Wake Up Or Blow Up America Lift The World Of Lose It

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Blow,

Books by C LAUBACH

Wake Up or^Blow Up
Streamlined English Lessons
Making Everybody's World Safe
Prayer, The Mightiest Force in th*> W>::

The Silent Billion Speak
You Are My Friends

AMERICA,
Lift the World or Lose It!

by
FRANK C. LAUBACH

New York

FLEMING H REVELL COMPANY
London and Glasgow

Copyright, 1951, by
Fleming H. Revell Company

Printed in the United States of America

New York 10-158 Fifth Avenue
London, E.G. 4-29 Ludgate Hill
Glasgow, C. 2-229 Bothwell Street

Contents
This Book in Brief 7

CHAPTER PAGE

1. You CAN'T WIN A COLD WAR WITH

HOT WEAPONS 15

2. THE WORLD'S 'HUNGRY 28

3. MISSIONS RETREATED AND THE

COMMUNISTS WALKED IN 37

4. THE GREATEST BREAK-THROUGH IN

HISTORY 48

5. How MY EYES WERE OPENED BY THE

MOROS - 54

6. I REMEMBER! 60

7. How GOVERNMENTS WELCOME Us 69

8. LITERACY MAKES HUNGRY' MINDS 77

9. How FOREIGN MISSIONS PLAN FOB

LITERACY AND LITERATURE 86

10. IT PAYS To BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR 95

5

6 CONTENTS

11. TECHNICAL AID 101

12. WHAT COULD BE DONE 112

13. WANTED, MORE LANDOWNERS 122

14. How THE CHURCH CAN HELP 135

15. IT MUST BE CHRISTIAN CHABACTEK 145

16. PRAYER FOB THE UNITED NATIONS . '. 151

17. POSTSCRIPT 157

This Book in Brief

A third world war can end in any horror, perhaps
even the destruction of the United States. We can
prevent that war.

Communism has been winning a cold war since
1920.

We can prevent Communism from taking the rest
of the world.

We can do these things the moment we see how
and begin to do them.

Bombs and jet planes cannot win cold wars.

The bottom four-fifths of the world are going Com-
munist because they are hungry, terribly unhappy,
and grimly determined to rise out of their destitu-
tion.

We can stop Communism cold by lifting those
wretched people above their misery and desperation.
We can do it by shariiig our know-how. They love us
when we help them; they hate us when we don't.

They are not satisfied with old clothes, surplus
food, loans of money. They want to rise to our level.
They will settle for nothing less.

They lack progressive methods, and will follow
anyone who promises to help them rise.

8 THIS BOOK IN BRIEF

The Communists, out to capture the world, studied
these desires and promised everything.

Our error is that we gave these masses few
promises, after Woodrow Wilson first promised and
then cracked up; since then little hope has been of-
fered them, and our deeds have been totally inade-
quate to the vast need.

Where we did help, the results were miraculous.
The few technical experts we sent abroad have had
tremendous success.

One missionary in every three helps with education
and medicine, and a handful of missionaries help
with agriculture. Everybody loves them, and treats
them like kings. Missionaries clamor for America to
contribute this aid on a world scale.

I have worked with missionaries in adult educa-
tion in sixty-eight countries.

I have worked with the educational departments
of fifty governments.

I have mingled with the illiterate three-fifths of the
human race, taught them, listened to their pleas, seen
their eagerness to learn, their boundless gratitude
for a chance to learn, the pathetic way they follow
any leader who loves them.

Where we go with literacy, or medicine, or agricul-
ture, they throng to us, love us, follow us, want our
religion.

They are as easy to win, if we are there to do it, as
a hungry man is to feed.

We could make Christians out of one billion two
hundred million illiterate non-Christians if we

THIS BOOK IN BBIEF 9

taught them, helped them better their conditions,
and so revealed to them the love of Christ

No country which I have visited prevents us from
carrying out our program of "each one teach and win
one." Fifty countries invite us to help them.

But there is less than one missionary, Catholic or
Protestant, with technical training of any kind, for
every 100,000 illiterate non-Christians. Not one
missionary trained to write for new literates in two
millions! Not one trained in agriculture for every
twelve illiterates!

The United Nations and the United States have
adopted a plan to help needy areas with technical
aid.

Governments, business, philanthropy, and the
Church should unite in an all-out, nation-wide,
world-wide attack on world poverty, disease, and op-
pression by helping people to help themselves.

We could conquer the world's heart by serving it,
as Jesus said we should. But in this all-out attack of
help, the Church has a very basic responsibility. It
must find the right kind of men.

The technicians will fail unless they have the type
of character that the Church at its best produces:
men with high honor, good habits, integrity, warm
heart, Christlike compassionate desire to help dem-
ocratic and congenial men who are "color blind,"
loving, and beloved.

Such men would do as much to raise the ideals
of people as they would to teach skills. They would
be living witnesses for Christ, and living witnesses
for America at her best.

10 THIS BOOK IN BBIEF

With 100,000 such men strategically planted over
the world, our Christian way of life would become
popular, and the counsels o violence, revolution,
hate, murder, robbery, and lies, would dry up and
blow away, because there would be nothing to be vio-
lent about. People don't want to murder anybody
when they are hopeful and happy and grateful. At
least half of those hundred thousand men should be
supported by the churches.

Christian missions ought to send out at least 50,000
highly trained technical experts wherever they are
wanted. This would cost two billion dollars a year.
That money would be available if each church mem-
ber would set aside five per cent of -his income for
this foreign-mission program an average of a dollar
a week per member.

We must also put pressure on all governments to
give every farmer enough land on which to work for
himself. There is no good teaching him how to farm if
he has no land. Land reform can be effected by pur-
chasing the great feudal estates and reselling to ten-
ants, as was done in Northern Ireland, or by co-opera-
tive farming, and by reclaiming hundreds of millions
of acres of now dry and useless land.

The Crusade for Freedom and the Voice of America
will be mockery until we do this. If we talk about the
glory of our freedom, the hungry people, thinking
only of food, will ask: "Do you mean freedom from
want? What are you doing about it? 35

If we start this program on an adequate scale we
shall have the desperate, retarded areas of the world
back of us within two years, and the threat of this

THIS BOOK IN BBIEF 11

hour will melt like fog before the sun. Our experiences
in many countries indicate that it requires from one
to two years to change hatred to love, if we do it this
way.

This is 100 per cent the way of Christ, who said
that anybody in trouble is our neighbor; so help him
and love him.

This is the only way to convert Russia to the way
of Christ.

As surprising world-wide kindness wins the na-
tions, the Communists in Russia will see that violence
and hate die out like a candle against loving service,
and they will change over to our weapons. Then we
shall have a war of kindness to conquer the heart of
the world! Who could ask more?

Is this too good to be true? Not unless we are too
selfish to try it Let's try Christianity! It has never
been tried by the nations.

But time is running out; it will soon be too late. So
be a missionary to everybody you meet; tell him
this is the way out. Start your missionaries moving, or
go yourself. Pay what every Christian ought to pay.
Success depends upon how many do their part ade-
quately.

And pray. Pray for the delegates of the United Na-
tions and write and tell them you are praying for
them.

Thus you will become powerful in two directions
for bringing in the peace.

You have been looking for the answer. You are the
answer, if you do what every Christian ought to do.

12 THIS BOOK IN BRIEF

But refusing to be the answer, or even being satisfied
with half an answer, is asking for disaster.

If we fail because the majority refuse to help, if
we are blown up, we shall be able at least to face the
great Judge and hear Him say:

"Well done, good and faithful servant; . . . enter
thou into the joy of thy lord."

The way to lay up a treasure in heaven is to help
human need. It is the only way that Jesus ever gave
us. What we hold we lose, what we use to help others
is ours forever.

This resume is necessarily bare, unsupported as-
sertion; the proof lies in the pages which follow.

If true, this is enormously urgent. It is too urgent
to be thrown aside without careful study. Too urgent
not to press upon the attention of everybody you
know. It may decide the issue of survival.

You will not like all of this book; some of it will
sting and hurt you. But when you have finished, you
will see a glorious vision, you will know the only
answer to our dilemma, and you will see that answer
within your grasp, for you will be part of the answer.

For here is the way, the only way to save our coun-
try, our world, and our loved ones from being swept
over the brink of unthinkable horror.

So let it hurt! Your pain is part of the birth pangs
of a new world.

If the book lacks polish, so does hot lava. It was
written to try to help save the world, and printed
posthaste. It was written to call America's attention
sharply to the only issue that matters now: whether
America will wake up or blow up!

Blow

CHAPTER 1
You Cant Win a Cold War with Hot Weapons

How to Survive an Atomic Bomb is a best seller on
arly every newsstand. It pretends to allay your
jrs. Death, it assures you, isn't certainonly prob-
le! If you were not blown to smithereens, and if
a were not too near to the bomb, and if you hid
bind something in three seconds, and if you
ubbed everything hard enough, you might be
iky and survive the first bomb. So why worry?

LET'S TRY CHRISTIANITY

But I do worry. My heart and soul and mind bum
save America and the world from being struck by
atom bomb. Especially am I excited because the
.e way to peace and survival is precisely the Way
Christ. This book is a lesson in applied Christianity,
of it, though it may sound too practical and self-
dent for religion. But Jesus was practical and self-
.dent, if only people had been wise enough to try

CQ.

15

16 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

IT HAS BEEN WAK FOR THIRTY YEABS

By now, Americans must see that we have been in
a war for thirty years, a war sometimes hot and some-
times cold, a war of ideas. When the Communists
set out to conquer the world in 1920, they knew it
was war and they fight with every weapon available.
There are no rules, no forbidden holds in their war. If
alliances are useful they make them. If lies are useful
they tell them, if smiles are useful they smile, if talk-
ing one way while acting the other is useful, they do
that. There is just one morality and that is to win.

We Americans did not know we were living in a
world at war. We thought we were living in a world
at peace. If we read Communist Manifestos, we did
not take them seriously. Part of Russian strategy was
to keep us thinking it was not war, for this placed us
at a tremendous disadvantage. We were also plagued
by our Christian ideals, and "conscience doth make
cowards of us all." Communists were not embarrassed
by our code of morals.

There is this strange difference between us: for
thirty years the Communists have known it was war
to the finish, while we did not know there was a war.
That gave the Communists the tremendous initial
advantage.

The Communists are not the first people who set
out to win the world with ideas. The Christian Church
was like that at the beginning. St. Paul went forth to
conquer the world for the gospel of Christ. The rest
of the world ignored the Christians until they were
so strong that they could no longer be ignored. The

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH HOT WEAPONS 17

Church for the most part has lost its first passion- for
conquest. Missionaries alone burned with that early
fervor. They knew it was war. The Roman Catholic
Church knew that the Communists had declared
war. The rest of us thought we were at peace.

The invasion of South Korea at last convinced
everybody that this is indeed war. It is a strange war,
more like a missionary crusade than a military cam-
paign. How shall we win it? In ordinary wars we al-
ways call on the military experts and build up armies
and armaments. We are doing that now, to prevent
Russia from attempting any more hot wars like Korea.
But in this queer struggle which we call a cold war
military experts are puzzled. They know how to kill
soldiers, but in this conflict "we do not war after the
flesh." We are bewildered. We are trying to discover
what weapons to use.

The purpose of this book is to prove that the mis-
sionaries have the answer. We need only wage our
war with the weapons Christ provided, and we shall
win. These weapons are compassionate service, truth,
justice, democratic friendliness. We need have no
iron curtain, no secrecy, no hidden weapon. We may
openly advertise our weapons to the Communists, for
they can neither oppose these weapons nor hate us
for using them.

The Communists are able to make little headway
among prosperous people. It was among the wretch-
edly hungry and discontented that the Communists
saw their opportunity to conquer the world. So with,
great cunning they went among these people, studied
what they wanted, and offered to give them every-

18 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

thing, offered to become their champions against
the oppressors.

They promised to liberate the desperately unhappy
four-fifths of the human race by using the very
method which Jesus Christ rejected, the method of
violence, revolution, murder, and terror.

Jesus Christ began as champion of the oppressed
and the wretched and died on a cross as their saviour.
Compassion for the poor is the very heart of the mis-
sionary's gospel.*

So the missionary and the Communist make prom-
ises to the same unhappy people. But there is a world
of difference between the methods they propose to
use in helping these unhappy multitudes. The mis-
sionaries seek to change the souls of men who are
doing wrong, or at most to stop them by peaceful and
legal means. The Communists propose to liquidate all
who are in power and to clamp iron bars on the minds
of people so that they will fill their stomachs (if they
do fill them) at the expense of personal freedom.

There are two ways to get rid of enemies. The way
of Jesus is to make them friends by befriending them.
(A successful politician and a shrewd businessman
employ this method habitually.) The other way is to
shoot them the way "of gangsters. There are two
ways to get rid of oppressors. One is to persuade
them to stop oppression, or to compel them to stop by
peaceful, legal means (the Christ method). The other
method is to become worse than the oppressor by

* If the reader desires to refresh Ms memory, let Mm read: Luke
4:18, 6:20-25, 11:46, 16:19-31, 18:22, and the terrible Matt.
25:31-46.

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH HOT WEAPONS 19

killing him. The Communists believe that powerful
oppressors cannot be unsaddled by love or law, and
that the realistic way is to form a conspiracy and des-
troy them and the government which they control.

Where we missionaries have tried the way of Christ
it has worked. We know that it will save the world,
if America and the other great powers go all out to
put it into practice.

This way of Christ has not been tried by nations,
although Mahatma Gandhi moved India in that di-
rection while he lived. The country which first em-
ploys Christ's method all out (not selfishly or stingily)
will conquer the heart of the world with love and
there is no other true conquest.

If the Communists adopted the plan described in
this book they would win the world, and in doing
so they would have such a complete rebirth that they
could become Christians in the truest sense of the
word. Perhaps they will be the first to adopt this
method. But I hope and believe that the Western
World is more likely to adopt it, because we profess it
in our Christian religion. We will be unconscious
hypocrites, betraying our religion, until we do try it.

Up to the present hour the missionaries have in
most of Asia and Africa fought nine-tenths of the war
of kindness for the oppressed. They have been hurled
back and are now retreating only because they are
overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Communist
missionaries. America has been making the disastrous
mistake of supposing that this way of winning the
cold war with Communism was ineffectual, and that
only arms and bombs are decisive. While Commu-

20 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

nists have been using every method and winning
most of their battles with promises and propaganda,
we have been depending upon military power.

WHAT MILITARY PREPARATION CAN ANB CANNOT Do

As I write, America is getting geared to spend at
least fifty billions a year for an indefinite period to
excel Russia in military preparation. We hope that
this will deter Russia from initiating a hot war. Per-
haps it will. If Russia desired a hot war, the best
time for her to have begun it was at the beginning of
the Korean invasion. It seems less likely that she
desires a shooting war involving Russian troops than
she did a few months ago.

But none of this military preparation can prevent
Russia from winning the cold war. If we place sol-
diers all over the world, while she infiltrates every
country with missionaries promising to help the peo-
ple, she will capture the heart of the world. Since the
world began, foreign troops were never popular in
any country during peace time. If our soldiers were
popular in peace time they would cease to become
soldiers; they would be missionaries instead.

CAN MILITARY PREPARATIONS SAVE Us?

Hanson Baldwin, writing in The New York Times
about "What Korea Has Taught Us," described all
the new weapons, and then gives this painful com-
ment:

The trend of weapon development has been toward
less security. The plane and the atom bomb, the tre-

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH HOT WEAPONS 21

mendous increases in ranges and speeds and power
have not made any nation on earth more secure but
less so. For the first time in its history the United States,
with a three dimensional defense problem, has live
frontiers, frontiers of the sea and sky, highly vulnerable
to assault . . .

In the air the long term prospects for the defense
overtaking the offense look least bright. . . . Civilian
defense is essentially passive defense, yet it implies
evacuation, dispersion, decentralization and other
measures tremendous in scope and terrible in contem-
plation. The preparation of defense against air attack
today is likely to prove far more costly than the prep-
aration for air attack.

Thus the age-old struggle between offense and de-
fense has come of horrible age; the simple duel be-
tween spear and shield has been transferred into duels
. between complex weapons, systems and whole peoples,
(quoted by permission of The New- York Times).

That gloomy picture well represents the statement
of most military writers. The experts all seem to say
that we can go bankrupt paying for armaments, only
to find less and less security.

The G.I/s in Korea discovered another thing that
we cannot fight armies reckless of life when they out-
number us ten to one, even with the most modern
weapons. Richard Johnson, writing to The New Jork
Times, December 9, 1950, from Tokio, says:

The discovery that their superiority in weapons . . .
was no guarantee of victory has struck a hard blow at
the morale of the United States troops fighting in
Korea. With an overwhelming advantage in numbers
the lightly armed Chinese Communist forces, under
constant air harassment, seized and held the initiative,

22 WAKE OT OR BLOW UP

wrecking the United Nations' offensive and forcing a
retreat under trying circumstances. . . .

The troops learned on the Korean battlefront that
the best they had in the way of equipment was not
enough to halt a foe willing and determined to drive
forward, taking any amount of losses to reach his ob-
jective. . . .

Several American battalion and regimental com-
manders have said in Korea that this willingness of the
enemy to throw in masses of men regardless of losses
has reduced the balance achieved by the G.I.'s superior
weapons; . . . the enemy's gigantic reserves of man-
power tipped the scales in his favor. "We were forced to
fight his kind of war on his terms," one field commander
said. "The prospect of meeting this challenge is a grim
one," he added. He said that to accept the enemy's
challenge on these terms could bog the United Nations
forces in an endless and costly campaign from which
no decisive results could be achieved.

Never, never before were Americans forced to give
from a fifth to four-fifths of their income to build up a
defense which is bound to grow steadily more danger-
ous and impossible. That is a bottomless pit.

But we don't need to put all our eggs in that basketl

Let us, at long last, try Christ's way as totally as
we have tried war. Christianity lias not failed we
have failed to try it in international affairs. '

vVe missionaries know that if we tried it all out
in the thorough way Americans try other things, it
would swiftly save- tibe world. We have had our pilot
r-<periments, we have proved that it works, we know
what to do, we know what it will cost.

Let's do it while we still have a world.

This is what I mean. To love our neighbor countries

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH HOT WEAPONS 2S

as ourselves in deed and in truth would be real in-
ternational Christianity. America as a nation never
practiced the second half of that great command-
ment: "Love thy neighbor as thyself/' No nation has
loved its neighbor as itself the very thought of pre-
tending that we did would make the devil laugh.

Yet the Golden Rule would be insignificant in cost
and effort as compared to these insane astronomical
costs of armament, and if thoroughly practiced, it
would make armaments obsolete in twenty years.

It is precisely this that President Truman proposed
in his Point IV program, and that the United Nations
unanimously ratified in its "technical assistance pro-
gram." It is beyond all question the most thoroughly
Christian plan ever presented by governments in in-
ternational affairs. The President has said:

"We must not be misled into thinking that our only
task is to create defenses against aggression. Our
whole purpose in creating a strong defense is to per-
mit us to carry on the great constructive tasks of
peace. Behind the shield of a strong defense, we must
continue to work to bring about better living con-
ditions in the free nations."

Ambassador Waynick, commenting on this, said:

"The United States is now ready to put into opera-
tion, on a world-wide scale, an undertaking of great
significance and even greater simplicity. In the midst
of global and total diplomacy, complicated by mixed
ideologies and confused by a doctrine of deception,
the Point IV Program seeks the simple basic thing of
helping our neighbors to help themselves. . . ."

Point IV is being launched in a period of emer-

24 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

gency, but it is not an emergency program. Rather, it
is a long-range effort to help correct some of the
fundamental economic and social problems of the
world which are among the principal causes of up-
heaval and war. Point IV is a positive, dynamic move-
ment for creating the basic economic conditions es-
sential for a free, peaceful, and prosperous world so-
ciety. It would be necessary and desirable even if we
were not confronted with a totalitarian conspiracy
that masquerades as a new form of democracy with
false promises of a better life for all.

Even if you are less sanguine than I am about its
results, it would be relatively inexpensive to try it.
And if we get blown to heaven, we shall at least be
able to face the great Judge and say that we tried the
Christian way. Today we cannot do that. We are
contemptible hypocrites in the eyes of God -and man
because we try to deceive ourselves and God and
man into believing that we are acting as Christians.

It is Christmas day, 1950, as I write. All day on the
radio they have been preaching and singing and
praying about the Prince of Peace. The Christian
world answers right, sings right at Christmas time
this do, America, and thou shalt live! Do it in all in-
ternational affairs and peace will come almost at
once. The tiny army of us who have tried it abroad
tingle with the miracle it works. Let's all try it to-
gether, unselfishly, and see whether it works on a
world scale as it does on a small scale. If it doesn't
work, then Christ's plan is futile, as the Communists
say it is, and we should stop pretending to believe it

But it does work. It's the one thing that never fails.

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH HOT WEAPONS 25

You businessmen know that to get and keep business
you must convince people that you are serving them.
You politicians know that to win votes you must con-
vince people that you are helping them. You teachers
know that to win the love of students you must prove
that you love them by your helpfulness. You hus-
bands and wives know that unselfish love alone can
make a happy homeeach seeking first the joy of the
other. You lovers will never win your lady loves until
you put this magic into practice. Christian love works
wherever it is tried. So try it for the first time on an
international scale!

Try it, America, and the world will sing your
praises.

Try it, and heaven will sing your praises.

If the smart men in the Kremlin see us succeeding
with unselfish service, and if they compete with us in
being helpful, if we have a war of astonishing kind-
nessthen will the kingdom of heaven be at hand!

This is the game at which, we can beat the Polit-
buro. We cannot equal them in lying, or in con-
spiracy, or in starting revolutions, or in sabotage, or
in murder. But we can beat them in selling the spirit
of Christmaswe have been rehearsing it every year
for two thousand years.

It is not things that we shall offer to the world. We
shall offer our sons, our best beloved sons, send them
out to heal the world's wounds, to turn hate into love,
sin into virtue, and despair into joy; giving our sons
as He gave His beloved Son because He so loved the
world.

The majority of Christians have forgotten that our

26 WAKE UP OB BLOW UP

faith started as a flaming crusade to prepare the
whole world for the coming of the kingdom of God,
Forgetting the flaming crusade, most. Christians de-
vote their talents and their time to making money and
spending it on comforts for themselves and their fami-
lies. The so-called "Christian nations" have had a
really tremendous crusade but it was to go forth and
exploit the world for profit, not to save it. Lured by
gold and not by zeal for the kingdom of God, "Chris-
tians" have spread all over the world to take all they
could get. We did not lift the Asiatics or the Africans
to our level. We exploited their poverty for our profit.

This was the great denial and the great betrayal of
the Cause of Christ. This is the sin which found us
out. Our other sins are sins, but this is the sin against
the whole earth,

We have another chance to repent, probably our
very last. If that repentance were sincere our purses
would repent and our aims would repent. We would
devote our time and strength and money to helping
Christ's kingdom to come, and all men everywhere
to have "life more abundantly."

If we do repent in 1951 and put the mighty shoulder
of America under the world to lift and heal its
wounds and wipe away its tears, and if we do that
without taint of greed, we shall conquer the world's
heart in two years. Before that weapon Russian com-
munists will be helpless. Indeed, Russia will be com-
pelled to fall in behind that crusade.

When President Truman proposed that idea in his
Point IV, every nation on earth, including Russia and
satellites^ endorsed it without a single word of

YOU CAN'T WIN WITH HOT WEAPONS 27

opposition. It was too popular; no nation dared to
oppose It.

One man caught his breath when he realized the
stupendous somersault in our life habits that this plan
would involve, and asked, "Do you imagine America
could be persuaded to do anything as revolutionary
as this? That would be a miracle nothing less than a
new birth."

I replied, "Such miracles happen when men get in
foxholes. And we are in a foxhole,"

CHAPTER 2
The World's Hungry

Businessmen are always on the alert for opportuni-
ties. I will try to talk their language. The most stu-
pendous opportunity to meet a felt need began Just
after the first World War, and it gets bigger and better
every year. It is new and it includes four-fifths of the
world.

This opportunity is due to the titanic efforts of the
hungry, destitute masses of Asia, Africa, Latin
America, and Europe to escape from their misery.
They were in despair, but now they are making up
their minds that they will come upor blow up the
world. They are desperate, grim, irresistible.

Our opportunity is to help them up. Our doom is
to seem to block their path.

That is the new stupendous crisis, involving four-
fifths of the world.

That rising tide is so awful that all other things that
go with that tide will also rise, or be deluged if they
try to go against it. This is true of the United Nations,
democracy, Communism, education, industry, the
press and all armies. Edwin Markham said that the
dumb thing will speak after the silence of the cen-

28

THE WORXI/S HUNGRY 29

turies; it Is speaking now, and what it says is this:
"I am coming up, and I will take the hand of anybody
who helps me up, and destroy any man who is in my
way."

I had nothing to do with starting this world up-
heaval. I did not encourage itbut I saw it Anybody
but a blind man would see it if he worked among
these masses in more than seventy countries, as I
have done.

AGE-OLD WANT

Poverty and famine and misery are not new. They
have always existed, as terrible as they are today and
often worse. Man's inhumanity to man shrieks so
loudly that it is hard to understand how God can
stand the human race. The world has always been
driven by severe and, often, cruel masters. There is
nothing new about that.

But the multitudes submitted and suffered and
died in sad and sullen despair. Their religions told
them that poverty was fate, kismet, and that they
would be set free only after they died.

THE NEW GRIM DETERMINATION

But this new thing that took birth after the first
World War is not sullen despair. It is sullen, but it is
not despair; it is grim purpose to come up out of mis-
ery. It is not for nothing that four-fifths of the human
race have changed from a state of despair to a new
grim resolve to come up from poverty and oppression;
that determination is growing everywhere and grow-

30 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

ing with ever-accelerating rapidity. In some countries,
like the United States, Australia and England, the
laborers have banded together in labor unions and
have been able to free themselves from poverty. Peo-
ple who live in these countries are likely to be blind
to the misery and to the desperate state of mind of the
masses in the rest of the world. Unless the reader of
these pages has lived among them he will find here
a startling and terrifying revelation of something
commentators seldom mention, because they, too, are
ignorant of it. Yet it is the most colossal and ominous
fact in the world, and the most wonderful fact, for
any nation that is prepared to help the suppressed
masses realize their hope.

Let us get clearly in mind how many people we are
talking about, and where they are. Out of the 2200
million people in the world, 1700 million, usually in
debt all of their lives, are in want, more or less op-
pressed and exploited, and increasingly unhappy and
determined to be free from want. They are not in the
United States, except a million or two migrant
workers and many of the Negroes; they are not in
Canada, the United Kingdom, or in the Scandina-
vian countries. But in all the rest of the world there
are multitudes dissatisfied and groping for some way
up and out of the dark drudgery and pain of empty
living.

THE CHANGE FROM DESPAIK TO
DESPERATE DETERMINATION

What caused this tremendous change from sullen
hopelessness to grim resolve? A great many factors.

THE WORLD'S HUNGRY , 31

The first were the teachings of Jesus, especially the
gospel of Luke and the companion Book of Acts. Here
was "good news for the poor, release to the captives,
liberty to those who are oppressed, sight to the blind.
. , . Today/' declared Jesus, "this scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:18-21). "Blessed are
you poor, blessed are you that hunger now, for you
shall be satisfied; blessed are you that weep now, for
you shall laugh. Woe to you that are rich, woe to you
that are full now, for you shall hunger* 5 (Luke 6:20-
25). These words are so terrible that few preachers
dare read them from the pulpit. The words, the com-
passionate deeds of Christ, and His death made Him
the friend of the poor, of sinners, of outcasts. It is very
likely that the millions who zealously distributed the
Bible never realized what new hope and what strong
new determination the poor and oppressed derived
from Jesus. Perhaps we can interpret His words as
meaning "pie in the sky by-and-by 59 but the people
who heard Him thought He meant a "kingdom of God
here" and He did! "Thy kingdom come ... in earth,
as it is in heaven" cannot be twisted to mean any-
thing but what it says. That prayer is more often re-
peated than any other in history. It included "our
daily bread 55 and forgiveness of debts and deliver-
ance from evil. It stirred and still stirs up infinite long-
ings where people felt only infinite despair. Many of
the Old Testament prophets were just as zealous for
social righteousness as was Jesus. For all these years
missionaries have been spreading this gospel of hope,
and even though they were not stirrers up of the peo-

32 WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

pie, the Bible was. The Bible is dynamite, and it is the
most widely sold book of all time.

But the thing which has really broken the masses
loose from their moorings in the retarded areas is the
vast new network of communications. The Portu-
guese, Italian, Dutch, French, and English explorers
of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries started it.
Then came steamships, railways, automobiles, trucks,
and good roads and autobuses (which are now incal-
culably important all over the world); then airplanes,
motion pictures and phonographs, businessmen in
swank homes, countless business enterprises, with
drugstores and the sewing machine always out in
front; then World War I, with our soldiers going
everywhere, well fed, generous with .their money;
then tourists sweeping by all these factors together
produced in the hungry masses a great envy and a
great longing to be like these "millionaires," a great
longing to better the condition of their children, to
rise out of their wretched hovels to the new level that
they saw in these foreigners. This turn took a sudden
rise in 1920 and it has been rising ever since, with,
ever-greater momentum.

Not the least of the causes of this new determina-
tion were the beautiful promises of Woodrow Wilson
at the end of the first World War. No words in all his-
tory have so electrified the world. When Wilson went
to Europe to build the League of Nations, his beauti-
ful dream was being repeated in every corner of the
world. No man before or since has aroused such pas-
sionate longings. Had Wilson not been opposed by
little selfish men as he sought to give justice to Eu-

THE WORLD'S HUNGRY S3

rope and as lie tried to sell his League of Nations to
America, we probably would never have had World
War II. But the world was not yet ready for his stu-
pendous vision. Perhaps, too, Wilson helped defeat
himself. At all events, the world lost its great incredi-
ble hope. Now it has its second chance in the United
Nations.

One must also recognize the enormous influence
which Mahatma Gandhi wielded upon India and the
entire world. Capturing the true revolutionary spirit
of Jesus from his reading of the New Testament, Gan-
dhi forged his program of non-violent and loving
non-co-operation, and he won the freedom of India
without firing a gun. Won it loving those who op-
posed it! In China, Sun Yat Sen had already per-
formed an equally prodigious service by breaking
from ancient imperialism and embracing the new
ideals of democracy.

It was at this time that Communism came upon the
scene in Russia, adopting the philosophy and pro-
gram of Marxian Socialism. When the Communists
set out to conquer the earth, they at once saw their
opportunity in this stupendous new determination of
the hungry majority of the world to come up out of
their misery. The Communists saw that they could
not win over the people who were satisfied; it was
therefore among the discontented that they began
their clever propaganda, discovering their grievances,
fanning them into a hotter flame, and promising any-
thing that the people wanted. The Russian Commu-
nists were seasoned masters of this type of intrigue
and propaganda, for they had worked underground

34 WAKE UP OB BLOW UP

to overthrow the Czarist regime for many years. Josef
Stalin was one of the cleverest of all the underground
workers.

Stalin and the Politburo have proven themselves
to be keen analysts of the world situation and amaz-
ingly clever in promising what the discontented peo-
.ple want. Because socialism is not what the disin-
herited wanted; they gave up socialism and adopted
exactly the opposite, private ownership of the land.
Because Sun Yat Sen and multitudes of others had
preached democracy, they thought they had "free-
dom" and "democracy/' although it is in reality the
opposite it is despotism. But the hungry people
of the world are illiterate and they can easily be de-
ceived. Like Esau, the masses will sell freedom for the
promise of a ful stomach. After the Iron Curtain falls
it is too late, for he who protests disappears.

It is amazing that we have allowed Russia to offer
'these two most attractive qualities of American life,
private ownership of land and individual freedom,
although she plans ultimately to take away both land
and freedom. We have allowed the Russians to out-
smart us*

They have jostled us into' co-operating with imperi-
alistic powers until in several notorious instances we
are backing oppression, the very thing America hates.
For example, in French Indo-China most Asiatics
want France to leave; yet we have loaned France
over three billion dollars, knowing that the money is
being used to suppress all opposition to the French
in Indo-China.

Chess is now the great Russian game, encouraged

THE WORLD'S HUNGRY 35

and subsidized by the government. Russian leaders
believe that chess develops mental acumen. The men
in the Kremlin are playing an exceedingly clever
chess game for the domination of the world. Icy cool,
unemotional, without sentiment, they deliberate be-
fore they call the plays, and thus far we have walked
into their traps.

It is time for us to take the initiative and call the
plays! America could do that with an all-out drive to
help the hungry people of the world out of their mis-
ery, finding out what they need and giving it to them
and asking nothing in return. That would be doing
what the Communists promise to do. The weapon of
selfless kindness need not be concealed. The clearer
it is seen by the world, the more invincible it be-
comes!

Why has America not gone all-out for this kind of
service before? It is anybody's guess. Most of us have
been enormously obsessed with America. Many have
thought of the rest of the world only in terms of trade.
Only a small part of the people of this country liave
been actively engaged in foreign missions. Indeed,
only a very small proportion of our American Chris-
tians have had any interest at all in foreign missions.

Russia is trying frantically to keep us split from
China, and that is one excellent reason why we should
refuse to be split from China! We need China, and
China needs us. We have been her friend, more con-
sistently than any other country. When she adopted
Communist revolutionary methods to get a redeal in
land, she adopted the American land system, and not
socialism.

36 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

When I said this in a western college, a Chinese
professor stood up and said, "This man knows the
truth. The Chinese peasants are not going Commu-
nist, for they do not know what Communism is. All
they know is that they are hungry and that the Com-
munists promise to give them land and to fill their
stomachs. They are not Communists; they are come-
up-ists."

As I write today the American representative in the
United Nations, Ambassador Warren Austin, is pro-
testing our friendship for China, and he is mentioning
our contribution in schools and hospitals and in other
forms of missionary service in China. How we wish
that contribution were a hundred times greater!

This book is written to urge all America to join in
unselfish, lavish, loving service; with that we would
have something to boast about! That, if we are sin-
cere and all-out, would start such a wave of love for
America across the world that nobody would listen
to those who caU us indifferent, or exploiters, or self-
ish. We have a tremendous advantage over the Krem-
lin in that we believe in the private ownership they
now offer temporarily because they must offer it. We
believe in the way of unselfish service, because that
is the way of Christ.

I am interested not only in making this case clear
to America. I am praying that it may make every
American an enthusiastic missionary, burning to back
this plan for lifting the world out of its dangerous and
horrible misery. Then and then only will our Chris-
tianity be honest Christianity. Then and then only
will it be adequate.

CHAPTER 3

Missions Retreated and the Communists
Walked In

It was the irony of history that just as this tremen-
dous new determination of the retarded peoples to
rise out of poverty to our level began to develop, the
Christian Church began to lose her enthusiasm for
missions. She became "broad-minded." Unfortu-
nately, I cannot here discuss all the causes of this
coolness toward missions and shall mention only one.
It is the utterly false description of idyllic primitive
conditions by professors of anthropology and soci-
ology who never crossed an ocean nor visited a Negro
slum, but who describe those who live there as happy,
better off indeed than we are. Here is a letter from a
woman steeped in this soothing falsehood:

Los Angeles, California
July llth, 1949
Dear Dr. Laubach:

After hearing your talk at Bethany Presbyterian
Church yesterday, I am inspired to write this letter. It
is written in a spirit of love, and of appreciation of that
part of your work which looks to me morally legitimate

37

38 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

and good. Please consider your possible mistakes as
follows:

You are taking to primitive peoples Bread, in the form
of Literacy which is tied in with concealed poison in
the shape of an alien culture.

Note the stage of evolution of the remote people of
New Guinea. According to your own words, they are
naked, polygamous cannibals. Well, in certain climates,
and for such people, there is nothing undesirable or
immoral about nudity. Why seek to rob them of their
naturalness, and complicate their lives with body con-
sciousness and clothes?

Polygamy may be best for some Races in some stages
of development. Any attempt to thrust a different cul-
ture upon such people may only cause confusion, psy-
chological maladjustment, and dislocations in their
social order.

And what about cannibalism? Is the eating of human
flesh any worse than killing and eating our defense-
less little Brother, the Cow and the Sheep? Is cannibal-
ism any worse than vivisection as practised by our
Scientists? Is it any worse than the greed, and war-
mongering of our Western "Civilized Culture"? I be-
lieve that bullfighting and prize fighting are more de-
grading than cannibalism.

Religion is natural and good; that is, Religion that is
indigenous to the (Social) soil of a People. Jesus' teach-
ing is universal, and no doubt is the highest yet brought
forth on this Planet. But Christianity and its fantastic
theology is only a Western distortion of the exalted
teachings of the gentle Oriental, Jesus of Nazareth.
Paul's theology began the distortions. And the Church
has mostly followed Paul and not Jesus. But anyway,
the highest and purest concepts of the way of Life that
Jesus gave to the world we should seek to incorporate
into native Religions, not try to thrust Christianity onto
peoples as a substitute for their own concepts and tra-

MISSIONS KETKEATED 89

ditions. It is shocking and bad that the Japanese should
forsake their own gods for other peoples' gods, as in
their wholesale adoption of Christianity, which you
mentioned.

Why waste time and energy combating anything so
sane and good as Communism? It is not good for this
country but it may be good for some people. If the
Communists are Atheists, that is not too bad, so long
as they teach and practice Human Brotherhood, and
the way of life that Jesus taught. Consider the harm
that you may be doing, the trouble you may be foment-
ing by combating the teachings and work of the Com-
munists in the Orient. The crimes of a Power Culture
and of Capitalistic exploitation of human beings are
the worst on Earth. And a Religion (that is Christianity)
which is unescapably tied in with Power Politics, and
Commercial exploitation of primitive peoples cannot
but harm them more than it benefits them.

You have much to give that is good, if you will only
separate it from the mistake of interfering with the
spread of Communism, and if you will avoid dislocat-
ing native cultures.

The fact that many primitive peoples seek eagerly
for what you have to give does not justify your trick-
ing them into adopting Christianity along with their
acquisition of a written language. Your campaign for
literacy is a wonderful enterprise, but why vitiate it
with the mistakes of our Christianity, and of our West-
em culture?

Sincerely,

It was teaching like this in our colleges and schools
(among other things) that undermined our interest

in missions. So the missionaries in some leading de-
nominations have actually diminislied in numbers

40 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

while their resources diminished in real value by the
decline of the dollar.

That the interest of American church members m
missions has not risen at all in these thirty years of
cold war is shown by these astonishing statistics,
Charles Fahs of the Missionary Research Library
discovered that the per capita giving from living
donors for foreign missions in 1920 for eleven leading
denominations in the United States was $1.66.*

The same eleven denominations, according to the
United Stewardship Council's statistics of December,
1949, showed a per capita giving for foreign missions
of $1.15 (as compared to $1.66 in 1920), or a de-
crease in per capita giving of 51 cents, in those
29 years.

The number of missionaries for these eleven de-
nominations has decreased from 5,373 in 1919 to
4,587 in 1948, or a decrease of 786.

Another way of estimating how missionary giving
has gone down is to study the published statistics of
foreign missionary expenditures since 1928, in mis-
sion boards. Those statistics show that for some 120
boards, a total of 32 million dollars was expended in
1928-1930; by 1934 it had dropped steadily to 21 mil-
lion dollars; in 1942 it had reached a low of 16 million,
and then it started to rise again. In 1944 it was 20
million, in 1946 it was 31 million, and by 1947 it was
up to 35 million three million above the figure
for 1928. Thus, there is a seeming rise or increase
back to 1947, but that is an illusion, inasmuch as
goods that cost $1.22 in 1928 would cost $1.59 in
* Trends in Protestant Giving, 1929, p. 53.

1947. That means that 35 million dollars in 1947 is the
equivalent of only 27 million dollars in 1928. So there
was a real loss of 8 million dollars between 1928
and 1947. The decreased interest in missions is even
more apparent when we compare giving and incomes.

Look at this: in 1929 the per capita income in our
country was $680. In 1947 the per capita income was
$1,323.* Almost double! But the total expenditures
for foreign missions, as we saw above, increased only
ten per cent, while per capita giving went down.

The United Stewardship Council says that the av-
erage American Protestant member's giving for for-
eign missions in 1949 was $1.25. The average income
in the U.S.A. in 1949 was $1,453. The average church
member therefore gave, to win the cold war through
missions, 9/100 of 1% of his income. He was com-
pelled to give 25% to 75% of his income for military
preparations. This means that while the average
church member gives less than % a cent a day for
foreign missions, he gives more than $1.50 a day for
war.

Yet a few days ago a man told me that we might as
well pull all our missionaries out, inasmuch as they
are so ineffectual against the Communists! I replied,
"Do you ever give anything for foreign missions?"
He replied proudly, "Never." "Better pull the mis-
sionaries out" if they can't get along on nothing! Does
that spirit deserve to survive?

Briefly, so far as three-fourths of the church mem-

* Tliis corresponds with another report of the Foreign Missions
Conference from fifteen denominations, which shows that they had
6,087 missionaries in 1919, and 5,192 missionaries in 1948. (World
Almanac, 1949, p. 433).

42 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

bers are concerned, our giving for foreign missions
has been a stupendous fraud. Can we awake soon
enough? I personally think that the survival of the
United States depends upon that more than upon
any other single factor. Thank God for the one-fourth
who have seen the vision and for the one-hundredth
who have tithed for missions!

All in all, American Christians thought it was "mis-
sions as usual" and "business as usual/ 5 The American
Church did not realize that an enormous world up-
heaval had taken place, which presented the Chris-
tian Church with such a chance as it has not seen in
two thousand years. She was blind, at the moment
when she was confronted with the most marvelous
break-through since Christ walked the earth.

The Communist International, on the other hand,
looking for a way to create a world revolution, saw ex-
actly the break-through they desired in this tremen-
dous urge of four-fifths of the human race to better
their condition. While the Church grew cold to her
own gospel, the Communists sent their missionaries
to convert the natives of every country to their violent
gospel.

The Communist gospel is simple enough to make
its lies sound plausible. It is passed on to the masses
not by foreigners, but by natives converted to
Communism. This is what they preach: "You are
hungry, in debt, without land, oppressed by the land-
owner. The moneylender and white foreigner and the
government all rob you. That is why you are desti-
tute. Ninety per cent of the people like you are desti-
tute. We will help you start a people's revolution. We

MISSIONS RETREATED 48

will furnish you with, arms; all o us will be armed
secretly, then we will make a tremendous attack and
overwhelm the government and establish a soviet
government of the poor people. We will drive out the
rich landowners and the foreigners and divide the
land into small farms so that every man can have
enough to live in comfort and happiness."

That formula sounds good to the hungry man, for
he has long hated the moneylenders and the land-
owners, especially the foreign landowners. It is a
formula of hate, robbery, violence, and murder, but
he will follow this course rather than remain in him-
ger and misery. He is ignorant and not bothered by.
the laws of property rights.

The hungrier people get, the less binding the rights
of others appear. The first right is to. survive, so the
hungry man believes, at whatever cost. Those who
went through the various stages of hunger in the in-
internment camps of the last war testify that they
reached a stage where they could think of nothing
but food, and finally where nature drove them to
steal it. Masses who are close to the hunger line or
over it all of the time have no deeply ingrained ethi-
cal code to restrain them from stealing or deceit or
violence or murder.

For that matter, nearly all of us justify violence
when it is called war. It is wrong to murder, but it
isn't considered murder if we kill enemies in war; that
is a victory for the right! So when war has been de-
clared on the government and the landlords, and the
moneylenders, the tenants can be persuaded that kill-
ing the enemy is victory for the right!

44 WAKE UP OB BLOW UP

The Communists have presented to the hungry and
oppressed multitudes the idea that they are in a right-
eous war of liberation from their enemies, and this
sounds true to oppressed people a fact that America
must understand.

Here is the chief reason why China fell before the
Communist propaganda with such amazing speed.
The Communists promised a new deal in land, and
kept their promise, while the Nationalist govern-
ment was supported by the rich landowners and so
could not make a redistribution. It is also the reason
why the people of North Korea fought with such fa-
natical desperation even when they faced defeat.
They had seen the Communists throw out the land-
lords and divide the land into small plots for the little
farmers, and this was enough to prove that Com-
munism was a friend of the masses.

Lest anybody suppose I am a Communist, let me
say here that I regard Communism as the most
dreadful menace that ever faced the human race.
Communism is a stupendous fraud. Its ultimate pur-
pose is not the redistribution of land into small par-
cels, not freedom, but the confiscation of all land by
government, and making all farmers tenants and all
men slaves. They get rid of the landlords but they
plan to make the state the superlandlord. This the
little people do not know, for they never read Marxist
doctrine; they know nothing about Communism; they
know only that the Communists promise exactly what
the people want and that at first they keep that
promise.

I have wondered why some of our American maga-

MISSIONS RETREATED 45

zines do not send journalists to find out exactly what
the Communists publish that so quickly and easily
captures the loyalty of the underprivileged of the
earth. These journalists would return, after such an
inquiry, with the one and only countermove to save
these multitudes from going Communist. Indeed, if
the statement which I have tried to make simply and
clearly is accepted as fact, the reader sees that answer
now. It is self-evident.

It is simply to go out and help those people, not on
a small scale but on a truly adequate scale, to give
them the true American way and not a little taste of
it. It is not enough to say, "The Communists are ly-
ing. Be content with your poverty." Those masses
will never again be content with their poverty. Noth-
ing can stop their upward movement now. Nor will
it save us merely to threaten to blow these hungry
people to pieces if they dare to raise their heads
against their oppressors.

We and the governments which are friendly to us
are trying hard to develop a United Nations police
force to prevent invasion of any one country by an-
other. That is a sound plan, and perhaps it is the most
helpful thing we are doing. And yet the danger we
face is that the United Nations will be tempted to use
that police force to repress the masses when they rise
in agony against their oppressors. That is exactly
what some people in the U.N. countries are urging us
to do. For example, as I write today, the French dele-
gate in the United Nations is trying to persuade the
Assembly to go to France's aid in French Indo-China,
as we went to the aid of South Korea, although nearly

46 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

all of the people of Indo-China and most of the peo-
ple of Asia want France to leave Indo-China.

If we are to help these people up above the danger
line of desperation and hate, if we are to capture their
confidence and loyalty, we have two tasks to perf onn:

1. To help them get out of debt and to get enough
land so that every man can till his own soil "the
American way/' as President Truman has put it.

2, To help them get the technical knowledge of
agriculture and its related industries, so that they can
use their resources most productively and profitably.

As I write, newspapers and magazines are saying
that we must strive for "a clearer understanding of
the Asian psychology" (Hanson Baldwin, 'New York
Times* Oct. 31, 1950). There is nothing mysterious
or difficult about the fundamental fact; it is the
gnawings of hunger and the misery of destitution. It
isn't Asian psychology; it is human psychology- yours
and mine. These people have been in despair in the
past, but they are becoming more and more like us,
determined not to be hungry, not to be oppressed!

This is no mystery to the missionaries. It is as clear
as any fact in the world.

What missionaries cannot understand is the atti-
tude of those among us who think it peculiar that
some people want their stomachs filled, that they
want to be like us, and that they believe the promises
of a country which offers to help them, even though
it is lying.

When they were shouting "Hosanna" around Jesus
during the triumphal march to Jerusalem, He came

MISSIONS RETREATED 47

riding over the brow of the hill and, to the consterna-
tion of the multitude, burst into tears over Jerusa-
lem as He moaned:

"Would that today you knew the things that make
for peace. But now they are hid from your eyes. The
days will come upon you, when your enemies will
cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem
you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you '
and your children within you, and they will not leave
one stone upon another in you, because you did not
know the time of your visitation."

It all came true as He foretold, because they put
their trust in war and not in His way.

Do you think He is weeping over America today,
saying the same words for the same reason? And does
it make you weep?

The Church lost faith in the last command of Jesus,
"Go ye into all the world," when it lost interest in
helping the world to catch up with us; and the Com-
munists, out to capture the world, found it easy. We
retreated and they walked in.

It is not too late, if we wake up. And we will either
wake up or blow up!

CHAPTER 4
The Greatest Break-Through in History

In the October 28, 1950, issue of the Saturday Eve-
ning Post appeared this editorial:

It would seem sensible before getting steamed up
too much in this war, for men's minds to get some really
useful information about what the minds of peasants
in Asia are like. One source would certainly be the
Christian missionaries. They live and labor among poor
people and their testimony ought to be worth at least
as much as that of some of die experts.

That is indeed sensible. If we had realized that mis-
sionaries were the only Americans we had who lived
close to the unhappy masses and knew what they
wanted, and if we had supported the missionaries and
listened to their advice, we would not be losing the
cold war for the world.

Soon after the first World War missionaries began
to experience in their own communities this tremen-
dous new urge to come up. Where they used medicine
and schools, they found in this service an effective
means to melt away prejudice and to win friends for
themselves and Jesus Christ.

48

THE GREATEST BREAK-THROUGH IN HISTORY 49

Most Christian missionaries have been strong for
the establishment of elementary schools; they wanted
their members to be able to read the Bible or prayer
books or hymnbooks. Sometimes these schools were
popular and sometimes they were not. In the past
thirty years, however, all this has been changed. The
world has gone education mad. Thousands of schools
began to overflow, and more new schools were needed
than the missions could afford to open. Thousands of
schools were opened by natives on a self-supporting
basis when the missionaries had no funds for them.

But adults were not satisfied just to educate their
children. They began to want to leam to read and
write themselves. They saw that one reason they
were hungry and sick, in rags and hovels, in debt, op-
pressed and swindled by moneylenders was because
they were ignorant. They noticed that the people
who had the wealth were literate and that the impov-
erished people were illiterate. Hitherto they had al-
ways longed to read, but to them illiteracy was like
povertya prison from which they could never es-
cape. They thought schools were for children.

It was during the first World War that all this be-
gan to change. The first evidence of the change was
among the Chinese coolies in the trenches of France.
They had been brought over to dig trenches. Being
illiterate, they could neither read letters from China
nor write back to their families. James Yen, a Chinese
Y.M.C.A. secretary for the coolies in France, wrote
so many letters for these homesick Chinese that his
fingers hurt. Then he got the idea of teaching them
to write their own letters. He chose a thousand Chin-

>0 WAKE HP OR BLOW UP

3se words which would be necessary to write simple
letters and taught the coolies how to write their own
letters home. The experiment was a great success.

At the end of the World War, Yen returned to
China with the coolies, and began to teach people to
read his thousand-character vocabulary, again with
great success. He had made a stupendous discovery;
he had experienced the great new passion of the adult
masses to come up through education out of poverty
and despair. When people want a thing badly enough
it is easy to organize them, and James Yen found here
a marvelous easy break-through for service. His cam-
paign spread like wildfire., spread beyond teaching,
reading and writing to the other basic needs of people
in deep poverty and disease and dirt. The govern-
ment of China took up this popular cause in one pro-
vince after another, and Yen believes that fifty mil-
lion Chinese have learned to read.

Almost simultaneously a second immense advance
in literacy began in Russia. Lenin said that Russia
could not be united nor made Communist if only
twenty per cent of the people could read. So the Com-
munists started a vast compulsory literacy program,
adopted a perfect alphabet, taught by the syllabic
method, allowed people to study in fifty languages,
set a time after which they must read to get a job, re-
quired millions to teach without pay and they re-
port having taught upwards of 100 millions, raising
the literacy from twenty per cent to ninety per cent
plus.

Meanwhile some fifty mission centers of the world
began to sense this new hunger of adults for educa-

THE GREATEST BREAK-THROUGH IN HISTORY 51

tion, and had Interesting though unnoticed local suc-
cesses. They began to correspond with one another
about this interesting new hunger, and to ask the best
way of meeting it. The traditional word story method
of teaching, now employed in English with children,
was proving to be too difficult. The memory load
when one must remember how to pronounce each
word is too heavy for adults.

Many missionaries, however, dared to be original
Ninety per cent of the languages of the world are al-
most perfectly phonetic, one sound for a letter. Eng-
lish, on the other hand, is the worst speled language
in the world. We have eight sounds on an average for
each of the vowels, and in any new word are not sure
which of these eight sounds to give it. "Ough" is pro-
nounced six ways in English. The large English dic-
tionaries have a thousand words few of us can pro-
nounce. But in Spanish you can pronounce any un-
known word after from a few days' to a few weeks'
study, because there is but one sound for each vowel
and consonant. All the languages of India, Africa, and
Latin America, all the languages of the Pacific, are
perfectly phonetic.

This is why the missionaries who tried teaching
syllables had remarkable results. They did not teach
the alphabet "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz," but
when they taught a, Iba, da, /a, ga, ha, ja, and all the
other syllables, in a few days their students could pro-
nounce any word without the teacher's help.

Most missionaries are unafraid to try new things.
They would not be missionaries if they followed the
crowd. They are compelled to be self-reliant and to

52 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

pioneer. There is a far greater percentage of these
fearless experimenters among missionaries than
among the people who remain at home. It is not that
they are brighter than other people; they are only
bolder.

These bold experimenters found that the easier
their methods became, the more illiterate adults
clamored to learn to read. I was one among hundreds
of experimenters. We corresponded with one another,
sharing our new, better ideas, growing more and more
excited at the results we were getting, the triumphant
smiles and the gratitude of our students, the rapidly
mounting number of new literates, the thousands of
new friends we were making and the numbers who
became Christians. Something tremendous was hap-
pening.

I happen to be a missionary whose business it is to
visit these miracle workers in sixty-eight countries. I
have seen the triumph in their eyes, the look of dis-
coverers of a new world, and I have seen a new way
to conquer the world for Christ. There are only a few
hundred of these educational missionaries who have
entered this open door of teaching and winning the
illiterate non-Christian world, but they are like me,
fanatically sure that down this road of Christian serv-
ice and witness lies the conquest of the world for
Christ. The "riddle of Asia and Africa," which has
baffled everybody except the Communists, looks not
only soluble but will be easy if you will give missions
the re-enforcements and the resources they need. A
few hundred of us missionaries believe we know how
to evangelize and to conquer the world for Christ in

THE GREATEST BREAK-THROUGH IN HISTORY 53

fids generation, and that this crisis stirred up by the
Communists can be made to help Christ. For one
thing, the Communists are helping shake conceited,
complacent, self-centered America out of her hyp-
notic stupor.

We are not afraid. God is standing in this new open
door and is ringing out that old terrible world we
have had and ringing in the new.

We must move and move rapidly, now.

CHAPTER 5
How My Eyes Were Opened by the Mows

I should like to tell a little of the experience which
has driven so deep into my soul the conviction that
down this road lies the way to save the freedom and
peace of the world.

While working in Mindanao, Philippines., among
the Moslem Moros, we found that they needed only
sixteen letters for their sixteen sounds; after a few
months of experimentation we learned to teach the
Moros all their syllables in a matter of two or three
days. We found three key words which contained all
the twelve Moro consonant sounds:

ma la ba nga (name of a Moro town)

ka ra ta sa ("paper" in Moro)

pa ga na da ("to study 3 * or 'learn" in Moro)

There were only four vowels in their language: a, % 9
o, u. By mixing these with the consonants, we could
write everything and read everything in the Moro
language.

When the M'oros realized that it was very easy,
they came to learn by the dozens, then by the hun-
dreds, and finally by the thousands.

54

HOW MY EYES WERE OPENED 55

Before we taught the Moros to read, none of them
would come to our church. After a few months of the
literacy campaign many came, and the younger men
who knew English began to join our church. In two
years the entire tribe of Moros, hostile when we first
arrived, became our warm friends.

We began to correspond with missionaries in other
mission countries, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the
Pacific Islands, telling our results and asking for their
experiences. The answers came back full of fervor,
many of them were tingling with local successes like
those which we were having, and all of them were
eager for help.

At that time I read a book by Daniel Fleming,
called The Marks of a World Christian, which said
that two-thirds of the population of the world could
not read, and that ninety per cent of the non-Chris-
tian world was illiterate. When I told my Moro
friends, "We have found a way to learn that will help
two-thirds of the world/' they became noisily excited.
I was as excited as they. It is a fervor that has not
died down in twenty years. We and other mission-
aries had struck it rich if helping people and win-
ning friends is what you are seeking.

The literacy campaign of the Moros got the rest of
the Philippines excited. At the request of the Na-
tional Christian Council and with the co-operation of
the Department of Education and the Governor Gen-
eral, I helped make similar lessons in about twenty
Philippine dialects. All of them were as simple and
easy to learn as our lessons for the Moros. All of them
were Malay languages, as easy as those in Mindanao

56 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

twelve to fourteen consonants, four vowels, and every
syllable ending in a vowel!

In 1935 we returned to America for our furlough,
going by way of Asia and the Mediterranean instead
of crossing the Pacific. Missionaries, eager to ex-
change experiences, arranged for our entertainment
and for conferences. We tried making lessons in the
Malay languages of Singapore and Sumatra. They
worked! We tried making lessons in five languages of
India, in Arabic at Cairo, Jerusalem and Beirut,
and in Turkish at Istanbul These languages proved
much harder than the Malay languages had been, and
our first lessons were not very good, but they were
an improvement on previous lessons. The enthusiasm
of the missionaries and of the illiterates was even
greater than we had expected to find. We told a group
of New York businessmen about this encouraging ex-
perience, and they formed the "World Literacy Com-
mittee." I have been traveling as the representative
of that Committee for the past fifteen years.

All of these tours have been in co-operation with
missions, and in fifty countries in co-operation with
governmental departments of education. The visits,
lasting from a week to two months in each area, were
occupied with conferences with competent linguists
and educators.

In each conference we prepared literacy primers
(mimeographed copies) and tried them on as many
illiterates as we could in the time at our disposal.
Then we organized the churches, schools, and other
organizations into "each one teach one" campaigns.

I have sat down beside thousands of illiterates and

HOW MY EYES WERE OPENED 57

helped them begin to read. I have seen their response
over nearly all the illiterate areas of the world.

The basic conviction expressed in this book was
not therefore the result of imagination, but of ex-
periences piling up higher and higher to verify one
another in every country. Anybody who had gone
through the same experiences would come out with
the same certainty that I have, that those who cannot
read have a strange, pathetic, even terrible longing
to learn to read, when they find it is possible, because
they believe that through this door they can get out
of their misery.

I did not know this in 1915 when I went to Min-
danao as an educational missionary. I had secured
my Doctor of Philosophy degree in Sociology and was
familiar with the literature of sociologists and anthro-
pologists, who often write poetry about the idyllic
happiness of the primitive peoples. But my experi-
ence with the illiterate millions all over the world has
long since exploded this academic fanatasy. I have
found the illiterate people close to the poverty line,
seldom able to get aU they want to eat, obsessed with
the never-ending problem of satisfying their hunger,
sick and plagued with flies and vermin and insects
and germs which make every day a battle for life.
In my generation, at least, the real illiterates are just
plain unhappy, and I believe this is the true picture
of ninety-five per cent of them, from Adam down to
today. They were formerly in dismal despair. The
new thing about them is that they no longer despair.
They now hope; they are like men trapped in a mine
desperately straggling to get out.

58 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

For many years I have traveled among these peo-
ple in every continent, and I have seen this new des-
perate hope rising steadily every year. If it were true
only in one country or in a few countries it would
still be significant, "but I find it true in every country.

Educated people differ widely in their attitude
toward these new aspirations of the masses, just as
people have differed in their attitude toward labor
unions in America. Missionaries and some other edu-
cated people ardently desire to help the illiterates,
but many other people are doubtful, some neutral,
some fearful, some hostile. Many see a terrible danger
in this yearning of the masses to rise. They had better
be afraid to oppose the masses, because this rising
tide is certain to destroy any man or any group that
stands in its way. This tide is as irresistible as the
revolving of the earth.

There are people who for selfish gain seek to keep
these people illiterate. In Johannesburg, South Africa,
some friends arranged for me to meet the men re-
sponsible for securing laborers for the gold mines.
The companies, by offering relatively good wages,
have lured hundreds of thousands of Negroes from
their villages, leaving the wives and children at home.
A true picture of the tragic moral conditions of these
camps is found in Cry, the Beloved Country. I told
these gold-mine officials that the camps afforded a
fine opportunity to send the men back home with a
little education and Christian ideals, so that they in
turn could teach the people in their villages; and
added that this separation might turn into a blessing

HOW MY EYES WERE OPENED 59

to them at least in this respect. The chief official at
the table replied:

"We are here on business .and we must be practical
Can you show us that if we teach these men to read
they will not leave the mines and get better jobs in
Johannesburg? Nobody is going to work in a hole a
mile deep if he can get out of it. I admit that the
ethics are on your side, but we have to mine gold and
make it pay."

They have not yet begun a literacy campaign in
those gold mines.

On a railroad platform in Kenya Colony I fell to
talking with a prosperous-looking gold-mine presi-
dent and told him my business. He told me his posi-
tion and added, "I never saw you before and have
nothing against you personally. But professionaly
you are my enemy, for if you succeed you will spoil
my labor market."

Fortunately such men are the exception, and co-
operation is the general rule. But so far as the illiter-
ates are concerned, there are no exceptions.

CHAPTER 6
I Remember!

During the last twenty years there have been, not
dozens nor hundreds, but thousands of evidences of
the wistful eagerness of illiterates to read.

There rises before my memory the enormous cam-
paign in Bihar Province, India, where Moslems and
Hindus forgot their antipathy and taught one another.
[ saw school buildings and homes crowded with
sager learners. At Gaya jail fifteen hundred prisoners
were teaching one another, and as I came in they
treated me like a god from heaven. While other pris-
oners and the warden wept, the poet of the prison
recited a long poem containing these lines:

The Spring season has set in for our souls.

The name of God has a new sweetness.

The garden of my heart has blossomed forth with new

beauty.
Praise be to God for the exceeding grace He has shown

to us in prison.
The days of our sighs and groans are over and a new

song is on our lips.
We were in a prison of the mind long before we came

to this jail.

i BEMEMBEB! 61

Today there is a new longing in our hearts.

India has been living in a dungeon of ignorance, but

now the good news has reached us that the day of

her emancipation is dawning.

No longer shall we be slaves of midnight ignorance.
Who am I, that I dare to dream the incredible new

aspirations which fill my soul!

I remember Baroda State, where a thousand peo-
ple led by an Indian Scottish bagpipe band met me
at the station before daybreak and before I was up,
and marched to a great mala or carnival, where they
celebrated all day long the opening of many blind
eyes.

I remember teaching two hundred prostitutes in
Dar Es Salaam to read, women who had been forced
into evil life and wanted to get out of it, and hoped
that literacy was the door to decency and health. I re-
member their courtesy, their reverence, their grati-
tude.

I remember a man who came for many days to the
nurse in Wembo Nyama to have "an injection for ig-
norance"; how he laughed and trembled when the
nurse brought him to me for his first triumphant reci-
tation!

I remember a hundred new literates looking happy
as angels when we gave them their diplomas in
Wembo Nyama; I remember that one old man in a
class became hysterical when he found he could learn,
and giggled and shouted like one gone crazy, so that
we had to stop the class! He couldn't endure Ms bliss!
Mary Hurlburt tells of a man who came to her, say-
ing, "I want the book that makes the blind to see."

62 WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

I remember in Kessua little boys and girls teach-
ing their fathers and mothers, and bringing them up
for their diplomas, while the crowd applauded and
the parents wiped their eyes.

I remember old women in Biantyre, Nyasaland,
growing so hysterical with delight at the end of the
first easy lesson that they danced round and round,
shaking hands with everybody in the church in un-
controllable rapture.

I remember the look of heavenly joy on the faces of
the 396 who received their diplomas at Donde after
studying the "each one teach one" way. I remember
how, after I had examined one woman and passed
her, she suddenly threw her arms around the man
who had taught her, and cried in a flood of tears, "You
taught me to read, you taught me, you taught me! >?

I remember thousands of students who had learned
to read, in Uganda and who erected booths of reeds
and bulrushes to welcome the man who had helped
make their lessons. I remember the presents they
gave me out of their poverty. Many dozens of eggs,
pineapples, chickens, roosters, and one huge sheep.

I remember the ten men and women whom we had
taught their first lesson in Guatemala City, bursting
out in tears of joy at the church service because at
last they would be able to read the Bible, and all the
congregation, including myself, weeping with them.

I remember the old Maya woman in Yucatan, when
I told her that she would make a good teacher, bury-
ing her head in her arms and shaking with sobs.
When I asked her what she was crying about, she
said;

i REMEMBER! 63

^1 don't see why you came down here to teach a
nobody like me. I'm nobody. What do you want?"
Then she wept harder than ever.

Through my interpreter I told her:

"I don't want anything, but I learned to teach peo-
ple from Jesus. He spent all His time helping people.
Every minute of His day He looked for people to heal,
to open their blind eyes, to feed them if they were
hungry, to save them from sin, to teach them the most
beautiful things in the whole world. I want you to
know Jesus. When you finish this book you will be
able to read His wonderful life,"

She said to my interpreter: "Tell him I think Jesus
is very kind."

I remember an incident in Nigeria, teaching a
hundred Moslems all dressed in white. At the end of
the lesson, to my consternation, they all fell down on
their faces in front of me to show their gratitude. I
thought of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, and said to
the interpreter, "Tell them to get up. I want to shake
hands with them in the good American fashion."

I remember making and experimenting with les-
sons in Tanganyika with Beryl Long and her illiter-
ate women, with babies tied on their backs. Months
later Beryl Long went to a village where nobody'had
ever heard the gospel and began to teach the first
old man who came along. He was so gleeful at learn-
ing so swiftly that he laughed and shouted with joy,
and the whole village came out to share the happy
miracle. Beryl Long then talked to them about Jesus.
The next time she went to the village she was met by
the chief at the head of the whole village.

64 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

"We have a nice room for you and we want a
teacher and we are going to build a church and we
all want to be Christians/'

Beryl Long replied, "It takes a great deal more to
be a Christian than building a church and learning
to read. You have to stop all your bad customs."

The chief replied, "We have talked over all that,
and we are ready to obey everything your religion
demands, if only you will teach us to read."

I remember one hundred women, half of them
quite old women, in Taigu, Korea, who spent a week
being taught by girls from the Mission School. At the
end of the week we gave them little diplomas, as we
always do. Then these women began to rise spon-
taneously one by one to tell how they felt. One
woman said, "People always called me stupid. But I
learned to read and now 111 go home and read to
them."

Another said, "I have stayed in this church all
week, studying whenever there was any light. Now
I can read the Bible, and I thank the Lord for send-
ing you."

An old woman who looked at least eighty stood up
and said, "I never had any paper of any kind, and I
never believed that in my old age I would read the
Bible." Then she walked up to me and said, "In the
name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,
I bless you."

That blessing meant everything to the Koreans,
for they hold old women in great reverence and obey
whatever they command.

i KEMEMBER! 65

I remember churches full of men and women in
Jos, Nigeria, wearing nothing but a handful of fresh
leaves, studying with zeal, and learning amazingly
well. I remember their animated faces, the light in
their eyes, their look of triumph, as they took their
first steps out of total illiteracy. These people were
real Christians, and the missionaries had been wise
enough not to insist upon clothes.

I remember the women studying with enormous
zeal in Leopoldville, Congo. When the interpreters
told them at the end of three days that our party was
about to leave, they suddenly began to shriek and to
look so furious that I thought they would tear us to
pieces. I asked the interpreter what had been said,
and he replied, "They think you are going away while
they are still nearly blind, and it breaks their hearts."

I said, "Tell them that the other missionaries are
staying here and will teach them/ 3 But as we went out
we heard them wailing and groaning. That, I realized,
was the groan and wail of the world's hungry, sick,
exploited, and illiterate.

I remember the ragged boy in Liberia who thrust
into my hands a dime, all the money he had, to ex-
press his gratitude that we had come to save his
country from ignorance.

I remember the new light that came into the eyes
of lepers in the heart of India, in Siam, in Africa and
Latin America, in the Philippine Islands, as they
taught one another and began to read their precious
hymnbooks and their Bibles. With no hope for this
world, these unfortunates find their sole consolation

66 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

In hope for the future life. This makes the ability to
read the Bible the most precious of all gifts. I remem-
ber them weeping with joy.

I remember the M'oro outlaw whom I taught in
Lanao, Philippines, not knowing who he was. After
we had finished the first lesson he took me over to a
corner and said, "You taught me to read and you are
the best friend I have in the world. I am going to do
something for you. Is there anybody you want me to
put out of the way?"

The Moro boys told me next day that the govern-
ment was looking for him for murder, but did not
know what he looked like.

1 remember teaching the laborers at the wells of
Pakistan, and the scores of garlands they put around
my neck.

I remember, after teaching illiterates in Beira,
Mozambique, how they tried to show their affection.
One man said, "I feel like a* dog that cannot find
words to tell its gratitude, and can only wag its tail"

There is no end to these incidents. The wildest and
most desperate men turn out to be good, loyal friends
when you help them. They are full of gratitude, pa-
thetically eager to follow you and be with you. Every
night you have trouble getting away from them in
order to sleep. These helpless multitudes will follow
anybody who tries to help them. You don't have to be
educated; you only have to love.

The most primitive people in the whole world live
in the interior of New Guinea, the great island north
of Australia. I taught the children of the cannibals
who ate James Chalmers, the famous missionary, in

I BEMEMBElEl! 67

1901. The coast lias been Christianized in the fifty
years since Chalmers died, but the interior stiE has
thousands of cannibals. Nobody can count them
without getting cooked. The largest tribe is well
called "Kookookookoo."

We made lessons in seventeen of the New Guinea
languages, and then the government took us by plane
to the interior, where there is a tribe which has de-
cided to stop cannibalism. They say they have not
eaten people for fifteen years. There is a missionary
named Daring among them, and he is well named.
Forty of us landed in little planes at the airfield which
had been built there by the army. There were forty
thousand people in that tribe, and more than a third
of them came to us to learn to read. Each of us cen-
tered upon one student, as our custom is, while all
the rest tried to look on and imitate what we said.
At the end of a week we had taught the first forty
who had ever read that language, for it had never be-
fore been written. Then we had our graduation for
those forty and told them they were to teach the en-
tire tribe. That Sunday at least fifteen thousand peo-
ple swarmed on the airfield, marching, dancing, jump-
ing, shouting, to celebrate this greatest event in their
history. Their chiefs met in solemn council. Then the
greatest chief of all came to tell us their decision:

"This is the new great day in our history, We like
your religion because it does so much for us. We are
all going to be Christians and we want you to baptize
everybody here this afternoon. All except us chiefs.
We are not quite ready. We are told that you do
not allow a man to have more than one wife, but

68 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

we have many. We can't think of any Christian way
to get rid of them suddenly. But we will marry them
off as fast as we can, and then we will be baptized
too. We all want your religion, for it does so much to
help us."

That night a chief, who had walked a week to get
there, would not go home. He stayed around to urge
each of us in the party to come to his area and help
his people. "Nobody in our region knows what good
is, and we need somebody to come and tell us how
to be good." All of us had good excuses, for we were
leaving the next day. But he would not leave until we
promised to try to send somebody up from the coast
as soon as we could. Even among the cannibals has
come this strange, terrible passion to rise to a new
level, this amazing gratitude when we help them,
this eagerness to become Christians when they learn
to read.

This is the kind of experience that has revealed to
me a thousand times over that these people at the
bottom of society are easy to win to Christ if we go
humbly with a helping hand to lift them out of their
poverty and ignorance.

CHAPTER 7
How Governments Welcome Us

Here is another cause for thanksgiving: nine out
of ten of the governments where our committee has
worked have been eager for our help. We went at the
official or unofficial invitation of most of them. We
worked in close co-operation with the departments
of education in Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo,
Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, Vene-
zuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru, Para-
guay, Brazil, Philippines, Australia, New Guinea, Re-
public of Indonesia, Ceylon, all the provinces and
presidencies and states of India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq,
Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tangan-
yika, Uganda, Congo, Nyasaland, North and South
Rhodesia, South Africa, French Cameroons, Angola,
Nigeria, Gold Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Korea,
Thailand, Hawaii, Basutoland, Natal, Zanzibar. In
China, James Yen and Hugh Hubbard and many
others have worked in constant co-operation with the
government, or in its employ. This number will be
larger before you read these pages, for we have invi-
tations from five other countries which we hope to
accept this year.

69

70 WAKE UP OB BLOW UP

We were entertained by governors and kings and
presidents in many of these countries, our expenses
paid in whole or in part in many of themall the way
around the world by air by one of the governments.

Not a single government in any country we have
visited has done anything to prevent Christians from
teaching people to read and witnessing for Christ
while teaching. Thus we have an enormous advan-
tage over the Communists, who are suspected by all
governments and outlawed by many.

I have asked a great many officials why they have
shown such hospitality and co-operation in teaching
the illiterates, and the first reply they give is that they
regard illiteracy as Enemy Number One to their
progress. They cannot have technical industries of a
high order with illiterate workmen. But they usually
add what I think gives them the real sense of urgency.
They say that the Communists have been infiltrating
all through their country, stirring up the hatred of
the people against the government. "The Commun-
ists say they made Russia literate and promise to
make this country literate. The people want to come
up and believe education is necessary, so we are tak-
ing the best steps we know to satisfy that demand. 55

Thus the Communists have stirred up the desire,
and we fulfill it! If we go and help the world, the
Communists help us, without intending to do so. The
Communists are dangerous to us only if we fail to be
Christian enough to help the world, and in that case
the wrath of God, too, is dangerous. We have nothing
to fear except our failure to heed the call of anguish.

Somebody has said that "the greatest of all sins is

HOW GOVERNMENTS WELCOME US 71

Indifference." Right! And it is also the greatest of all
dangers to the United States. Our chief enexny is our
Indifferent selves.

There is an old saying that "you can't eat your
cake and have it too." Well, you can't turn your
back on the world's cry for help and get away with
it.

America is the millionaire of the world, with a
large part of the world's wealth. My illiterates are
jealous 'of that when they are hungry and see us ride
by in our cars and airplanes. I understand that, for
whenever a millionaire turns a cold ear to my pleas
to help those hungry people, I have to summon up all
my Christian grace to keep my temper. Everybody
despises a mean man, especially a rich mean man.
America is the world's millionaire, and she decides
now whether she shal be loved or scorned. Every-
body loves the Rockefeller Foundation, because it
helps everybody.

Pardon me if I spell this out in simple language.
I do it for that large number of Americans who
have never been within a thousand miles of these
hungry masses and cannot comprehend even the
ABC's of the world problem. By those ABC's I mean
millions of humans who are hungry; their bones ache
with fever, they are driven to work when they are
sick, the moneylenders and landlords oppress them,
and they want help. We neglected them, and the
Communists, out to capture the world, went to these
people promising not Marxian Socialism but the
American way of life with private ownership of land
and freedom. These ignorant people believed those

72 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

promises, not knowing that the final goal of Commu-
nism is government confiscation of all land and de-
struction of all freedom. The Communists will cap-
ture the rest of the world unless America awakens and
actually gives what the Communists promise.

My experience is that sharing technical know-how
not only makes friends, but also bears a large, early
fruitage. Let us see what the countries have done
where our World Literacy Committee has assisted
as consultant or organizer.

In Mexico the great Christian leader Baez Camargo
made a set of literacy lessons in 1940. Partly as a re-
sult of this and of our visits to Mexico between 1941
and 1944, the government adopted fine phonetic les-
sons and effective methods. Under Dr. Jaime Torres
Bodet as Minister of Education, every person who
could read was required to teach, all who could not
read were required to learn, and those who failed to
teach or study were fined.

A million a year have been learning to read for the
past five years. Dr. Jaime Torres Bodet has been
made President of UNESCO as a result of this
achievement.

Cuba adopted a set of our Spanish lessons, which
the Readers Digest published, and is carrying on a
vigorous government and mission campaign.

Haiti had a campaign conducted first by the Rev.
Orville McConnell, then promoted by Ambassador
White of the United States, then taken over by the
Haitian Government. I saw thousands of people
learning. The lessons used were in the native Haitian
Creole, which is spoken by all the people, UNESCO

HOW GOVERNMENTS WELCOME US 73

now has a model experiment in adult education in
Haiti.

A young dynamic Council of Education took our
plans in Venezuela and has been carrying on a vigor-
ous literacy program ever since.

In Ecuador, Alan Reed effectively poured his vigor
and tremendous personal inluence into the literacy
campaign in that country. In Ecuador, one is re-
quired by law to teach if he can read, to learn if he
can't read, or to pay if he doesn't teach or learn.

After lessons had been used by our missionaries for
some time in Peru, the government organized 30,000
teachers to teach adults as well as children.

In Paraguay, the government started training its
army cadets to teach illiterates, so that they could
teach all the army.

In Brazil, the Department of Education asked me
to co-operate in the preparation of lessons, then or-
ganized a splendid nation-wide campaign, and re-
ported that a half million were taught in 1950.

In' the Philippines before the World War, cam-
paigns were going on to teach adults in a dozen
languages, government and missions working to-
gether.

In New Guinea, under the vigorous stimulus of the
Australian government, a new powerful literacy drive
is penetrating the areas which a few years ago were
cannibalistic, but nearly all the work is under the di-
rection of missionaries. The missionaries report a
graduation ceremony every three weeks!

King Farouk of Egypt invited us to prepare lessons
for his country. He then paid the bill for the first

74 WAKE UP OR BLOW IIP

edition of the Primer, and called upon all who could
read to teach at least one a year as a patriotic service.

Two Egyptian Christians went down tlirough
Egypt, calling all Christians together and saying:

"King Faroulc asked us to teach one a year as a
patriotic service. Nearly all of us can read. Let's teach
Moslems to read and tell them we are doing it for
the love of Jesus. The king wiH be glad if we help
him make Egypt literate."

The Christians of Egypt have been teaching and
witnessing for Christ, and the government has never
expressed any objection. Christian Egyptians now
have a marvelous campaign for Arab refugees at
Gaza.

No country has ever officially objected to this in-
dividual teaching and witnessing at home. My ex-
perience is that if you selfiessly help the government
with any felt need it loves you and appreciates your
religion* If you can help them, but refuse, they hate
both you and your religion.

Three-fourths of the provinces and presidencies
and states of India have conducted literacy campaigns
since our first visits in 1935, some provinces with tre-
mendous zeal, and millions of people have learned to
read. The government reports that illiteracy dropped
from 92 per cent in 1920 to 85 per cent in 1950, which
would mean that thirty-four millions had learned
to read.

India, like many other governments, is opposed to
any direct attempt to proselytize the people, but is
eager for us to come and help them teach illiterates,

HOW GOVERNMENTS WELCOME US 75

and if we make them Christians while teaching them,
no objection will be raised.

Mahatma Gandhi emphatically and repeatedly
said that while he welcomed missionaries who helped
India with their needs as the Quakers do, he did not
like the missionaries who spent their whole time try-
ing to convert Hindus to Christianity. This is still the
attitude of the government of India.

The government of Pakistan is putting forth des-
perate efforts to teach her people Urdu, with its
difficult Arabic alphabet. When I visited Pakistan
last year, after a ten-year absence, they were in the
midst of a tremendous effort to eliminate illiteracy.
They nearly killed me with hard work, praise, and
kindness. Moslems are wonderful brothers the world
over when they believe in your unselfish desires to
help them,

Since our visit to Iran, the government has been
carrying on an active literacy campaign under the
direction of the army.

' Lebanon, since our first visit in 1935, has made
steady advances in literacy, most of the program
centering around the American University.

Turkey is working tirelessly at" her literacy pro-
gram with large success. Dr. J. Kinsley Birge and
other missionaries have made valued contributions
to the government program.

Uganda, adopting the methods which we devel-
oped for Africa, is conducting a really great campaign
under the direction of the Department of Education,
and many thousands are learning every year.

76 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

The government of North Rhodesia, in co-opera-
tion with Mrs. Hope Hay, a missionary, has made re-
markable progress. South Africa has a similar semi-
official literacy campaign under Mrs. Quentin White,

The government of Korea, strongly supported by
the American Embassy, started a good campaign in
co-operation with missions during the one year be-
tween our visit and the invasion by North Korea. The
American Embassy paid for the printing of the
lessons.

The government of Siam engaged us to prepare
their textbooks for adult illiterates, printed the books
we helped prepare, and is getting teachers trained in
many places.

Other countries have started so recently that there
is as yet no unusual information to report. As a rule,
two years after making the first experimental lessons
the governments and missions are producing sub-
stantial results.

After seeing these successes, neighboring countries
are inviting us three times as rapidly as our commit-
tee can respond. We plan this year to accept invita-
tions from the governments of Algiers, Tunis, India,
Afghanistan, Burma, and the Indonesian Republic to
work where we have never worked before.

CHAPTER 8
Literacy Makes Hungry Minds

As soon as the illiterates learn to read, another door
swings open. It is the opportunity to furnish these
millions of hungry minds with something good and
interesting to read.

This is another open door for anybody else who
wishes to enter.

It is a very, very large opportunity, for about ten
million adults are learning to read each year the
number is impossible to give except in such round
numbers. We know that over one hundred and fifty
millions outside Russia have learned in the past three
decades.

We were caught wholly unprepared to enter that
literature door. The reading matter for new literates
did not exist. Almost none of the literature printed in
most countries is down on their level, except books
and papers meant for little children. But adults are
not children; they do not want children's fairy tales.
They want adult ideas told in language which they
can understand, just as you would if you tried to read
a book in some foreign language like Greek or He-

77

78 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

brew having an alphabet with which you were not
very familiar. You would want the matter to be inter-
esting, but with short simple sentences and familiar
words.

Until the last thirty years the literature in illiterate
countries has been written to meet the exacting de-
mands of scholars, with a beautiful and classical vo-
cabulary; half of it is unfamiliar to new literates.
Even the Bible was written far above the heads of
the semi-literates. This was true in all the languages
of Asia, in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, Arabic,
and the Ethiopian languages. It was not quite so true
of the African and other languages which have been
reduced to writing by the missionaries in the past
hundred years, but even in these tongues the reading
matter was too difficult for those who have just
emerged from illiteracy. And nine-tenths of it was as
dull as a government bulletin!

So here are millions upon millions of people for
whom a wholly new literature must be created. As
yet there is little literature easy enough for them to
read, and in many languages next to nothing!

The Communists saw this new open door and were
prepared by experience in their own country to enter
It. A hundred million people in Russia who had
emerged from illiteracy could not read difficult mat-
ter, so nobody in Russia today writes for scholars.
Russian style always has been simple and direct, like
that of Tolstoy, but now the writers of Communist
literature are far simpler than Russian writers had
ever been before.

So the Russians know what it means to write for

LITERACY MAKES HUNGRY MINDS 79

new literatures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Most of China was captured by propaganda without
firing a gun. Mao Tse-tung published an article in
the Calcutta Nation while we were in India last year,
which shows how this was done. He says:

The Chinese Communists have two armies, one
with guns and one with pens. The army of writers is
at least as important as the army of soldiers. They
write for the peasants, the soldiers, the laborers, and
the petty shopkeepers. They do not try to write to
please the scholars! Their writers go down among
the masses, live and suffer with them, learn their emo-
tions and their needs, and write to show how Com-
munism is the answer to their heart's desires.

That is the substance of Mao Tse-tung's article.

There are millions of posters, profusely illustrated.
There are tens of millions of handbills. We have
samples of them in our office as I write. The pam-
phlets and booklets, all far, far simpler than the
former literature, are within the reading vocabulary of
the fifty millions of Chinese who have learned to read
in the past thirty years.

Laura Cross, quoting a Communist leader from
Peking on June 21, 1950, said:

The new literature in China is quite different from
the old. It's all directed toward the masses and is full of
propaganda and says the same thing over and over to
be sure that even the most illiterate grasps the idea.
. . , They don't know how to write artistically, but
they have virility and creativity. At present the sophisti-
cated may have to be bored but the masses must be
educated.

80 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

What the Communists are doing in India is evi-
dent in this letter from Madras:

Outside the Buckingham and Camatic Mills, before
work in the early morning, during the tiffin hour, and
again in the evening, you may see hundreds and even
thousands of workers sitting around in groups of from
twenty to a hundred, listening to one of their members
reading Communist literature. The slogan seems to be
that every literate is a possible agent. He may not be
able to get up and make a speech, but he can read
aloud to his companions the literature we supply. There
is no doubt about the effectiveness of this method, and
it is less costly than any other.*

The same sort of simple Communist reading matter
has the governments of Asia and Africa worried. A
missionary recently returned from Kenya Colony,
saying they are excited about the quantity of Com-
munist revolutionary propaganda they found in that
colony. No country in Africa except Liberia is wholly
free from fear of Communist propaganda. In Nigeria,
the British government is torn between the desire
to help the people read and the fear that it will
help Communist Zik with his chain of Communist
newspapers to win more Nigerians to his side. He
claims half of Nigeria now.

The governor of Nigeria and Lord Healey invited
me to a conference on their baffling dilemma in
Nigeria. I told them what I believe to be the whole
truth in a nutshell:

"If you try to suppress literacy, you prove that Zik
is right, and you will have to fight a bloody revolu-

* Mr. W. H. Warren quoted this letter in his talk to the Chris-
tian Literature Council on September 22, 1950.

LITERACY MAKES HUNGRY MINDS 81

tlon. If you encourage literacy, and do little about
literature, you will play perfectly into the hands of
Zik and the Communists. The only sound plan is for
you to send to England for some of the best journal-
ists you have, bring them to Nigeria, seek Christian
writers, train them to write simply and readably,
have many workshops where they will write what the
people want and need to read, literature showing
the people how you really are helping them up to a
higher level, and how Communism is lying to them.
You in England have had the greatest writers in the
history of the world, and you still lead all other na-
tions. If you put your mind to it, you can easily out-
write this Communist who has no training in journal-
ism. England ought to be ashamed of herself to be
frightened at the literature of Zik."

This is what I say of America and the entire West.
We are cowards to fear the propaganda of Russia.
What we do need to fear is our own inaction. Her
propaganda is not within a thousand miles of the
high quality of our own advertising agencies. But
see where we pour all our genius! Into trying to sell
automobiles and razor blades and beer to one an-
other! Almost none of our genius has been invested
in selling the ideals of Christianity and freedom and
justice and honor to the other side of the world. We
are losing the world just as the hare in ^sop's fable
lost the race with the tortoise, by going to sleep, with
stupid overconfidence and indifference. America suf-
fers from the rabbit's swelled head. While we all
slumbered and slept, the Communists came and
nearly captured the world. They did not beat our

82 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

journalists and advertising geniuses, for we never
even entered the race! They won by default.

We have cornered a large part of the world's
wealth, and we can't find enough ways to squander it.
We have the talent, the education, the technical skills
to push the Communist writers right off the map. We
have been too stupid to be ashamed of ourselves! That
we shall stop being such fools at once is the most cru-
cial issue for America and for the world. Otherwise
we shall not deserve to survive or be free men. We
are being tried in the balances and found wanting.

If this makes you angry, don't be angry with me. I
don't want us to be this way. Be angry with the way
you have given pennies when you should have given
dollars. Be angry because you gave your abilities to
sell cigarettes, when you should have been selling
freedom.

Why do not the American publishers provide this
immense volume of simple literature? Because it is
so relatively unprofitable. Businessmen want quick
returns for their money, and in foreign countries large
returns to compensate for large risks.

Why, then, doesn't our government undertake the
task as the Moscow government does? We have
worked ourselves up into a great fear of government
doing too much, lest it become socialistic or bureau-
cratic.

I think the devil must laugh at this! When it
comes to war preparation we let the government have
a third of our national income, not learning the lesson
of history, that good government is always destroyed
by overtopping military power, never by any other

LITERACY MAKES HUNGKY MINDS " 88

kind of power. We are in danger of becoming a mili-
tary dictatorship, and there is no danger of our be-
coming any other kind of dictatorship.

Still, I am not arguing for the government to con-
trol our books and magazines and newspapers abroad.
1 don't believe it should print what most needs to
be printed. I believe in private enterprise to do this
work, if the right private enterprise does it. The right
enterprise is the Christian Church, as I hope to show
in the next chapter, because it is free from the profit
motive, possesses abundant resources, and has at its
center the spirit of Jesus the highest ideals the world
ever saw, the only hope of real, just peace.

But before we begin that chapter let me say some-
thing about radio and television, which many people
imagine are cheap, quick ways to get truth to the
world. A great many people seem to think that if we
can have a bigger military establishment than Russia,
and can shout over the radio louder than she does, we
shall be able to save the world from going Commu-
nistic and that we may even sow revolution behind
the Iron Curtain.

We are spending more on the Voice of America
and Crusade for Freedom radio plan than on all
missions put together. It is very important. * Yet it
would be blind folly to depend upon it to go far in
winning the cold war. First of all, it cannot get far
behind the Iron Curtain, because short-wave radios
are forbidden, and the others are jammed the mo-
ment they are anti-Communist The clever Politburo
knows how to keep its curtain tight

The Voice of America thought Russia would like

84 WAKE TO OR BLOW UP

to hear one of Mr. Malik's speeches In the Assembly
of the United Nations. But Russia jammed it all, so
her people could not even hear what was in their own
favor!

Nor does the radio reach the two-thirds who are
wretchedly poor and hungry, because they have no
radios. My billion illiterates do not even have chairs,
or beds, or tables, or knives, or forks, not to mention
radios. We might set up radios in every villiage for
the whole population to hear, but all we said would
be nullified- by the explanations of the Communist
propagandists who circulate among those people.

I say the illiterates cannot buy radios. But when
we teach them to read we have put radios in their
heads! We put them there free of charge; after that
all we need to do is to have our writers living among
them speak their simple language on the printed
page and plant in their minds what we want to grow
there. One of the fortunate things about new readers
is that at first they believe everything they read.
They do not know that people can print liesthat's
why Communism is flouiishing. This tendency to be-
lieve is fortunate for us if we are doing the printing,
and terrible if the Communists are doing it. We need
not fear the Communists if both they and we are
doing it, and if we are really helping the people to
better things, while the Communists raise false hopes
they cannot fulfill. As soon as the Church comes
awake, the two things she will need to do to help the
world out of its misery are to help it help itself, and
then to tell the whole truth.

LITERACY MAKES HUNGRY MINDS 85

Literacy is building a bridge to ten million minds
a year. We have got to cross that bridge.

You may say, "Stop literacy/' but that is folly. If
the missions stopped it, governments would still be
teaching ten million a year. Nothing can stop it now.
We cannot destroy that bridge, but we can cross it
with a great army of books and papers.

CHAPTER 9

How Foreign Missions Plan for
Literacy and Literature

In January 1950 the Foreign Missions Conference,
at its annual meeting, took the following action to
enter these two stupendous new doors, the door of
literacy and the door of Christian literature.

Whereas we recognize:

The increasing eagerness of the world's illiterates to
learn to read;

The requests of many governments for our help in
their adult literacy campaigns;

The opportunities which we have for effective evan-
gelism as we teach illiterates;

The near monopoly which missionaries have in train-
ing and ability in adult literacy and translation work;

The resources in men and means which American
Protestants have for advancing the world cause of

literacy;

The heavy responsibility which we have for supply-
ing Christian literature to the millions who are an-
nually becoming newly literate;

86

HOW FOKEIGN MISSIONS PLAN 87

Resolved:

1. That we recommend to each member board that
It select one or more missionaries to be trained in the
techniques of teaching adults to read so that they in
turn may teach others, both missionaries and na-
tionals, and thus by continued repetition of this pro-
cess, this invaluable means of evangelism may be
brought within the reach of the widest possible circle
of workers.

2. That we also recommend the selection and ad-
vanced training of missionaries and nationals gifted
in the creation of Christian literature.

3. That we urge the necessary additional support of

the program of the Committee on World Literacy
and Christian Literature serving all the Area Com-
mittees of the Foreign Missions Conference, in order
to take advantage of the opportunities thus created.

This dull, innocent-sounding motion is packed with
dynamite, if you know what it implies. It means that
the mission boards adopted the program which the
World Literacy Committee proposed at the confer-
ence. If you wish to read that proposal, it is printed
in full under the title Literacy as Evangelism.

Briefly die plan is this:

We plan as swiftly as possible to train all mission-
aries in the "each one teach and win one" method
so that they can go out to teach and win native Chris-
tians: each one to teach and win one. Millions of the
non-Christians of the world are illiterate. In fact, be-
fore the Protestant Reformation, ninety-five per cent
of the whole world was illiterate. The Reformation
placed enormous emphasis upon the reading of the
Bible, and out of that drive came a belief in universal

88 WAKE UP OR BLOW IIP

education for rich and poor alike. In this twentieth
century, belief in mass education has taken hold of
most of the world. Nine-tenths of the nations repre-
senting every religion are now making plans for uni-
versal education for adults as well as for children. All
the illiterate peoples of the world clamor for it.

This is what missions see now., and they are de-
termined to help the program because it is Christian,
because it opens the Bible, and because it wins friends
for Christ

Our committee has established courses in the art of
"each one teach one" in Hartford Seminary and in
Scarritt College, Nashville. But this reaches only
scores, while we need to train ten thousand as fast as
possible. Time is running out. Every mission board is
beginning to train picked missionaries to go out to
train all the missionaries of its denomination.

But this also is too slow. So a correspondence
course is being prepared which we hope to send to
every missionary in the world.

Our plan is to mobilize as swiftly as possible all the
native Christians in the non-Christian areas into
armies for teaching illiterates and winning them to
Christ.

There are about thirty million native Christians
(about half of them Protestants and half of them
Catholics) in the midst of 1200 million non-Christians,
one Christian to every forty non-Christians. We aim
to put all these native Christians to work teaching
and winning their neighbors. When that is accom-
plished we shall be able to teach 30 million a year to

HOW FOREIGN MISSIONS PLAN 89

read, to follow the way of love and Christ, and not
the way of hate and revolution.

Theoretically, if we could train all these Christians
at once and if we had as much of the Holy Spirit as
was evident at Pentecost, the number would rise in
something like geometric progression 30 millions
teaching 30 millions the first year, 60 millions teach-
ing the next, then 120 millions, then 240 millions, then
480 millions, then over the top! If there* were no
failures in the program the world would be literate
in a few years, and a large percentage of the newly
taught would be Christians!

Mathematically that is possible, but of course noth-
ing like this is happening, because, for one thing, we
do not have enough trained missionaries to train and
direct these thirty millions. It is also true that half of
those taught would fail to teach after being taught;
they would lack the Christian spirit. And as for a
Pentecost, experience shows that where a church is
well organized so that nearly everybody teaches, a
veritable Pentecost does fall upon that church. Then,
caught up with fervor, many Christians teach and
win one illiterate a month, and some a hundred or
more a year! When they get a taste of the joy of teach-
ing and winning, they develop an almost fanatical
passion for more and more of that joy! I know how
that feels I have it!

It is not difficult to train the church members. The
simple Primer is so easy to teach that they need only
follow the printed lines and encourage the students,
helping now and then. We also show each church

90 WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

member how to love and praise Ms students, and so
win their gratitude. We say, "Never an unpleasant or
discouraging moment! Never complain, or frown;
never say "no/ never ask a question the student can't
answer. Look pleased and overwhelmed with ad-
miration. Love your student and silently pray for
him." It sounds like a Dale .Carnegie course in sales-
manshipand it works!

At the end of the lesson tell him that the Christians
are teaching because Jesus wants to help other peo-
ple. We have prepared a series of short stories about
the kindness of Jesus, to be told during each lesson.
If the teacher is a sincere Christian, the student will
soon love his Christ. It is as easy for a Christlike
teacher to make the student love Christ as it is to
make him literate.

We set the entire church membership to work, each
one to teach some neighbor at home, at any hour, until
in one or two weeks the Primer is learned. Then all
the students are invited to come to church and get
their diplomas. As they march forward and receive
their diplomas, the pastor and church officials all give
them hearty congratulationsthe first time they have
entered a Christian church!

Then the new literates are invited to come and
study the second book, The Story of Jesus, so that
they can learn to read the Bible and books and maga-
zines. In The Story of Jesus they build a vocabulary
and they learn by heart what Jesus said and did.

Wherever a church follows this method, the mem-
bership of the church doubles rapidly and the whole
congregation experiences a veritable outpouring of

HOW FOREIGN MISSIONS FLAK 91

God's spirit. One can't give away Ms Christian faith
without getting more!

This, then, is how we are trying to mobilize an army
o thirty million to spread love and peace over our
distracted world.

Eric Johnston, former President of the American
Chamber of Commerce, and now Economic Stabili-
zation Administrator, returned from a recent trip
around the world with the alarming tidings that the
Communists have "millions of missionaries scattered
through every country, converting the people to
Communism." We have millions too! Thirty millions
of native Christians, waiting to be trained for our
army. But we lack trained missionaries and money to
organize these 30,000,000 into teaching and winning
regiments. We can't do it until America helps us in a
big way.

America's task is to finance and train and send
thousands of missionaries competent to drill and di-
rect our unorganized and untrained army. That is a
big order, but there is another just as big.

AN ARMY OF JOXJKNAIISTS

We must provide literature for the ten millions
now leamirg evc-iy year. We can ao it. If we get our
enormous potential machinery moving we can pro-
vide, good, readable literature for them all.

At Syracuse University the Department of Journal-
ism has developed a special division of Religious
Journalism to teach- missionaries and nationals how
to write very simple readable matter for new literates.

92 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

The big problem In such a school is to find a faculty
which knows enough about this simple level of writ-
ing for new literates in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Dean Lyle Spencer of Syracuse is one of
these rare professors, for he has lived and written in
the Near East and many other parts of the world for
many years.

But we can't wait for these young people to gradu-
ate. We can't wait! So we are interviewing hundreds
of newspaper reporters responsible for religious news
and inviting those with a Christian passion to come
out and help train natives to write. The men and
women in the newspaper business have priceless ex-
perience, they have proven that they can write, and
many are ready to go as fast as we find sponsors for
them.

As soon as our funds permit, we shall send these
Christian journalists out to mission colleges to start
schools of journalism in which natives will be taught
to write far more simply and alluringly than they had
dreamed possible.

These schools of journalism will also be workshops
in which the students and professors study what the
people want to read, and then write it for news-
papers and magazines. If no newspapers exist, they
will actually begin them, printing them with attrac-
tive cartoons and photographs and large clear type in
the best American style. Artists in cartooning and
photography will have special classes. Together they
plan and write books, and illustrate them.

The students will be taught to use the latest print-

HOW FOREIGN MISSIONS PLAN 93

ing processes, which make printing so much, cheaper,
swifter, and more readable.

There will also be classes dealing with all the prob-
lems o promotion and sale of literature, getting it
into people's homes and getting it read. So, in reality,
these schools of journalism wiH be publishing centers
as well as schools, the students learning to do by do-
ing, which is both good education and good business.

So far, all that has been done is pitifully inadequate,
hardly a beginning, as may be seen when we realize
that over a hundred million semi-literate people who
learned in the past two decades are starving for good,
interesting literature. If I had a hundred million dol-
lars I would invest it in meeting this need for readable
uplifting and religious literature.

I would offer any price necessary to try to secure
the finest directors of journalism to be found among
our great newspapers and magazines. I would entice
them from The New York Times and the Readers
Digest. I would send out an army of them to capture
this field from the Communists, confident that we in
America have a hundred times more of everything
it takes to flood the world with fascinating reading
matter far more money, far more experience, far
more training in keen competition, far better writers.
Yet we Americans waste this genius and money in
mad competition with one another, newspapers
crowding one another to the wall, when a vast starv-
ing world needs us! It does not make sense. We ought
to hide our heads in shame.

Does anybody want to invest a hundred million
dollars for twenty years to build this bridge?

94 WAKE UP OH BLOW UP

Don't you see how literacy and simple readable
literature would be the bridge from those who know
how to those who need to know how?

Do you want them to know how to get more pro-
duction from their land? Here is your bridge!

Do you want them to have better sanitation and
hygiene? Here is your bridge!

Do you want them to know about child care and
motherhood? Here is your bridge!

Or home economics, or balanced diet? Here is your
bridge!

Do you want to 1 prove to them that America is their
friend? Here is your bridge!

Do you want them to understand freedom? Here is
your bridge!

Do you want them to get your religion? Here is the
bridge!

Do you want to trade with them? Here is your ad-
vertising medium.

Foolish, shortsighted, blindly selfish America! Why
don't you build that bridge while there is yet a world
in which to build it?

CHAPTER 10
It Pays to Be a Good Neighbor

America has had enough experience, if we profit
by it, to know that one dollar invested in being a good
neighbor brings as much return as a thousand dollars
invested in guns and bombs. Indeed, the good-neigh-
bor program has been a marvelous success wherever
it has been carried out by sincere, kindhearted men.
It fails only when we try to substitute loans of money
and to work from a distance instead of sending real
warmhearted friends.

The Philippine Islands is one example. We took the
Islands in 1899 without wanting them. We were at
war with Spain and there was a Spanish fleet in the
Philippines. Dewey sank the Spanish fleet, and the
Islands were on our hands. Aguinaldo and the Fili-
pino patriots, thinking that we were like their Span-
ish foes, fought us for a year. Then we sent a delega-
tion to explain our motives. "We are here to liberate
you, but we must protect you from Spain and every
other greedy power, and we will set you free the mo-
ment you have a unified, strong government, and we
will do our best to help you."

95

WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

That delegation won over Aguinaldo. He laid down
Ms arms, and the Philippines and America began one
of the happiest experiments in the history of ur coun-
try. I had the delight of sharing that experiment be-
tween 1915 and 1940, and saw how it paid to be a
sincere good neighbor.

We sent a thousand school teachers to the Philip-
pines within a year after peace came, six hundred on
one boat. We have sent twenty thousand teachers al-
together. Never from any other country have so many
men and women of good will gone forth to help an-
other country, asking nothing in return. One out of
four died in the Philippines., but their influence will
never die. We did better in every respect for the Fili-
pinos than any other colonial power had ever done,
set up a sound self-government and then set them
free as our "daughter republic/ 5

We had our payoff when the Japanese struck in
southeastern Asia. The only country of which we were
sure in all Asia during the war was the Philippine Re-
public. The Filipinos suffered far more casualties
during the Philippine campaign than did we, had their
principal cities ruined worse than any other country
on the allied side, worse even than Britain, and they
helped us win the war. As I write they are fighting by
our side in Korea.

Carlos Romulo, Philippine Ambassador to the
United States, former president of Rotary Interna-
tional, then a delegate to and finally President of the
Assembly of the United Nations, the president under
whom the Assembly was for the first time opened
with a minute of silent prayer, is a magnificent prod-

IT PAYS TO BE A GOOD NEIGHBOK 97

net of the schools established in the Philippines under
our administration.

Latin America is another example of the payoff for
being a good neighbor. Before 1930 practically all
Latin America hated us and feared us because of our
"big-stick policy/ 5 They called us "gringos" a word
of loathing. Then Herbert Hoover, with his experi-
ence of service in Europe and his Quaker ideas,
went down to Latin America, and in spite of his awk-
ward shyness (or perhaps partly because of it) con-
vinced Latin America that we sincerely wanted to be
her good neighbor and not her boss. Franklin D.
Roosevelt continued that policy with his winning
friendliness. We established a department of Co-or-
dinators for Latin America, with Nelson Rockefeller
at its head. Rockefeller worked with prodigious zeal
and miraculous effectiveness to win the heart of Latin
America. Most of our international firms have co-op-
erated. In Venezuela, the oil companies espoused the
principle that the oil is the property of Venezuela,
and that the oil companies are entitled only to the
profit they deserve for helping the government ex-
tract this wealth from the ground. On this basis both
government and companies prosper, and the em-
ployes are far better treated than any others in Vene-
zuela.

Now we have our payoff. When Communism
threatens to close in on us East and West, Latin
America is the one continent where we have the
least to fear.

My own delightful experience in Latin America in
the interests of literacy was due to this co-operation

tfO WAKE UP OR BLOW UJ?

of the American Embassies and of the coordinators,
who opened the doors of gracious hospitality to me,
a Protestant missionary working in a Roman Cath-
olic continent. The countries welcomed me because
I offered to help meet a greatly felt need.

Liberia is just now Exhibit A of our experiments in
good-neighbor policy. After the Civil War of 1861-
65 we sent all the freed slaves to Liberia who wanted
to go, and we protected Liberia from being gobbled
up by any of the foreign powers, which at one time or
another took all the rest of Africa. Afterward, for a
long period, we neglected Liberia, because malaria
made it a deathtrap for whites; even the missionaries
gave it up after losing scores of martyrs to the cause of
Christ. Then medicine conquered malaria, even in
Liberia. Missionaries of a dozen denominations began
to work in the country, many of them black mission-
aries. Liberia is the only country on earth where the
government officially works hand in hand with mis-
sionaries to make everybody literate, to make every-
body Christian, and to make everybody speak and
read English.

The U.S. government sent experts in agriculture, in
health, in finance, and in education, to co-operate with
the Liberian government.

President Tubinan has left nothing to be desired
in appreciation and co-operation, Harvey Firestone
established a great rubber plantation in Liberia, pay-
ing the workers good wages and giving them good
home conditions. The Firestone plantation is now
erecting a great medical and research center in Li-

IT PAYS TO BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR 99

beria, with the purpose of defeating malaria, sleeping
sickness, dysentery, yellow fever, venereal disease,
hookworm, and many other diseases which make Af-
rica the most unhealthy continent in the world.

The Firestone Company also proposes to co-oper-
ate with the government and mission literacy pro-
gram to teach all its employes to read and speak the
English language.

Then Stettinius organized a company to develop
the tremendous iron and gold and other resources of
the country, offering excellent working conditions
and wages to the men, and placing the welfare of Li-
beria at the very top of their objectives. Liberia in the
last two years has become the miracle of the world.
It is the only country in all Africa which has no fear
of Communism.

Two years ago in India, I ran across another strik-
ing instance of how it pays to be a good neighbor.
After India and Pakistan were set free, there were
frightful riots in India, Millions of Moslems fled from
India to Pakistan, and millions of Hindus fled from
Pakistan to India. Strewn along the highways were
countless thousands, wounded, hungry, cold, and
wretched. It happened that there was in India an
abundance of medicine, food, and clothing which had
never been sent "over the hump" to China, because
the war with Japan ended so suddenly. So Christians
and missionaries, dropping their other work, began
binding up the wounded refugees, feeding the hun-
gry, and clothing the naked. In two weeks, Christian-
ity was so popular that Moslems wore Christian

1CW WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

crosses to deceive the Hindus, and Hindus wore
crosses so that they would not be killed by the
Moslems!

Japan is one of the most striking illustrations in the
world of how a nation can change from hate to love
in two years. At the end of World War II, they hated
us bitterly. Then MacAithur, who understood Japan,
instead of punishing the Japanese, did his best to give
them good government and to help them recover. His
kindness was so surprising that public opinion turned
a somersault. When a vote was taken in 1949 to de-
.termine what nation was most popular among the Jap-
anese, the United States got ten times as many votes
as any other nation and more than all the others put
together. It paid to be a good neighbor to Japan.

But had we stayed away and merely loaned Japan
a billion dollars, as we have often done for other coun-
tries, she would not have loved us. A good neighbor
doesn't fend money; a good neighbor goes and lends
a hand. Moneylenders are never loved.

CHAPTER 11
Technical Aid

For ten years I have been preaching to such. Ameri-
cans as will come to listen to a missionary that our
losing the world to Communism is our own fault,
wholly because we are blind to the situation, imagin-
ing that we can have a wonderful America and let the
rest take care of themselves as we take care of our-
selves. I wrote that point of view in the last chapter
of The Silent Billion Speak. Old, blind ex-Senator
Owen of Oklahoma had this book read to him, and it
set his soul on fire. He distributed it to all the senators.
One of the senators who read it was Senator Harry
Truman.

Four years ago, tingling with my experiences with
the illiterates who were passionately eager to learn
to read, and with the astonishing reception which
governments were giving a humble missionary who
happened to have something they wanted, I was tell-
ing my story in Calvary Episcopal Church, New York,
of which the Rev. Sam Shoemaker is rector. His wife,
the daughter of Senator Alexander Smith of New
Jersey, a woman of intense Christian devotion, caught

101

102 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

fire with this vision. She called her father in Washing-
ton and told him she wanted President Truman to
hear this story. A few days later Senator Smith, Mr.
Shoemaker, and I went into the office of President
Truman while Helen Shoemaker sat outside and
prayed. We said in substance:

"President Truman, the world is swiftly falling be-
fore Communist propaganda, because it is hungry
and sick and unhappy and desperately determined
to coine up out of its misery. Our experience with
literacy shows us that anybody who goes out with
something those people need and offers to help them
has their love and gratitude. The Communists are
winning them by telling them we don't care, and by
promising to help them. We believe, Mr. President^
that if you would tell the world that America stands
ready to help all nations help themselves by sharing
our technical knowledge unselfishly, you would find
the world wildly enthusiastic. You could win the cold
war if you kept that promise. 5 '

The President listened with close attention for per-
haps twenty minutes. Then he said this thing we pro-
posed was religion. He wondered whether America
would f olow him if he made such a promise. Then he
said, "You men go out and start a revival. I am a great
believer in religion. Nothing but religion will stir a
nation to rise to the high ideal you have proposed to-
day." The President made no promises.

But many other people were telling the President
the same thing we had told him. Among these was the
famous Dr. Norris Dodd, the agricultural expert who,
under the United States government and the United

TECHNICAL, AID 103

Nations, has been helping countries aU over the planet
raise better crops. It is probable that President Tru-
man has been thinking about this matter for many
years, always wondering whether America had
enough religion to go out unselfishly to lift the world
out of its dangerous misery. He wanted to be sure he
could take the country with him.

What was our delight when, on January 20, 1949,
in the midst of an inaugural address of the usual order,
President Truman electrified the world by his now
famous Point IV. The President said:

We must embark on a bold new program for making
the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial
progress available for the improvement and growth of
undeveloped areas. , . .

Our aim should be to help the free peoples of the
world, through their own eff orts, to produce more food,
more clothing, more materials for housing, and more
mechanical power to lighten their burdens. . . .

The old imperialism exploitation for foreign profit
has no place in our plans. What we envisage is ...
democratic fair-dealing.

Only by helping the least fortunate of its members
to help themselves can the human family achieve the
decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people. . . .

This is Point IV!

Whatever happens to Harry Truman, he will go
down in history as the first Chief Executive of any
nation who ever proposed such a world- wide Chris-
tian plan. It proposes to lift four-fifths of the human
race above the line of hunger and despair, not by vio-
lence and revolution and liquidation, but by unself-
ishly sharing our knowledge and our abundance.

104 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

The reaction to the President's proposal in America
was lukewarm. Some Americans took sides mildly for
or against the idea, but most Americans were uncer-
tain and neutral, They did not know what to make of
it

But the rest of the world was not lukewarmit was
hot. Other nations were more enthusiastic about Point
IV than about anything else since the United Nations
began. I was in Siam and saw in huge letters across
the first page of a newspaper, "America Promises to
Help All Needy Nations/ 3 People were amazed and
thrilled. Point IV had shot new hope into the veins
of the disintegrating world.

The United Nations was electrified. On November
15, 1950, the nations voted unanimously, no country
absenting, to invest many millions of dollars in aiding
the underdeveloped areas with their technical skills.
No action of the United Nations ever received a larger
number of votes.

Both the United States government and the United
Nations have worked vigorously to carry out their
proposals. There are many books and hundreds of
bulletins and pamphlets dealing with the subject.
Documents on Point IV may be obtained from the
United States government or from the United Na-
tions.

Harper & Brothers recently published a book en-
titled Bold New Program, by Willard R. Espy, of
Reader' s Digest, which now is obtainable in a twenty-
five cent edition. The Public Affairs Institute at Wash-
ington also has published a series of pamphlets un-
der the same general title.

TECHNICAL AID 105

No nation dares be against helping the world, and
not many individuals have dared to oppose it. Some
businessmen have expressed fear of teaching other
people arts and sciences which will enable them to
compete with our own business enterprises, as Japan
was doing before the second World War. Most busi-
nessmen believe, on the other hand, that if. other coun-
tries have more industries they will be able to buy
far more from the United States. Helping the other
people of the world help themselves is in the long
run very far-sighted good business.

The chief difference of opinion is as to how much
of Point IV the government should undertake, and
how much should be left to private enterprise. The
American Merchants Association issued a brochure
saying it would support the Point IV idea only if it
were all left to private enterprise. The Association for
Economic Education, with more than a million dol-
lars back of it, has also come out for a private-enter-
prise Point IV.

The two obvious reasons for this are: first, business
wants to get all the profits it can, with no government
competition; and, second, there is a very widespread
opposition to allowing any more power to drift into
the hands of the government. Americans want just as
little government as possible, except when threat-
ened by war. So far, President Truman has received
from Congress only 26 million of the 45 million dol-
lars he asked, and consequently the United Nations
got much less from the United States than it had ex-
pected.

106 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

So if the government will not do it adequately,
who will?

Private enterprise ought' to be given a chance to do
all it will. But there are several most important needs
which business will not help because there is no pro-
fit to be made in helping those needs.

For example, private enterprise seldom invests in
education, because it is usually a financial loss. For
the same reason business seldom invests in health. It
seldom invests in home economics, or dietetics, or
ideal home life, or child care, or simple agriculture,
because these produce no immediate profits.

It is true that some international business concerns
do help education and health in some countries in a
magnificent way. 1 have already mentioned the Fire-
stone Company building a great medical center for
Liberia. The oil companies in East Arabia have started
notable schools. Such companies see. that it pays to
purchase good will. But the list of those who invest
large sums abroad with no prospect of return is short.

Private philanthropies have been a great blessing.
We have had marvelous results in health and educa-
tion from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
Happily, many fortunes are being converted into
foundations to prevent them from disappearing as
inheritance taxes. There is reason to believe that some
of the newer foundations will see die vision of service
abroad. It seems likely that a much larger proportion
of the gifts of these foundations will be spent abroad
for lifting the backward people than in the past. Some
of them see now that one dollar spent abroad does
more for saving the peace than a hundred dollars

TECHNICAL AID 107

spent In America, just because the battieield of the
world is among the hungry and discontented multi-
tudes.

President Truman's appointment of Nelson Rocke-
feller at the head of a strong committee gives strength
to the Point IV program. As head of the Co-ordinators
in Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller was a tremen-
dous success. He has indeed been rightfully called a
a one-man Point IV for South America/* He will com-
mand the confidence of the philanthropies, will en-
list the aid of international business, and so will be
able to bring together these powerful units to co-op-
erate with government in an all-out American effort
to lift the world.

Americans must see just what a good Point IV is
not. It is not charity, in the sense of giving away our
surplus food or old clothes. In an earthquake or fam-
ine or revolt or after a tragedy like that in Korea it is
necessary to feed the hungry and clothe the naked,
People do not want to remain paupers; they want to
catch up with us so that they will not need our charity.
No beggar ever really thanks the man who gives him
alms. The gift leaves the benefactor with a glow of
virtue, but it humiliates the recipient. People want us
to help them to help themselves so that they will not
need charity and can be independent and self-re-
specting.

This does not mean that we should continue to de-
stroy potatoes and oranges and other crops instead
of giving them away. One of the most stinging accu-
sations the Communists can use to make the hungry
people hate us is to tell them that we destroy a hun-

108 , WAKE UP OR BLOW 0P

died times as much food as we give to feed the poor.
One of the things Mr. Nehru found it hardest to for-
give was that we refused to release for India some
fifteen shiploads of wheat which were lying in New
York Harbor while the wheat molded. We are making
people hate us when we destroy food. The Commu-
nists are seeing to that

Most of my readers have heard a Russian delegate
talking over the radio from the United Nations.
He may not like me if I say that he is the most diaboli-
cally clever liar since Adolf Hitler. His attempt to
make the ignorant world believe that South Koreans,
led by the United States, started the Korean war by
invading North Korea is an insult to every intelligent
person in the world, but hundreds of millions of illit-
erate people, who know nothing of the facts, will be-
lieve that lie if it is repeated often enough. Day after
day, Russia is telling the world that America is the
Shylock of the world. No nation in history has em-
ployed lies so effectively. Our only answer is to prove
that America is the Good Samaritan of the world,
prove it with a miEion deeds. Yet there are men in
America who will fight the Point IV program unless
we can exact our pound of flesh. These men in this
terrible hour are playing into Russia's hands, though
they bitterly hate her.

I do not mean that we should give the world all
our surplus food and stop there. That would not
make them love us. I mean that we must also give
the world our best selves, sending a hundred thou-
sand of our finest men and women with technical
skills to help people help themselves, to mingle with

TECHNICAL AID 109

them democratically and with no color consciousness,
to love them, to help them fulfil their aspirations, and
then we ought to back these men and women with
the financial resources which they need. I mean all
out as we fight our wars.

That and that alone will nullify the campaign of
lies which is building up hate for America. Isn't this
self-evident? I believe that the men who oppose Point
IV will quickly endorse it when they see the facts,
and that the hungry multitudes whom I know so well
want to come up to self-respect where they will not
need anybody's charity. They have begun to see the
true meaning of democracy, and that is what democ-
racy means.

We must offer our technical skills, asking neither
favor nor profit in return. We must show them how to
get ten times or a hundred times as much from their
land as they get now. We must show them how to
conquer those diseases and insects that kill their crops
and animals and children. We must show them how
to conquer malaria and hookworm and dysentery
and venereal disease and plague. We must help them
as they struggle up out of their hell. We must go to
their sides and help them. There is no substitute for
the real, living, loving person rubbing elbow to elbow
with the people who toil.

The New York Herald Tribune for October 29,
1950, says exactly this in an article by Walter Reuther,
head of the United Auto Workers. He declares that
the free nations must immediately "launch a total
war against poverty and social injustice .... Too
long we have made the tragic mistake of believing

110 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

that freedom's fight in Asia could be won alone on the
battlefields. It is imperative that we learn the lesson
and act in the knowledge that freedom's fight must
be won in the rice fields. Communism did not con-
quer China. Communism moved in to fill the vacuum
created by our failure to wage war there against pov-
erty and hunger." Reuther is smart!

Unless we help people to help themselves, the
Voice of America and the Crusade for Freedom are
utterly futile as substitutes for this help. Let nobody
suppose that the onward sweep of Communism is go-
ing to be stopped by any such easy short cut. I like
the radio idea chiefly because it helps us to analyze
our own case and see whether it really will win the
hungry masses. Perhaps it may do us good, but I lie
in dread lest it lull us to sleep.

I think the broadcasters realize that abstract truth
is not enough to save us. There is one truth which
Communists constantly push before the destitute
masses. This is that they are desperately hungry, while
America is fabulously rich, and wasting more than
they ever get to eat or wear. That is an ugly truth. If
you talk over the radio to the hungry man about the
danger of being enslaved to Russia and about the
glory of democracy and freedom, he will shake his
fist at that radio and ask, "Freedom from what? Free-
dom from hunger? What are you doing about it?
There is no way up but to kill the landlords and de-
stroy the government." As Espy puts it, "They cannot
eat democracy.' 5 But the broadcaster cannot hear
what the hungry masses say to him at their radios and
what their Communist comrades sitting among them

TECHNICAL AID 111

in every village say when they hear our broadcasts.
But I know! And it isn't sweet. You cannot counteract
Communism by absent treatment.

If we fail to help those masses, all the radio talc in
the world will make them hate us more. Words as a
substitute for deeds are loathsome to hungry people.
Their landlords have always used mealy-mouthed Hes
about "legal right" to cover their oppression. Genuine
help alone will prove that we are sincere and that the
Communists are telling lies about us. For the masses
will be deeply suspicious until we prove our genuine-
ness.

But our wealth need not be a hindrance to us. If we
use that wealth wisely to help the world help itself to
be wealthy also, if we use it to send technicians to
help those people help themselves to our level, our
wealth can be our salvation.

If we help those people to a new higher level above
poverty, above sickness, above exploitation and op-
pression, as the Communists promise to do, then our
broadcasts will become irresistible! We shall have a
truth to tell them which will silence the lies and half-
truths of the' Communists. Deeds compassionate
helpfulness plus witness, these two will save the
world if they are done by men who love their fellow
men. And this is pure Christlikeness. That is why the
Church should take the leading part, because only
Christians can do this with perfectly Christian love.

CHAPTER 12
What Could Be Done

This chapter should be written by engineers, hu-
man engineers and doctors. I have neither the train-
ing nor the time to make the great research which an
adequate picture would require.

One tiling we must keep in mind. We are aiming to
help hungry people, not to make the rich richer. In
Egypt a great dam was built across the Nile in 1890.
This enabled the Nile to triple its production. Land
values soared and rents went up. The common people
went heavily in debt to the moneylenders at rates of
30 per cent or higher. They lost their land. In 1941
half of Egypt's wonderful land was owned by 12,000
landlords, 442 acres each on an average; 2,280,000
peasants held an average of .8 of an acre each, and
millions were landless paupers. The farm family re-
ceived an average income of $36 per year family in-
come, not individual. That was improvement which
did the hungry people harm,

We are not seeking to speed up the exploitation of
the world's mineral wealth for the benefit of the few.
Harold Isaacs, in Bold New Program Series, No. 2,
writes:

, 112

WHAT COULD BE DONE 118

The great gold and diamond mines and farms of
South Africa . . . have been made possible by the
mass dispossession and virtual enslavement of the
African people. About 6 5 QOO ? OOG rural Africans have
been pushed off their land into 40 million acres, while
800,000 whites have 204,500,000 acres, seized from the
blacks by the state without compensation. Deprived of
his land the African was forced to work for the whites
or die . . . virtual forced labor in the mines, other in-
dustries, and on white owned farms, policed and
herded, deprived of all freedom of movement, and paid
from $1 to $12 a month.

This kind of "economic development 55 is not what
Point IV must helpit is the thing Point IV must stop
if we are to halt the onward march of Communism.

A study shows that the per capita annual income of
the lower two-thirds of the human race was $41 a
year; for China and Indonesia it was $22. We must
lift that. The per capita income of men, women, and
children in the United States was then $525.

Another study showed that the food consumption
of two-thirds of humanity was 2150 calories a day,
400 calories below an adequate diet and only 300
above starvation; those who go lower die. Ours in
America is 3040 a day. We eat too much!

How could we change these figures? (I do not refer
to ourswe can diet!)

Norris Dodd says that if we can increase the world
yield of agriculture 10 per cent and make it available
to all people, there will be sufficient food for perfect
health.

And we can go far above that! How can we do it?
For one thing, by introducing better seeds all over

114 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

the world. Where Introduced, hybrid com has al-
ready increased the production from 20 per cent to
300 per cent.

Agricultural science can perform similar miracles
for every crop by using better seeds, better plows,
better fertilizers, better irrigation systems, and by
destroying diseases of crops. It seems to be agreed
now that if we applied our agricultural know-how
over the world we could increase the food supply so
much that instead of 1,500 millions of the world be-
ing far below the decency level, we could support 3
billions with food to spare. We have the know-how,
and need only to show how (Rausherbeich, Bold New
Program, p. 64).

There are also exciting opportunities to reclaim
vast areas of the world that are now arid.

Africa has a fifth of the world's surface, one-third
desert, a third jungle, with high, cool plateaus. Its
possibilities for development in agriculture are incal-
culably great. Africa has 40 per cent of the possible
hydroelectric horsepower of the whole world. Less
than 1 per cent is used. There are proposals to turn
the water of the Niger river, the Zambesi, the Nile, the
Congo, out over rich desert loam and convert enor-
mous areas into lush tropical gardens and farms.
Much of the Sahara could be covered with grass or
farmed.

It looks as though for a while Africa will need
engineers and irrigation and agricultural and soil-
conservation experts to plan out these exciting
achievements. But God grant they may be Christians,
or all this development will make more misery for the

WHAT COULD BE DONE 115

African, not less, as Egypt and South Africa reveal.

Let us look at Asia,

In Iran, an American company called Overseas
Consultants prepared a program for spending $650
million in a grand face-lifting scheme for eveiy as-
pect of the country's life. The money would come
from $50-million-a-year oil royalties. They propose
to irrigate 400,000 acres of land, greatly extend edu-
cation, increase housing and electric power and road
contraction, construct mills and plants to make ferti-
lizers, soap, insecticides, and other needed products.
It is a marvelous conception will it lift the masses or
exploit them? If it exploits, those multitudes will go
Communist.

Iraq, next door, has an even more breath-taking
program. She has an eight-man board to reconstruct
the vast irrigation system which made it possible
to support 80,000,000 people when Babylon was in
her prime. That irrigation program is being blocked
by a dispute as to who will control and exploit the
water supply. That kind of thing makes the Commu-
nists gleeful.

Nobody yet knows what possibilities exist for con-
verting the seemingly limitless level waste of Arabia
into a garden. Perhaps with atomic energy we shall
distill water from the oceans, just as clouds do, and
make Arabia the very garden of Eden many think it
once was. All this directly aims at stopping the major
cause of wars in the Near East The reason the people
there are so violent and unhappy is that they are
hungry. If this desert land were watered and the peo-
ple could have their own acres it would easily support

116 WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

a multitude of happy people, one hundred times the
present population. Frances Perkins, in her book on
The Roosevelt I Knew, says that Roosevelt told her,
"When I get through being President of the United
States I think Eleanor and I will go to the Near East
and see if we can manage to put over an operation
like the Tennessee Valley system that will really make
something out of that country."

One hopes Roosevelt's spirit may yet watch over
that dream and make it come true.

Alas, thus far Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia has not in-
vested any of the billions he is receiving as royalties
from American oil companies in the development of
these vast areas for the welfare of the hungry multi-
tudes. He had better do it if he wants to save Arabia
from the Communists.

Look at Afghanistan. This country has never had a
missionary, because it is solidly Moslem. But, awak-
ening with the rest of the world, it invited Morrison-
Knudsen, an American engineering firm, to make a
plan for building roads and industries, for which they
expect to spend 135 minion dollars. They also em-
ployed American teachers, some of them deeply
Christian men, who went with a wonderful missionary
spirit and were liked.

Palestine, now the home of the Jewish Republic of
Israel, has one of the most astonishing programs in
the world, which has already turned desert and rocks
into a paradise, They have plans to develop the Jor-
dan Valley which will make fertile 900,000 acres that
now are arid, provide room for 2 million people and
generate 500 million kilowatts of electricity. This plan

WHAT COULD BE DONE 117

was conceived by the famous American soil-conser-
vation expert. Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk.

The reason Palestine can carry out this program is
that the Jews tithe, and so can raise 100 million dol-
lars a year for Palestine. If the Protestants of the
United States would tithe and would give half their
tithe to remove hunger and despair abroad through
technically trained missionaries, they could have more
than two billion dollars a year to help the world as the
Jews are helping Palestine. That would be ample! If
we will not listen to our Lord and do this, we are go-
ing to listen to the threat of Communists rolling down
over Asia and Africa, and perhaps over the whole of
Europe.

Sam Higginbottom and his associates in the Pres-
byterian Agricultural College at Allahabad, India,
proved that by crossbreeding, the cows of India can
be made to yield far more milk. Hindus do not kill
cows, so millions of useless cows are eating up India
without yielding any returns. Allahabad is changing
cows from liabilities to assets.

It will be possible in India to add forty million acres
of rice-producing land, to save twelve million tons
of rice now lost annually by poor storage methods,
to improve milling and transportation and cooking,
and so to make twice as much rice in India available
for food. Yet we do not need that much to raise India
above the hunger line. All we need is ten per cent!

Fortunately, the new Indian government has taken
the large estates and divided them into small farms,
a wise move that is the best guarantee that India
will not fall under the Iron Curtain*

118 WAKE UP OR BLOW CO?

We must hope that by sane and patient diplomacy
China may be won back to our friendship. If that hap-
pens, then America can help in the most stupendous
program of social upbuilding possible on the whole
earth. Dam projects now on paper could increase her
electric output 115 billion kilowatt hours, equal to the
total used by France, Germany, Russia, and the
United Kingdom together! China will need it she
has a fourth of the world's population, more people
than all those countries put together. Nitrogen ferti-
lizer could be extracted from the air in sufficient
quantity to fertilize 100 million sterile acres of Chi-
nese land which were long ago worn out, and irriga-
tion could make ten million acres of desert land rich
in productivity.

As Espy puts it, "The root of the problem is pov-
erty. If the Communists in China ease poverty faster
than the Indians do, then the Indians will become
Communists too. If, on the other hand, China's
economy remains stagnant while the economies of its
neighbors surge forward, then the Communists will
follow the Kuomintang into limbo. 55

Thanks to men like Nelson Rockefeller and Herbert
Hoover, we have already done more in Latin Amer-
ica than in any other part of the world. It is precisely
because we have been good neighbors in Latin
America that this is the part of the world which is
least likely to go Communist. Yet the possibilities in
Latin America have hardly been s-cratched.

Brazil's potential hydroelectric resources exceed
those of any other in the worldfar, far more than
she will need in centuries. The Amazon contains more

WHAT COULD BE DONE 119

water than any three other rivers combined, indeed,
one-fifth of all the fresh water in the world.

The sick world is in desperate need of our medical
knowledge. We can still be of tremendous assistance
to the health of Latin America. Malaria, dysentery
resulting from bad sanitation and bad water, venereal
disease, jungle fever, smallpox, hookworm, and mal-
nutrition are some of the diseases which medical
science can reduce or stop.

The tsetse fly is all across the center of Africa. It
has been keeping down the population of men and
cattle in that area for centuries. Now an injection
can protect both men and cattle.

Cholera and smallpox and yellow fever and the
plague have been conquered and can be wholly
stopped.

Malaria strikes 300 million people a year. Malaria
and mosquito control at 20 cents per person can prac-
tically wipe out the disease aH over the world.

There is a bacillus called BCG which can now im-
munize children against tuberculosis, the worst killer
in the world.

Venereal disease, affecting easily half of Africa
and a fourth of Asia, can now be cured by penicillin
and other means.

Leprosy, for ages the most dreaded of all diseases,
can now be clinically cured by the newest drugs, and
it seems to be only a matter of time until this disease
will be seen upon earth no more. The Church is re-
ducing leprosy more than all other agencies com-
bined.

This is but the beginning in the realm of health.

120 WAKE UP OH BLOW UP

But imagine our adopting a policy of improving
health for profit only! Here certainly is where the
Church must do most of the serving, and do it in the
spirit of the Great Physician.

Enormous aid can be given all over the world in
combating the diseases and insects which kill citrus
fruits, cocoa, indeed, most plants and nearly all do-
mestic animals. This know-how can be disseminated
through simple literature and by demonstrations,
and stores can be located where the insecticides and
fumigants can be purchased.

All this and thousands of other types of service are
suggested in Espy's Bold New Program and in the
eight-volume Bold New Program put out by Public
Affairs Institute.

We far excel Russia in this realm of technical ex-
perts and mechanics. Indeed, it is precisely in her
lack of technicians that Russia is having her greatest
trouble. She needs them all, while we have a super-
abundance. Why not fight our war where we have
the tremendous advantage with our technicians, go-
ing out to win the heart of the world with unselfish
competent service?

Russia will stir up the desire of the world let us
fulfil it! It is the thing America believes in, excels in;
we need not fear competition in service.

Who can exaggerate what American experience in
efficient service could accomplish if we would visual-
ize the situation and then go forth to serve and save
the world?

But who will do this? Much of it business will do

WHAT COULD BE BONE 121

as an investment But the Communists will take the
world if we do only what is profitable.

Some of it philanthropy will do, but not one per
cent of what must be done.

Government and UN will do much, but not nearly
enough. It looks as though neither our Congress nor
the other nations will offer an adequate appropriation
unless they are driven by fear, and then it will be too
late. I hope I am mistaken, but this seems to be true
as I write.

Who, then, will do the major part? It ought to be
the Church. Compassionate service for the needy mul-
titude, asking nothing in return, is perfect Christlike
Christianity. It is saving men and it is saving the
world, which is the true function of the Church of
Jesus Christ. The true function of the United Nations
and of the United States is to persuade the other na-
tions to reform their extortionate money-lending and
oppressive landlordism, while the Church lends an
adequate hand to help the hungry masses. Is it not
clear that we cannot trust this program exclusively
to men who will help only where they reap a profit?
Three-fourths of it can bring no financial dividends,
and that is the most crucial three-fourths.

CHAPTER 13
Wanted, More Landotmers

When our technical experts study the causes of

hunger and misery, they discover that "cause num-
ber one" of dissatisfaction and hunger is the feudal
system. Nearly all the countries of the world outside
the United States and Canada, and some of Europe,
have more people on large feudal estates than live on
their own land. These are the people who are hungry,
miserable, dissatisfied and ready to follow the Com-
munist, conspiracies to violence.

In the Philippines, the Huks are from large estates
owned by private landlords and the Church. If there
were no great estates there would be no Communist
threat in the Philippines. When William Howard
Taft was Governor General of the Philippines, he saw
that landlordism had been the cause of the constant
revolts against Spain, and he started to purchase the
big estates and resell them to the tenants. He suc-
ceeded in purchasing and reselling half of these
estates. But, alas, the power of the landlords over the
government was great enough to prevent his efforts
to divide the other half, and now the Philippine Re-

122

WANTED, MORE LANDOWNERS 123

public Is threatened by Communists bred by the op-
pression and misery of the tenants.

When I was a resident of the Philippines, I wrote
a book about their greatest hero, Dr. Jose Rizal,
martyred in the Spanish period because he became
the champion of the impoverished tenants of great
estates. Landlords are the curse of the Philippines
even today and the chief source of their political cor-
ruption.

The Bell report of 1950 made the landlords of the
Philippines furious but it told the truth. John Collier
comments on that report in The New York Times for
October 31, 1950, and says, "Usury, peonage, unpro-
ductive landlordism, administrative corruption, must
be ended/ 5

It is this kind of feudal system, with its grip on the
governments, which is responsible for nine-tenths of-
the advances of the Communists around the world.
The Communists overthrew feudalism in Russia,
know how it is hated everywhere, and are on the
march to overthrow it in the rest of the world.

America was shocked in the fall of 1950 at the
abortive rebellion in Puerto Rico and the attempt to
assassinate President Truman. Had people known the
truth they would have wondered that the rebellion
waited so long. The level fertile land of Puerto Rico
is practically all occupied by great sugar, tobacco, and
citrus estates, which make enormous profits. Sugar
made a profit of $100 million in fifteen years. The
wages of the sugar workers average $150 a year.
Governor Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., said in 1929:

"The inland districts, from the outskirts of the cane-

124 WAKE UP OH BLOW HP

ridden valleys to the tops of the mountains seethe
with human misery, and it is impossible to pass into
or out of any city or town without traversing the
fringes of unsightly, rnaladorous, filthy habitations
which surround the more prosperous areas."

In 1948, the government divided 70,000 acres be-
fore Governor Tugwell was driven out by the land-
lords. But the mountains are still crowded with poor
people, "undernourished, sicHy . . . literal skeletons
in the U. S. closet."

This is a difficult subject to handle justly, for all
estates are not alike. There are great estates where
people are treated far better than their neighbors
who own their own land. This is the case with the
Firestone plantation in Liberia. It is true of many
estates in Hawaii. It could be true of all estates. But
unfortunately the people who can be trusted with ir-
responsible power over others are in a very small
minority. When men can divide arbitrarily with
others they usually take all they can take without
actually "killing the goose that lays the golden egg."
Most of the great estates of the world are oppressive,
and many of them are practicing plain modern
slavery.

If one had written this a year ago he might have
been called a Communist or at least a "pink." But
now this fact is recognized by most of the world
leaders.

One of the greatest values of the United Nations
is the speed with which nations learn from one an-
other by their constant intimate interchange of ex-
perience. I think most of the members of the United

WANTED, MORE LANDOWNEBS 125

Nations now see clearly that parasitical landlords
must go. If there is no way to abolish the feudal lords
legally they will be abolished via the Communist way,
by revolution.

The Communist philosophy may be stated thus:
Be realistic; admit that the landlords own the govern-
ments and that they will never give up voluntarily.
Only well-organized revolution, a new government,
violent seizure of the land, and liquidation of the
landlords can get results.

The Christian agrees with the Communist that the
present system of landownership over much of the
world is terrible. The difference is that the Commun-
ist advocates revolution and violence, while the Chris-
tian advocates legal methods to right the wrongs.

The Christian way would be to throw as much light
as possible on oppression by landlords, persuade
governments where feudalism exists to reform volun-
tarily, and to pass laws requiring the landlords to sell
their land to the tenants or to die state for resale to
the tenants.

This Christian way is not just starry-eyed, wishful
thinking. It is beginning to happen in some countries
and is being strongly advocated in many other coun-
tries. In Northern Ireland, the landlords were com-
pelled by law to sell their estates for a reasonable
price, and the land was resold to the tenants. Form-
erly India was cursed by landlordism and the tenants
received an estimated income of $13 a year. Since
India became free, the princes and landlords are re-
quired by the new government to give up their land,
but if they do so voluntarily they are reimbursed in

WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

such a way that they will not suffer much loss in
standard of living and not much loss in prestige,

The Near East is all astir with the realization that
they must do something similar to what India has
done or be overthrown by the desperate masses. Let
us quote from The New Jork Times, November 27,
1950:

ARAB FORUM SIFTS RURAL CONDITIONS
by Albion Ross

Cairo, Nov. 26. An assembly here of economists and
experts from throughout the Arab world, meeting un-
der the auspices of the United Nations to study the
condition of 75 per cent of the Arab population that

works on the land, has described the situation as dis-
astrous. . . .

The assembly will last for three weeks and will be
entirely devoted to the desperate condition of the peas-
antry and means of changing the situation.

Experts and representatives of various Governments
were told that the cultivated land is intensely over-
crowded, while, with the exception of Egypt, far less
than one-half of the cultivated land is employed and
in Egypt less than three-quarters of the cultivable area
is used. Concentration of the land in the hands of ab-
sentee landlords was sharply attacked. Bitter criticism
of the conditions was made by Arabs from various
countries. . . .

Prof. Said Himadeh. of Lebanon stated: "If construc-
tive action is not taken soon, it may become too late.
The rural people are awakening. They are beginning to
realize the causes of their misery and their discontent
If their problems are not solved lawfully, the presump-
tion is that sooner or later they will attempt their solu-
tion by revolution.". . .

Prof. Himadeh stated that the amount of land per

WANTED, MOBE LANDOWNERS 127

settled rural individual is less than half an acre in
Egypt, in Lebanon about one and one-half acres, in
Syria and Jordan about two and one-half and in Iraq
four acres.

Speaking of the absentee landowner problem, he
said:

"In all Arab countries the density of rural popula-
tion on the cultivated land is greatly aggravated by the
extreme inequality in land ownership. In Egypt more
than 3,000,000 out of the 4,000,000 people actively en-
gaged in agriculture own no land or less than one acre
each. In Syria about half the land surveyed and settled
consists of large estates. In Lebanon, contrary to pre-
vious estimates, figures show that less than 200 persons
own about half the land surveyed. In northern Iraq
the degree of inequality in land ownership is similar
to that in Syria, but in southern Iraq practically all
land is owned by sheiks or city notables."

The New "York Times on November 1 ? 1950, pub-
lished an article saying that the government of the
United States is pushing such land reform in the
United Nations. It said:

U. S. AID TO FARM OWNERSHIP TOLD IN

U. N. IN RESPONSE TO POLISH MOVE

FOR REFORM STUDY

The United States delegation to the United Nations
stole the thunder of the Soviet bloc today and seized
on a Polish resolution calling for the study of land re-
form to present the case for the individually-owned
and operated family-sized farm.

Senator John J. Sparkman, Democrat of Alabama,
speaking as the son of a tenant farmer who became a
farm tenant and then a small owning farmer, told the
United Nations General Assembly's Economic and Fi-
nancial Committee in the course of its debate on land

128

WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

reform, of the great achievements of his country in re-
ducing farm tenancy and increasing the number of in-
dividually owned and operated farms.

In fourteen years, tenancy was reduced from 42 to
26 per cent, said Senator Sparkman, a member of the
United States delegation. Loans up to $50,000,000 a
year under the Bankhead- Jones Farm Tenant Purchase
Act gave the impetus to this development, he declared.

"In the United States we believe strongly in farm
ownership, individual farm ownership/' the United
States delegate said. "We believe that the land that a
man and his family works and on which they make a
living ought to belong to him and to his family.

"It is that objective toward which we have been
working the last many years, and it is that same kind of
program or a similar program that we envisage may
very well be encouraged by this General Assembly and
by this committee, and might very well be undertaken
in many parts of the world/*

Announcing "wholehearted" support of this kind of
program, Senator Sparkman asked only for an amend-
ment of the Polish draft "that would particularly pro-
vide for helping small farmers, individual farmers to
own and operate the land out of which they and then-
family make a living."

The United States representative described the net-
work of farmer-owned co-operatives with many billion
dollars in assets through which the United States
farmers controlled the purchase, production and mar-
keting phases of their operations. He told how in half
a generation electrified farms had been increased from
10 to 86 per cent

Mieczyslaw Blausztajn of Poland welcomed the
United States statement and defended the "production
co-operatives" that is, collectives introduced in the
country's agriculture as means of achieving a higher
level of agricultural production.

WANTED, MOBE LANDOWJSrEBS 129

TMs is an extremely interesting account, for it
shows Poland and the United States in enthusiastic
accord on the question o landownership, although
Poland is behind the Iron Curtain.

The truth is that Polish farmers, like the other
farmers behind the Iron Curtain, are going to resist
to the death any effort to take their land and make it
the property of the government, as Marxist socialism
requires. They want what President Truman has well
called "the American form of landownership," every
farmer owning the land he farms.

In Russia, in the European satellites, in China, in
Korea, the Communists have for the present aban-
doned the Socialist plan for land. They frankly say
this has to be postponed to the indefinite future".

So the present Communist proposal of land reform
differs from our own only in one respect and it is the
difference between war and peace. They advocate
revolution, seizure of the land, treating the landlords
as criminals, killing them or sending them to Siberia.
The American proposal is to pass laws requiring the
landlords to sell out their estates to their tenants, or
to make some other adjustment that will satisfy the
people.

America will not longer allow the Russians to
"steal our thunder" by introducing our system of
land tenure and calling it "Communism." We be-
lieve that we can help our allied governments to see
that they must correct this world-wide injustice
peacefully, as India did, or face the prospect of being
destroyed.

Let nobody imagine that this is going to be easy.

130 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

In many parts of the world the landlords have control
of the government. Being educated, they can manipu-
late the laws to their advantage. They force the gov-
ernment to raise taxes until people are driven to sell
their land and borrow money. Then they loan the
money at 30 per cent per year or more. They own
both the tenants and the small landowners, body and
soul.

Only the threat of total destruction will persuade
these landlords to change their system and surrender
their absolute power. The Communists are provid-
ing the threat and we will provide the persuasion.

We said at the beginning of this chapter that there
are estates which are proving a blessing to their
tenants. To break these up into small farms under
compulsion would be a backward step. Moreover,
there are a great many estates where mass produc-
tion is far more efficent than individual production.
Cotton, bananas, rubber, cocoa, hemp, wheat, to-
bacco, and fifty other products can be grown more
economically by using modem machinery on very
large fields. From plowing to harvesting, there is
enormous advantage in mass production.

How to accomplish this transfer of absolute control
from landlords to some better system without dis-
rupting the efficiency of the estate is a technical ques-
tion which will require the assistance of trained
specialists. Neither landlords nor tenants, as a rule,
know any way to do it save by the expulsion of land-
lords and dividing the land among the tenants. But
this method means losing all the advantages of mass
cultivation and it loses the experience which many

WANTED, MORE LANDOWNERS 131

landlords have in efficient management. Many tenants
have been left worse of than they were before when
it was done in the wrong way. There are many pos-
sibilities. Here are two that have proven satisfactory:

1. The tenants may be organized into unions and
engage in collective bargaining as unions do in
America.

2. The estate may be converted into a co-operative
enterprise, owned Jointly by all employes.

Toyohiko Kagawa believes that co-operatives are
the "Christian answer" to Marxian Socialism and to
Communism. The co-operative is private enterprise,
it is the purest type of democracy, and it possesses all
the advantages of mass production. Kagawa accom-
plished such miracles for the Japanese through or-
ganizing co-operatives that he is loved all over Japan,
In spite of his weak voice, tremendous crowds go to
hear him speak in Japan, and he has won as many as
ten thousand Japanese to Christ in one month. His
service has spoken far louder than his voice.

There is an impressive list of co-operative achieve-
ments in other parts of the world.

Co-operatives have been enormously useful to
fanners in America as every fanner will testify.

Beyond all contradiction, co-operatives saved the
economy of Denmark.

Under Gandhi and since, co-operatives became the
best hope of India. In 1935 there were 100,000 credit
co-operatives to fight the terrible moneylenders.

In Nova Scotia, St. Francis Xavier University, find-
ing terrible illiteracy, poverty, and Communist agita-

WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

tion among coal miners, fishermen, and farmers led
the way to co-operatives, lifted the load of poverty,
helped teach the illiterates, brought about a remark-
able co-operation of Catholics and Protestants, and
stopped the Communist agitation in its tracks, Haiti,
Bolivia, Mexico, China, Jamaica, and other countries
have called upon men trained in Nova Scotia to help
them.

Many Catholic and Protestant missionaries trained
in co-operative methods are now helping peoples in
hungry areas to form co-operatives. Many thousands
more need to be sent out to introduce this "Christian
answer." It is not only practical Christianity, but it
is also proving itself to be able to make its way in the
competitive world by sheer merit. It is economically
sound as well as ethically good.

As landlords are persuaded, or compelled by fear
or law, to relinquish their irresponsible domination,
the missionary-minded specialists can be at hand to
advise the wisest steps to be taken, and so can become
the guides and friends of everybody.

These co-operative technicians ought to be men of
great Christian fidelity and conscientiousness. For
changing over to co-operatives is far more than chang-
ing a policy. Kagawa shows that when led by Chris-
tian men it can be shot through with the Christian
spirit of the Golden Rule, whereas if it is not guided
by the Christian spirit it can become another form of
greed.

The management of co-operatives must first of all
be drilled in integrity. The co-operative is economic
democracy, and it breaks down exactly where de-

WANTED, MORE LANDOWNERS 133

mocracy breaks down, at the point of dishonesty.
The co-operative does not demand as much high-
pressure salesmanship as a private business, but it
does demand in its managers a conscientious faith-
fulness in every small detail. This is why missionaries
with a Christian spirit are the finest organizers of co-
operatives around the world.

The tenants need to be taught to read and write
and to have an intelligent grasp of the meaning of the
co-operative, and they, too, need to be drilled in the
need for integrity. For they vote for their managers!

Combine honesty with knowledge, and you have
a solid foundation.

Oppressive taxes, usurious moneylenders, and feu-
dal estates must go. We must have 100,000 tech-
nically trained men of unimpeachable integrity over
the world, to help people help themselves. We must
give or loan money when these technicians call for
it. That is our program. If that is carried out by gov-
ernment and philanthropy and business and the
Church, Communism will gain no more headway in
the world than it gained in Nova Scotia.

Foreign missionaries stand between callous, rich
landlords with governments in their grip on the one
hand, and, on the other hand, an utterly unscrupulous
gang of Communist thieves and liars who seek to
overthrow the landlords and governments in order to
make the world one vast prison pen of peons under
Moscow. And heedless of the tragedy, the Church in
America has left its missionaries with but meager re-
enforcements and resources. She did not know her
own army. Her sin has found her out.

134 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

That diagnosis alone does no good. What shall we
do to stop our defeat?

Admit our sin? Not enough.

Back corruption? That is sure defeat; God is against
corruption.

Hide the facts? Defeat.

Let Russia have the world by default, while she
uses lies and hate and murder? That is to abandon
Christ

Spend $1.26 a year per capita on foreign missions?
This way lies defeat.

Be the Good Samaritan of the world honestly, all
out, asking no special privileges, every Christian help-
ing adequately Victory!

"But/' one man replied, "we aren't good enough to
do that."

My answer was, "Then we'd better get that good,
and fast!"

CHAPTER 14
How the Church Can Help

It is the Church, more than any other organization
public or private, that ought to see the Technical
Assistance program of Point IV through to a marvel-
ous success.

What we need is an adequate plan of campaign. In
a military campaign everything is worked out for
everybody to the smallest detail. This is what we
need now for the Church and for each Church mem-
ber. We shall make a beginning in this chapter.

A Committee on Technical Co-operation has been
appointed by the Division of Foreign Missions of
the National Council of Churches to aid Point IV.
This committee ought to be increased to a wide repre-
sentation of the most influential and dynamic Chris-
t tians in America. It ought to have an adequate staff
and an ample budget. Then it should become the
Church's arm of the great agencies of U.S. and U.N.
which are building up a reserve bank of available
technical experts.

This Committee on Technical Co-operation would
reach in two directions, inward and outward:

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136 WAKE UP OB BLOW UP

1. In toward the churches.

2. Out toward the main agencies ready to help
that world.

1. REACHING INTO THE CHURCHES

Let us first describe how the Committee on Tech-
nical Co-operation might seek in the churches the
type of technicians needed throughout the world.

It could, in co-operation with die denominational
boards, contact ministers of churches where technical
men might be found. I do not think it would be wise
at first to send a letter to all the ministers in the
United States. I should think a pilot trial might be
made with certain selected ministers. These ministers
might talk with men and women in their congrega-
tions who possess technical skills and Christian char-
acter and let them read this book to help give them
the vision of saving the world, and ask that they per-
mit their names to be placed in the "reserve bank" of
technicians who may later be needed.

This reserve bank of names could include those of
men of experience, some of them perhaps ready to re-
tire, some of them able to pay a part of their expenses.
The experience of many men and women over sixty
years of age would be priceless,

This inquiry would be made without any publicity.
The congregation would not know anything about
the project until the technicians in their church were
actually called into service.

This first pilot project, with ten ministers, would
guide the committee as it reached out to a larger

HOW THE CHUBCH CAN HELP 137

number of churches. For the second pilot experiment
I would suggest that one hundred ministers be se-
lected. They would be told that they were chosen be-
cause their judgment was trusted in helping find the
best way to discover technically trained men and
women of vision and Christian character. They would
be asked to get into touch with men and women in
their congregations who might make valuable con-
tributions abroad and request that they permit their
names to be placed on the reserve list.

The third pilot or trial project might be with a
thousand ministers. I should think that by that time
the Committee would know how to approach all the
other churches. It is such a new field that these pilot
experiments should guide the Committee. But they
should not be dragged out over many months, for
time is running out.

2. REACHING our TO THE WORLD

Meanwhile the Committee on Technical Co-opera-
tion would get into touch with organizations which
need technicians for world service, so that it could be
a bridge from the supply to the demand.

Organizations which require technicians overseas
are of three general classes:

A. Official

The United States

The United Nations and its specialized agencies

Nations seeking technical assistance

B. Industry and Business

Firms of every kind doing international business

138 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

C. PMIanthropy and Religion

Al mission boards, including YMCA and YWCA

Foundations doing overseas service

CARE, Near East Relief, and other relief agen-
cies

Schools and colleges operating in the Near East
and elsewhere

American colleges with outreach abroad, as
"Yale in China"

Service clubs, like Rotary, serving abroad

Women's clubs

Our Committee could, I think, do much more than
ask these organizations what technicians they re-
quire. It could stimulate them to see the vision of
saving the world by sharing our know-how. It could
suggest the need of selecting new personnel so that
they would influence the character and ideals of a
country as well as its business interests.

The committee could keep insisting that the pur-
pose of Point IV is to save the world from danger-
ous despair, and not to exploit need for profit.

This committee could also influence churches to do
their part through missions in saving the world from
disaster. Missions did not start with that purpose. The
vast majority of Christians do not realize that they
have any responsibility or power to save the peace
through missions.

PKOPOSAL TO CONDUCT A QUICK SURVEY

The Student Volunteer publishes an annual bulle-
tin called "Christian Horizons"; it tells what types of

HOW THE CHURCH CAN HELP 139

missionaries the various Mission Boards are seeking.
Nothing whatever exists to indicate what kinds of
technicians the retarded areas of the world need and
want., though such studies have been made for some
countries.

If we ask only government officials at the top to
tell us, we shall get a lopsided and inadequate an-
swer. They will look at the country from the view-
point of politicians and of the ruling classes rather
than from the viewpoint of the people in misery. Any
American can understand how inadequate would be
a reply as to the needs of America solely from a po-
litical viewpoint. What, for example, would it say
about religion or racial relations?

The Committee on Technical Co-operation could
conduct a supplemental survey of its own at small
cost to add to die knowledge it could gain from, other
surveys. Nearly every country has one or more mis-
sionaries who are also true diplomats, with rich con-
tacts with officials and leaders in all walks of life.
Indeed, the American public would be astonished and
thrilled if it realized what a tremendous influence
these "missionary ambassadors wield in Latin Amer-
ica, in Asia, and in Africa. Here is one suggestion for
using these missionary diplomats to help with our
survey.

Suppose we asked an experienced missionary
statesman, one who is famous throughout all that
land, to represent us in India. He might secure a copy
of the Dictionary of Technical Skills published by the
Department of Labor of the United States Govern-
ment; he might carry this book with him as he visited

140 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

the recognized leaders of Industry and of all profes-
sions in India. He might say:

"I thought you might be interested in this diction-
ary of the technological skills of the United States.
The American people are eager to exchange tech-
nological knowledge with you. If you will kindly ac-
cept this book as a present, I should be glad to have
you mark in it what skills you feel India could give
to the U.S.A. and what America in turn could give to
India. If we find men and women of the highest type
of character, with a great love of their fellow men,
who love India and desire to be helpful, it is possible
that we may later send them here at the invitation of
your government. This is a preliminary inquiry only.
It is made with an earnest desire to draw our coun-
tries closer together in mutual co-operation."

If this kind of approach were made in India to, say,
a hundred men high in the professions and in indus-
try, the results ought to be illuminating. If similar in-
quiries were going on in other countries the total
findings ought to be important enough to be pub-
lished and furnished to all mission boards.

Many boards have been seeking only such types
of missionaries as the missionaries already on the field
report they need. This is not an adequate guide, be-
cause a non-technical missionary is not competent to
see the technical needs, just as an untrained man
could not recognize mineral-bearing rocks, or the
need for better fertilizer. Surveying needs and wants
is in itself an expert task.

This Committee on Technical Co-operation could
be one of the most effective committees in America

HOW THE CHURCH CAN HELP 141

if it had adequate resources. Composed of highly
skilled men, it might develop into the most useful
agency in the world in saving men from desperate
violence. It could be of enormous assistance to the
United Nations, to the United States, to all interna-
tional business enterprises, to philanthropies and
churches. It ought to be non-sectarian, so that it could
serve Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike.

The entire "Bold New Program" is stupendous in
its possibilities, beyond anything ever contemplated
before. It is beyond the purpose of this book to in-
dicate what vast doors of opportunity are open for
government, for the United States, for business, for
philanthropy. We cannot undertake here to outline
even what missions could do. That would in itself re-
quire several volumes. When Overseas Consultants
surveyed the needs of Iran, its findings filled six large
volumes. The moment one begins to examine what
missions could do in any country, we see many vol-
umes to be written!

Where would the Church get the money with
which to meet the opportunities which this world
presents for Christian service for human need?

By training people to tithe. They are now being
compelled to give thirty per cent of their income;
those in the high brackets of income must pay the
government fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty per cent of
their incomes. But fifteen per cent of their income is
exempt from taxation if they give it for religious and
philanthropic objects. People should be taught to
give five per cent of their income for the local and na-
tional church, including home missions; five per cent

142 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

for the foreign missions program, and the remaining
exempted five per cent for other philanthropy, like
the community chest.

Neither home missions nor churches nor com-
munity chests would suffer, because five per cent is
more than people are now giving for either. The
amount for foreign missions, if all of the forty million
Protestants gave their five per cent, would be around
two billion dollars a year. The average income of
Protestants is a good deal above the estimated in-
come for all adults, over $1,000 per year. Five per
cent of their incomes would be more than $50. Forty
millions at $50 each would be* two billion dollars. That
would be ample to place a hundred thousand tech-
nically trained missionaries in the field and give them
$20,000 each to spend.

All the Protestant churches together are giving an
average of $1.26 per member for their foreign mis-
sionaries, less than two and a half cents a week! They
are compelled to give an average of more than $20
a week for hot war, and they voluntarily give two and
a half cents a week to win the cold war. That is be-
cause they are utterly ignorant of the fact that mis-
sionaries are their soldiers in the cold war which we
are rapidly losing. If they knew, they would give.
Americans are generous.

Fifty thousand or a hundred thousand of the type
of Christian technicians that one can find in the
Christian churches would quickly change the attitude
of the hungry three-fourths of mankind.

It is not necessary for the projects to be finished,
or even half finished. The very initiation of this pro-
gram would send an electric thrill over all the world.

HOW THE CHURCH CAN HELP 143

People would see their best hope to be good will, co-
operation, education not violence.

This and this alone is the way to help the Russians
to see that the Christian way is the best. If the multi-
tudes turned away from hate and violence and began
to follow the way of peace and love and education
and co-operation, the men in Moscow would see that
the Christian way works better than tih.eir own. So
long as their way succeeds, they will never abandon
it

Stalin and the other members of the Russian Com-
munist Party have never had an opportunity to see
real Christianity in action. In the Czarist regime
they saw the unspeakable Rasputin at the head of
the Orthodox Russian Church, and they loathed the
type of false Christianity he embodied. How will they
ever see Jesus unless tibey see Jesus in us? If they saw
Him incarnated in a compassionate and humble
America the Russian leaders would love that Christ!
If Rasputin and his kind had not betrayed Christian
Russia there would today be no peril of atheistic
totalitarianism sweeping the rest of the non-Christian
world under the Iron Curtain. Rasputin betrayed
Christ by his collusion with the Czarist oppression;
we have betrayed Christ by indifference.

It is very, very late now, but not too late.

There are many reasons why the Church should
assume a leading part in this program.

First, it fe Christianity. Much so called Christianity
is only Christianity upward, not outward, because it
omits compassionate service for the neediest of all
people.

144 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

Second, this Is the way to win the remainder of the
world to Christ.

Third, the Church has the kind of men and women
who ought to go out and help the world.

Fourth, America believes in free enterprise doing
all it can do, with help from government only where
necessary. The Christian Church is free enterprise,
and its business is to help the world.

Fifth, we cannot leave the lifting of the world only
to capital, for capital invests only where it gets a
profit. The only profit the Church seeks is saved souls.

Sixth, Christians need this service for their own
souls' salvation. The Church languishes for want of a
burning cause. The youth of the Church need a cru-
sade to which they can dedicate their lives with de-
voted abandon. This is the crusade! The older people
need a cause to which to give their money and their
ardent prayers. When we begin to bum to lift the
miserable two-thirds of the world out of its misery
and despair, we shall ourselves have a Pentecost.

Seventh, millions of people want to try Christianity
in all-out world action. Millions who feel ugly and
more or less un-Christian in being compelled to spend
a third to a half of their income in building bombs
and planes, which they hope will never be used, need

an alternative in which thev can invest in construction

t>

instead of in destruction, in love instead of in fear, in
peace-making instead of war-making. Most of the
Christian Church is ripe for this bold Christian pro-
gram.

CHAPTER 15
It Must Be Christian Character

The technicians we send abroad must be more than
technicians. They must have the quality of person-
ality which the Church at its best produces. They
must have warm hearts, democratic freedom from
snobbery (which diplomats often lack), a great love
of their fellow men, total color blindness so that they
will reveal not the slightest awareness of racial preju-
dice, a Christlike longing to help. They must have
integrity and frank honest character, they must be
lovable because they love everybody, seeing the best
in people and knowing how to show them apprecia-
tion. They must not only help people but also win
their love. They must have the spirit of the mission-
ary at his best, who works among the masses because
he passionately longs to serve men and to help his
world, and not because he is getting a fat salary.

Where are such men and women? They are in the
churches. I have come to believe that they are in
American churches by the hundreds of thousands.
This is why the Christian Church ought to assume
the major role for finding and supplying men and
women to lift the world out of its misery.

145

146 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

For these men and women we are sending abroad
are just as useful in educating the characters and
ideals of people as in giving the technical knowledge.

A man whose mind is educated and whose heart is
evil is a menace. Education enables a man of bad will
to do more harm. Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize win-
ner and great Christian, calls Nou/s Human Des-
tiny "the greatest book of a century/' That book says:
"The conflict between pure intelligence and moral
values has become a matter of life and death. Intel-
ligence alone, not subjected to moral values, has led
to monstrosities." All knowledge is dangerous when
the heart is wrong.

Who has heard one of the Russian representatives
speak over the radio without marveling at his brilliant
mind and at the same time being pained by listening
to his perfectly immoral distortion of truth and his
intentional lies? That type of utter disregard of in-
tegrity in an intelligent man like him is the most
dangerous thing this world could have.

This is the reason why it would be magnificent if
the education of illiterates could be achieved by
Christian churches and missions. The general average
of character would be higher than when the education
is purely secular. A literacy campaign is like a school
in this respect; its quality is determined very largely
by the character of the men and women at the top.
This is also the reason why all the technicians whom
we send abroad should have sterling Christian honor.
If they have honest integrity they will spread in-
tegrity among all those who are working with them.

IT MUST BE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 147

We are trying to persuade the world to adopt de-
mocracy, yet most democracies tend to break down
and become democracies only in name. In every case
one cause of this failure is a lack of integrity. Lack of
honesty is working more havoc than lack of knowl-
edge.

Democracy is the best government in the world,
but it demands a high general level of character
among the masses. It is only as good as the general
average, for it is government by the majority. The
people tend to select their kind for office.

If the average man is willing to sell out his vote to
the highest bidder, then the man who buys his vote
does not represent honesty but crooked politics.
Where votes can be bought, the election goes to the
man who can spend the most to buy them. Corrup-
tion breeds corruption.

After such a man is elected he at once lays plans
to get his investment back, and to the extent that
other men in his government were elected on the
same dishonest basis he can conspire with them to
alter the law so that they can legally drain off the
revenues of the country into their own pockets. Only
an idiot breaks laws! The smart crook changes the
laws so that he will not need to violate them.

There are "democracies" in which all elected offi-
cials became millionaires in one term of office, while
nominally receiving very modest salaries.

When government becomes too oppressive, more
and more victims conspire against it or rise in open
rebellion, only to be liquidated by the police. Then

148 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

the army must be strengthened to suppress violence
and laws must be made to punish patriots and to
reward corruption.

At last, oppressive and corrupt governments have
trouble with the very armies which they create to
defend themselves. Some military leader, no more
honest than the politicians, sees his opportunity and
as a pseudo champion of the rights of the oppressed
people rides to the capital at die head of his army
and chases out or kills or imprisons the government
officials. The republic becomes a military dictator-
ship, a fascist government. It is then just as totalitar-
ian as the so-called "republics" of the Soviet Union.

This tragic and very common deterioration of de-
mocracy stems back, in the first place, to the corrupti-
bility of the average voter. If he had not been willing
to sell out his country for a few pieces of silver or for
some personal advantage, he would have voted for
the best men available, and government would have
remained clean.

Every country has a perpetual fight between the
forces of corruption and the forces of good govern-
ment. We have such a struggle in America just be-
cause we have good and bad, selfish and public-
spirited citizens. Often the balance between the two
is so nearly equal in some countries that the personal
influence and example of a few men in high position
determine whether the country will remain truly
free or deteriorate into a dictatorship.

Suppose we placed a hundred thousand Americans
of unimpeachable integrity all over the world, setting
countries an example of straight, open, honest Ameri-

IT MUST BE CHBISTIAN CHARACTER 149

can honor at its best. They would have more Influ-
ence for world righteousness than all the money
America possesses. They would tip the scales.

American leaders know that the billions they have
loaned to other countries have been used unwisely or
stolen so frequently that often little or none of the
money has reached down to the people for whom it
was intended. We are a generous nation, but we are
determined no longer to be "suckers/ 5 Perhaps one
reason that foreign missions have received less en-
thusiastic support than formerly is that we have
been so disappointed in the results of our enormous
loans. This is unjust to missions, for nobody has ever
accused missions of misusing or stealing money-
they never have enough! But the countries where the
missionaries work have often lost our money, and
the missionary cause has suffered as a consequence.

UNRRA is one of the programs which disappointed
us in this respect. We know that a large proportion
of the goods we gave through that agency found its
way to black markets. A young man in the Philippines
told me, "We thought UNRRA would heal our
wounds, but, instead, it has broken our hearts ."
Americans on the inside now see that if UNRRA had
called upon missionaries to administer their funds
and merchandise, very little of it would ever have
reached the black market. By and large, missionaries
are the most honest people in the world, and unques-
tionably they know the needy people as no other
foreigners can know them.

We ought never to loan or give money or charity
of any kind to a country until we have conscientious

150 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

men and women with a missionary spirit, who speak
the language of the country, who have exact knowl-
edge of the situation, and who are capable of seeing
that the money is not misused or misappropriated.

There is no reason why America should ever again
be deceived as so often we have been deceived in the
past. There is every reason why we should not. It is
bad for a country to be allowed to misuse millions or
billions.

The Church has the stupendous and even terrify-
ing responsibility to produce men with conscience,
passion to serve, sterling integrity, and true technical
skill, and it must see that such men are used all over
the world. The Church must lift not only the minds
of men, but also their souls, their integrity, their love.

CHAPTER 16
Prayer for the United Nations

While Christians join in reaching down to help
the hungry two-thirds at the bottom of society, they
must also reach up to pray for the men who are strug-
gling to find the pathway to peace through the United
Nations. Christians can be far more influential by
praying for the members of the United Nations than
they dream.

Indeed, a few thousand praying Christians are
wielding far greater influence right now than other
people believe is the case. The Laymen's Movement
for a Christian World, made up of Christian business
and professional men, began nine years ago to pray
for the United Nations. They send men to attend
daily sessions of the Security Council and the As-
sembly and pray in silence. The Laymen's Move-
ment has printed and distributed upon request over
a million cards bearing the names of the delegates
and asking people to pray for them, and write them
letters.

These men have become acquainted with many of
the delegates, and have their confidence. Largely

151

152 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

through their influence the Fifth General Assembly
of the United Nations opened September 19, 1950,
with one minute of silent prayer. Here is a descrip-
tion of it:

When the vote was taken in the General Assembly in
October of 1949 to place a moment of silent prayer
on the agenda, not one vote was cast against it.

Ambassador Warren R. Austin, speaking in New
York on Sunday evening, Sept 17, 1949, said: "At
three o'clock on Tuesday, September 19th, the delega-
tions of the fifty-nine nations of the United Nations will
convene for the opening of the most crucial General
Assembly since San Francisco. Before they begin to
tackle the vital issues of peace, they will observe a min-
ute of silence for individual prayer or meditation.

"At that moment I hope the people of America will
pause in their homes, their shops, on their farms, and
in the streets, wherever they may be, to offer up their
prayers for God's blessing upon the United Nations,
and for a peace with liberty and justice for all men."*

In continuing his remarks, Ambassador Austin said:
"The Laymen's Movement has long worked for such
reliance on prayer. This is a welcome suggestion."

Five members of the Laymen's Movement were pres-
ent at the opening session and were moved by the
reverent manner in which General Carlos P. Romulo,
the retiring president, introduced this new procedure.
General Romulo said: "This Assembly, often described
in the past as a mere international debating society,
has the chance to grow into a virtual Parliament of
Man. It has the chance to save the United Nations and
the peace of the world.

"Let us pray to Almighty God to grant us the vision
and the courage to discharge this awesome responsi-
bility. I invite the representatives to rise and observe

PRAYER FOR THE UNITED NATIONS 153

one minute of silence dedicated to prayer or medita-
tion/'

The hearts of many people were raised in prayer all
across the country at the same hour. (Laymen's Move-
ment for a Christian World.)

When a photograph taken during the moment of
silent prayer in the United Nations was sent to Am-
bassador Austin by the Laymen's Movement, Mr.
Austin responded with the following letter:

UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE
TO THE UNITED NATIONS

New York 16, New York
October 28, 1950
Dear Wallace Speers and Weyman Huckabee:

You have made very real to me the love and
omnipotence of our Heavenly Father through
your personal conversations with me and your
letters.

I am delighted to have the photograph of the
General Assembly in that moment of prayer with
which it opened the present Session. This was
an historic event, great enough to make such a
souvenir especially precious. But you have
added to its meaning by your lovely inscription.

Thanking you with a full heart, I am,

Sincerely yours,

WARREN R. AUSTIN

Mr. Wallace C. Speers, Chairman
Mr. Weyman C. Huckabee, Secretary
The Laymen's Movement for a

Christian World, Inc.
347 Madison Avenue
New York' 17, New York

154 WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

Warren Austin has many times thanked the Lay-
men's Movement for praying for him. He said he had
come to rely on them more than upon any other hu-
man source to help him to keep his mind free from
prejudice and hate so as to* see every issue dispas-
sionately and with a clear mind.

What the Laymen's Movement suggests, and what
Warren Austin approves, is for all of us Christians
everywhere to pray for the delegates, and to write one
letter a day or a week to different delegates, in turn,
saying that we are praying for them in their tremen-
dous responsibilitythat they may receive God's
wisdom and so bring peace on earth, and good will
among men. Thus in the course of a few months each
delegate will get a great many letters. Mr. Austin
said he gets thousands of letters from people who are
praying for him, and that he tries to answer every
letter, because he values them so highly. We can help
the delegates win the peace if we pray for and write
to aU the men in the General Assembly of the United
Nations.

The Prayer Call card, Standing in the Need of
Prayer (5# each), with the names of all delegates, may
be obtained from the Laymen's Movement, 847 Madi-
son Avenue, New York City, upon request.

By joining in this ever widening prayer army you
help produce the spiritual atmosphere in which, if
anywhere, men can agree upon the pathway to a just
and lasting peace.

If each of these men got a million letters from
people, never criticizing but only assuring them they
are being held up with prayer, that would give

PRAYER FOR THE UNITED NATIONS 155

them a new confidence in the heart of America, and a
new sense of the power of God.

"We are not weak when we raise our voices in
prayer for all government officials and reach down
through our missionaries and laymen to the pathetic
hungry people at the bottom as they hold up their
hands, asking, "Who will help us?" We are not weak
when we thus combine prayer and loving service.
If we should follow this practice we would become
the most powerful people in the world, for we would
be channels for the limitless power of God's spirit,
and demonstrate that right is might.

You and I have been looking everywhere for the
answer. We are the answer, if we help the masses and
pray for the leaders. We have been God's problem
because we in America have failed to see and do
these two things adequately. Let us all stop being
God's problem and become His answer. Wringing our
hands in helpless desperation is not only weak, it is
also wicked. Stop it, oh, ye of little faith, and pray and
write and help need. Be strong. "We have hard work
to do and loads to lift."

There are Christians in the United States who
strongly emphasize repentance, and who will say that
this book has not done enough in merely confessing
our sins and repenting them. For example, why have
we not shown how, historically, the oppression and
insolence of the white race has built up a tremendous
tide of resentment throughout the non- white world?
Is it because we did not realize this? No; I realize it.
But I think that the Communists have overdone con-
fessing for us, and certainly they have distorted the

>6 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

uth. Moreover, post-mortems do little good, espe-
aHy when they stir up grievances which we hope
>od deeds will help people to forget. We need good
seds, not repining.

And as for repenting, there are two kinds. Judas
pented and committed suicide. It would be easier
r us to say our prayers and "repent" and continue
.e way we have been going until our folly results in
e death of hope than to repent in deed and not in
ord only. It costs less to coast along while the
Casting lasts. The word "repent" originally meant
urn around and go the other way." From cover to
>ver, this book says "turn around, Christians of
nerica, and go the other way."
It has but one purpose. That is to point out what
marvelous opportunity we have to win the friend-
ip of the world through unselfishly serving it, and
inspire the Christian Church with new courage
.d fresh vision.

So, my friends, I'm not a fellow traveler! I'm a
sperate optimist.

I am saying only this: The other ways have failed.
y Christ's way of unselfish, humble, loving service.
e who have tried it are thrilled at its magic!

CHAPTEB 17
Postscript

We are in a race against time. Perhaps not enough
people will be willing to join you and me in applying
the Christian program of helping people up soon
enough. It may prove to be too little and too late. We
may lose the world and be blown up. But if we be-
lieve Christ we do not lose ourselves.

If we believe our religion it is far better to face our
Maker having done what we could than to go before
Him whimpering that we did not try because we
thought it was useless or because we hoped that fifty
billion dollars a year invested in hell's weapons would
be enough.

Jesus said that every dollar we invest in helping
need becomes a treasure (today we would call it
"bank account") in heaven. Listen to His words: "Lay
not up treasures for yourselves upon earth, where
moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break
through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
for where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also."

157

158 WAKE UP OK BLOW UP

Then He tells exactly how to lay up those treasures
in heaven. A rich young ruler asked Him, "Good mas-
ter, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus
told him to keep the commandments. He replied, "I
have kept them since my youth." Then Jesus said,
"Give all you have to help the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me." But
when he heard this h became very sad, for he was
very rich. Jesus, looking at him, -said, "How hard it is
for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of
God!" Their money will keep them out if they refuse
to help need.

Jesus said this in the story of the rich man and
Lazarus, He told it in the story of the rich man whose
land brought forth plentifully, and who said, "I will
pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there
I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say
to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for
many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be
merry. But God said to him, Fool, this night your
soul is required of you, and the things you have pre-
pared, whose will they be?" Then Jesus gives the
meaning: "So is he who lays up treasure for himself,
and is not rich toward God."

In Luke 12:33 He tells us: Help meet need, and in
this way provide yourselves with "a treasure in the
heavens that faileth not"

Everything, everything Jesus said agrees with His
words: "Make to yourselves friends of the mammon
of unrighteousness; so that when ye fail, they may re-
ceive you into everlasting habitations."

Those we have helped, Jesus says, have gone to

POSTSCRIPT 159

heaven to testify for us and to welcome us when we
arrive.

So what we keep we lose at last, and that may not
be far off! What we give to help need becomes an
everlasting treasure in heaven. This is driven in with
rather terrible insistence in Matthew 25:31-46. Not
one minister in ten dares to read that passage to his
congregationthey don't like it because they don't
want to hear it or believe it or obey It.

But to you and me it is really a wonderful promise,
if we have helped those who are hungry, or thirsty,
or naked, or a stranger, or sick, or in prison, for Christ
tells us what He will say:

"Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the king-
dom prepared for you from the foundation of the
world; for I was hungry and you gave me food; I was
thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and
you welcomed me; I was sick and you visited me; I
was in prison and you came to me. . . . Truly I say
to you, As you did it to one of the least of these my
brethren, you did it to me."

It is terrible only to those who refused to help need.

"I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was
thirsty and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger
and you did not welcome me; naked, and you did not
clothe me; sick and in prison, and you did not visit
me. . . . Depart from me, you cursed, into the
eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

That "eternal fire" sounds uncomfortably like the
terrible blast of the atom bomb or the hydrogen
bomb. And the words "you cursed" sound too much,
altogether too much, like the voice of that innumera-

160 WAKE UP OR BLOW UP

ble multitude of hungry people who plead with
America to help them, and who, if we refuse their
plea, will hate us and finally blast us with the bomb
which we invented. It is real enough and close
enough to give us goose flesh.

The Christian promise is infinitely comforting if
we have obeyed it, but hell if we have said no. Yet,
who can complain? For nothing, nothing, could be
more just than His promise:

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto me." "With what
judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged." "Whatever
you give is given, full measure, shaken down, run-
ning over. . . "

Well, then, this book is a lesson in applied Chris-
tianityor that part of Christianity we neglect
practicing what we preach, not stingily, or gingerly,
but all-out, total, magnificent, amazing love in action.

It is the kind of religion that makes sense, the kind
of religion that gets results, its head in the clouds, but
its feet on the ground.

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