Over the Labor Day weekend in early September, this year and in 1943, the Mackinac training centre was visited by labour and management from many parts of America. One of the labour leaders was William Schaffer from the Cramp Shipbuilding Company in Philadelphia, where You Can Defend America had been shown the previous year. He was twenty-nine and his wife, 'Dynamite', and he had already agreed upon a divorce, which meant separation from his two daughters. He met Buchman. 'My first impression was, "What's this bird want from me?" Much to my amazement, I found he wanted nothing. In his own quiet way, without saying much about it, he gave me a great sense of feeling that there was something wrong within myself.'29 Schaffer left Mackinac after four days, thinking furiously. He had been amazed to find Henry Sanger, Ford's banker, sweeping out the porch in his shirt-sleeves; and on his homeward journey he discovered that a former President of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, George Eastman, whom he had regarded with deep suspicion at the conference simply because of the position he held, had sat up in the train all night so that he could have a sleeping berth. 'I knew then, whatever anyone might say, that this was the greatest revolution in existence,' said Schaffer.30 Latter, when The Forgotten Factor wasshown at his shipyard, he realised that Buchman had 'the only answer that was going to save my home, my union and the Cramp Shipbuilding Company'. In 1958 he wrote 'the Schaffer family will always be grateful'.31

Denis Foss, a young British Merchant Navy officer who had been torpedoed twice in twenty-four hours and was now resting between voyages, visited Mackinac that year and noted the beginning of change in another union leader: 'There were maybe a hundred children there with their parents. Just as the Sunday session was starting, Buchman moved from the back of the barn-theatre on to the platform. He sat down and waited for everyone to settle. A little girl walked up and climbed on his knee. Buchman asked her if she wanted to tell the crowded meeting anything. "No," she said, "I just want to be with you." Almost immediately two other children were on the platform, and then the grown-ups discreetly withdrew as twenty others followed. "Well, children," said Buchman. "This is a working session. What are we going to say to these people?" One by one some of the children told us what they had been learning at Mackinac. In front of me sat a man called Nick Dragon with his wife. He was Regional Director of the United Automobile Workers - CIO in Detroit. I noticed that he had tears slowly coursing down his cheeks and heard him say to his wife, "Here I am trying to control thousands of workers and I can't control my own children. Look at them with Buchman. What has he got that we haven't?"’

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