Robert LeFevre - Early Life

Early Life

LeFevre was born in Gooding, Idaho in 1911, but when he was a child LeFevre's family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. LeFevre attended Hamline University studying English and drama. He then worked at a variety of jobs during the Great Depression, such as acting and radio announcing.

LeFevre was a follower of the "I AM" movement (religious sect) from 1936 to 1940 or so. He and one Pearl Diehl wrote a book in 1940 of their experiences in the cult called “I AM”—America’s Destiny (Twin City House, St. Paul, Minnesota). LeFevre told how one day, when he was in the radio station studio, he was struck by the Great I AM presence, who spoke to him personally. LeFevre also claimed a number of supernatural experiences: driving a car while asleep for over twenty miles without an accident (this was accomplished with the help of his “Higher Mental Body”), leaving his physical body for a trip through the air to Mt. Shasta, and seeing Jesus.

In 1940, I AM leaders Edna Ballard and her son Donald were indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles for use of the mails to defraud. Twenty-four other I AM leaders were also named in the first indictment; a supplemental indictment named LeFevre and Diehl as being defendants. During World War II, LeFevre served as an officer in the education and orientation division of the Army Air Corps before being discharged in 1945 after spending a year in Europe and being injured in an accident. Soon after, he and his wife went on a cross-country lecture tour “in a pilgrimage for world peace.” Their tour was bankrolled by the Falcon Lair Foundation, a nonprofit group interested in religion, philosophy and government whose headquarters were “Falcon Lair,” Beverly Hills, California.

After the War, LeFevre went to California and worked in the real estate business and unsuccessfully ran for Congress in the Republican primary of 1950. He then became radio and television broadcaster becoming involved in anti-leftist causes, including work for an anti-union organization named the Wage Earners Committee. A year later the committee was sued by two movie producers, Stanley Kramer and Dore Schary, for picketing and libeling their films as being pro-Soviet. LeFevre and Ruth Dazey were among the defendants, but the case died when the Wage Earners Committee disintegrated.

A few years later he went to work for the right wing in a larger way; he became vice-president of Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council; a director of the Congress of Freedom; a director of the U.S. (sometimes United States) Day Committee— whose purpose it was to diminish in importance the observation of October 23 as United Nations Day—and an adviser to Harry Everingham’s ''We, The People!". The U.S. Day Committee made headlines in 1954 when LeFevre led an attack on the Girl Scout Handbook as having too many references to the United Nations (UN). The Scouts retreated, reporting that more than forty changes had been made—about half of which were due to LeFevre’s protests.

That same year LeFevre relocated to Colorado Springs and started to write editorials for R. C. Hoiles’ Gazette-Telegraph. Two years later he founded the Freedom School.

What animated LeFevre personally and the Freedom School ideologically—indeed, forms the bedrock upon which all courses were based—is a complicated philosophy that, in essence, rejects all government of modern times.