Bruce Fairchild Barton

The Man Nobody Knows - Christian apologetics for wealthy businessmen

Barton had projected many Christian Biblical themes throughout his works completed within his varied writing career, due in part to his own strong religious convictions. One historian writes: "Barton believed incurably in material progress, in self-improvement, in individualism, and in the Judeo-Christian ethic, and none of the profound crises through which his generation lived appreciably changed the tenor of his writings or their capacity to reflect what masses of Americans, optimists in the progressive tradition, apparently continued to want to hear."

Barton's most famous book was, The Man Nobody Knows (1925), a "boosterish melding of religion with business" that coupled with "new communication and advertising media", provided the "cultural shift that encouraged the public display of spiritual allegiances that once belonged to the realm of private life", while amplifying the widely perceived public adoration of American business during the 1920s. In this book, Barton envisions Jesus as if he were alive as a man's man in the present day of the 1920s while criticizing the overly meek Jesus that people were used to during that time. Barton also depicts Jesus as a "strong magnetic" executive businessman, similar to himself.

In the 1925 edition of The Man Nobody Knows Barton incorporated controversial chapter titles leading into the exploration of Barton's Jesus-as-businessman themes, such as calling Jesus a modern "Executive", postulating that Jesus communicated effectively by "His Advertisements", and hailing Jesus as "The Founder of Modern Business" among others.

In his autobiography, William L. Shirer characterizes the book's asseverations about Jesus as "a great executive... whose parables were the most powerful advertisements of his time" as "idiotic ramblings" that in the U.S. in the 1920s were nevertheless "hailed by the country as gospel." In the much later 1956 edition of The Man Nobody Knows, editors at Bobbs-Merrill "heavily amended" Barton's text with his permission, cutting out such references to business and advertising along with excerpts featuring popular celebrities of the 1920s, such as Henry Ford, George Perkins, and Jim Jeffries.

Republican politician

Initially supporting progressive political policies as a young man, Barton later became an active supporter of the Republican Party in 1919, and he later served as an advisor for both the Republican Party and several Republican presidential candidates from the time of Calvin Coolidge during the 1920s to that of Dwight Eisenhower during the 1950s. As a staunch opponent of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Barton offered his public relations services to many Republican candidates over the years. Barton won a special election to fill the unexpired term of U.S. Representative Democrat Theodore A. Peyser, who died on August 8, 1937. Barton eventually served two terms (1937–1941) in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the Manhattan house district and he later ran an unsuccessful 1940 campaign for election as U.S. Senator from New York. During his time in Congress, Barton was a staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt.