The Family (23 page)

Abram agreed, and sent to the occupation government letters signed by dozens of congressmen demanding action.

America prevented German industry from feeding the nation, Zapp argued.

Abram agreed, and intervened time and again on behalf of German factories. He saved as many as he could, though a steel foundry named for Herman Göring was beyond even his powers of redemption.

America had put leftists and trade unionists and Bolsheviks in power, Zapp complained.

Abram agreed. The cleansing of the American occupation government became an obsession, the subject of his meetings with the American high commissioner John J. McCloy and his weekly prayer meetings with congressmen.

“Idealists” were prevented from serving their people, said Zapp. The man on the street was losing faith in the American religion. “Freedom in their interpretation is the ideal for which we shall fight and die but the reality is nothing else but a beautiful word for services for Western powers…The word freedom is not taken seriously anymore.”

Within a few years, nobody cared. The “Morgenthau Boys” were as much a part of the past as the history no German cared to speak of. “
Tabula rasa
,” declared Konrad Adenauer when he took power as the Bonn Republic’s first post-Hitler ruler.
⁴⁶
Abram met with Adenauer on several occasions, but the “Old Man of Europe,” a creature of the Weimar Republic’s forgotten tradition of conservative reformers, never took to him; Adenauer was a Moral Re-Armament man, a great friend of Buchman’s. But by then Buchmanism had diluted its fundamentalist flavor, had become 100 percent Cold War spirits, suitable for men and women of any faith who hated Bolshevism. More, Adenauer was too Roman Catholic to really embrace Abram’s religion—even, one might say, too Christian. A former mayor of Cologne, he had been deposed as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933, and had spent most of the next twelve years gardening and reading theology. At the heart of European politics for two decades after the war, by inclination he was a monastic, his face disfigured by an accident in his youth, his old bones subject to chills that led him to wrap himself in blankets on long journeys. His Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—the German equivalent of the Republican Party—was ascetic in its devotion to purging Germany of leftist tendencies but liberal in its economy. Adenauer did not like to see his Germans go hungry.

Given Abram’s influence in postwar Germany—if Adenauer kept his distance, many of his ministers did not—what kept the nation from falling into the orbit of American fundamentalism? Why did its Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s most powerful party, not become part of a Christian bloc within the Western bloc, the foundation of an evangelical supranationalism beside which the strength of the contemporary movement would pale?

Part of the answer lies in its Christianity, essentially Catholic, and its Democracy, which was, with occasional hiccups, actually democratic, in the most pedestrian sense—that of dull bureaucratic order. More, it was a political party; in the United States fundamentalism grew during the 1950s and ’60s by presenting itself as a greater force, to which men of either party could pay tribute in return for divine favors.

But most of all there was old, wrinkled Adenauer himself, more blatantly Christian in his pronouncements than any American politician could ever be, but also more cautious.
Keine Experimente,
“No Experiments,” was an official campaign slogan. The “values and sense of justice of Western Christendom”
⁴⁷
was the political plank on which he plodded forth, but it was the very lack of such a sense that made of Adenauer’s Germany a secular nation. For it was a nation with no concept of sin. That had gone into the dustbin right along with history when Adenauer in his first act as chancellor dropped all charges against—
privileged
was the official term—nearly 800,000 minor Nazi officials, many of whom would become the functionaries of his blank-slate regime.

In place of the very real dangers of German romanticism, the bloodlust of Wagner, Adenauer offered modest family values. A depoliticized philosophy of inward-looking households, the moral conformism of proper Germans. The man-on-the-street in the era of Adenauer, lamented Zapp, nostalgic for the thunder of the “new conception” now past, wants only “his job, his food, his movie, and his sport.”
⁴⁸

In the end, Abram and the Americans learned more from the Germans than the other way around. It was after the CDU turned
family
into cultural code that American fundamentalism found a way to make the term both modern and traditional, used to describe—and shape—the postwar suburban world as well as that of a mythical small-town past. Abram finally retired
normalcy,
the Harding-era neologism that for two decades had defined his mission, his Christ, and his politics. It was a notion to which postwar Americans studiously subscribed even as they celebrated the myth of themselves as rugged individuals, but
family
captured that paradox more neatly, a nation of cozy little kingdoms ruled by Father. And the new evangelical alliances, forged along the lines of spiritual war rather than the eradication of vices traditionally considered masculine—drinking, gambling—made sure that Father knew best about not only his little unit’s material welfare but also its spiritual morale, once the province of Mother. “Men must reclaim the Bible from their wives,” Abram’s “prophet,” Baron von der Ropp, taught the workers of the Ruhr, a succinct statement of the old nineteenth-century muscular Christianity that took on new meaning in the postwar era.

And then there were the questions of sin and of history, inescapable in Europe and thus ignored. But sin and history presented more nuanced dilemmas to American fundamentalism. Not its prewar mild sympathy for fascism—the blood of D-Day had wiped that record clean as far as most Americans were concerned—but the drag the actual, awful past put on the movement’s new global ambitions. What were they? Nearly the same as those of the nation’s. For a muddled period after the war, the United States had pretended that it could shrink back to its prewar isolationist ways, but by 1947, with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in place, it was firmly committed to the “new world order” hoped for by Abram and Senator Wiley and their bipartisan alliance of Christian internationalism.

“The United States has been assigned a destiny comparable to that of ancient Israel,” Harold Ockenga, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, had declared at its inception, reviving the old notion of manifest destiny and extending it around the globe.
⁴⁹
But manifest destiny, the original westward thrust that erased a continent of Native souls, burns history like coal and knows no sin but that of its enemies. So, too, Abram’s dream, in both its religious and secular manifestations. And in this regard, too, the Americans learned from the Germans, who understood that mythology makes of the past a parable, smooth and enigmatic, best understood by those who ask no questions.

T
HE MOST UNEXPECTED EARLY
fruit of Abram’s prayer breakfasts was
The Blob
, a 1958 B-movie about the creeping horrors of communism. “Indescribable…Indestructible! Nothing can stop it!” warned the tagline.
It
is mindless glop from outer space. The Blob absorbs the residents of a small town, growing bigger, grosser, and more ravenous until the townspeople discover they can defeat the Blob by freezing it—the Cold War writ small and literal.
The Blob
was the result of an unlikely collaboration between a screenwriter named Kate Phillips and an evangelical minister named Irvin “Shorty” Yeaworth. The two met at the 1957 Presidential Prayer Breakfast. Phillips, a former actress who’d appeared in forgotten films such as
Free, Blonde, and 21
and
Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise
, wasn’t known for her faith. She attended the Prayer Breakfast as a guest of a friend from Islip, Long Island—probably Abram’s patron, Marian Aymar Johnson, at whose Islip estate Abram did much of his planning.
¹
Phillips was accustomed to Hollywood glamour, but she felt lost amid the crowd of congressmen and business titans gathered for breakfast in a ballroom of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. “All of a sudden,” Phillips later told a fan, “a chap came out of the hotel and said that somebody had suggested he talk to me because I was a writer.”

The chap was Yeaworth, a director of “Christian education” films looking to subliminally broadcast his message into the mainstream. Shorty had backing for a full-length science fiction flick. The catch was that it had to be “wholesome.” And as if by providence, here was a screenwriter at a prayer breakfast. “I would like to have you be a part of the picture,” Shorty declared, and a few days later he traveled up to Phillips’s Long Island home to show off a two-pound coffee can full of the blob stuff that would come to serve as the Cold War’s most ridiculous metaphor for communism.

If picturing the Red Army as a carnivorous mass of Jell-O was absurd, the symbolism fit the bigger concept of
Cold War,
an amorphous fight that absorbed ideological nuance as it grew bigger, grosser, and more ravenous for the hearts, minds, and economies of two dueling empires. Between the rebirth of fundamentalism in the 1930s and ’40s and its emergence as a visible force during the Reagan years sits the historical blob of the Cold War, an era as bewildering to modern minds as any in American history. There is, to begin with, the question of whether the United States won this war or the Soviet Union lost it. A third school of thought wonders if both sides were losers. And then there is the more vexing question of just what we mean by
Cold War.

To today’s conservatives, it was a philosophical stance—better dead than red—that resulted in “our bloodless victory.”
²
For liberals eager to reclaim a mantle of muscular progressivism, meanwhile,
Cold War
refers to an abstract strategy of
containment
—as if the Cold War didn’t explode into dozens of “regional” conflicts strategized in Moscow and Washington, “civil wars,” fought with the empires’ weapons, that killed millions. Most memorably, the dead, American and otherwise, of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but also the forgotten losses of the Shah’s Iran, Suharto’s Indonesia, Mobutu’s “Zaire,” Pinochet’s Chile, Papa Doc’s Haiti, the United Fruit Company’s Guatemala, and many more. One could draw up just as long a list to lay at the Kremlin’s door or Beijing’s, but it’s our own sins that most require recollection, that fade to nostalgia in the sepia-toned memories of both liberals and conservatives.

Even those terms—
liberal
and
conservative
—befuddle us. Which was which, for instance, when Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson in 1952 on a campaign promise of
decreasing
military spending, while Stevenson boasted that “the strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country”?
³
How do we categorize Cold Warriors such as Senator Mark Hatfield—a Republican from Oregon, vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, and staunch advocate of evangelical political power—versus his colleague to the north, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, a “godless” Democrat whose relentless militarism inspired neoconservative protégés such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, architects of the Iraq War?

That the ideological spectrum in America more closely resembles a Mobius strip, left and right twisting into one another, than it does a radio dial is a basic truth of political history. But what of religious history?
⁴
What of the role of Christianity, and particularly that branch of the faith dedicated to “fundamental” principles, whether they’re those of Christ’s sovereignty over all, or of America’s divine destiny? How did American fundamentalism intertwine with the new internationalism to create the DNA of a Cold War in which one of the nation’s most militant commanders in chief—I am thinking here of Kennedy, not Reagan—reduced the issue to one of a belief in God, “ours,” versus the Soviets’ lack thereof?

T
HE
C
HRISTIANITY OF
American fundamentalism is a faith for futurists, the sort of people who delight in imagining what is to come next, even if it’s awful. World War II had changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it. Christendom had at times raced toward apocalypse before, but never with such technology at its disposal—no rockets, no bombers, no nuclear missiles. The stakes were higher in the new era, the enemy stronger. Fundamentalism responded with great imagination, not just following the popular trend of spotting flying saucers and aliens among us, but driving it. The aliens among us were not green men from Mars; they were red, at least on the inside, and they could be your neighbors. On the outside, they looked just like good Christian Americans. Many of them were Christians, in fact, or so supposed the conservative mind. By the end of the decade, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would declare that communist stealth operatives, “schooled in atheistic perversity,” had made Christian pulpits a main objective—and tool—of their propaganda. A “deadly radioactive cloud of Marxism-Leninism,” he preached, was fogging America’s liberal houses of worship.
⁵

Hoover kept files on liberal churches; Abram kept friendlier files on Hoover, a man who seemed to naturally speak the language of holy cause-and-effect Abram had refined before the war. “The criminal is the product of spiritual starvation,” Hoover was quoted in a pamphlet Abram saved,
The J. Edgar Hoover You Ought to Know
. The pamphlet’s author was an ally of Abram’s, Edward L. R. Elson, a mainline Presbyterian whose paranoia placed him at the far end of the religious spectrum. Elson joined another friend of Abram’s, Charles Wesley Lowry, to create the Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order, and Lowry, in turn, joined Abram in behind-the-scenes council of upper-crust Christian conservative leaders known as “the Twelve.”

Before the war, such initiatives were the stuff of the fringe, disaffected Babbits, America Firsters. After the war, they were mainstream. In the 1950s, the soldiers of Christ didn’t wear armor; they wore cufflinks. Consider this convention of Fellowship worthies, gathered in a hotel lobby for a group portrait. On the left is Abram in his customary double-breasted suit, lapels like bat wings, his silk kerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket and a slim leather Bible spread open in his right hand. To his right stands Billy Graham, his famous blue eyes glowering between his rock jaw and a wave of blond hair, almost good looking enough to play a gunfighter. And rising between them stands a fascinating character named Kenneth M. Crosby.

Crosby was literally our man in Havana, or at least one of them. He’d been a spy throughout Latin America during the war. Officially retired at its end, he took over Merrill Lynch’s Cuban operation in 1946 and stayed until 1959, when Fidel Castro drove out the dictator Fulgencio Batista, reporting all the while back to U.S. intelligence, a happy double posting which also allowed him time to set up prayer cells for Abram. His “Havana Group” consisted of American embassy personnel, representatives from American banks and the United Fruit Company. Cuban sugar cartels boasted openly in the
Havana Post
of the prayer cell’s use as a lobbying tool, noting that one of the International Christian Leadership officers, Congressman Brooks Hays, returned home from a spiritual session in Cuba ready to fight for Cuban sugar in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Crosby was even more loyal to the regime, serving as an intermediary between Batista’s Palacio Presidencial and American businessmen in Havana and New Orleans.

At the time, even
Christianity Today
considered Fidel preferable to the profoundly corrupt Batista.
⁶
But to Crosby, Castro was “another Hitler.” It was Crosby, briefing CIA director Allen Dulles, who laid one of the first bricks in the Cold War construction of the island nation as one of America’s greatest enemies. These were the days of citizen soldiers, spooks and “psyops” commandos, and, for the first time in American history, preachers on the front lines. Front lines of what? “Total cold war,” Eisenhower would call it, a battle not of bullets—although plenty of those would fly—but of ideas, many of which wouldn’t.
⁷
Against communism’s promise of “People’s Democracy,” for instance, Madison Avenue, at the behest of Eisenhower, coined “People’s Capitalism,” a catchphrase that somehow failed to inspire even the Americans who practiced it, much less Soviets supposed to be seduced by it.
⁸

Preachers provided the ammo capitalism couldn’t manufacture. “Your government,” one of Abram’s British protégés wrote, “is aware of the need of much greater propaganda to Russia and her satellites if we are to control the Communist menace.” The Brit hoped to obtain Abram’s help with a plan to smuggle New Testaments into the Eastern Bloc under diplomatic cover. The aim was “to place dynamite just where it is needed.”
⁹
Bible smuggling boomed in the 1950s, but very few efforts to sneak Western wisdom into the Soviet bloc made as much impact on their intended targets as on the West itself, which reveled in its crusades. Some of the schemes were truly quixotic: the use of hot-air balloons to drop leaflets on Albania, for instance, an effort that probably did more to spread the American love of UFOlogy than the Cold War double-dogma of God and private property.
¹⁰
Such is one of the overlooked legacies of the Cold War: the weirding of American fundamentalism. Abram’s was a space-age faith, thrilling to the vibrations of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” and throbbing to the conviction that God would guide our missiles, if only we could conform our national will to His. That was the stated goal, repeated over and over: conformity. Conform or die. Nuclear annihilation, should it occur, would be the result of rebellion, the “effect of the tragic choice of disobedience.”

Abram’s religion was sleek and powerful, an aerodynamic update on the clumsy bombs dropped by fundamentalism’s old angry ranters. Two of Abram’s “field representatives,” Dr. Bob Pierce and J. Edwin Orr—both to achieve fame of their own as major twentieth-century revivalists—coached young Billy Graham in the mores and manners of overseas operations and educated society. Harald Bredesen, another field representative who’d go on to build a powerful ministry of his own, performed a different service for a youthful Pat Robertson, teaching the senator’s son a folksy appeal that would complement his political acumen. One Abram understudy, Dr. Elton Trueblood, made a career of packaging militant fundamentalism in the language of country club banal, churning out best sellers that conflated spiritual war with Cold War; he also drew a paycheck from the United States Information Agency, for which he headed up the Office of Religious Information. On his watch “spiritual roots”—Christian ones, that is—as the foundation of American democracy became government policy, channeled through private organizations so that the office’s plans would not look like a “propaganda gimmick.”

Abram’s closest ally in the Senate, Frank Carlson, Republican of Kansas, coined the Fellowship’s slogan, “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive.” Carlson was a farmer from Cloud County, Kansas, who first made a national name for himself in 1936 when as a young congressman he double-crossed his patron, Governor Alf Landon, by ripping into the New Deal as a subversion of American principles. Landon had hoped to pitch his policies as a more moderate version of FDR’s vision, and here was his protégé, declaring the sitting president un-American. Not that Landon had a prayer, anyway; he became the losingest presidential candidate in American history. But Carlson prospered. Over the next decade, he rebuilt the Landon machine under his own name. He took the governor’s office in 1946, and when three years later one of Kansas’s senators died in office, Carlson inserted as a placeholder a flunky who then dutifully stepped aside when Carlson was ready to return to Washington in 1950 as a member of the nation’s most exclusive club.

In the early days of his career, Carlson cultivated a myth of himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus who entered politics only at the behest of a delegation of small businessmen that found him literally tilling his fields and begged him to help stop Dictator Roosevelt—the “destroyer of human rights and freedom,” as Carlson called him. By then, Carlson was chairman of the Interstate Oil Compact and he had denounced not only the New Deal but also Hoover’s business-friendly policies before it as an “insidious attack” on “free enterprise”—by which he meant government subsidies for Big Oil.
¹¹

And yet Carlson enjoyed a reputation as a moderate and even, in the surreal political landscape of the 1950s, a “liberal” Republican. His face was tanned and leathery, flanked by white wings of hair and almost-pointed ears, framed by arched eyebrows and a broad, lipless mouth, all of it centered on a nose the shape of a mushroom; he looked like a sunburned Bela Lugosi. It was hard to imagine this comically featured man as an ideologue in the mold of hammerhead Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. Carlson was a backslapper, an arm gripper. A Baptist teetotaler himself, he presided over the end of “Dry Kansas” and joined two other Fellowship senators in raising funds for a Republican club in Washington that would feature the best cigars and the finest Scotch whiskey. He was a Republican wise man, “sagacious,” according to the columnist Drew Pearson, “the ‘No Deal’ Dealer,” in the words of another pundit. It was Carlson who in 1951 coined for his friend and fellow Kansan Ike the double-duty slogan of “No Deal.” Eisenhower, then the electoral underdog even though he was the most popular man in America, meant that he wouldn’t horse-trade with crooked local GOP organizations, most of which were in the back pocket of “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the presumed front-runner. But the slogan also implied a none-too-subtle rebuke to FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s more conservative Fair Deal.
No Deal
meant more than the “rollback” of progressivism, as Carlson claimed, a conventional conservative assault on social welfare. By
No Deal,
Carlson and Eisenhower meant no politics. That is, they hoped to capitalize on Eisenhower’s popularity as a victorious general, incorruptible in peacetime, to replay the Cincinnatus story on a national scale.