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Introduction

ON A RAINY afternoon in May 1957, seventy-two-year-old Abraham Johannes (A. J.) Muste sat down to write his autobiography. Unfortunately, he would never complete the volume, as he was repeatedly interrupted by the pressing work of organizing protests against nuclear testing and aiding the African American civil rights movement. In his ‘‘Sketches for an Autobiography’’ that were published in Liberation magazine, the present always intruded, precluding a stable, linear narrative. Writing an autobiography, Muste mused, ‘‘relates to the present or immediate past, to the world in which the writer now lives, not the one into which he was born.’’ For Muste, that present was ‘‘Hiroshima; Nagasaki; Bikini; Korea; Dienbienphu; Suez; Hungary; Kenya; Algeria; South Africa; Alger Hiss; McCarthy; Oppenheimer; Japanese fishermen caught in a lethal rain; White Citizens Councils; the H-Bomb; the Intercontinental Ballistics Missile.’’ The yawning gap between the horrors of the mid-twentieth century and his childhood as a Dutch provincial seemed insuperable to him. ‘‘How far, far away is all this in years, and in more subtle and profound respects, from a little provincial city in Holland in 1885? How long the journey and to what end?’’¹

Muste’s comments speak to his long life as a leader of social movements and as an important political, intellectual, and moral presence in American society from World War I to the mid-1960s. In this book, I offer an interpretation of his evolving thought and politics as a window into the history of the American left in the years when the United States became a modern nation and emerged as a global superpower.² I argue that Muste was a prophet; he drew upon his Christian faith and the example of the Hebrew prophetic tradition to call the American people to righteousness, to repent of their sins and build a new world where ‘‘every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none should make them afraid.’’³ His prophetic sensibility underscores the messianic dreams that animated many American radicals, both religious and secular, giving them the courage to challenge the ideological and coercive structures of power, often at considerable personal risk.⁴ Yet messianism always threatened to become megalomania; indeed, the history of American radicalism is rich with examples of individuals and movements who succumbed to delusions of grandeur to compensate for political marginality.⁵ In Muste’s case, a commitment to the pragmatic method—to grounding theory in practice and the individual in community—helped to curb his messianic impulses and allowed him to remain flexible and relevant across and throughout the political and ideological shifts of the mid-twentieth century.⁶

Muste’s revolutionary commitment never ceased, but his confidence in the power of structural change to remake human beings and human society declined over time. Like others who came of age in the 1910s, he was a modernist, convinced of the plasticity of the self and the environment.⁷ But in the 1930s and 1940s, he shared in the introspective turn of many of his comrades, questioning his assumptions about reason, history, and progress.⁸ Rather than retreat from his socialist convictions, however, he remade them for the new era of the ‘‘American Century,’’ in which organization, bureaucracy, and conformity appeared to threaten human freedom as much as class inequality and poverty had in earlier decades. The result was a new kind of ‘‘prophetic politics’’ in which action and commitment represented an effort not only to change society, but also to maintain one’s humanity against the ‘‘anti-human.’’⁹ His existential politics and style resonated deeply with the New Left, making him an ideal figure for exploring change and continuity in radical politics over the course of the twentieth century.¹⁰

At the same time that Muste represents significant historical formations, he was unique. He occupied an anomalous place in the history of American radicalism: he was a Social Gospel minister yet he was a working-class immigrant; he was an intellectual and idealist yet he was beloved by the practical and down-to-earth workers who rallied to his vision of militant industrial unionism in the 1920s and 1930s; he was an anti-Stalinist yet he refused to condone McCarthyism and opposed the Cold War; he was the foremost theoretician of Gandhian nonviolence in the United States yet he publicly chastised the civil rights leadership for failing to respond to the challenges posed by black power and U.S. empire; he was a devout Christian yet he was held in high esteem by the Marxist, secular left; he was an Old Leftist yet he supported and celebrated the New Left.

This story of Muste’s life, thought, and politics thus illuminates familiar stories, while adding new twists and some largely unknown plots. Like other recent scholars, I emphasize the centrality of religion and culture in making the modern left and in forging alternative solidarities to modern nationalism. For Muste, as for others of his generation, exposure to liberal theology and mysticism allowed him to break from the Calvinist theology and world-view in which he had been raised.¹¹ Rather than leading to a narcissistic preoccupation with the self, as critics have charged, Muste’s liberal creed led him outward, toward engagement with modernity and reform.¹² By the time the United States entered World War I, he was a committed pacifist and socialist, views that put him in conflict with the wartime state. Yet these same views also propelled him into an alternative community of radical Christian pacifists and civil libertarians. Together, in groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), they helped to create the modern discourse of conscientious objection and civil liberties.¹³

The evolution of Muste’s activist career from Social Gospel minister to pacifist, and from pacifist to labor agitator reveals a history of collaborations between progressive labor, liberals, and the left that continues to be obscured by the ideological legacy of the Cold War. Muste and other pacifists helped to build this ‘‘liberal-left tradition’’ by forging connections to the vibrant labor movement of the World War I era.¹⁴ For example, although scholars often associate the birth of the civil liberties movement with a discourse of individual rights, Muste’s example demonstrates the pro-labor orientation of the early ACLU. In 1919, caught up in the ‘‘revolutionary ferment of the times,’’ he and other pacifists became involved in a massive strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Upon winning the dramatic and bloody strike, Muste assumed the leadership of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA), a radical union modeled after Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW). The nascent ACLU was a crucial ally in the ATWA’s organizational campaigns, particularly with the onset of the postwar Red Scare. Indeed, the modern fight for civil liberties and labor’s struggle for the right to organize evolved together quite literally in Muste’s ATWA.¹⁵

This broad alliance of pacifists, progressive unionists, and independent leftists continued into the 1920s. These were not the ‘‘tired radicals’’ of lore, but rather, like Muste, idealists who recognized that the labor movement and the left had entered a period of retrenchment.¹⁶ Many of them had been active in wartime efforts to build the Farmer-Labor Party, founded in 1919, and modeled after the British Labour Party. The postwar Red Scare led to the party’s quick demise, but remnants of this ‘‘progressive labor network’’ remained a strong minority presence and real influence in the labor movement. In the 1920s, they channeled their energies into third-party organizing, defense of political prisoners, and workers’ education.¹⁷ The workers’ education movement in particular offers a window into the rich and dynamic history of labor progressivism in the 1920s, a time usually considered one of quiescence and conservatism in American labor history.¹⁸

From 1921 through 1933, Muste was probably the most influential figure in the workers’ education movement. As head of Brookwood Labor College, the country’s only residential college for workers, he oversaw the development of the movement’s teaching philosophy, pedagogy, and curriculum, as well as its expansion to include city labor colleges throughout the country and summer schools for women workers. For Muste and other labor intellectuals, workers’ education was part of a larger effort to modernize and democratize the labor movement. They constructed a method of inquiry and working-class organization that drew upon the pragmatic method, while rejecting liberal citizenship and parliamentarianism as vehicles for social change. Their efforts disrupt the dominant historiographical narrative in which Randolph Bourne’s denunciation of John Dewey for his support for World War I serves as an epitaph, proof ‘‘that pragmatism is a philosophy of acquiescence to ‘the existing fact,’ a philosophy that must validate capitalism, accept imperialism, and repudiate socialism,’’ as James Livingston has summed it up.¹⁹

Muste and his comrades in workers’ education also developed an analysis of education and culture under capitalism that had striking parallels to Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and culture, viewing their educational programs as counter-hegemonic institutions that would produce working-class meaning and knowledge. Their educational, cultural, and organizational experiments helped to lay the groundwork for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Popular Front of the 1930s, both of which recognized the crucial role of culture in social movement formation.²⁰

The grouping that gave birth to and sustained workers’ educational experiments like Brookwood was not without its tensions; there were real philosophical, class, and cultural differences between the various elements that made up the liberal left. Indeed, one reason for making Muste the center of historical inquiry is that he quite consciously embraced the dialectical interaction between the poles of realism and idealism, liberalism and collectivism, that have been a source of creativity and contestation in American liberal-left politics throughout the twentieth century.

For example, pacifists tended to be strongly libertarian in contrast to their more collectivist comrades in the labor movement. Cultural differences also played a role; most pacifists were native-born Protestants from the upper and middle classes who felt uncomfortable in the diverse and contentious world of labor radicalism.²¹ In fact, Muste’s continued and active engagement in the labor movement was unusual for a pacifist and probably reflected his immigrant and working-class background. Also in contrast to his fellow pacifists, Muste was more of a syndicalist than a parliamentarian; he was deeply skeptical of legalistic and moralistic methods for achieving social change and instead placed his hopes in labor organization, militancy, and solidarity. With the onset of the Great Depression, these differences led to Muste’s estrangement from organized pacifism, making it difficult to group him uncritically with other Protestant pacifists of his generation.²²

This question of divisions on the liberal left inevitably brings up the Communist Party’s role in the labor and political struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. For many years, the standard interpretation was that the Communists pursued a policy of ‘‘divide and conquer,’’ slavishly following the party line set down in the Soviet Union rather than responding to the American context.²³ More recently, revisionists have shown that race, gender, and region inflected and mediated the Communist Party line.²⁴ While revisionist accounts have often been persuasive, this analysis suggests a more complex history. In Brookwood’s early years, for example, the party had shown a level of toleration for Brookwood, allowing its members to attend the college and inviting Brookwood faculty to lecture at the Party’s Workers’ School. Yet in 1928, the party entered its ‘‘Third Period’’ in which Stalin ordered a dramatic reversal of the policy of ‘‘boring from within’’ and a shift to dual unionism. In making this shift, the American Communist Party became openly revolutionary, frontally attacking the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and refusing to compromise with elements it dubbed ‘‘social fascist,’’ such as Muste and Brookwood Labor College.²⁵ As a result, Muste, along with other liberals and non-Communist leftists, increasingly found Communists impossible to work with, a sentiment that should be distinguished from ‘‘red-baiting,’’ which progressives viewed as a ‘‘bogey’’ that hindered labor’s progress.²⁶

Despite these differences, Communists, independent leftists, progressive laborites, and religious liberals all shared ‘‘a transformative concept of social progress,’’ in the words of historian Doug Rossinow.²⁷ Muste, for example, placed Christ in the Hebrew prophetic tradition to suggest that he was a revolutionary who stood against the church and state of his time. Like other liberal Protestants of his generation, he adopted a kind of philo-Semitism in which the Jewish view of history as a project of the human and the divine served as the basis for his radical politics. ‘‘To be religious,’’ Muste sermonized, ‘‘is to get out of Egypt into Canaan,’’ to refuse to be slaves and to seek out the promised land of milk and honey.²⁸

Muste’s radical ideals remained deeply important to him, despite the fact that he adopted a moderate tone and practical orientation in the 1920s. As economic and political conditions changed, and as the labor movement and the far left began to publicly attack and vilify him, he would revise his ideas about how to strengthen the labor movement and build a socialist America. His efforts gave birth to the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) in early 1929, an organization committed to revitalizing the American labor movement through aggressive and militant efforts to organize industrial workers and an unabashed idealism.

Historians typically associate the ‘‘Musteite’’ movement with the American Workers Party (AWP), which was founded in December 1933 only to merge with the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) a year later and become the Workers Party of the United States (WPUS). Yet the movement actually began with the founding of the CPLA as a reaction to the marginalization and persecution of labor progressives within the AFL.²⁹ As a result of the CPLA’s informal character, which was often no more than a progressive caucus within a union, the Musteites’ influence on the labor movement has not received adequate scholarly attention. Yet, as we shall see, they played a key role in jump-starting the movement for industrial unionism and were one of the main forces behind the movement of unemployed men and women in the early years of the Great Depression.³⁰

The Musteites also made important theoretical and organizational innovations. Drawing upon their efforts in the workers’ education movement, they attempted to ‘‘Americanize’’ Marxism by placing praxis at the center of organizing and revolutionary activity. As a result, they would attract intellectuals like Sidney Hook, V. F. Calverton, and Lewis Corey who were eager to reconcile pragmatism and Marxism and to make culture a front in the struggle for a socialist society. Their theoretical framework, in other words, was not imposed from above by late-coming intellectuals, but rather had been developed by the working-class men and women who formed the shock troops of the CPLA.³¹ This largely unknown story of the ‘‘Musteites’’ helps fill in gaps in the history of the left and labor from 1929 through 1934 and provides a social history of the independent radicals and industrial unionists who would become the backbone of the CIO and the Popular Front.³²

Ironically, just as the CIO exploded onto the scene, Muste’s own movement was on the verge of collapse. The Musteites had become more openly revolutionary over the course of the 1930s, viewing the widespread labor revolts as a sign of an imminent workers’ revolution. But it soon became apparent that the thrust of the revitalized labor movement was toward social democracy rather than communism. Muste sought to resolve this dilemma by adopting the Leninist idea of a vanguard party who would lead the masses in the revolution. In the interest of party building, he welcomed overtures from the Trotskyist CLA to merge their respective parties. But the Trotskyists did not conduct the merger in good faith; over the course of 1935, Muste watched in dismay as his most dedicated supporters left the party in disgust to serve as organizers for the CIO or to join the Communist Party, which had now entered its dynamic united front period. By early 1936, Muste’s movement was in shambles.³³

Muste’s options were limited. He could have remained in the Trotskyist movement, yet that would have meant being surrounded by comrades he had come to view as petty, duplicitous, self-interested, and ruthless. He could have joined the CIO, but that would have entailed some reconciliation with his old nemesis John L. Lewis, with whom he had tangled in the civil wars that had wracked the United Mine Workers of America in the late 1920s and early 1930s.³⁴ It also would have involved some compromise with the Democratic Party. Yet Muste firmly believed, with other Trotskyists, that President Franklin Roosevelt would take the nation into another world war, and that it would not be a war against fascism, but a war for American capitalism and imperialism. It turned out, of course, to be both a war against fascism and a war for American global hegemony, yet Muste would prove congenitally unable to make this ‘‘Faustian bargain,’’ as Nelson Lichtenstein has called the rapprochement made between socialists, the Democratic Party, and the warfare state over the course of the New Deal era.³⁵

It was in this painful and complicated context that Muste had a mystical experience that told him to return to Christianity and pacifism. His ‘‘reconversion’’ was no doubt genuine, as it paralleled a similar moment of transcendence that he had during World War I, but it also allowed him to leave the secular left and the labor movement, where he had found himself compromised and marginalized, and to return to the Christian-pacifist community and to mainline Protestantism.

Ever the social activist, Muste derived political meaning from his mystical experience. As he explained in numerous articles, speeches, and a book entitled Non-violence in an Aggressive World, the ‘‘proletarian movement’’ had been ‘‘corrupted’’ by ‘‘the philosophy of power, the will to power, the desire to humiliate and dominate over or destroy the opponent, the acceptance of the methods of violence and deceit, the theory that ‘the end justifies the means.’ ’’ Yet once one assumes that ‘‘in some situations, you must forswear the way of love, of truth, must accept the method of domination, deceit, violence . . . there is no stopping place.’’³⁶ His return to pacifism thus grew out of a renewed appreciation of pacifists for respecting human dignity and paying attention to means.³⁷

Muste’s return to the church and to absolute nonviolence involved, on some level, a rejection of his pragmatism and a more unequivocal embrace of moral prophecy. Yet pragmatism would continue to shape his political character; it bequeathed him openness, flexibility, and an experimental attitude that would allow him to transcend bitter intra-left conflicts of the postwar era and to build coalitions that advanced common purposes. Moreover, he continued to view the interaction between his ideals and reality as a sort of scientific project, as a search for truth. At its most creative, this approach would help to make pacifism dynamic and innovative in the post-1941 era. At its most limited, it could lead to pure prophecy, as pacifists judged American society harshly only to withdraw from it.

Muste’s renewed appreciation for the prophetic tradition led to a very public and ongoing debate with the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr charged that liberals and pacifists were insufficiently ‘‘realistic’’ about the realities of sin and power, and called for compromise with the coercion and violence that characterized real relations between social classes and nation-states. He did not, however, condone this reality, but rather hoped that prophets (such as himself) would act as society’s conscience and curb its excesses.³⁸ Muste sharply disagreed with this interpretation. The problem of the immorality of group behavior was indeed real, but the very ‘‘tension’’ Niebuhr and other ‘‘Christian realists’’ emphasized ‘‘exists only if the impossible demand of the Gospel is laid upon them. Otherwise . . . ‘the relationship between the Kingdom of Christ and the political sphere’ becomes ‘a tension of static parallelism’ and not ‘a tension of dynamic transformation.’ ’’ Indeed, in calling for compromise with human limitations, realists had actually renounced the prophetic tradition that they claimed was their inspiration. Without a vision and without a goal, Muste predicted, realism would serve as an apology for nationalism and war.³⁹

Muste’s preoccupation with making pacifism politically relevant became the basis for his exploration of Gandhian nonviolence as a method for social change. When the FOR hired him as national secretary in 1940, he attempted to transform the organization into a vehicle for building a mass ‘‘nonviolent direct action Movement’’ that reached out to ‘‘oppressed and minority groups such as Negroes, share-croppers, industrial workers . . . as Gandhi did in the India National Congress.’’⁴⁰ His efforts helped to lead to a renaissance in American pacifism. As one FOR staffer would recall, the era of World War II was the ‘‘golden age of the FOR.’’ The staff and the executive board were ‘‘composed of giants’’ like Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley, James Farmer, and George Houser. Muste ‘‘towered’’ over all of them.⁴¹

With Muste’s active encouragement, the main target of these early experiments with nonviolence was American race relations.⁴² As a labor progressive, Muste had long been a vocal opponent of racial segregation and discrimination, but he had ultimately subordinated race to class, viewing it as a problem that would be resolved with the inclusion of black workers in the labor movement. Changes in American political economy over the course of the late 1930s and into the 1940s led him to question this analysis. Although he welcomed the social legislation of the New Deal, he feared that it would lead to a rapport between labor and the Democratic Party that would compromise labor’s independence and diffuse its radical spirit. American intervention under a Democratic president only increased these concerns, as he predicted that the close relationship between labor and the state would tie the movement to American militarism and imperialism.⁴³ African Americans and other marginalized groups thus appeared uniquely situated to recognize and mobilize against the contradictions of American society. Gandhi had shown, moreover, how nonviolence could be a powerful tool in confronting the problem of caste.⁴⁴

Although World War II was a time of creativity and dynamism for the pacifist movement, it was also a time of marginalization and defensiveness, as pacifists’ opposition to the war brought them the enmity not only of the public, but also of longtime friends and allies. Already on the defensive since the publication of Moral Man and Immoral Society, they now faced a full-on assault. As Niebuhr powerfully argued, ‘‘Whatever may be the moral ambiguities of the so-called democratic nations . . . it is sheer moral perversity to equate the inconsistencies of a democratic civilization with the brutalities which modern tyrannical States practise. If we cannot make a distinction here, there are no historical distinctions which have any value.’’⁴⁵ As a consequence, pacifism shifted from being at the center of mainline Protestantism to the margins, in the process assuming a more distinct identity of nonconformity.⁴⁶

Muste’s analysis of the causes and potentially negative consequences of the war were not unfounded. Yet, as is further explored in Chapter 9 below, it lacked the nuance and complexity for which he was well known. After all, he had long held that it was morally irresponsible for pacifists to refuse to take sides in the class struggle and in the struggle against racism and Jim Crow. And later, during the Cold War, he would qualify his pacifism to accommodate liberation struggles in the global South. But, in the case of World War II, he was unequivocal in his support for neutrality legislation and his opposition to American intervention.

In part, Muste’s rigidity can be explained by his career and his biography; he had, just in the late 1930s, found his footing once again within the world of pacifism, something he would have jeopardized had he compromised his pacifism in the name of a war against fascism. But it also speaks to a stubborn optimism about human nature at the core of his pacifist faith, one that made it difficult for him to appreciate the ideological dimensions of the conflict. As Bhikhu Parekh has commented of Gandhi, Muste assumed that all human beings were essentially good and that their hearts would be moved by the power of self-suffering. ‘‘Satyagraha presupposes a sense of decency on the part of the opponent, an open society in which his brutality can be exposed, and a neutral body of opinion that can be mobilized against him. It also presupposes that the parties involved are interdependent, as otherwise non-cooperation by the victims cannot affect the vital interests of their opponents.’’ Yet the ruthless suppression of public discourse and the sanitized and hidden violence of totalitarian regimes left little room for the power of moral prophecy to have any meaningful effect on centers of power or the course of the war. Moreover, as Parekh comments, ‘‘some human beings might be profoundly distorted and beyond hope.’’⁴⁷

Still, a distinction should be made between opposition to war and resistance to war. Once the United States entered the conflict, Muste urged pacifists not to ‘‘sabotage or obstruct the war measures of the government’’ and instead focus their energies upon building pacifist fellowship, protecting civil liberties and the rights of conscientious objection, and seeking ‘‘human betterment and reconciliation’’ at home, particularly by befriending interned Japanese Americans and fighting for racial equality.⁴⁸ Indeed, more so than their contemporaries, pacifists acknowledged the ways in which the Allies, especially the United States, contradicted their own rhetoric. This was particularly evident in their response to the atomic bomb. As Muste asserted in his 1947 book Not by Might: Christianity, the Way to Human Decency, the specter of ‘‘total, global, atomic war’’ had rendered the just-war tradition of the Christian church obsolete.⁴⁹

As Paul Boyer argues in his classic history of the atomic bomb and U.S. culture, By the Bomb’s Early Light, Muste’s ‘‘eloquent manifesto posed profound dilemmas for the non-pacifist Christian who held with the just-war tradition that some conflicts were morally justifiable, and who believed that World War II fell in this category, but who recognized that it had ended in a orgy of killing almost beyond restraint or limit.’’ Niebuhr, for example, initially agreed with the Federal Council of Churches that the surprise attacks on Hiroshima and Nagaskai were ‘‘morally indefensible,’’ but soon thereafter justified their use as having shortened the war. The public dialogue that emerged after the war about the moral, ethical, and political challenges posed by atomic weapons quickly subsided, due in large part to the emergence of the Cold War and the U.S. government’s desire to promote a positive image of the atom. The campaign for international control of atomic energy and world government also foundered in the face of worsening relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.⁵⁰

The emergence of the Cold War also brought long-standing tensions between the anti-Communist and Popular Front wings of the American liberal left to the surface. Anti-Stalinists like Sidney Hook and Norman Thomas maintained that the Communist Party represented a totalitarian threat and therefore did not deserve democratic rights of free speech and free association. Similarly, Christian realists accelerated their attack on liberal Protestants who hoped for peace and reconciliation with the Soviet Union, calling them naive and irresponsible. Realism required a sharp differentiation between the sacred and profane and an acceptance that the ends could justify the means, including the reality and threat of nuclear warfare. By the end of the decade, American liberalism as a whole became more ‘‘realistic,’’ moving away from its indictment of corporate capitalism and unabashedly embracing a foreign policy bereft of Wilsonian moral idealism.⁵¹

Muste occupies a complex place in this history. On the one hand, his pacifist critique of science and technology in the atomic era called elements of the Enlightenment tradition into question. He also shared the anti-Stalinist analysis of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime intent on expanding its power. Moreover, many of his closest friends occupied the libertarian wing of the liberal left that was purging organizations like the ACLU of Communists.⁵² On the other hand, he recognized early on that a politics of anti-Communism served as a justification for an expansion of American military might and the suppression of civil liberties. As a pacifist and a devout Christian, furthermore, he was deeply troubled by the tendency of his fellow Protestants to identify the fate of Christianity with the nation-state and U.S. foreign policy. It seemed to him that the United States, like the Soviet Union, was guilty of excessive secularism and materialism, manifest most alarmingly in the twin evils of conscription and atomic weaponry.⁵³

Muste thus explicitly shunned ‘‘realism’’ and immediate political effectiveness in favor of a long-term campaign designed to appeal to the moral conscience of his fellow Americans. While ‘‘common sense and realism’’ were important, they were not ‘‘our first and greatest need,’’ he wrote in an open letter to Niebuhr. For Christian realists to pronounce judgment and doom on Americans for their atomic hubris without also calling on them to ‘‘repent, act and so flee from that judgment’’ allowed socialists and liberals to make their peace with war. The role of a prophet was not only to invoke a realization of God’s judgment but also to offer the possibility of escape from that judgment through repentance. Instead of realism, what the world desperately needed was ‘‘faith and hope’’ that it was possible ‘‘to build a just and durable peace.’’⁵⁴

Together with other radical pacifists, Muste formed the Peacemakers, a group dedicated to ‘‘holy Disobedience against the war-making and conscripting State.’’⁵⁵ Reflecting their essentially Christian worldview, they believed that by taking suffering upon themselves in individual and collective acts of disobedience, they would cut through the conformist culture of the Cold War and awaken their fellow Americans to their responsibility for the atomic and international crisis. With their themes of sin and suffering, repentance and redemption, Muste and his fellow Peacemakers continued and elaborated traditions of idealism and antimilitarism into the postwar era, both of which were being abandoned by large sections of the Protestant mainline, the labor movement, and the left.⁵⁶

Yet the Peacemakers ultimately proved disappointing to Muste. With the hardening of the Cold War, radical pacifists began to despair that they would ever change American opinion. Most turned inward, toward the building of alternative or ‘‘intentional’’ communities, some of which manifested deeply antimodern and sectarian values. Muste found the movement’s cultural politics discomfiting. While he believed in the importance of simple living, he remained a modern, delighting in the diversity, commotion, and cultural life of urban environments; he smoked and danced, and enjoyed Broadway shows, baseball, and the Marx Brothers. Indeed, parallels to Gandhi only go so far, as Muste firmly rejected asceticism and preindustrial nostalgia. ‘‘I believe men are meant to lead the ‘abundant life,’ ’’ he explained to his more abstemious comrades, ‘‘and this means physically, aesthetically, intellectually, spiritually . . . this involves variety, nonconformity, experimentation.’’⁵⁷

Muste also remained a socialist, and he viewed utopian experiments as, paradoxically, expressions of individualism and anarchism. Civil liberties and decentralism were not ends in themselves, but rather part of a larger effort to democratize and demilitarize the politics of the left. If we ‘‘profess to conceive of mankind as a family which should live as a family,’’ he commented, ‘‘then our only valid objective is the transformation of society, not the building of a shelter for the saints or a secular elite within a corrupt social order, which in effect is assumed to be beyond redemption.’’⁵⁸

This difference between radical pacifists and their titular head remained in abeyance until the mid-1950s when world-historical events intervened and persuaded Muste that a political and ideological space had opened up for mass action. He pointed to the Montgomery bus boycott as evidence that nonviolence might appeal to large numbers of people. He also suggested that growing public concern over nuclear fallout might be directed into opposition to the arms race and American foreign policy. In addition to these fissures within domestic political culture, international developments suggested some possibility for easing the tensions between the two superpowers. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin might lead to the humanization of Soviet rule; it might, moreover, be the grounds upon which the ‘‘split between Socialists and Communists could be healed’’ and a new left reborn. The emergence of a nonaligned movement in the decolonizing world was the most promising development of all.⁵⁹

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Muste sought to build a nonaligned ‘‘third way’’ and antinuclear sentiment through his leadership of and organizational efforts on behalf of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) and the World Peace Brigade (WPB), both of which exemplified the prophetic, existential style of political activism he had pioneered in the 1940s. Their dramatic, often transnational campaigns had Muste crisscrossing the globe, engaging in dialogue and building relationships with European and Asian peace activists and clergy that would help lay the foundations for the international antinuclear movement and the revitalization of the international peace movement.⁶⁰

At the same time, he took tentative steps toward rebuilding the United States’ shattered and divided left. He helped to found Liberation magazine in 1956 as a vehicle for promoting ‘‘fresh thinking,’’ and he pursued reconciliation of anti-Communist socialists and Communists through the American Forum for Socialist Education.⁶¹ The latter effort was a failure that illustrated the ways in which the question of Communism continued to divide liberals and socialists. Through Liberation, CNVA, and the civil rights movement, however, he would find that the younger generation was far more willing to move beyond the ideological divides of the Old Left and, moreover, that they shared his idealism and his flair for direct action and nonviolence.

The mid-1950s were also a time of personal change in which Muste’s assumptions about cultural norms, sexuality, and gender were challenged in a variety of ways. Muste had long had relationships of mutual respect and love with activists who were women, homosexual, and/or people of color. Yet, like others of his generation, he simply did not see the realm of family, gender, and sexuality as having political meanings. This was most apparent in his relationship with his wife, Anne (called ‘‘Anna’’ by her friends and family) whose life had been in service to making his political commitments possible. Yet her death in 1953 did not lead him to question the degree to which his public self had been dependent upon her private labor. Instead, he praised her for her ‘‘loyalty,’’ a comment that reveals his patriarchal assumptions about the proper role of women in relationship to men.⁶²

At the same time, however, his ideas about morality and sexuality started to shift. One can see this in his evolving views of Bayard Rustin’s homosexuality, as well as his reflections upon the cultural changes that had begun to make themselves felt by the end of the 1950s. Muste never politicized sexuality or gender, but his pragmatic sensibility and commitment to nonviolence allowed him to maintain open lines of communication and productive relationships with people whose cultural and sexual identities were far more subversive than his own. Hence the seemingly paradoxical place of honor the Protestant elder occupied in the minds and hearts of bohemian nonconformists like Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and Barbara Deming.⁶³

This was how Muste became a cultural and political icon in the 1960s. Bohemian radicals and Freudian psychoanalysts viewed him as a model of the self-actualized personality, delighting in his advocacy of authenticity, spontaneity, and love. Intellectuals dialogued with him about the problems of conformity and organization in contemporary American society, and admired his ability to take the existential leap of faith and action that eluded them. Liberal Protestants increasingly found his critique of realism persuasive, and joined him in signing petitions and marching in demonstrations against nuclear testing and the Vietnam War. Civil rights activists praised him for his pioneering efforts on behalf of nonviolence; as Martin Luther King Jr. told Muste’s biographer, the jazz critic Nat Hentoff, ‘‘The current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations field is due more to A. J. than to anyone else in the country.’’⁶⁴

Pacifists, meanwhile, continued to draw strength and sustenance from what they viewed as his equanimity, expressed through joyfulness and humor, as well as his spiritual constancy and depth of vision. ‘‘We are all sons of A. J.,’’ Tom Cornell of the Catholic Worker Movement proclaimed.⁶⁵ Muste was ‘‘the leader, prophet, confessor and gadfly to us all,’’ recalled Glenn Smiley.⁶⁶ Without Muste’s leadership, antiwar activists concurred, the coalition against the war in Vietnam would not have been possible. Activists outside of the United States similarly recognized Muste’s centrality to struggles for peace and freedom; Indian pacifists referred to him as ‘‘the American Gandhi,’’ and when he died, telegrams streamed in from around the world, from places as diverse as Tanzania, India, North Vietnam, England, France, and Chile.⁶⁷

Of course, philosophical, political, and cultural differences continued to inhibit Muste’s efforts. Many pacifists remained unwilling or unable to relate to all but true believers in nonviolence, while liberals and social democrats remained reluctant to move beyond anti-Communism and the bipolar worldview of the Cold War.⁶⁸ Perhaps Muste shared some responsibility for these difficulties. After all, his political position was a fairly complex and nuanced one that was difficult to enact in practice. He called on peace activists to avoid united fronts, while keeping the lines of communication with Communists open. He called on them to be ‘‘prophets,’’ while at the same time instructing them to be ‘‘canny’’ and pragmatic. He called for an absolute commitment to nonviolence, while urging qualified support for third world revolutionaries who embraced violence. For Muste, such were the inevitable contradictions of living as a revolutionary and a pacifist in a sinful world, and he was not personally troubled by them. Yet this made for an unclear and confusing strategy for nonviolent activists to follow.⁶⁹

Starting in 1964, Muste became utterly consumed with ending the war in Vietnam. ‘‘I cannot get it out of my head or my guts that Americans are away over there, not only shooting at people but dropping bombs on them, roasting them with napalm and all the rest,’’ he wrote in 1965.⁷⁰ In his speeches and publications, he insisted that Vietnam was not a ‘‘mistake,’’ but rather an expression of an overall ‘‘pattern’’ in American history and foreign policy. All of us ‘‘are trapped in the heritage of the past,’’ he observed, particularly the Western heritage of equating power with the use of force and violence, and of subjugating ‘‘others’’ based on notions of racial, national, and religious superiority. Yet he refused to be trapped by history, insisting that if Americans—’’especially white Anglo-Saxon Americans’’—genuinely confronted their sins of empire and race, then a ‘‘radically new approach’’ to relations between nations and people would become possible. As he wrote in 1965, ‘‘if a power like the United States voluntarily withdraws from the arms race and makes the changes in its own social structure which this entails, this would constitute ‘intervention’ of historic dimensions.’’⁷¹

Muste’s efforts to end the war in Vietnam combined his pragmatic and prophetic impulses. On the one hand, he worked relentlessly to overcome the divisions on the liberal left and within the peace and civil rights movements that inhibited taking a strong stance against President Lyndon B. Johnson and the war. In New York, the result was a new coalition, headed by Muste, known as the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, which managed to bring together groups as diverse as labor unions, women’s peace groups, black power revolutionaries, Protestant clergy, young Trotskyists, and liberal peace activists in opposition to the war. In the fall of 1966, the Parade Committee worked with other anti-war groups to form the November 8th Mobilization Committee, which, in early 1967 became known as the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), with Muste as national chairman.⁷²

At the same time, Muste insisted upon his right and the moral imperative of resistance, regardless of its popular appeal. As he wrote to a fellow peace activist, ‘‘Are prophets not needed in this age? Should prophets keep silence if they are unpopular and unheeded?’’ The ‘‘real world’’ was neither the ‘‘world of ethics, love, nonviolence’’ nor ‘‘the world of power.’’ Rather, these two worlds were in ‘‘perpetual tension,’’ a tension that only became creative ‘‘when, in [Martin] Buber’s phrase, ‘the plowshare of the normative principle’ is driven into the hard soil of political [reality], not when the plow is withdrawn from or blunted by the hard soil.’’⁷³ Muste thus encouraged and participated in myriad civil disobedience campaigns against the war. His final act of defiance, at age eighty-two, was to bypass the State Department and visit with Ho Chi Minh in order to ‘‘convey the spirit of peace to the stricken people of Vietnam.’’ He died in February 1967, soon after his return.⁷⁴

Central to Muste’s enduring radical politics was his philosophy of history as a joint project of human beings and God. Drawing parallels to his biblical namesake, he held that history began when Abraham left the city of his ancestors. By going out to find ‘‘a city which existed—and yet had to be brought into existence,’’ Abraham demonstrated that divinity was to be found in the history of human work and creation. For Muste, then, ‘‘the crucial thing about men, or societies, is not where they came from but where they are going.’’ Indeed, it was precisely when ‘‘human communities’’ decided to ‘‘intervene in their own destiny’’ that history was made rather than lived.⁷⁵

Since the 1960s, the liberal left has faltered and declined, losing faith in transcendent ideas of social progress and in the power of human beings to make change. Muste would have shared these critiques of the Enlightenment tradition and its notions of rationality, universality, and progress, but he also would have insisted on the human and divine imperative to continue dreaming and creating. ‘‘Without a vision, the people perish,’’ he wrote in 1955, paraphrasing Proverbs 29:18, at the height of the ColdWar.⁷⁶ Regardless of whether one shares his pacifism or his religious faith, his thoughtful and determined efforts to reconcile idealism and realism, collectivism and liberalism, internationalism and Americanism, anti-imperialism and labor unionism may offer insights on how to reinvigorate the dynamic and contested liberal left that once so indelibly shaped American political culture.