All the while, Edgar Prince continued to balance his business and religious obligations, both to his local Dutch Reform Church and the Prince Corporation. “Ed was at his best and was most valuable to [the Family Research Council] during the dark and difficult times—during the confirmation battle over Clarence Thomas, following the bitter disappointment of the Supreme Court’s unexpected pro-abortion ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, through the anti-family shift in the Congress in 1992, and in recent months with the wave of efforts by some to redefine the traditional family and undermine marriage,” Gary Bauer wrote of Prince in 1995.
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Prince Corporation continued to flourish, a “boom built on Biblical principles,” Bauer wrote.
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In 1992, the company roster had grown to 2,250 employees.
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By early 1995, it had ballooned to more than 4,000 employees and $400 million in annual sales.
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Prince had also married his business acumen with his desire to see Holland thrive and had founded Lumir Corporation, which became Holland’s foremost downtown developer, responsible for projects like the $2.5 million Evergreen Commons Senior Center.
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But tragedy would soon strike the Prince empire.
At about 1:00 p.m. on March 2, 1995, Edgar Prince had one of his usual chats with Prince Corporation president John Spoelhof,
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a longtime friend with whom he had just gone skiing in Colorado a week earlier.
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They said good-bye, and the sixty-three-year-old Prince stepped into the elevator at his company’s headquarters. Inside, he suffered a massive heart attack and was found on the floor fifteen minutes later.
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Despite CPR attempts by two Prince employees, Edgar was pronounced dead within the hour.
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“I saw him probably two minutes before he passed away,” Spoelhof said. “I looked at the expression of his face and the color of his face and Ed was Ed. I knew him so well all these years; if he would have been a little ashen, I would have noticed.”
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As happens with the deaths of kings, patriarchs, and heads of state, the town of Holland entered a period of intense mourning. The flag flew at half-staff.
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Every newspaper in the region ran front-page stories eulogizing Prince, accompanied with sidebars and pictures and timelines. More than one thousand people gathered at the Christ Memorial Reformed Church to hear evangelical leaders James Dobson and Gary Bauer, who referred to Edgar as his “mentor,” eulogize Prince.
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Bauer remembered how Prince was adamant that the Family Research Council’s new headquarters in Washington, D.C., should have a cross atop it, to remind the President, members of the Supreme Court, and Congress “that this is one nation under God’s judgment.”
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In the
Grand Rapids Press
Lakeshore supplement, the banner headline read “A Christian Man,” and the Rev. Ren Broekhuizen said, “Ed Prince was a gifted and developed individual who never took his eyes off the goal of honoring Jesus Christ in his life.”
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That pastor, a friend of Prince’s for two decades, would marry Edgar’s widow Elsa five years later.
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At the time of his father’s death, Erik Prince was a Navy SEAL serving a string of deployments in Bosnia, Haiti, and the Middle East.
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Even still, he had happened to visit his father just a week before his death, when Edgar made the sign of the cross on Erik’s daughter’s forehead during her baptism.
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Erik remembered that his father had taught him never to say, “I can’t.”
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At the time of his death, Edgar had been married to Elsa for forty-one years, and they had raised three daughters in addition to Erik. “Dad was definitely the shepherd of his family, and he would bring the whole family together every chance he could. He’d make all the arrangements and take care of all the details,” Erik told the
Holland Sentinel
after Edgar’s death.
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Erik seemed elated that his father had been able to meet and baptize his first-born daughter, Sophia, but that elation was tinged with regret: “He loved her. That was the last time I saw him. My regret is my kids will never know him. I wanted them to be able to talk to him, to learn from him.”
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Erik Prince adored his father and strived to follow in his footsteps from the time he was a child. Erik was an active youth, playing soccer, track, and basketball at the Holland Christian schools he attended as a primary and high schooler, and for which his family also provided financial support. Prince’s deeply religious high school featured pages upon pages of Bible quotations and incantations throughout its yearbooks. One year, the third page of his yearbook intoned: “In God’s Kingdom all of life is living out the meaning of the New Humanity in Christ. This takes all the inventiveness, creativity and discovering that we can do.” Gary Bauer recognized the special bond between Edgar and Erik: “Erik Prince, Ed and Elsa’s only son, and one of FRC’s first college interns, certainly did know him well.”
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In addition to his work with the Family Research Council, Erik spent his college years increasingly taking up his father’s mantle. He entered the Naval Academy after high school intending to be a Navy pilot but resigned after three semesters to attend Hillsdale College, a Michigan Christian liberal arts school that preaches libertarian economics. The campus was rated the most conservative in the country in a 2006 Princeton Review poll.
“He was a smart guy, and pleasant to be around, and he’s well spoken,” said Erik’s professor Gary Wolfram. “What’s good about him, he understands the interrelationship between markets and the political system.”
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Prince also had a thirst for adrenaline-pumping action and initially satiated it by becoming the first college student to join the Hillsdale Volunteer Fire Department. “When you’ve been on a fire an hour and a half and the crowd’s gone, some of the guys want to sit on bumpers and have a soft drink,” recalled firefighter Kevin Pauken. “Other guys will be rolling hoses and picking up equipment so you can get out of there. That was Erik.”
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As he grew older, Erik became increasingly active in right-wing politics, landing a six-month internship at George H. W. Bush’s White House. It was during this internship that the nineteen-year-old Prince made his first political contribution, giving $15,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Since then, Prince and his late wife, Joan, and current wife, Joanna, have given $244,800 in contributions to federal campaigns, not a dime of it to Democrats.
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He has supported Jesse Helms, Ollie North, Richard Pombo, Spencer Abraham, Dick Chrysler, Rick Santorum, Tom Coburn, Tom DeLay, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence, Duncan Hunter, and others.
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Prince also worked for a stint in the office of Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.
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In 1992, he became enthralled with the renegade presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, who challenged President Bush for the GOP nomination, running on an extreme anti-immigrant, antiabortion, antigay platform. Erik Prince’s backing of Buchanan led the then twenty-two-year-old into a feud of his own with his sister Betsy, who was working for Bush’s reelection as chairwoman of a local Republican district.
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Erik and Edgar, however, didn’t seem to care for Bush. “I interned with the Bush administration for six months,” Erik told the
Grand Rapids Press
in 1992. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with—homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.”
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Erik began coordinating Buchanan’s campaign at Hillsdale, and Edgar contributed to it. But Erik’s foray into public politics would be short-lived. The next year, he went back into the military, joining SEAL Team 8 through Officer Candidate School in1992
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and starting down the path that would bring him to Moyock, North Carolina. It was during his four years with SEAL Team 8 in Norfolk, Virginia, that he met many of the people who would found Blackwater.
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Erik seemed happy as a SEAL, and his family seemed proud to have him be one. “[Edgar] always wanted his children to do what they wanted to do, not just what he experienced,” Elsa Prince said months after her husband’s death. “He wanted them to go where their preferences and talents took them.”
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But during the months after Edgar Prince’s death, the future of the Prince Corporation was anything but clear. More than four thousand employees depended on what had largely been the vision of Edgar Prince. The company and many in the family felt that only the Prince family itself could ensure that the reputation of Prince Corporation outlived its founder. Elsa became chairman of the company’s board, and Erik came home to help get the company’s affairs in order, and to help his family. His wife, Joan Nicole, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Being a full-time SEAL was no longer an option.
But the young Prince would not become the king of Prince Corporation. On July 22, 1996, little more than a year after Edgar’s death, the family, after much deliberation and many suitors, agreed to sell the corporation to Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion in cash. They sold under the condition that the Prince name would remain, as would the employees and the community atmosphere they had long fostered. The bevy of stories in the local press took on that same enthusiasm, liberally quoting Elsa Prince gushing over the deal: “The Lord opened the right doors at the right time in an answer to our prayer. His timing is always perfect.”
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Beyond that, Elsa said the buyout would enable her husband’s company to have “an influence well beyond the United States.”
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A few years later, that influence could really be felt in Holland, as hundreds of jobs started migrating to Mexico.
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Johnson Controls eventually stripped the name off the company and shuttered some of the local factories.
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Though the influence of industrialist Edgar Prince has steadily receded in Holland, the religious beliefs and politics he promoted, as well as the downtown he created, continue to grow. When Edgar was alive, the Prince family largely shied away from overt political involvement, preferring to let its money do the talking. In the years after her husband’s death, Elsa Prince became notably outspoken on behalf of a number of right-wing political causes, including those favored by her late husband. In 2004 she was the single largest donor to the successful campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan, kicking in $75,000 of her own money.
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She served on the boards of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family and was active in the Council for National Policy and a host of other right-wing religious organizations.
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“My main thrust is to do things that Jesus would want you to do to further your knowledge of him and his ways,” she told the
Holland Sentinel
in 2003.
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Edgar, Elsa, and her new husband, Ren, cumulatively donated nearly $556,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees,
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along with untold millions to right-wing causes. Along with the DeVos family, the Princes remain major players in the conservative Christian movement in Michigan and nationally. One of their recent hard-fought but unsuccessful battles was to implement school vouchers in Michigan. The DeVos family itself spent upwards of $3 million in 2000 pushing the perennial conservative education ideal.
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Erik Prince adopted his father’s behind-the-scenes demeanor, as well as his passion for right-wing religious causes, but with a twist. “Erik is a Roman Catholic,” said author Robert Young Pelton, who has had rare access to Prince. “A lot of people brand him in his father’s religion, but he converted to Roman Catholicism.”
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Indeed, many of the executives who would later form the core of Prince’s Blackwater empire are also Catholics, and when Prince’s first wife, Joan, died, Catholic Mass was celebrated for her both near her hometown outside Schenectady, New York, and near where the family lived in McLean, Virginia.
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In 1997, Lt. Erik Prince, U.S. Navy SEAL, blurbed a book called
Christian Fatherhood: The Eight Commitments of St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers
, saying that it “provides men with the basic training they need to complete (their) mission.”
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At the time, Prince himself had two young children. The book’s author, Stephen Wood, is the founder of Family Life Center International, a Catholic apologist organization specializing in providing “moral media . . . geared toward deepening a family’s love and knowledge of their faith and thus hopes to impact today’s society. We place a special focus on fatherhood and providing resources which aid fathers in fulfilling their vocation.” The “moral media” include books with titles like
A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality
and
Breast Cancer and the Pill,
among many others.
Taking a cue from his father’s funding of right-wing evangelical Protestant causes, Prince became a major funder of extremist, fringe Catholic organizations. In 1999 he contributed $25,000 to Catholic Answers, a San Diego-based Catholic evangelical organization founded by the Catholic fundamentalist Karl Keating. Keating dedicated his life to apologetics and defending Catholicism at all costs. During the 2004 and 2006 elections, the group promoted a “Voters Guide for Serious Catholics,” which listed five “non-negotiable” issues that it said are never morally acceptable under Catholic teaching: abortion, homosexual marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, and human cloning.
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Issues that were identified as “Not Non-Negotiable” included “the questions of when to go to war and when to apply the death penalty.”
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When Prince’s wife was dying of cancer, he e-mailed Keating, who in turn asked his followers to pray for the Princes.
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The following year, Prince provided funding to the right-wing Catholic monthly magazine
Crisis
.
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He also gave generously to several Michigan churches, including $50,000 to Holy Family Oratory, a Kalamazoo Catholic Church, and $100,000 to St. Isidore Catholic Church and school in Grand Rapids, as well as Catholic churches in Virginia.
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