One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (25 page)

Not surprisingly, DeMille became a close ally of James Fifield. Although raised an Episcopalian, the director was deeply impressed with the pastor of First Congregational. He often attended services there and lectured to the Sunday Evening Club. In January 1950, when the church celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of Fifield's arrival, DeMille was a featured speaker. The service began with a processional; DeMille dutifully marched into the church alongside Don Belding, the advertising executive who led the Freedoms Foundation, and Fletcher Bowron, the mayor of Los Angeles. DeMille's address, broadcast live on KMPC and KFAC radio, praised Fifield's work in Spiritual Mobilization. “Like all good Americans, he believes in maintaining the separation of church and state,” he said. “But, like the Founders of America, he does not believe in the separation of God and government.” Pointing, as Fifield often did, to the Declaration's assertion that man's rights were “endowed by their Creator,” the director insisted that God alone could restrict those rights. “True Americans,” DeMille asserted, “believe that the people own the government. But certain groups have grown strong in the past two decades who believe that the government owns the people. Which side you are on depends to a great extent on how you answer the old question ‘What is man?' The Church answers, as the Declaration of Independence answers, that man is the child of God with God-given rights that the State cannot touch.”
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At the end of his speech, DeMille urged his listeners—the eighteen hundred packed into First Congregational's pews and all those following on the radio—to join in Fifield's crusade. “The honor I know he covets most,” he said in conclusion, “is not our words tonight, but our deeds tomorrow.” For his own part, the director personally enlisted in Spiritual Mobilization's program, serving as a founding member of the Committee to Proclaim Liberty and helping plan its radio broadcast for the first “Freedom Under God” celebration. Meanwhile, DeMille lent his support to other major figures in the postwar religious revival. During Billy Graham's 1949 Los Angeles crusade, for instance, the director leaked word that he had offered the charismatic preacher a formal screen test at Paramount Studios, thereby providing more publicity for Graham's cause.
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The director also worked in the political realm on his own. In 1945, he formed the DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom. A result of
his wartime fight against the American Federation of Radio Artists, the foundation worked to weaken labor unions across the country. Fifield helped steer some of his more generous donors to his “admired friend,” recommending that individuals and corporations who had already made the maximum allowable contribution to Spiritual Mobilization channel their remaining charitable giving to DeMille. “His organization seeks to secure legislation protecting the ‘right to work,' which is basic to Freedom,” Fifield advised his allies. “It needs and, assuredly, deserves the consideration and support of all corporations and individuals who wish to be counted in Freedom's fight.” As a result, many of the same interests that had generously supported Spiritual Mobilization donated to DeMille's foundation too. General Motors gave $20,000, for instance; Chrysler, $10,000 more.
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Despite his political activism, DeMille believed he could best serve the conservative religious revival with his considerable talents as a filmmaker. In August 1952, he announced that his next film would be an epic production of
The Ten Commandments.
The director had already produced a film on the topic three decades earlier, but he wanted to tackle it again. “I feel that this subject is particularly timely today,” he announced to the press. “There is a spiritual resurgence throughout the world. I want to do my part in furthering this spiritual mobilization both in countries where the state has not tried to replace God and in countries where it apparently has.” (Reporters did not ask into which category the director believed his own country fell.) In later interviews, DeMille often described the story in tones strikingly similar to those in his speech for Fifield. “The great clash between two beliefs is dramatized,” the director explained to the
Los Angeles Times.
“Rameses II represents the ruler governing only by his own whims and caprices, whereas Moses brought to the people a rule of life which was eternal and right because it came from the Supreme Being.” “It is the story of human freedom,” he told the
Washington Post,
“whether men are to be ruled by law or by the whims of dictators, whether they are to be free souls under God or whether they belong to the state.”
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In promoting the film, DeMille and his crew presented
The Ten Commandments
as a true story grounded in the hard facts of history and the holy truths of the Bible. A year before its premiere, the film's screenwriter Aeneas MacKenzie vouched for its accuracy in a lengthy piece for the
New York Times.
He recalled how DeMille made his “team of scenarists” aware of the solemnity of their duty. “There is no place for the usual fiction in a picture that deals with the interpretations and circumstances from which not one—but three!—of the world's great religions have sprung,” the director had instructed. “You may dramatize the scenes in any way you wish, but whatever episodes you employ must be justified to me in terms of recognized authorities. You are to invent nothing out of your own talented imaginations. “ (At this, MacKenzie remembered, DeMille had added a flourish from the pharaoh: “So let it be written, gentlemen! So let it be done!”) The director, however, had issued an impossible demand, for there simply was no record for much of Moses's life. The biblical account introduced Moses as a baby along the Nile and then returned to him three decades later, with no mention of his life in between. For a film that claimed simply to reveal God's words, much of its script would have to be written by man.
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To preserve the illusion of historical accuracy, DeMille instructed his head of research, Henry Noerdlinger, to find the documentation that would be needed to fend off religious and academic critics. Noerdlinger cast his net broadly, drawing on ancient rabbinical texts, early Christian narratives, and the Koran. Most of these accounts had been composed centuries after the Book of Exodus, leading the researcher to refer to them cautiously as “traditions” rather than “histories.” But he used them all the same, filling in the missing decades of Moses's life with a story quite literally made for Hollywood. In his telling, the Hebrew prophet who defiantly challenged the pharaoh had grown up with him as a fellow prince of Egypt. This was a version of events that had eluded biblical scholars in three major faiths for millennia, but DeMille's team insisted it was true, or true enough. For proof they pointed not to the quality of Noerdlinger's work but to the quantity, noting repeatedly that he had consulted some 1,644 sources in his research. Such claims helped keep critics of the film at bay. But more important, they gave DeMille the necessary cover to advance his own subjective interpretation as objective fact.
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DeMille went to great lengths to ensure that the audience saw the film as he did. A ten-minute trailer for the blockbuster, for instance, showed the director in an elegantly furnished room that overflowed with original works and reproductions of classical art, leather-bound Bibles, reference
books, and assorted historical documents. With the care of a curator, DeMille examined the evidence and instructed moviegoers on its meaning. “All this happened three thousand years ago,” he said, “but we're still fighting the same battle that Moses fought. Are men to be ruled by God's laws? Or are they to be ruled by the whims of a dictator, like Rameses II? Are men property of the state? Or are they free souls under God?” Shortly before its premiere, the director filmed a special introduction to be shown before the film. In it, DeMille parted a gold and white curtain, strode toward the audience, and informed them they were about to witness “the story of the birth of freedom.” He then repeated, virtually verbatim, his lines from the trailer about the film's depiction of the timeless struggle between tyranny under the state and freedom “under God.” If moviegoers still missed the connection to present-day politics, the official program distributed at screenings spelled it out plainly. On its final page, the noted painter Arnold Friberg depicted Moses, his arms outstretched, with the Liberty Bell ringing behind him. Across the top of the page ran the same passage from Leviticus used earlier by Spiritual Mobilization: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.” “These,” the program explained, “are the last words spoken by Moses in the motion picture as a mandate of liberty to the people.”
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When the film premiered in November 1956, audiences were awestruck. DeMille had spared no expense, with his budget ultimately ballooning to an astronomical $15 million. The cast of twenty-five thousand included everyone from Hollywood stars to Bedouin tribesmen, with all their actions captured in a stunning new widescreen format known as VistaVision. Appropriately for a film of such scale,
The Ten Commandments
opened at the celebrated Criterion Theatre on Broadway. As stars left their cars, they posed for photos as crowds of screaming New Yorkers pressed against police barricades on the sidewalks. Only the Camel cigarettes billboard seemed unimpressed by the spectacle, coolly blowing smoke rings a block away. The film played to sellout crowds at the Criterion for the next year. The three-hour-and-thirty-nine-minute running time meant that the theater could show it only twice a day, except on Saturdays and holidays, when it ran three times. Yet the film was still seen at that single theater by more than 1.3 million patrons, for a box office gross of $2.5 million. Across
America, it sold nearly twenty-two million tickets in its first year of release. Even today, it still ranks as the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time, with receipts measured in constant dollars.
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Yet the most lasting legacy of
The Ten Commandments
was its marketing campaign. As he prepared for the debut, DeMille worked with the Fraternal Order of Eagles on an ambitious plan to establish monuments of the Ten Commandments on public property across the nation. The organization had been distributing copies of the Ten Commandments for years, inspired by an incident in which Judge E. J. Ruegemer of St. Cloud, Minnesota, learned that a juvenile defendant in his courtroom had never heard of the laws and “sentenced” the boy to learn and obey them. Ruegemer, the head of the Eagles' Youth Guidance Commission, persuaded the fraternal order to take up the cause. Members and their families volunteered to make reproductions of the Ten Commandments, initially manufacturing them as paper scrolls in St. Paul and framing them with hand-cut wood and glass. The nearly nine hundred thousand members of the organization popularized the venture, distributing scrolls far and wide. Recipients included city halls in small towns from Washington State to Pennsylvania, judges in Idaho and Massachusetts, and a police detective in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
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When he learned of the Eagles' campaign, DeMille immediately wanted to join in. A consummate showman, the director urged the Eagles to work on a grander scale. Instead of modest scrolls, he suggested the organization craft larger stone monuments that more closely resembled the tablets described in Exodus. In the interests of accuracy, DeMille even sent Ruegemer a sample of the granite he had carved from Mount Sinai during his personal pilgrimage to the holy site. Sharing the filmmaker's eye for detail, the judge reported back that the Eagles had decided to build their monoliths “from Wisconsin red granite, believing it to more closely resemble the Mount Sinai granite than our Minnesota reds.” In the spring and summer of 1955, the fraternal organization began dedicating these new stone monuments at sites such as the lawn of the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana. Soon after, DeMille and the Eagles joined forces. The Eagles wanted “to offer to Paramount Pictures our cooperation in publicizing and urging membership and families to see the forthcoming
Ten Commandment film.” In return, DeMille promised to use the full influence of his publicity department, including personal appearances by stars of the film, to promote the Eagles' work.
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Together, DeMille and the Eagles established Ten Commandments monuments across America. In 1955, for instance, the organization dedicated one as the cornerstone for an addition to Milwaukee's City Hall. “It is unique,” Judge Ruegemer announced, for “this is the first time in the history of our country that the Ten Commandments in the form of a monolith will appear as part of a public building.” He credited the idea to DeMille, who wanted “to see the Eagles present plaques of the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds, on courthouse lawns, public parks and other strategic places so that as many people as possible might view the laws of God.” To underscore the director's importance in the process, both Donald Hayne, DeMille's executive assistant, and Yul Brynner, who played Rameses II in the film, also addressed the Milwaukee crowd. “The need for the Ten Commandments is even greater today that it was 3,000 years ago in Moses' time,” Brynner insisted. “They are the cornerstone on which our freedom rests.”
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Charlton Heston, who starred as Moses, appeared at another monument's dedication in June 1956. Under a broiling sun, a crowd of five thousand gathered to witness the installation of a monolith at the International Peace Garden located on the American-Canadian border in North Dakota. The stone symbolized, in the words of DeMille's public relations men, “the principle of freedom under God on which the governments of the two countries are based.” Following performances by the North Dakota Governor's Band and a Scottish bagpipe group from Manitoba, Heston and Ruegemer unveiled the Eagles' gift. Carved from red granite, the monument bore not only the words of the Decalogue but also images of the American and Canadian flags. “The Commandments monolith,” a studio release claimed, “not only serves as a reminder to visitors of God's law and their need to live by it, but of the concepts on which the laws of these nations are based—Freedom, democracy, justice, honor under God.” (The concept of “freedom under God” was familiar to Heston. As a “devoted member” of Fifield's First Congregational Church, the actor had delivered some of Moses's dialogue from the film to worshipers in its sanctuary.) After the Peace Garden ceremonies, Heston
signed autographs, took part in a family-style chicken dinner, and warmly accepted a lifetime membership in the local Eagles chapter. The biggest news of the day nearly happened on the flight home, when technical problems on his chartered plane forced Heston to help the pilot make a dramatic emergency landing.
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