Much of the cardboard and paper goods strewn about our homes — the mail-order boxes and food market bags — are sold by a single private company, with its name, Uline, stamped on the underside. Few Americans know that a multibillion-dollar fortune made on those ubiquitous products is now fueling election deniers and other far-right candidates across the country.
Dick and Liz Uihlein of Illinois are the most important contributors to Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and was linked to a outstanding antisemite, and have given to Jim Marchant, the Nevada Secretary of State nominee who says he opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. They’re major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, based on an internal document obtained by ProPublica, goals to “get on God’s side of the problems and stay there” and “punish leftists.”
Flush with profits from their shipping supply company, the Uihleins have emerged because the No. 1 federal campaign donors for Republicans ahead of the November elections, and the No. 2 donors overall behind liberal financier George Soros. The couple has spent not less than $121 million on state and federal politics within the last two years alone, fighting taxes, unions, abortion rights and marijuana legalization.
Uline’s core business — selling boxes — is so boring there’s an entire Simpsons bit dedicated to its dullness. But tax records obtained by ProPublica show the corporate, which is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose financial results, has experienced an astonishing boom.
The Uihleins, who make the overwhelming majority of their money from the corporate, reported around $18 million in income in 2002, based on the records. That rocketed fortyfold, to $712 million, in 2018. Because of the pandemic-induced online shopping surge, Uline has grown much more since.
While the Uihleins rarely speak to the press — they didn’t reply to requests for comment for this story — they’ve turn out to be well-known in political circles. However the explosion of the Uihleins’ wealth in addition to the roots of their politics haven’t been well understood.
The German-American clan made their original fortune within the nineteenth century as owners of the Milwaukee brewery Schlitz. Relations were staples of the Chicago Tribune society pages. In 1917, Dick’s grandfather was identified as a millionaire in a Chicago Tribune humor item about how the rich man had fired an unqualified chauffeur.
When Dick and Liz Uihlein donated hundreds of thousands lately to the pro-Trump super PAC America First Motion, they were following in a family tradition. Edgar J. Uihlein of Chicago was among the many handful of largest donors to the unique America First Committee, the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s group that opposed the US’ entry into World War II. (It’s unclear whether that was Edgar Sr., Dick’s grandfather, or Edgar Jr., his father, who had just graduated from college.) While America First drew supporters from across the political spectrum, it was most related to rightists. Uihlein’s donation was disclosed in 1941. Later that yr, Lindbergh gave an openly antisemitic speech assailing Jewish influence.
When Edgar Uihlein Sr. died in 1956, his estate was valued at $4.8 million — greater than $50 million in today’s dollars — and the cash was left in a trust for his heirs, newspapers reported on the time.
Dick’s father, Edgar Uihlein Jr., who had began a plastics company after serving within the Navy during World War II, established himself as a vital funder of far-right political groups within the Sixties.
A document from 1963 discover Edgar Uihlein Jr. as on the National Finance Committee of the John Birch Society. Founded just a few years earlier, the group quickly became a big force to the fitting of the Republican Party, known for its obsessively anti-communist politics. The Birchers combined hostility to Recent Deal social programs with lurid conspiracies, famously campaigning against “the horrors of fluoridation,” a supposed Red plot.
The group fiercely opposed civil rights. An entry in a single 1963 Birch newsletter railed against the upcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King would give his “I Have a Dream” speech: “the only good Americans who must have anything to do with this Communist-instigated mob in any way, or pay any attention to it in Washington, are the police required to take care of law and order.”
Edgar Uihlein Jr. supported politicians who embraced segregation. In early 1962, he sponsored a speech that delivered to Chicago a former U.S. Army general named Edwin Walker. Walker toured the country attacking supposed communist conspiracies and civil rights, while celebrating the Southern defeat of Reconstruction, which he labeled “the tyranny inside our own white race.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracked far-right figures within the period, has archives showing Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s involvement with several other groups and campaigns, including a $1,000 contribution to the presidential campaign of segregationist George Wallace in 1968. It’s not clear when, if ever, Uihlein’s association with the John Birch Society ended. As late as 1977, the founding father of the group wrote a long letter to him asking for money.
Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the rich Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the identical type of blue-blood education (Phillips Andover, Stanford) as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton). Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, Dick Uihlein didn’t waver: He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967, joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics. He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.
In one among the one interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father, who often went by Ed. On the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled, “My father would talk in regards to the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.” Dick said that very same yr that “my father shared most of the same values that I even have, conservative values.”
Dick and Liz Uihlein proceed to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005. Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars to right-wing institutions. Among the many recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the Federalist Society and think tanks which have pushed misleading claims in regards to the 2020 election, similar to the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Foundation for Government Accountability, because the Every day Beast reported.
Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer, sent out to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, was a protracted tribute to the “smart” Edgar Uihlein Jr.
“Father Uihlein, the pinnacle of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under an image of her husband and father-in-law, recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, problems with the day, fishing muskies and, all the time, politics were discussed.”
She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness: “Living your life and raising your kids were easier in a better time. There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media. We, like so many families, were raised with a pointy moral compass. The foundations were the foundations, nevertheless it was OK.”
The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era. Dick Uihlein is a serious funder of the American Principles Project, which runs ads attacking what it calls “transgender ideology,” abortion and the teaching of “critical race theory.”
Last yr, Uihlein weighed in on recalling 4 school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee due to their support for COVID-19 safety protocols and “equity” training for teachers. More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent greater than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that features details about gender identity and same-sex couples.
The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included within the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.
For all of the Uihleins’ dismay on the disorder they see consuming the country, there’s one domain where they’ll exert near total control. Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the corporate is run.
For brand spanking new staffers, it begins with the dress code in the worker handbook: Women usually are not permitted to wear pants except as a part of a pantsuit or on Fridays; hose or stockings have to be worn except through the warmer months; dresses “which can be too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.
“DRESS CODE VIOLATIONS ARE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND MAY RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION UP TO AND INCLUDING TERMINATION,” the handbook warns.
The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an worker’s scheduled start time. Just 4 personal items are allowed on employees’ desks, with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches. One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child. “Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and in case your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.
The Uihleins have enlisted company employees to administer their vast personal real estate holdings and maintain their exacting standards, records obtained by ProPublica show. While the Uihleins’ primary house is in Lake Forest, Illinois, in addition they have several waterfront properties in Florida. In a single case, a Uline staffer emailed an official in Everglades City to complain after surveillance footage showed a neighborhood man “peeing off Dick’s dock.”
The family’s management style has worked well for the corporate. Founded in 1980 when Dick and Liz Uihlein saw a niche out there and borrowed money from Dick’s father to launch a shipping supply distributor, Uline has grown to a network of 12 vast warehouses across the country in addition to in Canada and Mexico. Uline’s signature marketing product, its Sears-style catalog, now runs over 800 pages, offering infinite varieties of paper bags, packing tape, foaming hand soap, metal racks and more.
Liz Uihlein runs day-to-day operations from the corporate’s Nice Prairie, Wisconsin headquarters, right over the Illinois border. Her obsessive concentrate on next-day shipping and customer support — “We answer the phones faster than 911,” an organization saying goes — have powered Uline’s expansion.
Growth accelerated with the net shopping boom that relies on Uline’s specialty, cardboard boxes, which it carries in greater than 1,700 sizes. “It’s weird to develop a love of corrugated boxes and shipping supplies, but I actually enjoy” it, Liz Uihlein told a Milwaukee business newspaper.
Uline is now so dominant that its customers range from high-end firms like Tesla and Gucci to countless small merchants on Etsy to large municipal governments. The Recent York City Department of Education and other agencies, for instance, collectively spend greater than half 1,000,000 dollars per yr with Uline.
Unlike at other corporate workplaces where discussing politics is tacitly discouraged, the Uihleins lean in to theirs. Employees gathered at the main Uline distribution center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for an organization party in 2019 were bemused when the entertainment hired by the corporate emerged on stage: a Donald Trump impersonator, wearing a red MAGA hat. The corporate frequently hosts “Lunch & Learn” sessions at its headquarters with figures similar to former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, as the Guardian reported.
In 2018, when the Recent York Times published a profile labeling the Uihleins “The Most Powerful Conservative Couple You’ve Never Heard Of,” the corporate began to get calls from offended liberal customers canceling their accounts, a former sales staffer recalled. An internet site, Refuse Uline, was launched that lists alternatives to the corporate. But as the corporate’s only shareholders, the Uihleins only should answer to themselves.
When COVID-19 hit, as Liz Uihlein campaigned against shutdowns and required employees to return to the office before vaccines were available, demand for Uline’s shipping and cleansing supplies surged. In 2020, as other businesses shuttered, sales at Uline shot up 14% to $6.5 billion, based on an internal report obtained by ProPublica. Stung by a employee shortage, Uihlein emailed Wisconsin’s Democratic governor in July 2021 urging him to “get government out of the way in which” by immediately cutting people off of expanded federal unemployment advantages that had helped people weather the pandemic. Uline needed to fill 500 jobs, she noted in the e-mail, which ProPublica obtained via a public records request. The governor didn’t oblige.
It’s not clear when the Uihleins, who’re each 77, will retire. But the following generation is in place. The couple’s adult children are executives at the corporate, and so they have begun to offer money to federal candidates — all conservatives. Dick and Liz Uihlein, meanwhile, have been taking steps to preserve their multibillion-dollar empire for his or her descendants by shielding it from the hated estate tax.
Over time, they’ve regularly transferred the shares of Uline right into a so-called “dynasty trust,” which now appears to carry a majority of the corporate, based on the tax records and business documents filed in Florida. Bob Lord, a lawyer at tax reform group Patriotic Millionaires, said dynasty trusts are typically designed to avoid estate and other transfer taxes for ultrarich families.
“The goal is for the corporate to stay within the family for possibly a whole bunch of years,” he said. “And the wealth generated by the corporate will accumulate untouched by estate tax.”
Do you could have details about Uline or Dick and Liz Uihlein that we should always know? Reporter Justin Elliott will be reached via email at [email protected] or via Signal at (774) 826-6240.
Andy Kroll contributed reporting.