riot guns police thumped out gas shells that sliced through dry brown
grass and sparked it like tinder. Strikers scorched their ngers on the
shells and hurled them back down the hill. Blue smoke from the gas,
black and gray from the grass, an oily stink that pushed the armies
away from one another. Up the knoll went the strikers. Policemen in
ripped uniforms, blood dripping from facial wounds, squinted and
aimed and unloaded revolvers and ri es. A striker crested and fell,
shot like a turkey. A tear-gas salesman, deputized, cheered. T he smoke
stank of vomit and gun re. Airplanes dipped and whined, dropping
messages to police command. Horse hooves thudded; out of the blue
smoke went the charge, horses snorting and shrieking.
The strikers were ready with slingshots: two poles stretching a
car ti re inner tube hurled a three-pound stone fast and hard 40 0 feet,
or less should a policeman agree to catch it with his belly. Back down
the hill went the horses.
Up went another charge, replied to with another volley. The po-
lice charged again, and this time they took a wall, but the men be-
hind it had gone missing. So it went, charges and stone volleys and
feints and men vanishing like quicksilver.
The police found them. They blocked o both ends of the street
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 107
in front of the union hall. A plainclothesman drove into the crowd,
stepped out of his car, and opened up with a shotgun held at the hip,
and in front of the hall he brought down three men. One pulled him-
self up and looked at the crowd with blood in his mouth, blood in his
eyes, and then his head dropped and his jaw cracked like an egg.
At least thirty-three more nursed gunshot wounds that night.
They were laid in rows in the union hall or hidden in bedrooms by
wives and mothers and brokenhearted fathers who boiled water and
pried bullets out with thick ngers while their men screamed and the
neighbors cried. Down on the docks a boat landed, and into the city
marched soldiers, the rst of 5,000. A sharp wind snapped the fog,
the gas, the smoke up into the atmosphere, but the smell of violence
lingered.
“I walked down Market that night,” wrote the novelist Til lie Ol-
sen, then twenty-one-year-old Tillie Lerner fresh from Nebraska, in
one of her rst pieces of published prose. “All life seemed blown out
of the street; the few people hurrying by looked hunted, tense, ex-
pectant of anything. Cars moved past as if eeing. And a light, inde-
scribably green and ominous, was cast over everything, in great
shifting shadows. And down the street the trucks rumbled. Drab
colored, with boys sitting on them like corpses sitti ng and not mov-
ing, holding guns sti y, staring with wide frightened eyes.”6
That was what Abram didn’t understand: the fear of death and
the fear of sin, real sin, killing a brother or a sister. He was as de-
lighted by the prospect of his death, whatever hour God should ap-
point for it, as Abigail Hutchinson had been. Compassionate in the
abstract, he thought of the masses as just that, blocks to be arranged
neatly. The troops that moved in on San Francisco that night had no
feelings with which Abram would have been concerned; they were
expressing the will of God, which to him was order. After the Stri ke
of ’34, Abram’s allegiance would be forever given to the men who
com manded soldiers, not the soldiers themselves. As for those de-
ned as the enemy, they were not even human. Their grief never
registered.
A few days later, men and women marched tens of thousands
108 | JEFF SHARLET
strong ve miles up Market Street behi nd two black-draped atbed
trucks. The trucks bore co ns and mountains of owers, like can-
vases by Diego Rivera set in slow motion. A band played Beethoven.
Nobody said a word. “ ‘Life,’ the capitalist papers marveled,” wrote
Tillie Olsen, “ ‘Life stopped and stared.’ ”
It was incomparable drama, simultaneously staged and real. A
ritual, yes, the pro cession of the plain folk, the march of the mar-
tyrs, a script older than Christendom. Bridges, surely aware of the
moment’s theatrical power, nonetheless choked up when his turn to
speak came. Not a well-timed sob but wide-eyed, grief-stricken si-
lence. He o ered no i nspiration. None was needed. The funeral was
religion: not just solidarity, workers arm-in- arm, but communion, a
com ing together. The march up Market Street was the embodiment
of faith, not as a metaphor but as a new fact in the American story.
One Big Union on the move.
The strike went on, but the shippers were defeated by the time
the co ns went into the ground. Their old beliefs could not com-
pete. Management—capital—would require a new faith if it was to
survive.
The Idea, Part 2
The stri ke of 1934 scared Abram into lau nching the movement that
would become the vanguard of elite fundamentalism, and elite fun-
damentalism took as its rst challenge the destruction of militant
labor. Destruction was not the word Christians used, however. They
called it cooperation.
The April after the strike, Harry Bridges traveled to Seattle to
convene a meeting of a new federation of maritime workers, with
“maritime” broadly de ned to i nclude pretty much anyone within
driving distance of the ocean. For a brief moment that year, he came
close to turni ng the old Wobbly dream of One Big Union i nto a politi-
cal reality. But it wouldn’t last. Indeed, the revived Wobbly dream
began unraveling right there i n Seattle, where Abram nally plucked
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 109
up the theocratic strand and began pulling it taut into the twentieth
century.
That April, Abram had been having dreams of his own, unpleas-
ant ones. Subversives stalked his sleep, hammers and sickles danced
like sugar plum fairies, a Soviet agent “of Swedish nationality” as-
signed to Seattle—probably the brawny and bellicose six-footer from
the Seamen’s Union whom Bridges had tapped to lead the maritime
federation—roared his nightmare de ance of that which was godly.
One night Abram could sleep no longer. He sat up in bed and re-
solved to wait for God. At 1:30 a.m., He appeared: a bli nding light
and a voice. Abram listened and took notes. “ The plan had been un-
folded and the green light given.”7
A few hours later, Abram dressed and put on his coat and hurried
to downtown Seattle for the morning rush, where he waited for God
to bring him the means to put his plan into action. On a busy street
corner, a local developer of means hai led him. “Hey, Vereide, glad to
see you!”
The developer, a former major named Walter Douglass who still
preferred to be addressed by his m ilitary title, cut straight to the
matter on both men’s minds: “Where is this cou ntry going to, any-
way? ”
“You ought to know,” said Abram.
Indeed, the major did: “The bow-wows,” he harrumphed, “and
the worse of it is you fellows aren’t doing anything about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” growled Douglass, “ here you have your churches and ser-
vices and merry-go-round of activities, but as far as any actual impact
and strategy for turning the tide is concerned, you’re not making a
dent.”
Abram could not have agreed more. While San Francisco had
boiled, Abram had developed the prototype of the Idea, preaching a
manly Christ to a group of business executives who had no time for
hymnals and sob sisters and soup kitchens and the Jesus of long eye-
lashes beloved by old ladies. Jesus, for such men, “must be disentan-
gled from church organization,” Abram had discovered. In the 1930s,
110 | JEFF SHARLET
the meaning of that was plain: a rejection of the “Social Gospel” of
good works for the poor in favor of an unhindered Christ de ned by
his muscles, a laissez-fai re Jesus proclaimed not by spi ndly necked
clergymen bleating from seminary, but by men like Major Douglass,
o cers who commanded troops who brought order to cities.
“You ought to get after fellows like me,” Douglass told Abram.
He was standing in just the right spot for chest pu ng—behind him
towered the city’s Douglass Buildi ng.
These were the words Abram had been waiting for, in the place,
he was certain, to which God had guided him. He revealed the plan
God had given him just hours earlier that morning: the Idea. He kept
secret the bright light, the voice, the automatic writing in the dark
hours. Men like Major Douglass, men of a airs, would not under-
stand. But Major Douglass got the Idea.
“We are where we are,” Abram said—on the bri nk of anarchy,
both men thought—“because of what we are.” By that he meant sin-
ful, only his concept of sin was not so much concerned with immo-
rality as with “duty.” “ Top men” had a responsibility to do for God
what lesser men couldn’t. Their failure to take on this burden had led
the nation to its terrible position. “Obedience,” concluded Abram, is
“the way to power.” God wanted his chosen to rule—to “serve,” as
Abram liked to say. Were men such as Major Douglass ready to re-
port for duty?
Douglass stared at the silver-haired preacher. A “piercing gaze,”
Abram recalled. “Vereide,” he said, “if you will settle down in this
city and do a job like that, I will back you.”
Abram demanded speci cs. Douglass delivered: a suite of o ces
in the building behi nd Abram and a check to get him started.
“That’s tangible,” said Abram.
Then they set o together to see William St. Clair, one of the
wealthiest men in Seattle. There’s a whi of The Wizard of Oz in
Abram’s later retelling of this story, the major and the minister pop-
ping lightbulbs over their fedoras on the Seattle street corner and
rushing on to the man who would bring it all together, but that is,
apparently, what happened: St. Clair, president of Frederick Nelson,
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 111
the biggest department store in the Northwest, cleared his o ce and
insisted the two men sit down. “We told him the story,” Abram re-
membered. “And he, too, looked searchingly at me and remarked,
‘That’s constructive.’ ”
St. Clai r made a list of nineteen businessmen and invited them to
breakfast at one of the city’s nest hotels. St. Clair certainly didn’t
choose on the basis of Christian moral ity. Of the nineteen, only one
was a churchgoer, and he pointed out at the rst meeting that the
other men there knew him mainly as a creature of cocktail lounges
and poker tables. Among the nineteen sat a lumber baron, a gas ex-
ecutive, a railroad executive, a hardware magnate, a candy impresa-
rio, and two future mayors of Seattle. “Management and labor got
together,” Abram would later claim, but there were no union repre-
sentatives at the meeting, where nineteen businessmen plus Abram
agreed to use the “Bible as blueprint” with which to take back rst
the city, then the state, and perhaps the nation from the grip of god-
less or ga nized labor.
Their rst success soon followed. “One morning,” remembered
Abram, “a labor leader, who had been a disturbing factor in the com-
munity, was seen at the table.” Abram never fail s to provide full
names and corporate titles for the management side of his equation,
but his rst convert from labor is known only as “Jim my.” Jimmy
came back for more meetings, sitting quietly in the corner and lis-
tening as the businessmen testi ed to one another about the Bible’s
transforming power in their lives. So Abram took Jim my aside and
had a talk with him about his responsibilities. Jimmy had been a
leader in the “big strike.” There, at the breakfast table, sat many men
in whom Jimmy’s actions had provoked “bitter feelings.” One man,
in fact, had been burdened with leading the industrial ists’ comm ittee
that organized management’s ght against the strike. Jimmy had now
taken meals with this man but had done nothing to make amends.
Jimmy remained “unreconciled.”
The next week, before a group of executives that now numbered
seventy- ve, Jimmy rose and spoke for the rst time. “You fellows
know me.” He nodded toward one businessman. “I picketed your
112 | JEFF SHARLET
plant.” He looked toward another. “I closed your factory for months.”
He pointed to a third: “I hated you.”
But with Abram’s help, Jimmy had discovered “ how absolutely
honest” these men he had hated were. They were humble. They were
sincere. In fact, Jimmy realized, if they could bring more busi ness-
men in on the Idea, “there would be no need for a labor union.” This,
understandably, had been a bit of a shock to Jimmy. He had gone to
his knees in his home, he told the men, and begged God’s forgiveness
“for the spirit I had been manifesting.” And now he was ready to ask
their forgiveness. He had been a thorn in capital’s esh, he said, but
he would prick no more.
Jimmy sat down. The room was silent. Then “the sturdy, rugged
capital ist who had been chairman of the employer’s committee in the
big strike,” Abram observed—this probably refers to the “Citizens
Emergency Committee,” headed by the aptly named John Prim8 —
stood at the head of the table and walked over to Jimmy without a
word. Worker looked up at boss. Boss glared down at worker. The
businessman let drop a heavy hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.
“Jimmy,” he said, “on this basis we go on together.”
In the years to come, Abram would tell polished versions of this
story hundreds of times, in dozens of countries, to CEOs and sena-
tors and dictators, a parable of “cooperation” between management
and labor, the threat to Christ and capital subdued, order restored.
That was where it began, he’d say: Jimmy the agitator confessing his
sins before a room full of businessmen, God’s chosen men. This was
“Unit Number One” of what Abram called his “new world order.”
Abram was a kind of artist, just discovering in 1935 that there
were other men and women with powers like his, feelings like
his—“American,” he would say, “terri ed,” we might translate—with
whom he could join forces. Together they would smooth the dream.
They claimed thei r religion was very old, “ rst century Christianity,”
but in their hearts they understood that it was a new faith, a new
politics. Its conservatism was not vestigial; what made it thril ling
The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 113
was that the new religion made conservatism forceful again. It was
not just a veneer for capitalism, nor simply a vehicle for power. It was
a di erent way of wielding power. It shrugged o old inhibitions. It
sco ed at liberal restraints and ignored traditional conservative res-
ervations. It was Rotary Club dada, surrealism for businessmen from
Seattle. It was the Word made fresh for the industrial age, vital and
strong.
Just like that of Edwards. Just l ike that of Fi nney. But Finney had
been followed by Sunday, who’d made the Word muscular yet vul-
gar. In 1935, Abram breathed life into a faith for the elite, an Ameri-
can fundamentalism made up of both Edwards’s “heart” religion and
Finney’s permanent revival. He would write to his comrades with
exhilaration when he thought a “key man” was beginning to “catch”
the Idea. The religion Abram rebelled against was a set of ethics, a
rule book for women. He aspired instead to spread what he would
come to call a contagion, passed from key man to key man, the
avant-garde of American fundamental ism.
No comments:
Post a Comment