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). (20090316) |
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 Insight into American economics, politics and culture |
| Review Date: October 4, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Malvin, Frederick, MD USA |
"To Serve God and Wal-Mart" by Bethany Moreton is an exceptionally erudite account of the economic and cultural conditions that fueled the rise of the service economy's paradigmatic corporation, Wal-Mart. Ms. Moreton, who is an Assistant Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia, brings to light an heretofore underappreciated aspect of the Wal-Mart story with professional, scholarly precision. Ms. Moreton's narrative about how the world's largest corporation emerged from the relative economic backwoods of the Ozarks is an uniquely fascinating American story that should appeal to an educated audience.
Ms. Moreton's astute ethnography and history explains how the Ozarks were ripe for the kind of homegrown corporate success that Sam Walton was uniquely capable of delivering. For decades, the region had resisted encroachment by eastern chain stores and was ideologically predisposed to using state assistance to advantage locally-owned enterprises in the name of independence and populism. Ms. Moreton explains that the flood of federal dollars unleashed in the postwar period for military bases and other projects in the sunbelt provided unprecedented opportunities for Ozarks entrepreneurs, including the mercurial Sam Walton. After gaining control of this relatively insular market, Wal-Mart could and did expand nationwide, and then beyond.
All of this would not have been possible, Ms. Moreton asserts, without an accompanying ideology of work that was specifically suited to Ozarks culture. Wal-Mart's gendered division of labor, where men were elevated to management and women served as clerks, placated a rural workforce steeped in the patriarchal traditions of the small family farm; while the ethic of customer service played on Christian values of cooperation and sacrifice. Importantly, Ms. Moreton brilliantly shows us how Wal-Mart's celebration of the family as economic unit has become central to our collective understanding of how capitalism has adopted itself to a postindustrial world.
Ms. Moreton also discusses how Wal-Mart endowed Christian colleges and universities to promote entrepreneurialism as a peculiar kind of messianic calling to students interested in spreading the gospel of free enterprise to a non-believing, post-communist world. Wal-Mart progressively became ever more influential in government and business circles where its growing success seemed to validate the Washington Consensus policies of deregulation and tax cutting. Indeed, Wal-Mart's iconic status in American society was confirmed when its success in Mexico served as a propaganda tool that the Clinton administration used to turn public opinion decisively in favor of NAFTA.
Ms. Moreton seeks neither to praise or vilify Wal-Mart but to explain; in her account, Sam Walton does what any good capitalist would do. Wal-Mart ruthlessly squeezed American suppliers while importing more and more goods from China to decrease its costs; its 'Buy American' marketing campaign was effective brand-building; its hostility to organized labor ensures a reliable labor force to fuel expansion; and so on. Therefore, to the extent that many Wal-Mart workers today feel the company is no longer like the 'family' Sam Walton championed, Ms. Moreton suggests the current economic crisis represents the greatest challenge yet to Wal-Mart's unique blend of Christian culture and capitalist free enterprise.
I highly recommend this outstanding book to demanding readers who are interested in gaining profound insight into American economics, politics and culture. |
Making The World A Better Place
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| Review Date: June 13, 2009 |
| Reviewer: David Shores, |
This is an exceptionally thought provoking book. Using the growth of Wal-Mart as a frame of reference, the author explores a wide variety of cultural changes that influence the way we see the world.
One cultural change is the so called "feminization of men". Instead of being authoritarian family leaders, many husbands have learned how to joyfully participate in "feminine" activities such as cleaning house, cooking, shopping, and rearing children. The author accurately describes the role of the Promise Keepers organization in redefining the relationship between husbands and wives.
Another cultural change is the globalization of modern society. In the 1930s the Ozark region (northern Arkansas and southern Missouri) was one of the poorest parts of the United States. Wal-Mart, the "biggest company on the planet", has its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. How this area moved directly from being an agrarian society to becoming a major player in globalization (without first becoming "industrialized") is an amazing story. The author describes a number of factors that caused these changes.
The author also explores the "missionary" influence of Wal-Mart on Central America and South America. The world's largest Wal-Mart is located near Mexico City. Like all of the other changes, there have been major obstacles and successes.
Since the author is a professional historian, she provides extensive references that support her narratives. Since I am an amateur, I like movies that illustrate the cultural changes. The so called "feminization of men" is very well illustrated in the movie "Fireproof". Major obstacles and successes involved in blending cultures are dramatized in the movie "Gran Torino"
I applaud the author's achievement in writing this book. I look forward to reading her future books and I believe that her insights will help make the world a better place! |
Fascinating account
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| Review Date: July 6, 2009 |
| Reviewer: E. Scarborough, South Bend, IN USA |
| Well-written, informative, and extensively documented, this book is a fascinating account. Moreton weaves together a great deal of history, dealing not only with Wal-Mart's development and growth but also the geo-political, religious, cultural, and economic contexts that supported the business enterprise. The author's scholarship is admirable and her writing style captures and holds a reader's attention all the way. |
cargo cult america
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| Review Date: July 17, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Ryan Costa, Cleveland, OH |
Today Wal-Mart is America's largest retailer and largest private sector employer. How did it get this way, and how did it start out?
Sam Walton was born to a higher middle class family. They made a living repossessing the mortgages on family farms. and occasionally farming, when subsidies and government contracts for crops were up. Federal redistribution programs had given a lot of folks farms, then provided work for folks to loan farmers money and repossess the collateral.
After college and the war, Sam's in-laws gave him the money to start a store. It was easy to get started back then. intense popular revolts against chain stores made it easier for guys like Sam to get started.
Sam was careful to build his early stores near military bases, county seats, and other areas that enjoyed the federal redistribution of wealth from the industrial north to federal programs. He was a smart guy.
As America degenerated from an industrial economy to Cargo Cult there was trouble in paradise. Inflation rose as oil addiction and imports rose. Sam helped keep wages low by encouraging his managers to stop being jerks to their wives at home. The family farm was becoming obsolete: it was harder to find employees who grew up doing farm labor, but also had a decent K-12 education. So Sam tapped into this new version of Christianity called "servant leadership" to recruit and cultivate better managers.
As the new christian clique grew its academic and ideological leaders began subscribing to Austrian Economics School theories, or at least the best Austrian School slogans. Finally it came time to vote on NAFTA. Wal-Mart pushed NAFTA hard. Skeptical Congressmen and pundits were flown to the first Wal-Mart in Mexico, where they marvelled at Mexicans buying tools and socks made in Arkansas and South Carolina. They threw their support to NAFTA!
The trip should have convinced them there was plenty of trade without NAFTA. Instead it convinced them NAFTA was necessary. NAFTA was the critical inflection point. After this point whenever you listen to a Wal-Mart executive talk, you would be listening to a man without an honest bone in his body. |
Wal-Mart as a Christian pro-capitalist social movement
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| Review Date: November 7, 2009 |
| Reviewer: ROROTOKO, www.rorotoko.com |
| "To Serve God and Wal-Mart" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Moreton's book interview ran here as cover feature on November 4, 2009. |
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