There’s a pretty famous brand of “new age” liquid soap in the US called Dr. Bronner’s. The label has since been changed (to sell their book), but for a very long time the label was end-to-end text that was, and I know I’m being blunt here, totally crazy. There’s “quotes” from Muhammad, Abraham, and lots of anecdotes that seem to be rooted in early Abrahamic religious lore. There are also some outlandish facts about Dr. Bronner himself. Is any of this accurate or true?
February and March of 1945 were drenched with literal fire, as Dresden was firebombed in Europe and during the same month there came the firebombing of Tokyo. On March 9, while the bombing in the Pacific was still ongoing, a holy man in Chicago was crucified.
His name was Fred Walcher and he was found under the L at Lincoln Park. He was nailed to a cross with five spikes and a crown of thorns. He was an optician from Austria who wanted world peace with something called "American Industrial Democracy"; he wanted a United States of the World with 1 representative for every one million literate adults.
Walcher originally claimed it was three strangers who did the deed, but the police, finding his story erratic, eventually realized it was a publicity stunt; in the end Walcher was fined for disturbing the peace and the incident was closed; Walcher was disappointed that people were not interested in his pamphlets.
Police also alleged Walcher was sympathetic to the German American Bund, a Nazi organization. This is fairly confusing because Walcher was also friends with Emanuel Bronner, also known as Dr. Bronner: soap entrepreneur, but also virulent anti-Nazi and anti-communist crusader (and a lifelong conspiracy theorist).
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Emanuel Bronner was born into an orthodox Jewish family with a soap-making tradition that went back two generations. (His last name was originally Heilbronner but he changed it later for what are hopefully obvious reasons.) Emanuel grew up to receive a soap-making master certificate and was enmeshed into German culture but -- as he got older -- had increasing concerns about anti-Semitism, and eventually went to the United States in 1929.
His family mostly eventually made it out of Germany, but Emmanuel's parents stubborn clung to hope that the Nazis would eventually lose power and refused to leave (they even had an opportunity during a 1938 vacation to Switzerland). The same year as the vacation there came the Night of Broken Glass and the terrors to come; they were forced to sell their business under Aryanization, and finally got documents to leave the country at the end of 1941, but it was too late: they were deported to and died in concentration camps.
When in America, Bronner moved to Milwaukee (the third largest German population in the US during the 1930s) and met his first wife, Paula Wolfahrt there.
Wolfahrt was a Catholic, Bronner was of course still a Jew, and they had three children together that they baptized as Lutheran. This is the first stirrings of his All-One philosophy.
It sounds incoherent spelled out on a soap label, but in essence the idea is just: all religions should combine into one. While he was at it, he thought all people should combine into one for global peace.
Paula died in 1944; this was a "turning point" according to Bronner and from then he became a "searcher for truth" and gave himself the designation "Dr"; he claimed that his earning $60,000 from six patents was a "sign of God".
A year after Paula died was the cross incident, and Bronner was there by Walcher's bed on the crucifixion day; he said Walcher had claimed
...that people were so stupid and ignorant that something violent was needed to awaken them.
Bronner stayed friends with Walcher; his ideas were integrated into his as he gave public speeches. After a somewhat ambiguous incident in 1946 at the University of Chicago he was arrested (he claimed it had to do with his lobbying against fluoridation of water) and this directly led to him landing at the Elgin State Mental Hospital. He claimed he was put to electroshock therapy and tried to escape multiple times, making it out on his third time and heading from there to California.
(Aside: flouridation of water began in the US in 1945 and was one of the central locuses of conspiracy theories. It even ended up in the movie Dr. Strangelove. /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov has written more about this here.)
Note that as part of this he essentially abandoned his children -- the one who ended up keeping on the family tradition most, Ralph, went through 15 orphanages.
In Los Angeles he started selling health products, including “Dr. Bronner’s Organic-Mineral Salt” in 1953, and not long after also started making soap. By 1961 he had a factory at a rate of ten gallons a week; and this is roughly when the new design started to be made as the label wasn't catchy enough. (In other words, there was a bit of calculated capitalism in making an eye-catching rambling label.) The label didn't obtain its blue-and-white look until 1968 when the company made a deal to give 100,000 bottles in Israel (the deal fell through, the design was kept). The label went through many iterations -- according to Esquire in 1972, the text was changed every month -- and while a 1979 article claims Dr. Bronner converged on a "final text" the 1972 Esquire article claimed the same.
Perhaps that is why he revises them so often, even holding up a shipment of orders while he throws out thousands of already-printed ones, agonizing over the rewording of the tiny print, then exultantly announcing, as he has time and again, that the new one is the final, ultimate version.
I haven't found a comprehensive document detailing the endless fiddling, but the claims roughly converge on:
Lots of quotes talking about All-One-God-Faith, the merged super-religion.
claims that Dr. Bronner was Einstein's nephew (not true)
bizarre statements like Thomas Paine's books not being taught since 1799
claims about "Easter Isle" type overpopulation that will "destroy God's Spaceship Earth"
rambling about "Nazi-Psycho-Communism"
...ready to help teach the whole Human race the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith! For we're All-One or none! ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE!
The odd thing about all this is, despite the popularity amongst hipster leftists, the general conceit is a very right-wing one: essentially what Walcher conceived so many years ago, having peace through striving for homogeneity instead of difference. Simultaneous to this the far right was opposing the UN as a crypto-world-government, so maybe Dr. Bronner simply is breaking the left-right directionality altogether and shooting off into his own world.
Dr. Bronner was most definitely a true believer, and kept evangelizing about All-One until his death. He was willing to talk with anyone who would listen. The reporter William Poundstone for his book Bigger Secrets once found a poster given away by the company (sort of a super-extended version of the label) with the direct phone number to Dr. Bronner; he called and Dr. Bronner not only answered personally but also went on his typical lengthy diatribe.
Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, instantly 6 billion strong & we’re All-One.
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There are quite a few label variants, you can see a Canadian one here.
You can read some of Dr. Bronner's conspiracy ramblings circa 1960 from here.
My major sources were this article from the German Historical Institute and this newspaper profile from 1979.
What's most interesting to me is that he managed to be a bit off his rocker and still run a successful company that involved a factory/manufacturing process. That usually involves a lot of management minutiae, keeping workers happy, etc, and apparently, he did all that fairly well despite being quite strange otherwise. Funny that he had the spare time to talk to anyone who might call him as he managed his company.
Do we know anything about how his business was run? What his employees thought of him?
