Buchman was, as his name suggested, Frank. Since that time in Keswick, when he had found freedom and purpose in his life, Buchman shared his experience tirelessly. He knew that he could never change others, but he could put right what was wrong in his own life and longed for everyone he met to gain that same feeling of release and newness in life. 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! It often brought out the best in people and he burned to share the joy and freedom that he had experienced. He believed that reconcilliation between nations could be built by reconcilliation between people.
One day in 1921 when cycling in Cambridge, Buchman had had an amazing thought that was so distinct 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 and added 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 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 that time. He initially called this practice First Century Christian Fellowship and the core structure was:
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 your life; Taking steps in change to put right what one could; Sharing these steps of personal change with others and effectively passing it on. This personal experience was basic. He used to talk about ”Driving my sins like a team of horses!”
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 visit 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 contemplated 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 traveled 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 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. Frank and Sam went back a long way and 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 this 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 ’kids’ worked as photographers with 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 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.
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. They were deeply 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 batte 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. 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 losing his position if he supported Britain openly but he had a close relationship with Churchill and after the attack at 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 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. Norway finally capitulated to Germany on June 10th.
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. 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. 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 was devastated. That experience brought a feeling of certainty to me that there is a pattern and a plan.”
Looking back she realised: ”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 I 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 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.”
In June of 1940 when Britain was isolated and the future was uncertain, Buchman felt the need to prepare his task-force further. He was lent a chalet by Globin a hotel owner in Tahoe, 6,000 feet up on the borders of the California/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 them 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. 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 and they soon grew to over 100 people.
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 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 there. 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 vegetables and fruit! We were over 300 miles from San Francisco and I didn’t know the first thing about how to provide vegetables and fruit for 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 so that the vegetables stayed fresh. They would arrive at Tahoe at 4 in the morning and Arthur sounded the horn to get people out of bed to unload all the food into the chalet where they used ice in the 5 bars to keep it cool. Then they sorted and graded the fruit and vegetables carefully so they had enough to last for 2 weeks. And then Arthur 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 – came and stayed 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 as well as 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 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! The couple who were buried there had brought that bed with them all the way from Germany. When they died it was put on their grave!
Buchman got to know about two brothers in the area. John liked silver on his saddles and stirrups and he liked drinking. His brother was a simple farmer and solid citizen. And the brothers and their famillies had a feud over water which split the valley. Water is a treasured possession in those parts as if you don’t have water, you don’t farm. Frank 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 and Globin went and shot duck for a dinner where both brothers and their families were invited. So, they came up from Nevada, up into the heights of Tahoe, and came to this dinner.
”We sang some of the songs of 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.”
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. They started creating songs and skits out of things they were learning together. For instance learning to use all of everything was the motto at Tahoe and this led to a song about ‘No waste in the icebox, the cashbox or the brainbox’. ‘Use all of everything’ was a theme that went right through the revue because America had so much of everything that it was so easy for people to waste.
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.
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!
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 We 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 the 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 of two station wagons and about 20 cars. 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 but I could never understand why the last car always had to do about 60mph to keep up! I never could make it out but 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. So 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 earth 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.”
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. 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 the booklet You Can Defend America that Signe and Arthur and their team had 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 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.
Speaking from the stage to big public audiences was a strange concept to Signe who originally thought the idea of perfoming was not a good one! During this time 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 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.”
Travelling on the road wasn’t always easy! Signe 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!”
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 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 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.
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. 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 Calvary Church he 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. 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 request from the vestry at Calvary Church asking them to leave, ”I will always remain Sam’s friend. Now we go on the road.”
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.
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