The Saga of Frank Buchman

I never saw the flaccid-cherubic face of Frank Buchman except in photographs. Yet although I was not to meet the father of Moral Rearmament, I did cross paths with his movement when it was still in its back woods stage and known as Buchmanism. Frank started out from some YMCA in the slashes of Pennsylvania; and his original pitch, that somehow seems reflected in the very name Buchmanism, came from a series of books written by Mencken’s Sunday School teacher—What a Young Boy Ought to Know, What a. Young Man Ought to Know, etc. According to these tracts for the times, any manifestation of premarital sexual activity— “onanism” was the favored word—resulted in debility, ostracism, insanity and finally death. The Buchmanites at first traded on the sex guilt of adolescents in much the same way with their slogan of “absolute purity.” They also practiced somewhat exhibitionistic group confessions. So unsavory were their beginnings that in the twenties they were driven from the Princeton campus.

It was in my last year at Roxbury Latin that Fred Hurd—who had been five Roxbury classes ahead of me— invited me to a Buchmanite meeting at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. Fred had graduated from Dartmouth in 1926, and then in fever of post-adolescent piety had enrolled at ETS. Later, however, when the fever subsided, he transferred to the Harvard Business School.

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Francis Russell

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I never saw the flaccid-cherubic face of Frank Buchman except in photographs. Yet although I was not to meet the father of Moral Rearmament, I did cross paths with his movement when it was still in its back woods stage and known as Buchmanism. Frank started out from some YMCA in the slashes of Pennsylvania; and his original pitch, that somehow seems reflected in the very name Buchmanism, came from a series of books written by Mencken’s Sunday School teacher—What a Young Boy Ought to Know, What a. Young Man Ought to Know, etc. According to these tracts for the times, any manifestation of premarital sexual activity— “onanism” was the favored word—resulted in debility, ostracism, insanity and finally death. The Buchmanites at first traded on the sex guilt of adolescents in much the same way with their slogan of “absolute purity.” They also practiced somewhat exhibitionistic group confessions. So unsavory were their beginnings that in the twenties they were driven from the Princeton campus.

It was in my last year at Roxbury Latin that Fred Hurd—who had been five Roxbury classes ahead of me— invited me to a Buchmanite meeting at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge. Fred had graduated from Dartmouth in 1926, and then in fever of post-adolescent piety had enrolled at ETS. Later, however, when the fever subsided, he transferred to the Harvard Business School.