The Family (15 page)

What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them. His kind of good government meant deals for your friends but not envelopes full of cash. He didn’t rule through fear or finesse but through prayer. If Abram and Langlie could help it, there would be no bullets, no bribes. Instead, there would be a circle of men listening to Jesus by listening to one another’s remarkably similar views. It was the first fulfillment of Abram’s dream of government by God.

And although no one could see it in 1938, the shape of the Langlie campaign—the New Order of Cincinnatus as his political commandos, Abram’s God-picked elites, by then coming to be known as “the Fellowship,” as his brain trust, and Abram’s old network of housewives transformed into “prayer group” precincts for Langlie—was a bellwether indeed. Not of labor’s future—that was already eroding—but of prayer breakfast politics in the Christian nation to come.

“W
E WORK WITH
power where we can, build new power where we can’t.” These words belong to Doug Coe, who seized the Fellowship’s top spot in a succession struggle following Abram’s death in 1969 and began transforming it into what I eventually encountered as the Family. His blunt formulation of the Fellowship’s political theology is as much in play now as it was in 1969, and, indeed, in 1938, when Abram and his quiet gathering of businessmen staked Langlie to the beginning of his career. On the face of it, such words seem brutal, a foreshadowing of revolution—or
counterrevolution,
as conservatives like to say.

And yet Langlie-as-mayor, then governor, demonstrated the Fellowship’s subtler ambitions. Theocratic by instinct and fascinated by fascism according to the fashion of the times, the Fellowship never molted into European-style authoritarianism. Its most radical goals were (and remain) long-term, its method—
the man-method,
Abram called it—painstaking, dependent not on mass conversion but on individual assimilation into polite fundamentalism. “The more impersonal our order becomes,” observed Theodor Adorno in a study of 1930s fundamentalism, “the more important personality becomes as an ideology.” Abram’s man-method was a perfect illustration of this truth, but whereas Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany, saw this trend as leading only to populist demagogues, Abram recognized that “personality” in place of ideology could also preserve elite power in an age of mass movements. Good manners mattered to the immigrant preacher; the men he drew to him tended to be discreet, polished characters. They were fundamentalism’s avant-garde, its most radical thinkers, but to all appearances they were creatures of the country club, golf course crusaders.

Langlie epitomized the breed. In 1935, at the Canyon Creek Lodge, he rose from his knees as a “God-led” politician, literally a theocrat, and he campaigned as a modern-day Cincinnatus. As governor, he attempted (and failed) to pass a law giving him the power to suspend the law—almost all of it—if he desired.

So Langlie accepted the constraints of democracy as he found them. He did what business asked: purged welfare rolls, abolished guaranteed wage laws, denounced Democrats as un-American. In 1942, he investigated the possibility of using martial law to suppress organized labor, but when his advisers told him it would be unconstitutional, he settled for ordinary strikebreaking.
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He governed, in other words, as a right-wing Republican.

And yet the Fellowship was attracted to a kind of soft fascism. In 1932, Abram took as a Bible student Henry Ford. By then, the automaker was a wizened old leather strop of a man, wary of controversy. He had been the American publisher of the notoriously fraudulent
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, an anti-Semitic fantasia concocted in czarist Russia to justify pogroms against Jews, and the author of
The International Jew
, a book many Nazis would later credit with awakening their Aryan anti-Semitism. During the previous decade, historians suspect, he’d illegally financed Adolf Hitler. But it was not just national socialism’s bigotry that Ford supported, nor even mainly that. What Ford, inventor of the assembly line, loved above all was efficiency. Even his war of words against the Jews had been in the interests of standardization, the purging of “others” from the American scene. And yet, in 1932, Ford wanted certain details of his campaign for American purity to disappear. He wanted to sell cars to Jews. He was in need of a makeover, a quick bath in the Blood of the Lamb.

Ford’s wife heard Abram speak in Detroit and insisted that he meet with her husband, no doubt guessing that Abram’s theology of biblical capitalism would sit well with the tycoon, an eccentric religious thinker who had been raised on populist American fundamentalism. Abram and Ford traded Bible verses through a series of meetings in Ford’s offices, and then Ford invited Abram to his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. “They were together two days,” records Abram’s biographer Grubb, “[Ford] unloading about spiritual, intellectual, and business problems, and Abram seeking to give the answer for himself and the nation.” Abram thought Ford “befuddled,” full of half-baked religious notions gathered from partial readings of Hindu texts and theosophy. “The question was,” Abram thought, “How could he be untangled?”

Their meetings continued in Michigan. Abram was drawn like a moth to the great man’s wealth—to the possibility that Ford might put his tremendous worldly resources behind a campaign for government by God. But he was frustrated by Ford’s failure to settle on one simple fundamentalist explanation of life and the universe, until, at their final meeting, Ford finally shouted, “Vereide, I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I found the release that you spoke of. I’ve made my surrender. The only thing that matters is God’s will.”

But Ford continued to see divine will best expressed in German fascism. As Hitler’s power grew, Ford became more comfortable expressing his admiration. It was mutual; the Führer hung a portrait of Ford behind his desk and told the industrialist, on a visit Ford paid to Nazi Germany, that national socialism’s accomplishments were simply an implementation of Ford’s vision.

That was a perspective that, unlike theosophy, gave Abram no pause. Such was the nature of Abram’s ecumenicism. For Jews he felt nothing, one way or the other, but he would no more discriminate against an anti-Semite than against a Presbyterian. He welcomed the vigor anti-Semitism brought to his cause. After the war, another major American fascist sympathizer—Charles Lindbergh—would preside for a brief period over a prayer cell modeled on Abram’s original. Lindbergh first came under FBI scrutiny, in fact, for his association with a man who would become a stalwart of Abram’s inner circle and a member of the board of the Fellowship, by then incorporated as International Christian Leadership. Merwin K. Hart was an “alleged promoter of the American Fascist movement,” according to FBI files, and denounced publicly as a Nazi in all but name by Robert H. Jackson, the FDR-era attorney general who went on to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court and chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.

To Abram, Hart was a dapper habitué of New York’s blue blood clubs, a crucial node in his network of top men. He was a recruiter; operating out of the Empire State Building, he organized business executives bent on breaking the spine of unionism into an organization called the National Economic Council, and from those ranks he selected men for the Fellowship whose devotion to the antilabor cause was religious in intensity. Hart was Abram through a glass, darkly: if Abram could not distinguish between men of power and men of morals, Hart could not tell the difference between communists and Jews, who through “deceit” and “trickery,” he preached, threatened the “complete destruction” of the American way of life.
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Then there were the actual Nazis who would join Abram’s prayer circles in the postwar years. But that story must wait until the next chapter. To understand Abram’s weirdly ambivalent relationship with fascism—to understand the uneasy echoes of the last century’s most hateful ideology in contemporary American fundamentalism—we must exhume an unlikely pair of “thinkers”: Frank Buchman and Bruce Barton, two of the most influential hucksters of early twentieth-century America.

B
UCHMANISM

In 1935, Frank Buchman was at the height of his powers, a small, well-nourished, and well-tailored man of no natural distinction, who found himself touring the world in the company of kings and queens and bright, young, rosy-cheeked lads from Oxford and Cambridge and Princeton. True, Buchman was banned from Princeton, where as a Lutheran minister he had stalked students he thought eligible for
soul surgery,
as he would come to call his variation on the born-again procedure; and Oxford University was contemplating legal measures to stop him from using its name for his movement. He was then calling his followers the “Oxford Group,” having discarded “First Century Christian Fellowship”—a name Abram would later consider—as perhaps boastful, not to mention inaccurate when applied to Buchman’s hundreds of thousands of twentieth-century devotees. “Oxford Group,” though, was no more descriptive of the international circuit of confessional “house parties” for the well-to-do inspired by Buchman. He had not attended Oxford (or Cambridge, though he would claim the latter in his
Who’s Who
biography). He was a graduate of modest Muhlenberg College in what was then Pennsylvania coal country.
¹¹

“Moral Re-Armament,” coined by Buchman as Europe entered World War II, was the name that eventually stuck. Not quite an organization—there were no dues or membership rolls—but less democratic in spirit than a social movement, Moral Re-Armament deployed its military metaphors through Buchman’s never-ending lecture tour, propaganda campaigns, and the spiritual warfare practiced by his disciples in service of an ideology “Not Left, Not Right, but Straight,” in the words of one of Buchman’s hagiographers.
¹²
Moral Re-Armament’s aims were so broadly utopian as to be meaningless, but in practice it served distinctly conservative purposes: the preservation of caste. “There is tremendous power,” preached Buchman, “in a minority guided by God.”
¹³

It is probably most accurate to name Buchman’s innovation as did the papers of his day: Buchmanism. After all, it was Buchman’s idea—later adapted and sharpened by Abram—that the mass evangelism practiced by men such as Charles Finney and Billy Sunday would never appeal to the “best people,” those whom the liquor salesman’s son from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, had dreamed of cultivating for Christ since his first job, running a home for troubled boys in Philadelphia, had ended in abrupt dismissal.

The cause of Buchman’s firing is murky, as is the precise nature of the charges leveled against him at Princeton. In the first case he seems to have paid too little attention to the children’s needs, and in the second, too much to the undergraduates. In particular, the university’s president resented Buchman’s fascination with the sex lives of young Princetonians. Buchman estimated that between 85 and 90 percent of all sin is sexual, and thus to him it was natural to encourage young men to confess theirs in detail.
¹⁴
There is no evidence that he took advantage of the information. He had kissed a girl once when he was a boy, but thereafter lived as a sort of eunuch. In college his nickname was “Kate,” and in the drama society he played mainly female roles. Many close to him thought it obvious that he inclined toward the best-looking men of the best universities, but in terms of Christian conservatism and the anxieties that plague it today, he was ahead of his time in the fury with which he denounced homosexuality as a threat to civilization. Moreover, he was an exceedingly careful student of the crisis: In a pamphlet titled
Remaking Men
, he observed, “there are many who wear suede shoes who are not homosexual, but in Europe and America the majority of homosexuals do.” Also, Buchman declared, their favorite color is green.
¹⁵

Buchman’s own eyes were emerald, and capable of the most penetrating glances. His followers believed he knew their sins before they confessed them. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and, though bald, was more than once described as “shampooed.” He loved to be clean. Most striking about his appearance was his head; despite giant, pointed ears, it seemed several sizes too small for his round body. “Frank,” as he insisted on being called, was the gnome of early twentieth-century elite fundamentalism.

In the early 1930s, he and Abram crossed paths. Buchman was in Ottawa to perform soul surgery on Canadian members of Parliament, and Abram, fresh from what would prove to be his short-lived salvation of Henry Ford (Ford would later require renewal by Buchman, for whom he built a retreat in Michigan), was lecturing in Canada on behalf of Goodwill Industries. The two met, and Abram suggested to Buchman that he come on with Goodwill as a chaplain, to infuse the organization with his “life-changing” evangelical fervor. Buchman answered by proposing a
Quiet Time.
¹⁶

Besides confession of sexual sin, Quiet Time was the core practice of Buchmanism: a half-hour-long period of silence in which the believer waited for “Guidance” from God. Guidance was more than a warm feeling. It came in the form of direct orders and touched on every subject of concern, from the transcendent to the mundane. “The real question,” Buchman would preach, “is, ‘Will God control America?’ The country must be ‘governed by men under instructions from God, as definitely given and understood as if they came by wire.’”
¹⁷
Guidance meant not just spiritual direction but declaring one’s own decisions as divinely inspired. “We are not out to tell God,” Buchman announced to an assembly of twenty-five thousand in 1936. “We are out to let God tell us. And He will tell us.”
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