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

by Jeff Sharlet

  Just like that of Edwards. Just like that of Finney. But Finney had been followed by Sunday, who’d made the Word muscular yet vulgar. In 1935, Abram breathed life into a faith for the elite, an American 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 fundamentalism.

  THE F WORD

  THE DEFENDERS OF THE status quo,” Henry Kissinger wrote in his doctoral dissertation, published as A World Betrayed in 1957, “…tend to begin by treating revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical.” That this comment is sufficiently ambiguous to be worthy of the slippery career that followed it takes nothing from the weight of its insight, 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 comprise American fundamentalism do not include any single tactician of Kissinger’s caliber, and yet they have, as a movement, functioned in just such a fashion, building on the foundation of American Protestantism’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 stability, an end to the Depression’s hurdy-gurdy years. Men, women, and children dwindled into thin and hopeless creatures, listless and dull-witted and red-eyed. Then would come a strike or a street fight 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 cold and huddled around a radio, heads bent toward the voice of a man such as Father Coughlin, the “radio priest” from Detroit, the Shrine of the Little Flower, preaching and ranting to more millions than the president himself some evenings. What did he want? He was no communist, 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 capitalists 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 communism, that Abram schemed.

  Abram’s men did not consider themselves blameless. But they believed their folly didn’t lie 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 coffers 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 economic affairs.

  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 find 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 insisted on metaphor. The best pulpits were manned, if that word could be used, by foppish intellectuals who debated like Jews, sifting 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 confirmation of their spiritual gleanings, “teachings practical in business, government, and social life,” 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.”

  That summer Abram took a core of Christ-committed leaders—a railroad man and a lumberman and a banker, a car dealer, a clothier, 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 inventory,” each man taking turns listing aloud that which troubled their city, their state, their corporation. Hunger, pride, whores, Harry Bridges, booze, degenerates, sloth, corruption, the Teamsters. Women with short hair. Communism 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 their failures. They fell to their knees, old men’s joints 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 finger but more like the wilderness growling in the dark at the edge of the city. “He was like a bear waiting for me,” warned Jeremiah, “like 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 lawyer named Arthur B. Langlie, kneeling among the big men, discovered his calling. A flat-faced, blue-eyed Scandinavian like Abram, Langlie was thirty-five 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.

  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 finance 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 fireplace and sang a song in the mountains for the city they meant to save.

  Faith of our fathers, living still

  In spite of dungeon, fire, 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 political 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 figures, the Order ran candidates for office under the banner of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus, summoned from his farm five centuries before Christ to assume dictatorial power over a populace too exhausted by infighting to make decisions for itself.

  When several of Langlie’s Cincinnatans showed up at the city comptroller’s office to register, they came flanked by men of the Order wearing identical white shirts, joining a rainbow of like-minded lovers of disciplin
e and intimidation—not just Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts but the Greenshirts of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Blueshirts of Ireland, and, in America, the Silver Shirts, the initials of which, SS, deliberately chosen, justified the flamboyant color. The men of the Order gave themselves military ranks and considered adding a sieg heil–style salute to their public image, but decided that would be “too fascist.” The Order’s first “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 governments run like Henry Ford’s assembly lines. The Order craved efficiency. One of its first 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 officially joined the Order, but he became its chief candidate. The year of the big strike, the Order took control of Seattle’s city council by invoking middle-class fears of a Wobbly insurrection. Poverty, it maintained, was part of the natural way of things. The Order had two solutions to economic malaise: slash taxes and attack vice. As councilman, Langlie purged the city’s police department, which routinely ignored Sunday liquor sales, Chinese gambling halls, and the prostitution that prospered in a port city like Seattle. He then turned his ax toward the fire department (poor moral specimens) and public school teachers (indoctrinating the youth with godless notions). With his allies in the Order, he succeeded in passing a budget so brutal that the city’s conservative Republican mayor, whose first act in office had been to literally lead a police charge against the previous year’s strikers, vetoed it as contemptuous of human suffering. 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 telling, Langlie stood, pledged himself, and simply ascended to public office. Langlie had in fact taken his city council seat without the trouble of an election; his opponent, wary of a public fight with the Order, simply stepped down and appointed Langlie to replace him. But despite the Order’s white-shirted military manner and the financial backing of Abram’s brotherhood, his first bid for the mayoralty failed. The Democrat who’d been ousted in 1934, a flamboyantly corrupt opportunist named John Dore, charged Langlie with running as the candidate of a “secret society.” Dore wound up his campaign with a ninety-minute speech denouncing Langlie 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 diagnosis: Democrats, radicals, and even Republicans united to return the crook to power.

  “The insincerity of [Dore] is almost unquestionable,” the novelist Mary McCarthy observed. Double-chinned Dore perched his spectacles 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 incoming sailors. As far as conservatives were concerned, he might as well have grown a mustache and changed his name to Stalin. But Mary McCarthy understood 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 declared as he squared off with Langlie again in 1938, a bald confession of fealty to bossism. The race garnered broad attention, “a mayoralty election of national significance,” in the words of the New York Times.6 At stake seemed to be the future of organized labor in the Northwest, 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 Federation of Labor. His opponent on the Left, Lieutenant Governor Vic Meyers, championed the newborn Congress of Industrial Organizations, an alliance of more militant, pro-worker unions. And out in right field stood Langlie, so far from friendly to any labor union that even the rabidly right-wing Los Angeles Times tagged him as “ultraconservative.”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 promised, 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 office 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 Mahatma 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 budget slashing and punishing moral rectitude, trumped labor. “Seattle Deals Radicals a Blow,” declared the Los Angeles Times. “Whole Left Wing Beaten,” amplified the New York Times.8

  What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, 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 finesse but through prayer. If Abram and Langlie could help it, there would be no bullets, no bribes. Instead, there would be a circle of men listening to Jesus by listening to one another’s remarkably similar views. It was the first fulfillment of Abram’s dream of government 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 commandos, 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 Langlie—was a bellwether indeed. Not of labor’s future—that was already eroding—but of prayer breakfast politics 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 Family. 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 Fellowship’s subtler ambitions. Theocratic by instinct and fascinated by fascism according to the fashion of the times, the Fellowship never molted into European-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 assimilati
on into polite fundamentalism. “The more impersonal our order becomes,” observed Theodor Adorno in a study of 1930s fundamentalism, “the more important personality becomes as an ideology.” Abram’s man-method was a perfect illustration 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 in an age of mass movements. Good manners mattered to the immigrant preacher; the men he drew to him tended to be discreet, polished 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 governor, 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 democracy as he found them. He did what business asked: purged welfare rolls, abolished guaranteed wage laws, denounced Democrats as un-American. In 1942, he investigated the possibility of using martial law to suppress organized labor, but when his advisers told him it would be unconstitutional, he settled for ordinary 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 automaker 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 in czarist Russia to justify pogroms against Jews, and the author of The International Jew, a book many Nazis would later credit with awakening their Aryan anti-Semitism. During the previous decade, historians suspect, he’d illegally financed Adolf Hitler. But it was not just national socialism’s bigotry that Ford supported, nor even mainly that. What Ford, inventor of the assembly line, loved above all was efficiency. Even his war of words against the Jews had been in the interests 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 in need of a makeover, a quick bath in the Blood of the Lamb.