Those who had stayed to work with Buchman in America felt that their work, though not in time to avert World War II, could become the basis for reconstruction with an inspired ideology of democracy that could later spread from America to the world. But Buchman and his team were deeply concerned about the attitude in America about these events and continued with their offensive across America.first of all because they perceived that the current war would affect the whole world. It was a war of right and wrong.
World War 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.
Since that time in Keswick when Buchman found freedom and purpose in his life he strove to formulate his experience so that others would be able to gain the same freedom. In light of his personal challenge to remake the world by remaking men Buchman’s personal experience of being freed of bitterness and hate and his knack of ”reading” people, seeing their deepest needs, challenging them to see it, was a quality that could be attractive or repulsive depending on where a person stood in his or her own life! It often brought out the best in people and he burned to share the joy and freedom that he had experienced with everyone. He was, as his name suggested, Frank. Buchman developed his personal practice, building on several other great thinkers of the time, and called it First Century Christian Fellowship. For instance how the essence of the Sermon on the Mount was four absolute standards of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. The need to practice ‘quiet times’ to seek God’s guidance daily. Taking steps in change to put right what one could and passing it on by sharing steps in change with others.
Frank visited Beijing in 1918 where he met Sam Shoemaker a young theology student who had taken leave from Divinity Studies at Princeton to visit China where he started a branch of YMCA in Beijing and taught business as part of the Princeton-in-China Program. Buchman shared some profound truths from his own life with Sam. Later after contemplating his own inadequacy in the light of these truths, Shoemaker decided to let God guide his life. He returned to Princeton in 1920 and was ordained in 1921. Buchman stayed in close touch with Sam.
One day in 1921 Buchman was riding his bycicle in Cambridge and he had an experience of words being spoken to him. They were so loud that he wobbled and nearly fell off his bike as he heard: ”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. This certainly added a special 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 from every sphere of life just the same as he challenged himself and his team. No easy task.
Buchman always brought a team with him on his travels and after graduation and ordination, Shoemaker and two British university graduates joined Buchman through Europe and the Middle East, exploring the meaning of Christian discipleship and further developing the First Christian Fellowship together. It was on this trip in 1934 that Shoemaker received an invitation from Calvary Episcopal Church in New York to become their rector. Shoemaker eventually accepted and also gradually established the US headquarters of the First Century Christian Fellowship (soon to be named Oxford Group) at Calvary House adjacent to the church. Sam and his wife Helen managed to combine the diverse interests of Calvary Church with the lifestyle and program of the Oxford Group and kept in touch with Buchman who travelled between Europe and the US during these turbulent years between World War i and II. Frank and Sam went back a long way and Calvary House remained the US east coast center for over 15 years.
During this period some lots adjacent to the church were sold and the old rectory was replaced by a new seven-story building known as Calvary House. 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 AA’s 12 steps. Together with Sam they created the blueprint for AA inspired by the steps in the First Century Christianity Fellowship, now called the Oxford Group. It was at Calvary House that Arthur Strong had his photo lab and international task force based when they arrived in New York in 1939. Arthur and Signe started to train a group of young people in photography and graphic art here and many of those ’kids’ worked as photographers with MRA for most of their lives.
On the west coast in Los Angeles their headquarters was at 833 Flower Street, known as The Club.
Signe was in California when one of her friends called her early one morning to tell her that Norway had been invaded by a German military force. It was the 9th of April 1940. 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 didn’t know if they were safe or how they were doing. 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 so that they were hard to understand. 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 they 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 man speaking from the Norwegian underground outpost in Washington. He started telling 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 get to England and join the free Norwegian forces in order to liberate Norway together 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. They were first 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, “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 the incredibly few words that were personally important to me so far from home. Very strange. I was devastated. But somehow this also confirmed for me that there is a higher plan. There is a purpose that I cannot understand or influence, but it is there.
”I learnt how important it is to sensitize yourself to hunches, those things that steer your inner path to this higher force. These hunches are always there but it is so easy to get too busy, too thoughtless or too absorbed in what you are doing that you don’t take the time to be quiet and listen inwardly. Not that these experiences happen every day, but in order to be prepared it is important to get into the habit of being quiet and turning inwardly. That experience brought a feeling of certainty to me that there is a pattern and a plan. All I need to do is trust in it. I have since seen many times, how it all fits in to what seems to be an overall pattern that you can only sense 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 was given some thoughts. It was 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 and 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.”
Speaking from the stage to big public audiences was strange to Signe who 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 and to think and write in order to get your message across to people. Not just big important words of truth, but in everything 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.”
During the years in America Signe discovered a lot of new areas in her life. For example in relationships with other people. She experienced a greater personal freedom from herself and learnt what responsibility means. “I felt how my life had changed, not because the external circumstances were different, but because I had a new positive attitude to life, the future and to other people. This foundation has been built on throughout my life. It was a deep, experience of being in touch with a purpose higher than myself. Doing this together with others was a tremendous experience. We did many things wrong. Some experiments didn’t work. We did many things that we might have done better later – but I think that to all or most of us it was deeply inspiring.”
She 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!”
In the summer of 1940 (June-Oct 1940) Buchman felt that the time had come to give his team training so that they could be equipped to operate on their own. He invited some of the team to join him in Tahoe where he had a friend who ran a hotel. This friend provided them with some beds and with time the numbers grew and they eventually housed around a hundred people who stayed there untill winter began to make itself known and they woke up in the morning to find their hair frozen to the pillow! 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 their work.
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. A musical developed 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. Before they knew it, they were invited to bring the show to Reno, Nevada, Americas biggest casino city!
The mayor of Reno had seen one of the private performances at Tahoe and saw its’ possibilities. 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 that was what developed and from then on they were invited from one stage to another across America. The review was eventually called We Can Defend America and the production grew more and more professional as time went on. Soon they had a full programme taking them from coast to coast.
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 show gave a real sense of how everyone can do something positive that can affect the chain of events in the world.
Not all the members of Calvary Church were keen on the radical life style or what they called the ”hot gospelling” of the Oxford Group, to say nothing of the new name Moral re-armament. They still lived in the era of the First Christian Fellowship and Sam wanted Buchman to work full-time within the church. But Buchman had this distinct calling ’to be used to remake men who will remake the world’ and the events of the times maintained his focus. Eventually the Vestry asked Frank to move MRA from Calvary Church in 1941.
It had become harder for Shoemaker to reconcile MRA with the needs of the Vestry and at Calvary Church who wanted Buchman to stay more focused on the congregation and mission. Although Buchman fully supported this work he felt unable to turn his back on the calling he had been given in Cambridge. Shoemaker saw You Can Defend America when they visited Maine in 1941 but soon after this Frank received a letter from the Vestry asking the MRA team to leave Calvary. This must have been a painful break for Shoemaker and Buchman after working closely for over 20 years.
As Buchman said when he read the letter from the vestry at Calvary Church asking them to leave, ”I will always remain Sam’s friend. Now we go on the road.”
The task force left New York to travelled across America in a cavalcade of cars. For Arthur this meant closing the Photo lab and 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 till they started a weekly magazine in Washington DC called New World News. There he was finally able to clear out the station wagon and move into a small office!
The team in San Francisco had booked the big opera house in 1945 so that the show “You can defend America” could be presented on stage. Then they discovered that the League of Nations (before it became the United Nations) had decided that San Francisco would be their meeting place for the first gathering of the nations in order to create the constitution of the United Nations. This happened during the days that the MRA team was in San Francisco.
Arthur had applied to the Norwegian and British embassies in Washington to be their press photographers during the whole League of Nations Inaugural Assembly of the United Nations. As it turned out Arthur was the only representative for the British Press and Signe the only representative for the Norwegian Press.
There were altogether 80 photographers there and Signe was one of 3 women. One woman dressed and acted like a man – and was easily absorbed within the crowd of male photographers – which was of itself quite unusual in those days. The other 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. Signe found this very amusing!
There were several attempts made 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 she 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 Signe 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 enormous complicated press cameras. Signe had a slightly smaller version because she couldn’t lift the heavy version that Arthur had.
Senator Harry Truman came to see a play put on in Philadelphia called The Forgotten Factor. It was May 8th which happened to be his birthday and a birthday cake was made for him. He had come to see this play which had been written by Alan Thornhill in Tahoe. 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.
At this time the Soviet were allied with Nazi Germany, and all those with pro-Soviet leanings in America were doing their best to slow down the production of war equipment. Gary Cotton was union boss at Boeing in the Pacific Northwest, where they made the Flying Fortress bombers. This is what he said, ‘In my work as President of the Boeing union and earlier, I have been greatly helped by the co-operation of the MRA workers. Their help has been especially valuable since it has not always been easy to get constructive labour policies put through on account of the undermining effect of un-American forces.’The Soviet was allied with Nazi Germany so, people with pro-Soviet leanings in America were doing their best to slow down the production of Flying Fortress bombers and other war equipment.
Gary Cotton goes on in this way, ‘2 years ago when these forces got control of our union we had a tremendous battle to deal with them. It reached such a point that our international president, Mr. Brown, had to fly here to expel them. What we still face from these influences convinces me that we need a program that will arm our rank and file against their destructive efforts, and from my 3 years experiences of the MRA workers I believe they supply this armour. These men possess tremendous qualities of tenacity and fight. They help a fellow to see where he needs to pep up and at the same time make him like it. I speak from experience, knowing some of these 28 men. I have had them in my home with me. It means a lot to a fellow who has to make decisions involving thousands of men to have help from a straight-shooting crowd like this. They bring a new element into industry to speed up victory. For these men possess the rare ability to bring about a change in cantankerous human nature which releases and steps up productive power.’
Meanwhile 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 asked 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 were shocked to experience the extent of these measures in all areas of life and 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.
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