Scope and Content Note
The records of Moral Re-armament (MRA) span the years 1812-1991, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1873-1966. The collection is organized into into six series: the papers of Moral Re-armament's founder and leader, Frank Buchman , covering the years 1873-1966; the papers of its long-time organizational director, Ray Foote Purdy , 1812-1974; the records of the Moral Re-armament organization, beginning when it was the Oxford Group in 1923 and ending in 1977; the papers of Kenaston Twitchell , one of its founders and directors, 1924-1991; and the papers of Jarvis Harriman , registrar for the Conference for Tomorrow's America; and Oversize .
Moral Re-armament was officially launched at the East Ham Town Hall in London, England, in 1938 and brought to the United States a year later. Founded as a worldwide movement for spiritual and moral reawakening, its leader was Frank Buchman, a Pennsylvania-born Lutheran minister who worked in a Philadelphia settlement house and engaged in foreign missionary work for the YMCA before forming the First Century Christian Fellowship and the Oxford Group in the early 1920s. While a resident at Oxford, England, after World War I, Buchman practiced the conversion techniques within a confessional group setting that became the distinctive feature of his fellowship's houseparties for the next two decades. Disavowing any formal creed or denominational status, Buchman in the early period of his work appealed mostly to well-educated students in America's eastern universities and to the royalty and upper class of England and Europe. At the core of his teachings were the four absolutes he had discerned from the Gospels, absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute love, and absolute unselfishness.
Buchman's papers in the records of Moral Re-armament cover almost all aspects of his public and private life, but are especially informative for the years after his college education in the 1890s and the period during the late 1930s when the Oxford Group became the MRA. Material relating to the Buchman family includes letters from Frank Buchman to his mother, to his brother Daniel, and to other relatives and friends. The general correspondence file in the Buchman Papers, 1899-1961, traces the interrelationships of his followers and reflects the inner life of the people to whom Buchman's philosophy appealed. Letters and statements from members of prominent English and American families reveal their affiliation with the Oxford Group, with the MRA, and with Alcoholics Anonymous, an offshoot organization that Buchman has also been credited with helping create.
Buchman's personal and organizational development indicates the transition from the Protestant pietism of his Pennsylvania-German roots, with its ties to both late-nineteenth-century evangelism and the social gospel movement, to the group psychology approach that he used while a teacher and counselor in the 1920s and 1930s. Buchman's work at Luther Hospice in Philadelphia, his YMCA activities at Pennsylvania State College from 1909 to 1915, and his travels on behalf of the YMCA in China and throughout Asia during World War I are fully represented in his papers. Also evident is his movement away from these established institutions toward a more personal and independent character. The establishment of Moral Re-armament in 1938 signified an ecumenical approach that attempted to draw in Buddhists as well as Protestants, Hindus as well as Catholics. These changes are documented in Buchman's correspondence and in his subject files for the years 1938-1961.
Buchman's efforts to prevent World War II and his anticommunism caused critics to associate MRA with appeasement and fascism. Opponents in both America and England charged Buchman with favoring Adolph Hitler, with being part of the Clivedon set of prominent Englishmen associated with appeasement of Germany before World War II, and with seeking to obtain unfair exemption from military service for his followers. Information regarding these attacks and the MRA's response can be found in correspondence and subject files throughout the collection. Biographical data on Buchman collected by his friend and associate Morris Martin located in the subject file includes copies of important MRA documents and two drafts of a projected full length biography, both of which are amplified by research notes in the miscellany files of the Buchman Papers series.
After the outbreak of World War II and a stroke suffered by Buchman in 1942, Moral Re-armament became less definably religious and more intent on promoting national morale and unifying the American defense effort. Records concerning the group's wartime programs, including public relations campaigns such as "You Can Defend America" and "Battle for Britain," appear in the subject files of the MRA portion of the papers. Also in this series are labor files and material relating to the incorporation of MRA as a legal and fiscal entity. Records pertaining to MRA's involvement with labor include private and official files of various individuals and offices in the movement. Although the files cover Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries in which the MRA had volunteers, they mainly feature events and people in the United States.
Moral Re-armament cultivated and attracted the support of political luminaries such as Arthur Capper, John J. Pershing, H. Alexander Smith, Harry S. Truman, William Wadsworth, and Alexander Wiley. Correspondence and related materials pertaining to these individuals are located in the subject files and general correspondence of all three series in the collection. Among the primary features of the MRA records are files treating the organization's post-World War II attempt to imbue the noncommunist world with an ideological counterpart to Soviet and Chinese communism. Centered initially in Europe and Japan, this effort was later expanded to newly emerging nations in Africa and the developing countries of Asia and South America. Material on South Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Congo during the Cold War-era can be found in subject files throughout the collection.
The papers of Ray Foote Purdy in the collection derive from his life and work with MRA. Purdy was a Princeton-educated businessman who gave up his career to resume his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, where an encounter with Buchman led to a lifelong commitment to the principles of Moral Re-armament. Consisting of family papers , general and special correspondence , subject files , financial records , and miscellaneous printed matter , the files encompass Purdy's career as well as the work of his wife, Elsa Toennies Purdy, an MRA coworker, and the activities of his son, Ray Foote Purdy, Jr., and brother, Frederick H. Purdy. This portion of the collection also includes Purdy family documents from the early nineteenth century and personal and educational material preceding Purdy's role in the Moral Re-armament.
The general correspondence in the Purdy Papers illuminates the psychology, social climate, and personal interactions of the members and followers who determined MRA's policies. The subject file includes a report of an interview with Carl G. Jung and an on-the-spot analysis of a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, Germany, by an Oxford Group member who relayed his impressions to other followers in England. Also in the Purdy files is material concerning houseparties and public relations strategies and a controversy at Princeton University in 1925 that, because of student criticism of Buchman's teachings, resulted in Purdy's resignation as general secretary of the Philadelphian Society, the campus equivalent of the YMCA.
The organizational portion of the records of Moral Re-armament consist largely of subject files , play scripts , film scripts , and scrapbooks . Other records include a broadcast production file of radio and television scripts and a conference and convention file containing transcripts and printed matter from MRA world assemblies at Caux, Switzerland, MacKinac Island, Michigan, and other meeting sites between 1938 and 1961.
Among the correspondents in the records of Moral Re-armament are Konrad Adenauer, Chiang Kai-shek, May-ling Soong Chiang, Mina Miller Edison, Clara Bryant Ford, Prince Richard of Hesse, Queen Marie of Romania (Marie, Queen, consort of Ferdinand I, King of Romania), the royal family of Greece, Robert Schuman, U Thant, and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. Others include Richard Evelyn Byrd, Arthur Capper, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Hermann Hagedorn, Ramon Magsaysay, Gabriel Marcel, John Raleigh Mott, Ngo Dinh Diem, H. Alexander Smith, Harry S. Truman, and Alexander Wiley. Correspondence of Oxford Group members and followers of MRA includes Howard Carson Blake, Douglas Cornell, Sherwood E. Day, Albert H. Ely, Rajmohan Gandhi, Charles Henry Haines, William Cleveland Hicks, Bremer Hofmeyr, Peter Howard, Ivan Menzies, John Riffe, John McCook Roots, Samuel Moor Shoemaker, Margaret T. Tjader, and George West.
Papers of Kenaston Twitchell span much of the life of MRA. Twitchell was a Princeton University contemporary of Purdy's and a founder of the Oxford Group in England. His involvement began as early as 1929, when he visited South Africa with the Oxford Group, and continued until his retirement in 1973. In 1947 he was instrumental in gathering Germany's postwar leaders at a meeting in Caux, Switzerland, to help end the conflict between Germany and France and establish a permanent peace. In 1950 in Japan he played a role in bringing the mayors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Yasushiro Nakasone, later prime minister, to a successful MRA meeting in that country. Twitchell's papers, organized as a chronological file encompassing correspondence, reports, and printed matter, include detailed accounts of these and other MRA events in many countries. Also included is a media press kit released by MRA in 1991 related to events commemorating Frank Buchman in eastern Pennsylvania.
Papers of Jarvis Harriman span the years 1964-1965 and contain material on a youth conference at Mackinac Island, Michigan, in 1964, Sing Out '65, and assemblies at various schools throughout the Midwest, especially in Michigan.