BackStory Mailbag/Pastor to the Presidents

PETER: Before we move on with today’s topic, we wanted to open up the BackStory mailbag. We’ve been getting lots of great comments from our recent episodes. A couple of weeks ago, we did an episode on the history of the American work ethic. Historian Margaret O’Mara was on the program, comparing the work ethic and courage of Silicon Valley tech campuses, like Google, to the 19th century company town of Pullman, Illinois. Several of you pointed out that we didn’t include the full story of Pullman, which ended in a violent labor strike, the National Guard intervening, and congressional hearings.

BRIAN: Listener Max Rosenblum tweeted to us that while we ran that episode for Labor Day, we never noted that the national holiday grew out of the labor turmoil in Pullman in the 1890s. And listener Daniel Fuller wrote to us, saying, “not mentioning the outcome, and comparing it to the current Google campus, you left an impression of a successful experiment.”

We don’t even know how the Google plan will work out eventually, but other 19th and 20th century industrial, utopian experiences, based on the ideals of the ruling class, didn’t work out well, either.

PETER: Fortunately, we’re working on the history of utopias later this fall, and plan to explore the Pullman experiment more thoroughly.

ED: That recent episode of the American work ethic also got listener Bob Leaver from North Dakota thinking. He reached out with this question. “I’m 40 years old, and among my generation, I believe there’s a myth regarding retirement. My generation seems to feel that through time, people have been retiring as early as they possibly can. I’ve been researching my family tree and found that simply isn’t true. Most of my ancestors worked basically until they couldn’t work any longer. There was no real retirement to speak of. When retirement, as we know it today, began to be the norm?”

PETER: Well Bob’s got a great question, and it doesn’t really apply until the modern period, and I mean by that the late 19th century. In a traditional, agrarian household economy, there’s no such thin as retirement. Your productivity would certainly go down and down until you’re in a rocking chair, but there’s no such thing as retirement.

ED: The first– what you might think of– as retirement, known as pensions, were offered to veterans of the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Matter of fact, it would have been a huge government expenditure by the late 19th century, but this is a far cry from having applied to everybody.

BRIAN: That’s right, Ed, and a lot of those veterans were disabled. They were not able-bodied workers. We don’t really get retirement benefits for able-bodied workers until companies begin to provide them, a little bit, in the early 20th century.

And then in 1935, the Social Security Act provides them to manufacturing industrial workers. That hardly solved the problem for millions of Americans, because it only applied to industrialized work. So it really wasn’t until after World War II that the majority of Americans could even imagine retiring.

BRIAN: Thanks for your input on all of our shows. Don’t be shy about letting us know what’s on your mind. Head to backstoryradio.org.

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ED: In 2010, President Obama completed what has become a rite of passage for commanders in chief. He arranged a meeting with the Reverend Billy Graham. Here’s Obama recalling a visit to Graham’s North Carolina home. He called it one of the great honors of his life.

BARACK OBAMA: And before I left, Reverend Graham started praying for me, as he had prayed for so many presidents before me. And when he finished praying, I felt the urge to pray for him. I didn’t really know what to say. What do you pray for when it comes to the man who’s prayed for so many?

ED: Obama is the 12th American president to meet with the famous faith leader, who’s now 97 years old. For more than 60 years Graham has been the spiritual confidant of presidents, both Republican and Democratic. But Graham’s relationship with the presidency got off to a rocky start.

BRIAN: In 1950, Billy Graham was a popular evangelical minister with a national following. That’s when the ambitious 31 year old used his connections to snag a meeting with President Harry S. Truman.

GRANT WACKER: He asked Truman about his spiritual life.

BRIAN: This is Graham biographer Grant Wacker.

GRANT WACKER: Truman said something to the effect that he tried to live by the golden rule. And then Graham said, well, that’s not good enough. You need to make a commitment to Jesus Christ. And we don’t know what Truman said to that, but–

BRIAN: We can imagine what he thought.

GRANT WACKER: Yeah. Yeah, that’s not hard to imagine. But, at some point in the conversation, Graham asked Truman if he– that is Graham– could pray with Truman. And Truman said, well, I don’t suppose it could do any harm. So you get a sense of the drift of the conversation, here.

BRIAN: It was an awkward meeting, and to make things worse–

GRANT WACKER: Graham made the egregious mistake of telling the press everything that was said. And he had no idea that you don’t blab to reporters what the president says in the Oval Office. And Truman never forgave him.

BRIAN: Graham had better luck with Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Their relationship began when Graham encouraged the general to run for the White House in 1952.

GRANT WACKER: He said, Eisenhower, you are the only man who could possibly save America from a moral ruin. You’re the man for the hour. And, I mean, it was wildly exaggerated statements. And many years later, in his autobiography, Graham said, no one ever accused me of understatement in those years.

BRIAN: Graham’s fears of moral ruin were in part a product of the Cold War.

GRANT WACKER: Graham was a strident anti-Communist. Graham saw Communism as a religion, literally a demonic religion.

BILLY GRAHAM: For some time, I’ve been stating to this radio audience that Communism is far more than just an economic and political interpretation of life.

BRIAN: This is Billy Graham in a 1951 radio address.

BILLY GRAHAM: Communism is a fanatical religion of atheism. This atheistic philosophy is paralleling and counterfeiting Christianity. I do not–

BRIAN: Millions of Americans agreed with Graham’s anti-Communism, including Eisenhower, who constructed an image of America as a spiritual counterweight to the godless Soviet Union.

ED: Eisenhower, who wasn’t a publicly religious before his presidency, asked Graham for Bible verses that he could drop into campaign speeches. And after Eisenhower came to Washington, Graham persuaded him to join a Presbyterian Church in the capitol. Wacker says that during the presidential years Eisenhower’s how his faith became evermore public and political.

GRANT WACKER: Eisenhower marked a transition, and quite interestingly, Communism had a great deal to do with both Graham’s success and Eisenhower’s. It all seems counter intuitive. How does the purportedly godless, atheistic, menace of Communism enable presidents to use religion for their purposes? Graham helped create the public space that presidents embraced. But ever thereafter, we all know what every president’s religious identity is. This is public knowledge.

ED: In the mid-1950s, Eisenhower also persuaded Congress to add “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and “in God we trust” to the currency.

After Eisenhower, Graham remained an honored guest at the White House. He was friendly with Democratic President John F. Kennedy, and was quite close to Lyndon Johnson. Wacker says that these relationships, like Graham’s connections with other presidents, were mutually beneficial.

GRANT WACKER: Graham received publicity, and presidents received legitimation. That is, Americans were looking for people who were broadly, generally, religious, and therefore, they could trust them because they had higher values. And this is what Graham brought to the presidents.

BRIAN: But Graham’s relationship with the next president didn’t turn out so well. Wacker says that Graham and Richard Nixon had been friends since the early 1950s.

GRANT WACKER: They were golfing buddies. They played golf more than 100 times.

BRIAN: Who won?

[LAUGHTER]

GRANT WACKER: Graham was actually a pretty good golf player, and so there are a lot of jokes about how Graham had the benefit of divine assistance.

BRIAN: Yeah, we have to assume that God was on his side for those close ones. Graham remained a close friend after Nixon was elected president in 1968. He saw Nixon as a great man. At one point, Graham even compared him to Winston Churchill. The preacher stuck by his friend, even when the Watergate scandal engulfed the White House in the early 1970s.

RICHARD NIXON: Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress. Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

GRANT WACKER: He kept saying the Nixon was a man of too high a moral character to do these things. Then Graham read the Watergate transcripts. And this is very interesting, because he said that this was the first time he understood what was really going on. He said, I nearly vomited.

ED: Wacker says that Graham’s reputation took a hit. His close relationship to Nixon came back to haunt him 30 years later, when White House tapes were field that Graham made anti-Semitic comments in conversation with the President. But even back in the 1970s, the Watergate scandal forced Graham to re-evaluate his presidential friendships.

GRANT WACKER: I think that was a pivotal moment in Graham’s public, political career. The relationship becomes more pastoral, more private. He tried to transcend what he saw as the ebb and flow, give and take, of daily political fights.

BRIAN: Graham took this approach, for the most part, with presidents for the next 40 years. Wacker says the new Graham encouraged other pastors to do the same.

GRANT WACKER: Now he said, it’s fine to get into politics if it’s understood as a moral crusade, and he used civil rights as the moral side of politics. He said that you have to do. But partisanship– you need to stay out of that as a public figure.

BRIAN: But in the 1980s, many evangelical leaders didn’t follow his advice. Preachers such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell became political activists. They raised money for conservative causes. In fact, Graham even criticized Falwell for sermonizing on partisan political issues.

ED: Wacker says there will likely never be another presidential pastor like Billy Graham. Though there are plenty of evangelical preachers out there today who are politically active, none of them has the stature of Billy Graham. Why? In part because Graham knew how to listen, and he understood that the presidency of the United States was a tough gig.

GRANT WACKER: There’s some very touching letters between Lyndon Johnson and Graham, in which Johnson talks about how Graham’s friendship sustained him, as Johnson put it, during the dark loneliness of the presidency. And he said, I relied on you as a friend, and you never failed me.

BRIAN: Grant Wacker is a historian at Duke Divinity School. He’s the author of America’s Pastor Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation.