One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (44 page)

The crusade proved to be the largest public gathering in the history of the state. Roughly a hundred thousand spectators crammed into Neyland Stadium, filling every seat and packing the ramps and roads around it as well. Thousands stood on a sloping hill at the open end of the horseshoe-shaped stands; police estimated that thousands more were stuck outside in the middle of another record: the worst traffic jam in Knoxville's history. The crowd represented an impressive showing of the Silent Majority, a vast sea of clean-cut white southerners, with thousands of men in white shirts and neckties. Trim members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes guarded the stage at the twenty-yard line, as plainclothes detectives and uniformed policemen worked the stands. The few protesters who braved the stadium found themselves challenged at every turn. (One activist saw a crusade participant with a crucifix pin and offered him an antiwar pamphlet. “Stick it up your ass,” he spat back.) When Nixon and Graham strode onto the synthetic turf together, a two-minute ovation completely drowned out the chants of the outnumbered activists.
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The official theme was “Youth Night,” but most of the speakers directed their comments to the fifty-seven-year-old Nixon. The minister who gave the invocation asked for God's blessings for “our beloved president,” while elderly gospel singer Ethel Waters likened Nixon himself to a blessing from the Lord. “He belongs to everyone who wants to
receive and accept him,” she told the believers. Graham sounded the same themes. “I'm for change,” he told the students, “but the Bible teaches us to obey authority. . . . In this day of student unrest on the campus, here on one of the largest universities in America tens of thousands have been demonstrating their faith in the God of our fathers!” At this, protesters began chanting, “Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics!” Graham continued: “All Americans may not agree with the decisions a president makes, but he is our president.”
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President Richard Nixon regularly used the rites of public religion for his own political ends, often with the assistance of Reverend Billy Graham. In May 1970, when he was under fire for his expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, Nixon made an appearance at a Billy Graham Crusade at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to reach out to supporters.
Courtesy of the Office of the University Historian Collection, University of Tennessee, Knoxville–Libraries.

When Nixon took the pulpit, he basked in the moment. Graham had warned him there would be “different points of view” on display at the Crusade, he said, before adding with a grin: “I'm just glad that there seems to be a rather solid majority on one side rather than the other side tonight.” The stadium thundered again. Nixon then began reading what was, in essence, a presidential sermon on the need for faith in God and country. “America would not be what it is today, the greatest nation in the world, if this were not a nation which had made progress under God,” he
intoned. “If we are going to bring people together as we must bring them together, if we are going to have peace in the world, if our young people are going to have a fulfillment beyond simply those material things,” Nixon said, “they must turn to those great spiritual forces that have made America the great country that it is.” The protesters began chanting, “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” But once again, they were drowned out by an increasingly loud majority.
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The crusade worked wonders for the president. The Billy Graham Evangelical Association produced a triumphant film of the festivities, editing out all signs of dissent. The movie, distributed widely, showed the president basking before an enthusiastic crowd on a major campus. (Watching the film a month or so later, not even Graham could believe it. “Boy,” he muttered in awe, “they really gave him an ovation.”) The press praised Nixon effusively as well.
Time
called his address “one of the most effective speeches he has yet delivered.”
Newsweek
characterized it as “a suitably evangelistic ending for a Presidential week that started out seemingly beyond redemption.”
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N
OT A WEEK LATER
, G
RAHAM
once again demonstrated his value to the administration. At a press conference on June 4, 1970, he unveiled plans for the “pro-America rally” he had earlier proposed for the Fourth of July. With comedian Bob Hope at his side, the minister told reporters that “Honor America Day” would be “the biggest celebration in America's history.” The daylong event would take place at the capital's major monuments, with Graham leading a religious service at the Lincoln Memorial in the morning and Hope emceeing an all-star program of music and comedy from the Washington Monument in the evening. The entire extravaganza, Hope said, would show the world that “Americans can put aside their honest differences and rally around the flag to show national unity.”
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Though organizers insisted the event was for all Americans, the program had been carefully designed to appeal to the Silent Majority. Dwight Chapin, who had followed Haldeman from J. Walter Thompson to the White House, explained the early plans in a memo to his boss. “All this is excellent!” an enthusiastic Haldeman wrote in the margins, but “we need
a solid
cornball
program developer.” Accordingly, they enlisted J. Willard Marriott to bring the same sort of old-fashioned entertainment that he had provided for the inauguration a year before. He soon announced commitments from mainstream performers including comedians Jack Benny and Red Skelton and musicians Glen Campbell, Connie Stevens, and Dinah Shore. Kate Smith would perform her rendition of “God Bless America,” which she had been singing for nearly a quarter century, while a recent runner-up in the Miss Teen America pageant would recite an original composition titled “I Am an American.” (When radicals mocked the lineup as “a program for fossils and dinosaurs,” Marriott made a show of searching for hipper acts, such as the comedian Dick Gregory and the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. But all of them, he reported, had prior commitments.)
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Funding for Honor America Day followed the same general pattern. Publicly, organizers remained coy. Asked by reporters how it would be financed, Hope asked, “Do you have any ideas? So far we're using a pay phone.” Out of sight, though, Marriott had it well in hand. A seasoned Republican fund-raiser, he quickly secured over $285,000 in donations, largely from corporate leaders. Some were philanthropists who had supported similar celebrations in the past, most notably J. Howard Pew, who had bankrolled Spiritual Mobilization's Fourth of July celebrations in the early 1950s, and Patrick Frawley, who had funded Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade programs in the early 1960s. They were joined by corporations that had often donated to those same earlier endeavors: General Motors, Caterpillar Tractor, Marshall Field, Standard Oil, Union Carbide, US Steel, and more. But the most significant funding came from corporate leaders who had been singled out that same month by Nixon's aides as “financial angels” of the administration. Elmer Bobst, a pharmaceutical executive who had donated generously to the Nixon campaign, promised $5,000. Bob Abplanalp, head of the Precision Valve Corporation and a close ally of the president, donated another $15,000. From the headquarters of
Reader's Digest,
Nixon loyalists Hobart Lewis and DeWitt Wallace sent along $17,000 more.
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The Nixon administration took an even more direct hand in recruiting rank-and-file supporters from the Silent Majority. As he reviewed the early plans, Haldeman worried that the event needed more “professional
press/publicity work” and “some real, tough, nitty gritty crowd building.” To that end, Chapin brought in Ronald Walker, who handled those same duties for official presidential visits as Nixon's chief advance man. “Dwight [Chapin] said, ‘Look, Ron's got these thirty-some-odd guys, they're sensational, they're our advance men, they know how to build crowds and stuff,'” Walker recalled. “‘The President wants that Honor America Day to be the biggest happening on a Fourth of July ever in Washington, D.C. Let's let them have it.'” The order, he remembered, “was just like a gift from heaven” because it let his team start mobilizing members of the Silent Majority two years before the coming re-election campaign. “I turned those guys loose,” Walker recounted with pride. “Crowd raising, handbills, leaflets, telephone, boiler room operations.” White House advance teams established offices in Washington, across Maryland and Virginia, and in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City in order to ensure that the administration's supporters turned out for Honor America Day. Peter Brennan organized “a whole train of hardhats,” seventeen cars long, to come down from New York, Walker recalled. Likewise, H. Ross Perot, another “financial angel” of the administration, rented two planes to fly more supporters in from Texas. “Honor America Day was a real plus,” the advance man remembered. It “took what I'd been building for a year” and “just highlighted it.”
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Though much of the Nixon administration's role in planning the event took place behind the scenes, the conservative leanings of the celebration were clear to all. Organizers Graham and Marriott, of course, were longtime friends of the Nixons; the president's brother even worked for Marriott as a hotel executive. And the involvement of Bob Hope, another well-known ally of the administration, only fueled the suspicions of cynics. “They have some cause to wonder just how ‘nonpolitical' Mr. Hope really is,” the
Wall Street Journal
acknowledged, rattling off recent instances of the comedian “popping up in situations that are unquestionably political, partisan, and Republican.” Hope had been busy on the campaign trail that year, stumping for GOP candidates across the country. Meanwhile, he vocally supported Spiro Agnew's attacks on administration critics. “I travel a lot,” he told an Ohio audience, “and most people I have found think that he is saying the right things.” Hope was aligned with the administration but, more important, he was also associated with
the increasingly polarizing war in Vietnam. He had long toiled on USO tours to entertain troops overseas and had recently turned to drumming up support for the war stateside. Just a week before the Kent State shootings, Hope headlined a “Wake Up, America!” rally in Boston that saw an estimated sixty-five thousand clean-cut supporters of “the Constitution, God and Country” march from Boston Common to City Hall Plaza.
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The prominent involvement of the administration and its allies led many to dismiss the event as little more than a rally for the right. “While the ‘Honor America Day' celebration in Washington has been advertised as nonpartisan,” the columnist Art Buchwald noted, “any professional politician knows that when the public sees Billy Graham, Bob Hope and Lawrence Welk on the platform, the Nixon Administration will be the only ones enjoying the fireworks.” But, of course, the target audience for the event was much larger than that. Members of the Silent Majority, upset by the turmoil of the 1960s, increasingly looked back to the stability of the 1950s with nostalgia. The religious rhetoric and rituals of the Eisenhower years had been key markers of that era's seeming Cold War consensus with its conservative social values, and the Silent Majority readily seized on them in hopes that they might help them turn back the clock.
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Organizers continued to insist that Honor America Day was for everyone, though qualifications increasingly colored their claims. Two days before the event, Graham and Marriott held a press conference at the Mayflower Hotel, site of the first National Prayer Breakfast, to note that the day was for all Americans—or at least all who loved God and country. “We've tried to get every shade of philosophy into the program,” Marriott said. “But we're not after people who shine their shoes with the flag. I don't think those people want to honor America.” Religious belief, of course, was a key part of that patriotism. “Only atheists and agnostics were not invited to participate,” Graham explained, “because they don't believe in God.” Nevertheless, the minister extended an olive branch to the other side. Antiwar protesters surely loved their country, he said at the press conference, so they “would come out and wave the flag too.” In a sign of his sincerity, the night before the rally Graham ventured out to the Washington Monument to chat briefly with hundreds of radicals who had camped out for a “marijuana smoke-in” the next day. They
offered the preacher some pot, but he declined. As he walked away, several flashed him a peace sign. In an echo of the president's own impromptu meeting with students at the Lincoln Memorial, a single finger shot up in response. With Graham, however, it was an
index
finger, his friendly insistence that Jesus Christ was the one true way.
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