CORPORATIONS: Partnership with God

At the riverside near Vicksburg, Miss, one morning last week, Evangelist Billy Graham stepped up to a platform, lifted his eyes to heaven, and blessed a 200-ft. converted LSM (Landing Ship, Medium) and its crew. This week the ship, known around Vicksburg as “The Ark of LeTourneau,” will cast off and nose out into the muddy Mississippi. Its cargo consists of $500,000 worth of heavy earthmoving, lumbering and land-clearing machinery, food supplies for a year, 500 New Testaments and a dozen “technical missionaries.” Its destination: Liberia.

The Liberian expedition is the latest project of Robert Gilmour LeTourneau, 63, a missionary-minded businessman and one of the world’s biggest makers of earth-moving equipment. Twenty years ago, LeTourneau made what he calls “a deal with God” to turn over 90% of his personal earnings and a sizable block of company stock to the Lord’s work. The partnership has been successful. Last year, on sales of $55 million, R. G. LeTourneau, Inc. netted $3,100,000. Excluding LeTourneau’s personal contributions, God’s share, which was turned over to the interdenominational LeTourneau Foundation, was $158,820 in dividends. This year the partnership is doing even better; sales are up 45%.

Spiritual Point Four. But Earth-Mover LeTourneau has never been satisfied just to fill the financial side of his bargain. After a trip to Liberia in 1951, he decided that the best way to teach the Gospel to the natives was to teach them American technical skills at the same time. From the Liberian government LeTourneau leased 500,000 acres of jungle for 80 years at 6¢ an acre, laid plans to cultivate the land with such crops as rice, grapefruit, bananas and palms, cut down and export mahogany. He agreed to pour back the first five years’ profits into the development. With such material aid, LeTourneau, who is flying ahead “to be there when the boat rams that beach,” hopes to accomplish a material and spiritual Point Four. Says he: “Hungry natives will listen to us about God if we can show them a field of grain with a combine harvesting more in a day than they can eat in a year.”

Bathtub Dreamer. “Bob” LeTourneau, who does not drink or smoke and flies some 200,000 miles a year in his private planes, spreading the Lord’s word, combines his evangelism with hard-headed business sense. Born in Richford, Vt., he was still a boy when his family moved to the West Coast. He quit school after the seventh grade, made his first money selling pictures of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He learned mechanics as a grease monkey in a garage, later set up his own earth-moving and contracting business at Stockton, Calif, on a loan of $4,500. In 1931, he lost $32,000. Next year he switched to making scrapers, bulldozers, cranes, etc., and made his deal with God. His 1932 net: $52,000. LeTourneau, who comes from a deeply religious Plymouth Brethren family and whose two sisters were missionaries to China, turned over his stock interest to endow the LeTourneau Foundation, now worth $16 million and one of the biggest religious foundations in the U.S.

LeTourneau was the first to put earth-moving equipment on rubber tires, thus enabling it to go almost anywhere. He moved headquarters to Peoria, Ill., and cleared the land for new plant sites with his own equipment. By 1940, sales were up to $10 million. During the war they quadrupled, as LeTourneau built an estimated 70% of the basic earth-moving equipment used by the U.S. armed forces all over the world.

Dreaming up new ideas in the bathtub, and sketching them out on the backs of envelopes during his frequent preaching trips, LeTourneau got set for the peacetime construction boom. But he was in too much of a hurry. He installed new transmissions, differentials and drives in his equipment, put the new machines on the market before all the bugs had been removed. The company went $6,000,000 in the red. For a time, LeTourneau spent $100,000 a month merely servicing machinery that had broken down. But at length he perfected his new devices, and dug his way into the black again in 1949. Bankers who had complained of LeTourneau’s “downright stubbornness” began referring again to his “dauntless spirit.”

Flying Missionaries. In all his troubles, LeTourneau never forgot his Senior Partner. He set up a school to teach missionaries how to fly their own planes, let them pay their tuition by working for his company. He busily invented new methods and machines. Among them: the “Tournalayer,” a giant machine that can turn out small concrete houses at the rate of almost one a day; a machine with electric motors in each wheel for greater maneuverability.

LeTourneau is shipping some of his most impressive mechanical equipment to Africa, including a 22-ton machine that can shear off big trees like a scythe cutting grass and a self-contained sawmill unit which will be hauled by the biggest bulldozer in the world. LeTourneau insists that he is not primarily interested in profit in his Liberian adventure. Nor does he want to create mere “rice Christians.” Says he: “I am trying to do a missionary job in a businesslike way.”