The year was 1982 and an epic war was about to take place across the nation; not between any of the States, nor will it be between any two sovereign Nations. The battle will not play out on the battlefields, or the sports arena, or in the courtrooms (at least, not for a little while yet). However, an epic battle it will be, between good and evil, and if some are to be believed, it will hit at the heart of this nation like no other war ever had or ever will.
The two sides to this war will be Proctor and Gamble, a Cincinnati company that was, at that time, one of the largest manufacturers in the nation (especially for soap) … and Amway, a (surprisingly legal) MLM pyramid marketing company that also specializes in cleaning products.
Corporate Rivalries were nothing new at this point – Coke and Pepsi had been famously jabbing at each other for some time and that was the same year as that weird “blind taste test” where unsurprisingly people more enjoyed the taste of cold Pepsi than warm Coke, which ended up helping the creation of Diet Coke. But that’s another story.
This rivalry, however, was something very different. But first we need to look at the two principal players.
Procter and Gamble
After sisters Olivia and Elizabeth Norris of Cincinnati both got married, their father Albert convinced their new husbands, William Procter and James Gamble, to become business partners. Procter was a candle maker and Gamble made soap, and both things were in sharp demand at the time, so it kind of made sense. And they both made good quality goods so that kind of helped, too. And then, during The Civil War, the company was contracted to supply the Union Army with soap and candles. But it wasn’t until they released a new product in the 1880s that the company’s profits really began to skyrocket: Ivory Soap. It was very inexpensive to make … and it floated (which soaps didn’t do back then).
The company continued to grow.
Other than various products, the company was also innovative when it came to advertising.
In the 1920s and 30s, there was this relatively new thing they initially called Daytime Serials – dramatic radio shows with returning characters and storylines that were aimed directly at bored housewives who needed something to do while their husbands were working long hours. In the 1930s, Procter and Gamble decided that these were the next big thing, so they decided to sponsor them as a new form of advertising. And they didn’t just sponsor one or two of them – they tried sponsoring all of them. Within a year or two, they were no longer referred to as “Daytime Serials” but … as “Soap Operas”. (So, now you know where that term originated.)
Another thing Procter and Gamble did was to stamp their logo on just about everything. Well, everything they could control, anyway. In 1851, the company designed a new logo. Prior to this, barges that would carry Procter and Gamble products up and down The Ohio River would stamp the boxes with those goods with what was essentially a cross to note the Procter and Gamble products, so dock workers would have some idea where the products were going. But now, the company decided to design a more elaborate logo, featuring a man-in-the-moon type figure with a long, flowing beard and hair that gave him a crescent moon appearance. In front of the man was thirteen stars, which represented the original thirteen colonies. Now, their products were instantly recognizable, not just by the dock workers, but also by residents along the river towns who really wanted to know when the new products were about to hit the store shelves.
Little did they know at the time, however, that just under a decade later, this logo would spark a major controversy.
Since the company began, it has produced some of the most well-known products on the market, from Tide detergent to Prell Shampoo, Bounty paper towels and (please don’t squeeze the) Charmin toilet rolls, and Vicks, Downy, Febreze, Head and Shoulders, Dawn, and Old Spice … just to name a few.
Amway
Amway, or American Way, started indirectly in 1949, when two friends, Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos, were introduced to Nutrilite, a line of nutritional supplements and vitamins that had been around since 1934 that used a multi-level marketing model to sell products. In other words, it gave a commission to new distributors who had been introduced to the company by already existing ones.
Just under a decade later, the duo rebranded their company Amway (American Way) as they continued to utilize the MLM techniques to promote the Nutrilite brand of supplements. Amway soon started selling a product called Frisk, an organic household cleaner and after establishing the rights to manufacture it, they renamed it LOC or Liquid Organic Cleaner.
Over the years the Amway product line expanded as the company bought the rights to even more products that were absorbed into their product lines but continued to sell via their MLM model.
A large part of the company’s success has come from two things (well, beyond the founder’s hard work and determination): religion and politics. Amway has a history of promoting themselves as a promotional and motivational system, a “way of life”, that is almost entirely based on Republican ideals and Christian morality. The company has been major donors to numerous Republican politicians and causes, as well as far-right wing organizations (and dare I mention the number of politicians who have been recruited to also sell Amway products?)
It was this connection with religion and politics that would help ignite a war with a rivaling company: Procter and Gamble.
1980-1982 The Panic
In 1980, a book would be published that would, for better or worse, help define the 1980s. Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, was not the book to which I refer. Nor was it The CAMEO Dictionary of Creative Audio Terms, although I do suppose both books have entered the historical record for somewhat obvious reasons.
The book was called Michelle Remembers, written by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith and tells the story of how a psychiatrist, Pazder, helped his patient, Smith, remember her “repressed memories” of Satanic Ritual Abuse, nearly all of which have since been debunked (or recanted). The book is considered to be the start of a period we now call The Satanic Panic.
However, while history remembers that The Satanic Panic was mostly about physical and sexual abuse put into a demonic worshipping context, it was also about so much more. The Devil, it seems, was everywhere – just waiting for the right opportunity to … um … do something, I guess, to ensnare our youth into his diabolical plans or to trick even the most righteous into his realm of debauchery. I don’t know, it didn’t always make sense back then, either.
Anyway, according to those in the know, those Crazy Satanist people were always leaving little clues behind to let good the Christian folk know that The Devil was responsible for whatever they could blame him for. You could spot clues by playing popular music (especially heavy metal songs) backward and listening for secret messages. Or, if you took a dollar bill and folded it in a certain, esoteric way, you could make George Washington look like he had horns.
And then someone noticed the Procter and Gamble logo.
1982 – The War Begins
Now, let’s retrace our steps for a moment. Above, I mentioned the Procter and Gamble logo. Let’s take a quick look … OMG, you see all that Satanic imagery?
No? Sigh, yeah, I didn’t see it either. At least not at first. Then I read the book of Revelations in The Bible.
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: Revelations 12:1
See it now? Sigh, yeah, I don’t either. I guess the man in the logo is actually a woman, and the moon is actually supposed to be the sun, and the crown of twelve stars is really a sky of thirteen, so yeah, I guess, if you don’t consider any of the words from the actual bible verse, yeah that logo is clearly SATAN.
A lot of people weren’t impressed, or at least they didn’t see the demonic nature of the logo, further details were “noticed” … such as the three curls where the beard meet the hair are “clearly” the number 666, which everybody knows is the Number of the Beast, so, see SATAN!
Oh, wait, those top and bottom bits aren’t beard and head hair – they’re actually horns. Like you see on a ram, or how you might visualize said horns if you had never actually seen a ram before, so … See, it’s SATAN!
We aren’t sure who came up with this idea, or when exactly it started, or why … but we do know that there was one group, above all else, who really liked to spread that rumor: Amway. They put it in their promotional literature. They talked about it during the Amway seminars, and they even talked about it in a voicemail system sent out to and available to access by all Amway Distributers.
As the years started to pass, Amway still had not managed to destroy the Evil Procter and Gamble company so before long, somehow, the rumor added a new “fact”: That the president of Proctor and Gamble (who oddly is never actually mentioned by name) appeared on The Phil Donahue talk show where he said that because our society was now open, he was able to come out as a Satanist, and how Procter and Gamble is a major sponsor of The Church of Satan.
And, like any good Urban Legend, nobody actually witnessed this episode of Donahue personally, yet everyone who spread the rumor personally knew it to be true. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)
After Donahue’s show was cancelled in 1996, it wasn’t long before the exact same rumor appeared, this time for The Jenny Jones show. And when that didn’t work, it was on to The Sally Jesse Raphael show. And when that didn’t work out, it was “I swear it was one of those talk shows” (and I’m surprised nobody mentioned Oprah, but then again she had helped inadvertently kick off that whole Satanic Panic thing in the first place when she had Michelle of Michelle Remembers on the show and not once did she, nor her producers, try to fact check any of the easily debunked claims the author made).
One War – Two Battlefields
The battle between Procter and Gamble and the Amway Corporation played out on two very different battlefields. For Amway, it involved political organizations, churches, and internal Amway communications. And … even though the story was ridiculous from the start, somehow word of mouth really seemed to make the story go far.
Procter and Gamble, however, chose to fight a different way – they took Amway to court.
The first suit, filed in Utah, contained a lot of legal stuff which I, a non-lawyer, will try my best to make sense of. P&G didn’t like Amway defaming them by saying they were a bunch of Satanists. P&G didn’t like Amway making the untrue claim that Crest Toothpaste scratches teeth. P&G thought that the Multi-Level Marketing tactics used by Amway were illegal, or at least went against the current MLM regulations. And they thought Amway violated a few other laws, too.
Amway, on the other hand, tried repeatedly to get the charges against them thrown out because, I guess they felt you can’t sue Amway because … reasons? Oh, and you want to claim we defamed you by saying you were in league with Satan, so you need to prove you’re not in league with Satan for us to defame you so … good luck.
They made a few technical (legal) arguments and Utah threw the case out. P&G then filed another new lawsuit, this time in Texas, while trying to appeal the Utah ruling, but that case was thrown out on technical grounds as well.
After over a decade of lawsuits and appeals, Proctor and Gamble and Amway went to court one final time. This time, the results were mixed. Procter and Gamble was legally attacking Amway over two major issues: First, that Amway was a prohibited MLM Pyramid scheme. However, the courts ruled that pyramid schemes are not, on their own, illegal, however certain predatory behaviors that such companies use frequently are illegal, but Amway did not do any of those. So, P&G failed on that.
They did not fail, however, in their claim that Amway defamed them and conducted false advertising over that whole Satanic connection thing, which I think was the main thing they were going after. Amway did appeal that decision, because of course they did. They admitted to saying a bunch of false things about Procter and Gamble, however they tried to say that the company hadn’t suffered since it was still in business, but that argument didn’t change anything with the courts.
