Adrianne: The internet doesn’t have all the answers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find them. This is under understood.

Billy: I’m Billy Disney.

Adrianne: I’m Adrianne Jeffries. 

John: I’m John Lagomarsino. 

Adrianne: I’m Regina Dellea. Today, John finds a theme park so strange it wouldn’t even work in Florida. 

John: I am looking right now at a one… two.. two sentence Wikipedia article for a place called New Vietnam. 

Adrianne: Huh.

John: I’ll read you the entirety of the Wikipedia article. “New Vietnam was a theme park proposed to be built near Cape Canaveral in the mid 1970s by evangelist Carl McIntire and Giles Pace, a former Green Beret. It was intended to simulate what the Vietnam War was like during the height of fighting featuring actors shooting blanks.”

Billy: What…?

Adrianne: Oh my God, this is like, what was Dolly Parton’s place called?

Billy: Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede. They changed it. They got rid of Dixie. They took Dixie out.

John: Wait, really?

Billy: Yep.

John: We should clarify that Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede was like Medieval Times, the dinner and show place, but with a North versus South Civil War flavor.

Adrianne: Yeah, it’s Civil War era North versus South. Half of the audience roots for the North, half of the audience roots for the South. So it’s kind of this revisionist history whitewashing of the Civil War. 

Billy: Anyway… 

John: Right. New Vietnam. I can find absolutely no information about this anywhere on the internet, which makes me even doubt the validity of this as fact. The only reference on the Wikipedia page is the Bathroom Readers Institute in the volume Uncle John’s Ahh-inspiring Bathroom reader.

Billy: Nice.

John: Only citation. 

Billy: This is insane.

Regina: And there’s nothing else out there about this?

Adrianne: Okay. So if you go to the page for Carl McIntire… 

John: I’m there right now.

Adrianne: …it doesn’t seem totally out of the question that he might have tried something like this because it seems like he was kind of a stunt guy.

John: Like what?

Adrianne: He urged, in 1971, that a full-scale version of the Temple of Jerusalem be constructed in Florida. Or two decades later when he suggested that Noah’s Ark be rebuilt and perhaps refloated off his conference center in Cape May. 

John: Yes.

Adrianne: “It would be a tourist attraction,” said McIntire, “and it would forever down these liberals.” It sounds like he had a lot of ideas. 

John: Also here in his article: “McIntire also gained the public eye in the early 1970s when he organized a half-dozen pro-Vietnam War Victory marches in Washington DC.”

Adrianne: So it’s also confusing because it sounds like he thinks that we won the war.

Billy: Or does he think that, or does he want to create that narrative for some reason, so like is his goal by making a theme park…

John: Oh my God, it would have been Dixie Stampede. 

Adrianne: Right exactly like Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, but instead of the Civil War, it’s the Vietnam War, and he’s making a more family-friendly version of it so he can profit from it, I guess.

Regina: I feel like the goal is to rouse respect for the troops, like “look at what they’ve been through,” you know?

Billy: Yeah, I just imagined it like, you know, I would go to these theme parks where there’d be like old west re-creations of a train robbery. Like you’re on a little train ride and then all of a sudden it turns into a train robbery. Like I’m imagining that but it’s like guerrilla warfare. Like you’re…

John: Right. Yeah, right. 

Billy: You’re in the jungle and then suddenly becomes guerrilla warfare. It’s like Disney’s Animal Kingdom, except then all of a sudden it turns into the Vietnam War.

Adrianne: Do we have a sense of how advanced to this project got before someone was like, “no”? 

John: No, I don’t think we have any idea. And maybe that’s a more interesting question actually, because I mean as tasteless as it is, it’s Florida. There’s a market for literally anything in Florida. So if Carl McIntire wanted to create this theme park, what stopped it from becoming real? What happened to new Vietnam?

Regina: Coming up, John looks for answers in the place where all good answers come from: New Jersey.

John: Okay, I’m back and I’ve got some answers. And let’s just say that the answers here are a little darker than we thought they would be. So obviously my first stop was the Bathroom Readers’ Institute. That is the people who publish the Uncle John Bathroom Readers [sic]. 

Billy: I imagine them having a sprawling campus like Yale or Hogwarts or something.

Regina: Like Princeton.

Adrianne: All the bathrooms are singles. 

John: Okay, so I actually found the full write-up from Uncle John’s Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader…

Regina: I think it’s more like “ahh”…

Adrianne: Like, “ahh, what a good poop.”

John: But that’s the one that was cited on Wikipedia. I guess I’ll read you a little bit of the new Vietnam page. It starts off, “Most families vacation in Florida because of the warm weather and the abundance of theme parks. You can shake hands with Mickey Mouse at Disney World, feed the Dolphins at SeaWorld, and Duck and Cover in New Vietnam. Well, at least that was the idea. Background: in 1975 Reverend Carl McIntire, a New Jersey fundamentalist preacher and pro-Vietnam War activist, began construction on what was to be New Vietnam.

“Spread out over 300 acres of land in Cape Canaveral Florida, McIntire and his partner, former Green Beret Giles Pace, envisioned a theme park where people could get a glimpse of the Vietnam War. What would the theme park look like? Here are a few of the attractions McIntire planned. Tourists would take a sampan ride around a moat that encircled a recreated Vietnamese village with a neighboring Special Forces camp. The perimeter of the camp would be surrounded with row upon row of barbed wire, punji stakes, and fake Claymore mines to add to the atmosphere. ‘We’ll have a recording broadcasting a firefight, mortars exploding, bullets flying, Vietnamese screaming,’ McIntire explained, while hired GIs shoot blanks at the enemy. Visitors would be encouraged to take cover in the barracks or stationed themselves behind a machine gun and get in on the action.”

Adrianne: Oh my God. 

John: “Vietnamese people, real refugees from the real war, would travel through the village in traditional outfits and make new Vietnam come to life.”

The Bathroom Reader doesn’t list its sources at all. So I looked into this, and now they’re owned by a company called Portable Press and their website is not very helpful.

It says, “We use reputable newspapers such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today, magazines like Time, National Geographic, and Newsweek.” So I emailed them to ask directly where they heard about New Vietnam. Unsurprisingly. I still haven’t heard back from them about that. 

Adrianne: No accountability.

John: But in the meantime, I started looking around for more information about Carl McIntire. So like that Wikipedia listing on him said, this guy was… let’s call him colorful. He was, of course, an Evangelical minister and an activist, but he was also way more than that. I Googled around and found someone named Randall Blamer who had written about Carl McIntire in the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism. Balmer writes that McIntire was “the PT Barnum of American fundamentalism.” 

Adrianne: Such a good phrase.

John: So he goes on to describe how McIntire basically spent his entire life on this quest for pure fundamentalism. McIntire was prolific in his media output. He published a weekly newspaper called the Christian Beacon, starting in 1936, and that continued on for decades to the mid to late 70s. And he had a radio show called the 20th Century Reformation Hour.

Carl McIntire: Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s get this just as straight as can be. The wages of sin is death.

John: It was kind of a mixture of preaching and self-aggrandizement.

Carl McIntire: Some of these people are worried about Dr. McIntire having to go to jail. And they’re deeply concerned about it. Well, I may have to go to jail, but I told ’em that more than half of the New Testament was written by jailbirds. 

John: And on the show, he would very frequently speak out against communism in all its forms.

Carl McIntire: I cannot accept, ladies and gentlemen, and we cannot accept communism as a social system.

Billy: So this is a familiar type, right? Evangelical conservative radio host 

John: Right. Remember Randall Balmer, the guy who wrote the Encyclopedia? He also wrote something else that was way more interesting personally to me.

So I found this issue of Christianity Today from May of 2002. And Balmer wrote an article called “Fundamentalism with Flair.” This was just a couple of months after Carl McIntire died. And this was kind of a long write-up about him. So let me read you from the beginning of this article. “Until the end, his death at age 95 on March 19, fundamentalist empire builder Carl McIntire was a tireless opponent of theological liberalism and political totalitarianism. At the height of his influence during the Cold War McIntire’s empire extended from Collingswood, New Jersey, the home of his Bible Presbyterian Church and Faith Christian School, to Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Cape May, New Jersey and Pasadena, California. He ran a conference center in Florida and had designs for a theme park there that would have celebrated America’s military campaign in Vietnam.”

Adrianne: Aha. 

John: So this is the only mention of McIntire I could find anywhere that suggests that New Vietnam had any actual grounding in the real world. And so I had to talk to Randall Balmer.

Randall Balmer: Hello?

John:  So, Dr. Balmer Is at Dartmouth these days.

Randall Balmer: I’m the John Phillips professor in religion at Dartmouth College and also director of The Society of Fellows at Dartmouth. 

John: He interviewed Carl McIntire only once, but it was a little bit more notable than I even thought.

Randall Balmer: I may have had the last interview he gave before he died.

John: Dr. Balmer told me that Carl McIntire was one of the most notorious fundamentalists of the 20th century.

Randall Balmer: He was a contrarian about almost everything. He has a reputation… a well-deserved reputation as a kind of a crusty fundamentalist who was always in everybody’s face, but I actually enjoyed my counter with him.

John: So knowing that he’d mentioned this thing in his article, I asked Dr. Balmer about it.

I found a Wikipedia article and the title of the article is “New Vietnam.” And it says, “New Vietnam was a theme park proposed to be built near Cape Canaveral in the mid 1970s…

Randall Balmer: Oh yeah…

John: …by evangelicalist Carl McIntire and Giles Pace, a former Green Beret.

Randall Balmer: Yeah, I kind of… I definitely remember this reading about this, yeah. That sounds  like a McInire enterprise. 

John: Okay, so he only had this one interview with McIntire, and he did not use it to ask about his ill-fated theme park. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t real.

 Knowing what you know about him. Could he have been serious about this?

Randall Balmer: Oh sure. I expect he was serious about that. He had all sorts of crazy schemes going. I guess if you would look for a kind of more contemporary analog, I suppose it would be Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church…

John: Oh, wow.

Randall Balmer: …in Topeka Kansas. 

John: So this one’s kind of took me by surprise. He’s talking, of course, about Fred Phelps, the famously bigoted…

Regina: Horrible.

John: Yeah, horrible late minister of the Westboro Baptist Church

Fred Phelps: God hates America, vile land of the sodomite damned. The most ungrateful and the most arrogant anti-god nation that ever existed.

Billy: This is the guy who would like lead groups of people to protest on college campuses, right?

Regina: Yeah, or women who are getting abortions.

John: Right, that’s the guy. He died in 2014. I’m not convinced Carl McIntire was quite as like hateful as Fred Phelps. But knowing what I know now, he was definitely Xenophobic. And he had some of the same tendencies, especially like how he treated publicity stunts.

Randall Balmer: There would be parallels between the two, I think, in terms of their self-assurance and their abilities to to gather a crowd. And I think there’s a part of him that kind of craved validation and legitimation from even some of the people who you disagreed with.

About the time I wrote this article, actually, I had a friend who was the director of the library at Princeton Theological Seminary. He got a call one day from somebody in Collingswood, New Jersey and apparently they were getting ready to cart away of archives of files from McIntire and his operations. And somebody kind of called him at the last minute and said, “Do you guys have any interest in this?” And Steve said, “Yes, has of course.” And when McIntire found out about that later, he was apparently very, very gratified that Princeton had his papers. And he came to Princeton a couple times, and they had some events and so forth, and he was quite quite pleased about the whole thing.

Regina: Oh my God, you guys went to Princeton? 

John: Well, around this point in the conversation I started getting ideas about those papers.

Do you think there is any record of this anywhere? Like could it be in those Princeton files? 

Adrianne: Sure, oh yeah, could be, absolutely. And I don’t know if they’ve indexed this stuff or not. As I remember, it was a room probably 20 by 40 feet with pallets on the floor and boxes on the pallets. But yeah, I would expect you’d find something there. 

John: Well, I looked into it, and sure enough, there are 669 boxes of Carl McIntire’s things at Princeton Theological Seminary Library. Obviously, this is a lot to go through. So I asked Adrianne to come with me to Princeton and we could split the work up.

Adrianne: Field trip!

John: So Adrianne and I met at the Port Authority to take the bus down to Princeton.

Adrianne: And no John. 

John: Did you guys know… have you guys traveled with Adrianne recently? 

Regina: No.

Billy: No

John: This is a complete sidebar. Getting in touch with Adrianne in the morning was incredibly difficult.

Adrianne: I texted you before I left my house.

John: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I texted you and I was like, “I’m here. What do you want from Starbucks?” Got no response and like, “Okay. She’s probably in the subway.” Like half an hour went by and I finally find her by sight.

Adrianne: It’s in my backpack.

John: But it didn’t say “delivered.”

And she’s like, “Oh, yeah. I had my phone in a Faraday cage.”

Adrianne: It’s in a Faraday cage. I was about to take it out! 

John: Then she takes it out of her bag and she has a literal literal Faraday cage that she keeps her phone in!

Billy: Wait. So when you say in a Faraday cage, you mean literally in something that prevent signals from getting in and out? 

John: Yes, like a special little pouch.

Adrianne: They’re always watching me.

John: Why do you have… 

Billy: [Laughter]

John: So we got on the bus. We got to Princeton. We made our way to the library.

Adrianne: And then we finally found this tiny little back room with these librarians who were like, “Why yes. Sign in here.”

John: This is guy named Ken Henke. He’s the curator and archivist there.

Ken Henke: There’s a listing of the order it goes in.

John: We kind of offhandedly asked him if he knew anything about the McIntire collection, whether he could help us and he knew, it turns out, a ton about the Carl McIntire collection. And he told us that it’s actually the largest one in the collection.

Adrianne: I don’t think it’s in proportion to the importance of the person. I feel like it’s in proportion to the. Prolific-ness of the person.

John: Carl McIntire must have saved every piece of paper that he ever owned.

Actually, you wanna each do a box?

Adrianne: Sure.

John: And right away in this box containing “Cape Canaveral” stuff, I found something extremely weird.

Whoa whoa whoa…

Adrianne: Okay… 

John: Cape Canaveral Vietnamese…

Adrianne: Are you keeping them in order?

John: I took some photos of all of this. It’s an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper at the top. It says, “Cape Canaveral Central, Cape Canaveral Beach Gardens, developments by Shuford Mills, Palms East Residential Suites.” So this is a letter and it’s dated June 25th 1975. And this letter goes, “Dear sirs, Enclosed is the itemized bill of expenses incurred by the Vietnamese for the month of June. Sincerely yours, David L. Hulley, manager Palms East Apartments.” And then on the next page, it’s a list of 12 apartment units, and the breakdown of lodging and electricity costs. And then there’s another page of incidental expenses, like miscellaneous supplies.

Pots, pans, dishes, glasses, knives, forks, spoons, coffee mugs, bowls, for four hundred dollars.

And then this all happens again the next month in July of 1975. There’s no explanation for who the Vietnamese are or what they’re doing in Cape Canaveral, or why Carl McIntire is supposedly paying for their housing.

So this made me curious, and since being at the library, I have found out a little bit more about what was going on that would have gotten a group of Vietnamese refugees actually into Cape Canaveral in the first place. So I spoke to Dr. Yen Espiritu. She’s a distinguished professor at the University of California in San Diego. 

Yen Espiritu: My work deals with immigration and refugee studies. 

John: Dr. Espiritu has written a lot about Vietnamese refugees. Her book, Body Counts, is a really good resource on this. So in the wake of the Vietnam War around 130,000 Vietnamese were resettled really all over the United States and that included in Florida. 

Yen Espiritu: One of the reasons that the Vietnamese might have gone to Florida was because of the policy at the time that they would disperse Vietnamese to every single state in the country, which disabled them from harming any single community.  

John: When the Vietnamese refugees from the war arrived in the states, the government would kind of disperse them to kind of random areas in the country because there was some concern that this large influx of people would supposedly “damage” local economies.

Yen Espiritu: So when the Vietnamese refugees first came, there was a lot of objection to them being resettled in the United States. 

John: So you got these pockets of displaced Vietnamese, and it’s it’s very possible that a group of them would wind up in Cape Canaveral. So it is within the realm of possibility that Carl McIntire sponsored some Vietnamese refugees.

And in fact his newspaper was… I mean, Adrianne, you can attest this… his newspaper was full of talk about refugee relief work. And that wasn’t just in the US, but all over the world.

Adrianne: Right. I was skeptical that some of the pictures of refugees and all the helping refugee talk was about fishing for donations, which Carl McIntire was always doing with some narrative or another, but it does seem like he did pick up some refugees in Florida. 

John: Right. But I do think you’re also right to be skeptical that this might have been a scam. 

Adrianne: I mean, I don’t know if it’s too early to say this, but I’m just going to say… Carl McIntire struck me as kind of a schemer. His newspaper is full of requests for money. Like every page is basically him extorting money from his readers. I just got a very intense grifter vibe from him.

John: Right, Yeah. So in the Cape Canaveral boxes, we also found a bunch of land deeds, but none of those were labeled with what they were actually for. Most of the land, there was a lot of land too, it was like hundreds of acres… Most of that land was likely for Carl McIntire’s Reformation Freedom Center compound. The New York Times wrote in 1971 that McIntire somehow bought 700 acres of land in Cape Canaveral to build this Christian compound vacation destination. We know Carl McIntire was selling trips to Florida for like-minded people to go, I guess, hang out down there and get preached to by him and others who were like him.

Billy: I can see the flyer now: “Get preached to.”

John: Oh, we saw the fliers.

Adrianne: The ads feature a lot of older white Americans. 

John: So after the Florida stuff, Ken brought in a few volumes of the Christian Beacon, those the ones that were bound in the books, and he suggested that if something was on McIntire’s mind, you could find it in the Beacon. He was super right about that. I 

Adrianne: I loved this newspaper.

John: In many many ways. They’re a lot more interesting than the boxes of even his personal stuff.

Adrianne: So for one thing it makes sense that he had something in Cape Canaveral because he was really into space and aliens and UFOs. 

John: Right. Every single week had a sidebar column dedicated… It was called “UFO Reports.”

Adrianne: He also would do this thing where he would reprint stuff from other newspapers, like obviously with no permission. And then sometimes he would scribble his own notes on, like, this New York Times article about him or whatever, like pointing out its supposed inaccuracies.

John: You know like if your uncle will send you a newspaper clipping in the mail and it’ll have like sidebar notes…

Adrianne: Exactly like that. 

John: It was like like he was reprinting those in his newspaper.

Billy: It is really interesting these people always existed before social media. It’s just… At the time, they just scribbled on a newspaper and threw it in a box and it ended up at Princeton.

John: But the Christian Beacon here was released every week, and it’s maybe 10, 15 pages, like large newsprint pages every issue. You flip through them in order and you can very, very clearly see what was on Carl McIntire’s mind at any given point in time. So like in 1970 there are these articles upon articles about the Freedom Center in Florida as it was being built. In 1973 – this is a very good story – in 1973, McIntire’s troubles with the FCC heated up, and there’s this year-long fixation on the FCC thing. He purchased a radio station called WXUR in Philadelphia in 1965. And one of the things he would do with that station is basically preach on the radio.

Carl McIntire: And it’s a strange thing in this country when those of us who believe what the country always stood for, the kind of individualism that made America great… And we believe in separation of church and state, we believe in states rights. All of a sudden we become the scoundrels. 

John: So in 1973 the FCC revoked WXUR’s license completely. And they did that because of something called the Fairness Doctrine, which we won’t really get into, but basically it meant that broadcasters needed to present controversial issues in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balances. So in 1973, because of this fairness Doctrine, the FCC revoked his license and essentially shut him down.

Regina: The original Infowars.

John: Yes, 

Adrianne: Exactly.

John: So Infowars, our listeners may know, is a website run by a guy named Alex Jones that publishes, among other things, right wing conspiracy theories.

Alex Jones: Zuckerberg and everybody needs the Earth cleansed of you to enjoy the new future. None of them have screen time. None of them are allowed to watch television. None of their children like, Steve Jobs are allowed to be online. 

John: Alex Jones and Infowars relatively recently got into a bunch of trouble for perpetuating some pretty dangerous hoaxes. And they were removed from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. And Alex Jones, obviously has vehemently complained about this. So you can see the similarities with Carl McIntire’s situation: the FCC shuts down his radio station, he screams censorship.

Billy: The liberals got him.

John: After the shutdown, we see months and months and months of Christian Beacon articles about the injustice by the FCC. He’s asking readers for their support. He’s got template letters for readers to send to Congress to lobby them to let him back on the air.

Adrianne: And he would also reprint these letters that he would get from supporters in the Christian Beacon that would say like, “Oh Dr. McIntire” – he wasn’t really doctor – “Dr. McIntire, I already sent you a hundred dollars, but like here’s another thousand dollars. Because this fight is so important.”

John: Right. Right. And this is something he would do all the time on the radio, too.

Carl McIntire: Is there anybody sitting out there that has a million dollars they’d like to get rid of for the cause of the gospel and freedom? I’m asking you for it, my friend, If you got it, or if you could leave it in your will to us. And then all the rest of you, who don’t have anything like that, and that’s really all of us, I want to say to you that a dollar a month would be an awful lot. $10 a month. $25 a month. Or if you’d just like to send you tithe, whatever it is. $1,000 will start us on a new radio station, folks.

John: And then we start seeing small sidebar reports that ramp up, and they’re about plans to put a ship just off the coast of New Jersey.

Randall Balmer: That’s when he procured this Minesweeper. 

John: That’s Dr. Balmer again.

Randall Balmer: And he outfitted it with a radio transmitter. And he brought it up to Cape May, New Jersey. And then he went out just beyond the 3-mile boundary for international waters and began broadcasting Radio Free America. 

Billy: Wait, he was literally broadcasting from a boat?

John: Yes. He was literally broadcasting boat.

Carl McIntire: And radio free America is out on a placid, calm sea today…

John:  And this went on for around three months.

Randall Balmer:  And so the Coast Guard, of course, goes out and reels them in and that’s the end of it. You know, he’s certifiably crazy.

John: But then as soon as he was shut down on the boat, though, the WXUR stuff just fades away from the Beacon.

Adrianne: Yeah, it was so weird. It was like his primary obsession and then he got some other obsessions. And even when the FCC went back on it and he won, the Christian Beacon didn’t make that big a deal of it.

John: So this is pretty typical of things that we’re going on in the Christian Beacon and Carl McIntire’s mind. So we start seeing a flare-up of reports on opening churches in Africa for like a month or two. Then those articles pass. Then it’s on to land disputes in Collingswood, New Jersey. Then those go away, and then there are the weekly appeals for money to support refugees from various places in the world. Then it’s on to a convoluted political stance on detante to end the Vietnam War. In my mind, this reminds me a lot of Alex Jones.

Adrianne: Yeah, he had kind of a collection of topics that were his pet topics. And he also just had so much capacity. I mean the capacity is what reminds me the most of Alex Jones, just like volumes of content.

John: But you probably notice by now what wasn’t in any of these articles, or in any of the 20 boxes.

Regina: New Vietnam.

John: Yeah, there were no plans for New Vietnam anywhere in this archive. There’s just no mention of it at all. So in some desperation while we were still at the library, we went back to the original Wikipedia article just to give it a glance again. Do you remember the second person in the article? It was Giles pace.

Billy: This is the Green Beret. 

John: This is the Green Beret. 

Billy: Yeah.

Adrianne: Yeah, so I basically just was Googling Giles Pace and found this article on jstor that had a little quote at the beginning of the article. It was about film or something totally unrelated. And in fact, I’m still not totally sure why they chose this quote, but that excerpt said, “The Reverend Carl McIntire stands in the weed-choked fields behind his L. Mendel Rivers Convention Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida and leads a tour of the future. ‘The Vietnamese Village will be over to the left,’ says the fundamentalist New Jersey preacher, ‘And the Special Forces A attachment camp will be to the right.’ Beside him, Giles Pace, a 31-year-old Chicago ironworker outfitted in camouflage fatigues and Green Beret, expands upon the vision. “The Village will be authentic,” Pace promises. “Rice paddies, ducks, chickens those animals with the humps on their backs. What do you call them?'” Ellipses. 

Regina: Oh my God, 

Adrianne: And that quote, that little excerpt on this totally unrelated paper, is attributed to Newsweek, September 1975.

John: So this is the first new mention of a Vietnam project with McIntire and Pace we’ve been able to find anywhere.

Billy: Yeah, Newsweek. Newsweek certainly has searchable archives somewhere.

John: You would think so! But they don’t! It’s so crazy!

Adrianne: Not prior to 2010.

Billy: How is it you can find anybody’s old Xanga blog, but you can’t search Newsweek from… I don’t understand.

John: So I got an eBay and I got this. I have in front of me Newsweek from September 8, 1975. On page 21: “Enterprise: New Vietnam. What is going up at Canaveral these days is nothing less than a Vietnamese Village ‘like our boys went into during the war,’ says McIntire. And even the war will be simulated. 300 acres with five abandoned buildings that his Reformation Freedom Center bought for 14 and a half million dollars a year ago and had found little use for, until Vietnamese refugees began streaming into Florida. McIntire promptly sponsored 56 of them, mostly middle-class businessmen, artisans, and former Air Force officers and their families, and housed them in his Palms East apartment complex. 

Billy: Wait, so the market opportunity that he saw here wasn’t like, oh, people that are pro-Vietnam War. It was like, oh, there’s all these refugees coming in from Vietnam and Florida.

Regina: Yeah.

Billy: What if I came up with something to do with them?

John: Right. It’s so crazy.

Regina: And what else could you do with them but make them relive this war? 

John: Well, there was one other thing he found to do with them. “They have opened a Viet Arts Factory that turns out ceramic elephants, frogs, and Christmas trees, and they are launching a carpet weaving operation with wool donated by the minister’s flock.”

Regina: Oh my God.

Billy: This is just like one of his many like little ancillary side hustles. 

John: Yes. It seemed like Carl McIntire had a lot of plans for how to employ this group of Vietnamese refugees that he had sponsored. And actually this came up in my conversation with Dr. Espiritu. She told me that this kind of employment was really pretty common for Vietnamese.

Yen Espiritu: I think that the public understanding of the Vietnamese was that these were people who were desperate and they would do anything in order to make a living. And so I think that Americans, did feel that they were in fact doing the Vietnamese a favor by allowing them to come to the US and allowing them to get jobs.

John: The Vietnamese who were able to get out of the country, actually, were generally upper middle class and they had never done any kind of low-paying labor-intensive work.

Adrianne: So you have them come here, and of course many of them faced not only underemployment, but sometimes jsut mis-employment. They are doing things that they would have never done.

John: So this is a really extreme example of that Carl McIntire started off these folks in a factory making pottery and other crafts and then I guess opened it up to this new Vietnam project a job that no one should have had.

The article goes on to further describe what New Vietnam would have been like. “Moat: the blueprints for New Vietnam, as McIntire has dubbed it, call for paddies with irrigation dykes. About 40 banana and palm trees are being brought in to ‘give the place atmosphere,’ says Pace, along with an equal number of Vietnamese. They will dress and act in picturesque fashion, but will not actually live in the village. ‘It’s a fantasy land type of thing,’ Pace explains.”

Regina: Whose fantasy?

Billy: Yeah, I don’t understand, yeah, what the clientele is exactly. 

John: “The compound will contain concrete barracks and a small museum exhibiting weapons used ‘by the commies in Vietnam.'” That was a quote.

Regina: Oh my God. So like, what he created instead of what Vietnamese culture would actually be was just what he thought that it would be based on his very limited understanding of it. And so it was actually their nightmare. 

John: Yeah, so it goes into a little bit here. So it says, “‘Tourists are going to love this,’ McIntire insists, ‘and every penny will go back to the Vietnamese.'” 

Adrianne: Oh, yeah.

John: Yeah. “‘The Bible says love your neighbor. We’re taking them in our arms and giving them our love.’ Pace is plainer spoken. ‘They’ll work anywhere for a paycheck,’ he argues, ‘and this will be work that won’t be in competition with anyone else. There’s nothing offensive about it.'”

Billy: Just in case you were wondering.

Yep. 

John: No one asked, but…

Billy: Nothing offensive here!

Adrianne: Oh, I’m sure the reporter asked. 

John: Well, it was definitely offensive at least to one person. The article here ends: “The Vietnamese themselves aren’t so sure. Cong Nguyen Bin, once a wealthy Saigon businessman and now supervisor of the Viet Arts factory, says flatly that he wants no part of New Vietnam. ‘My wife won’t walk around that Village in a costume like Mickey Mouse,’ he declares. Dignity is only part of his objection. ‘We want to forget. We want to live here like you,’ Bin says. ‘We don’t want any more war.’

Now, all of this totally lines up with basically everything that was in the Bathroom Reader. In fact, I’m willing to bet this Newsweek article was the only source that the Bathroom Institute used to do this writeup in the first place. The facts are basically copy-pasted from Newsweek. There are two bylines on this Newsweek piece. Sandra Solmons and Bill Belleville. So I actually called up Sandra. She had no recollection of the story at all, though. So Bill Belleville must have been the person to have spoken to Carl McIntire. He was unable to actually speak to us directly, but we heard through his daughter that he does vaguely remember the project, but has no recollection of any details. So it is still a little unclear to me what actually made the project fall apart.

Adrianne: So I can’t get through to the actual article, but in 1975 and November Bill Belleville wrote an article for afford a newspaper with the headline “16 refugees abandoned McIntire.”

John: Oh wow. How did we not find this before now? 

Regina: Gotta get that article. 

John: Yeah, let’s get some newspapers.

Okay, we’re back now and we’ve got our hands on this article. This is from the newspaper Florida Today from Cocoa, Florida on November 8, 1975. “16 refugees abandoned McIntire: 16 Vietnamese refugees ‘packed up then ripped off’ their sponsor, fundamentalist preacher Carl McIntire during the last two weeks. The manager of the Palms East apartments where the refugees have been living said the four families left ‘on their own accord.’ 

“‘They’re not working,’ Dave Hulley, manager of the McIntire-owned apartments said. The New Jersey preacher was spending 6,000 dollars monthly to support the refugees.” We saw that. “Hulley said the apartments vacated by the refugees were destroyed. ‘They stole everything. Sheets, pillowcases, pots, and pans.'”

Billy: So it sounds like that’s the answer then, right? The reason that New Vietnam didn’t happen was because he couldn’t get Vietnamese people on board.

John: Yeah. The thing that prevented It ultimately from coming to fruition was just that he offended all of the people who he assumed would be working for him at New Vietnam.

Billy: I just think he saw them as vulnerable, and he is used to taking advantage of vulnerable people. I mean, I’m sure he was used to opposition, like I’m sure his radio station in Philadelphia had more people who didn’t like it and didn’t like him than he had followers, but there was always enough people that he could really rope in and take advantage of.

John: Yeah. So today obviously there are lots of theme parks in Central Florida, but New Vietnam is not one of them. In the 70s and 80s hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese resettled in the US, and Central Florida was actually one place where a Vietnamese community formed. In fact, I learned that there’s an area in Orlando in the Mills 50 district there that’s often referred to as Little Vietnam 

Radio Announcer: Shopping and dining in the Mills 50 district offers a rich insight into the history and culture of Vietnam, and into the community here in Orlando.

John: This is from a radio report on WFME, a public radio station in Florida.

Ricky Ly: Till is actually one of the very first Asian markets in town, and it kind of all just grew from here.

John: So that’s Ricky Ly, a food blogger at the site TastyChomps. I was able to find Ricky and I actually spoke to him about the Vietnamese scene in Central Florida. But first I told him about the New Vietnam project. 

Ricky Ly: I think it is pretty ridiculous that this was going on especially with the public opinion at the time of the Vietnam War, so probably whoever created this probably had some issues, I think.

John: So Ricky’s parents were both Vietnamese refugees, and his mom got here thanks to a sponsorship from a church group in Indiana. 

Ricky Ly: It was through the Lutheran Charities, church sponsorship, things like that. And actually my aunt is still very close with the sponsor. Family today. 

John: So this was a thing. And and these Church sponsorships were really positive for refugees. And they help set them up in the United States. But it seems like Carl McIntire’s brand of church sponsorship was a real outlier, and he had some really cynical ideas about how he would find employment for the group that he sponsored when they got here.  Carl McIntire is not some kind of lovable buffoon. I think that comparison to PT Barnum is apt. He had this flair for the dramatic and entertainment, but he was also really manipulative, and he was driven by I guess some desire for notoriety and for personal success.

Adrianne: I also found a story in the New York Times that said he had basically bilked an 83-year-old man out of his end-of-life savings in exchange for a promise to take care of him, and then just abandoned him.

Randall Balmer: Yeah, he caused a lot of people out of pain, I think.

John: That’s Dr. Balmer again.

Randall Balmer: And you know, it’s one thing to find him a risible character, as I do, but you know, I also acknowledge that he made a lot of people, a lot of lives really uncomfortable.

Ricky Ly: And I wonder where did those Vietnamese folks who were sponsored over… where they are now.

John: That’s Ricky Ly.

Ricky Ly: You know, it would be interesting probably. Many of them probably came to settle in Orlando or even within Cape Canaveral. 

John: We couldn’t find any records or contact information for the specific refugees who walked away from New Vietnam, but we know that there is a vibrant Vietnamese culture in Central Florida today.

Ricky Ly: I think the community today is a lot about being resilient. Our parents came here with nothing, and you kind of want to fulfill their promise of the American dream by going to school and doing well and being successful. We have quite a few second generation Vietnamese who are doing entrepreneurship who are opening up their own restaurants and businesses and kind of doing it their own way.

John: Sounds like there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. 

Ricky Ly: There is an annual Festival the New Year’s Festival that the committee puts on. There’s actually quite a few different festivals. And that’s a really great way to kind of get a feeling of Vietnamese culture through dance, music, and street food. So you can get a taste of Vietnam while you’re here in Central Florida, and it’s a great great event.

And no bullets, hopefully.

Adrianne: Underunderstood is reported and produced by Billy Disney, Regina Dellea, John Lagomarsino, and me, Adrianne Jeffries.

John: Special thanks to Dr. Randall Balmer and the staff of the library at the Princeton Theological Seminary for all their research help. If you want to learn more about New Vietnam and Carl McIntire, we’ve got a bunch of additional information and photos that we took at the library of the Christian Beacon and Carl McIntire stuff up at our website. You can find it at underunderstood.com. 

Billy: If you want to support the show the best way to do that is to share it with a friend. You can find links to subscribe, you can find our social media, you can find full transcripts, and a whole lot more on our website.

Adrianne: And if you have a burning question that the internet can’t answer, send us an email. hello at underunderstood.com. Maybe we’ll look into it.

Regina: Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week.