One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (10 page)

During the war, Vereide brought together his newfound political and corporate supporters to serve on the board of directors for the new national version of City Chapel, which he called the National Council for Christian Leadership (NCCL). By 1946, the forty-five members of the board represented an impressive range of public and private power in America. From the political arena, its number included eight members of the US Senate and ten representatives in the US House. Drawn in equal numbers from the Republican and Democratic parties, the congressmen were almost universally conservative in their politics. (Former senator Harold Burton, by then appointed to the Supreme Court, still served on the board with his former congressional colleagues.) These political leaders were joined by a number of prominent businessmen, including NAM president Coonley, timber titan F. K. Weyerhauser, earthmoving equipment manufacturer R. G. LeTourneau, and steel magnate Roy Ingersoll. The National Council for Christian Leadership made its headquarters in Washington, D.C., where Vereide had relocated during the war. In November 1945, with considerable help from a wealthy patron, the organization had bought a four-story mansion on Embassy Row, which became its official base of operations. “This,” Vereide announced with pride, “is God's Embassy in Washington.”
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Despite the seeming hyperbole, Vereide's organization did reach into the highest levels of politics. In 1946, for instance, when President Truman appointed treasury secretary Fred Vinson to become the new chief justice of the United States, Vereide invited Vinson to join the Senate breakfast group for a “dedication” of his new position on the Supreme Court. A devout Methodist, Vinson readily accepted and brought along attorney general Tom Clark. Before a gathering of twenty-eight senators, the Presbyterian attorney general offered his own religious testimony, and then the new chief justice followed suit. As Vereide remembered, Vinson spoke warmly about the influence the Bible had not just on his own life but on all of American government and law. After a silent prayer, Missouri senator Forest Donnell led the dedicatory prayer, “invoking God's blessing on the Chief Justice and dedicating him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to his exalted and important position.” Afterward, Vinson told Vereide that he wished the morning meeting had been “broadcast to all the American people, for he felt that it would do more than anything else to restore the confidence of the people in their government and to unite the nation in a common faith.”
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The “consecration” of the chief justice of the United States was not an aberration. Indeed, when Tom Clark and Sherman Minton were appointed to the Supreme Court in late 1949, Vereide arranged for another ceremony dedicating their new roles as well. The two new justices joined Chief Justice Vinson and a bipartisan set of senators for a special ceremony in early 1950. Virginia senator A. Willis Robertson, father of the evangelist Pat Robertson, led the group in an opening prayer, after which they polished off plates of toast and eggs. In the discussion that followed, these leaders from the judicial and legislative branches reflected on the role of prayer in political life. Senator John Stennis, a Mississippi Democrat, spoke of how America often focused on material issues, but “we must balance our planning with spirituality.” Chief Justice Vinson agreed. “I am not a preacher or even the son of a preacher,” he reflected. “But I know we must adhere to the ideals of Christianity.” Past civilizations, Vinson warned darkly, had crumbled from within as decadence removed them from their founding principles. Justice Clark wholeheartedly agreed. “No country or civilization can last,” he said, “unless it is founded on Christian values.”
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At the end of his “dedication” ceremony, Justice Sherman Minton urged those gathered to work for a closer brotherhood with the people of Europe. But Vereide had already begun just such an effort. In 1947, he unveiled a new International Council for Christian Leadership (ICCL). In theory, the ICCL was simply an extension of the NCCL, working alongside it in a common effort directed both at home and abroad. But in practice, many of Vereide's allies worried it meant that foreign issues would take priority over domestic ones. Republican congressman John Phillips, a member of the NCCL board of directors, sent Vereide an impassioned letter in August 1948 reminding him that he had “repeatedly been told by your executive committee that there must be no connection between the two movements until the home-grown movement is stronger on its feet.” Phillips felt so strongly about the matter that he resigned from the board and asked that his name be removed from the group's literature and letterhead. Responding with deep regret, Vereide insisted that he had never neglected their domestic priorities. “I have given myself unstintingly for the development in our nation of an appreciation for the protection of our form of government and private enterprise,” he asserted. Furthermore, the minister reasoned, any program to protect capitalism at home had to protect capitalism everywhere. “Our own economy will crack without the right relationship to [the] world economy,” Vereide argued, “and that whole structure is built on moral foundations.” The minister pressed ahead in his drive to give the organization an international presence, with quick success. Within a few years, Christian Leadership breakfast groups were meeting regularly in thirty-one foreign countries. England, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland represented the bulk of the initial growth of the group, but the ICCL made its presence felt in nations as varied as China, South Africa, and Canada, with isolated operations in localities such as Havana and Mexico City as well.
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Vereide recognized that the tensions of the Cold War could be exploited to win more converts to his cause. “The Time is Now!” he wrote members of the House breakfast group in August 1949. “On all sides today we hear people speaking fearfully of the spread of atheistic communism. Is there really anything we can do about it? Yes!” He urged the congressmen to stand up to communism in three ways—by maintaining their personal relationship with Jesus Christ; by “cultivating ‘intensive
fellowships,' i.e. the spread of small groups or cells,” back in their congressional districts patterned on their breakfast group in Congress; and by working with like-minded Christians across the country to present “a united front against the forces of the anti-Christ.” “The choice,” he insisted, “boils down to this: ‘Christ or Communism.' There is really no other. Those in between—playing neutral—are literally playing into the hands of the enemy.”
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Just two weeks later, Americans learned that the Soviet Union now had nuclear weapons. The paranoia over the dangers posed by “godless communism” increased dramatically in the coming months and years, and so too would the campaign to Christianize America. Abraham Vereide and his associates worked tirelessly to win more converts to their cause, moving on to ever greater successes over the course of the coming decade. They would not be alone.

I
N BOTH MEANS AND MOTIVES
, Billy Graham's ministry represented a continuation of Abraham Vereide's. Fresh from his success in Los Angeles in late 1949, the sensational young preacher toured the country in a series of revivals that seemed, in the words of one biographer, “like a long Palm Sunday procession of celebration and arrival.” He began in 1950 in Boston. There, a single, lightly advertised New Year's Eve service at Mechanics Hall attracted a crowd of more than six thousand, forcing stunned organizers to throw together a series of additional revivals at the opera house, the Park Street Church, Symphony Hall, and finally Boston Garden, where more than twenty-five thousand tried to get in. That spring, Graham held his first “crusade” in Columbia, South Carolina. Governor Strom Thurmond made regular appearances onstage at the services, as did Senator Olin Johnston and Supreme Court justice James Byrnes. Henry Luce, a devout missionary's son who had become publisher of Time Inc., came to see Graham preach to a record crowd at the University of South Carolina football stadium. Deeply impressed, he afterward returned with Graham to the governor's mansion, where the two stayed up late into the night discussing their faith. In the summer, the crusade came to Portland, Oregon. Frustrated by seating shortages in the earlier revivals, Graham convinced local organizers to craft a special
“tabernacle” of wood and aluminum that would seat twelve thousand worshipers. Nearly twice as many tried to get into the opening night's service; a half million more came over the next six weeks. Graham ended the year with a similar six-week revival in Atlanta, where organizers converted the Ponce de Leon baseball park to seat twenty-five thousand, ultimately drawing in another half-million worshipers. Between these extended crusades in 1950, Graham scheduled one-off revivals wherever he could, ranging from an overflow audience of twenty-five hundred at the State Auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island, to an estimated one hundred thousand at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. In early 1951, Billy Graham's travels took him to Fort Worth, Texas. The four-week crusade there was an unqualified success, with a total attendance of nearly 336,000, making it the largest evangelistic campaign in the history of the state or, for that matter, the entire Southwest.
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Of Graham's legion of admirers during the Fort Worth crusade, Sid Richardson stood out. A crusty, barrel-chested oilman, Richardson was by then one of the wealthiest men in the entire nation, if not
the
wealthiest. Not even the reclusive Richardson knew for sure; much of his immense fortune was buried underneath the Texas soil in his vast oil fields. Still, the journalist Theodore White declared him “far and away the richest American” in a 1954 article, suggesting that fellow Texas oilman H. L. Hunt might be “his only rival in the billion-dollar bracket.” In one of the earliest attempts to rank America's wealthiest citizens,
Ladies' Home Journal
gave Richardson the top honors in its inaugural 1957 list, estimating his overall net worth at $700 million. For his part, Richardson wore his wealth uncomfortably, like the rumpled suits that had to be custom-made for his stocky frame. For most of the year, the “billionaire bachelor” lived in two modest rooms at the downtown Fort Worth Club. But he also owned a private island in the Gulf of Mexico, a twenty-eight-mile-long retreat he purchased for a million dollars and then adorned with a luxurious hunting lodge.
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The oilman was a collector of sorts. He had started purchasing pieces of art from the American West at an associate's suggestion, soon amassing an unrivaled array of Remingtons and Russells. He also collected political clients. By 1951, he was already a generous backer of both Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. That year, he hired
John Connally as his executive secretary, launching the career of another talented young politician. Believing Graham had similar potential, Richardson befriended the evangelist, introducing him to other leaders in the state and offering help whenever he could. Graham, for his part, adored the oilman, whom he always called “Mr. Sid.” When the preacher started his film production company, the first two features seemed to be tributes to Richardson, or men like him. Filmed during the Fort Worth crusade,
Mr. Texas
(1951) chronicled the conversion of a hard-drinking rodeo rider;
Oiltown, U.S.A.
(1954) told a similar tale about an oil tycoon from Houston who made his way to Christ. The second film cost $100,000 to produce and was advertised as “the story of the free-enterprise system of America, the story of the development and use of God-given natural resources by men who have built a great new empire.” Years later, when Richardson passed away, Billy Graham flew down to his private island to preside over the funeral. The preacher offered the highest praise he could imagine for his longtime patron: “He was willing to go to any end to see that our American way of life was maintained.”
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The earthy Richardson had little use for Graham's religion, but the two shared a common faith in free enterprise. “When Graham speaks of ‘the American way of life,'” an early biographer noted, “he has in mind the same combination of economic and political freedom that the National Association of Manufacturers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the
Wall Street Journal
do when they use the phrase.” Indeed, during the early years of his ministry, Graham devoted himself to spreading the gospel of free enterprise. In his 1951 crusade in Greensboro, North Carolina, he spoke at length about the “dangers that face capitalistic America.” The nation was no longer “devoted to the individualism that made America great,” he warned the crowd. If it hoped to survive, it needed to embrace once again “the rugged individualism that Christ brought” to mankind. Not surprisingly, Graham saw that individualistic spirit in self-made millionaires such as Richardson and, therefore, made no apologies for ministering to him and men like him. “Whether the story of Christ is told in a huge stadium, across the desk of some powerful leader, or shared with a golfing companion,” the preacher reasoned, “it satisfies a common hunger.”
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Much like his patron, and much like Abraham Vereide and James Fifield, the preacher hungered to make his presence felt in Washington,
D.C. His network of political contacts gave him easy access to the Capitol, where he led a congressional prayer service in April 1950. “Our Father, we give thee thanks for the greatest nation in the world,” he offered. “We thank thee for the highest standard of living in the world.” Although Graham was delighted to make new friends in the legislature, he had a bigger target. During the Boston crusade, he told a reporter that his real ambition was “to get President Truman's ear for thirty minutes, to get a little help.” He peppered the president with letters and telegrams for months but had no luck winning an invitation until House majority leader John McCormack intervened. To Graham's lasting embarrassment, their July 1950 meeting was an utter disaster. He and his three associates arrived at the Oval Office wearing brightly colored suits, hand-painted silk ties, and new white suede shoes. They looked, Graham remembered with a grimace, like a “traveling vaudeville team.” The president received them politely. A devout but reserved Baptist who was wary of public displays of piety, he held the foursome at some distance. When Graham asked if he could offer a prayer, Truman shrugged and said, “I don't suppose it could do any harm.” The preacher wrapped his arm around the president, clutching him uncomfortably close. As he called down God's blessing, an associate punctuated the prayer with cries of “Amen!” and “Tell it!”
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