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...And to the following story about corporate execs who thought God might be able to repair their image after the Great Depression. Although their efforts backfired (how delicious), US students have pledged allegiance to “one nation under God” ever since:

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Today’s story comes from One Nation Under God by Kevin Kruse. Holy moly, what a good book!

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We explore the Powell Memo, a confidential document written in 1971 that led to the rise of the lobbying industry as we know it today.

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Otherwise, see you in two weeks with our episode on the memo.

Cheers,

Ben

This week’s transcript

Hello, I’m Ben Tumin and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about the Pledge of Allegiance. I read about it in One Nation Under God by Kevin Kruse.

In October 1892, Francis Bellamy, a patriotic Baptist minister from New York, proposed that every schoolhouse in the nation lead students through a celebration of the American flag. He wrote a salute reading, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands—one Nation indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all.” In the following years, this pledge spread around the country, although it did undergo some changes. In 1924, “my Flag” became “the Flag of the United States”; in 1925, this phrase became “the Flag of the United States of America”; and in 1926, to be extra clear, this phrase became “the Flag of the United States of America, this here blobby area that broke off from Pangea 175 million years ago.”

But through all these revisions, the Pledge of Allegiance never mentioned God. That changed in 1954, timing that coincided with corporations’ attempts to roll back the New Deal. Coincidence? I think not.

To see what I mean, let’s first chat about FDR. As part of the New Deal, his administration implemented banking reform, set maximum hours and minimum wages for workers, and raised taxes on the country’s wealthiest people. To sell this legislation to the public, FDR made heavy use of religious rhetoric. In fact, according to one biographer, “probably no American politician has given so many speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy,” except, of course, for Ted Cruz. Consequently, corporate executives, who didn’t like FDR’s pro-worker reforms, had a lot of trouble building opposition to the New Deal. But then a pro-business minister named James Fifield offered them a chance to beat FDR at his own game.

Originally from Chicago, Fifield led the elite First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. From his pulpit, he railed against FDR, stating, “Every Christian should oppose the totalitarian trends of the New Deal.” In 1939, Fifield even took out a full-page ad in the LA Times in defense of corporate America, saying “Goodness and Christian ideals run proportionately high among businessmen.” Of note, First Congregational’s pews were filled with corporate executives like Harry Chandler, the conservative publisher of the LA Times. And, thanks to the church’s custom-designed collections plate, Fifield enjoyed a lifestyle like those of the millionaires he ministered to, earning the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and living in a mansion that originally housed an oil tycoon. Sure, he conceded, during the Great Depression, “It was quite a shock to a lot of people to see a minister driving around in a good car with a chauffeur,” but Fifield and his wife insisted they were simple “small-town” folks, driving in a glitzy limo, took a chauffeured car all around LA…

As the 1940s wore on, Fifield engineered a campaign to show people that, contrary to what FDR might tell them, “The glorification of the state is really a denial of God.” With donations from executives at General Motors, Dupont, Chrysler, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil, Sun Oil, Republic Steel, Colgate-Palmolive, and more, Fifield developed a grassroots network of thousands of ministers preaching what one observer called “Christian libertarianism.” To shape their sermons, Fifield relied on an organization called Spiritual Mobilization, which distributed copies of his speeches, produced a national radio show that warned about the dangers of “creeping socialism,” and published a magazine that included articles like a parable about a group of seagulls who let themselves be fed by shrimp boats and soon forgot how to care for themselves. The moral of the story? Hell hath no fury like a libertarian scorned by a gull who ate all his shrimp.

Fifield’s efforts proved effective. After remaining stable throughout the first part of the 20th century, rates of churchgoing spiked in the US in the 1940s and 50s, largely thanks to the grassroots activity of organizations like Spiritual Mobilization. In fact, Spiritual Mobilization, which I’m just going to call SpirMo, organized tens of thousands of sermons in 1951 dedicated to the theme of “freedom under God,” successfully popularizing the phrase. However, Spirmo’s plan soon encountered an unexpected problem: the 1952 election of Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

On one hand, Ike was quite spiritual. He referred to himself as “the most intensely religious person I know,” and in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he declared his campaign to be “a great crusade for freedom in America and freedom in the world.” (Of course, as we’ve explored once or twice or thrice, that wasn’t exactly the case.) Encouraged by Ike’s seeming dedication to Christianity, organizations like the very religious, pro-business Freedoms Foundation organized a massive get out the vote campaign in 1952, helping guide Ike to a landslide victory.

On the other hand, after his election, it became clear that Ike didn’t intend to herd the faithful into the waiting arms of the conservative movement; rather, he wanted to use a vague conception of God to unify the country. Democracy, he believed, doesn’t work “unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” So, contrary to Christian Libertarians’ hopes, Ike used the heightened spirituality in the US that people like Fifield had helped build to enlarge the government rather than tear it down. His administration expanded social security, kept tax rates high, and beefed up funding for education—all part of a “spiritual revival” that Ike preached the US needed. Disappointed conservatives, their efforts backfiring, increasingly viewed Ike’s policies as a watered-down extension of FDR’s, or what Senator Barry Goldwater called a “dime-store New Deal.”

A Sunday School New Deal might’ve been more accurate because Ike made religion an indelible part of lawmakers’ and citizens’ everyday lives. He transformed the National Prayer Breakfast into an annual tradition for presidents, oversaw the addition of “In God We Trust” to stamps, and notably, attended a sermon by a Scottish minister named George Docherty who insisted that “Under God” be added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Why? Because, “apart from the mention of the phrase, United States of America, this could be the pledge of any Republic.” So in 1954, Eisenhower signed a bill into law amending the Pledge to read, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands—one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” Though I’ve always preferred the extra specific extended version, which reads, “I pledge allegiance to my flag, a piece of cloth that helps you determine how windy it is, and to the republic for which it stands (or sometimes, kind of droops when it isn’t windy at all)—one nation under God, that being who we’re pretty sure lives in the clouds. Hard to tell. I digress. Let’s be real: I could go on, and on, and on, and on…”

In sum, the US became suffused with religion in large part thanks to the efforts of Christian Libertarians who hoped that spiritual arguments would convince US citizens to oppose business regulations and big government. If you ever pledged allegiance to a nation under God, you have them to thank. But, as we also saw, Dwight Eisenhower unexpectedly derailed conservatives’ plans. In the 1970s, a memo by a future Supreme Court justice would set them back on track.

Tintl matbosh.

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