"I Was a Stranger ..."

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A procession of the Lord was marching through Sheffield, England. At its head was a brass band blaring hymns from atop a wagon; next, on a white horse, came the onetime champion wrestler of Northumberland, now a convert to God. After him in a carriage rode the Generals William and Catherine Booth, and behind marched the uniformed soldiers of their Salvation Army. Then the Devil attacked.

Clotted along the route of the procession, the citizens of Sheffield began hurling stones and brickbats. Hooligans rushed out to beat God's ex-wrestler with clubs and try to pull him off his horse. He did not retaliate. "Anything for Jesus," he called out hoarsely, and rode on, bleeding and battered, supported in his saddle by white-faced fellow soldiers. Although pelted with mud, the bandsmen continued to blow bravely on their instruments. General William Booth stood up in the carriage, beard flying and beak nose pointing to heaven, to direct his soldiers of the gospel and lead them, bedraggled and bloody, into Sheffield's Albert Hall for a revival meeting.

The year was 1882, a riotous time in the history of the evangelical army. In a way it was a day of victory for the Generals Booth and their followers. Statesman John Bright later wrote Catherine: "The people who mobbed you would doubtless have mobbed the apostles. Your faith and patience will prevail."

Unto the Least of These. This week, with faith and patience, the army still marched on. In New York, Chicago, Peoria, San Francisco, Omaha, Richmond, Los Angeles--all over the U.S. and half around the world--tambourines rattled and brass bells tinkled in the annual Christmas campaign. Americans dropped pennies, nickels and dimes by the millions into Salvation Army kettles. The money would be used to buy 300,000 Christmas dinners for the down & out, 450,000 presents for children, packages for the aged, the poor in hospitals, and the inmates of jails.

The sound of the bells was a more than abstract symbol of the army's obedience to Christ's command. Only a few avowed Christians have tried to follow one of Christ's injunctions so literally. On the Mount of Olives, the Savior had preached: "I was a stranger, and ye took me in ... naked, and ye clothed me ... In prison, and ye came unto me . . . Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

The War. The Salvation Army is a religion without elaborate liturgy or complicated creed. Its theology is the simplest practice of Christianity. It proceeds on the down-to-earth theory that Christ gave clear instructions on what to do about the degraded, the abandoned and the poor. And so it has fought--with its heart to God and its hand to man.

When he mobilized the Salvation Army in 1878, William Booth formally proclaimed a holy war. The enemy was the Devil and all the Devil's allies, particularly strong drink. Booth was after men's souls and his principal weapon was evangelism. The modern army still fights that war; but now its principal weapon is charity.

Through street-corner collections, donations, special campaigns, and participation in some Community Chests, the army in the U.S. takes in some $25 million a year. Of that amount, it spends more than $18 million on the welfare of men, women & children without regard for race, creed and color. With only 42,500 members, the army spends a larger percentage of its money and effort on the welfare of others than any other single denomination. No faith in the world works harder on society's lowest level.

The army's war on human misery in the U.S. is directed from an up-to-date, $2,500,000, twelve-story building on Manhattan's brash and busy 14th Street which houses both the army's Eastern Territorial and National headquarters. There, a tall, grave, businesslike man named Ernest Ivison Pugmire sits at the command center of a great social welfare program. His brown eyes behind rimless spectacles are the eyes of a gentle, dedicated man. His martial, stiff-collared uniform is the uniform of a militant faith. On the walls of his large, comfortable office hang the pictures of the generals, from William Booth down, who have directed the army's battles.

Out of the Gutter. The fighting is sharpest in the streets and in city slums, in small, crowded buildings marked by neon-lighted crosses in the midst of dark Skid Rows. The army regards such positions as its most important beachheads in the Devil's territory. Captains Olive McKeown and Luella Larder, of the army's Greater New York division, command one such corps (church) at 349 Bowery. One night last week, as they had hundreds of other times, they gathered to their fold some 200 men--refugees from the saloons attracted by amplified phonograph music, drawn by hunger, curiosity or loneliness to McKeown and Larder's service.

The little auditorium was heavy with the odors of whisky breaths and unwashed bodies. Eyes--cunning, defiant, haunted, hopeless, anguished and apathetic--fixed on the platform where McKeown and Larder sat surrounded by a small band of soldiers and converts.

Was there anything salvageable in such wreckage? William Booth had told his followers: "We are moral scavengers netting the very sewers." A grey, wiry little man in the army's uniform stood up to preach. Twenty years before, he told his audience, he had crawled out of the gutter into just such a meeting, figuring that he had tried everything else, and might as well try God.

He had been one of them. He knew the angles. Said he: "The Devil will come and bring you another bottle of smoke. You'll go over to Second Avenue and sell a pint of blood for five bucks and get drunk again before the day is over . . . Come and get God's help."

Captain Olive McKeown said: "Come to the altar. Ask God's forgiveness . . . Come on down. It's nothing to be ashamed of--it's something to be proud of . . ."

Six of them shuffled uncertainly to the rail while McKeown and Larder and their soldiers sang:

Ask the Savior to help you,

Comfort, strengthen and keep you . . .

The Road Back. McKeown's was an old-fashioned kind of evangelical attack, but one from which the army has never wavered. From its years of experience on the seamy side of life, the army thinks that it knows as much about drunkenness as any other organization. It maintains that evangelism can reach into depths of degradation which psychiatry cannot touch. Says Captain Tom Crocker, onetime alcoholic and drug addict who is now in command of the army's famed Harbor Light corps in Chicago: "Overcoming drunkenness is a matter of prayer from beginning to end. God is the deciding factor. The job is too overwhelming to be done by human means alone." With evangelism goes fellowship. Misery can find company in decent surroundings along Skid Row.

The army's slum corps are only its front line. The man who staggers drunkenly to its altar can count on the army's trying its best to rehabilitate him, feed him, shelter him and get him a job. If he is unemployable, the army will probably employ him.

There are 105 Men's Social Service Centers in the U.S., where the army starts its salvageable wrecks on the road back. Manhattan's center is a seven-story warehouse building near the Hudson River. In a kind of communal living arrangement, the men eat together, sleep in dormitories, earn $1 pocket money after the first week, $2 after the second, and eventually up to $15. There is an Alcoholics Anonymous group at the center, so that the men can fight together against the temptations of rum. There is a recreation room on the second floor with a television set, which eliminates one excuse for going to a neighborhood bar. Life's derelicts are put to work mending old clothes, fixing broken furniture and radio sets--and get back, if all goes well, on the road to self-respect and usefulness.

Rooms & Meals. The social centers are only one more department of a program which extends into every corner of human misery and misfortune. The Salvation Army also runs a chain of 115 cheap-rate hotels and lodgings. It operates special emergency havens for runaway girls and alcoholic women, nurseries, summer camps, boys' clubs, a chain of Evangeline Residences for low-income working girls. Its immigration bureau gives advice in deportation cases, straightens out legal tangles. It runs a missing persons bureau, visits prisons and takes on the responsibility of many parolees. It runs ten hospitals, 34 homes for unwed mothers.

One phenomenon not immediately observable in the statistics: all the army's work across the U.S. is carried on by 5,000 officers, 37,500 soldiers (these are the 42,500 of the Salvation Army in the U.S.), a few thousand non-army paid employees, and a handful of unpaid doctors and dentists. Around the world, preaching salvation in 102 languages, there are only some 125,000 all told in the hosts of the late General William Booth. But like Joshua's army at Jericho, they multiply their strength by sheer ubiquity. Their coffee-&-doughnuts campaign in World War I, which so impressed U.S. doughboys, was carried on by fewer than 300 men and "Sals."

No Worldly Goods. One fact not generally understood is that the Salvation Army, sometimes called the church of the unchurched, is just as definitely a religious body as, for example, the Methodist Church, from which it is a sturdy sprout. Its soldiers are its parishioners--generally people with regular jobs, who have made the army their avocation. The officers, who have dedicated their lives completely to the cause, are regular ordained ministers. Few of them are intellectuals; all have heard what they describe simply as "a call from God."

Officers are selected from the ranks of the soldiers and are trained for nine months at one of the army's four schools. They must be high-school graduates. Courses are short on arts but long on fundamentalism, homiletics and crowd psychology. One of their textbooks is the army's Orders & Regulations, which contains advice on how to handle toughs ("He should let them see that they have not worn out his love . . ."), how to conduct "Hallelujah Windup" sessions, how to select a wife or husband. Officers are not allowed to marry outside the army, and may not marry without their superiors' consent.

Cadets spend time learning to play trombones, trumpets, accordions, euphoniums, graduate with the rank of probationary lieutenant. After a year of correspondence study and strict probation, they are commissioned as second lieutenants with the legal standing of ordained ministers. From there they advance through the field ranks: first lieutenant, captain, major; through the staff ranks: brigadier, lieutenant-colonel, colonel, lieutenant-commissioner, commissioner.

Officers' pay ranges from $10 a week to the "about $70" a week paid to Commissioner Pugmire. The Salvationist owns few worldly goods, no home, no furniture. What he needs, beyond food and clothes, is provided for him. He is ready to pick up in an instant and fly to any part of the world, at his superior's command.

Cold Soil. Commissioner Pugmire's plain, earnest, large-jawed face is that of a veteran campaigner. He has been dedicated to the cause for almost half a century. A third-generation Salvationist, he and his forbears-bridge army history from its founding to its present day.

His maternal grandmother became a convert to the army when bearded, Godfearing General Booth was shocking England with his evangelism. Her daughter Mary Ivison was also a convert who met and fell in love with Joseph Pugmire, another Salvationist. Joseph was sent to plant the army's blue-bordered, blood-red flag in Kansas City, Mo., and Mary later followed and married him.

The U.S. was a cold, hard soil for evangelism. In 1880, General Booth's devoted and indefatigable disciple, George Scott Railton,* had landed in Manhattan at the head of seven female soldiers. He moved into Harry Hill's Gentleman's Sporting Theater, Billiard Parlor & Shooting Gallery and started to preach. But America, like England, received the hosts of William Booth with hostility.

The Midwest hooted at Mary and Joseph Pugmire and threw them into jail. It was against the law to preach in the streets. Between jail terms, on March 4, 1888, Mary Pugmire bore her first child. In the next 14 years, between Hallelujah-singing and evangelizing in the U.S., Canada and England, she bore six more. Her first child was son Ernest.

It was a deeply religious but not a puritanical family, in which father Pugmire was second in command. In whatever dining room the family happened to be using along its gospel travels, father Pugmire always hung the motto: "Christ is the head of this house, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation." Family prayers were said every morning and every night. Serious-minded Ernest read to improve himself, learned to play the euphonium. Occasionally he used his fists capably when the boys in the neighborhood taunted him about his parents being Salvationists.

At 18, he entered the army's Toronto training school, left it nine months later to deal with a wayward world. He became one of the army's most accomplished performers on the euphonium. Ernest could make men cry with his deep-throated horn. He married British-born Ann Vickers, daughter of a well-to-do businessman, who had marched to the army from the Episcopal Church. In 1914 he sailed aboard the Empress of Ireland for a London convention with 300 of Canada's top Salvationists. In a thick St. Lawrence River fog, a freighter cut the Empress in two; she capsized and 200 of the Salvationists were among the 1,024 passengers and crewmen who drowned. But Ernest, a powerful swimmer, survived.

Honor Declined. He survived to carry on the Lord's work in western Canada, China and Japan. He was in the mountains near Tokyo when the earthquake of 1923 rocked the island, and he plunged into the work of relief. After eight years he was brought back home, and later made financial secretary of the army's U.S. Central Territory.

A shy man whose talents lay in administrative work, Ernest Pugmire was quite unlike his fiery evangelist father. As an administrator he advanced through the army's staff ranks, by 1942 had become a commissioner and boss of the army's Eastern Territory. Four years later he was nominated by the army's all-powerful High Council in London for the topmost army job: general of the International. It was a signal honor to be in the line of succession from William Booth to son Bramwell Booth,* to Edward John Higgins, to Bramwell's firebrand sister Evangeline,/- to Australian-born George Lyndon Carpenter. But Pugmire turned it down; his heart, strained by years of work, travel and dedication, was not up to the job, which went to Albert W. T. Orsborn, son-in-law of the late General Higgins. Pugmire became commissioner of the U.S. Vested with more authority than any other U.S. churchman--his command over his four territories is absolute--he is still a diligent, humble man.

Era of Respectability. He leads what he calls a "very humdrum life" in the five-room frame house the army furnishes him in Ramsey, N.J., and rides to his 14th Street office every morning in the Buick sedan which the army allots him, behind a Dutch chauffeur who escaped from a German slave labor camp.

Mrs. Commissioner Pugmire goes to the office with him two or three mornings a week. As is the army rule, she holds the same rank as her husband. Their five children are all married, but to the commissioner's deep disappointment, none of them followed him into active army service. One reason they didn't, he thinks, was because of the shock of coming back to the U.S. after their early years spent in the Orient. "The clash of life in the U.S., after the quiet of the Far East," he says, "was very exciting to them. It was all we could do to hold them in line."

The clash of life has transformed many things for Old Campaigner Pugmire. William Booth had a horror of holier-than-thou, middle-class respectability. A fear of respectability is reflected by the commissioner, who is the true son of an evangelist, even if he was never a rousing evangelist himself. The legend "Blood & Fire" on the army's flag has lost some of its meaning. The army, taking on respectability in spite of itself, has acquired property, a standing in the community, a connection with Community Chests, advisory committees of distinguished citizens. It has lost some of its old, hoarse, street-corner fervor.

Says the commissioner: "We haven't got the opposition we once had when we were kicked around . . . and our people had to fight for the right to preach in the streets. That kind of opposition bred the courage of lions."

But the army had to change with the times, as the Devil himself changed, or lose the fight. In a modern world, the kind of social welfare program over which Ernest Pugmire presides is a sounder attack against the enemy than all the processions General Booth might lead today through Sheffield, and sounder than street-corner revivals. Ernest Pugmire's kind of attack also requires courage, and a Christian's stubborn patience and faith.

Such qualities, unflaggingly demonstrated by the Salvation Army through its 71-year history, had won it a measure of public support and respect, particularly in the U.S., that would have astonished the army's embattled first generation. But the workers in General Booth's host, like other dedicated servants of the poor, could make an explanation. The world could not continue to persecute, or even be indifferent, to men & women who live by the most difficult of Christ's beatitudes: "Blessed are the meek . . . blessed are the merciful."

*Commenting on the sudden death of a comrade who was running to catch a train, Railton once wrote: "Today's great news to me has been that of Major Elmslie's glorious rush up the railway steps into heaven."

*Ballington Booth, imperious second son of the imperious Booths, broke with father William and Bramwell and founded the Volunteers of America, which is much smaller than the army, is devoted to philanthropy and is not a church.

/-Who is 84 this Christmas, retired, and living in Hartsdale, N.Y.

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