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Akron1185381373.Pdf (1.49 © 2007 DAVID ZIETSMA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED IMAGINING HEAVEN AND HELL: RELIGION, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1930-1953 A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy David Zietsma August, 2007 IMAGINING HEAVEN AND HELL: RELIGION, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS, 1930-1953 David Zietsma Dissertation Approved: Accepted: _____________________________ _____________________________ Advisor Department Chair Dr. Walter L. Hixson Dr. Walter L. Hixson _____________________________ _____________________________ Committee Member Dean of the College Dr. T. J. Boisseau Dr. Ronald F. Levant _____________________________ _____________________________ Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Mary Ann Heiss Dr. George R. Newkome _____________________________ _____________________________ Committee Member Date Dr. Brant T. Lee _____________________________ Committee Member Dr. Elizabeth Mancke ii ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that religiously framed narratives of national identity conditioned the United States approach to the world from 1930 to 1953. When the Great Depression called into question U.S. manifest destiny, Americans reified their divine chosenness first through a “good neighbor” national image and later through a narrative imagining the United States as a righteous nation battling evil enemies. During the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations, competing religious groups/organizations provided the language and images through which national these identity narratives attained their form. The destabilizing impact of the Depression allowed the temporary ascendance of Protestant liberal modernist discourse and an attendant surge in popularity for cooperative internationalism. When the good neighbor narrative failed to reconcile Americans’ experience in the world with their neighborly picture of the world, a gradual shift toward the language/imagery of neo-orthodox realism occurred as Americans began imagining the United States as a righteous defender against the evil Axis powers. World War II empowered fundamentalist Christianity, enabling a postwar transition that gradually marginalized the vestiges of pre-war religious modernism and again depicted the United States as a righteous nation, this time battling the godless Soviet Union on behalf of God-ordained free market economics and political democracy. iii DEDICATION For Anna iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In nearly a decade of university studies I have accumulated greater personal and professional debts than I can ever hope to repay. My research benefited tremendously from the aid of archivists and librarians. I thank the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York and especially archivist Bob Clark. I am also grateful to the archivists at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.. Special thanks go to Wayne Sparkman at the Presbyterian Church in America Historical Center in St. Louis, Missouri for helpful advice and friendly hospitality. I also wish to express gratitude to the archival staff at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, especially to Randy Sowell who directed me to numerous invaluable files and documents and to Liz Safly who not only pointed out several important articles and clippings in the library’s holdings, but also brightened each research day with candor and a cheerful disposition. Generous financial support from the History Department at University of Akron, especially in the form of the Robert W. Little Dissertation Year Fellowship and the Barbara Hiney Award, helped make the researching and writing of this dissertation possible. I also wish to thank the Harry S. Truman Library Institute for a generous research grant that greatly benefited the scope and depth of this work. v Academically and professionally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Andrew Hunt and Gordon Morrell for their guidance and support both during and after my graduate studies at the University of Waterloo. Several scholars provided timely support and/or helpful critiques as the dissertation was in progress. In this regard, I thank Ira Chernus, Seth Jacobs, Fred Logevall, and George Marsden. Special appreciation goes to Eric Crouse who read virtually the entire manuscript and offered invaluable criticism and encouragement. The faculty, staff, and graduate students at the University of Akron History Department made attending seminars and other academic engagements a stimulating and enjoyable pursuit. Thanks to Wade Wilcox and an especially big thanks to Kym Rohrbach for ensuring that I made it through the tangled administrative web. I also wish to thank my dissertation committee, T. J. Boisseau, Mary-Ann Heiss, Brant T. Lee, and Elizabeth Mancke for their time and valuable criticism. Additional thanks go to Elizabeth for always having an open door, an open ear, and a willingness to help me solve whatever quandary I brought to her attention. Appreciation also goes to Michael Carley for support, intellectual challenge, and national comradeship. Finally, for thought-provoking discussion, comic relief, and lasting friendship, I am humbly indebted to Peter Guiler and John Henris - zen gardens and apples never meant so much. One of the largest academic debts I accumulated is to my doctoral advisor, Walter Hixson. I am extremely grateful to Walter for invigorating debate, professional guidance, and intellectual openness. Without his constant challenges and friendly encouragement this dissertation and its subject matter would not have been possible. I also thank Walter for friendship, collegiality, and attempting, albeit unsuccessfully, to help me lower my vi average score in a round of nine over discussions of Lacan and Foucault. On a personal note, I am extremely grateful to all the friends and family who encouraged and supported my efforts along the way. A special thanks to my parents who not only sheltered me for part of the journey but also for always believing in what I was doing. My greatest debt is to Anna, whose unwavering confidence and constant companionship were a perpetual inspiration. Without her emotional and spiritual support this dissertation could not have been completed. For these reasons and many more too voluminous to recount, this dissertation is dedicated to her. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION………………………………….1 II. ADRIFT IN A SEA OF CHOSENNESS…………………………………………….38 III. BUILDING THE KINGDOM OF GOD……………………………………………69 IV. “SIN HAS NO HISTORY”………………………………………………………..124 V. THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS AND THE DEAD BODIES THAT MATTER……………………………………………………………………….......180 VI. IMAGINING HELL……………………………………………………………….229 VII. “A BLACK RAIN UPON OUR SOULS”………………………………………..280 VIII. THE RISE OF FUNDAMENTALIST PATRIOTISM…………………………..330 IX. “THIS NATION UNDER GOD”………………………………………………….384 X. CONCLUSION: AMERICANS AS RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS……………………457 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………458 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION Make no mistake about it: This is good versus evil. These are evildoers. They have no justification for their actions . The only motivation is evil. - George W. Bush, September 20011 If the process of naming of objects amounts to the very act of their constitution, then their descriptive features will be fundamentally unstable and open to all kinds of hegemonic rearticulations. The essentially performative character of naming is the precondition for all hegemony and politics. - Ernesto Laclau, 19892 In the 1950s, few Americans rivaled John Foster Dulles in militant anti- communist zeal. Dulles routinely vilified “Soviet Communism” for its “atheistic Godless premise.” As a critic he argued that NATO’s geographic boundaries were too limited and as Secretary of State he staunchly supported nuclear-threat belligerence. In 1954, Dulles suggested a permanent nuclear policy of Massive Retaliation so that the United States could “retaliate, instantly, by means and places of our own choosing.” Dulles crystallized a dominant American patriotism that viewed the world in the binary terms of righteous democracy and evil communism. Indeed, he exemplified religiously framed national identity so well that biographer Townsend Hoopes titled his book on Dulles The Devil and John Foster Dulles.3 The Dulles of the 1950s, however, clashes with the Dulles of the 1930s and the early war years. In 1939, Dulles’s War, Peace and Change argued for new methods of international negotiation to “check the tendency to identify one’s” own nation “with 1 deity” and “the other nation . with evil.” Arguing that the United States should abstain from war in the spirit of the New Testament, Dulles condemned the rising clamor for U.S. intervention in Europe. “‘Practical’ men of the world tell me that all this talk of the Gospels has no place in the world today but it is only by bringing that Christian point of view to bear on world affairs that something really practical and constructive can be done to make peace last,” Dulles claimed.4 During the war Dulles further suggested that “military establishments everywhere should be brought under some form of international control.”5 The transformation of Dulles’s foreign policy thinking testifies to a sea change in the religious framing of American identity and the power of that identity to shape the U.S. approach to the world, the central themes of this dissertation.
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