Man's Belief in God is Personal
- Name
- Clark, Fred G. (Fred George), 1890-1973 (Author)
- Title
- Man's Belief in God is Personal
- Abstract
- This image appeared on the inside back cover of Not By Bread Alone, a booklet that sought to unite religious faith with free-market economics, opposing communism by asserting "the economic value of morality." The hairy, long-nailed hand pictured in the bottom half of the drawing was an icon widely-used to represent the communist threat in the 1950s and 1960s, but it is a particularly fitting image for this pamphlet because of the contrast it makes with the equally iconic "invisible hand" of the free market. Whether intentional or not, such an idea would have been appreciated by the pamphlet’s author, Fred G. Clark. Clark was a businessman who made a vocation out of disseminating free-market views, through radio shows like his popular 1940’s program, Wake Up, America!, books like 1948’s How to Be Popular, Though Conservative, and the American Economic Foundation ("AEF"), which Clark created in 1939 to distribute materials like Not By Bread Alone to both individuals and corporations. In this pamphlet, Clark first asserted that the United States was the apotheosis of what he called the Christian "idea of the sovereignty of the individual." He then vaguely described "decades" of attacks on this belief, particularly from socialist and communist thinkers who pitted "faith in God vs. faith in the state." Ultimately, Clark’s solution to these problems lay in his "Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom," a set of principles which formed the core of AEF ideology about unimpeded supply-and-demand economics and featured heavily in its publications.
- Collection Name
- Group Research, Inc. Records
- Archival Context
- Series III: States. Box no. 420, Folder no. North Carolina
- Format
- pamphlets
- Genre
- pamphlets
- Publication Information
- American Economic Foundation. 1940
- Date
- [between 1940 and 1959]
- Language
- English
- Library Location
- Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Browse Location’s Digital Content - Also In
- Choosing sides
- Persistent URL
- https://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8RV20QN