Buchman was, as his name suggested, Frank. Since that time in Keswick, when he personally found freedom and a new purpose in his life, Buchman shared his personal experience of change tirelessly. He knew that he could never change others, but once he discovered how freeing it was to put right what was wrong in his own life, he longed that everyone had the opportunity to get that same experience of freedom. He had a knack of ”reading” people, seeing their deepest needs and at times fearlessly challenging them to see it too. This was a quality that could be attractive or repulsive depending on where a person stood in his or her own life at the time! He believed that reconcilliation between nations could be built by reconcilliation between people.
One day in 1921 when bicycling in Cambridge, Buchman had an amazing thought that was so distinct that he wobbled and nearly fell off his bike as the thoughts sank in: ”You will be used to remake the world. You will be used to remake the men who will remake the world.” From then on this thought was etched in his spirit and added new focus to his work. He knew that if he was to bring change to the world he needed to be prepared to meet the deepest needs of people in every sphere of life in the same way that he challenged himself and his team. Personal change was the key. No easy task.
Buchman developed his personal practice by building on the ideas of some of the great thinkers of his time. He initially called this practice First Century Christian Fellowship and the core structure was built on four steps:
- Reviewing one’s life in light of the four standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, summarized from the Sermon on the Mount.
- Taking ’quiet times’ daily to seek God’s guidance to manage one’s life.
- Taking steps to put right what one could.
- Sharing these steps of personal change with others and effectively passing it on.
This personal experience was basic to Buchman who described sin as, ”Anything that comes between me and God.” He was no saint but he used to talk about ”Driving my sins like a team of horses!” and he tended to have a dynamic effect on people.
One day Buchman went to get his hair cut and was sitting in the barbershop’s chair when a shoeshine man came and asked if he wanted his shoes shined. Buchman accepted the offer and noticed how the man occasionally looked up at him as he worked. He commented later ”That man was a man of God”. Then three weeks later when he went back for a trim the shoeshine man came up to him and said, ”I have wanted to see you again and tell you what happened when I cleaned your shoes. I have been losing my sight, so I have prayed and prayed. The day I cleaned your shoes my eyesight began to return and it has been getting steadily better.” Frank replied, ”My eyesight is bad and I have been praying about it but God hasn’t done that for me yet!”
As a young man, Frank travelled extensively on speaking tours and often brought along students who were experimenting with these ideas. When he visited Beijing in 1918 he met Sam Shoemaker a young theology student who had taken leave from Divinity Studies at Princeton to work for a few years in China. Sam had started a branch of YMCA in Beijing and also taught business there as part of the Princeton-in-China Program. Buchman shared his experiences with Sam who in turn reviewed his own life in the light of these principles and decided to let God guide his life. He later returned to Princeton where Frank and Sam started a group of First Century Christian Fellowship and stayed in close touch. From 1922 to 1933 Buchman visited him often and Sam travelled with Buchman in Europe, the Middle East, and India.
After graduation and ordination, Shoemaker joined Buchman and two British university graduates on a journey through Europe and the Middle East, exploring the meaning of Christian discipleship and further developing the First Century Christian Fellowship. It was on this trip in 1924 that Shoemaker received an invitation from Calvary Episcopal Church in New York to become their rector. Shoemaker eventually accepted. Sam married fellow Princeton student Helen Smith in 1925 and together they managed to combine the diverse interests of Calvary Church with the lifestyle and program of the Oxford Group and gradually established the US headquarters of the First Century Christian Fellowship (soon to be named Oxford Group) at Calvary House adjacent to the church. Calvary House remained the US east coast center for the Oxford Group for over 15 years. On the west coast in Los Angeles their headquarters was at 833 Flower Street, known as The Club.
Calvary Church’s old rectory was eventually replaced by a new seven-story building known as Calvary House and it was at Calvary House that the international task force based when they arrived in New York in 1939. It was in the basement that Arthur ran the MRA photo lab and where he and Signe started to train a group of young people in photography and graphic art. Many of those youngsters worked as photographers recording the work of MRA for most of their lives.
At a different location the church also owned and operated the Calvary Mission, an outreach project to serve people in need. During its 10 years of operation Calvary Mission served over 200 000 meals and could house up to 57 homeless men at a time. It was here that Bill Wilson found a new start and first conceived of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12 steps. Together with Sam they created the blueprint for AA inspired by the four steps in the First Century Christianity Fellowship by then known as the Oxford Group or moral re-armament.
Those who had stayed to work with Buchman in America felt that their work, though not in time to avert World War II, could and should become the basis for reconstruction after the war. That an inspired ideology of democracy could later spread from America to the world and were committed to developing this strategy. They were concerned about America’s isolation from their former allies despite the US pledge to protect them after World War I.
WW II started officially when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939. Honoring their guarantee to Poland to secure Poland’s borders, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3 and Poland was invaded from the east by the Soviet Union on September 17th. But that was not all, Denmark and Norway were invaded by Hitler on April 9th 1940, Luxemburg on May 10th, the Netherlands on May 14th, Belgium on the 28th. Meanwhile the battle for France’s freedom was waged between May 10th and June 25th when France capitulated, isolating Britain in what was to become the toughest period of the war for Britain known as the Battle of Britain which was won thanks to all those who joined the Royal Air Force from from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Belgium, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. There were even some pilots from the neutral United States and Ireland. America supported Europe with armaments from 1940 but it was not untill the Japanese attack on the US Navy in Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that the US fully entered the war. President Roosevelt had feared he would lose his support as president if he supported Britain openly but he maintained a close relationship with Churchill. After the attack on Pearl Harbour when America’s navy was destroyed in a matter of hours, Churchill scrubbed his programme for the next two weeks and went and stayed with Roosevelt in the White House. This was the basis of Britain and American unity during the remainder of the war.
Signe was in California in 1940 when one of her friends called her early on the morning of April 9th to tell her that Norway had been invaded by a German military force. Signe couldn’t understand what they could want by invading Norway? This was tough news for a 25-year old girl who was far from home and unable to contact her family. She had no idea that her mother and youngest sister fled by train, taxi and finally horse and sled into Sweden the next night. She didn’t know if they were safe. She discovered that she could send a telegram through the Red Cross but it could only contain 25 words and no names or mention of the weather was allowed. The family could also send telegrams to Signe but the messages were highly censored with black lines drawn through the text that made it hard to read. This was how Signe discovered that her closest sister and friend, Nussa, had had a severe nervous breakdown. Signe’s family were constantly in her thoughts.
Signe’s Father’s sister was married to one of Norways leading Air Force officers at the time, Frits Holm. He had done many famous things one of which was to fly over the North Pole with the polar researcher Amundsen. Signe heard that her aunt and uncle had both escaped from Norway at the same time as the Norwegian King and that several of the government had set up an intelligence operation with the British authorities in Britain.
One day when Signe was in bed with a cold her hostess loaned her a radio. Signe was fiddling with the dials when she suddenly heard a Norwegian voice come over on the radio. She heard a representative of the Norwegian underground in Washington tell how a group of 30 young Norwegian men had been caught by the German military. They had been preparing a fishing boat to cross the North Sea to join the free Norwegian forces in England and liberate Norway with the British army and navy. It turned out that one of their group was an informer and when they reached a certain point he warned the German military of their whereabouts. They were all taken captive and among these 30 young men was Signe’s cousin Ole Holm. The men were interrogated about the Norwegian underground but when they didn’t talk they were tortured. Amongst other things their fingernails were pulled out and they were finally shot and put in a mass grave, including Signe’s cousin Ole.
Signe shared with her team, ”I am learning how important it is to sensitize myself to hunches that steer my inner path to my higher force. These hunches are always there but it is so easy to get too busy, too thoughtless or too absorbed in what I am doing that I don’t take the time to be quiet and listen inwardly. It was absolutely incredible that I should have been in bed at that point; that I had a radio to listen to; and that I had turned it on at that very moment so that I could hear those few words that were personally important to me so far from home. Very strange. I felt devastated.” Later she reflected on how that experience gave her a feeling of certainty that there is a pattern and a plan and ”In order to be prepared it is important to get into the habit of being quiet and listening inwardly. All I need to do is trust in this. I have since seen many times, how it all fits in to what seems to be an overall plan that I can only perceive later, looking back.”
After these painful snippets of news from home Signe didn’t spare herself, “I felt that nothing was too much if we were going to make these ideas for peace work. In the end I got so overworked that I couldn’t carry on. A kind friend sent me off to a health spa run by Seventh Day Adventists. I had all sorts of treatments there. Water treatment, massage treatment and many others. I was given healthy food and all this helped me to cleanse my body – but also my spirit. Then one day when I felt really desperate, I remember I had some thoughts as if they had been written clearly or spoken: All you need to do is to give yourself fully to one person at a time. This felt important for me – to know that I can’t alter things on my own but if we each individually do what is possible it will somehow be used and put together by our higher power like a mosaic. You live your little piece here and the next little piece comes there. You don’t see the whole pattern. You don’t know what it is going to become. But as you see the bit that you have to do you go on building your part of the mosaic. Here and there you meet others who are also building part of the mosaic and you continue building together. And maybe in our lifetime, or maybe later, the mosaic will be completed.”
Norway capitulated to Germany on June 10th and France on June 25th. Now that Britain was isolated and the future uncertain, Buchman felt the need to prepare his task-force further. He was lent a chalet by his friend and Tahoe hotel owner, Globin, 6 000 feet up on the borders of the California and Sierra Nevada. From June to October Frank shared the truths that were in back of his faith with his team: the Christian truths in songs and the simple rugged American philosophy of sound homes; teamwork in industry; and a united nation. Buchman wanted this team to be equipped to operate on their own whatever the future held. And they became friends for life eventually supporting eachother in action around the globe for the rest of their lives. During this time at Tahoe, the fun, the laughter and the flow of the Holy Spirit pervaded their work and was what attracted others to join them.
Arthur was 32 at the time and remembers how ”We were fairly rough youngsters. Most of us had not had to work too hard. Some had come from workers’ backgrounds but most of us, me included, had always had it fairly easy. One day I went into the cottage Frank had been lent and saw raspberries laid out. Now my mother always liked raspberries with the cup up, she would sugar them, cover with another row – cup up – and sugar them again etc, then leave them overnight and in the morning there would be wonderful juice in the cups! So, I thought this was how Frank would like it and said so to the person who was cooking. I thought nothing more of it. Next morning, I heard that Frank wanted to see me. He said, ‘Why did you do the raspberries that way? I like them done the other way!’ I said, ‘That’s the way to do them Frank, my mother always did them that way and it is much the best way.’ He was quiet a minute and then he said, ‘Well I think you had better look after the fruit and vegetables for all of us.’ I knew nothing about buying fruit and vegetables! We were over 300 miles from San Francisco and I didn’t know the first thing about shopping for 100-150 people!”
A friend in San Francisco introduced Arthur to a couple of Armenians brothers who ran a stall in a market there. They offered to lend him their one-ton truck every other weekend and he and a friend drove it up through the Mojave desert by night, to avoid the heat of the day and keep the produce fresh. They would arrive at Tahoe at 4 in the morning and Arthur sounded the horn to get people out of bed to unload it all into the chalet where they stored ice in the 5 bars to keep it all cool. Then they sorted and graded the fruit and vegetables carefully so they had enough to last for 2 weeks. Arthur and his friend drove the truck back down the mountain pass and over the desert on Sunday evening to get it there in time for the Armenians to start work next morning. For Arthur ”This was a fascinating experience. I learned a lot.”
While the team was in Tahoe men from industry – management and labour – were invited to join them over long weekends. Arthur remembered ”John Riffe, who later became the pivotal man in uniting the two great American unions (CIO and the AFL) to become one, was at that time the head of the steelworkers on the West Coast. He came up for weekend after weekend together with others in that field.”
”In our spirits we were living in the heart of the world. This was 1940 and Britain was losing her biggest number of planes. We were very conscious of what people were doing to save the lives of our families in England. So, it was natural that we were thinking about how we could share what we were learning personally to the whole country.”
It was rugged country around there. Arthur remembered a graveyard in Yerington, near Virginia City, where the first 50 citizens had all died violent deaths. The local pub was called The Bucket of Blood! One of the wooden grave plaques read: ”He played 5 aces. Now he plays the harp.” There was a four-poster bed on top of one grave and the couple who were buried there had brought that bed with them all the way from Germany. When they died it was placed on their grave!
Buchman got to know of two brothers in the area who had a feud over water which split the brothers, their famillies and the whole valley. Water is a treasured possession in those parts as if you don’t have water, you don’t farm. John liked silver on his saddles and stirrups and he liked drinking. His brother was a simple farmer and solid citizen but Frank had heard that these two brothers and their famillies hadn’t spoken for 12 years. He talked to Globin about it at Tahoe and one day Globin went out and shot duck for a dinner where both brothers and their families were invited. They drove up from Nevada to the heights of Tahoe for this dinner.
”We sang them some of the songs from the revue we were creating and the dinner went off so well that you would have thought that the brothers had always been pals. That was the beginning of a new day for them.” Arthur remembered how, ”John, the brother who liked silver on his saddles, saying ‘You know Frank, I have had a wonderful evening and I haven’t had a highball all evening’. Later this story was told in Washington DC because John’s best friend was Senator Pitman, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. This Senator used to go on drinking bouts with John and the next time they went out together he said to John, ‘What’s yours?’ John replied ‘Coca Cola’. He had to say it twice. ‘Coca Cola. MRA is tops!’. You can imagine how that went throughout the valley and we put on our production there. I remember one old dear saying, ‘No I just don’t neighbour but I don’t hate no one.’ However, she got the idea of baking a cake for her neighbour and she took it round and that began a new friendship between them.” This story eventually grew into a musical called ”Jotham Valley”.
Starting with a show at a party for a friend of Buchman’s in Tahoe they began to use the stage as an instrument to get ideas across. This was a new idea to the task force who saw their work more in terms of person-to-person talks and definitely not from a stage! Signe had serious doubts that this was the way to do it. Standing on a stage was way out of her comfort zone! But they started creating songs and skits out of things they were learning together. For instance learning to use all of everything was a motto at Tahoe and this led to a song about ‘No waste in the icebox, the cashbox or the brainbox’. And using all of everything was a revue theme because America had so much of everything that it was easy for people to waste.
This revue developed into a musical that demonstrated their personal experiences of change and with the help of gifted professional actors, actresses, writers and presenters within the team, the performance grew. The mayor of Reno saw one of the private performances at Tahoe and saw its’ possibilities.
Before they knew it, they were invited to bring the show to Reno, Nevada, Americas biggest casino city! They filled the biggest theatre in Reno, where Mrs. Roosevelt, the President’s wife, was previously the only person who had managed to fill it! The review was eventually called You Can Defend America and the production grew more and more professional as time went on. The General in command of the US army in the North East of America attended a course the task-force gave and told them, ‘You are the arm behind the army’. That became one of the main songs in the revue.
When they saw the response to their revue they knew that they were on to something important for America and Buchman said, ‘This must go on the road’.
From then on they were invited from one stage to another across America. Soon they had a full programme taking them from coast to coast.
Despite restrictions due to the war, the Civil Defense Authorities gave them backing and they travelled in cavalcades made up of about 20 cars and two station wagons. Petrol was provided specially so they could tour. Arthur told how ”I drove the last station wagon at the end of the cavalcade. 50 mph was the maximum speed allowed and I could never understand why the last car always had to do about 60 mph to keep up! I always had to go hell for leather! Only once did I drive off the road through driving too tired. After the shows I had to develop and print pictures and get them off to Washington so they could be published in the morning newspapers. Wherever I went I hunted for a possible darkroom, sometimes a newspaper office, sometimes the FBI darkroom, sometimes I would just hire a room. I remember one place was so dirty we had to shovel out the dirt before we could get down to printing. We would print as many as 5,000 prints a week to be used all over the country.”
Speaking from the stage to big public audiences was a challenge to Signe but during this years she experienced fundamental changes in her life. Changing from a self-absorbed unhappy child, to a person who dared to step out in faith. Later in life she marvelled at all she had absorbed in those years about the artistry of how to speak your word, to think, to write and get your message across to people. Not just big important words of truth, but in every thing and in every way. Later in life she marvelled at how she became able to give of herself. “Although I spent a lot of time during these travelling days, doing practical things like layouts for handbooks, posters, books, leaflets and helping Arthur and his photo team, they were all artistic expressions of things I felt very deeply. They were fundamental to me.”
Meanwhile, not all the members of Calvary Church were keen on the radical lifestyle or what they called the ”hot gospelling” of the Oxford Group, to say nothing of the new name moral re-armament. It had become harder for Shoemaker to reconcile MRA with the needs of the Vestry and Calvary Church who wanted Buchman to stay more focused on the congregation and mission. They still lived in the era of the First Century Christian Fellowship. Although Buchman fully supported the work at Calvary Church and Mission, he felt unable to turn his back on the calling he had been given in Cambridge. When You Can Defend America visited Maine in 1941 Shoemaker saw the show and met with the team. Soon after this Frank received a cable from the Vestry asking the MRA team to leave Calvary House. This must have been a painful break for Shoemaker and Buchman after working closely for over 20 years. After reading the cable Buchman told his team ”I will always remain Sam’s friend. Now we go on the road.”
Travelling on the road wasn’t always easy! For Arthur this meant packing his enlarger and developing equipment into a 3 ft sq trunk in the back of a station wagon. This became his office for the next 3 years untill they started the weekly magazine New World News in Washington DC where he was finally able to clear out the station wagon and move into a small office!
Signe remembered many funny sides to life on the road! “I was sharing a room in lodgings with a young girl from South Carolina and she was a terrible snorer! She snored absolutely relentlessly all night long! I am a very light sleeper and I was desperate! She slept from the moment her head hit the pillow and then she was off! She knew that she snored and we used to discuss our problem together. In the end she came up with the idea of tying a stocking under her jaw and over the top of her head to keep her mouth shut (chuckle)! This snoring was a real test for me! She was an artist too and we worked together for a long, long, time after that. The great thing was that she could have been hurt by my criticism of her snoring but she cooperated, we solved it together and we remained close friends throughout!”
They faced several major challenges. There developed, a persecution from powerful quarters to try to silence this voice for change and moral redirection. The work the MRA team were engaged in had become such a challenge to negative forces in the US and a campaign to split their force was started in order to minimize its effect. The men had been reccomended by their governments to stay out of military service in order to pursue the morale-building work inspired by Buchman. Pressure was now put on various enlistment boards to force these men into military service by ridiculing them, making personal threats and even false claims in the public eye through the press. Arthur had an encounter with such a person thinking he was interested in MRA but who afterwards used the information he gleaned to denounce Arthur in the British press as a traitor. These men had to go about incognito. They could never answer phones as they were at risk for spies and agents whose task it was to infiltrate and destroy the work of MRA.
This situation shook the team deeply. They had no idea that such destructiveness existed in ordinary daily life. It was of course also a measure of the effectiveness of the work they were engaged in on all levels of society: labour, management, government, military and culture. They had to learn how to work and manage situations without leaving themselves or their work open to those who were out to cause damage – not only to their team but also to those who were requesting their help. Many of these people were in high positions and had seen MRA as a way to reverse the decline of civilization.
A united nation is a very hard thing for America to become as every nation under the sun is represented there, from the Chinese and the Japanese on the West Coast to the Germans, Ukrainians and Polish in the middle. The Irish and Scots are everywhere and the Mexicans in the southern states. So, it was a very wide-ranging mission to make America a united nation. The show gave a real sense of how everyone can do something positive that can affect the chain of events in the world. The revue was performed all down the West Coast, over on the East Coast, to the army camps, in the aircraft industry, and each time they bought thousands of copies of a booklet, also called You Can Defend America, that Signe and Arthur and their team had produced to go with the revue.
Senator Harry Truman came to see another of the group’s plays The Forgotten Factor that was put on in Philadelphia. It was May 8th which happened to be Truman’s birthday and a birthday cake was made for him. On that occasion Harry Truman opened his heart to Buchman and his team saying:
”The time is ripe for an appeal not to self-interest but to the hunger for great living that lies deep in every man. What Americans really want is not a promise of getting something for nothing, but a chance to give everything for something great. I have known this group since June 4, 1939, when I read the message sent by President Roosevelt to the national mass-meeting for MRA in Constitution Hall in Washington DC. I was struck at the time by the clarity with which they saw the dangers threatening America and the zeal and intelligence with which they set about rousing the country. There is not a single industrial bottleneck I can think of which could not be broken in a matter of weeks if this crowd were given the green light to go full steam ahead. We need this spirit in industry. We need it in the nation. With it there is no limit to what we can do for America and America can do for the world.” Harry Truman became President some years later when Roosevelt died.
You Can Defend America was ultimately presented 185 times in 20 states and over 250 000 people saw it. It was sponsored by Governors, State Legislatures, management and labor committees, labor conventions. They were invited to perform to industries like Boeing, for Labor Unions and for soldiers in training at military camps. They were invited to perform in major cities where people had heard of their work and the effect it had on people. The theme was ‘Sound homes, teamwork in industry and a united nation’. The big opera house in San Francisco had been booked to show You can defend America in April of 1945. This coincided with the United Nations Conference on International Organization initiated by the League of Nations in San Francisco. Representatives of fifty nations met in San Francisco between 25 April and 26 June 1945 and the Charter of the United Nations was adopted unanimously at the end of this Conference. The Charter still had to be approved by congresses or parliaments in many countries but this eventually led to . its fullfilment on 24 October 1945 when the United Nations came into existence. Four years of planning and the hope of many years had materialized in an international organization designed to end war and promote peace, justice and better living for all mankind.
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