Corporate spirit: religion and the rise of the modern corporation 0199372659, 9780199372652

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Corporate Spirit

Corporate Spirit Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation

z AMANDA PORTERFIELD

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Porterfield, Amanda, 1947– author. Title: Corporate spirit : religion and the rise of the modern corporation / Amanda Porterfield. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017028645 (print) | LCCN 2017041144 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199372669 (updf) | ISBN 9780199372676 (epub) | ISBN 9780199372683 (online content) | ISBN 9780199372652 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Business—Religious aspects. | Capitalism—Religious aspects. | Corporations—United States—History. Classification: LCC HF5388 (ebook) | LCC HF5388 .P68 2018 (print) | DDC 261.8/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028645 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

To Keith

Contents

Introduction 

1

PART ONE: Corporate Organization in Roman Antiquity and Medieval Europe  1. Founding Visions: The Ancient Roots of Corporate Organization 

7

2. “So Poignant a Memory of the Past”: Corporate Accountability in Medieval Christendom 

27

3. “We Need Not See the Church with the Eyes”: Corporate Presence in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe 

44

PART TWO: Corporate Organization in America  4. “The Hearty Hand of Friendship”: New Men and Corporate Enterprise in British America 

69

5. Sanctifying Contracts and Persons: Corporate Organization in America’s “Infant Republics” 

93

6. “The Real Nature and Spirit of Our Lives”: The Evolution of Corporate Personality, 1865–​1920 

119

viii

Contents

7. “The Very Heart and Soul and Spirit of Our National Will”: Promoting the Corporate Dream, 1920–​1980  8. Between Faith and Delusion: Corporate Credit After 1980 

143 166

Epilogue 

191

Acknowledgments 

197

Index 

199

Introduction

How did the corporate organizations that play such an important role in American society come to be? This book attempts to answer that question. Corporate Spirit is not a study of corporate organization everywhere; it focuses on the development of corporate institutions in the United States, and on the earlier history of corporate organization out of which American institutions emerged. Though commercial and religious corporations operate separately under American law, they share important similarities. Both have legal standing as persons, protecting them from dissolution when individual members die or retire, and shielding members from certain liabilities. Through credos, mission statements, and social practices, corporate organizations in both spheres enlist cooperation, act purposefully to achieve collective goals, and construct group identity. Commercial companies often build their reputations through claims to ethical principles that serve customers and even benefit humanity. Conversely, religious organizations have financial concerns that often involve generating and distributing income and managing investments and debt to further their corporate interests. To achieve a better understanding of how corporations became building blocks of American society, this book examines the kinship between churches and commercial institutions, highlighting the importance of corporate organization for understanding wealth and expansion in both arenas. Religious appeals to a supernatural world, combined with legal separation between nonprofit and commercial organization, make this kinship easy to overlook. Ironically, however, the separation of church and state in the United States expedited the flow of ideas back and forth between business and religion, the development of common strategies, and a multiplication of corporate charters in both spheres. In a legal environment firmly rooted in contract law, with states and the federal government detached from a single established church,

2 Introduction

churches multiplied in much the same way, and on much the same legal footing, as commercial companies. If the history of corporate development in the United States is primarily a history of commercial growth, it is also a history with deep ties to a religious past, parallel formations in the growth of organized religion, and cycles of corruption and reform similar to those in religion. Problems of accountability run through and across this narrative of symbiosis, disrupting institutions organizations and prompting new approaches to corporate organization that, in turn, have generated new opportunities for corruption. While other factors have churned the waters as well—​not least wars, epidemics, and new technologies—​problems of accountability stand at the beginning and end of this narrative, and at each major turning point in between, as determinants of corporate growth and innovation. From ancient efforts to situate Christian institutions in relation to Roman law to debate about corporate regulation in managing global resources today, questions of accountability shape the trajectories of religious and economic organization described in this book. Not one of the major turns in corporate organization described here was inevitable. Actions taken in response to unforeseen disaster or long-​smoldering resentment shifted the trajectories along which religious and economic organizations moved. Faced today with global unrest, political and religious dysfunction, and questions about the sustainability of environmental resources, we can look to the history of corporate growth to better understand this situation. The antecedents of modern corporate organization can be found in Roman antiquity, where images of society as a supersized body, or corpus, shaped conceptions of the world, and Roman law recognized voluntary organizations known as collegia as legal persons. Unpredictably, the trope of membership in the corpus of Christ emerged from Roman antiquity as a compelling vision of organizational strength and sustainability. Crafted by the Jewish tentmaker and Roman citizen Paul, the ingenious trope of incorporation in Christ accommodated a wide array of interpretations and practical applications. Arguably the most influential letter in western history, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians described the problem of accountability that erupted when members of a small religious community fell out with each other. Paul’s demand for reform, written under the pressure of belief that the world would soon end, included practical instructions for corporate unification in the time that remained. The letter made the rounds of early communities of Christian Jews, gaining authority over time to be received, interpreted, and applied over centuries by bishops, kings, and religious reformers, and eventually by modern businessmen, labor leaders, and proponents of human rights.1

Introduction

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Simple but effective, Paul’s theory of social organization operated as a model for organizing people of different backgrounds under one tent—​into a social unit Paul rapturously identified as the mystical body of Christ. In one analysis of the principle at the core of this Pauline model, the social historian Troels Engberg-​Pedersen identified a common “X factor” in which all members of an organization participate equally, no matter how individual roles inside or outside the company set them apart. For Paul and later Christians who accepted his authority, Christ is the “X factor” mediating shared respect. The body of Christ is the church and, by extension, the larger society informed by “X factor” principles.2 With and without identification with Christ, shared participation in a common “X factor” characterizes kinship between churches and commercial corporations in the United States. To take a contemporary example free of any reference to Christ, the safety video shown on Delta airplanes in 2016 ended with an aerial view of an enormous Delta logo composed of hundreds of Delta employees aligned shoulder to shoulder in a superhuman corporate design. In online media geared to current and prospective Delta employees, “X factor” thinking is also prevalent: “Each of us has the opportunity every day to be a leader in how we represent Delta, how we handle difficult and unpredictable situations, how we use Delta’s resources, and how we take care of our customers, our shareholders and each other.”3 The monumental shift in the meaning of incorporation as a theological construct to its modern form as a social contract complicates the remarkable persistence of Pauline organizational theory in American life. While the legal concept of incorporation is rooted in Roman law, and the theology of Pauline incorporation is still very much alive today, modern secular law works to separate religion as a realm of activity apart from for-​profit commerce and public policy. Though far from complete, this legal “cornering” of religion creates a division within modern social life that few if any people in Roman antiquity or medieval Christianity could have imagined. Yet despite that division, religious and economic interests may be no less intertwined in people’s lives today than in the past.4 This American-​oriented narrative does not do justice to the development of modern corporations outside of the United States. Nor does it engage in any of the important comparative work that others have undertaken. But it does reveal the importance of organization theory and practice for understanding both religion and commerce. The book also shows how demands for accountability have shaped the history of corporate organization in America, and in Europe before Europeans discovered America.5 This book is not intended as a triumphal narrative of American exceptionalism, even though it emphasizes the contributions of corporate organizations

4 Introduction

to American prosperity. Nor is it meant to be a jeremiad against corporate malfeasance, even though it acknowledges that corporations have earned notoriety. Many Americans agree with the view expressed by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in a letter to the New York Times written shortly after the presidential election of 2016: “Over the last thirty years, too many Americans were sold out by their corporate bosses . . . . They are tired of having chief executives make 300 times what they do,” Sanders wrote, “while corporations suck the wealth out of their communities and stuff it into offshore accounts.”6 Nor are churches and other religious organizations exempt from manipulation, deceit, and corruption. Litanies of complaints against them have often exposed underlying assumptions about how people and organizations should behave, and these assumptions influence conduct outside as well as inside religious institutions, though by no means uniformly. Using examples from reform efforts in antiquity and medieval Europe to modern labor unions and recent efforts to integrate sustainability into corporate organization, this book argues that the resilience of corporate norms have often been manifest through complaints about bad behavior, demands for accountability, and efforts toward improvement and reorganization.

Notes 1. Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians, and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–​17. 2. Troels Engberg-​Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville, KY:  John Knox Press, 2000), 18–​37, quotation from 33. 3. Delta Rules of the Road, http://​www.delta.com/​content/​dam/​delta-​www/​pdfs/​ policy/​delta-​rules-​of-​the-​road.pdf, accessed June 13, 2013. 4. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom:  The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), quotation from 111; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 5. For comparative studies, see Sanford M.  Jacoby, The Embedded Corporation:  Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2005); Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence:  How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 6. Bernie Sanders, “Where the Democrats Go From Here: Commentary,” New York Times, November 12, 2016.

PART ONE

Corporate Organization in Roman Antiquity and Medieval Europe

1

Founding Visions The Ancient Roots of Corporate Organization

The antecedents of modern corporations can be traced to ancient Rome, where numerous organizations attained legal recognition and others operated unofficially. Even during its height in the first and second centuries of the Common Era, imperial power was limited, and dependent on these organizations. While Roman tribunals could execute criminals with dispatch, imperial bureaucracy was weak in comparison with modern governments, with little capacity outside the city of Rome to police or investigate crime. Roman armies might plunder a frontier, but in the interior regions of the empire around the Mediterranean, supplies, equipment, and the circulation of material goods depended on cooperation with local business and religious groups. The emperors and courts of Rome relied on local organizations and local leaders of the curial class to collect taxes, manage welfare and trade, and maintain social order. Jewish organizations were among the numerous entities Roman governors counted on to police their own membership.1 As Roman military power and economic reach expanded, imperial agents dealt with an increasing number of towns and local organizations whose cooperation they needed. To facilitate negotiations and settle disputes, Roman officers, judges, and governors recognized many organizations as corporate entities able to enter legal agreements as persons. At the highest level, grand collegia incorporated by imperial edict or by act of the Roman Senate conducted imperial business, sponsored games, and celebrated Roman rule. Smaller professional collegia, often associated with a particular street or section of a city where people worked the same trade, operated locally as legal entities able to purchase property and conduct business. Professional collegia existed, as imperial collegia did, for purposes of camaraderie and public display, with legal standing undergirding their strength and stability.2

8 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe

In addition to officially recognized organizations, private associations formed more informally, often around households. Groups convened unofficially to honor deities that immigrants had brought from home, or to honor a deity familiar to people in many regions—​especially Bacchus. Private associations gathered for common meals, and many met to drink wine. Though they may not have enjoyed official recognition, these private associations typically provided services to members for burying their dead, as professional associations did. Like the grand collegia established by imperial edict or the Roman Senate, and like professional collegia associated with business and trade, private groups organized for camaraderie, mutual support, parades, and displays of honor, all under the veneer of Roman authority. As historian Ramsay MacMullen concluded, “Associations thus resembled the whole social context they found themselves in and imitated it as best they could. Like everyone else, they sought status.”3 Among these disparate groups, some organizations upheld unconventional norms while simultaneously participating in Roman culture and respectful of Roman authority. Not least in this hybrid category, Christian Jews held their members accountable to charitable practices that ran counter to the Roman glorification of wealth and honor. Christian institutions expanded within this social world. While many of the oldest families in the Roman aristocracy and biggest landowners in the hinterlands remained staunchly pagan, Christianity attracted growing numbers of people able to donate money and property to churches that embraced the vision of corporate accountability promulgated in letters written or attributed to the Roman Jew Paul. So despite its criticism of wealth and status, Christianity accumulated wealth and status. And precisely because of its criticism of wealth and honor, Christianity acquired a moral prestige that enhanced its appeal. This prestige drew new people to Christianity, and its charitable operations offered them opportunities for public service and recognition they would not otherwise have enjoyed. Charity thus emerged as an effective strategy of corporate growth.4 Founded by Greeks, then destroyed and rebuilt by Romans, Corinth was a hub of commercial activity in the first century and one of the urban centers where Christianity took root. Situated on the tongue of land bridging the Aegean and the Ionian Seas, this city of two harbors contained a mix of cultures and peoples, many of whom worked around the diolkos, the stone road over which slaves dragged ships on wooden wheels across the isthmus to supply armies, erect public works, furnish private estates, and feed the city. Goods from near and far flowed through Corinth and other Mediterranean cities at an unprecedented rate; based on a study of shipwrecks, one archeologist estimated that the volume of trade around the Mediterranean was higher in the



Founding Visions

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first two centuries of the Common Era than for a thousand years afterward. As in other urban centers, local officials in Corinth managed the flow of goods, the shipment and storage of grain, and the exchange of grain, goods, and slaves for coin.5 The freed Roman slaves who colonized Corinth when the city was rebuilt in the first century BCE looked to voluntary associations to advance and establish themselves. These associations grew along with the rebuilding of local Greek organizations and with the formation of new organizations populated by immigrants from North Africa and Asia Minor. Associations honored particular deities, and Corinth boasted a number of temples, including one dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis on a local mountainside and a legendary temple for Aphrodite on the mountain’s top. Numerous organizations and their deities contributed to the Isthmian games, when visitors poured into the city to see athletes and hear musicians perform in honor of Poseidon. Corinth’s personification as the goddess Fortuna—​the more freewheeling Roman version of the Greek Tyche (Fate)—​complemented the city’s standing as a center of new wealth and its reputation for spectacles where gladiators tested their mettle fighting leopards and bears.6 Paul’s letters to Christian Jews in Corinth addressed problems that had arisen in this commercial and sporting center. The letters irritated recipients and disrupted other communities where they circulated. But through the prestige they acquired, the imagery, principles, and ingenious arguments within these letters shaped the early contours of Christian organization. No other texts have been so frequently cited as standards of Christian governance. They provided guidelines for an expanding network of churches and charitable operations that, by the fourth century, had grown as a stabilizing force within the Roman economy and a transforming agent within Roman imperialism.7 “At the games, as you know, all the runners take part,” Paul wrote to his people in Corinth. “You must also run to win. Every athlete goes into strict training.” Citing his own effort to “not spare my body, but bring it under strict control,” Paul defended his authority to represent Christ by analogy to the authority he maintained over his own body. He heaped tiers of meaning onto that corporate site—​his own physically disciplined body supported a spiritual body, his spiritual body participated in the super body of Christ, and the body of Christ, in turn, incorporated all its members. As fellow members in Christ, Paul argued, they should stop backbiting, act as one body, and trust in him as they trusted in Christ.8 Paul laid out his theory of corporate organization in the long letter (1 Corinthians) written around the year 54 from Ephesus, the Roman capital in Asia. The letter pictured membership in Christ in terms of the integral

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functioning of different body parts:  “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ.” Differences among members were purposive, Paul explained: “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.” But fellowship across the corpus demanded that each “inferior member” be treated as a full participant. “If the foot would say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.” To maintain corporate unity, Paul admonished Christians of superior rank to bestow more respect on others than they themselves received: “God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.” In its aspiration to holistic perfection, the Pauline body offered a model for social cooperation as well as individual discipline.9 Paul presented this theory of corporate organization in response to the division in Corinth between a majority of relatively poor Christians and a minority of relatively affluent members who hosted community meals and funded most of the group’s activities. “When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper,” Paul complained. “For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What!”10 Readiness among elites to “humiliate those who have nothing” was commonplace in Roman society, where meetings of voluntary associations provided occasions for displaying status through differential seating, with portions and qualities of food and drink served in accordance with the recipient’s social rank. Paul did not ask wealthy members to give up their meals. Never a leveler, he simply asked them to “eat at home” before breaking bread at the meeting.11 However individuals might be set apart by skills, gifts, and economic differences, they shared equality in Christ. Or so Paul thought they should. As Margaret Mitchell recently emphasized, the disputatious character of Paul’s rhetoric should not be overlooked. In explaining charity to the Corthinians by exposing their lack of it, Paul brought accountability into his picture of corporate order, making it a foundational element of membership in Christ.12 Paul challenged upper-​ class Roman attitudes toward work as well as Roman devotion to status and wealth. In a city where slaves performed much of the manual labor and wealthy citizens disdained those people who worked with their hands, Paul’s celebration of the disciplined body encouraged his followers to practice their faith in economic and spiritual worlds simultaneously. Paul insisted on earning his own living, which annoyed prominent church members who aspired to the honor of housing him, much as wealthy Romans gained prestige from supporting philosophers in their households. Working



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long hours as a tentmaker cutting and sewing leather pieces together, he even boasted, in one of the short letters later combined as 2 Corinthians, that he had “toiled and drudged and often gone without sleep.” And he drew images from his tentmaking to describe his efforts to craft community. “Are you not my own handiwork in the Lord?” he demanded in response to those who questioned his authority. “If others do not accept me as an apostle, you at least are bound to do so, for in the Lord you are the very seal of my apostleship.”13 The image of society as a giant human body was common in Paul’s time. In one famous story told by the first-​century historian Livy, the Roman consul Agrippa Menenius tamped down plebian resentment against all-​consuming but apparently useless patricians in 503 BCE by invoking the “fable” of a society as a human body. Menenius warned the plebs that when the hands, mouth, and teeth sought “to coerce the belly by starving it,” the whole body suffered. According to Livy, the plebs stood down when Menenius explained that “the belly rendered no idle service, and the nourishment it received was no greater than that which it bestowed by returning to all parts of the body this blood by which we live and are strong, equally distributed into the veins, after being matured by the digestion of the food.”14 Paul’s finer notion of membership derived from Jewish and Stoic sources, woven together into a hybrid trope of corporate unity that challenged the exploitive system defended by Menenius. Rooted in the ideal of Israel as a people specially favored by God, Paul’s corporatism evoked the figures of Abraham, Moses, David, and Job, who represented Israel through their favored and (especially in the case of Job) suffering personhood. Rabbinic notions of Adam as the perfect original man contributed another layer of meaning to Paul’s notion of the new perfection of humanity embodied by Christ. Convinced that the death and resurrection of Jesus represented the fruition of a constellation of Jewish themes, Paul drew deeply from Jewish traditions of peoplehood, moral obligation, and bodily purity to develop the image of Christ’s body as a trope for group organization. For Paul, the body of Christ was the perfection of Judaism. Fidelity to the God of Abraham, charity as an expression of social cohesion, and close attention to bodily purity all derived from Paul’s Judaism.15 While Judaism provided the basic framework for Paul’s theory, Stoicism influenced his interpretation of Judaism and his conception of citizenship. Drawing on Aristotle and Plato, Stoics imagined the universe as an organic whole, with reason permeating throughout. Some even depicted the universe as the body of God, with bones and musculature made of logic, and flesh and soul constructed from ethics and physics. “I shall sing of God,” wrote the Stoic astronomer Manilius, “who, permeating sky and land and sea, controls with

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uniform compact the mighty structure.” For Manilius, “the entire universe is alive in the mutual concord of its elements and is driven by the pulse of reason, since a single spirit (spiritus unus) dwells in all its parts and, speeding through all things, nourishes the world and shapes it like a living creature (corpus animale figuret).”16 Stoics familiar to Paul imagined the body of the universe as a state or city, and stressed the moral responsibility of citizens to put the common good above immediate personal advantage. Political philosophers Cicero and Seneca argued that commitment to society fostered personal happiness, and that the enlightened self-​interest of social responsibility yielded personal happiness more reliably than acting to seize advantage at the expense of others. Thus for Seneca, “you must live for your neighbor, if you would live for yourself.” In the fourth century, both Jerome and Augustine mention letters believed to represent correspondence between Paul and Seneca. Medieval copies of this alleged correspondence reflect a long tradition memorializing the common ground between Pauline corporatism and Roman political philosophy.17 Arguing that acting to the advantage of others was ultimately more satisfying than securing immediate or apparent advantage to oneself, Paul encouraged Corinthians not to be sticklers for customs offensive to others. “All things are lawful,” he wrote, “but not all things build up.” The reward for such restrained behavior included participation in a society that benefited everyone, including those who made sacrifices to maintain it. In the letter to Ephesians attributed to Paul though probably written by someone else, a “new humanity” brought Jews and Gentiles “to God in one body through the cross.” The new humanity associated with Pauline corporatism was part of a new hybrid culture in which sacrifice, humility, and charity made people “citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”18 While the Stoic principle of respect for the common good served as a critique of blatant displays of social superiority, for most Stoics the critique of status, wealth, and honor only went so far. Seeking honor at the expense of others was what came in for censure, not honor itself. The radical variant of Stoicism known as Cynicism went further. Cynics invited dishonor to themselves as a way to expose the rotten and hypocritical system in which they lived, taking pride, for example, in their shabby appearance.19 Paul’s rhetoric reflected his familiarity with this radical form of Stoicism. Paul counted the shipwreck, beatings, and tortures he suffered as badges of honor. After reciting the host of abuses he had withstood, Paul concluded as a Cynic might: “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.” Paul’s Christ accepted humiliation as a sign of righteousness, exposing



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the corruption that ensued when vanity ruled the world. In a similar vein, initiates into Pauline communities took Christ’s self-​surrender upon themselves by submitting to the death of their old selves in baptism.20 Paul promoted a new kind of corporate accountability that linked “the righteousness of God” celebrated in Jewish scripture to metaphors of citizenship drawn from Roman law. Portraying the divine justice revealed in Christ as the canopy above both Roman and Jewish law, to which “the whole world may be held accountable,” Paul appealed to higher standards implicit within both Roman and Jewish law, divine standards that authorized the legitimacy of earthly law. “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith?” Paul asked Christians in Rome, referring to Jewish law. “By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” The same principle applied to Roman law: “The authorities are God’s servants . . . . Pay to all what is due them—​taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.”21 This respect for Roman and Jewish law enabled the survival and growth of Christian institutions. Julius Caesar had recognized Judaism as a religio licita in the first century BCE, in the midst of the social upheavals that transformed the Roman Republic into an imperial state. While banning political clubs and restricting social organizations, Caesar acknowledged Judaism as a religion that could be relied on to contribute to social order. Though emperors afterward occasionally revoked it, Jews (and Christians under their aegis) generally enjoyed the right to organize. Prior to the edicts of toleration granted by Galerius and Constantine in 311 and 313, Roman law did not formally recognize Christianity; nevertheless, Christians owned and developed property, including catacombs in Rome dating from the second century, thanks to the protection they enjoyed under Roman law as part of Judaism.22 Within the city of Rome in the first century, Jewish groups and other religious associations did come in for increased surveillance. Tiberius (r. 14–​37) cracked down on foreign cults in the city, and Claudius (r. 41–​54) banned Jews from Rome as political subversives in 49. By and large, however, and especially outside the city of Rome, imperial officers left voluntary associations, including synagogues and their Christian offshoots, to govern themselves. While retaining power to punish actions taken against the state, imperial agents maintained a hands-​off policy in disputes regarding “words and names.” Thus Paul’s friends Aquila and Priscilla fled Rome in 49 CE during Claudius’s reign and found safe haven in Corinth, where Jews could pray to the God of Abraham and argue among themselves about whether or not Jesus was the Messiah without fear of state reprisal. Only rarely did “words and names” become tied to action against the state, most notably after the

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burning of Rome in 64, when Nero (r.54–​68) ordered Christians to be seized and executed.23 Christianity’s growing success as a corporate enterprise drew from a constellation of interlocking factors, including the rise of bishops as church administrators, the gradual Christianizing of social welfare in urban centers, and the increasing participation of women as supporters of Christian institutions and representatives of Christian life. These combined forces brought countercultural norms of humility and repentance into the mainstream of urban society, broadening the practice of charity to serve people classified as “poor,” including widows and orphans who might have become destitute without church aid. In a world of uncertainty, periodic upheaval, and escalating violence, Christianity evolved from a small cult of charismatic Jews into a network of powerful economic institutions. Acquiring legal status and support from imperial authority by the fourth century, these institutions operated as stabilizing institutions helping to preserve vestiges of Roman authority.24 Bishops first appeared to manage records and suppress factions soon after the crucifixion, gaining power over local elders and regional presbyters to administer the expansion of Christian organizations. Even as geographical distance and political, military, and ethnic allegiances divided them, along with incessant debate over the relationship between God and Christ, Christian organizations mushroomed under an army of bishops. These corporate managers strengthened the hierarchical organization of corporate unity, practiced charity as a means to organizational growth and prestige, and invested in the development of their own authority within different branches of a far-​flung corporate organization.25 The earliest known advocate for the supremacy of bishops, Ignatius of Antioch, built on Paul’s theory of corporate unity in Christ to promote one catholic church united and organized in congregations under episcopal authority. “Let the congregation be wherever the bishop is,” Ignatius instructed Christians in Smyrna, “just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there also is the universal church.” On his way to Rome in the early second century, anticipating dismemberment in the Colosseum, Ignatius wrote to Christians in Ephesus, instructing them that “it is fitting for you to run together in harmony with the mind of the bishop . . . as strings to the lyre.” Fusing the image of the lyre as an instrument of praise in Hebrew scriptures with Paul’s conceit of membership in the personified body of Christ, Ignatius urged the Ephesians to voice their devotion together:  “Each of you should join the chorus, that by being symphonic in your harmony, taking up God’s pitch in unison, you may sing in one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, that he may both hear and recognize you [as] members of his son.”26



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The bishop stood for the body of Christ as its visible authority, responsible for the communal body, and for the administration of its wealth and charity. Much as Paul insisted on his right to stand for Christ, pointing to his own disciplined body as a sign of his authority, later Christians built on Paul’s imagery to elevate bishops. And many bishops strove to meet expectations by adhering to ascetic practices. Like wandering or secluded holy men, bishops exuded spiritual power. But unlike those independent saints, bishops also operated as corporate directors, managing the growing accumulation and disbursement of real property, material goods, and money from a growing number of members and catechumens.27 Charitable activity accounted for much of Christianity’s increasing visibility and for much of its impact on society as an expanding network of powerful economic institutions more accountable to women, orphans, and non-​elite men than Roman society had been in the past. The state had long depended on local governments and voluntary associations to distribute food, build infrastructure, facilitate trade, and provide military support. By 250, a transregional network of Christian institutions had developed to supplant or expand some of the work of other organizations, including distribution of food to the poor, health services, hospitality for travelers, and care for widows, orphans, and refugees. When invaders attacked Roman cities, churches stepped in to aid and ransom prisoners of war.28 Christian efforts to aid the sick advertised the new religion’s standard of social responsibility. As healers, nurses, and caretakers of the dead, Christians played an increasingly prominent role in health care markets, offering services more readily accessible than those provided by followers of Asclepius or Isis, and free of cost. While apologists exaggerated the heroism of Christians who leapt in to help when plagues descended upon the cities, the devotion of Christian nurses during epidemics gave apologists something to boast about. Thus Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, praised Christians in the early fourth century who “tended to the dying and to their burial, countless numbers with no one to care for them.” In response to drought and plundering, he added, Christians “gathered together from all parts of the city a multitude of those withered from famine and distributed bread to them all, so that their deeds were on everyone’s lips, and they glorified the God of the Christians.” Churches grew through conversions inspired by public acts of faith and charity such as these, and through endowments made in gratitude or in hope of healing and salvation.29 Charity is more difficult to practice than to celebrate. Suspicion of people taking advantage of charity sanctioned uncharitable feelings, undermining the corporate unity charity was supposed to foster. Widows were special objects of

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charity in early Christian churches, as they were in synagogues, and they seem frequently to have been regarded with suspicion. The Didascalia Apostolorum, a third-​century Syrian compilation of church rules, reprimanded widows for “being like wallets, always roaming among the houses of Christians hoping to pick up cash.”30 As charitable operations became more rational, more systematic, and less driven by apocalyptic impulse, they became more accommodating to Roman and regional cultures. The more Christianized society became, the less heroism Christianity demanded from ordinary members. No longer limited to tiny communities committed to intense expressions of fellowship and arduous standards of purity, Christians became less heroic and more inclusive. In 250, these trends threatened Christianity’s existence when Emperor Decius decreed that all persons must appear before a local commission to offer a libation or eat meat sacrificed in his honor, and obtain a certificate as proof of having fulfilled this obligation. Christians flocked with their pagan neighbors to comply. A minority of Christians hid or resisted, but most of those were captured, imprisoned, and persuaded to participate in a pagan sacrifice. The edict was soon lifted, leaving many clergy as well as laity dishonored. Confessors emerged to offer penance, but Christian morale suffered from the embarrassment that so many had proved willing to practice emperor worship.31 Christians regrouped after the failure of accountability to Christian principle in the Decian disaster. Paul’s command to “love one another” gained new relevance as bishops sought to manage new outbreaks of dissension between backsliders and the minority of Christians who had managed to avoid sacrificing to Decius. Bishops strove to move forward, relying on charity as the agent of corporate unity that strengthened discipline among members, attracted converts, and supported expanding networks of communication. In cities plagued by epidemics and Roman brutality, charity helped restore Christian morale and moral authority.32 When Constantine became Augustus in 306, Christians accounted for only about 10 percent of the population within the sprawling Roman Empire. But their self-​governing organizations exerted greater influence than their numbers would suggest, contributing to welfare operations in urban centers and beginning to organize in rural areas. Christians involved in these activities worked through corporate branches headed by bishops who disciplined members, negotiated with state and local governments, and communicated with other bishops through letter and face-​to-​face meetings to debate doctrinal differences and organizational strategies.33 Constantine admired the bishops’ organization and self-​discipline. He wanted their God on his side in combat, supporting his efforts to maintain



Founding Visions

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civil order and expand imperial influence. In addition to whatever divine aid or purification he sought for himself through Christianity, Constantine recognized the political advantages of alliance with a religion that occupied the moral high ground, operated an expanding network of charitable institutions, and maintained a network of highly dedicated administrators. Once he became a Christian, Constantine strove to enhance these advantages, authorizing the construction of monumental buildings where the fusion of military power and Christian charity in his imperial person could be publicly displayed. Directing attention to dissension among bishops, he encouraged them to iron out differences and unify Christian doctrine and ritual across geographic regions. Bothered by confusion over the proper date for celebrating Easter and by the animosity stirred up by controversies over the exact relationship between God and Christ, Constantine supported bishops’ councils, most notably the Council of Nicaea, where bishops settled the date for celebrating Easter and hammered out a catholic creed.34 Constantine’s investment in the visibility of Christian institutions seeded a boom in their growth. Along with the expansion of churches and their charitable operations, the number of wealthy converts increased once Christianity gained a foothold in imperial courts. In Rome during the fourth century, a few very rich converts directed land rents to the churches of Rome, where building projects transformed the city into a visibly Christian hub of organization and good works. As Christian activity expanded, the need for managerial talent grew as well. And conversely, the growing pool of managerial talent within Christian congregations improved ecclesiastical organization. New opportunities for bishops to accumulate personal wealth also opened up. Bishops increasingly came to resemble the curial class of educated government officers responsible for local order. The more indispensable bishops became for social order, and the more property and wealth they managed, the more like other agents of imperial government they became. Some civil officers even stepped into the office of bishop as the capstone of their careers. While bishops stood apart from the wealthiest class of Roman citizens, with salaries that did not come close to what government agents with comparable managerial responsibilities received, the moral prestige of Christianity contributed to the attractiveness of religious office. At the same time, rules prohibiting bishops from conducting business outside their own jurisdictions suggest that economic pursuits among bishops had become significant enough to pose problems for the churches’ claims to high moral ground. The churches took on increasing responsibility for feeding the poor, receiving revenue from taxes levied by the state along with revenue from pious donations. With the suppression of paganism and the

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establishment of Christianity at the end of the fourth century, the line between taxing and tithing blurred, and bishops were reluctant to condemn oppressive taxes. Origen of Alexandria complained that, in bigger cities, bishops acted “like tyrants, imitating officials and terrorizing the poor.” A  fourth-​century writer, after encountering the bishop of Rome, commented that persons elected to that office “will be secure for the future, being enriched by offerings from matrons, riding in carriages, dressing splendidly, and even feasting luxuriously.”35 The Christian definition of honor in terms of self-​discipline and charity proved attractive, even as rhetoric celebrating these ideals jarred with behavior violating them. As the excesses of the wealthy became more blatant and the brutality of Roman government and military power increased, Christianity’s idealism about accountability appealed to an increasingly broad cross section of people. Though bishops generally came from families with some degree of wealth and standing, worldly status was not a prerequisite for office, and openness to educated men of low birth, including former slaves, attracted a considerable pool of talent. In addition, as requirements for admission to Christianity relaxed and Christian institutions multiplied, markers distinguishing clergy and ultrapious women from ordinary laypeople became more common, opening new opportunities for female leadership within an increasingly complex array of organizations. Especially in the West, women figured importantly as donors, volunteers, and recipients of charity, and in some cases as symbols of Christian purity. Although excluded from ordination and clerical office, women joined churches in greater numbers than men. Churches did not challenge common perceptions of women as naturally inferior to men, but they did offer women respect and even iconic status as representatives of the church. Manifest in the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose virgin body joined spirit to flesh like that of her son, women’s importance in the corporate order of Christianity developed along with aggressive attempts to manage women’s behavior and access to prestige. Recognition of women’s theological importance to the church dates to the late second-​century writings of Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum (now Lyon) in Gaul. Irenaeus expanded on Mary’s role as the mother of Jesus, who represented the restoration of Eve, as Jesus represented the restoration of Adam. As the bishop explained, “Just as it was through a virgin who disobeyed that man was stricken and fell and died, so too it was through the Virgin, who obeyed the word of God, that man resuscitated by life received life.” Irenaeus used Mary’s role in human redemption to challenge interpretations that minimized Christ’s humanity and denied his physical suffering. He also used the



Founding Visions

19

relationship between Mary and Eve to highlight women’s corrupt nature and blame them for man’s downfall.36 Like Paul’s description of his own disciplined body as a site where spiritual realms and practical worlds worked together, the asceticism of Christian virgins married their devotion to God to their work as volunteers and donors. With Christian virgins, two important aspects of Christianity that otherwise seemed in conflict—​ transcendence of the flesh and material presence—​ joined together in the church, the corporate body of Christ represented by monuments, institutions, and people. As Ambrose, the fourth-​century bishop of Milan, conceptualized it, virginity was “the manifestation of well-​ordered, balanced perfection in body, spirit, and soul.” The unbroken chastity of the virgin female body became a compelling symbol of the church—​the corporate body that contained and unified Christian people. By the fourth century, some of the most influential Christians were women, and emulation of Mary coincided with their influence. Women supported the renowned church fathers Jerome and John Chrysostom. The wealthy Roman widow Melania the Elder founded a religious community in Jerusalem, and her activities drew other high-​ranking women into Christian activities in Rome.37 An important contributor to Pauline social theory, Ambrose attempted to strengthen the constellation of forces propelling Christian growth—​the managerial authority of bishops, the Christianization of social welfare, and Christianity’s appeal to women as embodiments of both prestige and humility. Stepping from political office as governor of Milan into the office of bishop of Milan in 374, Ambrose projected his interpretation of Pauline charity against the garish screen of fourth-​century urban reality, proclaiming Christianity’s superiority over paganism as a basis for civic justice and social welfare. Without ever contesting imperial efforts to impose military authority or exact crippling taxes, Ambrose championed a welfare economy represented by virgins who embodied purity and administered by clergy who condemned avarice. While the administrative center of Christian government in the Western Empire remained in Rome, where both Peter and Paul had been martyred and were buried, Milan became the administrative center of imperial government in the West, where Ambrose made a fast transition from governor to bishop. His unexpected consecration also reflected the upheaval occurring as Christianity became increasingly tied to an imperial system that was dissolving through overexpansion and interaction with “barbarian” tribes. It is unlikely that Ambrose intended his speech in the Cathedral of Milan, amidst civic unrest after the death of the bishop Auxentius, to generate clamor for his own consecration. Though a catechumen and member of a pious Christian family recognized in the papal court thanks to his celebrated virgin

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sister Marcellina, Ambrose was not baptized. His cathedral speech as provincial governor of Milan addressed the problem of civic disruption caused by religious dissension. He spoke in behalf of the minority faction in the city allied with the embattled Pope Liberius, who held to strict interpretations of Pauline order and Nicene doctrine. When Ambrose appealed to the corporate spirit that membership in Christ demanded, his partisan audience shouted, “Ambrose for bishop!” Apparently surprised, Ambrose fled the city surreptitiously, sometime thereafter making a dignified reentry through the main gate. Pious biographers interpreted his sudden flight as an expression of unworthiness typical of adherents of Christianity’s countercultural code of honor. Other interpreters perceived a manipulative effort to garner support. But as historian Neil McLynn argued, given Ambrose’s lack of religious qualification, his flight from the city may have betrayed his confusion and even momentary panic in response to the clamor for him to become the bishop. Once he and his religious mentors perceived no other way to go forward, they rushed him through the requirements for baptism and ordination. Though steeped in Roman jurisprudence and political philosophy thanks to his education and very recent employment as governor, the new bishop found it necessary to devote considerable effort to acquiring the theological skills needed for interaction with other bishops.38 However unprepared he was for debating subtle theological distinctions relished by bishops in the East, Ambrose’s familiarity with Roman politics and his background in political philosophy positioned him to become a leading spokesman for Christian institutions in the West. In an imaginative leap that stretched back behind Paul to the political philosophers of the Roman republic, Ambrose linked the Roman Catholic church to the res publica of old. Alluding to the primeval harmony of man and nature common to pagan and Christian belief, Ambrose argued that the church had come to restore “good will” to the world. Through charity, baptism, and the Eucharist, all people might become citizens of Christ. As he wrote in De officiis, a commentary on duty that shared a title with the famous book written by Cicero in the first century BCE, “This good will is now enhanced by the communal nature of the church.” Through “our partnership in faith,” Ambrose claimed, “the congregation of the holy church grows ever upwards [adsurgit] into one body, joined and bound together in the unity of faith and love.”39 As Peter Brown and others have argued, Ambrose wrote De officiis in part to shame Symmachus, the prefect of Rome, who closed the city to everyone but registered citizens during the famine of 384, explaining the drought that



Founding Visions

21

caused the famine as the gods’ retaliation for the city’s defunding of their ancient rites. The cruelty and superstition of Symmachus provided the foil for Ambrose’s “call to duty,” which championed the inclusivity of Christian charity. Drawing partly on the Cicero he endeavored to replace, Ambrose championed charity to the poor as an essential ingredient in civic life, justifying Christian authority by appeal to its moral accountability. His condemnation of avarice drew on Stoic criticism of greed as a violation of natural and political harmony, on biblical pleas for justice, and on Paul’s theory of charity as the unifying spirit of Christ’s corpus.40 With Ambrose, Christianity’s sway over imperial politics in the West reached new heights. In 380, under the influence of Ambrose, Theodosius Augustus made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Ten years later, when Theodosius’s army massacred several thousand people in Thessalonica to avenge the death of an imperial charioteer, Ambrose insisted that Theodosius submit to the discipline of penance for his sin. Theodosius complied in order to receive the Eucharist, invoking David’s words as king of Israel to represent his submission to the Church:  “I have sinned greatly in that I have done this deed; and now, O Lord, take away the iniquity of your servant, for I have sinned miserably.” Taking David’s words as his own and thus imbuing the Hebrew scriptures with a Roman glow, the emperor recognized Christianity’s political power, acknowledging Ambrose as an official representative of norms beyond his own authority, norms that undermined his own deification as emperor and required him to display repentance for a brutal massacre and to swear to purification and self-​discipline.41 As part of his growing clout, Ambrose’s status in Rome drew from his sister Marcellina, a member of the papal circle in Rome whose virginity Pope Liberius had consecrated on Christmas Day. Ambrose dedicated the first of several treatises on virginity to Marcellina, and her prestige drew Roman readers to her brother’s writing. Ascribing transcendence of human nature to virgins, Ambrose made Mary, and all the virgins who emulated her, symbolic representations of the purification of flesh required for salvation. Among the first to insist on the virginity of Christ’s mother and to exalt Mary as a symbol of the church, Ambrose described Christ as “resembling His mother in body, His Father in power.”42 In elevating virgins as symbols of corporate integrity, Ambrose and others recast elements from pagan Rome, where for centuries virgins endowed by the city performed rites in honor of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and city, to ensure good harvests and protect city walls from hostile penetration. Unlike ordinary women, vestal virgins were free of legal attachments to men, could

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make wills of their own, and were allowed to represent themselves in court. Under increasing pressure from Christians, however, Rome’s vestal virgins had lost their public subsidy. They wished for reinstatement, as did many of their supporters in Rome who sought to rejuvenate ancient traditions.43 Ambrose opposed their efforts, treating vestal virgins as a foil against which the true honor of Christian virgins could be seen. In the bishop’s eyes, the pagan corps of virgins represented the avarice he condemned in Rome society. They took money for their services and traveled around in litters, dressed in purple. Their investment in beautifying themselves cast further suspicion on their chastity. Appealing to the Christian code of honor and its association with charity, Ambrose praised Christian virgins for shunning beauty, luxury, and gifts of money, and for donating their wealth and work to charity. Pagan priestesses were incapable of ensuring fertility and safety; only devotion to Christ could inspire spiritual life to flower.44 This praise of virginity acknowledged women’s importance as supporters of Christianity while at the same time insisting that strict rule be maintained over women who sought elevation through Christ. As Ambrose promised, virgins could escape lowly womanhood and attain a degree of independence from men by emulating Christ’s pristine humanity, achieved by closing their door to corruption through sex. Milan was not Rome, however, and in Milan, widows were reluctant to pay the cost of such independence, as were parents of the young women Ambrose beckoned to virginity with visions of queenly spirituality. To achieve a public show of virgins processing to consecration, the bishop found it necessary to ship in young Moors captured and enslaved in North Africa. In his later writings on virginity, Ambrose expressed his respect for married women and responded to concerns that he had denigrated widows who chose remarriage. He also backed off from encouraging young women to defy the wishes of parents who wanted them to marry. But he retained his enthusiasm for the virgin female body as the symbol of the church, as well as his obsession with sexual purity as the antidote for sin. His writings exalting virginity would be influential in medieval Christianity, especially in the West.45 With virgins becoming iconic symbols of Christianity’s countercultural—​ but increasingly popular and prestigious—​code of honor, Mary became a symbol of the church, the icon representing the honor, purity, and integrity of Christ’s body. When imperial authority weakened after the sack of Rome in 410 and local institutions became more autonomous, Christianity became even more far-​flung and decentralized. Virgins, bishops, and the charity they dispensed sustained the corporate institutions of Christianity and their growth in medieval Europe.



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Notes 1. P. F. Bang, “Trade and Empire—​In Search of Organizing Concepts for the Roman Empire,” Past and Present 195 (2007):  3–​54; Andrew Wallace-​Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 364–​365. 2. Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2003), 6–​47, esp.  46; John S. Kloppenborg, “Collegia and Thiasoi:  Issues in Function, Taxonomy and Membership,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-​Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (London: Routledge, 1996), 16–​30, esp. 16–​19; Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 77; Arthur K. Kuhn, “A Comparative Study of the Law of Corporations with Particular Reference to the Protection of Creditors and Shareholders,” Ph.D.  dissertation, Columbia University, 1912, 18; P. W. Duff, Personality in Roman Private Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). 3. MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, 77; Wendy Cotter, “The Collegia and Roman Law: State Restrictions on Voluntary Associations, 64 BCE–​200 CE,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-​Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (London: Routledge, 1996), 74–​89; Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 31–​32. 4. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). For discussion of hybridity in the modern context of British imperialism, see Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters:  Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 5. Keith Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C.–​A.D. 400),” Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): 101–​125. 6. Robert M. Grant, Paul in the Roman World: The Conflict at Corinth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 13–​21; Young Suk Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth: The Politics of Metaphor (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 18, 78; Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Isthmian Games,” July 20, 1998, http://​ www.britannica.com/​EBchecked/​topic/​297037/​Isthmian-​Games. 7. Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–​17; Benjamin L. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 71–​181; Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover,

24 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe NH: University Press of New England, 2002); Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–​ 550 AD (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2012); Brown, Power and Persuasion. 8. Quotations from 1 Cor. 9:25, 9:27. All citations from the Bible are taken from The Oxford Study Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 9. Quotations from 1 Cor. 12:12–​25 (also see Rom. 12:3–​8); Mitchell, Paul, 1–​57; Rapp, Holy Bishops, 3–​22. 10. Quotations from 1 Cor. 11:20–​21. 11. Quotations from 1 Cor. 11:22, 11:34; Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 69–​76; Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, ed. and trans. John H. Schutz (Philadelphia:  Fortress Press, 1982), 153–​163. 12. Mitchell, Paul, 18–​37; Troels Engberg-​Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 33. 13. Theissen, Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, 51; Ronald F. Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Ministry:  Tentmaking and Apostleship (Philadelphia:  Fortress Press, 1980); 2 Cor. 11:23–​27. Quotations from 2 Cor. 8:14, 11:27; 1 Cor. 9:1–​2. 14. Quotations from Titus Livius, The History of Rome, trans. Canon Roberts (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1905), 32. 15. Michelle V. Lee, Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8. For correction of the long-​standing misconception of Paul as the founder of anti-​Judaism within Christianity, see John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 16. Dirk Baltzly, “Stoicism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Winter 2012 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://​plato.stanford.edu/​ archives/​win2012/​entries/​stoicism; also see Martin, Corinthian Body, 6–​15. Translation and quotation from Lee, Paul, 57. 17. Translation and quotation from Lee, Paul, 95; “The Correspondence of Paul and Seneca,” Wesley Center Online, http://​wesley.nnu.edu/​index.php?id=2220, accessed August 28, 2013. 18. Quotations from 1 Cor. 10:23 and Eph. 2:15–​19. 19. F. Gerald Downing, Making Sense in (and of) the First Christian Century (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 19–​42, esp. 32. 20. Quotations from 2 Cor. 11:24–​30. 21. Rom. 3:22, 3:31, 13:6–​7. 22. Peter Richardson, “Early Synagogues as Collegia in the Diaspora and Palestine,” in Voluntary Associations in the Graeco-​Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson (London: Routledge, 1996), 90–​109; E. Mary Smallwood, The Jews Under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 124. 23. Cotter, “The Collegia and Roman Law,” 82.



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24. Brown, Poverty and Leadership. 25. In the earliest Christian communities, deacons served at common meals under the supervision of presbyters. Later they became assistants to bishops, appointed by bishops, thus replacing presbyters and the more collegial approach to church governance that presbyters had represented. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 406, 88. 26. Quotations from Ignatius, “To the Smyrneans 8” and “To the Ephesians 4,” in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and trans. Bart Ehrman (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003), 1:305, 223. 27. Rapp, Holy Bishops, 100–​152; Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 273–​274; Frend, Rise of Christianity, 487; Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 31–​52. 28. Frend, Rise of Christianity, 404; Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 31–​ 32, 356–​357. 29. Quotations from Eusebius, The Church History, trans. and ed. Paul L. Maier (Grand Rapids, MI:  Kregel, 1999), 328–​329; Hector Avalos, Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (Peabody, MA: Henrickson, 1999), esp. 81–​107; Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity:  How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 73–​94; Howard Clark Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World:  A Study in Sociohistorical Method (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1983), 252–​289. 30. Frend, Rise of Christianity, quotation from 411. 31. Wilken, First Thousand Years, 66–​68; Frend, Rise of Christianity, 318–​323. 32. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 73, 82. 33. Ibid., 132–​136; Rapp, Holy Bishops. 34. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 72–​73, 103–​109; Frend, Rise of Christianity, 342–​343. 35. Frend, Rise of Christianity, quotation from Origen on 404; Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, quotation from the fourth-​century historian Ammianus Marcellinus on 396; Ulrike Malmendier, “Law and Finance ‘at the Origin,’” Journal of Economic Literature 47, no. 4 (December 2009): 1076–​1108. 36. Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. and ed. Joseph P. Smith (New York: Paulist Press, 1952), A:33, quotation from 69; M. C. Steenberg, “The Role of Mary as Co-​Recapitulator in St Irenaeus of Lyons,” Vigiliae Christianae 58, no. 2 (2004): 117–​137. 37. Ariel Bybee Laughton, “Virginity Discourse and Ascetic Politics in the Writings of Ambrose of Milan,” Ph.D.  dissertation, Duke University, 2010, quotation from 142.

26 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe 38. Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose:  Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 1–​52. 39. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 120–​147, quotation from 133. 40. Ibid., 120–​147, quotation from 126; Christel Freu, Les figures du pauvre dans les sources italiennes de l’antiquité tardive (Paris:  Boccard, 2007), 245; McLynn, Ambrose, 273–​274. 41. Wilken, First Thousand Years, 127–​135, quotation from 135; McLynn, Ambrose, 315–​330. 42. McLynn, Ambrose, 35; Laughton, “Virginity Discourses,” 152, 101. Also see Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation:  Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999); Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends: Essays and Translations (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979); Elizabeth A. Clark, Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1986); Virginia Burrus, “‘Equipped for Victory’: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 461–​475; Daniel Boyarin, “The Talmud Meets Church History,” Diacritics 28, no. 2 (1998): 52–​80. 43. Laughton, “Virginity Discourses,” 190–​206. 44. Ibid., 208–​212. 45. Ibid., 25, 90–​91; McLynn, Ambrose, 60–​68.

2

“So Poignant a Memory of the Past” Corporate Accountability in Medieval Christendom

When Vandals attacked North Africa and cut off shipments bound for Rome in 439, the flow of grain supporting imperial wealth in western Europe diminished drastically. Trade declined, cities shrank, and fortunes evaporated. Military order weakened as Roman garrisons disappeared. Tribal chiefs and warlords vied with Roman officials and with each other in outbursts of violence that ruined communities and escalated uncertainty. Emperor Justinian’s effort to reconquer Gaul in the sixth century failed in the wake of the empire’s “loss of a monopoly over political legitimacy.”1 Virulent outbreaks of malaria hit Italy in the early sixth century, and plague erupted in the first of seventeen waves between 541 and 750, with at least one-​ third of the population in western Europe dying in the first outbreak. With towns diminished, artisanal specialization declined and farming became more rudimentary. Ceramic production and trade persisted in Italy, but kilns may have disappeared completely in England as people returned to more primitive ways of making bowls and pots. Jewelers could still be found near Notre-​Dame in Paris in 583, and the upper tier of wealthy landowners owned beautiful objects, but demand for luxury goods fell off and craftspeople concentrated on necessities for local markets. On the brighter side, dependence on slaves for manual labor declined and peasants became more independent and free from the crippling system of taxation Rome had employed to maintain its armies. But cities and towns in western Europe were poorer after 500, and people were more vulnerable to frightening waves of violence and disease.2 With Roman armies withdrawn from the frontier, numerous tribal chiefs from the north and east crossed into Gaul with their followers in the sixth century. New confederacies formed and warrior kings emerged to seize land

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and dominate local populations. Remnants of Roman government and ecclesiastical authority moved into deeper alliance to protect shrunken resources in Gaul and Francia, with bishops attempting to uphold Roman law and civic order along with their responsibility to oversee churches. But even churches proved difficult to manage. Church law stipulated that bishops must consecrate altars, otherwise mass could not be celebrated or a building become a church, but without official sanction and ceremony, episcopal oversight was spotty. Village churches emerged or hung on to serve local populations, along with private chapels, oratories, and monasteries, and many small churches operated outside direct supervision by regional bishops. The corporate order of Roman Christianity became even more decentralized than it previously had been, and more firmly wedded to enclaves of familial power. With bishops often at a distance, local saints protected noble families and their dependents, converted tribal chiefs, and watched over local assemblies gathered to decide collective action, witness trials, and pass judgment on criminals.3 In urban basilicas, the celebration of mass no longer culminated, as it once had, in a parade of donors bringing gifts to the altar as their names were called out. Religious ceremony now culminated in “a high sacrifice, offered by the clergy alone.” With bishops guarding precious remnants of faith and order, vessels of gold and silver remained in urban churches to carry the Savior’s body and blood, sacrificed to atone for human sin and lift the clouds of God’s punishing wrath. The priests who handled the sacred elements became holy vessels themselves, set apart from the laity to a greater degree than in earlier centuries, their consecrated status marked with stark formality.4 Aware of the challenges he faced and the limits of his authority at the turn of the seventh century, Pope Gregory I described himself as “bishop not of the Romans, but of Lombards, [a flock] whose flag of truce is the sword and whose good will gestures take the form of atrocities.” Hoping for a better life to come, Gregory compared the sweetness of heaven to the aroma from a box of apples rising above the reeking odor of a cargo ship. In this difficult environment, devout believers struggled to maintain their corporate presence, using small donations to keep churches stocked with inexpensive candles and lamp oil. As candlelight flickered in dim interiors, worshipers were not “a happy group bound eventually for the Heavenly Jerusalem. Rather, they stared directly,” to quote historian Peter Brown, “with a longing tinged with fear, into a world beyond this world.”5 Throughout the long period of corporate rebuilding that began with the papacy of Gregory I  (590–​606), memories of a golden age of imperial Christianity joined to images of Christ in heaven. Two new forms of accountability—​ the penitential system and Christian kingship—​ sustained



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this organizational rebuilding and led to important developments in corporate law. The penitential system introduced by Irish monks routinized the Pauline equation between bodily discipline and corporate membership in Christ, making accountability for sin a pathway to heaven accessible to all. In laying out precisely calibrated and universally applicable procedures for obtaining forgiveness, the penitential system encouraged the development of legal reasoning. Complementing this development, Christian kingship made rulers accountable to Christ, binding religious and civil government together more firmly than in the past, and regularizing authority and legal transactions in both realms. Advances in writing and literacy played a role in these interlocking trends, contributing to organizational strength but also to escalating criticism, as new calls for accountability to the principles of corporate order received from Paul arose to condemn corruption. The penitential system introduced by Irish monks strengthened religious discipline by making adherence to specified routines of penance a condition of individual membership in Christ. Inspired by accounts of the asceticism and homelessness of the early Desert Fathers in North Africa, these monks wandered the European continent beginning in the 590s, carrying handbooks to guide sinners toward forgiveness. The manual attributed to the famous monk Columbanus explained that, just as physicians applied antidotes in different doses in their treatment of different ailments, particular sins called for particular applications of penance. Common antidotes for sin included fasting, reciting Psalms, and genuflection. One widely circulated manual made different combinations of penitential activity available to sinners, stipulating that the recitation of 1,200 Psalms with genuflection was equivalent to 1,680 Psalms without genuflection, and that either might replace a month of fasting.6 Penitential discipline supported the growth of monasteries as centers of piety and repositories of penitential donations. As the gradual transition from burial rows with deposits of weapons and material goods to cemeteries around churches marked the conversion of Germanic tribes, the erection of monasteries and their churches marked the consolidation of new aristocracies. Thus the seventh-​century Frankish abbess Agneric left the estate she inherited from her father and subsequently improved, including land, houses, mills, and vineyards, to her monastery. As the bones of her extended family accumulated in its necropolis, the monastery became a center of corporate wealth and spiritual power.7 Combining Germanic practices of tribal unification around a charismatic leader with Christian practices of corporate membership in Christ, noble families and their dependents clustered around bones of founding ancestors that

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linked this world to the next, bringing generations together around the church. Devotion to the world beyond provided solace and fortitude in weathering life’s storms as family monasteries provided “a proper place for later generations to be buried,” Susan Wood explained, “waiting together for the general resurrection in an ark on the sea of time.” Like the sacramental vessels carrying the precious blood and body of Christ, the saintly founder whose body lay in the cemetery carried the collective body through generations and into eternity.8 Monasteries operated as farming communities and artisanal centers feeding, clothing, and sheltering the people who lived and worked there, not least the descendants of donors who inherited family rights to a portion of these estate and their produce. By founding and funding monasteries, families with wealth and status kept lands from being divided through inheritance and under their control. While disputes over monastic property were not uncommon, the principle that property given to God could not be alienated from God commanded wide respect. Relatively protected from division and loss, monastic property might be managed by sons, daughters, or widows who acted as proprietors in their roles as abbots or abbesses. Donors and their families received spiritual benefit as well as economic security from monastic estates, as in the case of the donor who gave land to the monastery of Echternach in Utrecht in 721 with a clear expectation of services in return: “I give and wish to give forever [this property] for the profit of prayers and Masses, eternally for me and mine.”9 The Merovingian and Frankish kings who emerged to consolidate power and command authority in Gaul and Francia relied on monasteries and churches as organizational centers. While Merovingian kings supported episcopal control over monasteries, the Frankish nobility gave support directly to local monasteries, and especially to those adhering to the Rule of St. Benedict and to the penitential system inherited from the Irish monk Columbanus. As the Merovingian kings weakened, the Frankish dynasty (later named Carolingian, from Carolus, the Latin name for Charles) elevated Irish Benedictine monasteries as centers of aristocratic wealth and spiritual power. Corporate organization expanded with the Carolingians as Pauline theory filtered through the penitential system and new applications of Benedict’s Rule. Eager for the Franks’ protection, Pope Leo III raised their king, Charlemagne (Charles the Great), to the rank of emperor, crowning him as the imperial head of Christian Europe on Christmas Day 800. Charlemagne brought the episcopal authority of Rome into his orbit by treating the bishops responsible for administering churches as his civil servants. His rule marked a new consolidation of corporate order, supported by Benedictine interpretations of Pauline organizational theory.10



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The famous Rule for monastic orders penned by the sixth-​century Italian monk Benedict of Nursia referenced Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians twenty-​ three times. Building on Paul’s trope of membership in Christ, Benedict described monastic community as a corporate body—​sociari corpori monasterii. While acknowledging that individual members might have particular gifts, as Paul had written, Benedict introduced a strong air of military order, declaring that the abbot of the monastery and his assistants exercised power over the body of each member of the community. Once a new member joined, the novice no longer had a body of his own. To maintain peace and avoid factions, obedience to seniors was essential.11 Benedict’s manual for monastic governance influenced Gregory I’s Book of Pastoral Rule for bishops, published in 591 on the eve of his installation as pope. Building on Benedict’s Rule to accommodate episcopal governance extending through all of Christian society, Gregory also cited copiously from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians—​thirty-​six times—​with particular attention to Paul’s trope of corporate union. For Gregory, the body of Christ was the governing image for Christian life: “Indeed, all are bound together in faith, just as many members constitute a single body.” Elaborating upon 1 Corinthians 12 with more detail than the apostle himself, Gregory described cooperation among different body parts—​eyes, feet, mouth, ears, tongue, stomach, and hands—​as the kind of union that should inspire and direct Christian life. “Therefore,” Gregory explained, “we observe in the inner working of the body how we should behave.” Also following Paul, Gregory stressed the essential importance of charity as a means to cooperation. Charity overcame envy and stimulated cooperation and productivity: “Let the envious consider how great is the virtue of charity, which makes the labor of others our own without any work on our part.”12 Though applied to bishops, Gregory’s term rector, or director, proved open to broad interpretation. Early medieval kings read Gregory’s Pastoral Rule as part of their education in governance, applying Gregory’s instruction to bishops to their own role as sovereigns. King Alfred of England (849–​899) translated the Latin Regula Pastoralis into early English prose, encouraging future kings to manifest the peace, justice, and charity of their realm in their own persons. By 1100, Norman ideas about government had expanded on Paul’s claim to authority as an embodiment of Christ to argue that, though as a man a king was subject to Christ like other men, in his official body “the power of the king is the power of God.” With regard to his actions as king, according to one influential Norman tract, “whatsoever he does, he does not simply as a man, but as one who has become God and Christ by grace.” Later in England, defenders of the Tudor monarchy elaborated on this idea of the king’s two

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bodies to explain that, through the divine agency of his official body, the king represented the organic union of membership in the body of Christ throughout his realm, and could not be contradicted. As the living symbol of corpus christianum, the official body of a Tudor monarch conveyed divine justice and healing power.13 Sovereign decrees issued by Charlemagne laid the foundations for these later ideas, as he drew from Gregory’s Pastoral Rule to create an image of the Christian monarch that later interpreters developed. Placing himself under “the eternal reign of our Lord Jesus Christ” as the “king and rector of the kingdom of the Franks and devout defender and humble adjuvant of the holy church,” Charlemagne issued capitularies, or sovereign decrees, to bishops, monks, and laypeople defining Christian life as it should be conducted under his pastoral administration. In 789, he decreed that all of his subjects aged twelve years and older should swear an oath of loyalty to him, and “that each should strive in his own person to keep himself fully in the service of God.” After his coronation, Charlemagne assembled envoys from across the lands he claimed to govern, demanding that they “swear on the gospels and relics of saints that they would tell the truth about all they knew about everything on which we made enquiry of them.” He also launched an investigation to find monks following orders other than those prescribed in Benedict’s Rule.14 As corporate centers favored by Carolingians, Benedictine monasteries and their churches tied aristocratic wealth and prestige to respect for Pauline Christianity and Carolingian rule, with monasteries embodying the Pauline ideal of the corporate unification of practical and spiritual activity through charity and penitential discipline. Carolingian rule also marked a turning point in the long struggle to work out the economic aspects of church property and corporate community. No longer simply religious corporations authorized to own property and pursue secular interests, monasteries and churches became economic assets—​properties in their own right—​that elites could invest in and trade. Utilizing charters of incorporation to legalize these exchanges of religious property, a monastery seeking protection or favor might be donated to the king, and he in turn might bestow that monastery on a favored subject. Thus Count Throand gave the family monastery of Holzkirchen “with all its belongings” to Charlemagne, who gave it in turn to the Church of St. Boniface. Charlemagne also authorized a counting of the properties in his realm, and the records produced through this effort listed many churches. Combined with records of property transactions, the listing of churches in the king’s records encouraged the tendency to think of churches as properties belonging to kings, lords, and bishops.15



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Not surprisingly, this proprietary approach to religious institutions raised concerns. Critics were wary of the threat to holiness posed by treating monasteries and churches as if they belonged to men rather than to God. Even during the reign of Charlemagne’s father Pippin, Archbishop Boniface had challenged the practice of religious charters being granted to noblemen by kings. Boniface viewed this practice as an invitation to opportunists eager to “beg to have churches and monasteries granted to them, so that they may live a lay life there wasting the places of saints.” Thus while royal charters enabled rulers to solidify economic power and centralize their corporate organization, they also stimulated questions of accountability as monasteries and churches came to be treated as proprietary entities whose ownership could be transferred or litigated.16 In his efforts to foster unity, Charlemagne worked to enforce accountability to Catholic spiritual rule across his domain, issuing orders to all bishops, clergy, and monks to “strive with vigilant care and sedulous admonition to lead the people of God to the pastures of eternal life.” These orders included a long list of specific instructions about how religious life should be regularized and infractions punished, with the caution that these instructions “be received in a benevolent spirit of charity.” Charlemagne’s own envoys would assist in the strenuous efforts he required of holy men “to bear the erring sheep back inside the walls of the ecclesiastical fortress on the shoulders of good example and exhortation.”17 Charlemagne also supported public rituals of religious incorporation, demanding that Saxons and other conquered tribes submit to the rite of baptism that initiated new members into the body of Christ. As more pagans and Arian Christians joined Catholic Christianity through force and persuasion, the increasingly prominent rite of baptism brought people of different tribal and cultural backgrounds together under one imagined Christian aegis. Bishops encouraged the baptism of infants, and built new and larger baptistries to accommodate Easter rituals. In many parts of western Europe by 800, adults to be baptized followed infants in arms in procession from the church to the baptistry after Easter mass. These Easter baptisms grew in magnitude as converts—​including war captives in shackles—​joined parents from around the region bringing newborn children to the priest for the sacrament.18 The sacrament of the Eucharist also facilitated the integration of peoples within what historian Janet Nelson called the Carolingians’ “empire of the mind.” Celebrating the miraculous fusion between the humanity and divinity of Christ, the Eucharist joined material and spiritual aspects of communion in Christ. The Eucharist also celebrated bodily sacrifice as the activity most pleasing to God, calling attention to Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of sinners,

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the indebtedness of sinners to Christ, and the need for penance. In Miri Rubin’s words, “The eucharistic wafer was constructed as a symbol for which over hundreds of years, and all over Europe, people lived and died, armies marched, bodies were tormented or controlled by a self-​imposed asceticism.”19 Paul was among the first to represent the death of Christ as a sacrifice given to compensate for human sin. As his letter to the Romans explained, “All who believe are now justified . . . through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” Early church leaders built on Paul’s idea of atonement by identifying Christ with God, and by transforming the common meal of fellowship in Christ into a dramatic reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice on church altars, officiated by priests.20 Elaborating on Paul’s theory of atonement, Augustine, the great theologian and fifth-​century bishop of Hippo in North Africa, urged Christians to internalize the drama of Christ’s sacrifice. According to Augustine, the only sacrifice pleasing to God was “a broken heart,” an internal condition manifest through contrition, ascetic discipline, and living for others. Quoting Paul, Augustine called his readers “to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” For Augustine as for Paul, “the true sacrifice is offered in every act which is designed to unite us to God in a holy fellowship.” Augustine followed Paul’s emphasis on charity as the defining element of Christian membership. In Augustine’s words, “The true sacrifices are acts of compassion, whether towards ourselves or towards our neighbors, when they are directed toward God.”21 Compared to the more straightforward rite of incorporation in Christ through baptism, the Catholic Eucharist involved complicated and not entirely settled questions about how the sacrament actually worked. While Franks long exposed to Catholicism had grown accustomed to the divine mystery of Christ’s eucharistic body and blood, newly converted Saxons expressed confusion, and pressed for more explanation. In a stretch of imagination that made a long-​lasting impact on Catholic theology, the ninth-​century missionary to the Saxons Paschasius Radbertus likened the elements of the Eucharist to the written words of the Bible. Paschasius identified the bread and wine as the figural elements of Christ, analogous to the figural elements of scripture that existed as words—​words that led people to the spiritual realities beyond the alphabetical figures on parchment. Just as Christ’s presence came through words written by Paul or in the gospels, so the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice might be transmitted through the Eucharist. In its likeness to the written word of God transmitted through men, the Eucharist also revealed the relationship between Christ’s humanity and his divinity. The word of God



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became flesh in Christ, Paschasius argued, and the Eucharist reenacted this miracle.22 As material objects, the Old Testament, gospels, and apostolic writings were reverently handled, bound, adorned, and treated as expressions of the larger reality encasing the dimness, chaos, and vulnerability of time. The sheer difficulty of recreating these holy texts augmented their status. The availability of papyrus had declined with the shrinkage of trade, and most medieval writing was done on parchment made from the skins of animals, many of them raised in monasteries for this purpose. According to one estimate, the production of one Bible required the death and skinning of two hundred animals. The act of writing was arduous, involving hard pressure with a stylus to make scratching impressions on animal skin, and more pressure with pumice stones to rub away errors. Sacrificing animals to make books, scratching animal skin with a stylus, and translating the story of Christ’s blood into ink—​long hours dedicated to transforming flesh into word amplified the meaning of Christ’s incarnation as the word made flesh.23 As vehicles of authority and means of standardization, texts figured centrally in the imagined empire of imperial Christianity, and in networks of political diplomacy and religious communication that Carolingian rulers developed across Europe. With texts and scribes at their command, they sent emissaries to record information and broadcast sovereign decrees to cities and monasteries. As Rosalind McKitterick noted, Carolingian rulers “insisted” on texts “for the consolidation and harmonization of the Christian religious faith and practice, for the transmission of knowledge, and for the exercise of justice and government.”24 The penitential system contributed to the textual orientation and consolidation of European culture, and to heightened belief in the objectivity of the things that writing represented. As Frankish Catholics preserved, copied, and disseminated penitential handbooks, the transactional approach to sin encouraged in these manuals complemented the growing use of texts in transactions involved property. Even as it emerged as a source of contention, this transactional mentality helped integrate and regulate religious and economic activity. Thus donations of land recommended in penitentials as appropriate penance for wealthy sinners complemented the use of corporate charters and the proprietary approach to churches, with many of these religious donations supporting local economies as well as prayers for the donors’ souls.25 As the written word became increasingly important both as a basis for transaction and as a nexus joining material and spiritual realms, the ability to read became a means of social advancement, and increasingly widespread even among peasants. Growing reliance on writing also encouraged new ways

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of thinking about sin, law, and property, allowing written standards of law and jurisprudence to affect collective decision-​making and shape the formation of local consensus. But the transition “from memory to written record” over the long period of early medieval Christianity was gradual and incomplete. People continued to strongly associate property with the life of a place, with rights to property firmly anchored in collective memory and local control. Local assemblies still convened to keep peace, punish crime, and hear disagreements about ownership and control over land and resources. In these meetings, reputable men called witnesses, heard testimonies, and weighed claims to property rights established in the past through conquest, inheritance, or marriage, with appeals to local saints as witnesses of truth.26 The ongoing strength of collective memory, judgment, and action was demonstrated in the Peace of God movement, which appeared across Europe after the millennial anniversary of Christ’s death to enforce accountability to Pauline ideals. Beginning in the south of France, where civil order had broken down, assemblies of men gathered to end vendettas by swearing oaths to Christ. Spreading to other regions of Europe in the eleventh century, assemblies invoked the Peace of God to outlaw warfare in specific locales and punish violators of sworn truces. Joining Pauline Christianity to popular memory of the Pax Romana, the Peace of God emerged “against a background in which collective oath-​taking and some collective responsibility for law and order were already taken for granted.”27 Along with acting to quell violence, Peace of God reformers censured church authorities for failures to uphold true corporate spirit, blaming corrupt priests for the violence engulfing Europe. In his Adversus simoniacos (c. 1059), Humbert of Silva Candida in Francia excoriated priests for selling pardons, offices, and benefits, calling the practice a violation of Christ’s body that invited apocalyptic destruction. Referencing Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Humbert explained, “Through the Holy Spirit, a very great diversity of limbs is brought to together, bound and united beneath one head, Christ, in an irreproachable and mysterious arrangement.” In buying and selling charity, the very essence of Christian community, corrupt priests attacked the work of the Holy Spirit that, “like a most powerful and fervent bitumen or gluten, glues together and joins the body of Christ with charity which is diffused in the hearts of the saints.” Humbert expressed outrage at the violation of corporate accountability: “These heretics dare to steal this most efficacious cement (so to speak) of God’s construction,” leaving “nothing but the squalor of nettles and thorns, of desire and avarice, and the horror of a serpent’s lair.”28 Beginning late in the eleventh century, popes turned this appeal to corporate accountability in Christ against Islam, exploiting the Peace of God and



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corporate membership to quell violence in Europe and magnify their own power. Drumming up support for a Crusade, Urban II called Christians to defend the body of Christ from corruption in a holy war to seize Jerusalem from the Turks. “Although, O sons of God, you have promised more firmly than ever to keep the peace among yourselves and to preserve the rights of the church,” Urban preached in 1095, “there remains still an important work for you to do.” He called on “Christ’s heralds” to “destroy that vile race” of Muhammad’s followers, proclaiming, “Christ wills it.” The shout that emerged in response to that sermon, “Deus vult!,” became the rallying cry for restoring Christian purity to the Holy Land.29 While support for Crusades against Islam diverted some attention from corruption inside European Christendom, reformers still blamed the disorder around them on the failure of churches to represent the “right order” that corporate membership required. Echoing the disputatious temper evident in Paul’s diatribes against un-​Christlike behavior among the Corinthians, medieval reformers focused their sights on the wealth that churches accrued, and on the perverted attempts of individuals to command that wealth for themselves. As Abbo, the eleventh-​century reformist abbot of the monastery of Fleury, argued, “The Church is Christ’s and no one else’s; there should be no disputing among men about its sustenance or goods, since whose the whole is, His is the part.” But disputes escalated as reformers condemned the sale of pardons and blessings to enhance revenue. Lay investiture also provoked outrage; when nobles arrogated authority for appointing clerics, even in some cases investing priests with the symbols of religious office, reformers condemned the practice as a sacrilege.30 The Peace of God contributed to the expansion of cities as well as to moral order. Relying on rituals of incorporation, and drawing on rules for religious governance to establish procedures for elections, jurisprudence, and finance, incorporated towns expanded the imaginative reach of Christ’s body to urban life, supporting developments in city government, trade, manufacture, and banking that enabled cities to grow. In 1050, Venice and London were the only cities in western Europe with more than ten thousand people; by 1250, hundreds of bigger cities existed, with the populations of Venice, Florence, and Paris probably reaching a hundred thousand. Soaring Gothic cathedrals built at the center of many cities testified to strong infrastructures of corporate governance and to the corporate spirit at the heart of these growing cities.31 Even if they established the seeds of modern democratic governance, as some scholars have argued, the corporate infrastructures of medieval cities reflected profoundly conservative efforts to restore practices believed to have existed in the past. For many inhabitants in the growing cities of twelfth-​century

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Europe, the idealized corporatism of the past bestowed a “sacred legitimacy” on city government that justified separation from the violence that often prevailed outside city walls as well as independence from the empire that tried to claim religious and military authority over cities. In Italy, urban communes may have laid the foundations for democratic governance in the distant future, but their leaders had nothing progressive in mind. As Chris Wickham argued, the “institutional creativity” evident in the Italian city-​states of the twelfth century was “a defensive reaction to crisis.” Wars between popes and kings over who had jurisdiction to invest bishops with civic authority drew landowners together to preserve order in the cities where they lived. With their minds focused on dreams of lost order—​and preservation of their own wealth and status—​commune leaders moved into the future with a sense of direction that Wickham compares to “sleepwalking.”32 No dream was more compelling than Paul’s vision of membership in Christ. With religious, economic, and civic life thoroughly intertwined, religious parades, general communion, and holy days shaped the rhythms of urban life in medieval cities, making membership both in the city and in Christ visible to all. Baptism incorporated children into the commune as well as into the body of Christ. Business corporations maintained chapels for their members, and merchants sold wares and produce in the cathedral nave. Craft guilds celebrated patron saints associated with their trade, and guild members relied on Christian charity among members for mutual support and insurance.33 Systematic rules for legal incorporation supported the legitimacy of city governments. Craft guilds of weavers, masons, and decorative artists also relied on increasing precision in corporate law to exclude competition and enforce guild hierarchy. In contrast to modern corporate law, which rests on the application of individual rights to corporations, twelfth-​century discussions about the legal rights of corporate entities emerged among people long accustomed to collective assembly as a component of social order. Lawyers invoked terms such as corpus and collegium to protect or target particular organizations, not to justify rights of assembly that people took for granted. As Susan Reynolds pointed out repeatedly, medieval references to the fictive personality of corporate entities emerged from long-​standing practices of collective assembly, not from any theories or expectations about the natural rights of individuals.34 Nevertheless, new precision in corporate law did hold revolutionary implications for how western Europe would come to be governed and imagined. Playing a decisive role in this process, the Bolognese monk Gratian compiled “the first comprehensive and systematic legal treatise in the history of the West, and perhaps,” as Harold Berman suggested, “in the history of mankind.”



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The aptly named Concordance of Discordant Canons appeared around 1140 in the wake of efforts by Pope Gregory VII to manage the legal crisis provoked by the German king and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. In response to Henry’s attempt to thwart church control over bishops, Gregory excommunicated him, declared him unfit to rule, and asserted the papacy’s legal authority over all Christians. Amid the violence and confusion that ensued, church lawyers worked to make the compass of canon law more precise.35 Gratian’s work of legal systemization invested the domains of religious and civil law with a new element of rationality, abstracted from collective memory and face-​to-​face jurisprudence. Church claims to personal jurisdiction over particular groups—​clergy and their servants, students, Crusaders, indigents, widows and orphans, Jews in disputes with Christians, and travelers—​became more extensive, but also more precise, with jurisdiction of secular justice more firmly established, even in cases involving clergy. Through this process of rationalization, law itself acquired greater status and even a superior jurisdiction of its own, rising above distinctions between ecclesiastical and civil realms. Moreover, as the jurisdictions of religious and civil law became more sharply defined, interest in law and demand for legal education and expertise increased. A growing class of highly trained legal officers worked “to develop not only laws but also a system of laws, and more than that, a system of law.”36 Two forms of corporate accountability made the development of medieval law possible:  penance and Christian kingship. Penance made individuals accountable for corporate order in their own bodies and through charitable donation. Christian kingship made military power and civil order accountable to Pauline rule, at least in theory. The development of legal reasoning also served to sharpen criticism of failures of accountability in both church and state, and to measure the great distances between heavenly ideals and sinful reality. And condemnation of these failures helped to sustain the ideal of corporate union, even as evocations of that ideal turned plaintive. Close to despair about the prospect of recovering accountability to Christ, the twelfth-​century historian and bishop of Freising, Otto, cast Paul’s vision of corporate unity onto the future heaven of the New Jerusalem, quoting Pauline texts twenty-​seven times in the final, apocalyptic chapter of his Universal History. As for the present world, Otto complained in 1146, “men throw everything into confusion by plundering and burning,” and even “do not shrink from committing violence contrary to divine and human law during the very season of Lent and the time for repentance.” In this brutal and degenerate world, enclaves of peace survived only through “the merits of the saints, the true citizens of the City of God, companies of whom flourish all over the world.”37

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Three hundred fifty years earlier, Carolingian rulers had also looked for inspiration to the “right order” of an “imagined apostolic age.” But the boldness that Carolingians showed in interpreting and enacting that imagined order differed from the “melancholy world-​weariness,” as Stephen Jaeger described it, of twelfth-​century reformers. These later reformers prized the corporate centers of monastic life more for the retreat they offered from a world that seemed to be running toward disaster and less for the wealth, corporate order, and moral authority that Carolingians sought so straightforwardly. Even as monastic life flourished, Christian cities expanded, and legal reasoning became more coherent, the gap between the Pauline vision of corporate order and historical reality seemed insurmountable to many Christians in the twelfth century. As Otto confessed, “We are oppressed by so poignant a memory of the past.”38

Notes 1. Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations of the Roman West, 376–​ 568 (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2007), quotation from 515; Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany:  The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1988); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–​800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–​1000, rev. ed. (West Sussex: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013; orig. 1996). 2. Michael McCormick, “Molecular Middle Ages: Early Medieval Economic History in the Twenty-​ First Century,” in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe:  New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Hampshire, UK:  Ashgate, 2008), 83–​ 97; Chris Wickham, “Rethinking the Structure of the Early Medieval Economy,” in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 19–​31; Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 794–​831. 3. Geary, Before France and Germany, 39–​75; Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004); Christopher N.  L. Brooke, Churches and Churchmen in Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), 1–​32. 4. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–​550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), quotation from 524; Claire Sotinel, Church and Society in Late Antique Italy and Beyond (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 1–​23. 5. Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 202–​206, quotation from 206; Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, quotation from 525.



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6. Arnold Angenendt, “Donations pro anima:  Gift and Countergift in the Early Medieval Liturgy,” in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 135–​136; Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 169–​170; Lisa M. Bitel, Isle of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 7. Geary, Before France and Germany, 171. 8. Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 119. 9. Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals:  The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001; orig. 1994), 1–​114; Angenendt, “Donations pro anima,” quotation from 138. 10. Geary, Before France and Germany, 147–​149, 171. 11. Anne Elizabeth Sweet, “Benedict’s Use of Scripture: 1 Corinthians,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 40 (2005): 135–​162, esp. 149. 12. Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, trans. George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 108. 13. Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 207–​215; Roger W. Clement, “King Alfred and the Latin Manuscripts of Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis,” Quidditas 6 (1985): 1–​13; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1957), 42–​61, quotation from 48. 14. “General Admonition:  (Aachen, 23 March?) 789,” in Charlemagne:  Translated Sources, ed. and trans. P. D. King (Lancaster, UK:  University of Lancaster, 1987), 209; Janet L. Nelson, “Charlemagne and Empire,” in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 223–​234, quotations from 230 and 232; Geary, Before France and Germany, 139–​140. 15. Wood, Proprietary Church, 225 (quote), 30, 75–​76. 16. Ibid., quotation from 213. 17. Charlemagne, “General Admonition,” quotations from 209; Wood, Proprietary Church, 15–​16, 76–​79, 211–​214, 147–​152, 263–​265, 794–​799. 18. Walter Ullman, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship (London: Methuen, 1969), 8–​9. 19. Nelson, “Charlemagne and Empire,” quotation from 230; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), quotation from 1. 20. Romans 3:21–​25. 21. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, ed. David Knowles, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1972; orig. 1467), Book X, Chapters 5 and 6, 377–​380.

42 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe 22. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 16–​22. 23. Ibid., 165–​166; Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought; Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–​1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998), 96–​103; M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record:  England 1066–​1307, 3rd ed. (Malden, MA:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2013; orig. 1979), 115–​132. 24. McKitterick, History and Memory, quotation from 6. 25. Angenendt, “Donations pro anima,” 138. 26. McKitterick, History and Memory, 32; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 9–​59; Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 12–​18, 259–​268. Janet L.  Nelson, “Charlemagne and Empire”; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 9–​ 59; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 1–​20, 255–​328; Richard Britnell, “Pragmatic Literacy in Latin Christendom,” in Pragmatic Literacy East and West, 1200–​1330, ed. Richard Britnell (Woodbridge, UK:  Boydell Press, 1997), 3–​24; Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 1–​26, 147–​170, 215–​338. 27. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–​ 1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34–​35, quotation from 34. 28. Amy G. Remensnyder, “Pollution, Purity, and Peace: An Aspect of Social Reform Between the Late Tenth Century and 1076,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1992), 280–​307, quotations from 296. 29. Harry W. Hazard and Norman P. Zacour, “Crusade Propaganda,” in The Impact of the Crusades on Europe, ed. Harry W. Hazard and Norman P. Zacour, vol. 6 of A History of the Crusades (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 39–​97; quotations from Medieval Sourcebook:  Urban II:  Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095, According to Fulcher of Chartres, http://​www.fordham.edu/​halsall/​source/​ urban2-​fulcher.html, accessed December 12, 2013. 30. Wood, Proprietary Church, 840, 883–​921, quotations from 213 and 820. 31. Berman, Law and Revolution, 102; Stephen C. Jaeger, “Pessimism in the Twelfth-​ Century Renaissance,” Speculum 78, no. 4 (2003): 1151–​1183. 32. Chris Wickham, Sleepwalking into a New World:  The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2015), quotations from 9 and 5.  Also see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996); and R. W. Scribner, “Communalism:  Universal Category or Ideological Construct? A  Debate in the Historiography of Early Modern Germany and Switzerland,” Historical Journal 1, no. 37 (March 1, 1994): 199–​207.



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33. Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–​ 1325 (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), quotation from 3; Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Methuen, 1984), 3–​31. 34. Reynolds, “The History of the Idea of Incorporation”; Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 34–​64; Wood, Proprietary Church, 147–​152; Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution:  The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1983), 49–​84; also see Black, Guilds and Civil Society. 35. Berman, Law and Revolution, quotation from 143. 36. Ibid., 221–​224, 245–​250, quotation from 223. 37. Otto of Freising, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D., trans. Charles Christopher Mierow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), quotations from 445. 38. Wood, Proprietary Church, quotations from 855; Otto, Two Cities, quotation from 445; Jaeger, “Pessimism,” quotation from 1180; Constable, Reformation, 125–​165.

3

“We Need Not See the Church with the Eyes” Corporate Presence in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Medieval parades honoring the body of Christ channeled the growing activism of laypeople in urban life. Parades celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi originated in thirteenth-​century Liège, where women vowed to poverty and charitable activity called for a new holy day in honor of Christ’s redemptive suffering. With its vision of membership in Christ as a standard of accountability for all, their campaign drew support from craftsmen burdened with city taxes and church tithes and resentful of established merchants who controlled the guilds providing access to civic authority. Because a succession of bishops presiding over the cathedral in Liège hoped the celebration might unify the city and increase their own authority over the city’s many corporate groups, the feast eventually won official church approval.1 Reaching England by 1318 and performed throughout western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the summer pageant drew crowds eager for sight of the wafer representing Christ’s body as it passed through crowded streets, often in a jeweled vessel under a canopy surrounded by priests, followed by groups representing civic authority, various trades, and special forms of religious devotion. These processions brought different groups together as partly autonomous, partly interlocking corporate entities within a city, town, or village in a harmonious show of unified social complexity. In mobilizing this social tapestry in procession through a city, Corpus Christi parades revealed the growing power of the laity as well as the efforts of



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church authorities to maintain religious authority and adjudicate lay demands for recognition and church reform.2 Guilds, new religious orders, and self-​ governing cities all developed together in Europe after 1200, competing with territorial princes and episcopal authorities, and with each other, for influence and power. Aided by new discoveries about the ancient world and new developments in corporate law and city government, vigorous competition among these disparate groups disturbed the conservative mentality of medieval Christianity that all these groups claimed to uphold. At the symbolic center of medieval corporate order, the eucharistic wafer mediated these tensions, representing the fragmentation of corporate unity and its ideal reintegration through pious devotion and social accountability.3 First mentioned in European court records during the twelfth century, craft guilds emerged as centers of economic activity independent of feudal and episcopal control, much like the independent cities where they flourished. The Germanic term “guild” originated in pre-​Christian times as a term for voluntary societies dedicated to drinking and mutual aid, but by the time of their appearance in European court records, guilds had become imbued with Christian ideas about corporate membership. In addition to organizing work, craft guilds sponsored masses, prayers for the dead, charitable endeavors, church building, religious art, and plays and parade floats based on stories drawn from the Bible and the lives of saints. Canon lawyers found reason to support them, citing ample precedent in Roman law for recognizing corporate associations able to regulate themselves and own property. Mainstays of urban order, labor regulation, craft specialization, and regional marketing, guilds controlled pathways to citizenship and elected office in many cities.4 Through shared investment in the Pauline ideal of corporate unity, alliances developed between craft guilds and religious orders whose visible embrace of poverty rebuked ostentatious displays of wealth. Guilds donated to Franciscans, Dominicans, and Cistercians, and these mendicant orders in turn encouraged charitable activities and Christian fellowship in guilds. Cistercians especially emphasized the need for people to become more socially accountable by joining in common purpose as “members of one another” in Christ. Officially incorporated as a monastic order in 1165, the Cistercian Order represented more than five hundred abbeys across Europe by 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council commended it as a model of monastic organization. Through bold administration of properties and tithing along with enthusiasm for Pauline ideas about charity and fellowship, the order gained considerable wealth. Thirteenth-​century accounts praised the order’s ties to Pauline

46 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe

authority and the Rule of St. Benedict, and to the mandate for manual labor ascribed to the twelfth-​century reformer Bernard of Clairvaux.5 Devotion to membership in Christ’s body bound together princes, episcopal authorities, monastic orders, craft guilds, and other lay fraternities, even as they vied with one another for power and influence. Though it would eventually become a major source of division, the Eucharist functioned as a strong agent of social cohesion well into the fifteenth century, eliciting a sense of Christ’s presence hovering over economic and political life, animating people’s interior lives, and passing judgment over all. Devotion to the Eucharist also supported major achievements in art, commerce, and citizenship across the expanding network of corporate institutions in medieval cities. The quintessential expression of Christian vitality, eucharistic piety contributed to the “extraordinary, vigorous growth of new forms of corporate life—​monasteries, cathedral chapters, collegiate churches, communes, boroughs, guilds, confraternities.”6 In addition, as Brian Tierney argued, the “theology of the mystical body” associated with the Eucharist stimulated “a great new body of juridical thought about the nature of corporations,” including a surge of legal rulings about the rights acquired by individuals who held corporate membership. As charters granting corporate status to cities, churches, monastic communities, and lay fraternities proliferated, the legal rights bestowed on individuals through corporate membership became clearer and more precisely defined. Membership in a cathedral chapter gave individual priests rights to a prebend, or stipend, that could be defended in ecclesiastical court against claims of insufficient parish revenue or dereliction of duty. Guild membership made individuals eligible to vote in city elections or serve on city councils, and membership in a merchant guild gave individuals the right to travel freely between cities. Reworking Pauline idealism about freedom in Christ as a component of social cooperation and adherence to authority, medieval charters of incorporation contributed to a “vast extension of civil liberties” in civil law.7 Grief rocked these corporate structures when the Black Death swept across Europe. Both trade and religion revived to become more vigorous than ever after the plague, but the sense of Christ’s cohesive presence hovering over all never fully reappeared. Breaking out in the Crimea in 1346, the Black Death cut counterclockwise in a circular swath through Europe, killing one-​third of the population in four years. Those in sparsely populated alpine regions fared best, while death rates in Sicily reached 60 percent. Victims succumbed quickly, dying after two or three days, their bodies covered in dark sores. Religious orders were especially hard hit; their members lived together in close quarters and were frequently exposed to infection as they tended the



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sick. The apparent vulnerability of people under religious vows contributed to questions about the religious meaning of the epidemic. With no knowledge of the causal agents of infection and few means of combatting it, medical philosophers at the University of Paris attributed the epidemic to an astrological shift that poisoned the air. In many cities, blame fell upon Jews supposed to be poisoning the water. In French and German cities, mobs bent on revenge massacred Jews, killing two thousand in Strasbourg alone. Pope Clement VI tried to stop these killings, arguing that the sins of Christians had provoked God’s wrath. Belief that the epidemic was punishment from God prompted some to try to atone; devout Christians assembled for long penitential marches though Italy and Germany, flagellating themselves for days in hope of obtaining God’s forgiveness.8 An estimated million participants joined these gruesome parades. In a mass movement of collective self-​punishment punctuated by episodes of mob violence, penitents whipped themselves to appease God’s wrath ahead of the plague. These rituals combined two conflicting impulses—​efforts to accept accountability for the sin that brought divine wrath, and pleas of innocence expressed by whipping oneself as Jesus had been whipped. While the practice of flagellation dated to the twelfth century, if not before, and physical self-​ abuse had been part of Christianity at least since the Desert Fathers of the third century, such mass recourse to flagellation was unprecedented. During the Black Death, self-​administration of pain emerged as a collective effort to dramatize human suffering.9 When the Black Death invaded, a town became a death trap that only the privileged could escape. In 1351, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio described how the pestilence spread across Florence “despite all that human wisdom could devise to avert it,” including “cleansing of the city from many impurities” and “humble supplications addressed to God, and often repeated both in public processions and otherwise.” Some people “formed communities in houses where there were no sick,” Boccaccio recounted, living fastidiously and “holding converse with none but one another, lest tidings of sickness or death should reach them.” Others turned madly to pleasure, roaming from one tavern to another, taking advantage of open houses whose “owners, seeing death imminent, became as reckless of their property as of their lives.” Distinctions of rank and status blurred, Boccaccio reported, as “the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved.” In this drastic moment, the foundational structures of medieval religious and civic life appeared flimsy and undependable. Boccaccio recorded the astonishing effect: “Every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.”10

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The Black Death altered many aspects of economic exchange and productivity. Shipments of grain to urban centers from outlying farms slowed or even stopped, causing food shortages and mass hunger in numerous towns. The epidemic disrupted the production of cloth and the flow of wine that supplied local markets and supported regional specialization and regional exports. It crippled larger networks of trade and banking that had grown since the twelfth century to stretch across and beyond western Europe. But in the long run, the disaster benefited economic productivity, clearing the way for rebuilding efforts that fostered innovation and revealed sharpened respect for human ambition. Though survivors had to deal with food scarcity, loss of income, property destruction, and the deterioration of civic and religious order, many of their descendants profited from the aftermath of the harrowing ordeal. The Black Death loosened conservative strictures on economic development, stimulated wage growth and technological innovation, and enabled more flexible corporate structures to emerge.11 Those who survived became wealthier than they would have been if the plague had not killed relatives in line with them for inheritance. This consolidation of inherited wealth through family shrinkage enabled the capitalization of new commercial ventures. Heightened awareness of the impermanence of traditional patterns encouraged bold ventures, as well as more calculated approaches to life such as rational plans for weathering loss. In the 1370s, Italian merchants devised written agreements for insuring the lives of slaves and other forms of property against loss. These agreements soon became routine, as Steven Epstein observed: “Insurance spread almost as quickly as the plague.”12 The disruption in traditional patterns of economic organization stimulated the development of labor-​saving devices. Innovations in iron making occurred in Sweden in the midst of the plague, and steel crossbows appeared in Europe soon after. As economic life rebounded in the fifteenth century, mills and spinning wheels became more efficient, and treadle looms, clocks, and weapons utilizing gunpowder became common. Many of the goods and technologies associated with this increasing economic productivity derived from Asia and the Middle East, where they had long existed. After the plague, the direction of exports began to change. Venetian merchants led the way in exporting glass to Syria and Egypt in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century, Venetians began exporting glass, cotton, and books around the Mediterranean. Woodblock printing, introduced from China, improved communication in Europe in the decades after the Black Death, and inspired the invention of moveable type. Book printing proved the most important innovation, contributing enormously to the flow of information within Europe



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and beyond, and to the standardization of knowledge. Europe leapt ahead in print technology; by the turn of the sixteenth century, printers operated in 236 European towns.13 Population growth in the decades prior to the Black Death had led to an oversupply of workers across Europe, resulting in wage depression. Economic prospects for workers improved considerably after 1350 as demand for labor spiked, resulting in steep rises in wages. Wage earners also became more mobile as skilled workers found opportunities to move from one neighborhood to another, across parish boundaries, or even from one city to another, disseminating technical knowledge in the process.14 The so-​called golden age of labor in late fourteenth-​century Europe led to novel attempts to control wage and price inflation. In England, a robust system of civil government emerged from efforts to control wages after the plague, and by the end of the seventeenth century this civil system would enable London to become the economic center of the Atlantic world. Soon after the plague, local juries and justices of the peace began to administer statutes on wages and prices enacted by crown and Parliament. By 1400, this parish-​centered bureaucracy had acquired responsibility for enforcing other statutes and orders as well, including tax collection. “It was not very efficient,” historian Joseph Strayer acknowledged, “but it was inefficient at less cost than that of most other states.” When crown, Parliament, and parish elites could agree, England’s centralized but also locally entrenched government proved more effective than other governments in “mobilizing human and financial resources.”15 Enormous effort went into rebuilding corporate institutions after the plague, and the creative achievements of these institutions were greater afterward than before. But the shocking devastation wrought by the Black Death introduced fissures of skepticism about Christian cosmology and social order that deepened everywhere over time. Problems developing before the Black Death became more volatile afterward, with the Hundred Years’ War between France and England driving public debt, currency debasement, heavy taxation, and onerous military service. Venetian wars with Genoa, Milan, and the Ottoman Empire destabilized Italian cities and disrupted commerce in southern Europe. Urban revolts became more frequent as resentment of guild control over labor and of merchant control over guilds surfaced in many cities. In the sharply divided worlds of fifteenth-​century Europe, the imagined communities of corporate Christianity were objects of controversy as much as they were ideals. Regional differences, political conflict, and dire warnings about lapses in Christian community were hardly new. But demands for human accountability became more pressing as the canopy of divine order became more subject to controversy.16

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The trauma of the Black Death created opportunities for the assimilation of classical humanism, especially with regard to how ancient writers respected both skepticism and human despair. Letters written by the fourteenth-​century scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch illustrate the appeal of newly recovered ancient authors as aids in expressing doubt and grief. An avid reader of Cicero and Virgil, Petrarch turned to classical writings for help after the onslaught of the plague in Florence left so many dead, including his beloved Laura. In one of his letters, Petrarch crafted his despair into a question to Socrates: “What now, brother? We have tried almost everything, and nowhere have we found peace.” Reaching for consolation from the ancient philosopher, Petrarch confessed, “The year 1348 has left us solitary and bereaved.”17 An outpouring of sadness affected popular devotion as well. Among pilgrims to Rome in 1350, the story spread that a weary, suffering Christ had appeared to St. Gregory 750  years before, when Gregory’s celebration of the Eucharist was interrupted by a woman doubting the reality of Christ’s presence under the appearance of the eucharistic elements (the doctrine of transubstantiation). Depictions of Jesus as the Man of Sorrows appeared on altarpieces throughout Europe after the pilgrims returned to their homes with this story. Resonating with gruesome memories of the Black Death, these altarpieces displayed heightened interest in the human suffering that Jesus embodied. And the popularity of the story about a woman questioning the doctrine of transubstantiation resonated both with religious uncertainty after the epidemic and with religious efforts to lay that uncertainty to rest.18 Meanwhile, religious institutions benefited from windfalls of pious donations. The income of many religious institutions increased dramatically after the Black Death, even as the ranks of men and women under religious vows who managed this income, and received support from it, shrank just as suddenly. The resulting consolidation of religious wealth funded new charitable endeavors and ambitious projects in religious art and architecture aimed at promoting, expanding upon, and shoring up Christian faith. Just as the apparent futility of religious devotion during the Black Death created impetus for religious skepticism, so the consolidation of religious wealth supported grand new efforts to encourage devotion, suppress skepticism, and draw new recruits and new wealth into religious life. Obsession with the suffering of Jesus intensified after the great plague, emerging as a focal point of cultural transition in which human feeling received increasing attention as a basis for moral value and social order. Before the Black Death, female mystics in southern Germany and the Low Countries were already fixated on the Eucharist and redemptive suffering manifest in the body of Jesus. Legendary accounts of the anguish experienced



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by these mystics contributed to popular demand for the Eucharist. As Carolyn Bynum argued, late medieval images of the suffering of Jesus reveal a new integration of body and soul through personal identification with Jesus, and even the beginnings of modern individualism. The new sense of personhood evolving through late medieval religious imagery coincided with the uptick in artistry and trade, and with the emergence of bourgeois sentimentality and consumerism.19 Despite the falloff in population after the Black Death, the Feast of Corpus Christi grew in importance as a context for commerce, religion, and interaction between the two. Donations to groups participating in the feast increased, along with the number of organizations dedicated solely to the feast and its summer production. The routes of Corpus Christi processions traced the borders of collective life in villages and linked zones of semi-​autonomous activity in cities to one another. Processions followed avenues of trade and information, and they outlined defensive borders protecting the city from outside threats. In Würzburg, for example, the Corpus Christi parade of 1381 began at the cathedral and traveled through the market square to the bridge at the river outside the city gate where produce came in, and where traffic in raw materials, trade goods, and news flowed back and forth. The procession continued along the city wall before heading back into the city to several parish churches that attracted donations from craft guilds and religious confraternities. The parade finally returned through the market square to the cathedral that towered over all. Processions stopped along the route for performances sponsored by religious fraternities and craft guilds. Representatives of various corporate entities processed in rank order behind the leaders of city government and the clergy, who transported the sacred host displayed in a monstrance, a container designed for that purpose. Bystanders beheld the “most precious coin” at the head of the procession, which represented the currency shared with others and the promise of each believer’s individual “transaction” into heaven through membership in Christ’s body.20 For all their utility as a socially unifying force, Corpus Christi parades eventually became provocations for religious, political, and economic dissent. Though these parades served the purposes of ruling elites, showing the numerous corporate units of society processing through town in orderly harmony, the visible displays of authority and wealth in the processions also exposed these oligarchies to dissent. The linkage between the body of Christ and society as a whole—​epitomized by the eucharistic wafer at the center of it all—​became a flash point of religious, economic, and political contention. The more visible the alignment between clerical authority and merchant wealth, the more that resentment of guild monopolies and city taxes spilled

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into criticism of priestly corruption and church wealth, and the greater the demand for accountability to Pauline standards of corporate life.21 Rejection of the Eucharist as an emblem of social order broke out in England around 1380, when the Oxford philosopher John Wyclif and his supporters challenged the church doctrine of transubstantiation. According to this doctrine, the consecration of the eucharistic wafer during the mass transformed the substance of the wafer from bread into the body of Christ, while the material accidents—​whiteness and roundness—​remained. Arguing that the sacrament of the Eucharist was beyond human understanding (and beyond the power of the papal hierarchy to control), Wyclif maintained that if only whiteness and roundness remained, it could not be bread, and if it still appeared to be bread, the wafer could not really be Christ.22 Refusing to equate the presence of Christ with the visible wafer and its episcopal control, Wyclif and his followers appealed instead to Paul’s claim that the members of the church constituted the body of Christ, unified by Christ’s spirit of charity. Elevating Paul’s authority above the papacy and episcopal power, they envisioned the church as a spiritual fellowship united through time, not an authorization of contemporary rule. Though they lacked the organizational structure to form a lasting movement, Lollards endorsing Wyclif’s ideas represented themselves as “poor men of the treasure of Christ,” aspiring to save the church. Reports circulated that these dissenters refused to look at the host at the moment of consecration, turning their eyes to heaven instead.23 Wyclif’s Bohemian sympathizer Jan Hus accepted transubstantiation but objected to religious ceremonialism that separated Christ’s presence from communities of love. Like Lollards in England, Hussites in Bohemia devolved into small groups that failed to coalesce. Thwarted by poverty, persecution, and lack of organization, Lollards and Hussites were “haphazard” iconoclasts without a “systematically developed ideological foundation.” Yet as Carlos Eire explained, their protest against equating Christianity with “external symbols” created “a strong tremor that revealed the pressures building up beneath the surface of medieval society.”24 When better-​organized dissenters emerged in the sixteenth century, the materiality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist became a major point of contention. Ridiculing belief that Christ could be perceived in a paste of flour and water, these dissenters used their complaints about the Catholic Eucharist to launch broader ideas about what was wrong with society and how the corporate structure of medieval society should be reformed. Division over the Eucharist invited assertions about the true nature of the church, which led in turn to protests against oligarchic rulers and the commercial wealth supporting them.



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In this fractured environment, burghers excluded from elite merchant guilds tended to support protestant regimes, eager to replace men with deeper ties to wealth on city councils. In the Reformation movements of northern Germany during the sixteenth century, economic, political, and religious concerns strongly reinforced one another, as middle-class lay leaders seeking to spiritualize the Eucharist also wanted to maintain fishing rights, preserve access to common grounds, and regulate prices for grain to keep it affordable. Upholding their own interpretations of Paul, protestant burghers sought restoration of communal principles embedded in city constitutions, and called for the renewal of oaths of citizenship legitimating their right to serve on city councils.25 Meanwhile, merchant groups experimented with new approaches to corporate organization. Headquartered in European cities, merchant companies provided capital for overland trade and overseas expansion, operating as small nations with financial systems supporting satellite communities in other cities. Merchant nations developed satellite operations in Lyons and Antwerp and expanded commercial activity in their home cities of Florence, Amsterdam, and London. Florence took the lead in corporate finance, with Amsterdam and London acquiring influence through wool industries, print culture, and commercial expansion in northern Europe. Building on financial strategies developed in Florence, Amsterdam and London emerged as powerful economic hubs, with London eventually coming to dominate commerce in the Atlantic world. Important developments in corporate organization in each of these three cities accelerated the momentum of commercial expansion, eventually transforming the Atlantic world into an arena of global trade. Religion contributed to this process of modernization, sometimes inspiring confidence and ambition, sometimes justifying exploitation of people and resources, and sometimes demanding accountability to God and Christian charity. Founded as a self-​governing republic in the late 1200s under the aegis of imperial German authority, Florence became a hub of trade and banking, and a leading merchant nation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Exploiting influence they had obtained by means of loans to the Vatican, the French court, and the English king Edward III, Florentine bankers stimulated commercial expansion throughout Europe. In exchange for loans from banks headquartered in Florence, many of the city’s merchants reaped the benefits of free passage to other European cities and tax exemptions on grain exports from southern Italy and wool exports from England. As bankers consolidated control over the city through loans and pious donations, Florence became a center of high-​quality workmanship, luxury goods, and artistic patronage, with guilds devoted to specific building materials, decorative arts, and forms of textile production. The Medici family and their allies rose to power through

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this patronage system and its facade of republicanism, cultivating strong alliances with popes and papal allies in France and Italy while espousing communal values favored by mendicant religious orders and lay fraternities. Under the banner of civic humanism, Pauline community, and investment in the splendor of Florence as a new Rome, the Medici bankrolled merchants and princes across Europe.26 As a holding company for banks in Rome, Bruges, London, and other European cities, the Medici Bank derived most of its profit from loans—​ which had to be represented as gifts to comply with laws against usury. The Medici Bank also traded in commodities, especially the wool needed in every European city, and many luxury items, including fine textiles from Spain, North Africa, and Asia. The bank brought religion and trade together by collecting and commissioning splendid religious art, managing the transfer of tithes to Rome, and expediting the trade in textiles and other commodities that enabled cities and principalities to pay their tithes. The more service the Medici performed for popes and their entourages, the more the Vatican operated like the Medici—​awash in art, luxury, and commerce. In 1466, the church even took control over the European trade in alum, a mineral essential to cloth dyeing, sanctioning this breach of church laws against monopoly as necessary to fund a Crusade against Ottoman Turks.27 For all their contributions to finance and humanism in Europe, the Medici proved unable to manage volatile religious forces in Florence. When Lorenzo de’Medici brought Girolamo Savonarola back to the city from his teaching post in Bologna in 1495, the fiery Dominican preacher ignited an uproar. Savonarola approved religious imagery that promoted charity, love of God, and external expressions of internal beauty, and, like the Medici, he combined Christian piety with new attention to personhood expressed in devotion to the Eucharist. But he condemned other things the Medici adored, including elaborate ornamentation, portraits of wealthy patrons imposed upon saints or inserted into paintings of biblical scenes, and depictions of the Virgin that hinted at her sexual allure, most notable in the work of the Medici artist Sandro Boticelli, who used the same model for painting both the Virgin Mary and the pagan goddess Venus. Savonarola was particularly critical of the extravagance, avarice, and hypocrisy of the Medici’s ally Alexander VI, the Borgia pope.28 An apocalyptic visionary, Savonarola threatened God’s vengeance if religious and civic leaders did not mend their ways. His thunderous denunciations and forecasts of horrific destruction throughout Europe drew large crowds and stoked anger over papal and Medici wealth. Already feeling the economic pinch on textile production and commercial trade produced by competition from the rising economic centers of northern Europe, many in



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Florence resented Lorenzo’s tyrannical behavior, especially after he jettisoned any pretense of governing the republic as first among equals and began to travel around the city surrounded by well-​armed guards. When Lorenzo died, leaving his inept twenty-​two-​year-​old son Piero in charge, Pope Alexander forced Piero to join his alliance with the Neapolitan king Alfonso II against France. In retaliation, the French king Charles VIII threw Florentine businessmen out of France, creating financial panic in Florence, and moved to invade the city. Savonarola preached on the Genesis story of the flood, calling the people of Florence to withstand the French deluge and cling to the ark of Christ.29 Seeking to control the city in Christ’s name, Savonarola led a revolt against Piero, forced the Medici to leave the city, and negotiated an agreement with Charles, who had arrived in force to take over the city and then departed. The Dominican lobbied for restoration of the city council, a republican form of government, and the renovation of Pauline morality. “It is of the utmost importance,” Savonarola argued in his plan for city government, “that the city foster good living and that it be filled with good men, especially priests.” Citing examples from the Old Testament, he claimed, “If religion and morality improve, government is bound to be perfected.” Fed up with Savonarola’s fulminations, Pope Alexander ordered him tortured until he confessed to heresy and then burned alive.30 Coinciding with the corruption and declining power of the Medici, Dutch merchants contributed to the shift of European economic activity from the Mediterranean to seaports in the north. By 1500, ships from northern ports had opened trade with Asia and industry in the Low Countries expanded as wool from England, grain and timber from Baltic regions, and iron and copper from central European mines flowed into Dutch cities. By 1550, Antwerp had become a leading entrepôt of foreign merchants from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Hanseatic League. With 90,000 inhabitants, Antwerp had become one of the largest cities north of the Alps; only Paris’s population of 130,000 was greater. But Antwerp did not enjoy easy access to the seas. Many of her leading merchants moved to Amsterdam, which was also a rising commercial center, but one with superior access to the Baltic and also to the Atlantic Ocean, over which goods from Asia and the Americas increasingly flowed. While foreign merchants had created the city of Antwerp and controlled much of the trade there, the merchants of Amsterdam operated a fleet of their own, and by 1550, their city had become “the most important staple market for bulk goods from the Baltic, especially grain and timber.” When Holland separated from Spanish rule in 1570 and erected a strong border division between the southern and northern Low Countries, Spain unleashed its

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fury on Antwerp. Many of that city’s leading merchants had already moved to Amsterdam.31 Even before Holland separated from the centralizing regime of Catholic Spain, the people of Amsterdam enjoyed a high degree of social mobility and “occupational flexibility.” Lacking the strong tradition of guild monopolism that existed elsewhere, the Hollanders’ penchant for grassroots organization conditioned their reception of protestant theory and social practice. When Amsterdam became a hot spot for Calvinist preaching, a variety of protestant groups found homes there. In contrast to Geneva, where the French reformer John Calvin established authoritarian institutions to regulate economic activity within a religiously unified city, Amsterdam’s “pluriform religious life” thrived in the context of “a relatively high degree of toleration and space for personal freedom.” Despite intermittent attempts by the protestant city councils to prohibit Catholic worship, Catholics remained a large and active minority.32 Amsterdam’s success as a hub of European commerce drew from protestant interpretations of Pauline corporatism as primarily a fellowship of mutual trust, more or less independent of outside control. Martin Luther’s call from Wittenberg for a “priesthood of all believers” resonated powerfully within the open and decentralized social institutions of Amsterdam, though in ways that Luther—​who considered trading companies a “bottomless pit of avarice and wrong-​doing”—​would not have approved. While Amsterdam’s merchant communities were too lax for strict Calvinists, and were flourishing as a result of the commercial activity Luther distrusted, many Amsterdam merchants appreciated the advantages of fellowships of mutual trust. As men whose businesses benefited from networks of religious affiliation, the merchants of Amsterdam created communal networks that, like protestant churches, depended more on invisible bonds of trust than on external signs of corporate unity. Their respect for independent, voluntary organizations extended to merchant companies of Catholic Walloons and Portuguese Jews who made Amsterdam their home, as well as to merchant companies founded by Huguenots and other Reformed protestants.33 Amsterdam became a hub of finance, as bankers adapted Italian systems for handling and clearing deposits; the city became Europe’s biggest creditor and amassed Europe’s largest store of precious metals. When the Amsterdam Bourse opened in 1611, it drew merchants and goods from around the world. Modeled on the Antwerp Bourse and London’s Royal Exchange, this permanent center for trade, banking, insurance, and shipping supplanted the medieval system of periodic regional fairs. When its gates opened at noon each day, people of all sorts jammed into the square to change money, conduct business, and view the textiles, spices, olives, and rice on display. With the



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Amsterdam Bourse operating as “the nerve center of the entire international economy,” the city’s population ballooned from about two hundred thousand in 1600 to more than half a million by 1650.34 Nothing affected the flow of trade or the conduct of trade business more than the cheap price sheets that Amsterdam merchants printed and sold. The city became a repository and purveyor of information—​“a great Staple of News,” one Englishman called it. With advances in print technology, Amsterdam became a clearinghouse for information about weather, wars, and crop production in different parts of the world, as well as notices about shipping delays and goods coming into port. Printers could easily adjust price lists as new information became available, correcting errors and miscalculations on previous lists. With print technology enabling sellers to convey broad-​ranging and trustworthy information to buyers, price lists sold in Amsterdam exerted a stabilizing force on trade throughout Europe. Reflecting expectations about delays or short shipments resulting from drought, disease, and war as well as early information about bumper crops expected to come to market, price lists helped buyers and sellers prepare for fluctuations that, in the past, would have caught them by surprise, with little time to manage overflows or depletions of goods, or to avoid spiking or collapsing prices.35 The impersonality of price sheets epitomized a process of secularization that enabled dissemination of information across and outside the boundaries of particular organizations. Merchants purchasing price lists may themselves have been embedded in particular religious cultures, and dependent on religious trust within those cultures to do business. But price lists did not show the religious associations operating behind columns of numbers and names of commodities available for sale. Abstracted from correspondence, word of mouth, and comparison of different sources, the information on these lists did not require any particular gateway of religious faith to access. London built on Amsterdam’s success. Like Amsterdam during the seventeenth century, London was a thriving port city with access to the Atlantic as well as the Baltic, a magnet of wealth, ambition, and creativity, and a hub of news and intellectual life. International trade first developed in London as an extension of the Antwerp trade, but by 1690 the operations of English merchant companies headquartered in London rivaled those in Amsterdam. By the first decades of the eighteenth century, London had surpassed Amsterdam as the world’s greatest trade center.36 London had first emerged as a powerful metropolis in the wake of the massive transfer of wealth associated with Henry VIII’s confiscation of monastic properties beginning in the 1520s. To pay his debts and gather military and political support, Henry sold or gave away many of these confiscated

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properties, resulting in a significant increase in the number and wealth of landed gentry. Henry’s gambit made the crown more accountable to the gentry, who used their influence in Parliament to limit the power of the crown, saddling Henry’s heir, Elizabeth, during her long reign from 1558 to 1603, with financial constraints that earlier monarchs had not faced. To get around Parliament’s control over government monies, Elizabeth chartered numerous corporations in exchange for revenue to the crown, further diluting her power, but also stimulating exploration and commercial ventures in the New World that would eventually feed London’s wealth and commercial clout.37 Meanwhile, Henry’s claim to spiritual authority as “head” of England’s church strengthened English sovereignty and independence, opening the way for protestant influence in religious as well as economic life. Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer’s campaign to consolidate Anglican doctrine resulted in a manual for worship services that appeared in 1549 and in a more reformed edition of 1552. Emphasizing Paul’s conception of the church as a corporate fellowship, The Book of Common Prayer reflected the influence of Strasbourg’s leading reformer, Martin Bucer, who had been recruited to London to advise the short-​lived young king Edward VI, brother to the future queen Elizabeth. In Bucer’s view, church membership overlapped with other forms of Christian association, confessions of faith in Christ operating in concert with oaths required of citizens and guild members. While churches did perform unique services, including baptism, celebration of the Eucharist, and preaching the word of God, he argued for the application of Christian principles to all aspects of worldly life, in opposition to any tendency “to reduce the whole of the sacred ministry into a narrow compass.”38 The foundations for this neo-​Pauline view of Christian governance as more or less coextensive with civic and secular life were already in place. The Tudor state rested on a corporate network of parishes where religious, economic, and political activities intertwined. With parish boundaries binding local populations to designated churches, laypeople exercised increasing control of parish governments after 1400, with churchwardens responsible for church maintenance, and collection boxes managed by parishioners. Lay oversight expanded during the sixteenth century to the organization of vestries to allocate funds, monitor the behavior of priests, and keep the peace by admonishing breaches of neighborly love. Though similar to urban communes in their encompassing sense of corporate life, English parishes were unique in linking local agrarian communities to king and Parliament, to a national church, and to a nationwide system of law and taxation.39 The secular functions of parish government developed over time, as economic, judicial, and legal powers accumulated at the parish level. Tudor and



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Stuart governments centered in London utilized these parish organizations for purposes of taxation and economic control, increasing their secular functions as agents of the central government. Local pride in self-​government and religious life demanded respect, however, and pushback against London elites could be dramatic. One historian attributes the democratic idealism of the Levellers during the English Civil War of the 1640s to an upsurge of religious communalism against government centralization.40 New interpretations of Pauline Christianity, centered on introspection, fellowship, and the difference between law and grace, fed into the vitality of the British economy prior to the Civil War of the 1640s. Historian John Coolidge pointed to the “renaissance” of Pauline Christianity in puritanism, locating “the matrix of Puritan thought” in a “Pauline understanding of scripture,” rediscovered during “a time of cultural dislocation.” This heightened interest in Pauline theology within English Christianity was fairly widespread, including broad-​minded proponents of religious toleration such as John Milton as well as people focused on precise applications of scripture to ordinary life. As Patrick Collinson argued, both “puritanism and Anglicanism” are best seen as “elusive and intangible” designations: “The English Church of this age was a spectrum, in which the extremes of colour are clear enough, but the intermediate tones merge imperceptibly.” The fluidity of this puritan-​Anglican mix coexisted with the blunter machinery of Tudor religious policy, which upheld protestant faith during the reign of Edward VI, lurched back to endorse the old religion under the Catholic Queen Mary, and then back again to protestant Christianity under Elizabeth. Varying interpretations of Pauline corporatism thrived beneath official decrees, with gifted pastors and heartrending preachers drawing new followers into “godly” fellowship, but not clearly separated from others, as Elizabeth recognized. “By a kind of charitable assumption, the whole nation, however ignorant, however lacking in faith, was deemed to be ‘the people of the Lord’ ” and members of Christ.41 Citing Pauline scripture for authority, ministers on the puritan end of the spectrum equated moral accountability with a blend of inward piety and communal fellowship that accommodated secular trends including the evacuation of elaborate religious iconography from churches, the expansion of parish vestries into agencies of civic governance, and the shift from celibate religious orders to ordinary family life as epicenters of religious life. Citing 1 Corinthians, William Ames explained the duty of godly minsters to encourage critical introspection: “Men are to be pricked to the quick so that they feel individually what the Apostle said, namely, that the word of the Lord is a two-​edged sword, piercing to the inward thoughts and affections and going through to the joining of bone and marrow.” This visceral internalization brought people

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into close relationships with each other, “joined together in a special bond for the continual exercise of the communion of saints among themselves.” As Ames explained the place of fellowship communities within the big picture of Pauline organization, “such a congregation or particular church is a society of believers” united by faith to other communions as “members” of the body of Christ.42 The blend of self-​examination and fellowship in this new reading of Pauline theology facilitated a secularizing trend with regard to the question of lending money at interest. Medieval canon law condemned usury as a sin, and church authorities withheld the sacraments from blatant offenders. For centuries, priests had spoken out against usury as a violation of commandments in both the New and Old Testaments, even as loopholes allowed Christians to rely on Jewish brokers or to represent repayments exceeding the amount of loans as gifts. When it passed the Act Against Usury in 1571, Parliament broke new ground in considering usury a matter of civil law and thus a crime against the state. Members of the House of Commons conducted the debate in theological terms, however, with copious reference to scripture and religious authorities, including Luther, who argued that, like murderers and thieves, usurers should be denied Christian burial. The outvoted minority had objected to that line of reasoning, maintaining that the usefulness of money depended on its being used; by denying lenders the productivity of their own money, borrowers who returned money without interest treated lenders unfairly.43 By 1624, the transition to secular regulation of finance moved to completion. When a new bill to regulate interest rates and brokerage fees came up for debate that year, efforts to bring government fiscal policy under biblical rule could not be sustained. Discussion concentrated on setting the right ceiling on interest rates, rather than on the question of whether or not to allow usury. Avoiding theological language, the House of Commons struck from the proposed preamble of the new bill the sentence “All usury is forbidden by the law of God.” A number of factors contributed to this reconceptualization of financial activity—​money shortages, demand for cheaper money, new opportunities for overseas trade, and sharp competition from the Dutch all exerted pressure, as did Parliament’s interest in enlarging its own scope of authority. Religious opinion had also changed to reflect trust in conscience and church as the proper settings for settling scriptural and theological questions about economic activity, aside from the regulatory power of the state.44 This secular approach to finance affected commercial corporations headquartered in London. Beyond the obvious advantage to them of a government empowered to facilitate access to credit, English willingness to grant authority to individual conscience contributed to new respect for corporate shareholders.



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Unlike the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-​Indische Compagnie, or VOC), founded in 1602, whose directors enjoyed lifetime appointments and withheld information from shareholders, London’s East India Company, founded in 1600, granted authority to its shareholding members, enabling them to elect the directors of the company for renewable but relatively short-​ term appointments. Both companies were important because of the range of their enterprises and because they capitalized ongoing commercial ventures to India and the Levant, rather than one voyage at a time. Both companies allowed investors to sell their shares, shielded them from some liabilities, and specified the responsibilities of managers. But while the VOC operated more like a partnership, with roots in the older, oligarchic merchant companies of Italy, the joint-​stock companies that emerged out of London drew new investors and created new wealth along with a growing class of corporate activists, more than a few of whom would find their fortunes in North America.45 Stressing the importance of individual conscience in conjunction with religious community, English interpretations of Pauline theology contributed to new ways of conceptualizing Christian accountability in the context of growing enthusiasm for commercial activity and secular rule. Puritan interpretations of Paul stimulated corporate activity in England in the early seventeenth century, enabling the creation of new commercial companies in North America animated by religious purpose. As the Geneva reformer admired by English puritans maintained, “We need not . . . see the church with the eyes or touch it with the hands.”46

Notes 1. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 164–​185, 210. 2. Ibid. 3. Steven A. Epstein, Wage and Labor Guilds in Medieval Europe (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 91–​98; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–​18th Century, vol. 2, trans. Siân Reynolds (London:  Collins, 1982), 26–​113; J. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1969), 23–​91. 4. Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Methuen, 1984), 12–​65; Epstein, Wage and Labor Guilds, 50–​101; Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–​1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 67–​78; Christopher Black, “Introduction:  The Confraternity in Context,” in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas:  International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives,

62 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe ed. Christopher Black and Pamela Gravestock (Hampshire, UK:  Ashgate, 2006), 1–​25. 5. Brian Tierney, “Religion and Rights:  A Medieval Perspective,” Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 1 (January 1, 1987):  163–​175, quotation from Romans 12 on 170; Black, “Confraternity in Context,” 1–​25; Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links Between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame, 1995; orig. 2nd ed. in German, 1961), 89–​137; Constance Hoffman Berman, The Cistercian Evolution:  The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-​ Century Europe (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 6. Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi, 3–​4, 155–​157, 166, 277–​280; Tierney, “Religion and Rights,” quotation from 170. 7. Tierney, “Religion and Rights,” quotations from 170 and 171. 8. Steven A. Epstein, The Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–​1500 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 159, 168–​178. 9. John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2001), 155–​158. 10. Boccaccio, “First Day—​Introduction,” Decameron [009, 020, 021, and 023], trans. J.  M. Rigg (1903), http://​www.brown.edu/​Departments/​Italian_​Studies/​dweb/​ texts, accessed April 13, 2014. 11. David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 12. Epstein, Economic and Social History, 190–​222, quotation from 184. 13. Ibid., 190–​222. 14. Ibid., 222, 237, 247; Black, Guilds and Civil Society. 15. Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005; orig. 1970), 73–​74; Epstein, Wage and Labor, 237. 16. Epstein, Economic and Social History, 223–​249. 17. R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiares, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 247–​256; Giuseppe Velli, “Petrarch’s ‘Epistole,’” Italica 82, nos. 3/​4 (October 1, 2005): 366–​379; Renée Neu Watkins, “Petrarch and the Black Death: From Fear to Monuments,” Studies in the Renaissance 19 (January 1, 1972): 196–​223; Francesco Petrarch, opening paragraph, “To His Friend Socrates: Preface to His First Collection of Letters,” trans. James Harvey Robinson, http://​petrarch. petersadlon.com/​read_​letters.html?s=pet02.html, accessed April 27, 2014. 18. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 207, 222–​223, 308–​309. 19. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption:  Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 119–​150;



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Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1987), 68, 253; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 156–​199, 247. 20. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 199, 243–​287, 14. 21. Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken:  The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-​Century Europe (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1999), 15–​ 26; Heinz Schilling, “The Reformation in the Hanseatic Cities,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 4 (December 1, 1983): 443–​ 456; Bernd Moeller, “Imperial Cities and the Reformation,” in Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, ed. and trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards Jr. (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1982; orig. 1972; orig. in German, 1962), 41–​115. Also see Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8–​27; Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation:  Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14–​45. 22. Frederick David Matthew, “Introduction,” The English Works of Wyclif (London: Trubner and Company, 1880), xx–​xxii; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 281–​290. 23. Hudson, Premature Reformation, 170–​171, quotation from 170; John Wyclif, “How Religious Men Should Keep Certain Articles,” English Works of Wyclif, 219–​225; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 324–​334. 24. Eire, War Against the Idols, 22–​24, quotation from 24; William R. Cook, “John Wyclif and Hussite Theology, 1415–​1436,” Church History 42, no. 3 (September 1, 1973):  335–​349; John M. Klassen, “The Czech Nobility’s Use of the Right of Patronage on Behalf of the Hussite Reform Movement,” Slavic Review 34, no. 2 (June 1, 1975):  341–​359; Howard Kaminsky, “Chiliasm and the Hussite Revolution,” Church History 26, no. 1 (March 1, 1957): 43–​71; Howard Kaminsky, “Pius Aeneas Among the Taborites,” Church History 28, no. 3 (September 1, 1959): 281–​301. 25. Schilling, “The Reformation in the Hanseatic Cities.” 26. Frédéric Mauro, “Merchant Communities, 1350–​1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires:  Long-​Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–​1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990), 255–​286; John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–​1575 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 39–​50, 52, 72–​76, 116–​117, 315–​316; John M. Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–​1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3–​78, 148, 158; Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 48–​49. 27. Tim Parks, Medici Money:  Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-​Century Florence (London: Profile Books, 2005), esp. 194.

64 Roman Antiquity and Medi eval Europe 28. Jill Burke, Changing Patrons:  Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 155–​187; Weinstein, Savonarola, 68–​71. 29. Weinstein, Savonarola, 57, 86–​93, 105–​108. 30. Girolamo Savonarola, “Treatise on the Constitution and Government of the City of Florence,” in Humanism and Liberty: Writings of Freedom from Fifteenth-​ Century Florence, trans. and ed. Renée Neu Watkins (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 231–​ 260, quotations from Second Treatise, Chapter III, 247; also see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 113, 171–​173; Alison Brown, The Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Perth:  University of Western Australia Press, 1992), 263–​303. 31. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy 1500–​ 1815 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23–​24; Clé Lesger, The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange:  Merchants, Commercial Expansion and Change in the Spatial Economy of the Low Countries c.  1550–​1630, trans. J. C. Grayson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1–​10, quotation from 9. 32. De Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, quotations from 160. 33. Martin Luther and Helmut T. Lehman, The Christian in Society: Luther’s Works, vol. 45 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1962), quotation from 270. 34. De Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, quotations from 129 and 147; also see Lesger, Rise of the Amsterdam Market, 222–​226, 131–​132. 35. Lesger, Rise of the Amsterdam Market, 214–​257, quotation from 214. 36. Peter Earle, “The Economy of London, 1660–​1730,” in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Glden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, ed. Patrick O’Brien, Marjolein ’t Hart, and Herman van der Wee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81–​96. 37. John Cannon and Ralph Griffiths, The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 317–​325, 338–​353, 383–​ 387; J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 130. 38. Bickle, “Communal Reformation,” quotation from 227; Ulrich Zwingli, “The Sixty-​Seven Articles of Zwingli,” trans. Samuel Macauley Jackson (1901), https://​ www.christianhistoryinstitute.org/​study/​module/​zwinglis-​sixty-​seven-​articles, accessed June 10, 2014, quotations from Articles XIX, XVII, VII; Schilling, “The Reformation in the Hanseatic Cities”; Mark E. VanderSchaaf, “Archbishop Parker’s Efforts Toward a Bucerian Discipline in the Church of England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 8, no. 1 (April 1, 1977): 85–​103; Amy Nelson Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation in the Thought of Martin Bucer,”



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Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 3 (October 1, 1991): 439–​456, esp. 446; Patrick Collinson, “The Reformer and the Archbishop:  Martin Bucer and an English Bucerian,” Journal of Religious History 6, no. 4 (December 1, 1971):  305–​330, quotation from 310. 39. Beat A. Kümin, The Shaping of a Community:  The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–​1560 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1996), 1–​52, 216, 234–​235. 40. Ibid., 216, 234–​235; Dairmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors:  Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–​1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 48, 338; also see Susan J. Wright, ed., Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–​1750 (London: Hutchinson, 1988). 41. John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England:  Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1970), 11, 48–​ 49, quotations from xiii; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1990; orig. 1967), 21–​28, quotations from 27 and 25; Patrick Collinson, “Antipuritanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19–​33. 42. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. from the third Latin edition of 1629 by John Dykstra Eusden (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983; orig. 1968), quotations from 193 and 179. 43. Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 1–​65. 44. Ibid., 175–​205, quotation from 195. 45. Jonathan G.  S. Koppell, “Shareholder Advocacy and the Development of the Corporation: The Timeless Dilemmas of an Ago-​Old Solution,” in The Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, ed. Jonathan G. S. Koppell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–​26; Oscar Gelderblom, Abe de Jong, and Joost Jonker, “An Admiralty for Asia: Business Organization and the Evolution of Corporate Governance in the Dutch Republic, 1590–​1640,” in Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, 29–​70; Andrew von Nordenflycht, “The Great Expropriation:  Interpreting the Innovation of ‘Permanent Capital’ at the Dutch East India Company,” in Origins of Shareholder Advocacy, 89–​98. 46. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, ed. John T. McNeill (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), quotation from 1015.

PART TWO

Corporate Organization in America

4

“The Hearty Hand of Friendship” New Men and Corporate Enterprise in British America

Commerce in North america was risky in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and investors were wary. The British East India Company (EIC) raised £2 million for trade with India and the Levant between 1609 and 1621, but the governing board of the royalist Virginia Company could raise only 2 percent of that amount. And little wonder. Between 1609 and 1611, of the cohort of 535 colonists who arrived in the crown colony of Virginia, only 60 managed to survive. Reports of skeletal men eating snakes, leather boots, and exhumed corpses circulated in Britain, as did the sensational account of the Virginia colonist who killed, chopped, salted, stored, and ate his wife. Political disorganization and rebellion plagued the colony as planters became fixated on short-​term profit from tobacco, and as resentment smoldered among Indians, slaves, and British convicts working as indentured servants.1 Early enterprise in New England did not look promising, either. Efforts to establish industries in northern New England in the 1610s and 1620s failed for want of investors and settlers. Recalling his attempt to establish a colony of poor, hardworking Anglicans to ship fish and timber back to England, Ferdinando Gorges told of stormy voyages across the northern Atlantic, bitterly cold winters, and the “great straits this Wildernesse people were in for want of food.”2 Though early initiatives failed or barely managed, capital investments began to make returns in the 1630s, and company plantations in New England, Virginia, and the Caribbean attracted a surge of English migrants. In 1635 alone, almost five thousand people sailed to American plantations from London, the equivalent of about 1.5 percent of the city’s entire population. Population growth in England spurred this exodus, along with growing

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poverty and the decline in English textile production due to the influx of EIC textiles from India.3 Investment in North America opened opportunities for smaller investors that gradually began to pay off. While membership on the governing board of the EIC required an investment of £2,000 and drew exclusively from London’s elite merchant class, “new men” of the “middling sort” from cities outside of London could invest in and manage companies in America. Smaller companies operating in America could compete more freely than large companies like the EIC, with few of the monopolistic restrictions common in Europe. And unlike the EIC, American companies did not require members of their governing boards to relinquish their work as tradesmen. By 1640, American companies had attracted hundreds of relatively small investors, many of whom harbored anti-​royalist sympathies and puritan leanings. Supporting the business endeavors of small investors, preachers celebrated “liberty in Christ” and the “new man” described by the Apostle Paul, whose writings puritans revered as a foremost source of authority.4 The crackdown on religious nonconformity under the authoritarian Archbishop Laud also stimulated emigration to America during the 1630s. While poverty and binding labor contracts drove the vast majority of migrants to cross the Atlantic, religious dissent was a major factor in the establishment of American institutions. Hundreds of merchant families with puritan leanings, and dozens of men of similar disposition with professional backgrounds in religion and politics, and with legal training, government experience, or theological expertise, soon emerged as plantation leaders. These were “new men” in two senses of the term—​in the Pauline sense of understanding themselves as empowered through membership in Christ and in the commercial sense of being men of a new middle class eager to make their mark in the expanding world of British trade. In New England they established churches, town governments, and commercial industries that often wed bold enterprise to fellowship among individuals made new in Christ. When emigration and commerce declined precipitously at the end of the 1630s on the eve of civil war in England, New Englanders offset the economic downturn by expanding their own markets. Local trade in cattle and pigs developed quickly in Massachusetts, thanks to the family discipline on which animal husbandry in New England depended. Local grain and cattle enterprise created demand for ironworks, waterwheels, and gristmills—​and blacksmiths, cartwrights, and millwrights to manage them—​while fish and lumber exports created demand for shipyards and financial institutions for credit and insurance. With the expansion of local markets in cattle, grain, fish,



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and lumber to the sugar-​producing slave colony of Barbados and other islands in the West Indies, economic activity in Massachusetts rebounded by the late 1640s and continued to grow.5 Largely left alone by the distant British government, which was preoccupied with its own turmoil, New England leaders founded independent, self-​ regulating institutions. By the time Parliament restored the monarchy in 1661, New England merchants dominated intercolonial American trade. Along with the EIC and the Russia Company, New England companies were among the first to establish permanent stock, pay dividends, form management committees, and assign operational responsibilities to capable individuals who were not company owners themselves. Well ahead of the EIC, New England land companies were the first to vote by shares, rather than by hands. These companies promoted immigration by introducing distinctions between shares in the company that formed a town through an initial investment in land, and shares in land, which might be given or sold to settlers. These advances in corporate governance favored wealthier investors but also accommodated newcomers, enabling men of relatively modest means to become shareholders in new towns and industries.6 Trade in land undergirded all these efforts. New Englanders acquired much of their land from Native Americans who faced unstoppable pressures to sell or forfeit their lands. By 1620 diseases from Europe had ravaged Native populations in New England, weakening the ability of Native groups to defend their lands. Though “exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands, belonging to this or that Prince or People, (even to a River, Brook), etc,” as Rhode Island founder Roger Williams observed in the 1630s, Natives found themselves at a legal disadvantage in transactions with colonists. Compared with Native reliance on custom and usage in determining land ownership, English conceptions of property were more abstract and impersonal, facilitating swift transactions. Natives soon realized that while colonists used their own legal apparatus to hold Indians accountable, they were far less likely to hold themselves accountable to Indians.7 The vast wilderness of North America appeared to be a resource unlike anything available in England, where land was relatively scarce, and communities were rooted in place. In England, land had long been worked, grazed, and divided into settled parishes and landed estates. When owners closed lands previously used for common grazing to improve crop yield and support sheep for the wool industry, violence often erupted, prompting resistance to for-​profit land management and numerous anti-​enclosure laws. The abundance of land across the Atlantic offered a different prospect. In New England, new communities cropped up at a great rate; some felt free to pick

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up and move, as did much of the community that relocated with their minister Thomas Hooker from Newtown (Cambridge) in Massachusetts to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1636. Puritan belief in an invisible church superseding local congregations supported these corporate spin-​offs into new locales, minimizing devotion to a national church as well as attachment to church buildings and their solid grounding in place.8 The brainchild of puritan investors, the Massachusetts Bay Company began as a land company chartered by Charles I in 1629, with a governance structure set forth in its charter and 125 English shareholders who were promised dividends in American land as part of their subscription. At a Board of Governors meeting that year, the Company reorganized, electing John Winthrop company governor. Winthrop sold his estate to make the voyage, with the agreement that he would take the charter with him to Massachusetts, where a new Board of Governors would establish a self-​governing plantation. A thousand immigrants in eleven ships made the passage across the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 1630. The following October, Winthrop and the other eight original stockholders who had crossed the ocean met to designate 116 new non-​ shareholding settlers as freemen and members of the General Court of voters, a bold move contrary to the charter’s stipulation that only shareholders could elect governors. Following this expansion of civil rights, Winthrop kept the charter hidden until 1634, despite demands from England that he return it.9 The close relationship between towns and land companies imbued all New England institutions with a commercial hue. The famed pastor and social theorist Thomas Hooker even described the churches of New England as joint-​stock companies, using the analogy of shareholding to describe how fellowship in Christ differentiated members from strangers. Companies, towns, and churches all involved “communion,” Hooker explained, “something common to many, wherein they share by way of proportion, each according to his position and place.” Church members shared stock in Christ. The “church considered as corpus organicum,” explained Hooker, was “a body organized of such prime and choice members, which may conduce to the building and beauty of the body” as a “holy temple to the Lord.” Towns created from land companies operated similarly, with some people involved as members in communion, and others involved but without the same privilege or status. Explaining how churches were organized much like towns created by land companies, Hooker wrote, “As it is in the members of civill corporations,” church members “come in vertue of the combination, which they hold by charter, and so have Corporate community” while “others come in by the by as strangers, and they communicate in the hearing of the Acts that passe, but not in the corporation community.”10



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As Hooker’s description reveals, exclusion was a prominent feature of New England social organization. A  staunch Augustinian and Calvinist, Hooker stressed the divide between true Christians and others; God predestined his elect for heaven and everyone else to hell. Members of visible churches could not be certain of their election, but they believed that God’s chosen people lived among those who upheld church rites and responsibilities. New England towns and commercial companies were not churches. But Hooker expected those institutions to enforce moral standards taught in church, and to eject or punish people who violated them.11 Hooker and others believed that all forms of true Christian organization—​ commercial, political, and ecclesiastical—​involved a mystical element that could not be captured in rational terms. For Massachusetts Bay Company governor John Winthrop, this element was Christian love, “the fruit of the new birth, and none can have it but the new Creature.” Stressing the need for respect between different ranks of society, he believed “the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against their superiors and shake off their yoke.” Such unequal distributions of power worked to everyone’s benefit, Winthrop thought, so long as “no man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy, etc, out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his Creator and the Common good.” Citing Paul, Winthrop reminded people that submission to authority was not enough: “all true Christians are of one body in Christ,” and “the ligaments of this body which knit together are Love.” Closing the sermon on a pragmatic note, Winthrop observed that a loving commune had practical value as the means to “our prosperity.”12 John Cotton, charismatic minister of First Church in the town of Boston, the hub of commerce, government, and religious life in early Massachusetts, celebrated the joy of corporate fellowship more exuberantly. Delighting in the joy of being “a new Creature” at liberty in Christ, Cotton commended the singing of psalms, a practice some considered unbiblical. He contrasted the constricted love of “an old and carnall heart, that lieth under the state of vanitie and corruption of nature,” with the boundless rejuvenation celebrated by Paul, in which “to the new Creature all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17, 18). But these pleasures were not for everyone. Corporate fellowship for Cotton was even more exclusive than for Hooker, who encouraged people to humbly prepare for grace and did not necessarily expect them to feel it.13 In England, Cotton found grace under the tutelage of Richard Sibbes, the pastor-​theologian known for his friendship with a broad cohort of puritan ministers, lawyers, and merchants. “Let us look for grace to be given in the communion of saints,” Sibbes wrote in an extended commentary on Paul’s

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second letter to the Corinthians. Preaching a mystical theory of friendship, Sibbes proclaimed, “God hath promised a blessing to the offices of communion of saints performed by one private man to another.” As a token of the “offices of communion” enacted through Christian friendship, Cotton kept a picture of Sibbes on display at home as a reminder of Sibbes’s belief that “there is sweet sight of God in the face of a friend.”14 In his lectures on the Song of Songs, Cotton promoted the mystical communion of persons with even more passion than Sibbes. “Let him kisse mee with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine,” he implored, explaining that the passage “doth shew us the happy estate of a Church or Common-​wealth, when men . . . desire to be kissed with the kisses of Gods mouth, that he would breath into them such graces as bee needful for their places.” Such graces empowered church and commonwealth with the vigor of “a Roe, or . . . young Hart upon the mountaine of spices.” Calling the church a “house of wine,” Cotton enjoined members to “be ready to faint and swoone through earnest affections, after more full and familiar fellowship.”15 Cotton wrote at length on the “congregational” interpretation of Pauline corporatism that would have lasting influence in America. Underscoring the need for loving cooperation—​“one with another, weak Christians and strong Christians”—​he celebrated “the vast liberty” permitted through “fellowship in Christ.” Key elements in Cotton’s explanation of congregational theory included self-​government, voluntary membership, and openness to ordinary people in the “Spiritual house” of Christ’s body. Exclusionary moral standards also applied. If liberty in Christ was vast, it was also limited to those who worshiped “the true God.” And the responsibilities attending this privilege were significant. “There is none under the Covenant of Grace,” Cotton claimed, “that dare allow himself any sin.”16 Not surprisingly, the mystical presence supposed to merge individual freedom with corporate order proved elusive, and disputes over freedom of expression soon erupted. Surfacing initially as a theological dispute in 1636, controversy over the relationship between grace and liberty contributed to the divide between business families with outgoing ambition and cosmopolitan interests, on one hand, and proponents of communal strength and local authority, on the other. Among those who followed John Cotton across the Atlantic was Anne Hutchinson, who arrived in 1633 with eight children and her husband, William, a well-​to-​do merchant from Lincolnshire who was elected deputy of the General Court shortly after arriving in Massachusetts. Another thirty members of the extended Hutchinson family arrived around the same time, including Anne’s brother-​in-​law, the radical minister John Wheelwright. These proponents of Christian liberty found an important supporter in Henry



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Vane Jr., the son of the king’s privy counselor, who reached New England in 1635, with some fanfare, at age twenty-​two. The highest-​ranking gentleman in the colony, Vane built an apartment for himself attached to John Cotton’s house, and soon challenged John Winthrop for the governorship, winning election over Winthrop in 1636. The radicals gathered around Cotton, Vane, and the Hutchinsons never united as a separate company, and few went as far as Anne Hutchinson in claiming, as she did during her civil trial for sedition, that God spoke to her “by an immediate revelation,” just as God had spoken to Abraham. As Winthrop tersely reported in the account he wrote for posterity, he was reelected governor, Vane returned to England, Cotton backed off from his support of the radicals, and the General Court banished Anne Hutchinson and several of her most outspoken associates.17 The Pauline trope of membership in the body of Christ accommodated a range of interpretation with respect to individual freedom, and merchant families continued to stretch their wings, but in the wake of the “free grace” controversy, church discipline constrained merchants and encouraged suspicion of their piety. Despite forthright repentance for his sins, many charitable offerings, and earnest adherence to conservative orthodoxy, “renowncing . . . Familisticall delusions . . . and other high imaginations,” merchant Robert Keayne came in for censure as a thief and profit-​monger, apparently because he sold nails at a profit in the midst of the economic downturn, expanded his trade outside New England, and grew wealthy while others felt pinched. Boston’s First Church formally admonished Keayne in 1639, following a sermon by John Cotton on the responsibilities of merchants that included “rules for trading” preventing merchants from raising prices above what was “usual” and from adjusting prices on new goods to make up for previous losses.18 With the banishment from Massachusetts of Anne Hutchinson and her most outspoken supporters, Rhode Island gained new merchants among these refugees, including Samuel Wilbore and John Porter. Land developers with similar religious sympathies, including Philip Sherman and merchants William Coddington and John Coggeshall, found Rhode Island a good base for their commercial operations. Free grace and commercial enterprise proved highly compatible, as “Rhode Island speculators stood out for their use of corporate, business methods,” with management divisions and with shares tied to company assets. In his study of New England commerce, John Martin described Rhode Island corporations forging ahead of others in devising “business entities” that became “the basic organizational tools of American enterprise.”19 Though interpreted conservatively in Massachusetts, congregational theory supported innovations in commercial enterprise and town government as

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well as religious life. As both David Hall and Michael Winship have argued, the “Congregational Way” developed in Massachusetts shaped the structures of civil as well as ecclesiastical government throughout New England. This “Congregational Way” also reflected the organizational structure of the stock companies from which New England’s institutions emerged. The interdependence of these corporate forms was clear. Christian fellowship served profitability and civil order, while commercial enterprise created the material base that enabled religion and civil society to expand, creating capital for building religious and civil institutions.20 Building on the long history of corporate law going back to ancient Rome and developed in medieval Europe, New England institutions granted individuals liberties through corporate membership. As eucharistic theology had supported legal advances that strengthened rights for corporate members in twelfth-​century Europe, so the mystic chords of Christian fellowship in New England strengthened the confidence and liberties of corporate insiders. The abundance of commercial and religious opportunity in New England stimulated new experiments in corporate-​based liberty. At the same time, disgruntlement among people who perceived a contradiction between true Pauline liberty and New England practice also became more pointed. In a powerful challenge to religious authority in Massachusetts during the 1630s and 1640s, Roger Williams argued that government should protect religious freedom and access to corporate association by placing churches on the same footing as any other company. As he explained, “The Church, or company of worshippers (whether true or false) is like unto a Body or College of Physicians in a Citie; like unto a Corporation, Society, or Company of East-​Indie or Turkie merchants, or any other Societie or Company in London.”21 Business dealings with Native Americans revealed the discriminatory side of this corporate mentality. Despite vehement objections from Roger Williams, New England courts gave preferential treatment to Christian colonists against Indian witnesses, even when applying laws created to protect Indians from English abuse. Natives fell victim to unscrupulous land deals at the hands of companies owned by Christians, as the Narragansett did in 1660 when the Rhode Island–​based Atherton Company agreed to pay a fine acknowledging abuse in exchange for a mortgage on Indian lands, which the company soon maneuvered to possess. Native resentment of this blatant lack of accountability with respect to how New England institutions dealt with them erupted in the Pequod War of 1636, and far more violently in King Philip’s War during the 1670s, when Native warriors destroyed several towns in western New England.22 Despite the trauma of King Philip’s War, government and church officials in Massachusetts became increasingly respectful of commercial interests as



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Boston continued its development as the largest port town in colonial America until Philadelphia and New York superseded it in the 1750s. The Hutchinson family expanded its commercial position in Boston, linking business there to commercial operations led by family members in Rhode Island, London, and Barbados. Bernard Bailyn identified the clan as “the most complete family commercial system” in seventeenth-​century New England. Richard Hutchinson of London shipped manufactured goods to Boston, where Anne’s husband, William, his brothers Samuel and Edward, their offspring Elisha and Eliakim, and brother-​in-​law Thomas Savage handled imports. Cousin Peleg Sanford managed cattle farms in Rhode Island owned by Hutchinson enterprises in Boston, and relied on them for manufactured goods. Peleg shipped horses to his merchant sons in the Barbados, where his own career had begun, along with provisions managed by Hutchinsons in Boston.23 Enterprising puritan merchants introduced covenantal fellowship into some of their business dealings, as in the case of the blacksmith’s son John Hull. After losing membership in Boston’s First Church as a result of his affiliation with Anne Hutchinson, Hull made amends and embarked on a wide-​ ranging career in trade, accounting, silver work, and engraving; he became the colony’s mint master and in 1690 produced the first paper money authorized in Massachusetts. Letters from Hull and his partner Eliakim Hutchison to Richard Rook, a shipmaster in their employ, show how corporate fellowship extended to business. The partners instructed Rook to be an example for his men by honoring the Sabbath and not swearing, and cautioned him to “be very prudent, just, and equal in your behaviour toward all your company.” This enjoinder to fair treatment wed Christian feeling to practical purpose: “that you may, if possible, have the good-​will and love of all that you shall converse withal, and may the better proceed and succeed.” In another letter to Rook and other ship captains the same year, the partners closed with a reference to the body of Christ within which the men and their ships operated: “In him we remain your loving friends.” The names of Hull’s ships reflected this imagined world of corporate cooperation. “Pleased God,” he wrote in May of 1666, “to send in safe the ship ‘Providence,’ and the ketch ‘Exchange,’ and the ketch ‘Friendship.’ ”24 Hull was a founding member of Third Church (Old South) in 1669; he and his fellow merchants made the church Boston’s wealthiest congregation. Befitting their relatively expansive view of Pauline liberty, Old South favored a reform in congregational policy on baptism to grant “halfway” membership to individuals who lacked the assurance associated with a full confession of faith. Ministers at Old South also favored a less draconian approach to discipline than those at Boston’s First and Second (Old North) Churches, focused less

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on meting out punishment and more on personal repentance and the responsibilities individuals bore to uphold God’s covenant of friendship with New England. Disciplinary cases that did arise focused on matters of self-​control such as drunkenness and slander, leaving merchants in the congregation to handle their own business dealings.25 When the congregation “solemnly renewed” its covenant of corporate membership in 1680, Old South minister Samuel Willard preached on the similarity between business relationships and personal relationships with God. Calling attention to the “inward principle” central to both, Willard explained, “Whatever is essential to a Covenant among Men, is here applicable by way of Analogy [to] our communion with God.” While the principle of “mercy” set Christian transactions apart from pro forma contracts and their misguided adherence to the covenant of works, honoring mercy did not mean that contractual obligations could be taken lightly: “In every Covenant there is an obligation or engagement and therein it agrees with all Bills, Bonds, mortgages, or whatever of the like nature.”26 The self-​assurance evident at Old South reflected the strength of New England commercial networks and their success in exploiting British efforts to regulate colonial trade. When Parliament worked to lower the cost of agricultural imports to England and expand the colonial market for English manufactures through a series of Navigation Acts restricting colonial trade with the Dutch, French, and Spanish, New England merchants exploited these regulations to increase their own trade with other British colonies. As historian Margaret Newell explained, the Navigation Acts “created a huge free trade zone linking the Caribbean with North America” that New England merchants turned to their own advantage. They also exploited loopholes in the Navigation Acts to work around the British trade zone. While prices for sugar, molasses, rice, indigo, wheat, and tobacco produced in the southern colonies fell as a result of British regulation, restrictions on colonial exports did not include many of the finished goods manufactured in the burgeoning home industries managed by New England merchants. Linens and other textiles spun and woven by New England girls made their way to French and Iberian ports, along with nails, tools, tanned animal skins, shoes, and other leather products processed in New England.27 Organizational skills learned in churches supported New England’s economic boom. Home and craft industries did not produce great wealth, but they did engage the hands of many people from an early age. The cooperative behavior preached in sermons and modeled in church supported the full employment of locally organized labor. Participation in church activities also enabled some people to develop managerial skills they might not



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otherwise have achieved. Men who excelled as organizers, such as artisan John Hull, stepped back and forth from positions of lay leadership in church to civil service and commercial enterprise. Lessons drawn from sermons and church organization were applicable in government and business, and vice versa. With growing self-​confidence, New England merchants and government officials devised their own system of custom duties and commercial taxes. As Parliament stepped up the regulation of imperial trade, New England enacted regulatory policies of her own. When imported cattle drove down the price of cattle in local markets, Massachusetts taxed imported cows. When outside merchants muscled in on the trade in gunpowder, the colony levied a special tax on gunpowder imported in large ships not owned or built in New England. Colonial governments also levied duties on imported alcohol, using much of the revenue to secure inland borders and fight against Indians and their French allies.28 The reach of New England corporate know-​how expanded through ties with New York. In 1664, Britain acquired New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it after the Duke of York. Supported by intermarriage among prominent families, merchants with ties in both New England and New York developed sophisticated trade networks with planters in British colonies to the south, often under the canopy of Anglicanism. Abetted by Dutch expertise—​ and Dutch theories about free trade as a natural right—​merchant families in New  York and New England built systems of commercial organization that linked northern and southern colonies in ways that eventually came to support American independence. By 1760, ships loaded with food and dry goods from warehouses in Boston and New  York delivered their cargo to Charleston, where captains received cash or credit to purchase wheat in Virginia or Maryland. When the ships returned to Boston and New York with the wheat, some of it was milled and sold through local outlets, and some of it was exported to southern Europe.29 Commercial networks linked merchants and their families to each other in port towns all along the North American coast and to slave plantations in the Caribbean islands. Huguenot families in Boston and New  York figured prominently in trade with Carolina, with Faneuils in Boston and New  York and Englishes in Boston intermarrying with Charleston’s wealthy Huguenot merchant community. Many of these French American protestants became Anglican, operating as a wealthy subculture among colonial elites in Boston, New  York, and Charleston, the thriving port city at the center of southern commerce. Commercial, family, and religious networks like these joined the interests of monocultural agrarian colonies dependent on slave labor to

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the interests of the more economically diversified colonies of New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. More passengers sailed to Boston from Barbados than to any other mainland port, but a notably wealthy and ambitious cohort settled in Charleston in the 1670s. Seven of Carolina’s early governors came from Barbados families, and four of those families owned big sugar plantations on the crowded island, where financial and ideological investment in slavery was well established and many African slaves were worked to death. To encourage the growth of slave plantations in Carolina, the provincial government created a land bank in 1712 that generated paper currency to provide loans to planters in exchange for mortgages on land and slaves. Drawing on the expertise of slaves who had grown rice in the western lowlands of Africa, rice production became the mainstay of Carolina’s economy. South Carolina separated from North Carolina in 1712. By 1730, out of fifty thousand inhabitants, thirty thousand were African and African American, the vast majority of them enslaved on rice or indigo plantations.30 Such heavy reliance on slavery in southern colonies conflicted with the foundational strategies of New England’s corporate society. New Englanders stressed the need for willing agency among participants in their institutions. From their perspective, sustainable corporate profit depended on honest cooperation, and reliance on forced labor created management problems. Nothing in the Bible condemned slave ownership or slave labor, and ministers throughout the colonies invoked Pauline injunctions to obedience to encourage compliance in slaves. Slaves who could be integrated into society did not undermine corporate order. But the growing number of slaves and the weakness of corporate unity and self-​discipline in southern society created problems. In one complaint about “bad Management and Extravagancies” in the southern colonies, Boston’s William Douglass lamented that some of “our Colonies have defrauded more in a few Years than bad administrations in Europe have formerly done in some Centuries.” Lack of sound organization in the southern colonies created havoc for New England merchants, Douglass complained, pointing to “the great Damage done to our generous Merchants at Home, and to the industrious fair Dealers amongst our selves.”31 Corporate forms of social organization in New England and the middle colonies accommodated arm’s-​length dealings with southern slave colonies. Merchants in Boston, Salem, and New York depended on import-​export markets in Charleston and the Caribbean, while merchants in Pennsylvania—​ some with Quaker scruples about owning slaves themselves—​depended on tobacco markets sustained by slave labor in Virginia and Maryland. In 1700, in one of the first anti-​slavery writings published in America, the printer, judge,



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and Old South congregant Samuel Sewall argued that it was wrong for “men to obstinately persist in holding their Neighbors and Brethren under the rigors of perpetual bondage.” But Sewall’s congregation included a number of merchant families whose prosperity was entangled in the slave trade centered outside New England.32 While the mix of cultures in British America and the increasing diversity of the population diluted the influence of what Stephen Innes called New England’s “civic ecology,” other factors combined to extend it. Fledgling newspapers and almanacs, itinerant preachers, and intercolonial migration facilitated communication throughout British America, enabling the spread of corporate ideas and institutions well developed in New England, including devotion to private property, representative government, and wage labor free of monopolistic restrictions. At the same time, communication throughout British America impacted life in New England, as regional cultures centered around New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston made their influence felt in Boston, Salem, and New London.33 Contributing to the development of an intercolonial culture, British merchants stimulated the growth of consumer markets. A passion for calico first caught on in England when the British East India Company began promoting the patterned cloth it imported from India as an alternative to expensive silks and brocades. Consumer enthusiasm for fashionable calico led to the invention of new patterns, the production of more cloth, and widening expressions of personal choice. Daniel Defoe registered his amazement at the profusion of busy color in London interiors: “It crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushion[s]‌, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or India stuffs.”34 Americans embraced the new interest in fashion with gusto, feeding a spectacular rise in demand for British imports, especially calico, tea, and china. With new items advertised in newspapers and available in all the big towns, fashion trends swept across cities, even as merchants cultivated specialty markets in Philadelphia and Charleston. At the turn of the eighteenth century, only a small fraction of goods available through England were purchased by Americans—​less than 6 percent of English exports—​but over the next decades, consumer markets expanded dramatically. By 1750, Americans bought “about half of the ironware, earthenware, silk goods, printed cotton and linen, and flannels that English merchants sold abroad” and “almost three-​quarters of all nails that British manufacturers exported.”35 Religious activity contributed to this consumer revolution. American thirst for British imports peaked in the 1740s when the dramatic preacher George Whitefield imported himself to the colonies after renouncing a theatrical career

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in London. Advertising his opinions and appearances in the fast-​growing supply of American newspapers, Whitefield called people to immediate personal conversion, or “new birth.” Along with other evangelical preachers, Whitfield reached across social divides between male and female, and slave and free. “New Light” preachers also reached across and beyond populations claimed by particular churches, calling Americans to drop their allegiance to dull, old-​ fashioned parish ministers.36 This religious enthusiasm threatened established structures of corporate organization, and the educated elites who led them. Opposition to the new birth echoed the controversy over free grace a century earlier, but this time ministers and merchant congregations with liberal theological leanings resisted calls for immediate grace. In Boston’s First Church, the hub of the free grace controversy a century before, minister Charles Chauncy condemned the factionalism fomented by evangelicals who called people to “come out” from their churches if their established ministers did not preach to their satisfaction. Faced with the alarm expressed by the established clergy over the threat to congregational order, Whitefield backtracked, assuring established ministers that he was “sorry if anything I wrote had been a means of promoting separations.”37 Chauncy took the lead in holding ground against so-​called New Light incursions. An authority on Paul whose reputation rested on his careful explication of the inward transformation in becoming a “New Creature” in Christ, Chauncy identified charity as a determining sign of grace. As he explained in a long treatise prefaced with a list of subscribers that ran eighteen pages, religious enthusiasm violated that cardinal principle: “The great st paul plainly tells the Corinthians, when there appear’d the want of Charity among them, that nothing else, while they were destitute of this, would avail to their Salvation.” Defending the authority of properly ordained and well-​educated ministers, Chauncy also warned against the “unjust Jurisdiction” involved in elevating upstarts to the “Bar of our Judgment.”38 Itinerant preachers challenged corporate religious monopolies and the men who managed them. Often preaching out-​of-​doors without any invitation from the establishment, they warned about what Gilbert Tennent, a Scotch-​Irish revivalist who operated in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, called “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.” Tennent condemned “Old Pharisee Teachers” who “were very proud and conceity,” and “loved the uppermost Seats in the Synagogues, and to be called Rabbi, Rabbi.” With a populist rhetoric that merged theological and political complaint, Tennent claimed that established clergy “regarded the common People, with an Air of Disdain.”39



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Aggressive marketers of “true” religion escalated competition for religious authority, increasing the available options for corporate membership. Competition had a stimulating effect: some individuals and families did leave to form new associations, but membership in New England’s established churches did not decline. Challenged by religious dissenters on one side and Anglican royalists on the other, New England’s established clergy doubled down on promoting and repackaging the theories of corporate organization developed by their predecessors, broadening the reach of their corporate idealism through New England’s expansive print media operations. As Newport pastor Ezra Stiles argued in 1760, the time had come to lay theological dispute aside and commit to interpreting “the noble principle of union . . . in a natural way.” Calling for civil accord under the “over-​ruling providence of heaven,” Stiles represented the Apostle Paul as a social organizer who stepped away from supernaturalism to foster the human “fellowship and union” that God “appointed to succeed the miraculous powers in supporting and diffusing Christianity through the world.”40 Enlisting Pauline corporatism in aid of their growing criticism of British rule and defense of American self-​government, New England ministers were forced to come to terms with Paul’s directive to obey civil authority. In an analysis of biblical citations in American sermons and pamphlets between 1763 and 1800, James Byrne found that Paul’s call in Romans 13 for obedience to civil rulers was invoked more frequently than any other text, with ninety-​ six citations. While loyalists cited Romans 13 to condemn American rebellion, revolutionaries turned to Paul’s writings on liberty in Christ to qualify the requirements of civil obedience. With its martial ring, Galatians 5:1 became popular:  “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” As Byrne noted, that passage in Galatians “was a rare commodity: a clear, biblical endorsement of liberty. Not surprisingly, this passage became the third most popular of the Revolutionary era,” with sixty-​seven citations. The second most frequently quoted biblical reference, Exodus 14–​15, describing Moses and the parting of the Red Sea, also appealed to revolutionaries, who cited it seventy-​five times.41 Aided by networks of print media that enabled New Englanders to shape much of the information that flowed through America, New England ministers wrote the vast majority of sermons available in the Continental Army and throughout the newly independent American colonies. Weaving together religious, political, and commercial arguments as ministers before them had done, a small army of New England clerics worked to define and defend American independence in New England terms. To reach patriots outside New England, ministers stressed common interests along with New England’s

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signature appeal to corporate union. “Much . . . depends on union,” preached Gad Hitchcock in an election sermon in Boston in 1774. “When each department centre their views in the same point, and act in their proper direction and character,” he argued, invoking an image of the people as one body, “gladness fills their heart, and sparkles in their countenance.” This happy face of American union looked toward the future: “Our contention is not about trifles, but about liberty and property, and not only ours but those of posterity to the latest generation.”42 Re-​situated within the accelerating political crisis, the old trope of membership in a superhuman body reemerged as “the Body” of “the People.” Members of the Sons of Liberty, an organization devoted to anti-​imperialist protest, united leading citizens in several colonies to pass resolutions against arbitrary taxation and in support of the rights and liberties of American colonists as Englishmen. In newspapers, individuals identifying as “sons of Liberty” invoked “the people” as a unified entity. As the New York Gazette asserted in 1769, “the happiness of the people” was the purpose of good government, and “every true son of Liberty is a friend of good government.”43 Appeals to “the happiness of the people” did not mean everyone was happy or that liberty was for all. In a stunning example of patriotic industry, Sons of Liberty organized factories for manufacturing homespun cloth to eliminate American dependence on British cloth. In 1769, the former Stamp Act agent Isaac Hughs received a tour of one of these factories in Boston and was “shew’d their manufactory, where upwards of 300 Little girls from six to ten years of Age are kept Spinning with the Little wheel.”44 In the midst of the boycott of British goods in 1773, several shipments of tea arrived in Boston Harbor from the British East India Company, the corporate face of British imperialism. In protest against the EIC—​the only company authorized by the British government to import tea to the American colonies—​the crowd demanded that the tea be returned to England, challenging the order from the provincial governor of Massachusetts to unload the ships. Calling themselves “the Body” of “the People,” the group continued meeting until the night of December 16, when resisters dressed as Indians broke into three ships and threw more than ninety thousand pounds of it into the harbor.45 Out of this unrest, a new framework for intercolonial governance evolved through correspondence, building on the network of corporate organizations sustained through correspondence among churches and commercial companies already in place. In Britain’s American colonies, correspondence among ministers had been as an important means of communication since the early seventeenth century. Official correspondence among ministerial committees in



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different colonies became well established after 1689, when Parliament passed the Act of Toleration, standardizing religious policy in British colonies. In 1766, Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew called attention to these ecclesiastical committees of correspondence as a model for political organization. In a letter to the Massachusetts political activist James Otis after the repeal of the Stamp Act, Mayhew proposed that the Massachusetts Assembly “send circulars” to assemblies in the other British colonies. “You have heard of the communion of churches,” Mayhew wrote on the eve of his departure for a church meeting in Vermont. “While I was thinking of this in my bed, the great use and importance of a communion of colonies appeared to me in a strong light.” Mayhew urged Otis to act on this idea during his absence, fearing that “the general court may be prorogued or dissolved before my return.”46 As historian Carl Bridenbaugh acknowledged, “the revolutionary committees of correspondence” drew from other organizational networks as well, but “none had been tried out so successfully over a long period or were more obviously right at hand than those of the Congregational and Presbyterian ministers.” As Bridenbaugh put it, there was no “miraculous improvisation” involved in organizing revolutionary committees in the American colonies. Rather, James Otis, Sam Adams, and other revolutionary leaders created a secular version of “the tried-​and-​proved ecclesiastical organization” well established in the colonies, an interchurch network loaded with Congregational and Presbyterian ministers already politicized by being treated as dissenters from the Anglican Church established by Britain in all her colonies.47 Revolutionary committees of correspondence formed in all thirteen colonies, providing organizational structure for the Continental Congress in 1775 and, eventually, for the federal government. Here again, organizational strategies honed in New England began to be more widely applied. The pamphlet designed in 1772 to facilitate communication between committees in Boston and other towns in Massachusetts became a template for the Continental Congress, and procedures established in Boston for debate and voting helped to standardize committee procedures elsewhere. Soon after it was printed, committees in other colonies received copies of this pamphlet, The Votes and Proceedings of Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, to aid their deliberations. In addition to guidelines for managing group process, the pamphlet spelled out economic and political grievances against Great Britain that violated “our Rights,” and summoned readers to their defense: “You will doubtless think it of the utmost Importance,” the committee emphasized, “that we stand firm as one Man, to recover and support them.”48 Paul’s exhortation to “stand fast” in Christ supported the conviction to “stand firm as one Man” against British tyranny, but rhetoric denouncing this

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tyranny as a form of slavery presented difficulties. Slavery as a metaphor for dependence on Britain ran up against the inconvenient fact that actual slaves could be found almost everywhere in America, including New England, where almost 5 percent of the population was enslaved. Many leading citizens in the colonies were slave owners, including John Hancock, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, respectively. In the southern colonies, prominent men including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. Calling attention to American hypocrisy, a visitor in the entourage of Admiral Richard Howe famously reported that in America “there is nothing to be heard but the Sound of Liberty, and nothing to be felt but the most detestable Slavery.”49 While Britain claimed that the Americans’ reliance on slavery made them unfit for independence, Americans claimed that Britain had foisted slavery upon them. In the debate over where to lay the blame, opposition to slavery coalesced on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1772, the Virginia House of Burgesses petitioned Britain to end the slave trade, calling it “an inhumanity.” Worry about overreliance on tobacco drove some of Virginia’s withdrawal of support for slavery, but moral revulsion played a role as well, with the resolution of 1774 from leading citizens of Fairfax County calling the slave trade “wicked cruel and unnatural.” In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson called George III to blame for being “determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold,” and for resisting “every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.”50 Adding to the quandary for well-​placed individuals who hoped to control the movement toward independence, the debate over slavery supported more than one interpretation of what tyranny and freedom meant. Poor artisans, hired hands, tenant farmers, indentured servants, and new immigrants claimed their natural rights to freedom from oppression, feeding domestic unrest in all the colonies as part of the movement for independence from Britain. Once the war began, the divide in wealth, class, and education made American victory uncertain. As Gary Nash pointed out, most of the men drafted into the Continental Army were “those with pinched lives, often fresh from Ireland or Germany, recently released from jail, or downright desperate.” The men “who froze at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–​78, were mostly young, poor, landless, voteless, and in about half the cases, immigrants.”51 The English immigrant, inventor, and former Quaker Thomas Paine worked to bridge this divide between the rhetoric of liberty and its application to ordinary men. Published anonymously in January 1776, Paine’s Common Sense proclaimed God to be man’s only sovereign. “For all men being originally equals,” Paine argued, “no one by birth could have a right to set up his



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own family in perpetual preference to all others.” Washington credited Paine’s pamphlet with overcoming reluctance in the Continental Congress to separate from Britain, “working a powerful change there in the Minds of many Men.” In Common Sense and in his American Crisis, which Washington read aloud to his soldiers before they crossed the Delaware on Christmas Eve 1777, Paine’s call to liberty embraced men of low rank with gratitude and respect. “I turn with the warmth and ardor of a friend to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out; I  call not upon a few but upon all,” Paine wrote in Crisis, “up and help us out; lay your shoulders to the wheel; . . . it matters not what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all.”52 The old investment in friendship as a mystical communion did not disappear in Paine’s calls for fortitude and sweeping renewal of human society in America. Both the corporatism disseminated from New England and the evangelicalism that challenged its elitism contributed to the enthusiastic reception of Paine’s proclamation in Common Sense that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Calling for a spirit of transparent affection not entirely dissimilar to that of Richard Sibbes and John Cotton but far more democratic than either ever could have tolerated, Paine urged, “Instead of gazing at each other with suspicious or doubtful curiosity, let each of us, hold out to his neighbor the hearty hand of friendship.”53

Notes 1. Conseil for Virginia, A True Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia with a confutation of such scandalous reports as have tended to the disgrace of so worthy an enterprise (London, 1610), 38–​39; Robert Brenner, “The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community,” Past and Present 58 (February 1, 1973): 53–​107; Elizabeth Mancke, “Chartered Enterprises and the Evolution of the British Atlantic World,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 237–​262. 2. Ferdinando Gorges, America Painted to the Life. A true history of the original undertakings of the advancement of plantations into those parts, with a perfect relation of our English discoveries (London: E. Brudenell, 1658), quotations from 36, 55, 54. 3. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–​37. 4. Brenner, “Civil War Politics,” 62–​71, quotations from 68; John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England:  Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1970). For puritan sermons on “liberty in Christ,” see, for example, Paul Bayne, A Commentarie upon the first and second chapters of Saint Paul to the Colossians (London, 1634); for puritan discussion of Paul’s “new man,” see for

88 Corpor ate Organization in America example, Paul Hobson, Practicall Divinity: or, A helpe through the blessing of God to leade men more to looke within themselves, and to unite experienced Christians in the bond and fellowship of the Spirit (London: R. Harford, 1646). 5. Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of New England (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1995), 275–​ 289 and 295–​ 297; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986; orig. 1985), 35–​63. 6. John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 59, 123, 149–​185. 7. Williams quotation from Alden Vaughan, New England Frontier:  Puritans and Indians, 1620–​1675, rev. ed. (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1979; orig. ed. 1965), 105; Katherine A. Hermes, “Jurisdiction in the Colonial Northeast: Algonquian, English and French Governance,” American Journal of Legal History 43, no. 1 (1999):  52–​73; Daragh Grant, “The Treaty of Hartford (1638):  Reconsidering Jurisdiction in Southern New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2015):  461–​498; James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 451–​512. 8. Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2000), 31–​40, 318 n. 92. 9. Charter of Massachusetts Bay (1629), http://​www.let.rug.nl/​usa/​documents/​ 1600-​1650/​charter-​of-​massachusetts-​bay-​1629.php, accessed August 2, 2014; David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 136; Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism:  Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 186–​188. 10. Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church-​Discipline (London:  John Bellam, 1648), quotations from I:288–​289 and 293, and II:1. 11. Baird Tipson, Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 54–​89. 12. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” reprinted in The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–​1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1–​9, quotations from 7, 1–​2, 5–​6, and 9. 13. John Cotton, Singing of Psalmes a Gospel-​ordinance, or, A Treatise wherein are handled these particulars 1. Touching the duty itselfe, 2. Touching the matter to be sung, 3. Touching the singers, 4. Touching the manner of singing (London: 1650), quotations from 26. 14. Richard Sibbes, “A Learned Commentary or Exposition upon the First Chapter of the Second Epistle of S. Paul to the Corinthians,” in The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862), quotation from III:432; Richard Sibbes, “The Soul’s Conflict with Itself,” in Complete Works, quotations from



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I:192; Mark E. Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Macon, GA:  Mercer University Press, 2000), 49–​70; Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts:  Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 40–​69, 137–​138. 15. John Cotton, A Brief Exposition of the whole Book of Canticles, or Song of Solomon Lively describing the Estate of the Church in all the Ages thereof, both Jewish and Christian, to this day (London, 1642), quotations from 21, 8. 16. John Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation by that Reverend and Eminent servant of the Lord, Mr. John Cotton (London: Tim. Smart, 1656), quotations from 75 and 182; John Cotton, A Conference Mr. John Cotton held at Boston with the elders of New-​England (London: J. Dawson, 1646), quotations from 51 and 4; John Cotton, The Covenant of Grace, discovering the great work of a Sinners reconciliation to God (London:  John Allen, 1655), quotation from 63. 17. Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics:  Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636—​1641 (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2002), 41, 101, 50–​51, quotation from 144; Frank Shuffelton, Thomas Hooker, 1586–​ 1647 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 203–​211; “The Examination of the Trial of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown,” reprinted in The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–​1638:  A Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 311–​348, quotation from 337. 18. Bernard Bailyn, “The Apologia of Robert Keayne,” William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 4 (October 1, 1950): 568–​587, quotation from 581; Winthrop, Journal, 163–​ 166, 205–​207, 229–​231, quotations from 165. Also see Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston:  Northeastern University Press, 1981; orig. 1930), 160–​ 162; Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 146–​ 148; Mark R. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize:  How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 37–​73; Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way:  The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 99–​126. 19. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 60, 125, quotations from 58 and 59; Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 36–​40. 20. Hall, A Reforming People, 25–​26; Winship, Godly Republicanism, 111–​232; Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 106–​110, 193, 115–​117. 21. Brian Tierney, “Religion and Rights: A Medieval Perspective,” Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 1 (January 1, 1987): 163–​175; Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, discussed (London, 1644), quotation from 25. 22. Martin, Profits in the Wilderness, 54–​55 and 62; Jill Lepore, In the Name of War:  King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New  York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

90 Corpor ate Organization in America 23. “Historical Metropolitan Populations of the United States,” http://​www.peakbagger.com/​pbgeog/​histmetropop.aspx, accessed September 8, 2014; Bailyn, New England Merchants, 88–​89. 24. John Hull and Eliakim Hutchison to Mr. Richard Rook, Boston, May 21, 1683, and John Hull and Eliakim Hutchison to Mr. Richard Rook, Mr. Perez Savage, and Captain Francis Lester, Boston, May 16, 1683, both included in “The Diaries of John Hull, Mint-​Master and Treasurer of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay,” Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society (New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1971; orig. 1857), 3:109–​318, quotations from 250–​251 and 252; John Hull, “Some Passages of God’s Providence about Myself and in Relation to Myself,” in “Diaries of John Hull.” 25. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 74–​110, esp.  92; Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony, 134–​182. 26. Samuel Willard, The Necessity of Sincerity, in renewing Covenant; Opened and urged in a Srrmon [sic] Preached to the Third gathered Church in Boston New-​England; June 29. 1680 (Boston: James Glen, 1682), quotations from 2, 6, 7. 27. Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independency: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 78–​79, quotation from 79. 28. Ibid., 72–​101. 29. Bailyn, New England Merchants, 138–​ 142; Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire:  Trading in Colonial New  York (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 13–​72 and 201; George L. Procter-​Smith, Religion and Trade in New Netherland:  Dutch Origins and American Development (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1973). 30. Meaghan N. Duff, “Creating a Plantation Province: Proprietary Land Policies and Early Settlement Patterns,” in Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society, ed. Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-​Shute, and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 1–​25; Gary L. Hewitt, “The State in the Planters’ Service: Politics and the Emergence of a Plantation Economy in South Carolina,” in Money, Trade, and Power, 49–​73; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–​1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 60–​ 74, 111–​116; R. C. Nash, “The Organization of Trade and Finance in the Atlantic Economy: Britain and South Carolina, 1670–​1775,” in Money, Trade, and Power, 74–​107. 31. William Douglass, A Discourse concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations in America. Especially with Regard to their Paper Money:  More Particularly, In Relation to the Province of the Massachusetts-​Bay, in New England (Boston:  S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1740), quotations from 20–​21. 32. Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1700), quotation from 3.



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33. Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 45–​51, 206–​209, quotation from 45. 34. Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–​1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 96–​101, quotation from 96. 35. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution:  How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 33–​71, quotations from 61; also see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 3–​206. 36. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 82, 142, 264; Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 1–​15, 66–​112; Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried:  The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (September 1982): 305–​325; Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999); Timothy E.  W. Gloege, “The Trouble with ‘Christian History’: Thomas Prince’s ‘Great Awakening,’” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 82, no. 1 (March 2013): 125–​165. 37. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion In New-​England, A  Treatise in five Parts (Boston:  Rogers and Fowle, 1743), quotation from 171; Whitefield quotation from Stout, Divine Dramatist, 190. 38. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, quotations from 174 and 172. 39. Gilbert Tennent, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1740), quotations from 4. 40. Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union (Boston:  Edes and Gill, 1761), quotations from 4. 41. James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); 116–​142, 170, quotations from 129. 42. Gad Hitchcock, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Thomas Gage, Esq; Governor [of ] Massachusetts-​Bay (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1774), quotations from 18 and 46; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1986), 259–​311, 379 n. 6; Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 43. Thomas W. Ramsbey, “The Sons of Liberty:  The Early Inter-​ Colonial Organization,” International Review of Modern Sociology 7, no. 2 (1987):  313–​ 335, quotations from 330; New York Gazette, January 23, 1769, quotations from page 1, column 1; Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). 44. Ramsbey, “Sons of Liberty,” quotation from 325; Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 321–​324. 45. Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–​1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 138–​141 and 163–​165, quotations from 164.

92 Corpor ate Organization in America 46. Jonathan Mayhew, “Lord’s-​ Day Morning, June 8, 1766,” printed in Alden Bradford, Memoir of the Life and Writings of Rev. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D. (Boston:  C. C.  Little, 1838), 428–​430, quotations from 428 and 429; Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-​Resistance to the Higher Powers (Boston: D. Fowle and D. Gookin, 1750). 47. Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics 1689–​1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), quotations from 203–​204. 48. William B. Warner, “The Invention of a Public Machine for Revolutionary Sentiment: The Boston Committee of Correspondence,” The Eighteenth Century 50, nos. 2/​3 (July 1, 2009): 145–​164, quotation from 151; The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Town Meeting assembled, According to Law (Boston:  Edes and Gill, 1772), quoted in Warner, “Invention of a Public Machine,” 151, 156. 49. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital:  Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 105–​ 153, quotation from 120; Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution:  The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 32–​33. 50. Brown, Moral Capital, House of Burgess and Fairfax County quotations from 139; “Jefferson’s ‘Original Draught’ of the Declaration of Independence,” https://​ jeffersonpapers.princeton.edu/​selected-​documents/​jefferson%E2%80%99s-​ %E2%80%9Coriginal-​rough-​draught%E2%80%9D-​declaration-​independence-​ 0, accessed June 12, 2016. 51. Nash, Unknown American Revolution, quotations from 217–​218 and 219. 52. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), quotations from 76; Washington quoted in Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, 2nd ed. (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 86; Thomas Paine, American Crisis, http://​www.ushistory.org/​paine/​crisis/​c-​ 01.htm, accessed June 12, 2016; Vikki J. Vickers, “My Pen and My Soul Have Ever Gone Together”:  Tom Paine and the American Revolution (New  York:  Routledge, 2006), 51–​52; Edward G. Gray, Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge: Building a United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). 53. Paine, Common Sense, quotations from 100 and 120.

5

Sanctifying Contracts and Persons Corporate Organization in America’s “Infant Republics”

Many hands of friendship came to be extended in corporate association as law took command in the early American republic as “the modality of governance” and “the paradigmatic discourse” used by Americans to describe their country. As historian Kevin Butterfield recently wrote, “The first generations of American citizens found within law and in an emphasis on procedural fairness a way to cohere.” Building on liberal political theories current throughout the Atlantic world that were free of kingship and mystical grounding in Christ alike, the new government of the United States rested on contract law, and on state-​chartered corporations protected by contract law, to an extent unprecedented in human history.1 The neighborly friendship championed by Thomas Paine was notably absent, however, in the dispute that led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1810 establishing the supremacy of contract law. Fifteen years earlier, the Georgia state legislature had authorized sale of the lands that later became Mississippi and Alabama, home to America’s most productive cotton plantations. Ignoring Indian claims, all but one member of the legislature accepted bribes from speculators for agreeing to sell these huge tracts of Yazoo lands (named after Indians in the region) for less than two cents an acre. A newly elected legislature rescinded authorization for the sale the following year, but speculators continued to buy and resell Yazoo lands nonetheless. Robert Fletcher bought some of this land in 1800, resold some to John Peck in 1803, and then, in 1807, colluded with Peck in a lawsuit to establish the validity of their contract. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the chief justice lamented the bribery that had occurred before either Fletcher or Peck got involved: “That corruption should find its way into the governments

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of our infant republics and contaminate the very source of legislation,” John Marshall wrote, is “most deeply to be deplored,” but he went on to affirm the “absolute rights” embedded in legal contracts, no matter how wrong the conditions enabling those contracts may have been.2 Echoing the English philosopher John Locke, who believed that the right of contract was rooted in the “natural law” or rational structure of the world of nature out of which men came to form society, Marshall found “the right to contract, and the obligations created by contract,” to be “original and pre-​existing principles . . . brought with man into society.” Though these principles “may be controlled,” he asserted, they “are not given by human legislation.” Upholding the validity of Fletcher’s contract with Peck, Marshall ruled that “no State shall pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts.”3 Marshall’s rationalist philosophy of natural rights overlooked the role that collective memory played in earlier centuries as the basis of social order. Legal rights in early medieval Europe emerged from long-​standing practices of collective assembly, and from vestiges of Roman law mixed with Christianity, not from any theory of individual rights grounded in nature. Nevertheless, the idea of natural law, and its premise that human reason was grounded in the order of nature, provided justification for new and important developments in American law.4 Marshall’s identification of contracts as the basis of American law supported the Land Ordinance passed by Congress in 1785, which instituted procedures for surveying, buying, and selling western lands. The ordinance established what historian John Larson called “the most rational, simple, accessible, democratic, and commercial land system the world had ever seen.” At the turn of the nineteenth century, most white men, like Fletcher and Peck, owned property, much of it newly acquired land protected by contract law. The “easy commerce in land” fueled national expansion, pushed Indians west, and enabled slave plantations to power the cotton production that drove U.S. exports.5 Fletcher v. Peck affirmed the sanctity of legal contracts between individuals; nine years later, in Dartmouth v. Woodward, the Supreme Court extended that protection to corporations. When the state of New Hampshire acted to make Dartmouth College a public institution, the college’s Board of Trustees sued to retain their governance over the institution. Writing again for the federal court, John Marshall sided with the trustees, arguing that the college had legal standing as a person by virtue of its charter, granted by George III in 1769: “An artificial immortal being was created by the crown, capable of receiving and distributing forever, according to the will of the donors, the donations which should be made to it.”6



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Though corporations were not as fully developed they would later become, with freedom of speech and well-​honed identities like those of Apple, Johnson & Johnson, or Whole Foods, they were nevertheless building blocks of early national expansion. Their standing as legal persons empowered and protected them, and their definition as artificial beings emphasized their dependence on civil law. In its support for corporate institutions as creatures of law, the Marshall court seemed to be establishing what John Adams, on the eve of the American Revolution, had hoped the new republic would become: “a government of laws and not of men.”7 Beginning with the rapid increase in state-​issued charters in the 1790s, corporations became primary vehicles of national organization. An 1829 article in the American Jurist and Law Magazine explained, “Multitudes of companies with corporate powers for banking, insurance, manufacturing, building bridges, roads and canals, have been created in all parts of our country, and form one of the striking features of our social system.” A  decade later, the French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville observed:  “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America.” Tocqueville noticed that even children at play organized themselves into companies, creating rules for governing their games and punishing infractions. Tocqueville also noticed the galvanizing effects of organizational thinking. “When an opinion is represented by a society, it necessarily assumes a more exact and explicit form,” he observed. “An association unites the efforts of minds which have a tendency to diverge, in one single channel, and urges them vigorously towards one single end which it points out.”8 Aided by government procedures for implementing contracts, the scale of corporate enterprise in the early United States soon surpassed that in Britain, which had led the world in corporate organization and industrial development in the eighteenth century. In the wake of a disastrous episode of financial speculation in the early eighteenth century, the British Parliament’s so-​called Bubble Act had outlawed joint-​stock companies without royal charters of incorporation. This legislation slowed corporate growth in Britain until 1825, when the act was repealed. Corporate development in France also lagged behind that of the United States; in 1791, during the French Revolution, the French Republic rescinded all corporate charters, and when corporations returned under Napoleon, they operated under strict government regulation. Commercial corporations grew faster in the United States than anywhere else in the world during the first half of the nineteenth century, with American law and corporate organization leading the development of corporate enterprise elsewhere.9

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In the United States during this period, established churches were losing their legal standing, and state governments severed the formal connections to God those churches had represented. In this gradual process of religious disestablishment, churches came to occupy much the same ground as commercial corporations in relationship to state governments. A new symmetry emerged between religion and commerce based on voluntary contracts. As corporate organizations in both arenas multiplied, legal reason and contract law facilitated expansion in both spheres, along with the flow of ideas and practices between them. Commercial and religious institutions transformed American life together, with religious organizations operating in the forefront of developments in print media, urban planning, interregional organization, and ideas about personhood, while commercial organizations expedited advances in industrial organization that transformed relationships among people, removing them from face-​to-​face contact with the people who made the shoes they wore or produced the cotton they spun.10 In theory, state-​chartered corporations embodied the virtue and ingenuity of a free and independent citizenry. In reality, however, the gap between this rational idealism and ordinary life was frighteningly apparent. A convulsive religious exercise known as “the jerks” epitomized the religious anguish on display in frontier revivals. Banks illustrated the distress people faced at a different level. Chronic shortages of legal tender combined with distrust of a national bank led state legislatures to authorize some of the banks they chartered to print money, despite the U.S. Constitution’s stipulation that money could be printed only by the federal government. When some of these banks failed, their notes became worthless. Rampant counterfeiting increased the confusion and unreliability surrounding money, adding to the problems involved in implementing America’s rational system of republican governance and corporate development.11 In human terms, the gap between the rational system of American governance and ordinary life could be even more disturbing. While corporations had legal standing as artificial persons, real persons could be bought and sold as property, a cruel reality that exposed both the power and the dark undercurrents of legal reasoning. Constitutional protection for slavery was the price that southern leaders exacted for joining the American union, and the price they continued to demand as slavery expanded. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution made it unlawful for Congress to restrict the “Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” until 1808. Article 4 protected the ownership of property moved across state lines, which implied and was consistently interpreted to mean that slaves did not become free by moving to a state where slavery had been abolished. Article



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I, Section 2 counted slaves as three-​fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning state representation in the House of Representatives, where all bills of revenue and spending originated.12 As historian George Van Cleve summarized the result of these protections, the Constitution “gave all the ‘head start’ slavery needed to escape from significant federal control until its continued expansion became politically uncontrollable—​a raging torrent that leaped the banks of the political river.” With slavery its driving force, the volume of cotton produced in the United States expanded exponentially between 1790 and 1859, from 1.2 million to 2.1 billion pounds, feeding American textile mills and 80 percent of Britain’s cotton industry by the 1830s. Driving this growth, the slave population increased from under 700,000 in 1790 to almost 4 million in 1860. The dramatic expansion of slave labor also contributed to financial disaster, as demand for more and more output from slaves flooded the economy in cotton, contributing to the decline in cotton prices that accelerated pressures on slave labor, wage labor, capital investment, and credit systems. Panic fueled by these pressures brought American manufacturers and many small investors to their knees in 1837. People increasingly looked to religion for relief, to restore order, to generate prosperity, and to help construct stabilizing visions of national identity.13 Even those who benefited from political freedom and accessible land felt the upheaval of traditional mores. As an early Mormon newspaper observed in 1832, “Old foundations are broken, and principles and maxims are undergoing a thorough and perilous revision, and that too upon a mighty scale.” New opportunities for land and corporate organization encouraged human ambition but also made the world more tumultuous. As the writer explained, “The intellect of man, wakened up to new activity, has burst the chains that bound it, and the barriers that confined it, and with ten-​fold means of influence, is going forth in its mightiness to agitate society.”14 After the War of 1812, the pace of immigration from Europe accelerated dramatically. Families and individuals accustomed to homogeneous religious and ethnic environments found themselves in a highly mobile, radically heterogeneous, rapidly expanding world. Innovations in communication and transportation often threw people together without a head or a common purpose, disrupting earlier forms of social organization. The faster and farther news traveled, the more anxious people became. As the Mormon author observed, “Now each colony is a state, and each state a nation, and intercourse is rapid, and local causes tell in their results throughout the whole, as every stroke on the body is felt through all the members.”15 The Pauline ideal of liberty through corporate membership was reworked during this period through new attention to the meaning and implications of

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personhood, as personhood acquired new importance in the context of early industrialization and American law. The American Revolution had generated prospects of a better world, increased respect for the rights of persons and great enthusiasm for voluntary organization. At the same time, rapid advances in mechanization and slavery undermined respect for persons and their power to freely associate, even as those advances provided economic support for an expanding culture of individualism and voluntarism. Attachment to the Pauline trope of Christian freedom could disguise the complexity of this conflict. It could also be invoked to expose conflict and encourage accountability to moral principle. Religious activists worked to stretch canopies of interpersonal sympathy and belief in divine providence over the nation, as Americans embraced religion to construct regional and national identities to meet territorial expansion, population growth, and new industries. In New York City, where many of the new immigrants first arrived, evangelicals built new religious institutions to serve the city’s dislocated, often desperately poor residents. Newly incorporated churches contributed as much to the island’s social organization as did factories and shipping companies, with the founding of religious organizations keeping pace with population growth between 1812 and 1840, and even laying groundwork for the establishment of new neighborhoods. New York also emerged as the center of publishing, not only for evangelical churches and their missionary organizations but also for the religiously tinged sentimental literature that flowed through the country in increasing abundance, encouraging sympathy as an expression of Christian humanism.16 The bonds of sympathy could gloss over hard realities. Mills and factories now produced shoes and textiles for wider distribution, and industry no longer served local communities in ways it once had. People expected commerce to serve the common good, but the meaning of “common good” shifted as sheer productivity became a legitimating standard in the 1810s and 1820s. Arguing that economic growth served progress and the public interest, textile mills and other industries claimed rights to water and land that disadvantaged local residents and small businesses. Backed up by belief in the natural “harmony of interests” that freedom from oppressive regulation would yield, factories claimed exemptions from rules against negligence and nuisance.17 Most new states were too poor to fund big public works, so their legislatures chartered corporations to build and operate roads, canals, and bridges to transport produce, merchandise, and people. Pent-​up demand for corporate charters also contributed to commercial growth. Britain had prohibited colonial governments from issuing charters, leaving American businessmen to rely on partnerships that did little to shield investors from liability, or from



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dissolution when one of the partners withdrew. Well aware of the legal advantages of incorporation, and also of the superior development of corporate roads, canals, and bridges in England, enterprising Americans with capital to invest were eager to establish corporate entities of their own, including banks to fund new industry and infrastructure.18 Corporate business advanced most aggressively in Philadelphia, where financial corporations became vehicles of political influence. Before the American Revolution, a network of wealthy merchant families supported Philadelphia’s strong civic institutions, including Pennsylvania Hospital, the College of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and America’s first public lending library. Determined to hold on to political influence after independence, these civic leaders faced the challenge of a unicameral state legislature more democratic and less dependent on educated elites than any other body of lawmakers in the new republic. With their direct power over government diminished, financiers in Philadelphia joined friends in New York to support Alexander Hamilton’s national bank and to found the Bank of Pennsylvania. Corporations supported by these financiers set a pattern for corporate developments elsewhere; Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire had issued more corporate charters by 1800 than Pennsylvania, but “the leveraging of capital by moneyed Philadelphia men” to obtain political influence suggested how corporations would be used in the future.19 With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, New  York leapt ahead of Philadelphia to become the most powerful commercial entrepôt in the nation. Funded by New  York State at the urging of New  York City’s wealthy merchants and bankers, the 360-​mile passageway from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes brought meat, whiskey, and flour to New  York City. The canal also transported the wholesale goods arriving at city docks, pouring into the city’s warehouses and famous auctions—​everything from stoneware and iron chains to window blinds and black silk handkerchiefs. “The valley of the Nile in Egypt cannot exceed it,” a correspondent to the Connecticut Herald gushed. “Well may it be said, that the Erie Canal is a gigantic artificial navigation, the equal of which cannot be found on the globe!!” With Robert Fulton’s steamboats moving goods up the Hudson to the canal at Albany, two-​way traffic from New York City into Ohio stimulated commercial development throughout the Northeast.20 Corporations drew strong criticism as well. The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations received its first American printing in 1796, viewed corporations as descendants of medieval guilds, inherently monopolistic and thus hostile to the competition that enabled trade to flourish. The essential purpose of corporations, Smith argued, was to elevate prices:  “all

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corporations, and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established” for that end, “to prevent this reduction in price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it.”21 Both Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe feared the imperialistic ambitions of corporations, and Jefferson celebrated the fact that the U.S. Constitution did not grant the federal government power to charter them. Monroe summarized their concern in a letter of 1813, writing to Jefferson, “We are now at the mercy of monied institutions, who have got the circulating medium into their hands, & in that degree the command of the country.” In addition to the problem of “Adventurers” within these institutions speculating with other people’s money, Monroe viewed commercial corporations as “hostile to the govt,” predicting that “these corporate bodies would make a great struggle, before they would surrender—​either their power or the profit they are making by the use of it.”22 Partisan resentment festered as farmers and small businessmen saw elites in state government favoring wealthy friends with special charters of incorporation. Later Democrats built on this animus to challenge the inequitable system of patronage they perceived in state charters for financial and manufacturing companies. Few were more vocal in denouncing financial corporations than Andrew Jackson. “Everyone that knows me,” Jackson wrote in 1833, “does know that I have always been opposed to the United States Bank, nay all banks.” When the charter for Bank of the United States came up for renewal during his presidency in 1832, Jackson vetoed “the Monster,” taking a stand against “the rich and powerful,” who “too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”23 But not all corporations—​ or even all banks—​ favored elites. Many Americans viewed corporations as republican institutions, perfectly suited to their republican system of government. One proponent of this view, the German American political philosopher Francis Lieber, embraced the idea that corporations were little governments. His popular Encyclopedia Americana of 1830 defined a corporation as “a political or civil institution, comprehending one or more persons, by whom it is conducted according to the laws of its constitution.” Exceptional for the purity of its republican system of governance, the United States contained many different corporate associations inside corporate states, themselves coexisting inside a republican nation: “All the American governments are corporations created by charters, viz. their constitutions.”24 Demand for equal access to incorporation triumphed over the anti-​ corporatism of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson.



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Responding to this demand, states established bureaucratic procedures for incorporation to eliminate the favoritism that incorporation through special legislative charter seemed to entail. In the 1840s and 1850s, thirteen states introduced laws of general incorporation into their constitutions, and most states enacted statutes establishing uniform mechanisms for attaining corporate standing. By 1860, nearly four thousand U.S. businesses had received charters through general incorporation procedures.25 Religious corporations matched business growth. Between 1750 and 1850, the number of Congregational churches almost quadrupled, growing from 465 to 1,706. Religious societies funded by Congregationalists established new churches, charities, schools, and missionary societies in Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas. Presbyterian church growth was more impressive still, expanding from 233 to 4,824 churches between 1750 and 1850. Baptists surpassed these wealthy rivals during the same period, growing tenfold from 932 churches to 9,375. Even as denominations split up over slavery in the 1840s and 1850s, northern and southern branches strengthened and pushed westward, expanding the geographical reach of religious institutions. These corporate organizations offered moral discipline and purpose, and competing religious visions of national identity.26 Between 1750 and 1850, American Catholics built 1,200 new churches along with schools, orphanages, and convents to serve a fast-​growing population of Catholic immigrants and tens of thousands of new converts. By 1860, 4.4 million Americans—​one out of every seven—​were Catholic. In the new western states, the proportion of Catholics was greater, closer to one in five. On numerous occasions, protestant preachers broadcast alarm about a flood of Catholic immigrants rushing into the West to take over the country. Coupled with fierce competition for low-​wage work in eastern cities, protestant anxiety about national identity fed the discrimination against Catholics that periodically erupted in violence. Catholics responded with their own ambitious programs of corporate expansion designed to strengthen Catholic identity and insulate members from abuse and discrimination.27 Several states supported the growth of Catholic organizations by issuing charters for Catholic religious societies. In 1784, New York State passed a law ending the “illiberal and partial Distribution of Charters of Incorporation to religious societies” that had created “great Difficulties” for Catholics. Without proper charters, unincorporated “religious Societies” lacked “proper Persons authorised by Law, to take charge of their pious Donations,” the new bill explained, with the result that religious property stayed “in private Hands, to the great Insecurity of the Society.” Laws expediting incorporation for religious societies followed in other states, and these laws encouraged congregational

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governance in Catholic churches. Under state charters of incorporation, Catholic congregations became legal persons able to own property and enter into other legal contracts, with lay trustees responsible for managing contracts and various matters of internal governance.28 By the 1840s, the Catholic hierarchy had become alarmed at the growth of lay trusteeship in America. In 1842, Bishop John Hughes challenged the “system . . . of leaving ecclesiastical property under the management of laymen,” claiming that church property was “the sacred furniture of the House of God” and “the property of God.” Compounding the sacrilege, lay trusteeship encouraged Catholics to view their religion as if it were a commercial enterprise. “How awfully low is the character of religion reduced,” Hughes complained, when laymen took it upon themselves “to deliberate on the best mode of drawing large congregations; and this, be it understood, not for the salvation of the souls of the people so much as for the revenue!” Laying down Church law, Hughes declared “that henceforward, no body of lay trustees, or lay persons,” would be allowed, without the pastor’s approval, “to appoint, retain, or dismiss, any person connected with the church—​such as the sexton, organist, singers, teachers.” Furthermore, “it shall not be lawful for any board of trustees, or other lay persons, to make use of the chapel, church basement, or other portions of ground for any meeting” without obtaining permission beforehand from “the pastor, who shall be accountable to the bishop for his decision.”29 Resisting this assertion of episcopal authority, Catholics in Buffalo appealed to the binding legal power of their corporate trust under New York State law for protection. The state legislature sided with the trustees and crafted a church property bill designed to thwart Bishop Hughes. Arguments in the legislature in favor of the church property bill turned on the republican character of American law and the need to support those “intelligent and faithful Catholics” who sought to build religious societies in accord with American law. In proposing the bill, Senator Erastus Brooks made it clear that he was not a Catholic, and that he would find it a “calamity” if one of his children ever became one. “Nevertheless,” he admonished his fellow senators, “Catholic believers . . . have the same right to their faith as I have to mine.” To Brooks, republican principles seemed to demand defense of Catholic rights against a foreign religious establishment.30 Methodists were the fastest-​growing protestant denomination in the early republic; with Catholics, they set the pace of American corporate expansion. The new denomination was founded in 1784, and by 1850 Methodists had built more than thirteen thousand churches. With small circles of largely self-​ governing religious societies operating under the supervision of a centralized



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hierarchy, Methodist leaders firmly grasped the principle of vertical integration as an effective means to horizontal expansion. In frontier regions, Methodist societies operated under the monthly supervision of circuit riders, and in cities, Methodist societies served local communities under the supervision of church ministers, elders, and deacons. The Methodist blend of hierarchical supervision and small group intimacy proved highly effective, and Methodist societies offered many people—​including women and blacks—​opportunities for leadership and decision-​making they would not otherwise have enjoyed. Well in advance of commercial institutions, the expansion of Methodist churches demonstrated a highly successful model of national organization.31 Methodists also contributed to the market revolution that enabled small artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers to forge respectable lives as middle class consumers. Methodist belief in free will supported this economic activity, as free will was translated into confidence in people’s ability to surmount difficulties. As Richard Carwardine explained, this religious self-​confidence spurred Methodists “to seek out potential converts under the most daunting conditions and in all corners of the union, however remote, and to get there before their competitors.” Providing emotional outreach to people trapped on the shoals of uncertainty, loss, and destitution, the Methodist Church and its publishing house played a major role in the dissemination of inexpensive print media, and in the promotion of reading as a means of communication and social integration.32 As they expanded across the nation side by side, religious and commercial corporations developed similarities. Corporate innovations among Catholics, Methodists, and other religious groups affected economic activity by supporting labor communities, providing cathartic outlets for emotion, and constructing ideals of human personhood to counter the mechanization of industry. At the same time, corporate innovations in manufacturing affected the texture of religious life, imbuing religious institutions and religious practices with elements of machine-​like efficiency, and pushing the operations of Christian charity and conceptions of Christian community in the direction of greater calculation and rational organization. Utopian societies represented the most thoroughgoing efforts to fuse these developments. Harnessing the emerging market economy to religious ideals, the United Society of Believers sought charters of incorporation to develop new systems of economic industry combined with intense communal devotion to membership in the mystical person of Christ. By 1826, the society had established nineteen villages from Maine to Kentucky, with each village recognized by the state as a legal person endowed with property rights. Trustees managed the legal affairs of these corporate entities and auditors conducted

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annual inspections of financial records. Defining labor as a form of spiritual exercise, many of these villages prospered—​selling seeds, brooms, buckets, furniture, cloth, and cattle to neighbors, implementing ingenious manufacturing and packaging methods, and providing the community with healthy and abundant food, serviceable clothing, sturdy housing, and meeting facilities. Called Shakers because of their dramatic, sometimes convulsive displays of religious feeling, these people were unusual in believing the founder of their society, Mother Ann Lee, to be the female incarnation of Christ. They also held extremist views about the sinfulness of all sexual intercourse and the need to separate from “the world.” Yet their participation in the world as successful entrepreneurs with clear standards for legal accountability situated them within a broad spectrum of corporate organization in the early republic. However extreme, Shaker efforts to combine emotional expressions of Christian membership with rational strategies for legal order and economic productivity were typical of their time.33 Enthusiasm for new forms of communal unity intensified in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Revivals swept through one locale after another and many new religious organizations appeared. In the setting of organizational activism along the Erie Canal, the treasure hunter Joseph Smith announced that he had unearthed golden tablets inscribed with revelations that supplemented the Old and New Testaments and situated the American continent in relation to biblical history. Like the Shakers, though far more successful, Mormon organization was as much a participant in new American trends in corporate organization as an alternative to them. Smith celebrated the U.S. Constitution as a sacred document, appealed to it and to state laws for protection of Mormon religious freedom, and committed his movement to corporate organization. Smith and his closest followers organized their Church of Latter-​day Saints at a private meeting in upstate New York in 1830, and later Smith and his followers received a charter to incorporate the City of Nauvoo (meaning “Beautiful Place” in Mormon Hebrew) under the aegis of Illinois State law.34 Early Mormons also developed a forthright theology of personhood that pushed forward elements of Christian humanism percolating in various sectors of American society. “God that sits enthroned is a man like one of ourselves,” Joseph Smith explained in a sermon delivered in Nauvoo in 1844. Mormons were restoring themselves and others to godliness, returning to the pure and natural nobility of Adam and Eve. In anticipation of the final restoration of humanity, Mormons followed Paul’s recommendation in 1 Corinthians 15:29 to baptize the dead. Smith’s exalted vision of humanity was grounded in the materialism of the natural world; men could become gods and “there is



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no other God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bones,” he preached in 1841. As his biographer Richard Bushman explained, Smith “envisioned a world where not even God could extinguish a human personality.”35 Though not without precedent in Christian mysticism or the puritans’ celebration of “new men” in Christ, American devotion to personhood intensified and became increasingly articulate. For Mormons and for many other Americans in the nineteenth century, the cultivation of personhood was firmly wedded to communal organization. In the midst of social upheaval, their own grinding poverty, the failure of their bank, and lack of confidence in other American forms of organization, Smith and his followers diligently applied themselves to the practicalities of restoring the communal organization of early Christianity in the construction of a new Jerusalem. To realize this vision, church leaders allocated property and monitored its use, and church tithing supported corporate building, industry, trade, agriculture, exploration, defense, and print media. Elaborating upon the theme of mutual responsibility set forth in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Smith called his followers to unite “with one heart and with one mind” and to pool their material resources. For Smith and his followers, religious and economic life would be harmoniously combined and on equal footing, with spiritual principles manifest in the organization of material life, and material life exalted for its spiritual importance. As Smith’s successor Brigham Young explained, “We cannot talk about spiritual things without connecting with them temporal things, neither can we talk about temporal things without connecting spiritual things with them.”36 In a parallel effort to join spiritual and temporal things, the Connecticut preacher Lyman Beecher asserted in 1835 that if the “moral culture” founded by New England puritans could be replicated in the West, then “this nation is, in the providence of God, destined to lead the way in the moral and political emancipation of the world.” Celebrating “twenty-​four thousand miles of steam navigation, and canals and rail roads” ensuring that “a market is brought to every man,” Beecher’s vision of a Christian nation reflected the vitality and power of national economic expansion he wanted evangelicals to control. Stressing the need for colleges and religious congregations to educate the tide of immigrants that came “rushing in like the waters of the flood,” Beecher called for legions of “ministers of cultivated mind and popular eloquence” to inspire, educate, and elevate individuals across the country. Through the “instrumentality” of these religious leaders, “organization and order” would be imposed. Beecher’s panoramic vision of America’s “uncontrollable greatness” heralded a “perpetual and boundless prosperity” not unlike the Kingdom of God.

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Businessmen helped to define this Christian vision of the nation. The earliest and most influential examples of commercial industry in American emerged in New England, where Pauline theories of corporate governance and liberty in Christ permeated the early development of many institutions. Most significantly, the land of the Pilgrims led the country in the profitable application of Christian corporatism to textile manufacturing. In Waltham, Massachusetts, beginning in the 1810s and in the new mill town of Lowell, built in the early 1820s, organizational strategies linked to Christianity placed American manufacturing on a revolutionary new footing.37 After Francis Cabot Lowell returned from England to Massachusetts in 1812, he executed a plan for a new system of textile manufacturing that owed as much to Pauline social theory as it did to the design for a new power loom, which he had committed to memory in Manchester to smuggle it through British customs. Departing from traditional reliance on domestic piecework, Lowell combined several processes for turning cotton into cloth, and introduced a new way to control the quality as well as the quantity of production by bringing workers together under one roof and orchestrating their labor. Repelled by the poverty and moral depravity he had observed in English factory workers, he recruited “daughters of respectable farmers” and paid them twice what factory workers in England received. To support and enhance the lives of these workers, the Boston Associates—​the investment company that capitalized this and other manufacturing ventures—​built boardinghouses that operated at a financial loss, and placed these houses “under the charge of respectable women, with every provision for religious worship.” To encourage the acquisition of cultural refinement in its female workforce, the company underwrote the Lowell Offering, a periodical devoted to contributions from workers’ pens. The company also built a library at Lowell and, at the behest of one investor, St. Anne’s Episcopal Church. Other new churches soon appeared in Lowell “with subscriptions freely made by stockholders for different religious societies.”38 The new system succeeded brilliantly—​at first. Nathan Appleton took over the management of operations in 1817 when Lowell died unexpectedly at the age of forty-​two. Cloth that had sold for thirty cents a yard in 1816 was soon made available for only six cents, Appleton reported, and “without a loss to the manufacturer.” He credited this wonderful success to his predecessor, after whom the new town was named. And he described Lowell’s organizational genius in biblical terms. Like Paul’s spirit of corporate union, Francis Cabot Lowell was “the informing soul, which gave direction and form to the whole proceeding.”39 The letters and diary of Amos Lawrence, another mill owner and member of the Boston Associates, show that some early American industrialists went



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to great lengths to keep their vision of Christian industry alive. A  punctiliously religious man, Lawrence upheld “perfection” as the Christian standard for manufacturing, telling his sister in a letter of 1807 that, “from motives of duty to our Creator, and ambition in ourselves, we ought to strive for it.” He kept a vigilant eye on his obligations, telling another correspondent that, in his effort to build a reputation in Boston, “I never allowed a bill against me to stand unsettled over the Sabbath.” Lawrence made large contributions to numerous causes, viewing charity as a precious commodity not to be wasted. Backing off from theological disputes, he hesitated to join “a religious controversy which does not promise to increase the stock of charity among us.” Calculation entered into everything he did, but Lawrence valued the kindness of charity. “No case occurred, while I was with him,” a long-​serving clerk recalled, “in which I  thought he dealt harshly with a debtor who had failed in business.” Devotion to work established common ground between him and his employees, or so Lawrence thought. His response to the labor reform movement in politics reflected his belief in an egalitarian work ethic, as well as his lack of empathy for people whose labor was more backbreaking than his own: “We are literally all working-​men; and the attempt to get up a ‘Working-​ men’s party’ is a libel upon the whole population.” With a Christian approach to corporate organization wedded to a mechanistic view of labor, Lawrence’s hostility toward the idea of a Workingmen’s Party represented one way of pushing Christianity forward in the context of industrialization.40 Though replicated in the Northeast with considerable success, the Lowell system of Christian manufacturing faced internal challenges as well as external pressures beyond any manager’s control or full comprehension. Lowell’s bold vision for a horizontally expansive and vertically integrated system of manufacturing made lasting contributions to corporate business in the United States, but the communal harmony and virtuous workforce that he viewed as critical for wholesome economic productivity could not be sustained. When prices for textile goods fell in 1829, and again in the Panic of 1837, the relatively high wages paid to American mill workers could not be maintained, and working conditions and relations between workers and managers deteriorated. The communal organization at Lowell made it possible for workers to stage protests against lower wages, but when the Lowell Offering was used by the Female Labor Reform Association to call for a ten-​hour work day, the periodical lost its subscribers, and it ceased publication in 1845. The arrival of new immigrants seeking work in the 1840s and 1850s brought men from Ireland and French Canada into the mills, suppressing wages further, as boardinghouses for mill workers became more like military barracks than school dormitories. The price for textile goods continued to decline. Merrimack calico

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prints (named for the manufacturing company in Lowell and the river whose flow powered the mill) sold for only nine cents a yard in 1855, down from the twenty-​three cents a yard they had commanded in 1825. Low prices were now combined with low wages and demand for increasing productivity. Thus while Christian organizational theory had contributed to the establishment of the textile industry in New England, the depersonalizing forces of manufacturing, combined with the high volume of cotton pouring into the mills, made Lowell’s vision of Christian industry impossible to sustain.41 The financial operations of the industrialists known as the Boston Associates illustrate the problems Lawrence and his friends faced (and created) in their effort to fuse Christian principles with business. These men knew one another, and often extended leniency to each other, fully aware that credit was a form of trust and that the trust they extended today might be needed in return tomorrow. The benefits from this system of “insider lending” extended beyond the investors themselves; Boston Associates and other groups like them created the large pools of stable capital that allowed American manufacturing to take off. But the principle of Christian charity that worked so profitably when expressed in leniency among investors was not extended to farmers and small suppliers drawn into the financial orbits of manufacturing towns. When they needed credit, these less wealthy individuals found themselves subject to rigorous repayment schedules and harsh financial penalties. After 1818, when Amos Lawrence and Nathan Appelton, their brothers, and a few other investors established the Suffolk Bank to stabilize currency throughout New England, the rift widened between hard-​nosed credit arrangements for small clients at a distance and more charitable arrangements for big investors who met face-​to-​face.42 When Appleton, Amos and Abbot Lawrence, and other members of the Boston Associates created Massachusetts General Life in 1823, investors and their families benefited greatly from the innovative approaches to charity the new corporation supported. Sending one-​third of its profits to the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston’s foremost medical center and a pioneer in modern health care, Massachusetts Life pooled its remaining capital into a fund from which investors could borrow, which Nathan Appleton’s son William did at least thirty times, as did numerous members of the Lawrence clan. In addition to capitalizing new mills and the railroad infrastructure for shipping cotton and cloth, the insurance company supported trusts for the Boston Associates and their children. As Robert Dalzell showed, Massachusetts Life enabled a cadre of Christian families to accrue wealth and status as leaders of Boston’s numerous charitable, philanthropic, educational, and artistic institutions, all of which promoted and disseminated New England values. Firm adherents of



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honest work, civic virtue, and Christian benevolence, these civic leaders managed to set themselves apart from others without entirely meaning to do so, all the while extending their cultural influence throughout and beyond New England, much as wealthy businessmen in Philadelphia and New  York did through their corporate activism.43 Even as New England manufacturers applied organizational strategies derived from religious life to manufacturing, the relationship of the parts of this system to the whole became more remote and mechanical, and less dependent on interpersonal fellowship. With economic growth elevated as a means to progress and the common good, commercial bodies dominated society, and they had to operate with increasing efficiency to survive and grow. The rapid pace of economic growth, territorial expansion, demographic change, and technological advance in antebellum America made these emerging systems of production and consumption difficult to comprehend, much less control.44 Sentimental writers elevated the privacy of family life as a sanctuary from these harsh and confusing realities. In the 1850s, the famed Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher located God inside the home, soothing troubles away, like a mother rocking her child: “God Almighty is the mother, and the soul is the tired child, and he folds it in his arms, and dispels its fears, and lulls it to repose, saying, ‘Sleep, my darling; sleep.’ ” Beecher’s emphasis on the maternal aspect of God had roots in the long tradition of associating the church with Mary, the Mother of God. It also reflected the new division between home and work characteristic of industrialization, as well the maudlin romanticism that appealed to many nineteenth-​century Americans as a salve for any form of distress.45 More invigorating responses to social change were also on offer. Calling Americans to resist every inclination to passivity, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson heralded a new era of personhood, a rousing of Adam to his own divinity. A “sign of our times,” Emerson wrote in 1837, “is the new importance given to the single person.” By the early 1850s, the tension between individual dignity and the grinding forces of business finally came to center on slavery for Emerson, as it did for many others who abhorred the institution that shackled man’s “Adamitic capacity” to the “immoral law” that protected slave owners rather than those held as slaves. Emerson spoke for many in New England in speeches against the Fugitive Slave Act, which made law enforcement officers in free states accountable for capturing and returning runaways to their owners. Denouncing Christians who “quote the Bible, quote Paul, quote Christ, to justify slavery,” Emerson offered an egalitarian version of Pauline liberty: “I hope we have reached the end of our unbelief” in the sanctity of persons, and

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“have come to a belief that there is a divine Providence in the world, which will not save us but through our own cooperation.”46 Black hands picked and baled the staple that was feeding industrial growth far away from the textile workers whose meager earnings depended on the raw cotton produced by slave labor, and from many Americans who worked small farms. Slave labor was much more visible in the South, where many Episcopalians and Catholics accepted slavery as part of Christian life, and church officials supported the institution in their teachings. Southern churchgoers found strong support for slavery in the Bible, pointing to numerous references to slaves owned by Old Testament patriarchs as well as New Testament writings attributed to the Apostle Paul, such as the letter to the Ephesians, which commanded, “Slaves, obey your masters with respect and fear.” Baptists and Methodists who opposed slavery in the Revolutionary era—​ even denying church membership to slave owners—​had given up their principled stand against slavery in the first decade of the nineteenth century to avoid disruption of their preaching, and to be able to minister to enslaved persons and encourage Christian treatment of slaves.47 As the most fervent champions of biblical exactitude, southern Presbyterians took the lead in mounting strong arguments for slavery as consonant with biblical teaching, and superior to wage labor and the dehumanizing industrialization prevalent in the North. Pro-​slavery Christians invoked Pauline teachings about the trust that bound unequal persons together in the body of Christ. In 1856, a Reverend Ross, a Presbyterian minister from Alabama, explained that many biblical passages “show unanswerably that God has really sanctioned the relation of master and slave, as those of husband and wife, and parent and child.” The minister hoped that through their relationships with earthly masters, slaves “may know that ‘they have a master in heaven.’ ”48 Southern efforts to bring slaves within the embrace of Christian community show how Pauline corporatism accommodated slavery and proved useful in its defense. Some defenders even insisted that slaves were happy and that it was their good fortune to live within the bonds of Christian order. “For God has intrusted to them [slave owners],” the Rev. Ross said, “to train millions of the most degraded in form and intellect, but at the same time, the most gentle, the most amiable, the most affectionate, the most imitative, the most susceptible of social and religious love, of all the races of mankind.”49 While some defended slaveholding Christianity as a legitimate version of Pauline community, others became convinced that the institution threatened the entire country, and invoked supernatural images to convey its demonic force. Allusions to Satan drawn from Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Bible multiplied during the 1850s. Charles Sumner, a Republican senator from



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Massachusetts, fell victim to a nearly fatal caning in the Senate chamber in 1856 when he delivered a speech attributing slavery to Satan. Tennessee representative John Savage blamed Satan for the ill will unleashed in Congress: “May we not believe that the prince of darkness, attacking our early weakness, as he did our first parents in the Garden of Eden, let loose this odious brood of the internal world, to destroy a Government whose progress to greatness will banish discord and tyranny from the world?”50 Dispute over slavery came to a head in 1857 in the Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sanford. Born into slavery in Virginia, Scott had lived in Illinois and been legally married in Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was banned. In the slave state of Missouri, John Sanford claimed ownership of the Scott family after Scott’s original owner died; Scott sued Sanford for unlawful imprisonment. In his deciding opinion, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney put the question in terms of citizenship:  “Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States?” Taney answered with a firm negative. Slave owners could not be “deprived of life, liberty, and property, without due process,” Taney insisted, building on the theory of contracts at the heart of American law. “The unhappy black race,” on the other hand, “were never thought of or spoken of except as property.” Representing the power of the federal government, Taney overrode state and territorial laws that enabled blacks to attain U.S. citizenship.51 The Dred Scott decision exposed the moral conundrum inherent in the rational idealism of American law and, more specifically, in the contract law that allowed persons to be owned as property. Opponents of slavery seized on the Dred Scott case to reject contractual reasoning in the name of a higher law. Calling Taney’s decision “an open rebellion against God’s government,” the orator and former slave Frederick Douglass condemned the Supreme Court’s effort “to blot out the broad distinction instituted by the Allwise between men and things, and to change the image and superscription of the everliving God into a speechless piece of merchandise.” As Douglass declared, “To decide against this right in the person of Dred Scott, or the humblest and most whipscarred bondman in the land, is to decide against God.”52 Underscoring the significance the term “person” had acquired as the sacred entity to which the laws of the nation should be beholden, Abraham Lincoln used the word three times in the first sentence of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863. The proclamation did not abolish slavery outside the Confederacy, but it did open the way to passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery, and to the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to “all persons born or

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naturalized in the United States.” Against the contract law reasoning underlying Dred Scott, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the ensuing amendments elevated personhood as a category and protected the rights of persons under federal law.53 In subsequent decades, corporations would also claim civil rights as persons, enabling a new era of corporate expansion. Ironically, that later development built on the legislation meant to end the abuse of human beings held as property, and on the sanctification of personhood that gained prominence in response to the increasing mechanization of industry. Prior to the Civil War, personhood emerged as the moral centerpiece in the new world of modern industry, upholding the sanctity of human individuality and fellow feeling. Among those who embraced personhood as the Adamic ideal of manhood, Mormon president Brigham Young addressed the challenge that ideal seemed to pose to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians that “the natural man receiveth not the things of God.” In a speech in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City in 1862, Young argued that a simplistic reading of this passage was “not true” and that, in fact, “the natural man is of God.” Young invoked the New Testament letter to Timothy, which he believed to have been written by Paul, to explain that Adam and Eve were not inherently evil but rather deceived by evil powers that beset them from outside. Exhorting his followers to build a New Jerusalem in the American West anchored in Pauline ideas about corporate order and new men in Christ, Young celebrated the simple truth he thought Paul was trying to communicate. “It is much easier to live the life of a Saint than to live the life of a sinner,” he explained. “There is more real good obtained, and more real profit gained in being honest and telling the truth as it, than in taking the opposite course.”54

Notes 1. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1996), quotation from 12; Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1993), quotation from 21; Kevin Butterfield, The Making of Tocqueville’s America (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2015), quotation from 4; Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (October 1, 1987): 1441–​1483; Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 39–​86, 241–​296; William M. Wiecek, “The Foundations of Classical Legal Thought, 1760–​1860,” in The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought:  Law



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and Ideology in America, 1886–​1937 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19–​ 63; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–​ 1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 160–​210. 2. Quotations from Chief Justice John Marshall, “Opinion,” Fletcher v. Peck, http://​ www.law.cornell.edu/​supremecourt/​text/​10/​87/​, accessed October 30, 2014; Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 171–​178; R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 222–​244. 3. Newmyer, John Marshall, 262–​ 264, Marshall quotation from 262; second Marshall quotation from “Opinion,” Fletcher v. Peck. Also see Kunal Madhukar Parker, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–​ 1900:  Legal Thought Before Modernism (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3–​ 20; Knyd Haakossen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 310–​331; D. J. Ibbetson, “Natural Law and Common Law,” Edinburgh Law Review 5, no. 4 (2001): 4–​10. 4. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–​1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 34–​64; Susan Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 147–​152. 5. John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America:  Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), quotations from 15 and 17. 6. Quotations from Chief Justice John Marshall, “Opinion of the Court,” Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, http://​www.law.cornell.edu/​supremecourt/​text/​ 17/​518, accessed April 4, 2016. 7. John Adams writing as “Novanglus” in the Boston Gazette (1774), quoted in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston:  Little, Brown, 1851), 4:106. 8. “Manufacturing Corporations,” American Jurist and Law Magazine 2, no. 3 (July 1829):  92–​119, quotation from 95; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Craighead and Allen, 1838), quotations from 170–​171; Robert E. Wright, “Capitalism and the Rise of the Corporation,” in Capitalism Takes Command:  The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-​Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 145–​ 168; Robert E. Wright, Corporation Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 25–​79; Butterfield, Making of Tocqueville’s America, 93–​118. 9. Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (January 1, 1993): 51–​84; Wright, “Capitalism and the Rise of the Corporation,” 149; Wright, Corporation Nation, 74–​77. 10. Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins Press, 1982; orig. 1978); Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1997); Ferdinand

114 Corpor ate Organization in America Tonnies, Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002; orig. in German 1887). 11. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 12. David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution:  From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 3–​19. 13. George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union:  Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), quotations from 49 and 271; Thomas Legion, “Total Slave Population in the United States, by State,” http://​thomaslegion.net/​totalslaveslaverypopulationinunitedstates17901860bystate.html, accessed December 5, 2014; Edward E. Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-​ Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2012), 74–​75; Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–​7; Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told:  Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 14. “The Times in Which We Live,” Evening and Morning Star (Independence, MO) 1, no. 1 (June 1832), quotations from 5. 15. Ibid., quotation from 5. 16. Kyle B. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham:  Religion and the Making of New  York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 81–​144; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs:  The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–​1860 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1985); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 17. Horwitz, Transformation of American Law, 31–​108; Larson, Market Revolution, 140–​153; Henry Charles Carey, Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (Philadelphia: J. S. Skinner, 1851). 18. Andrew M. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 24–​30. 19. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power, 17–​48, quotation from 47. 20. “Mr. Editor,” Connecticut Herald, February 15, 1825, quotation from 3; for auctions, see New  York Morning Herald, February 22, 1830, 4; Larson, Market Revolution, 46–​ 53; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815–​ 1848 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2007), 216–​223; Schocket, Founding Corporate Power, 142. 21. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, new ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1796; orig.1776), quotation from Book I, Chapter X, Part II, 163.



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22. Maier, “Revolutionary Origins,” 83; Mark, “Personification of the Business Corporation”; “James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, 1 October 1813,” http://​ rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/​founders/​TSJN-​03-​06-​02-​0421, accessed November 18, 2014. For Jefferson’s emphasis on the constitutional restriction on the federal government’s power to incorporate, see “Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 25 December 1809,” http://​rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/​founders/​TSJN-​ 03-​02-​02-​0064, accessed November 18, 2014. 23. Andrew Jackson, “To J.  K. Polk, December 23, 1833,” quoted in Thomas Payne Govan, Nicholas Biddle:  Nationalist and Public Banker, 1786–​ 1844 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1959), 115; Jackson quoted in Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 376 and 380. 24. Francis Lieber, “Corporation,” Encyclopedia Americana (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1830), quotations from 3:147; Maier, “Revolutionary Origins,” 82. 25. Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 142–​ 144; Wright, Corporation Nation, 16–​85, 184–​187. 26. Ben Wright, “Gospel of Liberty: Antislavery and American Salvation,” Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2014; Edwin Scott Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 390–​391; Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the Early American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 116–​117, 145–​149, 170–​179. 27. Gaustad and Barlow, New Historical Atlas, 390; Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 111. 28. Laws of the State of New-​York, Passed at the first Meeting of the Seventh Session of the Legislature of Said State (New York: Elizabeth Holt, 1784), quotations from Chapter XVIII, 21. 29. John Hughes, “Pastoral of Bishop Hughes,” September 8, 1842, in Complete Works of the Most Reverend John Hughes, D.D., ed. Lawrence Kehoe (New York: Lawrence Kehoe, 1866), 1:314–​327, quotations from 320–​323. 30. George Fisher Michael et al., “Saint Louis Catholic Church, Buffalo,” Christian Advocate and Journal, March 15, 1855; Erastus Brooks, “Speech of the Hon. E. Brooks” (March 6, 1855), in The Controversy Between Senator Brooks and John, Archbishop of New  York (New  York:  DeWitt and Davenport, 1855), quotations from 11 and 12. 31. Gaustad and Barlow, New Historical Atlas, 390; Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–​1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 39–​184; John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1998), 80–​103. 32. Richard Carwardine, “‘Antinomians’ and ‘Arminians’:  Methodists and the Market Revolution,” in The Market Revolution in America:  Social, Political, and

116 Corpor ate Organization in America Religious Expressions, 1800–​ 1880, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1996), 282–​307, quotation from 289; David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 125–​128, 156. 33. Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 40, 133–​148; Archie Faircloth, “The Importance of Accounting to the Shakers,” Accounting Historians Journal 15, no. 2 (October 1, 1988):  99–​129; Julie Nicoletta, “The Architecture of Control:  Shaker Dwelling Houses and the Reform Movement in Early-​ Nineteenth-​Century America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 3 (September 1, 2003): 352–​387. 34. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 109–​112, 405–​414; Edwin Brown Firmage and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​ Day Saints, 1830–​1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 83–​85; James L. Kimball Jr., “The Nauvoo Charter: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 64, no. 1 (1981):73. 35. Bushman, Joseph Smith, 418–​423, 533–​537, quotations from 534 and 420. 36. Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-​day Saints, 1830–​1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1–​35, quotations from 7 and 5; John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 33, 84; Firmage and Mangrum, Zion in the Courts, 132–​136. 37. Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England:  Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-​Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 79–​202. 38. Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell, Massachusetts (Lowell:  B. H.  Penhallow, 1858), 14–​25, quotations from 16 and 25; Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite:  The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1987), 5–​44; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–​1860 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1979); Christopher Clark, Social Change in America:  From the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 161–​168. 39. Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 14–​15, quotation from 15. 40. William R. Lawrence, Extracts from the Diary and Correspondence of the Late Amos Lawrence (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1855), quotations from 33, 31, 55, 61, and 103–​104. 41. Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 19–​34; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 68; Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–​1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 128–​138.



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42. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11–​83; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 94–​95. 43. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 101–​108, quotation from 103. 44. Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 45. Henry Ward Beecher in Edna Dean Proctor, Life Thoughts, Gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher (Boston:  Phillips, Samson, 1858), quotations from 79. 46. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 41–​59, quotations from 58 and 59; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” in Essential Writings, 777–​792, quotations from 781, 783, 787, and 797; R. W.  B. Lewis, The American Adam:  Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 47. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 206–​252; Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity:  White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Donald D. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism:  A Chapter in American Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 48. “Speech of Rev. Ross, of Huntsville, Alabama, on the Slavery Question,” printed in Charleston Mercury, July 4, 1856, quotations from 1. 49. Ross, “Speech on the Slavery Question,” quotations from 1. 50. Edward J. Blum, “The Kingdom of Satan in America: Weaving the Wicked Web of Antebellum Religion and Politics,” Common-​place 15, no. 3 (2015). 51. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, opinion of the Court in Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, March 6, 1857, reprinted in Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Paul Finkelman (Boston: Bedford, 1997), quotations from 57–​63. 52. Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision: Speech at New York, on the Occasion of the Anniversary of the American Abolition Society,” May 11, 1857, reprinted in Dred Scott v. Sandford, quotations from 175. 53. The first sentence of the Emancipation Proclamation reads:  “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-​three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” Quotation from

118 Corpor ate Organization in America http://​w ww.historynet.com/​ e mancipation- ​ p roclamation-​t ext#sthash.reSYCuPM.dpuf, accessed December 30, 2014; quotation from the Fourteenth Amendment, http://​www.14thamendment.us/​amendment/​14th_​amendment. html, accessed December 30, 2014. 54. Brigham Young, “Truth and Righteousness Implanted in the Natural Man,” June 15, 1862, in Journal of Discourses, http://​jod.mrm.org/​9/​305, accessed June 14, 2016.

6

“The Real Nature and Spirit of Our Lives” The Evolution of Corporate Personality, 1865–​1 920

In the decades following the Civil War, millions of American joined corporations as workers, stockholders, or volunteers, while state and federal governments grew to partner, patronize, and benefit corporate growth. Setting the pattern for these developments, railroads expanded across the United States, aided by state grants of eminent domain for 200 million acres of land. Religious organizations developed just as expansively, their strategies for large-​scale, cross-​country organization echoing those of commerce and industry. The United States entered the First World War with strong systems of manufacturing, finance, agriculture, municipal government, education, and religion. Spared the devastation suffered by European nations, the country emerged from the blood bath a major world power.1 Like railroad companies, American religious organizations competed with each other for passengers and freight, an analogy spelled out in a popular dialogue of the day. A  few months before the great railroad strike of 1886, “The Brakeman at Church” was presented at a Knights of Labor meeting in Sedalia, Missouri by Nellie Ingram, a frequent performer at local labor meetings. The dialogue began with the brakeman asking his companion to guess which church he had attended yesterday. The companion guesses Episcopal. Acknowledging that company to be a “nice line” with a “fast time” and “some mighty nice people,” the brakeman admits he “couldn’t stand the palace cars” because “the passengers are allowed to talk back to the conductor.” The companion guesses Universalist next, and the brakeman replies, “Broad gauge . . . Everybody travels on a pass. Conductor doesn’t get a fare

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once in fifty miles.” The brakeman knows “some awfully good men who ride on that line,” and appreciates the policy of allowing passengers to smoke, but he won’t ride it because “train orders are vague.” Unitarian? That’s “a mighty good road, well ballasted with reason, though it runs through a region a little bit cold.” Presbyterian? “Narrow gauge . . . pretty track, straight as a rule; tunnel right through a mountain rather than go around it.” But “the cars are a little narrow” with “no room in the aisle to dance.” Freethinkers? “All trains run wild and every engineer makes his own time,” and the brakeman did not want to “ride on a line that has no terminus.” The Methodist line gained more approval. “Now you’re shouting . . . . Fast time and plenty of passengers. Engines carry a power of steam, and don’t you forget it.” The Congregational line is “pleasant,” well-​organized, and “one of the oldest in the country.” But the Baptist road wins the brakeman’s heart. “She’s a daisy, isn’t she?” with a “river on one side and hills on the other, and it’s a steady climb up the grade till . . . the fountain head of the river begins.”2 This dialogue casts a genial eye on churches and railroad lines alike, but historians have often taken a much more negative view of corporate expansion during this period, concentrating on the exploitation of workers and the breakdown of community. Alan Trachtenberg argued that after the Civil War, the old concept of the corporation as a “communal or religious” body—​an “association of individuals bound together into a corpus, a body sharing a common purpose”—​faded from view. In its place arose the modern corporation, a “concentration of power” managed by a capitalist minority equipped with new strategies and “new hierarchies of control.” The privileged few supervised “the steady encroachment of mechanization on the forms of work, of everyday life, and social transactions throughout America.”3 Big industrial corporations did change American life in irrevocable ways, and “new hierarchies of control” did emerge. But communal impulses contributed to the organization of American society as vitally as did mechanization. Religious and commercial corporations evolved together along concurrent tracks, and over connecting rails of metaphysical thought. Idealism about business, profit, and social evolution blurred boundaries among different religious traditions and between commerce and Christianity, fostering a reliance on corporate spirit as ubiquitous as reliance on steam. Decades ago, historian Arthur M.  Schlesinger observed that by 1900 Americans had created a kind of “irregular government” composed of a “vast and intricate mosaic of organizations.” Voluntary associations proliferated to include numerous labor unions, a broad array of churches and religious societies, and seventy thousand different lodges representing five million members. Schlesinger described these organizations as America’s “greatest



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school of self-​government,” noting proudly that while European dictators disbanded voluntary associations as a threat to their authority, such associations became “a great cementing force for national integration” in the United States. Though keenly aware of the challenges to religion posed by science, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, Schlesinger did not appreciate the impact of new forms of spirituality on both religion and commerce. Nor did he acknowledge the extent to which racial segregation contributed to the social order he observed.4 Religious organizations grew in response to ethnic, class, and racial tensions, reflecting divisions between groups but also common standards of responsibility and respectability derived from Pauline Christianity that could be invoked to ease tensions. In their efforts to ameliorate the hardships such tensions caused for their co-​religionists, Catholic sisters built thousands of educational and charitable institutions across the country. “By 1920,” according to one tally, “Catholic sisters had created and/​or maintained approximately 500 hospitals, 50 women’s colleges, and over 6,000 parochial schools.” Serving millions of poor immigrants and their families, these institutions protected lay Catholics from the discriminatory practices of protestant institutions. Catholic institutions also contributed to the systematization of Catholic identity, joining people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds through uniform appeals to Catholic spirituality, rites of membership, and devotional practice. The sisters who performed this organizational labor changed along with the people they served, often relinquishing among themselves class and ethnic distinctions upheld by Catholic sisters in Europe.5 Corporate spirit operated as an exclusionary as well as a socially bonding energy, evident not only in distinctions between protestants and Catholics but also in the racism that hardened during this period, supported by proponents of social evolution who claimed that Anglo-​Saxons represented the highest level of human development. African Americans built religious organizations of their own, much as Catholics did, to sustain their communities and support individual members. But Catholics did not face the intimidation or resistance to assimilation that African Americans did. “When the twentieth century came, the West and the South united to create a new Christ for America,” historians Edward Blum and Paul Harvey argued. “He was a white man who strengthened white men . . . in the name of sacred liberty.”6 Popular ideas about evolution contributed to changes occurring simultaneously in commercial and religious life. Even as the brutality of industrial work and living conditions for the poor demonstrated the imperfection of society in the present age, idealism about the evolution of human history allowed some observers to perceive a relentless spiritual power working through nature and

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history to uplift humanity. While Pauline Christianity had been invoked in the early republic to affirm the nature and rights of man, in the era of industrial expansion after the Civil War, it was more often invoked to affirm the power of the spirit at work in nature and human history. New ideas about spiritual power developing in the context of massive industrialization also worked to expand the meaning of personhood. The popularity of spiritualism during this period reflects the tendency to see metaphysical forces at work in nature. As one promotional pamphlet explained, spiritual intuition led to the founding of the Chicago Artesian Well Company as a joint-​stock company with a million dollars of capital. The venture began when Thomas J. Whitehead and A. E. Swift, on a visit from Maine, consulted a medium in Chicago who envisioned “the best, purest and healthiest water known anywhere, which would rush to the surface with great force and power, and was in quantities sufficient to supply the people of this city for all time to come.” Excited by the prospect of this untapped resource, and by Chicago’s future as a great city, the entrepreneurs consulted another medium about exactly where to dig. In short order, two artesian wells were up and running, and the discovery of small deposits of oil suggested that even more good fortune might lie in store, enabling the men to build further on expectation. The spiritualist George Shufeldt contributed an essay to the pamphlet describing how petroleum and other elements formed under the earth as part of an evolutionary process in which spiritual forces generated material phenomena. “These primary elements were, and are yet—​for creation has not ceased—​in commotion; boiling, surging and upheaving; particular principles seeking and finding chemical affinities, and rushing from the center to the circumference, slowly, but gradually and surely, compounding themselves into the material things which we now see around us.”7 Even those most resistant to the erosion of traditional forms of religion joined in similar efforts to align spiritual forces with empirical reality. The Minneapolis proto-​fundamentalist William Bell Riley came close to defining the Bible’s divine authorship as a form of spiritualism: “Some people have difficulty to understand how God can be the author of a book which claims to have been written by human hands and certainly passed through the medium of the human mind.” Defending the truth of original sin, Riley offered a spiritualist explanation of its inception. “Whether we believe the scripture account of its introduction into Eden through the medium of a serpent,” he wrote, “or whether we hold to some less reasonable and altogether unscriptural theory about its origin, it leaves the great fact of its presence and desolating power the same.”8 Though he resisted the idea that society was improving over time, Riley remained steadfast in affirming the spiritual nature of Christian organization



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and its eventual triumph in human history. “Organization is a prime necessity of the highest life and most efficient labor,” he explained, and “God’s fraternity is equally superior to, and less mechanical than . . . man’s device.” Citing Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, Riley argued that “the fellowship of the gospel is not a mere mutual admiration society,” because “in the gospel men are ‘one in Christ.’” He celebrated the visible effects of Christianity’s invisible organizing power. “To my mind the greatest miracle recorded in the New Testament,” Riley wrote, “is that in Acts 2:47, where the first visible Church of Christ is organized.”9 If the spirit enabled union in one church among different individuals, it could also blur the boundaries between different churches and religious organizations, between religion and business, and between labor and capital. The spirit could also bring the future closer, and encourage people to invest in realities that had yet to achieve substance, realities that depended on willpower for actualization. “The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence,” William James wrote in 1901. Creating a bridge from religion to psychology that would sustain several generations of thinkers, James argued that “transmundane realities” had practical effects in ordinary life and that the “unseen region” beyond ordinary consciousness was “not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world.” Encouraging people to “postulat[e]‌new facts” and to work to bring ideals dimly grasped into visible reality, James focused much of his work on “the will to believe.” In his arguments for individual will as a pivotal force, James also emphasized that the most lasting achievements came through cooperation. “A social organism of any sort whatever,” James wrote in 1897, “is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Whenever a desired result is achieved by the co-​operation of many independent persons,” he said, “its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the recursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned.”10 As evolutionary ideas worked their way from biology to sociology and psychology, new theories about the organic nature of corporate organizations began to take hold. Among the first Americans to link evolutionary theory with Pauline idealism, Brooklyn author and preacher Henry Ward Beecher offered an optimistic vision of social evolution as a natural progression from simple to complex forms of organization. In a widely distributed sermon, “Evolution and the Church,” Beecher claimed that spiritual evolution would erase the distinction between natural and revealed religion, bringing about the Christianization of society and “the steady lifting up of men into the conscious atmosphere of God.”11

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Less sanguine interpreters of modern life deplored the growing economic disparity of American life, but also expressed belief in an underlying connection between Christianity and economic life that was shared by people across the economic spectrum. As historian Leon Fink recently cautioned, “The popular image of America’s era of titanic industrial conflicts has become all too tidy,” depicting owners and workers as adversaries without sufficient attention to the common principles underlying their disputes. In contrast to Europe, where more firmly entrenched class divisions and inherited privilege prevailed, a broad spectrum of the U.S. population supported an “American ideology” of respect for work and individual ownership of labor. Fink did not mention them, but both American law and Pauline Christianity contributed to the strength of this American ideology. Through decades of profound social and intellectual transformation, American workers and industrialists operated in a world where courts upheld the sanctity of contract law and often shared an idealism that joined individual liberty to corporate membership, even as they vigorously disputed questions of fairness and respect.12 Workers held owners accountable to ideals rooted in Pauline Christianity, and were outraged when they were violated. In response to a survey conducted in the late 1890s designed to find out why industrial workers did not attend church, labor leaders drew a sharp contrast between the behavior of the churches and the true spirit of Christianity. In the words of one respondent, “Workingmen do not see any similarity between Christ and his church.” Union leader Samuel Gompers criticized the churches’ commitment to wealth and class: “My associates have come to look upon the church and the ministry as the apologists and defenders” of business “whose real God is the almighty dollar.” Mary A. Nason stated succinctly that workers “cheer the name of Jesus Christ and hiss the church.” In her view, workers would be served if the spirit of Christ arose to “drive the money-​changers out of the temple.”13 One survey respondent described the church as “a sort of fashionable club” maintained for the “selfish purposes” of the “commercial class.” Another reported that workers “honestly believe that theology is a scheme gotten up to turn the poor man’s thought away from the present life to some dim, mysterious future world.” A third called attention to a pervasive sense of despair fostered by the exclusion of workers from real fellowship: “Men have grown hard under bitter conditions; and think of God as unjust and unkind, if there be any God.” The Baptist minister who had conducted the survey thought workers should give the churches more credit for wanting to help. With some resentment of his own, he criticized a view of Christianity that emphasized social responsibility and respect for workers but failed, in his opinion, to place sufficient stress on personal transformation and strict adherence to



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Scripture: “The Jesus who is applauded by the average workingman,” he concluded, was “a fictitious person, not the Christ of the gospels.”14 The Knights of Labor celebrated the corporate spirit of Christianity that prevailed among workers. Founded in 1869 and reorganized and expanded under the leadership of Terence Powderly, the Knights brought together farmers’ groups and trade unions representing different crafts, incorporating black workers to the extent that racist opposition allowed. At its peak in 1886, the Knights counted more than 700,000 members in more than 650 local assemblies across the country. In line with republican as well as Pauline principles, the Knights called on “each individual, in each and every branch of industry” to work in cooperation with others. “The fundamental principle on which the organization was based was co-​operation,” Powderly explained, “a co-​operation of the various callings and crafts by which men earned the right to remain on the earth’s surface as contributors to the public good.” Aware that his vision of society did not accord with that of many churchgoers, Powderly predicted, “If the Sermon on the Mount were preached in many a church to-​day, and the identity of the divine author concealed, fashionable pews would be emptied.”15 Although Powderly and many members of the Knights were Catholics, at least by birth, priests preached against them. Powderly worked hard to gain official church tolerance for the organization. He tried to downplay conflict between Catholic social teaching and the Knights’ social reform agenda, and allay concerns that the Knights’ ceremonial practices competed with Catholic rites. Discouraging religious rhetoric that pitted workers against churches, and members of different churches against one another, Knights appealed to the underlying Christian idealism embraced by a vast majority of Americans. In 1886, when city officials, merchants, and railroad engineers and linemen in Sedalia, Missouri, closed ranks to protest wage cuts imposed by Jay Gould on his Southwest Railroad, the Knights canceled their Sunday meetings during the ensuing strike so that strikers could present themselves in the city’s “various churches.”16 Workers who joined labor alliances and unions in late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century America resented the corporate greed that kept them from earning a decent living and undermined their dignity as persons. The Pauline image of membership in the body of Christ hovered in the background, as workers conceptualized individual dignity in relation to social membership and mutual respect. Social justice was linked to irreligion for only a few leaders, such as the German-​born Michael Britzius of Chicago, whose 1900 funeral pointedly omitted any reference to God or the Bible. Labor leaders such as Eugene V. Debs routinely appealed to “Christ’s doctrine of the brotherhood of man” to defend unions and their demands for better working

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conditions. In 1896, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune, Debs said that “if Christ was on earth today he would be on the side of the striking garment workers.”17 As Heath Carter showed in a recent study of the labor movement in Chicago, the workers’ challenges to churches exerted real impact during the 1890s, especially among Catholics and Methodists, who viewed their denominations as historically allied with working people. Their leaders adamantly rejected socialism and never budged in their support for private property and the sanctity of contract law, but the union movement inspired the “social Christianity” that worked its way into middle-​class churches and contributed to new labor laws and corporate welfare programs in the twentieth century. When the Knights of Labor proved unable to hold together diverse sectors of the American workforce, other unions were incorporated to pursue more focused goals—​by 1900 the American Federation of Labor (AFL) counted more than half a million members in 118 cities. Alliances between the AFL and Catholic societies developed in many regions; Catholic leaders affirmed Pauline principles of charity, union in Christ, and the dignity of labor, careful to distinguish these principles from those of socialism.18 Workers, labor union leaders, and Catholic priests were not the only ones to apply Pauline social theory to economic life. On the day before his new store opened in Philadelphia in 1876, the retail innovator John Wanamaker addressed his employees, suggesting that each of them was “a spoke” on “an immense wheel.” Identifying moral principle as “the motive power” behind the wheel, he vowed that “if each spoke would remain in its place and do its duty,” then “the motive power would . . . keep going ahead revolving this wheel and making it the largest and best of its kind in the world.” Forty years later, Wanamaker fleshed out the implications of this vision: “We are not counting each other as numbers or just simply a cog in a wheel.” Rather, “we intend to live together as men and women that respect each other and that seem to study each other’s comfort.” More specifically, “we ought to go to the farthest extreme of politeness with a scrubwoman or the man that brings up the elevator or the porter that carries the basket and sweeps.” Goodwill operated as a kind of invisible currency that generated more of itself. And it was good for business. “If we are not polite and kind to them, we cannot expect them to do anything more than to reflect our spirit when they meet the customer.”19 Wanamaker transformed retail business in America by applying lessons he learned and taught in Sunday school. He called his Christian approach to sales “the christening of co-​operation in trade. The application of mutuality to merchandising.” Replacing older practices involving custom-​made goods, bargaining over prices, and different prices and terms of credit for different people,



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Wanamaker established “Four Cardinal Points” that attracted many customers and undercut his competitors: “full guarantee, one price, cash payment, and cash returned . . . for dissatisfaction from any and every cause whatsoever.” Pioneers in customer service, Wanamaker stores were the first to offer a credit card option of payment at the end of each month and “free rest rooms, toilets, telegraph and postal facilities and package and baggage checking rooms.” In Wanamaker’s mind, customer service derived from Christian tenets. As one of his many advertising maxims put it, “Religion first, earning power next, and a vision of general culture later.”20 Wanamaker’s friend Dwight L.  Moody represented another side of the partnership between business and religion. Aided by Cyrus McCormick Jr., Marshall Field, George Armour, and other wealthy Chicago businessmen, Moody utilized modern corporate business practices to build a sprawling network of evangelical institutions. Employing a tier of managers to organize revivals, conduct fundraising, and develop extension programs, Moody promoted “Christian work” as a spiritual activity that produced practical results. His “old-​time religion” brought Christian salvation into a new world of salaried employment and retail consumption. Inspired by the idea of spiritual transformation and the impact it could have in material life, Moody preached that God could “take some tramp walking on the streets of Chicago” and make him a success. Such a miracle was akin to Paul’s transformation on the road to Damascus.21 The manager of Moody’s Chicago Institute, Reuben A. Torrey, explained the operation of the spirit in more detail. He identified “seven simple steps” that everyone could take, “with absolute certainty,” to “obtain” spiritual power from God. Alluding to Paul’s conversion as described in the book of Acts, Torrey called on people to act without delay. “There is no need that any reader of this book wait,” he wrote in 1900. “You can have the Baptism with the Holy Spirit just now.” Like other forms of energy, spiritual power needed “refilling.” And it could be “lost through the incoming of sin,” for example through the corrupting taint of “greed for money.”22 Even as he borrowed imagery from modern hydraulics and spiritualism, Torrey’s view of the relationship between sin and spiritual power carried forward important elements from ancient Christianity and the medieval system of penance, such as the need to guard purity, and atone for corruption, to gain spiritual elevation. And as in earlier forms of Christianity, the proper use of wealth was critical for Torrey. While he never celebrated poverty as a form of holiness as some earlier Christians did, his conception of charity as a moral discipline, means of communal outreach, and system for managing wealth had strong precedent. For Torrey, incoming power from God required

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sympathy for the poor and fellowship with them. Before joining forces with Moody, Torrey renamed his Minneapolis parish the “Open Door Church,” abolishing pew rents and offering an array of social services to the neighborhood. Continuing this work on a bigger scale in Chicago, Torrey interpreted the meaning of “church” along Pauline lines as a community that brought people of different social ranks together, with an emphasis on spiritual vitality working in the lives of ordinary people.23 Torrey’s caution against “greed for money” was not a protest against business but part of a recipe for business success that he shared with Moody and Wanamaker. The Moody Bible Institute was proof that a big organization could grow even bigger through the fusion of managerial skill and spiritual strength. In Torrey’s view, moral discipline, respect for the poor, and reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit made good sense in business and religion, just as Wanamaker credited Christian spirit as the driving power behind the success of his department stores. More cosmopolitan than Wanamaker, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie embodied another variant of Pauline idealism. Looking back on his own breakthroughs in the application of new discoveries in chemistry to the industrial manufacture of steel, Carnegie remembered that when he began revolutionizing the steel industry in the 1870s, the furnace man “was supposed to diagnose the condition of the furnace by instinct, to possess some almost supernatural power of divination,” similar to the man “reputed to be able to locate an oil well or water supply by means of a hazel rod.” Writing in 1910, Carnegie remarked that “it seems incredible” that only forty years earlier, “chemistry in the United States was an almost unknown agent in the manufacture of pig iron,” essential to steel.24 Carnegie’s application of chemistry removed the mystery from pig iron, but it only enlarged his respect for the spiritual power of “Individualism.” He viewed individual talent as a spiritual gift, and dedicated himself to activating that talent as the most practical means of “laboring for the good of our fellows.” The good of everyone was most likely to be advanced, Carnegie believed, when individuals were free to labor for themselves—​and contract their labor to corporations such as his. Carnegie firmly believed that honest dealing was good business policy: “A great business is seldom if ever built up, except on lines of the strictest integrity.” Fair dealing involved an affective, spiritual respect for others: “Not the letter of the law, but the spirit, must be the rule.”25 Carnegie’s spirituality evolved over time. In Scotland, his mother counted the American Unitarian William Ellery Channing among her favorite authors. His father had abandoned the Presbyterian Church after hearing a sermon



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on infant damnation preached soon after Andrew’s birth. With financial assistance from relatives, the impoverished family moved to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, where Andrew followed his father into the local Swedenborgian Society. His aunt Aitken encouraged him to become a Swedenborgian preacher, believing that her nephew was blessed with a remarkable “spiritual sense.” Through his engagement with Swedenborg’s philosophy, Andrew acquired an appreciation for music that eventually led to the establishment of Carnegie Hall in New York and to the Carnegie Foundation, which supported the purchase of church organs in numerous towns and cities throughout the country. As Carnegie explained his fondness for the instrument and why he thought people would benefit from hearing it, “The strains of the reverence-​ compelling organ . . . show us a little of the Heavenly Father.”26 After he become fabulously wealthy manufacturing steel, Carnegie took a round-​the-​world tour that expanded his spiritual horizon. “In China I read Confucius; in India, Buddha and the sacred books of the Hindoos,” Carnegie reported, and “among the Parsees, in Bombay, I studied Zoroaster.” Exposure to these traditions had an integrative effect on Carnegie, deepening his appreciation for “the words of Christ, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,’ ” and confirming the transcendental spirituality Carnegie learned from his earlier membership in the Swedenborgian Society. Swedenborg’s vision of the New Jerusalem was not so different from Carnegie’s epiphany during his Asia tour, though the Swedish philosopher might have been saddened by Carnegie’s conclusion that “trying impatiently to peer into that which lies beyond is as vain as fruitless.”27 Carnegie’s reputation as a friend to unions and the workingman suffered mightily in the 1892 strike at his steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In response to a decline in steel prices, the mill’s general manager, Henry Clay Frick, cut wages, with Carnegie’s approval. As protests escalated and Frick refused to negotiate with the union, Carnegie sailed for his castle in Scotland, leaving Frick to lock out workers and call in armed detectives. The result was a battle that left ten dead and many wounded. Looking back on the debacle that tarnished his reputation forever, Carnegie affirmed his support for the right of workers to organize, though he also maintained that the best union of all was “a cordial union between the employers and their men.” In his autobiography, Carnegie wrote, “I believe the best preventative of quarrels to be recognition of, and sincere interest in, the men.” He continued, “This I can sincerely say, that I always enjoyed my conferences with my workmen, which were not always in regard to wages, and the better I knew the men the more I liked them.”28 Carnegie’s sunny and patronizing version of Pauline corporatism competed with more sinister views. Frank Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus, depicted the

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Pacific and Southwest Railroad as a “huge, sprawling organism  .  .  .  fattening upon the life-​blood of an entire commonwealth.” Spreading out across California, Norris wrote, was “a veritable system of blood circulation, complicated, dividing, and reuniting, branching, splitting, extending, throwing off feelers, off-​shoots, tap roots, feeders—​diminutive little blood suckers that shot out from the main jugular,” which was located in San Francisco. This voracious beast drew its vitality from farmers and ranchers across the state, “laying hold of some forgotten village or town, involving it in one of a myriad branching coils, one of a hundred tentacles.” Building on a cartoon image from the 1880s of the Pacific and Southwest Railroad as a giant octopus, Norris treated the sprawling railroad system and the political powers intertwined as a monstrous, amoral organism. But even the octopus version of corporate life exuded a spiritual force that worked toward an irresistibly harmonious future. In the concluding pages of The Octopus, ranchers form a League of “the People” to challenge the Railroad’s control of land prices. Though it failed in the short term, the League forecast the future union of the human race. Supporting “the People” of the future, California wheat would grow as “a mighty world-​force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm.” Ending the novel with this mystic vision of organic harmony, Norris promised, “The larger view always and through all shams, all wickedness, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for good.”29 Such organic theories of society contributed not only to criticism of corporate power but also to legal debates about corporations as real persons, and to efforts to award corporations the legal rights guaranteed to citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Prior to the introduction of organic language into legal debates in 1880s, American courts had adhered to the 1819 Supreme Court decision in Dartmouth College declaring a corporation to be “an artificial being” and “mere creature of law.” In 1886, in Santa Clara County v.  Southern Pacific Railroad—​a dispute over whether railroads could deduct debt from taxable property—​the Supreme Court abruptly shifted gears to recognize corporations as natural persons. Chief Justice Morrison Waite did not expound on the Court’s reasons for applying a statute originally enacted to protect the civil rights of African Americans to a railroad: “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”30 In the background of this decision, railroads wielded enormous power over labor, industry, and government—​laying track across every region of



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the country and controlling shipping costs that determined decisions about manufacturing, agriculture, and civic development. Railroads also epitomized the problems involved in limiting the activity of corporations to the states that chartered them. These restrictions led to costly delays, as freight and passengers often had to change cars at state lines to accommodate different companies. Labor disputes escalated as overbuilding and cutthroat competition prompted companies to cut wages, reduce the workforce, and contrive devious ways to combine operations across state lines.31 Also in the background of the Santa Clara decision were German theories about the evolution of Christianity and medieval institutions as predecessors of modern corporations that were reaching American economists and legal scholars. Gottingen professor Albrecht Ritschl’s conception of Christian life as an unstoppable spiritual force moving through time to transform human society was standard fare in the German universities so admired by many late nineteenth-​century American intellectuals. At Heidelberg, Karl Knies taught “organismic” theories about economic history to John Bates Clark and Richard T. Ely, two Americans who helped formulate economic theory on their return to the United States. Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch applied these German theories to American corporations, arguing that these “super personal” beings should follow the law of Christ.32 Berlin’s Otto Gierke promoted ideas about medieval Christendom as a “corpus mysticum,” with church and state working together as soul and body. “Medieval thought proceeded from the idea of a single Whole,” Gierke wrote: “Mankind in its Totality was conceived as an Organism.” Gierke attributed this powerful concept to the “profound words of the Apostle” Paul and to his “allegory which dominated all spheres of thought—​Mankind constituted a Mystical body, whereof the Head was Christ.” Gierke emphasized the importance of Paul’s allegory for all forms of medieval organization; it was the “fundamental idea” medieval Christians used to understand “Membership” in society and “to portray the positions filled by individual men in various ecclesiastical and political groups.”33 Gierke’s theory of corporate personality informed American legal debate at the turn of the twentieth century. English translations of his writings were not available before 1900, but Gierke’s arguments reached American readers through his English disciples, especially through the work of his promoter and translator, English historian Frederich William Maitland. While Gierke celebrated “the German notion of the autonomous life of communities and fellowships” sustained by respect for the “Reign of Law,” Maitland called attention to the civil liberty developed in medieval English boroughs and parish townships. Of the combined impact of Gierke and Maitland, legal historian

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Gregory A. Mark wrote, “Their findings catalyzed a transatlantic search for a basis for the legitimacy of the corporation.”34 Following Maitland’s argument that corporate unity in medieval Europe gave birth to political liberty, the American jurist H. L Wingus praised the U.S. Supreme Court for its 1919 decision recognizing the Roman Catholic Church as a corporation “which antedates by almost a thousand years any other personality in Europe.” By implication, the “personality” at the historic root of all modern corporations was the church. Like Maitland, Wingus called attention to the religious liberty that developed through the corporate system of parish government in England. For Wingus, English religious rights translated into legal instruments enabling financial security. English devotion to “religious liberty,” Wingus wrote quoting Maitland, “has been intimately connected with the making of trusts.”35 Maitland and Gierke constructed a bridge linking modern corporations to medieval Christendom. With this history in mind, Maitland applauded American efforts to overturn the narrower and more mechanistic view of incorporation as an artificial construction bestowed on favored organizations by the state. In the Introduction to his translation of Gierke’s work, Maitland called attention to the “large strides” American lawyers had taken in recognizing corporations as entities with rights antecedent to the state. “The age of corporation created by way of ‘privilege’ is passing away,” Maitland theorized, and “in these days of free association, if a group behaves as a corporation, the courts are well-​nigh compelled to treat it as such.”36 In the years following the Santa Clara decision, corporate “personality” became a “virtual obsession” among American legal scholars, according to legal historian Morton J. Horowitz. As Horowitz explained, America’s earliest “ ‘natural entity’ theorists, writing in ignorance both of Gierke and Maitland, simply repeated over and over again that the corporation was a ‘fact’ like any other holder of rights.” Once Gierke and Maitland became recognized authorities, American legal scholars cited them in support of newfound appreciation for the Christian roots and spiritual dimensions of corporate organization. As Jethro W. Brown instructed his readers in 1905, “Long before the reign of Henry VI,” the “acquisition of a formal charter of incorporation could only recognize, not bestow, these rights.” Moreover, “the personality of the corporation is not a mere metaphor or fiction,” wrote Brown, citing Gierke and Maitland, because a “common purpose inevitably begets a common spirit which is real.” For Brown, “psychical realities in the group find means of expression in corporate action.”37 Writing in a similar vein in the Harvard Law Review, Arthur W. Machen Jr. characterized corporate organization as an important legacy of Western



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Christianity, not a useless “relic of the Middle Ages.” For Machen, “the existence of a corporation is quite as real as the existence of the Church, of the Republican Party, or any other aggregation of men for good or evil.” Combining religious idealism with American respect for common sense, Machen went even further to assert that he needed “no theological instruction, still less any metaphysical disquisition about the nature of an imaginary entity, to inform him that the Church is the same church to-​day as in the days of our Lord.”38 Efforts to impute personality to corporations did meet resistance. In 1897, Ernst Freund, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, backed away from full endorsement of Gierke’s theory that “out of the association of the individuals” in a corporation “the new personality arises, having a distinctive sphere of existence and a will of its own.” Freund attempted to leave sociology, psychology, and metaphysics aside in favor of a narrower “analytical” approach more consonant with American law. Corporations should be treated as real persons, he argued, because they represented the collective sum of interests of shareholders. But as Horowitz pointed out, “At the very moment, then, at which Freund sought to derive the corporate personality from majority rule of the shareholders, the corporate entity itself was becoming virtually independent of the shareholders.” As a new tier of managers took control over labor, production, and development in big corporations, the analogy between corporate organization and representative government was out of step with the times. Organic theories of corporate personality based in romantic idealism and evolutionary theory blossomed.39 Many Americans condemned corporate greed and feared the growing power of trusts and monopolies, but idealism about corporate solutions to economic problems also flourished. Simon Sterne, an economist who was critical of monopolies, expressed his trust in corporate structures, even as he argued for the need for better regulation. “The corporation has become an all-​important factor in the social arrangements of modern civilization,” Sterne wrote in 1880, “it surrounds us; it furnishes us with almost every need; it is our banker, our transporter, our insurer, even our interrer.” Drawing on his study of history while at Heidelberg, Sterne explained how the modern corporation evolved from medieval guilds, and tipped his hat “to the great monastic corporations of the middle ages” that “preserved the torch of knowledge from extinguishment.” Sterne credited modern individual freedom and shareholder participation with improving upon the medieval corporation, which “took possession of the whole activity of the man, and left him no freedom to attach himself to many different occupations.” In the modern era, shareholding “changed the relations of peoples towards each other, and stimulated the production of wealth a hundred-​fold.” On the other hand, he pointed to the

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“recurring financial crises” that stemmed from the abuse of freedom by investors whose speculations were “quite out of all proportion to actually available assets.”40 John Bates Clark, professor of history and political economy at Carleton College, also traced the “fraternal spirit” of corporate cooperation to “the village-​community of medieval times” and, behind that, to “the communal ideal” of Pauline Christianity in antiquity. Clark argued that the countervailing tendency to individualism reached the apex of its evolutionary swing with Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century. Without forgetting lessons learned from Smith about the value of private property and competition through capitalism, owners and workers were moving into a new stage of corporate cooperation, Clark thought, which would eventuate in true profit sharing.41 Clark applied the ancient trope of society as a human body to describe the political state of modern America. “Within the great organism which we term the state, there are many specific organisms of an industrial character,” Clark wrote in The Philosophy of Wealth. “All the laborers of the factory, taken collectively, compose an organism which acts as a unit,” he explained. But “fraternal spirit” suffered because workers could now simply be “hired” without according them the corporate membership they deserved. He was sure the economic advantage of full cooperation between labor and capital would eventually be realized. “There can be no retreat in the general course of moral progress upon which the world has lately entered,” Clark asserted. “Fraternity is the result and true test of Christianity working through sound economic forms.”42 Richard T.  Ely cited the Apostle Paul sixteen times in The Law of Social Service, explaining in one instance that Paul opposed stealing and lying “because ‘we are members one of another.’ ” Raised a Presbyterian, Ely joined the Episcopal Church as an adult, and he lectured to a host of different religious groups and seminaries. Ministers joining the Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church found Ely’s books required reading over the course of two decades, as did seminary students in the United Brethren of Christ Church. Ely represented the “social Christianity” that emerged from the labor union movement, and from progressive efforts to trace the genealogy of modern corporations to medieval Christianity and Pauline social theory. A popular Chautauqua speaker, chair of the Economics Department at Johns Hopkins, and founding member of the American Economics Association, Ely represented the fusion between Pauline corporatism and economic theory popular in many American churches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.43 Ely credited the seventeenth-​ century New England Congregationalist Thomas Hooker with perceiving the state as a “continuous, conscious



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organism, and a moral personality, which has its foundations laid in the nature of man.” At a time when industrialists promoted conglomerates and trusts to lessen fierce competition among rival companies, Ely called for a collaboration between Catholic and protestant Christians that Hooker would have found shocking. Committed to the Christian spirit that he believed transcended doctrinal and liturgical differences, Ely worked with James Cardinal Gibbons to mediate labor disputes in Baltimore, and wrote the introduction to Monsignor John A. Ryan’s book A Living Wage, published in 1906.44 While Ryan and Ely invoked the spiritual element of corporate personhood to counter the cruelties of industrial life, others banked on enthusiasm for the vitality of corporate entities to envision profits to be made by investing in their future. “A speculative feeling pervades the community,” economic historian Simon Sterne observed in 1880, commenting on the new trend among small investors to capitalize grand schemes proposed by big investors. As speculation became popular, Sterne noted, “Large fortunes are made, not because any particular share has increased in value, but because the expectations indulged in yesterday by a few are supposed to-​day by many to be nearer realization.”45 Andrew Carnegie saw this rage for speculation as essentially immoral, defending instead the more grounded variant of Pauline social theory that had proved so profitable for him: “A rule which we adopted and adhered to has given greater returns than we thought possible, namely: always give the other party the benefit of the doubt.” By contrast, the “speculative class” operated without any moral compass. “An entirely different atmosphere pervades that world,” Carnegie complained. “Men are only gamblers there.”46 Speculation in stocks may not have brought men to God, but it did create a kind of metaphysical “atmosphere” that sucked the future into the present. The expression “watered stock,” originally coined to describe dehydrated cattle fed salt and given as much water as they could drink to increase their weight just before they were brought to auction, now came to refer to shares of corporate ownership priced according to their anticipated future value. Financial conservatives decried the practice as reckless and immoral, but speculation in so-​called watered stock brought the modern stock market into being.47 Prior to the 1880s, industrial companies in the United States were relatively small and tightly held, and shareholders often knew one another. Though capital for new ventures might exceed real assets, those assets determined the value of company shares and the terms for borrowing capital. This anchoring in material reality loosened in a wave of corporate mergers between 1897 and 1903 that enabled corporate conglomerates to expand and operate across state lines. Big new companies issued “watered” stock that middle-​class investors snapped up in anticipation of future gain. Preeminent in this financial

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trend, in 1901 J. P. Morgan created U.S. Steel by combining corporations previously controlled by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick. With real assets of the combined companies estimated at $676 million, Morgan capitalized U.S. Steel for $1.4 billion and issued $1.1 billion in common stock. Many new investors bought Morgan’s water—​and a piece of a promising new corporate giant and its yet-​to-​materialize future. In addition to attracting a new population of middle-​class investors, the business of speculation in stock created a new class of corporate titans such as Morgan, whose business centered on financial transactions, not on industrial production itself.48 By 1890, speculation in “futures” was already established in livestock and commodities like cotton and wheat. Across the country farmers traded shares in the next season’s produce at small “bucket shops,” and larger “trading pits” emerged where wagers on the future prices of commodities attracted speculators who never intended to handle or even see the anticipated cotton or cattle they traded. By World War I, the success of this system enabled American brokers to control global prices for many important commodities. It also contributed to a boom in industrial stocks around the turn of the century. “Futures traders speculated on conceptual entities as if they were corporeal goods,” according to historian Jonathan Levy, creating a “metaphysical economy” that “abstracted financial exchange from the space-​time of the physical economy.”49 Coinciding with the emerging market in virtual stock, in a parallel development, religious speculation about the future intensified, bringing a spirit-​ propelled engineering mentality to bear on events described and foretold in the Bible. Aided by charts that divided human history into eras whose defining characteristics were encoded in biblical prophecy, The Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909, offered readers guidelines for calculating the timing of the world’s destruction and the second coming of Christ. With an investment in the empirical reality of prophecy not unlike investment in watered stock, a passionate minority of Americans embraced the dispensational scheme of time promoted by Scofield and its prediction of future events.50 The pentecostal movement burst on the scene at the same time as ecstatic Christians gathered to praise God for pouring out his Spirit in anticipation of the last days prophesied in Acts 2. Holy Ghost Baptism brought spiritual power down from heaven in “streams of living fire” that healed the sick and launched believers into a glorious future. Like so many other early twentieth-​ century Americans, pentecostals combined pragmatic concerns for material well-​being with investment in a spiritual realm. The collapsing boundary between heaven and earth in pentecostal fire complemented trade in futures and idealism about corporate persons. Even the most ominous signs of death and destruction could be spiritualized. In the words of one participant in a



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pentecostal meeting, “Already a Heaven-​born soldiery are treading their way to the various battlefields to spread the flames.”51 As the First World War raged in Europe, one Sunday School Board leader offered a lesson plan for Christians across America. Christ’s apostles “were no longer ordinary men,” he wrote, telling Sunday school students what should happen to them. In overcoming the “desperation of our helpless estate,” he explained, “a new personality is created” through life in the Spirit, enabling people to find “a new center, a new ideal, and form a new group of associates.” Menacing forces of industrialization, dislocation, and even war would be transformed through investment in “the real nature and Spirit of our lives.”52

Notes 1. Steven Cassedy, Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 2014); S. Douglas Beets, “The History of Corporate Organizations in the United States,” Journal of Business Ethics 102, no. 2 (2011): 193–​219; Stanley L. Engerman, “Some Economic Issues Relating to Railroad Subsidies and the Evaluation of Land Grants,” Journal of Economic History 32, no. 2 (1972): 443–​463; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Jon C. Teaford, Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–​1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 2. “The Brakeman at Church,” New Hampshire Sentinel, March 18, 1880, quotations from 1; for almost identical versions, see Boston Daily Advertiser, February 28, 1880, 1, and Clarion-​Ledger (Jackson, MS), February 28, 1889, 3. For reference to the dialogue in East Sedalia, see Michael Cassity, “Modernization and Social Crisis: The Knights of Labor and a Midwest Community, 1885–​1886,” Journal of American History 66 (June 1979): 41–​61, esp. 51. 3. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007; orig. 1982), quotations from 4–​7 and 63. 4. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Biography of Joiners,” American Historical Review 50, no. 1 (October 1, 1944):  1–​25, quotations from 21 and 24; Arthur M. Schlesinger, “A Critical Period in American Religion, 1875–​1900,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 64 (1930–​ 1932):  523–​ 547; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New  York:  Harper Perennial Classics, 2006; orig. 1835–​ 1840), 514; Jason Kaufman, “Rise and Fall of a Nation of Joiners: The Knights of Labor Revisited,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no. 4 (April 1, 2001):  553–​579; Gerald Gamm and Robert D. Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations in

138 Corpor ate Organization in America America, 1840–​1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (April 1, 1999): 511–​557. 5. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–​1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), quotation from 2; Anne M. Butler, Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–​1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 6. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) quotations from 137; Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 65–​139; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–​1877, rev. ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 2014; orig. 1988); Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic:  Race, Religion, and American Nationalism 1865–​1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists 1865–​1925 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Katharine L. Dvorak, An African-​American Exodus: The Segregation of the Southern Churches (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991); William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African American Church in the South 1865–​1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1993). 7. George A. Shufeldt, History of the Chicago Artesian Well, a Demonstration of the Truth of the Spiritual Philosophy, with an Essay on the Origin and Uses of Petroleum (Chicago:  Religio-​philosophical Publishing Association, 1867), quotations from iii and 27; Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul:  A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2003); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past:  Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-​Century America (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008); Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism; A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits (Memphis, TN: General Books, 2010; orig. 1870); Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy:  Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–​1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Grant Wacker, “The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880–​1910,” Journal of American History 72, no. 1 (June 1, 1985):  45–​62; John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America with Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 222–​227. 8. William Bell Riley, Ten Sermons on the Greater Doctrines of Scripture (Bloomington, IL:  Leader, 1891), quotations from 7 and 35 (italics mine); William Vance



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Trollinger Jr., God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 9. Riley, Ten Sermons, quotations from 96, 102–​103, and 92. 10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Library of America, 2010: orig. 1902), quotations from 467, 455, 460, and 462; William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956, orig.1897), quotation from 24. For James’s continuing influence, see T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New  York:  Knopf, 2012), 127, 223–​227. 11. Henry Ward Beecher, “Evolution and the Church,” in Plymouth Pulpit (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1885), 1–​22, quotation from 10; Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers; or, Experiences of Art and Nature (New York: Derby, Philips, and Samson, 1855), 194; Kenneth Lipartito, “The Utopian Corporation,” in Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–​119, esp. 109. 12. Leon Fink, The Long Gilded Age:  American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 12–​ 34, quotation from 34; Theresa A. Case, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor (Texarkana:  Texas A&M University Press, 2010); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–​ 1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–​42; Gerald N. Grob, Workers and Utopia:  A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement 1865–​1900 (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1961); The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s:  Essays on Labor and Politics, ed. Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999); A. S. Eisenstadt, Carnegie’s Model Republic:  Triumphant Democracy and the British-​American Relationship (Albany:  SUNY Press, 2007); Melton Alonza McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 1978); Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor:  Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–​ 1930 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13. H. Francis Perry, “The Workingman’s Alienation from the Church,” American Journal of Sociology 4, no. 5 (March 1, 1899): 621–​629, quotations from 625–​626. 14. Ibid., quotations from 624, 622, and 628. 15. Terence Vincent Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor (Columbus, OH: Excelsior, 1889), quotations from 88–​89, 151, 166, and 669; Case, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike, 147. 16. Cassity, “Modernization and Social Crisis,” quotation from 45; Henry J. Browne, “Terence V. Powderly and Church-​Labor Difficulties of the Early 1880’s,” Catholic Historical Review 32, no. 1 (April 1, 1946): 1–​27.

140 Corpor ate Organization in America 17. Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 136, quotations from Debs on 129 and 131. 18. Ibid., 129–​169; Mark Karson, “The Catholic Church and the Political Development of American Trade Unionism,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 4, no. 4 (July 1951): 527–​542. 19. John Wanamaker, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: 1911–​ 1913), quotations from 1:53; John Wanamaker quoted in Joseph H. Appel, The Business Biography of John Wanamaker (New York: Macmillan, 1930), quotations from 339. 20. Wanamaker, Golden Book, quotation from 1:65; Appel, Business Biography, quotations from 93 and 322. 21. Timothy E. W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Bruce J. Evensen, God’s Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 22. Reuben A. Torrey, Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Chicago: Bible Corportage, 1895), quotations from 52, 54, 60, 62, and 67. 23. Reuben A. Torrey, How to Obtain Fulness of Power in Christian Life and Service (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1897), 42. 24. Andrew Carnegie, The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and His Essay “The Gospel of Wealth” (New York: New American Library, 2006), quotations from 158. 25. Ibid., quotations from 327 and 151. 26. Ibid., 24–​25, 48–​49, and 241, quotations from 48 and 241. 27. Ibid., quotations from 178–​179 28. Ibid., quotations from 218; “1892 Homestead Strike,” http://​www.aflcio.org/​ About/ ​ O ur- ​ History/​ Key-​ Events-​ i n-​ L abor-​ History/ ​ 1 892- ​ Homestead- ​ S trike, accessed June 12, 2015; “The Homestead Strike,” http://​www.pbs.org/​wgbh/​ amex/​carnegie/​peopleevents/​pande04.html, accessed June 12, 2015; Fink, Long Gilded Age, 38–​44. 29. Frank Norris, The Octopus:  A Story of California (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1901), quotations from II:5 and III:360–​ 361; Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte, “Mapping ‘The Octopus’: Frank Norris’ Naturalist Geography,” American Literary Realism 37, no. 3 (April 1, 2005): 202–​224; Donald Pizer, “Another Look at ‘The Octopus,’” Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 10, no. 3 (December 1, 1955): 217–​224. 30. Santa Clara County v.  Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 US 394 (1886), quotation from 396, https://​supreme.justia.com/​cases/​federal/​us/​118/​394/​case.html, accessed May 19, 2015. 31. John Marshall, “Opinion,” Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, quotations from 636, https://​www.law.cornell.edu/​supremecourt/​text/​17/​518#writing-​ USSC_​CR_​0017_​0518_​ZO, accessed May 17, 2015.



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32. John Rutherford Everett, Religion in Economics:  A Study of John Bates Clark, Richard T.  Ely, and Simon N.  Patten (New  York:  King’s Crown Press, 1946), 33, 78–​79; Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997; orig. 1917), 110–​117, quotation from 113; Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–​1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 141–​182. 33. Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. Frederic William Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), quotations from 22–​23. 34. Ibid., quotations from 98 and 73; Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 4 (October 1, 1987):  1441–​1483, quotation from 1470. Also see Frederick William Maitland, English Constitutional Law:  A Course of Lectures Delivered by F. W. Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Alan MacFarlane, F. W. Maitland and the Making of the Modern World (CreateSpace, 2013). 35. W. L. Wingus, “Corporations and Express Trusts as Business Operations,” Michigan Law Review 13, no. 2 (December 1914): 71–​99, quotations from 76–​77. 36. Maitland, “Introduction,” in Gierke, Political Theories, quotations from xxxviii. 37. Martin J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited:  The Development of Corporate Theory,” West Virginia Law Review 88 (1985–​1986): 173–​224, quotations from 217 and 218; Jethro W. Brown, “The Personality of the Corporation and the State,” Law Quarterly Review 21 (1905): 365–​379, quotations from 368 and 369. 38. Arthur W. Machen Jr., “Corporate Personality,” Harvard Law Review 24, no. 4 (February 1, 1911): 253–​267, quotations from 259–​262. 39. Ernst Freund, The Legal Nature of Corporations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1897), 13–​14, 23–​39, quotations from 13; Horowitz, “Santa Clara,” quotation from 219; Mark, “Personification,” 1474–​1478. 40. Simon Sterne, The Corporation: Its Benefits, Its Evils: As Benefactor, as Monopolist (New York: Slote and Janes, 1880), quotations from 3–​4, 7, and 13. 41. John Bates Clark, The Philosophy of Wealth: Economic Principles Newly Formulated (Boston: Ginn, 1886), quotations from 174–​175. 42. Ibid., quotations from 176 and 234. 43. Richard T. Ely, The Law of Social Service (New  York:  Eaton and Mains, 1896), quotation from 46; Benjamin G. Rader, “Richard T. Ely: Lay Spokesman for the Social Gospel,” Journal of American History 53, no. 1 (June 1, 1966): 61–​74; Don D. Lescohier, “Richard T. Ely in Retrospect,” Land Economics 30, no. 4 (November 1, 1954):  367–​377; Henry C. Taylor and George Wehrwein, “Richard T.  Ely,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 19, no. 3 (August 1, 1943): 387–​390. For Ely’s personal identification with Paul, see Richard T. Ely, The Ground Under Our Feet: An Autobiography (New York: 1938), 72. 44. Rader, “Richard T. Ely,” 62, quotation from 71. 45. Sterne, Corporation, quotations from 14.

142 Corpor ate Organization in America 46. Carnegie, Autobiography, 151. 47. Lawrence E. Mitchell, The Speculation Economy:  How Finance Triumphed over Industry (San Francisco: Berrett-​Koehler, 2007), 58–​60. 48. Ibid., 68–​69; Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Industry, 1895–​1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–​13. 49. Levy, Freaks of Fortune, quotations from 232–​233. 50. B. M. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2015); Matthew Avery Sutton, Modern Apocalypticism:  A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 8–​46. 51. Wacker, Heaven Below, Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), quotations from 69. 52. Westin C. Wicker, “Sunday Schools:  Peter’s Sermon at Pentecost,” Herald of Gospel Liberty 108, no. 1 (January 6, 1916): 20–​21, quotations from 20 and 21.

7

“The Very Heart and Soul and Spirit of Our National Will” Promoting the Corporate Dream, 1920–​1 980

On one side of a two-​page spread in a 1924 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, a handsome man in a clerical collar sits looking over his shoulder across a fogged-​in valley toward a steepled church in the distance. On the left-​hand page, under the heading “Through the Eyes of Faith,” a letter explains how the purchase of a car had advanced a minister’s work, enabling him to extend “unselfish service” across the valley. Because of the minister’s access to a car, the “community is undergoing a marvelous change,” the letter reported: “merchants felt its influence” and “young people are becoming interested in education.” Its corporate name blazoned across both pages, General Motors proudly laid claim to its service to the mission of building Christian community.1 The creator of this advertisement, Bruce Barton, rose to prominence publicizing war bonds during World War I and soliciting funds for the Interchurch World Movement campaign to “win the world for Christ.” After the war, Barton pursued advertising as a form of missionary work, celebrating Jesus as its highest exemplar. In his popular book The Man Nobody Knows, first published in 1924, he portrayed Jesus as the man who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” To counter the impression that Jesus was “weak and unhappy and glad to die,” Barton emphasized the Master’s self-​confidence, sociability, and brilliance as a salesman. As “the greatest advertiser of his own day,” Barton explained, Jesus represented his Father’s business as a public service, while displaying his sincere personality, charismatic leadership, and compassion for the needy with “crisp, graphic language and a message so clear that even the dullest can not escape it.”2

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The art of persuasion was hardly new to either business or religion, but it became more calculated after World War I as the psychology of public relations was applied to corporate management. While Bruce Barton promoted the connection between advertising and missionary work, for Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward L.  Bernays, advertising was part of a new field of public relations aimed at corporate growth, efficiency, and “the engineering of consent.” In the first book-​length exposition of his theory, Crystalizing Public Opinion, published in 1923, Bernays described a “two-​way street” in which the public relations counselor “interpreted the public to the client as well as vice versa.” Drawing on the new science of mass psychology, Bernays explained the benefit to corporations of hiring a “societal technician” who understood both consumers and companies and could articulate and develop their mutual interests. Dismissing earlier advertisers as mere “apologists” hired to counter negative perceptions about business, Bernays represented the new field of public relations as something more constructive and much more powerful.3 As a branch of public relations, advertising served American democracy, he wrote, by educating the public about new research and technology, and by drawing attention to “minority ideas.” Bernays produced advertising campaigns for a variety of different products aimed to serve the common good—​ gelatin for use in schools as an aid in digesting milk, Procter & Gamble soap for better public hygiene, and the benefits of radium in treating cancer. In keeping with his commitment to advertising as a form of public education, Bernays helped the popular women’s magazine Good Housekeeping build public awareness of the Sheppard-​Towner Act, which authorized government funds for prenatal and infant care. He also worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to promote its 1920 Atlanta conference, the first such conference held in the South.4 Not all of Bernays’s work occupied such high moral ground. Coining the slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” Bernays helped the American Tobacco Company dominate the world market in cigarettes. To allay concern about the effects of smoking, Bernays enlisted opera singers for a full-​page newspaper ad promoting Lucky Strikes as “kind to your throat.” In another campaign of dubious value, Bernays worked on behalf of the United Fruit Company to generate fear of a communist takeover in Guatemala. In 1953, his campaign led to the decision of the CIA and the Eisenhower administration to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government.5 Advertising encouraged consumption, which soared during the “roaring twenties” as women gained new freedoms, and working Americans saw more than 10 percent average growth in real earnings. Increased consumption buoyed corporate earnings, and dividends from U.S. companies doubled



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between 1922 and 1929 as new chemical processes for manufacturing cloth, paint, plastic, and cellophane brought an array of new products into stores. Innovations in technology including power shovels, coal loaders, and lumber carriers increased industrial output, and friendly relations between government and business expedited innovation and productivity. Economic growth strengthened the hand of business in relation to labor, and communism failed to gain a deep foothold; in the years following the Russian Revolution, Marxist ideologies attracted many fewer adherents in the United States than in Europe.6 Christianity permeated America’s hot economy; more than one public figure pointed to religion as an explanation for national prosperity. “God has blessed the American people,” a Reformed Church minister declared in 1924, and “by all accounts America is the most favored of all lands to-​day.” Comparing America’s status to that of ancient Israel, the minister counted the nation’s blessings: “By God’s favor and our faith in him we have a civilization that has resulted in our good homes, our schools, factories, stores, railroads, automobiles, electric lights, telephones, and the wireless.” Americans should do more to bring God to every nation, he argued, and to celebrate the religious component essential to American strength. At the very least, those traveling abroad should heed the example of the former U.S. minister to Japan Colonel Alfred E.  Buck, who “said he was not always a regular church attendant in America, but in a foreign land he felt it his duty to represent his country rightly by regular church attendance.”7 Business leaders looked eagerly toward the future, often with religious and economic enthusiasm intertwined. Chairman of the board of Western Auto Supply and Christian activist George Pepperdine predicted in 1925 that Los Angeles would soon become the world center of “spiritual advancement.” Citizens of California could anticipate “every nation on earth paying financial tribute,” he predicted, “with the entire commercial universe vibrating in response to our activities.” In a radio broadcast to the people of Los Angeles, Pepperdine was effusive: “Right here we shall some day see the heart and center of human activity, the climax and mountain peak of American and world civilization.”8 Elsewhere in Los Angeles during the 1920s the charismatic pentecostal Aimee Semple McPherson opened the world’s largest building. “Half like a Roman Coliseum, half like a Parisian Opera House,” one visitor reported, the Angelus Temple was dedicated to worldwide, interdenominational evangelicalism. In this as in many of her ventures, McPherson made use of sensational publicity—​entering “the most costly float ever” in Pasadena’s 1925 Tournament of Roses, for example—​with a keen eye to what people found

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appealing. When she regained her religious celebrity after weathering a sex scandal, Look magazine profiled her in a 1938 article titled “I Am God’s Best Publicity Agent.” Like George Pepperdine, McPherson believed popular success and Christianity should work together, with business know-​how and publicity contributing to the expansion of Christian organizations such as Angelus Temple, and evangelical Christianity flowing through businesses such as Western Auto.9 In this era of aggressive corporate idealism, business leaders often represented their work as a moral undertaking. Henry Ford made a fortune building cars that ordinary people could afford, saying that “businessmen can best serve the cause of social progress” by “advancing their own self-​interest.” Introducing the assembly lines that would revolutionize industrial manufacture, Ford maintained a stable workforce in the Detroit area by offering higher wages than other employers. Alert to the benefits of “keeping a healthy and productive community,” Ford founded “a hospital for the working man” in Detroit. Modeled after the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnestota, Ford’s operation boasted “a closed staff of employed physicians who worked exclusively in and for the hospital.”10 Despite the fulminations of anti-​Semites such as Ford, Jewish business leaders also contributed to corporate growth after World War I, and Jews participated in new corporate efforts to attend to the needs of workers and consumers alike. The famous Filene’s Department Store gave customers “the right goods at the right time in the right quantity and at the right price.” It was also “a pace-​setter in labor relations,” offering employees the option of winter vacations, training programs to encourage female advancement, and a medical clinic with a podiatrist and nurses who made home visits. Edward Filene believed that respect for “prophets” harmonized with respect for “profits,” and his brother Lincoln looked to business for solutions to social problems. “For too long a time the problem of human betterment was looked upon as a side issue, a charity, subsisting on the dole of philanthropists,” Lincoln maintained. “Now it is being put where it belongs—​on a business basis, in business itself.”11 Catholic businessmen also endorsed corporate organization as the path to social progress. Jacob Raskob, the “financial genius” of DuPont and General Motors, combined dedication to corporate growth with bold strategies for exploiting capital and credit mechanisms that ordinary people could use. After leveraging capital from DuPont to stabilize and expand GM, Raskob devised stock option and savings plans for both companies. In line with his theory that “industrial citizenship” would lessen divisions of wealth and class, GM offered the opportunity to purchase life, health, and accident insurance to all



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employees with at least three months on the job. Raskob founded GMAC, which provided financing to GM customers, giving them access to cars they could not afford to pay for all at once. Raskob also used his influence as a substantial religious donor to modernize Catholic financial operations in the United States and to promote lay business leaders as managers of diocesan and parish wealth. News media championed his financial strategies and ebullient idea that “everyone should be rich.” Many smaller investors followed his bold speculations in the stock market with their own contributions, helping to elevate the market to dizzying heights before its disastrous plunge in 1929. Raskob’s reputation crashed along with the market and investigators delved into his secretive financial maneuvers at GM.12 With the help of Raskob and the public relations team he assembled in the 1920s, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. revolutionized automobile manufacture at GM, which had originated as a decentralized holding company for a cluster of other companies. Sloan aimed to challenge the Ford Motor Company, which dominated the car market in the 1920s through the production of its utilitarian Model T. Rather than competing with Ford head-​on, GM integrated sales of different cars—​Chevrolet, Oakland, two Buicks (V4 and V6), Oldsmobile, and Cadillac—​each set at a different price point. Sloan thought GM could entice consumers to pay slightly more (or even much more) for cars that offered power, design, and amenities beyond Model T utility; he also understood how managing a diversified inventory and its range of price offerings would generate sales. Sloan’s aggressive management policies came to epitomize the organizational development of American business and its new devotion to public relations. By 1962, managerial centralization, effective advertising, and public relations psychology had combined to make GM “the world’s largest private industrial enterprise.”13 Sloan’s autobiography, based on interviews but written by a team of ardent supporters, depicted this success in the most positive terms: he had effectively persuaded “decentralized management to yield some of its functions for the common good.” Yet “the common good” envisioned from the lofty height of GM management was a more calculated strategic principle than it was for smaller businesses with closer emotional and economic ties to local communities. GM’s folksy advertising aimed to obscure this difference by publicizing a vision of the giant company that was both personal and Christian, as the 1924 ad in the Saturday Evening Post implied. When Sloan hired Bruce Barton to promote “unification of spirit and interest among GM’s manufacturing and distributing units,” Barton developed the concept of “the General Motors Family,” creating the pamphlet Facts About a Famous Company, advertising posters for distribution to dealers, and invitations to dealers to send reports

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about happy customers to the central office for circulation. Sloan loved the idea of “the General Motors Family” and invoked it to counter the idea that “big business” was “soulless.”14 During the 1920s, managers became more removed from both workers and consumers as public relations and advertising emerged to instill optimism and promote growth. Public relations could bring out the best in a company but also hide unsavory aspects as managers juggled the logistics of expanding production and sales. Earnest respect for the idea of combining commercial success with public interest and workers’ welfare coincided with areas of “ethical blindness” resulting from the limitations of managerial vision. Lapses into outright greed and exploitation aside, managers perceived their accountability to workers and consumers largely in terms of goals and standards that managers devised.15 Proponents of “corporate trusteeship” including Sloan and Owen D. Young, chairman of the board of General Electric during the 1920s, elevated managers because of their presumed dedication to balancing the interests of owners, workers, and consumers. A  prominent Baptist, Young argued that corporations functioned most effectively when managers worked to bring a company together as a “whole undertaking,” no longer acting as “partisan attorneys” for either owners or workers, as they had in the past. In a sermon delivered at the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan, Young reflected on the “sacredness” of managerial work and the communal trust that managers sought to instill. Not an easy job, corporate trusteeship required “men of great understanding and knowledge, as well as conscience,” men who were “technicians” of the sacred, “in the sense of making the connecting link between the Golden Rule [and] complicated business transactions.”16 The U.S. Department of Commerce expanded to support this philosophy of corporate trusteeship. As secretary of commerce from 1920 until his election to the presidency in 1928, Herbert C. Hoover sought to place corporate trusteeship at the center of American political life. Hoover believed that America worked best as a “cooperative system” of corporate “organisms,” each capable of internal regulation and all working together for mutual benefit. He drew inspiration for this “associative” theory of governance from his Quaker background, applying Quaker practices of friendship and voluntary organization to government and business on a scale that would have astounded Quaker merchants in earlier centuries.17 In one of his first speeches as secretary of commerce, Hoover invoked “community” as the foundation upon which both business and society stood. In an address to the American Academy of Political Science in 1921, Hoover reflected on the transition to peacetime production, and emphasized the need



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for “disarmament” in labor as well as international relations. Observing that “discussions” between organized workers and organized employers “now send economic shivers through the whole community,” he called for “tranquility.” Harmonious cooperation between owners and workers was essential for “the march of civilization,” though he admitted, “It is not easy to organize good will.”18 As in the “two-​way street” model of public relations outlined by Edward Bernays, which gave weight to the wants of consumers, workers played an essential part in Hoover’s approach to labor relations. In Hoover’s view, as in that of Alfred Sloan and Owen Young, workers deserved attention and respect. Corporate managers had no intention of ceding control to workers or to consumers, but they needed cooperation from both, and public relations work helped them achieve it. This trustee approach to corporate governance rested on the principle of “free labor,” endorsed by unions as well as by owners. “The whole gospel” of the labor movement “is summed up in one phrase,” declared American Federation of Labor leader Samuel Gompers:  “freedom of contract.” Labor unions shared in the belief—​long associated with Christian organizations—​ that individual liberty and corporate membership belonged together. But workers often had to join unions—​corporations of their own—​to wrest fair treatment from owners. And unions faced enormous resistance, even to their recognition as legal entities. More than two thousand strike injunctions were issued during the 1920s, and unions focused much of their activity not on job safety, pay, or benefits but on their right to collective action.19 Appeals to the community spirit of corporate enterprise lost a good deal of credibility when the perfect storm of overproduction, unemployment, income disparity, personal debt, lack of savings, speculation, and the stock market crash sent the heated U.S. economy into a tailspin. Vast amounts of private, corporate, and government wealth simply vanished as national income slid uncontrollably between 1929 and 1932, from $87.8 to $42.5 billion. Hoover’s efforts to stop the meltdown failed; after supporting tax reductions to stimulate the economy, he had to defend tax increases to keep the government running. By 1932, Hoover’s faith in the corporate structure of American society seemed misplaced and even demonic to many Americans. In “one of the most photographed and widely witnessed moments of state terrorism in U.S. history,” on July 28, Hoover sent cavalry, tanks, and infantry to tear gas and bayonet more than a thousand impoverished veterans and their families, encamped in Washington to demand payment of promised military bonuses. When the Democratic governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, won the presidential election in November, Hoover left office under a cloud of disapproval, with

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the moral prestige of business tarnished and the inadequacies of corporate trusteeism plain for all to see. At his swearing-​in ceremony the following January, Roosevelt symbolized his intent to restore accountability to Pauline ideals of charity by placing his hand on an old family Dutch Bible open to 1 Corinthians 13.20 Roosevelt maintained friendly relations with numerous business leaders until industrial strikes and devastating poverty demanded aggressive federal action. Beginning in 1934, Roosevelt’s taxation policies, government welfare programs, and political rhetoric sharply challenged the moral standing of business. The publication that year of an expose on war profiteering, Merchants of Death, further besmirched the character of business. Loaded with moral outrage, the book condemned the DuPont family for supplying the world with gunpowder and bitterly condemned the idea that American business leaders were noble individuals who could be trusted to manage corporations in the best interests of society. The book painted businessmen as “unscrupulous villains” engaged in “a well-​organized conspiracy to block world peace and to promote war.”21 Roosevelt employed his own skill as a public relations strategist to garner support for new federal programs. In his negotiations with both houses of Congress and “fireside chats” that brought his radio messages into American homes, Roosevelt nationalized the Pauline ideal of corporate fellowship that Owen Young, Alfred Sloan, and Bruce Barton had used to promote GE and GM, and turned it against them. Celebrating the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1934, Roosevelt evoked “a great, willing spirit of cooperation throughout the country,” boasting that “under the authority of Congress we have brought the component parts of each industry around a common table.” Blaming especially those “high officials of banks and corporations who have grown rich at the expense of their stockholders or the public,” Roosevelt told his listeners that “we have demanded of many citizens that they surrender their licenses to do as they please in their businesses.” As for those miscreants “who have evaded the spirit or purpose of our tax laws,” Roosevelt promised “stringent preventative or regulatory measures.”22 Roosevelt’s skill as a persuader was not lost on the men who developed public relations as a vital aspect of corporate management. For all his abhorrence of FDR’s policies, Bruce Barton had to admire the president’s talent. “The present occupant of the White House is preeminent among all men in public life in his ability to think in selling terms and speak in advertising language,” Barton told a business group in Illinois. “My friend,” Barton went on, imitating Roosevelt, “you are feeling better, and I am going to tell you some of the things that are going to make you feel still better.”23



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Enraged by the idea of being told by the government how to run his business, Henry Ford resisted government demands to recognize labor unions. With wages at Ford plants exceeding the minimum set by the National Industrial Recovery Act, Ford thought his workers had little to gain from joining the AFL. “We have always bargained for our men,” he asserted in 1933, “we have never been compelled to bargain against them, or they against us.” Ford and his supporters viewed the new government regulations as fundamentally unchristian—​one of his friends called it a “Jewish” type of pharisaical “persecution.”24 Battling the widespread belief that big business was to blame for the crushing economic depression, business leaders became more dedicated political partisans and more adamant about the need to educate the public about the essential work performed by industrial corporations. In an address to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce in 1936, Alfred Sloan urged management to “expand its horizon of thought and action” beyond “the physical production of goods and distribution of goods and services.” He called the leaders of American industry to “assume the role of an enlightened industrial statesmanship” to defend business from political attack and “promote the broadest possible understanding on the part of all our people” regarding industry’s “ability to accelerate human progress and promote human security.”25 Warning that the “regimentation” imposed by the Roosevelt administration smacked of socialism and posed a threat to the nation’s moral character, in 1936 Herbert Hoover ran against Roosevelt again on a platform of “true liberalism.” For Hoover, true liberalism was an American version of Pauline idealism, “the highest development of the Christian faith—​the conception of individual freedom with brotherhood.” In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Hoover chastised the Roosevelt administration for showing no “repentance” as it led the country into the moral sink of “European collectivism” and its “Fascist dictatorships.” Instead of marching onward after they had “reached Mount Pisgah,” from the top of which, like Moses, Americans could see the promised land of prosperity laid out before them, the false prophets of the New Deal “flung the poison gospel of class hatred,” hawking “apples of Sodom” and promising a “mirage of Utopia to those in distress.” Hoover called for renewal of the solid foundations of American society—​“the Great Book,” the American Revolution, and “the ceaseless struggle of humankind to be free.”26 Business leaders’ resentment of government intervention grew with Roosevelt’s reelection. Meanwhile, workers gained strength through federal support for collective bargaining, fair wages, work safety, social security, and bank regulation, though social security and equal pay for equal work did not extend to women or southern blacks. Government regulation under Roosevelt

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was a far cry from socialism and did not undermine popular support for the American ideal of individual ownership of labor and property. As historian David Kennedy pointed out, the New Deal “put in place an apparatus of financial security that allowed private money to build post-​war suburbia and the Sunbelt.” Roosevelt did not spare his business antagonists, however. “We have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government. The legend that they were invincible,” he boasted in his second inaugural address, “has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten.”27 Business leaders lost to New Deal attorneys in battles over government regulation and collective bargaining power, but much remained intact, including treatment of labor as a market commodity, and resistance to worker participation in management. Belief in the compatibility of individual freedom with corporate membership also remained. But the public relations battles of the 1930s took their toll, with effects on religion that eventually boomeranged back through economic policy. Anti-​statist economic thinkers found new bedfellows in fundamentalist Christians who saw political events as part of a cosmic battle between Christ and the Antichrist playing out in a contest over free enterprise. When the federal government called on Americans to boycott businesses that did not display the Blue Eagle sign, which certified compliance with the labor and pricing rules in the National Recovery Act, some Bible students linked the sign to the “mark of the beast” forecast in Revelation 13. Aimee Semple McPherson had supported labor unions in the 1920s, but her “America, Awake” tour in the 1930s called God’s people to stem the tide of communist influence. Her magazine Crusader blamed a 1937 strike at GM on “communist agitators” and lamented that “the present epidemic of strikes only indicates how tragically we have lost our good old American Rugged Individualism.” Something of the original meaning of “propaganda” as “propagation of the faith” returned, now carrying the venom of sparring economic ideologies.28 Industrial production regained momentum in response to Allied demand for military supplies in the buildup to World War II, but liberal confidence in human progress was shaken. Racism thrived inside the strong southern wing of the Democratic Party, while among Republicans, the old associationalist theory linking business, government, and religion as friendly partners shifted into a harder ideology of military defense in support of religious and economic freedom. Religion was more openly affirmed as a bulwark against communism and antidote to social unrest as political and military leaders enlisted an array of religious organizations to build organizational discipline and emotional commitment to military effort. The U.S. Army introduced



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unprecedented policies to accommodate religious diversity: meatless Fridays for the sake of Catholic soldiers, papal audiences for U.S. soldiers serving in Italy, new policies with respect to Jewish dietary restrictions, and even a rabbinic ruling on the hour that the Sabbath began for Jewish soldiers serving in the Arctic Circle, where there was no sundown to observe.29 After the war, religious leaders stepped up to champion American liberty. At a memorial mass at Arlington National Cemetery in 1947, the Very Reverend Ignatius Smith of Catholic University urged all Americans “to defend and spread the freedoms that form the foundation of the American, democratic way of life.” Three years later, the Los Angeles Times called on Americans to lead the way in awakening European “hearts and minds” to the dangers of communism. This awakening was “just as urgent now as that of producing the other weapons of defense of everything the free western world has created over the last 2000 years and everything that constitutes the spiritual, moral, and material heritage of free men.”30 A new cohort of business leaders drawn to conservative interpretations of the Bible supported the expansion of churches, missionary societies, and evangelical networks, linking patriotism and fundamentalist Christianity to anti-​statist economic policy. No region of the country figured more prominently in this new Cold War alliance of corporate business, corporate religion, and premillennial prophecy than southern California. Military training facilities and defense-​related industries had transformed the region after World War II; by the late 1950s, according to one industry analyst, “15 of the 25 largest aerospace companies in the United States” operated there. “In the decade between 1952 and 1962, Pentagon spending would etch itself into every facet of Southern California’s economy,” according to historian Darren Dochuk, “with 38 percent of its manufacturing directly tied to a defense sector subsidized by four billion dollars’ worth of government contracts.”31 Eight counties, from Ventura to San Diego, also became centers of conservative evangelicalism, as immigrants streaming into southern California from Texas, Oklahoma, and other rural states joined churches to sing familiar hymns, attend Sunday school, and experience old-​time Christian fellowship. Churches sprang up in the new housing developments around industrial plants shaped by idealized memories of churches left behind and by hard memories of the Depression, droughts, and dustbowl storms of the 1930s. J. Vernon McGee, senior pastor of the Church of the Open Door in Los Angeles during the 1950s, compared his own journey from West Texas to that of the prophet Amos, who left his small town on the Dead Sea for his nation’s northern capital to warn complacent Israelites about the dangers of backsliding and about the urgency of rededication to God. McGee linked the dangers of his

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own time to biblical calls for repentance and to prophecies of Christ’s return. Along with other preachers who shaped evangelical conservatism in Southern California, McGee interpreted the rise of fascism and communism as signs of the Antichrist and his coming reign of fury prior to the Day of Judgment and Christ’s return.32 Also like other premillennial preachers, McGee depicted women as mainstays of religious conservatism. In a booklet on the parable of the ten virgins (also known as the parable of the wise and foolish virgins) published in 1955, he explained that faithful women represented the church. McGee linked biblical literalism and anticommunism to long-​standing images of the church as a faithful virgin. Sacrificing earthly renown for eternal glory, “wise” virgins prepared for Christ the Bridegroom, who promised to appear at the end of time to establish his kingdom on earth, beyond the “Iron Curtain” of death.33 As a bulwark against liberal intellectuals who waffled on the truth of biblical revelation and were suspicious of business corporations, premillennial Christians advocated a strong work ethic centered on corporate loyalty. Believing that devotion to Christ’s Kingdom spurred worker efficiency and corporate profit as well as personal salvation, Robert G.  LeTourneau, the inventor of earthmoving machinery, instituted weekly gospel meetings in all his factories, one for day workers and another for the night shift. Like other business leaders who resented government backing for labor unions and social welfare, LeTourneau supported Christian missionary organizations that promoted hard work as a better path to economic security than reliance on government programs. Sun Oil’s president J. Howard Pew also used conservative evangelicalism and missionary organization to support free enterprise, as did George Pepperdine, whose success selling auto supplies enabled him to found a college in Southern California. Pepperdine’s investments faltered in the 1950s, bringing his eponymous college to the verge of bankruptcy, but conservative leaders in the Republican Party came to the rescue with a plan to fund Pepperdine College as a center for grassroots political organizing.34 Conservative evangelicals revived a populist form of republicanism that evoked Jeffersonian idealism about individual freedom and property ownership as the basis of American governance. Looking beyond the traditional evangelical identification of the Church of Rome as the Antichrist, they pointed to godless communism as the real enemy. Efforts on the part of the U.S. military to accommodate the religious practices of Catholic and Jewish servicemen complemented this revision in premillennial thinking, as did U.S. recognition for the new state of Israel in 1949, which generated prophetic anticipation of the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and the conversion of the Jews gathered back into Israel prior to the return of Christ.35



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Resistance to economic planning and government management of social welfare gained intellectual as well as monetary support during the 1950s and 1960s in the form of new private institutions funded by wealthy donors. The Earhart Foundation, Volker Fund, Mount Pelerin Society, Foundation for Economic Education, Institute for Humane Studies, and American Enterprise Institute all extended their reach during these decades as they sought to educate the public about the moral as well as economic benefits of free markets. Condemning government efforts to engineer prosperity, these institutes promoted free enterprise aggressively, taking aim at economic theories developed during the New Deal and still taught in many universities. Between 1974 and 1991, seven members of the Mount Pelerin Society would receive the Nobel Prize in economics—​evidence of the growing influence and acceptance of this movement.36 Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom presented a moral argument against socialism that many religious conservatives found compelling. Though a professed agnostic, Hayek traced the foundational principle of individual liberty—​“the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own gifts and bents”—​to “Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity.” Excerpted in popular magazines including Reader’s Digest, Hayek’s celebration of individual liberty appealed to many American Christians, as well as to “neoliberal” economists working to discredit government regulation and strengthen arguments for free markets.37 The Austrian-​born Hayek developed his ideas in reaction to Nazi authoritarianism. After he left the London School of Economics in 1950 to join the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he and his American disciples redirected their criticism of economic planning from Nazism to Soviet communism. Hayek argued that government attempts to implement economic systems were fundamentally misguided because the myriad circumstances influencing economic activity were impossible to anticipate; no one could know enough to engineer state prosperity. Government planning was morally treacherous as well, Hayek explained, because “a ready-​ made system of values” encouraged human tendencies toward moral laxness while at the same time creating a bureaucracy that invited corruption and allowed “the worst elements of any society” to “get on top.”38 Hayek warned that government planning eroded “one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and the respect for truth.” To be respected as the agent of good, he reasoned, the state must convince people that its values and the people’s values are one and the same, and that the means to achieve valued ends were also good. But “that complete ethical code, that all-​comprehensive system of values which is implicit in an economic plan,” he argued, “does not

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exist in a free society.” Like Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, Hayek and his followers believed free markets would expose and correct deceit.39 These arguments helped galvanize support for fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity during the 1950s. Though unlike Hayek, conservative evangelicals looked to biblical prophecy to support their political and economic views, his arguments against government planning bolstered their distrust of government efforts to advance social justice. Conservative religion and American business became further intertwined as managerial strategies developed in the business context contributed to evangelical church growth, building on already well-​developed missionary strategies. No one embodied this integration of religion and big business more effectively than Billy Graham. The lanky Southern Baptist preacher hailed Christian preparedness as the proper response to global wars, economic disasters, and the rising danger of nuclear holocaust. Anticipation of Christ’s Second Coming, “written off fifty years ago as irrelevant, inconsistent and impossible,” Graham believed, “had become the great hope of the church in the middle of the twentieth century.” Though he discouraged efforts to calculate the exact dates when prophecies would be fulfilled, Graham rejoiced that people around the world were awakening to the religious dimension of political conflicts. The stakes could not be higher. “Many world leaders,” he wrote in 1955, “are consciously aware that we are on the brink of a world catastrophe and impending judgment.” By mobilizing a vast network of church groups across the country, Graham drew audiences of unprecedented size. He also promoted urgency and fear as missionary strategies: “The truth is that the Church has been most effective in the world when she has lived in momentary expectancy of the return of Christ.”40 Billy Graham crusades were corporate events. Generously supported by wealthy business leaders as well as local religious groups, these mass revival meetings reflected some of the managerial skill and public relations expertise achieved by GM and other big American corporations. In the years between his first hugely successful campaign in Los Angeles in 1949—​ extended from three to eight weeks by popular demand—​and his triumphant return to Southern California two decades later, Graham perfected the link between advertising and missionary work extolled by Bruce Barton. A  month before the 1969 crusade opened in Anaheim, an Executive Committee of forty-​three people managed far-​ flung neighborhood subcommittees as well as nine hundred middle managers grouped into councils of ministers, laymen, and youth. Drawing volunteers from regional colleges and high schools, the Youth Council enlisted 175,000  “walking workers” to blanket the neighborhoods of Orange County one Sunday with promotional literature about upcoming events in the crusade.41



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An enthusiastic supporter of the alliance of business and Christianity, in 1951 Graham preached a sermon to an airborne congregation assembled inside the Chicago and Southern Airline’s new four-​engine plane, equipped with a lectern and small organ for the day. Flying over Memphis, he invoked God’s blessing on the company. At a meeting for hotel owners, Graham called on God to shower grace on Holiday Inns. In an essay for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1954, Graham touted God’s investment in business: “Thousands of businessmen have discovered the satisfaction of having God as a working partner.” He made it clear that labor unions were not compatible with God’s will. Strikes were “unfair,” he preached in 1952; before man’s fall into sin, there were “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease” in Eden.42 Postwar interdependence between religion and industry stimulated growth in Catholic and Jewish institutions as well. As Kevin Kruse has argued, business-​oriented religion “reached its triumphant climax with the election of Dwight Eisenhower.” During Eisenhower’s presidency, Congress officially declared the United States a religious nation, revising the Pledge of Allegiance to include “under God” in 1954 and adding the credo “In God We Trust” to U.S. currency in 1956. In his endorsement of these acts and patriotic respect for belief in God, Eisenhower “ushered in an unprecedented religious revival that temporarily filled the nation’s churches and synagogues but permanently altered its political culture.”43 As Congress and the president blessed the central role of religion in American life, fundraising for religious causes expanded, often spearheaded by businessmen. Emulating corporate advertising campaigns, protestant churches organized Every Member Canvass campaigns to promote church giving across the country and to canvass neighborhoods, soliciting annual pledges from every family in a congregation. These campaigns encouraged the habit of giving, beginning with children at the age of seven. Annual pledges were paid out on a monthly installment plan. These campaigns supported thousands of new church buildings and produced a great boom in church membership, especially in suburban areas.44 American churches, missionary societies, and religious schools had long served as arenas of corporate organizing where innovative experiments in leadership and persuasion flourished, and where effective lessons in group adherence and crisis management passed from one generation to the next. As Billy Graham’s corporate friends no doubt understood, business organization benefited from association with Christian methods of leadership, persuasion, and cooperation. No one hammered that point home more vigorously that James W. Fifield Jr., head minister of the wealthy First Congregational Church in Los Angeles and founder of Spiritual Mobilization, an interdenominational,

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Christ-​centered organization dedicated to enlisting ministers across the country in defense of free enterprise. Though Fifield was a theological liberal, at Spiritual Mobilization he joined forces with theologically conservative businessmen including J. Howard Pew. With fifty thousand subscribers by the mid-​ 1950s, the organization’s magazine, Faith and Freedom, offered Hayek’s Road to Serfdom for sale and urged ministers to celebrate American Independence Day in their churches.45 Fifield described the “market-​place” as an arena of spiritual testing, and argued that applying Christian methods of leadership, persuasion, and cooperation to business would result in both moral and economic benefit. In his 1957 book, The Single Path, Fifield defined “the truly religious person” as “one who is willing to throw himself into the ardors and joys of life with tremendous energy” while keeping God in mind, knowing that “he is going to judge us” not on material wealth itself but “only on how we played the game.” Based on his acquaintance with Conrad Hilton, J.  C. Penney, and other businessmen, Fifield concluded that Christian behavior in the game of business paid off in goodwill and cooperation. Despite the fact that his own goodwill did not extend to Jews or socialists, he believed that “the Christian rises above the pettiness and spite of others” and that “sooner or later most people will respond” by improving their own behavior. Though he did not think everyone merited fellowship, Fifield nevertheless argued that “brotherhood is as necessary and practical at work as it is in every other activity of mankind.”46 Critics of neo-​liberal economic policy in the post-​World War II era also homed in on the need for cooperative good will. Building on a version of Pauline charity far more inclusive and respectful of government structures than that of James Fifield, Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the United Nations Commission that issued the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Challenging narratives about the world centered on race or cultural supremacy, the Declaration promoted the idea of one human family, with rights for all members and respect for political and religious differences. As a template for discussions of human suffering around the world, the Declaration’s impact on the development of international law after 1950 was unanticipated but decisive. Though often honored in the breach, the Declaration offered a language of accountability that became common parlance in many parts of the world. As Jenna Reinbold recently argued, the demand for respect for human dignity embedded in the Declaration came to operate as religious myths do, providing a constructive ideal that encouraged the behavior it described in many different situations. While operating with something like religious force, in its insistence of religious freedom and respect for religious difference, the



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Declaration also operated above and beyond any particular religion, including Christianity.47 The post-​Pauline idea of human dignity and membership in a universal human community had real impact as a global standard of accountability, but hardly proved a panacea. In the U.S., the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 enacted important provisions for racial equality into law consonant with human rights, but also heightened resentment of federal oversight of business and education as right-​wing activists denounced government interference in industry as an invitation to moral weakness and recipe for economic disaster. Meanwhile, the long and costly Vietnam War provoked criticism of American government among political liberals and reactivated left-​wing accusations that big corporations were “merchants of death.”48 As the Vietnam War dragged on without victory, efforts to influence public opinion became more strenuous. During the Eisenhower administration, exaggerated stories about the persecution of Catholics in Vietnam, devised to create public support for American intervention, created little suspicion. But in the 1970s, during Nixon’s presidency, “body counts” and American manipulation of the numbers undermined public trust. “Considerable doubt was cast on the statistics,” the New  York Times reported in April 1971, describing the propaganda effort of the American military “to cure the public discomfort over the Laos campaign.” The Times scoffed at the government claim that “the toll of the enemy ran into the thousands.” The paper also decried “the deliberate leak in Washington of low American casualty figures” just prior to Election Day the previous November.49 As trust in government deteriorated, alliances among free-​market enthusiasts and right-​wing religious activists intensified. Conservative religious organizations such as the National Association of American Evangelicals made common cause with the Republican Party to oppose communism and revitalize America as a Christian nation. In 1972, Campus Crusade for Christ hosted Explo ’72 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, a six-​day event that concluded with an eight-​hour Christian rock concert for an audience of more than a hundred thousand, many of them newcomers to theologically conservative evangelicalism. Featuring Billy Graham as preacher for several events, Explo ’72 combined the networking strategies of Campus Crusade with the Graham organization’s well-​honed strategies for revival meetings. Organizers of Explo ’72 hoped to generate the kind of youthful energy produced three years earlier at the countercultural Woodstock Festival in upstate New York where, following a host of other antiwar musicians, Jimmy Hendrix performed his psychedelic rendition of “The Star-​ Spangled Banner.”50

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The troubled state of the American economy contributed to the erosion of support for social policies crafted in the New Deal. Though median household income had doubled between 1947 and 1973, the steady climb in real earnings ended abruptly in 1973, confounding expectations of continued growth. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other leaders of the religious right joined many business leaders in the Republican Party to campaign for tax cuts. Aimed at lowering government spending on entitlement programs, especially racially inclusive programs, the tax cuts would not affect government spending on military defense needed to fight communism.51 Exacerbating the problem of wage stagnation, the system of financial regulation established during the New Deal failed to control inflation. That system presupposed a steady flow of money circulating through it. But investment banks disrupted the “plumbing” by starting to offer high-​yield certificates of deposit (CDs) to corporate investors. The money that then flowed into corporate investment firms drained mortgage banks, creating a massive credit crunch for home buyers. Since the 1930s mortgage banks had operated with credit ceilings intended to make home ownership widely accessible. But the drain on the banks’ money supply made it difficult even for people with substantial resources to obtain a mortgage. When, in response to the crunch, Congress loosened federal regulation of mortgage banks, the credit market opened up for people who could afford inflated rates and substantial down payments, but others were left behind. These changes in banking regulation began to reverse the previous quarter century’s trend toward solidifying the middle class, which was now pulled apart, some climbing up and others falling.52 The growth of new religious movements contributed to social fragmentation. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), founded in 1966 by Swami Bhaktivedanta, attracted thousands of young converts during the 1970s. Recognizable for their shaved heads, saffron robes, chants of “Hare, Hare Krishna,” and aggressive airport proselytizing, missionaries for Lord Krishna’s gospel of love and peace seemed to many of their family members to have been brainwashed. The Family Foundation for World Peace and Unification, popularly branded as “Moonies,” was another high-​profile alternative religion. After the founding leader, Sun Myung Moon, moved to the United States in 1971, thousands of young middle-​class Americans joined his politically conservative movement, which joined spiritualism, protestant Christianity, mass weddings, and belief in Moon as the Messiah who was restoring God’s Kingdom on earth.53 When the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960, freed itself from Western oil companies, religion-​inflected turmoil escalated. In retaliation for U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur



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War of 1973, OPEC countries used their ability to manipulate the price of oil as a political weapon. Oil prices spiked higher when the Iranian Revolution broke out in the winter of 1978–​1979, leading to long lines at American gas stations and irate motorists during the hot summer months. On July 15, ten days after truckers and residents in Levittown, Pennsylvania, had rioted and set bonfires in protest of gas shortages, President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation. Much in the spirit of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Carter’s speech called attention to what he felt was America’s underlying spiritual problem, a problem “deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.” This “crisis of confidence” was evident in “the loss of a unity of purpose” that was “threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”54 The initial response to Carter’s “malaise speech” was positive: his approval rate rose 11 percent, according to a poll taken shortly afterward. In a world rife with hyperbolic rhetoric, advertising, and propaganda, Carter’s plainspoken argument struck a chord. The first step in finding “a way out of this crisis” was to “face the truth,” he said, and the truth was that Americans had lost “faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, faith in the future of this Nation.” Not everyone thought an American political leader should speak so candidly of national weakness and disunion. Carter himself seemed to lose confidence after the speech, dismissing cabinet members two days afterward in what one analyst described as a “government meltdown.”55 In addition to calling on Americans to conserve energy and sacrifice consumption for the common good, Carter addressed the erosion of trust and accountability that had hitherto stabilized the corporate structure of American society. Though he would lose the presidential election of 1980 to a politician more adept in public relations, Carter had put his finger on “faith” as “the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” In the decades that followed, the role that faith played in the U.S.  economy would become frighteningly apparent.56

Notes 1. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul:  The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1998), quotations from 137 and 142. 2. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis, IN:  Bobbs-​Merrill, 1924), quotations from the preface, “How It Came to Be Written,” n.p., and from 140 and 143; Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, 131–​ 148, quotation from 134.

162 Corpor ate Organization in America 3. Edward L. Bernays, “The Engineering of Consent,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (March 1, 1947):  113–​120; Edward L. Bernays, “Emergence of the Public Relations Counsel:  Principles and Recollections,” Business History Review 44, no. 3 (October 1, 1971):  296–​ 316, quotations from 297, 301, and 303–​304; Eugene E. Leach, “Mastering the Crowd:  Collective Behavior and Mass Society in American Social Thought, 1917–​1939,” American Studies 27, no. 1 (1986): 99–​114. 4. Bernays, “Public Relations,” 297–​304. 5. Bernays, “Public Relations,” quotations from 304; Mark Crispin Miller, “Introduction,” in Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn: Ig, 2005; Propaganda, orig. pub. 1928), 27; Edmond de Clermont, “Roots of Terrorism,” Economic and Political Weekly 18, no. 32 (1983): 1384–​1387. 6. Robert F. Burk, The Corporate State and the Broker State:  The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925–​1940 (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–​3. 7. A. C. Shurman, “America at Her Best,” Reformed Church Review 3, no. 2 (April 1924), quotations from 193. 8. George Pepperdine, “Los Angeles, the Heart of the World,” March 16, 1925, KNX radio address, reprinted in Richard L. Clark and Jack W. Bates, Faith Is My Fortune: A Life Story of George Pepperdine (Los Angeles: Pepperdine College, 1962), 132–​135, quotations from 134. 9. Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2007), 14–​23, 64, quotations from 22 and 182; Ben Primer, Protestants and American Business Methods (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979). 10. Morrell Heald, The Social Responsibilities of Business:  Company and Community, 1900–​1960 (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), Ford quotation from 89; “The Beginning Years, 1900–​1940,” Henry Ford Health System, quotations from http://​www.henryford.com/​body.cfm?id=47713, accessed August 6, 2016. 11. George E. Berkley, The Filenes (Boston:  Brandon, 1998), quotations from 178, 99, 100, and 174; Heald, Social Responsibilities, Lincoln Filene quotation from 105; Michael J. Lisicky, Filene’s: Boston’s Great Specialty Store (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2012), 33–​44. 12. Burk, Corporate State, 6–​15, quotation from 13; David Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich:  The Life and Times of John J.  Raskob, Capitalist (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 188. 13. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., My Years with General Motors, ed. John McDonald and Catharine Stevens (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1964), 1–​70, quotations from 47, 56, 68, and xix. 14. Ibid., quotation from 47; Marchand, Corporate Soul, quotations from 140–​141 and 137; John McDonald, A Ghost’s Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan’s “My Years



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with General Motors” (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2002); David Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 15. Guido Palazoo, Franciska Krings, and Ulrich Hoffrage, “Ethical Blindness,” Journal of Business Ethics 109, no. 3 (September 2012): 323–​338. 16. Heald, Social Responsibilities, “undertaking” and “attorneys” quotations from Owen D. Young on 101; Owen D. Young, “Business Sermon,” Nation’s Business 17, no. 4 (April 1929), “sacredness” quotations from 161; James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution:  What Is Happening in the World (New  York:  John Day, 1941). 17. Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–​1928,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (1974): 116–​140, quotations from the “Cooperative Committee and Conference System” report, Dec. 14, 1926, cited on 139. 18. Herbert C. Hoover, “The Value of Good Will and Cooperation in Industry,” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 9, no. 4 (January 1, 1922): 95–​ 97, quotations from 95 and 96. 19. William E. Forbath, “The Shaping of the American Labor Movement,” Harvard Law Review 102, no. 6 (1989): 1109–​1256, quotation from 1205. 20. Joseph J. Thorndike, Their Fair Share:  Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR (Washington, DC:  Urban Institute, 2013), national income figures on 30; Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt:  The Defining Years, 3  vols., Volume Two: 1933-​1938 (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 45 and 21, quotation from 45. 21. H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death:  A Study of the International Armament Industry (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934), quotation from 6. 22. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “State of the Union 1934,” January 3, 1934, http://​ www.let.rug.nl/​usa/​presidents/​franklin-​delano-​roosevelt/​state-​of-​the-​union-​ 1934.php, accessed September 19, 2015. 23. Marchand, Corporate Soul, quotations from Barton on 206. 24. Sidney Fine, “The Ford Motor Company and the N.R.A.,” Business History Review 32, no. 4 (Winter 1958): 353–​385, quotations from 360 and 362. 25. Alfred P. Sloan Jr., “Humanizing Industry,” New York Times, May 31, 1936. 26. Brant Short, “The Rhetoric of the Post-​Presidency: Herbert Hoover’s Campaign Against the New Deal, 1934–​1936,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 21, no. 2 (April 1, 1991): 333–​350, Hoover quotations from 336, 337, 339, and 346–​347. 27. David M. Kennedy, “What the New Deal Did,” Political Science Quarterly 124 (Summer 2009): 251–​268, quotation from 258; Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Second Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1937, http://​xroads.virginia.edu/​~MA02/​volpe/​ newdeal/​second_​inaugural_​text.html, accessed October 5, 2015. 28. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2014), 240–​ 241; Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 217–​223, quotations from 221 and 219.

164 Corpor ate Organization in America 29. Kurt Piehler, “A Religious History of the American G.I.  in World War II,” unpublished paper. 30. “Sees a Challenge from U.S. War Dead:  Catholic Educator at Arlington Mass Says the Living Must Defend, Spread Freedoms,” New York Times, May 26, 1947; Polyzoides, “Difficulties Beset Europe Defense Path:  U.S. Experience Seen as Advantage in Vast Undertaking,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1950. 31. Dwayne A.  Day, “Blue Skies on the West Coast:  A History of the Aerospace Industry in Southern California,” http://​www.thespacereview.com/​article/​938/​ 1, accessed October 4, 2015; Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-​ Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), quotation from 170; Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-​Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction:  R. J.  Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 32. Dochuk, Bible Belt, 3–​76, 153–​166. 33. J. Vernon McGee, Christ His Cross and His Church (Los Angeles: Church of the Open Door, n.d.), quotations from 42 and 59; the publication date of 1955 is based on a report of the resignation of Winston Churchill “this past week (April 10, 1955),” 52. 34. Albert W. Lorimer, God Runs My Business:  The Story of R.  G. LeTourneau (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1941), 102. For Pepperdine’s “political marriage to the Republican Right,” see Dochuk, Bible Belt, 197–​198. 35. Dochuk, Bible Belt, 9–​12; Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-​Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–​68; Sutton, American Apocalypse, 19–​21, 68–​75. 36. Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 204. 37. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom:  Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2007; orig. 1944), quotations from 68; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2012), 57–​84; Kenneth G. Elzinga and Matthew R. Givens, “Christianity and Hayek,” Faith and Economics 53 (November 2009), 53–​68. 38. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, quotations from 160. 39. Ibid., quotations from 172. 40. Billy Graham quotations from Sutton, American Apocalypse, 329. 41. For the 1949 crusade, see Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 36. For the 1969 crusade, see Dochuk, Bible Belt, xiv. 42. Billy Graham quotations from Kruse, One Nation Under God, 37. 43. Kruse, One Nation Under God, quotations from 293.



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44. James Hudnut-​Beumler, In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 150–​186. 45. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 49–​52; Kruse, One Nation, 8–​34. 46. James W. Fifield Jr., The Single Path (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1957), quotations from 94; Charles E. Harvey, “Congregationalism on Trial, 1949–​ 1950:  An Account of the Cadman Case,” Journal of Church and State 12, no. 2 (Spring 1970):  255–​272; Margaret L. Hartley, “The Protestant Underworld,” Southwest Review 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1953): 342–​346. 47. Jenna Reinbold, Seeing the Myth in Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 48. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars:  The Struggle to Define America (New  York:  HarperCollins, 1991), 67–​172; John W. Finney, “The Selling by the Pentagon,” New York Times, February 25, 1973; “Bias Laws to Bring Shifts in Hiring:  Employers Told They Must Adjust Old Patterns,” New  York Times, November 20, 1964. 49. Michael Graziano, “Religion and the Birth of the American Intelligence State,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Religion, Florida State University, 2016, 116–​ 117; Alvin Shuster, “Reports by Saigon on Toll Inflicted on Enemy in Laos Are Arousing Doubts,” New York Times, April 1, 1971. 50. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party:  The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–​48. 51. Thomas Byrne Edsall, “The Changing Shape of Power: A Realignment in Public Policy,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–​1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 269–​293. 52. Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 58–​85, quotations from 63 and 62. 53. “Hinduism in America,” The Pluralism Project, Harvard University http://​ www.pluralism.org/​religion/​hinduism/​timeline/​america, accessed November 15, 2015; Eileen Barker, “Unification Church,” http://​hirr.hartsem.edu/​ency/​ Unification.htm, accessed July 13, 2016. 54. Quotations from Jimmy Carter, “Crisis of Confidence” speech (July 15, 1979), http://​millercenter.org/​president/​speeches/​speech-​3402, accessed July 4, 2016; Fadhil J. Chalabi, “OPEC:  An Obituary,” Foreign Policy 109 (Winter 1997–​1998): 126–​140. 55. Kevin Mattson, “A Politics of National Sacrifice,” American Prospect, March 23, 2009. 56. Quotations from Carter, “Crisis of Confidence.”

8

Between Faith and Delusion Corporate Credit After 1980

At the end of the twentieth century, aggressive government support for free markets launched a new era of corporate expansion in the United States. Tax cuts and deregulation of energy, transportation, and communications stimulated corporate growth, breaking the stagnation that had gripped the economy in the aftermath of America’s demoralizing engagement in Vietnam. “History will remember this as an era of American renewal,” President Reagan predicted in his State of the Union address in January 1982. Announcing the rollback of government regulation, Reagan vowed to “make this economy a mighty engine of freedom.”1 Fueling the pace of corporate growth, huge influxes of foreign capital enabled American companies to operate on a global scale. When Exxon and Mobil merged in the late 1990s, becoming the world largest petrochemical company, the Wall Street Journal observed that the combined workforce, revenue, and profit of the two companies “almost defies comprehension,” adding that “many companies are coming to believe that only the truly massive will survive.” Speaking of the pressure to generate profit by accelerating growth, Mobil chairman and CEO Lucio A. Noto said, “Most of us are looking for ways to make the quantum leap.”2 Innovative approaches to finance were a key factor in this global expansion, as American banks shed their reputation for stodgy respectability to become the nation’s biggest and most venturesome form of business. Investors chased short-​term, high-​interest returns as industrial development in Mexico, Asia, South America, and the Middle East pumped new money into circulation. Multinational corporations headquartered in the United States created new financial instruments to extend credit, leverage debt, and generate cash flow. According to financial analyst Mohamed El-​ Erian, this transformation in



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managing money produced “a generation that mistakenly fell in love with the notion that credit rather than income could underpin a growing standard of living and national prosperity.”3 To generate capital and leverage debt for expansion, American corporations concentrated more on short-​term “shareholder value” and less on balancing the interests of shareholders with those of workers and consumers. Growing investment in the expanding international stock markets by large institutions created new opportunities for shareholder gains. Stoking the momentum of these trends, corporate boards incentivized executives with huge bonus payments in company stock at guaranteed minimum levels that rewarded ever-​ higher quarterly earnings reports. But to generate enough cash to keep these stocks afloat, labor had to be outsourced. As corporations cut labor costs to achieve record profits, the percentage of U.S. citizens employed by America’s biggest corporations fell. Increased reliance on cheap labor outside the country diminished the responsibility big corporations had previously shouldered for American workers and their standards of living. And the job security associated with corporate employment evaporated as some jobs disappeared and new jobs required higher levels of education and technological skill.4 Economic disparity widened as wages, job training, and worker benefits stagnated. “By 2013, the top 0.1  percent owned 22  percent of the country’s wealth, or three times the share that they had forty years ago,” El-​Erian reported. Ten percent of the U.S. population owned 75 percent of the wealth, and “the top 3 percent owned 54 percent of the total.” Income inequality was racially and ethnically skewed, with Hispanics and African Americans faring worse than whites. A study by the Pew Research Center found that by 2013, the disparity between African American and white wealth had increased to levels not seen for a quarter century.5 The new regime of high-​flying finance did not lack for moral defenders. Those who relished the fast-​paced concentration on short-​term shareholder value and executive incentives argued that quarterly profit targets stimulated brainpower and creativity, corporate growth, and global prosperity. Along with the thrill of making big money, hostility toward government regulation helped sustain belief in free markets as arbiters of justice. Deregulation would encourage smart, talented, hardworking people and reward their creativity, it was said. The innovations produced by these ambitious thinkers would make the future a better place for everyone. Developments in religion pushed this trend forward. Building on well-​ established ties between religion and business, new applications of popular religious psychology gained momentum over the course of the twentieth century. Americans were encouraged to link religious faith to willpower, and

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willpower with material success. During the Cold War, this psychologically stripped-​down approach to religion gained prominence as political, business, and religious leaders defined American freedom as a matter of faith, and faith as a means to success. On several occasions during his presidency Eisenhower championed this “faith in faith” as both deeply American and good for business. “We are essentially a religious people,” he said in 1954. “We are not merely religious, we are inclined, more today than ever, to see the value of religion as a practical force in our affairs.”6 Eisenhower’s emphasis on the “practical force” of faith was in keeping with the growing American tendency to reduce religion and psychology to “positive thinking.” In his best-​selling Faith Is the Answer, Norman Vincent Peale popularized the idea that there was no limit to the difference faith could make. Though “some people doubt” it, Peale insisted, “everything troubling you, every weakness, every unhappiness could be eliminated” through the power of faith. Doubters “suffer,” he said, from a “vast inertia of the soul” that could be dispelled “if you surrender your life completely to God.” Surrender was not humility or the admission of vulnerability, but rather a “letting go of doubt to let deep forces within the self take over to find an absolute sense of being attached to the very power of God himself.” Only believe in that power, Peale promised, and “you can obtain Divine power by which you can win over anything.”7 The long-​term impact of Peale’s positive thinking could be seen in the election of Donald Trump as the forty-​fifth president of the United States. Both Donald Trump and his father, Fred, greatly admired Peale, and Peale’s preaching helped inspire the younger Trump to summon the willpower to “win over anything.” Donald Trump attended many services at Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, and married his first two wives in ceremonies there. When Trump Tower opened in Manhattan in 1983, Peale sent a congratulatory letter in which he recalled his own earlier prediction that Trump would become “America’s greatest builder.”8 Trump’s aggressive posturing had roots in the will-​power psychology that developed in the United States after the Civil War, which in turn had roots in the idea of the sanctity of personhood that developed in response to slavery, industrialization, and the myth that individual rights derived from nature. Like business tycoon Andrew Carnegie more than a century before, Trump’s supreme faith in himself as a business man was buoyed by a popular culture fascinated by the metaphysical power of individual will. Trump was a product of the high-​flying financial culture of his time and the winner-​take-​all mentality of some of its prime exponents. By contrast, Carnegie distrusted financial speculation and cited “A rule which we adopted and adhered to [that] has given greater returns than we thought possible, namely: always give the other party



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the benefit of the doubt.” And while Carnegie, an intellectually curious man, investigated different religious traditions and found new appreciation for Christianity as a result, Trump, ever the opportunist, curried favor among fundamentalist evangelicals who made opposition to liberal government part of their credo. Carnegie was a philanthropist who dedicated much of his wealth, however patronizingly, to improving the life of his fellow man. Trump showed little interest in such charity or accountability.9 Religious developments in America enabled Trump’s rise to power as a political leader. The strenuous, almost maniacal surge in financial markets after 1980 built on the “positive thinking” extolled by Peale and his followers. Their religious thinking derived, in turn, from the equation of faith and willpower in the work of the philosopher William James, whom Peale admired and quoted. James understood faith as the power of human will to transform reality. In his essay “The Will to Believe,” James argued that “faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.” Indeed, he contended, “where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence” is unwarranted.10 As James wrote in his influential work Varieties of Religious Experience, faith led people to establish binding emotional relationships with “unseen” realities; the progress of humanity depended on people unlocking the power of these relationships. By attending to the practical benefits of faith, or what he called their “cash value,” James laid the groundwork for a more streamlined focus on immediate gain. While James stressed the need for real social progress and the essential role that cooperation played in achieving it, many of his followers interpreted his emphasis on the power of the human will more narrowly.11 Growing interest in the power of will coincided with the growth of the stock market and with the “financialization” of the economy. By the 1980s, millions of Americans had moved at least some of their savings out of banks into corporate stocks, often investing in mutual funds that managed clusters of stock holdings. Economic forecasts spiraled optimistically upward as middle-​class retirement savings streamed into the stock market alongside enormous infusions of capital from financial institutions and foreign investors. Expectations of future profits came to be conflated in people’s minds with real assets as companies pitched faith-​enhanced profit models. Expectations surged again as the market recovered from the shock of the Al Qaeda attack of 9/​11, sending forecasts of economic growth skyward.12 As William James had discovered a century before, models of unseen reality invited fraud. In his research on psychic phenomena, James often

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encountered skillful performers who could evoke unrealities and persuade clients that their delusions were real. But James never discounted the practical force that willing to believe could generate. For James and many Americans who learned to embrace optimistic willpower as a kind of civil religion, expectation was something you could bet on.13 Lifting the reality-​generating force of willpower further off the ground, pentecostal faith in the power of the Holy Spirit moved from the margins to the mainstreams of American religious life. Televangelists commanded big audiences as people tuned into religious networks where pentecostal preachers, celebrating faith as a power that could achieve anything, made the power of the Holy Spirit seem as reliable as electricity. When the Federal Communications Commission decided in 1960 that networks could sell broadcasting time for religious programs, a new cohort of preachers took advantage of the ruling to increase their visibility, wealth, and media outreach. While mainline protestant denominations balked at using television to raise money or celebrate wealth, pentecostal and charismatic evangelists jumped right in. By the early 1980s, televangelists touting prayer and visualization as techniques for achieving prosperity dominated religious broadcasting, reaching hundreds of millions of viewers in their living rooms and decoupling the power of faith from corporate practices of mutual trust and accountability. With its “spiritualized mass marketing,” as one critic described it, televangelism monetized “an upbeat gospel of personal success” disguised under “the name of Christ.” A more sympathetic observer, seeking to understand this gospel’s popularity among African Americans, saw it functioning as “a divinely democratic theory, which confers control back to the individual believer.” Self-​affirming optimism gave confidence to “African American working and middle classes that have scratched and scraped in search of their slice of the American pie.”14 Pentecostal preacher and vocalist Jimmy Swaggart recounted how “prevailing prayer” had enabled him to overcome a series of formidable obstacles earlier in his life, not least his own lack of self-​confidence. Seeking to acquire his first radio station, he faced competition from a foul-​mouthed bidder who wanted to broadcast rock music. Swaggart heard an inner voice telling him to put everything he had into buying WLUX in Baton Rouge. “The Lord spoke to me,” Swaggart recounted. “ ‘Go to the bank,’ he directed. ‘Get all the money you can lay your hands on.’ ” Swaggart’s broadcast ministry expanded to television, and by the 1980s millions of viewers tuned into his weekly programs. Eventually, questions about visits to prostitutes and improper use of donations cut into his popularity. Swaggart’s father explained that “the strain” on his son was terrible: “You’re not knowing from one day to the next if you’re going to



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have the money. And Satan is there to tell him during the night, ‘You’re not going to get it.’ ” A  repentant Swaggart recovered from the scandals of the 1980s to launch SonLife Radio Network in 1995 and SonLife Broadcasting Network in 2009. By 2016, the television network was reaching “a potential viewing audience of over 80 million.”15 In the 1980s, the Praise the Lord (PTL) television network, founded by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, reached thirteen million households and The Jim and Tammy Show appeared on two hundred television stations. Tammy offered tearful prayers for ailing viewers and tearful pleas for donations to support the Bakkers’ good works and lavish lifestyle. Prior to Jim’s conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges in 1989, their television ministry grossed $129 million a year and their 2,300-​acre religious resort and theme park, Heritage USA, promised “lifetime vacations” to investors. At a news conference shortly after Jim’s conviction, tears streamed down Tammy’s face again as she sang, “On Christ the solid rock I stand /​All other ground is sinking sand.”16 Celebrity preachers defined faith as the power individuals could unleash in their own lives. “Get rid of low expectations,” advised evangelist Joel Osteen in his best-​selling book of 2004. “Give birth to the dreams and desires that God has placed in your heart.” Osteen encouraged people to accept Christ and join a Bible-​based, fundamentalist church, but the focal point of his preaching was not communion with others in the body of Christ but the equation between faith and the relentless power of will. “Somebody may have told you ‘no’ a thousand times,” Osteen preached. You must “ask again. Keep asking until you get the ‘yes’ that you’ve been waiting to hear.”17 Calling him “America’s most powerful twenty-​ first-​ century evangelical minister,” Phillip Sinitiere recently identified Osteen as the contemporary equivalent and heir to Billy Graham. As the face of Houston’s Lakewood Church, America’s biggest congregation, the ever-​smiling Osteen embodied the power of Christian evangelicalism in the eyes of many Americans, both admirers and detractors. If Osteen had replaced Graham, the difference in personality between the two men reflected changing times; while Graham made humility a signature element of his public presence, Osteen exuded self-​assurance.18 Willpower psychology enabled the success of megachurches such as Lakewood that advanced the popular mixture of charismatic evangelicalism with the therapeutic culture of self-​help. These consumer-​oriented churches attracted people eager to take advantage of their entertainment and social services. In venues designed like shopping malls, they could participate in exercise classes, music lessons, Bible study, child care, and domestic support groups—​once they signed membership contracts agreeing to support the

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church and its teachings and authority. In a 1995 book that sold more than a million copies in five years, Rick Warren, founder of the enormous Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, explained his strategy: “The practice of targeting specific kinds of people for evangelism is a biblical principle for ministry.” And megachurches were effective: “One of the advantages of being a large church is that you have the resources to go after multiple targets.”19 Many of these churches also offered guidance in how to cultivate personal experiences of God. Evangelicals found “specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions,” one student of these practices argued, training themselves to identify “some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch.” While Christians in earlier eras often understood God as a governor and judge—​explaining misfortune as punishment from God—​many now see him more as a life coach. The transcendence of God diminished as believers related to God as “an external being they find internally in their minds.”20 As people sought powers of healing and stimulants to mental acuity, the market for alternative medicines burgeoned. Some Christians drew a sharp line between the Holy Spirit and the chi, prana, or spirituality of other traditions, but others explored commonalities. American reliance on faith for everything from “parking karma” to anticipation of cosmic rapture reached new heights at the same time corporate traders relied more and more aggressively on expectation and clever instruments of credit and debt. Con men were nothing new, but the magnitude of the game was unprecedented.21 The blend of Christian fundamentalism and New Age mysticism forged through televangelism and institutionalized in megachurches contributed to a gestalt of aggressive confidence-​building that complemented the ascendance of consumer choice, shareholder value, and bold financial schemes. Some evangelicals embraced the resonance between consumer choice and Christianity: Rick Warren asked each Christian to represent himself or herself as a “satisfied customer” in order to “build a relational bridge that Jesus can walk across from your heart to theirs.” Membership in the corporate body of Christ became commodified through savvy corporate management at Saddleback and other new religious institutions.22 Religious devotion to willpower contributed to a fusion of expectation and reality that affected politics as well as the economy. Sociologist Greta Krippner argued that reliance on market forces to sort out the distribution of wealth and punish bad actors enabled the elected government to avoid making decisions about financial inequality, ceding responsibility instead to the market. A champion of this strategy during the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan relied on the simple conviction that belief in America, political liberty, and free markets would



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carry the day. Trained in Hollywood, the “Great Communicator” represented reality-​as-​he-​would-​like-​it-​to-​be with apparently complete sincerity, skating over inconvenient facts with ease. As the New York Times reported in 1987, Reagan “dominated the political life of the country for six years, gliding gracefully across the national stage with an optimistic smile.” Even an admission of duplicity served to underscore his will to believe; when the Tower Commission showed that he had signed off on a secret deal to supply Iran with weapons, Reagan excused his previous denial as the product of his will to believe he never would have approved any such deal. As he explained in an apologetic address from the Oval Office, “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”23 Americans who viewed economic success as the result of willpower often looked down on people who seemed deficient in it. In the early twenty-​ first century, ethnographer Elisha Omri surveyed evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee, and found that they considered Christian faith as a viable alternative to welfare entitlements. Intending “to ‘restore’ principles of biblical compassion and theocentric accountability to a public sphere seen as long deprived of such values,” these evangelicals funded numerous programs designed to help unfortunate people improve their lives. But their compassion dimmed when the poor failed to respond with the moral agency that evangelicals equated with faith in God. An African American pastor complained to these white benefactors, “I’m the one who has to clean up the blood of the messes you make when your churches just drop in, drop off, and leave the community behind.”24 Ironically, evangelical efforts to exercise “biblical compassion and theocentric accountability” often worked to justify the poverty and economic disparity these missionaries intended to alleviate. Their focus on willpower sustained a feedback loop of frustration and blame that diverted attention from systemic causes of poverty. During his presidency, George W. Bush backed the awarding of government contracts to religious groups for “faith-​based initiatives” to help the poor. He argued that “a compassionate society is one that recognizes the great power of faith.” This emphasis on faith as a path to opportunity and social advancement coincided with the weakening of other social supports. In his first year of office, President Bush enacted a $1.6 billion tax cut that forced the scaling back of government-​funded social services.25 While some free-​market enthusiasts drew from protestant evangelicalism and New Age metaphysics, others found support in Catholic teaching. Writing in the 1980s and 1990s, Catholic moral philosopher Michael Novak defended corporate capitalism as offering individuals an arena in which to pursue a “religious vocation.” Addressing his remarks to a broad audience of “intelligent,

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ambitious, and morally serious young Christians and Jews,” Novak declared they would “better save their souls and serve the cause of the Kingdom of God all around the world by restoring the liberty and power of the private sector than by working for the state.” Building on free-​market, anti-​statist arguments advanced by F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, Novak urged theologians who had been seduced by Marxist criticism to see that “the prevailing moral threat in our era may not be the power of the corporations but the growing power and irresponsibility of the state.”26 A powerful cohort of theologically conservative Catholic businessmen joined Novak in celebrating free markets, funding political candidates opposed to government regulation, and developing institutions that joined Catholic teachings against abortion and same-​sex marriage to arguments against what they perceived as creeping trends toward government socialism. Among the most important of these organizations was Legatus, founded by Thomas Monaghan, former head of Domino’s Pizza, to enable religion and money to work together. As “a community of Catholic executives (and their spouses) who desire to bring Christ to the marketplace,” Legatus emphasizes fellowship among like-​minded wealthy Catholics, pious devotion to religious discipline, and investment in an array of complementary organizations. Membership in the society is exclusive, but it has dozens of chapters in the United States, and its growth since the 1980s reflects the increasing number, wealth, and influence of American Catholics who join free-​market capitalism to a conservative theology of life.27 On the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s visit to St. Louis in 1999, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on the complementarity between “the Gospels” and free markets. “Capitalism, after all, is not value free,” the Journal reminded its readers. Confident that “market economists come down on the side of the angels,” the piece explained that “capitalists like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek always and everywhere speak of hope and possibility.” And like everyone truly inspired by “the Gospels,” this pope stood on the side of capitalists “in the great cultural war—​between a vision of man that sees him as a rutting animal breeding his own and the earth’s destruction and one that sees man as fashioned in the image of his Creator.”28 Exemplifying the faith-​based optimism churning through American culture, Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling celebrated the “magical” new market in energy futures he helped to create in the 1980s. Known as “Rocky Hard Hat” for his right-​wing politics as a student at Southern Methodist University in the 1970s, Skilling combined anti-​government sentiment with passion for business, devotion to success, and intolerance of failure. By simultaneously generating and investing in expectations about natural gas prices, Skilling



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believed he was not only expanding global prosperity but also serving a religious purpose. “It wasn’t a job—​it was a mission,” said Skilling of his leadership at Enron. “We were changing the world. We were doing God’s work.” Convicted on nineteen counts of conspiracy, fraud, and insider trading in 2006, Skilling insisted on his innocence, defending his efforts to keep the company afloat and blaming “market conditions that caused Enron’s credit rating to fall.”29 Skilling’s rival, the glamorous Rebecca Mark, head strategist for Enron development in Asia and Africa, mocked him for being removed from the real world of pipes and flowing gas. But she was no less driven than he by belief in the power of belief. Raised by devout Baptists and educated at Baptist schools before entering Harvard for her MBA, Mark explained how “everything I learned growing up” taught her that “you can control your own destiny.” Mark blended the faith she grew up with—​“We were taught to believe that if you worked hard enough at anything, you could accomplish it”—​with enthusiasm for free markets and a kind of mystical delight in her own boundless will power. A  fan of Paul Coelho’s popular book The Alchemist, a fable about a poor shepherd boy who spins treasure from humble materials, Mark felt a similar kind of metaphysical transformation at work within the culture of Enron. “We are brought together with a certain amount of missionary zeal,” she explained for a business school case study. “We are bringing a market mentality and spreading the privatization gospel in countries that desperately need this kind of thinking.”30 This purist commitment to free-​market ideology drew support from the hard-​ driving, us-​ versus-​ them mentality of Christian fundamentalism that Mark and her boss Kenneth L. Lay, the son of a Baptist preacher, had imbibed from childhood. Like the fundamentalist belief that Jesus was the son of God and our only hope for salvation, free-​market ideology at Enron was all or nothing. In a culture devoted to the power of entrepreneurial will and its material rewards, deregulation and supply-​side economic policy were absolutes, not to be questioned. Mark-​to-​market accounting served these enthusiasms for fast-​paced innovation and free-​market ideology. This method of accounting allowed firms to calculate their assets at current market value at the end of every quarter or, in the case of mutual funds, at the end of every day of trading. While an accurate account of earnings might take weeks to compile, mark-​to-​market accounting relied on profit models to compute value. As its proponents well understood, optimistic profit models stimulated investment. Strong incentives to optimize forecasts favored mark-​to-​market accounting, which also offered opportunities to minimize, hide, or rationalize debt.

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Mounting problems with corporate accounting emerged to challenge the Wall Street Journal’s simplistic, even smug view of capitalism—​“Like the Gospels, it elevates the straight and narrow over the free and easy, and hard virtues such as thrift, sobriety, enterprise.” Enron turned out to be the tip of a looming iceberg of wishful thinking. In the late 1990s, the company moved into the market for electricity in California. Jeff Skilling and Enron CEO Kenneth Lay lobbied hard in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., presenting deregulation as the high moral ground of a free economy. When California’s strategy of partial deregulation failed, Enron executives never admitted that their own manipulation of the market had contributed to an unsustainable situation. They blamed the “stupid system”—​and felt free to “game” it and morally justified in doing so. In contrast to the managerial culture of earlier decades, which viewed corporations as responsible to society, with corporations and government working in association, Enron stuck to its devil-​take-​ the-​hindmost strategy, even when it worked against the company. “From Ken Lay on down,” according to one analyst, “Enron executives simply refused to see that their best interest” with respect to the electricity market in California “lay in helping the state succeed.”31 In their efforts to drive short-​term shareholder value and their own wealth skyward, Enron executives stretched the legality of their financial maneuvers further and further to hide risks from investors and to disguise losses in the company’s ventures in natural gas, electricity, and broadband networks. The will-​to-​believe culture at Enron simply overpowered fact-​based reasoning, and the market rewarded company executives and traders for their ability to sustain optimism. Enron failed only when investors, analysts, and employees finally lost faith. In one sense, Jeff Skilling was right that “market conditions” forced Enron into bankruptcy in 2002; it would have survived longer if investors, analysts, and employees had continued to believe in the company’s bright future. But when Enron’s dazzling reputation faded, company shares took a nosedive. The company suddenly came to epitomize not the brilliance of American capitalism but the wreckage produced by corporate malfeasance. When he died in 2006, Lay’s obituary in the New York Times identified him as “the son of a Baptist preacher in rural Missouri who rose to the pinnacle of corporate America as head of Enron before becoming a symbol of corporate excess.”32 It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Enron went wrong, or to clearly differentiate Enron’s risky operations from business at other firms, especially other firms devoted to energy and technology. More than a few of these companies chased after short-​term shareholder value and engaged in mark-​to-​ market accounting and aggressive lobbying against government regulation.



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Heightening the risks involved, America’s biggest and most reputable banks profited from the financial hype at Enron and at other companies. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Merrill Lynch all paid hefty fines for abetting Enron in fraud.33 Despite the evidence of widespread corporate dysfunction—​as seen in the complicity of big banks, the similarities between Enron and other companies, and confusion about exactly where Enron had “crossed the line”—​defenders of the gospel of privatization excoriated Enron as the Judas in their midst. Chastising the firm for the “corporate deceit” that finally had to be acknowledged in 2002, the Wall Street Journal warned, “Enron’s financial shenanigans won’t be paid for only by its shareholders, auditors and creditors.” More worrisome by far was that “politicians will seize on its sins as another excuse to meddle in financial markets.” Paternalistic accounting requirements were not the answer, the editorial insisted: “Auditors can’t sit at every CFO’s shoulder like a guilty conscience.” The most important thing the government could do in response to the collapse of Enron was to “restore trust in the markets.”34 The Wall Street Journal’s plea to “trust in the markets” was not all about Enron. Criminal prosecutions of CEOs at WorldCom, Tyco, HealthSouth, Adelphia, and other firms were under way. And the country was still reeling from the September 2001 Al Qaeda attack on the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center, the most visible symbol of American corporate power. Days after the attack, President George W. Bush ginned up faith in America by declaring a “crusade” against terrorism. Taliban commander Mohammed Hasan Akhund responded the following day, calling for holy war if the United States invaded Afghanistan. With the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Bush’s war heightened animosity toward America among Islamic states and sectarian groups across the Middle East, deepening U.S. entanglement in escalating religious and political conflicts that few Americans understood. Commenting on the impulsiveness of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and his inability to fathom, much less control, the impact of the American “war on terrorism,” Senator Max Cleland observed, “His plan has been no plan. His strategy has been no strategy. It’s been a faith-​based war.” A Silver Star recipient and triple amputee Vietnam veteran, Cleland lost his Senate seat in 2002 when Republican campaign ads cast his dissent from Bush’s crusade as unpatriotic.35 Seven years after 9/​11, the U.S. housing market collapsed, causing runs on America’s largest financial institutions, most of which were drowning in bad mortgage debt. At the end of 2008, outgoing Secretary of the Treasury Henry F. Paulson pleaded with Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to avoid “Armageddon” by backstopping a broad network of

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financial institutions, not just conventional banks insured by the FDIC. “Armageddon” loomed again when the threat of default by insurance giant AIG “dramatically intensified pressure on the entire system.” In his blow-​by-​ blow account of the unraveling of the financial underpinnings of the American economy, Paulson’s successor at Treasury, Timothy Geithner, envisioned the collapse of world order as desperate government and business leaders accustomed to working against each other threw in together to keep panic in check. To preserve the so-​called secular, or structural, foundations of the financial system, faith had to be restored. Though the price for this rescue included the “moral hazard” of propping up mismanaged companies and wealthy executives, eleventh-​hour action to save AIG “benefited  .  .  .  not just the millions of families and businesses around the world with AIG policies,” Geithner believed, “but everyone with a job, a house, or some savings to lose.”36 Millions of Americans had contributed to the unsustainable financial boom that led up to the crisis of 2008:  as mortgage borrowers in an overpriced housing market, and as investors in an overpriced stock market buoyed by financial instruments that divided, disseminated, and disguised bad debt as worthy investment. This widespread participation in the financial bubble of the late twentieth century had a strangely depersonalizing effect, obligating people to complex and interlocking financial entities that defied comprehension, and then suddenly leaving them less secure than they had believed themselves to be until the bubble burst. This was a corporate society, but one in which corporations failed to act as legally responsible persons enabling the cooperation of individuals in productive institutions driven by clear goals and subject to reliable methods of accounting. In an ethnographic study of Wall Street, anthropologist Karen Ho examined the relationship between delusion and destruction inside the culture of big investment banks. An analyst for Bankers Trust recruited from Stanford in the late 1990s, Ho found herself surrounded by people in their twenties working as many as a hundred hours a week compiling data for bankers to use in presentations for investors. These presentations were designed to show how short-​term shareholder profit could be extracted from corporate mergers and acquisitions and from the downsizing of departments and elimination of employees that followed these transitions. Many of those working in financial institutions believed in the “righteous” work of maximizing shareholder value and in the positive outcomes that would result from pushing corporations to get rid of inefficiencies. At the same time, this “almost unflinching allegiance to shareholder value” coexisted with strong evidence that corporate takeovers failed to produce their intended results. In more than a few cases, mergers and acquisitions destroyed the



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companies that investors thought would be strengthened. To explain the “gap between the ideal and the effects,” Ho pointed to the overwhelming power of her informants’ “faith” and their sense of “mission.”37 Identifying the operative element of faith in investment banking still left the question of how so many smart individuals could avoid acknowledging the unfortunate consequences of their faith. Ho argued that devotees of shareholder value had imbibed and come to embody destructive aspects of their faith in short-​term profitability. In other words, the people hired to maintain this system had become so fully identified with its process that they were unable to calmly sort things out and see that they too were being eaten alive. Brutal work environments left participants little time, space, or opportunity for doubt, dissent, reflection, or happiness. The business of cultivating young people willing to do these jobs rested on deep ties between investment banks and the elite universities from which banks harvested their recruits. In collaboration with the nonprofit corporations of Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, Wall Street banks indoctrinated recruits to think of themselves as the chosen few, smarter and more deserving than other people, predestined for power and greatness. Evoking the thirst for superiority the banks wanted to cultivate, a recruiter working at Princeton for Merrill Lynch explained what his firm’s global reach meant for the chosen few: “What does ‘global’ mean for Merrill Lynch? Is it simply that you have an office in Frankfurt or Tokyo? No,” the recruiter said, “it means that you are dominant.”38 The drive to dominance, systematically encouraged in a population with an exalted sense of their importance to begin with, helps to explain the outbreaks of cynicism Ho observed at Bankers Trust. Disrupting the picture of integrity that bankers worked to preserve, Ho found an itemized list of the “real” strategies behind investment banking on a Wall Street desk. “Manipulate projection so credit ratings are reasonable,” the list advised. “Mask the company’s weaknesses by concentrating on 1 or 2 strengths.” If the quest for dominance was “the real deal” behind investment banking, “faith” in the “mission” of corporate efficiency and shareholder value disguised that end from investors, and even from bankers themselves. A constant need to justify irrational activity characterized this predatory culture, along with an initiation and training regimen that brought in recruits, eager to live the dream, to feed the culture of corporate destruction.39 Some analysts swam against the tide of free-​market fundamentalism to argue that older and more traditional approaches to corporate governance proved more profitable in the long run, and that America’s most successful companies pursued goals that their members believed to be more important

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than profit. Even before the Al Qaeda attack on corporate America, the fall of Enron, and the collapse of the housing market in 2008, some business analysts and leaders worked to uphold ideals of corporate responsibility to workers, consumers, and society. In an important study published in 1994, researchers at Stanford University attributed the strength of America’s most successful companies to their purposeful, “visionary” cultures. Researchers James Collins and Jerry Porras found that in corporations with the highest profits over the long term, owners and employees viewed the work of the company as an end in itself. “We had to shift from seeing the company as a vehicle for the products to seeing the products as a vehicle for the company,” Collins and Porras explained. Though the personal “charisma” of a founder or CEO might contribute to a company’s success, the charisma of the company itself proved essential for long-​term success.40 Drawing on a questionnaire sent to seven hundred CEOs of companies ranked in the Fortune 500 and Inc. 500, Collins and Porras identified eighteen “best of the best” companies across a broad range of industries. They analyzed each of these in relation to a comparison company that achieved success in the same industry, but not to the same degree. The key to stellar success, said Collins and Porras, and the crucial ingredient that comparison companies often lacked, was a collective sense of “purpose.” All eighteen “visionary” companies maintained a “credo” that was clearly defined and thoroughly embedded in company operations. At 3M, the company that produced Scotch tape and Post-​it notes, employees took real pride in the company’s credo: “Our real business is solving problems.” They adhered to policies designed to implement that credo, such as the “tolerance for mistakes” that enabled innovation, and procedures for quality control that ensured product reliability. Embracing a similar strategy in a completely different industry, the Mormon founders of the Marriott hotel chain instituted an array of training programs for employees designed to instill the company’s credo—​to “make people away from home feel that they’re among friends”—​and to train employees in exactly how that credo should be put into practice.41 Likewise at Johnson & Johnson, everyone knew the company credo—​“to alleviate pain and disease”—​and the company went to great lengths to protect its reputation. When Tylenol capsules tainted with cyanide turned up in the Chicago area in 1982, J&J removed Tylenol from store shelves across the country and launched a nation-​wide alert and communications program. Shortly afterward, J&J’s comparison company in the Stanford study—​Bristol-​ Meyers—​handled a similar problem differently. When containers of Excedrin were poisoned, Bristol-​ Meyers issued no public warning and removed Excedrin only from stores in Colorado, where the problem occurred. In their



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comparison of J&J with Bristol-​Myers, Collins and Porras showed that while the strong exercise of corporate responsibility in response to the Tylenol problem meant lost earnings and increased expenditures for J&J in the short term, the company maintained its long-​term earnings lead over Bristol-​Myers. (J&J did not sustain its reputation without blemish. In the late 1990s, after two decades of rapid expansion at J&J, the U.S. government found the company guilty of withholding evidence of faulty software in diabetes diagnosis systems created by its subsidiary LifeScan.)42 Collins and Porras hinted at the religious implications of their findings. The subtitle of their book—​Successful Habits of Visionary Companies—​nodded to the enormously popular book written by Mormon bishop, mission leader, and business leader Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Written for a broad audience, Covey’s book expanded upon the argument he had earlier developed for Mormon readers, that true success derived from adherence to “gospel principles.” Building on Covey’s argument about the spiritual discipline of successful individuals, Collins and Porras applied it to corporations—​successful companies performed with purpose and discipline, like successful individuals.43 Collins and Porras signaled their intent to ground their argument about corporate success in the language of contemporary spirituality by reproducing the Daoist symbol of natural harmony throughout their book. The yin/​yang icon appeared at the beginning of every chapter and in numerous diagrams illustrating their arguments. While avoiding the term “religion” and overlooking the long history of Pauline influence on their conception of corporate spirit, they stressed the importance of “vision,” “credo,” and the harmonious balance between the seemingly opposing demands of profit and high moral ground. A telling expression of this corporate spirit was that Collins and Porras found many of America’s most enduringly successful companies to be “cult-​ like” in their “indoctrination” of employees and in their insistence that employees bond around the company’s “core ideology.” IBM expected employees to adhere to a strict dress code, socialize with other employees and their families, and even buy houses in the same neighborhoods. At Nordstrom, employees competed for best salesperson, with winners receiving store discounts that enabled them to wear Nordstrom clothes at work. Salespeople at Nordstrom could be reprimanded for frowning, or sent home if caught showing irritation to a customer. Similarly, the Walt Disney Company explicitly prohibited “cynicism.” Disney also maintained “fanatical control” of every detail of the company’s “ ‘magic’ image.” At Philip Morris, people smoked like mad, espoused libertarian political views, and championed smoking as the exercise of “the right to personal freedom of choice.”44

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Like churches, the “visionary companies” analyzed by Collins and Porras maintained a commitment to purpose that operated with magnetic force, attracting respect from the outside world and fostering cooperation within. In these “best of the best” companies, respect for the company involved employee dedication and consumer loyalty. Immortal as legal entities, these corporations operated as organic institutions with a transcendent, person-​like identity that joined together members and consumers. At a time when many American businesses were degrading their investment in workers to maximize payout, advocates for corporate vision swam against the tide to argue that it was counterproductive to devalue human resources; companies that rewarded initiative by joining corporate loyalty to decentralized leadership structures were more profitable in the long run. Growing alarm about environmental degradation and the looming consequences of global warming raised new questions about narrow-​minded attention to quarterly profits and overreliance on market forces to distribute wealth. Anticipation of a future world in which natural resources had “peaked out” triggered new interest in corporate “sustainability.”45 The President’s Council on Sustainable Development was created by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to draw attention to this new interest in balancing economic growth with environmental concerns. The twenty-​five-​ member council brought together heads of nonprofit organizations devoted to conserving natural resources, such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and leaders of several big corporations dedicated to developing natural resources, including Harry J. Pearce of General Motors, David T.  Buzzelli of Dow Chemical, and Enron’s Kenneth L.  Lay. Not surprisingly, council members agreed with each other only at the level of generalities. The high point of congeniality, a “visioning exercise early in 1994, moderated by a professional facilitator,” encouraged each member to share “their own vision of a sustainable U.S. in 2050.” The council did succeed in drawing public attention to the concept of sustainability, but it also created a backlash among opponents of expanding federal power, and contributed to skepticism about climate change as a ruse perpetrated by liberal elites.46 Some analysts sought to build on the attention generated by the President’s Council to pin down the meaning of corporate sustainability with respect to preservation of resources. One study published in 2014 argued that by doing a better job of assessing the risks of environmental degradation created by their operations and embarking on public relations efforts that acknowledged the importance of environmental stewardship, many companies had made incremental moves toward sustainability over the past several decades. But these



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efforts only tinkered around the edges of profit-​driven corporate organization. Only a few companies, such as Patagonia, Interface Inc., and the Body Shop, viewed sustainability as integral to the whole structure of corporation organization, encouraging employees at every level of the company to become more innovative, efficient, and profitable by finding new ways to preserve resources and reduce waste.47 At Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard made sustainability the central purpose of his outdoor equipment and clothing store. Profit was the means to a host of more inherently valuable things, including preserving natural resources, producing useful, high-​quality goods, engaging responsibly with local communities, working proactively to combat environmental degradation, and maintaining a corporate culture based on collaboration, trust, and transparency. “In many companies, the tail (finance) wags the dog (corporate decisions),” Chouinard wrote in 2004. “Our intent is to remain a closely held private company, so we can continue to focus on our bottom line, doing good.” Corporate idealism had come back to life in Yvon Chouinard, a self-​professed “fun hog” devoted entirely to nature and its enjoyments, in a new combination of fashion, good works, and “dirt bag” respectability.48 Chouinard’s corporate idealism looked more like the Pauline ideal of corporate membership than did the business model espoused by Enron’s Bible-​ loving executives. Chouinard described his company as a transcendent entity built on respect for individuals: “The owners and the officers see that since the company will outlive them, they have responsibilities beyond the bottom line. Perhaps they will even see themselves as stewards, protectors of the corporate culture, the assets, and of course the employees.” Chouinard’s corporate vision also had a strong missionary component. “If Patagonia can continue to be successful operating under the constraints of our environmental philosophy,” he wrote, “then perhaps we can convince other companies that green business is good business.”49 Chouinard’s effort to spread a deep ethos of corporate accountability coincides with a view of the future no less dire than that of Paul two millennia before. If the title of his book, Let My People Go Surfing, is lighthearted, his assessment of the real prospects for humanity is dire. As he says, “We’re fucked.” With respect to “extinctions and threats” to the environment, and the magnitude of human carelessness, “he’s one of the most pessimistic people I’ve ever known,” according to Mark Harbaugh, the head of fly-​fishing sales at Patagonia. At the same time, Chouinard takes delight in the surprising success of efforts to avert disaster. “Sometimes all it takes is one person,” Chouinard said about a governor’s decision, after seeing a film about salmon, to jettison plans for building a dam on the Susitna River in Alaska.50

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Other assessments of the trajectory of corporate civilization emphasize the significance of the present moment. Financial analyst Mohamed El-​Erian sees the global economy as at a tipping point, a “T junction,” at which the economic growth trajectory “engineered and maintained by hyperactive central banks” can no longer be sustained. A  route to “high-​inclusive growth” that “counters excessive inequality” must be found, or else we will be facing a future of greater inequality, instability, and dysfunction.51 Religious events can be good indicators of broader cultural trends, and can even impact corporations at this crossroads. The six-​day visit of Pope Francis to the United States in September 2015 may be one such event. Head of the world’s largest religious corporation, an organization that has promoted Pauline social theory more or less faithfully over two millennia, Francis made it his mission to “press the world’s last superpower to do more to care for the planet and its marginalized inhabitants.” Riding around Washington, D.C., New York City, and Philadelphia in undersized Fiats was one way to get his message about charity across.52 Arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, the pope received a rare welcome from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and their families, while the crowd chanted, “We love Francis, yes we do. We love Francis, how about you?” When the door of his plane, Shepherd I, opened at Kennedy International Airport two days later, the Xaverian High School Jazz Band struck up a lively rendition of “New York, New York.” The song’s well-​known refrain seemed appropriate: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”53 The brash New York welcome for the world’s most prominent religious leader is a fine example of the religion-​loving, success-​seeking, business-​ oriented culture of the United States. As the first pope ever to address Congress, Francis celebrated “the spirit of the American people” and America as “a land which has inspired so many people to dream.” He also praised the virtues of corporate industry:  “Business is a noble vocation directed to producing wealth and improving the world” in “its service to the common good.” Yet he insisted on the necessity of corporate discipline:  “The right use of natural resources” and “the harnessing of the spirit of enterprise are essential elements of an economy which seeks to be modern, inclusive and sustainable.” In a contemporary expansion of Pauline corporatism, the pontiff called on corporate organizations in both business and religion to help “avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity” and to encourage “dialogue with all people about our common home.”54 Corporate organizations are not recipes for virtuous behavior in business or religion. But as the pope’s own long-​lived organization illustrates, visions of



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goodness have been a mainstay of corporate success, and charity has worked relatively well as a means of identifying goodness. Disputation has played a major role as well. Corporate growth in both business and religion has often involved ethical blind spots and moral failure. But on more than one occasion, the discovery of these problems has generated considerable complaint, and complaint has generated reform. One might even conclude that corporate idealism depends on standards of accountability that appear most clearly when people have been roused to action by some violation or lapse in corporate spirit. As the history of corporate organization from Roman antiquity to the American present shows, corporate spirit is a form of social prestige that relies on vigorous criticism as well as charity to survive.

Notes 1. Ronald Reagan, “State of the Union Address,” January 26, 1982, http://​www. nationalcenter.org/​ReaganStateofUnion82.html. 2. Christopher Cooper and Steve Leisman, “Exxon Agrees to Buy Mobil for $73.5 Billion—​Historic Deal,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 1998. 3. Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (New York: Broadway Books, 2014), 47–​70, quotation from 52; Mohamed A. El-​Erian, The Only Game in Town: Central Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), quotation from loc. 689. 4. Henry Hansmann and Reiner Kraakmann, “The End of History of Corporate Law,” Georgetown Law Journal 89, no. 2 (January 2001): 439–​468; Mary Zey and Tami Swenson, “The Transformation and Survival of Fortune 500 Industrial Corporations Through Mergers and Acquisitions, 1981–​ 1995,” Sociological Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2001): 461–​486; Peter Koslowski, “The Limits of Shareholder Value,” Journal of Business Ethics 27, nos. 1/​2 (2000): 137–​148. For the historical roots of shareholder advocacy, see Jonathan G. S. Koppell, Origins of Shareholder Advocacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 5. El-​Erian, Only Game in Town, locs. 1385–​1499, quotations from loc. 1404. 6. Dwight D. Eisenhower, quotations from “Address at the Freedoms Foundation, Waldorf-​Astoria, New York, New York, December 22, 1952,” and “Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois,” August 19, 1954, both at https://​www.eisenhower.archives.gov/​all_​about_​ike/​quotes. html, accessed February 12, 2016. 7. Norman Vincent Peale, “The Power of Faith,” in Norman Vincent Peale and Smiley Blanton, Faith Is the Answer: A Pastor and a Psychiatrist Discuss Your Problems, rev. and enlarged ed. (Carmel, NY: Guideposts Associates, 1955; orig. 1940), quotations from 19, 24 and 25. Also see Donald Capps, “Norman Vincent Peale, Smiley Blanton, and the Hidden Energies of the Mind,” Journal of Religion and Health

186 Corpor ate Organization in America 48 (December 2009):  507–​527; Carol V.  R. George, God’s Salesman:  Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1993). 8. James Barron, “Overlooked Influences in Trump’s Life: A Famous Minister and His Church,” New York Times, September 6, 2016. 9. Andrew Carnegie, The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and His Essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” (New York: North American Library, 2006), quotation from 151. 10. William James, “Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New  York:  Dover Publications, 1956; orig. 1897), 1–​31, quotations from 25. 11. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Library of America, 2010; orig. 1902), quotation from 55; George Cotkin, “William James and the Cash-​Value Metaphor,” Et Cetera, Spring 1985, 37–​46; James, “Will to Believe,” quotation from 24. 12. Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), quotation from 2. 13. Krister Dylan Knapp, William James:  Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (New York: Penguin, 2006). 14. Quentin J. Schultze, “TV Religion as Pagan-​American Missions,” Electronic Media and Mission 9, no. 4 (October 1992):  2–​5, quotations from 2; Jonathan L. Walton, “For Where Two or Three (Thousand) Are Gathered in My Name! A  Cultural History and Ethical Analysis of African American Megachurches,” Journal of African American Studies 15 (2011):  133–​154, quotations from 147. Also see Kate Bowler, Blessed:  A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 78–​94, 104–​105; Jeffrey K. Hadden, “The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (1993): 113–​130. 15. Jimmy Swaggart, To Cross a River (Plainfield, NJ:  Logos International, 1977), quotation from 220; Peter Applebome, “Swaggart’s Troubles Show Tension of Passion and Power in TV,” New  York Times, February 28, 1988; “A Brief Biography of Jimmy Swaggart,” http://​www.jsm.org/​jimmy-​swaggart.html, accessed February 20, 2016. 16. “Keeping the Faith,” New  York Times, August 27, 1989; Anita Gates, “Tammy Faye Bakker, 65, Emotive Evangelist, Dies,” New York Times, July 22, 2007. 17. Joel Osteen, Become a Better You:  7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day (Brentwood, TN: Howard Books, 2009; orig. 2004), quotations from 4–​5. 18. Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 2015), quotation from 8; Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 56, 304.



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19. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church (Grand Rapids, MI:  Zondervan, 1995), quotations from 158 and 160–​161; Marc von der Ruhr and Joseph P. Daniels, “Subsidizing Religious Participation Through Groups:  A Model of the ‘Megachurch’ Strategy for Growth,” Review of Religious Research 53, no. 4 (2012): 471–​491; Kimberly Karnes, Wayne McIntosh, Irwin L. Morris, and Shanna Pearson-​Merkowitz, “Mighty Fortresses: Explaining the Spatial Distribution of American Megachurches,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46, no. 2 (2007): 261–​268. 20. T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), quotations from xxi. 21. Joseph W. Williams, Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 22. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life:  What on Earth Am I  Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), quotations from 290–​291. 23. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, quotation from 2; David S. Broder, “The Great Persuader,” Washington Post, June 7, 2004; Steven V.  Roberts, “The White House Crisis:  The Tower Report Inquiry Finds Reagan and Chief Advisers Responsible for ‘Chaos’ in Iran Arms Deal,” New York Times, February 27, 1987; Ronald Reagan, “Speech from the Oval Office on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy,” March 4, 1987, http://​www.pbs.org/​wgbh/​americanexperience/​ features/​primary-​resources/​reagan-​iran-​contra, accessed February 11, 2016. 24. Omri Elisha, “Moral Ambitions of Grace:  The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-​Based Activism,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 154–​189, quotations from 158 and 161. 25. Frank Bruni and Laurie Goodstein, “Bush to Focus on a Favorite Project: Helping Religious Groups Help the Needy,” New York Times, January 26, 2001; “Freezing Government,” New York Times, April 11, 2001. 26. Michael Novak, Toward a Theology of the Corporation (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), quotations from 38 and 24; also see Michael Novak, The Fire of Invention:  Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); Michael Novak and John W. Cooper, eds., The Corporation:  A Theological Inquiry (Washington, DC:  American Enterprise Institute, 1981). 27. Paula M. Kane, “St. Homobonus Leads the CEOs:  Doing Good Versus Doing (Really) Well,” in The Business Turn in American Religious History, ed. Amanda Porterfield, John Corrigan, and Darren Grem (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2017), 199–​ 222; quotation from https://​legatus.org/​join-​us, accessed April 21, 2017. 28. “The Good News,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 1999. 29. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Fall of Enron (New York: Portfolio/​Penguin, 2013; orig. 2003), quotations from xxv; Barbara Shook, “Skilling Sentenced to 24 Years; Claims Remorse, But

188 Corpor ate Organization in America Innocence, Natural Gas Week, October 27, 2006, quotation from 1; “Rocky Hard Hat” quotation from “Jeff Skilling’s Spectacular Career,” Houston Chronicle, February 15, 2004. 30. McLean and Elkind, Smartest Guys, quotations from 71–​73; Paul Coelho, The Alchemist (New York: HarperOne, 2014; orig. 1993), quotation from the excerpt from the book on the back cover. 31. “The Good News”; McLean and Elkind, Smartest Guys, 264–​283, quotations from 264 and 267. 32. Vikas Bajaj and Kurt Eichenwald, “Kenneth L.  Lay, 64, Enron Founder and Symbol of Corporate Excess,” New York Times, July 6, 2006. 33. “Enron’s Friends in Need,” New York Times, July 31, 2003; Thomas Landon Jr., “Trader Said to Have Started to Deceive Early,” New York Times, August 22, 2003, C1; McLean and Elkind, Smartest Guys, 410. 34. McLean and Elkind, Smartest Guys, quotation from 133; “Enron’s Sins,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2002. 35. For Bush’s words and Akhund’s response, see Peter Ford, “Europe Cringes at Bush ‘Crusade’ Against Terrorists,” Christian Science Monitor, September 19, 2001. Max Cleland quoted in Adam Nagourney, “Bush Makes Midwest Push Before Democratic Convention,” New  York Times, July 14, 2004; Joe Conason, “Vile Ann Coulter Smears a War Hero,” Observer, February 23, 2004. 36. Geithner, Stress Test, quotations from 233 and 248. 37. Karen Ho, Liquidated:  An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2009), 88, quotations from 152, 154, 29, and 153. 38. Ibid., quotation from 71. 39. Ibid., quotations from 106. 40. James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994), quotations from 28 and 32. 41. Ibid., quotations from 88–​89. 42. Ibid., quotations from 88–​89; Alexandra Stevenson, “Ralph S. Larsen, Builder of Giant Johnson & Johnson, Dies at 77,” New York Times, March 13, 2016. 43. Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People:  Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, rev. ed. (New  York:  Free Press, 2004; orig. 1988; Stephen R. Covey, The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (Salt Lake City:  Deseret Book, 1970). 44. Collins and Porras, Built to Last, 115–​139, quotations from 70–​71. 45. Sanford M. Jacoby, The Embedded Corporation:  Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2005), 3, 96–​97; Jeremy L. Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2–​4. 46. Quotations from https://​clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/​PCSD, accessed March 6, 2016; Crescencia Maurer, “The U.S. President’s Council on Sustainable



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Development:  A Case Study,” September 1998, updated May 1999, quotations from 4, http://​pdf.wri.org/​ncsd_​usa.pdf, accessed March 6, 2016; Cassandra Anderson, “How Bill Clinton Forced Agenda 21 on America,” Activist Post, May 22, 2013. 47. Naser Muja, Steven H. Appelbaum, Tara Walker, Said Ramadan, and Tolu Sodeyi, “Sustainability and Organizational Transformation:  Putting the Cart Before the Horse (Part One),” Industrial and Commercial Training 46, no. 5 (August 2014): 249–​256, quotation from 251; Jeremy Hall and Marcus Wagner, “Integrating Sustainability into Firms’ Processes: Performance Effects and the Moderating Role of Business Models and Innovation,” Business Strategy and the Environment 21, no. 3 (March 2012):  183–​196; Edward E. Lawler, Christopher G. Worley, and David Creelman, Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey-​Bass, 2011). 48. Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing:  The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (New York: Penguin Books, 2014; orig. 2004), locs. 857–​872, quotations from locs. 1915 and 1976. 49. Nick Paumgarten, “Wild Man: Patagonia’s Philosopher King,” New Yorker, September 19, 2016, 63–​73, “fun hog” quotation from 66; Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing, quotations from locs. 3006 and 2891. 50. Paumgarten, “Wild Man,” quotations from 73. 51. El-​Erian, Only Game in Town, quotations from locs. 297, 299, 3227, and 4643. 52. Peter Baker, Ahmed Azam, and Jim Yardley, “Pope Francis’ Arrival in the U.S. Is a Low-​Key Prelude to Pageantry,” New York Times, September 23, 2015. 53. Dan Mannarino, “Brooklyn Students to Give Pope Francis Musical Welcome to NYC,” PIX11 News, September 24, 2015; “Theme from New York, New York,” https://​play.google.com/​music/​preview/​Teofhiksdgnteorjr4entbykl6i?lyrics= 1&utm_​source=google&utm_​medium=search&utm_​campaign= lyrics&pcampaignid=kp-​songlyrics, accessed July 20, 2016. 54. Pope Francis, Address to Congress, September 24, 2015, quotations from http://​ time.com/​4048176/​pope-​francis-​us-​visit-​congress-​transcript/​, accessed April 26, 2017.

Epilogue

At Christmastime across America, hundreds of nonprofit companies mount performances of The Nutcracker, the Franco-​Russian ballet originally choreographed by Lev Ivanov and Marius Petipa in 1892 to music composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Russian emigré George Balanchine reinterpreted the ballet for American audiences in 1954, centering it around a magically growing Christmas tree, with spectacular success. Broadcast nationwide by CBS in 1957 and 1958, performances by Balanchine’s New York City Ballet introduced millions of American children and adults to the world of classical ballet. In recognition of its achievement, the Ford Foundation awarded the company $6 million in 1963, enabling a bigger and more lavish production of The Nutcracker the following year at the company’s new home in Lincoln Center. Inspired by Balanchine’s Nutcracker, local productions of the Christmas show multiplied to entertain audiences across America every December. In the absence of significant government support for the arts, many dance companies and schools count on revenue generated from ticket sales and corporate sponsorships for The Nutcracker to sustain them through the year.1 The Nutcracker celebrates the magic of Christmas, though without reference to Christian theology. Loosely based on E.  T. A.  Hoffman’s 1816 story “Nussknacker und Mausekönig” (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King), the tale unfolds on Christmas Eve at an upper-​middle-​class party with dancing and magical entertainment directed by Herr Drosselmeyer, who presents his goddaughter, Clara, with the gift of a nutcracker carved to resemble a handsome soldier. In a fit of jealousy, Clara’s brother, Fritz, breaks the wooden soldier, but Drosselmeyer uses his magical power to repair it. Clara falls asleep, and in her dream the Nutcracker comes to life and saves her from the Mouse King and his nefarious minions. After the battle, Clara travels with Drosselmeyer through the snow to the Land of Sweets, where the Sugar Plum Fairy reigns with her Cavalier, and dancers from around the world perform to Clara’s

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delight. The story ends with Clara fast asleep with the wooden Nutcracker safely tucked in her arms.2 We can imagine similarities between heaven and Clara’s dream world, or between Christian piety and Clara’s love for her Nutcracker Prince. These analogies pale, however, beside the corporate organization on display in The Nutcracker. In the ballet, as in Paul’s vision of corporate membership, conflict is resolved through a vision that celebrates individual talent as well as mutual trust. Sustained for centuries by devotion to membership in Christ, Pauline corporate organization outgrew its dependence on churches and Christian theology, even as Christian institutions continued to promote it. American productions of The Nutcracker belong to this history of corporate structuring that crosses different sectors of society. This ballet is particularly interesting in this regard, as it intersects with the worlds of business and religion without collapsing into either. Like other theatrical productions, The Nutcracker offers a carefully controlled representation of social life, dependent on close cooperation on-​and offstage, with everyone playing a role. And as in other ballets, the invisible flow of sound brings the company together, evoking the spirit and the narrative that the dancers strive to embody. Unlike most other forms of such entertainments, however, The Nutcracker involves many children as well as adults, and local productions accommodate child performers of different ages and levels of ability. In their compressed and idealized expression of how corporate society is supposed to work, Nutcracker productions not only develop children’s artistic and athletic abilities but also educate the children in corporate responsibility. Children in the show see how everyone in the company depends on everyone else, and how the achievements of one individual support and inspire achievements in others. The Nutcracker’s popularity as a local tradition reflects the deeply entrenched role of voluntary organization in American life, which was already evident to Alexis de Tocqueville two centuries ago. He observed that, even in play, American children organized themselves into companies, creating rules to govern their own games and punish infractions. “In no country in the world,” he remarked, “has the principle of association been more successfully used, or unsparingly applied.” Impressed with the energizing purposefulness inherent in voluntary organization, Tocqueville observed, “An association unites the efforts of minds which have a tendency to diverge, in one single channel, and urges them vigorously towards one single end.”3 Exemplifying this cultural tendency, the phenomenon of The Nutcracker also speaks to the situation of grassroots organizations in an economy now dominated by global corporations. Beginning in the late nineteenth century,

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many nonprofit organizations fell under the influence of industrial corporations; rational management and machine-​like discipline were the order of the day in religion, sports, and entertainment as well as in steel manufacture and railroad expansion. As this trajectory continued into the twentieth century, the ascendance of global corporations found its complement in the growth of American ballet. In its perfectionist self-​discipline, intricate teamwork, and multinational esthetic, American ballet contributed to a social order markedly different from the rustic world Tocqueville had observed. Like soccer, football, and other kinds of athletic teamwork that prepare children for corporate life today, ballet reflects and prepares children for participation in the reach, complexity, and precision of corporate life. Ballet might even be said to mimic spectacles of vast corporate wealth and power. The talent on display in ballet reflects the growing poise and prominence of women in American society, and recognition of their power as gifted, hardworking citizens; women play a larger role in the labor force that ever before, and girls today have opportunities their grandmothers never did. Girls eager for roles and training in ballet always outnumber boys, and the visibility of female talent in ballet is obvious. But the celebration of female accomplishment in ballet has until very recently been bound to traditional ideals of female beauty, pliability, and surrender. New ballets reflect “a new equivalence in partnering, whether opposite-​sex or same-​sex,” even as the great ballets centered on female glorification continue to be brilliantly performed and much admired. The dilemma of female achievement still evident in ballet resonates with contradictions in the broader society that may even have intensified as women have made great strides into fields long dominated by men, such as running for president of the United States.4 Efforts to manage the visibility of women have a long history in Christianity, as far back as Ambrose’s fourth-​century celebration of female virgins as representatives of the purity, discipline, and unity of the church. Women have often played crucial roles in sustaining Christian institutions as members, laborers, and donors. In exchange for the dignity, prestige, and opportunities that Christian institutions offered, they bound themselves time and again to male authorities whose ambivalence toward women often collapsed into misogyny. Balanchine’s manipulative gaze on the women who inspired him offers a contemporary example of this long-​standing Christian ambivalence toward the flesh and blood of humanity, so often projected onto women. According to ballet historian Jennifer Homans, Balanchine understood his work as fundamentally religious. “God creates,” he said; “I assemble.” Like the icons venerated in his beloved Russian Orthodox Church, Balanchine’s dancers brought viewers into contact with the divine beauty that women could be choreographed to

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represent. “My work is with what I see, with moving, with making ballets,” he once said. “So too with God, he is real, before me . . . . You see, that’s how I believe, and I believe so fantastic.”5 The dilemma of female visibility, so important both in ballet and in the history of Christianity, has been enlisted to support dystopian narratives about corporate society today. The beautiful robot played by Alicia Vikander in the 2015 film Ex Machina is only one example of the female body as the embodiment of corporate manipulation and its tragic allure in a future world. Similarly, in the HBO series Westworld, created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, high-​paying male customers do whatever they want to saloon-​girl robots in a corporate amusement park that mimics an authentic nineteenth-​century western town. Dave Eggers’s popular novel The Circle, published in 2013 and adapted as a film starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks in 2017, takes direct aim at corporate organization. Talented, ambitious Mae Holland is thrilled when she is hired to join The Circle, a prestigious Internet company that is famous for its contributions to society, for the many lifestyle amenities available to its employees, and for the devotion those employees show toward the company. Mae is required to maintain constant, positive engagement with customers, superiors, and the outside world, and at first she is excited by the magnitude of her responsibility. “Three screens for someone so low on the ladder! Only at The Circle.” Even as disturbing signs of her eroding autonomy start to multiply, Mae cannot escape the pull of incorporation. With cameras everywhere, “the plan was that most Circlers would be transparent within the year.” In the film, “accountability” is twisted to mean the obligation employees have to reveal every moment of their lives to The Circle, and gladly subject themselves to its conformity.6 In light of these dystopian visions, it is worth recalling the role that criticism of corporate arrogance has played in the history of corporations, and the importance of various forms of discipline and regulation that have steered corporations toward productive forms of social organization. In cases like the medieval Peace of God, the modern Knights of Labor, or movements devoted to human rights today, demands that corporate organizations be held accountable to real people have led to innovation and reform. While challenges to greed, injustice, and corruption have not always carried the day, most corporations today take their reputations as good citizens seriously. As evident in the movement of business leaders to dissociate themselves from President Donald Trump in the summer of 2017, most corporatations do not want and cannot afford to be associated with white supremacy or anti-​Semitism. And as recent disclosures of large-​scale malfeasance at Wells Fargo and Volkswagen have shown, corporations pay a price when trust in their accountability erodes. 7

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In the lives of real people, the link between creativity and corporate membership is often established in the context of voluntary associations, including churches, where much of the education in corporate life still occurs. The impact of grassroots organizations radiates outward through people’s expectations of themselves and others, with effects on American life perhaps as great as those of Apple, Exxon, or General Motors. Even as local associations absorb some of the cultural and economic impact of big corporations, they generate expectations of corporate responsibility into the social order on which corporations depend.

Notes 1. Laura Jacobs, “Balanchine’s Christmas Miracle,” Vanity Fair, December 9, 2014; Diane Haithman, “In ‘Nutcracker’ We Trust:  For Ballet Companies, the Real Magic of the Most Popular and Most Performed Ballet in the U.S. Is the Money It Generates,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1992; Ann Daly, “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers,” The Drama Review: TDR 31, no. 1 (1987):  8–​21; Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels:  A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 448–​539. 2. E. T. A. Hoffman and Alexander Dumas, Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Penguin, 2007). 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Craighead and Allen, 1838), quotations from 170–​171. 4. Quotations from Alastair Macaulay, “Women, Men and Ballet in the 21st Century,” New York Times, January 15, 2017. 5. Homans, Apollo’s Angels, quotations from 508 and 509. 6. Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Vintage Books, 2014; orig. 2013), quotations from 96 and 313. 7. David Gelles, “Executive Powers:  C.E.O.s Are Speaking Out on Social Issues, Recasting the Role of Business in National Debates,” New  York Times (August 20, 2017), B1; Jack Ewing and Melissa Eddy, “Volkswagen Expected to Name New C.E.O as Pressure Mounts on Company,” New  York Times (September 25, 2015), B4; Stacy Cowley, “Banking Scandal Harms Unaccused,” New York Times (February 1, 2017), B1.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. They are trusted friends as well as great scholars from whom I have learned much. Special thanks to Matthew Goff, Nicole Kelley, David Levinson, Thomas Whitley, and other members of the colloquium in Religions of Western Antiquity who responded to an early draft of Chapter One of Corporate Spirit, and to Mike McVicar, Sher Afgan Tareen, Jacob Hicks, and others in the colloquium in American Religious History who responded to an early draft of Chapter Four. These colloquia stimulated further research and helped me shape the book’s core themes. I also want to acknowledge my good fortune in being able to work with such fine graduate students at FSU; some of my most rewarding hours have been spent in lively discussion around the graduate seminar table in Dodd Hall. Several scholars advised and encouraged this project along the way, especially Brooks Holifield, David Hall, Winnifred Sullivan, John Corrigan, and Grant Wacker. I also owe a big debt of gratitude to Michael Friedman and Rob Reich, who invited me to share some of my work with the Political Theory Workshop at Stanford University. Comments on a early draft of Chapter Five from Ariela Gross and Brent Sockness sharpened my thinking considerably. I also want to recognize Niko Pfund and others Oxford University Press not only for their dedication to excellence in scholarly publishing (and generosity in taking me on as an author), but also for exemplifying the corporate spirit investigated in this book. Over the years, I have benefited greatly from working with talented individuals at OUP, not least of all Cynthia Read, whose deep erudition and insight into scholarly publishing on religion may be unrivaled. I am grateful to Cynthia for her care of this book, and for comments that elevated and strengthened it. Many thanks also to the anonymous reader

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Acknowledgments

who suggested making more of “accountability” as an organizing theme, and to Theo Calderara, who crafted the book’s subtitle. Further afield but close to my heart as I worked on this book, the Pas de Vie Ballet Company also stimulated my thinking about corporate organization. As a guest performer in Pas de Vie’s The Nutcracker’s party scene for more than a decade, I  have been fortunate to participate in the company’s merry corporate spirit. And as president of the company’s Board of Directors, I have been educated about the challenges faced by voluntary associations in highly competitive environments. Thank you to artistic directors Natalia Botha and Charles Hagan, who inspire brilliant performances year after year, delighting audiences and teaching dancers how to surpass themselves in company with others. Lastly, I am most grateful to my husband, Keith Hull. In addition to his thoughtful engagement with this project at every step in its development, he is my loving, generous, and delightful companion.

Index

Abraham, 11, 13, 75, 111 Adams, John, 95 Agneric, 29 Alexander VI, Pope, 54–5 Al Qaeda, 169, 177, 180 Ambrose, 19–22, 193 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 126, 151 American Philosophical Society, 99 American Revolution, 83–5, 95, 98–9, 110 Ames, William, 59–60 Anglicanism, 58–9, 69, 79, 85 Apple, 95, 195 Appleton, Nathan, 106, 108 Aristotle, 11 Augustine, 12, 34 Bakker, Jimmy and Tammy Faye, 171 Balanchine, George, 191, 193 banks, of medieval Europe, 53–4 as the early American Republic, 96–7 as a stimulant for industry, 99–100 after the Great Depression, 150 and early twentieth-​century investment practices, 160, 166, 169

and late twentieth-​century Wall Street, 177–9 Baptists, 101, 110, 120, 124, 156, 175 Barton, Bruce, 143–4, 147, 150, 156 Beecher, Henry Ward, 109, 123 Beecher, Lyman, 105 Berman, Harold, 38 Bernard of Clairvaux, 46 Bernays, Edward L., 144, 149 Bhaktivedanta, Swami, 160 Biden, Joe, 184 Black Death, 46–51 Blum, Edward, 121 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 47 St. Boniface, Church of, 32–3 Book of Pastoral Rule, 31–2 Boticelli, Sandro, 54 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 85 British East India Company, 61, 69–70, 81, 84 Brown, Peter, 20, 28 Bucer, Martin, 58 Bush, George W., 173, 177 Bushman, Richard, 105 Butterfield, Kevin, 93 Bynum, Carolyn, 51 Byrne, James, 83

200

Index

Caesar, Julius, 13 Calvin, John, 56, 73 Carnegie, Andrew, 128–9, 135–6, 168–9 Carter, Jimmy, 161 Carwardine, Richard, 103 Catholicism, 20, 33–5, 52, 59, 110, 153–4 medieval merchant companies of, 56 corporate organization in antebellum America, 101–3 and twentieth-​century charitable institutions, 121 labor activism of, 125–6 and industrial corporations, 146–7, 173–4 See also Christianity Charlemagne, 30, 32–3 Charles I, 72 Charles VIII, 55 Chauncy, Charles, 82 Chouinard, Yvon, 183 Christianity in ancient Rome, 2–3, 10–22 and the “body of Christ,” 3, 10–1, 29, 60 early institutions of, 8–9, 14–21 growing imperialism of, 35 and medieval commerce, 37–9 corporatism within, 49, 51, 61, 72–3, 103, 149 and puritan community, 72–8 and American liberty, 83–7 humanist movement within, 98, 104 role in industrialized business, 105–8 and slavery, 109–12 role in corporate ideology, 120, 123, 128–37, 146 as a mediator of labor activism, 124–7 and fundamentalism, 152–7, 171–2, 175 and televangelism, 170–3 early role of bishops in, 15–8 elevation of female virgins in, 21–2

eucharistic devotion in, 20–1, 33–5, 45–6, 50–4, 58 See also Paul, the Apostle Chrysostom, John, 19 Cicero, 12, 20–1, 50 Civil Rights Act (1964), 159, Civil War (American), 112, 119–22 Civil War (English), 59, 70 Clark, John Bates, 131, 134 Claudius, 13 Clement VI, Pope, 47 Clinton, Bill, 182 Coddington, William, 75 Coggeshall, John, 75 Cold War, 153, 168 collegia, 2, 7–8 Collins, James, 180–2 Columbanus, 29–30 Constantine, 13, 16–7 Congregationalism, 74–7, 85, 101, 120, 134 Corinth, Paul’s Epistles to, 2, 9, 37 discussion of social organization in, 10–12, 36 as a foundation for monasticism, 31 puritan reference to, 59, 73–4 as a criticism of early evangelicalism, 82 Mormon reference to, 104–5, 112 fundamentalist reference to, 123 as a general example of charity, 150, 161 corporations, 159, 166–7, 174–84 and early Christianity, 8–11, 14, 21, 29–31 of medieval Europe, 38, 46, 58 and American puritans, 72, 75–6 and the early American Republic, 93–112 in modern America, 120, 128–36, 150–1

Index as a basis for labor unions, 144, 149 global presence of, 192–5 See also Christiantiy; Paul, the Apostle. corpus, 2, 10, 12, 21, 32, 38 Corpus Christi, Feast of, 44, 51 Cotton, John, 73–5, 87 Cranmer, Thomas, 58 Cynicism, 12 Dalzell, Robert, 108 Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 94, 130 David (biblical), 11, 21 Debs, Eugene V., 125–6 Decius, 16 Defoe, Daniel, 81 Desert Fathers, 29, 47 Dochuk, Darren, 153 Douglass, Frederick, 111 Dred Scott v. Sanford. See law. DuPont, 146, 150 Dutch East India Company, 61 Edward III, 53 Edward VI, 59 Eisenhower, Dwight, 144, 157–9, 168 El-​Erian, Mohamed, 166–7, 184 Elizabeth, Queen, 58–9 Ely, Richard T., 131, 134–5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109 Enron, 174–7, 180–3 Epstein, Steven, 48 eucharist. See Christianity; Paul, the Apostle. Eusebius, 15 Ex Machina, 194 Exxon, 166, 195 Falwell, Jerry, 160 Fifield, Jr., James W., 157–8 Fink, Leon, 124

Fletcher, Robert, 93–4 Ford, Henry, 146–7, 151 Ford Motor Company. See Ford, Henry. Frick, Henry Clay, 129, 136 Friedman, Michael, 174, 197 fundamentalism. See Christianity. Francis, Pope, 184 French Revolution, 95 Freud, Sigmund, 144 Galerius, 13 General Motors, 143, 146–8, 182, 195 George III, 86, 94 Gierke, Otto, 131–3 Gompers, Samuel, 124, 149 Gould, Jay, 125 Graham, Billy, 156–9 Gratian, 38–9 Gregory I, Pope, 28, 31–2 Gregory VII, Pope, 39 guilds, 38, 43–6, 49–53, 56–8, 99, 138 Hall, David, 76 Hamilton, Alexander, 99 Harvey, Paul, 121 Hayek, Friedrich, 155–8 Henry IV, 39 Henry VIII, 57–8 Hilton, Conrad, 158 Hitchcock, Gad, 84 Ho, Karen, 178–9 Homans, Jennifer, 193 Hooker, Thomas, 72–3, 133 Horowitz, Morton J., 132–3 Hoover, Herbert C., 148–51 Hull, John, 77, 79 Hus, Jan, 52 Hutchinson, Anne, 74–7 Hutchinson, William, 74–7

201

202

Index

Ignatius, 14 insurance, 48, 56, 70, 95, 108 Irenaeus, 18 Jackson, Andrew, 100 Jaeger, Stephen, 40 James, William, 123, 169–70 Jefferson, Thomas, 86, 100 Jerome, 12, 19 Job, 11 Judaism, 7–10, 39, 47, 56, 153–4 as an influence on Pauline corporatism, 11 in ancient Rome, 13 and Christian usury, 60 and post-​World War I corporate growth, 146 Justinian, 27 Keayne, Robert, 75 Kennedy, David, 152 Knights of Labor, 119, 125–6, 194 Krippner, Greta, 172 Kruse, Kevin, 157 Larson, John, 94 Laud, William, 70 law, 1–3, 38, 58, 71, 150 Pauline conception of, 13 and medieval Roman Christianity, 28, 39, 54 as a partner to Pauline corporatism, 29, 36, 45–6, 124, 131, 134 in English puritanism, 59–60, 73–4 in New England puritanism, 76 in the early American republic, 93–100 Catholic use of, 101–2 and the Dred Scott case, 108–12 Lawrence, Amos, 106–8 Lay, Kenneth, 175–6, 182 Lee, Mother Ann, 104

Liberius, Pope, 20–1 Livy, 11 Locke, John, 94 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 106–8 Luther, Martin, 56, 60 Machen, Jr., Arthur W., 132–3 MacMullen, Ramsay, 8 Maitland, Frederich William, 131–2 Manilius, 11–2 Marshall, John, 94–5 Mary, Queen, 59 Massachusetts Bay Company, 72–3 Mayhew, Jonathan, 85 McGee, J. Vernon, 153–4 McKitterick, Rosalind, 35 McLynn, Neil, 20 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 145–6, 152 Medici, 53–5 de’Medici, Lorenzo, 54–5 Menenius, Agrippa, 11 Merrill Lynch, 177, 179 Methodism, 102–3, 110, 120, 126 Mitchell, Margaret, 10 Monroe, James, 100 Moody, Dwight L., 127–8 Morgan, J.P., 136, 177 Mormonism, 97, 104–5, 112, 180–1 Moses, 11, 83, 151 Nash, Gary, 86 Nelson, Janet, 33 Nero, 14 New Deal. See Roosevelt, Franklin D. New York Times, 4, 153, 159, 173, 176 Newell, Margaret, 78 Nicaea, Council of, 17 Norris, Frank, 129–30 Novak, Michael, 173–4 Nutcracker, The, 191–2, 195, 198

Index

203

Obama, Barack, 184 Omri, Elisha, 173 Origen, 18 Osteen, Joel, 171 Otis, James, 85

Plato, 11 Porras, Jerry I., 180–2 Porter, John, 75 puritanism. See Christianity; Paul, the Apostle.

Paul, the Apostle, 2, 8, 19, 53, 97, 151, 161 theory of social corporatism, 3, 9–16, 52, 56–8, 134–5, 181–4, 192 theory of charity, 21, 34, 150, 158 and monastic discipline, 29–32 theory of atonement, 34 impact upon medieval business, 36–40, 54 and eucharistic devotion, 46 impact upon puritanism, 59–61, 70, 73–7 utilized to maintain Southern slavery, 80, 110 and early evangelicalism, 82 utilized by American colonists during the Revolution, 83–5 and Mormonism, 104–5, 112 impact upon American business and industrialization, 106, 122–9 Paine, Thomas, 86–7, 93 Panic of 1837, 107 Patagonia, 183 Paul II, Pope John, 174 Peace of God, 36–7 Peale, Norman Vincent, 168–9 Penney, J.C., 158 Pepperdine, George, 145–6, 154 Petrarch, Francesco, 50 Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 160–1 Pew, J. Howard, 154, 158 Pippin, 33

Quakerism, 80, 86, 148 Radbertus, Paschasius, 34 Raskob, Jacob, 146–7 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 131 Reagan, Ronald, 166, 172–3 Reinbold, Jenna, 158 Reynolds, Susan, 38 Riley, William Bell, 122–3 Ritschl, Albert, 131 Robertson, Pat, 160 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 158 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 149–52 Rule of St. Benedict, 30–1 Sanders, Bernie, 4 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 130–2 Savonarola, Girolamo, 54–5 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 120–1 Seneca, 12 Sherman, Philip, 75 Sibbes, Richard, 73–4, 87 Sinitiere, Phillip, 171 Skilling, Jeffrey, 174–6 Sloan, Jr., Alfred P., 147–51 Smith, Adam, 99–100, 134, 156 Smith, Joseph, 104–5 Socrates, 50 Sterne, Simon, 133, 135 Stiles, Ezra, 83 Strayer, Joseph, 49 Stoicism, 11–2 Swaggart, Jimmy, 170–1 Symmachus, 20–1

204 Taney, Roger B., 111 Tchaikovsky, Pytor Ilyich, 191 Tennent, Gilbert, 82 Theodosius, 21 Tiberius, 13 Tierney, Brian, 46 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 95, 192–3 Torrey, Reuben A., 127–8 Trachtenberg, Alan, 120 Trump, Donald, 168–9, 194

Index

Van Cleve, George, 97 Vane, Jr., Henry, 75 Vietnam War, 159, 166, 176 Virgil, 50 Virginia Company, 69

Wanamaker, John, 126–8 War of 1812, 97 Warren, Rick, 172 Washington, George, 86–7 Wealth of Nations. See Smith, Adam. Westworld, 194 Wheelwright, John, 74 Whitefield, George, 81–2 Whole Foods, 95 Wickham, Chris, 38 Wilbore, Samuel, 75 Willard, Samuel, 78 Williams, Roger, 71, 76 Winship, Michael, 76 Winthrop, John, 72–5 World War I, 119, 136–7, 143–6 World War II, 152–3, 158 Wyclif, John, 52

Wall Street Journal, 166, 174, 176–7

Young, Brigham, 105, 112

Urban II, Pope, 37