One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (23 page)

Disneyland represented a subtle extension of Disney's postwar politics, but within a few years he began to worry that the theme park was perhaps
too
subtle. Therefore, in 1958, he began planning a new addition, a second major thoroughfare to run parallel to Main Street, U.S.A. The new Liberty Street would celebrate colonial America, with its architecture and storefronts reflecting eighteenth-century life. The avenue would lead visitors into Liberty Square, where they would find a replica of Independence Hall. Inside, they would be dazzled by a film depicting American history through the Civil War, shown in Circarama, a two-hundred-degree screen that encompassed their entire field of vision. At the film's conclusion, the curtain would drop and then rise again to reveal life-size versions of a half dozen American presidents. “The visitor will see all the chief executives modeled life-size,” the lead designer explained. “He'll think it's waxworks—until Lincoln stands up and talks.” Disney was sure that the advanced “audio-animatronics” would make the exhibit the central attraction of the entire park. Accordingly, he gave it a grand name: One Nation Under God.
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Due to developmental problems, the entire plan was never realized at Disneyland. (The exhibit lived on elsewhere, first in a smaller-scale Mr. Lincoln animatronic feature at the 1964 World's Fair and then as a new Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World in Florida a few years later.) But the underlying spirit of the One Nation Under God attraction remained a vital part of Disneyland nonetheless. In a 1957 interview with the columnist Hedda Hopper, Disney stressed the “American theme” that ran through the theme park. “I believe in emphasizing the story of what made America great and what will keep it great,” he said. Free enterprise, in his mind, was an essential element of the nation's success. As a reporter
for the
Wall Street Journal
enthusiastically recorded, more than sixty-five corporations advertised their products at the park, with seemingly unlikely partners such as Richfield Oil and Monsanto Chemical sponsoring entire rides. But as the One Nation Under God plans illustrated, the patriotism and capitalism on display at Disneyland were merely manifestations of a deeper foundation of faith. “It was,” as Disney biographer Neal Gabler noted aptly, “a modern variant on the City on a Hill of Puritan dreams.”
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In its conflation of piety and patriotism, Disneyland embodied larger currents in American popular culture during the postwar era. Political leaders and religious reformers led the way in fomenting the religious revival of the Eisenhower era, but their counterparts in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue proved to be indispensable allies. Prompted by both patriotism and an eye for profits, entertainers and advertisers did a great deal to promote public expressions of faith in the era. Prominent advertising agencies promoted religious observance as a vital part of American life and religion as an essential marker of the national character. In the same spirit, the era's biggest film emphasized the foundational role of religion in American institutions, while prominent movie and television stars banded together in a Christian “crusade” to defend America. When it came to the role of religion in American life, political culture and popular culture sang from the same hymnal.

L
IKE MUCH OF CORPORATE
A
MERICA
, the advertising industry discovered religion as a means of professional salvation in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The industry had fallen into turmoil when ad revenues plummeted along with corporate profits in the crash of the late 1920s and early 1930s. More ominously for advertising executives, the New Deal represented the first real efforts to regulate their work, as it empowered the Federal Trade Commission to fight false claims about food and drugs. As the nation prepared itself for the Second World War, further growth of the federal government seemed guaranteed. Thus, in November 1941, hundreds of ad executives gathered at a spa in Hot Springs, Virginia, to discuss the danger of “those who would do away with the American system of free enterprise” or who might “modify the economic
system of which advertising is an integral part.” Marketing legend James Webb Young of the J. Walter Thompson Company urged the assembled admen to close ranks with corporate America, to defend its interests as if they were their own. “Let us ask ourselves whether we, as an industry, do not have a great contribution to make in this effort to regain for business the leadership of our economy,” Young said. “We have within our hands the greatest aggregate means of mass education and persuasion the world has ever seen—namely, the channels of advertising communication. We have the masters of the techniques of using these channels. We have the power. Why do we not use it?” He argued that the advertising industry should work tirelessly on behalf of “a belief in a dynamic economy,” particularly through the use of public service campaigns.
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The Advertising Council was the result. Founded in 1942 as the War Advertising Council, the organization brought together representatives from major ad agencies and their corporate clients to promote bond drives, material conservation campaigns, and similar programs on the home front. When the war ended, the council continued identifying campaigns for the industry as a whole and coordinating contributions from specific agencies that did the work. The Advertising Council classified its projects as acts of public service, but in truth they were acts of public relations, meant to sell the American people on the merits of free enterprise. In 1946, for instance, the council launched a campaign titled “Our American Heritage.” On the surface, it seemed wholly nonpartisan, simply intended to raise Americans' awareness of their rights and responsibilities as citizens. Internally, though, organizers described it as a conservative-minded effort that would help Americans resist becoming “pawns of a master state.” The admen persuaded corporations that their sponsorship would offer “an unparalleled opportunity to build public goodwill for themselves and enhance respect for American business at the same time that they make an important contribution to the country's welfare when, because of both world and internal conditions, that contribution is most needed.” A second campaign promoting the “American Economic System” was even more explicit in championing corporate interests. Begun in late 1948, a week after Truman's reelection, it focused on fighting collectivization. “If people really understand what our private enterprise system had done for
us and exactly how it had done it,” an Ad Council official explained, “they will not be very good prospects for swapping this system for government ownership and control.”
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In 1949, the Advertising Council launched what would be its most influential effort, the “Religion in American Life” campaign. The stated purposes of RIAL, its creators claimed, were “(1) to accent the importance of all religious institutions as the basis of American life” and “(2) to urge all Americans to attend the church or synagogue of their choice.” While RIAL seemed more altruistic than the other postwar drives, it served the interests of corporate America as much as the others. (“In fact,” Ad Council chairman Stuart Peabody later noted, “when you stop to figure it out, there is hardly any Council campaign which doesn't make some contribution to the health of American business.”) Major corporations and ad firms rushed to take part. Charles E. Wilson, head of General Electric, served as RIAL chairman; Robert W. Boggs of the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation coordinated its work with the Advertising Council. Launched the same year as the print and radio programs of Spiritual Mobilization, their program advanced an almost identical message about the foundational role of religion in American political and social institutions. While RIAL refrained from arguing explicitly that the free enterprise system was the only rightful result of that religious heritage, it nevertheless did much to advance the fundamental arguments of Christian libertarianism.
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The J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), the largest advertising firm in the world, handled the practical work of the campaign. Its RIAL advertisements had a simple message for Americans: go to church. Copywriters drew on their conventional strategies, pitching religion as a path to personal improvement and self-satisfaction. “Find yourself through
faith
,” the 1949 RIAL campaign urged; “come to church this week.” Ads typically dramatized the concerns of a frantic father or an anxious housewife and then, in the same tones used to hawk antacid or mouthwash, promised that faith would cure their problems quickly. Some ads, however, took a different approach, framing faith as something that transcended individual concerns and affected the nation as a whole. One magazine piece, for instance, depicted a dozen children singing together, open hymnals in their hands. Beneath the picture ran a banner: “Democracy starts
here . . . ” “The way I see it,” the copy began, “when you're a father you're automatically a Founding Father, too. It's up to you to found America in the heart and mind of every young citizen you add to the census. Because a nation isn't history—it's what's going on right now in your own children's minds and spirits.”
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In 1949, the Advertising Council launched a massive “Religion in American Life” campaign to encourage attendance at churches and synagogues. Its ads urged ordinary Americans to embrace religion for their own salvation and the salvation of the nation.
Courtesy of the Ad Council Archives at the University of Illinois, Ad Council Historical File, RS 13/2/207.

The new advertising drive proved incredibly popular, prompting a steady expansion of the “Religion in American Life” campaign during the next decade. Newspapers ran more and more of the ads each year, from about twenty-two hundred in 1949 to over ninety-seven hundred in 1956. Along with the ads, these papers published more than a thousand stories promoting national and local RIAL campaigns that same year. Meanwhile, popular magazines such as
Reader's Digest, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated,
and
Ladies' Home Journal
ran full-color advertisements
and stories of their own. Radio played a vital role as well, with the Ad Council distributing program kits to twenty-nine hundred radio stations across the country, with a variety of scripts ready to air. In 1955, for instance, station owners could choose from eight different topics and then, on each topic, select scripts written for one minute, thirty seconds, twenty seconds, or ten seconds in length. Of course, RIAL took its message to television too, soon producing a full-length program each year. In 1956, bandleader Vaughn Monroe interviewed celebrities, including Olympic champion Jesse Owens and Miss America Lee Meriwether, about the role religion played in their lives. NBC devoted its
Wide, Wide World
program to the special, with sponsor General Motors covering all expenses and broadcasting it live on 143 stations nationwide.
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The “Religion in American Life” campaign succeeded, in large part, because its creators linked it to the religious revival in the political sphere. In a 1955 letter to radio stations, Ad Council officials explained that their work was meant to remind Americans that “religious faith, cultivated by our churches and synagogues, is one of the foundations of our nation and of our dedication to human rights and individual liberty, as suggested in our national motto, ‘In God We Trust.'” To publicize this idea, the letter offered talking points: “What to Tell Your Audience.” Again, the council stressed that stations should “point out that our nation was founded on faith in God and that freedom to worship God constitutes a precious national heritage.”
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As it pressed these themes, RIAL increasingly seemed an unofficial extension of the work done by the Eisenhower administration in the same sphere. This was no accident, of course, as many of the admen involved in RIAL were also working on Republican presidential campaigns at the same time, using the same themes. “Faith in God and Country,” blared a 1956 billboard: “That's Eisenhower! How about you?”
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The Ad Council, meanwhile, linked its work explicitly to the president. In a letter describing its activities, it cited Eisenhower as its authority, quoting at length his claim that “all free civilization rests upon a basis of religious faith.” The 1957 RIAL television special made such links between the program and politics clear. Aired simultaneously on ABC, NBC, and CBS, it featured a speech from Eisenhower and a roundtable discussion on religion that included Republican congressman Walter Judd, a prominent figure in Abraham Vereide's organization.
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RIAL's message about the union of piety and patriotism echoed themes pressed by the president, but on a scale that would have seemed repulsive to most Americans if it had been officially tied to him. In 1956 alone, the RIAL venture erected 5,412 billboards along major highways, with another 9,857 posters featured at bus, train, and railroad stations and 59,590 ad cards highlighted inside buses, trains, subways, and streetcars. Taken together, organizers bragged, the transportation advertising would stretch more than forty-one miles long if it were laid end to end. They described their goal as nothing less than total saturation with the RIAL message: