The Family (14 page)

“I walked down Market that night,” wrote the novelist Tillie Olsen, then twenty-one-year-old Tillie Lerner fresh from Nebraska, in one of her first pieces of published prose. “All life seemed blown out of the street; the few people hurrying by looked hunted, tense, expectant of anything. Cars moved past as if fleeing. And a light, indescribably green and ominous, was cast over everything, in great shifting shadows. And down the street the trucks rumbled. Drab colored, with boys sitting on them like corpses sitting and not moving, holding guns stiffly, staring with wide frightened eyes.”
⁶

That was what Abram didn’t understand: the fear of death and the fear of sin, real sin, killing a brother or a sister. He was as delighted by the prospect of his death, whatever hour God should appoint for it, as Abigail Hutchinson had been. Compassionate in the abstract, he thought of the masses as just that, blocks to be arranged neatly. The troops that moved in on San Francisco that night had no feelings with which Abram would have been concerned; they were expressing the will of God, which to him was order. After the Strike of ’34, Abram’s allegiance would be forever given to the men who commanded soldiers, not the soldiers themselves. As for those defined as the enemy, they were not even human. Their grief never registered.

A few days later, men and women marched tens of thousands strong five miles up Market Street behind two black-draped flatbed trucks. The trucks bore coffins and mountains of flowers, like canvases by Diego Rivera set in slow motion. A band played Beethoven. Nobody said a word. “‘Life,’ the capitalist papers marveled,” wrote Tillie Olsen, “‘Life stopped and stared.’”

It was incomparable drama, simultaneously staged and real. A ritual, yes, the procession of the plain folk, the march of the martyrs, a script older than Christendom. Bridges, surely aware of the moment’s theatrical power, nonetheless choked up when his turn to speak came. Not a well-timed sob but wide-eyed, grief-stricken silence. He offered no inspiration. None was needed. The funeral was religion: not just solidarity, workers arm-in-arm, but communion, a coming together. The march up Market Street was the embodiment of faith, not as a metaphor but as a new fact in the American story. One Big Union on the move.

The strike went on, but the shippers were defeated by the time the coffins went into the ground. Their old beliefs could not compete. Management—capital—would require a new faith if it was to survive.

T
HE
I
DEA
, P
ART
2

The strike of 1934 scared Abram into launching the movement that would become the vanguard of elite fundamentalism, and elite fundamentalism took as its first challenge the destruction of militant labor.
Destruction
was not the word Christians used, however. They called it
cooperation.

The April after the strike, Harry Bridges traveled to Seattle to convene a meeting of a new federation of maritime workers, with “maritime” broadly defined to include pretty much anyone within driving distance of the ocean. For a brief moment that year, he came close to turning the old Wobbly dream of One Big Union into a political reality. But it wouldn’t last. Indeed, the revived Wobbly dream began unraveling right there in Seattle, where Abram finally plucked up the theocratic strand and began pulling it taut into the twentieth century.

That April, Abram had been having dreams of his own, unpleasant ones. Subversives stalked his sleep, hammers and sickles danced like sugar plum fairies, a Soviet agent “of Swedish nationality” assigned to Seattle—probably the brawny and bellicose six-footer from the Seamen’s Union whom Bridges had tapped to lead the maritime federation—roared his nightmare defiance of that which was godly. One night Abram could sleep no longer. He sat up in bed and resolved to wait for God. At 1:30 a.m., He appeared: a blinding light and a voice. Abram listened and took notes. “The plan had been unfolded and the green light given.”
⁷

A few hours later, Abram dressed and put on his coat and hurried to downtown Seattle for the morning rush, where he waited for God to bring him the means to put his plan into action. On a busy street corner, a local developer of means hailed him. “Hey, Vereide, glad to see you!”

The developer, a former major named Walter Douglass who still preferred to be addressed by his military title, cut straight to the matter on both men’s minds: “Where is this country going to, anyway?”

“You ought to know,” said Abram.

Indeed, the major did: “The bow-wows,” he harrumphed, “and the worse of it is you fellows aren’t doing anything about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” growled Douglass, “here you have your churches and services and merry-go-round of activities, but as far as any actual impact and strategy for turning the tide is concerned, you’re not making a dent.”

Abram could not have agreed more. While San Francisco had boiled, Abram had developed the prototype of the Idea, preaching a manly Christ to a group of business executives who had no time for hymnals and sob sisters and soup kitchens and the Jesus of long eyelashes beloved by old ladies. Jesus, for such men, “must be disentangled from church organization,” Abram had discovered. In the 1930s, the meaning of that was plain: a rejection of the “Social Gospel” of good works for the poor in favor of an unhindered Christ defined by his muscles, a laissez-faire Jesus proclaimed not by spindly necked clergymen bleating from seminary, but by men like Major Douglass, officers who commanded troops who brought order to cities.

“You ought to get after fellows like me,” Douglass told Abram. He was standing in just the right spot for chest puffing—behind him towered the city’s Douglass Building.

These were the words Abram had been waiting for, in the place, he was certain, to which God had guided him. He revealed the plan God had given him just hours earlier that morning: the Idea. He kept secret the bright light, the voice, the automatic writing in the dark hours. Men like Major Douglass, men of affairs, would not understand. But Major Douglass got the Idea.

“We are where we are,” Abram said—on the brink of anarchy, both men thought—“because of what we are.” By that he meant sinful, only his concept of sin was not so much concerned with immorality as with “duty.” “Top men” had a responsibility to do for God what lesser men couldn’t. Their failure to take on this burden had led the nation to its terrible position. “Obedience,” concluded Abram, is “the way to power.” God wanted his chosen to rule—to “serve,” as Abram liked to say. Were men such as Major Douglass ready to report for duty?

Douglass stared at the silver-haired preacher. A “piercing gaze,” Abram recalled. “Vereide,” he said, “if you will settle down in this city and do a job like that, I will back you.”

Abram demanded specifics. Douglass delivered: a suite of offices in the building behind Abram and a check to get him started.

“That’s tangible,” said Abram.

Then they set off together to see William St. Clair, one of the wealthiest men in Seattle. There’s a whiff of
The Wizard of Oz
in Abram’s later retelling of this story, the major and the minister popping lightbulbs over their fedoras on the Seattle street corner and rushing on to the man who would bring it all together, but that is, apparently, what happened: St. Clair, president of Frederick Nelson, the biggest department store in the Northwest, cleared his office and insisted the two men sit down. “We told him the story,” Abram remembered. “And he, too, looked searchingly at me and remarked, ‘That’s constructive.’”

St. Clair made a list of nineteen businessmen and invited them to breakfast at one of the city’s finest hotels. St. Clair certainly didn’t choose on the basis of Christian morality. Of the nineteen, only one was a churchgoer, and he pointed out at the first meeting that the other men there knew him mainly as a creature of cocktail lounges and poker tables. Among the nineteen sat a lumber baron, a gas executive, a railroad executive, a hardware magnate, a candy impresario, and two future mayors of Seattle. “Management and labor got together,” Abram would later claim, but there were no union representatives at the meeting, where nineteen businessmen plus Abram agreed to use the “Bible as blueprint” with which to take back first the city, then the state, and perhaps the nation from the grip of godless organized labor.

Their first success soon followed. “One morning,” remembered Abram, “a labor leader, who had been a disturbing factor in the community, was seen at the table.” Abram never fails to provide full names and corporate titles for the management side of his equation, but his first convert from labor is known only as “Jimmy.” Jimmy came back for more meetings, sitting quietly in the corner and listening as the businessmen testified to one another about the Bible’s transforming power in their lives. So Abram took Jimmy aside and had a talk with him about his responsibilities. Jimmy had been a leader in the “big strike.” There, at the breakfast table, sat many men in whom Jimmy’s actions had provoked “bitter feelings.” One man, in fact, had been burdened with leading the industrialists’ committee that organized management’s fight against the strike. Jimmy had now taken meals with this man but had done nothing to make amends. Jimmy remained “unreconciled.”

The next week, before a group of executives that now numbered seventy-five, Jimmy rose and spoke for the first time. “You fellows know me.” He nodded toward one businessman. “I picketed your plant.” He looked toward another. “I closed your factory for months.” He pointed to a third: “I hated you.”

But with Abram’s help, Jimmy had discovered “how absolutely honest” these men he had hated were. They were humble. They were sincere. In fact, Jimmy realized, if they could bring more businessmen in on the Idea, “there would be no need for a labor union.” This, understandably, had been a bit of a shock to Jimmy. He had gone to his knees in his home, he told the men, and begged God’s forgiveness “for the spirit I had been manifesting.” And now he was ready to ask their forgiveness. He had been a thorn in capital’s flesh, he said, but he would prick no more.

Jimmy sat down. The room was silent. Then “the sturdy, rugged capitalist who had been chairman of the employer’s committee in the big strike,” Abram observed—this probably refers to the “Citizens Emergency Committee,” headed by the aptly named John Prim
⁸
—stood at the head of the table and walked over to Jimmy without a word. Worker looked up at boss. Boss glared down at worker. The businessman let drop a heavy hand on Jimmy’s shoulder.

“Jimmy,” he said, “on this basis we go on together.”

I
N THE YEARS
to come, Abram would tell polished versions of this story hundreds of times, in dozens of countries, to CEOs and senators and dictators, a parable of “cooperation” between management and labor, the threat to Christ and capital subdued, order restored. That was where it began, he’d say: Jimmy the agitator confessing his sins before a room full of businessmen, God’s chosen men. This was “Unit Number One” of what Abram called his “new world order.”

Abram was a kind of artist, just discovering in 1935 that there were other men and women with powers like his,
feelings
like his—“American,” he would say, “terrified,” we might translate—with whom he could join forces. Together they would smooth the dream. They claimed their religion was very old, “first century Christianity,” but in their hearts they understood that it was a new faith, a new politics. Its conservatism was not vestigial; what made it thrilling was that the new religion made conservatism forceful again. It was not just a veneer for capitalism, nor simply a vehicle for power. It was a different way of wielding power. It shrugged off old inhibitions. It scoffed at liberal restraints and ignored traditional conservative reservations. It was Rotary Club dada, surrealism for businessmen from Seattle. It was the Word made fresh for the industrial age, vital and strong.

Just like that of Edwards. Just like that of Finney. But Finney had been followed by Sunday, who’d made the Word muscular yet vulgar. In 1935, Abram breathed life into a faith for the elite, an American fundamentalism made up of both Edwards’s “heart” religion and Finney’s permanent revival. He would write to his comrades with exhilaration when he thought a “key man” was beginning to “catch” the Idea. The religion Abram rebelled against was a set of ethics, a rule book for women. He aspired instead to spread what he would come to call a
contagion,
passed from key man to key man, the avant-garde of American fundamentalism.

T
HE DEFENDERS OF THE
status quo,” Henry Kissinger wrote in his doctoral dissertation, published as
A World Betrayed
in 1957, “…tend to begin by treating revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical.” That this comment is sufficiently ambiguous to be worthy of the slippery career that followed it takes nothing from the weight of its insight, and, more, its double meaning. Kissinger himself provides a perfect illustration. Like most brilliant political players, he became both a defender of the status quo and a revolutionary, a champion of American hegemony where it already existed and a clever tactician of revolution on behalf of that power where it had not yet been achieved. The vast array of actors that comprise American fundamentalism do not include any single tactician of Kissinger’s caliber, and yet they have, as a movement, functioned in just such a fashion, building on the foundation of American Protestantism’s traditional power to strategize both its expansion and, in true revolutionary fashion, its transformation.
¹

In one sense, the men Abram Vereide gathered for bacon and eggs and Bible were defenders of the status quo. They sought not so much spiritual sustenance as stability, an end to the Depression’s hurdy-gurdy years. Men, women, and children dwindled into thin and hopeless creatures, listless and dull-witted and red-eyed. Then would come a strike or a street fight or a mob that had decided to take vegetables from a moving train, or to march on city hall, and out came the bulls like it was Pamplona. And there were words in the air, and a family cold and huddled around a radio, heads bent toward the voice of a man such as Father Coughlin, the “radio priest” from Detroit, the Shrine of the Little Flower, preaching and ranting to more millions than the president himself some evenings. What did he want? He was no communist, that was for certain. He called
them
the “Red Fog.” But he was no friend of things as they were, either. He was a furious man, his voice dulcet but his words full of hatred for the capitalists who had lined their silk pockets. Coughlin, as much as or more than the communists, seemed like he might call for blood one day, and soon.
²
It was against that threat, as much as communism, that Abram schemed.

Abram’s men did not consider themselves blameless. But they believed their folly didn’t lie in the economics of do-as-you-will that had brought the nation and the city to those days of breadlines and street battles. Their sin was slippage. They had enriched their coffers at the expense of their souls. Money was like power: Those who had it should not speak of it, concern themselves with it, acknowledge its existence as a factor. To do so was worse than bad manners; it was blasphemy, an attempt to refute God’s ordering of economic affairs.

So they sought a return to that order. To reclaim it, they had to take steps they had never taken before. One of these was reading the Bible, a book that for most of them was long in the past, of interest only to grandmothers; now, they were determined to find in it a message for men such as themselves. They promised one another that they would study at least a chapter a day. Understanding was another matter. The churches had failed. They no longer taught truth but insisted on metaphor. The best pulpits were manned, if that word could be used, by foppish intellectuals who debated like Jews, sifting sentences like sand for grains of meaning. A useless endeavor. The ocean was crashing upon them. They needed rocks to stand on. They needed marching orders. “Men who did not want to be preached at” turned to one another for confirmation of their spiritual gleanings, “teachings practical in business, government, and social life,” wrote Abram. “We discovered that, as the eye is made for light and the ear for sound, so the human personality is made for God. We discovered that sanity and normalcy are to be Christ-like.”

That summer Abram took a core of Christ-committed leaders—a railroad man and a lumberman and a banker, a car dealer, a clothier, and a navy commander—on a retreat to the Canyon Creek Lodge, alongside a river amid the peaks of the Cascades. He gathered his troops around a tall stone hearth and led them in a “spiritual inventory,” each man taking turns listing aloud that which troubled their city, their state, their corporation. Hunger, pride, whores, Harry Bridges, booze, degenerates, sloth, corruption, the Teamsters. Women with short hair. Communism in the colleges. Sailors, a dirty, immoral lot. Pessimism. Racy movies. The Soviet Union. The color red, in general, the “red tide,” the “red menace,” the “red-hued progeny” of Stalin. Also brown, for Brownshirts, a force so vital, so strong, so bursting with muscle—could America possibly compete with the fabulous rising of Italy, Germany, Austria? Round the room the men went, moaning their fears and their losses and their failures. They fell to their knees, old men’s joints creaking, overwhelmed by the godlessness surrounding them, and, yes, they confessed, within them. “Utter helplessness,” Abram recorded.

They had been reading the Bible for months, and most must have known its darkest corners, the truth of an angry God not as a bearded man in heaven shaking an ancient finger but more like the wilderness growling in the dark at the edge of the city. “He was like a bear waiting for me,” warned Jeremiah, “like a lion in secret places.” To them the thud of the billy club and the shriek of the gas canister were the sounds not of repression but of Christian civilization making its last stand. The tribes of labor were whooping. If history taught any lesson, it was that no Custer could save society from the coarse-clothed savages. “Subversive forces had taken over,” observed Abram. “What could we do?”

It was at this moment on the edge of hysteria when a young lawyer named Arthur B. Langlie, kneeling among the big men, discovered his calling. A flat-faced, blue-eyed Scandinavian like Abram, Langlie was thirty-five years old that July, known equally for his wide smile and his zealous religion, a sharp-nosed teetotaling man who could work a party with just a glass of water in his hand.

He rose from his knees. “Men, it can be done,” he said. “I am ready to let God use me.”

Abram’s brotherhood was ready to use him, too. On the spot one rich man said he would finance Langlie’s crusade, and others followed with promises of time and connections. Langlie would be their key man. Abram’s heart must have been pounding. This was what God had shown him. The brothers gripped hands in a circle before the fireplace and sang a song in the mountains for the city they meant to save.

“There,” Abram would declare, “was born a new regime.” It was the beginning of the movement of elite fundamentalism that would, in the 1980s, come to be known as “the Family.”

T
HAT MEETING ALSO
marked a turning point in Langlie’s long and successful political career. Langlie came to the prayer movement as a representative of a brotherhood of young businessmen across the state of Washington called the New Order of Cincinnatus. Twelve hundred strong, the Cincinnatans presented a “New Order” of moral and economic force in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. Younger than Abram’s establishment figures, the Order ran candidates for office under the banner of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus, summoned from his farm five centuries before Christ to assume dictatorial power over a populace too exhausted by infighting to make decisions for itself.

When several of Langlie’s Cincinnatans showed up at the city comptroller’s office to register, they came flanked by men of the Order wearing identical white shirts, joining a rainbow of like-minded lovers of discipline and intimidation—not just Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts but the Greenshirts of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Blueshirts of Ireland, and, in America, the Silver Shirts, the initials of which,
SS
, deliberately chosen, justified the flamboyant color. The men of the Order gave themselves military ranks and considered adding a
sieg heil
–style salute to their public image, but decided that would be “
too
fascist.” The Order’s first “National Commander,” an excitable former Republican operative, saw models for such qualities in the strong men across the Atlantic and the bureaucrats who made their governments run like Henry Ford’s assembly lines. The Order craved efficiency. One of its first goals after its formation in 1933 was a Washington state constitutional convention at which local police forces would be eliminated and replaced with troopers trained at retooled state colleges.
³

Langlie never officially joined the Order, but he became its chief candidate. The year of the big strike, the Order took control of Seattle’s city council by invoking middle-class fears of a Wobbly insurrection. Poverty, it maintained, was part of the natural way of things. The Order had two solutions to economic malaise: slash taxes and attack vice. As councilman, Langlie purged the city’s police department, which routinely ignored Sunday liquor sales, Chinese gambling halls, and the prostitution that prospered in a port city like Seattle. He then turned his ax toward the fire department (poor moral specimens) and public school teachers (indoctrinating the youth with godless notions). With his allies in the Order, he succeeded in passing a budget so brutal that the city’s conservative Republican mayor, whose first act in office had been to literally lead a police charge against the previous year’s strikers, vetoed it as contemptuous of human suffering. So Langlie decided to depose him. The Order’s rise won attention as far away as Manhattan, where a titillated
New York Times
thrilled to the movement’s youthful fervor.
⁴

In Abram’s telling, Langlie stood, pledged himself, and simply ascended to public office. Langlie had in fact taken his city council seat without the trouble of an election; his opponent, wary of a public fight with the Order, simply stepped down and appointed Langlie to replace him. But despite the Order’s white-shirted military manner and the financial backing of Abram’s brotherhood, his first bid for the mayoralty failed. The Democrat who’d been ousted in 1934, a flamboyantly corrupt opportunist named John Dore, charged Langlie with running as the candidate of a “secret society.” Dore wound up his campaign with a ninety-minute speech denouncing Langlie as a fascist so dangerous that his own almost-open corruption was preferable. The city that had thrown Dore out in a special election only a year before agreed with that diagnosis: Democrats, radicals, and even Republicans united to return the crook to power.

“The insincerity of [Dore] is almost unquestionable,” the novelist Mary McCarthy observed. Double-chinned Dore perched his spectacles on the end of his nose and reveled in his royal belly and, as a sign of his high regard for the common man, occasionally went down to the docks and passed out glasses of beer to incoming sailors. As far as conservatives were concerned, he might as well have grown a mustache and changed his name to Stalin. But Mary McCarthy understood that the “Soviet of Washington,” as one wag dubbed the state, was more like a vaudeville routine than a government on the verge of a worker’s utopia. “The state of Washington is in ferment,” she wrote in
The Nation
; “it is wild, comic, theatrical, dishonest, disorganized, hopeful; but it is not revolutionary.”
⁵

Dubbed “Labor’s Mayor” by the conservative press, Dore was really the right-wing Teamster chief Dave Beck’s man. “Dave Beck runs this town, and I tell you it’s a good thing he does,” Dore declared as he squared off with Langlie again in 1938, a bald confession of fealty to bossism. The race garnered broad attention, “a mayoralty election of national significance,” in the words of the
New York Times
.
⁶
At stake seemed to be the future of organized labor in the Northwest, which, as one of the labor movement’s strongholds, was a bellwether for the nation. Dore stood for Beck, and Beck stood for the old, management-friendly craft unions of the American Federation of Labor. His opponent on the Left, Lieutenant Governor Vic Meyers, championed the newborn Congress of Industrial Organizations, an alliance of more militant, pro-worker unions. And out in right field stood Langlie, so far from friendly to any labor union that even the rabidly right-wing
Los Angeles Times
tagged him as “ultraconservative.”
⁷

Lieutenant Governor Meyers, the most well-liked man in the state, should have won. But for once the Left did itself in with a sense of humor. Meyers had entered public service in 1932 as a joke. A beaming, mustache-twirling master of ceremonies at the city’s most fashionable nightclub, he’d campaigned at the head of an oompah band, wearing the uniform of a circus drum major. If elected, he’d promised, he’d put a pretty girl hostess on every streetcar.

Such was the state of the union in 1932—its disgust with the big business do-nothingism of Herbert Hoover—that Meyers and his trombone campaign marched into office on FDR’s coattails. By 1938, though, after years of strikes and police violence, Meyers had grown serious about doing something for working people. Unfortunately, he still loved a good costume, and he campaigned dressed as Mahatma Gandhi. Even Harry Bridges, Meyers’s chief backer, couldn’t make the bandleader look like a serious candidate.

So Dore and Meyers canceled each other out, and between them slipped the winner, Arthur B. Langlie. The verdict was in: neither the AFL nor the CIO represented the future. “Good government,” as Langlie called his platform of budget slashing and punishing moral rectitude, trumped labor. “Seattle Deals Radicals a Blow,” declared the
Los Angeles Times
. “Whole Left Wing Beaten,” amplified the
New York Times
.
⁸