On September 27, 1940, radio listeners across North America tuned into “Ripley's Believe It Or Not” to hear R. G. LeTourneau, who designed and manufactured moving equipment, discuss the financial rewards of his evangelical faith.Footnote ¹ The program opened with a fictional dialogue between LeTourneau, playing his younger self, and a colleague incredulous that God is their chief stakeholder. “The time . . . December 1929, just after the memorable Wall Street crash,” the narrator intoned. “The place—the office of a small factory in Stockton, California. The owner of the plant is talking with his assistant. They face the unhappy prospect of bankruptcy.” LeTourneau says that he intends to spend his savings on “one obligation—my missionary pledge.” The assistant gasps, “What?” LeTourneau is adamant: “I told God that as long as I had a dime I would pay that missionary pledge.” Introducing the punch line that made LeTourneau a minor celebrity, the assistant cries, “Why, that's actually making God—your partner!!!” LeTourneau says, “Yes, I shall make God a partner in my business.” He would henceforth serve both God and mammon by setting aside 90 percent of his salary and company profits for evangelical causes. “You have made the word of God a glorious, practical reality,” program host Robert Ripley told his guest, then turned to the audience with his own trademark flourish. “And of such is the work of faith . . . Believe It Or Not.”Footnote ²

“Believe It Or Not” is an apt phrase for the unsung story of business men such as LeTourneau who financed and mobilized theologically conservative white evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, during the Depression and World War II.Footnote ³ LeTourneau's star turn on “Ripley” challenges a historiography of fundamentalism that focuses on preachers, full-time evangelists, and theologians who drew sharp rhetorical lines between believers and “the world.”Footnote ⁴ This scholarship, exemplified by the deservedly canonical early work of George Marsden and Joel Carpenter, depicts a vibrant, proselytizing, yet deeply insular Protestant subculture whose members viewed the public sphere—“the world” of politics and hedonistic consumption—in opposition to doctrinal correctness and behavioral purity.Footnote ⁵ Even as fundamentalists appropriated dress, slang, music, and other aspects of the culture they wished to convert, they rigidly policed the boundaries. The world, in this account, dismissed the broad canopy of evangelicalism as a pre-modern phenomenon doomed to extinction.Footnote ⁶ Why, then, did a prominent evangelical executive appear on Ripley's secular and frequently scandalous program, sharing the airwaves with Siamese twins and Indian firewalkers?Footnote ⁷ Stranger still, why did Ripley treat LeTourneau's faith as vital and heroic rather than a fossilized freak show? One answer was that LeTourneau's religiously fueled success in business offered a timely rejoinder to Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs for revitalizing the economy. After a decade of wrenching poverty when the federal government touched more Americans' lives than ever before, Ripley and LeTourneau colluded on a classically evangelical vision of a good society built on the relationship between each individual and God. “The minute I started that partnership, business boomed,” LeTourneau told Ripley. The host applauded, “Mr. LeTourneau, in these troubled times, you are a magnificent example to those of little faith.”Footnote ⁸ With personal faith triumphing over the Depression, it was as if the New Deal had never happened.

A burgeoning scholarship suggests that students of American religion have overemphasized the parochialism of white mid-twentieth-century evangelicals and, as a result, overlooked evangelical engagement with multi-faith or formally secular public spheres.Footnote ⁹ Evangelical reaction against and adaptation to the New Deal state are central to this emerging argument. Alison Collis Greene chronicles the ambivalent relief that some pastors in the Mississippi Delta felt when the government took over charitable activities that churches could no longer sustain. Darren Dochuk describes how white southern migration shaped the religious and entrepreneurial character of the Sunbelt, where an individualistic ethos coexisted with government largesse. Daniel K. Williams and Steven P. Miller trace evangelical activism within the Republican Party. From a business history perspective, Kim Phillips-Fein shows the anti–New Deal roots of the broader conservative movement. Bethany Moreton and Darren Grem analyze the intersections of evangelical Christianity and postindustrial capitalism.Footnote ¹⁰

R. G. LeTourneau's career in the 1930s and early 1940s fleshes out several dimensions of this historiographical revisionism.Footnote ¹¹ First, the time period enriches the post–World War II emphasis of much recent writing on evangelicalism while reconceptualizing the Depression years that even some new scholarship treats as politically fallow.Footnote ¹² Second, as a business man, LeTourneau draws attention to an understudied group of laity who functioned as ambassadors between evangelical subcultures and “the world.” Work, not worship, was the primary site where business men practiced evangelicalism within the homogenizing norms of a pluralistic civil society. A widely held middle-class belief in the essential Christianity of capitalism forged common ground with figures such as Ripley rather than relegating evangelicals to the margins of American life. LeTourneau's motto, “God is My Partner,” celebrated the icon of the self-made man and the conservative politics that went with it, holding individuals responsible for their fate regardless of socioeconomic circumstances.Footnote ¹³ To be God's partner was to adhere to a contractual theology as old as biblical Israel and as binding as a modern commercial agreement. In return for obedience, God endowed business men with shrewdness, pragmatism, and profits. Likewise, God punished the faithless on their balance sheets. Representing a putatively otherworldly religious milieu, LeTourneau was significant for embodying a Weberian breed of evangelical whose very worldliness was a defining spiritual credential.Footnote ¹⁴

This article embeds LeTourneau in the context in which he learned how to be an evangelical business man, with the state serving as both an antagonist and a silent partner. It sketches his peripatetic path to a career designing earthmoving equipment for private and public sector projects to build roads, bridges, and dams—the connective tissue of industrialization. As LeTourneau moved manufacturing hubs from California to the Midwest and the South, he cultivated powerful political allies, and simultaneously benefited from and decried the growth of the federal government under Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, like non-evangelical conservatives, he denied that human intervention in the marketplace could restore the nation to prosperity. His solution, which many of his co-religionists shared and which seemed plausible to Ripley, was a business-led evangelical revival.

I. Beginnings: “Prosperously Dressed Bearded Men”

LeTourneau's generation was a living link between culturally confident nineteenth-century evangelicalism and embattled twentieth-century fundamentalism. Robert Gilmour LeTourneau was born in 1888 into a French-Canadian family with roots in the Plymouth Brethren, a transplanted British sect that balanced cultural separatism with business acumen. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Brethren and other evangelicals felt pressed to counter theological modernism, which treated the Bible as a human artifact instead of the literal word of God and concerned itself less with the redemption of individuals than with large-scale social reform.Footnote ¹⁵ Transatlantic revivalist Dwight L. Moody was the most famous anti-modernist to adopt premillennialism, the Brethren-authored doctrine that evangelistic outreach was the only hope for a world hurtling toward apocalypse.Footnote ¹⁶ LeTourneau internalized the magnitude of being in covenant with a God whose omnipotence trumped human will. He remembered visible markers of the Brethren's segregation from the world they were driven to save, in particular, the “prosperously dressed and bearded men” who gathered after services.Footnote ¹⁷

These bearded men—including LeTourneau's father, who was a farmer and a carpenter—were church elders, and part of a far-flung Plymouth Brethren business network that took the family westward from LeTourneau's birthplace in Vermont.Footnote ¹⁸ He owed the formative years of his working life to denominational clannishness. An explosively energetic boy, impatient with book-learning and infatuated with machinery, he quit school in eighth grade, insisting that he was, at fourteen, a “man growed.”Footnote ¹⁹ It was 1902, and the LeTourneaus had moved to Portland, Oregon, at a church member's invitation.Footnote ²⁰ Portland was a boom town, with Midwestern farmers and German, Scandinavian, and Chinese immigrants feverishly industrializing the region.Footnote ²¹

The LeTourneau parents yielded to their impetuous son and conspired with Brethren elders to catapult him into adult responsibilities.Footnote ²² A “little, soft-voiced” Englishman who owned the East Portland Iron Works hired LeTourneau to work dawn to dusk in the foundry. Under Mr. Hill's watchful eye, LeTourneau shunned alcohol and roughhousing and learned to use his precocious vocabulary to “cuss harder without swear words than any man”—a boast that established his masculine credentials within the bounds of evangelical propriety.Footnote ²³ Hill promoted the boy to apprenticeship, allowing him to use the machine shop after hours to experiment with new metals and alloys that were transforming the industry.Footnote ²⁴

Hill's supervision and support kept LeTourneau within the Brethren fold but could not produce the conversion experience that would make the boy a true believer. At sixteen, during a weeklong urban revival, the prodigal son finally found Christ. “No bolts of lightning hit me. No great flash of awareness. I just prayed to the Lord to save me . . . [and] all of my bitterness was drained away, and I was filled with such a vast relief I could not contain it all.”Footnote ²⁵ After fire destroyed the East Portland Iron Works at the end of 1905, LeTourneau moved to San Francisco, completing his apprenticeship in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. His religious and business ambitions, like those of many British, Canadian, and American evangelicals, were bound up in missionary work. Having displaced native peoples and foreign colonizers to establish its continental borders, and won new territories in the Spanish–American War, the United States was an imperial power in its own right. The fast-growing foreign missionary movement interpreted unprecedented American access to dark-skinned lands in light of the Great Commission to “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.”Footnote ²⁶ Undeterred by the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, an anti-colonial revolt that targeted foreign proselytizers and Chinese converts, LeTourneau's sister Sarah was studying Chinese and raising money for the journey across the ocean. LeTourneau toyed with the idea of joining her and building a foundry that would expose its workers to evangelicalism.Footnote ²⁷ Notably, he did not believe that conversion automatically improved living standards. He doubted that “a lot of heathens have been converted to Christianity while slowly starving to death.” Rather, seeing “[God's] power in better housing, food, and medical care” would bring them “eagerly” to Christ.Footnote ²⁸

If LeTourneau sometimes sounded like the theological modernists he despised, it was because his faith in God was inseparable from his faith in technological progress. Notwithstanding his premillennialist pessimism about an inexorably deteriorating world, he thrilled to the seemingly unlimited power of manufacturing. His years in California, from 1906 to 1935, put him at the forefront of dramatic changes in the physical landscape. He helped build a bridge from San Francisco to Stockton, then crossed it to become a car mechanic in 1909, thirteen years into the mass production of motorized vehicles in the United States.Footnote ²⁹ When his alcoholic business partner put the garage in debt, LeTourneau went to work for two brothers who sold engine-powered, rather than mule-driven, farm machinery. This innovation made California's post–World War I irrigation and highway-building projects possible, as well as LeTourneau's career.Footnote ³⁰

II. 1919–1938: A Working Gospel

LeTourneau felt on firm ground translating his faith into economic terms. “I like my machines and they work,” he analogized. “And the Gospel of Jesus Christ works too.”Footnote ³¹ To work was to produce measurable results, and with religion as with machinery, LeTourneau was willing to try new approaches if the initial yield was poor. Because Stockton's Plymouth Brethren community was too small to sustain a church, LeTourneau and his young wife Evelyn joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA), founded in 1887 by a preacher whose passion for world evangelism grew out of his ministry to the poor in New York City.Footnote ³² Soon, LeTourneau found himself banging the drum in an outdoor gospel band and hauling homeless alcoholics to the C&MA mission house. It was in 1919—not, as Robert Ripley would have it, the fatal year of 1929—that LeTourneau declared his partnership with God. When his missionary sister (one of two) accused him of caring more about business than Jesus, he consulted his pastor, who told him that “God needs business men as well as preachers and missionaries.” LeTourneau replied with immense relief, “All right, if that is what God wants me to be, I'll try to be His business man.”Footnote ³³ As Ripley would observe admiringly of LeTourneau's outsized philanthropy, being God's business man sometimes meant defying business conventions. In addition to donating considerable money and time to evangelical causes, it entailed maintaining a “Christian atmosphere” at work that subverted traditional male sociability, observing, if not necessarily enforcing, evangelical taboos against drinking, swearing, smoking, and overt sexuality.Footnote ³⁴

The partnership with God seemed off to a good start in 1920, a year after LeTourneau left his employers to become an independent contractor. In his work crews, he made an effort to “attract a good Christian element,” believing that Christians worked harder than “your toughest redneck[s]” and might even convert them.Footnote ³⁵ While he insisted that he never discriminated against the non-evangelicals he hoped to save, he sentimentalized faith as a bond between management and labor that could serve as an example for the church. “I had a mighty loyal bunch of men,” he said. “If all Christians could unite like that in their loyalty to the Lord”—an inadvertently revealing image of power and subordination, not equality—“this world wouldn't be in the mess it was in.”Footnote ³⁶For the rest of the decade, he honed his managerial as well as his manufacturing skills.

With the exception of a 1931 loss that he blamed on a lack of trust in God's provision, LeTourneau made his fortune during the Depression. His signal event of 1929 was not the stock market crash, which to many observers looked like a short-term cyclical correction, but the legal incorporation of LeTourneau, Inc. with twenty employees and a product request from “backward Russia.”Footnote ³⁷ His reflexive anticommunism did not stand in the way of international commerce. Nor was he loath to take advantage of stateside corporate welfare. In 1931, LeTourneau became the indirect recipient of federal money when a consortium for which he was a contractor won a government bid to build the Boulder Dam (later the Hoover Dam) in Colorado.Footnote ³⁸ The proof that he was doing God's will lay in his receipts. For example, in a confrontation with a creditor who believed in a seven-day workweek, LeTourneau held to his policy of honoring the sabbath by giving employees Sunday off. He made $207,237 in sales in 1932, almost doubling his total of $110,800 in 1930. In 1933, sales shot up to $379,100, and came close to tripling to $929,860 in 1934.Footnote ³⁹ His business was small by comparison with industry giants such as Caterpillar, Inc.Footnote ⁴⁰ Still, Caterpillar executives took notice of their up-and-coming rival, and agreed to be LeTourneau's national distributor. In April 1935, LeTourneau left the Stockton plant in family hands to build a factory near Caterpillar headquarters in Peoria, Illinois.Footnote ⁴¹

After almost thirty years away from America's industrial and agricultural centers, LeTourneau wasted no time moving his partnership with God to a bigger stage. Peoria was about 130 miles from Chicago, making it a satellite of the nation's “Second City” of manufacturing and finance next to New York.Footnote ⁴² Following the footsteps of Christian entrepreneurs before him, LeTourneau saw his growing wealth as a platform that made evangelism more than a personal or business commitment, but a civic duty. His success would show Depression-era America that revival was the only road to economic recovery. Between 1935, when he settled in Peoria, and 1938, when he made an even more pivotal expansion to Georgia, LeTourneau reinterpreted his role as an evangelical business man in three career-defining ways: first, becoming a public speaker; second, institutionalizing conservative Protestantism in labor-management relations; and third, establishing the LeTourneau Evangelistic Foundation to apply most of his profits to Christian work. As skyrocketing sales cemented his faith in the free market and antagonism toward the regulatory power of the New Deal, he mixed politics with his preaching.

It was only fitting that LeTourneau launched his evangelistic career neither in church nor on a revival stump, but in the Peoria Chamber of Commerce, which invited its new member to speak in late 1935. He asked God “to give him the words,” and God obliged with well-worn nostalgia for a golden age of American pluck and piety. “You may wonder what religion has to do with business, and I used to wonder about it myself,” LeTourneau began. “Now I know that it was our forefathers' faith in God that made our country great . . . I believe we need to get back to that faith, and when we do, God will lead us out of the depression we've been in.” The contractual theology that enabled LeTourneau and later Ripley to solve the economic crisis in a word, “faith,” was both familiar and invigorating to this “business crowd,” as was the American exceptionalism.Footnote ⁴³ Having called on business men to redeem the nation, LeTourneau argued that they must simultaneously redeem the church. He challenged laymen to take their rightful place beside clergy to make abstract truths concrete. “The preachers can tell us that Christianity works. They are God's salesmen, selling Christianity and the Christian way of life. But unless we business men … testify that Christianity is the driving power of our business, you'll always have doubters claiming that religion is all talk and no production.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Clergy in the audience who struggled to get men involved in the historically feminine religious sphere must have been delighted by such gendered calls to arms.Footnote ⁴⁵

Along with the Chamber of Commerce, the churches of Peoria gave LeTourneau a springboard to a national evangelical stage. His reputation spread to congregations and business groups out of town, so he hired a gospel quartet and drove—or later, flew in a private jet—to engagements on evenings and weekends. Clergy–lay collaboration contained seeds of tension, as LeTourneau made clear when speaking among revivalist peers such as the Christian Business Men's Committee International, the Business Men's Evangelistic Clubs, and the Gideons, organizations that saw a providential role for business men in the church. “Just as God called the men of old to do certain things, I believe He is today making that call more especially to commercial men to witness that the Gospel is still the power of God unto salvation,” he told the Gideons. “We commercial men have no conflict with preachers,” but “when we laymen who rub shoulders with people in the world every day tell them that Jesus Christ is the solution to all our problems . . . they can't say of us as they sometimes say of the preachers, ‘They get paid for it.’”Footnote ⁴⁶ In one blow, LeTourneau dismissed ministers as out of touch with ordinary men and women and positioned business men as evangelicalism's envoys to “the world.” Even though, in practice, pew and pulpit worked together to save souls, LeTourneau and his cohort held fast to the expectation of a lay-led revival.Footnote ⁴⁷ As producers and earners, business men gave skeptics hard evidence of God's faithfulness that sermons alone could not provide.

Most of LeTourneau's own sermons were inspirational lessons, “funny stories,” or bootstraps-and-Bible tales of how to succeed in business. Titles included “Mental Attitude,” “Right Religion,” “Conference with the Lord,” “Mechanical and Spiritual Progress,” and “Run God's Business.” Less often, but no less ardently, LeTourneau preached conservative politics. He attacked the New Deal's Works Products Administration and the National Recovery Administration, which, before being declared unconstitutional, regulated hours and wages, gave the government the power to force competing companies into cartels, and enshrined the right of workers to collective bargaining. Along the same lines, he excoriated “Higher Taxes and Redistribution,” “Socialism—Theory,” and “Class Hatred”; called “Labor Union[s] a Religion”'; and warned against “Dictators and Propaganda.”Footnote ⁴⁸ He opined unoriginally that everyone “who doesn't like our way of doing business, and wants to teach us a new social order” should be thrown “by the seat of his pants . . . on a boat bound for a land he does like.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Although LeTourneau had minimal if any ties to organized opposition to the New Deal, such as the plutocratic American Liberty League and the National Association of Manufacturers, he joined a conservative chorus that Christianity and patriotism required limited government.Footnote ⁵⁰

As his sermon notes demonstrated, LeTourneau believed that the real-world opposite of “Christianity,” from the global red menace to his own plants, was “communism.” Anticommunism put evangelicals in the mainstream of American political discourse.Footnote ⁵¹ Communism carried a string of interlocking associations: atheism, arrogance about human potential to improve society, and replacing individual initiative with collective control. For the political right wing, these philosophies culminated in a tyrannical state held hostage to the mob rule that employers had long attributed to labor unions.Footnote ⁵² For premillennialists such as LeTourneau, the stakes for humanity were even higher. In their interpretation of the Bible, Russian aggression, manifested in Bolshevik ideology, was a sign of the end times. International politics—which premillennialists expected to culminate in the return of Jews, God's first chosen people, to Israel, God's first chosen land—was a map for impending apocalypse.Footnote ⁵³ Before most Americans were paying close attention to Germany and Italy, then, premillennialist clergy and laity were conflating communism, fascism, and anti-Semitism into a single Satanic enemy. The King's Business, the monthly magazine of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, had the New Deal in its sights from the start of Roosevelt's first term. In 1933, the editors culled dire warnings from mainstream publications to the Congressional Record to claim, “Russia has her Stalin … Germany has her Hitler; and impossible as it may seem, the United States of America has her Roosevelt!”Footnote ⁵⁴ Aside from their apocalyptic worldview, evangelicals who raised the alarm against concentrated political and economic power were indistinguishable from, if not visibly connected to, the rising libertarian, anti-Keynesian, and Republican conservative movement.Footnote ⁵⁵

By 1936, LeTourneau was preaching to employees and publicizing these “shop talks” as signs of labor-management harmony. As early as his work on the Boulder Dam, he had welcomed a visiting evangelist to the worksite. He formalized the practice in Stockton, declaring that attendance was voluntary while paying on the clock everyone who came.Footnote ⁵⁶ LeTourneau handled the meetings when he was in town, using his religious platform to deal with business problems: “I Thank You for Your Loyalty,” “Loyalty Means Sacrifice” (twice), “Loyalty Beautiful,” “Loyalty is a Force,” “Compel [Not] I Nor Christ.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Individually, these snippets could mean anything; together, they indicated that LeTourneau feared worker loyalty to be very thin indeed. He had arrived in Peoria at a time when employers had to tread carefully. 1935 marked the third year of a manufacturing strike wave, John L. Lewis's founding of the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Wagner Act's protection of workers' right to organize.Footnote ⁵⁸ One management strategy was to treat management and labor as inherently opposed and boost profits by paying as little as possible for long hours of punishing work. Another possibility, paternalism, bound employer and employees together as a symbolic family in which the corporation determined its dependents' best interests. LeTourneau preferred a historically progressive third choice, welfare capitalism, which posited a mutually beneficial relationship between employer and employee on more equal ground than paternalism and with better working conditions than the autocratic model. Adopted by many employers after violent strikes in the wake of World War I, welfare capitalism combined competitive pay, benefits, and opportunities for advancement with company-sponsored grievance channels, socializing, and recreation.Footnote ⁵⁹

LeTourneau's evangelical version of welfare capitalism co-opted the familial imagery of paternalism, casting him as an avuncular patriarch devoted to employees' spiritual and physical well-being. The shop talks were no mere ruse to pacify the workers with heavenly instead of earthly rewards. He believed that his partnership with God required him to proselytize the people God had put under his care, and he viewed the in-plant services as the most important benefit he provided. Like sick leave or safety inspections, which encouraged allegiance to the company, communal worship was both the right and the pragmatic thing to do. LeTourneau candidly described “better morale” as a “by-product” of his overriding goal “to get men to believe in Jesus Christ.”Footnote ⁶⁰ His blind spot was his unwillingness to recognize that the power he held over his employees made some interpret shop talks as less than voluntary. When rumors swirled around the Peoria plant that professing Christians won more promotions than non-Christians, LeTourneau's retort that Christianity made him “fair and square” likely did little to quell unease.Footnote ⁶¹

To publicize all of LeTourneau, Inc.'s good works, LeTourneau established a company magazine, NOW, named after 2 Corinthians 6:2: “Behold, NOW is the accepted time; behold, NOW is the day of salvation.” He imagined the four-page weekly newsletter as “not just a house organ to express my own views and company policy, but one that would also voice the message of the Lord I was trying to serve as a partner.”Footnote ⁶² His sister Marie's husband, tract writer Tom Olson, spun biblical allegories from inspirational stories and current events. By 1938, there were ten issues of NOW for every employee, and Olson distributed countless articles to evangelical groups and households.Footnote ⁶³

The cover of NOW usually displayed a machine at work or in progress, while the back page, “Plant Life,” compiled personnel updates to make the company feel like a family. NOW chronicled LeTourneau's evangelistic traveling schedule and worker initiatives such as a Bible study organized by men on Peoria's night shift. Business news, though often mundane, drew attention to employee benefits: disability assistance, stock options, home rentals.Footnote ⁶⁴NOW even noted outside criticism and internal labor trouble, which were usually related. Peoria's Labor Temple News charged LeTourneau with publicity-seeking “religious spectacularism,” sniping that “Christ probably never intended that His teachings should help to advertise road graders.” If LeTourneau wanted to show a “Christian spirit,” he could start by “meeting his workmen on a collective bargaining basis.” NOW counter-charged that certain “religious leaders,” presumably like those at the Labor Temple, “delivered up the Lord Jesus Christ to Pilate to be crucified and then persuaded the people to demand his death.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This took a clear shot at unions as thugs whipped into a frenzy by their “leaders,” not the representative democracies the News depicted. Meanwhile, LeTourneau warded off a threatened strike at Stockton by establishing another talismanic feature of welfare capitalism, a company union. He raised wages by 10 percent, and the newly minted “Le Tourneau Employes [sic] Union” vowed to “protec[t] employes [sic] against irresponsible picketing or sit-downs by minority groups”—that is, independent organizers who rejected the premise of labor-management comity.Footnote ⁶⁶

By defining Christianity in the individualistic and pietistic terms of conservative evangelicalism, LeTourneau and his mouthpiece, Olson, ventured into conservative politics. Without question, both men cared more about saving souls than about current events per se. But some articles in NOW explicitly connected theology and public life. “A few days ago President Roosevelt proposed to Congress for himself something of the reorganization of government that Jethro, the priest of Midian, proposed for his son-in-law [Moses] 3400 years ago,” Olson wrote after the Second Inaugural Address in 1937. The mistake, in both cases, was to increase the number of departments to be supervised, putting what should be “the burden of all Israelites” on the leader.Footnote ⁶⁷ Following the example of Moody Monthly, The King's Business, and other evangelical publications, NOW gave subscribers a smorgasbord of popular journalism that uplifted spirits while disparaging collectivism.

Both LeTourneau's speaking career and NOW evolved rapidly over the same trajectory, from a small start in Peoria to an ambitious campaign for a national audience. So did the LeTourneau Evangelistic Foundation (LEF), which funded the other two endeavors on a grand scale.Footnote ⁶⁸ Foundation philanthropy had been interwoven with Christian capitalism since the late nineteenth century, with the growth of a finance economy based in high-risk, high-yield stocks and bonds.Footnote ⁶⁹ Gilded Age business men and society women transformed urban charities from providers of “direct personal service” to centralized bureaucracies that mirrored the economic ideology and practices of their wealthy directors.Footnote ⁷⁰Nouveau riche business men and blue-blooded patricians both inherited an ethos of Christian stewardship. Based in the biblical parable of the talents, in which a master gives three slaves the same amount of money to invest and rewards the one who earns the most, the commandment carried the same weight in the 1930s as in earlier generations: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.”Footnote ⁷¹ LeTourneau dubbed the LEF. “The Lord's Treasury,” delegated its management to British-born evangelist Harold Strathearn, and set up shop in Rockefeller Center, citadel of American capitalism.Footnote ⁷²Joyful News, Strathearn's newspaper, became by far the most militant of LeTourneau's publicity outlets, with puff pieces on “God's business man” sandwiched between denunciations of theological and cultural liberalism. Plant productivity filled LEF coffers. In 1936 and 1937, LeTourneau's annual sales reached $5,500,000, with most profits going to the Foundation.Footnote ⁷³

III. 1938–1943: The South, Labor Unrest, and War

LeTourneau was ready to expand his business again, and just as the Plymouth Brethren had kept him employed as a young man, the Christian and Missionary Alliance turned out to be the network he needed. At a denominational convention in 1936, LeTourneau had been impressed by the speech of R. A. Forrest, founder of a coeducational Bible and vocational school in Toccoa Falls, Georgia. Thanks to infusions of money from fundamentalist oilmen, 1936 was Toccoa Institute's twenty-fifth anniversary, and Forrest was traveling the world to meet his graduates in the mission field.Footnote ⁷⁴ LeTourneau sent a thousand dollar check. When the two men finally met in person, LeTourneau increased his support to ten thousand dollars and enrolled his son Donald in the Institute. In 1938, Forrest embraced LeTourneau's proposal to build a plant in Toccoa Falls with the Institute as a feeder school for workers.Footnote ⁷⁵

Like other manufacturers, LeTourneau already had his eye on the under-industrialized South. High poverty rates, a Jim Crow workforce that held wages down, and anti-union state governments guaranteed a cheap labor pool.Footnote ⁷⁶ At the same time, Toccoa Falls was reaping the benefits of the New Deal, as federal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and National Youth Administration (NYA) hired young men from the area to work on civic improvement projects. The Tennessee Valley Authority generated hydroelectric power vital to industrial development. From CCC-donated lumber to NYA-constructed campus buildings, the Institute had become a private-public hybrid.Footnote ⁷⁷

LeTourneau might have protested such a thorough government presence on his new turf, but instead, he took advantage of the political battle between Roosevelt and conservative southern Democrats over the region's future. Roosevelt signed a Fair Labor Standards Act that enacted a national minimum wage targeted specifically at the poverty-stricken South, which he called “the Nation's number one economic problem.” The President barnstormed through the region during the summer, trying to rouse voters against recalcitrant Democratic congressmen he called the “Copperheads.” These legislators resisted federal intervention that, to Roosevelt's mind, would end the South's economic isolation and, to their minds, would trample southern independence. In November 1938, when LeTourneau arrived in Toccoa Falls, southern voters—which is to say, white voters—overwhelmingly supported the Copperheads.Footnote ⁷⁸NOW applauded the midterm elections, hoping that Congress would “once again be a representative body instead of a rubber stamp for the Chief Executive.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet repudiating the President did not mean rejecting all of his initiatives. LeTourneau contracted with the NYA to build an airport in Toccoa Falls while he created an aviation training program at the Institute. In doing so, he tacitly acknowledged what pro–New Deal business men had contended all along: that working with, rather than against, a powerful federal government could be the best way to navigate the Depression.Footnote ⁸⁰

Cooperation among church, business, and southern states was the theme of the four-day revival LeTourneau staged in 1939 to consecrate the Toccoa Falls plant. An all-star cast of public figures joined LeTourneau in insisting on the unity of theological and political conservatism. Crowds of thousands enjoyed free barbecue while LeTourneau introduced them to his contractual creed.Footnote ⁸¹ Governor Eurith D. “Ed” Rivers boosted his region and evangelical religion by attacking labor unions. “Mr. LeTourneau had the means to go anywhere in the nation with his business,” Rivers said, but instead, he chose “Georgia and the southland. He's not going to find communists and sit-down strikes in the south!” The Governor added that “a spiritual revival is needed if the nation is to climb out of the present crisis.” Joining Rivers on the platform were Senator Richard Russell, a Roosevelt ally, and three state and local officials. Big business was represented by Preston Arkwright, president of the Georgia Power Company, and R. W. Wirt, Vice President of the Southern Railway. Wirt praised LeTourneau's welfare capitalism: “He is not starting a sweat shop. He pays better wages than the average employer. . . . He needs no regulation. His employees need no protection.”Footnote ⁸² Arkwright inaccurately asserted that LeTourneau also needed no New Deal: “All this we see here today is individual enterprise.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that an evening service would “be dedicated to the factory workers of north Georgia and … centered about wholesome, friendly relations between employer and employe [sic].”Footnote ⁸³ Two thousand people attended.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Journal-Constitution and Governor Richards would be proven wrong: LeTourneau could not escape labor unrest in the South. When the United Steel Workers tried to unionize Toccoa Falls in 1943, the same year the American Federation of Labor (AFL) won recognition in Peoria, he responded with no small edge of hysteria. “CIO Out to Communize LeTourneau Company,” the LeTourneau Evangelistic Foundation's Joyful News announced in an issue largely devoted to the emergency.Footnote ⁸⁵ Editor Harold Strathearn depicted the strike as a modern version of the parable of the tenants and the vineyard. In the gospel account, a rich man leases his vineyard to tenants who not only refuse him its harvest, but attack each servant he sends to collect his due. Finally, he sends his beloved son, whom he is sure they will respect; instead, they kill the son, hoping to collect the inheritance. The rich man represents God; the son, Christ; and the tenants, Christ's crucifiers.Footnote ⁸⁶ Strathearn reimagined the hapless servants as “company representatives” and the murderous tenants as “trusted employees” who seized control of the business. The rich man and his son stood in for Christianity and capitalism, respectively. The son's death, Strathearn seethed, showed that “progressive confiscation will lead inevitably to complete seizure of property.” However, justice would be served in the end. “The point in the biblical story is that these wicked men will be miserably destroyed and replaced by those who recognize the rights of the owner.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Intense biblicism of this sort made evangelicals unique among anti–New Deal conservatives, most of whom stuck to the secular language of economics.Footnote ⁸⁸

But back in 1939, as LeTourneau settled into Toccoa Falls, he saw another challenge and opportunity on the horizon—war. With the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Roosevelt assured a nervous public that the United States would remain neutral; yet he was already pushing for higher military spending to help the Allies. The most immediate beneficiary was the manufacturing sector, and in 1940, LeTourneau again set his anti-Roosevelt politics aside and scored a $4.5 million War Department contract to manufacture ammunition shells at Toccoa Falls.Footnote ⁸⁹ Other evangelicals were in the isolationist majority. As early as 1938, an article in The King's Business warned of “propaganda aimed to convince Americans that a plunge into war would ‘serve the interests of democracy and the stabilization of peace.’” The “militarists” were New Dealers writ large, “bureaucratic slave-drivers who will tyrannize over free Americans” by subjecting them to Europe's “war horrors.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The author correctly foresaw big government only getting bigger, a prospect that had come to serve LeTourneau's business interests. On the terms of his partnership with God, LeTourneau had only to point to his profits to counter any charges of hypocrisy.

Humanitarian considerations loomed larger than collaboration with the state for evangelicals who wrote to LeTourneau protesting his contribution to the machinery of death. One correspondent cried, “How can you preach so zealously the love of Jesus Christ, and at the same time make shells, that destroy those souls that Jesus died for??????”Footnote ⁹¹ A NOW subscriber in Madison, Wisconsin, insinuated that LeTourneau was behaving like a greedy Judas, making weapons “for a few pieces of Silver.”Footnote ⁹² However, LeTourneau stood firm. In his form-letter reply, he argued that “the aggressor nations of our day . . . are the enemies of God and the Bible.” A company memo in July 1941 made his financial considerations plain as well. “With defense business we can stay in business. Without defense business we are out of this business.”Footnote ⁹³ Five months later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made all business defense business. LeTourneau's dirt-movers, transported to strategic locations around the world, proved more important than his shells.Footnote ⁹⁴

America's entry into the war transformed cultural critics into ardent nationalists; conservative evangelicals, who often lived out both identities at once, were no exception.Footnote ⁹⁵ The 1942 opening of LeTourneau's plant in Vicksburg, Mississippi, was a pageant of white Christian patriotism. The southern regional pride that had characterized the Toccoa Falls dedication gave way to a message of national unity from the Vicksburg Chamber of Commerce, which organized the factory's consecration to the Lord.Footnote ⁹⁶ The rally opened with a war bond and stamp drive, after which the American Legion led the crowd in singing “America” before the invocation. The governors of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana spoke, as did a visitor from Washington, Admiral John S. McCain. The father of the future Senator and presidential candidate thanked LeTourneau for a “grand time.”Footnote ⁹⁷ He and the audience enjoyed an exhibition of LeTourneau, Inc.'s military equipment; a “patriotic display by Army, Navy, and Marine Corps”; a band playing over a top-of-the-line public address system; and, of course, “Free Barbeque for 10,000.”Footnote ⁹⁸ If this was revival, it looked different than the one evangelicals had been calling for during the Depression and that LeTourneau advertised to Ripley. War, not mass professions of faith, had yanked the economy from the brink. God's business men were now government contractors.