To Serve God and Wal-Mart

The Making of Christian Free Enterprise

Bethany Moreton

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780674256460
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America's devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world's largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next.This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart's world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).

1

Our Fathers’ America

Today, even the most casual reader of the national press has encountered some version of this formula: Wal-Mart is the biggest company on the planet. Its sales on a single day topped the gross domestic products of thirty-six sovereign nations. If it were the independent Republic of Wal-Mart, it would be China’s sixth largest export market and its economy would rank thirtieth in the world, right behind Saudi Arabia’s. And then the punch line: it’s from a little town in the Ozark mountains where you can’t even buy a beer!¹ Bentonville, Arkansas, was typically treated in the business press as the unlikeliest of places to produce a world-class player. “The paradox,” marveled one commentator in 2002, “is that Wal-Mart stands for both Main Street values and the efficiencies of the huge corporation, aw-shucks hokeyness and terabytes of minute-by-minute sales data, fried-chicken luncheons at the Waltons’ Arkansas home and the demands of Wall Street.”²

A more useful interpretation of the “Wal-Mart paradox” came from within its own management. In Wal-Mart circles, no single story of the company’s early years was more treasured than that of the Chicken Report. Since the early 1970s, Wal-Mart had courted investors with laid-back annual meetings featuring fishing trips and barbecues, and by the mid-1980s the national analysts could not ignore the home office’s overtures. The result was an irresistible target for the Arkansans: an audience of slightly bewildered city folk, struggling to comprehend the company’s magic. With encouragement from Walton, Senior Vice President Ron Loveless elaborated on one of management’s typical in-house gags and presented it to the attentive crowd. “People often ask us how we predict market demand for discount merchandise,” Loveless began,

and you’ve heard a lot of numbers today. But there is more to it than that. We raise a good many chickens in Northwest Arkansas, and we’ve come to depend on them for what we call the Loveless Economic Indicator Report. You see, when times are good, you find plenty of dead chickens by the side of the road, ones that have fallen off the trucks. But when times are getting lean, people stop and pick up the dead chickens and take ’em home for supper. So in addition to the traditional methods, we try to correlate our advance stock orders with the number of dead chickens by the side of the road.

With elaborate graphs, Loveless demonstrated the entirely fictitious relationship, gravely explaining the peaks and valleys of chicken mortality, describing one anomalous spike as a misleading head-on collision between two chicken trucks outside Koziusko, Mississippi, and projecting slides of a uniformed “Chicken Patrol” inspecting a bird’s carcass on a two-lane country road. “And the audience sat there nodding and frowning and writing it all down!”³

Like the majority of the world’s population, but unlike most other United States citizens, Wal-Mart’s core constituency only left the agrarian economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century.⁴ The frames of reference it carried into the age of terabytes therefore sounded anomalous to the representatives of industrial modernity. But as the Chicken Patrol suggested, anomaly was in the eye of the beholder. The high-tech redneck, the rustic with a Bible in one hand and a Blackberry in the other, was only paradoxical from the perspective of a stage theory of history. Innovation from the agricultural periphery only shocked those who assumed that the industrial North Atlantic led and everyone else would follow, at their own remedial pace, along the same path.

In fact, however, it was the reputed antimodernists who showed a consistent talent for innovation. The rural South embraced distance commerce back when it meant mail-order catalogues and global cotton markets. Fundamentalist preachers first seized the new technology of radio and then cable television to create a congregation of the air. In the 1970s, the Moral Majority mastered computerized direct mail to remake national politics. And, indeed, one small-town retailer set the technological standard for a global economic empire.⁵ Observers who thus mistook style for substance, as the Chicken Patrollers knew, revealed more about their own assumptions than about the objects of their interest. To reject Detroit as the universal telos, it turned out, was not to reject progress itself.

In order to raise up not only a large, successful service company but an entire economic model, Wal-Mart had to overcome formidable obstacles to its legitimacy. The megastore selected as its home the most inhospitable part of the country for big business: the very same rural, Southwestern counties that since the 1880s had fought against large corporations and for increased government safeguards in the nation’s economy. Not only were these Populist strongholds hostile to the distant capitalists of Eastern industry and finance, they were also lousy customers. The early twentieth century’s department stores and theme parks were creatures of the city, and their paying customers the beneficiaries of industrial profits and union wages. Placed next to this urban cornucopia, small towns and their rural trade areas looked distinctly unpromising as the raw material of retail dominance. The viability of the small farms depended on the low consumption levels of those who stayed put. Measured in access to electric power, farm machinery, running water, phone service, or automobiles, the Ozarks in 1930 ranked at the bottom of America’s consumer hierarchy.⁶ Several obstacles stood between the Ozarks and the culture of consumption before World War II, most fundamentally the absence of two nickels to rub together.

Yet the American periphery—Wal-Mart Country—won the economic commanding heights in the second half of the century precisely by creatively mobilizing its regional disadvantages, turning necessity to invention, hostility to triumph. The Populist critique of the industrial political economy provided the raw material for a new corporate populism, a distinctly Ozarks version of capitalism with broad appeal across the Sun Belt. At the same time, the region helped develop new circuits for the redistribution of national wealth out of the industrial North and into the pockets of the Populists’ own grandchildren scattered across Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma.

In both cases—reversing the anticorporate revolt and tapping new income—the region’s farms, small towns, and churches provided the cultural resources to enable a massive shift in the conditions of economic possibility. Wal-Mart Country strove for alternatives to industrial modernity, urbanism, and the “society of strangers” that terrified early observers. The specific terms of its critique shaped the postindustrial service economy, suburbanism, and the free-market global village that have marked the era since World War II. By the time the United States addressed the world as a lonely hegemon in the last decades of the twentieth century, it spoke in the accents of the South and West. In short, as the business press concluded, Wal-Mart was “a lot like America: a sole superpower with a down-home twang.”⁷ Wal-Mart’s prehistory in the Ozarks reveals how globalization got its twang.

In Branson, Missouri, everything changed on or about December 9, 1991. That was the day when 60 Minutes described the little Ozarks town as “the country music capital of the universe” to a national audience of millions. Nashville felt the slight—it remains the Vatican City of this popular music genre—but the phrase became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In three years, tax receipts rose 75 percent; now roughly 7 million people annually visit the town of 7,000. Branson, once the country industry’s low-profile retreat from the tour circuit, now claims more theaters than Manhattan. Particularly during its boom in the 1980s and 1990s, the town attracted a distinct demographic: retirees who made it America’s number one destination for bus tours, and families who preferred their children to meet the famous Veggie Tales Christian cartoon characters than the mincing Teletubby Tinky-Winky, whom Jerry Falwell castigated publicly for his effeminate man-purse.⁸ Opting for what one satisfied customer labeled a “G-rated, country version of Las Vegas,” these gentle visitors eschewed Sin City in favor of Silver Dollar City, the “old-timey” theme park that anchored an international chain of Christian tourist attractions.⁹ The faux-vintage “saloon” served no alcohol. Instead, an actress portraying local temperance terrorist Carrie Nation staged a raid five times a day, smashing bottles and shutting down a kick line. Professionally produced stage shows blended country staples and gospel favorites like “I’ll Fly Away” with patriotic anthems that brought the crowds to their feet.¹⁰ Branson was a reservation for the stars television made, including the orange-juice promoter and antihomosexual crusader Anita Bryant and the singing Mormon family named Osmond. Sequins, lights, and glitz were welcome, as long as the entertainment remained free of both sex and sarcasm.¹¹ In the pages of the free Branson Church Getaway Planner, it offered tens of thousands of congregations a sanitized version of America’s rural heritage, a family-fun-filled redoubt of Jeffersonian virtue in a republic gone wickedly metro-sexual.¹²

But as much as decaying Detroit itself, Branson was wholly the heir of America’s industrial moment, that high tide of liberal, industrial Keynesianism. The region drew visitors to a half-dozen recreational reservoirs built with taxpayer money by the Army Corps of Engineers.¹³ Its graying pilgrims owed their retirement leisure to the New Deal and the Cold War, in the guises of Social Security, Medicare, and the long, liberal boom economy from the 1940s through the 1970s, primed with military spending. Like every community built on tourism, Branson employed a low-wage seasonal work force subsidized by federal and state funds. When the tourists went home, up to 20 percent of the town was out of work. “In the winter,” one resident admitted candidly, “everyone sits around on unemployment.”¹⁴ Yet the little town boomed because in the summer it drew a curtain over this heritage of the liberal industrial state, struck up the band, and spun a different tale. In Branson’s version of America, there was “no crime, no crack, no inner-city blight,” reported a visitor in the early 1990s. “Almost everyone is white, speaks English, and shares the same values of God, family and country. Almost everyone who wants a job has one,” and the state was just a bumbling, risible tax collector.¹⁵ In this imagined homeland, rural white virtue offered a hiding place from the twentieth century’s tempests of creative destruction.

Throughout most of the preceding century, the Ozarks periodically offered the same comfort to a nation deeply ambivalent about the modern incorporation of America. Urbanites dazed by sudden, unchecked industrialization in the early 1900s often located the new urban pathologies in the polyglot work force that staffed the factories and filled the tenements. The Ozarks presented a dramatic contrast. Northwest Arkansas and Southern Missouri have historically been among the whitest places in the country—over 95 percent white as late as 1996. The African-American proportion of the population in Wal-Mart’s Benton County has stayed under 1 percent since the close of the Civil War.¹⁶ Moreover, the oldest waves of American immigration predominated— eighteenth-century English and Scotch-Irish, pre–Civil War Germans. Like much of the South’s rural interior, the region remained virtually untouched by the Southern and Eastern European immigration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Catholics and Jews who made up the industrial work force in the North.

In the wake of that immigration, during the high tide of American eugenics, the Ozarks enjoyed a brief vogue as the source for a reserve supply of old-stock pioneers who needed only to be taken off ice to re-invigorate the nation with traditional republican virtues of thrift, hard work, and quaint Elizabethan speech patterns.¹⁷ Then Progressive-era legislation reined in some of the most destructive effects of industry; the First World War made large-scale manufacturing patriotic; the Immigration Act of 1924 virtually halted the flow of objectionable immigrants; and for a while, America did not need the Ozarks.

The mountains next soothed the national imagination during the Great Depression, representing the simple independence of small farming—an occupation in fact devastated by the collapse in agricultural prices in the 1920s—at a time when the perils of large-scale bureaucratic enterprises were all too apparent. In a 1934 travel article, celebrated muralist Thomas Hart Benton christened the area “America’s Yesterday.” This paean to a preindustrial, preurban, preimmigrant America located our collective past in a decreasingly representative white rural enclave while the country faced a grim present and an uncertain future. If the Ozarks sheltered “‘the very last of our fathers’ America,’” then our fathers must have been Scotch-Irish farmers—not slaves, not immigrants, and not factory hands.¹⁸

With the industrial boom of World War II, the national need for the Ozarks faded again for a time. But the hillbilly made a comeback as a cultural icon in the late 1950s, this time through television. Rural comedies like The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, and especially The Beverly Hillbillies regularly ranked among the top ten programs on the air and counterbalanced the theme of degenerate mountain poverty that ran simultaneously through the news programming. By the 1960s, many Americans felt that progress was not what it used to be, and the small screen’s sturdy mountain folk offered a critique as well as an escape. Paul Henning, the Beverly Hillbillies writer and producer, was a native Missourian who had spent childhood summers hiking the Ozarks. Henning attributed the show’s genesis to a 1960 report that people in a remote Ozarks county were fighting progress in the form of a proposed road through their mountain refuge. His sanitized, made-for-television Ozarkers regularly exposed the shallow materialism of their new California neighbors with their kindly common sense.¹⁹

Despite the excesses of this romantic tradition, the political economy of the Ozarks offered some plausible conditions for its independent reputation. Like the Appalachian counties further east, Wal-Mart’s Ozark homeland avoided the pathologies of widespread tenancy and monocropping that characterized the South’s old plantation zones. On the better lands, a diversified farm economy built around grain, fruit, and livestock did not require the extensive holdi...