The New York Times reports on this new book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America:
Bridget Read’s “Little Bosses Everywhere” exposes the deceptions of direct-selling companies that make their profit not off customers but off their own sales force…
When Read introduces the characters behind America’s first big multilevel marketing scheme, it almost sounds like the setup to a joke: What happens when a Gilded Age dilettante, a eugenics-curious Dale Carnegie acolyte and an overzealous marketer of burial plots come together? The answer is Nutrilite, a vitamin company that in the mid-1940s started offering its distributors a new business opportunity. Instead of just selling vitamins, they could recruit other distributors and form a “downline,” with lower-level sellers all contributing to their higher-ups’ sales volume…
In her telling, it was partly under the leadership of Van Andel and DeVos that multilevel marketers coalesced with the New Right, forming an alliance of “the country’s wealthiest businessmen, evangelicals and other conservative Christians, positive thinkers and free-market radicals.” The story of multilevel marketing is one of Americans falling prey to the idea that they should turn against experts and big institutions: Try supplements as a way to hack your health, work for yourself as a way to hack your career. These lifestyle tips can end up forming a political worldview, too, one that’s doggedly anti-expert and fiercely capitalist.
Here are some excerpts from this new book:
* In the true story of MLM, told in full, its operators aren’t just cheerleaders at the sidelines of a long – fomenting right – wing revolution. They are major players in this movement to return American society, under the guise of free enterprise and economic populism, to Judeo – Christian values, and to an era of small government, unprotected labor, and consolidated private wealth not seen since before the New Deal. The DeVos and Van Andel families may be MLM’s most prominent political architects, using their distributors’ dollars to fund think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and corporate activist groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — but they are not the only ones. Their allies across the industry, from the grandmotherly Mary Kay Ash in 1963 to the tanned fitness influencers of Herbalife in 2016, have helped power the modern conservative movement’s most effective, unseen propaganda factory, indoctrinating its spiritual warriors on a crusade for capitalism. The money of millions of people caught up in a web of innumerable downlines has been used to convince many generations that government regulation turns them into slaves. Multilevel marketing has profoundly altered American society, seeping into all our lives regardless of whether or not one has every participated in one. It is to be ignored at our own peril.
* Mary Kay Ash was not as explicitly political — though in 1977, she came under fire for circulating a leaflet among her beauty consultants cribbed from an anti – Equal Rights Amendment group in Texas called “Women Who Want to Be Women,” with the signature “Lovingly, Mary Kay,” affixed on the bottom. Instead, she grew her profile as a free enterprise mascot on the motivational speaking circuit, which had by now become a lucrative industry. Ash was a fixture at a series of “Positive Mental Attitude” rallies, the brainchild of W. Clement Stone, the insurance executive multimillionaire and Nixon fundraiser who had collaborated with an aging Napoleon Hill on Success magazine in the 1950s. Other speakers included Paul Harvey, a radio personality who for years voiced Amway ads, and Zig Ziglar, a former Nutri – Bio and Holiday Magic salesman with a wildly successful motivational speaking business.
Another speaker at Positive Mental Attitude rallies was Robert Schuller, a California televangelist and disciple of Norman Vincent Peale. Richard DeVos gave $58,000 to support Schuller’s “Hour of Power,” broadcast live on TV from his drive – in megachurch in Garden Grove, California. Along with the think tanks and business groups, a network of conservative Christian media companies platformed figures like Schuller, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell to rival mainstream liberal programming. In 1977, Amway wanted to be a part of them and purchased the Mutual Broadcasting System, a radio network with the largest number of affiliates of any in the world at the time.* There is also a section devoted to independent contractors; Project 2025 recommends that the next president return to Trump – era rules that made it easier to designate workers as temporary contractors rather than full – time employees. “Roughly 60 million Americans across all income groups, ages, education levels, races, and household types participate in independent work, including full – time, part – time, or as a ‘side hustle,’ ” the document reads. “People choose independent work for a variety of reasons, including flexibility, earnings potential, and the desire to be one’s own boss.”
The foreword to the policy book was written by President Kevin D. Roberts, a former college history professor turned think tank CEO, whose appointment was announced in 2021 by Heritage board Chair Barb Van Andel – Gaby, Jay’s daughter. (“He will ensure that our unprecedented influence on Capitol Hill continues,” Van Andel – Gaby said.) Roberts opens the foreword by invoking an important year: 1979, the year of the Amway decision. He compares the current moment to that one, when “the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits,” yet righted themselves by coming together just in time to elect Ronald Reagan. The country again has a chance for revolution, to “champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite – directed socialism.” His foreword could have come directly out of one of Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel’s “Business Viewpoint” newspaper columns in the 1980s.
