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

by Jeff Sharlet

  Before the war, such initiatives were the stuff of the fringe, disaffected Babbits, America Firsters. After the war, they were mainstream. In the 1950s, the soldiers of Christ didn’t wear armor; they wore cufflinks. Consider this convention of Fellowship worthies, gathered in a hotel lobby for a group portrait. On the left is Abram in his customary double-breasted suit, lapels like bat wings, his silk kerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket and a slim leather Bible spread open in his right hand. To his right stands Billy Graham, his famous blue eyes glowering between his rock jaw and a wave of blond hair, almost good looking enough to play a gunfighter. And rising between them stands a fascinating character named Kenneth M. Crosby.

  Crosby was literally our man in Havana, or at least one of them. He’d been a spy throughout Latin America during the war. Officially retired at its end, he took over Merrill Lynch’s Cuban operation in 1946 and stayed until 1959, when Fidel Castro drove out the dictator Fulgencio Batista, reporting all the while back to U.S. intelligence, a happy double posting which also allowed him time to set up prayer cells for Abram. His “Havana Group” consisted of American embassy personnel, representatives from American banks and the United Fruit Company. Cuban sugar cartels boasted openly in the Havana Post of the prayer cell’s use as a lobbying tool, noting that one of the International Christian Leadership officers, Congressman Brooks Hays, returned home from a spiritual session in Cuba ready to fight for Cuban sugar in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Crosby was even more loyal to the regime, serving as an intermediary between Batista’s Palacio Presidencial and American businessmen in Havana and New Orleans.

  At the time, even Christianity Today considered Fidel preferable to the profoundly corrupt Batista.6 But to Crosby, Castro was “another Hitler.” It was Crosby, briefing CIA director Allen Dulles, who laid one of the first bricks in the Cold War construction of the island nation as one of America’s greatest enemies. These were the days of citizen soldiers, spooks and “psyops” commandos, and, for the first time in American history, preachers on the front lines. Front lines of what? “Total cold war,” Eisenhower would call it, a battle not of bullets—although plenty of those would fly—but of ideas, many of which wouldn’t.7 Against communism’s promise of “People’s Democracy,” for instance, Madison Avenue, at the behest of Eisenhower, coined “People’s Capitalism,” a catchphrase that somehow failed to inspire even the Americans who practiced it, much less Soviets supposed to be seduced by it.8

  Preachers provided the ammo capitalism couldn’t manufacture. “Your government,” one of Abram’s British protégés wrote, “is aware of the need of much greater propaganda to Russia and her satellites if we are to control the Communist menace.” The Brit hoped to obtain Abram’s help with a plan to smuggle New Testaments into the Eastern Bloc under diplomatic cover. The aim was “to place dynamite just where it is needed.”9 Bible smuggling boomed in the 1950s, but very few efforts to sneak Western wisdom into the Soviet bloc made as much impact on their intended targets as on the West itself, which reveled in its crusades. Some of the schemes were truly quixotic: the use of hot-air balloons to drop leaflets on Albania, for instance, an effort that probably did more to spread the American love of UFOlogy than the Cold War double-dogma of God and private property.10 Such is one of the overlooked legacies of the Cold War: the weirding of American fundamentalism. Abram’s was a space-age faith, thrilling to the vibrations of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” and throbbing to the conviction that God would guide our missiles, if only we could conform our national will to His. That was the stated goal, repeated over and over: conformity. Conform or die. Nuclear annihilation, should it occur, would be the result of rebellion, the “effect of the tragic choice of disobedience.”

  Abram’s religion was sleek and powerful, an aerodynamic update on the clumsy bombs dropped by fundamentalism’s old angry ranters. Two of Abram’s “field representatives,” Dr. Bob Pierce and J. Edwin Orr—both to achieve fame of their own as major twentieth-century revivalists—coached young Billy Graham in the mores and manners of overseas operations and educated society. Harald Bredesen, another field representative who’d go on to build a powerful ministry of his own, performed a different service for a youthful Pat Robertson, teaching the senator’s son a folksy appeal that would complement his political acumen. One Abram understudy, Dr. Elton Trueblood, made a career of packaging militant fundamentalism in the language of country club banal, churning out best sellers that conflated spiritual war with Cold War; he also drew a paycheck from the United States Information Agency, for which he headed up the Office of Religious Information. On his watch “spiritual roots”—Christian ones, that is—as the foundation of American democracy became government policy, channeled through private organizations so that the office’s plans would not look like a “propaganda gimmick.”

  Abram’s closest ally in the Senate, Frank Carlson, Republican of Kansas, coined the Fellowship’s slogan, “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive.” Carlson was a farmer from Cloud County, Kansas, who first made a national name for himself in 1936 when as a young congressman he double-crossed his patron, Governor Alf Landon, by ripping into the New Deal as a subversion of American principles. Landon had hoped to pitch his policies as a more moderate version of FDR’s vision, and here was his protégé, declaring the sitting president un-American. Not that Landon had a prayer, anyway; he became the losingest presidential candidate in American history. But Carlson prospered. Over the next decade, he rebuilt the Landon machine under his own name. He took the governor’s office in 1946, and when three years later one of Kansas’s senators died in office, Carlson inserted as a placeholder a flunky who then dutifully stepped aside when Carlson was ready to return to Washington in 1950 as a member of the nation’s most exclusive club.

  In the early days of his career, Carlson cultivated a myth of himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus who entered politics only at the behest of a delegation of small businessmen that found him literally tilling his fields and begged him to help stop Dictator Roosevelt—the “destroyer of human rights and freedom,” as Carlson called him. By then, Carlson was chairman of the Interstate Oil Compact and he had denounced not only the New Deal but also Hoover’s business-friendly policies before it as an “insidious attack” on “free enterprise”—by which he meant government subsidies for Big Oil.11

  And yet Carlson enjoyed a reputation as a moderate and even, in the surreal political landscape of the 1950s, a “liberal” Republican. His face was tanned and leathery, flanked by white wings of hair and almost-pointed ears, framed by arched eyebrows and a broad, lipless mouth, all of it centered on a nose the shape of a mushroom; he looked like a sunburned Bela Lugosi. It was hard to imagine this comically featured man as an ideologue in the mold of hammerhead Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. Carlson was a backslapper, an arm gripper. A Baptist teetotaler himself, he presided over the end of “Dry Kansas” and joined two other Fellowship senators in raising funds for a Republican club in Washington that would feature the best cigars and the finest Scotch whiskey. He was a Republican wise man, “sagacious,” according to the columnist Drew Pearson, “the ‘No Deal’ Dealer,” in the words of another pundit. It was Carlson who in 1951 coined for his friend and fellow Kansan Ike the double-duty slogan of “No Deal.” Eisenhower, then the electoral underdog even though he was the most popular man in America, meant that he wouldn’t horse-trade with crooked local GOP organizations, most of which were in the back pocket of “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the presumed front-runner. But the slogan also implied a none-too-subtle rebuke to FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s more conservative Fair Deal. No Deal meant more than the “rollback” of progressivism, as Carlson claimed, a conventional conservative assault on social welfare. By No Deal, Carlson and Eisenhower meant no politics. That is, they hoped to capitalize on Eisenhower’s popularity as a victorious general, incorruptible in peacetime, to replay the Cincinnatus story on a national scale.

  Carlson spread the rumor that he a
nd a shadow cabinet of more senior senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts were pushing Ike for the White House without Ike’s permission. Eisenhower privately wondered, meanwhile, whether it would be legal to win the nominations of both political parties. It wasn’t that Eisenhower transcended ideology—history has revealed him to be one of the most masterful politicians of the postwar era—but rather that he believed that he could best achieve his goals by pretending not to have any.

  Eisenhower was the great literate of midcentury politics, the man who knew how to parse a moment, to respond to the masses as if they were all individuals, each unique in his sameness. Eisenhower was a PR man; he had learned on the battlefield the secrets of psyops, of psychological warfare. “Don’t be afraid of that term,” he advised the voters. He was a bridge player; he knew how to bluff and win. He bluffed the Republicans, in whose traditional ranks he did not properly belong, and the Democrats, who, having lost their chance to nominate him, dismissed him as an amateur. Eisenhower knew what Americans were looking for and he let them see it in him, a hero both grand and ordinary. “The sort of prince who could be ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalogue,” as Saul Bellow described him.

  In 1952, Carlson and a small group of like-minded Republicans put in their order, and Ike delivered. The ringleader was ostensibly Senator Lodge, but Carlson ran Ike’s Washington campaign headquarters, and his sidekick and former senatorial substitute, Henry Darby, ran the nominal HQ on the second floor of the Jayhawk Hotel back in Topeka. Carlson’s abandoned patron Alf Landon briefly tried to swing his state to Taft, but Carlson effectively smeared Taft—and Landon, his more moderate former mentor—as reactionaries nonetheless too soft for “total cold war.” Carlson had laid the groundwork for his new middle-ground reputation the year before. And he did it with the help of Abram.

  In April 1951, Abram enlisted ICL president Ed Cabaniss, a wealthy manufacturer, to round up some businessmen interested in the Idea who could help create an advisory prayer cell for every governor who wanted one, to be organized by Carlson. Cabaniss, a holdover from the pre–1950s Fellowship, was an Old Guard conservative. He had a V-shaped head, a tiny jaw, and a giant brow; he looked like a praying mantis, and his affect was that of one as well, slow and chilly. For his latest undertaking, Abram wanted more dynamic men. He specifically requested that two of the most effective red hunters in his circle be included: Howard Coonley, the former president of the National Association of Manufacturers who’d helped win him access to big business during the 1940s, and Merwin K. Hart, a wealthy member of his board of directors who recruited businessmen for the Fellowship through his pet project, the National Economic Council.

  The council was little more than letterhead, a desk in the Empire State Building, and Hart himself, a goggle-eyed, tuxedoed blue blood with a fringe of hair around his narrow skull and more than a hint of fascism around his politics. “If you find any organization containing the word ‘democracy,’” Hart declared, “it is probably directly or indirectly affiliated with the Communist Party.” Hart wasn’t kidding; effective in his deregulation crusades, he was never able to achieve one of his fondest ambitions, the disenfranchisement of the poor, whom he considered spiritually unfit for voting.

  The war had made Hart toxic for a spell, since unlike Lindbergh, who’d abandoned his own fascist inclinations to fly for the United States, Hart never repented for his prewar fascist position. But the Cold War changed everything, Cabaniss wrote Abram. “It seems to me there is a growing proportion of the public, particularly in the political world, who are coming to a realization that Merwin Hart is not so far ‘off the beam’ in his thinking.” The business world was coming around, too; Hart counted among the supporters of his National Economic Council’s program of God and laissez-faire capitalism top men from Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors.

  This theology of the dollar was not quite as cynical as it sounds. Abram was expanding his European operation into Greece’s upper crust, an experience that was teaching him to refine the stealth evangelism he’d learned in Germany. First came capitalism; then came Christ. Capitalism, preached his friend Norman Grubb, was the wedge. “ICL,” he commented to Abram, “is a bold attempt to reach a certain unreachable class with Christ, and is therefore not primarily concerned with presenting itself as sound in a ‘fundamental’ doctrinal basis; it is after fish who might refuse the bait if this fundamental doctrinal basis was flaunted in front of them.”12

  Hart, Coonley, and Cabaniss were to line up financial backers for the group (who, as it turned out, agreed to raise $100,000 for the project); Abram would explain the Idea; and the public face of the initiative would be two former governors who’d made the leap to the big leagues, Carlson and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma. Kerr was a Democrat, thus blunting the growing concern within the Fellowship that it appeared to be simply a subsidiary of the Republican Party, and he was Carlson’s kind of Democrat—“the chief of the wheelers-and-dealers,” according to the journalist Milton Viorst, “a self-made millionaire who freely and publicly expressed the conviction that any man in the Senate who didn’t use his position to make money was a sucker.”

  Like Carlson, Kerr was an oilman. Or, more precisely, oil’s man. He knew a good investment when he saw one; he sent Abram a check for $500. Other senators fell in line: Robertson of Virginia contributed a fund-raising letter, Republican Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont gave $200 and the use of his name, and Pat McCarran of Nevada, McCarthy’s Democratic mirror, wrote asking what would be most helpful—money or contacts (or both). That fall, the president of the ultraright William Volker Fund chipped in $500 from his own pocket. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in America by subsidizing editions of his Road to Serfdom. First published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press, the book appeared in shortened versions produced by Reader’s Digest and Look magazine, which illustrated Hayek’s argument that any attempt at “central planning” (including FDR-style government regulation of big business) would send a society down a “road to serfdom”—and mass murder along the lines of Hitler and Stalin—from which there was no return. Hayek’s economic ideas were considerably more complex than the uses to which they were put, but as understood by the American public—and by Abram, who recoiled from serfdom even as he embraced what he happily termed slavery to God and his markets—they seemed to lend a scientific imprimatur to the Manichaean worldview of the country’s most rabid red hunters. A decade later, the Volker Fund would hire Rousas John Rushdoony, a theologian who was to the far right of fundamentalism what Hayek was to economic conservatism; it was Rushdoony who helped marry the two with extensive writings on theonomy, a jargony term for what Abram’s descendants would come to call biblical capitalism.

  Both theonomy and biblical capitalism suggest an equal yoke between scripture and currency, but there can be little doubt about which was the driving force behind this new plan to surround governors with prayer warriors vetted by Abram and his friends in corporate America. And yet it was Carlson, who disliked even acknowledging the existence of dollars, who quietly climbed Abram’s chain of command. The following spring, he took time off from Eisenhower’s still-unofficial campaign to travel to The Hague, where Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina anointed him as the new chair of International Council for Christian Leadership, the overseas division of Abram’s ICL composed at that point mainly of Germans who didn’t want to talk about their pasts and French businessmen just as eager to smooth over history in the service of profits. Three fellow GOP congressmen, all Abram disciples, accompanied Carlson. They flew on the public tab, and the trip occasioned sharp questions from the press. Why had the secretary of defense given the four use of a U.S. military plane for private travel? The ICLer’s mission, said a spokesman for the secretary, was in “direct relationship to the national interest.”13

  At The Hague, Queen Wilhelmina, a strong monarch famous for bypassing Holland’s parli
amentary system,14 presided over this American interest, and the inner circle of the Fellowship’s trans-Atlantic organization elected Carlson their new chairman. Carlson looked like a stand-in, though, for the general running the Allied command in Paris. That seemed to be as Carlson wanted it; he was in Holland to recruit allies for an American campaign. Besides Abram, there were industrialists who’d line up behind Eisenhower, including the automobile titan Paul G. Hoffman, who’d become one of Ike’s economic advisers; a pair of ultraright congressmen to shore up Ike’s conservative flank; and, in addition to GOP heavies such as Senators Wiley and Flanders, a delegation of “Dixiecrats,” Southern Democrats to the right of most Republicans. That summer, Carlson declared that Eisenhower would contest the traditionally solid-Democratic South, a quixotic quest that anticipated Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” by more than a decade.

  Far more troublesome to Eisenhower than the Democratic South, though, was a singular midwestern Republican, the de facto party boss, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. To the uninitiated, Taft did not appear be a formidable obstacle. He was a dull speaker, unmemorable in appearance, indifferent to the public. But no politician could claim a more perfect pedigree: grandson of a secretary of war, son of a president, first in his class at Yale and Harvard Law. “The best mind in Washington,” went a popular Democratic jab, “until he makes it up.” And yet he played the part of a common man. Not like Roosevelt, who’d disingenuously claimed to be a farmer, but rather, in the name of an ill-defined middle class—in reality, the managerial class, small businessmen and second bananas who dreamed one day of being bosses themselves—that would become a template for conservative “populism” long after Taft’s name was forgotten.

  If Taft was hardly just another Rotarian-on-the-make, he truly was in every sense a provincial man, and proud of that fact. A son of Ohio beholden to neither the New England aristocracy nor the solid South, wary of Wall Street, contemptuous of Europe and its wars, he was a conservative at the last time in American life when such views connoted a kind of pacifism. His enemies murmured of fascist sympathies because he did not want to fight Hitler, but it was war itself that he loathed. When World War II ended and the Cold War began, he opposed it even more strongly, opposed the draft and opposed military spending and opposed what he feared, correctly, was the coming age of American empire, an era in which the United States would wage the wars the old colonial powers could no longer afford.