The first time I recall my mother mentioning Amway, we were in the car late at night, coming back from a meeting at her boss’s house. Ten years old, I’d gone upstairs to play and missed the whole point of the whiteboard sitting on an easel downstairs. My mother, however, had been rapt. Riding home with my brother and stepfather, she seemed almost to glow, as if she were throwing off sparks in the darkness.
The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold.
It was 1978. I didn’t realize that this was one of those moments, like Waterloo or Watergate, after which nothing would be the same. Amway—or, as we soon began to call it, the business—would become the load-bearing beam of my mother’s existence for the next four decades.
The business as then practiced in our West Virginia river town had its own culture. I found myself plunged into religious nationalism, anti-communist obsessions, denunciation of the very idea of public schools, and the worship of money. Across my lifetime, versions of these ideas would be marketed again and again to working-class Americans. Amway leaders would help elect presidents. Familiar characters from my childhood—the Amway celebrity Doug Wead, members of the DeVos family, which co-founded the company—would reappear in Republican administrations. In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story, prefiguring the Trump era.
But for many years, I had no context for what had swallowed my family. I had no way to understand how I’d managed to lose my mother.
Amway products began to appear around the house. We changed our laundry detergent to SA-8 and swapped our toothpaste for Glister. I rode with my mother to upline distributors’ houses to pick up the boxes that had been shipped from headquarters in Michigan. My mother and stepfather sponsored people into the business, who in turn came to our house to pick up their own orders: makeup, hair spray, a liquid soap you could use to clean anything, a portable medicine case of expensive daily vitamins called Nutrilite Double X.
My stepfather, who ran a local charity, began to introduce himself as a businessman. My mother was even more smitten with the beautiful future that Amway offered. Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.
My mother and stepfather stayed out late on weeknights and weekends, bringing new recruits to see “the plan.” They paid to go to meetings and rallies. I had no idea at the time that these events were hosted not by corporate Amway but by high-level distributors, who were technically independent business operators. We bought books and cassette tapes by the Amway personalities Doug Wead and Dexter Yager, with titles such as Tales of the Super Rich and Becoming Rich: Eleven Principles of Material and Spiritual Success. Wead had been an evangelical minister before gaining a higher profile with Amway. Yager had sold cars and Utica Club beer before becoming one of a handful of top distributors. Their wives wrote a book together. We bought that, too.
We ended up collecting more “motivational tools” than cleaning supplies. A few people sold soap or makeup to their friends at parties, Mary Kay–style. But for us, the business mostly meant recruiting people to sign up and buy products they would use themselves, while earning points toward advancing to the next level and higher bonuses.
We became students of success, advised to set goals of a bigger house and more expensive cars, as if wishing alone could make it happen. But by this point, whatever cash we had was spent on Amway. I had a pair of bell-bottom jeans with three bright satin stripes sewn diagonally across one knee. They were the only pants I owned.
One weekend during the summer of 1980, we packed jars of peanut butter, loaves of bread, and fruit into our car, then drove 300 miles east for a rally at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. On the road, my mother and I imagined what we would do when we reached the Diamond level of the business, when true wealth would arrive.
After we checked in, my brother and I were left to our own devices, running the halls and playing in the elevators. I read a pamphlet about how John Lennon’s “Imagine” threatened America as a Christian nation, which introduced me to the (dangerous) phrase secular humanism. I listened as leading Amway distributors denounced public schools for brainwashing children.
In the hotel ballroom, distributors sang along to songs like “Rut Job Blues,” about how stupid it was to work a regular job: “I feel so D-U-M-B / I’ve got a J-O-B.” Cheers went up at any mention of Ronald Reagan, who had embraced Amway for years—and would soon be president. (A few years earlier he’d told a crowd of Amway distributors that “for me to come here and talk to you about free enterprise is like saving souls in heaven.”)
We went to more rallies—in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other faltering Rust Belt cities where people were laid off and looking for hope. We ate up testimonials to God’s grace and to his desire that everyone should become as rich as possible. High-ranking distributors encouraged low-level distributors like us to Drop that stinkin’ thinkin’ and Fake it till you make it.
At one rally, my brother and I ran into Doug Wead’s son, who was about our age. After walking around the hotel, the three of us sat in our room and talked. I said how great it would be when our mother and stepfather became Diamonds, so we would be rich, too.
He told me I had it all wrong. His dad didn’t make serious money through Amway products. Most of what he earned came from writing books and recording talks. That was how people got rich in Amway—selling motivational books and tapes to distributors like my parents. Didn’t I know?
He spoke honestly, without malice, and the words rattled around in my brain for the rest of the trip. I picked at the upholstery on the seat of the car on the ride home. We would never be rich. There was no other plan. We were doomed.
What was it about Amway that so captured a bright, extroverted woman like my mother? Abandoned as a child when her own mother ran off to become a nightclub singer, she’d been raised by her grandparents. She graduated high school with a journalism scholarship to college, but met my father that summer and never left town. She became a stringer for the local paper, later working as a lunchtime anchor and interviewer for our local television station. When I was a preschooler, she took night classes and earned a bachelor’s degree in social work. By the time she discovered Amway, my mother had divorced and remarried. My stepfather had a more fundamentalist view of religion than I had been raised with—a view that dovetailed with many Amway leaders’ emphasis on biblical literalism and wives submitting to their husbands.
My mother couldn’t imagine life without a husband. More crucially, she believed herself destined for something extraordinary. But how could someone achieve greatness in Parkersburg, West Virginia? Amway promised to deliver what nothing else in our town could—or at least to give her a community that would pretend along with her.
For some Americans, joining the business might have been harmless. For us, it was not. Soon my mother and stepfather had no other job. Their bad decisions ricocheted in the echo chamber of Amway culture, where they were encouraged to dedicate themselves more deeply. Surely, any day now, we would make it. Within three years, we were living in a filthy house without electricity, eating food out of a cooler that we kept filled with ice. Then we were evicted, and my mother and stepfather declared bankruptcy. Ordinary people might have thought twice about sticking with Amway. But by that point, we had left the small dreams of ordinary people behind.
A few months later, we climbed in a van headed to New York to stay at another Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve. My parents went to see the Rockettes and to hear the same speakers they’d cheered on in other cities, singing songs, giving glory to God, and talking about his vision for America.
When I was a teenager and my mother was in her early 40s, she stopped talking to me about Amway. She filed for divorce from my stepfather and started a graduate-school program in behavioral psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist.
Despite being more than a decade older than her classmates, she was well liked and a good student. My brother and I had already escaped to college, thanks to cobbled-together loans, grants, and multiple part-time jobs. I didn’t talk to either of them often, because in 1988, long-distance phone calls were expensive. But my mother called one day to chat.
“Going crazy isn’t like being hit by a car,” she said in the middle of our conversation. “People make a small but conscious decision to give up. At some point, it’s easier than living in reality.”
She was deep in clinical work with the mentally ill at the time; I assumed she was drawing on that experience. Still, the line stayed with me. In recent years, I’ve wondered whether she was talking about herself, and whether there might have been some way to intervene that I didn’t see. Because, just two years later, in the last semester of her Ph.D. program, my mother decided to quit and marry a third husband, one who would do Amway with her.
Only much later would I hear stories about distributors like us who had declared bankruptcy and begin to understand how common our experience was. A 1980 study of tax returns conducted by Wisconsin’s attorney general showed that the top 1 percent of Amway distributors in that state had lost, on average, $900 in the business. In 1994, Dexter Yager and Amway faced a class-action lawsuit claiming that they had fraudulently misrepresented how much distributors were likely to earn and illegally pressured people to buy books and tapes. The case was settled with Amway promising compensation and changes that would require distributors to make clear that motivational tools were optional and didn’t guarantee success. The FTC had determined in 1979 that Amway was not a pyramid scheme, but the company continued to face allegations to the contrary. In 2010 it settled another class-action suit alleging that it operated a pyramid scheme. The company did not admit to guilt but did agree to pay plaintiffs $56 million, in the form of cash and Amway products.
In the years that followed, my mother and I would sometimes talk about real life—a birth, a death, a grandchild—and flashes of who she used to be would shine through. But she also shared long lists of people the Clintons had supposedly murdered, and continued to insist on Amway’s tremendous potential. She always sounded a little embarrassed by the things she said, as if she understood that they were hard to believe. I think she wanted me to see that she knew that the most cultlike aspects of the business were over the top, that she hadn’t been taken in entirely, that she wasn’t some kind of fool. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Amway owned her as fully as if she’d believed every word. Despite interventions my brother and I attempted, despite the money she continued to lose year after year, our mother never gave up on the business.
When I tell people how I grew up, I get a few different reactions. Sometimes I meet people who thought about joining Amway, and are relieved they never signed up. Sometimes they’re surprised that Amway still exists—they thought it disappeared decades ago. Most barely know what it is. And why should they? They themselves might never fall for such a hustle. But whether they know it or not, Amway has deeply influenced American politics for decades.
Amway supported Reagan’s candidacy in the 1980s. In the ’90s, a co-founder of the business, Rich DeVos, gave the GOP what was believed to be the largest-ever-recorded individual political donation. Less than a decade after I first listened to him on Amway tapes, Doug Wead became Vice President George H. W. Bush’s liaison to right-wing Christians. The Bush-era term compassionate conservatism may have been an Amway invention—Wead is said to have coined it. Dexter Yager, who had paid Reagan and Bush to speak at his events, reportedly mass-distributed voicemails pushing support for Republican candidates and accusing Bill Clinton of trying to “force the emergence of deviant lifestyles, of a socialist agenda.”
I grew up hearing rumors about the satanic influences motivating Procter & Gamble, which Amway considered a business competitor—stories that led to another lawsuit and required distributors to pay $19 million in damages. Amway didn’t invent the art of communal delusion via disinformation—the John Birch Society had already perfected it in the 1960s. The Birchers’ influence was in decline by the time we joined the business, but Amway’s culture helped carry their unhinged style into the digital era.
In 2021, Doug Wead died. At the time, he was under federal indictment—not for anything related to Amway, but for allegedly funneling Russian money into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. In Trump’s first administration, he nominated Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. An advocate for school choice and religious education, she is married to Rich DeVos’s son, Dick, who was president of Amway himself in the 1990s, and whose family still co-owns the company. She said she’d be open to returning to the post, “with the goal of phasing out the Department of Education.” The rallies leading up to Trump’s latest election, with their euphoric resentments and tent-revival energy, recalled nothing so much as a 1980s Amway function.
My mother had fallen so deep into the delusional communities of Amway and religious extremism that I took a while to realize she was developing dementia. Her Alzheimer’s manifested in part as paranoid psychosis. Over time, as her memory failed and her sense of her own importance ballooned, she exchanged my actual childhood for one in which we’d been staggeringly wealthy. She had once been engaged to Trump, she told me. When a court-appointed attorney came to assess her legal competence, my mother threatened to have Trump fire her. For months, my mother believed she was working as Trump’s campaign director for Ohio and Michigan. They had met through Amway, of course.
It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which Trump’s political followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some prominent Trump supporters may see him as a means to wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe, eventually, when they see what his second administration delivers, some voters will peel away.
That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.
My mother was an outlier. As the illness devoured her mind, she stopped recognizing her friends. But she still remembered the business. At the beginning of 2020, just three weeks before the pandemic began, I brought her to live with me and my brother in Virginia. She set off the fire alarm and constantly announced that the belongings she’d misplaced had been stolen. But the hardest part was her insistence that we all inhabit her imaginary world—one where she lives in grievance and terror, a place of invented enemies.
When I cleaned out her old house for her, I found storage shelves in the basement filled with Amway binders, makeup tutorials, old catalogs, and hundreds of motivational CDs and cassettes. Like some ritual to release the dead, I emptied the binders one by one. I filled a dozen Hefty bags, and then more. When the outdoor bins could no longer contain the trash, I stacked the rest on the ground by the curb: relics that would help no one, souvenirs of a lost life.
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