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Nixon's First Cover-Up
The Religious Life of a Quaker President
By H. Larry Ingle University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2015 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7335-2
CHAPTER 1
Richard Nixon's Evangelical Quaker Heritage
[Nixon] told me one time that he intended to go through his presidential papers by a fireplace; he would go through them one by one, and cull out the things he didn't want history to notice. ... He was going to destroy things, so that what was left to history would be his selective version.
— John Ehrlichman
During his political career, Richard Milhous Nixon would occasionally cite his Quaker heritage when called upon to explain or defend controversial actions. Perhaps the most startling example was in 1971 when, in an interview with the New York Times, he was asked about the bombing of neutral Laos he had secretly authorized during the Vietnam War. Commenting on his action, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy Nixon told a Times reporter, "I rate myself a deeply committed pacifist, perhaps because of my Quaker heritage from my mother." As president he exercised more raw power than any other of the world's Quakers during the twentieth century, in truth more absolute power than any Quaker in history. This was the same "deeply committed pacifist" whose "Quaker heritage" did not prevent him from enlisting in the navy during World War II and serving in the south Pacific.
Such anomalies might cause some head-scratching among critics, but they did not seem that surprising to those who knew anything about the world of evangelical Friends in the western United States from the 1890s onward. Unfortunately few did — or do. Perhaps the most egregious example was in the biography of Nixon by the much-acclaimed historian Stephen E. Ambrose, author of numerous historical works on a variety of topics. Describing the kind of Quaker meeting that he said Nixon attended, Ambrose had Nixon and the Quakers at his East Whittier Friends Church "[s]itting quietly together ... without intermediary rites, church, creed, or priesthood ... or hymns sung together." There was no written creed at East Whittier, true enough, but the rest of the description was totally inaccurate for Friends churches in California. Other scholars who have described Nixon's Quakerism have not been as oblivious as Ambrose to the realities of Friends' history, their tradition, and practice, but most have been bad enough.
Such mischaracterizations make one wonder why this myopia existed. It was no Nixonian conspiracy. Indeed, a major source of ignorance about his religion is the neglect of the question by most historians. A very small group, Quakers in the United States are sharply and often bitterly divided and have been since the 1820s, nearly a century before Nixon was born. Many of those who have written about him have been natives of the eastern states, have lived there, or have earned advanced degrees in that area of the country; their knowledge of Quakerism has been colored by the brand that they are most familiar with, the eastern, or what Friends call the "unprogrammed," type, in the United States the one with the fewest actual adherents. Hence relatively few historians have been willing to go beyond Nixon's nearly-always-bland comments about Quakerism and probe into what he was saying — or avoiding. The same goes for his mother's, Hannah's, statements about her faith, a primary source for historians' accounts of their religion.
Toward the end of his life, with less political need to avoid reminding people of his Quakerism, Nixon could occasionally be more forthcoming. Always somewhat fearful and wary of those who wrote about him, in 1989 Nixon told Aitken, the only biographer he half-trusted, that the others were "second rate," but that one of them, Stephen Ambrose, was at least "close to the truth when he said, 'The impact of RN's Quaker heritage on his personality has been underestimated.'" Yet, paradoxically Nixon never corrected the public record: in his own memoir, he limited discussion of his own Quaker background to three short paragraphs. He certainly made no effort to indicate how Quakerism had the significant impact on his personality that he implied in his comment to Aitken.
In truth, Nixon's Quakerism differed little from the conventional versions of Christianity that marked the religious commitments of most American politicians. To understand why, the history of the Quaker experience in the United States is instructive. Quakers, or Friends of the Truth and Children of the Light as they were first known, began in seventeenth-century England at the height of the English civil wars. Sparked by the charismatic preacher George Fox, they represented one of the radical sects spawned by the revolution and became notorious for their insistence that Christ spoke to all manners and sorts of people and commanded them to testify to the truth they experienced from their divine Teacher during their silent meetings.
Sometimes they were hardly civil, invading churches — which they derisively called "steeple houses" — to demand that their hearers come out from the apostasy that the church had followed for better than sixteen hundred years. On more than one occasion, they went "naked for a sign" in the streets of English towns to demonstrate that sinners should similarly strip themselves of their wrongdoing in penance before the Lord. They disdained social niceties, such as tipping their hats or bowing and curtseying to their "betters," used "plain language" such as "thee" and "thou" to aristocrats and parents who expected the plural "you" from inferior subordinates such as children, and refused to pay tithes or swear any kind of oath. For the last two offenses, they filled up the jails, children, men, and women indiscriminately, particularly after restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Just gathering in groups over five in number now amounted to a violation of the law and sent them to jail, but their numbers continued to increase accordingly. Undaunted by legal restrictions on getting together and unlike their opponents and rivals the Baptists, they insisted on meeting openly, even advertising their meetings. They made few distinctions between men and women, allowing both to speak in their meetings. While not at first opposing slavery — it did not exist in England — their insistence on equality led them in that direction rather early.
After 1661, the sect officially insisted that members refuse to participate in "outward wars" with "carnal weapons," a position that, with the group's other peculiar testimonies, emphasized its differences with other Christian groups. The Quaker mentality stressed these differences. Friends saw themselves as differing fundamentally from their worldly neighbors. When members became more prosperous and somewhat more acceptable to the larger community, they maintained a different dress — wearing outdated, slightly quaint clothing well into the nineteenth century — and many tried to live in rural separation from those around them. In fact, they "disowned" or cut off members from participating in Quaker business affairs any who married outsiders and did not confess their error to their meetings.
The astute reader will notice that I have not dealt directly with what Friends believed. In contrast to most religious groups, Quakers did not focus on what might be termed "right beliefs," ideas about the Bible's inerrancy, Jesus' virgin birth, the trinity, whether Christ was divine or not or when he became so, the substitutionary atonement, and the resurrection. Not that such matters were unimportant; it was only that the Friends limited their witness to what they themselves knew by personal experience. They accepted fully, for example, that Christ had been resurrected after his death because they felt his presence in leading and speaking to them during their meetings when they gathered for worship: "Christ was come to teach people himself," Fox proclaimed. So they testified to that reality; the rest they left to others to debate. They were concerned more with right actions than right beliefs, responses to God's leadings rather than theoretical theological discussions. To a group of secular leaders who insisted that the "Gospel" consisted of the first four books of the New Testament, Fox reminded them that "the Gospel was the power of God, which was preached before Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were printed or written." Such power sufficed for him.
These differences between Quakers and other Christians began to lessen with a series of schisms that took place in the United States in the first third of the nineteenth century. These splits occurred within five yearly meetings — annual governing bodies in five regions — between groups of mostly urban-oriented evangelicals who desired to substitute the Bible as a rule and guide for the leadership of the ineffable Spirit of Christ and those who identified with a farmer-minister from Long Island, Elias Hicks, who wanted to somehow recapture what he thought was the purer Quakerism of the seventeenth century; inevitably these latter became known as "Hicksites." The evangelicals who accepted the label of Orthodox, backed by English Quakers, did not have much use for the Quaker "distinctives," so that among them there was a gradual slide toward more integration with the larger Christian world. Over time, some even disdained use of the word Quaker, preferring Friend instead; that preference continues until today when the term "Friends Church" is widely used, especially in California. After the Civil War, the midwestern Orthodox part of this world was swept by waves of revivalism, and within twenty years the Quaker meetings in Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa, as well as those on the west coast replaced silent meetings with churches led by paid pastors, a departure previously unheard of in the world of Friends.
Over the thirty years preceding 1897 when orchardist Franklin Milhous, Nixon's grandfather, decided to move his family from southeastern Indiana to southern California, midwestern Quakerism had undergone a revolutionary transformation. Before the Civil War, midwestern Quakers differed strikingly from their neighbors of other faiths: they met in silence, in plain unadorned meetinghouses, with no clergy as leaders, following no order of service, and with few distinctions between male and female members. All of them testified against slavery — many of them had moved to the Midwest from southern states because of personal and religious opposition to the peculiar institution — and enough supported abolitionism and the underground railroad that Indiana Yearly Meeting split in the early 1840s over acceptable tactics to use against slavery. Support for women's rights was also normal among these Friends.
After the Civil War, this situation changed dramatically, at least in the Midwest. "Programmed" meetings pushed aside unplanned programs based on silence. The first cause of this replacement occurred in the late 1860s when revivals, led by visiting evangelists — some Quaker, some not — swept through these quiet meetings. Revivals became annual events for many meetings, now almost always denominated "churches," with "mourners benches" where the newly converted could forsake their sins amid pleas from the preacher for the unredeemed to repent. A new theology, one calling for an instantaneous "sanctification" after conversion, promised both immediate holiness, a "second blessing," for the converted and a perfected new life in the future. This altered focus among Friends mirrored the Methodists' holiness emphasis of a few decades earlier. So close were these holiness Quakers to Methodism that one of them explained matter-offactly that first Friend George Fox's real successor was not another Quaker but Methodist founder John Wesley.
By the 1880s, many Quaker churches had started employing paid ministers, a startling departure for a movement that had always insisted that any person could speak at a meeting and regarded paid ministers as unscriptural. These new leaders planned services resembling those of other Protestant churches: music, spoken prayers, a choir that led hymns and sang anthems, a formal sermon planned by the pastor, a collection, and an invitation to unbelievers to convert. Some Quaker revivalists advocated adopting — and a few personally embraced — what earlier Friends had disparaged as the "ordinances" or sacraments: outward water baptism and the "supper." In the broad Protestant context, it was hardly a new world, but it differed markedly from the one Quakers had lived in before. The new moves brought these midwestern Quakers into line with many of their fellow evangelical Protestant believers, even as they separated them from most traditional eastern Friends or, as some called them, "silent Quakers."
As they drew closer to other evangelicals and emphasized the need to embrace right beliefs, midwestern and West Coast Friends dropped many of the peculiar testimonies that had long marked the Religious Society of Friends. Before the Civil War, many Friends had worn what they called "plain clothes" — long dresses and bonnets for the women, grey clothing with broad-brimmed grey or straw hats for men — they had spoken the "plain language," peppering their talk with "thee" and "thy" and naming the months and days as "seventh month" (for July) and "fourth day" (for Wednesday). Such peculiarities all but vanished after the Civil War for Quakers in the Midwest, except occasionally within family groups. Furthermore Quaker opposition to war had been severely compromised by the Civil War because, once viewed as a war against slavery, the conflict between 1861 and 1865 led to numerous defections from the Quaker heritage of opposition to war for any reasons whatsoever. Before the war, "disownment" from meeting was the ultimate penalty for infractions, but afterward most Quaker veterans were welcomed back as though nothing had been changed by their violation. As a result disciplinary measures in other areas declined after the war: Quakers who married non-Quakers escaped being "dealt with" by their meetings, so yet another longstanding distinction between Friends and their neighbors went by the wayside.
Whether they consciously intended it or not, these new-departure Quakers had inched toward the evangelical mainstream of Protestantism, forming groups that were much like other churches, especially those that stressed that members should remain "close to Christ." They never defined this closeness specifically, other than demanding that adherents embrace the Bible as the final authority above the immediate direction of the Holy Spirit, while eschewing swearing, drinking, dancing, and other immodest acts; Christianity consisted primarily of requiring upright personal behavior. By surrendering their sectarian theological distinctiveness, they inevitably began also to merge into the broader population and take on the majority's secular worldviews. Hence it became more difficult for Friends to maintain their commitments to opposition to war, insistence on women's equality, and living in ways that stressed simplicity and wholeness. All this change happened rather rapidly — within the course of a bit more than a generation, in fact. The end result was that evangelical Friends' churches became for all practical purposes little different from those of their neighbors. "I saw no difference whatever [between Methodists and Quakers]," one woman remembered. Neither apparently did most evangelical Friends.
Let us call Walter C. Woodward, evangelical editor of the American Friend, to help us understand. In 1918, for example, this leader of the new departure carefully drew the distinctions, based more on practice than theology, between his variety of Quakerism as compared to "the strict sect." Woodward named the differences "we Western Quakers can scarcely appreciate":
"Our evangelistic and revivals methods ... wherein rather a fixed order of religious experience is prescribed; ... the use of a 'hireling ministry' to which we apply the more euphemistic term of pastoral system; a 'programmed' service of worship; ... we eschew the plain language, say 'Friends Church' and ever refer to our ministers as "Rev." and "Bro. ..."
These were, he concluded, a result of facing the frontier and confronting new conditions, so most of the "old customs and ideas were accordingly sloughed off." Woodward lamented that some of the good in "the true Quaker perspective" — he failed to name any — had been lost, but, on balance, "Quakerism must always be truly evangelistic."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nixon's First Cover-Up by H. Larry Ingle. Copyright © 2015 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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