Shock Troops

One day in 1877, big-bearded British Evangelist William Booth was pacing up & down as he dictated to his son Bramwell. "The Christian Mission," said Booth, "is a Volunteer Army." Then suddenly he leaned over his son's shoulder, crossed out the word "Volunteer" and substituted "Salvation." Thus he named the Army that has since planted its red-and-blue flag in almost every country in the world.

William Booth became "General" and his new Salvation Army fell into step behind him as uniformed privates, noncoms and officers--with bands, "councils of war," "orders of the day" and "knee-drill" (prayer). The enemy was the Devil, and the Army marched to meet him wherever the going was toughest: in Skid Rows and slum alleyways.

The 43rd issue of the Salvation Army Yearbook, published by the international headquarters in London and released in the U.S. last week, records--as far as figures can--the good fight that Booth's troops have fought. During the past fiscal year the Army has given out 33,772,383 meals and 10,941,102 beds, found jobs for 77,766, operated 415 shelters, hostels and food depots, maintained 94 maternity homes and 26 industrial and boarding schools. Commissioned officers and cadets increased by 4,294 (to 32,105), and 15,205 laymen were employed fulltime.

The machine with its 4,000,000-odd "adherents" that copes with this worldwide problem of spiritual and material logistics is a very different organization from the little band of inspired amateurs who first surrounded William Booth and his wife Catherine. And the faith has mellowed, if not changed.

Booth left the Methodist ministry because the ragtag-&-bobtail following he drew with his fiery street-corner sermons shocked his respectable brethren. Now the Army considers itself a religious body much like any other Protestant denomination, with an accent on works and service. But the old-fashioned blue-and-red uniforms still stand for humility and love--and another chance for sinners.

Bowery Expert. Few modern Army officers have a background like Captain Tom Crocker. When his father died, Tom quit school at 17 and joined the Navy. After World War I he got a job as clerk in a Detroit police court and began to drink. First an alcoholic, then a dope addict, he lost his job, took to forgery, was arrested and finally committed to an insane asylum. Discharged at last, he began the same thing all over again. One night in a Detroit park, he recalls, "I got the jimmies--the D.T.s." At a Salvation Army headquarters, where he had been given a handout, he asked: "Do you think your Jesus could save me?" An officer advised him to go to the altar. "I went forward and I knelt and I asked Jesus. A new man was born then. I haven't touched drink or dope since."

Short, paunchy Tom Crocker, 52, has become one of the Army's most successful U.S. officers. For the past four years in charge of Detroit's "Bowery" Corps (as the posts specializing in alcoholics are called), Crocker and his staff of eleven have helped or cured almost 10,000 cases. Wherever he travels, Tom Crocker takes with him the clothes he wore the night he got the jimmies: "I've still got the pants, with holes in the back wired up and safety pins closing up the knees, and shoes with no soles. I don't know why I keep them. But I just want to."

Crimlnologist. Businesslike "Red" Sheppard, 55, of New York City, is another kind of specialist. His field is criminology, his beat is Sing Sing Prison and the state parole board. During the past Salvation Army year, Red Sheppard "handled" 7,200 discharged convicts and parolees. He meets and talks to prisoners during his regular monthly visits to Sing Sing, though often he sees them for the first time when they have left jail and come to his office for a suit of clothes, a place to flop and something to eat. He gets about 300 letters a week from prisoners and ex-prisoners.

Like all Army men, Red Sheppard knows that salvation is spiritual, but that it has its material side. He "buys" his men jobs (paying employment agency fees), gets them into night school, urges them to visit museums and libraries, join a church social group and meet a nice girl. ("Keep your mouth shut about your past," he advises them.)

His mother was a well-known Salvationist, and Red was brought up in the rigid moral ideas of the oldtime Army: "Our war was pretty much reduced to the three S's taken literally--Soup, Soap and Salvation. We used to say of a man, 'The Devil is in him,' but as Army leaders and followers have developed, we've seen many things about people who commit crimes. . . . We see now that there's got to be a process of un-education, of breaking down a man's old habits of thinking, and then a process of education, once we have tried to heal his suffering. I never talk religion to a man who comes here unless he asks for it. ... If God didn't fit you emotionally for this work it would kill you in six months."

Rotarian. Adjutant Edward Mayhue Brewer, 34, commander of the Cambridge (Mass.) No. 1 Corps, is a new type of Salvationist. He and his wife Dorothy (also an adjutant) work together as a team, she specializing in the corps' activities for women and girls. Like most Protestant city clergymen, Adjutant Brewer spends most of his time struggling with the corps' finances, visiting the poor and the sick, working with youth groups and trying to add a gym and an auditorium to his yellow brick Citadel on Massachusetts Avenue.

Ed Brewer is an affable, well-fed Rotarian and 32nd degree Mason. He drives a two-toned 1947 Chevrolet, has four children, lives in suburban Arlington. He could pass for a successful young banker, except for his uniform and his habit of saying "God bless you."

Adjutant Brewer worked for a number of years in the ranks before going to a training center to study theology, Army doctrine, public speaking and accounting. After that, he served another term of years as an officer on probation. Such training left Brewer adept in the highly organized affairs of the new Army, but just as willing to shake a tambourine or comfort a bum as his father would have been. During the Christmas holidays he stood at the subway entrance in Harvard Square, playing an accordion with his left hand and chimes with his right, while $2,500 was dropped into the tambourine of the woman beside him.

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