On the April 9th 1940 one of Signe’s friends called to say 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 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 and had black lines drawn through the text that made it hard to read. Signe’s family were constantly in her thoughts.
Signe’s aunt was married to Norways’ Marine Air Force Chief, Finn Lützen Holm and she had heard they had both escaped to Britain and that the King and several of the Norwegian government had set up an intelligence operation with the British authorities. 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 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 Norwegian free forces in England and liberate Norway with British Forces. But one of their group was an informer and at 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 Lützen Holm. The men were interrogated about the Norwegian underground but when they didn’t talk they were tortured, including Signe’s cousin Ole, and were finally shot and put in a mass grave.
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 so I forget to take the time to be quiet and listen inwardly. It was incredible that I should have been at home; that I had a radio to listen to; that I had turned it on just then so that I could hear those few words that were personally important to me so far from home. I have since learnt that things fit into an overall plan that often can only be perceived later.”
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. Once again I overworked and couldn’t carry on. A kind friend sent me off to a health spa run by Seventh Day Adventists where I was given all sorts of treatments and healthy food. It all helped me to cleanse my body – but also my spirit. Then one day when I felt really desperate, I had some clear thoughts, ‘All you need to do is to give yourself fully to one person at a time.’ This felt important for me. 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 will become. But you see the bit that you have to build in your part of the mosaic. Here and there you meet others who are building another part of the mosaic and you can build together. And maybe in our lifetime, or maybe later, the mosaic will be completed.”
Britain was isolated after Europe was occupied and the future was uncertain. Buchman felt the need to prepare his task-force further. He wanted this team to be equipped to operate on their own whatever the future held. He was lent a chalet by his friend Globin, a hotel owner in Tahoe 6 000 feet up on the borders of California and the Sierra Nevada. From June to October Frank shared the truths that were in back of his faith with his team: Christian truths; simple rugged American philosophy of sound homes; teamwork in industry; and a united nation. The fun, the laughter and the flow of the Holy Spirit pervaded their work, attracted others and many of them became teammates for life.
Arthur was 32 at the time and remembers how ”We were fairly rough youngsters. Some had come from a working background but most of us, me included, had had it fairly easy. One day I went into the cottage Frank had been lent and saw raspberries laid out. My mother arranged raspberries cup up. She sugared them, covered them with another row, sugared again etc and left them overnight. In the morning juice filled the cups! I thought that Frank would like it and said so to the person who was cooking. Next morning 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!’
“We were over 300 miles from San Francisco and I didn’t know the first thing about buying fruit and vegetables, let alone shopping for 100-150 people!”
A friend in San Francisco introduced Arthur to a couple of Armenian brothers who ran a stall in a market. They offered 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 arrived at Tahoe at 4 am and Arthur sounded the horn to get people out of bed to unload it all into the chalet’s 5 ice-filled bars to keep cool. They sorted and graded the fruit and vegetables carefully so it lasted for 2 weeks. Then they 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 day.
While they were in Tahoe men from industry management and labour were invited to join them over long weekends. Arthur remembered ”John Riffe, who later became pivotal in uniting the two great American unions (CIO and the AFL) to become one. He was head of the steelworkers on the West Coast and came up to learn more 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. 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 the grave of a couple who 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 families 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 families hadn’t spoken for 12 years. He talked to Globin about it at Tahoe. Globin went out and shot duck for a dinner for both the brothers and their families.
Arthur remembered how, ” We were creating a revue and sang them some of the songs. In fact the dinner went off so well that you would have thought that the brothers had always been pals and that was the beginning of a new day for them.” John, the brother who liked silver on his saddles, said ‘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 on their next trip he said to John, ‘What’s yours?’ John replied ‘Coca Cola’. He had to say it twice. ‘Coca Cola. MRA is tops!’ The news spread throughout their valley and this story eventually grew into a musical called Jotham Valley.
Using songs and sketches to get ideas across 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! They started creating songs and sketches and the revue developed into a musical that demonstrated their personal experiences of change. 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 invited them to bring the show to Reno America’s biggest casino city. The review was eventually called You Can Defend America and the production grew steadily more and more professional. The General in command of the US army in the North East of America attended a course that the task-force gave and told them, ‘You are the arm behind the army’. This 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 and soon had a full program taking them from coast to coast.
You Can Defend America was ultimately presented 185 times in 20 states to over 250 000 people. It was sponsored by Governors, State Legislatures, management, labor conventions and labor conventions. It was performed all down the West Coast, up the East Coast, to the aircraft industry, soldiers in training at military camps and in major cities. They also sold thousands of copies of the booklet You Can Defend America that Signe, Arthur and their team produced to go with the revue. The theme was Sound homes, teamwork in industry and a united nation.
A united nation is a very hard thing for America to become as every nation under the sun is represented there, from Chinese and Japanese on the West Coast to German, Ukrainian and Polish in the middle. The Irish and Scots are everywhere and the Mexicans in the southern states. So uniting America was a wide-ranging mission.
Meanwhile, back in New York, not all members of Calvary Church were keen on 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 at Calvary Church who still lived in the era of the First Century Christian Fellowship and wanted Buchman to stay more focused on the individual, the congregation and the Mission. Although Buchman fully supported their work he couldn’t turn his back on the calling he had been given in Cambridge to remake the world.
Shoemaker came to see You can defend America and meet with his MRA friends when they performed in Maine in 1941. Soon after this Frank received a telegram from the Calvary Vestry asking the MRA team to leave Calvary House. This must have been a painful break for Shoemaker and Buchman after working together for over 20 years. Helen Shoemaker’s sister was now married to Ken Twitchell, one of Frank’s closest colleagues. After reading the telegram to his team Frank said simply, “I will always remain Sam’s friend. Now we go on the road.”
Despite fuel restrictions due to the war, the Civil Defense Authorities gave them petrol so they could tour in a cavalcade of about 20 cars and two station wagons. Arthur told how ”I drove the last station wagon at the end of the cavalcade. 50 mph was the maximum speed but 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!”
Going on the road for Arthur meant packing his enlarger and developing equipment into a 3 ft sq trunk in the back of a station wagon for the next 3 years. After the shows he developed and printed pictures to get them into the morning newspapers so wherever they went Arthur hunted for a possible darkroom, sometimes a newspaper office, sometimes the FBI darkroom, sometimes he just hired a room. One place was so dirty they had to shovel out the dirt before they could get down to printing! They printed 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 for Signe but during these 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 marveled at all she had absorbed about the artistry of how to speak your word and 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. “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 the photo team, they were all artistic expressions of things I felt very deeply.”
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 relentlessly all night long. From the moment her head hit the pillow she was off and I was desperate! We used to discuss our problem together and 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! This snoring was a real test for Signe as this girl was also an artist. “But she cooperated, we solved it together and we remained close friends.”
They faced several major challenges including persecution from powerful quarters to silence this voice for change and moral redirection. The men in the task force had been recommended by their governments to stay out of military service in order to pursue this morale-building work. Pressure was now put on enlistment boards to force them into military service by ridiculing them; personal threats and even false claims in 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 which must have been painful for his family. The team had to learn how to work 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.
Senator Harry Truman came to Philadelphia to see another of their plays: The Forgotten Factor. He opened his heart to Buchman and his team afterwards 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 you saw the dangers threatening America and the zeal and intelligence with which you 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.
America supported Europe with armaments from 1940 but it was not until 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 program 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.
The world was beginning to look towards how to resolve the war and find reconciliation.
The big opera house in San Francisco had been booked to show You can defend America in April of 1945 coinciding with the United Nations Conference on International Organization initiated by the League of Nations. Representatives of fifty nations approved the Charter of the United Nations by 24 October 1945 when the United Nations came into existence. Four years of hope and planning materialized in an international organization designed to end war and promote peace, justice and better living for all mankind.
The San Francisco Conference was not only one of the most important in history but perhaps the largest international gathering ever to take place at the time. There were 850 delegates at the conference, and their advisers and staff together with the conference secretariat brought the total to 3 500. In addition to this there were more than 2,500 press, radio and newsreel representatives and observers from many societies and organizations.
There were altogether 80 press photographers. Arthur and Signe had applied to their embassies and were the sole representatives of their countries during the conference and Signe was one of 3 women. One woman dressed and acted like a man which was of itself quite unusual in those days but meant that she was easily absorbed within the crowd of male photographers. The second was a young woman who arrived every day on a motorbike much like a Valkyria, wearing a white sweater, black trousers and yellow flying hair. And then there was Signe in her best Sunday dress which Signe found very amusing!
There were several attempts by the male photographers to patronize Signe. Maybe because she was the only woman photographer who looked like a girl! On the first day, she went into the big foyer where all the journalists and photographers gathered and became very aware of a group of photographers across the hall who were obviously looking and talking about her. She watched them out of the corner of her eye as her heart beat like drumsticks. Eventually one of them came over to her and said, “We haven’t seen you before,” implying that all the photographers knew each other. “No,” she said, ”you haven’t seen me before.” He asked who she represented and when she replied, “The Royal Norwegian Information Service.” He responded “Oh, it’s very royal isn’t it!” And Signe said, “Yes, it is!” She could see him register that she was no push-over and from then on, she was fully respected as a photographer.
Most of the photographers were big men in comparison and Signe had to struggle to claim her shot when it came to popular speakers. For instance, when the Russian delegation spoke and there was a barrier of photographers in front of her she ended up going up to the balcony while Arthur was able to be down on the floor and crept onto the stage if he wanted to. But then Signe didn’t represent a big country like Britain either. Gradually the other photographers made space for Signe to get her shots and showed her the ropes, like where to go if her camera gave her trouble, as you had to tinker with your camera yourself in those days. Arthur and the other photographers all had huge press cameras. Signe had a slightly smaller version because she couldn’t lift the heavy version that Arthur had. Arthur was shooting in colour and his photo of Anthony Eden speaking was the only photo taken in colour at this event and hangs to-day at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Arthur, had a great gift for making friends with all kinds of people. He didn’t care if a person was a king or a taxi-driver. He talked to them about what the MRA team was doing and invited them to see You Can Defend America at the opera house where they could meet Frank Buchman and other interesting people. They came, were very impressed and many became life-long friends. The people around Buchman were able to meet them on their own terms and that impressed them too. For instance Jan Smuts, South Africa’s Prime Minister at the time.
During the League of Nations conference Arthur took a portrait of the son of the Saudi Arabian King. He was invited up to his room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and he asked Signe to be his assistant. While Arthur set up his tripod Signe tried to make light conversation with the Prince and pointed to something that was pinned on the wall behind the Prince. She asked naively, “That is very interesting, does it have a special meaning?” He replied haughtily, “It’s our national flag!” Signe felt like the naive girl from a small country in northern Europe that she was and wanted to sink into the floor! She didn’t follow world events, was still a child at heart and had seldom met a person of colour before but Arthur quickly smoothed it over and took a beautiful picture. The picture was signed many years later when Feisal made an official visit to London as King.
The MRA team in Switzerland were now focused on rebuilding an old hotel that was originally built in 1902 as a high society hotel. It had been run as a Red Cross refugee center during the war and was about to be demolished when 300 Swiss families put up the money to buy it. They wanted to create a conference center for Moral re-Armament in the little village of Caux up the mountain above Montreux. They saw this as their contribution to reconciliation after the war as they, due to neutrality, had been spared the many atrocities of war. The center was badly run down after housing hundreds of refugees during the war. The elevator shafts had been used as rubbish dumps and the kitchen had been used for cooking on indoor bonfires. Hundreds of people were already at work to work to clean it up and make it usable as a conference center for MRA starting that summer, 1946.
Now that peace had been declared most of the task force left for Britain. But before they set sail Frank told them that he expected them to live alongside statesmen and make their task easier. This team continued to work together and grow greatly in the coming years and continued to be committed to developing this strategy.
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