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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

Sarah R. Hammond
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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
Information
Church History , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 498 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2011

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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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96 “An Invitation to Attend a Tri-State Patriotic Rally in connection with the dedication of the Vicksburg Plant of the LeTourneau Company of Mississippi, Saturday, November 28, 1942,” n.d., 1. Papers of R. G. LeTourneau (Box F1U, Folder 39), LeTourneau University.

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).