Quarter, Dimes, and Dollars,
Spending more and more!
I'm so nice that, for a price,
I'll let you through my door!

Got to have the very best . . .
Rolls Royce, Mercedes Benz!
Nothing has too high a price,
It can even buy your friends!^[22]

Creative Initiative used two other media, films and radio, to educate the general public during the 1970s. The first films were put together as part of the 1968 meeting that announced the voluntary national service project. Although the volunteer national service project had a brief life, the use of films to communicate the movement's ideas lived on into Beyond War.^[23] The group prepared scripts for five films, three of which were produced and used extensively before the Beyond War era. All the films were written by Emilia, although she never claimed public credit.^[24] Like the theatrical productions, the films were intended to present Creative Initiative's basic ideas to a general audience in an easy-to-understand and nonthreatening way. The films, however, were much less overtly religious than the pageants, in part because they were designed to be used with people even further removed from the Creative Initiative sphere than those in the theaters. Generally, the films were a collage of quick-cut stills and short bits of action with classical background music and a narrative voice-over.

Besides being used in some of the introductory courses, the films were shown widely to the general community, to government groups, managerial conferences, and at public "fairs."^[25] Thus, there was a strong emphasis on the secular rather than the religious message. Except for the title of the proposed fifth film, "Choose Your God," there were no

explicit religious references in any of the scripts. Nevertheless, the themes of evolution, danger, and choice were as central to the films as they were to the pageants.

Certainly, the most unequivocally educational of all the dramatized messages were a series of forty one-minute radio spots that were broadcast on a San Francisco radio station between 1975 and 1977. These radio messages must have been even more perplexing to the uninitiated than the average Creative Initiative pronouncement, since they appeared in isolated segments without context and without transition from one idea to the next. Because they were written for a general audience, moreover, they had no religious references, making many of them sound like all-purpose, positive-thinking pieces of psychology and philosophy.

For example, spot number ten addressed the issue of "authority." To Creative Initiative, "authority" meant only one thing, surrendering individual will to the authority of God. The radio spot said that although people wanted to be number one, they had to realize they were really number two because they were governed by the laws of nature. One has to obey the laws of nature, continued the spot, "because to be obedient means you've discovered the difference between thinking you're number one and knowing you're number two."^[26] Similarly, the spot that discussed the great paradox of Jesus never actually mentioned him. It began with the question, "What is the meaning of life?" and ended with the advice, "we are fulfilled by giving. We find life by surrendering it."^[27] Among the other topics covered were the presence of the masculine and feminine in all people, the need to make a decision to act (four times), the dangers of materialism, the need for spiritual fulfillment, and so forth.

Dramatizing their message and presenting it to the general public was Creative Initiative's way of casting their seed widely. If the success of the efforts is to be judged by the number of people attracted to the movement, then most of the seed would seem to have fallen on fallow ground. Yet, recruiting new members was only a secondary purpose of the plays, films, and radio spots. By going public in an aggressive way with their ideas, Creative Initiative was also trying to legitimize itself. If outsiders could be convinced of the validity of the movement's principles, then the effort would be achieving two goals at once. First, Creative Initiative would be spreading its doctrine in accordance with its own declared purpose to educate the world with the teachings of the third age. Second, and this was never made explicit, to the extent that outsiders were exposed to their ideas and came to see them as legitimate, even if the outsiders did not actually accept them, the movement was creating a more receptive environment for its own people and thereby decreasing the social cost of being a member. Like any other kind of publicity and the group certainly did not shy away from opportunities to tell its story to the press the dramatized messages made insiders who saw them feel as though their group had gained some social legitimacy.

Reaching out to the Black Community

Among the efforts made by Creative Initiative to reach out to people in the larger community, their involvement with two black churches in the predominantly black town of East Palo Alto holds a special place. Because they genuinely and fervently believed that they could create a world in which there was unity among the nations, religions, and races, they also believed that it was incumbent upon them to live lives compatible with that view. To accomplish the first goal, as we shall see, they actively pursued programs that promoted internationalism. The goal of unifying the religions was, at first, dealt with by declaring themselves an ecumenical movement. Even when that failed, they continued to insist that their New Religion was really an amalgam of existing faiths whose doctrines they honored in their work. The third goal, unifying the races, was more difficult because nonwhites in general and blacks in particular did not fall into the socioeconomic categories from which they drew their members. There were always a few Asians in the group, but Hispanics, like blacks, were conspicuously absent.

The absence of ethnic and racial minorities was certainly not due to any lack of intellectual commitment to the cause of brotherhood on the part of the movement. A "Ten Commandments of Good Will" produced in 1963 described the attitude toward race relations that the group expected from its members. Those subscribing to this creed promised to "honor all men and women regardless of their race or religion." They promised, in addition, to stand up for people who were persecuted and to challenge the idea of racial superiority. Couched in the extreme language of the early New Religion period, persons accepting the commandments promised to obey them until their "dying day" and not to "be divorced from this purpose by threats of personal violence or social ostracism."^[28]

Emilia's active work with black groups went back at least to 1950 when she and some of the others in Sequoia Seminar became involved with the AME Zion Church in East Palo Alto. Del Carlson led the church choir, and Emilia worked with the church, first on their Negro History Week event, and then on various other projects dealing with the issue of racial prejudice.^[29]

Cooperation with black churches took on a profounder significance after 1962. In 1965, the cook at Ben Lomond told Emilia that a deacon had stolen money from her church that was to be used for remodeling. Emilia offered to help raise the missing money and was introduced to "Mother" Branch, president of Palo Alto Church Women United, an ecumenical group, and wife of "Father" James Branch, the church's minister. Creative Initiative donated fifteen hundred dollars to Saint John Missionary Baptist Church and, as part of their increasing involvement, arranged to have nine paintings installed in the church. All the paintings contained New Religion iconography, including illustrations of the "Six Great Religions" and the "Cross of Fulfillment," a metal version of which was prepared for but never placed on the church roof.^[30]

A paper distributed to the members of the New Religion in the spring of 1965 made clear the tremendous importance that Emilia (the paper was almost certainly written by her) placed on the movement's relationship with Saint John. The paper opened with the statement, "St. John's Baptist Church is being used by God as the birthplace of the new or Second Coming of Christ." It went on to explain that "the Book of John, the fourth book of the New Testament, is the book which unfolds the third dispensation. It is therefore proper that this first occasion of formally establishing the invisible church built without hands should take place in a church named St. John." That event was to occur on Good Friday, April 16, at a service that symbolized the coming together of the races in cooperation.^[31] Almost one hundred members of the movement who were present accepted an invitation to go forward and join the church. Forty of them were subsequently given a traditional full-immersion baptism. The people from Creative Initiative did not intend this act to mean that they were becoming Baptists, but rather that they were engaged in work that embraced all denominations. For their part, both Mother and Father Branch were given special ad hoc initiation ceremonies into New Sphere, and several women from the black church were also given " 'mild' identification," apparently without going through the usual courses.^[32] Although quasi-unity between the two groups could not last long the church did not want to be subsumed into Creative Initiative, and the people in the movement had their own agenda for action relations between the two groups remained warm, if increasingly detached, until 1968. That year, Creative Initiative became a cosponsor of an "African heritage" festival that was going to be held in East Palo Alto in late April to celebrate "the arts and culture of Africa." After working out some initial disagreement as to where the fair would be held and whether or not it was a "black nationalist" event, plans went forward involving people from Saint John, from the East Palo Alto AME Zion Church, from a black women's group called the Strivers, and from several Stanford University student groups.^[33]

Unfortunately, early in the month, before the fair could be held, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Working overnight, the Rathbuns and Creative Initiative along with their friends in the black community organized a peaceful memorial march. Harry and Emilia were in the front rank of the demonstration. Feelings in the black community were inflamed, nevertheless, and several of the black women who had been working on the fair were reportedly threatened by black men with pistols and told not to cooperate with whites. For this reason the Strivers withdrew from participation in the fair. The loss of support from this middle-class black women's group combined with the mood of unrest following the assassination caused the fair to be canceled. Creative Initiative's active phase of black-white cooperation died along with the African Heritage festival.^[34]

The attempts to integrate a black church into the New Religion of the Third Age had been a failure, and so had the more modest effort to cooperate with black groups in celebrating the cultural heritage of Africa. As Creative Initiative moved into the 1970s, members turned their attention away from the dispossessed, with whom they had never had much success, toward their natural constituency in the white upper-middle class. In a certain sense they were actually following the advice of many black activists who told them if they really wanted to help they should change the attitudes in the white community. They told a black officer of the Ford Foundation in 1970, "We are after significant attitude changes in white communities. We believe this is absolutely essential to . . . help produce the concrete changes that must be made quickly in the underprivileged parts of our society."^[35]

The National Voluntary Service Movement

The collapse of Creative Initiative's active involvement with the black community in 1968 coincided with the emergence of their first full-scale social action project, the plan for a national voluntary service corps of young people. The inception of the national voluntary service scheme, in fact, was closely linked to Creative Initiative's involvement with the militant black community.^[36] Early proposals for the service project announced that it would have to reach "black students who make up the vanguard of black activist movements," or else it would "make very little impact on the country's consciousness."^[37] As they promoted their pilot program through the spring of 1968, the emphasis was always on ways in which the program could further racial harmony among youth. They went so far as to announce that the first project would take place in San Francisco, where eight white college students from Stanford and eight ghetto youths would work together on unspecified projects chosen by a black activist group called the Mission Rebels.^[38] The dissolution of Creative Initiative's tenuous link to the militant black community after King's assassination did not stop the voluntary service drive, although it did put an end to most of the hopeful rhetoric about solving the problems of poor youth.

Unlike the media efforts and the work with the black churches, the national service project did not have an obvious religious subtext. Like them, however, it was strongly educational in nature and aimed at the outside world. Part of its purpose, as in all Creative Initiative projects, was to draw attention to the work of the movement. Yet the national service project was action oriented and served as a model for the subsequent civic activities that followed in the 1970s.

Emilia originally suggested the idea for a voluntary national service corps during a "brainstorming" session in the autumn of 1967, and it was quickly adopted by the hub leadership. Obviously there could be no hope of spreading the concept to the youth outside the movement unless the children of Creative Initiative members were fully committed to it. Therefore, in April 1968, when they were gearing up for a major publicity campaign, Creative Initiative teenagers were told that they either had to become active in the new project or drop out of the movement's teen programs. There was one report that as many as a quarter of the teenagers balked at becoming part of the new project, but eventually most joined the support group called "Youth for Positive Action."^[39]

Although it was not made explicit, there was a quid pro quo aspect to the demand that teens participate in the national service campaign. After all, they were the ones who would benefit if it were successful, because one of the major objectives of the project was to create an alternative to the military draft and service in the Vietnam War. Harry told the press that he hoped local draft boards would exempt young men who worked for the new program and that he expected that the draft law would eventually be changed to require such exemption. "The difference between us and VISTA and the Peace Corps," said Harry, "is that they are not committed to changing the draft system."^[40]

Creative Initiative sought funding for the "Involvement Corps" by appealing to the business community. They explained that they wanted to set up a demonstration project in the Bay Area to "show what can be accomplished by dedicated young people under private leadership and financing." They acknowledged that they were following the lead of VISTA and the Peace Corps but claimed that "government cannot do the job alone" and that the Involvement Corps would show how the private sector could expand the example of the government's projects. It was, nevertheless, not at all clear how Creative Initiative's voluntary service would differ appreciably from the existing federal organizations, other than the fact that it originally planned to recruit large numbers of poorly educated black youth to work with white, middle-class young people.^[41]

The core of the first demonstration project was to be made up of Stanford students, many of whom were children of Creative Initiative members. In October 1967, students, faculty, and staff affiliated with the movement formed a campus group called the "Community for Relevant Education" (CRE).^[42] Modeling their approach on the psychological deconditioning sessions that the movement had used for years, CRE established a program of "relevance groups" at Stanford through which students could become more aware of their feelings. Public descriptions emphasized the value of people learning to trust one another and developing a sense of power to act. Ironically, one of the criticisms that CRE members aimed at other campus encounter groups was that they were "process oriented," whereas CRE's relevance groups were "action oriented."^[43] This was indeed a new departure for a group whose entire history had been one of avoiding social action in favor of an educational process designed only to change the individual.^[44]

Nonmembers criticized the two hundred CRE students for being elitist, intolerant, and counterrevolutionary, but the most common complaint was that CRE was a religion or a sect.^[45] Here, of course, the critics were correct. The Stanford Daily reported a rumor that CRE members were required to sign a paper of commitment after completing a five-week course of relevance groups but it said it could find no proof.^[46] In fact, CRE had drawn up a pledge of commitment that, although it avoided any explicit religious terminology, was the functional equivalent of the pledge that people took when they entered the New Religion. The CRE "Statement of Position" asserted that one person could make a difference in the world; that personal relationships could be honest and direct; that people had to be helped to achieve their highest potential; that work toward the cooperation of all races, religions, and nations was the greatest service a person could perform; and that all conditioned responses had to be tested against reality. The signer pledged "to be part of a force of enlightened, committed, caring people capable of building a really loving world" and promised to be "a new kind of universal citizen" who would "free the human race to achieve its highest manifestation."^[47]

By presenting itself as a secular effort, CRE was reducing the social cost of joining. The effort to create a national voluntary service project was sincere, but underlying it, as with all Creative Initiative activities, was the desire to spread the group's beliefs. Useful as they might be, social action projects were always seen as part of a greater educational effort. In the middle of all the publicity promoting CRE, the Rathbuns could still assert that when people actually understood the meaning of their philosophy, "the familiar question: 'But what are we going to do when we have the trained and committed community?' becomes irrelevant because one is already in action if he has become committed to the goal inherent in the philosophy."^[48] They were apparently untroubled by the fact that these statements were made during a period when CRE and Creative Initiative were pushing national service that is, real action in the community, not just "education." After all, CRE said that it had two purposes: one was, in effect, spreading the philosophy of Creative Initiative, but the second was promoting the national service program.

Like so many Creative Initiative projects, national service started with great expectations. A thirty-four page "Training Manual" drawn up at the beginning of 1968 (for internal distribution only) listed as the first goal of the project: "to shift the attitude of this country, and eventually of the world, from one of narrow self-interest to one of positive and willing contribution to build the earth for all people." In addition to making it a force for better race relations, they hoped eventually to make national service a part of the educational system nationwide. They believed these goals would be achieved because Creative Initiative would generate "a groundswell of support for National Service of such magnitude and fervor that political forces will naturally support the needs of the program."^[49]

The proposal laid out every step in their hypothetical program, from the way it would deal with military service to the cost per volunteer. Creative Initiative's role was to act as a catalyst, and to that end they created a separate legal entity, the National Service Foundation (later called the National Initiative Foundation) to oversee the work. When fully implemented, national service, as its name implied, would be a requirement for every young person in the nation, either in the traditional military or in a new civilian capacity. Obviously, before such a drastic step could be taken a demonstration project was necessary. At first Creative Initiative hoped to establish a nationwide pilot program involving fifty thousand young people. Professional consultants who were brought in quickly scaled down the pilot project, however, to a regional endeavor involving a projected five thousand volunteers for the summer of 1968.^[50] Only the eager optimism that marked all Creative Initiative programs could have convinced the organizers that they could draw up plans, raise money, recruit five thousand young people, and have them on the job in less than four months.

There were two public launchings of this project, the first in March and the second in April. The March presentation of the national service idea drew upon the movement's two years of theatrical experience with a three-act dramatic presentation called "Building the Earth" staged at the three-thousand-seat Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, a few miles north of Palo Alto. After films and speeches, several hundred Build the Earth women in rainbow-colored dresses filled the stage to sing a current popular song, "Who Will Answer?" At the end of the song a disembodied voice from the middle of the women spoke: "We are neither the extreme right nor the extreme left we are the mobilized middle. If people like us won't do it, who will?" Members of the audience were then asked to volunteer to help organize the pilot program.^[51]

Then in April the National Initiative Foundation made plans to present the pilot project to the public at a huge pageant in Stanford Stadium which holds a hundred thousand people with "speakers of national prominence," black and white marching bands, and an upbeat program that would cause grown men to stand and weep.^[52] Fortunately, perhaps, for Creative Initiative, the stadium was unobtainable, because it was unlikely they could have attracted anything close to a hundred thousand people. They had to settle instead for Stanford's Frost Amphitheater, which seats ten thousand. In the meantime, of course, the possibility of the national service movement working closely with the black community had evaporated in the face of the unrest following King's assassination. Undaunted, they went ahead, and on the appointed day in May they managed to fill the amphitheater. No speakers of major national prominence appeared, but otherwise the pageant was clearly up to Creative Initiative's standards. Entitled "Build the Earth," it featured several Stanford bands, speeches, poems, national and state flags, foreign students in their native costumes, and international folk dancers. The finale consisted of Build the Earth women in their ubiquitous rainbow dresses releasing matching balloons that, after abbreviated flights, soon settled down into the crowd, most having lost their helium in the hot afternoon sun.^[53]

The half-filled balloons bobbing listlessly just above the crowd were an unpropitious omen. Back in February the organizers had talked bravely of five thousand volunteers, scaled down from fifty thousand. At the May pageant itself the names of fifteen volunteers were announced, although the office claimed that there were a total of forty applications. Internal communications indicate the number was more like twenty-five. When all the dust (and balloons) had settled, fewer than a dozen people actually went out onto the first projects. Months of labor, thousands of work hours, reams of publicity, and the full-time employment of two people one Creative Initiative man (Donald Fitton, the first full-time paid Creative Initiative worker) and an outside specialist plus additional input from two professional consultants, placed eleven young people in a variety of local service projects. Three of the eleven volunteers were women and two were black. Half of them were, as advertised, placed with black-led action groups in San Francisco.^[54]

As far as Creative Initiative was concerned, the whole experiment with national service came to an end in October 1968 when they formally severed their ties with the Involvement Corps. Leadership of the group was turned over to one of the outside consultants who had been hired to help the foundation with the experiment. The members of the Creative Initiative community in turn were told that their continued involvement with the program would be a matter of personal choice, for although the movement still supported the corps and the idea of national service, they had fulfilled their goal by launching the program and wanted to move onto other projects.^[55]

The Question of Civic Action

The national service experiment demonstrated a recurrent tension in the Creative Initiative movement betweeen the homocentric and the sociocentric. Going back at least to 1946 and the break with the Canadian radicals, the Rathbuns' belief was that changed people would change society rather than the other way around. Recruiting material had emphasized repeatedly that they were not seeking to attract people whose primary interest was political action. "We are looking for people who are concerned with the human dimension," said a 1971 recruiting memo. "While we certainly do not reject politically or ecologically oriented individuals," it continued, "we frequently only frustrate them because we do not take action in the outer world in a way they can appreciate and which satisfies their major concern."^[56]

In practice, however, it was sometimes very hard not to slip into civic and political action. Indeed, unless the Creative Initiative movement actually tried to do something, how could they know when enough people had been changed to establish that vital "creative minority" that would reform society? Because of this ambivalent but continuing link with the social gospel tradition, Creative Initiative could never simply turn its back on social action. The ultimate litmus test of the validity of their kind of homocentric approach to reform was social and political change. So when they strayed into the area of civic action, as they did with national service, they may have been unconsciously trying to validate their approach by doing exactly what they always said they shouldn't spend time doing, becoming involved in politics.

The first formal involvement with political issues had come in early 1967 when the men (action in the political sphere was always dominated by the men) began to formulate a position on "The New Politics." The men engaged in this exploratory project felt that they had to change worldwide political ideology from competition to cooperation.^[57] In July of 1967 the New Politics task force produced a draft paper entitled "Statement of Political Position" and a timeline for accomplishing its goals. The first part of the position paper called for international cooperation and, because it was an existing body whose ideals embodied the philosophy of the group, the paper named the United Nations as the logical vehicle for bringing about this goal.^[58] Their three-year timeline projected a series of steps at home and abroad culminating in 1970 with a world conference. Like so many of Creative Initiative's projects, the conception was extremely ambitious. They planned to have teams of trained contacts spreading out through the "seven power sectors" of the United States ("Left, Right, South, Mid-West, Industry, Labor, Church") and the "seven cultures" of the world ("India, USSR, UK, Western Europe, South America, Japan, Africa") and expected the effort also to expand geometrically as they moved.^[59] The New Politics campaign never got beyond the designing stage and the great plan remained a paper promise.

Two years later, however, directly after the end of the national service experiment, the group did formulate a program to take direct action in the civic arena, but on a much more modest level than the seven power sectors and the seven cultures. Their target was Palo Alto, and their goal was to "humanize" the city. The "Palo Alto Initiative," as it was called, began in January 1969 when Creative Initiative conducted a survey of community leaders to determine what they thought were the most pressing problems in the city.^[60] Tabulating the responses, Creative Initiative determined that there were five areas that needed attention: long-range civic planning, improved black-white relations, dissatisfied young people, nonrelevant education, and community apathy.^[61]

Perhaps because their recent experience with the national service program had convinced them that community resistance stemmed from the failure of people to accept Creative Initiative's philosophy, all the problems identified by the survey, except civic planning, were seen as attitudinal and therefore susceptible to correction through education. "Palo Alto," they concluded, "is a symptom of what is going on throughout the entire world." They felt they had to show the city how to realize that "home" was the planet and their "race," mankind. All that was needed to accomplish this was to expose the people in the city to the truth and, they reaffirmed, they were "willing to tell the truth even at the risk of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."^[62] The plan was to "revolutionize the educational system in Palo Alto."^[63] Creative Initiative sketched out a curriculum, wrote up a rationale, and contacted the principal of one of the Palo Alto high schools. They offered to set up a pilot program at the school for volunteer students and faculty.^[64] Apparently neither that overture nor another to the board of education was favorably received. A subse quent memo referred to "a general up-tightness on the part of the [school] staff regarding 'sensitivity training" which was apparently how they viewed the Creative Initiative proposal and complained that the school administrators "did not, as yet, recognize us as experts in the field of education."^[65]

Eternally optimistic and undeterred by weak response to the civic initiatives of 1969, the movement entered the new decade with their political views intact. A "Statement on Politics" drawn up in 1970 listed the major problems of the nation as peace, "responsiveness," and ecology, and predicted, "If a majority of people in America wanted to shift the use of our national resources from war and destruction to human development and environmental preservation, government would inexorably fall into line."^[66]

One of the first political education programs that Creative Initiative proposed for the new decade was based on the upcoming bicentennial of the American revolution. Hoping, as they did at the beginning of each new administration, to entice the president into supporting one of their projects, they contacted Richard Nixon both before and after his second inauguration in 1972. The flowery letters sought to describe how the president's values and those of the foundation coincided and urged him to meet with them so that they could explain their ideas for the bicentennial.^[67] They had previously suggested a series of specific ideas for projects to be launched as part of the bicentennial celebration. Although the calls for a peace academy, a department of unity, and a world unity corps may have been unrealistic, they were an earnest effort to develop a meaningful theme for a celebration that eventually was almost universally condemned as dull and directionless.^[68]

Undeterred by the lack of positive response from the federal government, Creative Initiative placed the new project in the highest-priority category which, in fact, was the only category that Creative Initiative had. The membership was told that they would have to make a "total shift " in their approach to the bicentennial and visualize themselves "involved in a war for survival for the next two years (a war for unity and without violence)." "Can you imagine yourself going into battle halfheartedly?" asked the rhetorical call for action. It continued, "The reality is that the only way we can reach the world through '76 or at all is to believe at the center of our being that our survival is at stake and to act accordingly."^[69]

The call for action urged members to think about ways to implement the proposed theme, "Rebirth '76," which would promote the bicenten nial celebration as the gateway to "Century Three."^[70] The idea of a third century echoed Creative Initiative's belief in a third age and, to emphasize that connection further, they took the motto on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States, novus ordo seclorum ("a new order of the ages"), as the slogan of their bicentennial program. The movement drafted a full-scale plan of action that included: "interchanges" among students, families, and community specialists; international contests on the theme of "interdependence"; a new educational curriculum for the country's schools; and, finally, both a full-length film and a "full-scale musical drama for the stage, entitled 'Reunion.' " The play would be "presented professionally in Washington, and other key national capitals throughout the world."^[71]

Since the project they envisioned was expected to cost more than three hundred thousand dollars, they applied for funding to various foundations. A report in September of 1973 to the one foundation that did grant them fifteen thousand dollars reveals that in the end almost none of the projects they had proposed for the bicentennial celebration had been implemented.^[72] In fact, by the time 1976 actually arrived, almost all projects for the bicentennial celebration had been left behind as the group became involved in another set of political activities, mostly having to do with ecology. They did, however, compose and circulate a "Declaration of Interdependence" that emphasized the unity of human beings and their environment and rejected nationalism, violence and war, and exploitation of people or the environment.^[73]

Energy and Ecology

The movement's stress on environmental issues did not suddenly appear fully formed in the mid-1970s. In the late 1960s, echoing the concerns of organizations such as Zero Population Growth, Creative Initiative had called on their members and the public to support population limitation. The women's ecology task force, established in the spring of 1969, issued a flyer entitled "Overpopulation Newsletter." It consisted of a series of short news items almost all of which supported liberalizing antiabortion laws. The newsletter ended by urging readers to write to their federal and state representatives to support "just abortion and voluntary sterilization laws, which would be open to all with fees to be determined by financial ability to pay."^[74] In July 1969 Build the Earth put together an ecology exhibit composed of a series of sixteen freestanding display panels with very professional pictures and graphics. First erected at a Palo Alto shopping mall, it was later shown in museums and schools in the Bay Area. The display emphasized the contrast between the finite capacity of the earth to produce food and the apparently infinite capacity of people to reproduce; it predicted that unless something were done to reduce the birth rate, starvation would be the inevitable result.^[75] In 1970, when a special "committee of 90" men drafted a series of suggested position papers on issues of concern, the "politics" statement included an unqualified call for all forms of population control including "massive education, tax penalties for more than two children, free sterilization, intensified research on safe and convenient contraceptives, and unconditional abortion."^[76]

There was a hiatus in the public education programs during the early 1970s while the group focused on the theatrical productions. Then, in 1975, Creative Initiative returned to the ecology movement, shifting their emphasis from population control and recycling to energy. The energy issue involved them directly in political activities and led up to the crisis that preceded their reorganization into Beyond War.

Operating as Build the Earth, Creative Initiative created a special task force called "Project Survival" at the beginning of 1975. They were motivated, they said, by hearing British economist E. F. Schumacher speaking at Stanford University. Shumacher's book, Small Is Beautiful, further stimulated them to investigate the energy problem, and they chose the nuclear power issue as an appropriate focus for action.^[77] From February to March, Project Survival sponsored twelve community forums at which the issue of nuclear power was discussed. These meetings presented both sides of the issue, including people and films from the nuclear power industry, while an accompanying questionnaire tried to determine popular attitudes toward nuclear power.^[78] Creative Initiative was far from neutral on the subject, however, and the appearance of objectivity was quickly abandoned. Within months they were distributing flyers listing the long-term dangers of radioactive plutonium waste from reactors and predicting grave consequences for the future unless the production of nuclear energy were halted. They concluded one early list of antinuclear arguments with the statement: "Because of these facts we feel the issue of nuclear power is a moral one."^[79]

The more explicitly political side of the nuclear project went through the same rapid transformation from nominally objective to unabashedly partisan in just a few months. In March, the movement circulated a petition calling on the government to create a special commission, "representative of all the people of California, to inquire into the question of nuclear power in our state." The rest of the document maintained the same even-handed tone, noting that nuclear power had both benefits and dangers, supporters and opponents, and that the decision should not be left to the power industry or to scientists. Since the issue was moral and ethical as well as technological and economic reasoned the petition, the decision had to be made by everybody based on all the facts.^[80]

By April, the movement had moved to outright antinuclear advocacy. One of the early announcements for an "educational presentation" was headlined, "WE ARE IRREVERSIBLY COMMITTED TO ONE MILLION DEATHS FROM NUCLEAR RADIATION." In the face of so palpable and immediate a danger, the flyer explained, "we must take immediate action. All other problems of human welfare take second place."^[81]

On May 9, five hundred women staged a demonstration in Los Angeles to draw attention to the petition campaign. In a newspaper interview several spokeswomen for the march admitted that although the petition only called for an investigation, they were opposed to nuclear power.^[82] Their point of view was obvious from the march itself. demonstrating at the Department of Water and Power, they carried signs saying "Plutonium Kills," "Energy Conservation not Nuclear Proliferation," "People Need the Truth About Nuclear Waste," "Children Need a Future, Not a Radioactive Lcgacy," and "God Gave Us a Finite Planet, Let Us Not Destroy It."^[83] Aside from the fact that all the demonstrators were women, with the vast majority middle-aged and white, there was one other aspect that set this march apart from the usual demonstration: they were all dressed in pantsuits that were the colors of the rainbow and each had a matching scarf tied through her hair. They explained that the rainbow was God's sign to Noah that he would not destroy the earth and their sign that they accepted the responsibility to also persuade people not to destroy the earth.^[84]

Petition drives were staged in more than half a dozen cities around the state. In Fresno and San Francisco they were accompanied by marches using the same signs and colored costumes as were used in Los Angeles. The highly disciplined demonstration in San Francisco so unnerved one Pacific Gas and Electric counterdemonstrator that he commented, "It's like watching the Hitler youth corps."^[85] He was subsequently reprimanded for his remark and apologized to Creative Initiative. But these regional marches were just warmups for the grand finale demonstration in Sacramento. The women had managed to collect 345,000 signatures on their "call for information" petitions, and they went to the state capital to present them to the governor in typical Creative Initiative style. Drawing on their years of experience producing "Bless Man" and "Thirteen Is a Mystical Number," they pulled out all the stops.

More than four thousand enthusiastic and costumed demonstrators went to Sacramento on May 21, 1975. Led by four hundred women forming the inevitable pastel rainbow, they marched from a local park to the Capitol Mall. There the "rainbow women" formed a backdrop to an invocation by American Indians (in costume) and four costumed women representing the four races of the earth. An Indian representative called upon the crowd to "hear a prophecy of my people." "The Great Spirit will return," he predicted, going on to assure the audience that the 'War of Light" would vanquish the "Sons of Darkness." Unprompted, he then proceeded to outline the fundamental tenets of Creative Initiative philosophy. He told the people to "go to the mountain-top of consciousness and learn to be 'Warriors of the Rainbow.' " He told them to fight with truth and not with violence. He foretold the emergence of understanding, kindness, and the end of destruction, and finally he called upon them to help bring about a "new order of the ages."^[86]

Each of the four costumed women then stepped forward and, after a statement of reconciliation and concern was read for her, released a dove. The black woman forgave the whites. The woman representing the "red" and "brown" races called for the protection of "Mother Earth." The Asian woman denounced war with particular reference to the war in Vietnam. While the white woman denounced war and waste, saying, "We do not want an industrial-military complex running our nation. . . . We do not want more affluence, more electric gadgets, bigger automobiles, more energy. We want simplicity and conservation." It went on in this vein for two and a half hours. A hundred and one men in white pants with gold sashes and rainbow-colored shirts carried beautifully designed banners bearing symbols of life. After speeches and the presentation of the petitions to the chairman of the California Energy Commission, additional men with flags joined those with the banners and, in turn, became part of an ever-growing tableau that included women with baskets of fruit, grain, and flowers, and a huge globe. The afternoon's activities ended with the singing of "America, the Beautiful" and a Creative Initiative anthem, "Mankind, Arise." Press reaction to the Sacramento demonstration was generally quite favorable. A commentator from a local school wondered about the demonstrators singing "America, the Beautiful" after they had spoken of uniting nations, races, and religions, but she was otherwise greatly impressed.^[87] A bemused reporter from the Sacramento Union couldn't make up his mind whether the pageant was closer to the model of Busby Berkley or Joseph Goebbels but concluded that neither could have done a better job.^[88] The Union reporter's reaction was a rather typical one for outsiders when first confronted with Creative Initiative. On the one hand the group seemed to stand for everything that was good peace, brotherhood, and a clean environment but on the other hand there was something disquieting about a movement that could convince mature adults to dress up in elaborate uniforms and costumes and march in highly structured formations to further those same ideals.

Other antinuclear-power forces had already qualified an initiative, "Proposition 15," for the June 15 ballot. If passed, Proposition 15 would have placed nuclear power plants in the state under tighter controls for safety and disposal of nuclear waste, and it would have eliminated the limit on liability for nuclear power plants.^[89] Because initiatives were considered "political" and the various legal entities that made up Creative Initiatives in 1975 (Sequoia Seminar, Build the Earth, and the National Initiative Foundation) were all tax-exempt, they could not legally partake in any partisan political activity. That problem was resolved in July 1975 when Creative Initiative created a new organization, "Project Survival," through which people could work in support of the "nuclear safeguards initiative!" as its supporters called it, without endangering the tax status of the preexisiting entities.

A skeleton crew remained in the established groups to run some seminars and tend to the correspondence, but virtually all regular activities ceased as members of Creative Initiative directed their considerable energy and single-minded purpose to supporting the antinuclear initiative. Not everybody was pleased with the move. One member, who was employed by the nuclear power industry, worried that the suspension of all youth activities would deprive his children of support for the values he had been instilling in them. He pointed out, with considerable logic given Creative Initiative principles, that supporting a coercive law was not in the spirit of the movement. He argued that people would change their energy consumption behavior only when they had changed their thinking and that attempts to force such change from without were doomed, like Prohibition, to failure. Yet, as a true member of the com munity, he concluded that he would have to go along with whatever the group decided to do and promised, "I will give what I see and act with totality in whatever direction we proceed."^[90]

The decision to give up almost all of the regular recruiting and educational work in order to devote all resources to the nuclear power issue foreshadowed the move made seven years later to abandon the New Religion and become Beyond War. Because the initiative drive was limited by its very nature and would be over, one way or the other, after the election in June, the decision to work for Proposition 15 was not as drastic as the decision to reorganize as Beyond War. Nevertheless, the group's willingness to digress dramatically from its previous course and to undertake a task that was actually contradictory to one of its underlying principles was indicative of a flexibility that sometimes seemed to set the movement at odds with itself.

Opponents of Proposition 15 occasionally tried to paint the entire project as part of a sinister conspiracy devised by Creative Initiative itself (it began using that name during this period). Whether it was a conspiracy, as some contended, or merely an expression of the fervor of a group of "true believers," as some newspaper articles implied, it was obvious to most outsiders that Creative Initiative's activity on behalf of the state proposition went well beyond that usually expected from supporters of a political issue.^[91] Although members of Creative Initiative founded and dominated Project Survival, the movement had a life of its own with more than ten thousand affiliated people who had no connection with Creative Initiative either before or after the campaign, and, according to participants, no attempt was made to use the antinuclear power drive to recruit members for Creative Initiative.^[92]

Although there were no paid workers on Project Survival, of the more than five thousand people who participated, some men, as well as the usually large contingent of women, worked full-time for the initiative.^[93] The greatest personal sacrifice, as well as the most spectacular statement of personal commitment, came from three engineers who worked for General Electric Nuclear Systems in San Jose. Each had independently come to the decision to leave his employment in the nuclear power industry, but because they knew one another both from work and their involvement in Creative Initiative, they decided to act in unison. In a highly publicized news conference in February 1976 they all resigned, citing their concern about the dangers of nuclear power and their inability to work any longer in good conscience for a company that was contributing to a situation they believed endangered all humankind.^[94] In the wake of these resignations, some other engineers who were members of Creative Initiative but did not support Proposition 15 reported that they were told they would have to leave the movement unless they could get behind the campaign. Although that "shape up or ship out" ultimatum was eventually rescinded, here, as in so much of the sect's activity, conformity was expected as a sign of commitmcnt.^[95]

Project Survival disbanded after the proposition's defeat, and Creative Initiative resumed its full schedule of preproposition activities. The conclusion of this experiment with political activism did not, however, mark an end to the group's concern with ecology. The environmental movement was still running strong in California, and Creative Initiative seemed willing to ride that wave as far as it would go. A flyer from some time after 1976 placed the ecology issue in perspective from Creative Initiative's viewpoint. A page and a half of the handout listed the usual problems of water pollution, air pollution, and the limited supply of natural resources. Then it went further, however, lumping together with these environmental dangers such other problems as the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, divorce, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, television violence, pornography, child abuse, and venereal disease. They were all part, said the flyer, of "the whole deterioration of our human environment."^[96] By not separating ecology from other social problems, Creative Initiative was able to regard its continued activity in that area as both an educational tool and as an expression of its personal commitment to living lives in harmony with people and nature.

In the years between the failure of the nuclear power safety drive and the emergence of Beyond War, the community engaged in three highly visible public campaigns centered on the ecology issue. In 1977 Creative Initiative formed an organization called the "Palo Alto Youth Conservation Corps." Unlike the national service project, the Youth Conservation Corps had no national plans. Essentially it was a three-week summer program for fifteen- and sixteen-year-old children of Creative Initiative members. Dressed in green polo shirts and riding their bicycles, the twenty-six members of the corps canvassed Palo Alto trying to get citizens "to do one thing more" to conserve water and energy.^[97]

In 1979 and 1980 Creative Initiative launched its penultimate campaign in the ecology field. Like the earlier efforts, this one was aimed at conserving energy, but unlike the three-week teenage program in the summer of 1977, it involved the whole community and was a full-bore effort. It began in May 1979, contined through the summer and fall, and was revived briefly during the following summer. Called "Energyfast," the project was an attempt to get people in the Bay Area to cut back on their consumption of energy. Carrying signs that said "Children are the endangered species," "Cooperate now for survival," and "Save energy," a thousand rainbow-suited women introduced the project by marching through downtown San Francisco to a rally in Union Square. There, Creative Initiative spokeswoman Phyllis Kidd reminded the lunchtime crowd that they were the same people who had demonstrated five years earlier against nuclear energy and had been laughed at on the street and defeated at the polls. She said that many people had asked where they had been for five years, and the answer was "we have been studying and investigating. What we see strikes horror in our hearts for the future." Their role, said Kidd, was what it had always been: "to act and to educate the people who have not heard, so they can join with us."^[98]

Energyfast used two devices to induce people to participate in the program. The first employed the shock strategy that grew out of Creative Initiative's apocalyptic vision. One flyer began, "People are outraged by the lack of cooperation . . . for survival of life on this planet." Then in bold letters it proclaimed, "Children are the endangered species!" It listed the dangers of nuclear war, waste of energy and natural resources, and poisons in the air, water, and food. It concluded with the terse warnings, "We only have one planet. Our resources are going fast. Life is in danger. Cooperate now for survival."^[99] The second, more moderate approach emphasized the need for people to take voluntary action and listed the kinds of changes in transportation and home life that could lead to energy savings. Another flyer that advocated this more positive approach ended with the familiar call for geometric growth. "If each person got one more person each week to Energyfast," it explained, in fewer than six months the population of California would be recruited, and in just seven months the entire population of the United States would be participating.^[100]

Energyfast for 1979 reached its conclusion with a full-scale Creative Initiative celebration in Palo Alto's city hall plaza. "International Energy Conservation Day," as they called it, featured half a dozen speakers joined by representatives from fifteen countries and more than sixty other dignitaries who lent their support to the program. There was also the usual Creative Initiative rainbow theme, this time augmented by the Palo Alto High School marching band, several other bands, and "giant costumed animals." The parade was followed by an ecology fair at a local park.^[101]

Despite a presidential citation awarded at White House ceremonies, Creative Initiative was turned down for a state grant to expand the project. The Energyfast idea was revived briefly the following summer; nevertheless, when the public was invited to visit the homes of six Creative Initiative members to see how they had used various conservation measures, including solar heat, to cut down on their use of energy.^[102] The failure to expand Energyfast did not discourage the group's environmental efforts; they turned instead to a final effort in the ecology field that once more drew them to the edge of politics.

In July of 1980 a report entitled "Global 2000," prepared at the request of President Jimmy Carter by thirteen different government agencies, was released to the public. Although Creative Initiative believed that the report's gloomy prognostications about population, resources, and the environment were not pessimistic enough, its generally negative outlook did support Creative Initiative's own dire predictions, and the movement immediately included the document in its ecological program.^[103] Since the release of "Global 2000" occurred during the 1980 presidential race, Creative Initiative "decided to create a small action task force of about 30 full-time volunteers whose singular task [would] be to impel the candidates to respond to the crucial issues raised by Global 2000."^[104]

Dubbing themselves "Global 2000: The Challenge to Change," the special task force began their new endeavor by opening a storefront headquarters on University Avenue, Palo Alto's main street. Posters of presidential candidates Carter, Reagan, and independent John Anderson were pasted on the windows under a banner that asked, "When will the candidates discuss the real issues?"^[105] Creative Initiative's Global 2000 project folded with the election but did survive briefly in the form of a "Global 2000 Course" in the winter of 1980–1981.^[106]

Drugs and Television

Although he had never consumed alcoholic beverages, Harry Rathbun's long association with Alcoholics Anonymous and, through it, his firsthand knowledge of the destructive effects of drinking had turned the Rathbuns against alcohol quite early in their careers of religious work. Although drinking was discouraged, in effect prohibited, at meetings as early as the Sequoia Seminar days, smoking was tolerated at least through the 1950s. But tobacco eventually joined alcohol as substances shunned by members of Creative Initiative. There was no single explicit reason given for the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco only a series of explanations that ranged from the waste of farmland and grain to the negative impact on the individual's health and relationships. Using the ecological metaphor, ingestion of such substances was frequently referred to as pollution of the body. And, although tobacco and alcohol were often mentioned negatively in passing during discussions of other subjects, they were never the focus of any public action on the part of the group.

Illegal drugs, however, were featured in several public displays sponsored by Creative Initiative. Although they certainly never spoke about it publicly, the fact that a number of the upper leadership group had briefly experimented with LSD in the late 1950s, when it was legal, gave them a position of some authority when they spoke to the children of the movement hoping to keep them from using illegal drugs. The most elaborate antidrug display was created in 1970 for Mayfield Mall, a major Palo Alto shopping center and later set up at the state capitol in Sacramento. The display occupied half the mall and took almost half a year to build. It described effects of both alcohol and tobacco as well as those of illegal drugs. Betsy Scarborough, the Creative Initiative person who spearheaded the project, explained the movement's position by saying that drugs were used by people who were "uncomfortable with themselves and cannot express their feelings." She went on to say, "I believe that each of us has our own share of creative potential."^[107]

If alcohol, tobacco, and drugs were pollutants for the body, then television was pollution for the mind. In 1974 the "parent education team" of Creative Initiative circulated a letter that urged members to participate in a project being run by ABC to gather information on what parents thought of children's television programs.^[108] There was no particular followup to this suggestion until 1977, when the "Woman to Woman Building the Earth" segment of Creative Initiative organized a one-year program called 'Women's Network" to try to improve the quality of television. Unlike most of the public programs run by the movement, in which the ideological motivation was fairly clear even if it were not made explicit, the rationale for Women's Network remains obscure. One can surmise that ultimately the women hoped to attract more people to the movement for that was always one of the goals of any program aimed at the public. In fact, the only document we could find that lists the purposes of Women's Network does not even mention television but rather reads like a general description of Creative Initiative itself. The group's objective is listed as building "a network of women who will work together to build a better world for the children and all life."^[109]

In their attempt to improve television programming, the group held public meetings, handed out information sheets, and urged people to write both to the networks and to advertisers making their feelings known. In addition, they sponsored a speech by Nicholas Johnson, the outspoken former FCC commissioner who called television a "vast wasteland," and they published several versions of a handout called "Guidelines for Conscious Viewing."^[110] Most of the suggestions were reasonable and nondogmatic, advising that parents be aware of what their children watch, discuss the programs with them, and not allow television to interfere with other activities within the family. Finally, the Women's Network distributed a petition through which broadcasters were urged to adhere to their own code and stop airing shows that assaulted "the human mind by the showing of excessive violence, abcrrated sex, and a loss of respect for the individual person."^[111]

Women's Network lasted almost one full year. There is no indication that anything like a hundred thousand women were enrolled by the target date of 1978. They decided to disband the effort and move on, nevertheless, urging those who were interested in staying with the television issue to contact the Committee on Children's Television.^[112]

The Role of Public Action

The television effort, like every other public program sponsored by Creative Initiative, proved to be ephemeral. Great enthusiasm and grandiose predictions were followed by a strong burst of effort that was never sustained. No matter what the results, and they were frequently modest by any standards and far short of the group's own predictions, success was declared and a new direction taken. Sometimes the project lasted only a couple of months, like the Palo Alto Initiative, and sometimes a few years, like the Bless Man shows. Usually, however, the life cycle of public activities was around a year. Each of the projects appears to have been a small-scale recapitulation of the movement as a whole; great expectations followed by furious effort, ending, if not in failure, then at least in unfulfilled expectations. According to their own philosophy, the essence of progress (continued evolution) was flexibility and freedom from preconceived patterns. By constantly changing their short-range focus and, at greater intervals, by changing their community name and image, they were living out their own ideology. By making inconstancy a constant the community was able to avoid the challenge of reality. If they had set hard and fast long-range goals, then their progress or lack thereof could have been easily measured, and they would have been faced with the dilemma of how to alter their beliefs or behaviors to achieve their stated ends. But by keeping the group in a state of flux, never lingering long at any one place, they could provide the membership with ever new goals and excitement and the appearance, if not the reality, of accomplishment.

The public presentations also functioned within the sect to give people a way to interact with the outside world other than the one-to-one proselytizing that was their main method of attracting new members. Creative Initiative was sufficiently outside of the mainstream to have to keep religious practices and values quiet, if not actually secret. Yet by incorporating many of those religious values into various presentations and projects, they were able to "practice" their religion in public without risking rejection. Thus, the various campaigns and programs were a way for community members to reinforce their own beliefs by affirming them in public. At the same time, the public programs allowed them to fulfill one of the basic tenets of the New Religion: that all members work actively to spread their ideas to outsiders.

Like all committed revolutionaries (and they never doubted that they were revolutionaries, albeit peaceful ones) the members of Creative Initiative truly believed that victory was imminent. All that was needed to bring about the change they sought was a push in the right direction by a visionary minority who perceived reality while the rest of society was still caught up in a false consciousness. Their homocentric beliefs restrained them from becoming too deeply involved in purely political activities, but invariably most of the public issues they espoused had political implications, and they were not always successful in avoiding the lure of political activity. Even when their own actions were not actually political, they frequently demanded that public officials take specific actions to alleviate the targeted problems, be it television violence, international violence, or violence against the environment. Although they did not always say so explicitly, it was always assumed that nothing politicians did could ultimately solve the problems unless the people had a change of heart, and all their "educational" campaigns had that as their real purpose.