Moral Re-Armament

Topic: Religious Folk Music Revival
Up with People made its first national appearance in the summer of 1966 in a film shown by NBC television. [1] It was financed by a southern California businessman who contributed to anti-communism organizations. [2] The program set the group’s image as the youthful alternative to protestors preferred by the more conservative corporations who financed its tours. [3]

It then was part of Moral Re-Armament. The organization’s founder, Frank Buchman, was associated attempting to defuse conflicts between nations with efforts to change the attitudes of leaders.

Buchman was raised as a Lutheran [4] in a Schwenkfelder community in eastern Pennsylvania before 1900. [5] He spent much of World War I in Asia with YMCA leaders bent on converting heathen. [6] He accepted its goals as worthy, but thought its methods of mass crusades ineffective. [7] Buchman concluded he should concentrate on leaders and future leaders who could influence others, and it was best to work in small groups.

He made his first experiments at Hartford Seminary and Princeton University. He taught men to set aside an hour in the morning to allow the Holy Spirit to speak to them. He then suggested they form small groups with whom they could share their failings and revelations. Many of the confessions dealt with sexual desires, and at least some students complained that Buchman was too inquisitive. Both schools asked him to leave their campuses. [8] Time magazine made it a cause célèbre in 1926. [9]

Buchman and some of his followers moved to England where they began working with students. As members of the Oxford Group aged, they began holding weekend meetings for middle-class adults who learned to confess their failings and build strength from groups. [10]

The emphasis of the group meetings began changing in the 1930s, when the economy was poor and men like Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini were taking power. Individuals were more concerned with what they could do to avert disaster than with moral failings. [11]

Buchman was impressed with Hitler’s success in changing the attitudes of the German people from ones of despair to ones of optimism. In 1936, he began utilizing some of their techniques to attract people to rallies, where later the interested could be channeled into small groups. This was when he first began using music. [12]

His associates quickly mastered the emerging tools of mass persuasion. In 1938, they made a film with their new name, Moral Re-Armament. [13] The next year, they rented the Hollywood Bowl for a rally that featured patriotic songs and speeches. [14] Instead of ethnic purity, they advocated moral purity.

Buchman was in the United States when war broke out. [15] In 1940, he called his supporters to Lake Tahoe to develop a new program. During the weeks of living together in summer camp conditions, they produced a new play, The Forgotten Factor, to urge labor and management to cooperate in plants producing war materials. [16]

They also created a musical revue that included skits and songs. Buchman recruited corporate sponsors to take You Can Defend America on the road. MRA produced booklets for public schools to use to supplement the message of the show when it appeared in their area. [17]

After the war, MRA redefined itself as a vocal critic of Communism. Buchman had had a stroke in 1942, [18] and spent most of the year in Los Angeles. [19] Each summer the group held training conferences at Mackinac Island in the summer, where they built an auditorium in 1955. [20] When Russell Kirk visited the island that year, he noted many at the meeting were from Africa, that music was used throughout the evenings to diffuse tensions, and that the 87-year-old Buchman appeared to be senile. [21]

Buchman died in 1961. He left a moribund organization.

End Notes
1. "Up with People." 30 August 1966. Archival Television Audio website.

2. "3 CBS-owned TV’s Refuse Schick Show." Broadcasting. 4 July 1966. 38. Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., introduced leak-proof Paper-Mate pens and stainless-steal Schick razor blades. He built a factory in Cuba for the latter that was nationalized by Castro. After that he became vehemently anti-communist. [22]

3. One of the first supporters was the owner of Reader’s Digest, DeWitt Wallace. [23] Others included "Sears, General Motors, Toyota, and Coca-Cola." [24]

4. Buchman’s father’s family came from Saint Gallen, [25] a Protestant area of Switzerland that saw religious wars from the Reformation through Napoléon. [26] His mother’s family may have fled Protestant persecutions in the Palatinate in the early 1700s. Belden said Sarah Greenwalt came from the Kistler Valley. [27] Histories of the valley indicate the immigrant Kistler was born in the Palatinate, and that many others had moved into the area. Some "had left the Lutheran church and had connected themselves with the Moravians from Bethlehem. Many of the German people who lived there were poor and destitute." [28] The name also was spelled Greenwald, Greenawald, and Greenawalt.

5. David C. Belden. "The Origins and Development of the Oxford Group (Moral Re-Armament)." D. Phil Thesis. St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University, January 1976. 76–77, 86–87. Caspar Schwenkfeld formulated his own religious beliefs outside the influence of John Calvin, Martin Luther, and what became the Anglo-Scots reformation. Rather than focusing on Christ, the Silesian emphasized individuals’ relationships with the Holy Spirit and the changes they wrought in them. [29] It was part of the same general theological tradition as the Anabaptists in New Bern and Pamlico County, North Carolina. [30]

6. Belden. 134.
7. Belden. 135–136.

8. Belden. 164, on Hartford; 177–178 on Princeton. Also, "Moral Re-Armament." Encyclopædia Britannica website. Last updated by Gloria Lotha. 20 September 2019.

9. Belden. 177.

10. Belden. 238–256. Belden noted some similarities between Buchman’s house parties and encounter groups. [31] Some of these methods were adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. [32]

11. Belden. 246–247.
12. Belden. 266–268.
13. Belden. 350.

14. Daniel Sack. Moral Re-Armament: The Reinventions of an American Religious Movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1.

15. Morris Martin. Always a Little Further. Tucson: Elm Street Press, 2001. 94.

16. Belden. 361.
17. Sack. 122–125.
18. Sack. 117.

19. Sack. 131. The Los Angeles center opened in 1948. Buchman moved to Tucson in 1958. [33]

20. "Mission Point Began as Conference Center and College." Mackinac Parks website. 24 April 2015.

21. Russell Kirk. "Right Reason Does Not Pay." Modern Age 26:228-234:Summer/Fall 1982. Republished by the Imaginative Conservative website. 25 February 2018.

22. Edward Helmore. "Patrick J. Frawley Jnr." The [London] Independent website. 24 November 1998.

23. Mary Levy Peachin. "1960s Era Led to Founding of Up With People." Inside Tucson Business website.

24. Frank McGee. A Song for the World. Santa Barbara, California: Many Roads Publishing, 2007. 129.

25. Belden. 76.
26. Wikipedia. "St. Gallen" and "Toggenburg War"
27. Belden. 77.

28. Records of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg quoted by Judith "Judi" Elaine (McKee) Burns. "Johannes George Kistler." Geni website. 31 December 2018.

29. Wikipedia. "Schwenkfelder Church."

30. See post for 19 January 2020 on religious traditions of Minnie Lee. Anabaptist will be discussed in a future post.

31. Belden. 241.
32. Sack. 81–84.
33. Sack. 167.