'AMERICA HAS NO SENSE OF DANGER'

Fifteen thousand people were turned away after 30,000 had packed the arena. The setting was dramatic, with four great fingers of light, to represent the four moral standards, piercing the velvet sky behind the Bowl. 'A preview of a new world' was Buchman's theme. The Los Angeles Times reported: 'They came in limousines. They arrived in jalopies that barely chugged along the traffic-jammed roads leading to the Hollywood Bowl. They came afoot, in wheel-chairs, in buses, taxicabs. One and all, they came marvelling. The Bowl rally brought together all the strength of the vast movement - leaders from Burma, London, East Africa, Australia, China and Japan - and showed 30,000 persons how it might work.'4Half-way through the meeting twenty burly press and camera men elbowed their way on to the already crowded press seats because William Randolph Hearst, reading of the crowds on his teletype at San Simeon, had seen that his papers were missing a big story.

Louis B. Mayer, who had the week before given a luncheon for Buchman, sent up a note asking if he could speak on behalf of the film industry. A school teacher from a small town in Nebraska, who had never before addressed an audience larger than the pupils in her one-room schoolhouse, described how a new spirit had taken hold of her hard-hit area and how honesty about farm relief cheques had created a new atmosphere in the community. Her story was made the basis for the film Meet John Doe,with Gary Cooper.

MRA mass meeting, Hollywood Bowl, California

At the end of the rally Buchman announced the next stage of his strategy - a mobilisation, over the days of 1, 2 and 3 December, of one hundred million people listening' - prepared to face personal, national and international issues in the light of God's will for the world. He envisaged speakers from different countries linked by a world-wide radio network. The suggestion first came from 'Manny' Straus, the public relations man from Macy's Departmental Stores, who said, 'Everyone has some MRA in them, even if it is only one per cent. The thing is to increase the per cent.'

But when December came, Europe was at war. The Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 took Buchman by surprise. 'The Communists are the strategists!' he exclaimed. 'Look at France. The serpent of Communism has coiled so long in her breast, and the Communists have turned the tables by shaking hands with Hitler. Where is France's future now?'* Just before war actually broke out, he voiced his distress. 'War means the suicide of nations. Everybody loses. There is no such thing as the winner of a war. As for Hitler - if he starts it, he will repent at leisure.'

(* Nikolai Tolstoy writes in Stalin’s Secret War (Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 114): ‘Astonishing as it may seem, the French Communist Party's anti-patriotic campaign was directed by Hitler himself...French Communists' support for Stalin's ally played a significant and perhaps crucial role in the destruction of the French will to resist.' Anthony Cave Brown and Charles Macdonald, in The Communist International and the Coming of World War II (Putnam, 1981, pp. 528-9 and 536), state that Comintern propaganda was one of a number of factors which reduced the French Army by the spring of 1940 to 'a nerveless, soulless body, a castle made out of cards'. They write that this was particularly true of the 9th Army, drawn mainly from the 'Red Belt' of Paris, and that this army was placed in an apparently non-crucial sector of the front line, precisely where the German panzer divisions chose to make their major attack.)

286

Photo: Four searchlights representing absolute standards of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, illuminate the sky over a packed assembly for MRA in the Hollywood Bowl, California.
©Arthur Strong/MRA Productions