At the same time they appealed directly to religiously-oriented Southern workers using the language of the Bible. In a 1949 Textile Workers Union-sponsored radio broadcast in Gallatin, Tennessee, for example, Ramsay asked "every Christian worker" to "realize his own personal, moral responsibility to become a member of the labor movement which has done so much to benefit humanity." Ramsay cited the first verse of the 133d Psalm"Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity"-and in Galatians"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ"as Biblical justification for collective action. The CIO's full-color comic book, "The Bible and the Working Man" aimed at the religious rank and file who had a "distorted picture" of the labor movement's aims. It featured a minister assuring an autoworker fresh from the countryside that "unions were Christian," for "unions want justice and justice is Christian."36
The CIO's campaign for support from the Southern church, however, failed to achieve significant union gains. Although there were nineteen fellowships meeting in Southern cities, labor made few inroads among most of the Southern clergy. In November 1951, Ramsay admitted that most religious leaders in the South were "still skeptical of the labor movement, if not opposed to it." The historian of Operation Dixie concludes that the weak labor-religious coalition forged by the CIO could not overcome the "totality of the cultural opposition" it encountered during the organizing drive.37
Despite the rather discouraging results in the South, interest in expanding labor's ties to religion grew within the CIO. In early 1953, for instance, the UAW formed the "Religion-Labor Conference of Metropolitan Detroit." Seeking a "more effective channel of communication between the church and labor," the conference brought Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergy together with unionists on a monthly basis to learn more about labor's thinking on such questions as the guaranteed annual wage, pension agreements, and collective bargaining.38 Meanwhile, the United Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers, led by George Crago, urged the 1953 CIO convention to establish a CIO National Committee for Church Liaison. The union was "painfully aware of the power and influence of the church" as a negative force during Operation Dixie. Crago wanted the CIO to cultivate the "wholesome influence the church can exert when it cares to do so."39
First considered as a program in 1944, CIO leaders Crago, Ramsay, Al Whitehouse of the Steelworkers, Ellis Van Riper of the Textile Workers, and Tilford Dudley of the CIO central office finally got the CIO to formalize its church program in December 1954. It established a Committee on Religion and Labor that was headed by Victor Re-uther, with Ramsay as secretary. Charles Webber joined Ramsay as a second full-time labor liaison to the religious community. In 1955, the newly merged AFL-CIO continued the CIO's program with the Office for Religious Relations, which interpreted the ideals, aims, and achievements of the labor movement to the clergy, while at the same time encouraging trade unionists to join and participate in a religious organization. Ramsay and Webber, often in direct competition with their NAM counterparts, traveled throughout the country, representing labor at national religious meeting, participating in church-sponsored social action conferences, addressing seminary students and ministerial associations, and continuing to promote religion and labor fellowships.40
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Like business, the CIO cooperated with independent religious groups sympathetic to their aims. In the mid-fifties, the CIO took virtual control of the National Religion and Labor Foundation, an organization founded in 1931 by a small group of liberal Protestant theologians to enlist church support for the hardpressed labor movement. It taught classes about unions to seminary students and organized conferences and local fellowships that brought labor and religious leaders face to face. Although unable to elicit much interest from AFL craft unionists, it quickly attracted labor leaders from the ranks of the CIO. Over the years, members of the Foundation's Executive Board included such CIO leaders as Van Bittner, James B. Carey, Walter Reuther, Joseph Beirne, and David McDonald. But labor did not have a controlling influence until 1954, when the CIO became anxious to achieve a higher profile in the religious community. The CIO Committee on Religion decided to "work with and through the NRLF," strengthening its existing facilities through grants and staff assistance. A tiny, financially strapped organization, the Foundation was willing to trade some independence for the CIO's "whole-hearted support." The CIO cemented this relationship with an initial $25,000 grant and steady support, which continued after the merger. The increasing conservative tenor of the country during the fifties seemed to make this alliance all the more imperative.41
* * *
There was perhaps no greater prize in the struggle between labor and capital over religion than the National Council of Churches. The product of a 1950 merger of the Federal Council of Churches and eleven smaller Protestant ecumenical bodies, the National Council quickly emerged as the most important voice of religious authority in a predominantly Protestant society. At its formation, businessman Jasper Crane predicted that it "will almost certainly be one of the most influential organizations in American life."42 The Council's endorsement of either business's or labor's values promised to confer upon these values an aura of legitimacy.
The creation of the National Council occurred while business was seeking to increase its influence over the preeminent voice of Protestantism. But business leaders' efforts were fraught with difficulty. Indeed, they approached the Federal Council and later the National Council with a distinct disadvantage. First, divided between moderates and conservatives, business leaders clashed among themselves over their objectives. Second, business leaders faced the tough job of shifting the Council from its identification with liberalism. From its inception in 1908, the Federal Council had stood as a friend of labor and liberalism. Finally, business's task was complicated by the fact that the church was not a pliable institution to be controlled by the most strong-willed outsider. Clerical leaders in the Council had their own agenda independent of either labor or business. Despite these impediments, closer investigation of the business community's involvement with Protestant ecumenicalism demonstrates its ability to shape pronouncements more in tune with business's political agenda.
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By the mid-1940s, there were forces already encouraging the Federal Council of Churches to move from its commitment to liberal social change. During the twenties and thirties, the Federal Council's identification with religious and political liberalism had cost it the support of a sizable group of Protestants.43 Among the Federal Council's most virulent critics were religious evangelicals and political conservatives. In the early forties, their dissatisfaction with the Federal Council culminated in the formation of two competing ecumenical bodies, the American Council of Christian Churches headed by fundamentalist Carl Mclntire, one of the FCC's most extreme critics, and the National Association of Evangelicals, a broader coalition of conservatives, seeking to create a unified voice for Protestant evangelicalism.44
Attacks on the Federal Council intensified after World War II. The American Council of Christian Laymen, the Committee for Constitutional Government, and Spiritual Mobilization, among other conservative organizations, largely financed by business, joined Mclntire in charging the Council's leadership with apostasy and with advocating communism. The American Council's widely distributed pamphlet, How Red Is the Federal Council of Churches, depicted Federal Council leaders enmeshed in an ominous spider's web of "Communist, Communist-front and Socialist organizations." These accusations gained more weight in light of the growing fear of communism in postwar America.45
Anxious about these attacks and its waning prestige, the Federal Council sought to disarm its critics. Building upon earlier efforts of a small group of evangelicals in its ranks, the FCC sought to work more closely with the conservative, evangelically oriented, interdenominational bodies of Protestantism. This cooperation culminated in 1950 with the formation of the National Council of Churches. The Federal Council also confronted the issue of communism, asserting in 1946 that, contrary to recent allegations, the FCC sought to reform society while working within the system of private and public ownership. It issued a statement making "perfectly clear the irreconcilable conflict between Christianity and the Communistic philosophy as set forth by the Russian state."46
The Federal Council hoped to restore its influence by reasserting "the relevance of a Christian perspective on world affairs." During the war, the Council regained credibility by helping to shape a consensus around America's international role in the postwar world. It led the struggle within religion against isolationism, mobilizing public support for the United Nations. The Federal Council wanted to play an equally significant role in domestic affairs, but its postwar economic vision met ridicule for questioning aspects of capitalism. Consequently, Protestant leaders turned to more subtle messages in an effort to win over significant sectors of American public opinion.47
One way the FCC sought to expand its appeal was to associate more closely with the economic philosophy and business leaders of the Committee for Economic Development. In December 1946, the election of Charles R Taft, a lawyer, as the first lay president of the Federal Council of Churches reflected the Council's search for an economic approach that would appeal to a wider audience. Unlike his brother, Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, Charles Taft was a CED trustee and business moderate who served under Roosevelt and supported some of the New Deal programs. According to a Time reporter, "knowing delegates" saw his election as "presaging a new era of lay leadership and political activity" for Protestantism. Taft's more conservative colleagues in the business community looked forward to his driving out "the socialists, pinks and reds that have worked their way into the various levels of policy and positions of power in the organization."48
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Taft, however, was less concerned about "socialists, pinks and reds" and more interested in helping the Federal Council adopt the CED's more moderate economic positions. He repeatedly argued that "a substantial majority of church people" were "clearly on the conservative side," and that when the Council charged ahead on progressive social and economic issues they left "the constituency 'way in the rear." On the issue of labor, as Taft saw it, the Federal Council need no longer treat unions as "the underdog." He observed that the "twelve-hour day in steel is long since gone, most large companies arbitrate their discharges and labor for some years has been top dog."49
Concurrent with Taft's election, the appeal of the CED's economic philosophy was apparent in seven position papers the Council published during 1946. These papers were part of an educational project which culminated in February 1947 in the FCC's first National Study Conference of Church and Economic Life. They analyzed the economic situation Christians faced in the postwar period often in language that mirrored the CED's. Study number five spoke of a middle way between absolute economic freedom and social or governmental control, calling for increasing the influence of moderate organizations representing various economic interests. Sharing the CED's corporatist ethos, Council writers envisioned society as an "equilibrium of numerous functional groups where each group endeavors to adjust its interest to the common interest." Praising the CED as "one of the most constructive recent efforts of progressive business leaders," the FCC suggested creating a corporatist type device called the Congress for Economic Development, representing business, labor, agriculture, and consumer groups. Like the CED, it would rely on impartial studies by experts and explore "the possibilities of voluntary organization" in the private sector to orchestrate reform.50
While CED-thinking influenced, it certainly did not yet dominate the Council's understanding of economy. Other sections of the studies that spoke of the worker concern for security praised the revolutionary potential of organized labor and the cooperative movement and analyzed the necessity of promoting purchasing power as well as addressing the maldistribution of income hearkened back to earlier FCC traditions.51 These issues were anathema to business leaders of both conservative and moderate stripes. Retired Du Pont executive Jasper Crane called the studies "terrible tripe" worth ignoring, but he worried about the impact of these "poisonous pronouncements" on Protestant ministers.52
The convening of a three-day conference by the Federal Council in mid-February 1947 to discuss the economic issues raised by the studies provided an arena for both business and labor to contest future FCC pronouncements. Indeed, this conference was unique for its degree of lay participation; two-thirds of the delegates in Pittsburgh were laymen.53 Sensing an opportunity, the NAM'S Noel Sargent mobilized a strong conservative business representation and strategy for the conference. Charles Taft was just as determined to see to it that there would be no "one-sided" pronouncements passed. He recruited an impressive array of CED-types to attend.54 Outnumbered by the business representatives but extremely articulate were the representatives from the labor movement. The CIO's core of religious activists with assistance from a few AFL representatives joined in alliance with a group of liberal clergy headed by Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, who had just stepped down from the Federal Council's presidency. They came to the conference in the expectation that the gathering would come out strongly for greater government control over the economy and an enhanced welfare state. This faction pushed for the adoption of resolutions endorsing full employment, cooperatives, and a guaranteed annual wage and condemning private * concentration of ownership and control."55
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The liberals quickly ran into opposition from business leaders and the proceedings bogged down. Outraged by labor's proposals and wary of Oxnam's influence, the NAM caucus met with Taft and threatened to issue a minority report or to withdraw. As the conference stood on the verge of disintegrating, business moderates led by Taft took the initiative and developed a compromise. Economic issues raised by labor or the NAM faction would be incorporated in the final report in the form of questions, preventing either interest group from using the FCC to promote their agenda. The conference concluded by recommending that the church take a more active role in the economic sphere. Having saved the conference, business moderates emerged with increased prestige within the Council.56
To meet its new mandate, the Federal Council changed its Industrial Relations Division to the Department of Church and Economic Life, charged with providing the clergy and the laity with religious guidance on economic issues. The Industrial Relations Division, from which most of the Federal Council's pronouncements on economics originated, had long been a source of irritation to the business community. Its professional staff was identified closely with organized labor and liberalism. The division, for instance, endorsed Operation Dixie, and division secretary, Cameron P. Hall, told Southern employers that it was their Christian duty to encourage their workers to join the CIO. To many business leaders this division represented the worst socialistic tendencies within the FCC.57
Taft hoped that a reorganized Industrial Relations Division could serve as a sophisticated vehicle for promoting the economic agenda of the moderate wing of the business community. He had a low opinion of most of business's educational activities on behalf of capitalism. The NAM'S campaigns either sounded "phony" or came off as "a hysterical anti-Communist witch hunt." Taft envisioned the new department teaching the clergy how "the United States built up the highest standard of living and the least misery and poverty of any nation in history."58
The Federal Council's professional staff contested the new direction. Cameron Hall, a Presbyterian minister with a long background in social action, headed the new department and Hall enlisted such prominent trade unionists and liberal clergy as Walter Reuther, A. Phillip Randolph, Van A. Bittner, Bishop Bromley Oxnam, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Taft, however, recruited business moderates, many with close connections with the CED, who had supported him during the Pittsburgh conference.59 They helped Taft get the resources to expand the department's activities. With Rockefeller Foundation funding obtained in 1949, Taft borrowed the CED staff economists to conduct a series of studies on the role of ethics in economic activity. These reports reflected the CED's outlook, suggesting the importance of increasing productivity and stabilizing the economy as well as warning of the increased coercive power of organized labor.60 But, throughout this period, Taft struggled with only partial success to limit the input of Hall and his staff who retained their commitment to liberalism and organized labor.61
Conservative elements of the business community found the moderates' involvement in the Federal Council no more appealing than labor's. The moderates' willingness to accept a role for the government in regulating the economy, however small, was as damaging as labor's advocacy of the welfare state. Conservatives, however, were divided over what approach to take to counter their opponents influence on the FCC. The most conservative, evangelical business leaders denounced both the Council and religion's involvement in any secular affairs. In contrast, the leaders of the NAM'S Committee on Cooperation with Churches argued that this was "neither a realistic nor effective position for businessmen to take." Standard Oil President Robert E. Wilson argued that whether business liked it or not the church was going to continue to take positions on economic and political issues. He warned that if businessmen boycotted the Federal Council "when others are trying to use it for left-wing purposes, we shall have to expect a lot of left-wing pronouncements." Consequently, in 1947, NAM secretary Noel Sargent joined the Department of Church and Economic Life, hoping to temper both the influence of moderate business leaders as well as organized labor.62
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The Federal Council's second National Study Conference on Church and Economic Life, however, jolted all elements of the business community. The February 1950 Detroit conference, was a replica of the Pittsburgh conference, bringing labor and business factions together in fierce competition for the clergy's allegiance. Walter Reuther, head of the labor delegation, gave the keynote address, which "took the place by storm." Bromley Oxnam recorded in his diary that Reuther's speech was "grounded in such an understanding of human beings" that it became "emotionally powerful. For a time it seemed we were listening to one of the Hebrew prophets." Noel Sargent, in turn, defended the "advocates of free enterprise as the true liberals of the 20th century." His performance failed to measure up to that of the more dynamic Reuther, however. Taft tried to make the conference's final report a moderate, well-balanced document that "fully recognizes the basic importance of enterprise system/' but instead it had strong prolabor undertones, reflecting the attitudes of the liberals.63 The conference, which received wide publicity, convinced a powerful group of business leaders who had been standing aloof to reverse course. They decided that the best way to stop the Federal Council's "subversive activities" was to join the organization and to work from within to correct it.64
The formation of the National Council of Churches provided these conservatives with just such an opportunity. Planning for a new ecumenical organization that incorporated the FCC and eleven other Protestant bodies had begun during World War II. The planning committee included critics of the Federal Council from more evangelically oriented bodies, who emphasized that the progressive leaders of the FCC had lost touch with local churches. The more evangelical clergy hoped to push the new organization in a more conservative direction by bringing a large number of laymen into the new organization and by using these laymen as a major source of financial support for the new Council's ambitious program of operations.65
In early 1950, planners formed a Laymen's Committee to seek the "vital participation" of lay members in the National Council's work. For chairman they wanted a man of nationwide reputation with demonstrated executive ability, "preferably with experience in financing of eleemosynary institutions." After trying unsuccessfully to recruit several moderate business leaders, in July 1950, the planning committee approached J. Howard Pew, chairman of the board and recently retired president of Sun Oil Corporation.66 On the surface, Pew was an unusual choice. A self-proclaimed fundamentalist, he was a supporter of organizations that attacked the Federal Council and had even commissioned his own expose of its "subversive" activities. In December 1948, he declared that he was adamant in his determination to never give financial assistance to the Federal Council of Churches or any organization linked to it. An active member of the Liberty League in the 1930s, to the American public his name was "virtually a symbol for ultra-conservative positions" on political, economic, and social issues. But, the planning committee was prepared to overlook this past. It had learned that Pew was among the conservative business leaders who had decided that backing the FCC's opponents was a mistake. Equally important, Pew was also a man of substantial means with connections to some of the wealthiest people and corporations in the country.67
Pew's service had a price. He demanded assurance that lay leaders would have the opportunity to discuss major questions of policy, especially in the area of economics, on an "equal footing" with clerical leaders. He privately confided that he did "not propose to be put into a position that businessmen will provide the organization with the money with which to implement a campaign of Socialization." He argued that only if business leaders and the clergy worked as equals could they correct ministers' misunderstanding of "the relationship of freedom in economics, education, and politics to the basic principles of the Christian religion." Eager for his participation and his money, the planning committee acceded to his demands and were "just walking on air" when they learned that "Mr. Pew is with us." Pew immediately pumped $60,000 into the planning committee's budget.68
The National Council of Churches gave Pew a free hand in selecting the members of the Lay Committee, which he began assembling immediately. He searched for a group of individuals who shared his commitment to freedom, individualism, and Christianity, which, like many conservative fundamentalists, he wove together. If, Pew asserted, "we want to be free to continue in business, the leadership of the people of our country must believe in the fundamentals of Christianity." Pew's recruitment pitch stated: "We never can hope to stop this Country's plunge toward totalitarism until we have gotten the ministers' thinking straight." Pew promised potential members that, unlike the Federal Council, the new organization would avoid "political involvements and controversies." He repeatedly argued that "conservative control is possible." To ensure this, the Lay Committee, which grew to almost two hundred members, would "maintain close contact and surveillance" over all the NCC's activities. With these powers, Pew boasted that "we have a very real opportunity to get the National Council of Churches established on a firm foundation."69
Joining Pew's Lay Committee were manufacturers, educators, bankers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and public officials. The most active members of the lay committee were the business leaders. Among them were an array of major corporate executives, including Harry A. Bullis of General Mills, Harvey S. Firestone of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Charles R. Hook of Armco Steel Corporation, B. E. Hutchinson of Chrysler Corporation, H. W. Prentis of Armstrong Cork, Colby M. Chester of General Foods Corporation, Robert E. Wilson of Standard Oil, Charles E. Wilson of General Electric, and Jasper Crane, recently retired from Du Pont, who shared Pew's dedication to remolding the basic values of the American public. All of them were involved in a similar campaign in their companies' factories, local schools, and communities.70
Under pressure from the Council to create a representative committee, Pew also searched for the right kind of labor leaders. Dismissing CIO unionists as "Socialists," he induced a small group of "trustworthy" labor leaders from AFL affiliates to join. Pew's associate, Lois Hunter, named several "free enterprisers" who had earlier rejected serving on the "too radical" Department of Church and Economic Life. Included were: George MacGregor Harrison and Glen B. Goble, president and vice-president of the Railway Steamship Clerks; Earl W. Jimerson, president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters; and J. Scott Milne, secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Pew subsequently recruited them to the Lay Committee.71
In late November 1950, at the first convention of the National Council of Churches, Pew's presentation of the Lay Committee and its intention to play a significant policy-making role shocked most of the delegates, few of whom had even heard of its existence. Immediately, debate ensued over the Lay Committee's status. Was it, as Pew envisioned, a permanent overarching committee attached directly to the General Board with sweeping powers of participation and review, or was it a temporary advisory body designed to help integrate the laity into the National Council's structure and to raise funds?72 Worried about censorship, liberal Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam led the opposition to the creation of an autonomous Lay Committee that met separately from the clergy. They "seem to think that they have everything settled and that anyone who disagrees with their dogma is a revolutionist," he argued, adding that we "dare not set a precedent which in any way gives to a group of men not in the organization and not chosen by the churches the right to review, directly or indirectly, the pronouncements of a great church." Impressed by Oxnam's argument, the General Board held off approval of the Lay Committee and appointed a committee to study the issue.73
As the Council's committee weighed the Lay Committee's future, a number of prominent liberal clergy, including Oxnam, John Bennett and Reinhold Neibuhr, remained alarmed at the prospect of a group of conservative laity overseeing the NCC's activities. Oxnam suspected that "big business has decided that the proper way to handle what it has regarded as too progressive announcements on the part of the church is to get on the inside and to control it." While Oxnam worried about selling "our soul for a mess of pottage," other clergy within the Council's leadership, however, were still impressed with Pew's potential to attract great wealth to the organization. Moreover, the more evangelical members recently incorporated into the National Council shared many of Pew's religious and political views. Still others, such as National Council Secretary Samuel Cavert, believed Pew posed little threat. Cavert dismissed Pew as "an old man today," yearning for "the recognition he once had when he was directing a great enterprise." Cavert even anticipated that the liberal clergy could give men like Pew a greater appreciation of the "social meaning of Christianity."74
