The Family (16 page)

“What did God say to you?” Buchman asked Abram when their Quiet Time was completed. Abram believed he had heard God’s voice several times in his life, and had even considered the possibility that he might be a prophet, but he had not yet been exposed to the idea that God spoke to men
regularly
and in detail. “He didn’t say anything,” Abram confessed, disappointed.

Well, Buchman replied, God
had
spoken to him. “God told me, ‘Christianize what you have. You have something to share.’”

Blander words no Sunday school teacher ever spoke, but to Abram they seemed like a revelation. God had told Buchman not to join Goodwill, but that didn’t matter. What was important was the discovery that God should be consulted not just on broad spiritual questions but on absolutely everything. This, Abram decided, was what it meant to die to the self: to turn all responsibility over to God. That such a transfer meant the abdication of any accountability for one’s actions, that it provided justification for any ambition, did not occur to him.

Thereafter he transformed his daily prayer ritual into Buchmanite Quiet Time. And, soon enough, God filled the silence with instructions: go forth, he said, and build cells for my cause like Buchman’s.

The cell of spiritual warriors that elected Arthur Langlie was one result. That cell of men listening to God during their Quiet Time doubled itself, and the two became four, the four became eight. The many cells for congressmen and generals and lowly government clerks in the Washington, D.C., of the present are the offspring of that original mitosis, catalyzed by Buchman. But to call them Buchmanite wouldn’t be quite right. When Buchman spoke of Christianity’s “new illumination,” “a new social order under the dictatorship of the Spirit of God” that would transform politics and eradicate the conflict of capital and labor, Abram took him literally.

Abram never actually attended a Buchman house party. Had he done so, he might have veered away from his new enthusiasm. The most successful events took place at one of the estates around the world that Buchman used as outreach stations. He had won the allegiance of a number of wealthy widows and heiresses and neglected wives of businessmen, and they regularly showered him with riches, including their great homes, to which Buchman would invite select groups for a day in the country. There would be tennis and golf and some praying, and then the group would gather for the party. A fire would be built, the lights dimmed, and Buchman or a trained confessor might begin with some minor transgression, a traffic ticket, a youthful prank. Another Buchman veteran might then up the ante. “Some lad might now turn evidence against a governess or an upstairs maid,” observed a
New Yorker
writer in 1932. And from there it was on to the weaknesses that afflict not just college boys but also the grand dames who flocked to Buchman and the big men they dragged in their wake, all stumbling over one another in elaborate description of their private perversions, how they had been blinded to their purpose in life by sexual desire, and how “Guidance” had saved them. Around the circle they went, spurring one another on.

And yet Buchmanism was not purely narcissistic. Once one had been “changed,” as Buchmanites called the experience of coming through soul surgery successfully, one was ready for political action. What sort of action? On this, Buchman was vague. Like Abram, he considered industrial strife an affront to God, to be solved by “changed” men among the captains of industry. Like Abram, he considered the sharp elbows of democracy an insult to the “dictatorship of the Holy Spirit.” And it was from Buchman that Abram surely absorbed the idea of a leadership of “God-led” men organized into cells, consulting not the unchanged masses but the mandate of Jesus as He revealed Himself to them behind closed doors. Beyond that, though, Buchman rarely went. Even more than Abram, he so desired the company of powerful people that he was loath to align himself too closely with any one faction. But in 1936, in a sympathetic portrait published by the
New York World-Telegram
, Buchman named names.

“But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man, God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.” He seemed to think the process had already started: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defence against the anti-Christ of Communism,” he told the reporter.
¹⁹

Buchman had just returned from the Olympic Games in Berlin, orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels as a visual symphony of black and red swastikas and eagles and the long, lean muscle of Aryan athleticism. Most of the world would remember the “Nazi Olympics” for the African American athlete Jesse Owens, but Goebbels’s spectacle achieved its desired effect on Buchman, who left Berlin with a surging admiration for the vigor of the Third Reich. In particular, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the Gestapo, had impressed him as a “great lad,” a man whom he recommended to his followers in British government. The sentiment, to be fair, was not mutual. After World War II, Buchman’s followers, eager to “wash out” their leader’s past, would produce Gestapo documents condemning Buchmanism, though in terms not exactly reassuring: Himmler, it seems, saw Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament as too close of a competitor to national socialism.

In 1936, flush with the excitement of Hitler’s Olympics, Buchman gathered some American Oxford Group men at a house party at a Lenox, Massachusetts, estate. The Oxfordites sat on the floor in their tweeds as Buchman described the vision he brought back with him.

“Suppose we here were all God-controlled and we became the Cabinet,” he said. Then he designated the
World-Telegram
reporter secretary of agriculture and pointed to a recent Princeton graduate (they came to him, since he could not go to them) to replace Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Around the room he went, referring not to the talents of his followers but to their willingness to govern by Guidance.

“Then,” he continued, “in a God-controlled nation, capital and labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-controlled situations.” The distribution of wealth would remain as it was, but the workers would be content to be led by employers who were not greedy but God-controlled. Echoing the words of U.S. Steel’s James A. Farrell that had so inspired Abram in 1932, words which the Fellowship repeats to this day, Buchman declared, “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.”

In 1936, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh openly admired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of government to which these words pointed. Human problems, Buchman told his little group that night in Lenox, require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, said Buchman, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.”

He paused. He let his emerald eyes glide over the young manhood of Buchmanism, sitting cross-legged on the floor before him as if he was a Greek philosopher. Frank smiled and adjusted the red rose in his boutonniere.

“T
HERE IS A
book in the store windows in London and New York,” Buchman told an assembly at the Metropolitan Opera House in November of 1935. “The title is
It Can’t Happen Here
. Some of you who read the very important words of the Secretary of State, ‘Our own country urgently needs a moral and spiritual awakening,’ may have said the same thing, ‘It can’t happen here.’”

Buchman had taken the stage that evening to tell Manhattan’s wealthiest that it could. “Think of nations changed,” he told his audience, urging them to imagine soul surgery on a national scale, or something even grander: “God-controlled supernationalism.”
²⁰

Buchman never was one for details. Had he bothered to pick up the book he considered too pessimistic, he would have discovered that the
It
of the volume’s title was fascism. Five years earlier, the book’s author, Sinclair Lewis, had become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in recognition of novels such as
Babbit
,
Arrowsmith
, and
Elmer Gantry
.
It Can’t Happen Here
wasn’t Lewis’s finest work, but it contained some of his scariest writing. Can’t happen here? Lewis’s novel contended that it already had, in countless little rooms across the country, at gatherings of Rotarians and the Daughters of the American Revolution, in hot-blooded church meetings and movie houses where gunfighters bestrode American dreams like Mussolinis in spurs. All that was wanting was the right key man to take up the sword and the cross and move into the oval office. In the novel, that man is Senator Buzz Windrip, a folksy southerner backed by a radio preacher called Bishop Peter Paul Prang and his “League of Forgotten Men.”

The story opens with the “Ladies Night Dinner” of a small town Rotary Club, and Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, an expert on “Child Culture,” lecturing a group of concerned citizens in eveningwear. Her sermon could have been lifted directly from Abram: “I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so many are
selfish!
Here’s a hundred and twenty million people, with ninety-five per cent of ’em only thinking of
self,
instead of turning to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity! All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers! Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!

“What this country needs is Discipline.”

The novel’s voice of reason is the local newspaper editor, one Doremus Jessup, into whose mouth Lewis packs a dense but brief account of the authoritarian strain in American history.

And yet that fruit was never plucked. The United States did not then—and has not yet—succumbed to fascism. Nor, for that matter, does the contemporary Christian Right embrace even a modern strain of “national socialism.” Many of the ingredients are there: militaristic patriotism, a blurry identification of church with state, a reverence for strong men, a tendency to locate such men at the top of corporate hierarchies, even a hated “other” (for American fundamentalists, Jews and Catholics gave way to communists, and now the populist front of the movement is divided over whom to demonize more, Muslims or gay people).

But other elements of European-style fascism never emerged in the United States. Despite the nation’s near constant involvement in one war or another for the last sixty years, it has never adopted an ideology that explicitly celebrates violence. Nor do we have a significant secret police force. And it is Christianity itself that has prevented fundamentalists, America’s most authoritarian demographic, from embracing the cult of personality around which fascist states are organized. No matter how much the movement may revere Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or the next political savior to arise, such men must always accept second billing to Jesus—
The Man Nobody Knows
, in the words of Bruce Barton’s 1925 best seller, perhaps the most influential forgotten book of the twentieth century.

Barton’s publisher boasted that the book could be read in two hours, but most readers could bounce through it in half that time. Less a narrative than a collage of advertising copy,
The Man Nobody Knows
offered Christ on the cheap as “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem!”
²²

Exclamation points come by the bushel in Barton’s work. “A failure!” the book opens—and here the exclamation point must be read as an incredulous question mark, a quotation of the supposed liberal view of Christ as “weak and puny,” an effeminate sadsack who died on the cross because he could not do better. Barton responds with the greatest
Fortune
magazine story ever told: “He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”

Barton himself was such a man. Shaped like a shoe box, he had a flat-faced head atop a rectangle of a body but was handsome all the same in that lock-jawed manner that makes some men look like they were born to captain industry. Barton’s name lives on as one fourth of the advertising giant Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, but his slim volume on Christ as the ultimate salesman exists now only as an academic curiosity, evidence to historians of the “secularization” of religion during the 1920s. Published in the same year as the Scopes monkey trial took place,
The Man Nobody Knows
has long looked to such observers like proof that the chief concern of secularism—business—had subsumed theology. Barton made Jesus into a management guru, and profit trumped prophet. Even in the era of a president who touts as his twin qualifications a business degree and his intimate relationship with Jesus, Fitzgerald’s
Great Gatsby
and Lewis’s
Babbitt
are celebrated as the definitive texts of that earlier age, the stories that shaped the later course of the nation.