Abstract “God’s Business Men”: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War Sarah Ruth Hammond Yale University Ph.D., 2010 For decades, historians of the twentieth-century United States have treated evangelicals as politically apathetic and culturally marginal between the 1925 Scopes Trial and the Reagan revolution. To the contrary, evangelical businessmen during the Depression and World War II opposed the New Deal on theological and economic grounds, and claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the same visionary pragmatism they practiced in the boardroom. For example, industrialist R.G. LeTourneau and executive Herbert J. Taylor countered government centralization in the 1930s and 1940s with philanthropies that invested in a Protestant, capitalist, and democratic world. Meanwhile, the Christian Business Men’s Committee International, the Business Men’s Evangelistic Clubs, and the Gideons infused spiritual fellowship with the elitism of advertising culture. They were confident that they could steer the masses to Christ and free enterprise from the top down. Indeed, for a few exhilarating years, World War II seemed to give America and its missionaries dominion over the globe. Piety, patriotism, and power drew LeTourneau, Taylor, and the new National Association of Evangelicals to the center of it all,Washington, D.C. The marriage of religious and economic conservatism since the 1970s, which surprised many historians, reflects historical continuity rather than evangelical retreat. “God’s Business Men”: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sarah Ruth Hammond Dissertation Co-Directors: Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout May, 2010 © 2010 by Sarah Ruth Hammond All Rights Reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1 Dedication 3 Introduction 4 Chapter 1: “God Is My Partner”: R.G. LeTourneau’s Prosperity Gospel 15 Chapter 2: “Business Men Working for Jesus”: The World Vision of 73 Laymen’s Evangelism Chapter 3: “The High Ethics and Morals God Would Want in Any Business”: 140 Herbert J. Taylor, Rotarian Fundamentalist Chapter 4: “Cooperation Without Compromise”: Business Men and 201 the National Association of Evangelicals Conclusion 266 Bibliography 286 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe an immeasurable debt to the archivists who made my research possible. Bob Shuster and Wayne Weber at the Billy Graham Center Archives know every nook and cranny of American evangelicalism. Bob’s habit of staying late for out-of-towners gave me at least ten extra hours with the materials. My hosts Julie and John Worthen fed me, gave rides when I could have taken the train, and filled the evenings with laughter, talk, and movies. At the Margaret Estes Library at LeTourneau University, Henry S. Whitlow went miles beyond the call of duty by loaning me volumes of NOW. Dale Hardy, an archive unto himself, mobilized volunteers to catalog hundreds of disorganized boxes. His tour of the LeTourneau plant was a highlight of my visit, as was staying with Lee Wilkinson, a favorite childhood babysitter. The Hagley Library awarded me a grant- in-aid to spend two weeks with the papers of J. Howard Pew. Phil Wade at the Christian Business Men’s Committee headquarters not only searched for, but scanned, sources that fleshed out the stories of evangelical business men’s groups. I also thank the staff at the Library of Congress and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library. I am deeply grateful to the organizations that helped fund my graduate school career. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation subsidized my first year with the Andrew F. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies. The Richard J. Franke Interdisciplinary Fellowship in the Humanities added three years of support. Most of all, the Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at Indiana University enabled me to finish. Meeting the members of the Lake Institute board felt like being re-introduced to old friends. I thank them for their hospitality and their feedback on my research. Hammond God’s Business Men, Acknowledgments 2 Many scholars pushed me intellectually. Jon Butler, Skip Stout, and Beverly Gage, my dissertation committee, doled out precise doses of criticism and encouragement. Chapter 2 had its genesis at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) conference in 2007. I presented a paper for a panel on “Religion, Economic Values, and Business Culture in America, 1865-1965,” which also featured Jeanne Kilde, Tim Gloege, and Bryan Bademan. At OAH 2009, I joined Joseph Lowndes, Jason Morgan Ward, and Elizabeth Tandy Sherman on the panel “Grassroots Conservatism: From the Bottom Up or Top Down?” Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf graciously supplied an unpublished paper on industrial chaplaincies and encouraged my work. Dr. Uta Balbier shared her 2009 Billy Graham Center Archival Research Lecture, “God and Coca-Cola: Billy Graham in Germany.” The American Religious History Working Group at Yale and its counterpart at Columbia sharpened many a draft. Special thanks to Heather Rivera and the dedicated Religious Studies staff for smoothing bureaucratic hurdles. Extraordinary colleagues and friends helped me think through what I wanted to say, and did no small amount of hand-holding as I struggled to say it. Amanda Bell, Alexandra Block, Debbie Dinner, Jill Fraley, Brian Gold, Alison Greene, Keith Harper, Michael Jo, Geoff Kabaservice, Kramer A. Kramer, Tracy Lemos, A.G. Miller, Bethany Moreton, Robin Morris, Dawn Neely-Randall, Eva Pascal, Gabby Redwine, Maria Satterwhite, Reva Siegel, Linn Tonstad, Kate Unterman, Shira Weidenbaum, and Molly Worthen were conversation partners, editors, and cheerleaders. Infinite thanks to Mary and Steve Hammond, Rachel Ramirez-Hammond, and Grace Hammond for their generosity, stubborn faith, and love. Hammond God’s Business Men, Acknowledgments 3 For JR, with love and squalor INTRODUCTION It was 1920 and workers were striking in Zenith, a Midwestern town whose gleaming skyscrapers gave middle-class strivers a sense of the sublime. Each morning, George F. Babbitt – a forty-six year old realtor, Presbyterian, Republican, Elk, Zenith Booster, and Chamber of Commerce member – gazed from his suburban window upon the thirty-five story Second National Bank, “a temple-spire of the religion of business.”1 Torn between unreflective faith in unimpeded capitalism and qualms about rhetorical and real violence against the workers (“bomb-throwing socialists and thugs,” he overheard, “and the only way to handle ’em is with a club!”), Babbitt went to church to learn “How the Saviour Would End Strikes.”2 “Hope the doc gives the strikers hell!” hissed the advertising man sharing his pew. “Ordinarily, I don’t believe in a preacher butting into political matters – let him stick to straight religion and save souls, and not stir up a lot of discussion – but at a time like this, I do think he ought to stand right up and bawl out those plug-uglies to a fare-you well!”3 The Chatham Road Presbyterian Church of Zenith was a belligerent in a broader fight dividing white Northern Protestants. “Modernists” accepted historical and scientific criticism of the Bible, emphasized human potential over innate depravity, and denounced industrial capitalism’s extremes of wealth and poverty. They dismissed pietism without social reform as irresponsible, seeing inequality as a collective problem requiring collective, sometimes government, solutions. Conservative evangelicals or “fundamentalists,” by contrast, conceptualized orthodoxy as adherence to supernatural 1 Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Bantam Books, 1998 [1922]), 26, 98, 13 (quote). 2 Ibid., 324, 321. 3 Ibid., 321. Hammond God’s Business Men, Introduction 5 doctrines that science could not explain: divine creation, original sin, the virgin birth, Jesus’s atoning death and resurrection, an afterlife in heaven or hell. To them, social change was a byproduct of conversion, which took place in individual hearts and trumped schemes for the common good. Trusting God to bless the righteous and curse the wicked, they defended capitalism by pointing to scriptures in which riches rewarded obedience. Making hay of communist atheism, they acknowledged no meaningful distinctions among the Social Gospel, socialism, and out-and-out Bolshevism. All represented sedition against God’s chosen nation, the United States, and evangelicals did fear collective punishment. Babbitt’s evangelical minister argued that opposing Zenith’s strike was not a political statement, but a religious duty. The labor revolt capped “a generation” of spiritual warfare between Bible-believing Christians and enemies of the gospel and “the natural condition of free enterprise.”4 He mocked evolutionists and the “great poo-bahs of [theological] criticism” who “attack…the established fundamentals of the Christian creed.” He called labor unions “crazy systems…of despotic paternalism” that tried to stop the invisible hand of God from regulating the marketplace. “[T]his whole industrial matter isn’t a question of economics,” he concluded. “It’s essentially and only a matter of Love, and of the practical application of the Christian religion!” If management and labor could coexist in Christian brotherhood, “then…strikes would