One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (28 page)

Some of the stations broadcasting the event did voice reservations. Before agreeing to broadcast the special on the three stations they operated in the Northwest—KING in Seattle, KGW in Portland, and KREM in Spokane—executives at Crown Stations sought assurances that the program would not contain “highly undesirable attributes of what might be called ‘the Birch Society approach' to combating communism.” Reassured by Richfield Oil that it would be free of “‘witch hunting' or character assassination in any form,” the broadcasters agreed to air it. In a rare effort to offer a counterpoint, however, they produced their own companion special to offer a more dispassionate approach to the topic. “It could bring us widespread praise,” a Crown executive mused, “but more importantly, widespread viewer attention to the fact that there is more to outstripping communism than just being wildly and emotionally agin it.” With support from the State Department, Crown quickly put together a ninety-minute special titled
The Threat.
It began with an introduction by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, followed by a roundtable discussion with Arthur S. Fleming, Eisenhower's secretary of health, education, and welfare; Richard Rovere, staff writer for the
New Yorker;
Gilbert Seldes, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Edward Teller, the famed physicist who had lectured at the Southern California School of Anti-Communism. Viewers seemed unimpressed. “I consider the remarks of Teller worth hearing,” wrote one woman; “the others became so muddled in their already fuzzy thoughts that they were not worth much.”
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The widespread replay of the Hollywood rally gave Schwarz and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade a prominent profile in national politics. Critical appraisals of their work now appeared in mainstream
magazines such as
Time
and
Newsweek
as well as prominent religious publications such as
Christian Century
and
Christianity Today.
Most of these pieces took a cautious tone, but on occasion they veered toward mockery. In his “T.R.B.” column for the
New Republic,
Richard Strout passed along a tongue-in-cheek report from an informant he called “West Coast Operative X-9” who had attended a CACC organizational meeting at a private home. “Heard phrase several times, ‘If Communists come . . . ,'” his informant reported. “Seemed to feel it real and imminent, a Bataan death march with children carried off.” More substantively, liberal politicians and labor officials aggressively challenged the CACC. For instance, California's attorney general, Stanley Mosk, appeared on television after the successful San Francisco Bay Regional School of Anti-Communism in early 1962 to denounce it as “Patriotism for Profit.” In the same vein, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers lambasted the CACC as an extremist organization funded entirely by corporate interests. Such attacks on Schwarz only led the right to clutch him closer.
National Review
ran three separate articles supporting the CACC in June and July 1962 alone, with titles such as “The Impending Smear of Fred Schwarz” and “The Mad Attempt to Get Schwarz.”
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As the media firestorm began, Schwarz continued to travel the country, holding Schools of Anti-Communism wherever he could, bringing out high-profile supporters at every stop. To promote another Los Angeles School of Anti-Communism, for instance, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond barnstormed Southern California in late 1961, making ten appearances alongside fellow conservative congressmen and celebrities such as John Wayne. Schwarz held additional schools the following year in cities as diverse as Seattle, Honolulu, and Omaha, but he focused his energies on the major school he planned for New York City. That location had been chosen, he explained, because Manhattan was home to the media that distorted and defamed his work. “We decided to meet this challenge,” he noted, “and go to the source.” Schwarz ventured into the city several times that year. In May, he faced Michael Harrington in a debate moderated by perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas; in June, he spoke to a cheering crowd of more than eight thousand at a rally in Madison Square Garden. In August 1962, he opened the Greater New York School of Anti-Communism at Carnegie Hall. Conservative
luminaries including William F. Buckley Jr., James Burnham, and Frank Meyer served on the sponsoring committee. The highlight of his trip, Schwarz believed, was his appearance on NBC's
Meet the Press,
during which he had the chance to face his critics. Watching the show, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell was impressed with Schwarz's quick handling of the panel. “He made them all look like jerks,” he noted. “He was articulate, knowledgeable and backed up everything he politely said in reply to their needling. . . . It was a delight to witness.”
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Through his work in the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, Schwarz emerged as one of the most energetic and effective voices advancing the cause of religious nationalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Taking advantage of Cold War tensions during an era of seemingly incessant turmoil, Schwarz insisted that religion would be the key to America's survival and salvation. Much like the advertising executives behind the “Religion in American Life” campaign or entertainers like Disney and DeMille, the physician-turned-preacher was at heart a promoter, one who put his considerable talents to good use convincing Americans that they needed to do more than simply pay lip service to the supposed religious roots of their nation. They needed, as DeMille had urged them, to put those words into deeds in their own lives.

PART III

CONFLICT

CHAPTER 6

“
Whose
Religious Tradition?”

F
OR THE EVANGELICAL BUSINESSMEN WHO
belonged to the Gideons International, Inc., selling God was a second calling, if not their first. Founded by a trio of traveling salesmen at the end of the nineteenth century, the Gideons made a name for themselves in the early twentieth by putting millions of copies of the Holy Bible in hotel and hospital rooms across the nation. During the Second World War, the organization distributed, with the military's blessing, a specially prepared edition of the King James Version of the New Testament and Book of Psalms to every member of the armed forces. After the conflict, the group created a new paperback version of this “Gideon Bible” (now with the Book of Proverbs as well) for distribution at public and private schools for all students between the fifth and twelfth grades. In the words of W. L. Hardin, an Atlanta contractor and past president of the Gideons, their new ministry would help them meet their long-standing goal “to win men and women for the Lord Jesus Christ” by reaching them earlier in life. “In the days of their youth, before the evil days come,” Hardin said in 1946, “the boys and girls of our public schools may by means of the precious Word of God, come to know Him.”
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In practical terms, the Gideons' program reflected their roots as salesmen. Their founders originally considered calling the new organization the Christian Traveling Men of the United States of America but abandoned the idea because, as one later noted, “traveling men don't have time to use such long names.” So they settled for the simpler calling card, a
name inspired by an Old Testament judge who led a small band of faithful Israelites to victory over a vastly larger force. But their identity as on-the-road representatives of business never changed. Indeed, in its first four decades,
only
traveling salesmen could join the Gideons. Even after expanding their ranks to admit a broader range of businessmen in 1937, this spirit of door-to-door salesmanship still prevailed. The postwar program to distribute their abridged Bibles to schoolchildren is perhaps the prime example. In what quickly became a standard script, a Gideon first contacted a local school board or principal to win permission. He then spoke to the entire school at a special assembly, offering an address that an observer characterized as “evangelical in tone and content, on the advantages of Bible reading.” After the sales pitch, the Gideons announced that every student—or, in some cases, every student who provided written permission from a parent—was welcome to a free paperback version of the New Testament. Moving from school to school, the Gideons distributed 4.2 million of their Bibles in the first three years, with ambitious plans to distribute 25 million in all.
²

For the Gideons, their drive to distribute Bibles at public schools seemed a natural extension of the larger effort to encourage public religion in the postwar era. While other religious innovations had been relatively uncontroversial at the time of their creation, the Gideons' ministry to schoolchildren sparked a contentious debate. Religion in the public schools had long been considered a local concern. Communities dominated by one faith traditionally instituted sectarian prayers or Bible reading in classrooms with little complaint. More diverse locales often tried to avoid the issue of religion entirely, but the Gideons brought long-simmering tensions to the forefront. Jewish leaders protested any effort to place the New Testament in public schools, while Catholic officials objected because canon law forbade members of their faith from using the King James Version. “Most children will accept anything free,” noted a priest in upstate New York, and thus they would inadvertently sin in taking the gift. In Boston, it became such a widespread problem that the archdiocese instructed priests to order all Catholic children who had accepted Gideon Bibles to return them immediately. Even some liberal Protestants disapproved of the Gideons' campaign. The editors of the
Christian Century
insisted that public schools were simply “not the place”
to evangelize, arguing that Christians had “a duty to respect separation of church and state in relation to the schools.”
³

The objections were strongest in religiously diverse cities and suburbs, especially in the Northeast. In the fall of 1951, the school board in suburban Rutherford, New Jersey, inadvertently caused a controversy when it accepted an offer from the Gideons of Passaic and Bergen Counties to distribute their version of the Bible to all students in grades five through twelve in the district. The board printed up permission slips for children to take home, but when scores of parents protested, it found itself on the defensive. At its next meeting, the superintendent of schools, Guy Hilleboe, insisted that “the Gideon Society was not presenting their own version of the Bible but were merely offering a New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Version” for families who wanted it. He pointed out that the Gideons had not, in this instance, been allowed to make a special address at school assemblies, and principals had been instructed to send the permission slips home “without comment.” Furthermore, Hilleboe added, the state's lawyers assured him that the practice was wholly constitutional.
⁴

Despite these assurances, religious leaders and parents continued to object. A local priest asserted that, although he believed Rutherford was a “God fearing town” and he supported the general effort to get “God into the schools,” the board had made a mistake. The separation of church and state had to be maintained in schools because the sectarian nature of the Gideons' work would assuredly “create tensions.” Likewise, Rabbi Herman Schwartz argued that even if principals offered no comment on the program, several teachers had become “salesmen” for the proposal. The permission slips had also been prepared by school officials, he noted, and therefore the entire endeavor bore the formal approval of the district. Parents echoed these concerns. Mrs. E. K. Ingalls, for instance, reminded the board there had been a similar controversy in their high school over the state-mandated practice of Bible reading during morning assemblies. Catholic students there had refused to read from the King James Version and were castigated by the principal. Was it “good teaching,” she asked, for a school to say “you will read the St. James [sic] version or else”? The superintendent recognized “the right of each child in the Public Schools to use the religion of his choice” but maintained that the board had done
nothing wrong. The district's legal counsel double-checked the law and reassured school officials that they were in the right. The Gideons, the board decided, could proceed with their evangelism in Rutherford's schools.
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But before they could begin, a pair of parents filed for an injunction. Bernard Tudor and Ralph Lecoque, Jewish and Catholic, respectively, asserted that the Gideon Bible was a “sectarian work of peculiar religious value and significance to the Protestant faith.” Its embrace by the schools therefore amounted to an establishment of sectarian religion. Their complaints quickly drew national attention. The Catholic diocese and the American Jewish Committee rallied behind them. Notably, civil liberties organizations did as well. While they still held that religious invocations at the national level were relatively harmless, in such local manifestations civil libertarians identified individuals who felt personally wronged by new religious policies and, more important, who would serve as plaintiffs in lawsuits against them. In March 1953, a trial judge in Hackensack heard arguments in
Tudor v. Board of Education of Rutherford and the Gideons International.
Leo Pfeffer, a prominent advocate for the separation of church and state, represented the plaintiffs. Bringing forth an array of witnesses with expertise in religion, law, and even child psychology, Pfeffer argued that the school board displayed an “unconstitutional preference” for Protestantism by embracing the Gideons and, as a result, infringed on the religious liberties of Catholic and Jewish children. The trial judge disagreed, but the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed his opinion in December, issuing a unanimous decision condemning the school board's actions as clear “favoritism” of one faith.
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