Upon returning to the town, Edgar rolled up his sleeves and started working in die-casting, rising to the position of chief engineer at Holland’s Buss Machine Works.9 But Edgar had much bigger ambitions and soon quit. In 1965, Prince and two fellow employees founded their own company that made die-cast machines for the auto industry.10 In 1969, he shipped a sixteen-hundred-ton machine capable of creating aluminum transmission cases every two minutes.11 By 1973, Prince Corporation was a great success, with hundreds of people working for the company’s various Holland divisions.12 That year, the company began production of what would become its signature product, an invention that would end up in virtually every car in the world and put Edgar Prince on his way to becoming a billionaire: the ubiquitous lighted sun visor.13
But while wealth and success were in abundance in the Prince family, the sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days had been taking their toll on Edgar, and in the early 1970s, he nearly fell to the same fate as his father when he suffered a serious heart attack.14 “It was then, while he lay in a hospital bed reflecting on what all his labor had won for him, that he committed himself anew to his faith in Jesus Christ,” recalled Prince’s friend Gary Bauer, one of the early leaders of the religious right and founder of the conservative Christian lobby group the Family Research Council. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God. From that point forward, the Prince Corporation was blessed with unprecedented growth and financial success.”15 Edgar Prince recovered from the heart attack and steered his company toward amazing prosperity. Prince Corporation soon expanded into map lamps, visors that could open garage doors, consoles with ashtrays, and cup and change holders, among many other products.16 By 1980, the Prince empire boasted numerous plants and more than 550 employees.17 As Erik Prince later recalled, “My dad was a very successful entrepreneur. From scratch he started a company that first produced high-pressure die-cast machines and grew into a world-class automotive parts supplier in west Michigan. They developed and patented the first lighted car sun visor, developed the car digital compass/thermometer and the programmable garage door opener.”18 But, Prince said, “Not all their ideas were winners. Things like a sock-drawer light, an automated ham de-boning machine and a propeller-driven snowmobile didn’t work out so well for the company. My dad used them as examples of the need for perseverance and determination.”19
In that respect, it wasn’t the only way in which the product itself seemed of secondary importance to Prince. “People make the difference,” read the copy from an old Prince Corporation brochure. “It isn’t magic that brings excellence to a company; excellence is the result of commitment and hard work by dedicated people. Whether we’re talking about products or processes, no wizardry or easy formulas will solve the challenges of tomorrow. People will.”20 Edgar Prince was fond of initiatives like one where executives stuck to a strict exercise regimen. Three days a week from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m. the executives met at the Holland Tennis Club, which Prince also owned.21 In 1987, Prince opened a sprawling 550,000-square-foot facility spread over thirty-five acres, its fourth manufacturing center and home to many of its now fifteen hundred employees.22 The Prince “campus” centerpiece featured nearly five thousand feet of skylights and amenities like a basketball and volleyball court.23 He never made employees work on Sundays and flew executives home from business trips promptly so they could be with their families on the Lord’s Day.24
Detroit’s auto industry may have been suffering in the 1980s, “but you’d never know it from the Prince Corporation,” read the lead of a story in the Holland Sentinel.25 “My family’s business was automotive supply—the most viciously competitive business in the world,” Erik Prince told author Robert Young Pelton. “My father was focused on quality, volume, and customer satisfaction. That’s what we talked around the dinner table.”26 But Edgar Prince had more than the success of his business and his employees on his mind, and with the money flowing into Prince Corporation, he finally had the means to achieve the higher goals to which he aspired. That meant pouring serious money into conservative Christian causes. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” recalled Gary Bauer. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.”27
In the 1980s, the Prince family merged with one of the most venerable conservative families in the United States when Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team.28 Amway was a powerhouse distributor of home products and was regularly plagued by accusations that it was run like a cult and was nothing more than a sophisticated pyramid scheme.29 The company would rise to become one of the greatest corporate contributors in the U.S. electoral process in the 1990s, mostly to Republican candidates and causes, and used its business infrastructure as a massive political organizing network.30 “Amway relies heavily on the nearly fanatical—some say cultlike—devotion of its more than 500,000 U.S. ‘independent distributors.’ As they sell the company’s soaps, vitamins, detergents, and other household products, the distributors push the Amway philosophy,” reported Mother Jones magazine in a 1996 exposé on the company.31 “They tell you to always vote conservative no matter what. They say liberals support the homosexuals and let women get out of their place,” Karen Jones, a former Amway distributor, told the magazine. “They say we need to get things back to the way it’s supposed to be.”32 Amway leaders also reportedly used “voice-mail messages, along with company rallies and motivational tapes, to mobilize distributors into a potent domestic political force.”33
Betsy and Dick’s union was the kind of alliance common among the families of monarchs in Europe. The DeVos family was one of the few in Michigan whose power and influence exceeded that of the Princes. They were one of the greatest bankrollers of far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of prominence. For a time, Betsy and Dick lived down the street from the Prince family, including Erik, who is nine years younger than his sister.34
In 1988, Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson began building what would become the Family Research Council (FRC), the crusading, influential, and staunchly conservative evangelical organization that has since taken the lead on issues ranging from banning gay marriage to promoting school vouchers for Christian schools to outlawing abortion and stem-cell research. To get it off the ground, though, they needed funding, and they turned to Edgar Prince. “[W]hen Jim Dobson and I decided that the financial resources weren’t available to launch FRC, Ed and his family stepped into the breach,” wrote Bauer. “I can say without hesitation that without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council.”35 Young Erik would go on to become one of Bauer’s earliest interns at the FRC.36 It was one of many right-wing causes that the Princes would join the DeVoses in bankrolling, leading to what would be known as the Republican Revolution in 1994, which brought Newt Gingrich and a radical right-wing agenda known as the Contract with America to power in Congress, wrestling control from the Democrats for the first time in forty years. To support the “revolution,” DeVos’s Amway gave some $2.5 million to the Republican Party in what was the single largest soft-money donation on record to any political party in history.37 In 1996, Amway also donated $1.3 million to the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau to pay for Republican “infomercials” broadcast on Pat Robertson’s Family Channel during the RNC convention.38