MRA in Hollywood

Into the black sky above the Hollywood Bowl in Hollywood, Calif, four great searchlights stabbed. They stood like steady swords of light--or like the beams thrown up at Germany's annual Nuremberg Party Congresses. But these four rays signalled the four standards of Moral Re-Armament: Absolute Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness, Love. MRA, launched in the East this spring, had been brought to the West Coast by Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman and 1,000 followers, many of whom traveled across the land on a 22-car "MRA Special." In the Hollywood Bowl, the Buchmanites sat on the stage beneath the acoustic shell newly labeled NEW MEN . . . NEW NATIONS . . . A NEW WORLD. To see and hear them, 25,000 Southern Californians jammed the Bowl, 10,000 more were turned away.

Said Frank Buchman: ''Tonight you are going to witness the preview of a new world order." To anyone who had ever attended a Buchmanite meeting, the preview itself was not new, although as usual it featured some new names. M. G. M.'s Louis Burt Mayer spoke up for MRA--as Cinema Tsar Will H. Hays had done at a luncheon given by Mr. Mayer for the Buchmanites. Henry Ford sent a message, publicly endorsing Dr. Buchman and his work by name. Herbert Hoover furnished some words about the world's troubles, which headline writers construed as praise for MRA; thereupon Mr. Hoover let it be known that he neither endorsed MRA nor denied endorsing it. Read again was the message President Roosevelt sent a recent MRA meeting in Washington. Thirty-three U. S. Governors let their names be used as subscribing to a statement that "Moral Re-Armament is our most urgent need."

Among the Buchmanite testifiers who told the Bowl meeting how MRA had helped them were two whose appearance was, to the Los Angeles Evening News, "almost painfully exquisite." They were a Chinese girl, a Japanese man who, after speaking their pieces, shook hands, stood silently smiling. The Bowl audience, predominantly middleclass, was equally pleased when Charles Copperman, boss of the Imperial Valley Teamsters' Union (A. F. of L.), vowed his friendship for G. G. Bennett, president of the Imperial Valley branch of the reactionary Associated Farmers.

Aside from the Teamsters' Union, California labor was not represented at the meeting. C. I. O. leaders believe that Mr. Copperman's Union, once aggressive, was taken into camp by MRA. And Californians recall how, five years ago, Buchmanites claimed they had "settled" the longshoremen's strike, "the first strike in history in which Christ was called upon to act as arbiter." That strike went on long after Buchmanites had been guided to urge the longshoremen to forget their troubles, go back to work.

From Hollywood, Dr. Buchman journeyed to Del Monte, opened a "World Assembly" for MRA, attended by 2,000 delegates from 25 nations. Said he: "We must possess some superior quality, a quality of living that rises above resentment, jealousy, greed and points of view, because all these may keep us from a maximum message. . . . We need the same characteristics that distinguish a great general--the plus of character, the plus that will change the world."

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