The Family (12 page)

“You are in America now—do like Americans do,” one man said.

That was exactly what Abram planned; he would do as the Americans of his imagination did. “No, thank you,” he said, his voice controlled. “I never tasted liquor in my life, and I can get along without it.”

Into the cold night under a sky filled with strange stars, he walked until he came to the cliffs that loom over Butte. He shivered and stared at the mines below, lit up for night shifts like glittering stones. There he wept, and then he shouted, to the God he had been certain he would find in America. And out of the darkness, he would say to the end of his days, he heard the voice of his Lord, speaking the clean English the immigrant would soon master. This time the words came from Proverbs:
There is yet a future and your hope shall not come to naught.

“In America,” he’d assured his worried father, “education is free, money is plentiful, and everyone has a chance.” Instead, his first experience of the United States was the savage life of immigrants, men and women pressed into the hardest, most dangerous work. In the days that followed, he did such labor himself, knocking around the copper camps of Montana, a once-healthy farm boy eventually laid low by sickness and industrial poison, “copper-tinged water” that put him into a state of semiconsciousness that lasted for days, hallucinatory hours spent flat on his back in the shack by the railroad tracks, his gaunt body sweating away the butter and beef and herring on which he had grown strong in Norway. It was God’s doing, he believed: “The European starch had to be washed out.”

And it was. The boy from the village that bore his family name worked as a section hand, a floor mopper, and a hard laborer, beaten out of his wages again and again by crooked bosses who called him a “big-footed Norwegian”—feet, apparently, being the currency of bigotry with regard to Norsemen. On the Fourth of July 1905, Abram asked to be paid for work he had done as a painter in the town of Basin so he could buy some “American clothes” to celebrate the holiday. Stick it, said the boss. So Abram took the American option: “when I heard the train whistle, bound from Basin to Butte, I said goodbye.” In Butte on that Fourth of July, Abram spent his last dime on a streetcar ride to a park on the edge of the city, where he found a grove of trees far from the American celebration. He had no money, no friends, no place to sleep. The city was too far behind for him to walk back, but that didn’t matter: Abram wanted to die right there and be done. It was a moment like Finney’s, only starker: Abram’s suffering was in his belly as well as his soul. He sat in the shade of the trees beneath the high plains sun and waited for an answer. He’d brought all his possessions with him in a small bundle—the goat hide suitcase from home lost along the way—and from it he took out his New Testament and began to read through his tears. As his eyes scanned the now-familiar words, he sensed God Himself once again speaking:
Ye have not chosen me, but I chose you…
The Gospel of John, chapter 15, verse 16…
Whatsoever you ask the Father in my name
,
he shall give it to you.

Then—a sign, Abram thought—through the woods, came a man who found Abram wiping away his tears. The man had a beautiful smile. He opened his mouth to speak. Abram would later remember not so much the words as their sound: this messenger from God was a Norwegian. Not an angel but a former saloonkeeper who’d found Jesus before he’d found Abram. As if, Abram thought, God was lining up all his experiences in the New World to reveal a singular lesson.
Ye have not chosen me, but I chose you…
The Norwegian took Abram home to live with his family that Fourth of July, and through him Abram eventually found his way to a Methodist seminary, the free education he had boasted of to his father, and the hand in marriage of a well-off minister’s daughter, the middle-class step up into American life Abram had been looking for.
Whatsoever you ask the Father in my name
,
he shall give it to you.

The one word that does not appear in the notes on his life Abram prepared near the end of his life, when instead of sheepskin he wore silk and gabardine, when instead of miners and cowboys he preached to senators and presidents, is
power
. But in 1935, when Abram was just beginning to dream his real ministry, he wrote the word once, in the margin of a church program. It was at the bottom of a list of names of men he had recruited. Besides each was a responsibility:
organization, finances.
Beside his own name, he wrote
power
—and then crossed it out. If it must be said, it can’t be had. Power, Abram realized as he moved through the high corner offices of businessmen and leaders, has nothing to do with forcing the devil behind you or making the company increase your wages. Power lies in things as they are. God had already chosen the powerful, his key men. There they are, Jesus whispered in Abram’s ear; go and serve them.

Throughout the 1920s, Abram directed Seattle’s division of Goodwill Industries. He didn’t just open stores for used clothes; he organized 49,000 housewives into thirty-seven districts and set them to work salvaging goods for the poor. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, governor of New York, invited Abram to his office to discuss his organizing system. Later he’d come to see Russian red running throughout Roosevelt’s New Deal, but at the time Abram was captivated by another man summoned to advise the governor, James Augustine Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation. Abram had met industry chiefs before then, but here was a titan. A tall, stern man of dark suits and high collars, Farrell had led U.S. Steel for decades, since not long after its creation as the biggest business enterprise in history, and he had a reputation as an industrial free thinker. The year before he’d rebuked a group of businessmen for treating workers like animals. Farrell looked on his employees more like children. Big business, he believed, ought to act as a big brother, and to that end he insisted that the age of competition had passed; captains of industry must be freed of antitrust legislation so that they might better council together for the good of the innocent and the poor.

Abram fixed his rapt attention on the “steel shogun,” as the press of the time called the industrialist. “Mr. Farrell reviewed the history of America,” he’d remember, “and pointed out that we have had nineteen depressions—five major ones—and that every one was caused by disobedience to divine laws.” Farrell offered no evidence for his dismissal of economic factors, but he did have a solution on hand. “Now,” Abram recorded his words, “I am a Roman Catholic and we don’t go in much for revivals and such things, but I am sure as I am sitting here that if we don’t get a thorough revival of genuine religion…with a return to prayer and the Bible”—an oddly Protestant aim—“we are headed for chaos.” Farrell suggested that the time had come for the “leaders of industry” to take the reins not just of the economy but of the entire nation in order to restore it to a godly path.

Farrell, a former steelworker himself and thus living proof in his own mind that equal opportunity existed for all, was likely too modest to mention U.S. Steel’s own efforts in this regard; most notably, its relief program for the Pennsylvania steeltown of Farrell, renamed just that year in honor of the great man himself. A desperate measure by a community of 30,000 utterly dependent on U.S. Steel and starving because of that fact. In Farrell, U.S. Steel fought the spiritual roots of its economic woes not through revival but by evicting from company housing those who were not part of the nation’s godly heritage: foreign-born workers, black workers, and even the old white men who had built Farrell and now approached retirement and pensions. U.S. Steel replaced them all with young peons paid low wages. It was not a matter of getting the job done, since the mills were shuttered and there was no work to be done. U.S. Steel simply saw an opportunity for a correction.
³

But then, so did the men and women whom companies such as U.S. Steel were liquidating. It’s hard now, in the present United States, to imagine the fear that attended the Depression years, and harder still to remember the anger. Most forgotten of all is the optimism of ordinary people pushed to an edge over which they peered and saw not the abyss they had been told by their employers and their politicians awaited them, but—maybe, if they built it themselves—a future dramatically different from the past.

The 1930s were the hungry years, yes; but they were also radical, which is to say, visionary—an era of political imagination. American history has plunked Roosevelt at the left edge of the spectrum of our political life, but at the time Roosevelt was closer to the middle. To his right were fools and fascists; these were the days when one might respectably admire the methods of “Mr. Hitler” and wonder, in the pages of newspapers or on the floor of Congress, whether there might not be some part of his approach for Americans to copy. And to Roosevelt’s left? There lies the missing history of America without which the rise of Abram’s religion, the fundamentalism of the “up and out,” the gospel of power for the powerful that soothes the consciences of fundamentalism’s elite to this day, cannot be understood. The elite fundamentalist movement of which Abram would be a pioneer arose in response to a radical age. Abram’s biographers say that for a brief moment in 1932, a Roosevelt aide charged with building a brain trust from which the future president’s cabinet could be constructed promoted Abram to take charge of a social services portfolio on the strength of his Goodwill work, and began including him in meetings. “Abram was introduced to the inner workings of the economic and political forces of the nation,” wrote Abram’s friend and biographer Norman Grubb. There he saw “how serious was the danger of leftwing elements actually taking over the nation.”

As far as Abram was concerned, they did. He had begun drawing up plans for government-backed religious revival as a cure for the nation, but FDR went the way of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s name rarely appears in Abram’s papers thereafter.

Nor, for that matter, does the name of anyone Abram thought beyond God’s sphere of influence. Abram perfected a feel-good fundamentalism that was every bit as militant and aggressive as today’s populist front but incapable of uttering a harsh word. It was country club fundamentalism, for men who believed in their own goodness and proved it to themselves and each other by commending Christ and the next fellow’s fine effort at following His example. They followed the law of kindergarten: if you have nothing nice to say about someone, say nothing at all. Or put it in terms of abstraction, the preeningly polite language of upper-class religion: One might talk about a “Red Menace,” but good Christians did not discuss what they deemed Roosevelt’s communistic tendencies: One might bemoan moral decay, but it would not do to mention the name of a fellow businessman who kept ladies on the side. Only once, in the notes Abram gave his friend Grubb, did he come close to identifying an enemy: the notorious “B.”

Who is B? The Red Menace in the shape of a man, subversion personified, a zombie from Moscow.

That is, B belonged to a union. Which union? Hard to say. Two candidates present themselves, but neither fits Abram’s description precisely. Rather, the mysterious B who inspired Abram to gather his decades of work and contacts and fundamentalist refinements into the Idea seems to be an amalgam of the two most powerful labor chiefs on the West Coast in 1935, and, indeed, perhaps the country: Dave Beck, the Teamster warlord of Seattle, and Harry Bridges, the Australian-born champion of longshoremen from San Diego to Vancouver.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Beck, with his “pink moon face and icy blue eyes,” as the journalist John Gunther described him, a union leader so conservative he was “probably the most ardent exponent of capitalism in the Northwest,” ran Seattle like a fiefdom with bully-boy squadrons of brass-knuckled goons and a mayor who actually boasted of being in Beck’s pocket. Bridges, “a slight, lanky fellow,” observed the radical writer Louis Adamic, “with a narrow, longish head, receding dark hair, a good straight brow, an aggressive hook nose, and a tense-lipped mouth,” operated out of San Francisco but at only thirty-four years old had a rank-and-file following across the trades and industries up and down the coast. Beck wore double-breasted suits and painted ties and thought he looked pretty damn good in black and white on the front page of a paper. Bridges dressed like the longshoreman he was: black canvas Frisco Jeans with his iron cargo hook hanging from the back pocket, denim shirt, and a flat white cap. A shave, maybe, for a special occasion. He rarely spoke to reporters.
⁴

Beck’s integrity can best be summed up by the fact that years later—by then he was the boss of the whole union—when he was summoned to Washington to account for himself and his mysterious riches, he pled the Fifth, got drummed out of the Teamsters like a bad punch line, and Jimmy Hoffa took over. After Beck, even the Kennedy brothers thought Hoffa was good news.

Bridges? In 1934, the legend spread that the San Francisco ship owners sent an ex-prize fighter with $50,000 to try and buy him. Bridges met the boxer alone; considered putting the cash into the strike fund; but said no because he gleaned it was a trap. Had he taken the money, he would have been dead in two minutes, and his union brothers would have found an impossible wad of cash on his corpse, and that would have made for a very different story than the one that got around.

Abram knew Beck was a crook and probably knew Bridges was not, but he likely loathed them with equal intensity. Beck’s muscle made a mockery of the government of God-led men Abram dreamed of for Seattle, and Bridges’s pure-hearted radicalism must have seemed to Abram like a devil’s parody of religious conviction.

“‘B’,” wrote Abram of the conditions that sparked the Idea, “had a lot of folks up in arms against him, but most of them had now involved themselves in one way or another and didn’t dare squeal. Some played the game and liked it, and others paid through the nose; but whether you were a businessman, a contractor, or a labor leader, you went along.”