BOOK REVIEW: To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterpriseby Bethany Moreton; Harvard University Press; £20.95 (€24)
‘IF YOU want to reach the Christian population on Sunday, you do it from the Church pulpit. If you want to reach them on Saturday, you did it in Walmart” – Ralph Read.
One anecdotal statistic taken from the book tells its own tale of this retail giant’s character: George W Bush secured the support of 85 per cent of frequent Walmart shoppers.
The persona of the Walmart shopper is a southern state, Christian, family woman opposed to the removal of school prayer, gay liberation and Roe v Wade.
While the chain store and large corporations were perceived as an antithesis to communities, attitudes were more amenable to these operations if they were run for and by farmers.
The narrowness of thinking and the distrust of “Northern” or “Yankee” money – in particular from Wall Street, Jews and Catholics – would ensure that the success of any major business would have to be locally founded, managed and the profits retained locally so that they did not “leak” back to the industrial North.
Walmart Stores were based on the tradition of the farmers’ co-operative using local finance and their own slogan “Keep Ozarks Dollars in the Ozarks”, referring to the rural highland region in the southeast of the US.
As a company it recognised that the combination of using all of the family to work in the store, to a backing track of country music, was the way to grow their business. The old idea of the southern Protestant from the small town showing personal thrift, loyal to the matriarch of the family, was the way forward.
Bethany Moreton’s book clearly identifies that “Walmart wanted the yeoman’s wife as both the customer and an employee. To get her it had to model itself on her family relationships.”
The “Jesus movement” revival of the 1960s and 1970s was one of the main drivers for the expansion of this movement and Walmart at the same time. As Bethany Morton put it: “Walmart executives looking for ways to integrate faith and the market, recruited one another to the pews”.
They identified that the mix of mass consumption with low-wage earners and the growing religious identity found a new altar for the new Christian revolution.
Walmart also recognised post-1973 that with wages stagnating and female labour producing higher profit margins, part-time working and the new age of two-income families, meant that the company’s idea of a male dominated entity would have to change.
Changes in the education system during the brief Presidential reign of Gerald Ford meant the less endowed colleges were now going to rely on big corporations for support. These businesses in turn were concerned about pouring money onto campuses with a radical hue about them.
For example, there was a clear attempt at the time by the Oklahoma Christian College to save their position by referencing a poll that claimed male Protestants working more than 30 hours a week and studying businesses, math or engineering, were most likely to be in favour of free enterprise.
These same entities had no time for unions and also abhorred the large corporations of the North. Instead they believed that well educated small town boys, working their way through college, were the new entrepreneurs of the late 20th Century happily leaving the liberal arts curriculum to their northern counterparts.
Walmart was a central part of the new movement. It’s founder Sam Walton showed his abhorrence to the reformation of the Labour Laws, when in 1978 he travelled to Washington. Following a campaign involving advice to the readers of Walmart World, eight million pieces of mail poured into Congress to kill off the proposed reform to the Labour Legislation.
In a further development, and one which would cement Walmart to universities in the Ozarks, a group called Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) would, in the next three decades, develop a leadership programme based on a Christian ethos with right wing settings and which would see Walmart as its biggest corporate sponsor. By 2003 Walmart were hiring 35 per cent of its management trainees out of SIFE.
While this new book is full of detailed and important information and gives a very good insight as to how the sunbelt states set about their development after the second World War, it is not a quick or easy read. For those interested in the Southern Christian psyche it’s a valuable reference, but its conclusions and findings have very limited value to Irish or European readers hoping to replicate any of Walmart’s success in their own markets.
Noel Smyth is a solicitor and director of several firms, including Alburn, a property development and investment group
