One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (4 page)

Fifield's connection to his congregation extended to their views on religion and politics too. In the apt words of one observer, Fifield was “one of the most theologically liberal and at the same time politically conservative ministers” of his era. He had no patience for fundamentalists who insisted upon a literal reading of Scripture. “The men who chronicled and canonized the Bible were subject to human error and limitation,” he believed, and therefore the text needed to be sifted and interpreted. Reading the holy book should be “like eating fish—we take the bones out to enjoy the meat. All parts are not of equal value.” Accordingly, Fifield dismissed the many passages in the New Testament about wealth and poverty and instead worked tirelessly to reconcile Christianity and capitalism. In his view, both systems rested on a basic belief that individuals would succeed or fail on their own merit. Although Fifield was not the first to suggest such connections, he put those theories into action in ways unlike any
before him. At First Congregational and elsewhere, the minister reached out warmly to the wealthy, assuring them that their worldly success was a sign of God's blessings and brushing off the criticism of clergymen who disagreed. “I have smiled,” he reflected later in life, “when critics of mine have called me the Thirteenth Apostle of Big Business or the St. Paul of the Prosperous.”
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While Fifield took a loose approach to the Bible, he was a strict constructionist with the Constitution. Much like the millionaires to whom he ministered, Fifield had watched in alarm as Roosevelt convinced vast majorities of Americans that unfettered capitalism had crippled the nation and that the federal government now needed to play an important new role in regulating the free market's risks and redistributing its rewards. For Fifield and his flock, Roosevelt's actions violated not just the Constitution but the natural order of things. In December 1939, the minister placed a full-page ad in the
Los Angeles Times
decrying the New Deal as antithetical to the designs of the founding fathers. “From the beginning,” the ad read, “America has built on the ideal of government which provides that the state is the servant of its citizens, that all just powers of government arise from consent of the governed, and that government's function is to provide maximum responsibility and maximum freedom to individual citizens. The opposite philosophy has been unwelcome in America until recently.” The New Deal, it continued, posed a dire threat to the American way of life, and it was the duty of clergymen to save the nation's soul. In their crusade against the wanton growth of government, the church would find natural allies in corporate America because both were committed at their core to the “preservation of basic freedom in this nation.” “Goodness and Christian ideals run proportionately high among businessmen,” the ad assured. “They need no defense, for with all their faults, they have given America within the last decade a new world-high in general economic well-being.”
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To lead his crusade in defense of freedom, Fifield offered the services of Spiritual Mobilization. He had founded the organization in the spring of 1935 with a pair of like-minded intellectuals, President Donald J. Cowling of Carleton College, a doctrinally liberal graduate of Yale Divinity School, and Professor William Hocking of Harvard University, a libertarian philosopher. The organization's founding goal was “to arouse
the ministers of all denominations in America to check the trends toward pagan stateism, which would destroy our basic freedom and spiritual ideals.” Soon Fifield took sole control, running its operations from his offices in Los Angeles. The organization's credo reflected the common politics of the minister and the millionaires in his congregation. It held that men were creatures of God imbued with “inalienable rights and responsibilities,” specifically enumerated as “the liberty and dignity of the individual, in which freedom of choice, of enterprise and of property is inherent.” Churches, it asserted, had a solemn duty to defend those rights against the encroachments of the state. Heeding this call, the First Congregational Church formally took charge of Spiritual Mobilization in 1938.
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With First Congregational now supporting it, Fifield brought the organization into national politics. He began by simply distributing copies of the political speeches he delivered from the pulpit. In one such pamphlet, Fifield detailed at great lengths the “grievous sin” of the New Deal state, which had wreaked havoc on the professional and personal lives of upstanding businessmen with its unwarranted meddling in their affairs. “The President of the United States and his administration are responsible for the willful or unconscious destruction of thrift, initiative, industriousness and resourcefulness which have been among our best assets since Pilgrim days,” he charged. “I speak of the intimate, personal observations I have made of individuals who have lost their ideal, their purpose and their motive through the New Deal's destruction of spiritual rootage.” It wasn't merely the rich who were suffering but all Americans. “Every Christian should oppose the totalitarian trends of the New Deal,” he warned in another tract. Dismissing Roosevelt's promises of progress, Fifield called for a return to traditional values. “The way out for America is not ahead but back,” he insisted. “How far back? Back as far as the old Gospel which exalted individuals, which placed responsibility for thought on individuals, and which insisted that individuals should be free spirits under God.”
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These pamphlets from Spiritual Mobilization drew attention from leading conservatives across America, men who were eager to enlist the clergy in their fight against the New Deal. Former president Herbert Hoover, who had been deposed by Roosevelt and disparaged by his acolytes, encouraged Fifield in personal meetings and regular correspondence.
“If it would be possible for the Church to make a non-biased investigation into the morals of this government,” Hoover wrote the minister in 1938, “they would find everywhere the old negation of Christianity that ‘the end justifies the means.'” (“Aside from all that,” he added, “I do not believe that the end they are trying to get to is any good either.”) In October 1938, Fifield sent an alarmist tract to more than seventy thousand ministers across the nation, seeking to enlist them in the revolt against Roosevelt. “We ministers have special opportunities and special responsibilities in these critical days,” it began. “America's movement toward dictatorship has already eliminated checks and balances in its concentration of powers in our chief executive.” The New Deal undermined the spirit of Christianity and demanded a response from Christ's representatives on earth. “If, with Jesus, we believe in the sacredness of individual personalities, then our leadership responsibility is very plain.” This duty was “not an easy one,” he cautioned. “We may be called unpatriotic and accused of ‘selling out,' but so was Jesus.” Finding the leaflet to his liking, Hoover sent Fifield a warm note of appreciation and urged him to press on.
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As the 1930s drew to a close, these conservatives watched with delight as the New Deal stumbled. Though they had hoped to destroy the Roosevelt administration themselves, its wounds were largely self-inflicted. In 1937, the president's labor allies launched a series of sit-down strikes that secured union recognition at corporations such as General Motors and US Steel but also roused sympathy for seemingly beleaguered businessmen. At the same time, Roosevelt overreached with his proposal to “pack” the Supreme Court with new justices, a move that played into the hands of those who sought to portray him as dictatorial in intent. Most significant, though, was his ill-fated decision to rein in federal spending in an effort to balance the budget. The impressive economic recovery of Roosevelt's first term suddenly stalled, and the country entered a short but sharp recession in the winter of 1937–1938. As the New Deal faltered, Fifield began to look forward to the next presidential election—in “the critical year 1940”—when conservatives might finally rout the architects of the regulatory state. To his dismay, international tensions soon marginalized domestic politics and prompted the country to rally around Roosevelt again. “Our Mobilization program is developing somewhat,” Fifield reported to Hoover in May 1941, “although, of course, under great
difficulties in view of current tensions and trends.” An ardent isolationist, Fifield argued strongly for neutrality in the coming conflict but found his prayers unanswered.
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Unable to keep America out of the Second World War, Fifield resolved to use it for his own ends. Pointing to the fascist dictatorships of the Axis powers as examples of “pagan stateism,” he urged Americans to support Spiritual Mobilization as a bulwark against the coming threat. In a series of newspaper advertisements, the organization convinced nearly two million Christians to sign its official pledge. As originally written in June 1940, the pledge simply stated concern that the “rising tides of paganism and apostasy” around the globe were a threat to freedom. But as the war continued, Fifield began focusing on enemies at home. By 1944, the Spiritual Mobilization pledge had taken a more clearly partisan form: “Recognizing the anti-Christian and anti-American trends toward pagan stateism in America, I covenant to oppose them in all my areas of influence. I will use every opportunity to champion basic freedoms [of the] free pulpit, free speech, free enterprise, free press, and free assembly.”
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As the distraction of the foreign war drew to a close, Fifield looked forward to renewing the fight against the New Deal. The minister now counted on the support of not just Hoover but an impressive array of conservative figures in politics, business, and religion. The advisory committee for Spiritual Mobilization's wartime pledge was, in the words of one observer, “a who's who of the conservative establishment.” At mid-decade, its twenty-four-man roster included three past or present presidents of the US Chamber of Commerce, a leading Wall Street analyst, a prominent economist at the American Banking Association, the founder of the National Small Businessmen's Association, a US congressman, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a few notable authors and lecturers, and the presidents of the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Florida, and Princeton Theological Seminary.
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In Spiritual Mobilization's publications, these corporate leaders and conservative intellectuals strove to convince clergymen to reject the New Deal state. The organization's annual bulletin, distributed to seventy thousand “carefully selected ministers of all denominations,” warned of the dangers of unchecked government power. The 1944 iteration, for instance, challenged Roosevelt's famous claim that Americans cherished “Four
Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “Within ever-narrowing limits, we still have freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and worship,” noted conservative author Channing Pollock, “but freedom of enterprise, of labor, and of the smallest concerns of our daily lives are gone with the wind from Washington. Instead we are offered the preposterous and impossible ‘Four Freedoms' of slaves and convicts.” The omens of a domestic dictatorship were clear, Senator Albert Hawkes agreed. “After careful examination of the records during the past ten years, one can only conclude that there is the objective of the assumption of greater power and control by the government over individual life. If these policies continue,” he warned, “they will lead to state direction and control of all the lives of our citizens. That is the goal of Federal planners. That is
NOT
the desire of the American people!”
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The organization's national ambitions soon stretched its budget beyond even the ample resources of First Congregational, leading Fifield to search for new sponsors. In December 1944, Hawkes arranged a meeting with an elite group of industrialists at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Fifield found the audience to be just as receptive as the one he had addressed there four years before. After the meeting, the attendees dedicated themselves to raising funds for Spiritual Mobilization through corporate donations, personal checks, and solicitations from their friends and associates. Harvey Firestone, for instance, secured a donation at “the suggested maximum level” of $5,000 from his firm and promised to “work out a studied approach to two other rubber companies in Akron.” H. W. Prentis Jr., meanwhile, sent Fifield the names of “twenty or twenty-five industrialists in this part of the country” from whom he could solicit funds. After Fifield wrote them, the former NAM president followed up with unsubtle messages of his own. Prentis noted that he personally had funded Spiritual Mobilization's work “in behalf of sound American Christian principles” and asked that they “give the movement some financial assistance” as well.
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F
IFIELD WON A NUMBER OF
powerful new patrons that year, but none was more important—not simply in terms of supporting Spiritual Mobilization financially but also in shaping its growth and effectiveness—than
J. Howard Pew Jr., president of Sun Oil. Tall and stiff, with bushy eyebrows, Pew had a stern appearance that was matched by his attitude. As a US senator once remarked, “He not only talks like an affidavit, he looks like one.”
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In theological terms, the doctrinally conservative Presbyterian had little in common with the liberal Congregationalist Fifield.
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“He is far more modernistic in his religious views than I like,” Pew confided to a friend, “and I am not sure his views on the divinity of Christ are sound.” Politically, though, the two were in complete agreement, and that was what mattered most. During the 1930s, Pew had emerged as the voice of conservatism in corporate America, holding prominent positions in industrial organizations such as NAM and, more notably, serving as a driving force behind the American Liberty League. In his letter appealing for Pew's support, Fifield offered words of flattery that had the benefit of being true. “During the last decade I have been pretty active in connection with the fight to perpetuate our American way of doing things and have had contacts with most of the individuals and groups throughout the country who are working upon that same problem,” he noted. “I just want to put in writing the fact that I have found no more steadfast, trustworthy, competent champion of our basic freedoms and spiritual ideals than J. Howard Pew.”
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