AWAKENING DEMOCRACIES

From Philadelphia, where the Democrats were gathered, he broadcast nationally, speaking of the vast effort it would take for the democracies to match the march of the dictators: 'Few people today seem to have any definite plans or any idea of what the cost will be for moral and spiritual recovery. They don't seem to have thought through the united disciplined action under God's control necessary to bring it about... This is the true patriotism, for the true patriot gives his life for his country's resurrection.'17

Buchman returned to Britain in late June 1936. It was the Britain to which Baldwin neither at first cared, nor later dared, to tell the truth about Hitler's Germany, a Britain missing the chance to rearm because it was more comfortable to refuse even to envisage a threat to itself.

Buchman was striving to awaken Britain to what he felt to be at base a moral and spiritual need. Oxford had, the previous year, shown itself too small any longer to accommodate the annual house-party. So in 1936 simultaneous house-parties were staged during July in Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter and Harrogate, as well as camps for young women on Hinksey Hill outside Oxford and for young men near Birmingham.

Buchman with Rear-Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Ray Purdy

The response in Harrogate was typical enough. According to the Leeds Mercury, the first meeting at the Royal Hall was packed to overflowing with 2,000 people three-quarters of an hour before it was due to start and, when the overflow was directed to the Winter Gardens, its 1,000 seats filled up within ten minutes and another 500 people had to be sent on to the Hydro for a second overflow meeting.18 Dr Maxwell Telling, a distinguished psychiatrist, remarked of the speakers, 'This is the first time I have seen people with absolutely no fear.'

On 7 July speakers from the various house-parties combined to address a crowded meeting in the Albert Hall, and at the end of the month a three-day demonstration took place at the British Industries Fair building at Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, then said to be the largest covered hall in Europe. To this gathering 21 special trains brought audiences totalling 25,000 from all parts of Britain.

On 9 August Buchman made a coast-to-coast broadcast to America from London, before making visits of a week to Germany and a month to America. To America, he took thirty with him, and it was on his arrival in New York that he gave the interview to the New York World-Telegram. While there he took a party to spend a weekend with Henry Ford, where for the first time he met Rear-Admiral Richard E. Byrd, recently returned from a winter alone in the Antarctic.

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