AWAKENING DEMOCRACIES

Buchman's conviction that war in Europe was imminent had shown itself in his insistence, in December 1935, that a 'war clause' be written into the contract with the Oxford colleges for the next summer's house-party. In May 1936 he called an Assembly in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, entitled 'America Awake', to which five thousand people came. It proved nationwide news. The New York Times special correspondent wrote a column a day for almost two weeks,13 movie companies estimated that their newsreels reached 40 million people, and the CBS broadcast a delegate's speech from coast to coast.

Immediately after this, on 19 May, Buchman was summoned to Reading, Pennsylvania, for a personally painful occasion. He was arraigned there before the regional Synod of the Lutheran Church for not having attended a sufficient number of the periodic meetings of his local Ministerium. Having often been abroad at the time of the annual meetings, which he was by statute required to attend, he had always been meticulous in writing an apology for his absence and an account of his activities, not erring on the side of understatement. This may have aggravated, rather than mollified, his principal accuser, Dr Ernst P. Pfatteicher, the President of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States. He had previously attacked Buchman in a lecture entitled 'The Man from Oxford' for, amongst other things, travelling the world instead of serving in a Pennsylvanian parish.14

Buchman addressing BIF mass demonstration, 1938

Pfatteicher was opposed by Dr Paul Strodach, editor of the United Lutheran Publication House. The matter was referred back for re-study - and forgotten. Buchman did not himself speak and, as he had had to leave immediately after his indictment, did not know for some days that several ministers had spoken for him. 'Your silence was your best defence if any were needed,' wrote the Revd Edward Horn; 'the unhappy and disgraceful procedure was checked,' added C. P. Harry, from the Lutheran Church Board of Education.15 Buchman had been all the more hurt by this occasion because he was 'put up before the whole conference' alongside a minister accused of committing adultery, a very serious charge in such a gathering. It felt to him, he said, like 'a crucifixion'. Next day, however, he took his European visitors to address Senators and Congressmen on Capitol Hill and also to meet Cordell Hull.

That year Buchman addressed delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The editor of an Ohio newspaper wrote, 'Whether Democrats or Republicans win the election, Buchman came to Cleveland to say, the result will be about equally bad unless his candidate commands. Buchman's candidate for ruler of America is God ... He doesn't plan to have God rule according to instructions from below. He would have men rule under instructions from God as definitely given and understood as if they came by wire.'16

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