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“God Is My Partner”: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2011

Abstract

“‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War” chronicles the early career of R. G. LeTourneau, an industrialist and lay preacher whose life challenges the historiography of mid-twentieth-century fundamentalism as apolitical and otherworldly. In the 1930s and 1940s, every businessman had to grapple with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and in World War II. LeTourneau exemplified theologically conservative evangelical resourcefulness under changing political and economic conditions. Born in 1888 to a Plymouth Brethren family, his cultural memory reached back to the evangelical business activism of the nineteenth century, while his future lay in the fundamentalist subculture that the Brethren did much to create. However, as a businessman, LeTourneau had little patience with doctrines dividing “the world” from the church. He integrated evangelicalism into his manufacturing and managerial roles, and pushed fundamentalist clergy to tap laymen's proselytizing energy. Between 1930 and 1943, the years on which this article focuses, LeTourneau attacked dilemmas that preoccupied other evangelical business men: higher taxes, greater regulation, a forceful labor movement, and the challenge, as he saw it, to uphold the gospel and private enterprise against communist subversion. Business men such as LeTourneau represented the front line of what scholars have too often dismissed as trivial: evangelical politics during the New Deal.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2011

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References

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3 A word as to spelling: contemporary sources use “business men” as two words, while LeTourneau's, R. G. later autobiography, Mover of Men and Mountains: The Autobiography of R. G. LeTourneau (New York: Prentice Hall, 1960)Google Scholar, uses “businessmen.” For consistency, I use “business men” throughout. A word as to terminology: the relationship between “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” is theologically and sociologically vexing during the first half of the twentieth century. Except for a new emphasis on the divine inspiration and literal interpretation of scripture, twentieth-century fundamentalists upheld the evangelical orthodoxy of previous generations: salvation through Jesus Christ alone and the duty to redeem as many souls as possible. Yet they laid claim to the word “evangelical” while excluding other heirs to the interdenominational revivalist tradition, such as Pentecostals. Furthermore, “fundamentalist” was a more Northern and urban than Southern or rural identity, and the subculture incubated “new evangelicals” who would distance themselves from “fundamentalists” mid-century. While I am largely engaging scholarship on fundamentalism, I favor the more inclusive term “evangelical” to describe conservative Protestantism and its business culture writ large. Just as God was the fundamentalist LeTourneau's partner, for example, the Pentecostal William Doctor Gentry was “In Business for God” (Wacker, Grant, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001, 203Google Scholar). For the 1930s and 1940s terminological context, see Marsden, George, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987), 48Google Scholar; Glass, William R., Strangers in Zion: Fundamentalists in the South, 1900–1950 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Carpenter, Joel A., Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141–60Google Scholar.

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63 Ackland, Moving Heaven and Earth, 157–58. By 1939, a million Olson tracts went out from the Peoria plant each month. “Acts 16:30 and 31,” NOW (November 17, 1939), 1.

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86 Luke 20:9–19.

87 “Bible Declares the Rights of Capital and Labor,” Joyful News (May–June 1943), 4.

88 Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 10–22.

89 Jacob Bos to R. G. LeTourneau, November 18, 1940, quoting Newsweek (November 11, 1940), 50. Papers of R. G. LeTourneau (Box J4J, Folder 38), LeTourneau University.

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93 E. R. Galvin to All District Representatives, July 7, 1941. Papers of R. G. LeTourneau (Box F1U, Folder 1), LeTourneau University.

94 Ackland, Moving Heaven and Earth, 115–29; LeTourneau, Mover of Men and Mountains, 230–32, 239.

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97 John S. McCain to R. G. LeTourneau, February 8, 1943. Papers of R. G. LeTourneau (Box J4J, Folder 24), LeTourneau University.

98 “An Invitation to Attend a Tri-State Patriotic Rally,” 2.

99 Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review, No. CCCXCI (June 1889), available at http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html (accessed January 26, 2011).