American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ ideal of ‘‘human brotherhood’’ and the imperative to bring it about on earth, drove his activism, whether that ideal was rooted in Christianity or socialism (or both). Still, drawing upon pragmatic theory, he insisted that ideals, to be meaningful, had to be grounded in practical analysis and activity. ‘‘Ultimate values, ideals which are essential,’’ he reflected in an interview about his early career as a minister and an activist, ‘‘have to operate in some political and economic situation and not in a vacuum, not [in the] abstract.’’ Bringing the ideal and the real together and ‘‘effecting some kind of an integration . . . is a perpetual and very difficult problem, but it seems to me that this is the problem of human existence and therefore in some way or other I’m trying to work at it all the time.’’²³

      Muste’s move toward a more modern, pragmatic worldview and theology was gradual. For a while he seemed to live in two different worlds. One was in New Brunswick where he continued to see himself as preparing for a life serving the Reformed Church and the Dutch American community. The other was the intellectual and cultural life of the great modern metropolis. There, as we have seen, he took seminars with leading philosophers who stressed the diverse ways of knowing and being. Moreover, as a supply preacher at a Reformed church in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1908, he delighted in the ‘‘seething’’ culture of ‘‘Italian, Polish, Jewish, recently arrived immigrant[s], children, babies all over the streets and the steps [of tenements].’’ Reflecting his roots in industrial Grand Rapids, he felt comfortable among the city’s immigrant, working-class residents. He ‘‘never had the feeling that some people do[,] that New York is a terrible place to live in. I can put up with almost anything in New York.’’²⁴ In this respect Muste differed from the Progressive Era reformers with whom he is often linked. Although he shared their Protestant heritage and commitment to a life of service, his ease in the culture of urban America marks him as part of the modernist generation, which was more ethnically diverse and which celebrated the possibilities of the city.²⁵

      In 1908–9, of course, Muste had not yet embraced a modern credo, but his inclination was forward rather than backward. His choice of pulpit is illustrative. As valedictorian, he was offered three choice pulpits: one was the newly founded Fort Washington Collegiate Church in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan, and the other two were older, established churches in rural settings outside of the city. The president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary had also offered him funding for doctoral study in Europe and the promise of an academic position at the seminary when he returned. He made the decision ‘‘that New York was the place for me’’ without ‘‘too much difficulty.’’ In the first place, Fort Washington Collegiate Church was only a few blocks away from where the Yankee ballpark was then located. For another, academic life held little appeal: ‘‘I was too much interested in action.’’²⁶ He would also be able to continue his education, since Washington Heights was located just north of Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. Finally, the New York church was especially wealthy and well established, with roots in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, but it had shed its exclusively Dutch cast, while its Presbyterian structure and Calvinism attracted non-Dutch Protestants. With a single classis (the local governing body, known as a presbytery in the Presbyterian Church) for all four of New York’s Reformed churches and substantial investment income, it offered a salary of $2,000 a year, more than twice the average salary for Reformed ministers at the time.²⁷

      More to the point, Muste chose the Collegiate Church for the ‘‘challenge’’ it represented. It was a world he knew little about: mostly native-born, middle-class professionals who were active in social work and politics, and whose intellectual pursuits extended far beyond his parlance of theology and the classics. The lawyer Raymond Fosdick, then commissioner of accounts for the City of New York, was one of his congregants. Fosdick’s older brother was Harry Emerson Fosdick, then a minister in Montclair, New Jersey, who would later become famous as the pastor of Riverside Church in Morningside Heights and as a staunch defender of modernism against the rising tide of fundamentalism in the 1920s. Another congregant, John A. Fitch, former student of the labor economist John Commons, had just published The Steel Workers, an acclaimed sociological study of the steel industry. Fitch also served as industrial editor of Paul Kellogg’s Survey, the leading journal of social work, and was a professor at the New York School of Social Work. Shelby Harrison, head of the research department at the recently formed Russell Sage Foundation was yet another prominent member of the congregation, as was the Republican congressman William Stiles Bennet. Here, as Muste noted wryly in his oral history, he could not get away with popularizing a Calvin passage as he could have in a ‘‘typically Dutch-speaking congregation,’’ and he found the opportunity ‘‘decidedly stimulating.’’²⁸

      Before Muste could accept his call to the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, however, he had to pass the licensure examinations and be ordained by a classis. He also wanted to marry Anne who remained with her parents in Iowa. The preparation for ordination was lengthy and arduous. Under the care of the Grand Rapids classis, Muste had to return home to take an all-day licensing exam in Greek, Hebrew, church history, theology, and church government, as well as deliver a sermon. His father was present when he received his license, and they celebrated at the Muste home afterward. The occasion was indeed a ‘‘very important’’ and ‘‘happy one’’ for his parents, for whom it had been eleven years since their eldest son had left for Hope Preparatory Academy. On his way back to New York to be ordained by the city’s classis, Muste traveled to Iowa to marry and collect Anne. Back in New York, on June 25, 1909, Muste was examined again and then ordained in ‘‘a very solemn and impressive service’’ in which the novitiate knelt while the ministers placed their hands upon his head. The service concluded with a benediction by Muste. It was a ‘‘tremendous experience for me,’’ Muste recalled. ‘‘I felt a very strong call to the ministry and a very strong urge to preach and a feeling that I had something to give and, of course, [I had] this sense of fulfillment that my parents had.’’²⁹

      AT Fort Washington, Muste exhibited the personal traits that would make him a successful minister and, later, a beloved and effective leader. He had an unpretentious and down-to-earth temperament, keen sense of humor, and took pleasure in leisure and commercial amusements, particularly baseball. When providing pastoral care, he was an attentive and nonjudgmental listener, and when he spoke, he had a direct, personal style that sought to reconcile different points of view. Moreover, unlike stereotypically charismatic personalities, he had first-rate organizational skills that would make Fort Washington a dynamic and expanding institution. These two aspects of his character—warmhearted and catholic, on the one hand, and calculated and ambitious, on the other—help to explain why, later in his career, he was often underestimated by political and intellectual foes. At Fort Washington, it led to personal growth and professional success, endearing him to his congregation and his superiors in the collegiate system and making his break with the church, when it came, free of mutual recriminations.³⁰

      As minister, Muste continued to evolve a more modern theology. God assumed the role of loving father, not judging patriarch; his focus was on life on this earth, not on the hereafter.³¹ Union Theological Seminary, where he took courses from 1909 until 1913 and obtained another bachelor of divinity degree, encouraged this move away from Calvinism.³² The center of liberal Protestantism, Union had declared its independence from denominational control in 1892 following the ‘‘Briggs controversy.’’ The controversy began when the Presbyterian Church suspended a faculty member for advocating the revision of the Westminster Confession, which, among other things, asserts the doctrines of infallibility and biblical literalism. From then on, Union ‘‘moved in an increasingly liberal and nondenominational direction.’’³³ It also served as a leader in the move toward a more academic, historical-critical approach to seminary education. Reflecting this orientation, its faculty did not necessarily have pastoral experience, and often held advanced degrees from German universities, making it a striking contrast to the education Muste had received at New Brunswick. At Union, Muste became acquainted with the national and international leaders in mainline Protestantism and made contacts with СКАЧАТЬ